Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Slavoj Žižek at The Creative Time Summit
October 12, 2012—October 13, 2012
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
Slavoj Žižek at The Creative Time Summit
Creative Time has commissioned and presented ambitious
public art projects with thousands of artists throughout New York City, across
the country, around the world—and now even in outer space.
Creative Time Summit 2012: Confronting Inequality will focus on global economic inequity and boasts presenters including Mike Daisey, Jeff Chang, Suzanne Lacy, Josh MacPhee, Hito Steyerl and Rebel Díaz.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Welcome to the “Spiritual Kingdom of Animals” | Slavoj Žižek on the moral vacuum of global capitalism
The documentary The
Act of Killing (Final Cut Film Production, Copenhagen) premiered in
2012 at the Telluride film festival and was also shown at Toronto International
Film Festival. The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer,
provides a unique and deeply disturbing insight into the ethical deadlock of
global capitalism.
The film – shot in Medan, Indonesia, in 2007 – reports on a
case of obscenity which reaches the extreme: a film, made by Anwar Congo and
his friends, who are now respected politicians, but were gangsters and death squad
leaders playing a key role in the 1966 killing of cca 2,5 millions of alleged
Communist sympathizers, mostly ethnic Chinese. The Act of Killing is
about “killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built.” After
their victory, their terrible acts were not relegated to the status of the
“dirty secret”, the founding crime whose traces are to be obliterated – on the
contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacres (the way to
strangle a victim with a wire, the way to cut a throat, how to rape a woman in
a most pleasurable way…). In October 2007, the Indonesian state TV produced a
talk show celebrating Anwar and his friends; in the middle of the show, after
Anwar says that their killings were inspired by gangster movies, the beaming
moderator turns to the cameras and says: “Amazing! Let’s give Anwar Congo a
round of applause!” When she asks Anwar if he fears the revenge of the victim’s
relatives, Anwar answers: “They can’t. When they raise their heads, we wipe
them out!” His henchman adds: “We’ll exterminate them all!”, and the audience
explodes into exuberant cheers… one has to see this to believe it’s possible.
But what makes Freemen extraordinary is also the level of reflexivity
between documentary and fiction – the film is, in a way, a documentary about
the real effects of living a fiction:
“To explore the killers’ astounding boastfulness, and to
test the limits of their pride, we began with documentary portraiture and
simple re-enactments of the massacres. But when we realized what kind of movie
Anwar and his friends really wanted to make about the genocide, the
re-enactments became more elaborate. And so we offered Anwar and his
friends the opportunity to dramatize the killings using film genres of their
choice (western, gangster, musical). That is, we gave them the chance to
script, direct and star in the scenes they had in mind when they were
killing people.”[i]
Did they reach the limits of the killers’ “pride”? They
barely touched it when they proposed to Anwar to play the victim of his
tortures in a reenactment; when a wire is placed around his neck, he interrupts
the performance and says “Forgive me for everything I’ve done.” But this is
more a temporary relapse which did not lead to any deeper crisis of conscience
– his heroic pride immediately takes over again. Probably, the protective
screen which prevented a deeper moral crisis was the very cinematic screen: as
in their past real killings and torture, they experienced their activity as an
enactment of their cinematic models, which enabled them to experience reality
itself as a fiction – as great admirers of Hollywood (they started their career
as organizers and controllers of the black market in peddling cinema tickets),
they played a role in their massacres, imitating a Hollywood gangster, cowboy
or even a musical dancer.
Here the “big Other” enters, not only with the fact that the
killers modeled their crimes on the cinematic imaginary, but also and above all
the much more important fact of society’s moral vacuum: what kind of symbolic
texture (the set of rules which draw the line between what is publicly
acceptable and what is not) a society must be composed of, if even a minimal
level of public shame (which would compel the perpetrators to treat their acts
as a “dirty secret”) is suspended, and the monstrous orgy of torture and
killing can be publicly celebrated even decades after it took place, not even as
a extraordinary necessary crime for the public good, but as an ordinary
acceptable pleasurable activity? The trap to be avoided here is, of course, the
easy one of putting the blame either directly on Hollywood or on the “ethical
primitiveness” of Indonesia. The starting point should rather be the
dislocating effects of capitalist globalization which, by undermining the
“symbolic efficacy” of traditional ethical structures, creates such a moral
vacuum.
However, the status of the “big Other” deserves here a closer
analysis – let us compare The Act of Killing to an incident which
drew a lot of attention in the US some decades ago: a woman was beaten and
slowly killed by a violent perpetrator in the courtyard of a big apartment
block in Brooklyn, New York; of the more than 70 witnesses who clearly saw what
was going on from their windows, not one called the police – why not? As the
later investigation established, the most prevalent excuse by far was that each
witness thought someone else already had or surely would do it. This data
should not be moralistically dismissed as a mere excuse for moral cowardice and
egotistic indifference: what we encounter here is also the function of the big
Other – this time not as Lacan’s “subject supposed to know,” but as what one
could call “the subject supposed to call the police.” The fatal mistake of the
witnesses of the slow Brooklyn killing was to misread the symbolic (fictional)
function of the “subject supposed to call the police” as an empirical claim of
existence, wrongly concluding that there must be at least one who effectively
did call the police – they overlooked the fact that the function of the
“subject supposed to call the police” is operative even if there is no actual
subject who enacts it.[ii]
Does this mean that, through the gradual dissolution of our
ethical substance, we are simply regressing to individualist egotism? Things
are much more complex. We often hear that our ecological crisis is the result
of our short-term egotism: obsessed with immediate pleasures and wealth, we
forgot about the common Good. However, it is here that Walter Benjamin’s notion
of capitalism as religion becomes crucial: a true capitalist is not a hedonist
egotist; he is, on the contrary, fanatically devoted to his task of multiplying
his wealth, ready to neglect his health and happiness, not to mention the
prosperity of his family and the well-being of environment, for it. There is
thus no need to evoke some high ground moralism and trash capitalist egotism –
against capitalist perverted fanatical dedication, it is enough to evoke a good
measure of simple egotist and utilitarian concerns. In other words, the pursuit
of what Rousseau calls the natural amour-de-soi requires a highly
civilized level of awareness. Or, to put it in the terms of Alain Badiou:
contrary to what he implies, the subjectivity of capitalism is NOT that of the
“human animal,” but rather a call to subordinate egotism to the
self-reproduction of the Capital. However, this does not imply that Badiou is
simply wrong: the individual caught into the global market capitalism
necessarily perceives itself as a self-interested hedonist “human animal,” this
self-perception is a necessary illusion.
In other words, self-interested egotism is not the brutal
fact of our societies but its ideology – the ideology philosophically
articulated in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit towards the end of the chapter
on Reason, under the name of “das geistige Tierreich” – the “spiritual kingdom
of animals,” Hegel’s name for the modern civil society in which human animals
are caught in self-interested interaction. As Hegel put it, the achievement of
modernity was to allow “the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in
the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity.”[iii] The
reign of this principle makes possible civil society as the domain in which
autonomous human individuals associate with each other through the institutions
of free-market economy in order to satisfy their private needs: all communal
ends are subordinated to private interests of individuals, they are consciously
posited and calculated with the goal of maximizing the satisfaction of these
interests. What matters for Hegel here is the opposition of private and common
perceived by those on whom Hegel relies (Mandeville, Smith) as well as by Marx:
individuals perceive the common domain as something that should serve their
private interests (like a liberal who thinks of state as a protector of private
freedom and safety), while individuals, in pursuing their narrow goals, effectively
serve the communal interest. The properly dialectical tension emerges here when
we become aware that, the more individuals act egotistically, the more they
contribute to the common wealth. The paradox is that when individuals want to
sacrifice their narrow private interests and directly work for the common good,
the one which suffers is the common good itself – Hegel loves to tell
historical anecdotes about a good king or prince whose very dedication to the
common good brought his country to ruins. The properly philosophical novelty of
Hegel was to further determine this “contradiction” along the lines of the
tension between the “animal” and the “spiritual”: the universal spiritual
substance, the “work of all and everyone,” emerges as the result of the
“mechanical” interaction of individuals. What this means is that the very
“animality” of the self-interested “human animal” (the individual participating
in the complex network of civil society) is the result of the long historical
process of the transformation of medieval hierarchic society into modern
bourgeois society. It is thus the very fulfillment of the principle of
subjectivity – the radical opposite of animality – which brings about the
reversal of subjectivity into animality.
