Straight to the point

Early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand — but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird’s brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a new higher stage arrives, there must be a squashed bird somewhere. 

The first thing to renounce is thus any notion of the global linear progress of humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, postulated by liberals like Francis Fukuyama (who declared the end of history) or dominated by Enlightenment dialectics. Marx’s overall vision of history is that of a linear succession of “progressive” modes of social development from primitive societies through the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism to socialism and communism. Problems arise almost immediately with the historical dynamic Marx envisioned; to start with, the notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” is clearly problematic (it is an empty category into which Marx threw whatever didn’t fit his Eurocentric logic of history, and thus in itself a receptacle for squashed dead birds). As for socialism, Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that “the future will be socialism or barbarism” proved to be wrong also: what we got in Stalinism was a socialist barbarian, and the corpses are still being counted. As for liberalism, its state of crisis is obvious, so much so that even Fukuyama has renounced his notion of the end of history.

There should be no holds barred in the pursuit of squashed birds. Russia and China like to present themselves as partisans of a new multi-centric world order in which all ways of life will coexist as equal and in which Western colonial economic and ideological domination will finally be swept away. In this rhetoric we might see whole cages of squashed birds swept aside with the West, not only economic and political but also the flattening of feminism, gay rights and general human freedoms. A fairly recent example might be the debate that took place in the Ugandan parliament in February 2023 as the legislature contemplated a further toughening of the anti-gay law — where the most radical proponents demanded the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, for those caught in the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, stated: “You are either with us, or you’re with the Western world.” We live in an era of unholy alliances, collaborations and conjunctions of ideological forces which disrupt the standard binary of Left and Right. Feminist, gay and trans struggles are denounced as an instrument of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African identity. If this type of thinking continues to be allowed to define the debate, the possibility of being a gay Ugandan, a feminist Ugandan, a trans Ugandan can be redefined out of existence; another casualty of a narrow definition of “progress”.

The miserable reality is that the promise of decolonisation can be co-opted as a screen for other processes, its liberatory potential caught in the vice-like grip of a too-rigid definition of what moving forward means. The people of numerous African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, exist under more or less corrupt social systems in which the gap between the “masters” and the poor majority — the gap in wealth, in power, in privileges and freedom — is arguably even wider than under colonial rule. “Decolonisation” in these circumstances can function almost as a metaphor for the emergence of new class-based hierarchies. While there are, of course, a myriad of arguments that one can advance against any suggestion that things were “better” under colonial rule, if we fail to recognise the potential for decolonial movements to be absorbed into problematic regimes, the new Right will do it for us (as they are already doing in the case of South Africa, bloviating about the inability of black people to run the country “properly”). Mao said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” But what if the reality after the revolution is even less of a dinner party? This in no way implies that we should abandon progress — we should rather redefine it, and the first step towards doing so is to be able to acknowledge uncomfortable realities, even those which appear squalid and mangled, and especially those we find shameful and grievous. We need less squashed birds hidden in trunks while we applaud the false living bird distracting us from capitalist corruption and authoritarian power.

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Julian Assange is no fool

By Slavoj Zizek

The two articles Marx wrote on India in 1893 (“The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of British Rule in India”), usually dismissed by postcolonial scholars as embarrassing cases of Marx’s “Eurocentrism”, are today more interesting than ever. Marx outlines, without restraint, the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of the British colonisation of India, right up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but “outsourced” to Indians (really there is nothing new under the sun — these were the Guantanamos of 19th-century British India). All he adds is: “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” 

Despite the mention of “destiny”, one should not wholly dismiss the notion of the “unconscious tool of history” as naive teleology, an ends-justify-the-means fatalistic “trust into the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress”. The point Marx is making is simply that the British colonisation of India created conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonisation itself. Today, of course, such a standpoint appears all too naive — now we know how the British colonisers destroyed local industries in India and provoked havoc with tens of millions dead. Of course, we would never say that the horrors of colonisation were worth the price of progressing towards some nebulous utopian future. A much more modest stance should be adopted: Great Britain’s actions in India were inexcusable and the direct outcome a devastating catastrophe; however, once this catastrophe happened it opened up a new path for India. That “however” is an uncomfortable adverb to dwell in, but it remains open to hope as neater historical narratives do not.

When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer delineate the contours of the emerging late-capitalist “administered world” (verwaltete Welt), they are presenting it as coinciding with barbarism, as the point at which civilisation itself returns to barbarism. A kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men: “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless warn against the more direct catastrophes (different forms of terror, etc.). The liberal-democratic society of Last Men is thus unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse (or a rock and a hard place). The ambiguity here is irreducible: on the one hand, the “administered world” is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment; on the other hand, the “normal” societal path is continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to ecological disasters. We are required to battle these catastrophes while simultaneously bearing in mind that the ultimate catastrophe is the apparently “normal” structures and rhythms of the “administered world”. In other words, we are walking a kind of Moebius path: if we progress far enough on one side, we reach our starting point again. Does the same not hold for progressivism in general? After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together. The only indubitable “progressive” goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply survive.

The possibilities and pitfalls of technological and scientific advancement have been the stuff of centuries’ worth of dreaming about human progress, yet here too we find ourselves treading a viciously circular path. Free development, experimentation and research leads to Artificial Intelligence, which not only threatens to supplant the human mind but is intended specifically to overcome its limitations, to replicate humanity without its frailties. Leaving aside more abstract questions about what this would look like and mean should it be achieved, one does not have to look very far for the dead birds littering the path to “progress” like autumn leaves, from the astronomical energy costs burdening a burning planet to the people whose jobs will increasingly be done by AI. This is what blind commitment to an uncritically adopted idea of “progress” looks like; proponents of AI talk about the freedom it brings, but are vague on freedom from what, for who and what for. Freedom for humanity to dedicate itself to leisure, art or meditation? Or freedom for an oligarchy of technocrats from the slightest tethering to the social contract, in exchange for reducing humanity to a cog in the endless self-reproduction of AI?

This brings us to the relationship between progress and freedom. The axiom of modern philosophy is that progress is, at its most fundamental, progress in freedom. (This is how Hegel conceives the development of the entire history of humanity: in Oriental despotism only the despot is free; in antique slavery only the few are free; and with Christianity all are free.) However, problems with the definition of freedom explode here from the very beginning.

Within the Enlightenment tradition, there is true freedom only if all are equally free, while for conservative liberals equality limits freedom; then there is the opposition between individual freedom and collective freedom (freedom of a nation advocated by fascism). For socialists, freedom is actual only when its material and institutional conditions are present (free education and press, healthcare), while for liberal conservatives, such measures already limit the full freedom of individuals (recall how US Republicans opposed Obamacare, claiming that it will limit the freedom to choose your own doctor).

The issue is further complicated by the post-Sixties shift away from economic and political freedom to cultural freedom. Why, after the Sixties, have so many problems come to be perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation and injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation or political struggle? The immediate answer is the “culturalisation of politics”, in which political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation and so forth are neutralised into “cultural” differences, different “ways of life”, which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely “tolerated”. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat or failure of direct political solutions, such as the welfare state. Tolerance is the post-political ersatz of these solutions: “the cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation.”

The squashed dead bird here is politics itself. And this bird remains squashed even after the rise of the Rightist new populism.

How, then, should we orient ourselves in this mess? Our starting point should be that there is no such thing as progress in general. But true progress must aim at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses — not redeeming them in reality, but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.

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A version of this essay appears in Slavoj Žižek’s latest book Against Progress, part of the new Žižek’s Essays series, published by Bloomsbury on 31 October.

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