混乱的天堂
斯拉沃伊·齐泽克
一个据称是古老的中国诅咒（与中国无关——它可能是一些西方观察者发明的）说：“愿你生活在有趣的时代！” – 有趣的时代是烦恼、困惑和痛苦的时代。似乎在西方“民主”国家，我们最近正在目睹一种奇怪的现象，证明我们生活在有趣的时代。
毛泽东最著名的一句话是：“天下大乱；情况非常好。”毛在这里的意思很容易理解：当现有的社会秩序正在瓦解时，随之而来的混乱为革命力量提供了果断行动并夺取政权的绝佳机会。今天，天底下肯定存在巨大的混乱，Covid-19 大流行、全球变暖、新冷战的迹象以及世界范围内流行的抗议和社会对抗的爆发，只列举了一些困扰我们的危机。但这种混乱是否仍然让情况变得非常好，还是自毁的危险性太高了？毛心目中的情况与我们自己的情况之间的差异可以通过微小的术语区别来最好地表达。毛谈到天底下的混乱，其中“天，”或任何形式的大他者——历史进程的无情逻辑， 社会发展的规律——仍然存在，并谨慎地调节社会混乱。今天，我们应该说天堂本身是混乱的。我这是什么意思？
在克里斯塔·沃尔夫 (Christa Wolf) 的经典东德小说《分裂的天堂》(Divided Heaven) (1963) 中，关于分裂德国的主观影响的经典小说中，曼弗雷德（选择了西方）在他们最后一次见面时对他的爱人丽塔说：“但即使我们的土地被分裂了，我们仍然共享同一个天堂。”丽塔（选择留在东方）苦涩地回答：“不，他们先分裂了天堂。”这部小说提供了正确的见解，让我们了解我们“地上”的分裂和斗争如何最终总是基于“分裂的天堂”；也就是说，在我们所居住的这个（象征性）宇宙的一个更加激进和排他性的划分中。今天的情况已经不是冷战时期两种全球世界观对峙的天体分为两个领域的情况。今天，在每个特定的国家中，天堂的分裂似乎越来越多。在美国， 民粹主义替代右翼与自由民主建制派之间存在意识形态和政治内战。在欧洲，Coviddeniers 正在成为一场真正的流行运动……寻求共同点的步伐在不断减弱，这反映了实体公共空间的持续封闭，而这发生在多个相互交叉的危机意味着更需要全球团结和国际合作的时候比以往任何时候。是什么阻碍了全球的团结与合作？
西方的许多左翼主义者如此痴迷于对新自由主义资本主义的批判，以至于他们忽视了从新自由主义资本主义到一些分析家称之为“企业新封建主义”的奇怪后资本主义的转变。由于“一般智力”（社会知识和合作）在财富创造中的关键作用，当财富的形式越来越与其生产所花费的直接劳动时间不成比例时，结果不是正如马克思所预料的那样，资本主义的自我解体，而是将剥削劳动所产生的利润逐渐转变为“一般知识”和其他公地私有化所占用的租金。让我们以比尔盖茨为例：他是如何成为世界上最富有的人之一的？他的财富与微软所销售产品的生产成本无关（人们甚至可以争辩说微软向其智力工作者支付了相对较高的工资），即， 盖茨的财富不是因为他成功地以低于竞争对手的价格生产出好的软件，也不是因为他对雇佣的知识工作者进行了更高的剥削。那么，为什么仍有数百万人购买微软？因为微软将自己强加于一个几乎通用的标准，（几乎）垄断了该领域，是“一般智力”的一种直接体现。杰夫·贝索斯和亚马逊、苹果、Facebook 等的情况类似。 ——在所有这些情况下，公地本身——平台（我们社会交流和互动的空间）——被私有化，这使我们，他们的用户，处于农奴的位置，向作为我们封建主人的公地所有者支付租金。关于 Facebook，“马克·扎克伯格‘单方面控制着超过 30 亿人’，因为他在 Facebook 的顶端地位无懈可击，” 举报人弗朗西斯豪根告诉英国国会议员，她呼吁紧急外部监管以控制科技公司的管理并减少对社会造成的伤害。” 现代性的巨大成就，即公共空间，正在消失。
但让情况真正危险，将我们推向新野蛮的原因是，这些全球私有化的公地与新一波强烈的民族国家竞争并存，这直接违背了建立与我们的关系的新模式的迫切需要。 Peter Sloterdijk 称其为“野生动物文化的驯化”。直到现在，每种文化都对自己的成员进行了纪律教育/教育，并保证了他们之间的公民和平，但不同文化和国家之间的关系永远处于潜在战争的阴影之下，每个和平时代都只不过是暂时的停战。一个国家的整个伦理以最高的英雄主义行为而告终，即愿意为自己的民族国家牺牲自己的生命，这意味着国家之间的野蛮关系是一个国家内部伦理生活的基础。
今天，情况变得更糟。公地的持续私有化并没有使文化（之间的关系）文明化，而是破坏了每种文化中的道德实质，将我们推回到野蛮状态。然而，一旦我们完全接受我们生活在地球上的宇宙飞船这一事实，紧迫的任务就是在所有人类社区之间实现普遍团结与合作。没有更高的历史必然性将我们推向这个方向，历史不站在我们这边，它倾向于我们集体自杀。正如沃尔特·本雅明（Walter Benjamin）所写，我们今天的任务不是推动历史进步的火车，而是在我们都结束后资本主义野蛮主义之前拉动紧急中断。最近几个月，Covid-19 大流行危机与持续的社会、政治、气候和经济危机交织在一起的令人震惊的方式越来越明显。大流行必须与全球变暖一起对待， 爆发的阶级对立、父权制和厌女症，以及许多其他持续的危机，这些危机在复杂的相互作用中与它产生共鸣，并相互产生共鸣。这种相互作用是无法控制的，充满危险，我们不能指望天堂有任何保证，可以清楚地想象解决方案。如此危险的情况使我们的时刻成为一个显着的政治时刻：情况绝对不是很好，这就是为什么人们必须采取行动。
我认为只有在这样的背景下，我们才能了解中国现在的情况。中国最近的反对大公司的运动和在北京开设的专门促进小公司的新证券交易所也可以被视为反对新封建公司主义的举措，即试图恢复“正常”资本主义。情况的讽刺是显而易见的：一个强大的共产党政权需要一个强大的共产主义政权来维持资本主义免受新封建社团主义后资本主义的威胁因此，我非常感兴趣地关注中国共产党的主要思想家王沪宁的著作现任中共中央政治局常委，中央精神文明建设指导委员会主任。王先生在强调文化、象征小说领域的关键作用方面是正确的。 真正唯物主义反对“现实的虚构”话题（主观主义怀疑“我们所感知的现实不仅仅是另一种虚构？”）不是严格区分虚构和现实，而是着眼于现实。小说的现实。小说并非在现实之外，它们在我们的社会交往、我们的制度和习俗中具体化——正如我们在今天的混乱中所看到的那样，如果我们摧毁我们社会交往所依据的小说，我们的社会现实本身就会开始瓦解。
王称自己为新保守主义者——这是什么意思？如果要相信我们的大媒体，王是反对最近中国政治新方向的大脑。当我读到中国政府最近实施的一项措施是禁止“996”时，我必须承认我的第一个联想是性方面的：“69”在我们的俚语中意味着男人对女人舔阴的位置和女人对男人口交，我认为“996”指的是一些更变态的性行为在中国变得普遍，涉及两个男人和一个女人（因为那里缺少女人）。然后我了解到“996”意味着中国许多公司强加的残酷工作节奏（工作日上午9点到晚上9点，每周6天）。但从某种意义上说，我并没有完全错：中国正在进行的运动有一个双重目标：更多的经济平等，包括更好的工作条件，消除以性、消费主义和狂热为重点的西化流行文化。
那么，在当今的条件下，成为新保守主义者意味着什么？ 2019年10月中旬，中国媒体发起攻势，宣扬“欧洲和南美的示威活动是西方容忍香港动乱的直接结果”的说法。在新京报发表的一篇评论文章中，前中国外交官王震写道，“‘乱港’的灾难性影响已经开始影响西方世界”，即智利和西班牙的示威者正在从香港汲取教训。 .同样，《环球时报》的一篇社论指责香港示威者“向世界输出革命”：“西方正在为支持香港的骚乱付出代价，这在世界其他地方迅速点燃了暴力，预示着西方无法应对的政治风险。/……/西方有很多问题，各种不满的暗流。其中许多最终会以香港抗议活动的方式表现出来。”以及不祥的结论：“加泰罗尼亚可能只是个开始。”