Traces of this shift can be detected everywhere today,
especially in the fast-developing Asian countries where capitalism exerts a
most brutal impact. Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule (a
learning play written in 1929-30) tells the story of a rich Merchant who, with
his porter (“coolie”), crosses the Yahi Desert (yet another of Brecht’s
fictional Chinese places) to close an oil deal. When the two get lost in the
Desert and their water supplies are running low, the Merchant mistakenly shoots
the coolie, thinking he was being attacked, when the coolie was actually
offering him some water that he still had left in his bottle. Later, in a
court, the Merchant is acquitted: the Judge concludes that the Merchant had
every right to fear a potential threat from the coolie, so he was justified in
shooting the coolie in self-defense regardless of whether there was an actual
threat. Since the Merchant and his coolie belong to different classes, the Merchant
had all the reasons to expect hatred and aggression from him – this is the
typical situation, the rule, while the coolie’s kindness was an exception. Is
this story yet another of Brecht’s ridiculous Marxist simplification? No,
judging from the report from today’s real China:
“In Nanjing, half a decade ago, an elderly woman fell while
getting on a bus. Newspaper reports tell us that the 65 year old woman broke
her hip. At the scene, a young man came to her aid; let us call him Peng Yu,
for that is his name. Peng Yu gave the elderly woman 200RMB (at that time
enough to buy three hundred bus tickets) and took her to the hospital. Then, he
continued to stay with her until the family arrived. The family sued the young
man for 136,419 RMB. Indeed, the Nanjing Gulou District Court found the young
man to be guilty and ordered him to pay 45,876 RMB. The court reasoned,
‘according to common sense’, that because Peng Yu was the first off the bus, in
all probability he had knocked over the elderly woman. Further, he actually had
admitted his guilt, the court reasoned, by staying with the elderly woman at
the hospital. It being the case that a normal person would not be as kind as
Peng Yu claimed he was.”[iv]
Is this incident not exactly parallel to Brecht’s story?
Peng Yu helped the old lady out of simple compassion or decency, but since such
a display of goodness is not “typical”, not the rule (“a normal person would
not be as kind as Peng Yu claimed he was”), it was interpreted by the court as
a proof of Peng Yu’s guilt, and he was appropriately punished.
Is this a ridiculous exception? Not so, according to the People’s
Daily (the government newspaper) which, in an online opinion poll, asked a
large sample of young people what they would do if they were to see a fallen
elderly person: “87% of young people would not help. Peng Yu’s story echoes the
surveillance of the public space. People will only help when a camera was
present”. What such a reluctance to help signals is a change in the status of
public space: “the street is an intensely private place and seemingly the words
public and private make no sense”. In short, being in a public space does not
entails only being together with other unknown people – in moving among them, I
am still within my private space, engaged in no interaction with or recognition
of them. In order to count as public, the space of my co-existence and
interaction with others (or the lack of it) has to be covered by security
cameras.
Another sign of this same change can be found at the opposite
end of watching people die in public and doing nothing – the recent trend of
public sex in hard-core porn. There are more and more films which show a couple
(or more persons) engaged in erotic games up to full copulation in some heavily
frequented public space (on a public beach, inside a streetcar or train, at a
bus or train station, in the open space of a shopping mall…), and the
interesting feature is that a large majority of foreigners who pass by (pretend
to) ignore the scene – a minority throws a discrete glance at the couple, even
less of them makes a sarcastic obscene remark. Again, it is as if the
copulating couple remained in its private space, so that we should not be
concerned by their intimacies.
This brings us back to Hegel’s “spiritual animal kingdom” –
that is to say, who effectively behaves like this, passing by dying fellows in
blessed ignorance or copulating in front of others? Animals, of course. This
fact in no way entails that ridiculous conclusion that we are somehow
“regressing” to the animal level: the animality with which we are dealing here
– the ruthless egotism of each of the individuals pursuing his/her private
interest – is the paradoxical result of the most complex network of social
relations (market exchange, social mediation of production), and the fact
individuals themselves are blinded for this complex network points towards its
ideal (“spiritual”) character: in the civil society structured by market,
abstraction rules more than ever in the history of humanity. In contrast to
nature, the market competition of “wolves against wolves” is thus the material
reality of its opposite, of the “spiritual” public substance which provides the
background and base for this struggle among private animals.
It is often said that today, with our total exposure to the
media, culture of public confessions and instruments of digital control,
private space is disappearing. One should counter this commonplace with the
opposite claim: it is the public space proper which is disappearing. The
person who displays on the web his/her naked images or intimate data and
obscene dreams is not an exhibitionist: exhibitionists intrude into the public
space, while those who post their naked images on the web remain in their
private space and are just expanding it to include others. And, back to The
Act of Killing, the same goes for Anwar and his colleagues: they are
privatizing the public space in a sense which is much more threatening than
economic privatization.
[i] Quoted from the publicity material of Final Cut
Film Production.
[ii] One can even imagine an empirical test for this
claim: if one could recreate a circumstance in which each of the witnesses were
to think that he or she is alone in observing the gruesome scene, one can
predict that, their opportunist avoidance of “getting involved in something
that isn’t your business”, a large majority of them would have called the
police.
[iii] G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of
Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, par. 260.
[iv] Michael Yuen, “China and the Mist of
Complicated Things” (text given by the author).
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Spain's crisis spawns alternative economy that doesn't rely on the euro
Time banks and alternative currencies can be used to trade
goods as well as services
Ariana Eunjung Cha for The Washington Post
Guardian Weekly
Alternative ... a butcher in Rosenheim, Germany, holds the
Cheimgauer currency, created to help bolster the local economy. Photograph:
Paul Cooper/Rex Features
Psychologist Angels Corcoles recently taught a seminar about
self-empowerment for women, and when she finished the organisers handed her a
cheque with her fee. The amount was in hours, not euros.
But Corcoles didn't mind. Through a citywide credit network
that allows people to trade services without money, the 10 hours Corcoles
earned could be used to pay for a haircut, yoga classes or even carpentry work.
At a time when the future of the euro is in doubt and
millions are unemployed, a parallel economy is springing up in parts of Spain, allowing people to live
outside the single currency.
In the city of Málaga, on the
country's southern Mediterranean coast just 130km from Africa, residents have
set up an online site that allows them to earn money and buy products using a
virtual currency. The Catalonian fishing town of Vilanova i la Geltrù has launched
a similar experiment but with a paper credit card of sorts. It implements a new
currency worth slightly more than the euro when it is used at local
stores.
In Barcelona, the preferred model is time banks, which allow
people to trade their services in hours without the involvement of money at
all.
"This is a way for people who are on the fringes of the
economy to participate again," said Josefina Altes, co-ordinator of the
Spanish Time Bank Network.
Similar projects are popping up in Greece, Portugal and
other eurozone countries with troubled economies.
These experiments aim to take communities back to a time
when goods and services were bartered, before things such as interest rates,
market speculation and derivatives complicated the financial world.
While some local governments have backed these efforts,
others have raised questions about their implications for taxes, the effect on
local wages and the potential for fraud.
Social money or alternative currency systems have existed
throughout history, mostly in places such as remote coal towns or occupied
countries during war, or during times of great economic stress.
Many of these efforts took years to set up, and the number
of people involved is limited. In Spain, however, the economic crisis has been
an impetus to move faster. There are now more than 325 time banks and
alternative currency systems in Spain involving tens of thousands of citizens.
Collectively, these projects represent one of the largest experiments in social
money in modern times.
Peter North, a senior lecturer at the University of
Liverpool who has written two books about the subject, said alternative
currencies – or scrips – have tended to appear during times of crisis
and often disappear soon afterwards. But North says the efforts in Spain may
last longer because they are connected to the 15M, or indignados, movement,
originally a youth initiative organised through internet sites that was the
inspiration for the Occupy protests.
"Instead of just being a desperate way for people to
survive a horrible economic crisis, this is part of the co-operatives, credit
unions, community banks, organic farms and recovering factories – the alternate
economy – that the Occupy movement is groping towards," North said.
While each social-money project has its own accounting
rules, the basic concept is the same. You earn credits by providing services or
selling goods, and you can redeem the credits with people or businesses in the
network.
In Vilanova i la Geltrù's central square, a growing number
of stores – including an upscale artisanal Catalonian bread shop, a deli and an
electronics shop – now post blue Turutas aqui si (Turutas accepted
here) signs in their windows.
Started as a way of breaking with the global financial
system, the alternative currency – named after a traditional wind instrument –
has been embraced by only about 190 of the town's 67,000 residents. But
organisers say more are signing up as the crisis deepens.
Ton Dalmau, 57, one of the founders of the initiative, said
the goal is to keep the money in circulation, which means that the bank where
people keep their Turutas does not offer any interest.
"We are returning money to its origins and making it
purely a system of exchange," he said.
