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Enter the Derridean: The Martial Architecture of Taoism as Contemporary Cultural Theory Paul Bowman Roehampton University, [email protected]

This paper is posted at Roehampton Research Papers. http://rrp.roehampton.ac.uk/artspapers/11

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Enter the Derridean THE MARTIAL ARCHITECTURE OF TAOISM AS CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL THEORY Paul Bowman Why these encounters between phrases of heterogeneous regimen? Differends are born, you say, from these encounters. Can’t these contacts be avoided? – That’s impossible, contact is necessary. First of all, it is necessary to link onto a phrase that happens (be it by a silence, which is a phrase), there is no possibility of not linking onto it. Second, to link is necessary; how to link is contingent…. – But there exist genres of discourse which fix rules of linkage… Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend1 Finding a truth in one discipline and then applying that truth to an entirely unrelated discipline is a hallmark of Lee’s genius: he saw the connections where others did not. John Little, Bruce Lee, Artist of Life2

1. Inter the Dragon Driving along in California (of all places), in (of all years) 1968, with his senior student, a Philippino eskrimador (of all people) called Dan Inosanto; the Chinese American Bruce Lee was discussing (of all things) Western fencing. At this multiethnic, multicultural, interdisciplinary moment, Inosanto tells us, a new martial art was born. It ‘emerged full grown from the head!’3 It was named, and its name encapsulated its principle: according to Inosanto, the principle and the naming emerged simultaneously. In his masterfully postmodern, polyvalent and multi-genre text, entitled Jeet Kune Do: The Art and Philosophy of Bruce Lee,4 Inosanto says that it happened like this (I quote Inosanto at length): 1

Lyotard, J.-F. (1988), The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Manchester: Manchester University Press, xiii, 29. 2 Lee, B. (2001), Bruce Lee, Artist of Life: The Essential Writings, compiled and edited by John Little, Boston: Tuttle, xiv. 3 Hall, S. (1996), ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, p. 262. 4 Inosanto, D. (1980), Jeet Kune Do: The Art and Philosophy of Bruce Lee. Know How Publishing Company: Los Angeles.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

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It all began in the early part of 1968 while Bruce and I were driving along in the car. We were talking about fencing, Western fencing. Bruce said [that] the most efficient means of countering in fencing was the stop-hit. A stop-hit is when you do not parry and then counter, it’s all done in one step. When the opponent attacks, you intercept his move with a thrust or hit of your own. It is designed to score a hit in the midst of the attacker’s action, and is the highest and most economical of all the counters. Then Bruce said, “We should call our method of fighting the ‘stop-hitting fist style’, or the ‘intercepting fist style’.” “What would that be in Chinese?” I asked. “That would be Jeet Kune Do,” he said. Jeet Kune Do means the way of the stopping fist, or the way of the intercepting fist. So, instead of blocking and then hitting, our main concept is to dispense with blocking completely, and instead to intercept and hit. We realize that this cannot be done all the time, but this is the main theme. Up until 1967 our method was called “Jun Fan” Gung Fu, which was a modification of various techniques from Northern Praying Mantis, Southern Praying Mantis, Choy Li Fut, Eagle Claw, Western Boxing, Hung Gar, Thai Boxing, wrestling, Judo, Jiu Jitsu, and several Northern Gung-Fu styles. [But] It is obvious that Wing Chun was the main nucleus and [that] all the other methods evolved around it. [….] In later years he became sorry that he ever coined the term Jeet Kune Do because he felt that it, too, was limiting, and according to Bruce, “There is no such thing as a style if you totally understand the roots of combat.”5 Now, with the overdetermined and overdetermining date of 1968 still ringing in our ears, and with the themes of interdisciplinarity, productive multicultural encounters, hybridity,