尽管认为巴塞罗那和智利的示威活动是从香港汲取线索的想法有些牵强，但这些爆发引发了普遍的不满，这种不满显然已经在那里，潜伏着，等待一个偶然的触发器爆发，所以即使是特定的法律或措施被废除，抗议仍在继续。共产主义中国谨慎地利用全世界当权者的团结来对抗反叛的民众，警告西方不要低估自己国家的不满——好像在所有意识形态和地缘政治紧张局势之下，他们都分享保持权力的基本兴趣相同……但是这种防御会奏效吗？
在他对东欧共产主义垮台的解释中，尤尔根·哈贝马斯被证明是最终的左翼福山主义者，他默默地接受了现有的自由民主秩序是最好的一种，虽然我们应该努力使其更加公正，但我们不应挑战其基本前提。这就是为什么他恰恰欢迎许多左翼人士认为东欧反共产主义抗议的一大缺陷：这些抗议活动的动机不是任何对后共产主义未来的新愿景。正如他所说，中欧和东欧革命只是“整顿”或“追赶”（nachholende）革命，其目的是使这些社会获得西欧人已经拥有的东西；换句话说，回到西欧常态。
然而，法国的“gilets jaunes”（黄色背心）、西班牙的抗议活动以及其他类似的抗议活动今天绝对不是追赶运动。他们体现了人们不得不称之为对自由民主资本主义的深刻不满。然而，新鲜的是，事实证明，民粹主义右翼比左翼更擅长将这些爆发导向其方向。因此，Alain Badiou 完全有理由对黄马甲说：“Tout ce qui bouge n'est pas rouge”——所有移动（引起骚乱）的都不是红色的。今天的民粹主义右翼参与了以左翼为主的民众抗议的悠久传统。中国似乎选择了新保守主义的一面：通过一个强调爱国主义和传统价值观的强大民族国家来控制现代全球经济的潜在破坏性动力。这种方法的局限性在哪里？
Carlo Ginzburg 提出了这样一种观点，即对一个国家的耻辱，而不是对它的热爱，可能才是属于它的真正标志。这种耻辱的一个最高例子发生在 2014 年，当时数百名大屠杀幸存者和幸存者的后代在周六的纽约时报上购买了一则广告，谴责他们所说的“加沙巴勒斯坦人的大屠杀以及对历史悠久的巴勒斯坦的持续占领和殖民化”声明说：“我们对以色列社会对巴勒斯坦人的极端种族主义非人化感到震惊，这种歧视已经达到高潮。”也许，今天，一些以色列人会鼓起勇气，对以色列人在西岸和以色列本身所做的事情感到羞耻——当然，不是犹太人的羞耻感，而是相反，西岸的以色列政治对犹太教本身最宝贵的遗产所做的事情感到羞耻。 “我的国家是对是错”是最恶心的格言之一， 它完美地说明了无条件爱国主义的错误之处。今天的中国也是如此。我们可以发展这种批判性思维的空间就是公共使用理性的空间。在他的“什么是启蒙运动？”的著名段落中，伊曼纽尔·康德反对理性的“公共”和“私人”使用：“私人”不是个人空间而不是公共关系，而是非常公共的制度秩序一个人的特定身份；而“公共”则是行使一个人的理性的跨国普遍性：
“一个人对理性的公开使用必须始终是免费的，只有它才能在人们中带来启蒙。另一方面，个人对理性的私人使用，通常可能受到非常狭窄的限制，而不会特别阻碍启蒙的进步。通过公开使用一个人的理性，我理解一个人在阅读公众之前作为学者的使用。私人使用我称之为个人在委托给他的特定民事邮政或办公室中可能使用的东西。”
这就是为什么康德的启蒙公式不是“不服从，自由思考！”的原因。不是“不服从，思考和反抗！”但是：“自由思考，公开表达你的想法，并服从！”疫苗怀疑者也是如此：辩论，发表你的怀疑，但一旦公共当局强加他们就遵守规定。如果没有这样的实际共识，我们将慢慢进入一个由部落派系组成的社会，就像许多西方国家正在发生的那样。但是，如果没有公共使用理性的空间，国家本身就会面临成为私人使用理性的另一个例子的危险。理性的公共运用空间不同于西方自由主义意义上的民主——在他最后活跃的一年里，列宁本人看到了这样一个体现理性公共运用的机构的必要性。在承认苏维埃政权的专制性质的同时，他提议建立一个中央控制委员会：一个具有“非政治性”优势的独立、教育和控制机构， 由最好的教师和技术专家组成，他们监督“政治化”的 CC 及其机关。在“梦想”（他的表达）关于 CCC 要做的工作时，他描述了这个机构应该如何“采取一些半幽默的把戏、狡猾的手段、诡计或类似的东西。我知道在西欧那些严肃认真的国家，这样的想法会吓坏人们，甚至没有一个像样的官员会接受它。然而，我希望我们还没有变得如此官僚，在我们中间讨论这个想法只会带来乐趣。的确，为什么不将快乐与效用结合起来呢？为什么不采取一些幽默或半幽默的伎俩来揭露一些可笑的、有害的、半荒谬的、半有害的等等？”
也许，中国需要一个类似的中央控制委员会。它的首要任务是注意毛派永久的自我革命、反对国家结构僵化的永久斗争以及资本主义的内在动力之间深刻的结构同源性。我想王是默默地意识到这一点的。我很想在此转述 Bertolt Brecht 的双关语“抢劫银行与成立新银行相比是什么？”：与真正的文革相比，在文化大革命中被捕的红卫兵的暴力和破坏性爆发是什么，资本主义再生产所必需的所有生命形式的永久消亡？今天，大跃进的悲剧正在重演，成为资本主义大跃进快速走向现代化的喜剧，“铸铁进村”的旧口号重新以“摩天大楼进街”的形式出现。
一些天真的左派声称，是文化大革命和毛主义的遗产，作为对抗肆无忌惮的资本主义的反力量，防止其最严重的过度行为，保持最低限度的社会团结。然而，如果情况正好相反呢？如果文化大革命以一种无意识的、更残酷的讽刺方式，对过去传统的残酷抹杀，是一种冲击，为随后的资本主义爆发创造了条件，那会怎样？如果中国必须被添加到 Naomi Klein 的自然、军事或社会灾难为新的资本主义爆发扫清障碍的国家名单中怎么办？
因此，历史最大的讽刺是，正是毛泽东自己撕裂了传统社会的结构，为资本主义的快速发展创造了意识形态条件。他在文革中对人民，特别是对年轻人的号召是什么？不要等别人告诉你该怎么做，你有反抗的权利！所以要为自己着想，为自己行动，破坏文物，不仅谴责和攻击你的长辈，还有政府和党的官员！扫除压制性的国家机制并在公社中组织自己！毛的号召被听到了——随之而来的是一股无拘无束的热情，要取消所有形式的权威的合法性，因此，最终，军队不得不进行干预以恢复秩序。
今天，我们生活在一个陌生的时代。宗教和民族原教旨主义正在上升，与此同时，愤世嫉俗的怀疑也在上升。在这样的时刻，我们应该退后一步，而不是仅仅分析当今意识形态的内容，而应该关注其更正式的特征。当我们说我们相信或不相信某种意识形态时，我们是什么意思？今天，我们比以往任何时候都更应该牢记，即使没有人真正相信，也有一些信仰在社会上发挥作用。我记得，从我年轻的时候起，在社会主义南斯拉夫，即使是国家机关也没有认真对待官方意识形态——因此它完美地发挥了作用。当有人把官方意识形态看得太重时，官僚们感到恐慌——这对他们来说是成为持不同政见者的第一步。但这并不意味着个人根本不相信——他们表现得好像他们相信一样，这才是最重要的。他们相信并通过他们的活动。
尼尔斯·玻尔提供了信仰如何在意识形态中发挥作用的完美例子：看到他门上的马蹄铁，惊讶的访客说他不相信它带来运气的迷信，玻尔反驳道：“我也相信不相信；我把它放在那里，因为有人告诉我，如果一个人不相信它，它也会起作用！”这就是为什么，当某种意识形态被强制执行时，人们应该始终仔细分析这种强制执行的实际运作方式。我在社会主义南斯拉夫的青年时期，社会主义教育事实上惨遭失败：大多数学生对此视而不见，他们的反应是：“不要当真，享受你的生活。”然而，一位老共产党员向我解释说，这种表面上的失败实际上是成功的：当权者想要一个无视官方意识形态，只是机械地参加官方仪式的人口。所以当我听到今天在中国又叫小学生读马克思主义经典，我的问题是： 该禁令的真正含义是什么？
