Zizek Study:

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d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

Haven't used it in a while, Dalek.
d63
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Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

“Something I need to point out: hipsters really are not problem to me.
To me, they're basically caught in the crossfire between a Marxist cynicism about Capitalism and the very fact that Capitalism has adopted (via marketers (them as the ideal producer/consumers.” –Me

“They are the product of a younger generation just going fuck it.. we are just going to live our lives... deal with the world as it is and have fun.” –Andy

“ I'll buy into that, Andy. But what it suggests to me is a kind of nihilism that if not adding to the problem, will allow it to continue. In that sense, it is as perfectly implicit in our possible self destruction through climate change or our enslavement through global capitalism. It's no wonder they are the flavor of the day for marketers.” –yes, me again……

Once again, I’m sure the hipsters are fine people with a lot of different political views. However, as Andy’s point confirms, one of the main concerns I have with them (and the term “concerns” is important here in that it is not a sweeping judgment of hipsters as a whole (is that they remind me a lot of the sports bar culture that emerged in the 90’s under the Clinton boom: a lot of people sitting around all tight fisted, flush with prosperity, and acting like they did it in a vacuum. And because of this (for reasons they will claim to be enlightened or radical: the same ones that got Jr. in (our next president will likely be republican.

And as luck would have it, my present reading of Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies sheds a little light on this on page 27:

“The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: ‘not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person is the very form of ideology, of its ‘practical efficiency’.”

Now in order to crystallize this, I have to backtrack to the page before which offers up a criticism of the Robert Altman movie MASH which I consider a powerful response to right-wingers who harp on some supposed left-wing Hollywood conspiracy which completely neglects the very fact that Hollywood is run by corporations. He points to its perfect conformity in that while its anti-militarianism is expressed through a healthy dose of “cynicism, practical jokes, laughing at pompous officials, and so on,” the MASH crew performs their jobs exemplarily and thus present no threat to the military machine. It conforms while seeming to not conform. And I would humbly offer my own example concerning James Thurber’s story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Anyone who has read the story knows that it is the ultimate anti-Rand story in that it starts with a weak hen-pecked man who compensates through his daydreams and ends (triumphantly, mind you (with a weak hen-pecked man who compensates through his daydreams. But let’s take a look at what the Hollywood corporate machine has done with it so far. First we had the Danny Kaye version which basically got turned into a common Hollywood musical and dance spectacular. Enough said about that. But even more insidious (while actually being entertaining (was the Ben Stiller Ayn Rand fuck fantasy of Walter Mitty opposing all odds and actually becoming a hero. As the corporate mentality constantly reminds us: if you will it enough, you can make it happen.

To give you another personal and anecdotal example of how so-called anti-ideology can end up ideological: I was in a bar back in 90’s. One of the big movements then was thrash/rap metal that included bands like Limp Biscuit. That night, I watched a guy walk up to the bar with that Limp Biscuit look: the kaki shorts, the le tigre shirt, and the short brimmed hat turned sideways or backwards (I can’t remember which. Okay: a man trying to find his identity; nothing wrong there. But it turned comical when I watched another man walk up to the bar in the exact same dress. I had to wonder if they were wearing the same cologne. Probably should have smelled them but I think I was going nose blind by that time. And imagine how embarrassed they would have felt face to face.

The point is (and I hope the hipsters are listening (that there is no final realm of non-conformity that can put us beyond the status quo. Power will always assimilate what is available to it: even what defies it. So we have to defer to what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as a constant nomadic flight: to keep moving even while standing still. We have to keep the radars moving in the hope that they will eventually break down.
d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

“On a somewhat higher, more “spiritual” level, one usually fails to take note of how a free play of our theoretical imagination is possible only against the background of a firmly established set of “dogmatic” conceptual constraints: our intellectual creativity can be ‘set free’ only within the confines of some notional framework in which, precisely, we are able to ‘move freely’ –the lack of this imposed framework is necessarily experienced as an unbearable burden, since it compels us to focus constantly on how to respond to every particular empirical situation in which we find ourselves.” –from Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder

“As I understand it, Zizek ties this in with the delicate balance required between contraction and expansion: the speed of the universe’s expansion which, were it too fast for gravity to keep in check, would rip everything completely apart.”

And to kick off this particular rhizome (for effect perhaps (perhaps even a cheap one:

“To give you an example, I recently started on an immersion into Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. What I didn’t think about going into it was that I know absolutely nothing about Schelling. I, therefore, at the “library”, for my study point, attempted to learn about him through Wiki and the Stanford page on philosophy, but only realized those would require an immersion in itself. Nor was Blackburn’s Dictionary of Philosophy much help. It just became a distracting use of resources. I therefore decided to just focus on the book, write about it as if Schelling was not involved, and leave him for another immersion.”