5

Inosanto, D. (1980), Jeet Kune Do: The Art and Philosophy of Bruce Lee. Know How Publishing Company: Los Angeles , p.66-67.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 3 of 15 efficiency, and (of course) construction on the table, I’m sure I need not belabour the generally acknowledged point that the 1960s saw more than one new inventive, subversive, transgressive interdisciplinary ‘revolution’. Perhaps simply saying ‘1968’ is enough to conjure up a certain zeitgeist. (Or a certain dread!) Either way, let me throw up some more dates: in 1962, the year Derrida’s introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry6 was published, Bruce Lee gave a spectacular demonstration of Chinese Kung Fu at Ed Parker’s International Karate Championships, an event that, according to Inosanto, ‘proved to be the major turning point in [Bruce Lee’s] career’.7 America met Lee’s Kung Fu as France met Derrida’s deconstruction. In 1964, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was established in Birmingham, the same year that the tape of Lee’s earlier demonstration secured him a screen test for the role of Kato in the TV series, The Green Hornet (produced by the makers of Batman). And so it all began. Only in 1968, the year Stuart Hall became director of the Birmingham Centre, did Lee – slightly after Derrida – baptise his own method-that-wasn’t-really-a-method. However, he would come to regret the name slightly before Derrida would. (Stuart Hall, meanwhile, has always defended the name ‘cultural studies’.)8 Now, you might be concerned about the legitimacy of the implicit but telegraphed presupposition that one might possibly even begin to generalize anything at all from such conspicuously select, heterogeneous and unrelated things as these moments in the institution and dissemination of ‘cultural studies’, ‘deconstruction’, and ‘Bruce Lee’. You might protest, like Fleiss protested to Freud about psychoanalysis, that making such preposterous connections is simply ‘wit gone wild, overingenious analogizing lacking the necessary discrimination’.9 And you would, of course, be wise to do so. Nevertheless,

6

Derrida, J. (1962), L’Origine de la géométrie, by Edmund Husserl, Translated with an introduction: Presses Universitaires de France. / Derrida, J. (1978), Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London. 7 Inosanto, D. (1980), Jeet Kune Do: The Art and Philosophy of Bruce Lee. Know How Publishing Company: Los Angeles, p. 36. 8 Stuart Hall never seems to have had problems with the name ‘cultural studies’, apparently because unlike names like ‘deconstruction’ or ‘jeet kune do’, the name ‘cultural studies’ effectively works in an opposite direction; i.e., denoting the multiple, the partial, the incomplete and the amorphous, in its very plural vagueness, as opposed to denoting some putatively singular and definite identity. 9 Wilhelm Fleiss, quoted in Weber, S. (1982), The Legend of Freud, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 106.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 4 of 15 what may be a potentially devastating blow to psychoanalysis need not amount to the same thing here, because, unlike for Freud, there is no intricately crafted edifice to defend here, as yet. And hopefully, whatever might come to be (or come to have been) constructed, will only be about construction, of construction, or – translated into ‘Franglais’ – de-construction. So, if this is about construction, then perhaps the most pertinent question to raise is the one about the authorisation and legitimacy of any analogy, and (by extension… or analogy) of any connecting, articulating, comparing, relating, or equivalating at all. And this would be a question that could become a criticism that could strike at the heart of this construction, and perhaps at the heart of everything in ‘cultural theory’… and beyond: in fact, striking at the heart of all inventive constructions, especially those that would pass themselves off as being other than inventive constructions.10 Conveniently, on the issue of arguing and making analogies and connections, Derrida discerns what he calls ‘the irreducibility of structure and relation, of proportionality, within analogy’.11 In any given context (to the extent that a context is ever given), there are proper and there are improper analogies; there are valid and acceptable connections, comparisons, and articulations, to be made, and there are aberrant and unacceptable ones, to be written off, for ‘stretching things too far’. To the extent that contexts are established (and contexts are nothing if not ‘established’),12 forces of propriety are established too, policing connections.13 Transgressions may seem monstrous; or they may merely be greeted like jokes, frivolity, triviality, or idiocy. I say this because the issue here is not just the actual question drummed up by relating Bruce Lee, Derridean deconstruction, and cultural studies, namely: is there actually something in common between them (or is this just a nonsensical, joking, ‘overingenious analogizing lacking the necessary discrimination’)? The other issue here is that of what exactly is going on in any

