Signs From The Future

By Slavoj Žižek

So where do we stand now, in 2012? 2011 was the year of dream­ing dan­ger­ously, of the revival of rad­ical eman­cip­at­ory polit­ics all around the world. Now, a year later, every day brings new proofs of how fra­gile and incon­sist­ent the awaken­ing was, with all of its many facets dis­play­ing the same signs of exhaus­tion: the enthu­si­asm of the Arab Spring is mired in com­prom­ises and reli­gious fun­da­ment­al­ism; the OWS is los­ing momentum to such an extent that, in a nice case of the »cun­ning of reason,« the police cleans­ing of Zuchotti Park and other sites of the OWS protests can­not but appear as a bless­ing in dis­guise, cov­er­ing up the imman­ent loss of momentum. And the same story goes on all around the world: the Maoists in Nepal seem out­man­euvered by the reac­tion­ary roy­al­ist forces; Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” exper­i­ment more and more regress­ing into a caudillo-​​run pop­u­lism… What are we to do in such depress­ive times when dreams seem to fade away? Is the only choice we have the one between nostalgic-​​narcissistic remem­brance of the sub­lime enthu­si­astic moments, and the cynically-​​realist explan­a­tion of why the attempts to really change the situ­ation had to fail?

The first thing to state is that the sub­ter­ranean work of dis­sat­is­fac­tion is going on: rage is accu­mu­lat­ing and a new wave of revolts will fol­low. The weird and unnat­ural rel­at­ive calm of the Spring of 2012 is more and more per­for­ated by the grow­ing sub­ter­ranean ten­sions announ­cing new explo­sions; what makes the situ­ation so omin­ous is the all-​​pervasive sense of block­age: there no clear way out, the rul­ing elite is clearly los­ing its abil­ity to rule. What makes the situ­ation even more dis­turb­ing is the obvi­ous fact that demo­cracy doesn’t work: after elec­tions in Greece and in Spain, the same frus­tra­tions remain. How should we read the signs of this rage? In his Arcades Pro­ject, Wal­ter Ben­jamin quotes the French his­tor­ian André Mon­glond: “The past has left images of itself in lit­er­ary texts, images com­par­able to those which are imprin­ted by light on a pho­to­sensit­ive plate. The future alone pos­sesses developers act­ive enough to scan such sur­faces per­fectly.”¹ Events like the OWSprotests, the Arab Spring, demon­stra­tions in Greece and Spain, etc., have to be read as such signs from the future. In other words, we should turn around the usual his­tor­icist per­spect­ive of under­stand­ing an event out of its con­text and gen­esis. Rad­ical eman­cip­at­ory out­burst can­not be under­stood in this way: instead of ana­lyz­ing them as a part of the con­tinuum of past/​present, we should bring in the per­spect­ive of the future, i.e., we should ana­lyze them as lim­ited, dis­tor­ted (some­times even per­ver­ted) frag­ments of a uto­pian future which lies dormant in the present as its hid­den poten­tial. Accord­ing to Deleuze, in Proust, “people and things occupy a place in time which is incom­men­sur­able with the one that they have in space”²: the notori­ous madeleine is here in place, but this is not its true time.³ In a sim­ilar way, one should learn the art to recog­nize, from an engaged sub­ject­ive pos­i­tion, ele­ments which are here, in our space, but whose time is the eman­cip­ated future, the future of the Com­mun­ist Idea.