As it turns out, much to my surprise, while an immersion might deepen my understanding of the book, I’m actually getting by based on themes that overlap with those in other books of Zizek I have read. What I’m mainly noting here is the relationship between expansion and contraction which, as I go along, I will attempt to connect with Zizek’s emphasis on Lacan’s Jouissance: that push/pull way in which we find ourselves engaging with reality throughout many of our activities. (And please note that I am fumbling around with a lot of new material.) That said, for today’s quote I turn to page 40:

“It is the same with the couple of expansion and contraction: in Weltalter [a German term (one among many) that hopefully my German jam-mate, Harald, may be able to help me with], ‘expansion’ expresses God’s love, His ‘giving away’ of Himself; ‘contraction’ expresses His destructive rage, His egotistical withdrawal into-Self; in ‘positive philosophy’ we again have an inversion: expansion is now identified with the destructive rage which draws every finite, limited, firmly delineated being into its formless vortex, whereas the contractive force is conceived as creative, formative, as the activity of providing things with a stable form which alone guarantees their ontological consistency.”

First I would clarify that what Zizek is talking about here is the two later phases in Schelling’s process. And this, of course, goes back to an earlier point I made in this immersion:

“"Some scholars characterize Schelling as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system." -from Wikipedia

“Perhaps we can think of Schelling as the prototypical rhizomatic thinker.”

But can’t we also see the old school element involved in Schelling’s obsession with expansion and contraction as well the perfectly understandable conflict (and consequential vacillation (an intellectual process might go through attempting to accommodate its religious beliefs with its philosophical ones? And we can see how both models might work for Schelling. On one hand (and I’m speaking metaphorically here, we can see expansion as God’s love in that it is what allows us to be as compared to not being and contraction as that which pulls us back to not being. (And I would note here an analogy that Zizek makes with Eros and Thanatos: the life and death instincts.) On the other, we can perfectly understand the reversal in which expansion is seen as the evil threatening to rip everything apart while contraction seems like the good that pulls everything back into order. Think, for instance, of Robert Frost’s classicist point:

“We rise out of disorder into order. I would sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

And while I consider myself more of a free verse person, I still gotta sympathize when Frost describes poetry (much as I would language (as a momentary stay against confusion.
d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

Just a couple of quotes and points before I leave this particular immersion, Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder, and move on to the next:

“One more thing should be noted about the blind rotary motion of God prior to the Word: this motion is not yet temporal, it does not occur 'in time', since time already presupposes that God has broken free from the closed psychotic circle.”

Now first I would admit that this will seem a little self indulgent in that what I’m mainly noting here is an overlap between my process and that of Zizek’s. It’s a little like saying, “See? I told you so,” when, in fact, all I may be doing is reading myself into it. In my defense, though, I have come to believe that philosophy, or the backbone of one’s philosophical process, is the act of engaging creatively with the world, of thinking what one thinks, and playing it against the writings of those who have gotten further in that process. Beyond that, there is only the check and balance of Alexander Pope’s dictum in A Little Learning:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”

In other words, given the process of self flattery by which we come to know a philosopher, all we can really do is keep playing our perspective against theirs, be open minded, and hope that doing so expands our own processes out a little more.

That said (a reminder in case you got distracted:

“One more thing should be noted about the blind rotary motion of God prior to the Word: this motion is not yet temporal, it does not occur 'in time', since time already presupposes that God has broken free from the closed psychotic circle.”

What I’m mainly focusing on here is the phrase ‘closed psychotic circle’ and the preceding ‘blind rotary motion of God prior to the Word’. The overlap I’m mainly seeing is with my concept of the psychotic response to the nihilistic perspective (in which all assumptions float on thin air (in relation to the symbolic order. In it, I see the psychotic response, similar to Schelling’s God ‘prior to the word’, having no real criteria by which to judge action, receding into its own semiotic bubble with its own semiotic rules (its own language games (that alienates it from the general symbolic order.

I would also like to cover something that has seemed implicit throughout my 15 hours with this book: Zizek’s understanding of Lacan’s Jouissance. This was somewhat confirmed by the fact that this book was published in 1996 while Plague of Fantasies (the book I got my sense of Zizek’s sense (via Lacan (of Jouissance (was published in 1997.

“What we have here is Schelling's grandiose 'Wagerian' vision of God in the state of endless 'pleasure in pain', agonizing and struggling with Himself, affected by an unbearable anxiety, the vision of 'psychotic' mad God who is absolutely alone, a One who is 'all' since he tolerates nothing outside Himself -a 'wild madness, tearing itself apart'.”