意识形态的空间，规范我们日常互动的习俗，是模棱两可且不一致的。我们预计会违反一些禁令，但要谨慎，不要在公共场合。反之亦然，我们拥有自由，条件是我们不使用它们——如果我们做出正确的选择，我们就可以自由选择。 （例如，在我的国家，如果我和我的穷人朋友一起吃饭，当账单到达时，他会坚持要他支付他的份额，但我会坚持要我支付，所以他很快接受我将支付。）我们有本身被禁止的禁令，即不能公开宣布的禁令。例如，在斯大林主义强硬的政权中，公开批评领袖当然是被禁止的，但公开宣布这一禁令也是被禁止的。没有人公开说禁止批评斯大林，而当众说这话的人，瞬间就消失了。 这就是我想了解的有关中国的信息：这种由明确和不成文规则构成的复杂结构在那里如何发挥作用？
为了进一步分析所说的和未说的之间如此复杂的相互作用，未说隐含在所说的内容中，让我转向恩斯特·卢比奇（Ernst Lubitch）的电影《尼诺契卡》中的一个精彩的辩证笑话：英雄去自助餐厅点了没有奶油的咖啡；服务员回答：“对不起，我们的奶油用完了，但我们还有牛奶。我可以给你端咖啡不加牛奶吗？”在这两种情况下，顾客单独喝咖啡，但这种 One-coffee 每次都伴随着不同的否定，首先是不含奶油的咖啡，然后是不含牛奶的咖啡。这些话在政治上有等价之处：在社会主义波兰的一个众所周知的笑话中，一位顾客走进一家商店并问道：“你可能没有黄油，或者是吗？”答案是：“对不起，我们是没有卫生纸的商店；街对面的那个是没有黄油的！”这就是黑格尔所说的“确定的否定”，而不是抽象的否定：原味咖啡、不加牛奶的咖啡和不加奶油的咖啡实际上是同一种咖啡，但在我们的象征宇宙中，它们是不同的，它们体现了不同的否定（或没有否定）。政治不也是这样吗？ 当一个从属的个人或群体不仅将其社会地位视为简单的身份，而且作为“确定性否定”时，这种情况就会被政治化。当一个女人体验到她“没有”（没有自由，没有经济权力……）的地位时，她就会成为女权主义者。我们无法改变过去的现实，但我们可以而且应该让它看起来被它所否定的东西污名化。当一个女人在一个以“外在”为标志的父权社会中体验到她的身份后，所有的过去都改变了：我们学会在以前经历过的有机稳定社会秩序中发现压迫和剥削的痕迹。这种确定性否定的逻辑所暗示的是意义的追溯性，这是由伟大的英国保守派诗人 T.S.艾略特：
“当一件新的艺术作品被创造出来时，所有在它之前的艺术作品都会同时发生。现有的纪念碑在它们之间形成了一个理想的秩序，通过在它们中间引入新的（真正新的）艺术作品来修改。现有订单在新作品到来之前完成；为了在出现新颖性之后继续存在，整个现存的秩序必须被稍微改变；从而重新调整每件艺术品与整体的关系、比例、价值；这是新旧之间的一致性。 /./ 过去应该被现在改变，就像现在被过去所引导一样。”
让我们以莎士比亚为例：今天对哈姆雷特的精彩上演不仅仅是对该剧的新诠释，它在某种程度上填补了莎士比亚原作本身的不足——在写作时，莎士比亚并不完全知道他在说什么，该剧充满矛盾，面向未来开放。这同样适用于政治。 1953年，中国总理周恩来在日内瓦参加结束朝鲜战争的和平谈判时，一位法国记者问他对法国大革命有何看法；周回答说：“现在说还为时过早。” 在某种程度上，他是对的：随着 1990 年代后期东欧“人民民主国家”的解体，法国大革命历史地位的斗争再次爆发.自由修正主义者试图强加一种观念，即 1989 年共产主义的消亡恰逢其时：它标志着始于 1789 年的时代结束， 与雅各宾派一起首次进入现场的革命模式的最终失败。过去的斗争今天仍在继续：如果一个激进的解放政治的新空间会出现，那么法国大革命不仅仅是历史的僵局。
---这让我们更接近哲学。为了指明对立面如此复杂的相互作用，黑格尔使用了一个独特的术语“绝对的 Gegenstoss”（后坐力、反推力、反推力，或者为什么不简单地反击）：退出创造它退出的东西；运动中对立面的投机巧合，通过它，事物从其自身的损失中浮现：
“因此，反思在它面前发现了一个直接的，它超越了它，它是回归。但这种回归只是对反思在它面前发现的东西的预设。因此，被发现的东西只有通过被抛在后面。/……/ “反思性运动应被视为对自身的绝对反冲 [absoluter Gegenstoss]。因为回归自我的预设——本质来自于，并且只是作为这种回归——只存在于回归本身中。”
因此，Absoluter Gegenstoss 代表对立的完全巧合，在这种情况下，行动表现为自己的反作用，或者更准确地说，非常消极的举动（损失、撤回）产生了它“否定”的东西。 “被发现的东西只能通过被遗忘”及其倒置（我们返回的东西“只有在返回本身中”才会出现，就像通过“返回丢失的根源”来构成自己的国家一样）是黑格尔所说的“绝对反思”的两个方面：一种不再在其对象之外的反思，将其预设为既定的，而是一种关闭循环并设定其预设的反思。
谈到英国对印度的殖民，首先是殖民前印度的“冷漠多样性”；然后英国殖民者残酷地干预，将殖民世界的结构强加于印度，并用西方普遍主义的术语为殖民化辩护；然后印度对殖民化的抵抗开始发展，指出西方在殖民印度时是如何背叛其平等主义解放的遗产。反殖民斗争指的是印度作为世俗民主国家的理念，一种起源于西方的理念；然而，这一理念的印度版本并不是西方世俗平等主义精神与印度传统的“综合”，而是通过切断西方世俗平等主义精神的根基，对西方平等主义精神的充分肯定。传统并肯定其实际的普遍性。
在经历损失之前，什么都没有——当然，在失去之前有一些东西（就印度而言，这是一个庞大而复杂的传统），但这种传统是一种异质的混乱，与后来的民族复兴想要回归的东西无关。这通常适用于所有失去和重新获得民族认同的过程。在复兴的过程中，一个正在形成的民族经历了它现在的星座失去了一些宝贵的起源，并努力重新获得这些起源，回到它们——然而，没有丢失的起源，起源是通过他们失去和回归的经历而构成的。这适用于所有“回归本源”：从 19 世纪开始，当新的民族国家在中欧和东欧出现时，他们对“古老的民族根源”的回归产生了这些根源，产生了埃里克·霍布斯邦所说的“发明的传统” 。”
--- 但是，这样的追溯运动岂不是只能在我们的文化和象征空间中发生，而现实就是如此吗？在这里，我想，量子物理学进入了——我们如何解释所谓的“不确定性原理”，它阻止我们在量子水平上获得对粒子的全部知识（以确定粒子的速度和位置）？对爱因斯坦来说，这个不确定性原理证明量子物理学并没有提供对现实的完整描述，它的概念装置肯定遗漏了一些未知的特征。相反，海森堡、玻尔和其他人坚持认为，我们对量子现实知识的这种不完整指向了量子现实本身的一种奇怪的不完整，这一主张导致了令人叹为观止的怪异本体论。当我们想在人工（虚拟、数字）媒体中模拟现实时，我们不必走到最后： 我们只需要再现特征，使图像对于观众的观点来说是真实的。比如说，如果背景中有房子，我们不必通过程序构建房子的整个内部，因为我们预计参与者不会想要进入房子；或者，在这个空间中构建一个虚拟人可以仅限于他的外表——不需要打扰内部器官、骨骼等。我们只需要安装一个程序，如果参与者的活动需要，它会迅速填补这个空白它（比如说，如果他会用刀深深地切入虚拟人的身体）。当我们模拟一个虚拟的宇宙时，物体的微观结构可以是空白的，如果地平线上的星星看起来很朦胧，我们就不必费心去构建它们仔细观察的样子，因为没有人会上去拍摄这样看他们。 这里真正有趣的想法是，当我们探索宇宙中最微小的组成部分时，我们遇到的量子不确定性可以以完全相同的方式读取，作为我们模拟世界有限分辨率的特征，即作为（我们所体验的）现实本身的本体论不完整性。也就是说，让我们想象一位上帝正在为我们创造世界，让我们的人类居住在其中——他的任务
“可以通过只为它提供居民需要了解的那些部分来使其更容易。例如，地球内部的微观结构可能是空白的，至少在有人决定挖得足够深之前，在这种情况下，可以根据需要匆忙填写细节。如果最遥远的恒星是朦胧的，那么没有人会靠得足够近才能注意到有什么不对劲。”
