Looks like it’s Zizek all the way these days: Apocalyptic Times.

There’s a variety of reactions to Zizek’s appearance on HardTalk. Some are interesting, some are silly. I was particularly disappointed by comments like this:

It is sometimes too easy for us to think that Zizek was misunderstood or stitched up but we are still presented with a very real problem: if Zizek cannot get across his views in an interview like this what chance do his views have in their potential to make change? Precisely who is Zizek for? And by feeding into increasingly obtuse readings do we not simply make ourselves obsolete from the political scene? This is where I see a kind of reverse disavowal: we too are opting out creating a ‘faux-communism’ whose definition has become, and I’m being honest here, pretty damn obscure.

Sorry, Paul, but this is very likely the most ridiculous comment in the history of commenting – one might not agree with Zizek, but to say that he is in any way obtuse or cannot get his views across in the form of sound bites is to reveal an amazing ignorance of all things Zizek. Plus, the idea that only simple and presentable views can “make change” is just odd – there go Hegel and Marx, apparently their utter inability to be presentable doomed them to obscurity…

Slavoj Žižek’s lecture at the RSA last night was entitled ‘Against Charity’, taking a closer look at philanthropic tendencies and neoliberalism to coincide with the launch of his latest book  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. The full mp3 audio file will be available shortly on the RSA website here.

In the meantime, listen to Žižek’s response to the question ‘What is Philosophy?’ posed by the chair Nigel Warburton, philosopher and producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast series.

Slavoj Žižek’s sold out talk the Myth of Natural Balance at the ICA on Monday 23 November focussed on one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse examined in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – the threat of ecological catastrophe. James Burgess reports for the New Statesman:

Žižek warned of the dangers of “naturalising” nature, positing the natural world as some utopia to which we can return inbalanced harmony. Nature, he says, is itself is not a balanced system, insofar as it is a set of contingent systems adapting to survive amidst various catastrophes and changing circumstances. That is not to say that we should disregard the dangers of climate change. On the contrary, despite the fact that the current global climate crisis has been caused by the structure of the particular economic system of one subset of one species, the crisis has the potential to affect the very basis of life on earth for the majority of species. Humans have become, for the first time, a geological force capable of changing the global temperatures that sustain life on Earth…

Žižek insists that we cannot look on the bright side of climate change for new opportunities to adapt. He argues that we must resist the normalisation of climate change, whereby what is first experienced as impossible and unthinkable becomes real and is accepted as part of every day life (for example, the re-emergence of the far right in mainstream politics, or the normalisation of torture in Guantanamo). In the case of the environment, damaging consequences of climate change have first been denied by governments and businesses, then accepted as part of business as usual…

As such, Žižek offers great insight to the those on the left who may feel dismayed at the co-opting of the environmental agenda by diverse conservative political (and corporate) forces. Žižek rightly identifies the global economic capitalist framework as responsible for both the financial and the climate crises, and poses a choice: we can put aside political differences to attempt to tackle impending climatic doom (with the inevitable resurgence of capitalist crisis under business as usual), or we can face the driving force of the crisis head on.

Read the full article here.

Video | Info

For those of you who think that Stephen Sackur is a really bad interviewer, see BBCs ‘Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution’ and compare the portrayal of Žižek there to this video..

See also:
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Alain Badiou – BBC HARDtalk

It’s here for 7 days, but you have to be in a certain area to watch it online. I’m sure there’s a YouTube video somewhere out there. Whoever the guy interviewing Zizek is kind of annoyingly interruptive, but Zizek needs that sort of person, otherwise he will talk forever.

I mean the interviewer’s obvious bias is quite clear – “you call yourself a Communist, but Communism sucks!” – plus in the end he ends up talking too much (at least for a Zizek-type encounter), so it’s kind of stupid, but it’s a Zizek-sighting so I must post about it.

Slavoj Žižek speaks about the ideas in his latest book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce with Stephen Sackur:

Talk:

Thanks to René from backdoorbroadcasting.net for providing the link.

Editor’s Note: This is part III in a series  of posts on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.  For part I of the series, scroll down or click here.  For part II, scroll down or click here.  As mentioned before the first post: I reveal many plot points from these films, so please watch them before reading.

In my previous posts on Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I touched upon some of the ways in which these films exploit the uncanny feelings we experience in relation to our own bodies, as well as how these films may have a comment on the ways in which contemporary power structures terrorize and appropriate the female body.   In this continuation of the larger discussion on Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I am interested in investigating how these films might also be mining some horror from the inherently uncomfortable disconnect we all have between our minds and our bodies.

In support of this notion, I will posit that the eeriest things in life are not often the things prowling around outside your home at night, nor are they the things coming down from outer space to apprehend unsuspecting sleepers, and certainly they are not pitchfork-wielding goblins reveling in a fiery orgy of sin below the earth.  On the contrary, the eeriest things in life often originate within the confines of our own skulls.  Throughout our history, we humans have made a habit of projecting the weird things going on in our own psyches outwardly, thereby attributing anomalous or unsavory behavior or phenomena to demons, witches and the like.  For instance, Mary Beth Norton makes a compelling argument in her 2002 book In the Devil’s Snare, that the Salem Witch Trials toward the end of the 17^th Century can be largely attributed to the anxieties and other psychological ramifications of frontier life, and specifically the fear of Native American attacks on European settlements.  The dark-skinned men lurking in the unfamiliar forests, along with the constant bloodshed that was inherent to that time and place, created a fear that was coupled with an already-present collective belief in witches, demons and unknown evils lurking in the shadows.  While these settlers did have actual danger prowling outside their homes, they were not aware that the reach of Native American influence reached through the walls of their homes into their minds, leading to irrational behavior and decision-making.  Those weren’t demons in the woods, those were people tired of being slaughtered and otherwise molested by strangely-dressed white people.

The point is that our own minds are the source of our greatest terrors.  And historically, as with the Salem Witch Trials example above, it has been  much easier to explain away the most uncomfortable or undesirable aspects of our lives with a little bit of supernatural belief and magical thinking.  The most powerful of these supernatural belief systems are the monotheistic religions which, although they are very much thriving to this day, are much more difficult to accept absolutely than they were, say, 500 years ago.  Magical thinking was a pat way to explain away events and circumstances that otherwise were baffling or anxiety-provoking.  With scientific knowledge skyrocketing in the latter half of the 19^th Century and through the 20^th Century, it became much more difficult to blame everything on witches, angels, demons and god(s).  In this vein, both Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist share a subtheme of religious faith and the loss thereof.  Father Karras, the central priest character in The Exorcist (although not the “Exorcist” referred to in the title), is wrestling with his own loss of faith.  Father Karras resides in a slummy area of Washington DC, with poverty and squalor constituting his day-to-day world and, along with this, he shares his small apartment with this ailing mother, who eventually is forced to move into a mental institution brimming with the psychologically anomalous.  Karras finds it difficult to rectify these realities with his Catholic beliefs and the demon possessing Regan exploits this fact.  In Rosemary’s Baby, one scene has the camera conspicuously linger on the April 8^th, 1966 cover of Time magazine.  The cover simply features the question “Is God Dead?” in bold red letters over a black background.  This was an actual cover of Time that was attached to an article that stated that the age of religion was essentially out the door.  Rosemary herself, when asked by Roman if she is religious, states, “I was brought up Catholic, but now I don’t know”.

