Friday, December 29, 2017
Žižek at the 'European Angst' conference Goethe Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd6NZ05_QDQ
Sign a contract before sex? Political correctness could destroy passion
In the West, at least, everyone has become massively aware
of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations.
However, we should bear in mind also the (no less
significant) fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt and play the
game of seduction, with the clear aim of finding a partner for making love. The
result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an
active role in this game.
When women dress provocatively to attract the male gaze or
when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it
offering themselves as passive objects: instead they are the active agents of
their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including
reserving the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the
male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous “signals.”
This freedom women enjoy bothers all kinds of
fundamentalists, from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and
playing with bananas and other fruit which resembles the penis to our own
ordinary male chauvinist who explodes in violence against a woman who
first “provokes” him and then rejects his advances.
Female sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal
from being “objectivized” (as a sexual object for men) but the right
to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at
will. But will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts, or will the
politically-correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some
formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?
New thinking
A recent, politically-correct idea is the so-called “Consent
Conscious Kit,” currently on sale in the US: a small bag with a condom, a
pen, some breath mints, and a simple contract stating that both participants
freely consent to a shared sexual act. The suggestion is that a couple ready to
have sex either takes a photo holding in their hands the contract, or that they
both date and sign it.
Yet, although the “Consent Conscious Kit” addresses
a very real problem, it does it in a way which is not only silly but directly
counter-productive – and why is that?
The underlying idea is how a sex act, if it to be cleansed
of any suspicion of coercion, has to be declared, in advance, as a freely-made
conscious decision of both participants – to put it in Lacanian terms, it has
to be registered by the big Other, and inscribed into the symbolic order.
As such, the “Consent Conscious Kit” is just an
extreme expression of an attitude that grows all around the US – for example,
the state of California passed a law requiring all colleges that accept state
funding to adopt policies requiring their students to obtain affirmative
consent — which it defines as “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary
agreement to engage in sexual activity” that is “ongoing” and
not given when too drunk, before engaging in sexual activity, or else risk
punishment for sexual assault.
Bigger picture
“Affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” – by
whom? The first thing to do here is to mobilize the Freudian triad of Ego,
Superego, and Id (in a simplified version: my conscious self-awareness, the
agency of moral responsibility enforcing norms on me, and my deepest
half-disavowed passions).
What if there is a conflict between the three? If, under
the pressure of the Superego, my Ego say NO, but my Id resists and clings to
the denied desire? Or (a much more interesting case) the opposite: I say YES to
the sexual invitation, surrendering to my Id passion, but in the midst of
performing the act, my Superego triggers an unbearable guilt feeling?
Thus, to bring things to the absurd, should the contract be
signed by the Ego, Superego, and Id of each party, so that it is valid only if
all three say YES? Plus, what if the male partner also uses his contractual
right to step back and cancel the agreement at any moment in the sexual
activity? Imagine that, after obtaining the woman’s consent, when the
prospective lovers find themselves naked in bed, some tiny bodily detail (an
unpleasant sound like a vulgar belching) dispels the erotic charm and makes the
man withdraw? Is this not in itself an extreme humiliation for the woman?
The ideology that sustains this promotion of “sexual
respect” deserves a closer look. The basic formula is: “Yes means
yes!” – it has to be an explicit yes, not just the absence of a no. “No
no” does not automatically amount to a “yes”: because if a woman who is
being seduced does not actively resist it, this still leaves the space open for
different forms of coercion.
Mood killer
Here, however, problems multiply: what if a woman
passionately desires it but is too embarrassed to openly declare it? What if,
for both partners, ironically playing coercion is part of the erotic game? And
a yes to what, precisely, to what types of sexual activity, is a declared yes?
Should then the contract form be more detailed, so that the principal consent
is specified: a yes to vaginal but not anal intercourse, a yes to fellatio but not
swallowing the sperm, a yes to light spanking but not harsh blows, etc.etc.
One can easily imagine a long bureaucratic negotiation,
which can kill all desire for the act, but it can also get libidinally invested
on its own. These problems are far from secondary, they concern the very core
of erotic interplay from which one cannot withdraw into a neutral position and
declare one's readiness (or unreadiness) to do it: every such act is part of
the interplay and either de-eroticizes the situation or gets eroticized on its
own.
The “yes means yes’ sexual rule is an exemplary
case of the narcissistic notion of subjectivity that predominates today. A
subject is experienced as something vulnerable, something that has to be
protected by a complex set of rules, warned in advance about all possible
intrusions that may disturb him/her.
Remember how, upon its release, ET was prohibited in
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: because it’s non-sympathetic portrayal of adults
was considered dangerous for relations between children and their parents. (An
ingenious detail confirms this accusation: in the first 10 minutes of the film,
all adults are seen only below their belts, like the adults in cartoons who
threaten Tom and Jerry…)
From today’s perspective, we can see this prohibition as an
early sign of the politically-correct obsession with protecting individuals
from any experience that may hurt them in any way. And the list can go on
indefinitely – recall the proposal to digitally delete smoking from Hollywood
classics…
Yes, sex is traversed by power games, violent obscenities,
etc., but the difficult thing to admit is that it’s inherent to it. Some
perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relation
that fully meets the politically correct criteria would have been a contract
drawn between sadomasochist partners.
