I cite

Zizek: a bit of transgression

What we should always bear in mind is that there is nothing »spontaneous« in such transgressive outbursts. A close look demonstrates that we truly enjoy smoking and drinking only in public, as part of a public “carnival,” the sacred suspension of ordinary rules. The same goes even for swearing and sex: none of them is at its most radical an activity in which we “explode” in spontaneous passion against the stifled public conventions – they are, on the contrary, both practiced “against the pleasure principle,” for the gaze of the Other. (A personal note: I like to swear only in public, never in private, where I find doing it stupid and inappropriate, indecent even.) Violating the public rules is thus not done by the private ego, but is enjoined by the same public rules which are in themselves redoubled, divided. This is what distinguishes such violations from tolerant wisdom: the stance of tolerant wisdom (like the proverbial Catholic attitude of ignoring – suggesting even – occasional infidelities if they help keeping the marriage) allows for private transgressions, for the transgressions outside the public gaze. 

How does one really become adult? By way of knowing when to violate the explicit rule one is committed to. So, with regard to marriage, one can well say that one becomes adult when one is able to commit adultery. The only proof of reason is occasional laps into “irrationality” (as Hegel knew very well). The only proof of taste is that one knows how to occasionally like things which do not meet the criteria of high taste; the one who strictly follows high taste thereby displays his lack of taste. (A person who expresses his admiration for Beethoven’s 9th symphony or other masterpieces of Western civilization immediately bears witness to his tastelessness – a true taste is displayed by praising a minor work by Beethoven as superior to his “greatest hits,” like my friend Mladen Dolar, an absolute Schubert fan who prefers Schubert’s unknown male-chorus peaces (celebrating hunters’ reunions, etc.) to his much better known songs.)

Perhaps, one should turn around the terms of Bertrand Russell’s well-known barber-paradox (does the barber who follows the rule of shaving all the people who do not shave themselves shave himself?) which led him to prohibit self-inclusion, i.e., inconsistent self-redoubling, as the only way to avoid contradiction: what if, on the contrary, the “consistent” sticking to one’s rules which is truly self-contradictory, i.e., which turns into its opposite? (If you want to follow high taste consistently, you display your tastelessness, etc.) And what if the only way to truly be reasonable or to truly display taste is to fully engage in self-redoubling, to self-reflexively violate the rule one follows (to occasionally lap into tastelessness or abandon reason)?

It is as if, in today’s permissive society, transgressive violations are permitted, but in a “privatized” form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of its public-spectacle-ritual dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our private weird practices, but they remain our private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps, one should turn around here the standard formula of fetishist disavowal: “I know very well (to obey the rules), but nonetheless… (I occasionally violate them, since this is part of the rules).” In today’s permissive society, the predominant stance is rather: “I believe (that permanent hedonist transgressions are what makes life worth living), but nonetheless… (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but just a fake coloring which re-asserts the grey social reality.”

via www.lacan.com

Dream differently

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

They should go back to sleep.

Real footage

Zizek argues that the little piece of the real that supports our fragile symbolic reality must appear to be found rather than produced. Yes, any old object can serve. But we have to think that its fascinating power comes from it rather than from its place in the structure.

Is not this part of the appeal of found footage and outsider art? We think that we have come across something that is Real, appealing because it is not part of the established system, not produced for us and our consumption.

So how does this work with You Tube? Are we finding pieces of the Real or are they produced for us? The fissure or gap here is irreducible. The answer to both questions is yes and no. The experience of the gap is what drives us.

Review of Zizek, First as Tragedy...

A review by John Gullick

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Salvoj Žižek

by John Gullick

The intellectual composting of the entire world continues with another Žižek release: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. This isn't one of his "sustained," or philosophical books as were In Defence of Lost Cases, Parallax View or the seminal Sublime Object of Ideology. Instead this is what would probably be termed a "political intervention." Žižek has never shied away from politics, be it at home in Slovenia, or in the EU and America; indeed, embarrassingly to many of the commentariat, he often manages to churn out prescient journalism and reflections about subjects which local writers can only flail at. So it was with Thatcherism, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and most recently Italian politics and the Iranian elections.

Žižek's engagement is not difficult to understand: these are interesting times, and he seems to have a mind which feeds off scandal and intrigue. It will thus come as no surprise that this latest release continues this run, taking on what has become termed the "Credit Crunch," but fusing it with various other concerns uncle Slavoj has had over the past year. For those who witnessed his showing at the SWP's Marxism 2009 conference Žižek's stance in the book will be familiar: he variously advocates a Bartleby politics, a sustained critique of the nation-State-capital triad and a "re-imagining" of communism. He warns us not to fall into the trap of impotent action which serves only reinforce the status quo, in other words, he continues his war against the liberal-Left as the ultimate legitimisers of the Right. Žižek's critique of the Left from the Left is engaged immediately with his now infamous joke about rape... For those who don't get it or don't like it, you're advised to skip page 6.

Like his other recent political "pamphlet," Violence, this latest release is a concise distillation of the various re-occurring themes in Žižek's work, but, unlike that book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is less bricolage, and may well be as close to a Žižekian manifesto as we will ever come -replete with self-references, cut-and-paste passages and even a footnote pointing us to Wikipedia. The book is broken into two sections, the first ostensibly re-asserts ideology as the pre-eminent problematic with which we are dealing, even though depression appears "economically determined". The second section picks up the theme Žižek has been debating over the last year or so in various lectures around London: communist possibilities and revolutionary potential.

