Zizek on Tibet

What if China now is our past and future?
Tibet: dream and reality

The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is – and China too.

By Slavoj Zizek

All the media reports impose an image which goes like this: the People’s Republic of China, which illegally occupied Tibet in 1950, engaged for decades in brutal and systematic destruction not only of the Tibetan religion, but of the identity of Tibetans as a free people. Recently the protests of the Tibetan people against Chinese occupation were again crushed with brutal police and military force. Since China is organising the 2008 Olympic games, it is the duty of all of us who love democracy and freedom to put pressure on China to return to the Tibetans what it stole from them. A country with such a dismal human rights record cannot be allowed to whitewash its image with the noble Olympic spectacle.

What are our governments going to do? Will they, as usual, cede to economic pragmatism, or will they gather the strength to put our highest ethical and political values above short-term economic interests? While the Chinese authorities did no doubt commit many acts of murderous terror and destruction in Tibet, some things disturb this simple “good guys versus bad guys” image. Here are nine points which anyone passing judgment on recent events in Tibet should bear in mind:

1. Tibet, an independent country until 1950, was not suddenly occupied by China. The history of its relations with China is long and complex, with China often acting as a protective overlord – the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. (The term “Dalai Lama” bears witness to this interaction: it combines the Mongolian dalai – ocean – and the Tibetan bla-ma.)

2. Before 1950 Tibet was no Shangri-la, but a country of harsh feudalism, poverty (life expectancy was barely 30), corruption and civil wars (the last, between two monastic factions, was in 1948 when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited any development of industry, so all metal had to be imported from India. This did not prevent the elite from sending their children to British schools in India and transferring financial assets to British banks there.

3. The Cultural Revolution which ravaged the Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s was not imported by the Chinese. Fewer than a hundred of the Red Guards came to Tibet with the revolution, and the young mobs burning the monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetan.

4. Since the early 1950s there has been systematic and substantial CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational (1).

5. As television images show, what is going on now in Tibetan regions is no longer a peaceful “spiritual” protest of monks as in Burma over the last year, but also gangs burning and killing ordinary Chinese immigrants and their stores. We should measure the Tibetan protests by the same standards as we measure other violent protests: if Tibetans can attack Chinese immigrants, why can’t the Palestinians do the same to the Israeli settlers on the West Bank?

6. The Chinese invested heavily in Tibetan economic development, as well as infrastructure, education and health services. Despite undeniable oppression, the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard of living as today. Poverty is now worse in China’s own undeveloped western rural provinces than in Tibet.

7. In recent years the Chinese changed their strategy in Tibet: depoliticised religion is now tolerated, often even supported. The Chinese rely more on ethnic and economic colonisation, rapidly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese capitalist Wild West with karaoke bars and Disney-like “Buddhist theme parks” for western tourists. What the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorising the Buddhist monks conceals is a far more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation. In a decade or two Tibetans will be reduced to the status of Native Americans in the United States.

It seems the Chinese Communists finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments, compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations? The Chinese are doing what the West has always done, as Brazil did in the Amazon or Russia in Siberia, and the US on its own western frontiers.

8. A main reason why so many in the West have taken part in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by the Dalai Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist spirituality which is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. Our fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don’t care about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote: “If you are snagged in another’s dream, you are lost.” The protesters against China are right to counter the Beijing Olympics motto of “one world, one dream” with “one world, many dreams”. But they should be aware that they are imprisoning Tibetans in their own dream. It is not the only dream.

9. If there is an ominous dimension to what is going on now in China, it is elsewhere. Faced with today’s explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask when political democracy, as the “natural” political accompaniment of capitalism, will come.

Valley of tears

In a television interview a couple of years ago, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust of democracy in post-Communist east European countries to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a valley of tears. After the breakdown of socialism, one cannot directly pass to the abundance of a successful market economy. The limited but real socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful.

For Dahrendorf, this painful passage lasts longer than the average period between (democratic) elections, so that the temptation is great to postpone the difficult changes for the short-term electoral gains. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, pointed out (2) that democracy can only catch on in economically developed countries: if developing countries are prematurely democratised, the result is a populism which ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism. No wonder the three formerly third world countries that are the most successful economically – Taiwan, South Korea, Chile – embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.

There is a further paradox: what if the promised democratic second stage that follows the authoritarian valley of tears never comes? This is the most unsettling thing about China. There is the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past, the repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which in Europe went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of the future. What if the “vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market” proves economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? Might it signal that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle?

