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New Issue: International Journal of Zizek Studies

International Journal of Zizek Studies Vol 4, No 1 (2010)

Žižek and Ideology - Guest Editors: Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi

Table of Contents

Articles

Žižek’s Notion of Ideology Critique in Context
Heiko Feldner, Fabio Vighi

'Thought is Grievance: On Žižek’s Parallax'
Rex William Butler

The Real Internet
Jodi Dean

Struggling with Žižek's Ideology: The Deleuzian Complaint, Or, Why is Žižek a Disguised Deleuzian in Denial?
Jan Jagodzinski

The Necessity of Belief, Or, The Trouble with Atheism
Todd McGowan

A Subject that Matters: Žižek’s Ideology Critique Today
Fabio Vighi, Heiko Feldner

Habermas avec Žižek
Ricardo Camargo

Shakespeare's Politics of Invisibility: Power and Ideology in The Tempest
Étienne Poulard

Techne and Impossibility: Re-reading Žižek’s Ideology-Critique as Geistgekritik
Daniel Hourigan

Reviews and Debates

On Practicing Theory: Some Remarks on Adrian Johnston’s Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations
Fabio Vighi

Meta-Dialectics and the Balancing Acts of Žižekianism: A Response to Fabio Vighi
Adrian Owen Johnston

Symptom or Sinthome? A critical review of "Burnout and intersubjectivity: A psychoanalytical study from a Lacanian perspective"
Duane Rousselle

Review: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. 157pp.
Douglas Reeser

New issue of MediaTropes

MediaTropes  Vol. II, No. 2 (2010)

McLuhan and the Cultural Theory of Media
    Mark Poster (pp. 1-18)

Affective Networks
    Jodi Dean (pp. 19-44)

Thin-Sliced Thoughts and Theory's Ends
    Mark Andrejevic (pp. 45-64)

Becoming Bombs:
3D Animated Satellite Imagery and the Weaponization of the Civic Eye
    Roger Stahl (pp. 65-93)

La masse se fait avant-garde :
Généalogie du "polbusting"
    Vincenzo Susca (pp. 94-108)

Here I Stand:
Mediated Bodies in Dissent
    D.R. Koukal (pp. 109-127)

Technology, Crisis, and Interaction Design:
A Conversation with Bruce Sterling, Donald Norman, and Derrick de Kerckhove
    Lorenzo Imbesi (pp. 128-135)

Entre libération et représentation réductrice :
La pornographie gaie masculine comme véhicule de stéréotypes
    Simon Corneau, Geneviève Rail et Dave Holmes (pp. 136-166)

Joseph Stiglitz: Bankers Made Reckless Bets on the Economy, Knowing Taxpayers Were Going to Pick up the Tab | | AlterNet

Joseph Stiglitz: Well, there are so many pieces that contributed to our getting here that it's hard to distill into something simple, but the bottom line is that the banks acted recklessly in their lending, in their gambling, in their management of risk. They made bad judgments about credit worthiness. In a sense, they failed their core societal function of allocating capital and managing risk. They misallocated capital and they mismanaged the risk. What I tried to do with the book is peel back the onion and ask – this is not the way capitalism supposed to work – why did things happen so badly?  And here there are a number of factors. One of them was that the bankers had the incentive to engage in short-sighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. You have to ask, "Why is that?" And the answer has to do with problems of corporate governance and a host of other problems that I try to delineate in the book.

On the other side, though, they were allowed to get away with it. And here the issue was deregulation. We stripped away the regulations that had worked so well in the quarter century before 1980. We'd known about the potential for these problems for decades and we had figured out how to stop them, but then we stripped away those regulations. Then you have to ask why we did that, and it had to do with the ideology and with financial interests. The bankers wanted to be unrestrained and they painted the political process, shaped it to make sure they could get away with it. The economists provided some arguments for why it would be a good thing.

ZC:  I want to focus on that word 'capitalism.' A lot of people who are advocates of financial reform are being described as 'populist' or 'socialist.' But it seems to me that one of the core thrusts of your book is that the system we had in place in the mid-'70s was a good system, and nobody was screaming about our socialist banking system at that time. What do you make of the current debate over the banks?