Both films take as their setting a 20^th Century backdrop that is turning more toward medical, scientific and psychological knowledge to assist with problems of the body and mind instead of relying upon supernatural paradigms.  Until recent modern history, many of us have told ourselves stories about the ethereal soul and its dominion over the base, corrupted body.  The soul is said to be made of otherworldly material that is unfortunately tainted by the fleshy, gooey spaceship that it must possess in order to traverse through our inherently dirty world.  If one begins to accept the idea that we – every part of us – are of this world and then supplants the soul idea with this way of thinking, then the means by which one thinks of oneself and the world becomes dramatically altered.  This paradigmatic shift would be seismically uncomfortable, and it is my contention that Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist place themselves firmly in the fault line created from just such a shift.

In his wonderfully entertaining 2007 film The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, Slavoj Zizek shares some of his thoughts on modern cinema from a philosophical perspective that is rooted in the ideas of famed French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan.  In his film, Zizek pontificates on Ridley Scott’s Alien and claims that this film derives its power, particularly regarding the iconic scene in which an alien baby hatches from the stomach of its human host, from the idea that humans are essentially alien intelligences with a human body as a host.  We humans are uncomfortable in our own skins because of a fundamental disconnect; we tolerate our bodies, but we must also misrecognize our bodies as something different from ourselves in order to get by.  This disconnect is much easier to handle when one has, for instance, the Christian notion of the soul which advises comfortingly that there is no need to worry, that it’s right to fear your body, and that it’s really okay that you will die someday, for everything will be taken care of because your personality is actually not of this world to begin with.  For psychoanalysis as well as for Christianity, we are essentially ghosts inside a machine, or aliens inside of spaceships.  Christianity tells us that our alien souls will someday rejoin the Mothership (Fathership?)  in the sky, whereas psychoanalysis offers no such happy ending.  For psychoanalysis, life is weird and then you die.

Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist generate some wonderful creepiness by interjecting antiquated notions of Soul/Body and Good/Evil into a modern, scientifically-advanced setting.  One can have every priest and psychologist on call, but life will never cease to be strange.  It’s unfortunate that this basic concept is lost on many contemporary horror filmmakers.  These filmmakers spend too much time on computer graphics and convoluted story lines and not enough time looking into the mirror and contemplating the stranger staring back.

Note: I’m thinking there’s one more post on these two films on the way.  I’m thinking the next post will be about domestic spaces and antagonistic furniture in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

 Video Clip

Can someone get me the full video?

Radical Politics

RADICAL THINKERS AUDIO

 

AUDIO NOW AVAILABLE FROM THE OCT 23 NEW SCHOOL EVENT:

Judith Butler, Simon Critchley and Jacques Rancière

On the importance of critical theory to social movements today

Radical Thinkers

To celebrate the release of a new set of titles in the acclaimed Radical Thinkers series, as well as publication of their own key texts, three of Verso’s most respected and influential writers met October 23 in New York to discuss the future of radical thought.

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE TALK HERE:  http://versobooks.com/verso_info/butler-critchley-ranciere.shtml

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

It was a morning dog walk much like every other morning dog walk, though Leeloo, Otto and I stepped out onto the porch to find conditions on the damp side.  Light rain and overcast skies set a rather melancholy tone for our 6:15 a.m. journey around Sonoma Plaza, a change from the previous morning’s clear and frosty weather.  As a rule, the dogs prefer the feel of crunchy frozen grass under paw, but are not impartial to piles of soggy leaves, provided they’re gathered sufficiently high to facilitate vigorous redistribution via aggressive hind leg action.

Going against common wisdom, I tend to actively pursue cognitive dissonance in my life, above and beyond the ample supply heaped upon us by everyday existence.  And so it was last night when, following the conclusion of Sherlock Holmes’ “The Last Vampyre” (1993, Jeremy Brett, Edward Hardwicke), I retired to bed to catch up on some reading.  To supplement the online course materials for my MBA class on Research Methods, I find myself slogging through Marketing Research (McDaniel and Gates, 2007) and Multivariate Data Analysis:  With Readings (Hair, et al., 1995), neither of which are quite the page-turners that I find Alan Furst’s novels of Eastern European espionage and political intrigue in WWII to be.

After a dozen or so pages on programmatic, selective, and evaluative research, it was time for a stiff shot of cogdiff so I reached for my copy of Revolution at the Gates:  Žižek on Lenin – The 1917 Writings and thumbed through the remainder of Lenin’s second “Letter from Afar” (March 22, 1917), written from Zurich to his revolutionary colleagues back in Russia on the topic of the provisional revolutionary government and the proletariat.

Now, of course, there’s more than enough cognitive dissonance to go around here.  The transition from learning how to sell more stuff to consumers to understanding why the provisional revolutionary government’s efforts to reach compromise with the Tsarist supporters of Nicholas II, in order to protect the interest of Russian land owners, the bourgeoisie, Western European investors, and war profiteers, could only be accomplished at the expense of workers’ and peasants’ freedom and economic well-being, is not exactly an effortless one to make.

Yet it is precisely by juxtaposing contemporary marketing practices against Bolshevik political discourse that we are forced to look at the two things in a different light than we would ordinarily do.  And this is setting aside what is probably the more dissonant experience of even reading Lenin’s writings at all, in this post-Communist / post-revolutionary age.  For isn’t it commonly received wisdom that Lenin is one of the arch-villains of history, the father of the original “Evil Empire” that was ultimately vanquished by the triumphant forces of capitalism and democracy, but only after the suffering and death of millions of innocents?  What could possibly be learned from reading anything Lenin ever wrote?  Indeed…

In fact, what is striking about Lenin’s letters – as Slavoj Žižek points out in his forward to the collection – is his intuitive grasp of the revolutionary conditions of possibility which emerged as a result of the incipient failure of the initial revolt against tsarist rule in 1917 (itself a continuation of the failure of the 1905 uprising).   As Lenin observed, most commentators surveying the events of early 1917 interpreted the situation as portending either the gradual transition from autocratic monarchy to constitutional liberal democracy (should the revolution succeed) or the restoration of monarchical power, albeit with some provisions for limited democratic expression (should the revolution fail).  Lenin, on the other hand, understood that conditions were unfolding under which the power of a unified coalition of workers and peasants – a coalition which did not yet exist but would have to be forged by the Bolshevik Party and it’s allies – could sweep away both the tsarists and the parties of established wealth and privilege, and the lay the foundation for a truly transformational society.

Well, we all know how that turned out.  And yet, at 6:30 a.m. on a damp and foggy morning, it’s hard (for me) not to reflect on current conditions, here at the “end of history”.  We’re being told by our leaders that threatened economic collapse has been avoided and that we are slowly on the road to recovery, despite ample evidence all around us that the situation remains dire and the underlying systemic causes of the melt-down remain unaddressed.

Meanwhile, as the dogs stopped to inspect what to my untrained nose was yet another indistinguishable patch of grass, I noticed someone, warmly bundled against the chill, standing in the shadows by the duck pond, distributing bread crumbs to several large ducks.  Once upon a time, chickens and ducks roamed Sonoma Plaza freely, and a pond had been constructed to provide suitable “natural” habitat for the migratory ducks and geese who dropped in for seasonal visits.  Like many good deeds, this one had unintended consequences, as the feathered visitors flocked to enjoy the new amenities, and warm-hearted residents were more than happy to provide snacks.  Eventually the chickens were banished from the Plaza, in 1999, allegedly out of concern for their own safety.  The ducks, who were reconsidering their migratory status and contemplating a more settled lifestyle, were periodically “culled” – an interesting euphemism – in order to keep their numbers under control.