Crews at it again

Here's a marvelous piece of abject dishonesty from everyone's favorite Freud-denier Fred Crews:

"One rational way of judging whether Freudian propositions have found empirical support might be to bypass the print wars between Freudians and anti-Freudians and simply look at the research being done in academic psychology departments. A recent citation study (by Robbins et al.) found that, for several decades now, the major journals of the field have completely ignored all psychoanalytic claims. Nor, I believe, can you find a single course, in the psychology department of any reputable American university, that treats Freudianism as anything other than a historical curiosity."

First, let's note that he adds the bizarre and parochial qualifier 'American'. This should not be read as an assertion that serious psychology is only done in America (at least, I hope not) but rather as an attempt to add a grain of plausibility to an otherwise preposterous statement. After all, British universities like London, Sheffield, Essex and so forth all have specifically Psychoanalytic clinical certification programs and, in the case of U. London an endowed Sigmund Freud professorship.

Second, let's assume that by 'American' he means 'in the United States of America'. Canadian and Argentine Universities, for two, are frequently psychoanalytically oriented. Mariano Ben Plotkin has written a book about the reception of Psychoanalysis in Argentina which concludes that not only clinical psychiatric practice but all aspects of Argentine life have been given a deep-seated psychoanalytic bent.

Third, even giving him this, we find that he is utterly incorrect. Not only do several US schools actively promote Psychoanalysis, but about a quarter of the teaching faculty in Psychology at UC Berkeley (where Crews is a prof. Emeritus) identify as Psychoanalysts.

As for the citation study, since Crews neglects to identify it with anything other than the lead author's name, I can't find it, but I would like to know exactly which 'psychoanalytic claims' he is talking about, and the extent to which they actually are 'ignored'. In any case, this is question-begging. Empirically-minded psychodynamically-oriented scholars are quick to acknowledge that their claims are not widely credited by the heavily CBT dominated Psychological establishment, but they argue (in some cases convincingly) that the latter has actually validated their claims through studies that don't make any refernce to psychoanalysis whatsoever (like the construct validity of Rorschach tests compared to the MMPI)

Crews makes another obnoxious and patently false assertion with regards to the neuro-Psychoanalyst Mark Solms:

"What Mr. Guterl neglected to mention was that Solms is a psychoanalyst, an editor of Freud's writings, an official of the Anna Freud Centre, and an ardent public advocate whose views about psychoanalysis-&-dreaming are by no means shared by his scientific colleagues, who find them amusing at best. On a deeper level, Mr. Guterl failed to understand the point I have made above: that resemblances between a given phenomenon--e.g., dreaming--and a given theory in no way constitute a triumph for the theory. (Guterl and I had a civil correspondence about this.)"

Since Crews carefully and typically provides no documentation for the claim that Solms' colleagues find his Psychoanalytic bent 'amusing at best', I am not sure precisely what he is referring to. However, I do know that Solms is a founder of NeuroPsychoanalysis, a journal whose editorial board includes Eric Kandel, Antonio Damasio and various other luminaries. One is left to wonder whether such figures would waste their time and energy to support a project they regard with bemused detachment.

More on Fashionable Nonsense

Its interesting to note that 'debunker' type writers tend to grossly abuse the term 'meaningless'. How does one proceed when one's interlocutor is working with a meaningless definition of 'meaningless'?

For example, according to Sokal, the following definition is 'meaningless'

'a limit is defined as that which is greater than one point and less than another but in no case equal to the point of departure, to sketch it for you quickly.'

This is clearly meaningful, in fact I can hazard to say I know damn well what he means by this.

'Let us call a limit any point such x that if Y (the 'point of departure') is a specified unique set X is not an element of Y and X is not the empty set.' He may wish to say something else (if he is trying to talk about limit points in topology, he must clarify a good deal more. This could be the case, if what he means by 'point of departure' and 'point of arrival' is the boundary of the relevant open set. He would then have imprecisely restated the correct definition, which is here. Greater than one point and less than another but in no case equal to the point of departure or the point of arrival is an awkward way of saying that it is 'in the middle' - a limit point is a point x in a Subset S of topological space X such that - to simplify- if you draw a small circle around x that doesn't contain anything outside of S it will always contain a point of S other than itself ), and his formulation may not be precise, but I maintain that i have come up with an unambiguous and meaningful re-statement of Lacan's text.