JS:  What we have now is not real capitalism. I give it the name "ersatz capitalism" because what we're doing is socializing losses and privatizing gains. That's worse than real capitalism, of course, because it means that there are distorted incentives. So the banks can write these credit default swaps and crazy derivatives knowing that if things go bad, the taxpayer is going to pick up the tab. So the first point I want to make is that today's system is not real capitalism. It's gambling at the expense of the taxpayers. 

The other point that I would make is about the use of the word "populism," which is used in a number of different ways. One meaning of populism is a government that responds to the concerns of the people. Of course, that is what democracy is supposed to be about, so reformers shouldn't worry about being labeled populist in that sense. But the other use of the word is much more negative in tone, and it describes a situation where political leaders promise things that are beyond the laws of economics. In this crisis, I actually think of these bankers as being the populist figures in that sense. It was the bankers who tried to pretend that they could break the laws of economics. The things they were telling poor people -- borrow all this money, don't worry about your ability to replay, house prices are going to go up, you're going to be a wealthy person -- and by the way, you can share some of that wealth that you're going to get by giving us big fees -- well, that was unreality. There's no such thing as a free lunch and the bankers were promising a free lunch both for themselves and for everybody else. So the irony in all of this is that the people who ought to be most accused of that kind of populism, that out-of-touchness with reality, are the bankers themselves.

via www.alternet.org

To lead is to take: but from whom?

excerpt from: Banks demand austerity measures against “profligate” countries

The journalistic scoundrels who are promoting the crusade against profligacy ignore the well-known fact that the living standards of working people in all of the industrialized countries have been declining for decades, while the wealth of the financial elite has grown almost exponentially.

A notable example of this type of punditry is provided by Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, in an op-ed piece published Sunday. Friedman, always a bellwether of the sentiments of the smug, well-heeled spokesmen for American liberalism, writes: “Yes, sir, we’ve just had our 70 fat years in America… And in these past 70 years, leadership… has largely been about giving things away…”

He continues: “But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, ‘where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,’ said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel.”

Friedman goes on to compare the people of America with locusts who have eaten “the prosperity that was bequeathed us.”

He gives the following advice to President Obama (whose campaign for fiscal austerity shows that he hardly needs it): “The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past—past profligacy—all at the same time. We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever, when public trust in government is lower than ever.”

Two days after Friedman’s piece appeared, the New York State comptroller issued a report that underscores who the real profligates are. The report estimates that Wall Street bonuses rose 17 percent in 2009 to $20.3 billion. It reports further that New York Stock Exchange broker-dealer firms took in a record $49.9 billion in the first three quarters of 2009 and are on track to net more than $55 billion in profits for the entire year—nearly three times greater than the previous all-time record.

Total average compensation at the largest Wall Street banks, such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, increased 31 percent for the year, while overall average compensation rose 27 percent to more than $340,000.

These figures document the fact that the American financial elite, through the good offices of the Obama administration, has been exploiting the crisis of its own making to carry through its long-standing agenda of restructuring class relations by drastically and permanently lowering the living standards of the working class.

This is an acceleration of a decades-long ruling class offensive. By means of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, deregulation of business, cuts in social programs, the virtual dismantling of the country’s manufacturing base and the use of state repression abetted by the trade union bureaucracy’s suppression of working class resistance, the American ruling elite has already immensely increased its share of the national wealth.

To cite some facts:

The Economic Policy Institute reports that in the 30 years before 2008, nearly 35 percent of total income growth in the US went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income earners. The bottom 90 percent shared only 15.9 percent of income growth in the same period.

The growth of income inequality was accelerating even before the financial crisis hit in 2008. According to one study, two-thirds of income increases between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1 percent of society, and income for the top 1 percent grew 10 times faster than that of the bottom 90 percent. The top 1 percent of earners got a higher share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928.

Recent figures released by the Internal Revenue Service show that the average income of the top-earning 400 US families grew from $16 million to $87 million between 1992 and 2007—a five-fold increase. During this period, the percentage of the total national income that went to the top 400 families tripled, from 0.52 percent in 1992 to 1.59 percent in 2007.

Meanwhile, an average American’s net worth fell by 13 percent in the first decade of this century.

