Paul Nadal

Lit 281 | Michael Hardt 4/24/08

“Minimal Difference”: Zizek’s Critique of Multiculturalist Rhetoric in The Parallax View

One of the tasks Slavoj Zizek undertakes in The Parallax View is to undermine what he calls our “common sense” view of reality. Beyond mere ideological demystification, the kind of critical moves Zizek takes involve the critique of what we take as the presuppositions informing the terms by which we comprehend reality, a “short-circuiting” of the prior axiomatics by which any ideation of a Thing comes into being. In giving this critical operation a name, “parallax,” Zizek continues with what he takes as “the fundamental lesson of Hegel…that the key ontological problem is not that of reality, but that of appearance” (29). For Zizek, then, the parallax provides him the key to understanding the determinate relations that constitute what comes to appear for us as “objective reality.” Such relations are first and foremost multiple or, put differently, it is precisely the existence of multiple perspectives that give philosophical complexity to our subjective perception of experience. Multiple and perspectival, the “parallax” is thus the critical cognition of “the apparent displacement of an object…caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight” (17). Because the parallax (point-of-)view is both epistemological and ontological, it would be productive to bring to bear the parallax as such in what is, appropriately enough, the “common sense” view of cultural and political life in the contemporary United States. For what is celebrated for the richness of its perspectival multiplicity of social life if not American multiculturalism?

The topic of multiculturalism is frequently cited in the labyrinth constellation of examples that make up Zizek’s performance of dialectical materialism in The Parallax View. From discussions of high and low culture to the antinomies of desire in social life and to discussions of the various apparatuses of the properly multi-cultural state, Zizek takes to task the rhetoric of multiculturalism. For it would seem that multiculturalism—as a discourse, or structuring principle of social formation, or following Zizek’s own terminology, what I would suggest as the objet petit a of a post-racial U.S. nationalism—takes as its form the parallax just as it disavows it. Multiculturalism hence would offer us the occasion to displace cultural politics, to measure the ways in which the concept of culture is variously deployed and to elaborate its ideological edifice.

To juxtapose Zizek’s analytic of the parallax, if we can call it that, with multiculturalism—its rhetoric and political consequences—is to already engage with what becomes a recurring theme in The Parallax View, that of the binary pairing of the Universal and the Particular, and its variations of Identity and Difference. For we can agree that in its dominant form, multiculturalism establishes itself as the universal framework for understanding inter-group relations in the United States, the “common sense” narrative of social differences qua cultural diversity. This narrative is common-sensical to the extent that it is simply a descriptive fact, that is to say, it “is” the reality of American society. It becomes ideological when the concept calls for actual decisive changes, when multiculturalism becomes the site of struggles for reparations and the restructuring of resources. Between the “common sense” view of that “objective reality” that is multicultural America and the ideological deployment of its embarrassing failures and contradictions, Zizek would say that this multicultural reality is “enframed, seen through an invisible frame” (29). More to the point, this enframing, which allows for the sliding of "multiculturalism" as, on the one hand, a matter-of-factness to, on the other, an ideological appearance, is parallaxic. It is in this way that multiculturalism would function something like fantasy, the parallax of which betrays the “minimal difference” between its “formal symbolic structure and the positivity of the objects” encountered in reality (40). This “minimal difference,” this residual remainder derived from the perspectival change from the common facticity to the ideological, lies the Zizekian sublime object, whose truth kernel points to nothing other than the phantasmatic support of multiculturalism’s ideological propositions.

Consider for example the confusion around what is taken to be the multicultural agenda: does it call for a jettisoning of Western culture or does it advance the noble cause for a more plenary form of American national democracy? This debate is motivated around a contested Universality: on the one, the universalization of the West as the origin of Culture, and on the other, the universalization of the excluded particulars from the discursive totalization of the West as such. “The Universal,” Zizek writes, “is the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism” (35). But the attacks leveled against Anglo-European Culture, the breaking down of its hegemonic Universality by shoring up its repressed particularities, like the notion of alternate modernities, are often blunt critiques, in the formula of multiplication. The Identity of the One is replaced for the Difference of the Many. This happens all the time, and Zizek argues that multiplication functions nothing more than “the disavowal of the antagonism” (35).