Not too tough, is it? I came up with the re-statement in about five seconds, and found all the relevant information about topology on wikipedia within the space of a few minutes. Given the (alluded to) time constraints of this kind of seminar and the fact that Lacan was, if nothing else, a pretty bright MD who forgot more formal training in math than I've ever had , I think its probably better to go with one of the two more charitable readings. The seminar may not be one of the brightest moments in the history of the pedagogy of Mathematics (Lacan was not much of a teacher), but the particular passage is either well-formed but unrelated to topology or poorly formed and correct. In any case, this example of Lacanian prose is clearly not schizophasiac (for example, his terms retain their meaning over time), which is what we usually mean by 'gibberish'. So we now wonder what exactly does Sokal mean when he calls something 'meaningless' or 'gibberish'. We can start by examining a case where he clearly believes that posited terms are meaningful. When Sokal wishes to define his own terms, he guarantees their meaning first by asserting that they are meaningful (and they indeed are), then by pointing out that they rely on a long chain of relations to already clearly and specifically defined terms.

Of course, one COULD be led to wonder how this meaning is ultimately guaranteed (indeed, at first blush this seems to lead to vicious regress), but, like good Saussureans, we know that a universe of discourse is a given. Sokal's S's (sound-images) corresponds to his s's (concepts) relationally - so 'compactness 'is 'meaningful' because it fails to be any other (synchronically or diachronically) substitutable S/s relation. So we may not know what Sokal means by meaning, but we at the very least know how he manages to mean it. As an added bonus, we have also explained (should Alan Sokal read this blog, which is unlikely) what another 'meaningless' Lacanian formula (S/s) means. Remember kids, Lacan helps you read Sokal on Lacan.

Presumed Idiotic

The SF gate ran a review of Fashionable Nonsense a while back that, on a second read, yields a true inanity in the midst of otherwise expected mediocre journalistic pap.

"Perhaps only a mathematical genius could propose these insights? Don't buy into the con, Sokal and Bricmont advise. When he tosses tori and square roots in with penises and neuroses, Lacan is betting that a math-induced brain freeze will suspend the critical faculties of his audience. Not so readily bamboozled, the authors of ``Fashionable Nonsense'' expose Lacan's mathematical antics as ``showing off a superficial erudition and manipulating meaningless sentences.''

That sounds pretty right on. After all, Lacan's audience was made up primarily of dim bulbs like this fella. Are we expected to believe that not only did Lacan completely make up all of his reference to higher Maths, but that he put such nonsense over on a gentleman who studied under Husserl and David Hilbert? Weird.

The shit piled up so fast you needed wings to stay above it

Howdy folks. After spending many months attempting to find real, useful information about the Darfur conflict on the internet and coming up with precious little but ten thousand iterations of the typical prepackaged 'bad arab/good african' narrative all wrapped up in snuff porn and tied with a pretty little bow of 'calls to action', I've decided to add my own insignificant voice to the fray. First, a couple provisos: I am not an Arab supremacist, I am not a member of al-Qaeda, I do not hate Jews, I am not a Marxist, I am not a death fetishist, I am not a Khartoum apologist (unless by "Khartoum apologist" one means "person who disagrees with the Save Darfur party line", as many do). I am not, and do not claim to be, an expert on the conflict (although I do promise to make all possible effort to buttress my claims with evidence provided by people who are).

That being said, let's leap right into it. The first inductee into the Save Darfur Hall of Shame is www.darfurgenocide.org. Let's imagine a nice, liberal, suburban family trying to decide where to send their monthly charity budget. They sit down to a yummy plate of organic kale and free range chicken, and talk about what they can do for the poor kids in Africa. Suddenly, their fifteen year old, bandana-sporting activist daughter pipes up: "let's donate to darfurgenocide.org. After all, it is a genocide we can stop!" Great idea, right? Right? Not so fast. Where does your money actually go?

So far, we have used your generous support to carry out the following projects:

• Sent a team of experts to Darfur and the region to meet with representatives of the people of Darfur to listen to what we can do to help bring peace, and to help the international community better understand how to support these groups. Click here to see photos from our trip to Darfur.
• Organized two hunger strikes of several thousand people in all 50 states and worldwide. Click here to read initial press coverage.
• Sent a camera crew to Darfur to provide up to the minute video footage to international media of the situation on the ground.
• Supported rolling protests at Sudanese embassies in other countries, including in Washington DC, where with our partner the Sudan Campaign, we have encouraged several religious leaders and prominent personalities to get arrested.
• Hired a PR firm to train, book, and drive Sudan advocates like John Prendergast and Samantha Power into the mass media in the US and Europe. Together with our partner TrueMajority, we have achieved several major media hits with this approach.
• Provided advice and support to several other organizations working on Darfur, including the Genocide Intervention Fund, the Sudan Campaign, the Save Darfur Coalition, the National Council of Churches, TrueMajority, MTV and many others at international, national and local levels.
• Developed this website to inform several hundred thousand visitors, organize over 35,000 online and grass roots activists, and advocate on Darfur.