How­ever, while one should learn to watch for such signs from the future, we should also be aware that what we are doing now will only become read­able once the future will be here, so we should not put too much hopes into the des­per­ate search for the »germs of Com­mun­ism« in today’s soci­ety. One should thus strive for a del­ic­ate bal­ance between read­ing signs from the (hypo­thetic Com­mun­ist) future and main­tain­ing the rad­ical open­ness of the future: open­ness alone ends up in decision­ist nihil­ism which con­strains us to leaps into the void, while full reli­ance on the signs from the future can suc­cumb to determ­in­ist plan­ning (we know what the future should look like and, from a pos­i­tion of meta-​​language, some­how exemp­ted from his­tory, we just have to enact it). How­ever, the bal­ance one should strive for has noth­ing to do with some kind of wise “middle road” avoid­ing both extremes (“we know in a gen­eral sense the shape of the future we are mov­ing towards, but we should sim­ul­tan­eously remain open to unpre­dict­able con­tin­gen­cies”). Signs from the future are not con­stitutive but reg­u­lat­ive in the Kan­tian sense; their status is sub­ject­ively medi­ated, i.e., they are not dis­cern­ible from any neut­ral “object­ive” study of his­tory, but only from an engaged pos­i­tion – fol­low­ing them remains an exist­en­tial wager in Pascal’s sense. We are deal­ing here with the cir­cu­lar struc­ture best exem­pli­fied by a science-​​fiction story set a couple of hun­dred years ahead of our time when time travel was already pos­sible, about an art critic who gets so fas­cin­ated by the works of a New York painter from our era that he travels back in time to meet him; he dis­cov­ers that the painter is a worth­less drunk who even steals from him the time machine and escapes to the future; alone in today’s world, the art critic paints all the paint­ings that fas­cin­ated him in the future and made him travel into the past. In a homo­log­ous way, the Com­mun­ist signs from the future are signs from a pos­sible future which will become actual only if we fol­low these signs – in other words, they are signs which para­dox­ic­ally pre­cede that of which they are signs. Recall the Pas­calean topic of deus absconditus, of a “hid­den god” dis­cern­ible only to those who search for him, who are engaged in the path of this search:

“God has willed to redeem men and to open sal­va­tion to those who seek it. But men render them­selves so unworthy of it that it is right that God should refuse to some, because of their obdur­acy, what He grants oth­ers from a com­pas­sion which is not due to them. If He had willed to over­come the obstin­acy of the most hardened, He could have done so by reveal­ing Him­self so mani­festly to them that they could not have doubted of the truth of His essence; as it will appear at the last day, with such thun­ders and such a con­vul­sion of nature that the dead will rise again, and the blind­est will see Him. It is not in this man­ner that He has willed to appear in His advent of mercy, because, as so many make them­selves unworthy of His mercy, He has willed to leave them in the loss of the good which they do not want. It was not, then, right that He should appear in a man­ner mani­festly divine, and com­pletely cap­able of con­vin­cing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in so hid­den a man­ner that He could not be known by those who should sin­cerely seek Him. He has willed to make him­self quite recog­niz­able by those; and thus, will­ing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be hid­den from those who flee from Him with all their heart. He so reg­u­lates the know­ledge of Him­self that He has given signs of Him­self, vis­ible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscur­ity for those who have a con­trary dis­pos­i­tion.”⁴

God gives these signs in the guise of mir­acles, and this is why the same mix­ture of light and obscur­ity char­ac­ter­izes mir­acles: mir­acles are not vis­ible as such to every­one, but only to believ­ers – skep­tical non-​​believers (to whom Pas­cal refers as “lib­ertins,” in a typ­ical 17^thcen­tury way, as opposed to the 18^th cen­tury pre­dom­in­ant mean­ing of debauch­ery) can eas­ily dis­miss them as nat­ural phe­nom­ena, and those who believe in them as vic­tims of super­sti­tion. Pas­cal thus openly admits a kind of her­men­eutic circle in the guise of the mutual inter­de­pend­ence of mir­acles and “doc­trine” (the church teach­ing): “Rule: we must judge of doc­trine by mir­acles; we must judge of mir­acles by doc­trine. All this is true, but con­tains no con­tra­dic­tion.” Per­haps, one can apply here Kant’s for­mula of the rela­tion­ship between reason and (sen­su­ous) intu­ition: doc­trine without mir­acles is sterile and impot­ent, mir­acles without doc­trine are blind and mean­ing­less. Their mutual inde­pend­ence is thus not sym­met­rical: “Mir­acles are for doc­trine, and not doc­trine for mir­acles.” In Badiou’s terms, mir­acle is Pascal’s name for an Event, an intru­sion of the impossible-​​Real into our ordin­ary real­ity which moment­ar­ily sus­pends its causal nexus; how­ever, it is only an engaged sub­ject­ive pos­i­tion, a sub­ject who “desires to see,” which can truly identify a mir­acle.⁵

