Words: Jack Brindelli
Speaking frankly, as is his
custom, Slavoj Žižek said in a 2011 Guardian interview, “most of the left hates
me even though I am supposed to be one of the world’s leading communist
intellectuals.” Two years on, with the DVD release of The Pervert’s Guide
to Ideology, the shape of the British left might be changing (the SWP who
fiercely criticised him for his words on an old Russian proverb regarding the
horrors of rape, have effectively collapsed because of their actions regarding
rape accusations in their own party) but the collective disdain remains. And
whilst of course, we should always be willing to have conversations with even
the loftiest of figures when they take problematic lines on any subject, there
is something opportunistic about the way the orthodox left have approached this
in writing off Žižek and his methods entirely.
In his previous screen
outing, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek looked at the
implications of Chaplin’s Great Dictator on anti-fascism, utilised
the Marx brothers to explain Freudian theory, and usedThe Matrix to
illustrate how illusion and reality may often be inextricably linked. If it is
possible to believe, his latest project is even grander. This time, Žižek turns
his unique brand of philosophy and theatrical panache on deconstructing ‘common
sense’ ideas and exposing them as constructs of capitalist ideology.
From sitting aboard a plane
bound for Nazi Germany in a Riefenstahl propaganda piece, to staging his own
icy death in Titanic, the Slovenian radical makes his sequel engaging
and often hilarious. He examines everything from the London riots to Rammstein
gigs, in order to show how ideology shapes our world, and how it might be
challenged. By looking into the assumptions and contradictions of widely known
and loved culture, he not only flags up “the dictatorship in liberal
democracy”, but creates an accessible framework for doing so – so that people
who didn’t come out of the womb clutching a copy of Kapital might even find it
interesting!
So why does the man remain
so polarising to the left? Observing the widespread snobbery directed at
Russell Brand after his now infamous Paxman interview, it is perhaps easy to
work out why the left’s hostility toward Žižek persists. It seems for a broad
swathe of the left’s hierarchy, socialism, the ideology of the ordinary people,
is conversely not something that should be easily accessible. It’s a position
you should arrive at after intense study of voluminous texts and hyper verbose,
po-faced lecturing. So when somebody cracks jokes whilst arguing for radical
change, or when somebody uses film and popular culture to explain Marxism to
the masses, they are often charged with a “lack of genuine analysis” and with
trivialising the almost sacred institution of dusty academia.
But this is precisely what
makes Žižek so compelling to watch – and so important as a philosopher. He has
a fantastic grasp of Lacanian jargon, well-honed anti-capitalist rhetoric and
all the fashion sense of a blind, inebriate Oxbridge Professor. And yet, he
doesn’t play it safe, consigning himself to some buttoned down monastery like
so many other leftist thinkers. On the contrary, he continuously enters realms
of mass culture to interface with millions of people, many of whom may totally
disagree.
His work often delves into
areas considered too vulgar for other Marxist academics to dirty their hands
with. The established left commonly write these subjects off as “bourgeois
distraction” at the best of times, preferring instead the safety of the academic
enclave, or engage with them as a token gesture at worst, with ‘working man
speak’ in their papers mirroring the Mockney of Chas and Dave. Yet cinema,
sport, music, comedy, these contain ample opportunities to challenge the
economic system that is the base of these aspects of civil society – and to do
so on a level millions of people can relate to.
What Žižek shows us, is that
things like cinema do embody many ideological myths that we are
brought up within capitalism thinking to be natural occurrences, to be
‘reality’. Obviously it is not enough to simply point to the fallacies before
you expect revolution. However, lefties the world over should be engaging with
and analysing mass entertainment rather than avoiding it! Because when they do,
it becomes a tool to show these constructs for what they are – no more natural
than the fictions flickering across a screen. From there, anything can be
challenged.
