Zizek On Egypt

Via:

What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty, and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. ...

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent."

Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.

Wilde Zizek

From Oscar Wilde's essay, "The soul of man under Socialism:"

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life - educated men who live in the East End - coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Marxism 2009: Harvey and Zizek

From July's Marxism 2009 festival:

Summer School

I'm finishing up my first ever semester of summer school teaching and I've been pleased with how things have gone. It has not been as grueling as I feared for either the students or myself.

One of the surprise hits of the semester has been using Zizek's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema in class. The movie is very long - almost 3 hours - but is split up into three parts each of which provides a nice framework for class discussion. Talking about movies seems to open up discussion much more quickly than simply reading Lacan's "Mirror Stage."

The only downside is that it means I have to inflict on myself almost every disturbing scene from every David Lynch film ever made. That's a lot of disturbing scenes.

Unknown Zizek

Here is a video of Zizek speaking on ideology to Google workers. I hadn't seen this one. It repeats much of the material from other talks Zizek gave last year on the heels of his Violence book. But I find the setting of this one at Google's New York offices strangely compelling.

Zizek on Politeness

... which is a little like listening to Miss Manners on waterboarding. Zizek was recorded at Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon on September 9, 2008.



"The Giant of Ljubljana" speaks on Sarah Palin, nature, ideology, Marx, psychoanalysis, terrorism, the RNC, Hegel, The Dark Knight, Israel, golf, Kung-Fu Panda, Niels Bohr, chicken, Stalin, Lacan, underwear, Casablanca, Harvard, breasts, Gore Vidal, pornography, fundamentalism, John Carpenter's They Live, charity, organic food, global warming, torture, Karl Rove, more chicken, love, Darth Vader, etc.

Via.

This Thing That We Do

I've been tagged by Philosophers' Playground with the teaching meme. There have already been so many varied responses to this question of why we teach the things that we do, that I won't begin to be able to respond to all the different issues raised. So I will simply pluck at one or two of the strands of this far-flung discussion that resonate with my most recent teaching. This past week I have been teaching Marx and Zizek. Why?

I'm tempted to simply answer: "Because that's what I've been hired to do." The job aspect of teaching in the academy sometimes tends to disappear behind the presumed pleasures of teaching. After all, any job that pays this poorly must be a labor of love, and variations on "I love teaching" have been one of the most frequently recurring themes in response to this meme. Exceptions to this can be found in posts from Professor Zero and The Little Professor (along with a response at HTUW) who both express their ambivalence about this love of teaching. But even those who profess such a love will, I think, admit that on at least some days love is the last thing they feel in the classroom. This would be the Marxist answer in me. I teach because that's the place within the current social division of labor where I can best sell my labor-power. Every other reason for teaching tends to melt away when confronted by this simple economic fact.

However, one of Slavoj Zizek's oft repeated riffs is on the ways our culture has forced us to internalize our duties such that not only must we do them, we must enjoy them as well.

Superego is the reversal of the permissive "You May!" into the prescriptive "You Must!", the point in which permitted enjoyment turns into ordained enjoyment. We all know the formula of Kant's unconditional imperative: "Du canst, denn du sollst". You can do your duty, because you must do it. Superego turns this around into "You must, because you can." ... The external opposition between pleasure and duty is precisely overcome in the superego. It can be overcome in two opposite ways. On one hand, we have the paradox of the extremely oppressive, so–called totalitarian post–traditional power which goes further than the traditional authoritarian power. It does not only tell you "Do your duty, I don’t care if you like it or not." It tells you not only "You must obey my orders and do your duty" but "You must do it with pleasure. You must enjoy it." It is not enough for the subjects to obey their leader, they must actively love him. This passage from traditional authoritarian power to modern totalitarianism can be precisely rendered through superego in an old joke of mine. Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? "I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty." A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: "You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to." Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say "I have a choice, I will not do it." I promise your father will say "What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how she loves you? How could you do this to her?" That’s superego. On the other hand, we have the opposite paradox of the pleasure itself whose pursuit turns into duty. In a permissive society, subjects experience the need to have a good time, to really enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and consequently feel guilty for failing to be happy.