My overactive imagination wondered whether this scene wasn’t ripe for some kind of critical analogy about homelessness, illegal immigration, bleeding heart liberalism, welfare, or any number of political hot button issues bombarding us these days.  I confess to actually looking around to see if there might be someone of a different ideological persuasion lurking in a car, hammering away furiously on a laptop his or her latest inflammatory outburst of righteous indignation.  I didn’t see anyone though, so the dogs and I proceeded around to the other side of the Plaza.

My take away from the metaphorically-overdetermined bird feeding scene is that there’s nothing easier than building simple analogies from complex assortments of facts.  Feeding migratory birds apparently reduces their inclination to migrate and renders them dependent on the kindness of strangers to subsist through the months of inclement weather.  Better to let them fly away south for the winter, to warmer environs.  Thanks for the visit, see you next spring.  And so too migrant farm workers and homeless people, n’est-ce pas?  When I lived in Santa Barbara, free bus tickets to Long Beach were used to promote the orderly process of seasonal migration.

The morning walk was almost done, as we prepared to cross the street to where the Subaru was parked in front of the Ledson Hotel.  I noticed how the view down First Street East of the old First Baptist Church, built in the late 19th century, was partly obscured by the telephone poles arrayed like fence posts from one corner to the next.  It occurred to me that when electricity and telephones were first introduced, the presence of these poles and wires must have been experienced as signs of modernity and progress – of the spread of civilisation and all its conveniences.  Of course, there were no doubt Luddites who bemoaned the passing of an earlier age, but the benefits of these new technologies far outweighed romantic nostalgia or aesthetic considerations.   But in 2009, I’m struck by how unsightly these things are, and how they’ve lost whatever earlier sense of the new and modern they might have conveyed.  The fact that the more affluent parts of town have removed all external traces of these things – save for the occasional gray fiberglass “rock” signifying the location of an access point to underground utility cabling – speaks volumes to where we are today.

With the dogs snug in the back of the car, we concluded our walk and drove home, to reflect on the things we’d seen this morning and to eat some kibble.

This is a reply to comment by Mr. Alex Reynolds in a previous blog entry explaining my position as a fan of the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The introduction to the said blog entry was, of course, something of a joke, a play on the postmodernist commonplace of how no narrative can be privileged to explain the complexity of life and history anymore. Thus the juxtaposition of Žižek’s cultural theory and Maria Ozawa’s pornographic videography. Consequently, an excess meaning can be traced in the demonstration of how in this era of late capitalism what has been described as the condition of postmodernity inaugurates a multiplicity of (and often contradictory) identities.

Coming from a university with a culture of student activism, I join immersions in impoverished communities, protest actions on various issues, and espouse a “nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented culture” in the Maoist mold. But then as a student of Literature in the Humanities Department, I study The Illiad, Oedipus Rex and other artifacts of Western “high culture” in the classroom. But then I also keep myself updated on the latest Korean pop songs from my classmates and friends and listen to these songs while reading on Said or the latest by Žižek in the dormitory. And in facebook, I got hit for watching the latest Harry Potter without reading the book version first.

Seriously though, I don’t think it would be fruitful to dismiss Derrida, Lacan, Žižek, and much of Post-Saussurean theory on the premise that the language these theorists use in expounding their texts lack clarity. The aim of their theoretical projects is precisely to demonstrate that what we perceive as “natural,” “obvious,” and “commonsensical” are ideologically constructed. Common sense, as Catherine Belsey notes in her book Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), is “rooted in a specific historical situation and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation”[1] and is thus “produced in a specific society by ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience.”[2] And since “Common sense appears obvious because it is inscribed in the language we speak,”[3] a critique of ideology necessitates a reappraisal of the concept of language as “merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmit messages to each other about an independently constituted world of things… transparency of language is an illusion.”[4] Belsey explains:

Partly as a consequence of this theory, the language used by its practitioners is usually far from transparent. The effect of this is to alert the reader to the opacity of language, and to avoid the “tyranny of lucidity,” the impression that what is being said must be true because it is obvious, clear and familiar… New concepts, new theories, necessitate new, unfamiliar and therefore intially difficult discourses. [5]

As Adorno and Horkheimer already pointed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): “False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the devices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labor of conceptualization.” [6] Of course, there is a proper place for everything. I don’t use Lacanese when writing for the student paper or speak in Derridean aporias to my classmates. Anyhow, my position vis-a-vis Žižek is perhaps better captured by Filipino literary critic and poet Edel E. Garcellano:

It is not surprising that Žižek would find resonance in the heart of young scholars: The Elvis Presley of philo is a veritable compendium of film, music, philo & lit giants that are intertwined in a new light: this bestiary that would dazzle the Socratic flaneurs in MTV mix. At this point of historical flux when Marxism is a god that failed & the future isn’t even privy to Benjamin’s angel, anyone who emerges from the ruins of despair would find Žižek a comforting figure that survived the first wave of socialism but wouldn’t denounce it, assaying also as unacceptable the triumphalistic chest beating of capitalism. Which exactly fills the bill for a generation of Filipino activists who devours Žižek as a feast of texts: he represents a positive despair in view of the promise yet unfulfilled by the revolutionists of the ’70s, its deflection in the ’80s, & the subsequent rectification in the past decades to keep their hopes alive.[7]

As I’ve pointed out before, I do have reservations about Žižek. But it has nothing to do with his lack of clarity or his compulsion to be original, which as Mr. Alex Reynolds points out, leads him to cling to the most unoriginal and orthodox Leninist positions (which for me is one of the good things about Žižek!). My primary reservation would be, apart from those I already pointed out in my previous blog entry, Filipino Marxist scholar E. San Juan Jr.’s observation that Žižek does not go beyond questioning the coordinates of the present order:

Armed with Žižek’s apercus disseminated in numerous books and articles circulated all over the world, are we any wiser or more fully informed of the total picture of the world today after his brilliant disclosure? Are we more adequately mobilized to confront Obama’s imperial mission in Afghanistan and all over the world, including the Philippines, via the subservient neocolonial Arroyo regime? Can the Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework clarify the root and solution to the unprecedented global economic crisis started by the financial collapse of 2008? Is US hegemony still standing after the powerful Žižek diagnosis of self-deception, seduction, and traumatic cathexes?[8] ■

1. As cited in Isagani R. Cruz, “Ang Wika bilang Ideolohiya o ang Wika ng Teorya bilang Teorya ng Wika” in Bukod na Bukod: Mga Piling Sanaysay, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2003), 133.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 134.

5. Ibid.

6. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), xiv.