Jordi Morera, 25, whose family owns the bread shop, said
that accepting Turturas hurts his bottom line because his raw materials can be
paid for only in euros. But he said the sacrifice is worth it because he
believes in the goals of the initiative.
"Money limits our lives more than we realise,"
Morera said.
In Málaga, David Chapman, 65, said social money encourages
innovation because you have to start thinking about different services or
products you can offer to be able to participate in the market.
Chapman, a carpenter originally from Britain who has made
Spain his home for 25 years, said he recently sold six sun ovens he made
himself for a total of 300 comuns, the community's virtual currency. He was
planning on cashing some of them in to pay someone to paint his house.
Launched three years ago by Chapman and some friends, the
project has seen dramatic growth. From March to August, the number of people
using the virtual currency has jumped from around 250 to 470, with most of the
newcomers in their 20s and 30s.
The scale of the Barcelona projects is significantly larger,
with more than 100 time banks that range in size from a few dozen members to
3,000.
Many of the time banks operate like real banks – with
individual accounts, ledgers, chequebooks and, in many cases, even auditors.
Some conduct transactions with physical checks and are overseen by a secretary
who keeps track of deposits. Others exist solely on the internet.
Sergi Alonso, a 30-year-old computer technician who has been
unable to find a full-time job, said he has helped numerous neighbours develop
web pages and troubleshoot hardware problems through a time bank. In return, he
was able to get private sewing instruction and piano lessons and learn about
graphic design.
Time banks help remind people that "regardless of your
skills, you can always bring things to others", Alonso said.
Greeks go back to basics as recession bites
By Chloe Hadjimatheou
BBC News, Evia, Greece
As Greece sinks ever deeper into the most severe economic
depression in living memory, some young people are taking drastic action to
change their lives.
In the spring of 2010, just as the Greek government was
embarking on some of its harshest austerity measures, 29-year-old Apostolos
Sianos packed in his well-paid job as a website designer, gave up his Athens
apartment and walked away from modern civilisation.
In the foothills of Mount Telaithrion on the Greek island of
Evia, Mr Sianos and three other like-minded Athenians set up an eco-community.
The idea was to live in an entirely sustainable way, free
from the ties of money and cut off from the national electricity grid.
'Crisis of civilisation'
The group sleeps communally in yurts they have built
themselves, they grow their own food and exchange the surplus in the nearest
village for any necessities they cannot produce.
“The Greek financial
crisis is not all negative”
--Apostolos Sianos
"What others saw as a global economic crisis, we saw as
a crisis of civilisation," Mr Sianos explains.
"Everything seemed to be in crisis - healthcare, the
environment, education. So we made the decision to try something
different."
Mr Sianos and his eco-activist companions first met in an
online forum in 2008 and after two years of exploring ideas decided to put
their principles into practice.
"When I first made the decision to give up the city and
move to this patch of land I was a little nervous," he admits.
"But now I can't imagine ever being attracted by that
kind of lifestyle again."
The community calls itself "Free and Real" - an
acronym for Freedom of Resources for
Everyone, Respect, Equality, Awareness and Learning.
Now in its second year, it has 10 permanent members and more
than 100 part-time residents who spend some of the year there.
But the last few months have seen an explosion of interest
in the community from Greeks who feel let down by the system and find life in
the financially crippled cities stifling.
Last year the country's economy shrank by 7% and 2012 could
see a similar dip; in real terms that means thousands of businesses going bust
and tens of thousands of people being laid off.
A recent survey by Thessaloniki University suggested 76%
of Greeks would like to emigrate, but for those who cannot afford to start
a new life abroad, going back to farming the land is an increasingly attractive
alternative.
Mr Sianos says that this year has seen an enormous movement
of people from big cities to the countryside, with many contacting his
community to ask for advice on sustainable living and organic farming.
"The Greek financial crisis is not all negative,"
he says.
"It is providing a huge opportunity for people to see
that the system they live in is not working, so they can begin looking for
alternatives."
Seasonal jobless
Hundreds of miles away, another group of young Greeks is
taking an entirely different approach to the dire circumstances their country
finds itself in.
Like most people in Greece's fourth-largest city Heraklion,
Andonis Sklavenitis is what he calls an "insecure worker".
Last year he worked a few months helping out on an
archaeological dig and this year he has managed to get a few shifts a week as
an airport security guard.
Since leaving university with a degree in tourism he has
worked in bars, restaurants and shops, but in almost every one of those jobs
his employers have refused to give him sick pay, holidays or pay his national
insurance contributions.
To make matters worse it is all seasonal work. As soon as
the summer is over he will rejoin the growing numbers of unemployed.
Mr Sklavenitis's experience is typical; Crete has the
highest jobless rate of any region in the country, with nearly one in four
people out of work and many others in unstable positions without decent
conditions.
In 2010, when Mr Sklavenitis and his unemployed friends
realised that their numbers were growing, they decided it was time they stood
up for their rights.
They established the first Association of the Unemployed,
which had two main objectives: to fight for decent working conditions and to
provide practical and psychological support to those struggling financially.
“If I didn't have
that connection with other people in my position, which reassures me that I am
not alone, I would probably have killed myself by now”
--Nikos Vrahasotakis
After the latest round of cuts, unemployment benefit in
Greece is now around 350 euros (£273; $431) per month, but only those who have
up-to-date national insurance contributions are eligible; and even then it only
lasts for one year.
"When the 12 payments are up you are completely on your
own," Mr Sklavenitis says.
Among the association's demands are free travel on public
transport for the jobless, as well as discounts on electricity and telephone
bills.
One member who desperately needs help with his bills is
Nikos Vrahasotakis.
The 30-year-old does odd jobs as a cleaner, making around 10
euros daily, barely enough to feed his young family.
"I just got an electricity bill for 600 euros; it is
the fourth bill they have sent, so I am expecting them to cut us off any
day," he says.
Food and support
Mr Vrahasotakis, who is not entitled to state benefits,
lives with his wife and 18-month-old daughter in an old building that used to
be a canteen.
"In the winter it is freezing and a few months ago part
of the ceiling caved in," he says.
Without the support of the association he says he would not
be able to cope.
"If I didn't have that connection with other people in
my position, which reassures me that I am not alone, I would probably have
killed myself by now," he admits.
As well as the psychological support the association
provides, they also distribute food parcels to families in dire circumstances.
Director Nikos Karantinakis, 31, says he and his whole
family - father, mother and fiancee - are all unemployed and depend on food
handouts to supplement the little they manage to grow in their garden.
"There are arguments every day at home because everyone
is so stressed," he says.
It is estimated that around 1,000
people a day are losing their jobs in Greece and already the
percentage of the population not working is higher than those who are employed.
It is those under the age of 35 who have been the hardest hit.
"Our whole generation is on hold," Mr Karantinakis
says.
“Being able to work
is a basic human right in a civilised society”
--Nikos KarantinakisDirector, Heraklion Association of
Unemployed
He and his fiancee are unable to plan a future together.
Starting a family is completely out of the question.
Since the Association of Unemployed was created in Crete,
other chapters have been cropping up around the country, in big cities such as
Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras.
Beyond the support it provides its members, Mr Karantinakis
says the association has had few successes, but it has allowed him to feel he
is doing something.
Before he began focusing on unemployed rights he used to sit
in his room staring at the ceiling. Now he spends his days petitioning local
government and organising demonstrations.
"Being able to work is a basic human right in a
civilised society," he says.
"If the government won't provide us with it then we
will have to fight for it."
American Pussy Riot
A call for revolution in the New York Times?
Adbusters , 21 Aug 2012
DENIS SINYAKOV/REUTERS
American zealots for the recently convicted Russian punk
rock trio Pussy Riot don’t know what they’re actually supporting, says New York
Times Russian columnist Vadim Nikitin. If they did, they might think twice
– Pussy Riot stands for ideals most American liberals, let alone conservatives,
don’t really want. The US has a long history of loving their competitors’
dissidents. And Russia, either communist or oligarchical, has always proven to
be the perfect foil.
Here’s what Vadim Nikitin has to say:
From Madonna to Björk, from the elite New Yorker to the
populist Daily Mail, the world united in supporting Russia’s irreverent
feminist activists Pussy Riot against the blunt cruelty inflicted on them by
the state. It may not have stopped Vladimir Putin’s kangaroo court from
sentencing them to two years in prison on charges of hooliganism, but blanket
international media pressure helped turn the case into a major embarrassment
for the Kremlin.
Yet there is something about the West’s embrace of the young
women’s cause that should make us deeply uneasy, as Pussy Riot’s philosophy,
activism and even music quickly took second place to its usefulness in
discrediting one of America’s geopolitical foes. Twenty years after the end of
the Cold
War, are dissident intellectuals once again in danger of becoming
pawns in the West’s anti-Russian narrative?
