Zizek at Powell's in Oregon

part 1 of 10, the rest of this is available adjacent to the clip that's here.

Impressions/Feedback:

minute 6: we live in a post-ideological era - no. Ideology matters more than ever. This would be like being in a relationship and someone says "now that we love each other, we don't have to discuss our feelings any more."
min. 8: Culture Wars emphasize tolerance, and we have to move beyond a discussion of tolerance. Agreed. Wouldn't it be great if all we had to debate was whether you could wear a pro-abortion pin to work? But we can't, and that's why ideology matters.
Min 10: Catastrophe is natural in nature - no it isn't, not even from our (human)point of view. The type of catastrophe one is subjected to depends on where one is living. Ecological crisis on a global scale is real.
min 15: We are a part of nature and therefore can't step back and critique our own behavior within it. First part yes. But weren't native American cultures critical of our treatment of nature from the beginning? This bit about legitimizing fetishes is disturbing. Can't a corporate interest say that their shareholders have a fetish for profit and so thereby legitimize what they do? "Fetish" is just an excuse.
min 19: but Hegel is wrong.
min 22: Ideology =Brutality? No, brutality does not need ideology to operate, only opportunity. Ideology can be used later as an excuse to hide the true mechanism of power in operation, which I think was a point Foucault made somewhere.? Or was it Chomsky? Actually they both agreed on that did they not?
min 25: That's not the message of the film as I see it. See below
min 30: Does the chicken know? This is interesting. Kind of reminds me of Ginsberg's later poem: "Birdbrain" *birdbrain rules the world!* Ginsberg wrote.
min 38: I wish he would talk more of this, the Yugoslav situation. But I wonder with his preoccupation with fetishes if he is trying to tell Western listeners that Yugoslavia was made a fetish of the West after communism's collapse? As in there was some powerful interest that agreed to let the country destroy itself while it/we/US stood by and watched with a reluctant but guilty pleasure. Is that what he thinks?
min 47: I'm a leftist fascist, privately. Gee are you sure? You kind of just told everyone. Does ideology matter now then?
min 56: back to porno. Why is he requiring civility and manners out of something that never delivered it in the first place? Moving along..
min 1:01: Nothing is forbidden: Karadzic. I'm glad he mentions this because that's a good motto for the power-hungry. Now I don't see a necessary connection between socialism and the rise of nationalism as Metternich suggested, instead I see a connection between the collapse of the social contract and the rise of nihilistic ideas, aggressive nationalism among them. But when the punk rockers of the UK said "nothing is forbidden" in 1978, full-scale war didn't break out because the UK does not define the nation-hood through ethnicity, but through belief in the abstract values of what it is to be British, and there are many of those values. Oh and the social contract held together, -ideas such as, if you got beef, form a band instead of smashing your neighbor's face- which the Balkan region of the world did/does not endorse to a similar extent. In that part of the world nationality was/is defined by ethnicity and or religion more so than the artificial, put-upon distinction of "being Yugoslav." This has been mentioned many times by journalists just doing their job and I don't know how Z. managed to miss it. Actually, maybe it can be imagined, because he has a personal stake in what he's discussing. But his efforts to use that personal stake as persuasive leverage undermine his overall arguments that appear elsewhere about transcending personal stake for the sake of a collective benefit.

min 1:06: They Live. Well the glasses to be put on are the ideology. Or you can choose to not put on glasses/take the blue pill etc. and that is an ideology also.
min 1:15: Torture. Yes it's disturbing that this even has to be discussed. Here is where Agamben matters.
min 1:42: The enemy! Don't forget who the enemy is! Wow that's real constructive.

Am I taking this guy too seriously? I think what's needed is an american continental philosophy. Why let all these Europeans continue to narrate our psychic existence? Its like he wants to float an abstraction that allows us to "be American" while at the same time declare that America is guilty of aggression and militarism, but yknow it's kind of a joke because we're fetishy, and the Zeez is fetishy with us. So maybe he wants to make fetish into an addendum to our own social contract. This way he won't scream at the West like much of Yugoslavia did when the country fell apart and NATO stood by for too long while atrocities occurred. Does the West have an excuse? Perhaps we're just a culture of sexually experimenting teenage girls and the Zeez instead of barking at that in a Poundian manner wants to supplement it philosophically.

My admiration for Zizek has come to an end.

Zizek pt III

Something I've been troubled about regarding the philosophy of Zizek - how can we be 'imminent' and yet socialist at the same time? In his answer to Levinas, Zizek invokes Spinoza and writes that our presence is not at the expense of the world, but a full acceptance of being part of the world, 'my assertion of the wider reality within which I can only thrive.'

