Ontocide: The Despair of Gaza

Ontocide destroys the will to care about things in the world. Together with politicide and genocide, it forms the “dark triad of occupation”: destroy the state, the people, and meaning as such.

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports of polio virus found in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO). Mountains of garbage are piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports that clearing 40 million tons of rubble may take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040 at an estimated cost of $40 billion. And as of July 2024, some 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The real body count may prove much higher, given the significant destruction of civil infrastructure by Israel’s armed forces, making recovering and registering fatalities difficult, with thousands likely buried beneath the rubble of the bombed-out enclave.

That the War on Gaza may one day be classified as genocidal by the International Criminal Court (ICC) seems increasingly likely as international legal institutions dare to condemn Israel’s government. Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court, determined that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was “illegal” and should end as “rapidly as possible” (even as the Court limited their scope to East Jerusalem and the West Bank). In May 2024, the ICC prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Hamas’s leadership as well as Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Israel’s policies as a form of politicide, involving the “gradual but systematic attempt to cause Palestinians’ annihilation as an independent social, political and economic entity.” If politicide involves the denial of statehood and/or destruction of the basic trappings of an autonomous polity (including, as Max Weber pointed out long ago, the right to collect taxes which serves as the fiscal basis of the state), then genocide is the deathly acceleration and lethal concentration of a state’s firepower against the Other, the maturation of a still-nascent germ at the core of politicide.

Less commented upon than the “polity-destroying” (politicidal) or “people-destroying” (genocidal) nature of war and occupation, however, is the Gaza War’s deeply damaging effects on the continued belief in existential meaning and hope. This overwhelming destruction of meaning can be said to constitute what we can call ontocide (from the Greek, ὄντως [ontos] or “being”): Like any besieged, bombed, and starving population, Gazans are not only being killed and displaced in the thousands but are also facing a destruction of belief in the future, of meaning-in-existence, and of certainty that their personhood will advance into the future, under reasonably safe and secure conditions, respectful of their human dignity. Ontocide is the killing of belief in existence as such, the destruction of faith that the world, and the people who live in it, will go on, achieved through the concentrated intensification of multiple, overlapping agonies. Needless to say, ontocide is a terrible crime, because it tends to grind down the survivors—and all genocides in modern history have left survivors to pick up the pieces.

Ontocide is taking place in Gaza. By April 2024, after 200 days of war, some 75,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on Gaza—more than the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The result of this atrocity is pure negativity and despair: As someone has written on the walls of Gaza’s European Hospital: “We don’t care anymore about anything.” And who can blame them? The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has collected eyewitness testimonials from Gaza’s population, which vividly demonstrate the deep despair into which the enclave’s civilians have been thrown. One 30-year-old man “recounted how his entire family was killed while sheltering in a Rafah warehouse, after repeatedly being displaced”:

Since then, I’ve been alone in the world. I lost my family. I have no home and no future. I cry every day. I go to sleep alone and wake up lonely and lost…My mother really wanted me to get married. We hoped the war would end and we’d go back to our lives, but they killed my mother, my father and everyone else in my family. They killed everyone…My life is black now. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the trauma.

The Doctors without Borders psychologist Davide Musardo has recorded similarly harrowing eyewitness accounts from the ground:

Children maimed, with burns or without parents. Children having panic attacks, because physical pain triggers psychological wounds when pain reminds you of the bomb that changed your life forever. […] ‘I haven’t had a glass of fresh water for months. What kind of life is this?’ another patient asked me…I have seen people break down when receiving news of another evacuation order. Some people have changed places as many as 12 times in eight months. ‘I won’t move my tent anymore, I might as well die,’ I have heard people say. […] In Gaza, one survives but the exposure to trauma is constant. Everything is missing, even the idea of a future. For people, the greatest anguish is not today – the bombs, the fighting and the mourning – but the aftermath. There is little confidence about peace and reconstruction, while the children I saw in the hospital showed clear signs of regression.

To repeat: “Everything is missing, even the idea of future.”

Despair is a weapon of war, and ontocide is a tool for destroying hope and meaning, instilling existential emptiness in the Other.

Are not Gazans today slowly being turned into a kind of “living dead,” husks of humanity for whom little remains but bleak despair, with those fortunate enough to survive the 500-, 1000- or 2000-pound bombs, mostly supplied by the United States, left to attempt to reconstitute fragments of meaning in a totally abyssal, meaningless world? For these seemingly lucky ones, trauma is too weak a word; for them it is as if the world itself has ended.

For the survivors of genocide, the problem of existential meaning can prove intractable. Adorno famously wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Finding or reclaiming meaning after the destruction of meaning—the subjective experience of ontocide—is among the primary difficulties facing survivors. There can be great cruelty in having survived the guns and bombs—only to find that nothing matters, that “we don’t care anymore about anything,” as the anonymous graffiti in the Gazan hospital writer phrased it. Speaking to B’Tselem in February, a 45-year-old Palestinian mother of nine said: “We’re exhausted. We’re broken and have no strength left…I don't know where else we can run. We’ve been displaced four times. I don’t know what fate awaits us.”