Back in the ’70s, the United States and its allies cared
little about what Soviet dissidents were actually saying, so long as it was
aimed against the Kremlin. No wonder so many Americans who had never read
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s books cheered when he dissed the Soviet Union later
felt so shocked, offended and even betrayed when he criticized many of the same
shortcomings in his adoptive homeland. Wasn’t this guy supposed to be on our
side?
Using dissidents to score political points against the
Russian regime is as dangerous as adopting a pet tiger: No matter how
domesticated they may seem, in the end they are free spirits, liable to maul
the hand that feeds them.
[…]
Chilean tax reform incites new wave of student discontent
WEDNESDAY, 05 SEPTEMBER 2012 21:56
WRITTEN BY GWYNNE HOGAN
Wave of student takeovers sweep Santiago after the approval
of controversial tax reform.
Hundreds of student protesters occupied various political party headquarters to show their indignation at the passage of a controversial tax reform late Tuesday night.
Hundreds of student protesters occupied various political party headquarters to show their indignation at the passage of a controversial tax reform late Tuesday night.
Frustrated high school students took over the headquarters
of the center-left Christian Democratic Party (DC), the far-right Independent
Democratic Union Party (UDI), and the liberal Party for Democracy (PPD), while
the Socialist Party (PS) headquarters was occupied by university students.
High schoolers also staged a failed attempt to occupy the Communist Party (PC) headquarters. While most headquarters were taken peacefully, Álvaro Pillado, president of the UDI youth league, said protesters stormed the UDI headquarters by force, throwing rocks and smoke grenades.
High schoolers also staged a failed attempt to occupy the Communist Party (PC) headquarters. While most headquarters were taken peacefully, Álvaro Pillado, president of the UDI youth league, said protesters stormed the UDI headquarters by force, throwing rocks and smoke grenades.
According to Santiago police, the DC, UDI, and PPD
occupations were evicted by Wednesday afternoon, and students voluntarily
withdrew from the PS headquarters with no police intervention.
Members of the Socialist Youth explained to the press that the goal of their occupation was to hold their party accountable for its actions which they interpreted as incongruous with the core beliefs of the party. While socialist deputies voted en masse against the bill, all but one socialist senator supported it.
"It has been a peaceful occupation... we want to express our discontent with the actions of our congressmen and from now on the socialist youth will reclaim its space, and dispute that space within the party," Gabriel Ossandón, the group’s spokesperson, explained to press.
The tax reform will allot US$1.23 billion to education spending, mostly by way of an increased business tax. While it aimed to address student pressures for education reform, critics say it falls far short of what the country needs.
Hoping to soften the anticipated backlash from student groups, President Sebastián Piñera had directly addressed them in a televised speech Tuesday after the bill was passed.
"A message for the students: I know you are not responsible for the problems that face our education system today, but I do know that you should be part of the solution," he said.
However, Gabriel Boric, president of the Federation of Students of the Universidad de Chile (FECH), asserted that the students needed a stronger role in “the solution.”
"We do want to be part of the solution. We are not here just to say 'this is bad' and 'I don't like this' but we will not accept the argument by politicians that says 'thanks very much students for bringing this issue to light, now its our job to resolve it,'” Boric told CNN Chile. “We have proposals and we want them heard."
Boric said he would outline said proposals to the Ministry of Education this Thursday.
While happy about the increased budget for education reform, Boric questioned the ways in which those funds will be invested.
"(The funds will) mainly benefit a system of education that produces segregation in our country, and moreover it reinforces the for-profit education system," Boric said. "This reform does not address the needs of our country today … At the end of the day both sides are a little uncomfortable with it.”
By Gwynne Hogan (hogan@santiagotimes.cl)
Copyright 2012 - The Santiago Times
Members of the Socialist Youth explained to the press that the goal of their occupation was to hold their party accountable for its actions which they interpreted as incongruous with the core beliefs of the party. While socialist deputies voted en masse against the bill, all but one socialist senator supported it.
"It has been a peaceful occupation... we want to express our discontent with the actions of our congressmen and from now on the socialist youth will reclaim its space, and dispute that space within the party," Gabriel Ossandón, the group’s spokesperson, explained to press.
The tax reform will allot US$1.23 billion to education spending, mostly by way of an increased business tax. While it aimed to address student pressures for education reform, critics say it falls far short of what the country needs.
Hoping to soften the anticipated backlash from student groups, President Sebastián Piñera had directly addressed them in a televised speech Tuesday after the bill was passed.
"A message for the students: I know you are not responsible for the problems that face our education system today, but I do know that you should be part of the solution," he said.
However, Gabriel Boric, president of the Federation of Students of the Universidad de Chile (FECH), asserted that the students needed a stronger role in “the solution.”
"We do want to be part of the solution. We are not here just to say 'this is bad' and 'I don't like this' but we will not accept the argument by politicians that says 'thanks very much students for bringing this issue to light, now its our job to resolve it,'” Boric told CNN Chile. “We have proposals and we want them heard."
Boric said he would outline said proposals to the Ministry of Education this Thursday.
While happy about the increased budget for education reform, Boric questioned the ways in which those funds will be invested.
"(The funds will) mainly benefit a system of education that produces segregation in our country, and moreover it reinforces the for-profit education system," Boric said. "This reform does not address the needs of our country today … At the end of the day both sides are a little uncomfortable with it.”
By Gwynne Hogan (hogan@santiagotimes.cl)
Copyright 2012 - The Santiago Times
Protesters blockade Mexico's biggest TV station
(Reuters) - Thousands of protesters on Thursday blockaded
the studios of Mexico's most popular TV network, accusing it of biased coverage
of the July 1 presidential election.
Shouting "Tell the truth," the demonstrators,
including students and union workers, stopped employees entering the offices of
the Televisa studios in Mexico City although they allowed others to leave.
The protesters allege that Televisa supported Enrique Pena
Nieto, who won the election by almost 7 percentage points over leftist Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador.
The protesters promised to continue the blockade for 24
hours.
Televisa, which carried on broadcasting as normal, argues
that it covered the election fairly and gave all candidates time on prime-time
news shows.
Televisa is the world's most popular Spanish language
network and sells its soap operas around the globe.
Lopez Obrador has claimed that Pena Nieto paid Televisa for
favorable coverage and bought votes. He has filed a legal challenge to the vote
with an electoral tribunal, asking it to annul the ballot.
The tribunal has until September to rule on the accusations
and officially declare Pena Nieto as president. It is widely expected to uphold
the vote.
(Reporting By Ioan Grillo; Editing by Eric Beech)
Victory for Quebec students
SEPTEMBER 6, 2012
Students and their supporters throughout the Canadian
province of Quebec are celebrating the ousting of Liberal Premier Jean Charest,
the promise of the withdrawal of Bill 78 and most importantly the freeze in
tuition fees. This victory comes after six months of student strike involving
more than 190 000 students.
Quebec students who already paid the lowest tuition fees
across North America were faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Even if the
planned increase had gone ahead, Quebec students still would have pay less than
in any other Canadian province. Why? Quebec students have a strong tradition of
fighting for free education since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. And if you
fight you can win!
During the six month –long strike many the demonstrations held
on the 22nd of each month reached up to 500 000 protesters. However, it
was the roughly180 local unions organised in CLASSE which carried the fight
from day to day shutting down the Port of Montreal, ministerial meetings and
nearly all classes in post-secondary education across the province.
In the face of state repression, the use of tear gas, shock
grenades, the arrest of thousands of protesters, and riot police in college
corridors, students didn’t buckle but instead called upon workers and the neighbourhoods
to join in nightly pots and pans protests, the casseroles. Charest’s unpopular
Bill 78 acted as a catalyist for the student movement to turn into a popular
movement.
But student protesters were not only campaigning against
tuition fees. Time again, they argued that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s
provincial budget of 2011-2012 would cut public and accessible healthcare,
hydroelectricity and education.
Over the last nine years in power the Liberals have pursued
to restructure society in the interest of the rich. Tax cuts for corporations
have gone hand in hand with increasing the retirement age to 67. After trade
unions suffered a blow in 2005 it was announced that student fees were to
increase. As the ‘sacred cows of Quebecoise society’ came under attack students
engaged in a ‘general strike’, causing significant economic damage to the
provincial government. This meant that the elections were a referendum on the
student movement and dominated by two topics: tuition fees and student debt.
With full privatisation looming, students did not want to
see a repeat of their 2005 strike, which saw them go back to class
empty-handed. Students have learnt some important lessons. They are organising
on a departmental/faculty basis, which has strengthened the overall
organisation of the strike. This has also helped them to hold their unions and
executives to account.
