Category: ideology

Next 4 years under Biden

The Election Is Over. Here’s a Vision From the Left for the Next Four Years.
Organizers and thinkers on where we are in the major fights of our moment—from prison abolition to climate justice and the housing crisis—and where we go next. Melissa Gira Grant, Nick Martin, Katie McDonough, J.C. Pan

We have a new president, but little else has changed in terms of the work ahead. A Biden administration may be more vulnerable to pressure from the left, but its positions on climate disaster, police and private right-wing violence, mass precarity and poverty, and other compounding crises of our moment will do little to pull us out of the fire. Our elite institutions are largely incapable of responding to the urgency of the moment or the left movements rising to meet it.

Continue reading “Next 4 years under Biden”

Oren Cass on Ezra Klein

Review of Cass’s book The Once and Future Worker This review appeared in french in Paris, and has been translated by Emmanuel Todd

In a world without manufacturing, based uniquely on the tertiary economy, one sees neither gains in productivity nor increases in purchasing power. As Cass reminds us in a felicitous formulation: “Everyone can’t just serve each other coffee.” The production of tangible, exportable goods remains indispensable.

Cass on the Ezra Klein podcast

The Ezra Klein Show, July 16 2020

Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

But then he launched an insurgency. Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets.

What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policy making, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy.

Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.

In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.

References: The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass “Removing the Blinders from Economic Policy” by Oren Cass. Book recommendations: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Aggregate GDP: Pay less attention to this indicator. We do a lot of analysis at aggregate level, but any given group or place isn’t looked at, need to focus in at those not doing as well. Measure consumption, increases in consumption when it is size of your television isn’t correlated with healthy families and communities through to the next generation.

Are people being able to achieve self-sufficiency, creating stable families

Basket of Indicators: Savings rate, not aggregate savings rate. Savings rate of typical household with children. Not reliant on transfer payments, but are net economic contributors.

Median Wage. Family Status. Divorce rate is not the way to look at it .. its families not being formed in the first place, instead marriage rate and fertility rate. Share of kids being raised in stable households.

Look at the health of local economies and communities. NY Times looked at county by county and share of personal income came from transfer payments. in the 1970s you were at 10 to 20% income from gov’t transfers, now you get 30-40% in some places and up to 50% in others. This shows economy is not working.

Finance: cut up and merge companies or go on to work and make real things in the economy

Culture and economics and the black community: family breakdown, fleeing of manufacturing from where black people live, economic devastation made it hard for families to remain stable. Now it’s happening to white communities. Divorce rates, drug addiction .. exposed white people to same economic conditions, they followed along the same trends, but treated differently. For instance the way crack and opioid are treated.

Post 2012: Slow recovery from recession. Post-Romney, Pre-Trump… academic research confirming shocks to labour markets deeply damage communities that they have trouble recovering from.

Oren Cass Working Goal

A labour market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.

For most of the country, and most conversations, ivy league degree and job in investment banking, has very little status value, and is very negatively associated with a lot of things.

Klein: But hold it, what I’m getting at there, is that who holds status in society is important. The professions that attract the most powerful and selective cohorts, I think problem in the economy is that we mis-classify status.

Cass: In every human society you will have status, and positions of authority, that’s why they are high status. We want is a society is that anybody whereever they live can find work, feel they are a productive contributor and support a family that can sustain itself. Stable job paying $40 – $50,000 per year. This is what we should be talking about as policy goals.

Klein: Some of what you’re saying is severed from a power analysis. Wall St. players get their voices in the op-eds. Their voices set policy.

A society is going to have an elite thta exercises power. The 2 most important levers to pull.

1. what is the pool in which they all swim. ideas matter, trace way people opted different policies to get where we are today. Economic Piety Story (get a big pie for all)

2. At end of day, whoever is exercising power, is still subject to the coalition that their power is built on. The way coalition is structured is focused on certain groups and not others, so a realignment is needed.

opposed to any public funding for child care, the household should take care of child care. move toward an economy in which a single earner could earn enough so that both parents don’t have to work to support a household. Even a quite poor paying job that a second earner, is still going to earn more enough to pay child care. what is least affordable is to stay at home.