10

This being among Nietzsche’s key targets in ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1873), The Nietzsche Channel, http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/tls.htm 11 Derrida, J. (1981), Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 159. 12 Derrida, J. (1977), Limited Inc, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Il. 13 Protevi, J. (2001) Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic, London and New York: Athlone, pp. 63-4.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 5 of 15 analogising,

connecting,

equivalating,

articulating,

or

indeed,

explaining

or

understanding? But, because any effort to get ‘directly’ to the putative, general, or universal ‘heart of the matter’ cannot avoid being routed through and rooted to specific, concrete, and particular cases, therefore we must address this question first: Is there or is there not actually something in common between what Bruce Lee, Jacques Derrida, and cultural studies were up to in the ’60s? It strikes me that, ultimately, all possible answers – from the most rigorously theoretical to the most preposterously creative (as if these are entirely separable)14 – will rely on the following inversion and displacement, implicitly or explicitly: namely, that if there actually is something in common with what they were up to in the ’60s, then this is only so to the extent that it was the ’60s themselves that were up to something. But how could the ’60s be up to something? Now, anthropomorphism, historiographical selectivity, models of significance and theorisations of causality are wily bedfellows, of course – smugglers, equivocators and dissemblers to a tee – but we cannot get by without them. Yet it would surely be a catachresis too far to expect the ’60s themselves to answer simply and directly with one voice – even though such preposterous prosopopeia is an everyday standard feat of academic ventriloquism, achieved most conventionally by telling a story stretching from 1945 to Vietnam to America, whereupon everyone nods and the ’60s materialise as an anti-establishment hippy. Rather than tell this tale again here, let us instead enquire into the accounts of the apperceptions of our three representatives. If they are unrelated, they will be polyvocal. Or is it still possible, even when they themselves speak of themselves, to misrepresent, mistranslate, miscorrelate, them, tendentiously, under the sway of a spurious analogy or tropology?

14

Claire Burchall has recently made an excellent contribution clarifying the intractability of the problematic of interpretation itself, or of the inevitable limitations of authority, legitimacy, and methodological adequacy, by relating ‘cultural studies’ and by extension all ‘cultural interpretation’ and indeed ‘interpretation itself’ to the way ‘conspiracy theories’ work. See Burchall, C. (2004), ‘Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out To Get You: Cultural Studies on/as Conspiracy Theory’, Culture Machine 6, ed., Boothroyd, Hall, Zylinska, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

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2. Into ‘the fancy mess’ Stuart Hall describes cultural studies as ‘a discursive formation, in Foucault’s sense’,15 within the ‘milieu’ of the open and radical New Left:16 open to alterity, ethico-politically motivated, pushing limits, borders, conventions, boundaries, hierarchies, exclusions. Derrida captures the same sense (if not necessarily exactly the ‘same’ scene)17 when he says: If it were only a question of ‘my’ work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, [these scandalised denunciations of deconstruction] wouldn’t happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can’t be limited to a personal ‘oeuvre,’ nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution.... If this work seems so threatening to [some], this is because it isn’t eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is to modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene…18 Bruce Lee, too, self-consciously ‘inter-disciplined’, ‘democratised’, and ‘antiessentialised’ kung fu, insisting that there is no substantial essence to it and one need not be Chinese to do it. (This was met with no little ‘institutional’ resistance.) He called 15