When 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a Gaza resident with Down’s syndrome, was bitten by an Israeli army dog during a military raid on his family’s apartment, according to a BBC report, and found two weeks later, dead and on the floor by his displaced family, the question of despair naturally sets in: We find ourselves thrown into an abyssal horror story, that of a totally defenseless, innocent disabled person mauled in the course of a military raid. As his brother Nabila described to the BBC: “This scene I will never forget…I constantly see the dog tearing at him and his hand, and the blood pouring from his hand…It is always in front of my eyes, never leaving me for a moment. We couldn't save him, neither from them nor from the dog.”

Reclaiming existence after existence as such has been shattered is a near-insurmountable task. Think only here of Samuel Beckett’s famously paradoxical phrase: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Politicide smooths the way to genocide, and genocide naturally pairs with ontocide—its natural consequence for those escaping lethal destruction. The triplet of politicide, genocide, and ontocide might even be said to constitute the dark triad of occupation: destroy the state, destroy the people, destroy meaning as such.

Faced with this “dark triad,” the question confronting the international community is raised poignantly by two volunteer medical doctors returned from the Gaza Strip: “We must decide, once and for all: are we for or against murdering children, doctors and emergency medical personnel? Are we for or against demolishing an entire society?”

To this we can add: Are we for or against the destruction of belief in meaning as such? How can those who must go on, still go on? And what chance for poetry “after Gaza”?

The Nexus of the Presidency

Overemphasizing Biden’s verbal gaffes risks falling prey to a reactionary politics of the performance: What matters more is the nexus of forces the President surrounds himself with.

Photo: CNN Presidential Debate, 27 June 2024 (WSJ.com/CNN)

On Friday, the New York Times Editorial Board called for Biden’s resignation from the 2024 presidential race. Recognizing that a call for “ending his candidacy” was an extraordinary step, the Times still lamented “the president’s performance,” noting: “Even when Mr. Biden tried to lay out his policy proposals, he stumbled.”

The somewhat hysterical anti-Biden reactions to the Biden-Trump presidential debate on CNN suggest that we still have an essentially olympic and theatrical relationship to politics, that is, a politics of performance and (implicit) athleticism.

But overemphasizing Biden’s verbal gaffes and stammering risks falling prey to a reactionary politics of the performance.

In the age of hyperindividualized politics, what counts, seemingly, is measuring the figure of the Leader, according to the ideals of the individual performer—a bit like a contestant on America’s Got Talent, or an athlete in an olympic sport evaluated by judges, like gymnastics or figure skating. As the comedian Jon Stewart said, to much laughter from his audience: “Both of these men should be using performance-enhancing drugs.” And while this is a good line for a stand-up comedian, it nevertheless reveals the essentially performative-dramaturgical nature of politics in the West today. 

Clearly, criticizing this hyperindividuality has its limits. The President of the United States is often thought to be the most powerful individual in the world, and there is a performative, “personal suitability” element to the job. To take but one example: The President stands at the apex of a nuclear weapons force that includes more than 400 nuclear-armed Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, 14 Ohio-class submarines carrying up to 20 nuclear ballistic missiles, and 66 nuclear-armed bombers; in theory, the President has the power to wipe out all of humanity at the push of a button. On a smaller scale, the U.S. president wields the authority to assassinate single persons using drone strikes: President Obama, for instance, ordered 563 drone strikes during his two-term presidency, killing “between 384 and 807 civilians” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; and Trump nearly started a regional conflagration in the Middle East in 2020 when he ordered the airstrike that killed the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. The President also has the power to (attempt to) break individual dissidents, as the case of Julian Assange’s 14-year ordeal shows. All of this means that personal suitability and individual characteristics are not totally irrelevant. 

And yet: We ought to think more about the way a President acts as a nexus of complex interlocking forces involving a machinery of politics that draws upon the energies of thousands of individuals: An incoming president must, for example, make “about 4,000 political appointments” in a short period of time after taking up office. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us, via Hegel, the King should be an idiot, an “idiotic dotter of the i’s.” It is when the Leader “embodied the rational totality”—Stalin comes to mind—that we are really in trouble and run the risk of a figurehead who involves themselves in every aspect of the polity.

Thinking in terms of nexus, not personal character—and what kinds of forces will be mobilized within this nexus—should occupy our time far more than the current hyper-stress on individuality indicates.

So what kind of nexus of forces did the two presidents hint at in the debate?

First, Biden pulled leftward and attacked Trump for his vehement class politics. It is telling in the extreme that Biden’s very first statement went straight for Trump’s class/economic jugular: “[H]e rewarded the wealthy. He had the largest tax cut in American history, $2 trillion,” Biden said. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is the most important Trump policy that hardly anyone seems to remember.

Remember that Biden is the first sitting U.S. president who has attended an ongoing strike: In September 2023, he “visited a picket line in Michigan in a show of loyalty to autoworkers.” And as Bernie Sanders points out in his most recent book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, Biden in 2020 understood the need to “adopt policies that could create some degree of excitement within the progressive community.” He can be made to understand it again.

Second, Biden suggested a much more fiery and self-assertive (potentially progressive) Democratic Party, with barbs against Trump that matched the 45th president’s own historic aggressiveness. In one memorable utterance, Biden said of his opponent, “You have the morals of an alley cat,” after having accused him of “having sex with a porn star”—words one never expected to hear in a U.S. presidential debate. Biden dismissed  Trump’s ramblings coolly: “I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life.” And when Trump accused Biden, surreally, of being “a very bad Palestinian,” Biden rightly riposted that he had “never heard so much foolishness.”  He sliced against Trump’s alleged remark that the war dead of World War I were “losers and suckers,” and attacked Trump’s far-right allegiances for his infamous, and chilling, remark after the Charlotesville “Unite the Right Rally” that there were “fine people on both sides.”