Zupančič reviews McGowan

Alenka Zupančič reviews Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, 2016 Columbia University Press

“With the onset of capitalism, the speaking being enters a system that promises relief from the absence that inheres within the basic structure of signification.”

According to McGowan this promise (whichs also the promise of a better future) is an essential feature of capitalism. It is also what m akes critique of it very difficult: for how are we to criticize capitalism without (at least implicitly) proposing a better (alternative) future? Yet the moment we do this, we get entrapped into the logic of capital: “The task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a better future.”

Interestingly, German philosopher Frank Ruda dedicates his recently published book Abolishing Freedom almost entirely to a very similar task, formulated by Ruda in slightly different terms, namely as an attack on the concept of freedom as potentiality (to be realized). Freedom as possibility, as potentiality, as capacity to do something (exemplified in the liberal capitalist freedom of choice), argues Ruda, has become a signifier of oppression and functions as the best antidote to actual freedom.

Once the mode of possibility enters the game and structures it, one should resist understanding or presenting the stakes simply in terms of possibility versus actuality (actual action), that is, in terms of the opposition between a possibility and its realization.

For this is precisely how freedom as oppression works in practice. It works following the logic of the superego, most concisely defined by Žižek as the reversal of the Kantian “you must, therefore you can” into “you can, therefore you must.”

Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means an at any price: You can do it, therefore you must!

The culture (and economy) of possibilities is not suffocating simply because there are so many possibilities, but because we are supposed not to miss out on any of them. A person who just sits at home, relishing in the idea of all the possibilities and opportunities capitalism has to offer and doing nothing to realize them is not the kind of person this system needs.

What we are expected to do is to realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities. Which is precisely where “actual” freedom has to be situated: not simply in the actual realisation of possibilities, but in “unscrewing” the very framework which is based on the idea of freedom as possibility to be (yet) realized.

Ruda proposes to do this by advocating what he calls “comic fatalism.” He formulates several slogans of such fatalism: they suggest that a way out of this freedom-as-oppression is to act as if there were no future

  • “Act as if the apocalypse has already happened!”
  • “Act as if you were dead!”
  • “Act as if everything were always already lost!”

There is thus an interesting connection between the way in which both McGowan and Ruda see the dismantling of the promise/potentiality (set in the future) as a crucial step in undermining the ideological and libidinal power of capitalism.

This proximity goes very far, for the way in which McGowan proposes to go about this undermining could actually be formulated in a single maxim coined upon Ruda’s examples:

“Act as if you were already satisfied!”

As he notes explicitly, McGowan sees the most important novelty of his approach to the critique of capitalism in conceiving the core of the problem not in terms of the injustice or inequality (following Marx), nor in terms of repression (following the Frankfurt school) – including the Foucauldian reversal of the “repressive hypothesis” – , but it terms of satisfaction.

The promise of a better future is the promise of a future (full) satisfaction which drives our desire. Yet what we don’t see is that the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is precisely the real s ource of satisfaction. This real source of satisfaction is traumatic in its nature, and capitalism – with both its economic and ideological structuring – allows this traumatic source to remain unconscious. It provides a gigantic armature for the metonymy of our desire, and hence protects us against confronting the trauma of loss as constitutive (and not empirical).

The ultimate commodity sold (to us) by capitalism is not this or that commodity, but its dissatisfaction as such: “No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction.”

Dissatisfaction, and the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is the very source of satisfaction that accompanies capitalism. It is the reason what we cling to it so tightly.

By accepting the psychic or psychoanalytic perspective adopted by McGowan there nevertheless remains one question that concerns what we may call “material conditions of the reproduction of our psyche”. This question is intrinsic to the psychoanalytic theory itself.

The unconscious is out there

Jacques Lacan

Lacan is famous for his statement that “the unconscious is out there”, which implies that we can perhaps also change it only out there. Commodity functions as it does because of our attitude to it, but such an attitude is already part of the commodity as its objective functioning, and this functioning continues pretty much independently of what we think and know about the object in the first instance.

