Žižek at CUNY given on Monday April 4, 2011.
I don’t believe in authentic events. Authenticity for me is what happens after. The disintegration of communist regimes was not an event because nothing new came about. Adorno said “in today’s consumerist society we are so much caught in pseudo-activity”
We are hyper-active. When we go to a art gallery nobody really is looking at the pictures. The idea is that the curator does the viewing for them, so that we can just make comments and so on and so on.
Hegel
Totality: not organic whole, but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality is not to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system its antagonism, symptoms, inconsistencies as necessary integral parts. The Hegelian totality is self-contradictory and antagonistic.
The whole which is true, is the whole with its symptoms. For Marx the totality of capitalism includes crisis. For Freud the totality of subject is its symptoms. The whole is never truly whole. Every notion of whole LEAVES SOMETHING OUT. The dialectical method means to include this excess, to account for it. Symptoms are not signs that something is wrong that can be fixed but signs that the whole is rotton.
What is out totality today?
Fetishist disavowal
I know very well but … I don’t really believe it
The very material force of ideology that makes us refuse what we know
Zero point: we are being confronted by something so outside our collective experience that we really don’t see it, the biological and physical disturbances in world that sustains it
Global warming: the arctic sea ice is melting faster than predicted. Before this meant ominous calls to act … lately however we hear voice enjoin us to warm to global warming. The pessimistic predictions should be put in more context, more optimistic. How right Naomi Klein was that global capitalism exploits catastrophes to get rid of the old to use the clean slate to impose its order. Perhaps global warming will provide the same.
Dipesh Chakrabaty: human and natural histories … humans are able to effect the very balance of life on earth … anthropocene the lesson of global warming is that our freedom was only possible against stable natural parameters, we can do what we want be don’t peturb the parameters. Global warming is the paradoxical outcome of our growing freedom up to destabilizing the parameters of life on earth.
Geo-engineering recognizes tipping points. Ge represents a lesser risk than not pursuing such strategies.
27 minutes Žižek talks about JAPAN
Natual disasters are useful reminders that ecological troubles cannot be just caused by human hubris, NATURE itself is to blame, we are mercilessly exposed to nature’s cruel whims. We have no where to withdraw to, no Mother Earth or balanced state to return.
Deceptively self-assuring by saying we are guilty.
Passive role of impotent observer, who can only sit back and watch what his fate will be so to avoid situation, we engage in frantic obsessive activities, recycling paper, buying organic food etc, just so we can think we are doing, just like a soccer fan in front of the television, shouting thinking he will impact the outcome.
Fetishistic disavowal apropos ecology, I know very well, but I won’t change my life.
Opposite form of disavowal: I know very well I can’t really influence the process that will lead to my ruin do anything, but I can’t just stand here and not do anything, so I’ll buy organic apples, we are demonstrating our capacity for noble large collective project. There is something of this order, no longer just marginal, but assuming a central role in capitalism functions, i.e., the Starbucks thing. In the old days we were consumerists and we felt bad so you had to do something to counteract it. True our coffee is expensive but some of our profits go to Guatemala, etc. You can remain a consumerist because solidarity with the poor is included in the price.
This is the horror of ETHICAL CAPITALISM. It presents itself as anti-ideology. I remember when I was young it was usually leftists who speak of urgency, now it is Bill Gates, let’s stop the talk, let’s DO something. Don’t think do! Do so that you will not have to think. Humanitarianism in all forms, charity, is absolutely integral in capitalism’s reproduction.
Capitalism exploitation of nature, tries to fix it by making ecological and social responsibility profitable. Postmodern ethical capitalism, Peter Hawkin, new revolution in production, comparable to the first industrial revolution. To counteract this tendency we have to change our approach. Our prosperity was illusory, by exploiting natural resources, water, trees soil air all this natural goods, are non-renewable, they also perform services indispensable for our survival. We should act economic value of nature as a system. For this definition to become possible, would require regulations, but also a change in form of commodity and market exchange.
With hawkin new ecological content is squeezed into capitalist form. So that everything becomes a commodity. The basic capitalist matrix pursuit of profit through expanded reproduction, he save this matrix. No matter how far we expand the notion of capital. But capital contains use-value and exchange-value.