This antagonism of multiculturalism, to be sure, has a name, but it will do as well first to consider Zizek’s premise that nominalist historicizing and identity politics are both situated in postmodern relativism. The politics of naming and the politicization of identity are attempted solutions advanced from a particular position in opposition to another, ad infinitum. The caricature for this is the relentless binary between Self and Other, which identity politics at once deplores and deploys in the name of culture. The politics of postmodern relativism, i.e., the demonstration of the mutuality of Self and Other, is nothing less than the exhaustion of culture as such. But it is the irreducible gap between the Self and Other, that is, within the One, that Zizek would demand for us to highlight. For the task at hand is to grapple with the insurmountable gap that is the parallax, the “fundamental antinomy which can never be dialectically ‘mediated/sublated’ into a higher synthesis, since there is no common language, no shared ground” (4). Zizek therefore does not locate the irreducible antagonism of multiculturalism in the field of culture, insofar as “culture” itself is a fiction taken as reality, a fetishistic disavowal of what he calls the “as if…”, the “as if” we had a common language, a shared ground upon which something like “our culture” would emerge. Multiculturalism is therefore nothing more than an empty signifier functioning as a universal totality, which furnishes for itself a chain of equivalences around identity and difference. When culture becomes simply “the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without ‘taking them seriously’” (361), its positive content becomes “merely cultural,” in the pejorative sense of “culture” deprived of class, of “cultural politics” without class consciousness.

It becomes obvious to see how the “misunderstandings” of the multicultural project are not the false appearance behind which a deeper truth exists. If multiculturalism has been attacked for calling too much attention to divisions in society, then it is charged of separatism. Consequently, the pro-multicultural agenda “corrects” this misunderstanding by asserting its aim of healing divisions, calling not for the insistence of the particular, as it were, but rather the coalition and collaboration of differential identities across cultures. “Multiculturalism” in the initial form of misunderstanding-as-false-appearance becomes, in the multicultural turn, ideology-as-common-sense: cultures are multiply existing in a field of relationality. From this impasse follows the next step, of noting valuations, that is the production of something like cultural value in social difference. This value is affective, in the sense that multiculturalist revisions are at once rationalized by and attacked for making minorities “feel better.” Zizek locates this affect at the heart of multiculturalist politics, what he calls the “striving for the full recognition of the other” (362).

Between the desire for recognition (the assertion of Identity) and the desire for coexistence (the affirmation of Difference), multiculturalism thrives on the multiplicity of the particular. To recapitulate the previous point about the confusion and impasse of multiculturalist rhetoric, the lost parallax between what is taken as the real and what is taken as ideological appearance, the dual desire for Identity and Difference obfuscates the irreducible parallax gap precisely by presenting what is already taken for granted, that is, without being named as such, what is already accomplished. If we follow Zizek, the parallax of multiculturalism demonstrates that while it produces for itself its object—culture—it is to be understood merely as a container of particular formations. Zizek therefore locates the irreducible antagonism of multiculturalism not in the field of culture, but rather in the schematization of society under global capitalism, which strives to politically neutralize culture as it transposes its mark of difference into surplus value. On this view, discrepant language games and discordant performances of groups in the multiculturalist milieu are symptomal of the play of difference actualized in the field of capitalist production. Zizek’s solution to this is to privilege class struggle over cultural ones, for the former “annihilates the other” (362). But if we take Zizek’s fundamental lesson to be about the assertion of the irreducibility of any antinomy by virtue of its structural split within itself, then it would seem too easy to dismiss identificatory practices as "mere" cultural play. The politics of identification by and through difference, taken to its parallax, a procedure which would need more theoretical exploration, would seem to me to undo its very own spectacle of consensus in the multicultural frame. For what is the transnational rivalry for recognition, wealth, and power in the point-of-view of capital if not, in the strictest sense, the performativity of identity and difference?