7. Edel E. Garcellano, “Theory, Theory, Theory,” Edel Garcellano: Poems Old and New, 9 May 2008, http://theworksofedelgarcellano.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/theory-theory-theory

8. E. San Juan Jr., “On Zizek’s Popularity in Diliman, Philippines, and the Problem of Freudian and Lacanian Speculations for Social Change in the Philippines and Elsewhere: A Brief Comment,” The E. San Juan Jr. Archive, 5 April 2009, http://rizalarchive.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-is-afraid-of-zizek.html

The political philosopher John Gray, who warned in the New Statesman “Western progressives nostalgic for the Soviet Union shouldn’t get too excited by the global financial crisis”, reviews Slavoj Žižek’s latest First as Tragedy, Then as Farce in the Independent today alongside Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, the final book in the trilogy with Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004):

No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century’s biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas…

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that “One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the ‘Jacobin-Leninist paradigm’ of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around… Now, more than ever, one should insist on the ‘eternal Idea of Communism’”

Read the full review here.

Verso publishes Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project and Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy by Negri. Hardt & Negri are contributers to Debating Empire.

The new film by Astra Taylor, the director of Zizek!, opens tonight. Examined Life features Žižek and Judith Butler, amongst other philosophers. The Times says ”Examined Life unfolds like a companion piece to Richard Linklater’s 2001 cartoon Waking Life.”

Kester Brewin has a post about a new campaign brought to you by the “atheist bus” people. In this effort they pick up on a complaint made by Richard Dawkins that labeling children as belonging to any particular religious, political, or ideological group is somehow tantamount to child abuse. Of course we can all see the extreme examples of this, the kids of Westboro Baptist come to my mind as horribly mistreated props in Fred Phelps insane efforts. It seems easy enough to spot the dangers of the extremes.

A brief aside: I want to make it clear that I went to public schools and I fully intend to send any children that I have to public schools – what I am about to say is not any sort of pitch for homeschooling or Christian private schools. That said, it is impossible not impress one’s values on one’s children – and yes, this is an observation that homeschoolers and private religious institutions frequently make. Even if I differ with their solution, their analysis is fundamentally correct. The very value of religious choice – a characteristic of neo-Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian societies – arose out of the Westphalian system and its aftermath. Prior to this turn, one’s church was embedded in one’s identity with community, social order, and nation – Durkheim’s opponents after all were French Catholic Royalists. (Some more in-depth discussion here.) Thus religion was part of a broader construction of identity that could not – or ought not – be disentangled.

Insofar as evangelicals are, by definition, always trying to add to their numbers, both from non-Christians and Christians disaffected by their own church, it can be argued that contemporary evangelicalism is a product of neo-Durkheimian society itself. Nonetheless, giving individuals unfettered religious choice is a sort of late-Western value. (One that might have some ancient antecedents, but I haven’t the time to go into that right here and now.) At any rate, a commitment to at least some form of neo-Durkheimianism is something that the British Humanist Association (creators of the new campaign) and Western evangelicals share – whether or not either group is aware of it. Kester Brewin himself expresses his support for some kind of neo- or post-Durkheimianism stance towards religion by saying,

“Parents do not and should not see their children as blank canvases that they should not make any mark on. If they did there would be no education. It is the responsibility of every parent – and every society – to do its best to pass on the history and story of the family or culture they have come from – as long as this is then followed by an invitation to freedom beyond it.”

What the British Humanist Association is trying here is a classic trick that Žižek is often fond of pointing out: the effort to appear non-ideological or post-ideological as a way to smuggle some a priori ideology into an argument. For Žižek everything is ideological (on YouTube you can find his explanation of the ideological underpinnings of toilet design – I’m serious) and any attempt to appear non-ideological should be greeted with a great deal of suspicion as the “non-ideological” rhetorical trick often works since it allows one to accuse one’s opponents thusly: “Why are you being ideological about this?! I’m just proposing something here and now you’ve put your ideology in it.”

This ad campaign is an excellent example of the process: there is an advocacy for a particular sort of meta-religious attitude that at first appears to be non-ideological since is appears to be against imposing any sort of religious labels on children. As I’ve demonstrated above though this is an expression of a particular ideological stance – that religious choice – previously delegated to adults, should be extended to children as well. By saying that there should be no religious/political/ideological label on children, one creates and new sort of meaning for the word “children” that now means not only “younger persons” but also “pre-ideological.” Of course “pre-ideological” is a label that concerns ideology.

By saying that children should not be labelled by their parent’s ideology one is both applying a new label and making a statement about what said parents ideology should be.

Vi tar väl några citat till då. Tack alla ni som bidrar till samlingen. Fortsätt gärna med det!

Var och en blir tillfrågad om sin åsikt i varje enskild fråga för att förhindras att ha en åsikt om helheten.
Raoul Vaneigem

Those who have nothing have only their discipline
Alan Badiou

Vi använder oss av en tjänst som redan existerar utan att betala vad som kunde varit en struntsumma om den inte kontrollerades av profiterande frossare. Och ni kallar oss kriminella.
The Mentor

Absorb what i useful, reject what is useless
Bruce Lee

If you can get power, grab it. Do whatever is possible.
Slavoj Zizek

Jag gör vad som helst för pengar, till och med jobbar
Kaisa-Leena Piltti

If they are innocent, they deserve all the more to be shot
Bertolt Brecht

Americas worst nightmare. A nigger with a library card.
Brother Mouzone

It is only when there is class struggle that there can be philosophy
Mao Zedong

The purpose of an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it upon something solid
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

If you live in the bay area, and you are at all interested in joining, or even contributing something to our little beaubourg – we invite you to leave a comment on our Beaubourg 268 blog (below). Beaubourg 268 is located on Saint Charles Avenue at the southern periphery of the San Francisco Peninsula. Adjacent to San Francisco State Universiity, the institution’s new home is a modest two story residential building that hopes to attract educators and students alike. The ground floor contains a small garden, sound studio, and outdoor planning areas; the second floor holds a small archive-library, along with lodging accommodations.

Most of the artists and thinkers in Steven Henry Madoff’s new big book, Art School suffer from one of two opposing superstitions: either art schools are the new business schools preparing designers and emerging artists for the real world, or art schools are the new pockets of resistance and reform informing social stakeholders for the real world challenges of global consumer capitalism. As a literary terrorist, one of whose concerns is the future of art school, I sometimes am asked: “Which theoretician should I know?” To their astonishment, I have yet to reply to them with the usual French names: Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, etc. Rather, I’ve tended to answer with one of two names: Gina Clark & Robert Hansen.

Gina Clark was born and raised in Southern California. Over the past decade she has worked across a variety of media including performance, film, photography, installation, and curating. Within these practices, the desert-based CalArts graduate has supported the preservation of the innovative and exploratory arts; always mindful of the fact that we are living in an age dominated by Domesticity & Artifice.  Robert Hansen is a sound artist, visual artist, writer and founder of the renowned group Mini Voyeur. From its initial formation, the group was exploring properties in speech, sound and acoustics; all the while, infusing humor in to the concepts of music, memory and logic. Robert has maintained an extended library of recorded audio and video documents created with the help of friends and family.

The newly established Beaubourg 268 will offer the public a series of classes, projects and improvisational “adventures” that remain more or less outside the existing coordinates of art schools such as Cal Arts and Goldsmiths. Under its co-founder Gina Clark, her weekly Carnal Knowledge workshops will stress the emancipatory potential of performance, as it relates to issues as varied as familial piety, animal welfare, and Czech cinema. Students, if they so desire, will have an opportunity to work with Clark’s nonprofit group, Unsichtbar Birnbaum Exploratory. Sound artist Robert Hansen will offer weekly workshops to appreciate the visual arts, through the lens of sound, music, or voice. I will offer bi-monthly ‘Reading’ Slavoj Zizek group seminars to provide theoretical supplement for those emerging artists who desire it. To the degree that art schools can play a “revolutionary” role today, I will attempt to open up a space in which isolated Japanese youths and North Korean defectors can be heard.