Many per­spicu­ous Marx­ists noted long ago how this Pascal’s topic, far from stand­ing for a regres­sion to obscur­ant­ist theo­logy, points for­ward towards the Marx­ist notion of a revolu­tion­ary the­ory whose truth is dis­cern­ible only from an engaged class pos­i­tion. And are we today not in exactly the same situ­ation with regard to Com­mun­ism? The times of “revealed Com­mun­ism” are over: we can­not any longer pre­tend (or act as if) the Com­mun­ist truth is simply here for every­one to see, access­ible to neut­ral rational his­tor­ical ana­lysis; there is no Com­mun­ist “big Other,” no higher his­tor­ical neces­sity or tele­ology to guide and legit­im­ize our acts. In such a situ­ation, today’s lib­ertins (post­mod­ern his­tor­icist skep­tics) thrive, and the only way to counter them, i.e., to assert the dimen­sion of Event (of eternal Truth) in our epoch of con­tin­gency, is to prac­tice a kind of Com­mun­ism absconditus: what defines today’s Com­mun­ist is the “doc­trine” (the­ory) which enables him to dis­cern in (the con­tem­por­ary ver­sion of) a “miracle” – say, an unex­pec­ted social explo­sion like the crowd per­sist­ing on Tahrir Square – its Com­mun­ist nature, to read it is a sign from the (Com­mun­ist) future. (For a lib­ertin, of course, such an event remains a con­fused out­come of social frus­tra­tions and illu­sions, an out­burst which will prob­ably lead to an even worst situ­ation than the one to which it reacted.) And, again, this future is not “object­ive,” it will come to be only through the sub­ject­ive engage­ment which sus­tains it.

Per­haps, we should turn the usual reproach about what we want and what we don’t want around: it is basic­ally clear what we want (in the long term, at least); but do we really know what we don’t want, i.e., what we are ready to renounce of our present “freedoms”?) Or, to go back to our Ninotchka joke: we want cof­fee, but do we want it without milk or without cream? (Without state? Without private prop­erty? Etc.) It is here that we should remain res­ol­utely Hegel­ian – Hegel’s open­ing towards the future is a neg­at­ive one: it is artic­u­lated in his negative/​limiting state­ments like the fam­ous »one can­not jump ahead of one’s time« from his Philo­sophy of Right. The impossib­il­ity to dir­ectly bor­row from the future is groun­ded in the very fact of ret­ro­activ­ity which makes future a pri­ori unpre­dict­able: we can­not jump onto our shoulders and see ourselves »object­ively,« the way we fit into the tex­ture of his­tory, because this tex­ture is again and again ret­ro­act­ively rearranged. In theo­logy, Kart Barth exten­ded this unpre­dict­ab­il­ity to the Last Judg­ment itself, emphas­iz­ing how the final rev­el­a­tion of God will be totally incom­men­sur­able with our expectations:

“God is not hid­den to us; He is revealed. But what and how we shall be in Christ, and what and how the World will be in Christ at the end of God’s road, at the break­ing in of redemp­tion and com­ple­tion, that is not revealed to us; that is hid­den. Let us be hon­est: we do not know what we are say­ing when we speak of Jesús Christ’s com­ing again in judg­ment, and of the resur­rec­tion of the dead, of eternal life and eternal death. That with all these there will be bound up a pier­cing rev­el­a­tion – a see­ing, com­pared to which all our present vis­ion will have been blind­ness – is too often test­i­fied in Scrip­ture for us to feel we ought to pre­pare ourselves for it. For we do not know what will be revealed when the last cov­er­ing is removed from our eyes, from all eyes: how we shall behold one another and what we shall be to one another – men of today and men of past cen­turias and mil­lenia, ancest­ors and des­cend­ants, hus­bands and wives, wise and fool­ish, oppress­ors and oppressed, trait­ors and betrayed, mur­der­ers and murdered, West and East, Ger­mans and oth­ers, Chris­ti­ans, Jews, and hea­then, ortho­dox and heretics, Cath­ol­ics and Prot­est­ants, Luther­ans and Reformed; upon what divi­sions and uni­ons, what con­front­a­tions and cross-​​connections the seals of all books will be opened; how much will seem small and unim­port­ant to us then, how much will only then appear great and import­ant; for what sur­prises of all kinds we must pre­pare ourselves. /​ We also do not know what Nature, as the cos­mos in which we have lived and still live here and now, will be for us then; what the con­stel­la­tions, the sea, the broad val­leys and heights, which we see and know now, will say and mean then.”⁶