Thus, the rise of Political Correctness and the rise of
violence are two sides of the same coin: insofar as the basic premise of
Political Correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual
consent. And the French linguist Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how
the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which
stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a
collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing).
In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of
the contract negates itself: and slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of
freedom. It is as if Jacques Lacan’s motif “Kant with Sade” (Marquis
de Sade’s brutal hedonism as the truth of Kant’s rigorous ethics) becomes
reality in an unexpected way. But, before we dismiss this motif as just a
provocative paradox, we should reflect upon how this paradox is at work in our
social reality itself.
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior
researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and
international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the
University of London.
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Instant preplay of the Amazon bidding war
Some of the city officials who
have been most shameless in their spending on stadiums are now groveling to
attract Amazon, writes TheNation.com columnist Dave Zirin.
November 30, 2017
Comment: Dave Zirin
November 30, 2017
THE TERRIFIC podcast Citations
Needed, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, call it
"lotteryism"--the grotesque process where local and state governments
bid for Fortune 500 companies by offering billions of dollars in tax breaks in
the hopes that they will relocate to their cities. The most high-profile
example of this right now is, of course, Amazon. Politicians across the country
are offering absurd packages to attract the new "Amazon HQ2"
headquarters. These enticements will gut services for those who depend on
public schools, hospitals, public transportation and basic infrastructure. This
is not to say that Amazon won't bring jobs to these cities. It is making
promises of thousands of permanent hires. But the pound of flesh being offered
for these jobs is frightening.
Chicago has said Amazon could
keep local income taxes levied on the company's employees, a
total estimated at $1.32 billion, according to the Seattle publication The
Stranger. New Jersey has offered a
staggering $7 billion in tax breaks. Boston has offered to have city
employees be privatized workers when doing work under the auspices of Jeff
Bezos' empire: his own army of the underclass. Southern California is offering
$100 million in free land. Fresno
is offering to "place 85 percent of every tax dollar generated by
Amazon into a so-called 'Amazon Community Fund.'"
This would give Amazon control
over where our taxes flow, which undoubtedly would be in the direction of its
own well-compensated employees--think parks, bike lanes, condo development--creating
a new model of gentrification, directly subsidized by traffic tickets, parking
meters and regressive taxation of the poor.
Fresno's economic development
director Larry Westerlund told
the Los Angeles Times, "Rather than the money disappearing into a
civic black hole, Amazon would have a say on where it will go. Not for the fire
department on the fringe of town, but to enhance their own investment in
Fresno." Sure would suck to have your home on fire if you live on the
"fringe of town."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
THIS IS little more than
corporate theft, in collusion with often Democratic Party-led governments. And
publicly funded sports stadium scams and Olympic bidding wars laid the
groundwork for it. They have normalized the idea that our tax dollars exist to
fund the projects of the wealthy, with benefits trickling down in ways that
only produce more thirst.
Chris Heller wrote
a terrifically detailed report for the Pacific Standard about stadium
funding in which he estimated, "Over the past 15 years, more than $12
billion in public money has been spent on privately owned stadiums. Between
1991 and 2010, 101
new stadiums were opened across the country; nearly all those projects were
funded by taxpayers."
As Neil DeMause, author of Field
of Schemes said to me, "More recent corporate leaders have no doubt looked
to the billions of dollars lavished on sports teams and decided to up their
ante."
You can see this in the cities
that have offered the most gobsmacking giveaways to Amazon. Chicago is
still paying off renovations to the White Sox Cellular Field, more than 25
years after it opened, as well as the Chicago Bears' home of Soldier Field.
According to the Chicago Tribune, "Nearly $430 million in debt related to
renovations at the ballpark and a major overhaul of Soldier Field, including
$36 million in payments owed this year."
Then there is Southern
California, where San Diego voters rejected pouring over a billion dollars into
a new NFL stadium for the Chargers. Los Angeles then took the team and is
paying $60 million to pay for roads and "infrastructure" for a
new facility that was supposed to be privately funded. Los Angeles has also
pledged $5.3 billion to host the 2028 Olympics, a number, to judge by past
Olympics, that will balloon. It is doing so despite having the
highest number of chronically homeless people in the U.S. and, according to
the U.S. Census, more people living in poverty than any other major U.S. city.
It is also telling that Sacramento, the state capital, is where $272
million is being paid in taxes for the NBA Sacramento Kings' new facility.
If the Kings leave before the 35-year lease is up, that debt will still need to
be paid, just as the people of Oakland will be paying for the Raiders' stadium
for years after the team moves to Las Vegas.
Then there is Boston, which
tried to ram through its own multibillion-dollar bid for the Olympic Games.
Even though its bid was beaten back by activists, the heavy-handed efforts by
politicians to sell this to the public has normalized the playing field upon
which cities compete against one another. They don't compete to see who has the
lowest poverty rate or the fewest people behind bars. They compete for businesses
and the affection of 21st-century plutocrats, who promise prosperity yet
deliver it only for themselves, newly arriving executives, and whatever
politicians might be greased in the process. Our love of sports laid the
groundwork for the madness of "lotteryism." We're the frog in the
slowly boiling water. And they are not content merely to cook us. We're also
their dinner.
First published at TheNation.com.
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