Strategic Passivity

7/29/2019 Strategic Passivity

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Strategic Passivity Overview

They think they’re resisting the system by speaking out against it, but extend Baudrillard 81 who says it just ain’t so. Their efforts to make their voices heard, raise consciousness and so on, are not responsive, because the system is already configured to absorb this type of protest – if speaking out could change thesystem it’d be illegal. Also, speaking out and engaging the system is supporting its call for participationand involvement. They think they’re revolutionary, but in fact, they’re further granting the hegemony of the system that they criticize.

Instead of speaking out, we need to embrace the opposite strategy, which is passivity and indifference to

the system. When it is no longer recognized, it can no longer resist – ironically, our political project, which ignores what they critique, is more effectively political than theirs.

2Nd Overview

They miss some key points to our argument, so extend the Baudrillard 81 evidence and this analysis fromthe overview:

First, their speech act is useless because the system absorbs protest without changing. If speaking out worked, the system wouldn’t exist, because lots have spoken out before. Theirs won’t make any difference, so they do nothing.

Second, their speech act goes in the direction of the system, because it demands this form of engagement with it. Even if they disagree, this disagreement keeps the dominant discourse on center stage andunconsciously recognizes its dominance, which is a turn because they make what they criticize morepowerful.

Third, instead of speaking out, the correct strategy is strategic passivity, refusing to engage in criticismoutside the system and instead using its own object practices against it by not participating in it at all.Don’t enter the rigged game – instead, refuse to play at all.



Zizek

This talks about how why radical change is only appreciated if it fails… note that this is more of a

response to radical change instead of a support for passivity (it’s a subtle difference, but you probably get

what I’m saying) – note that this card is also technically only in the context of neoliberalism and

democracy… as that’s Zizek’s area of expertise

Particularized demands for change, no matter how radical, are performed against the backdrop of the

neoliberal-democratic order and are tolerated as long as they fail to fundamentally change hegemonic

ideology.Slavoj Zizek , professor of philosophy at the university of Ljubljana, 2001, “Repeating Lenin,”http://lacan.com/replenin.htm, accessed January 28, 2004

What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the

"concrete analysis of the concrete situation," as Lenin himself would have put it. "Fidelity to the democratic consensus"

means the acceptance of the present liberal-parlamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this

liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to

imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want - on

condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is

allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights,

sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises,

the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our

daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into

how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background

of a fundamental Denkverbot, the prohibition to think . Today's liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of

unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 60s - the moment one shows a minimal sign

of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: "Benevolent as it

is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!" The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the

more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things

may have been much worse: "Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!" And itis exactly the same thing that the demand for "scientific objectivity" means: the moment one seriously questions the existing

liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point on

which one cannot and should not concede: today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the

predominant liberal-democratic "post-ideological" consensus - or it means nothing. Habermas designated the present era

as that of the neue Undurchsichtlichkeit - the new opacity.1 More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying: modernization

generates new obscurantisms, the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these

circumstances, one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology which SEEMS to dominate.More then ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin's reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art)

declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles - one should also ask how it effectively functions IN these very struggles.

In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression, but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious "Sensation" exhibitions ARE the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment. One is

therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act,

to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can

one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If , today, one follows a direct

call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological

coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like

Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported

by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do notrespect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too

close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not toachieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian,

politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will

remain the same!"

This is probably slightly more relevant – refusal to participate in First World mindsets andsystems is a way to escape a system

Particularly in the context of human rights, today’s reign of ethical decisionmaking amounts to nothing

more than the right of First-World powers to intervene where it suits their interests and leave entire

other populations condemned to violence and oppression. Fortunately, there’s a way out of this deadlock

– the best thing we can do is to refuse to participate, to become like Bartleby the Scrivener who passively

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refused involvement in the system. This is our act of self-censorship, and this evidence proves it’s

comparatively better than appeals to human rights.

Slavoj Zizek , Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, Fall 2005, online:http://www.lacan.com/zizviol.htm, accessed October 15, 2005

So, to put it in the Leninist way: what today, in the predominant Western discourse, the "Human Rights of the Third World

suffering victims" effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to intervene - politically, economically,

culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. The

reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in

its inverted, i.e. true, form) is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed

West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment HumanRights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political

opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today's "new reign of Ethics," 10 clearly discernible in, say, Michael

Ignatieff's work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized other political

subjectivization. And, as Ranciere pointed out, liberal humanitarianism a la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the "radical"

position of Foucault or Agamben with regard to this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as

the culmination of the entire Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of "ontological trap" in which

concentration camps appear as a kind of "ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp.Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already

ensnared in the biopolitical trap." 11 When, in a shift from Foucault, Agamben identifies sovereign power and biopolitics(in today's generalized state of exception, the two overlap), he thus precludes the very possibility of the emergence of political

subjectivity. - However, the rise of political subjectivity takes place against the background of a certain limit of the "inhuman,"

so that one should continue to endorse the paradox of the inhumanity of human being deprived of citizenship, and posit the