Resist temptation of human meaning. Jerry falwell and Pat Robertson, 911 was a sign that god had lifted his protection because of homosexual…
We must save Judeo-Christian legacy, the Book of Job. Your suffering has a deeper meaning. The meaning of job ‘s protest, is not that I’M innocent it’s just that I don’t think my suffering has a deeper meaning, then God comes, agrees with Job, then Job asks, ok ok, why did I lose my house my calf, my goats, my wife. God gives the famous answer: but where were you when I created those monsters, this is read as the infinite gap between god and mortals, but GK Chesteron suggests: You think you have the right to complain, but look at the universe it covered in shit.
Žižek in CUNY March, 2011.
Only through Christianity you can become a true atheist. Don’t worry there’s a guy overlook and caring for us, this dies on the cross. This is why we then get the Holy Spirit. Hate them in their function of mother and father, in their function of hierarchic social order.
Fighting emanicipatory collective, it’s not trust God, god says I’m impotent, I trust you. You the egalitarian spirit of believers, is all there is.
Ecological catastrophes can be solved science and also mythologizes it by reference to spirit and spirituality.
What it leaves out is basic socio-political analysis. We must reject a serious of solutions, it is not enough to treat ecological threats as ones for science must deal with or holistic wisdom.
What we need is to look at the uniqueness of our situation. The destruction of nature itself, the natural enviorment.
1906 william james glee at the vividness and admiration of earthquake, pure delight. How far are we here from the way the Japanese experienced their earthquake.
Plastic nomadic way : large-scale social transformations. Should people of japan be dispersed throughout the world … how would the movement of populations be organized. National sovereignty will have to be redefined and new global forms of cooperation will have to be invented.
Immanuel Kant: egalitarian universality of thought – public use of reason – no man or women, no Greeks
Immature invidiudals – private use of reason
Universal singularity – directly participates in the universal, if a couple of friends meet in apt and debate philosophy its public use of reason, if you work for the state and talk philosophy its private use of reason. The EU a mega-catastrophe, the Bologna reform of higher education, the urge to subordinate higher educ to the needs of society – useful to concrete problems, — expert opinion, the idea is if you have car burning in suburb of paris, you call security specialists and sociologists, but what you need is to reflect, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive such problems. The way we perceive of a problem is part of the problem
Our struggle should focus on threat to world civil society. Cloud computing, no more floppy discs, we are internet based, users access through browsers. In this way we can access information from anywehere, the access is in our pocket. Users are accessing files and programs kept in far away place in climate controlled rooms, in order to manage a cloud there needs to be a controlling system, the more the small item small phone is personalized, easy to use and transparent, the more the entire set-up needs to be done elsewhere. But content is also controlled. Vertical integration, a single company is more and more controlling all levels of web. Apple Inc. Made a deal with Murdoch news to make it that access to news on their stuff must go through Murdoch.
Wiki leaks: citizen right to know, investigative journalism, liberal freedom-fighters. This is ideology. Even if corruption is shown to reach the top,
Wikileaks went beyond free flow of info, what WL threatened was the formal mode of functioning of power, the true target were not just dirty details, those in power, but power itself.
Sari challenging power, by challenging the normal avenues of challenging power,not about dirty secrets, not embarrass those in power, they sought a different functioning of power.
Marx’s General Intellect: forms of wealth are more and more are out of proportion to directly labour time spent on their production, the result is not self-dissolution of capital, but transition of profit into rent.
Bill Gates is richest man, his wealth had nothing to do with the production costs. Gate’s weall is not result of his higher exploitation of his workers. Why then are milliosn still buying MS. Because MS monopolized the field as direct embodiment by privatized the GI.
Deregulatory, but the state is more and more all present. Personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with a complex web of state regulatory mechanisms. Apropos neo-liberalism, we should always be aware that it is an ideology, the more the economists are successful is Singapore, capitalist investments are done through state-corporate investments.
Is this our fate? This offensive of privatised GI, although we participate in a public space, this public space is privatized. We are slowly witnessing a series of events that are SUBLIME.
Is there a true ethical progress in history? 20th century brought democracy but also the holocaust.