Biden’s gloves were off, which is the only way of dealing effectively with Trump: One must, within limits and while maintaining one’s dignity, confront Trump at his own rhetorical level. Silk-glove politics will not work against Trump the street brawler. For all of Biden’s verbal bumbling and stumbling, it remains the case that Trump, as Biden rightly said, “has no idea what the hell he’s talking about”: He is the ultimate empty signifier, the opportunist par excellence, who turns wherever the winds of political fortune will take him.

Trump did not do himself any favors among black or other minority voters when describing the former as “the black people”—a syntactic construction seeming to confirm suspicions that his relations to minority voters are still entangled in the racist policies of his father’s real-estate business in the 1970s, when black would-be tenants found themselves barred from Fred Sr.’s buildings.

Third, on the geopolitical front, Biden’s statements suggested business as usual, and stasis, with more deaths and killings on the horizon. It was clear he had no meaningful policy for Ukraine—short of delivering ATACMS missiles and the like—capable of pulling the country out of its stalemate, if not outright war of attrition, with the more populous Russia. Trump, conversely, could credibly score major points on his observation that “[t]hat’s a war that should have never started” and his view that “they’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people.” His pathos-filled line, “It’s so sad,” even seemed half-authentic.

On Palestine, Biden’s ghoulish side came to the fore. He claimed to have denied Israel nothing except “2,000-pound bombs” because “[t]hey don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people. We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.” This pseudo-noble attitude is an outright lie: The news agency Reuters has revealed that the U.S. has in fact sent some 14,000 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs. Biden’s latter claim, however, is more or less accurate: He has provided Israel with all the weapons they want (though “need” implies that the destruction of Gaza is rational, not wanton): “6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs,” according to Reuters. The dead and mutilated among the ruins of Gaza cry out against Biden’s presidency.

Two other elements stand out from that night': The lack of an audience—and yet Biden for some reason walking out on to the stage pointing and smiling, as if to an invisible or spectral audience—with the consequence that both candidates looked like Zoom-call lecturers at the height of the pandemic, speaking out into the abyss of virtual space; and the absurdity of the two candidates comparing their golf game, in what is surely the most “privileged male senior citizen” moment in U.S. presidential politics.

The absence of an audience is hard to square with the democratic process: Even if we all know that the audiences in televised debates are likely highly selective and, in some sense, “rigged,” maintaining this minimal fiction, it turns out, is still important to what I would call, borrowing a term from the culinary arts, the “mouthfeel” of democracy. Without even this veneer of public participation, the (Baudrillardian) simulacra-like tendencies of modern democratic politics reach an almost unbearable degree.

***

In short, for Biden, the debate performance amounts to a familiar picture: An unhinged or impotent foreign policy (on Gaza and Ukraine, respectively), and yet with a domestic policy that can, with enough popular mobilization, be pulled leftward. In his most recent book, Bernie Sanders boasts of having “succeeded in pushing Biden in a more progressive direction” back in 2020. The question is whether the left in America can succeed in doing so again—that is, in reshaping the nexus of forces that Biden represents, more so than obsessing over his personal characteristics, such as they are.

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[First published on The Theory Brief (Substack).]

The Upside-Down Philosopher (On Slavoj Žižek's 'Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure')

Slavoj Žižek. Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 320 s.

Reviewing a Žižek book is a bit like “dancing about architecture,” to borrow a Frank Zappa quotation. Ideally, a review ought to provide a rational overview of a work’s contents and form. But Žižek unusual prose style resists simplified summary, and many of his most recent works are, if not formless, then at least formally idiosyncratic—more like patchworks of loosely interwoven textual fragments than formal or even sustained argument. With strands of text that have been recombined, reused and (occasionally subtly) rewritten, his texts at times seem to draw more upon Burroughs’ “cut-up” collage technique than the Western canon of philosophy, redolent of the free-associating analysand on the couch giving free rein to their thoughts: One idea succeeds the next, certainly, but the sum of it all is naturally quite fragmentary.

What, then, ties it all together? After some 40 years of writing books, Žižek is perhaps first and foremost a thinker of dialectical inversion, someone who has made turning things upside down into something of an intellectual trademark. A large part of Žižek’s method revolves around showing that a thing is actually its own counterpart—and the more absurd, paradoxical or comical the result, the better. What if the laugh tracks in TV sitcoms don’t so much passivize us as “laugh for us” and therefore allow us to escape the passivity of having to laugh “on our own,” which the cultural theorist Robert Pfaller calls interpassivity (p. 143)? What if the metaphoric masks we wear, i.e. our public personas, are more authentic than the “real” self behind the mask (p. 119)? What if the conventional understanding of freedom is actually a form of unfreedom—as when we are given a choice we are meant to refuse (an illusory freedom), or when the prohibition itself provides an independent pleasure that then disappears as soon as the culture is liberalized and social norms opened up (p. 3)? Or what if military occupation is not a form of oppression, but an opportunity to take fate into one’s own hands and thus, paradoxically, experience a deeper freedom—as when Sartre wrote in 1944 that “never were we freer than during the German occupation,” which Žižek quotes approvingly (p. 25)?