But if we fully assert ourselves then how can we be socialist, when in socialism we agree to cap our efforts for a common good?

I imagine that Spinoza (1632-1677) matures as a writer immediately after the Thirty Years War concludes (1648) and this must be a time when people, recoiling from the war, are hushing up about religious dialogue and concluding that their existence is at the expense of others, hence must be curtailed.

The Zeez

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3751/the_ambiguous_legacy_of_68/

The Zeez, a contemporary philosopher I admire, always gives you something to chew on, allow me:

In 1968 Paris, one of the best-known graffiti messages on the city’s walls was “Structures do not walk on the streets!” In other words, the massive student and workers demonstrations of ‘68 could not be explained in the terms of structuralism, as determined by the structural changes in society, as in Saussurean structuralism. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s response was that this, precisely, is what happened in ‘68: structures did descend onto the streets. The visible explosive events on the streets were, ultimately, the result of a structural imbalance.

There are good reasons for Lacan’s skeptical view. As French scholars Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello noted in 1999’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, from the ’70s onward, a new form of capitalism emerged.

Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process — which, named after auto maker Henry Ford, enforced a hierarchical and centralized chain of command — and developed a network-based form of organization that accounted for employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. As a result, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in teams or by projects, intent on customer satisfaction and public welfare, or worrying about ecology.

In this way, capitalism usurped the left’s rhetoric of worker self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative, hierarchic and administrative.

**mm not exactly..what is meant by a network? Is Zizek reading notes of the Rand corporation in the hopes that he'll re-appropriate the language back from the power structure?**

The anti-capitalist protests of the ’60s supplemented the traditional critique of socioeconomic exploitation with a new cultural critique: alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption, inauthenticity of a mass society in which we “wear masks” and suffer sexual and other oppressions.

The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ‘68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism and “really existing” socialism. This new libertarian spirit is epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

What survived of the sexual liberation of the ’60s was the tolerant hedonism readily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. Today, sexual enjoyment is not only permitted, it is ordained — individuals feel guilty if they are not able to enjoy it. The drive to radical forms of enjoyment (through sexual experiments and drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when “the spirit of ‘68” had exhausted its political potential.

At this critical point in the mid-’70s, we witnessed a direct, brutal push-toward-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: first, the search for extreme forms of sexual enjoyment; second, the turn toward the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism); and, finally, the rise of leftist political terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.).

**yes I agree with this, though I will declare it doesn't do any good to read it, you have to experience it organically for yourself or you don't get it, but market forces are constructed today so that you will nearly never experience the need to go there, and you'll suffer if you do, last paragraph especially**

Leftist political terror operated under the belief that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative. Only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence could awaken them.

What these three options share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement, and we feel the consequences of this withdrawal from engagement today.

Autumn 2005’s suburb riots in France saw thousands of cars burning and a major outburst of public violence. But what struck the eye was the absence of any positive utopian vision among protesters. If May ‘68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolt was an outburst with no pretense to vision.

Here’s proof of the common aphorism that we live in a post-ideological era: The protesters in the Paris suburbs made no particular demands. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, non-articulated resentment.

The fact that there was no program in the burning of Paris suburbs tells us that we inhabit a universe in which, though it celebrates itself as a society of choice, the only option available to the enforced democratic consensus is the explosion of (self-)destructive violence.

**the illusion is that we live in a post-ideological era, and it was brought on by the radical Muslim attacks on Western targets, people, especially leftists and liberals, believe that belief is bad, therefore they cant stand up for anything or form any kind of cohesive opposition to the war machine. I know I wrote this two years ago, but the only way the left can win is when the right screws up so badly, it becomes apparent to even them (Bush)**

Recall here Lacan’s challenge to the protesting students in ‘68: “As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”

And we did get one — in the guise of the post-modern “permissive” master whose domination is all the stronger for being less visible.

**you see, Lacan's quote is used to justify the myth of post-ideologicalism, as in why advocate change cuz you're just gonna get hammered, so people who hear and believe that advocate behavior that's just as conservative as Fukuyama**

While many undoubtedly positive changes accompanied this passage — such as new freedoms and access to positions of power for women — one should nonetheless raise hard questions: Was this passage from one “spirit of capitalism” to another really all that happened in ‘68? Was all the drunken enthusiasm of freedom just a means to replacing one form of domination with another?

Things are not so simple. While ‘68 was gloriously appropriated by the dominant culture as an explosion of sexual freedom and anti-hierarchic creativity, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy said in his 2007 presidential campaign that his great task is to make France finally get over ‘68.

