IEK/GAGA: Communism Knows No Monster

DSG's now infamous article "by" Slavoj iek. Based on an in-joke in the UK student movement, it was picked
up by the mainstream media in the US and even received comment from iek himself.

This Tuesday Lady Gaga and myself shall be appearing at Birkbeck in support of the UCU
strike in the run up to the 26th of March. My theoretical project and, indeed, my defence of
pure theory as such in contraposition to those calling for near unreflective action has reached
a critical zero-point. Either we act now, or we do not act at all.

But what of my good friend Lady Gagas theoretical contributions? Certainly, there is a certain
performance of theory in her costumes, videos and even (some of) her music. Nina Power
has already noted that the infamous meat costume could be seen in reference, indeed, a
performance of, Carol J. Adamss The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical
Theory, a book that notes the consistent linking in the oppressive imaginary of the patriarchy
of the female body and meat, of animality and the feminine. Equally, her moral support for the
cause of gay rights in The States has been well documented in an underrated piece Dan
Hancox traced the spidery pathways between her work, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and the
end of the dont ask dont tell. Gagas work as a cultural phenomena has generated its own
theory. But what of her actual theoretical project? Let us turn to her one extant theoretical
fragment, written at college in 2004 when she began her musical production, Assignment #4:
Reckoning of Evidence by the then Stefani Germanotta.

Gaga begins by reckoning with the social construction of the body, with particular reference to
the work of Spencer Tunick, a New York artist whose displays of mass public nudity, perhaps
with a hint of bourgeois vulgarity, caused controversy in Guillianis reformed city to the point
that the artworks were only possible through mass civil disobedience. His work, for Gaga, is
the movement of freeing objects from their social significance and thus endowing them with
endless possibilities of form. Thus the naked body, seen only (and thus made controversial)
from the perspective of sex, is repurposed in Tunicks work as pure form, and thus as moves
into the sphere of art, which simultaneously, and dialectically challenges that initial social
signification oppositionally. Is this not entirely then the very logic of the spectacular
occupations of place that have been occurring, both in student spaces, old public houses and
disused Job Centres that we see today? The reduction of spaces of the social body of capital
or the neoliberal university into places of pure use, in what Giorgio Agamben calls the
movement of profanation opened to the infinite possibilities of collective human creativity
while standing as a direct challenge to the structures it is placed within in an oppositional
mode, simultaneously inside and outside the system both sharing communication and co-
operation and antagonism much as Antonia Birnbaums recent essay on communism is
early Marx shows. Tunick discovered the same himself in the construction of his own pieces,
in their need to find a way around New York, to take a space and fill it with naked human
bodies The choice of location provides symbolic impact (i.e. the Brooklyn Bridge, the
Dakota, the Stock Exchange), and as the models become more numerous, the compositions
become progressively more abstract clothed, and made more permanent, this could
appear as an economic blockade.

Tunicks work brings us to a paradox: the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself, ones
direct identification with a particular culture which renders one intolerant towards other
cultures. The basic opposition is thus related to the opposite between collective and
individual: culture is by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other
cultures, while next paradox it is the individual who is universal, the site of universality,
insofar as s/he extricates itself from and elevates itself above its particular culture. Since,
however, every individual has to be somehow particularized, it has to dwell in a particular
life-world, the only way to resolve this deadlock is to split the individual into universal and
particular, public and private (where private covers both the safe haven of family and the
non-state public sphere of civil society (economy)). In liberalism, culture survives, but as
privatized: as way of life, a set of beliefs and practices, not the public network of norms and
rules. Culture is thus literally transubstantiated: the same sets of beliefs and practices change
from the binding power of a collective into an expression of personal and private
idiosyncrasies. The task, then, of todays revolutionary is precisely this bodily-economic
blockade.

This is perhaps why then we find, like nudity in public places, the occupied space frequently
objected to through in terms of abjection squatters are dirty, they dont wash, they dont
have jobs, they arent respectable and so on. For police, protesters are dirty swampies,
animals, profane. The repurposing and reduction of these spaces and their subtraction from
capital is formally offensive to its systematic logic. The system react with characteristic
venom. The same is true of the UCU strike itself the press will be at pains to describe its
actants as bedraggled, ugly, Trotskyite perverts, ivory tower intellectuals and so on to stress
the traditional association of political opposition with ugliness the same will be true, we
predict without checking, of the right-wing reaction to Saturday. We have already seen Labour
and Conservative politicians dip into their stores of insult, retards among the most well know,
to describe anti-cuts protesters disrupting council meetings. Gaga perhaps anticipates this in
the closing section of the essay on the monstrous. Considering Montaigne essay on
deformity she notes that like public nudity, what is deformed is only an effect of social
constructions of the body, just as nudity is only sexual, and therefore mass nudity only
problematic for the New York police due to this social formation. Emphatically Gaga notes we
call contrary to nature what we call contrary to custom, we only accept the regular and it is
this which blinds us from seeing the prodigy of what we have never seen before. The
greatest lie of capitalism is perhaps its naturalisation the idea that it is simply the law of
nature that it is this way. The cuts cannot be helped, just as capitalism cannot be helped.
Deborah Orr, at the high of the student protests displays this logic with stunning clarity. Fiscal
discipline really is necessary, Orr opines The truth is that they [so-called "adults" failing to
protest] are too wise to waste their energy on something so silly. Protesting against the cuts is
like protesting against waters stubborn habit of flowing downwards. My God! The bleak hand
of capitalist realism! Protesting cuts is equivalent to being against the direction of the
fundamental laws of the cosmos! But this is not nature, but simply custom, a custom that the
ruling class have generated as an ideology that manufactures exploitation and alienation. To
denaturalise capital, to subtract while remaining within to push outward, to reform spaces to
pure use opposed to the commodity form, to not accept as regular what is simply custom
this is the essence of our protest. This strike can be seen as a dull churning of reaction
against the telos of nature, or, placed in a global context of revolution, something we have
never seen before just as Lady Gaga appearing in solidarity with workers, or as I have
explained elsewhere, the utterly unpredicted revolutions shaking the Middle East.

Slavoj iek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana,

Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.

Originally posted: March 11, 2011 at Deterritorial Support Group