As the art teacher John Baldessari put it “[I]f you’re lecturing in a class and there’s a car crash outside, you better bring that car crash into what you’re saying or you’ve lost them.” It is from this perspective that the crucial first step, for us, is to foster an informal classroom environment that treats art as both a past-time and a means for exploration. To the degree that students may indeed require a postpostmodern vocabulary, Beaubourg 268 firmly believes that what students need most is the unconditional permission to use everything in the world, including their own naivete, fears, and desires.

Beaubourg 268 will be comprised with approximately fifteen students from the surrounding area who are diverse in terms of their backgrounds, ages, and aspirations. We invite every one – no matter what your age or artistic background – to participate in the fun. Ideally, we here at the beaubourg want to learn from you as much as you might learn from us. An informal meeting is set for Tuesday, 19 January 2010. The official opening is set for mid-February.

Theorists of postmodernism such as Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard explore the ways that post-Fordist capitalist societies present reality as a replication of that which has its origin in texts. Similarly, the film The Matrix presents a world in which human beings live in a computer-generated simulation designed to distract their minds while artificially intelligent machines use their bodies for energy. The film, then, literalizes the idea of a textual world; however, it does not merely convey this point through plot but also through cinematography and mise-en-scene since the world within the matrix resembles computer code in terms of color and downward vertical motion.

The opening shot of the film establishes the formal elements of the computer code. Green lettering runs downward in vertical lines, eventually revealing the film’s title. This shot signifies the concept of the matrix as text, using a specific color scheme (green on black), motion (vertical), and pattern (lined). Following this first instance, the film repeats this use of code throughout, raising it to the level of a motif.

The film reproduces the formal qualities of the computer code in scenes that take place in the matrix, emphasizing green tones during these segments of the film. The scene of Neo’s first interrogation by the agents demonstrates the use of green tones through cinematography and lighting.

Other scenes bring green tones out through costume and set design. The Oracle, for instance, wears a green patterned dress and her kitchen’s tile and counter tops also display the color. As a result, the mise-en-scene and cinematography align the color schemes of the world within the matrix with the motif of computer code.

A shot from The Matrix that illustrate the use of lighting and mise-en-scene to bring out the color green.

On-screen motion and patterns during scenes within the matrix also mimic the vertical fall of the code. One scene in which Neo meets Trinity under a bridge brings the code to mind through heavy rain. Kristen Whissel makes this connection in her essay on contemporary cinema and verticality, stating, “Fragments of marble and concrete, spent bullet casings, shards of glass, and water from a sprinkler system create a constant stream of downward motion that mimics the descent of binary codes seen falling across the screens throughout the film” (850). Hence, the downward vertical motion within the world of the matrix replicates the motion of the computer code.

Two shots from The Matrix that illustrate the importance of verticality to the film's aesthetic.

In essence, the film portrays the world of the matrix as a simulated text through these formal elements, literalizing the postmodern notion of a reality based on text. Still, The Matrix’s aspiration to allegorize the work of Baudrillard falters in a significant way: by so dramatically contrasting a simulated world with “the desert of the real,” The Matrix suggests that what Zizek would call a “real reality” exists beyond the simulation (19). For Baudrillard specifically, “the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials,” and only simulacra remain (2). In many ways, then, The Matrix offers a comforting narrative in which the simulated world can be identified as such, and cinematography and mise-en-scene help make that distinction.

Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press,1994.

Whissel, Kristen. “Tales of Upward Mobility: The New Verticality and Digital Special
Effects.” Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 834-852.

Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002.

In an earlier post, I suggested that few will embrace every element of Žižek’s compassionate-Marxist panacea, but that his analyses of history’s big movements nevertheless remain insightful, often compelling, and usually fascinating. I’ve received a bit of e-flack for reading (and posting on) Žižek, but let me say again that I don’t draw attention to Žižek’s work because I agree with all his conclusions, or with how he gets there. Rather, I read Žižek for many of the same reasons that I read from traditions and centuries other than my own – because I’m grateful for anyone who helps me to think differently about the world, and to ask some different questions about reality and human experience than does the literature I most typically immerse myself in. Apart from all that, reading Žižek is, at times, just such great fun. [Who is this idiot blogger, i.e. me, who feels the need to defend his own reading habits!]

Anyway, that said, here’s more from Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce; this time, on Apocalypse:

‘Apocalypse is characterized by a specific mode of time, clearly opposed to the two other predominant modes: traditional circular time (time ordered and regulated on cosmic principles, reflecting the order of nature and the heavens; the time-form in which microcosm and macrocosm resonate in harmony), and the modern linear time of gradual progress or development. Apocalyptic time is the “time of the end of time,” the time of emergency, of the “state of exception” when the end is nigh and we can only prepare for it. There are at least four different versions of apocalyptism today: Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism, and secular ecologism. Although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero-point of radical transmutation, their respective ontologies differ radically: Techno-digital apocalyptism … remains within the confines of scientific naturalism, and discerns in the evolution of human species the contours of our transformation into “post-humans.” New Age spirituality gives this transmutation a further twist, interpreting it as the shift from one mode of “cosmic awareness” to another (usually a shift from the modern dualist-mechanistic stance to one of holistic immersion). Christian fundamentalists of course read the apocalypse in strictly biblical terms, that is, they search for (and find) in the contemporary world signs that the final battle between Christ and the Anti-Christ is imminent. Finally, secular ecologism shares the naturalist stance of post-humanism, but gives it a negative twist-what lies ahead, the “omega point” we are approaching, is not a progression to a higher “post-human” level, but the catastrophic self-destruction of humanity. Although Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism is considered the most ridiculous, and dangerous, in its content, it remains the version closest to a radical “milenarian” emancipatory logic. The task is thus to bring it into closer contact with secular ecologism, thereby conceiving the threat of annihilation as the chance for a radical emancipatory renewal’. (pp. 93–4)

So what future does Žižek look to?

‘The future will be Hegelian … The only true alternative that awaits us – the alternative between socialism and communism – is the alternative between the two Hegels’.

Žižek contrasts Hegel’s ‘conservative’ vision (which points forward to what Žižek describes as ‘capitalism with Asian values’, as ‘a capitalist civil society organized into estates and kept in check by a strong authoritarian state with managerial “public servants” and traditional values’; he suggests that modern Japan comes close to this model), with the young Hegelianism evidenced in Haiti. He suggests: ‘It is as if the split into Old and Young Hegelians is to be re-enacted once again’. (p. 148)

He continues:

But what are the chances for an Hegelian Left today? Can we count only on momentary utopian explosions – like the Paris Commune, the Canudos settlement in Brazil, or the Shanghai Commune – which dissolve because of brutal external suppression or internal weaknesses, fated to remain no more than brief diversions from the main trajectory of History? Is communism then condemned to remain the utopian Idea of another possible world, an Idea whose realization necessarily ends in failure or self- destructive terror? Or should we remain heroically faithful to the Benjaminian project of the final Revolution that will redeem-through-repetition all past defeats, a day of full Reckoning? Or, more radically, should we change the field entirely, recognizing that the alternatives just proposed simply represent two sides of the same coin, that is, of the teleological-redemptive notion of history? Perhaps the solution resides in an eschatological apocalyptism which does not involve the fantasy of the symbolic Last Judgment in which all past accounts will be settled; to refer to another of Benjamin’s metaphors, the task is “merely” to stop the train of history which, left to its own course, leads to a precipice. (Communism is thus not the light at the end of the tunnel, that is, the happy final outcome of a long and arduous struggle – if anything, the light at the end of the tunnel is rather that of another train approaching us at full speed.) This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of “divine violence” would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress. In other words, one has to learn fully to accept that there is no big Other … (pp. 148–9)