这个想法是创造-“编程”我们宇宙的上帝太懒惰（或者，更确切地说，他低估了我们 - 人类 - 智力）：他认为我们人类不会成功地探索超越水平的自然结构原子，所以他只将我们宇宙的矩阵编程到其原子结构的水平——除此之外，他只是让事情变得模糊，就像一个房子的内部没有在 PC 游戏中编程。然而，神学数字方法是解读这个悖论的唯一方法吗？我们可以将其解读为我们已经生活在一个模拟宇宙中的标志，但也可以视为现实本身本体论不完整的一个信号。在第一种情况下，本体论的不完备性被转换为认识论的不完备性，即不完备性被认为是另一个（秘密但完全真实的）机构将我们的现实构建为模拟宇宙这一事实的结果。真正困难的是接受第二个选择， 现实本身的本体论不完整性。也就是说，立即出现的是一种大规模的常识性谴责：但这种本体论的不完备性如何适用于现实本身？现实难道不是由它的本体论完整性来定义的吗？如果现实“真的存在于那里”，那么它必须“一路向下”是完整的，否则我们正在处理一个“悬而未决”的虚构，就像不是实体事物的表象……但是量子物理学的本体论含义似乎是物质现实本身已经不完整，面向未来开放。
--- 在他对文化的定义的注释中，TSEliot 指出，有时唯一的选择是异端和非信仰之间的选择，当保持宗教活力的唯一方法是进行宗派分裂时主要尸体。列宁对传统马克思主义这样做，毛泽东用他自己的方式这样做，这是今天必须要做的。
星期六辩论介绍
今天，我们有哲学的两端。第一个发生在实证科学中，慢慢地占据了旧的形而上学思辨的领域。在过去的几十年里，实验物理学的技术进步开辟了一个新领域，在经典科学宇宙中是不可想象的，即“实验形而上学”：“以前被认为只是哲学辩论的问题已经被带入轨道的实证调查。” 适当的“形而上学”命题测试是偶然性的本体论状态、因果关系的局部性条件、独立于我们观察的现实状态等。这就是为什么史蒂芬·霍金在他的《大设计》一开始就得意洋洋地宣称 »哲学已经死了。” 随着量子物理学和宇宙学的最新进展，所谓的实验形而上学达到了顶峰：关于宇宙起源等的形而上学问题，以前是哲学思辨的话题，现在可以通过实验科学和如此实证检验……“连线大脑”的前景是人类思维自然化的一种最终点：当我们的思维过程可以直接与数字机器交互时，它实际上成为现实中的一个对象，它不再是与外部现实相对的“我们的”内在思想。
另一方面，在今天的先验历史主义中，关于现实的“幼稚”问题被准确地接受为“幼稚”，这意味着它们无法提供我们知识的最终认知框架。例如，福柯的真理概念可以概括为以下主张：真理/非真理不是我们陈述的直接属性，而是在不同的历史条件下，不同的话语产生各自特定的真实效果，即，它暗示了它的真实性。什么值是“真”的自己的标准：
“问题不在于在属于科学性或真理范畴的话语与属于其他类别的话语之间划清界限，而在于从历史上看真理的影响是如何在既不真实也不真实的话语中产生的。错误的。”
科学用它自己的术语来定义真理：一个命题的真理（应该用清晰明确的、最好是形式化的术语来表述）是由任何人都可以重复的实验程序建立的。宗教话语以不同的方式运作：它的“真理”是通过复杂的修辞方式建立的，这些方式产生了居住在一个由更高权力仁慈控制的有意义世界的体验。所以如果有人问米歇尔·福柯一个形而上学的大问题，比如“我们有自由意志吗？”，他的回答应该是这样的：“这个问题只有意义，它只能在某个认识、领域内提出知识/权力决定在什么条件下它是真或假的，我们最终能做的就是描述这个认识。”对于福柯来说，这个认识论在德语中被称为 Unhintergehbares，在它背后是我们无法触及的东西。有没有办法摆脱这种令人衰弱的僵局？
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原稿：
HEAVEN IN DISORDER
Slavoj Zizek
An allegedly old Chinese curse (which has nothing to do with China – it was probably invented by some Western observer) says “May you live in interesting times!” – interesting times are the times of troubles, confusion and suffering. And it seems that in Western “democratic” countries, we are lately witnessing a weird phenomenon which proves that we live in interesting times.
One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” It is easy to understand what Mao meant here: when the existing social order is disintegrating, the ensuing chaos offers revolutionary forces a great chance to act decisively and political power. Today, there certainly is great disorder under heaven the pandemic, , signs of a new Cold War, and protests and antagonisms ut does this chaos still make the situation excellent, or is the danger of self-destruction too high? The difference between the situation Mao had in mind and our situation can be best rendered by a tiny terminological distinction. Mao speaks about disorder UNDER heaven, wherein “heaven,” or the big Other in whatever form—the inexorable logic of historical process, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly regulates social chaos. Today, we should talk about HEAVEN ITSELF in disorder. What do I mean by this?