**yeah Gen-Xrs sometimes resent the older generation, because now they're retiring and their health care will cost more than ever. Add to that an influx of immigrants in many western countries and its like the people in their most productive years are in a bottleneck. Who needs ideology, they think, when you have to bust so much ass just to stay afloat and plan to retire? Which in my mind is a copout.**

So, what we have is “their” and “our” May ‘68. In today’s ideological memory, “our” basic idea of the May demonstrations — the link between students’ protests and workers’ strikes — is forgotten.

If we look at our predicament with the eyes of ‘68, we should remember that, at its core, ‘68 was a rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, a “NO” to the totality of it.

It is easy to make fun of political economist Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the “end of history,” of his claim that, in liberal capitalism, we found the best possible social system. But today, the majority is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula for the best of all possible worlds, all that is left to do is render it more just, tolerant, etc.

**quit quoting Lacan, and that would help. Because Lacanian approaches give us the illusion that change is a matter of psychological self-analysis, and not having anything to do with the exterior world or objects and structures within it. Better to have a master than burrow in a cybernetic fantasy forever - is the master too cruel? This is America, you can get a new one**

When Marco Cicala, an Italian journalist, recently used the word “capitalism” in an article for the Italian daily La Repubblica, his editor asked him if the use of this term was necessary and could he not replace it with a synonym like “economy”?

What better proof of capitalism’s triumph in the last three decades than the disappearance of the very term “capitalism”? So, again, the only true question today is: Do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain contradictions strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?

There are (at least) four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property rights for so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, in the form of new walls and slums.

**ok sure, among those the least important one is intellectual property**

The first three antagonisms concern the domains of what political theorists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call “commons” — the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act that should be resisted with violent means, if necessary (violence against private property, that is).

The commons of external nature are threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity) are threatened by technological interference; and the commons of culture — the socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. — are privatized for profit. (If Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software texture of our basic network of communication.)

**If Bill Gates makes you uncomfortable, you can always buy a mac or use linux. I've been a mac owner for 10 years, my godfather uses linux. we're never switching back**

We are gradually becoming aware of the destructive potential, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, that could be unleashed if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run.

Economist Nicholas Stern rightly characterized the climate crisis as “the greatest market failure in human history.”

There is an increasing awareness that we need global environmental citizenship, a political space to address climate change as a matter of common concern of all humanity.

One should give weight to the terms “global citizenship” and “common concern.” Doesn’t this desire to establish a global political organization and engagement that will neutralize and channel market forces mean that we are in need of a properly communist perspective? The need to protect the “commons” justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism: It enables us to see the ongoing “enclosure” of our commons as a process of proletarization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance.

**ok, well, what about the dictatorship? always kind of a speed bump there on the road to the happy commons**

It is, however, only the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded that properly justifies the term Communism. In slums around the world, we are witnessing the fast growth of a population outside state control, living in conditions outside the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self-organization. Although marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants make up this population, they are not simply a redundant surplus: They are incorporated into the global economy, many working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) These new slum dwellers are not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.

Whoever lives in the favelas — or shanty towns — of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or in Shanghai, China, is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues — or outskirts — of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago.

If the principal task of the 19th century’s emancipatory politics was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by politicizing the working class, and if the task of the 20th century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the 21st century is to politicize — organize and discipline — the “destructured masses” of slum-dwellers.

If we ignore this problem of the Excluded, all other antagonisms lose their subversive edge.

**agreed, but communism requires some intellectual rigor, how can they get there? The destructured masses default to a kind of rump Hegelianism, or the religion becomes a chief informant to the politics, like in some places in the Muslim world - Guns n Religion!**

Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development. Intellectual property turns into a complex legal challenge. Biogenetics becomes an ethical issue. Corporations — like Whole Foods and Starbucks — enjoy favor among liberals even though they engage in anti-union activities; they just sell products with a progressive spin.

**yes unions matter, but how is America going to model their importance to the rest of the world, when anyone who expects one is pegged as a whiner? "call the wah-mbulance" they say**

You buy coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value.

You drive a hybrid vehicle.

You buy from companies that provide good benefits for their customers (according to corporation’s standards).

In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases, and NewCorp’s Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

In contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are thus ALL in danger of losing ALL. The risk is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subjects deprived of substantial content, dispossessed of symbolic substance, our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

These triple threats to our being make all of us potential proletarians. And the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.

The true legacy of ‘68 is best encapsulated in the formula Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible! (Let’s be realists, demand the impossible.)

**I can't think of a better slogan to provoke the right-wing backlash of 'don't tax the end user'**

Today’s utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.