The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the
350,000-strong demonstration in Montreal on May 22. Following the biggest
student demonstration ever, students called for a week of economic disruptions,
bringing inner cities’ traffic to a standstill while also mobilising 30,000
parents in support of the students’ demands. The two largest public sector
unions also called their membership on to the streets for the mobilisation.
The looming summer break did not succeed in breaking the
strike either. Instead students continued to carry their message into the
streets and to the election rallies.
While the mainstream media continuously claimed that the liberal
government had “extended a hand” by offering students an “increased bursary and
loan programs”, the government was intent on breaking the movement time again.
Premier Jean Charest said: “The decision has been made and we will not back
down”. This only strengthened the determination of student strikers, and led
them to forge new alliances. Students organised solidarity with locked-out Rio
Tinto Alcan workers and with hundreds of Aveos employees who recently lost
their jobs.
Protests also saw environmentalists and students come out
together. They stormed the top floor of a conference centre in which Charest
was to unveil further details of his ‘Plan Nord’, a mining plan which will see
a 1.2-million-square kilometre stretch of indigenous land be sold off to big
business.
At the same time, other students stormed a meeting of the
federal Immigration minister Jason Kenney, best known for his anti-gay and
anti-immigration stances.
This display of resistance has inspired activists far beyond
the provincial borders of Quebec. The question is whether the newly elected
nationalist government will stick to its promises and whether students will
continue to be part of the fight for a different kind of society. Another
Quebec is possible! Another world is possible!
Monday, September 10, 2012
chtodelat news ArtLeaks Gazette
On the urgency of launching the ArtLeaks Gazette
Artleaks
was founded in 2011 as an international platform for cultural workers
where instances of abuse, corruption and exploitation are exposed and submitted
for public inquiry. After over a year of activity, we, members of the
collective ArtLeaks felt an urgent need to establish a regular on-line
publication as a tool for empowerment in the face of the systemic abuse of
cultural workers’ basic labor rights, repression or even blatant censorship and
growing corporatization of culture that we encounter today.
Namely: radical (political) projects are co-opted under the
umbrella of corporate promotion and gentrification; artistic research is
performed on research hand-outs, creating only an illusion of depth while in
fact adding to the reserve army of creative capital; the secondary market
thrives as auction houses speculate on blue chip artists for enormous amounts
of laundered money, following finance capitalism from boom to bust, meanwhile,
most artists can’t even make a living and depend on miserly fees, restrictive
residencies, and research handouts to survive; galleries and dealers more and
more heavily copyright cultural values; approximately 5% of authors, producers
and dealers control 80% of all cultural resources (and indeed, in reality, the
situation may be even worse than these numbers suggest) ; certain cultural
managers and institutions do not shy away from using repressive maneuvers
against those who bring into question their mission, politics or dubious
engagements with corporate or state benefactors; and last but not least,
restrictive national(ist) laws and governments suppress cultural workers
through very drastic politics, not to mention the national state functions as a
factor of neoliberal expression in the field of culture.
Do you recognize yourself in the scenarios above? Do you
accept them as immutable conditions of your labor? We strongly believe that
this dire state of affairs can be changed. We do not have to carry on complying
to politics that cultivate harsh principles of pseudo-natural selection (or
social Darwinism) – instead we should fight against them and imagine different
scenarios based on collective values, fairness and dignity. We strongly believe
that issues of exploitation, repression or co-optation cannot be divorced from
their specific politico-economic contexts and historical conditions, and need
to be raised in connection with a new concept of culture as an invaluable
reservoir of the common, as well as new forms of class consciousness in the
artistic field in particular, and the cultural field more generally.
Recently, this spectrum of urgencies and the necessity to
address them has also become the focus of fundamental discussions and
reflection on the part of communities involved in cultural production and
certain leftist social and political activists. Among these, we share the
concerns of pioneering groups such as the Radical Education Collective (Ljubljana), Precarious
Workers’ Brigade (PWB) (London), W.A.G.E. (NYC), Arts &Labor (NYC), the May Congress of Creative
Workers (Moscow) and others (see the Related Causessection on
our website). The condition of cultural workers has also recently been
theorized within the framework of bio-politics, in which cognitive labor is
implicitly described as a new hegemonic type of production in the context of
the global industrialization of creative work.
The question then emerges, what is creative work today? To
structure this undifferentiated categorizations, we will begin by addressing in
our journal all those “occupied” with art who are striving towards emancipatory
knowledge in the process of their activity. As the contemporary art world more
and more envelops different areas of knowledge as well as the production of
events, we considered it a priority to focus on this particular field. However,
we remain open to discussing urgencies related to other forms of creative
activity beyond the art world.
Through our journal, we want to stresses the urgent need to
seriously transform these workers’ relationship with institutions, networks and
economies involved in the production, reproduction and consumption of art and
culture. We will pursue these goals through developing a new
approach to the tradition of institutional critique and fostering new forms of
artistic production, that may challenge dominant discourses of criticality and
social engagement which tame creative forces. We also feel the urgency to link
cultural workers’ struggles with similar ones from other fields of human activity
– at the same time, we strongly believe that any such sustainable alliances
could hardly be built unless we begin with the struggles in our own factories.
Announced Theme for the first issue: Breaking the
Silence – Towards Justice, Solidarity and Mobilization
The main theme of the first issue of our journal is
establishing a politics of truth by breaking the silence on the art world. What
do we actually mean by this? We suggest that breaking the silence on the art
world is similar to breaking the silence of family violence and other forms of
domestic abuse. Similarly as when coming out with stories of endemic
exploitation form inside the household, talking about violence and exploitation
in the art world commonly brings shame, ambivalence and fear. But while each
case of abuse may be different, we believe these are not singular instances but
part of a larger system of repression, abuse and arrogance that have been
normalized through the practices of certain cultural managers and institutions.
Our task is to find voices, narratives, hybrid forms that raise consciousness
about the profound effects of these forms of maltreatment: to break through the
normalizing rhetoric that relegate cultural workers’ labor to an activity
performed out of instinct, for the survival of culture at large, like sex or
child rearing which, too are zones of intense exploitation today.
Implicit in this gesture is a radical form of protest – one
that does not simply join the concert of affirmative institutional critique
which confirms the system by criticizing it. Rather, breaking the silence
implies bringing into question the ways in which the current art system
constructs positions for its speakers, and looking for strategies in which to
counteract naturalized exploitation and repression today.
At the same time, we recognize that the moment of exposure
does not fully address self-organization or, what comes after breaking the
silence? We suggest that it is therefore important to link this to solidarity,
mobilization and an appeal for justice, as political tools. As it is the
understanding of the dynamic interaction between the mobilization of resources,
political opportunities in contexts and emancipatory cultural frames that we
can use to analyze and construct strategies for cultural workers movements.
With summoning the urgency of potentia agendi (or the power to
act) collectively we also call for the necessity to forge coalitions within the
art world and beyond it – alliances that have the concrete ability of exerting
a certain political pressure towards achieving the promise of a more just and emancipatory
cultural field.
Structure of publication
The journal would be divided into six major sections.
A. Critique of cultural dominance apparatuses
Here we will address methodological issues in analyzing the
condition of cultural production and the system that allows for the facile
exploitation of the cultural labor-force. Ideally, though not necessarily,
these theoretical elaborations would be related to concrete case studies of
conflicts, exploitation, dissent across various regions of the world, drawing
comparisons and providing local context for understanding them.
B. Forms of organization and history of struggles
Cultural workers have been demanding just working
conditions, struggling over agency and subjectivity in myriad ways and through
various ideas about what this entails. In this section we will analyze
historical case-studies of self-organization of cultural workers. Our goal is
not to produce a synthetic model out of all of these struggles, rather to
examine how problems have been articulated at various levels of (political)
organization, with attention to the genealogy of the issues and the interaction
between hegemonic discourses (of the institution, corporation, the state) and
those employed by cultural workers in their respective communities.
C. The struggle of narrations
C. The struggle of narrations
In this section we will invite our contributors to develop
and practice artistic forms of narration which cannot be fully articulated
through direct “leaking”. It should be focused on finding new languages for
narration of systemic dysfunctions. We expect these elaborations can take
different form of artistic contributions, including comics, poems, films,
plays, short stories, librettos etc.
D. Glossary of terms
What do we mean by the concept of “cultural workers”? What does
“gentrification” or “systemic abuse” mean in certain contexts? Whose “art
world”? This section addresses the necessity of developing a terminology to
make theoretical articulations more clear and accessible to our readers.
Members of ArtLeaks as well as our contributors to our gazette will be invited
to define key terms used in the material presented in the publication. These
definitions should be no more that 3-4 sentences long and they should be
formulated as a result of a dialogue between all the contributors.