In Divided Heaven (1963), Christa Wolf’s classic GDR novel about the subjective impact of divided Germany, Manfred (who has chosen the West) says to his love Rita, when they meet for the last time: “But even if our land is divided, we still share the same heaven.” Rita (who has chosen to remain in the East) bitterly replies: “No, they first divided the heaven.” The novel offers the right insight into how our “earthly” divisions and fights are ultimately always grounded in a “divided heaven”; that is, in a much more radical and exclusive division of the very (symbolic) universe in which we dwell. Today, the Heaven divided into two spheres, as was the case in the Cold War period when two global world-views confronted each other. Heaven . In the United States, there is an ideological and political civil war between the populist alternative Right and the liberal-democratic establishment. In Europe, the Covid-deniers are becoming a true popular movement… ever diminishing, and this is happening global solidarity and international cooperation are more needed than ever. What is preventing global solidarity and cooperation?
Many Leftists in the West are so obsessed with the critique of neoliberal capitalism that they neglect the big change, the passage from neoliberal capitalism to a strange post-capitalism which some analysts call “corporate neo-feudalism.” When, due to the crucial role of the “general intellect” (social knowledge and cooperation) in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are more and more out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, the result is not, as Marx expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor into rent appropriated by the privatization of the “general intellect” and other commons. Let us take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become one of the richest men in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling (one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary), i.e., Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher exploitation of his hired intellectual workers. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft imposed itself as an almost universal standard, (almost) monopolizing the field, a kind of direct embodiment of the “general intellect.” Things are similar with Jeff Bezos and Amazon, with Apple, Facebook, etc.etc. – in all these cases, commons themselves - the platforms (spaces of our social exchange and interaction) – are privatized, which puts us, their users, into the position of serfs paying a rent to the owner of a common as our feudal master. with regard to Facebook, “Mark Zuckerberg ‘has unilateral control over 3 billion people’ due to his unassailable position at the top of Facebook, the whistleblower Frances Haugen told to the British MPs as she called for urgent external regulation to rein in the tech company’s management and reduce the harm being done to society.”The big achievement of modernity, the public space, is thus disappearing.
But what makes the situation really dangerous, pushing us into a new barbarism, is that these global privatized commons co-exist with a new wave of strong nation-state competition which runs directly against the urgent need to establish a new mode of relating to our environs, a radical politico-economic change called by Peter Sloterdijk “the domestication of the wild animal Culture.” Till now, each culture disciplined/educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them, but the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each epoch of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice. The entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state.
