Zizek: Through the Glasses Darkly -- In These Times

An excerpt from an article that appeared today. The first part of the article relies on the trope of the glasses that let people see what's really going on from the John Carpenter film, They Live!. After discussing McCain and Palin, Zizek turns to the economy: Through the Glasses Darkly -- In These Times.

But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

Comments

[kurt]

In honor of the Zizek I want to share the following:

My coworker posted this 'palin'drome all over our workplace the other day (She didn't mess around. She got every floor!).

Sarah Palin
Wasilla’s all I saw.

A fine example of the subject's alienation within language!

[Joe Clement]

I think, like in his first article on the financial crisis, his critique is one-sided. Zizek will protest against McCain talking about change and "working across the aisle," and say nothing of how this rhetoric functions on the other side of the aisle, as it were. I'm not a rabid anti-Obama person, but it's commentary like this that does little or nothing to convince those who are. Of course, Zizek shouldn't have to pander to those sorts of critics, nor is he really responsible for giving a "fair and balanced" analysis, but when it comes to the ideological critique he's doing I don't know how come he avoids the Democrats.

While there are important differences, it's the same kind of one-sidedness that ZIzek has pointed out when it came to the Frankfurt school and others critically examining Fascism at the expense of Stalinism. Of course, what we have today (neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism) is not a one-for-one repetition of that history, but that the majority of Democrats are or are sympathetic to neo-liberals is as significant as all the bullshit the Republicans pander.

Spivak talks about "strategic essentialism," which is an after thought I had about your comments, Jodi, to your political theorist friend. However, then it occurred to me that what you did was more like "strategic shooting-yourself-in-the-foot," which I think we need more of. Zizek has a massive theoretical gun in his hand, and he's trying to take liberal-democratic hostages instead of (apropos The Usual Suspects) shooting them.