"inhuman" pure man as a necessary excess of humanity over itself, its "indivisible remainder," a kind of Kantian limit-conceptof the phenomenal notion of humanity? So that, in exactly the same way in Kant's philosophy the sublime Noumenal, when we

come too close to it, appears as pure horror, man "as such," deprived of all phenomenal qualifications, appears as an inhuman

monster, something like Kafka's odradek. The problem with human rights humanism is that it covers up this monstrosity

of the "human as such," presenting it as a sublime human essence. What, then, is the way out of this deadlock? Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhi's formula "Be yourself the change you would

like to see in the world" encapsulates perfectly the basic attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the "objective

process" to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just wait for it, it will never come; instead, throw YOURSELF

into it, BE this change, take upon yourself the risk of enacting it directly. However, is not the ultimate limitation of

Gandhi's strategy that it only works against a liberal-democratic regime which refers to certain minimal ethico-political

standards, i.e., in which, to put it in pathetic terms, those in power still "have conscience." Recall Gandhi's reply, in the late

1930s, to the question of what should the Jews in Germany do against Hitler: they should commit a collective suicide and thus

arouse the conscience of the world... One can easily imagine what the Nazi reaction to it would have been: OK, we will help

you, where do you want the poison to be delivered to you? There is, however, another way in which Balibar's plea for renouncing violence can be given a specific twist - that of what one is tempted to call the Bartleby-politics. Recall the twosymmetrically opposed modes of the "living dead," of finding oneself in the uncanny place "between the two deaths": one is

either biologically dead while symbolically alive (surviving one's biological death as a spectral apparition or symbolic authority

of the Name), or symbolically dead while biologically alive (those excluded from the socio-symbolic order, from Antigone to

today's homo sacer). And what if we apply the same logic to the opposition of violence and non-violence, identifying two

modes of their intersection? We all know the pop-psychological notion of the "passive-aggressive behavior," usually

applied to a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband, passively sabotages him. And this brings us back to our

beginning: perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast

to aggressive passivity, the standard "interpassive" mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are

active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change . In such a

constellation, the first truly critical ("aggressive," violent) step is to WITHDRAW into passivity, to refuse to participate -

Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is the necessary first step which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an

act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation.

This argues against Levinas, who believed that philosophy was not “love of wisdom” but“wisdom of love” – basically, that your responsibility to the Other was to be loving – akaaltruism

Redemptive politics are self-defeating – their call to action in the name of human rights and an infinite

responsibility to the Other is overwhelming as a basis for political mobilization. Levinas’s ethic of infinite

responsibility cannot be translated into the political.

Jacob Schiff , Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, 2003, online:http://ptw.uchicago.edu/schiff03.pdf, accessed September 8, 2005

Redemptive politics, then, can serve good and bad ends, and this is reason enough to be suspicious of them. But even

when they aim at something good, they are self-defeating because they work in two contradictory and mutually

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reinforcing ways. On the one hand, redemptive politics serve as a powerful rallying cry--“Never again genocide!”--a cry

that prods us into action and awakens us from passivity, indifference or ignorance to defeat genocide for all time.

Redemptive politics were behind Raphael Lemkin’s efforts to criminalize genocide. He argued that “[i]f the international

community every hoped to prevent mass slaughter of the kind the Armenians had suffered [at Turkish hands in 1915]…the

world’s states would have to unite in a campaign to ban the practice” (Powers, 2002: 19). Thus Lemkin universalized the

Armenian tragedy and projected it into a boundless future. How could he, then, argue for anything but total eradication, total

victory over genocide? The law behind Lemkin’s proposed ban was to rest upon “universal repression”, or what has become“universal jurisdiction” (ibid, 19-20; see Schabas, 2000)--in other words, universal responsibility. The intent behind the

Genocide Convention was to insure that we “never again” look away, that we assume an absolute and infinite

responsibility for eradicating that “odious scourge”. Accordingly, in 1979, President Carter insisted that “we must forge an

unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world fail to act in

time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide” (in Power, 2002: xxi). President George H.W. Bush later expressed a similar

sentiment (ibid). The redemptive language of “never again!” seems on its face to be a potentially powerful political tool.

And yet its effects have been deeply disappointing. The reason might be connected to the second and conflicting way in

which redemptive politics work--they overwhelm us. Is it any surprise, in the face of our responsibility to eradicate

genocide, that we would behave precisely like the anti-Semite depicted by Jean-Paul Sartre? That, “burdened with an

agonizing and infinite responsibility” (1948: 40), carrying “the weight of the whole world on” our shoulders (1956), we

would follow the anti-Semite in his “fear of the human condition”, of his responsibility, and flee along with him(pp. 27-

8, 53-4)? President Clinton’s rebuke of President Bush is haunting: “If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything…it is

the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide” (Power, 2002: xxi). Yet that is exactly what has

happened. Redemptive politics can make anti-Semites of us all.

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Strategic Passivity