It goes without saying that this “up-is-really-down” methodology is far from unproblematic. It can be taken too far, and at times Žižek over-applies his theoretical matrix, either to the point of boredom or the politically problematic. Sartre’s romanticization of occupation was, after all, invalid for the murdered millions who could not join a Resistance; a superficial persona put on to function in public is more oppressive than being able to “be yourself,” whatever that might mean; and the softening of social norms is, on the whole, a good thing for many groups: Who wants to return back to the 1950s? Turning things upside down can be as reactionary as it is enlightening. Moreover, Žižek isn’t entirely consistent in the way he deploys this “Hegelian” dialectic. A good question to ask oneself when facing a book by Žižek might thus be: Which firmly fixed “Archimedean” points of reference does he nevertheless insist upon establishing? What is it that he is not willing to turn upside down? In other words, where does Žižek choose to make his stand, with both feet firmly planted on the ground?

Because there are some solid anchor points, even in Freedom. The Ukraine war, for example, becomes in Žižek’s book an unproblematic narrative about Russia’s imperial ambitions that triggers a commitment from the West to provide military assistance to Kyiv. Žižek seems to fear a peace treaty between Ukraine and Russia as a possible symptom of Western, and U.S., weakness of resolve (p. 197)—and this despite acknowledging only a few pages later, en passant, that “Ukraine cannot win over Russia” (p. 210). Western NATO critics are dismissed as mere “peaceniks,” which is Cold War language, fitting for a second Cold War: “The peaceniks who are against NATO and sending arms to Ukraine ignore the key fact that it was Western help that allowed Ukraine to resist—without it, Ukraine would be all long occupied” (p. 229; italics in original). No dialectical twist awaits us here: The only way forward is “full support for Ukraine” (p. 229), whatever the cost, and forget suggesting that any war must sooner or later end in a political solution (as U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently recognized in Congress). Quite the contrary: “The most despicable figures in our public space are the peaceniks from Chomsky through Varoufakis to Peterson” (p. 229). Žižek offers no critical attempt to think beyond the confines of a tragically locked geopolitical situation. Moreover, one can disagree with left-wing intellectuals like Varoufakis and Chomsky, but are they “despicable figures”? For someone who has advocated more “politeness and civility” in public discourse, partly in response to Trump’s vulgarity, this seems strangely inconsistent.

In some places, Žižek’s critical observations turn conspiratorial. On China, for example, he claims that “[t]hey have already started to plant small chips into the bodies of individuals” for the “general purpose of controlling the whereabouts and characteristics of individuals” (p. 186). On Switzerland, he claims that the country is “really run by a half-secret elite board of twenty men who really decide everything” (p. 210). Perhaps unsurprisingly, both sets of claims are unsourced.

The Dangers of Freedom

In this book, too, Žižek treads familiar ground. We meet here the same Hegelian-Lacanian-Marxist admixture we have grown accustomed to from dozens of past books and essays, interspersed with pop culture references (Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Agatha Christie novels, the Netflix series Inventing Anna, Alexandre Dumas, Fight Club), where the goal—as always, and somewhat contrary to the book’s purported aim—seems to be to capture the world’s overall ideological situation and basic political-economic-cultural logic. With grandiose ambitions such as these, it goes without saying that the pitfalls run deep.

Having said all this, Freedom is still a stimulating book. For a book supposedly devoted to the concept of freedom, however, it makes up a vanishingly small part of the book’s overall contents. The ironic subtitle, A Disease Without a Cure, nevertheless reveals its overarching thesis conclusion. We are facing here a very different concept from liberalism’s paeans to freedom. In Žižek’s terms, we are condemned to be free, understood as the ability and opportunity to shape the political, social and cultural space, especially through collective action. However, following Kant, Žižek notes that our natural urge for freedom needs to be restrained; freedom must be met with “discipline” in order to curb man’s unruly “Wildheit” (lit. “wildness”) (p. 5). But at the same time, this “wildness” is our greatest strength as a species; it is expressed in the capacity for passion, which Žižek understands as an irrational (over)identification with an activity or project, often artistic or political. Passion makes us more than animals: “Passion is as such purely human: animals have no passions, just instincts” (p. 5). The paradox, then, is that the human urge for freedom or “wildness”—a word redolent with the natural—is actually our most civilizing quality, what in its essence separates us from other animals.

But as Žižek writes, the desire for freedom is also “at its most basic a disease” (p. 4), something that is “beyond the pleasure principle,” and not necessarily a source of joy—neither for individuals who are seized by a passion and who can thus find themselves submitting their entire life force to the project, but also for social collectives seized by the desire for freedom. With his long-standing interest in Stalinism, Žižek nevertheless reads the Soviet Union’s origins in the Bolshevik Revolution as based on a fundamental idea of freedom—what Žižek, following the German author Bini Adamczak, calls “the ineradicable, absolutely authentic, Communist desire, the Idea of a society which fully overcomes domination” (p. 202). The Soviet Union was a disaster for the millions who died in Stalin’s murderous campaigns, but this longing for a world without (illegitimate) domination, without social suffering, is an immortal, positive idea—a product of the desire for freedom. Communism in its purest form is thus the idea of a world enhanced by freedom, even if the self-proclaimed “moderately conservative communist” Žižek is nevertheless fully aware of the dangers of utopian fantasies. (As he likes to phrase it in various written and verbal contexts, he has “no illusions.”)