Kant interpreted the French revolution which pointed towards the possibility of freedom. A whole people asserted their freedom and equality. Spectators a taking of sides which borders on enthusiasm, can only be caused by a moral diposition within the human race. Do these words not fit perfectly the Egyptian uprising. The universal freedom of humanity. It was immediately possible for all of us to identify with it, we didn’t need particularist interpretations, here the frame is universal secular call for freedom and justice. Muslim and Coptic Chritians joined in a prayer, we are 1, was a SUBLIME moment.
The rise of radical Islamism is the opposite side of the coin of failed leftist revolutions in muslim countries. Afghanistan was caught in larger global countries, there are no backward people whose 1000 year tradition etc. That is simply not true. Thomas Frank What’s the Matter with Kansas.
Western Europe violent return of anti-immigrant populism, to combat centrist liberalism LePen is only politician who refers to working class.
The struggle for who will appropriate the struggles of Egyptian revolution. The demand for social justice. What happens the day after. How will emancipatory explosions be translated into new social order. Democracy but poverty remains. Look at South Africa, Hollywood Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. If anything the black majority is even a little bit worse than under apartheid, with its police brutality, it brought a minimum of safety, now crime is out of control, black elite replaces the white elite.
At different levels we are facing a series of problems which are literally problems of the commons. They all concern the ‘commons’ of nature, intellectual property, biogenetics and new walls and new exclusions.
We should not abandon the notion of proletariat, redefine it under new conditions. Proletarian is a worker, reduced to pure subjectivity, when all substantical content is taken from him (marx). In a way ecological crisis is making us proletarian, natural environment is taken from us, intellectual property means general intellect is taken from us we should radicalize the category of proletarian…
Saroy Giri: we have an overload of false moralistic anti-capitalism, corrupt banks, the catch is that in all these cases it is the ‘bad guy’ corruption, the situation in other words is moralized. The big question is how the system itself generates this. A defence of Bernard Madoff: anti-semtic, look that greedy guy, he was a model of charitable capitalism, he just went to the end in the direction the system was going. At all levels we should do it, in ecology its the same, I wanted to write a text to defend BP. Wasn’t it suspicious that they all focused on they BP were inefficient, but they were only doing what every other oil company was doing.
I’m not a guy we need a “Leninist Party”. The old style commies in power, when people ask me, you want the old style commies, you are taking to the wrong guy, look at China they are ruthless capitalists, they are on your side. Even when they celebrated Stalin and Mao, they never proclaimed Stalin did miracles, but they do so in North Korea.
No sympathy for Stalin, but my reproach to standard Anti-communism, if anything it is too soft. Did you see the movie Life of the Others. It’s supposed to be anti-communist. Communist minister wants to sleep with the wife of a writer. But my east german friends this is ridiculous, where behind evil act there must be some private vice.
The tragedy of East Germany was that writer would been under total surveillance forget about a guy wanting to screw his wife.
People whose basic disposition is good are made to do bad things.
I am saying communism disappears but the problems of COMMONS remains. And we will have somehow to solve it.
I have no problems with markets, but markets need time, but when you have a catastrophe,large social acts are needed, neither market nor the state but when a nuclear reactor explains transnational large mobilization will have to emerge.
The problems of communism are here, the alternative is either some kind of re-invention of this large scale social movement, or its also quite possible something between Berlusconi and China. I have nothing against the Chinese, you give to the devil what belongs to the devil, capitalism needed dictatorship for 10 years, Chile, South Korea, but now Singapoer, China, a dynamic capitalism, productive, but no tendency for democracy. This marriage between capitalism and democracy is slowing disintegrating. Nothing against democracy, in England, the last elections won by Tony Blair, 1 week there was a t.v. show the most hated person in the U.K. and Blair won. There is a level of social discontent that can’t be captured by multi-party democractic mechanisms, what about brazil and Bolivia, an inter-action and organized movements, indigenous, workers, social movements. You get this additional push beyond this purely representational function. If we really care about democracy, in the long term only a new more radical left can save it. Left to itself, …
Did you notice in what a strange way, the word “impossible” functions, at the level of tech possibilities and private pleasures anything possible, can be an astronaut, go to space, everyting is possible, but the moment you touch the economy, you way raise a little more money for health care NO NO that’s impossible.
Neo-liberalism doesn’t exist in reality. We have a space.to change things.