Today, things are getting even worse. Instead of civilizing (the relations between) cultures, the ongoing privatization of commons undermines the ethical substance within each culture, pushing us back into barbarism. However, the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities. There is no higher historical necessity that pushes us in this direction, history is not on our side, it tends towards our collective suicide. As Walter Benjamin wrote, our task today is not to push forward the train of historical progress but to pull the emergency break before we all end in post-capitalist barbarism. In recent months the crisis of the pandemic is intertwined with The pandemic together with class antagonisms, which resonate other in a complex interplay. This interplay is uncontrollable and full of dangers, and we cannot count on any guarantee in Heaven make the solution clearly imaginable. Such a risky situation makes our moment an eminently political one: the situation is decidedly NOT excellent, and that’s why one has to act.
I think it is only against this background that we can understand what is going now in China. The recent Chinese campaign against big corporations and the opening of a new stock exchange in Beijing dedicated to the promotion of small firms can also be seen as moves against neo-feudal corporatism, i.e., as attempts to bring back “normal” capitalism. The irony of the situation is obvious: a strong Communist regime is needed to keep alive capitalism against the threat of ne-feudal corporatist post-capitalism…Consequently, I follow with great interest the writings of Wang Huning, the leading ideologue of the Chinese Communist party, a current member of the party's Politburo Standing Committee, and the director of Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization. Wang is correct in emphasizing the key role of culture, of the domain of symbolic fictions. The true materialist way to oppose the topic of the “fiction of reality” (subjectivist doubts in the style of “is what we perceive as reality not just another fiction?”) is not to strictly distinguish between fiction and reality but to focus on the reality of fictions. Fictions are not outside reality, they are materialized in our social interactions, in our institutions and customs – as we can see in today’s mess, if we destroy fictions on which our social interactions are based, our social reality itself begins to fall apart.
Wang designated himself as a neo-conservative – what does this mean?If one is to trust our big media, Wang is the brain against the recent new orientation of Chinese politics. When I read that one of the measures lately imposed by the Chinese government is the prohibition of “996”, I must admit my first association was a sexual one: “69” means in our slang the position in which man performs on the woman cunnilingus and woman on the man fellatio, and I thought “996” refers to some more perverted sexual practice becoming widespread in China and involving two men and a woman (since there is a lack of women there). Then I learned that “996” means a brutal work rhythm imposed by many corporations in China (a workday 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week). But in some sense I was not totally wrong: the ongoing campaign in China has a double target: more economic equality, inclusive of better conditions of work, and elimination of the Westernized popular culture focused on sex, consumerism, and fandom.
"exporting revolution to the world"So what does being a neo-conservative mean in today’s conditions? In mid-October 2019, Chinese media launched an offensive promoting the claim that “demonstrations in Europe and South America are the direct result of Western tolerance of Hong Kong unrest.” In a commentary published in Beijing News, former Chinese diplomat Wang Zhen wrote that "the disastrous impact of a 'chaotic Hong Kong' has begun to influence the Western world," i.e., that demonstrators in Chile and Spain were taking their cues from Hong Kong. Along the same lines, an editorial in Global Times accused Hong Kong demonstrators of : "The West is paying the price for supporting riots in Hong Kong, which has quickly kindled violence in other parts of the world and foreboded the political risks that the West can't manage. /…/ There are many problems in the West and all kinds of undercurrents of dissatisfaction. Many of them will eventually manifest in the way the Hong Kong protests did." And the ominous conclusion: "Catalonia is probably just the beginning."
Although the idea that demonstrations in Barcelona and Chile are taking their cues from Hong Kong is far-fetched, these outbursts exploded into a general discontent which was obviously already there, lurking, waiting for a contingent trigger to explode, so that even when the particular law or measure was repealed, protests persisted. The Communist China discreetly plays on the solidarity of those in power all around the world against the rebellious populace, warning the West not to underestimate the dissatisfaction in their own countries – as if, beneath all ideological and geo-political tensions, they all share the same basic interest in holding onto power… But will this defense work?
In his interpretation of the fall of East European Communism, Jürgen Habermas proved to be the ultimate Left Fukuyamist, silently accepting that the existing liberal-democratic order is the best possible, and that, while we should strive to make it more just, we should not challenge its basic premises. This is why he welcomed precisely what many leftists saw as the big deficiency of the anti-Communist protests in Eastern Europe: the fact that ths protests were not motivated by any new visions of the post-Communist future he put it, the central and eastern European revolutions were just “rectifying” or “catch-up” (nachholende) revolutions their aim to enable societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed the West European normality.
However, the (yellow vests) in France, theprotests in Spain, and other similar protests are definitely NOT catch-up movements. what one cannot but call a profound dissatisfaction with liberal-democratic capitalism. leftist China seems to have chosen here the neoconservative side: to control the potentially-destructive dynamics of modern global economy with a strong Nation-State that emphasizes patriotism and traditional values. Where is the limit of such an approach?
Carlo Ginzburg proposed the notion that a shame for one’s country, not love of it, may be the true mark of belonging to it. A supreme example of such shame occurred back in 2014 when hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors bought an ad in Saturday’s New York Times condemning what they referred to as “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine”: “We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch,” said the statement. Maybe, today, some Israelis will gather the courage to feel shame apropos of what the Israelis are doing on the West Bank and in Israel itself – not, of course, in the sense of shame of being Jewish but, on the contrary, of feeling shame for what the Israeli politics in the West Bank is doing to the most precious legacy of Judaism itself. “My country right or wrong” is one of the most disgusting mottos, and it illustrates perfectly what is wrong with unconditional patriotism. The same holds for China today. The space in which we can develop such critical thinking is the space of the public use of reason. In the famous passage of his “What is Enlightenment?”, Immanuel Kant opposes the “public” and the “private” use of reason: “private” is not one’s individual space as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while “public” is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason:
“The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one’s reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one’s reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.”
This is why Kant’s formula of Enlightenment is not “Don’t obey, think freely!” is not “Don’t obey, think and rebel!” but: “Think freely, state your thoughts publicly, and obey!” The same holds for vaccine doubters: debate, publish your doubts, but obey regulations once the public authority imposes them. Without such practical consensus we will slowly drift into a society composed of tribal factions, as it is happening in many Western countries. But without the space for the public use of reason, the state itself courts the danger of becoming just another instance of the private use of reason. The space for the public use of reason is not the same as democracy in the Western liberal sense – in his last active year, Lenin himself saw the necessity of such an organ embodying the public use of reason. While admitting the dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime, he proposed to establish a Central Control Commission: an independent, educational and controlling body with ‘apolitical’ edge, consisting of best teachers and technocratic specialists the ‘politicized’ CC and its organs. In “dreaming” (his expression) about the of work the CCC, he describes how this body should resort “to some semi-humorous trick, cunning device, piece of trickery or something of that sortI know that in the staid and earnest states of Western Europe such an idea would horrify people and that not a single decent official would even entertain it. I hope, however, that we have not yet become as bureaucratic as all that and that in our midst the discussion of this idea will give rise to nothing more than amusement. Indeed, why not combine pleasure with utility? Why not resort to some humorous or semi-humorous trick to expose something ridiculous, something harmful, something semi-ridiculous, semi-harmful, etc.?”