Hall, S. (1996), ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, p. 263. 16 Rojek, C. (2003), Stuart Hall, London: Polity, p. 23. 17 However, the similarities between Derrida’s statements about the problems and problematics of ‘Greph’ (Groupe de Recherches sur l’Enseignement Philosophique) and ‘Ciph’ (Collège International de Philosophie) and Hall’s statements about cultural studies and ‘the Centre’ are striking. See Derrida, J. (2002), Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press. 18 Derrida, J. (1995) Points…Interviews, 1974-1994, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, pp. 409-410.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 7 of 15 formal styles ‘the classical mess’, rigid forms a ‘fancy mess’, and competitions ‘organised despair’.19 Overwhelmingly, though, his literal and explicit politicisation related ‘directly’ to his experience of racism and exclusion in America. What is striking and perhaps telling is that something in this politicisation permeated his entire orientation, informing the logic of his thought and constituting the principles of his jeet kune do. Its key tenets were: faith in positive thinking and positive attitude in self-help and self-construction, a belief in racial and cultural equality coupled with a belief in the importance of respecting cultural difference, an investment in the ethico-political power of media representation (specifically, in the power of ostensibly ‘positive’ images of Asians in combating racism), and an unswerving belief in the need for efficiency, economy, rationality and logicality in the business of fighting. Its key coordinates, then, are individualism, rationality, equality, effort, economy, and efficiency. Before denouncing Lee as some kind of proto-Thatcherite (even if he was),20 let’s note that in a strong sense this formation was once clearly radical and relevant to emancipatory rather than exploitative politics. Lee self-consciously struggled against the racism of both a white exclusionary Hollywood and a Chinese ‘separatist’ ethos, for democratic, egalitarian inclusivity. Indeed he is rightly celebrated as achieving a milestone in Hollywood cinema, in being the first Asian male lead in ‘the first American produced martial arts spectacular’, Enter the Dragon.21 Of course, there is a lot that this celebratory narrative excludes – not merely in terms of historical or biographical detail; but rather, ‘structurally’. It could be put this way: Lee’s motivation may well also have been, but was never simply to release a new figure of the oriental into cultural circulation – a ‘positive’, ‘powerful’, politicised, eroticised figure of the orient – to replace an earlier, more clearly racist stereotype. It was also to become a star, a de facto desire to become a commodity. Furthermore, his attempt to counter racist stereotypes operated 19

Lee, B. (1975), The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Santa Clarita, Ca.: Ohara Publications, p. 14. Michael A. Peters provides an excellent account of the Thatcherite and neoliberal strategy of ‘responsibilizing the self’, which is ‘a process at once economic and moral that is concomitant with a tendency to “invest” in the self at crucial points in the life-cycle, that, above all, symbolizes the shift in the regime and governance of welfare under neoliberalism’. Differences notwithstanding, Lee was always already ripe for tendentious re-narration along such lines. See Peters, M. (2001), Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and Politics, London: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 91. 21 Enter the Dragon (1973, 1998), Warner Bros, Dir., Robert Clouse. 20

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 8 of 15 completely within the codes of orientalism and fetishistic racism. And, as well as being always

already

commodified

and

boundlessly

re-commodifiable

in

many

cinematographically orientalist ways, Lee’s radical individualism remains perfectly in tune with what is (still) called ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’: in the rejection and desedimentation of tradition, in the displaced/translated idealisation of economic rationality, in the identification with the western cinematic apparatus and attendant values, in the internalisation of the view of life as (‘harmonious’) conflict or competitiveness, and in the generalisation of this into all areas. Indeed, so perfectly does Lee embody the cultural logic of late capitalism that his ruminations on hand-to-hand combat have been packaged simultaneously for martial arts, business/management and lifestyle/self-help readerships. Infinitely more appealing than nasty old Machiavelli, Lee is more ‘relevant’ even than Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, for which the first testimonial on the cover of one edition reads: Today’s business people will find … [this] 350-year-old martial arts classic … compelling and tantalizingly relevant. Perseverance, insight, self-understanding, inward calm even in the midst of chaos, the importance of swift but unhurried action: Musashi’s teachings read like lessons from the latest business management gurus. Who couldn’t succeed in business by applying Musashi’s insights on conflict and strategy!22 Bruce Lee’s words, however, are presented as also offering a universally relevant approach to life itself.23 Bruce Lee, the anciently modern, rationally esoteric, philosophically practical, materially spiritual, oriental warrior in America, could represent the sublime object of ideology. However, it still seems a bit churlish to level criticisms of this order at the admirably intentioned, politicised, anti-racist, culturally sensitive, egalitarian project of Bruce Lee. After all, you could say: as deconstructive, anti-essentialist, post-colonial, and radically democratic as he was, he was still no Jacques Derrida or Stuart Hall. But who could fault him for that – especially if it was