This passage also resonates for me with much of Limited, Inc.'s ongoing interrogation of the pursuit of happiness as a new and strangely misplaced goal of life.

Teaching Marx and Zizek provides me with a way to raise these issues for my students who also face a similar bind of being forced first to take classes, and then forced to enjoy them. After all, why would someone pay all that money and spend all that time reading and studying subjects they don't enjoy?

I confess, I enjoy this part of my teaching. D'oh!

Rather than tag new victims and require them to respond to this meme, I'm simply going to ask for volunteers. If you would like to respond to this meme, just leave a comment below with a link to your post. Of course, you only have to respond if you would enjoy it...

Desiring Blog Production

This post is in response to a comment below from jreeve as well as to a recent post from Decoys on the continuing discussion of the labor theory of blogging begun on I cite.

jreeve writes:

When I read my kids Sesame Street books, they are also getting an advertisement for Big Bird. This inclusion or citation is a big part of the value of those products: the value of a Big Bird doll as greater than that of a stuffed yellow bird is created not by some inherent goodness of the product but rather by the fact I have developed Big Bird as a significant character for my children.

This seems right to me. It's very hard to avoid participating in the corporate marketing aimed at ourselves and our kids. One of the very first words of my youngest was "Picachu" – which was disturbing for her marxist dad on any number of levels. Asking why kids desire Big Bird or Picachu, though, isn't so far removed from asking Wilhelm Reich's question of why people desire fascism? The question isn't one of value, though, but of use-value. Why do we want the particular things we want? Why do these things come to have a use-value for us? Marx writes:

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.

Marx writes very little about how use-value becomes attached to one thing rather than another. The question of why we desire the things we do isn't one that Marx addresses directly since for Marx's discussion of value, the particular use-value involved "makes no difference." This is one reason for so much later interest in various Freudian supplements to Marx as a way to approach this question of desire. From here, it's only a short step to discussions of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-production or Zizek's Lacanian riffs. The advertising and branding that capital engages in today is focused on shaping and producing consumer desires for what capital is selling.

Decoyist writes:

Should the value of blogging be measured in economic terms? As L.P. shows, it can be, but as L.P.’s links also show, it can be seen in other terms. Blogging is economically highly unprofitable without returns from other quarters; given this, one might look to Hegelian recognition, were this to offer much profitability itself in the small circles it operates in; alternatively, the blogger might seek to resist the global order in statements that represent their subjectivity in performativity.

What is it that gets a blogger out of bed in the morning? All of the above and none of the above! It is a question of priorities, caprice. It is difficult for one motivation alone to overshadow all other others without extraordinary discharge of energy, a wastefulness lurking where economy (of whatever kind) imposes – no expenditure without loss. The blogger, in considering economic imperatives, embraces the uneconomical.

This also seems right to me, except that what the blogger embraces might better be understood as a variety of different use-values for blogging, including even, its uselessness. What a blogger gets out of his or her blog isn't the same thing as what capital gets out of that blog. This is another way to describe the difference between use-value (the thing workers desire) and value (the thing capital desires). Use-value is always very malleable and the production of new and different use-values is always possible within capital. Capital is extremely tolerant of these innovations in use-value. In fact, capital almost never cares what we use something for as long as we still buy it, and the more different use-values the better since each use-value brings along with it the possibility of a new commodity to sell.

Capital makes no such concessions when it comes to value. While you and I may be able to imagine finding value in many different things – beauty, love, wit, recognition, or cool – capital can only ever value a single thing: labor. The more labor something takes to produce, the more value it has. Capital is not subtle or flexible on this point and capital's hunger for value can't be sated by offering up some substitute source of value. Capital lives on a steady and monotonous diet of dead labor alone. And while you and I may find many different and wondrous use-values for a commodity, capital sees every commodity through its monochromatic lens of labor-time only. Thus, from capital's perspective the value of blogging lays not in the variety of uses the consumers and producers find for their blogs. For capital, blogs can only have value in that the labor put into them helps to produce and reproduce a commodity, in this case, the commodity of labor-power itself. Even the dreams discussed by Decoyist have a place in this production of labor-power. One can't escape working for capital even in sleep, and in so far as our dreams are part of the production and reproduction of ourselves as labor-power for capital they also have value for capital.

jreeve continues:

To push this onto blogging, can't the same be true about the mechanism behind discussing some film or book? Isn't a blog about the films 300 an ad for the film?Is it possible to think of the labor of blogging as creating that kind of value, or are these narratives foreign to Marxism as it stands now?