And I would also note that both quotes were extracted from the chapter: Schelling in-itself: The ‘Orgasm of Forces’. What has been implicit to me throughout this immersion is the push/pull tension (the jouissance surveyed in Plague of Fantasies (that can be attributed to the tension between expansion (which wants to be something (and contraction which wants to return to the nothingness it was before it became something.
d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

"What ideology offers is the symbolic construction of reality -the ultimate fantasy- as a way to escape the traumatic effects of the Real. Reality is is always a 'virtual' take on the real; a virtualization that can fully overcome the Real or achieve homeostasis. In the language of Laclau and Mouffe, this means that Society as an integrated unity is universally impossible precisely because of the constitutive excess of the Real qua the unmasterable negativity upon which every positivication finally depends.


And it is here that ideology performs its supreme conjuring trick. What ideology aims at is a fantasmatic re-staging of the encounter with the Real in such a way that the impossibility of Society is translated into the theft of society by some historical Other [the Jews, welfare queens, immigrants, etc., etc.]." -from Glyn Daly's introduction to Conversations with Zizek

The first thing I would note is the crystallization this involves as concern’s Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies. Being in about the 5th, 6th, maybe 7th (I’ve lost count (reading of the book, my experience has generally been one of not being able to see the forest for the trees. I have always been able to relate to and use individual points he makes throughout the book. But what always eluded me was the general point outside of what I could gather from the title: that our human interactions are generally haunted by fantasy.

(And I would compare this to Rorty with whom you always have a general sense of what he is getting at while always struggling with the particulars. I am, to this day, still struggling with the significance of the antipodeans in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.)

At the same time, the clarification came as clarifications usually do with philosophy: the feeling of confirming vague instincts about it. And this, of course, comes with the risk of misinterpretation. But if we worry too much about getting something wrong, we risk never getting anything right. Therefore, all I can do is bounce off of it and hope I’m getting closer:

As I understand it, the Real, being that which overflows or eludes the Symbolic, must lead to a kind of negativity (that which is a kind of nothingness (that defines what we can positively identify. This dynamic, for instance, is what underlies the objet petit a or fetish. The object in question acts metonymically in that it represents the Thing that is not there (in terms of sex: the Breast, the curve of the thigh, the O-shaped form of the mouth, the way the foot curves (but seems to draw one to something based on fantasy. This can lead to a kind of violence. Think, for instance, of the caress which is a kind of tenderness that verges on violence in its futile attempt (in some sense or other (to penetrate the skin and actually get inside the other. It is that absence involved in the act that leaves a space for fantasy to fill.

And we see a similar dynamic (a kind of frustration supplemented by fantasy (at the social and political level. And here we see the silver lining in America’s greatest failure of democracy: the election of Donald Trump as president. I’m guessing that it will serve as a catalyst for Zizek’s career as a theorist. We only need look at the extent to which fancy played in his success –not just that of the right, but the left as well. I mean didn’t his whole campaign feel like some Quentin Tarentino revenge fantasy in which all those people fucking with the white working-man’s privilege were finally going to get their just deserts?

It’s going to be really interesting to see what Zizek has to say post-Trump.
d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

“Two words are revealing here: abstracted and control— in order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, and this system is by definition hidden from users. The paradox is that, the more the small item (smartphone or iPod) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use, ‘transparent’ in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience. The more our experience is non-alienated, spontaneous, transparent, the more it is regulated and controlled by the invisible network of state agencies and large private companies that follow their secret agendas….

“In this sense, the US is even more dangerous than China insofar as its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed. That is to say, while, in a country like China, the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone— there are no illusions about it, the state is an openly oppressive mechanism— in the US formal freedoms are officially guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms.” -Zizek, Slavoj. Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (p. 68). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

Once again, we return to the way people can feel free while actually being enslaved: the piece of jouissance stolen by the slave from the master. One only need step into a time machine and go back to a pub in Germany in the early 30’s (one that looks a lot like contemporary sports bars (but where everyone (males at least (have sharp uniforms on. One only need look at the way people obsess over the newest technology like primates discovering fire. One only need look at how a primate might react were fire taken from it, to what extent they would bow before the leader that brought it back and all their resentments.

But what is important to understand here is that it is not so much a matter of what state is doing as corporate power. It is, rather, the misdirect towards state (propped up by old 70’s and 80’s reactions to the War on Drugs (propagated by corporate agendas that want us stuck on buzz phrases like “big government” –that is when state and government is the only real check and balance we can hope to have against corporate power. And unlike corporate power (and provided we are still living in a democracy (we can still influence government.