This dialectical alternation between positive and negative understandings of freedom is replaced in the conclusion of Freedom with a one-sidedly dark reading of the effects of freedom, in which Žižek notes that climate change is the result of an excessive exercise of freedom: An impending climate catastrophe—recall that nearly 80 percent of leading scientists polled now expect a 2.5 degree increase by 2100 and believe we are facing a “semi-dystopian” future—does not necessarily (only) mean that the earth is getting warmer, but that nature as such, understood as a stable foundation for the exercise of human freedom, will cease to exist. Žižek encapsulates this with the phrase “the end of nature” (p. 265), a consequence of humanity going too far in its exercise of freedom:

The lesson of global warming is that the freedom of humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of life on earth (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply, etc.): humans can “do what they want” only insofar as they remain marginal enough so that they don’t seriously perturb the parameters of life on earth. The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, i.e., of our growing ability to transform nature around us up to destabilizing the very basic geological parameters of life on earth. (p. 266)

The more scientific and technological advances, the more power to act—but also, consequently, the power to destroy, a clear illustration of the dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno’s book is a recurring reference in Žižek’s works over the decades).

Moderately Conservative Communism?

In recent years, Žižek has begun to refer to himself, somewhat self-deprecatingly, as a “moderately conservative communist.” If the communist element is becoming somewhat harder to spot, the moderate conservatism is all the more conspicuous, e.g., lashing out against Sweden’s perceived crime problem (pp. 248-249), while failing to take into account that the level of crime in the Nordic country still remains extremely low in comparative terms or placing the suburbs in a larger context of political-economic liberalization. It is relevant that Sweden has systematically cut and liberalized the welfare state and that the level of inequality has increased: The country now has one of the world’s largest shares of dollar billionaires measured per capita. But Žižek is too busy rushing on to the next topic to dwell on the case of Sweden, even though he manages to claim that to “blame immigrants for their refusal to integrate” is just as wrong as blaming the majority “for its non-readiness to integrate immigrants” (p. 249), an example of how dialectics can just as easily result in centrist political platitudes.

So where does that leave the communism of Žižek’s self-styled ideology? In the face of what he calls the “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” consisting of “plague,” war, hunger and “death” (understood, unconventionally, as the “death” of the sovereign subject in the face of new digital technology, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology and what Žižek has previously called “the wired brain” ), Žižek believes that “parliamentary liberal democracy,” and liberal market capitalism, are no longer enough. We will need something like communism, even as it must take on a completely different form than failed, catastrophic “20th century communism.” What is needed is precisely “a new form of communism” (p. 255). Žižek is not particularly clear on what he means by this here, other than offering the examples of “universal healthcare, social regulation of the economy, [and] free education” (p. 256), but small hints throughout the book, as well as in earlier texts (such as his 2020 book, PANDEMIC!), suggest the need for some form of strong state control, with collective control over important economic resources, perhaps subject to some sort of transnational coordination mechanisms.

In the poem Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling asked the pointed question (through the figure of the Devil): “It’s pretty, but is it art?”. Similarly, one is tempted to ask of Žižek: “It’s pretty (i.e. makes good sense), but is it communism?”

Perhaps not. What Žižek calls a “new communism” in fact resembles the policy packages and forms of statecraft that all the major geopolitical players have increasingly come to subscribe to in the post-pandemic era. The U.S., China and EU are all attempting to establish tighter state controls over energy supplies, key resources (such as rare minerals) and industries (microchips, solar cells, EV batteries), and increasingly deploy the full range of instruments at their disposal, from subsidies, tax breaks, and bilateral trade and investment agreements to more direct interventions in the market (depending on the country or bloc’s relative ideological leanings), whether it be President Joe Biden’s billion-dollar “green tax credits” or China’s billions in subsidies and loans to its domestic industry or the “Belt and Road” initiative. What Žižek terms a “new communism” seems more like the sort of state mercantilism that, in the wake of the unbridled market liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s, looks gradually set to become the dominant ideology of the major powers in our time. If communism is defined as minimally as Žižek does, Beijing, Washington, and Brussels are all more or less moving toward “communist” principles today. The state is increasingly called upon to regulate economic life for the preservation and furtherance of geographically-bounded social life, in direct contest with geopolitical peer competitors.

Consuming Culture

Žižek is a discerning curator of pop-cultural (and not-so-popular cultural) products, and one of the pleasures of reading a Žižek book is maintaining a running list of all the movies, books and music referenced. At his best, Žižek sends us on a voyage of discovery through his reference lists, whether it’s to read Andrei Platonov’s post-revolutionary novels or the final Hercule Poirot story, Curtain, or to listen to Shostakovich’s “failed” opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. And who wouldn’t want to read Adamczak’s meditation on Soviet communism from 1917 to 1939, Yesterday’s Tomorrow, after the following recommendation from Žižek in the footnotes: “After reading this book and trying to select quotes from it, I was overwhelmed by a weird feeling that the entire book should be quoted” (p. 300).

Perhaps, in the end, this is what Žižek does best: divulging and spreading his enthusiasms. As an enthusiastic reader of contemporary culture, at least, he stands on firm ground.

* A version of this essay in Norwegian is forthcoming in the philosophy journal, Agora: Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon.