The result is that the US has the highest level of income inequality of all the highly industrialized countries. It is ranked as more unequal than Sri Lanka and on a par with Ghana and Turkmenistan.

This is what capitalism had produced for the American people before the eruption of the financial crisis. Since the crash of 2008, millions more have been plunged into unemployment, poverty, homelessness and hunger. Today, 40 million Americans live in poverty, while six million (2 percent of the population) have no income, subsisting on food stamps alone.

via www.wsws.org

Two million Greek workers strike against austerity measures

Some two million Greek workers participated in a general strike on Wednesday. The mass one-day action was called in response to austerity measures being imposed by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) government of Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Elected last October on the basis of populist appeals to working class anger over the policies of the previous conservative government, Papandreou quickly bowed to demands from the European Union and the international banks to impose drastic cuts in jobs, wages and social programs in order to stave off a default of government debt by slashing Greece’s soaring budget deficit.

The strike reflected widespread popular opposition to the austerity program, which is being roundly criticized by the European Commission and financial interests as insufficiently harsh. The mass action brought the country to a virtual standstill.

All flights to and from Greece—with the exception of emergency flights—were cancelled, as air traffic controllers joined the action, forcing the closure of the nation’s main airport, Athens International. Public transportation was severely disrupted, with the Athens metro and bus services running only a skeleton service to allow strikers to get to demonstrations in the city centre. Trains and ferry services ground to a halt.

Public schools, tax offices, courtrooms and other government buildings were closed nationwide, as were public hospitals and other state-run facilities. All the main archaeological and tourist sites were forced to close, including the Acropolis in Athens.

Media workers also struck. Journalists, members of the national journalists’ union, held a 24-hour strike and as a result no newspapers will be published on Thursday. Due to industrial action by media workers, there were no reports of the strike on national television.

The strike takes place within the context of growing working class resistance across Europe to austerity measures now being imposed by governments across the continent—irrespective of whether they are nominally social democratic or conservative.

via www.wsws.org

Record demand for heating assistance in US

Over 8.8 million households will have received heating assistance by winter’s end, up from 7.7 million last year and 5.7 million in 2008, according to a new report from the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association (NEADA). About 4.3 million households had utilities disconnected in 2009, up from 4.1 million the previous year.

In spite of mounting unemployment, Congress this year approved the same amount of money as it did last year for heating assistance, allocating $5.1 billion for the states to administer LIHEAP—a figure substantially less than several Wall Street banks paid their executives in 2009.

The difficulties families face in procuring heat and other utilities lead to tragic deaths each year. “This is more than an energy issue and needs to be acknowledged for what it is: a serious public health matter,” said Jerry McKim, LIHEAP director for Iowa.

“In an effort to better afford their utility bills, many elderly households cut back on prescribed medicine and/or set their thermostats too low risking their already insecure health and families with young children sacrifice their children’s nutritional needs,” McKim explained. “Disconnected households use unsafe methods of heating that increase the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, and those who live by candlelight increase the likelihood of a house fire tragedy.”

LIHEAP grants are about $500 on average, but vary by state, and mostly go to the elderly and families with young children. Grants are typically awarded to households that subsist below the official poverty level—about $22,000 for a family of four—but some states provide assistance to households at 150 percent of the official poverty threshold.

As demand has soared, a few states have already cut back on the amount of money they give to households in need. Now state energy directors warn that they may soon cut off further applications.

At least 35 states have seen an increase in home heating cases of more than 10 percent, and in ten states the increase has been over 25 percent. The states with the largest increases are scattered across the country, indicating the breadth of the social crisis: Mississippi (68 percent), Washington (42 percent), Michigan (38 percent), Nebraska (34 percent), New Jersey (31 percent), West Virginia (28 percent), Colorado (26 percent), and Kansas (25 percent), New Hampshire (25 percent), and Wisconsin (25 percent).

New York, which saw a 10 percent increase in applications, by itself accounts for 15 percent of all home heating assistance cases in the US. It is followed by Michigan, a cold-weather state with the highest jobless rate in the country, with about 10 percent of all cases.

Demand is likely to increase next year again. Because a number of states prohibit utilities to suspend service in the winter, many households forgo paying bills. A sharp increase in shut-offs is therefore anticipated for the spring. In order to get their utilities back before next winter, these households will be required to pay off their backlog in bills.