Maybe, China needs a similar Central Control Commission. Its first task would be to notice the profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of State structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. I think Wang is silently aware of this. I am tempted to paraphrase here Bertolt Brecht’s pun »What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?«: what are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life-forms necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? Today, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is repeating itself as the comedy of the rapid capitalist Great Leap Forward into modernization, with the old slogan “iron foundry into every village” re-emerging as “a skyscraper into every street.”
Some naïve Leftists claim that it is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and Maoism in general which acts as a counter-force to the unbridled capitalism, preventing its worst excesses, maintaining a minimum of social solidarity. What if, however, it is exactly the opposite that is the case? What if, in a kind of unintended and for this reason all the more cruelly ironic way, the Cultural Revolution, with its brutal erasure of past traditions, was a shock which created the conditions for the ensuing capitalist explosion? What if China has to be added to Naomi Klein’s list of states in which a natural, military or social catastrophe cleared the slate for a new capitalist explosion?
The supreme irony of history is thus that it was Mao himself who created the ideological conditions for the rapid capitalist development by tearing apart the fabric of traditional society. What was his call to the people, especially the young ones, in the Cultural Revolution? Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what to do, you have the right to rebel! So think and act for yourselves, destroy cultural relics, denounce and attack not only your elders, but also government and party officials! Swipe away the repressive state mechanisms and organize yourself in communes! And Mao’s call was heard - what followed was an explosion of the unrestrained passion to de-legitimize all forms of authority, so that, at the end, the Army had to intervene to restore order.
Today we live in a strange era. Religious and national fundamentalisms are rising, at the same time that cynical disbelief is rising. In such a moment, we should make a step back and, instead of just analyzing the content of today’s ideologies, we should focus on their more formal features. What do we mean when we say that we believe or not in an ideology? Today, more than ever, we should bear in mind that there are beliefs which function socially, even if no-one really believes. I remember, from my youth, in the Socialist Yugoslavia, the official ideology was not taken seriously even by the state apparatchiks – and in this way it functioned perfectly. The apparatchiks got in panic when someone took the official ideology too seriously – this was for them the first the first step towards becoming a dissident. But this didn’t mean that individuals simply didn’t believe – they acted as if they believed, and this was what mattered. They believed in and through their activity.
Niels Bohr provided the perfect example of how belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn’t believe in the superstition that it brings luck, to what Bohr snapped back: „I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!“This is why, when a certain ideology is enforced, one should always closely analyze how this enforcement actually works. In my youth in Socialist Yugoslavia, the Socialist education de facto miserably failed: most of the pupils just ignored it, their reaction was: “Don’t take it seriously, just enjoy your life.” However, an old Communist explained to me that this apparent failure really was a success: those in power wanted a population which ignored official ideology and just mechanically took part in the official rituals. So when, as I hear, today in China pupils are again told to read Marxist classics, my question is: how is this injunction really meant?
The space of ideology, of customs that regulate our daily interactions, is ambiguous and inconsistent. There are prohibitions we are expected to violate, but discreetly, not in public. And the obverse, there are freedoms that are given to us, on condition that we don’t use them – we are given a free choice if we make the right choice. (For example, in my country, if I have a diner with my friend who is poor, when the bill arrives he is expected to insist that he will pay his share, but I am expected to insist that I will pay, so he quickly accepts that I will pay.) We have prohibitions which are themselves prohibited, i.e., which cannot be publicly announced. For example, in a hard Stalinist regime, it was of course prohibited to openly criticize the Leader, but it was also prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. Nobody publicly said that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin, and the one saying this publicly would instantly disappear. This is what I would like to know about China: how does this complex texture of explicit and unwritten rules function there?
To analyze further such a complex interplay between what is said and what is not said, which un-said is implied in what is said, let me turn to a wonderful dialectical joke in Ernst Lubitch’s film Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: “Sorry, we have run out of cream, but we still have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?” In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this One-coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then coffee-with-no-milk. There is a political equivalent of these lines: in a well-known joke from Socialist Poland, a customer enters a store and asks: “You probably don’t have butter, or do you?” The answer: “Sorry, but we are the store which doesn’t have toilet paper; the one across the street is the one which doesn’t have butter!” This is what Hegel called “determinate negation” as opposed to abstract negation: plain coffee, coffee without milk, and coffee without cream are in reality the same coffee, but in our symbolic universe, they are different, they embody a different negation (or no negation). And does the same not hold for politics? A situation gets politicized when a subordinated person or group experiences its social position not just as a simple identity but as a “determinate negation.” A woman becomes a feminist when she experiences her position as “without” (without freedom, without economic power…). We cannot change the past reality, but we can and should make it appear as stigmatized by what it negates. After a woman experiences her identity in a patriarchal society as marked by a “without,” all the past is changed: we learn to discover traces of oppression and exploitation in what was previously experienced as an organic stable social order. What this logic of determinate negation implies is the retroactivity of meaning which was nicely formulated by the great English conservative poet T.S. Eliot:
“what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. /…/ the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”
Let’s take the example of Shakespeare: a great staging of Hamlet today is not just a new interpretation of the play, it in a way fills the lacks of Shakespeare’s original itself – when writing it, Shakespeare didn’t know fully what he is saying, the play is full of inconsistencies, open towards the future. And the same holds for politics. When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou replied: „It is still too early to tell.“ In a way, he was right: with the disintegration of the East European “people’s democracies” in the late 1990s, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists tried to impose the notion that the demise of Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era which began in 1789, the final failure of the revolutionary model which first entered the scene with the Jacobins. The battle for the past goes on today: if a new space of radical emancipatory politics will emerge, then French Revolution was not just a deadlock of history.
--- This brings us closer to philosophy. To designate such complex interplay of opposites, Hegel uses the unique term “absoluter Gegenstoss“(recoil, counter-push, counter-thrust, or, why not, simply counterpunch): a withdrawal-from creates what it withdraws from; the speculative coincidence of the opposites in the movement by means of which a thing emerges out of its own loss:
"Reflection therefore finds before itan immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return. But this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind. /…/ the reflective movement is to be taken as anabsolute recoil [absoluter Gegenstoss] upon itself. For the presupposition of the return-into-self – that from which essence comes, and is only as this return – is only in the return itself.”