22 23

Musashi, M. (1994), The Book of Five Rings, trans. Thomas Cleary, Boston and London: Shambala. Lee, B. (1999), Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, ed., Mark Little, Boston: Tuttle Publishing.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 9 of 15 indeed the ‘times themselves’ that were ‘up to something’ ‘through’ him? However, this makes the reciprocal question all the more pertinent: Are Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall no Bruce Lees? Here, Bruce Lee ceases to be ‘merely’ just any old example (just some ‘mere’ cultural studies example of something deconstructive). Bruce Lee might actually become exemplary of the very practices themselves that might take him as their example. In other words, Bruce Lee might exemplify how and why and what deconstruction and cultural studies ‘are’.

3. Enter the Žižekian In this view, Bruce Lee would be exemplary of a generalised tendency towards deconstruction, transgression, and interdisciplinarity; that is related to the cultural logic of capitalism. This is a very Žižekian view, for whom the nature of the Lee-Derridacultural studies relation would be one of an ‘equivalence’ indicative of the reach of capitalist hegemony. In this view, a series of otherwise apparently disparate phenomena like deconstruction, interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, postmodernism, contemporary Taoism, western Buddhism, ‘New Ageism’, identity politics, cultural studies, neoliberalism, and so on, would be seen as equivalent reaction formations to, and in the service of, a relentless capitalism. And Žižek might see in all of these a Freudian ‘far reaching psychical conformity’,24 a spiralling symptomaticity, in the face of, yet blind to, what he calls the ‘fundamental antagonism’:25 capitalism. Now, Žižek explicitly diagnoses a profound solidarity between deconstruction and cultural studies – invoking a beast that he calls ‘postmodernist-’ or ‘deconstructionist cultural studies’, an entity he deems to be at the vanguard of ‘political correctness’. ‘Political correctness’, for him, is an aspect of neoliberalism, or sheer ideology, the ‘obscene, disavowed’ truth of which is a fundamental intolerance towards every actual or significant difference. This dominant neoliberal hegemony is intolerant of anything that cannot be recuperated by and for the banal, facile, saccharine, anodyne, and cynical

24

Freud, S. (1976), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, London: Penguin, pp. 203-4. Žižek, S. (2000), in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso. 25

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 10 of 15 position of the ideological ideals of apathetic consumption and complete identification with and capitulation to the market. For Žižek, therefore, anything that is not explicitly and vociferously opposed to capitalism is itself a promulgator of ‘interpassivity’:26 chimerical (non)politics that might change all sorts of actual things but without altering any fundamental thing – i.e., the ‘fundamental horizon’ or ‘systemic-’ or ‘epistemicarchitecture’ of capitalism itself. Thus, Žižek discerns equivalence and tacit solidarity between Derrida, Laclau, Rorty, ‘politically correct postmodern deconstructionist cultural studies’, and political movements of any kind, whether identity-, gender-, sex-, race- or ecology-based.27 Their fundamental solidarity, he claims, is a ‘resigned and cynical’ agreement that capitalism is ‘the only game in town’.28 His point is that deconstruction, cultural studies, and so on, cannot see the changeless backdrop to their own activity: capitalism, the horizon within which all actually-existing politics drone on, but avoid ‘the problem itself’.29 The worst offender in all of this is said to be postmodernism, or the myth directly generated by ‘the dynamic, rootless postindustrial society’.30 The worst manifestation of this mythological misrecognition is what he interchangeably calls ‘Western Buddhism’ or ‘Taoism’.31 These belief systems, he claims, ‘perfectly fit’ the ‘fetishist mode of ideology of our allegedly “post-ideological” era’,32 as they enable ‘you to participate fully in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is’.33 So, for Žižek: if Protestantism was the necessary ideology of industrial capitalism, then western Buddhism and/or Taoism is the necessary ideology of post-industrial 26