From this insight, it becomes clear how false, how “all too human,” the fear is that the guilty will not be prop­erly pun­ished – here, espe­cially, we must aban­don our expect­a­tions: “Strange Chris­tian­ity, whose most press­ing anxi­ety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being pop­u­lated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!”⁷ And the same uncer­tainty holds for the Church itself – it pos­sesses no super­ior know­ledge, it is like a post­man who deliv­ers mail with no idea what it says: “The Church can only deliver it the way a post­man deliv­ers his mail; the Church is not asked what it thinks it is thereby start­ing, or what it makes of the mes­sage. The less it makes of it and the less it leaves on it its own fin­ger­prints, the more it simple hands it on as it has received it – and so much the bet­ter.”⁸

No won­der Hegel for­mu­lated this same lim­it­a­tion apro­pos polit­ics: espe­cially as Com­mun­ists, we should abstain from any pos­it­ive ima­gin­ing of the future Com­mun­ist soci­ety. Recall Christ’s scep­tical words against the proph­ets of doom from Mark 13: »If any­one tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it. For there will arise false Christs and false proph­ets, and will show signs and won­ders, that they may lead astray, if pos­sible, even the chosen ones. But you watch.⁹‘« Watch for the signs of the apo­ca­lypse, bear­ing in mind the open mean­ing of this term in Greek: apokálypsis (“lift­ing of the veil” or “rev­el­a­tion”) is a dis­clos­ure of some­thing hid­den from the major­ity of man­kind in an era dom­in­ated by false­hood and mis­con­cep­tion. On account of this rad­ical het­ero­gen­eity of the New, its arrival has to cause ter­ror and con­fu­sion – recall Heiner Müller’s fam­ous motto: “the first appear­ance of the new is the dread.” Or, as Seneca put it almost two thou­sand years ago: “Et ipse miror vixque iam facto malo /​ potuisse fieri credo. /​Although the evil is already done, we still find it hard to believe it is pos­sible.”(Medea883 – 4) This is how we react to rad­ical Evil: it is real, but still per­ceived as impossible. But does the same not hold for everything that is really New?

So what about apo­ca­lyptic tones we often hear, espe­cially after a cata­strophe occurs? The ulti­mate para­dox here is that the very excess­ive cata­stroph­ism (»the end of the world is near« man­tra) is a defense, a way to obfus­cate the true dangers, not to take them really ser­i­ously. This is why the only appro­pri­ate reply to an eco­lo­gist who tries to con­vince us of the impend­ing threat is that the true tar­get of his des­per­ate arguing is HIS OWN non­be­lief – con­sequently, our answer to him should be some­thing like »Don’t worry, the cata­strophe will come for sure!«… And the cata­strophe is com­ing, the impossible is hap­pen­ing all around us – but watch patiently, don’t get caught in pre­cip­it­ous extra­pol­a­tions, don’t let your­self go to the prop­erly per­verse pleas­ure of: »This is it! The dreaded moment has arrived!« In eco­logy, such apo­ca­lyptic fas­cin­a­tion arrives in many diverse forms: global warm­ing will drawn us all in a couple of dec­ades; bio­gen­et­ics will bring the end of human eth­ics and respons­ib­il­ity; bees will dis­ap­pear soon and unima­gin­able star­va­tion will fol­low… Take all these treats ser­i­ously, but don’t be seduced by them and enjoy too much the false sense of guilt and justice (»We offen­ded Mother Earth, so we are get­ting what we deserve!«). Instead, keep your head cool and – »but you watch«:

“But you watch, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a jour­ney, when he leaves home and puts his ser­vants in charge, each with his work, and com­mands the door­keeper to stay awake. There­fore stay awake —for you do not know when the mas­ter of the house will come, in the even­ing, or at mid­night, or when the rooster crows, or in the morn­ing — lest he come sud­denly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”(Mark13)

Stay wake and watch for what? As we have already seen, the Left entered a period of pro­found crisis – the shadow of the XXth cen­tury still hangs over it, and the full scope of the defeat is not yet admit­ted. In the years of prosper­ing cap­it­al­ism, it was easy for the Left to play a Cas­sandra, warn­ing that the prosper­ity is based on illu­sions and proph­es­iz­ing cata­strophes to come. Now the eco­nomic down­turn and social dis­in­teg­ra­tion the Left was wait­ing for is here, protests and revolts are pop­ping up all around the globe – but what is con­spicu­ously absent is any con­sist­ent Left­ist reply to these events, any pro­ject of how to trans­pose islands of chaotic res­ist­ance into a pos­it­ive pro­gram of social change: “When and if a national eco­nomy enters into crisis in the present inter­lock­ing global order, what has any­one to say – in any non-​​laughable detail – about ‘social­ism in one coun­try’ or even ‘partly detached pseudo-​​nation-​​state non-​​finance-​​capital-​​driven cap­it­al­ism’?”¹⁰ T.J. Clark sees the reason for this inab­il­ity to act in the Left’s “futur­al­ism,” in its ori­ent­a­tion towards a future of rad­ical eman­cip­a­tion; due to this fix­a­tion, the Left is immob­il­ized “by the idea that it should spend its time turn­ing over the entrails of the present for the signs of cata­strophe and sal­va­tion,” i.e., it con­tin­ues to be premised “on some ter­ra­cotta mul­ti­tude wait­ing to march out of the emperor’s tomb.”¹¹

We have to admit the grain of truth in this sim­pli­fied bleak vis­ion which seems to sap the very pos­sib­il­ity of a proper polit­ical Event: per­haps, we should effect­ively renounce the myth of a Great Awaken­ing – the moment when (if not the old work­ing class then) a new alli­ance of the dis­pos­sessed, mul­ti­tude or whatever, will gather its forces and mas­ter a decis­ive inter­ven­tion. The entire his­tory of the (rad­ical) Left, up to Hardt and Negri, is colored by this stance of await­ing the Moment. After describ­ing mul­tiple forms of res­ist­ance to the Empire, Hardt and Negri’s Mul­ti­tude ends with a mes­si­anic note point­ing towards the great Rup­ture, the moment of Decision when the move­ment of mul­ti­tudes will be tran­sub­stan­ti­ated the sud­den birth of a new world: “After this long sea­son of viol­ence and con­tra­dic­tions, global civil war, cor­rup­tion of imper­ial biopower, and infin­ite toil of the biopol­it­ical mul­ti­tudes, the extraordin­ary accu­mu­la­tions of griev­ances and reform pro­pos­als must at some point be trans­formed by a strong event, a rad­ical insur­rec­tional demand.”¹² How­ever, at this point when one expects a min­imum the­or­et­ical determ­in­a­tion of this rup­ture, what we get is again with­drawal into philo­sophy: “A philo­soph­ical book like this, how­ever, is not the place for us to eval­u­ate whether the time for revolu­tion­ary polit­ical decision is immin­ent.”¹³ Hardt and Negri per­form here an all to quick jump: of course one can­not ask them to provide a detailed empir­ical descrip­tion of the Decision, of the pas­sage to the glob­al­ized “abso­lute demo­cracy,” to the mul­ti­tude that rules itself; how­ever, what if this a jus­ti­fied refusal to engage in pseudo-​​concrete futur­istic pre­dic­tions masks an inher­ent notional deadlock/​impossibility? That is to say, what one does and should expect is a descrip­tion of the notional struc­ture of this qual­it­at­ive jump, of the pas­sage from the mul­ti­tudes res­ist­ing the One of sov­er­eign Power to the mul­ti­tudes dir­ectlyrul­ing themselves.