And, in another place, Žižek offers the following reflection/commentary on ‘Obama’s victory’:

‘One can and should entertain cynical doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: from a pragmatic-realistic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will turn out to be a “Bush with a human face” making no more than a few minor face-lifting improvements. He will pursue the same basic politics in a more attractive mode and thus possibly even strengthen US hegemony, damaged as it has been by the catastrophe of the Bush years. There is nonetheless something deeply wrong in such a reaction – a key dimension is missing. It is in light of the Kantian conception of enthusiasm that Obama’s victory should be viewed not simply as another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all its pragmatic calculations and manipulations. It is a sign of something more. This is why a good American friend of mine, a hardened Leftist with no illusions, cried for hours when the news came through of Obama’s victory. Whatever our doubts, fears and compromises, for that instant of enthusiasm, each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

The reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm was not only the fact that, against all the odds, it really happened, but that the possibility of such a thing happening was demonstrated. The same goes for all great historical ruptures – recall the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although we all knew about the rotten inefficiency of the communist regimes, we somehow did not “really believe” that they would disintegrate – like Henry Kissinger, we were all too much victims of a cynical pragmatism. This attitude is best encapsulated by the French expression je sais bien, mais quand même – I know very well that it can happen, but all the same (I cannot really accept that it will happen). This is why, although Obama’s victory was clearly predictable, at least for the last two weeks before the election, his actual victory was still experienced as a surprise – in some sense, the unthinkable had happened, something which we really did not believe could happen. (Note that there is also a tragic version of the unthinkable really taking place: the Holocaust, the Gulag … how can one accept that something like that could happen?)

This is also how one should answer those who point to all the compromises Obama had to make to become electable. The danger Obama courted in his campaign is that he was already applying to himself what the later historical censorship applied to Martin Luther King, namely, cleansing his program of contentious topics in order to assure his eligibility. There is a famous dialogue in Monty Python’s religious spoof The Life of Brian, set in Palestine at the time of Christ: the leader of a Jewish revolutionary resistance organization passionately argues that the Romans have brought only misery to the Jews; when his followers remark that they have nonetheless introduced education, built roads, constructed irrigation, and so on, he triumphantly concludes: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, education, medicine, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Do the latest proclamations by Obama not follow the same line? “I stand for a radical break with Bush’s politics! OK, I pleaded for full support for Israel, for continuing the war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for refusing prosecutions against those who ordered torture, and so on, but I still stand for a radical break with Bush’s politics!” Obama’s inauguration speech concluded this process of “political self-cleansing” – which is why it was such a disappointment even for many left-liberals in the US. It was a well-crafted but weirdly anemic speech whose message to “all other peoples and governments who are watching today” was: “we are ready to lead once more”; “we will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.”

During the election campaign, it was often noted that when Obama talked about the “audacity of hope,” about a change we can believe in, he relied on a rhetoric which lacked any specific content: to hope for what? To change what? Now things are a little clearer: Obama proposes a tactical change destined to reassert the fundamental goals of US politics: the defense of the American way of life and a leading role internationally for the US. The US empire will be now more humane, and respectful of others; it will lead through dialogue, rather than through the brutal imposition of its will. If the Bush administration was the empire with a brutal face, now we shall have the empire with a human face – but it will be the same empire. In Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, in which he tried to reach out to the Muslim world, he formulated the debate in terms of the depoliticized dialogue of religions (not even of civilizations) – this was Obama at his politically-correct worst’. (pp. 107–9)

With my lectures for next two weeks (basically) written, I’ve turned to some fun reading: namely, Slavoj Žižek’s latest book, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. It’s an unsurprisingly-passionate critique of contemporary capitalism post the recent so-called financial crash. While few will embrace every element of Žižek’s compassionate-Marxist panacea, his analyses of the big movements are very insightful, often compelling, and nearly always worth reflecting on – if for no other reason than that no-one quite says it like Žižek. Here he is on liberalism, fundamentalism and the true Left:

‘A true Left takes a crisis seriously, without illusions, but as something inevitable, as a chance to be fully exploited. The basic insight of the radical Left is that although crises are painful and dangerous they are ineluctable, and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, the radical Left and the Right are two forms of the same “totalitarian” excess; while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, the populist “radical” Right being nothing but the symptom of liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat. When today we hear a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, triumphantly asking (purely rhetorical) questions such as “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocker of religion to be punishable by death?” what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle in which two opposed poles generate and presuppose each other. Here one should take an Hegelian step backwards, placing in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge. What Horkheimer once said should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism. And, even more pointedly, one should emphatically insist that the conflict between the State of Israel and the Arabs is a false conflict: even if we will all come to perish because of it, it is a conflict which only mystifies the true issues.

How are we to understand this reversal of an emancipatory thrust into fundamentalist populism? In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion-to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include within a system all its “symptoms:’ it antagonisms and inconsistencies, as integral parts. In this sense then, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality:’ for their opposition is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite. Where then do the core values of liberalism – freedom, equality, etc. – stand? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save its own core values from the fundamentalist onslaught. Its problem is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice. Liberalism is, in its very notion, “parasitic” relying as it does on a presupposed network of communal values that it undermines in the course of its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystificatory reaction of course – against a real flaw inherent within liberalism, and this is why fundamentalism is, over and again, generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself – the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left. Or, to put it in the well-known terms of 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism will need the brotherly help of the radical Left’. – Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London/New York: Verso, 2009), 75–77.

Hace más de dos mil años que Platón, en su República, nos ofreció una de las primeras visiones hoy conocidas de la utopía, el no-lugar donde la justicia (no “la igualdad”: “lo justo” para Platón no era un concepto igualitario) sería realizada plenamente. Este género político-literario encontraría adeptos tan renombrados como San Agustín, Tomás Moro y Robert Owen, y más tarde, su imagen negativa en las distopías de Huxley, Bradbury y Orwell, entre muchos otros.

En la República de Platón, los seres humanos ocuparían posiciones sociales según su “naturaleza” intrínseca. Un grupo reducido de filósofos-reyes, dotados de racionalidad, tendría a su cargo todas las decisiones importantes sobre cómo organizar y regir la vida económica y política. Aunque ostentarían todo el poder real, su desdén por las meras apariencias les llevaba a asumir voluntariamente una vida de austeridad y sacrificio material, mientras las masas populares, liberadas de la responsabilidad de gobernar, se dedicarían a satisfacer sus apetitos corporales. La República así gobernada era, para Platón, la sociedad más justa imaginable, regida por la mejor parte de sí misma.