Žižek, S. (2002), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from February to October 1917, London: Verso, p. 170. 27 Žižek, S. (2002), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from February to October 1917, London: Verso, p. 308. 28 Žižek, S. (2000), in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso. 29 Žižek wants ‘direct’ action, but ‘direct action’ itself is not really ‘direct’, and is instead ‘misdirected’ unless its target is ‘systemic’, or, in other words unless it is rhetorico-politically organised as ‘anticapitalist’. See Žižek, S. (2002), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from February to October 1917, London: Verso, 308. 30 Žižek, S. (2001), On Belief, London: Routledge, p. 11. 31 Žižek, S. (2001), On Belief, London: Routledge, p. 12, 13. 32 Žižek, S. (2001), On Belief, London: Routledge, p. 13. 33 Žižek, S. (2001), On Belief, London: Routledge, p. 15.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 11 of 15 contemporary capitalism. From this perspective, Bruce Lee is a sublime object of ideology: radically individualist, fetishistic, orientalist, multicultural, mythological, multiply exemplary of ‘bio-power’, of political docility, of ideological false consciousness, of male fantasy, neoliberal fantasy, globalisation fantasy. Cultural studies, media studies, film studies, subcultural studies, identity studies, and so on, are merely rabbits caught, transfixed, in the headlights of capitalism, or indeed, capitalism’s dung flies. And deconstruction would be one name for this entire situation; the name, as Nick Royle puts it, for ‘what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality’34 – and, we might add, academia and martial arts. From this perspective, the deconstruction of limits, the proliferation of interdisciplinarity, the desedimentation of tradition, the generalised cultural-theoretical insistence on the ethical ‘openness to alterity’ and respect for difference, the mistrust of institutions, and, in short, the entrance of the Derridean and of cultural studies, would be the same as the entrance of Taoism, which would be the same as the entrance of capitulation to capitalism. From this perspective, then, literally everything looks lost to something evil called capitalism. But what exactly is this perspective? According to Žižek, it is certainly not like ‘today’s twin brothers of deconstructionist sophistry and New Age obscurantism’,35 nor is it ‘capitulation itself’,36 or the position of ‘the Third Way’ ideologues, like Giddens or Beck. Žižek’s apperception is Hegelian: sometimes Lacanian Hegelian, sometimes Marxian Hegelian; but always his own overdetermined version of Hegelian. This is his apperception. However, what also remains crystal clear is that everything in Žižek is overdetermined by his sedulous inability or refusal to get over the most pessimistic moments in Adorno and Horkheimer. That is to say, Žižek’s entire perspective is reducible to a bleak, resigned and pessimistic reading of ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’,37 plus a ‘fancy’, ostensibly-‘classical mess’ of Hegelian and Lacanian terms. 34

Royle, N. (2000), ‘What is Deconstruction?’, Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Palgrave: Basingstoke and New York, p. 11. 35 Žižek, S. (1998), ‘A Leftist Plea for “Eurocentrism”’, Critical Inquiry 24 (2), pp. 988-1,009, p. 1,007. 36 Žižek, S. (2002), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from February to October 1917, London: Verso, p. 308. 37 Adorno, T., and Horkheimer, M., (1972), Dialectic of Enlightenment, Herder & Herder, London.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