Adam Kotsko

The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead
Rick Santelli has apologized for suggesting the populace should be infected with coronavirus, but his sadistic worldview is still a threat.
By ADAM KOTSKO
March 6, 2020

Rick Santelli is at it again. Speaking from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Thursday, the stock trader and frequent CNBC commentator shared his views about the best way to handle the coronavirus. Dismissing the possibility of containing it through quarantines, he suggested that “maybe we’d be just better off if we gave it to everybody, and then in a month it would be over.” He went on to make the questionable claim that “the mortality rate of this probably isn’t going to be any different if we did it that way than the long-term picture.”

The extreme optimism of Santelli’s armchair epidemiology notwithstanding, it’s clear that his real concern isn’t public health at all. Compared to his brutally efficient plan of mass infection, his seeming problem with the more drawn-out containment attempts was that they “[wreak] havoc on global and domestic economies.” So, whoever is going to die from coronavirus had better get it over with as quickly as possible—for the sake of capitalism.

It would be too easy to dismiss this unforeseen outburst as the ranting of a sociopath, or even a sick attempt at humor. Santelli’s ravings reflect a coherent worldview, one that has previously demonstrated its appeal by kicking off an entire social movement. I am speaking, of course, of the Tea Party, which Santelli summoned into existence in an infamous 2009 harangue that found an enthusiastic reception among conservative commentators.

Raging against what he saw as the Obama administration’s excessive generosity, and claiming that government largesse was “promoting bad behavior,” Santelli called for the tech-savvy administration to “put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or, would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give ’em to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road?” Exclaiming, “This is America!” he built to a crescendo, ultimately calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to head off the nation’s decline into Cuban-style collectivism.

In his Tea Party rant, Santelli’s “get it over with” philosophy is not stated quite so baldly as it is in his more recent statement on the coronavirus. Santelli nevertheless makes it clear that he would prefer the undeserving to be kicked out of their homes as quickly as possible, so that they will stop draining resources that others could use more productively. Such an approach, he contended, would “reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water.”

What would happen to the thirsty people deprived of water? In typical fashion, Santelli didn’t care enough to make it explicit. Instead, he turned his attention to the “silent majority” represented by the stock traders who stood in the background of CNBC’s live coverage, cheering his Tea Party oration. Those colleagues, he averred, are “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America,” showing the same fast-and-loose approach to statistics as in his claims that intentionally infecting all Americans with coronavirus would lead to a similar death rate as attempting to contain it. Still, we should resist our impulse to dismiss Santelli as ignorant here. This is not a simple error, but a statement about who really counts—namely, people like him and his fellow stewards of the market, who are never going to be underwater on their mortgage, just as they will presumably never be among the unwashed masses dying of coronavirus.

Capitalism has always created winners and losers, of course, and capitalist ideology has always aimed to portray those outcomes as legitimate and just. Hence we should not be surprised that a privileged person like Santelli views himself and his colleagues as uniquely deserving. What is surprising, indeed disturbing, is the element of malice toward the losers. Santelli travels far beyond the more conventional view that acknowledges the destruction wrought by the market—the job losses, the failed businesses, the bad bets—as a necessary evil that is outweighed by the benefits of economic growth overall. Within such a framework, even ardent pro-market theorists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman concede that society owes something to those left behind. For Santelli, by contrast, the fact that some people are harmed by the market is a positive good, to the point where offering aid and comfort to the losers can appear as an injustice worthy of the condemnation of an enraged overclass.

Back in 2009, many Americans among the hoi polloi were willing to be drafted into Santelli’s aristocratic revolution, dressing up in Founding Fathers drag for their contemporary Tea Party. There were serious questions about the extent to which the Tea Party was an authentic grassroots movement or a corporate-sponsored “astroturf” campaign, but it is undeniable that it was, at the time, the most effective American protest movement in this young century. The Tea Party tipped the balance of power in Congress and within the Republican Party itself, putting Obama on the defensive for the rest of his presidency. More than that, with its anti-intellectualism and its vulgar provocations (most notably on the topic of rape), it cleared the way for Trump, who has shown just as much malice toward society’s “losers.” It may not represent a numerical majority, but enough Americans are on board with a program of vengeance against society’s most vulnerable to allow the anti-democratic aspects of our system to stymie any movement toward a less punitive society.