Artificial Unintelligence (AU) and the Problem of Perpetual Patchability

It is increasingly recognized that large language models (LLMs) are prone to erroneous outputs, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. As AI spreads ever wider into the technological substrate of late modernity—summarizing news stories, synthesizing search results, condensing research papers, speeding up office worker productivity, and so on—the hallucinatory effects of AI are only likely to grow more consequential.

To give just one relatively innocent example: In 2022, Google announced that it was deploying its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to produce “snippets,” or brief summaries, of search results. So how’s it faring? Say you want to learn whether Switzerland is a member of the European Union. You might plausibly search for a phrase like “Switzerland EU.” As of May 2024, the phrase results in the following Google-manufactured summary of a Wikipedia page devoted to Switzerland-European Union relations: “Switzerland is a member state of the European Union (EU).”

The only problem, of course, is that this is completely wrong. In fact, the first sentence of the Wikipedia page that Google summarizes, states exactly the opposite of Google’s AI-driven summary: “Switzerland is not a member state of the European Union (EU),” Wikipedia writes (emphasis added). 

So how did Google’s AI-driven model get it so wrong? How can artificial intelligence be so confidently unintelligent as to omit something so basic as the negation, thereby inverting the original proposition’s meaning and upending its truth-content?

There are lots of other examples of hallucinations, such as LLMs generating lists of references to works that do not exist, or summarizing books that have never been written, or which contain completely different materials from what the program claims. 

The makers of AI do not necessarily know why their LLMs produce the outputs they do, a phenomenon known as the “black box problem”: You enter some input X into a program, which produces some output Y, but what happens in the intermediate phase is governed by logics and datasets so complex and convoluted that the mediating link risks turning into a mystery, even unto its own creators.

Artificial Unintelligence (AU)

The problem with AI’s growing proliferation today, then, can be summarized in the following formula: hallucinations * black box = Artificial Unintelligence (AU).

1. Hallucinations mean we cannot inherently trust the truth-content of AI outputs. From this basic lack of trustworthiness, it follows that we cannot determine in advance when we might find ourselves in the throes of AI hallucination and when we are being addressed by a more lucid apparatus. The outputs are therefore in essence spoiled, unless we possess the expert knowledge to make reasonably certain determinations about their veracity (but then why would we want or need AI outputs?).

2. Worse still, the black box problem means we do not necessarily know why the AI model is hallucinating. This has led to the rise of the Explainable AI movement (abbreviated to XAI), which advocates constructing AI in such a way that the inscrutable black box might turn into a more transparent “glass box,” satisfying a claimed human “right to explanation,” a basic condition of human machine-learning oversight.

3. The modulation of hallucinatory drives by the basic fact of black-box opacity means that, even as the world seems on the verge of a “great leap forward” into the unknown abyss of machine learning (from higher education to journalism, from office productivity to tutoring aids), we are at risk of consigning ourselves to Artificial Unintelligence.

The Forever Patch

Silicon Valley is, I think, increasingly aware of the risks posed by the two-headed beast that is Artificial Unintelligence, which is at once enormously learned (measured in the vast quantities of text and other data that it has consumed) and strangely idiotic (claiming, for instance, that Switzerland is a part of the EU, or offering summaries of imaginary books). 

But Silicon Valley has, intentionally or inadvertently, developed—or hit upon—an ingenious technical-political technique to manage and respond to the problem: perpetual patchability. 

An AI model is never “finished,” never actually ready for consumption in a completed state, but exists in an ever-evolving state of development. All we get are versions, never finalized editions, a basic feature of software as such, but all the more aggressively emphasized in AI marketing. Thus, in early May 2024, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, claimed that ChatGPT, while seemingly impressive today, would retroactively be transformed by the future appearance of newer, improved versions of the program: “In the next couple of 12 months, I think the systems that we use today will be laughably bad.” Similarly, in early 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, promised that ChatGPT-5 (version 5.0) would be a major improvement. The present moment “is the stupidest these models will ever be,” Altman said.

AI LLMs, then, are said to be in a constant state of improvement, and developers claim the right to forever make improvements to “the system,” even going so far as to admitting that their present-day product is “laughably bad.” This creates a state of permanent disruption, throwing the user—and much of an increasingly AI-fixated society—into an always unraveling present moment that awaits only the next patch. 

More importantly, permanent patchability precludes socio-technical critique: If the object is always being unmade and remade, how can critics hope to convince with their assessments of a system that is always-already undergoing transformation (and, so it is claimed, fundamental improvement)? The forever patch, or state of perpetual patchability, is an ingenious technique for regulating and stifling criticism, not by modernist techniques of brute control, but through the late-modern promise of a permanently disrupted/improved future.

Perpetual patchability may be Silicon Valley’s optimism of the will, embodied and turned into social ontology. But is it enough to fundamentally alter the basic problem confronting AI today: its shadowy obverse, the specter of artificial unintelligence? I think not. I suspect that throwing more data at the AU will not fundamentally alter the constraints outlined in the formula above: hallucinations * black box = Artificial Unintelligence (AU). In fact, the hallucinatory tendencies may worsen or grow more insidious. The problems of opacity might become more profound as the systems grow in complexity.

But who can really tell? The forever patch means we can never, finally, be certain of what we are dealing with. A perpetually patchable object is one that, therefore, intelligently eludes critique. In this, at least, Silicon Valley demonstrates the not inconsiderable intellectual resources at its command.