The sharp increase in LIHEAP applications this year came in spite of a modest decline in energy prices.

Behind the record numbers of those seeking home heating assistance is the unemployment crisis. Mark Wolfe, director of NEADA, told the New York Times the increase is at least partly attributable to steady growth in long-term joblessness.

Chronic mass unemployment differentiates the current economic crisis from every other downturn since the Great Depression. More workers have been without a job for six months or longer than at any time since record-keeping began in 1948—6.3 million in all. The average duration of unemployment also surpassed 6 months late last year, another record.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the US economy added private sector jobs at a rate of 3.5 percent per year, according to an analysis by the Economic Cycle Research Institute. In the 1980s and 1990s, annual private sector expansion was 2.4 percent. But since 2000, it has declined .9 percent annually.

“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” said study author Lakshman Achuthan. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”

To have kept pace with population growth, the economy would have had to generate between 12 and 15 million jobs since 2000. Instead the economy has shed 8.7 million jobs since December 2007, and there are officially 15 million jobless Americans.

There is no expectation that joblessness will subside significantly in the near future. Janet Yellen, head of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, said in a Monday speech she expects “unemployment to remain painfully high for years.” Even if the current crisis follows the patterns of recovery charted by recent recessions, unemployment will be about 8 percent in 2014, according to Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute.

via www.wsws.org

Laid Off? Join 31 million unemployed Americans - UCubed — Home

Useful. Unique. Unified.

You lost your job. You're not alone. 31 million Americans face the same challenges. You want your job back. You want your life back. But you can't do it alone. Neither can anyone else. You all need each other. That's what UCubed is here to do: Help you and 31 million other Americans organize, work together and get back to work. Let UCubed help you connect. Form a cube, and multipy your political and economic power by 6. Then by 36. Eventually, by 31 million. Take Control.

via www.unionofunemployed.com

article at alternet:

Joining a Cube is as simple as it is important. Six people who live in the same zip code address can form a Ucube. Nine such UCubes make a neighborhood. Three neighborhood UCubes form a power block that cntains 162 activists. Politicians cannot easily ignore a multitude of power blocks, nor can merchants avoid them.

The union is built from the ground up. Cube activists will select their own leadership in each cube, neighborhood, block and higher group as well.

Jobless Union's Encouraging Progress in One Month

The UR Union of Unemployed (or UCubed) already has members in over 300 zip code addresses and 43 states, reports Rick Sloan, acting executive director of the union. Seventy-five cubes are up and running.

infinite thØught: badiou op ed: the courage of the present

So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics want to scrap the word ‘communism’ under the pretext that an experience with state communism, which lasted seventy years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a question of overthrowing the domination of the rich and the inheritance of power, which have lasted millennia, their objections rest on seventy years of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth be told, the communist idea has only traversed an infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification, of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can be summed up in three axioms.

First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimistic idea, which once again dominates our time, is that human nature is destined to inequality; that it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to grasp this and accept it. To this view, the communist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-seated equality immanent to human nature – but by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, in every collective action, that which is in keeping with the communist hypothesis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to an animal vision of humanity.

Then we have the conviction that the existence of a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists, of the withering-away of the state. There have existed societies without the state, and it is rational to postulate that there may be others in the future. But above all, it is possible to organize popular political action without subordinating it to the idea of power, representation within the state, elections, etc. The liberating constraint of organized action can be exercised outside the state. There are many examples of this, including recent ones: the unexpected power of the movement of December 1995 delayed by several years anti-popular measures on pensions. The militant action of undocumented workers did not stop a host of despicable laws, but it has made it possible for these workers to be recognized as a part of our collective and political life.

A final axiom: the organization of work does not imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and possible to aim for the essential polymorphousness of human labour. This is the material basis of the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies. These three principles do not constitute a programme; they are maxims of orientation, which anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he or she says and does, personally or collectively, in its relation to the communist hypothesis.

via www.cinestatic.com

Nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers underemployed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce lacked adequate employment in January and struggled to make ends meet with reduced resources and bleak job prospects, according to a Gallup poll released on Tuesday.

In findings that appear to paint a darker employment picture than official U.S. data, Gallup estimated that about 30 million Americans are underemployed, meaning either jobless or able to find only part-time work.