How could such a cruel and seemingly irrational view gain such purchase? Once more, we need to resist purely individualistic explanations—such as the idea that Tea Party or Trump supporters are simply bad people whose negative urges have finally found an outlet. Santelli’s remarks do not reflect the universal facts of human nature, but a very specific historical situation: the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which produced a permanent ratcheting down of incomes and life chances for entire populations. The usual bromides about hard work and individual virtue could not make sense of such a system-wide shock. And to add insult to injury, many of the victims got into trouble by pursuing homeownership, which is supposed to be the ultimate sign of personal responsibility and prosperity.

All of this had the potential to call the legitimacy of the system as a whole into question. In that context, Santelli’s rant and its subsequent embrace by conservatives represents a desperate attempt to harness this populist rage and declare that the suffering the crisis inflicted was a feature, not a bug. We realize in retrospect that Santelli’s fears were groundless, because no shift toward collectivism was on the Democrats’ agenda under Obama. We are living in the aftermath of the right’s cruel preemptive assault against a program of radical reform that never came.

Thankfully, Santelli’s novel idea of infecting the populace with the coronavirus was greeted with the opprobrium it deserved, compelling him to apologize for his suggestion Friday morning. Nevertheless, we should not let that distract us from the fact that the conservative movement has successfully taken his earlier vision to stratospheric heights. We may be spared a forced pandemic, but they will keep on doubling down and doubling down, until we do what Santelli feared the most: make the choice to improve the lives of others, whether they “deserve” it or not. Until that day comes, we cannot be surprised that, with no prospect of any positive change, a vocal plurality of our fellow citizens will continue to be seduced by the consolations of sadism.

Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. He is the author, most recently, of Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital.

Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff

In 2017, a leaked Facebook document acquired by The Australian exposed the corporation’s interest in applying “psychological insights” from “internal Facebook data” to modify user behavior. The targets were 6.4 million young Australians and New Zealanders. “By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity in real time,” the executives wrote, “Facebook can work out when young people feel ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘overwhelmed,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘silly,’ ‘useless’ and a ‘failure.’” This depth of information, they explained, allows Facebook to pinpoint the time frame during which a young person needs a “confidence boost” and is most vulnerable to a specific configuration of subliminal cues and triggers. The data are then used to match each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed sales.

Elif Shafik on CBC Ideas

Women in their own private space can be matriarchs of the house, how they navigate their way through patriarchy but the same time public space is very partriarchal

Authoritarian regimes first thing that is curbed is HUMOUR. Laugh at yourself, laugh at people holding positions of power. Once you lose that it indicates loss of democracy as well.

Nostalgia, political Imperial Nostalgia. come to power with liberal promises, but longer stay in power, they become more inward looking, authoritarian, illusions of a golden era that we have lost, lost it because of foreigners, US/THEM, etc.

Golden Imperial past, re-constructed, re-invented, symbols and rhetoric, posing with Ottoman soldiers, assumption that we were one big great empire, homogenous, but we were not, story of Ottoman empire changes
concubine in harem, slave, Armenian silversmith, Jewish miller, prostitute working in brothel, or shamam. Offical history wants only one history

Head scarf ban created backlash. resentment.

EMOTIONS
21:00 something is happening in the cultural sphere, a culture clash within every society, not between countries. People’s perceptions are determined/shaped by emotions. A fundamental fact is that we humans are emotional creatures, but in poly sci, emotions are not measurable data, quantitative data fails to capture what is happening right now, because what is happening right now can’t be captured in empirical data

Liberal Elite versus Real people
Who are not part of the ‘real people’ immigrants, race, class. Romanticization of the ‘real’ people is dangerous. the VOLK, real people, not corrupted. untainted by western ideology, resentment against intellectuals and educated.

Leaders of populist movement are elites, just as elitist as people they claim to criticize, Marie Le Pen, Nigel Farage, vested interests in business world and political establishment.