E. Education and its discontents
The conflicts and struggles in the field of creative
education are at the core of determining what kind of subjectivities will shape
the culture(s) of future generations. It is very important to carefully analyze
what is currently at the stake in these specific fields of educational
processes and how they are linked with what is happening outside academies and
universities. In this section we will discuss possible emancipatory
approaches to education that are possible today, which resist pressing
commercial demands for flexible and “creative” subjectivities. Can we imagine
an alternative system of values based of a different meaning of progress?
F. Best practices and useful resources
In this section we would like to invite people to play out
their fantasies of new, just forms of organization of creative life. Developing
the tradition of different visionaries of the past we hope that this section
will trigger many speculations which might help us collect modest proposals for
the future and thus counter the shabby reality of the present. This section is
also dedicated to the practices which demonstrate alternative
ethical guidelines, and stimulate the creation of a common cultural sphere.
This would allow cultural workers to unleash their full potential in creating
values based on principles of emancipatory politics, critical reflections and
affirmative inspiration of a different world where these values should form the
basis of a dignified life.
[…]
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Slavoj Žižek in Moscow. Some notes.
Posted on September 7, 2012 by afoniya
It is quite a complex thing to describe a Slavoj Zizek
lecture. I went to two of his Moscow lectures- listened and laughed at one and
listened, laughed and took copious notes at the second one. It seems such a
long time since I attended the lectures that all I have are my notes on his
second lecture and very vague memories of his first lecture. The problem with
describing a Zizek lecture is in trying not to give a simple recapitulation of
all the jokes and the serious philosophical or psychoanalytical points that
these jokes or quotes from films are said to represent. As Zizek himself
acknowledged many of the jokes and anecdotes have already appeared and are
probably already well known to the Zizek fan. So his quotation from
Ninotchka about a waiter telling a client at a restaurant that there was no
cream but there was milk so instead of having coffee without cream perhaps the
customer would like coffee without milk was one I had already come across a
couple of times. His jokes and anecdotes about the Communist era also came
thick and fast – the wonderful conspiracy theory in the Soviet period where
people imagined a secret KGB cell that was dedicated only to producing
anti-Soviet jokes which would be repeated in kitchens throughout the country
has since become my favourite conspiracy theory. Yet as Zizek had argued it,
too, only reproduced the Stalinist paranoia that it was supposed to be
conspiratorial about.
In any case the Hegel lecture was genuinely quite a
fascinating one. As the person who presented Zizek argued, Zizek himself
embodied a kind of truly Hegelian contradiction as was Hegel the embodiment of
contradictions in his day. Zizek tried to develop this idea as to how Hegel
could become both the philosopher of the Prussian State and of the French
Revolution and of how Hegel went further in accepting the totality of the
French Revolution, understanding that 1789 without 1793 was impossible. This
led Zizek into a number of Hegelian concepts which he illustrated with the
usual jokes and anecdotes. For Zizek, the contradiction of Hegel was embodied
in being the end of the line in metaphysical philosophers and the first
philosopher of modernity. Zizek also tried to show how the idea of great
opening was embodied in the very moment of total closure and how the
proclamation of an end (end of history, end of art, end of literature) is at
the same time the proclamation of a beginning. (He went to hint at some of the
errors of Kojeve who Lacan was greatly influenced by having said that Kojeve
was the freest person he (Lacan) had ever met.
Zizek took up Hegel as a cudgel in the criticism of the
totalitarianism approach. The Popperian idea of philosophers such as Hegel and
Platon as represnting a threat of totalitarianism was denounced. Philosophy for
Hegel was “time seized in thought”, in the sense that only when philosophy is
totally immersed in a certain historical moment can it find any opening to a
total or absolute knowledge. For Zizek, Lenin’s study of Hegel Logic must
fully embodied Hegelian thought amongst Marxists (and that for the past 50
years no Marxist has been able to properly read Das Kapital was
precisely because of their lack of knowledge of Hegel’s text). Zizek then took
us on the detour regarding Lacan and Kojeve mentioned above.
Zizek also spoke about what he saw as the trinity of
fundamental philosophers: Plato, Descartes and Hegel arguing that all
philosophy has only ever been anti-Platonism, anti-Cartesianism or
anti-Hegelianism. Zizek wanted to challenge the screen image of Hegel being
interested in absolute knowledge and the philosophical madman at his
purest. He argued that there was another Hegel and then used some
illustrations about Hegelian concepts such as Hegel’s idea of differentiality.
Here Zizek spoke of Russian formalism and the Lotman school. He illustrated the
absence of a characteristic feature as a positive feature in Hegelian thought
illustrating this by the Sherlock Holmes curious incident about the dog last
night story (ie the curious incident was that there was no incident).
Zizek went on to add in a number of theological ideas in his
next section. Beginning with G.K. Chesterton’s idea of the philosopher
policemen who tour philosophy conferences to see if crimes will be committed in
the future he related this to Popper’s accusation/denunciation of Plato where
Popper tries to prove that a totalitarian crime will be committed in the future
because of Plato’s world view. Zizek then further elucidated Chesterton’s
notion of the morality of the criminal but says that Chesterton doesn’t go far
enough in discovering how morality itself is essentially criminal. The idea of
Universal Law being crime elevated to the Absolute takes Zizek on a path from
Proudhon, Wagner and Ilyenkov to Pussy Riot who Zizek called true
Hegelians. Zizek, then, introduces us to ways in which certain religious
ideas and holistic truths become unbearable.
Hegelianism is not, Zizek is saying, telling us to look at
the bigger picture but truth for
Hegelians is a kind of unilateral fact and here Zizek
attacks the the lie, or the deception of the middle path or the centrist
(which was symbolised by Stalin and here we had yet another Stalin
joke/anecdote about Stalin telling Bukharin -who believed that a future
socialist society would still use money and Trotsky – who thought that
socialist society would abolish money by telling them there was a centrist- for
some there would be money and for others there would be none).
After this theology was discussed at some length- the book
of Job (the first acknowledgment of the Death of God and the visit of the three
ideologists), Chesterton (again) who accuses God of blasphemy, some Norwegian
theologist (Krampfel?) who believed that God was all powerful but totally
stupid and Levinas who argued that the injunction ‘Don’t Kill’ for example was
addressed to God himself (Zizek argues that the first theology of God being dead
is to be found in Judaism and not Nietzsche). He then argues about the
difference between the death of God and the need for the death of Christ and
that the message of this is that there is no one left to trust in. (Here he
talks of Paul Claudel’s belief that we should not trust God but that God should
trust us).
Zizek, then, talks about how the choices made during
revolutionary times are always wrong choices at first but that the wrong choice
needs to be taken in order to get to the right choice and here Zizek links this
to Hegel’s understanding of the Prussian State and the French revolution.
Finally Zizek returns to totality as being only a
retroactive truth – that is, every totality is only possible after the event.
Here he relates it to Borges’s essay on Kafka creating his own predecessors as
well as Eliot’s view in Tradition and the Individual Talent relating
all this to the Hegelian view of contingency and arguing that Hegel is really
more of a materialist than Marx. Hegel is more open to the ontological
incompleteness of knowledge. Zizek, interestingly relates this to a Tarkovsky
film where reality is not yet fully and completely formed. Reality itself,
Zizek seems to be saying, is incomplete.
The exchanges after the talk were interesting and Zizek was
definitely not brief in his answers. Zizek insisted that Hegel was no
organicist and was not a thinker of proto harmony. Moreover he also mentioned
the views of Boehme and the idea that Boehme was the first to point out the
demonic side of God himself (that is, if mankind fell from God something
terrible must have happened within God himself). Freud and sexuality came up in
questioning too (sex not as an animalistic experience as the Church insisted
but the first metaphysical experience and on this he spoke more at length
during the first lecture).
Well there is no way of denying that listening to Zizek is
an extraordinary experience, rather a whirlwind experience which it is
difficult to pick at critically. Some comments that I have read from the Russian
left are rather sceptical (both Boris Kagarlitsky and Maxim Kantor seem to
think that Zizek is either rather insane or an idle chatterbox- Волван). How,
in general, Zizek was understood in Moscow by those attending his lectures is
hard to tell. The lectures nonetheless seemed to have generated quite a
significant interest though how his ideas are interpreted still remains to be
seen.
Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot Punk Protest and the Exercise of Democratic Culture
by Claire Tancons
[…]
4. Return of the Balagan
Pussy Riot have already garnered a wide following around the
world, albeit more so in Europe than anywhere else, and they are under
discussion to copyright their name. On the day of or in the days immediately
following their trial, balaclava-clad copycats, sometimes armed with guitars,
attacked cathedrals and churches and other Christian religious symbols, which
seem to have been their main target. A small group managed to climb up the
Grossmuenster Cathedral in Zurich to tie up a monumental Pussy Riot Banner on
the façade. On Sunday 19, two male Germans and a female Austrian were reported
to have interrupted a church service at Cologne’s cathedral. The most
carnivalesque aspect of these acts, in the absence of a coherent target, was
their spontaneous solidarity. As for the members of the topless feminist
activist group FEMEN, who assailed Patriarch Kirill on a visit to Kiev and used
a chainsaw to cut down a cross, they missed the mark altogether with
spectacular but uncarnivalesque actions devoid of the identificatory and
counter-identificatory tensions that can provoke reversals of roles or
functions like the symbolic decrowning of Putin and defrocking of Kirill.
“Russia takes to the streets to say goodbye to the regime,”
says one free member of Pussy Riot in the latest released song, “Putin sets the
Fires to Revolution.” Russia has been a country of revolutions before, and
Pussy Riot has lit and extinguished their own fires in prior performances. Of
the good intentions paving the road to democracy, Hardt and Negri joke about
“[…] the Soviets who battling capitalist domination thought they were headed
for a new democracy but ended up in a bureaucratic state machine.”21 There
is little hope that an old-style communism or a nominal democracy will
inaugurate a new era of cultural revolution. At the very least, Pussy Riot is
well on its way to consolidating Russia’s democratic culture. “Russia takes to
the streets to say goodbye to the regime./ Russia takes to the streets to say
goodbye to the regime.” The refrain might well take Pussy Riot and their
growing mass of supporters to the top charts, and the balagan then
will make a full comeback to save the world.
×
The author welcomes any comments on this essay at carnivalagainstcapital@gmail.com
Friday, September 7, 2012
Panel discussion on Aloni’s What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 7:00pm Miller Theatre
Notes
This event is free and open to the public.
No tickets or registration necessary.
Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
Co-Sponsors
School of the Arts
Heyman Center for the Humanities
This panel discussion is part of the series,
"Theory-Art-Action: On Binationalism and Other Specters,"
co-sponsored by the School of the Arts and the Heyman Center for the
Humanities.
The topic for tonight's event will be Udi Aloni's newly
published book, What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters (CU
Press, 2011). The panel includes Udi Aloni, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek,
and Alisa Solomon; the moderator will be James Schamus.
Participants
Featured Speakers
Filmmaker
Associate Professor of Journalism
Columbia University
Rene Descartes Chair
European Graduate School
Cultural Critic and Professor of Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis
The European Graduate School
Moderator
Professor of Professional Practice
Columbia University
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Queen Elizabeth Hall, 24 November
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
Saturday 24 November 2012
After his sold out appearance in Royal Festival Hall in
2010, Slavoj Žižek returns to Southbank Centre to discuss 'The Year of Dreaming
Dangerously', his analysis of the riots and revolutions that swept the world
last year.
As part of our series on Modernism, Žižek discusses how
these events augur a new political reality - fragments of a utopian future
lying dormant in the present.
He considers the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street within
the rapidly shifting world order before taking questions from the audience.
'The thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual
vanguard.' (Observer)
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[…]
Irish Co-Production ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology’ Secures Doc & Film Distribution
Irish co-production ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology’ has
been picked up by French distribution company Doc & Film International in a
deal negotiated by Blinder Films’ Katie Holly and Doc & Films’ Daniela
Elstner.
The Paris-based sales house is expected to release the
documentary Europe-wide following its world premiere at this week’s Toronto
International Film Festival.
The documentary is a co-production between Dublin’s Blinder
Films and P Guide Productions in the UK. It is a sequel to director Sophie
Fiennes’ ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’, released in 2006.
‘The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology’ sees Slovenian philosopher
and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek explore different ideologies through the use of
classic film clips, using ‘A Clockwork Orange’, ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘The Sound of
Music’ as examples.
Fiennes directed, with Blinder’s Holly producing. James
Wilson, Martin Rosenbaum and Sophie Fiennes co-produced for P Guide
Productions. Žižek wrote the script and presented.
Speaking of the deal with Doc & Film, which previously
distributed Fiennes’ ‘Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow’, the director said:
“I’m thrilled to be working again with Daniela and the team at Doc & Film.
I really appreciate her continued commitment to the film and the audience for
it.”
The 134 minute-long film was shot mainly in Ardmore
Studios in Wicklow in 2011, before moving on to locations in LA. Dun
Laoghaire-based EMC Ltd looked after post-production, with Ardmore Sound
looking after sound.
The documentary was funded by the Irish Film Board, the BFI
Film Fund, Film 4, Channel 4 and Rooks Nest Entertainment.
‘The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology’ will screen at TIFF on
September 7, joining seven other Irish-attached productions, including
‘Byzantium’; ‘The Sapphires’; ‘Jump’; ‘Men at Lunch’; ‘Call Girl’; ‘Anna
Karenina’ and ‘Seven Psychopaths’.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012
“How to Read ŽIŽEK,” by Adam Kotsko
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia,
is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity
among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject
of a documentary film (called simply Žižek!), and surely counts as one of the
world’s most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When Žižek first broke into
the English-speaking academic scene, however, few would likely have predicted
such success. For one thing, his research focused on an unpromising topic: the
long-neglected field of “ideology critique,” a staple of Marxist cultural
criticism that had fallen into eclipse as Marxism became less central to
Western intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century.
“Ideology” is one of those philosophical terms that has
entered into everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as
“deconstruction” means little more than “detailed analysis” in popular usage,
so “ideology” tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with overtones of
inflexibility or fanaticism. But as Žižek argued in his 1989 book The
Sublime Object of Ideology, ideology is not to be found in our conscious
opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our everyday practices.
Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as symptoms to be interpreted
rather than statements to be taken at face value.
Racism, for example. Žižek recommends that we look for
symptomatic contradictions, as when the anti-Semite claims that the Jews are
both arch-capitalist exploiters and Bolshevik subversives, that they are
both excessively tied to their overly particular tradition and deracinated
cosmopolitans undercutting national traditions. In the Jim Crow South, blacks
were presented simultaneously as childlike innocents needing the guidance of
whites and as brutal sexual predators. In contemporary America,
Mexican immigrants are viewed at once as lay-abouts burdening our social
welfare system and as relentless workaholics who are stealing all our
jobs.
These contradictions don’t show that ideology is
“irrational” — the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too
many reasons supporting their views. Žižek argues that these piled-up
rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.
A similar sense that something else is going on always
strikes me when I read a review of Žižek’s work in the mainstream media. (A
recent example is John Gray’s review of two of Žižek’s books in the New
York Review of Books, to which Žižek has responded.) Now academics are always ill-used in the
mainstream press, particularly if they deal in abstract concepts and refer to a
lot of European philosophers. Yet there’s something special about the treatment
of Žižek. In what has become a kind of ritual, the reader of a review of
Žižek’s work always learns that Žižek is simultaneously hugely politically
dangerous and a clown with no political program whatsoever, that he
is an apologist for the worst excesses of twentieth-century Communism and a
total right-wing reactionary, both a world-famous left-wing intellectual and an
anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself.
The goal is not so much to give an account of Žižek’s
arguments and weigh their merits as to inoculate readers against Žižek’s ideas
so they feel comfortable dismissing them. To find left-wing thinkers and
movements simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and totalitarian,
overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power is to suggest: there is
no alternative. Rather than simply knocking around a poor, misunderstood
academic in the public square, it is an attempt to shut down debate on the
basic structure of our society. The rolling disaster of contemporary capitalism
— war, crisis, hyper-exploitation of workers, looming environmental catastrophe
— demands that we think boldly and creatively to develop some kind of livable
alternative. Žižek can help.
The biggest obstacle facing the reader of Žižek’s work is
not the academic trappings — the technical terms, the references to other
thinkers — but a writing style that defies convention. Broadly speaking, the
general expectation of argumentative writing is that it will lay out a more or
less straightforward chain of reasons supporting a clear central claim. Even
though we acknowledge that this format is almost never encountered in its pure
form, it still remains a kind of ideal. In Žižek’s writing, though, it’s difficult
to pick out anything like a “thesis statement,” and the argument most often
proceeds via intuitive leaps rather than tight chains of reasoning. This is
true even of pieces that are more or less totally non-academic, and it is
doubtless one of the reasons his work is so often misunderstood. One thing I
hope to show here, though, is that his method fits with his goals and with the
kinds of phenomena he is trying to get at. Although Žižek’s work can be
difficult to get into at first, he is one of the most engaging and
thought-provoking writers working in philosophy today, with a unique ability to
get people excited about philosophy and critical theory. He is, in short, a
gateway drug, and I’m the pusher.
