First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – Slavoj Zizek's newest pithy little book – offers a funny and credible take on the social/political meanings of the 21st century (so far). Here are a few excerpts from his introduction, The Lessons of the First Decade:
We should note the similarity of President Bush's language in his addresses to the American people after 9/11 and after the financial collapse: they sounded very much like two versions of the same speech. Both times Bush evoked the threat to the American way of life and the need to take fast and decisive action to cope with the danger. Both times he called for the partial suspension of American values (guarantees of individual freedom, market capitalism) in order to save these very same values. From whence comes this similarity?
Marx began his Eighteenth Brumaire with a correction of Hegel's idea that history necessarily repeats itself: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
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Twelve years prior to 9/11, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. This event seemed to announce the beginning of the "happy '90s," Francis Fukuyamna's utopia of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won out, that the advent of a global liberal community was hovering just around the corner, and that the obstacles to this Hollywood-style ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance whose leaders had not yet grasped that their time was up). September 11, in contrast, symbolized the end of the Clintonite period, and heralded an era in which new walls were seen emerging everywhere: between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, along the U.S.-Mexico border, but also within nation-states themselves.
In an article for Newsweek, Emily Flynn Vencat and Ginanne Brownell report how today,
the members-only phenomenon is exploding into a whole way of life, encompassing everything from private banking conditions to invitation-only health clinics ... those with money are increasingly locking their entire lives behind closed doors. Rather than attend media-heavy events, they arrange private concerts, fashion shows and art exhibitions in their own homes. They shop after-hours, and have their neighbors (and potential friends) vetted for class and cash.
A new global class is thus emerging "with, say, an Indian passport, a castle in Scotland, a pied-à-terre in Manhattan and a private Caribbean island" – the paradox is that the members of this global class "dine privately, shop privately, view art privately, everything is private, private, private." They are thus creating a life-world of their own to solve their anguishing hermeneutic problem; as Todd Millay puts it: "wealthy families can't just invite people over and expect them to understand what it's like to have $300 million." So what are their contacts with the world at large? They come in two forms: business and humanitarianism (protecting the environment, fighting against diseases, supporting the arts, etc.). These global citizens live their lives mostly in pristine nature – whether trekking in Patagonia or swimming in the translucent waters of their private islands. One cannot help but note that one feature basic to the attitude of these gated superrich is fear: fear of external social life itself. The highest priorities of the "ultrahigh-net-worth individuals" are thus how to minimize security risks – diseases, exposure to threats of violent crime, and so forth.
In contemporary China, the new rich have built secluded communities modeled upon idealized "typical" Western towns; there is, for example, near Shanghai a "real" replica of a small English town, including a main street with pubs, an Anglican church, a Sainsbury supermarket, etc. – the whole area is isolated from its surroundings by an invisible, but no less real, cupola. There is no longer a hierarchy of social groups within the same nation – residents in this town live in a universe for which, within its ideological imaginary, the "lower class" surrounding world simply does not exist. Are not these "global citizens" living in secluded areas the true counter-pole to those living in slums and other "white spots" of the public sphere? They are, indeed, two sides of the same coin, the two extremes of the new class division. The city that best embodies that division is São Paulo in Lula's Brazil, which boasts 250 heliports in its central downtown area. To insulate themselves from the dangers of mingling with ordinary people, the rich of São Paulo prefer to use helicopters, so that, looking around the skyline of the city, one really does feel as if one is in a futuristic megalopolis of the kind pictured in films such as Blade Runner or The Fifth Element, with ordinary people swarming through the dangerous streets down below, whilst the rich float around on a higher sphere, up in the air.
It thus seems that Fukuyama's utopia of the 1990s had to die twice, since the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did not affect the economic utopia of global market capitalism; if the 2008 financial meltdown has a historical meaning then, it is as a sign of the end of the economic face of Fukuyama's dream. Which brings us back to Marx's paraphrase of Hegel: one should recall that, in his introduction to a new edition of Eighteenth Brumaire in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse added yet another turn of the screw: sometimes, the repetition in the guise of farce can be more terrifying than the original tragedy.