Better late or never? Zizek/Hollywood

At the Weblog, in a post by Amish, I found links to a discussion about Zizek and the 300. I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to (although a classics major told me it was pretty true to the comic and to ancient stereotypes and that she found the movie very funny). I skimmed Steve Shaviro's remarks and plan to look at the others from Sinthome and K-punk later on. It's likely too late for me to have anything interesting to add, but well, I probably will chime in anyway because that's what I do (it really does seem like coming to a party after all the interesting people have left; the host is pouring the warm drinks out in the sink, the remaining hummus has darkened and gotten hard around the edges; the only people left are those with poor social skills and a couple of mean drunks).

Steve writes: The Pinocchio Theory » Blog Archive » Zizek/Hollywood.

I have to comment, at least, that the thing I found most repellent in either of the Zizek articles I am discussing was the following:

In today’s era of hedonist permissivity as the ruling ideology, the time is coming for the Left to (re)appropriate discipline and the spirit of sacrifice: there is nothing inherently “Fascist” about these values.

This is the sort of slippery slide, fueled by the spirit of negation, that I think needs to be rejected as much as acquiescence in the actual world system needs to be rejected. There is a real analytic acuity behind identifying what Zizek calls “hedonist permissivity as the ruling ideology”: this has to do with the way that, for today’s neoliberal capitalism, it is much more effective to turn something into a commodity than to ban it or censor it or otherwise repress it. Anything can be commodified, and by that fact alone what has thus been packaged and offered for sale is deprived of any radical efficacy, any potential for real change.

Later on, I'll say something about the various analytical points at stake. For now, I want to focus just on the point regarding discipline and sacrifice. I agree with Zizek. I think the problem on much of what thinks of itself as the left is an inability to distance itself from the pleasures of consumption and communicative capitalism. Part of the blame goes to cultural studies as it saw resistance in consumption, of commodities, entertainment, and experience. I would also point the finger at the branch of critical and feminist theory loosely associated with Marcuse and sexual liberation--as if the problems of the late 60s could be remedied by a few good orgasms. Capitalism is much more adaptable and clever than that--it doesn't need sexual repression at all.

The left can't provide strong alternatives to capitalism because it enjoys it--and because it doesn't want to lose this enjoyment or take responsibility for denying enjoyment to others.

Everything, it seems, is supposed to be fun, cost free, easy, and entertaining. College education is a consumer item. In sports everyone gets a prize just for showing up. Diet and exercise books promise quick results in just minutes a day--no inconvenience, discomfort, or sacrifice necessary. Even war is supposed to be quick and easy. We all know that these are lies. Yet, we aren't disciplined enough to say so and accept the consequences.

There won't be a left politics adequate to neoliberalism until we are willing to give up its pleasures. Or, differently put, we will continue to remain complicit in the horrifying crimes of neoliberal capitalism until we have the discipline to sacrifice our enjoyment of it.

Comments

[Ken]

Ha! Now that was funny.

[gpatrick]

I am in favor of foregrounding neoliberalism in discussions of our present-day crises. David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” should be required reading. But are the array of consumer “pleasures” available today properly (wholly) neoliberal? Maybe this is so, as the twin hammers of deregulation and privatization smash up everything into commodity form. Education (like you describe) but also nature (vacations! therapy!) and human relationships. But in the days of embedded liberalism, of Keynes and the compromise between labor and capital (weirdly mythic and bygone for today’s left) was it any different?

I do find your argument appealing, but I question whether our libidinal investment in consumption is the tie that binds Americans to the current economic reality. Market abstinence as political action, while possibly a step in the right direction, strikes me as still rooted in lifestyle and identity. (e.g.: the leftist couple who goes off the grid and raises their kids on homegrown sprouts.)

A discipline of sacrifice may be the solution. But let’s be less ambiguous. What is required – time, money, collectivization, direct action and thus in today’s world, the risk of financial suicide, jail, and being labeled terrorist – comes with too great a cost for the majority. This is precisely because of the institutionalization of neoliberal policy. Not only has the ridiculous economics of Mont Pelerin taken the piss out of, if not destroyed, most forms of social solidarity, it has made it a life risk to reinvigorate those forms.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Why isn't the pronouncement of the necessity of sacrifice a source of enjoyment, an anti-ideological (i.e. ideological) thought-commodity?

[Jodi]

Kenneth--it can be, as when the Party under Stalin demanded all sorts of sacrifices from Party members and the people. This is why Zizek refrains from introducing a cause or purpose or new Master signifier or big Other in the name of which sacrifices must be made, to avoid the problem of perverse enjoyment.