I.
Already in this brief discussion of ideology, one of the
most consistent features of Žižek’s work shines through: his fascination with
contradictions and reversals. Žižek will frequently present what he views as a
commonly accepted belief, then turn around and ask, “But is not the exact
opposite the case?!” And then, as one continues reading, it often begins to
seem as though the forcefully asserted opposite view is not quite Žižek’s own;
it too gets called into question, with the surprising result that the first
naïve view begins to look somehow less naïve.
The initial reversal can sometimes look alarmingly like a
cheap, Christopher Hitchens-style contrarianism, particularly since Zizek’s
political writings often start with a mainstream liberal view and then assert
one that sounds much more right-wing. Yet the point is not simply to “provoke”
liberals or to play devil’s advocate. Rather, these reversals are part of a
strategy to keep the thought in motion. Instead of proposing a solution or
finding a resting place, Žižek relentlessly seeks out further conflicts and
contradictions, carrying out what Marx called “the ruthless criticism of
everything existing.” The goal is not to arrive at a settled view, but to
achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue, about what is really at
stake in a given debate.
And what is always at stake is a conflict, because for
Žižek, society is always riven with conflict and contradiction. That’s why
ideology produces mutually conflicting answers — it’s responding to an
underlying reality that is inherently contradictory, a struggle so deep and
irreconcilable that it can’t directly be put into words. Nothing is a complete
and harmonious whole, from quarks all the way up to the most abstract
philosophical ideal. Nothing is inherently stable, but only temporarily stabilized.
It’s not that there are first positions that then come into conflict — all our
positions amount to a kind of “fall-out” of our attempts to manage this
ultimately unmanageable conflict.
Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes
that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is
“class struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the
working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter into
some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of capitalism, which
is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” before capitalism, but the
working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their
labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development.
Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people
who sought to extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the
system, the system the conflict.
“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces
two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the difference
between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion,
it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot
come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone’s interests into
account. The “middle ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents
our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican
immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake
can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply
pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and
then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the
Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture,
because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is
inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs —
the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in
who they pay.
II.
The example of immigration demonstrates that conflict is
never truly eliminated, but can be shifted. The task of the critic is to shift
the conflict back to its proper place. Since straightforward argument
presupposes a shared frame of reference, it is not a suitable tool for carrying
out the kind of frame-shifting that Žižek is trying to achieve. More indirect
methods are necessary.
One of Žižek’s primary tactics for shifting the frame of
reference is overidentification. This strategy grows out of his experience
under the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Observing his country’s political
life, Žižek came to a paradoxical realization: the fact that no one “really”
bought into the official socialist ideology was not an obstacle for the rulers
— cynical distance was part of their strategy for maintaining control. In this
situation, Žižek proposed, the best way to resist was to take the ruling ideology
at its word, naïvely demanding that the leaders fulfill the promise of their
ideals.
The political situation in the contemporary West is not as
straightforward, but Žižek continues to carry out a version of this strategy of
overidentification in his political writings. His diagnosis of the basic
political situation is found in his 1993 book Tarrying With the Negative,
where he claims that mainstream liberal political leaders are fundamentally
complicit with right-wing nationalism, using it as a tool in their attempt to
maintain the capitalist status quo. On the one hand, right-wing outbursts and
movements serve as helpful distractions, diverting people’s energy away from
the real problem (people who might otherwise be rioting against bank bailouts are
demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate, or arguing that birthers are
crazy). On the other hand, they serve as an ever-present threat, as in the
demands for the Greek electorate to approve of the E.U.-I.M.F. program, lest
fascism overrun the land. One can see both sides of this dynamic in the
Democratic Party’s political strategy: on the one hand, they must continually
make unfortunate concessions to the political right out of a supposed
“realism,” but on the other hand, they present themselves as the only thing
standing between us and the unmitigated horror of a Tea Party government.
In this situation, where liberals are continually conceding
that the right wing is expressing “legitimate concerns,” Žižek says
essentially: yes, they are expressing legitimate concerns, but not the
ones they think they’re expressing. To return to the immigration example, Žižek
would proceed by agreeing that right-wing outbursts should be taken seriously —
not as signs of the need for a more homogeneous culture, or for preserving
American jobs, or for keeping foreigners from overwhelming the welfare state, but
as symptoms of the disruptive contradictions of capitalism. Similarly, when
liberals acknowledge that conservatives have a point about the need to preserve
“the European tradition” or “the Christian heritage,” Žižek agrees that they do
indeed have a point: we absolutely need to preserve the European tradition of
radical revolution and the Christian heritage of radical equality! He shifts
the conflict from one between liberals and conservatives to the one at the
heart of the cultural tradition itself.
This strategy of overidentification — which can be
summarized in the vertiginous formula, “Yes, of course I agree completely, but
aren’t you actually completely wrong?!” — may be difficult to follow, but it
produces jolting shifts that could not easily be produced any other way.
III.
In his more academic texts, Žižek rarely states his own view
directly, but routes it through the great thinkers of contradiction: above all,
the German Idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan — two thinkers who proceed through dialogue and whose own views
are notoriously difficult to decipher. This coupling of Lacan and Hegel is
absolutely crucial for him. In fact, in the introduction to his latest major
work, Less Than Nothing, he claims that for him and his close intellectual
comrades, “whatever we were doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel
through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon.” Other thinkers
are also extremely important to him — most notably Marx, another great thinker
of contradiction who worked primarily in the mode of critique — but none so
much as these two.
Yet it should be emphasized that this combination is in many
ways counterintuitive, if only because Lacan is himself very distrustful of
Hegel’s philosophy, and most so in the very works that are central for Žižek.
This is far from the only example of a counterintuitive pairing in Žižek’s work
— one of his earliest books is entitled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, dedicated to explaining Lacan’s
psychoanalytic concepts through Hitchcock’s films. Similarly, he can pair Kant
with Blade Runner or Schelling with Lassie Come Home. He can
explain Hegel by means of an obscene joke, and he can end a book on the
subversive potential of Christianity with a meditation on a cheap candy with a
toy in the middle (the “Kinder Egg”). He calls these “short-circuits,”
unexpected pairings that produce striking insights.
The goal is not to show how the two fields are “actually”
connected in a previously unseen way. “The reader should not simply have
learned something new,” he says. “The point is, rather, to make him or her
aware of another — disturbing — side of something he or she knew all the time.”
The same could be said of Žižek’s work as a whole: the point isn’t so much to
learn about a topic as to be jolted into a new (and yes, disturbing)
perspective on the familiar.
IV.
Like Marx’s, Žižek’s “ruthless critique of everything
existing” doesn’t critique “both sides” in a conflict equally. Contradictions
are always asymmetrical. In the conflict between the capitalists and the
workers, for example, it isn’t a matter of two different, equally limited
viewpoints. In the ultimate short-circuit, the particular position of the
workers represents the “truth” of the entire situation — the worker embodies the
contradiction of capitalism. Similarly, the relationship between men and women
in our male-dominated society cannot be accounted for in terms of stable
complementary roles for the two sexes — in another short-circuit, the woman’s
position directly reveals the central contradiction around which the entire
society is structured.
In short, for Žižek, one must take sides in order
to have access to the truth. Truth is not “universal” in the traditional sense
of applying equally in every situation — each situation has its own truth. In Less
Than Nothing, Žižek explains this dynamic in terms of the relationship between
the universal and the particular, a topic that has bedeviled philosophers for
centuries. Whereas we might normally view a “universal” as an unattainable
ideal like justice or democracy that we must always strive to approximate in
our particular circumstances, Žižek takes the opposite view: particular
societies aren’t inadequate compared to the universal, but rather the very idea
of the universal arises out of the inherent inadequacies of every particular
system. In other words, the truly universal dimension is not the noble ideal,
but the complaint — what unites us is not our devotion to high ideals and deep
human values, but the fact that the world sucks, everywhere.
Žižek does not hold out the utopian hope of eliminating all
conflict — in fact, he believes our supposedly “post-ideological” era is
blinded by the truly utopian hope that all genuine conflicts might be resolved,
allowing the system of liberal-democratic capitalism to go on more or less
forever. What Žižek hopes for, in tracking down the contradiction at the heart
of our society and identifying with the class that embodies it, is not that the
world will no longer suck, but that it will no longer suck in this
particular way, that we will no longer be stuck in this particular vicious
cycle, that we can somehow find a way to stop frantically grasping at
rationalizations for our self-destructive fixations and do something else — in
short, to jolt us into the realization that there is an alternative.