Underemployed people spent 36 percent less on household purchases than their fully employed neighbors in January, while six out of 10 were not hopeful about their chances of finding adequate work in the coming month, the poll said.

Unemployed workforce: diminution of taxable income, diminution of social security contributions, diminution of sales taxes; expansion of demand on food stamps, school lunch programs, medicaid, other available social services.

Will there be further expansions in cooperative food purchasing and preparation? Local resource and knowledge sharing? Reclamations of abandoned buildings?

Do our suburbs and exurbs hinder these opportunities to benefit from cooperation? Do they encourage screen-based rather than face to face interactions? Will people abandon the suburbs for better modes of urban life (there was an interesting story in the NYT on Sunday about a couple that left retirement in Florida to return to Detroit where they became active in initiatives around resurgence).

And when and how do frustration and anger organize into opposition, opposition that cannot be displaced or ignored, opposition that changes the very contours of the possible? 

via news.yahoo.com

Badiou and depression

Another affect Badiou addresses is depression. I read him in here in terms of themes of left melancholia that others (I'm thinking of Wendy Brown) have powerfully discussed. In the text, Badiou is concerned with those depressed by Sarkozy's electoral victory. The obvious US parallel is Bush. But, at this point, it could also be with Obama (although this depression, or the affect involved here, is not quite the same, it has more to do with the encounter with the truth of the person elected, with the end of the fantasy--exposed on the Daily Show--that black men are magic).

The depression regarding the election of Sarkozy/Bush is the negativity of the fear of the other fear, the derivative fear. How might this general affective negativity be analyzed?

First, in terms of a disorientation (Badiou quotes Sartre: 'the left is a stinking overturned corpse'). This disorientation is linked to the political upheaval associated with the collapse of the USSR. Badiou writes:

From this point of view, moreover, it is notable that what created the most serious crisis for the Left, in the face of the victorious pretensions of unleashed capialism, was in no way Stalin. In Stalin's time, we have to admit, the political organizations of the workers and popular classes behaved infinitely better, and capitalism was much less arrogant.

The problem for the left, its disorientation, came with the decay and fall of USSR.

Second, in terms of nostalgia. This stems from the disorientation. In order to combat it, leftists, in particular, are nostalgic for a time when they had their bearings. Their nostalgia thus takes the form of a nostalgia for the party, particularly a unified party--hence the appeal of contemporary politicians who assert unity (Obama).

Third, impotence. Badiou's insight here is not that impotence is new--people have asked, 'what do we do now?' for years. What's important is the way that this impotence is 'acknowledged as an intrinsic dimension of electoral democracy.' Badiou writes:

Everyone can see that electoral democracy is not a space of real choice, but something that registers, like a passive seismograph, propensities that are quite different from an enlightened intention, and have nothing in common with the representaiton that a real thought can have of the objective that the will pursues.

We know that a real choice isn't offered because emphasis is always on the fact of choosing and not the outcome. Everyone praises the fact that people voted, that they showed up to vote. That they showed up is itself the triumph of democracy, no matter what sort of outcome--which means that democracy is indifferent to content. It's simply a matter of form.

'By their stupid number they brought about the triumph of democracy.' Which means that referenda that take rights away from same sex couples are triumphs of democracy? Perhaps an underlying meaning: we are relieved that people voted instead of delegitimizing the system, exposing its fundamental corruption. We are relieved that they did not riot in the streets, loot the houses of the rich, break the windows and take what we know is rightfully theirs. Badiou:

To praise numbers because people came out to vote, independently of the result, and to respect this majority decision in a proclaimed indifference to its content, is another symptom of the general depression.

Depression: disorientation, nostalgia, impotence.

What is the cure? 'Raise impotence to impossibility.'

What does this mean? Find, construct, and nhold on to a real point, a point that can't be described or reduced part of the situation, but rather exceptional to it. We can call that point communism, a generic term for the move beyond capitalism, private property, financial circulation, etc. Such a point would be in a kind of dialectical relation to our depression, a way of negating it, persisting as its negation. The point punctures a hole in the situation of what we take to be reality. It says no to the service of wealth and yes to the possibility that there is something beyond it.