That said, while I do have issues with Zizek (primarily because of his propensity for theoretical over-reach and his contrarian tendency, his taste for the radical strictly for the sake of the radical (what always draws me back to him is his ear for spin and ability to dismantle it.
Dubious
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by Dubious »

d63 wrote:...the way Nazi’s would go home at night and listen to Wagner in order to prove to themselves that they were, after all, civilized men.
Total BS. Most Nazis didn't even like Wagner.
d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

“As Zizek makes clear in The Ticklish Subject, what German Idealism accomplishes is a displacement of the usual opposition between the idea of the savage 'pre-human' self and the symbolic universe of 'civilized' human subjectivity (where in the Enlightenment tradition the latter is identified with the Light of Reason and as something which affects an ultimate mastery, or pacification, over the former). Instead, what is affirmed is a view of subjectivity that can only come into being as a passage through madness; as an ongoing attempt to impose a symbolic integrity against the ever-present threat of disintegration and negativity (Zizek, 1999;31-41). –from Glyn Daly’s introduction to Conversations with Zizek

What I’m seeing here is a description of the Hegelian dialectic laid out for me in my audio book on Hegel as explained by Chuck Hesston -that is as compared to the more static model laid out by the triad of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. In the more subtle form, it is a matter of taking a given situation, breaking it down to its more atomistic elements (think Russell here), and putting them back together in new ways. And it is in the art of that atomistic phase that we breach and traverse madness.

I would note here the similar dynamic described by Ian Buchanan in his reader’s guide to The Anti-Oedipus: the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive. Now we only need feel the words to get at what Buchanan is getting at: things start with a certain order that is disrupted via the connective process. This results in a disjunctive order similar to the atomistic one described above. And what this results in is a conjunctive synthesis very similar to Kierkegaard’s unstable synthesis: that which seems like stability while retaining the old instabilities.

What I would like to add to this dynamic (my dialectic (is what I consider the Dantean archetype, based on The Divine Comedy but in a mirror form. First consider the process: Inferno (the process of going deeper: and think chaos here (purgatory: the process of rising out of it (and paradismo: the fulfillment of getting there. Now imagine a real world situation similar to a common plot line: one that rises in intensity until comes to a denouement above the Dantean plotline.

And in the spirit of Zizek, I would humbly back my point with the example of the movie Blue Velvet. It was as if the deeper we went into the human condition the more the action rose in the traditional plot line way, that is until it imploded into a kind of reordering that still showed traces of instability such as when the two old women were watching a bird eat a bug.

This, of course, was the point of the movie drawing into the ear that the protagonist found then withdrawing from it towards the denouement.
d63
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Re: Zizek Study:

Post by d63 »

"A favoured exercise of intellectuals throughout the twentieth century -which can also be taken as symptomatic of what Badiou calls the 'passion of the Real'- was the urge to 'catastrophize' the situation: whatever the situation, it had to be denounced as 'catastrophic', and better it appeared, the more it solicited this exercise. Heidegger denounced the present age as that of the highest 'danger', the epoch of accomplished nihilism; Adorno and Horkheimer saw in it the culmination of the dialectic of enlightenment in the administered world; up to Giorgo Agamben, who defines twentieth-century concentration camps as the 'truth' of the entire Western political project." -from Conversations with Zizek

And I should also note that this is a response to Glyn Daley’s question:

“On the other hand, you have also criticized certain modern philosophers for manufacturing fake crises. What do you mean by this?”

First of all, I’m a little surprised by this in that I had previously tended to read theoretical overreach into Zizek –especially as concerns some of his solutions to the problems he describes. Perhaps I’ll have to revise my position. That said, I repeat my holy triad: Deleuze, Rorty, and Zizek. And I tend to work in the overlaps between them and have generally saw most of them between Deleuze and Rorty. This one is rare in that I see a Rortian pragmatic core in Zizek –which makes perfect sense now given Zizek’s practical concerns.

What Zizek seems to be getting at is something I’ve come to suspect for some time now: that high theory can take itself a little more serious than it really warrants. Theory, as I see it, can at best have a SLIGHT trickle-down effect on the general roll of things. Or to put it another way:

Ideologies do nothing. People, on the other hand, do.

I, for instance, don’t need every worker in the world to read Marx’s Das Kapital to know they are being exploited. And all it can do for anyone that is familiar with it is give them tools to elaborate and articulate on feelings those workers are having anyway. It can also validate those natural experiences by framing them in more sophisticated ways. Beyond that, theory can do little more. And this is why we must approach it with a sense of humility as compared to Heidegger which Rorty described as the esoteric priest. To focus in on what Zizek said:

“Heidegger denounced the present age as that of the highest 'danger', the epoch of accomplished nihilism…”

My point here is that if theory (especially of the continental kind (is to have an effect on day to day matters, it will likely be in the same humble capacity as that of art or literature (including cinema): that of changing the sensibility of people without dictating to them what their reality “really is”. Doing otherwise can only lead to a guru dynamic that can only alienate the very sensibility we are trying to change.

Also, I can’t help but see Zizek’s concern with theoretical overreach (being a product of academic culture –the best money can buy (as a concern with the role that theory may be inadvertently playing in Capitalist hierarchical/vertical models.
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