What can we make of Alain Badiou's "This Crisis is the Spectacle: Where is the Real?"? Well, let's see...
When we turn on our TV's to find out about the global financial crisis, what do we see? Bailouts of hundreds of millions of dollars, European countries aiding Greece with hundreds of billions of dollars, the battle cry: "Save the banks!", and stimulus packages of hundreds of billions of dollars to help us get back on track. We hear politicians, listen to economic analysts, and we read the articles accompanying our crumbling stocks. Badiou calls this the spectacle, meaning these are the symbolic representations our media has to offer us to help us understand our crisis. But what does a hundred billion dollars mean? Can we really comprehend that kind of volume? Badiou says, "I have to admit it: when I see all these figures circulating - and like almost everyone else, I have no idea what they represent (just what does 400 billion euros look like?) - I trust them. I have every confidence in the fire-fighters. If they all act together, they can do it, I know they can, I can feel it. The banks will be even bigger than before, and a few small and medium-sized banks that initially survived only because they were saved by the benevolence of states will be given to the bigger ones for next to nothing, The collapse of capitalism? You must be joking" (92).
This is the common reaction to the spectacle. But what happens when we turn our attention to the everyday people perceiving the spectacle? It is there, Badiou contends, that we find the Real. The Real is a term stemming from the tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It refers to life prior to its being carved up into a symbolic order, prior to the spectacle - the experience. It conditions the spectacle. It makes possible the media representation. It's the other side of the coin. As we watch 400 billion euros stream across the screen, it's in the comparison of that figure to the resources owned by the common family or person. For instance, the spectacle presents us with the housing market crash: thousands of people agreeing to contracts too big for them to chew, irresponsible families taking on a mortgage they couldn't afford, people defaulting on their debts, people walking away from a promise, banks and their risk flying back in their poor faces - Bail them out! Prior to the spectacle, we have a mass of people who cannot afford to live anywhere. Badiou writes, "Ultimately, all this came about because tens of millions of people are on such low incomes - or non-incomes - that they cannot afford anywhere to live. The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis. And the people who cannot afford anywhere to live are certainly not bankers. We have to go back to the lives of ordinary people" (98).
After inspecting the startling statistics displayed on progressive channels marking the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, we get back to the people's lives: it's getting harder and harder to afford a house, to conceive of retiring, to raise a family. The spectacle continues: "Reform Social Security", which means to get rid of it or seriously cut it back. A leading candidate in the presidential race describes social security as a ponzi scheme. So, the spectacle tells us the banks are more important than providing care to senior citizens. Imagine a call for 400 billion dollars to bail out social security. What a political risk - maybe political suicide. But we live in a world where it's politically safe to call for 400 billion to bail out the banks.
And then we turn again to the real: masses of people who, without social security, would be living below the poverty line. Women fair far worse than men in that category. We live in a world where social security is keeping 14 million seniors above the poverty line, and it's politically safe to call for its abolishment or its "reform", which means major cutbacks, or to call it a "bad investment".
Badiou argues that we need to think beyond the spectacle and get to the Real. Examine the lived experience of the people (the proletariat). He says, "We must, as many experiments have tried to do over the past 20 years, organize a very different kind of politics... It begins with the real, with a practical alliance with those people who are in the best position to invent it in the immediate: the new proletarians who have come from Africa and elsewhere, and the intellectuals who are the heirs to the political battles of recent decades... It will not have any organic relationship with existing parties of the electoral and institutional system that sustains them. It will invent the new discipline of those who have nothing, their political capabilities, and a new idea of what their victory might mean" (99). So, for those who, caught int he spectacle, argue that bailing out the banks was necessary, and saved the multitudes, the answer is: what sort of saving was this? The number of people living in poverty in the United States is the highest it's been in 51 years? Bankers are ok. They weren't the ones who couldn't afford a house, and they are the ones who came out of this ahead. The answer is not to react, but to invent.
Badiou, with Zizek, argues that a big hurdle to overcome is the bias that we live in a post-ideological era. The call to save the banks is Capitalist ideology in its purest form. The political safety of that call reveals the ideological grasp Capitalism has on the populace: even as the worker slides deeper and deeper into poverty, he will defend the Capitalism that offers him his opportunities. In contrast to this, "We will contrast the wicked spectacle of capitalism with the real of peoples, with the lives of people and the movement of ideas" (100). And with that, a grassroots politics will begin, far different from the current ideology, and this will be our redemption - not a bailing out of banks and certainly not a reform of social security.
Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. Trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran. New York: Verso, 2010.
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