Observando el comportamiento de los líderes políticos Puerto Rico de hoy, es tentador concluir que nuestra polis es el anverso de la República de Platón – una especie de anti-República, no porque gobiernen las masas populares, sino por la bajeza ética e intelectual de la élite que gobierna. Basta echarle un vistazo superficial a las peripecias de un Jorge “Alejo” Santini, Tomás Rivera Schatz o Evelyn Vázquez, para concluir que somos una sociedad gobernada por lo absolutamente peor de sí misma (¿será casualidad que en nuestra eterna colonia, hasta la misma palabra “República” sea una palabra “soez” de las que perturban al Secretario de Educación?). Los politiqueros de la otra mitad del bi-partido único colonial, tampoco pueden eludir su responsabilidad por el estado actual de las cosas.

Por supuesto que no puede faltar, en cualquier conversación sobre estos temas, quién, en aparente arrebato de inspiración neo-platónica, insista en que todo es culpa de que se le permita votar a las masas ignorantes, y que lo mejor sería una especie de dictadura benigna de una élite capacitada, al menos “hasta que” mediante políticas educativas bien implementadas, se logre producir un electorado inteligente (la versión “progresista” de esta postura es posponer las luchas emancipadoras “hasta que” las masas estén preparadas para recibir el mensaje, ya sea en términos educativos o económicos). Una Neo-República, con todo y sus filósofos-reyes. En esta nueva visión utópica, la Anti-República que vivimos es el producto de la degradación o degeneración de la sociedad puertorriqueña, particularmente de sus mecanismos de enseñanza, como resultado del desarrollo modernista, capitalista, o una combinación de ambas. ¿Es realmente así de sencillo?

Ya en el siglo diecinueve, Marx y Engels reprochaban a algunos de sus contemporáneos, entre los cuales se encontraba Owen, la calidad “utópica” de su socialismo, desconectado de todo análisis de la realidad social del capitalismo. En uno de esos extraños giros irónicos de la historia, luego de la caída del Muro de Berlín (cuyo vigésimo aniversario se festejó recientemente con bombos y platillos, sin reflexión crítica alguna), fue declarado el “Fin de la Historia”, descartando por “utópico” e “ideológico” el socialismo “científico” de Marx y Engels, en términos curiosamente similares a los utilizados anteriormente por éstos. En el campo académico, muchos de los “marxistas” que sobrevivieron el tsunami “posmoderno”, retornando al “economicismo vulgar” de la Segunda Internacional, se fueron conformado con el estudio de las estructuras del capitalismo, abandonando por “utópico” el proyecto de emancipación radical que siempre fue la razón de ser de la teoría marxista.

No obstante, como nos señala Slavoj Žižek, entre otras voces disidentes que poco a poco se vuelven a escuchar, eventos recientes (el 11-S en lo político, la debacle financiera en lo económico) develan el “retorno de lo Real” del capitalismo mundial, sacando a relucir como verdadera utopía ideológica el (neo)liberalismo “democrático” triunfalista del “fin de la historia”.[i]

¿Cómo llegamos a esta situación? En Puerto Rico, lo Real-reprimido que retorna con la “crisis” de la que todo el mundo habla pero nadie quiere nombrar, no es otra cosa que el inseparable binomio capital-colonia , y que se manifiesta, en el plano político, en la “ineptitud” de nuestros gobernantes.[ii] No se trata, pues, de que las personas “equivocadas” estén en el poder, como si los seres humanos tuviéramos una esencia intrínseca e inmutable, en el sentido platónico. Tampoco, como argumentaría el elitismo neo-platónico, de que la democracia representativa moderna haya dado acceso al poder a las masas ignorantes. Se trata sencillamente de que lo Real de nuestro espectáculo político-electoral, es la lucha de clases intrínseca al capitalismo como tal.

Para Marx y Engels, el Estado, en última instancia, es “el [poder] ejecutivo de toda la burguesía”. Para fungir de funcionario del capital, no hace falta proceder de un trasfondo acomodado, sino únicamente ser leal a las “reglas del juego” capitalista. En la democracia representativa formal, las elecciones no son otra cosa que un mecanismo de mercado a través del cual diferentes sectores del capital “invierten” su dinero (en forma legal e ilegal) en candidatos que los electores “compran”, para determinar como mejor administrar esas inversiones.

En tiempos de estabilidad, el mecanismo funciona relativamente bien, y resultan electos candidatos más o menos diestros para tomar las decisiones que mejor garanticen la estabilidad a largo plazo del sistema, ayudando a contener dentro de las reglas del juego a los y las trabajadoras y otros sectores oprimidos y subalternos, mediante concesiones. De ello consistió el consenso keynesiano o social-demócrata que fue hegemónico en gran parte del mundo capitalista desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la década de 1980.

En tiempos de crisis, sin embargo, las fórmulas de estabilidad fallan, las certezas se desvanecen y el terreno político-electoral favorece a administradores más comprometidos con la ganancia inmediata del sector del capital que resulte dominante. La “crisis” política consiste en que todo el mundo sabe el “secreto” de que la democracia no es tal cosa, pero continúa cínicamente jugando el juego, lo que resulta en la perpetuación en el poder de “líderes” como Santini, o el Presidente italiano Silvio Berlusconi.[iii]

A su vez aumentan, de la mano las unas con los otros, las inquietudes de los subalternos y los mecanismos para reprimirles. La democracia representativa cada vez se ve menos atractiva para el capital, y las posibilidad de que se generalice un capitalismo autoritario siguiendo el modelo estrenado en Singapur, y que hoy es realidad en la China, son cada vez más reales.[iv] Fracasada la utopía de la democracia capitalista, se levanta ahora la utopía neo-platónica de un capitalismo autoritario administrado por “expertos” mientras las masas nos contentamos con consumir pasivamente.

Nada de esto ocurre por imperativo divino ni histórico. Se trata de patrones y tendencias entre las cuales existe una plétora de alternativas posibles, incluyendo la restauración keynesiana, algún tipo de neo-fascismo tecnológico, los fundamentalismos étnicos y religiosos, o algún tipo de transformación radical genuinamente libertaria y egalitaria. Por dar sólo un ejemplo, en los Estados Unidos, tras la experiencia de Bush, hijo, el capital (y particularmente el capital financiero) logró presentar un candidato capaz de restaurar una semblanza de racionalidad a largo plazo a la administración del capital. Aún así, sin embargo, tras casi un año del gobierno de Obama, se ha hecho patentemente obvio que a ese sector del capital ni siquiera le interesa otorgar concesiones al nivel del keynesianismo “light” que predominó en ese país hasta ser desmantelado por Reagan. Los movimientos populares y subalternos tampoco han demostrado, hasta ahora, la capacidad de empujar a Obama en esa dirección.

La especie humana tiene la capacidad de incidir sobre las alternativas que se nos presentan, pero sólo si respondemos nuevamente al llamado de las luchas radicales emancipadoras; es decir, a la utopía – no la utopía dominante constituída mediante la exclusión de aquella parte de lo Real que conflige con su definición de lo posible, sino la que hace estallar el conflicto para traer lo Real-excluido al plano de la posibilidad. Para ello, contamos con toda la experiencia de los movimientos y luchas de los siglos pasado, con sus aciertos y errores. De entre estos últimos, el que es más urgente y necesario recordar, es que la meta emancipadora no se encuentra en una etapa lejana y final que llegará luego de muchos sacrificios y privaciones, o en nombre de la cual debemos posponer la lucha hasta al fin “estar preparados” para el cambio (el estalinismo y la social democracia también son, a fin de cuentas, dos caras de la misma moneda), sino en la lucha misma por hacer posible lo (aparentemente) imposible.