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Needless to say, there are many problems with it, and much to say about it. I have to limit my comments here; so I will orientate them in terms of the question of the political: of ‘agency’, or ‘consequence’. First we might note Žižek’s ensnarement in a hyperAdornian, meta-Debordian, or ultra-Baudrillardian belief in the totality of the structuring, determining ‘horizon’ (of the capitalist ‘system’). He portrays ‘neoliberalism’ as the total and universal backdrop against or within which things appear to change but fundamentally remain the same. As such, ‘neoliberalism’ signifies the limit of his thought, functioning within it as ‘the eternal Tao’, rather than being treated as a historically real, deliberately implemented geopolitical economic ‘experiment’ of ongoing, piecemeal, pragmatic, legislative violence.38 Ironically, the anti-globalisation movement(s) that he often ridicule(s) can themselves quite easily construe neoliberalism as a project that is politically contestable,39 rather than being the fait accompli it often appears to be for Žižek. Žižek’s perspective, then, appears to renounce politics, and to reject anything like a dialectical or material approach to history.40 Indeed it seems to be exactly the kind of postmodern bricolage that he otherwise decries. And, just like his claims that the fundamental truth of sexuality does not consist in the physical encounter

38

So, unlike the post-Marxists Laclau and Mouffe, who treat their notion of the ‘discursive terrain’ as the unchanging, universal backdrop – or ‘eternal Tao’ – for Žižek it is the ‘structure’ of ‘capitalism’ that is ‘today’s’ universal backdrop, or ‘eternal Tao’. The problem is Žižek’s double-handedness or schizophrenia here: he at once asserts and denies the Laclauian position that all constitution is achieved through and in ‘discourse’, and that reality is constitutively political, but then asserts that hegemonic discursive construction takes place ‘within’ the capitalist horizon. I hope it is apparent that I address this point in the following paragraph, when I make the points about this being Žižek’s ‘decision’, ‘wager’, ‘act’ and ‘strategy’. Nevertheless, what is apparent is that Žižek equivocates, ‘abuses’ and treats double-handedly all of the institutions (‘academic’ and ‘political’) his work circulates within. Žižek is therefore peculiarly and paradoxically the postmodern sophist he denounces, but he is so in the name of ‘truth’. This ‘truth’ is the truth of the political, as articulated by Laclau and Mouffe, but he rejects their ‘true’ rendering of the situation because it, as it were, gives the game away and removes the possibility of what he deems to be an effective rhetorico-political strategy (i.e., making proclamations about the truth of Marx, etc.). 39 Kingsnorth, P. (2003), One No, Many Yeses: a journey to the heart of the global resistance movement, London: Free Press. 40 John Mowitt observes that ‘one finds [in Žižek’s Lacanianism] a clear repudiation of something like the method of historical materialism as a way to get at the affiliation between capitalism and psychoanalysis’, and goes on to note that ‘[a]lthough Žižek does acknowledge the historical specificity of capitalism – his whole account of fetishism hinges on the distinction between feudalism and capitalism – the homological orientation of his discussion leads one to assume either that psychoanalysis is essentially a derivative hermeneutic or that it is foundational in a way that makes its commitment to historicity quite difficult to assess Mowitt, J. (2002), Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 206.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 13 of 15 between two bodies, but rather in the imaginary fantasy of the lone masturbator,41 so he seems (against himself, again, as it were) to deem politics and political intervention to consist in an uncannily Derridean ‘teleieopoetic’ conjuration of and with spectres;42 or even just in the mobilisation of signifiers against signifiers. However, this is not actually the shortcoming within Žižek’s conceptual architecture that it might at first appear to be. That is: it isn’t something that he hasn’t noticed! It is rather Žižek’s wager, Žižek’s decision, Žižek’s act. He once asserted, ‘Do not forget that with me everything is the opposite of what it seems’.43 Thus, the contradictions don’t matter, the aporias don’t matter, even the facts don’t matter. What matters is the conviction, the spirit, the belief, the name. Which makes Žižek very much more like the Derrida he seems to denounce. Is he also then like cultural studies and Bruce Lee?