Notice anything missing? Well how about this - not one dime of any money donated to www.darfurgenocide.org goes to anyone WHO ACTUALLY LIVES IN DARFUR. Not one red cent!

But let's examine a bit more. They have 'hired a PR firm to train, book, and drive Sudan advocates like John Pendergrast...' Real lovely fellow, him. For a little sample of his brand of "activism", interested readers should take a look at his illiterate, ad hominem riddled screed against Darfur expert Alex de Waal.

darfurgenocide.org also has a section where you can LEARN! OOH BOY, I love to learn! Let's see what we have here http://www.darfurgenocide.org/learn.php

International Crisis Group, provides expert analysis of the crisis and recommendations to the international community for dealing with it. Read their latest reports calling for support for a strategy for a comprehensive peace in Sudan, "A Strategy for Comprehensive Peace in Sudan", 26 July, 2007 and "Darfur: Revitalizing the Peace Process", 30 April, 2007
• Washington Post, July 1, FAQs on the genocide.
• US Agency for International Development, full description of the humanitarian crisis, including maps and statistics on bombings.
• "Dying in Darfur: Can the Ethnic Cleansing in Sudan be Stopped", August 30th, Samantha Power in "The New Yorker"
• "A Dozen Reasons Why Khartoum Wants a War in Darfur", Ali Ali-Dinar, a Darfurian academic based in the US.
• "The Emergence of the Janjaweed", Alex de Waal and Julie Flint
• UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Special Report on Darfur and the prospects for peace in Sudan.
• "Racism at the Root of Sudan's Darfur Crisis", Christian Science Monitor, July 14, 2004
• "Darfur Mortality Update", August 13, 2004, Eric Reeves* analyses the data available and puts the total death toll in Darfur at 180,000 people. See also Reeves' analyses of July 6, 2004, July 15, 2004, and July 30, 2004
• Round up of the various aspects of the Situation, July 21, 2004, Eric Reeves*.
• "Khartoum's Gamble", June 25, 2004 Eric Reeves* argues that the Sudanese Government continues with the genocide in Darfur because it doesn't believe the international community will intervene.
• "Darfur Mortality Update", March 11, 2005 Eric Reeves*
• "The International Failure to Confront Khartoum", March 17, 2005 Eric Reeves*
• "Current Security Conditions in Darfur: An Overview", April 7, 2005 Eric Reeves*
• "Darfur: Women Raped Even After Seeking Refuge", Human Rights Watch

Let's note a few interesting features. First, while we are supposedly 'learning' about the 'background and history' of the conflict, we should keep in mind that none of these articles, with the possible exceptions of the UN summary and the Flint/De Waal piece are actually a comprehensive introduction to the region, the conflict, or the groups involved. Even more strangely, they seem to have left out easily accessible articles that ARE. If they can find De Waal's "the Emergence...", why would it be so hard to dredge up "Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap" ? Could it have anything to do with de Waal's disturbing tendency to go off the reservation with ideologically incorrect tidbits like:

The ‘African’ label may have played well to international audiences in the 1990s, but it had little purchase in Sudan. One reason for this was the prevalence of radical Islam and its appeal to many Darfurians – the result of the success of a political experiment by the regime in Khartoum, masterminded by Hassan al-Turabi.

And if they can find the ICJ's policy recommendations, why can't they give their public a look at their 387 page chronology of reportage on the conflict? Perhaps they are trying to avoid compounding the crimes against humanity committed by the Janjawiid by doing equal violence to the attention spans of their MTV demographic? Or maybe they'd like people not to know that until 2003 (the official 'beginning' of the conflict - never mind the low intensity warfare being waged in the region for at least a decade prior) Khartoum intervened decisively on the side of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa and AGAINST the nomadic tribes, even being targeted by human rights groups for their failure to observe due process while summarily executing 'arabs' accused of attacking 'african' dars? Because that is like, totally weird man. After all, The Christian Science Monitor, Eric Reeves - professor of English Literature at Smith, and the Simon Wisenthal center agree that the GoS' Darfur policy is virulently racist and intended to exterminate the Africans!

Anyway. Its good to start things off by finding a big target and kicking them in the balls. I'll be a bit less polemical sometimes.