This also fits with capital's more recent focus on marketing and advertising as ways of shaping and producing consumer desires. Blogs function as consumer produced advertisements for movies and books and certainly capital benefits. This would be yet another facet of the link between blogs and the production of labor-power as desiring-consumers.

Love in Iraq

Continuing the speculations on Zizek, Freud, and the evils of love, this photo was taken Mardi Gras day in Iraq.

The most benign formulation I can give for the current horrors in Iraq is that they emerged out of love. Love of country, love of family, love of god, love of freedom, love of peace. If it is true that love is always unjust and does evil by excluding others from the focus of our care and concern, then certainly the outpouring of love by the citizens of the United States in the wake of 9/11 finds no more spectacular expression than in the injustice and evil of the carnage in Iraq. Iraq is the place where love goes to die.

Love of country, love of freedom, love of the troops, and love for the victims of 9/11 becomes transformed into the injustice and evil of shock and awe, of Abu Ghraib, and of the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq. This seems to fit well with both the experience and rhetoric of the war to date where noble sentiments and endless shit have marched hand in hand.

Evil as the result of a good heart is, of course, what makes for truly magnificent evil. It is much easier to avoid evil when it confronts us naked and undisguised. Evil expressed as love is much harder to resist, and much harder to stop. This is because resistance to expressions of such love may be portrayed as folks who do not love their country, their troops, their commander-in-chief, or their freedom.

Loving Evil

The post below on Zizek and the evils of love reminded me of a wonderful post from Limited, Inc. on the world's most dangerous man:

"The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous man the world has ever known died without having an inkling that he was the most dangerous man the world has ever known. He wasn’t a politician, or a general, or a bandit, and the most publicity he ever received was when he was elected president of the American Chemical Association in 1944. His name was Tom Midgley."

Thomas Midgley was the inventor of both tetraethyl lead and freon. Tetraethyl lead is the additive used to make leaded gasoline. In addition to helping engines run smoothly, it also caused the most wide spread and dramatic increase in environmental lead pollution and lead poisoning in history. (The EPA has a bizarrely defensive history of lead poisoning on its website which is almost nostalgic for the good old days of smooth burning leaded gas and laments the advent of automobile emission standards which required catalytic converters that inadvertently prevented cars from being able to burn leaded gasoline.) Midgley also pioneered the use of freon and chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration systems and air conditioners. These same chlorofluorocarbons have depleted the ozone layer and helped usher in global warming. (In a strange twist of fate, Midgley contracted polio and died from being strangled by the system of wires and pulleys he used to raise himself out of bed -- another device of his own invention.) It is the first two inventions, though, that put Midgley in the running for the title of world's most dangerous man. However, we were speaking of love.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes that the injunction to love thine enemy does an injustice to those we have more reason to love. If our love is universal and extends to everybody and everything, then those who give us special cause to be loved are short changed and cheated. In Zizek's gloss, the evil that love does is to discriminate against all those others we withhold our love from; for to invest love in one special object is also to deprive the rest of the world of our love. These two formulations of who gets cheated by love describe exactly the same situations, so I see no need to quibble over whom love does an injustice to. Love is unjust. This is why Zizek can describe love as a "cosmic imbalance" and say that "in this quite formal sense, love is evil."

Perhaps Tom Midgley's inventions are simply another face of the injustice of love. To love engines that don't knock and beer that is cold does an injustice. It does an injustice to all those other engines that ping and all that other beer that is warm. It also does an injustice to all those who wish to live without environmental holocaust and to the rest of the planet which is deprived of this particular love. Midgley's evil is not one of premeditation and malice aforethought. His aim was not cataclysm. His aim was quiet motors and cold drinks. Loving these simple things, though, does an injustice to the rest of the world. This love is also evil. It may be that love always brings with it this risk of loving "not wisely, but too well."

Love Is Evil

Zizek arguing that "Love is evil." I love this guy. Srsly. I'll need to write more about him soon.