4. Enter the Derridean Earlier, a question emerged about the propriety, validity, and limits of analogising; and of what takes place when a comparison, connection, articulation, equivalence, or analogy is (said to be) made. Put bluntly, this is the entire question of construction, or de construction. And everything hangs on the answer to this question: when is an analogy not an analogy? I have to answer: when it’s a door, on hinges. Going directly to the heart of this matter, Bruce Lee once wrote: Each man belongs to a style which claims to possess truth to the exclusion of all other styles. These styles become institutes with their explanations of the “Way,” dissecting and isolating the harmony of firmness and gentleness, establishing rhythmic forms as the particular state of their techniques. Instead of facing combat in its suchness, then, most systems of martial art accumulate a “fancy mess” that distorts and cramps their practitioners and 41

Žižek, S. (2001), On Belief, London: Routledge, p. 24. The allusions here are to the Derridean themes that Žižek would claim to reject. For ‘teleiopoiesis’ see Derrida, J. (1997), Politics of Friendship, Verso, London. For ‘conjuration’ and ‘spectres’ see Derrida, J. (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Routledge, London. 43 Žižek quoted in Parker, I. (2004), Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto, p. 35. 42

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 14 of 15 distracts them from the actual reality of combat, which is simple and direct. Instead of going immediately to the heart of things, flowery forms (organized despair) and artificial techniques are ritualistically practiced to simulate actual combat. Thus, instead of “being” in combat these practitioners are “doing” something “about” combat.44 To generalise from this, to say that this relates to all institutions, is not actually to make an analogy. It is rather to make a direct ontological assertion.45 Bruce Lee, like Žižek, and surely like us all, wants to get directly to the heart of the matter. But, unlike Lee (here), what Derrida, Hall, Žižek, and indeed Taoism, all know about trying to get directly to truth and reality is that something ‘forever prevents us from grasping our intended object directly … [that] our grasping is always refracted, ‘mediated’, by a decentred otherness [and that this] is the feature which connects us with the basic proto-ontological structure of the universe’.46 Žižek, like Lee, wants to strike down the other as they approach, before they arrive. Interestingly, this is more like Shaolin, or Buddhist, kung fu. Taoist martial arts, as exemplified by taijiquan (T’ai Chi), advocate meeting the other, sticking intimately to them, listening, or ‘reading them’, with absolute fidelity, yielding, as if hospitably, to every force, to every hostility, and simply guiding them past their point of logical conclusion, to their own unravelling or over-tightening. Taoist taijiquan could be construed as an intimate openness to and engagement with the other, operating with a view to the lesser violence. It looks in a certain view more like a ‘flowery form’, more like a ‘classical mess’, than jeet kune do, which looks like it goes straight to the heart of the matter. But the question that captivates and guides every martial artist is the same as

44

Lee, B. (1975), The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Santa Clarita, Ca.: Ohara, p. 14. Albeit in an ‘anamorphic’, or ‘skewed’, way: but this is arguably as ‘direct’ as it is ever possible to be. See Žižek, S. (2001), Did Someone Say Totalitarianism: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, London: Verso, pp. 150-151: ‘anamorphosis designates an object whose very material reality is distorted in such a way that a gaze is inscribed into its ‘objective’ features’, p. 150. See also Rifkin, A. (2003), ‘Inventing Recollection’, in P. Bowman, ed., Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice, London: Pluto, p. 122. Žižek, S. (2001), On Belief, London: Routledge, p. 204.

45

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]

Page 15 of 15 that which captivates and guides deconstruction, cultural studies, and every motivated, politicised thinker: how to establish what’s what, what works, in what name.

‘Enter The Derridean’, Paul Bowman, Roehampton University, UK. [email protected]