So what hap­pens if we rad­ic­ally renounce this stance of eschat­o­lo­gical expect­a­tion? Clark con­cludes that one has to admit the tra­gic vis­ion of (social) life: there is no (great bright) future, the “tiger” of suf­fer­ing, evil, and viol­ence is here to stay, and, in such cir­cum­stances, the only reas­on­able polit­ics is the polit­ics of mod­er­a­tion which tries to con­tain the mon­ster: “a polit­ics actu­ally dir­ec­ted, step by step, fail­ure by fail­ure, to pre­vent­ing the tiger from char­ging out would be the most mod­er­ate and revolu­tion­ary there has ever been.”¹⁴Prac­ti­cing such a polit­ics would pro­voke a bru­tal reply of those in power and dis­solve the “bound­ar­ies between polit­ical organ­iz­ing and armed res­ist­ance.”¹⁵ Again, the grain of truth in this pro­posal is that, often, a stra­tegic­ally well-​​placed pre­cise “mod­er­ate” demand can trig­ger a global trans­form­a­tion – recall Gorbachov’s “mod­er­ate” attempt to reform the Soviet Union which res­ul­ted in its dis­in­teg­ra­tion. But is this all one should say (and do)?

There are in French two words for “future” which can­not be adequately rendered in Eng­lish: futur and avenir. Futur stands for future as the con­tinu­ation of the present, as the full actu­al­iz­a­tion of the tend­en­cies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a rad­ical break, a dis­con­tinu­ity with the present – avenir is what is to come /​a venir/​, not just what will be. Say, in today’s apo­ca­lyptic global situ­ation, the ulti­mate hori­zon of the “future” is what Jean-​​Pierre Dupuy calls the dysto­pian “fixed point,” the zero-​​point of the eco­lo­gical break­down, of global eco­nomic and social chaos – even if it is indef­in­itely post­poned, this zero-​​point is the vir­tual “attractor” towards which our real­ity, left to itself, tends. The way to com­bat the cata­strophy is through acts which inter­rupt this drift­ing towards the cata­strophic “fixed point” and take upon them­selves the risk of giv­ing birth to some rad­ical Oth­er­ness “to come.” We can see here how ambigu­ous the slo­gan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not des­ig­nate the clos­ure, the impossib­il­ity of change, but what we should be striv­ing for – to break the hold of the cata­strophic “future” over up and thereby open up the space for some­thing New “to come.”

Based on this dis­tinc­tion, we can see what was the prob­lem with Marx (as well as with the XXth cen­tury Left): it was not that Marx was too uto­pian in his Com­mun­ist dreams, but that his Com­mun­ism was too “futural.” What Marx wrote about Plato (Plato’s Repub­licwas not a uto­pia, but an ideal­ized image of the exist­ing Ancient Greek soci­ety), holds for Marx him­self: what Marx con­ceived as Com­mun­ism remained an ideal­ized image of cap­it­al­ism, cap­it­al­ism without cap­it­al­ism, i.e., expan­ded self-​​reproduction without profit and exploit­a­tion. This is why we should return from Marx to Hegel, to Hegel’s “tra­gic” vis­ion of the social pro­cess where no hid­den tele­ology is guid­ing us, where every inter­ven­tion is a jump into the unknown, where the res­ult always thwarts our expect­a­tions. All we can be cer­tain of is that the exist­ing sys­tem can­not repro­duce itself indef­in­itely: whatever will come after will not be “our future.” A new Middle East war or an eco­nomic chaos or an unheard-​​of envir­on­mental cata­strophe can swiftly change the basic coordin­ates of our pre­dic­a­ment. We should fully assume this open­ness, guid­ing ourselves on noth­ing more than ambigu­ous signs from the future.

Exclus­ive final chapter from Žižek’s new book, The years of dream­ing dan­ger­ously(Verso) coming-​​out this autumn.  Repos­ted from www​.odbor​.org

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