And that Switzerland search result? It might already have been patched by some Google engineer.

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First published on The Theory Brief

Social Democracy, or Defending the National Interest

Social democracy may be the solution to the problems of some fortunate subset of individual nations, but it is not a solution for the world as such—that is, to collective global problems and to the problems of poorer nations around the globe today. Instead, social democracy—so I argue in a forthcoming publication—fundamentally hinges on the preservation of difference, and in many cases the active production and acceleration of differences between nations, for internal, nationally-bounded ends.[1] Social democracy is, finally, about furthering the well-being of a nation’s own citizens—and by extension, a given state’s own national interests. If everyone were to become a high-functioning Nordic welfare-capitalist society, for instance, the difference-reliant components inherent to the social-democratic model of political economy would in short order begin to break down.

Briefly restated: No social democracy without global hierarchies—of wealth and poverty, of power and dispossession, of capital and labor, of financial rentier and client-tenants. In this sense, social democracy fails Kant’s categorical imperative: Social democracy can never become a solution for the entire universe of states in the world today, can never become generalizable to the world as such.

Why is this important? Because social democracy, and the countries most commonly associated with this reformist vision of market capitalism, the Nordic countries, are often held up as exemplars for the rest of the world to follow. (The examples are too many to enumerate, but for one example, see George Lakey’s Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right—and How We Can, Too.) 

But as I argue in my paper, “The global hinterland of social democracy,” this is strictly speaking an impossible promise to the world, especially those parts of the world riddled with poverty and positioned at the lower ends of global political-economic hierarchies. Social democracy needs what I call a global hinterland to meet its specific national needs and relies upon global hierarchies to feed its national populations. Social democracy is, we might say, great for those who can get it; but so few can—and largely for structural reasons. While social democracy is often redescribed as welfare capitalism, in practice this usually ends up meaning welfare for those on the inside of the social-democratic national polity (including social security and free public healthcare and education), and capitalism for everyone else.

So what are some of the things this global hinterland supplies a nationally-bounded social democracy like Norway with? In the specific case of Norway—and we sociologists should always be careful to ground our analyses in “concrete analyses of a concrete situation,” in Lenin’s famous phrase—the big factors are cheap labor from geographically peripheral zones (mainly Eastern Europe), cheap imported goods (from the industrial heartland of the world in East and Southeast Asia), and accessible financial markets across the world, to revalorize its pension funds and world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Norwegian government’s “Oil Fund.” Meanwhile, Norwegian corporations—including a booming weapons industry—are increasingly present and engaged in profit-extracting activities around the world .

Without labor, goods, profits, and financial value pulled in from the global hinterland—that is, from those less privileged zones of the globe not fortunate enough to be ensconced at the top of political-economic hierarchies, whose citizens are largely not protected by the welfarist side of “welfare capitalism”—social democracy in Norway would be that much harder to sustain. While it might be tempting for reformist progressives to ask, “What can we learn from Norway?”, as Senator Bernie Sanders did in an interview with Norway’s Washington DC ambassador in a 45-minute long webcast in 2022,[2] it is equally important to follow up and ask: What must social democracies do in and to the world in order to remain identifiably social-democratic? And is this is a trully universalizable model of political-economic transformation?

Does my paper, then, tell a story about social democracy in general or Norway in all its messy empirical specificities? A bit of both. In the company of the Nordics, the Oil Fund is a highly specific Norwegian institution to be sure, but Sweden and Denmark’s large state-owned pension funds are key pillars in their respective welfare states as well, with deep reliance upon profit-extraction from global financial markets. Norway has also been enormously fortunate to be able to export oil and gas for decades, making it less exposed to international market competition, unlike, say, Sweden’s manufacturing industrial base, which has been ravaged by competition from countries like China, without the soft cushioning effects of vast oil resources to act as a shock absorber for the welfare state.

But if anything, the vast wealth generated by the commodification of these natural resources demonstrates even more clearly the basic logic at the core of the social-democratic project: This is a national, not internationalist, system of market-capitalist reform, primarily intended for the benefit of the nation and its people. The trillions in natural resource revenues over the years have not to any significant degree—development aid notwithstanding, which has always consumed a paltry proportion of state budgets—been devoted to amelioriating the life chances of the world’s poor, or redressing global power imbalances, but rather to bolstering the nation-state and its privileged citizenry. 

Yet again, welfare capitalism tends to mean welfare for those on the inside, and capitalism for all the rest. To truly attend to the world’s problems would mean abandoning the parochial, nation-centered vision of social democracy for something like a true internationalism.

Notes

[1] For a fuller elucidation of this argument, see: Shammas, V. L. (2024) “The global hinterland of social democracy: On the limitations of Norwegian welfare capitalism.” Nordic Welfare Research/Nordisk välfärdsforskning.

[2] Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, which in some ways is but an American synonym to the more European-inflected term social democracy, is similarly laudatory of Norway in his 2023 book, It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism—understandably so, since social democracy does tend to offer tangible benefits to its citizens.

[Originally published on Substack: The Theory Brief.]

Post-Politics and Technocracy: Taking "People Power" Seriously Again

I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consult the draft here)[1], which is about how societies deal with crime and punishment, and how they structure the policymaking processes around crime control and imprisonmnet. That might not sound very abstruse, but, alas, it is (for substantially defensible reasons, I  claim).