Absoluter Gegenstoss thus stands for the radical coincidence of the opposites in which the action appears as its own counter-action, or, more precisely, in which the very negative move (loss, withdrawal) generates what it “negates.” “What is found only comes to be through being left behind,” and its inversion (it is “only in the return itself” that what we return to emerges, like nations who constitute themselves by way of “returning to their lost roots”) are the two sides of what Hegel calls “absolute reflection”: a reflection which is no longer external to its object, presupposing it as given, but a reflection which, as it were, closes the loop and posits its presupposition.
Apropos the British colonization of India, there is first the “indifferent multiplicity” of the pre-colonial India; then the English colonization brutally intervenes, imposing on India the structure of a colonial world, and justifying colonization in the terms of Western universalism; then Indian resistance to colonization develops, pointing out how, in colonizing India, the West is betraying its own legacy of egalitarian emancipation. The anti-colonial struggle refers to the Idea of India as a secular democratic state, an Idea which originated in the West; the Indian version of this Idea, however, is not a “synthesis” between the Western secular-egalitarian spirit and the Indian tradition, but the full assertion of the Western egalitarian spirit by way of the cutting off the roots that ground it in the Western tradition and affirming its actual universality.
There is nothing there prior to the experience of a loss – of course there was something before the loss (in the case of India, a vast and complex tradition), but this tradition was a heterogeneous mess that has nothing to do with that to which the later national revival wants to return. This holds in general for all processes of lost and regained national identity. In the process of its revival, a nation-in-becoming experiences its present constellation as that of a loss of some precious origins, and strives to regain these origins, to return to them – however, there are no origins which were lost, the origins are constituted through the very experience of their loss and return to them. This holds for all “return to origins”: when, from 19th century onwards, new Nation-States were popping up in Central and Eastern Europe, their return to “old ethnic roots” generated these roots, producing what Eric Hobsbawn called “invented traditions.”
--- But is it not that such a retroactive movement can only happen in our cultural and symbolic space, while reality is just what it is? Here, I think, quantum physics enters - how are we to interpret the so-called “principle of uncertainty” which prohibits us from attaining full knowledge of particles at the quantum level (to determine the velocity and the position of a particle)? For Einstein, this principle of uncertainty proves that quantum physics does not provide a full description of reality, that there must be some unknown features missed by its conceptual apparatus. Heisenberg, Bohr, and others, on the contrary, insisted that this incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points towards a strange incompleteness of quantum reality itself, a claim which leads to a breath-taking weird ontology. When we want to simulate reality within an artificial (virtual, digital) medium, we do not have to go to the end: we just have to reproduce features which make the image realistic for the spectator’s point of view. Say, if there is a house in the background, we do not have to construct through program the house’s entire interior, since we expect that the participant will not want to enter the house; or, the construction of a virtual person in this space can be limited to his exterior – no need to bother with inner organs, bones, etc. We just need to install a program which will promptly fill in this gap if the participant’s activity will necessitate it (say, if he will cut with a knife deep into the virtual person’s body). When we simulate a virtual universe, the microscopic structure of objects can be left blank, and if stars on the horizon appear hazy, we need not bother to construct the way they would appear to a closer look, since nobody will go up there to take such a look at them. The truly interesting idea here is that the quantum indeterminacy which we encounter when we inquire into the tiniest components of our universe can read in exactly the same way, as a feature of the limited resolution of our simulated world, i.e., as the sign of the ontological incompleteness of (what we experience as) reality itself. That is to say, let us imagine a God who is creating the world for us, its human inhabitants, to dwell in – his task
“could be made easier by furnishing it only with those parts that its inhabitants need to know about. For example, the microscopic structure of the Earth’s interior could be left blank, at least until someone decides to dig down deep enough, in which case the details could be hastily filled in as required. If the most distant stars are hazy, no one is ever going to get close enough to them to notice that something is amiss.”
The idea is that God who created-”programmed” our universe was too lazy (or, rather, he underestimated our – human – intelligence): he thought that we, humans, will not succeed in probing into the structure of nature beyond the level of atoms, so he programmed the Matrix of our universe only to the level of its atomic structure – beyond it, he simply left things fuzzy, like a house whose interior is not programmed in a PC game. Is, however, the theologico-digital way the only way to read this paradox? We can read it as a sign that we already live in a simulated universe, but also as a signal of the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. In the first case, the ontological incompleteness is transposed into an epistemological one, i.e., the incompleteness is perceived as the effect of the fact that another (secret, but fully real) agency constructed our reality as a simulated universe. The truly difficult thing is to accept the second choice, the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. That is to say, what immediately arises is a massive commonsense reproach: but how can this ontological incompleteness hold for reality itself? Is not reality defined by its ontological completeness? If reality “really exists out there,” it HAS to be complete “all the way down,” otherwise we are dealing with a fiction which just “hangs in the air,” like appearances which are not appearances of a substantial Something… But the ontological implication of quantum physics seems to be that material reality is already in itself incomplete, open towards future.
--- In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, T.S.Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. Lenin did this with regard to traditional Marxism, Mao did this in his own way, and this is what has to be done today.
INTRODUCTION FOR SATURDAY DEBATE
Today, we have TWO ends of philosophy. The first one takes place in positive sciences slowly occupying the field of old metaphysical speculations. In the last decades, technological progress in experimental physics has opened up a new domain, unthinkable in the classical scientific universe, that of the “experimental metaphysics”: “questions previously thought to be a matter solely for philosophical debate have been brought into the orbit of empirical inquiry.” The properly “metaphysical” propositions tested are the ontological status of contingency, the locality-condition of causality, the status of reality independent of our observation, etc. This is why, at the very beginning of his The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking triumphantly proclaims that »philosophy is dead.” With the latest advances in quantum physics and cosmology, the so-called experimental metaphysics reaches its apogee: metaphysical questions about the origins of the universe, etc., which were till now the topic of philosophical speculations, can now be answered through experimental science and thus empirically tested… The prospect of a “wired brain” is a kind of final point of the naturalization of human thought: when our process of thinking can directly interact with a digital machine, it effectively becomes an object in reality, it is no longer “our” inner thought as opposed to external reality.
On the other hand, with today’s transcendental historicism, “naïve” questions about reality are accepted precisely as “naïve,” which means they cannot provide the ultimate cognitive frame of our knowledge. For example, notion of truth
So if one were to ask Michel Foucault a big metaphysical question, like “Do we have a free will?”, his answer would have been something like: “This question only has meaning, it can only be raised within a certain episteme, field of knowledge/power which determines under what conditions it is true or false, and all we can ultimately do is describe this episteme.” For Foucault, this episteme in what in German it is called Unhintergehbares, something behind which we cannot reach. Is there a way out of this debilitating deadlock?