Little people, poor people and the ELITES. Duality re-cast for the 21st century.
Pareto: Italian sociologist, swing from liberal elites to republican elites. Liberal elites fail to understand nationalism, republican elites rise in nationalism, jingoism. 100 years later, we have forgotten this.

32:00 Sweden, there is a re-branding right-wing nationalists are calling themselves democrats

Žižek Dec 2010 princeton u. belief big Other chicken joke neils borg commodity fetishism ethnic dances

Žižek, S. Why Only an Atheist Can Be A True Christian  Wilson College, Princeton University.  12 Dec. 2010.
Here is the talk on YouTube

Eppur Si Muove: Although someone possesses true knowledge is forced to renounce it, this does not stop it from being true. It can also be used in the opposite sense, assert the deeper symbolic truth, make a statement its obviously false but nonetheless, even if its not true, in a deeper sense, the message has metaphorical truth.
Although he knows that there is no God, the idea of a god still moves him. This is nothing mystical, how does it evoke emotion? The well known conservative idea: IF THERE IS NO GOD THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.
Lacan inverts this: If there is no god then everything is prohibited, everything is regulated.
I visited Belgrade, there I encountered Nationalists engaged in ethnic cleansing: for them modern hedonist liberal society was not too much freedom, but too regulated, I can’t beat my wife I can’t rape, for them being a nationalist, I can steal, rape, kill. Hitler is false permissivity, pretend to sacrifice yourself and beneath this surface we can have lots of fun.

Sound of Music: Sister Maria, Julie Andrews, goes to Mother Superior in the monastery, I’m still in love, repent? Mother Superior sings Climb every mountain, go back and screw

Pretend to be one of us, Catholic priest and you can have all the boys you want.  It isn’t superfically follow the ritual and then do secret stuff, no you are obliged to particpate in obscene transgressions, take the KKK in Alabama 1950.  If you were against the church you would be teased, but if you spoke against the KKK, to be a real member of the white community you had to participate in these rituals.  When I was young in the Yugoslav army, you had to do fragging, it is there solidarity is asserted.

Stalinist commies were NOT atheists, commies had their own GODS which is why everything was permitted, commies did not perceive themselves as hedonists, but instruments of a historical necessity, perceiving yourself as instrument of historical necessity which permitted them to do whatever they wanted.  In 1956 when Kruschev denounced Stalin’s crimes, they had psychiatrists, delegated had heart attacks, hospitalized, Why?  They didn’t find out anything new, no, they all knew it, the point is that what in Lacanian theory we call the big Other, the public space, there it was admitted.

The big Other, I claim we believe more than ever.

CHICKEN JOKE
crazy as this sounds, this is how ideology functions today
Neils Borg joke: We don’t have to believe in it, it works objectively.  we don’t believe in democracy, justice

Commodity Fetishism
Of course we know that there is nothing magical about money, in our everyday ideology we are rational utilitarians, fetishism is not in what we think but WHAT WE DO.   They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.  They don’t know what they don’t know.  They don’t know the illusions they follow in their real social actions.  My father is a jerk.  If you observe the same teen interacting with his father, you see a different attitude.  It is not simply what you think and how things really are, OBJECTIVE BELIEF even if you don’t you believe, you believe without believing subjectively, you believe in your ACTS.

This is how RELIGION functions, we believe much more, even if we say we don’t, we believe through our acts.
INTERPASSIVITY: Weepers, Tibetan Prayer Wheel: objectively you are praying, think about sex whatever. Canned Laughter The TV set laughs. At the end of the show I feel relaxed as if I had laughed. The tv literally laughs for you.

Religion: we don’t need to, we need an other one Subject Supposed to Believe, exist as a presupposition, Xmas time, why did you buy present for kid, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but the child pretend to believe in it to get presents and not disappoint parents. A belief can be objective without anyone believing in it.
Age of Innocence, movie: Winona Ryder, hero has a love affair with Michelle Pfeiffer. The young wife dies, he thinks he is free to marry Pfeiffer, but his son says that mother knew it all the time, she just pretended, everything is ruing for Daniel Day Lewis. Nothing changed, he just learned that the OTHER was not ignorant. We need another agent/group/subject that through their/his/her belief COVERS US. Have orgies, but there should be someone who does not know. MOLESTATION OF small children, children’s sexuality disappeared, to be transgressive, do what you want but there needs to be an appearance, a big Other who doesn’t know.