There is, however, a broader claim about the nature of democracy running through the chapter, which might be of interest to a wider audience.

Essentially, I claim, we are passing through an era characterized by two broad, and seemingly contradictory, political tendencies: 

(1) a form of post-political technocracy, meaning “governance by experts” and the displacement of the very idea of “the political” (to be replaced by “self-evidently” true procedures of fact-finding and the formation of value-free “policies”);

(2) a rare moment of right-wing resurgence, after several (sluggish) decades of centrist liberalism (think Clinton, Blair, Obama), characterized by paradoxically high levels of political polarization.

Now, it makes a great deal of sense to view the latter as the direct result of the former. The post-political attempt was a social-political project engineered from above, which tried in essence to take “the people” out of the political equation. This has opened up for a number of oozing, festering popular resentments, which have gone largely unaddressed by political elites. And these resentments have been skillfully exploited by the (far) right. Throughout the 2000s, there was a growing belief among liberal elites in Washington and Western European capitals that one really could craft a “politics without politics” (as Slavoj Žižek might say), run purely on rational reason and without the noisome interference of “the people.” Democracy is otherwise a messy business. It involves the meeting of a profusion of conflicting viewpoints, often with loud fighting (preferably in the metaphorical sense) and slow-moving, laborious processes of contestation. Much better, so the conventional wisdom went, to implement a politics of “the best answers.” Let the policymakers determine the course of society.

The problem with the post-political, of course, is that it actually involves a huge amount of politics, only now disguised and disavowed. The Iraq War—the U.S.’s costliest foreign policy misadventure in modern times, costing at least a trillion dollars—was hardly the work of brilliant policymakers producing unassailable syllogisms of war. The dismantling of the UK welfare state has largely accelerated the decentering of Britain from the world stage—another “irrational” move, even from within a purely “realist” perspective. Even the statist response to the Covid pandemic, involving mass vaccination and lockdowns (which I agree with unqualifiedly, incidentally), were hardly the result of neutral “science” in action, but involved the implementation of a political will. (In Norway, there was an attempt in 2020 to debate the merits of school lockdowns on the basis of empirical studies of so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” at times verging on the comical, where even the most avid empiricsts finally had to admit defeat: The pandemic was a unique laboratory setting that exploded the validity of past studies. History only runs through once. School lockdowns were implemented, but not on the basis of “science,” but precisely a political will.)

So where does this leave democracy today?

Democracy, of course, comes from the Greek: the noun, demos, or “people,” and kratéō, denoting rulership: to “have command or control,” to “have sovereign power,” or simply to rule.[2] Democrats are those who care about whether the people (demos) rule (kratein).  “People power” was the somewhat hackneyed phrase bandied about in the 1960s, but it has the admirable quality of cutting right to the core of the matter. Are the people in power? My claim in the book chapter mentioned above is that so much of recent political history has been about diluting democracy, by gradually lengthening the distance between real power and the public as a whole, ensuring that strong “buffers” are established between the people and political power. Power, on this terminology, has been “insulated.”

On the liberal-centrist view, “the people” are essentially thought to be irrational, uninformed, and, what is worse, in some sense uninformable, not to be trusted with the reins of power. They are the “basket of deplorables” (as Hilary Clinton said) who look “low-class” (as Trump is to have said in candid disappointment of his supporters during the January 6 insurrection); they are the “sans-dents,” the “toothless” masses (on Francois Hollande’s phrase). There is nothing very new about these thoughts. Gustave Le Bon wrote of the irrationality of “the crowd” in the late nineteenth century. Many feared the “dangerous classes” in the epoch of Marx and industrialization. But these ideas run right through the 21st century project of post-political technocratization. 

If the conventional wisdom of technocratic liberal centrists has paved the way for far-right victories across the postindustrialized world, is the solution less democracy? Hardly. But if you listened to political pundits and liberal journalism of the past decade, you could be forgiven for thinking that the problem with “populism” is that it gives too much power to the populus, failing to “insulate” power sufficiently. 

My claim is quite the contrary. Right-wing “populism”—a misnomer much better described in conventional terms as a renascent far right, verging in places on neofascism—is not the result of giving the people too much of a say, but precisely of taking them too far away from the halls of power. By failing to bolster living standards, shore up real wages, build vibrant communities supported by generous welfare-state investments, liberal centrism has started digging its own grave. The post-political centrists thought they could get away with the negative consequences of neoliberal restructuration by appealing to “unassailable facts”—demographic transformation, global competitiveness, etc.—but Trump, Brexit, Meloni, and so on are symptoms of the very failure of an essentially anti-democratic form of rule, namely technocratic governance. 

To ensure the survival of democracy requires not just combatting the symptoms of the post-political project—e.g. Trump and his assorted political allies across the world—but taking the fight directly to the idea of technocratic liberalism as such. Only by building coalitions of activists, organizers, experts, and “ordinary people” can this be achieved. It means taking economic conditions very seriously. But it also means displacing the very political class that has tried for decades to keep “the people” out.

Notes

[1] An earlier statement of a similar argument can be found in: Shammas, V. L. (2016) “Who's afraid of penal populism? Technocracy and ‘the people’ in the sociology of punishment.” Contemporary Justice Review 19(3): 325-346.

[2] Diggle, J. (2021) κρατέω. In: Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 831.

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[Originally published on Substack: The Theory Brief.]