La República (esta vez sí, contrario a la de Platón, fundada en la igualdad plena) que tanto hemos esperado, parafraseando la filosofía tradicional del pueblo indígena Hopi, somos nosotros y nostras mismas.[v] El primer paso, el de comenzar a luchar, es simultáneamente el más sencillo y el más difícil. No hay transformación más profunda y trascendental (y por ende más violenta y dolorosa) que la de la propia conciencia.

En Puerto Rico, esa lucha necesariamente conlleva la confrontación con el binomio dominante capital-colonia, abandonando toda ilusión de que es posible luchar contra uno y no lo otro.

[ii] Aclaración necesaria: el patriarcado y la dominación étnico-racial, sistemas de dominación claramente vigentes en Puerto Rico y contra los cuales es imperativo luchar, son dinámicas en órbitas paralelas, pero no anversas – caras de la misma moneda –a la relación Capital-Estado. Pero esto es tema para otro debate necesario y que espero ayudar a provocar.

[iii] Žižek, op cit., pp. 48-51

[iv] Ídem., pp. 131-132

[v] Ídem., p. 154

My friend Ian is a brilliant writer and story-teller. I asked him once how he did it. He said that he has to wait on characters who find their way to him from a dark wood in his mind. The characters are often shy, unsure of how to respond to the disembodied voice who will become their narrator. Eventually, these timid fictives step forward and begin to tell their story. For Ian, this is the place from which stories come, and these stories can be used to communicate any message, to stir up any emotion, and to prove any point. If you want to do theology or philosophy, says Ian, tell a story.

At times, I find myself nodding along, hearing the shuffle of hidden characters in the dark woods of my mind. I can see the beauty in the ambiguity of stories and parable — their fluidity and malleability to address the complex issues of human existence. I resonate with a desire to give my theoretical ponderings flesh and bones; to see and hear and touch what I say that I think that I might believe.

And at other times, I find such stories wanting, communicating the complex ethos of the wide range of experience, but unable to express the things that I simply need to say. I guess at times narrative seems evasive and elusive, creating opportunities for beautiful, glorious, disastrous re-interpretation (which is going to happen regardless of the genre). It seems to me that a straight-forward discourse — an “essay,” as one friend called it — is less likely to be misread. It is oftentimes simpler, more clear, and more precisely what I want or need to say. In these ways, it seems like a valid and sometimes necessary way of expressing philo-theological or theosophical ideas.

But I wonder if my need for such clear and concise discourse is the remnant of a post-Enlightenment rhetorical logocentrism. Maybe I’m afraid of the open-ended absence of a purely narrative approach to philosophy or theology and would prefer the “nearness” of a clearly presented and well-argued case. The question I’m left with is this: Is it bad to sometimes prefer discourse, and therefore, to uphold and perpetuate a logocentric belief that discourse will be more understood (or less misunderstood)?

This whole conversation reminded me of the debates amongst the Inklings of Oxford in the 1930s and 40s. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien asked very similar questions. Lewis was very proud of his first Narnia novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Tolkien, however, thought that the religious allusions were too blatant. Instead, Tolkien suggested, any religious implications ought to be buried deep within the story, so as not to detract from the story itself. Aslan was too obviously the Christ-figure and as such distracted the reader from the stories of Narnia.[1] More than that, Tolkien was appalled at Lewis’s theological ventures, believing firmly that such discourse was better left for the professional theologians, not the writers and scholars of fiction and literature.[2] And so their two great works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, reflect their differences. Lewis chose a combination of allegorical narrative and straightforward discourse; Tolkien chose to hide his wisdom deeply in his stories of hobbits and wizards.

In my own life, I would say that Lewis’s approach has affected me more personally. In other words, I prefer The Chronicles of Narnia to Tolkien’s work. Tolkien’s insistence on hiding his message makes his stories epic — though at times overly descriptive and long-winded. Lewis’s fiction is witty, to-the-point, and, for me, nearly existential to read. As a theologian, Lewis’s work is sometimes lacking. He was, after all (and as Tolkien rightly pointed out), primarily a writer of fiction and a lover of literature. But despite that, Lewis made points in his theological works that he could not make so easily in Narnia. His simultaneous use of narrative and discourse offered Lewis a variety of paths to conversation, both with his friends and with his readers then and now.

A few weeks ago, I read an interview from Slavoj Žižek. In the interview, Žižek gives his take on the current political struggle over healthcare. Standing up for theoretical discourse, Žižek says:

My friend told me [that Norm] Chomsky said something very sad. He said that today we don’t need theory. All we need to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree: facts are facts, and they are precious, but they can work in this way or that. Facts alone are not enough. You have to change the ideological background.[3]

Of course, Žižek is describing politics, particularly as it relates to healthcare, but his point remains: Telling the story isn’t always enough. There are times that one must use theory to change ideology. If we can’t engage the theory, then our stories will be open-ended ammunition for whoever wants to use it (which, I agree, is the beautiful thing about using narrative). But occasionally, ideologies must be challenged, and to do that, theory must be engaged in discourse.

I like narrative philosophy. I like when philosophy is done through fleshed-out, evocative, subtle, and open-ended stories. But I also like the use of discourse and essays. They both have a place and a time. So, I prefer a “philosophy of narrative,” one that sees the world in both stories and theories; a communicative methodology that embraces the narratives of real people in communities striving to embody the ideals of their theosophical dialogue; a worldview in which people are recognized as simultaneously transcendent and immanent, summed up by thought and stories. After all, Christians are a people endlessly dialoguing about the incarnational event that can’t be captured in words.

::The Question::
What do you think? Tolkien or Lewis? Chomsky or Žižek? Purely narrative philosophy or a philosophy of narrative? Both? Neither?

———
[1]About.com, “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Friendship and Disagreements over Christian Theology,” http://atheism.about.com/od/cslewisnarnia/a/jrrtolkein.htm [accessed on November 14, 2009]. I know, I know. I shouldn’t use such questionable sources.
[2]Ibid.; Literary Traveler,  ”J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: A Literary Friendship and Rivalry Made in Oxford,” http://www.literarytraveler.com/literary_articles/tolkien_lewis_oxford.aspx [accessed on November 14, 2009]. Tolkien seemed upset with Lewis’s preference for Anglicanism over his own Catholicism, probably in large part because Tolkien was crucial in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.
[3]Jonathan Derbyshire, “I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. If you can get power, grab it,” The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/11/381-382-interview-obama-theory [accessed on November 14, 2009].

Video | Info

This session features a conversation between prominent radical theologian Thomas Altizer and well-known cultural critic Slavoj Žižek on the continuing and changing currency of the “death of God” idea within theology, religious studies, philosophy, the arts, and the trajectory of global culture in general. How has the notion of the death of God evolved as the secularization thesis has declined? Has the phrase become passé or is it alive, current, and still significant? Must we understand this phrase in new senses in the present globalizing world? What are the most important resources and thinkers for contending with its meaning? Around the core exchange of the two panelists, some thirty or more scholars, junior and senior, who have been closely engaged with the death of God idea have been invited to participate actively from the audience, with the intent to catalyze a lively, multifaceted conversation on these issues.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a recording of Altizer from this event.

See also:
The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?