Zizek on democracy (now)

That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody. You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no? Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean? You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.

Slavoj Zizek - Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?

The answer has been here all along. Zizek writes:

One is thus able to conceive of Ungeschehenmachen, the highest manifestation of negativity, as the Hegelian version of 'death drive': it is not an accidental or marginal element in the Hegelian edifice, but rather designates the crucial moment of the dialectical process, the so-called moment of the 'negation of negation', the inversion of the 'antithesis' into the 'synthesis': the 'reconciliation' proper to synthesis is not a surpassing or suspension (whether it be 'dialectical') of scission on some higher plane, but a retroactive reversal which means that there never was any scission to begin with - 'synthesis' retroactively annuls this scission. This is how the enigmatic but crucial passage from Hegel's Encyclopaedia must be understood:

The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists therefore in sublating the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished. 

One does not accomplish the end by attaining it, but by proving that one has already attained it, even when the way to its realization is hidden from view. While advancing, one was not yet there, but all of a sudden, one has been there all along - 'too soon' changes suddenly into 'too late' without detecting the exact moment of their transformation. The whole affair thus has the structure of the missed encounter: along the way, the truth, which we have not yet attained, pushes us forward like a phantom, promising that it awaits us at the end of the road; but all of a sudden we perceive that we were always already in the truth. The paradoxical surplus which slips away, which reveals itself as 'impossible' in this missed encounter of the 'opportune moment', is of course objet a: the pure semblance which pushes us toward the truth, right up to the moment when it suddenly appears behind us and that we have already arrived ahead of it, a chimerical being that does not have its 'proper time', only ever persisting in the interval between 'too soon' and 'too late'.

via www.lacan.com

Zizek/Brecht

Zizek will be speaking at the Brecht Forum:

"First as Tragedy, Then as Farce"

Wed Oct 14 @ 7pm

Cooper Union, The Great Hall, 7 East 7th St, Astor Place, New York

Sliding Scale $10-15, $15 tickets include a free copy of Zizek’s new book
Sponsors: Verso Books, The Brecht Forum

Tickets: http://brechtforum.org/zizek

For more information, call the Brecht Forum (212) 242-4201

Supporting the Brecht Forum is a good idea: The Brecht Forum is an organizing, cultural, educational, and event space for groups involved in social justice, equality, and radical culture in NYC. In addition to organizing its own events, it rents space to local, progressive, grassroots organizations and local artists on a pay-as-you-can basis.  Among the different types of events they have here are: music, visual art, and film showings by local artists; Spanish classes; speaker panels; philosophy and Marxist reading groups; Theatre of the Oppressed Workshops; book launch events; fundraisers for local activist groups.

I'll be posting about Zizek's new book soon.

LRB · Slavoj Žižek: Berlusconi in Tehran

LRB · Slavoj Žižek: Berlusconi in Tehran.

This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy. The American journalist Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an elite class acting to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, which is its inability to bring about the ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is manifestly true; the mystery is that, knowing it, we continue to play the game. We act as though we were free, not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction tell us what to do and think.

In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

New Left Review - Slavoj Zizek: How to Begin from the Beginning

New Left Review - Slavoj Zizek: How to Begin from the Beginning. This ‘red terror’ should nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs, Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. Even in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech, they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list, but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped.

For Stalinism, however, even such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors who are less than human.

This passage makes me think of the injunctions to express oneself that are necessary for communicative capitalism. Without the requirement that one express one's thoughts, desires, dreams, that one not only confess in the privacy of the confessional or analyst's couch but before others, whether on television or online, without the sense that putting into words was the essential political task, communicative capitalism could not have emerged. It could not have been a formation for or of strong silent types, for or of a repressed bourgeoisie. Rather, it depended--as is retroactively clear (the only possible path to clarity is backward)--on rap sessions, telling it like it is, speaking truth to power, expressing oneself, sharing one's feelings, not just being free to be you and me but being empowered and impelled to talk about it all the fucking time.

Why don't students talk? It's resistance, resistance to the Stalinist intolerance of silence. And, at risk of eliding Stalinism, communicative capitalism, and Nazism (I hope not an early symptom of becoming-Arendtian), I can't help but think of Schmitt's Buribunks, excerpted in Kittler:

Every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life. These diaries are handed over on a daily basis and catalogued by district. A screening is done according to both a subject and a personal index. Then, while rigidly enforcing copyright for each individual entry, all entires of an erotic, demonic, satiric, political, and son on nature are subsumed accordingly, and witers are catalogued by district. Thanks to a precise systme, the organization of these entries in a card catalogue allows for immediate identification of relevant persons and their circumstances.
...
A series of relevant practices--such as periodic and mutual photo opportunities and film presenations, an active exchange of diaries, readings from diaries, studio visits, conferences, new journals, theater productions preceded and followed by laudatios on the personality of the artists--ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and in the quintessentially Buribunkic does not become mere decorum; they prevent as well a damaging, countercultural waning of interest, which leads us to doubt whether the refined existence of the Buribunk will ever come to an end.
...
The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish therefore I am.
...
I write therefore I am; I am, therefore I write. What do I write? I write muself. Who writes me? I myself write myself. What do i write about? I write that I write myself. What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent circle of egohood? History!

Looking for volunteers. Must be willing to get hands dirty.