Everyone knows it but everyone pretends not to know it, and it works.
Life is Beautiful: holocaust was so brutal and violent it was too strong for a tragedy, a minimal of dignity of victim should be maintained. To imagine such a confrontation in Auschwitz is to presupposes a level of dignity which was not given to them. Comedy, not where you laugh, but a total ridicule of a scene. Primo Levi. In the movie Life is Beautiful, the son should know all along that father was lying, but was just playing the game so not to hurt his father. This would make the situation tragic.

Capitalism is a religion: Usually we say capitalism is brutal egotism, utilitarian, profiteering. NO. It is clear a capitalist works as a monk, what matters to him is to totally sacrifice himself to capital, so that just capital should circulate.
Christianity: A religion functions without people really believing in it. It can function objectively.

Nobody believed, not taking it seriously was a condition for taking part in nomenklatura, if you take the ruling ideology seriously you are close to being a dissident. The chicken should know that you are not corn, not you. It is not enough for us that there is no god, the illusion must be broken from within. This whole history of Christianity is dealing with this, Napoleon forced the Pope to crown him, Pope told him, you want to destroy Christianity, but we the church have been trying for 2000 yrs and have not succeeded.

Judaism God is dead. Woody Aloni, God is speaking to his people, you have made me a single entity in the world through your prayers. Marshal Mcluhan, the other rabbi says God go away, god runs away. The structure of illusion, what you still have here, we know its an illusion but it still fully functions as an illusion.
On that moment on the Cross for Christianity, Father why did you abandon me, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist, what dies on the Cross is not the terrestial rep of Divinity, but God dies himself and Holy spirit is the community of believers.

Book of Job. And then 3 theological friends come. Your suffering has a deeper meaning. He rejects the idea that his calamity has deeper meaning. God comes everything that Job says is true, Chesterton says it is supreme moment of blasphemy, God becomes for an instant an atheist, the maker is astonished at the things he made, I don’t control anything, all is a mess.

What dies on the CROSS? God as the big Other, God as such.

Death of Christ: radical renunciation, God is saying NO YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST ME, there is no meaning guaranteed, don’t trust me, I trust you, where there is love between two of you I will be there. We are condemned to our freedom. RUINING THE STRUCTURE OF ILLUSION FROM WITHIN, this atheist message is the Christian message, God dies on the cross we are condemned to freedom.

Levinasian Ethics: Experience of the Other as vulnerable, the wounded perplexed suffering face. We are still in a position of Masters, it is the other who is fragile not ourselves, when the other addresses us, I don’t accept it, the problem of animals, as Derrida demonstrated, the Animal that I am, how Levinas with all his celebration of otherness, the face, EXPLICITLY excludes animals. If there is a paradigm case of confronting wounded other, it is the animal, all philosophy disavows this, rationally you accept it, but nonetheless you ignore it. A photo of a cat submitted to a lab experiment, broken bones, without fur, helplessly looking into camera. Jeremy Bentham, instead of asking can animals talk/reason/think, denying things to animals, half blind pigs fattened and slaughtered, philosophical way to deny this is Cartesian notion of animals as machines, cries of pain should not disturb us, just imagine malfunction of machine there is nothing behind it. What do we see in the perplexed gaze of tortured animal, I claim that instead of just asking the standard philosophical questions what are animals for us, but what are WE for animals, what does the tortured animal see when the see us, inhuman dimension of human being, Freud said it was DEATH DRIVE. This excessive monstrosity of being HUMAN, some philosophers got it, Kant, in his unknown text on education, human is an animal who needs a master. Human nature is explosive radical crazy freedom, it is to control this excess that humans need education not animals. I see in the animals gaze is my MONSTROSITY.

I claim that some things, ordinary things we do, could be read against this background, how to cope/control this other as neighbour. A kiss is clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language. A kiss is by the mouth, it is as if the message of a kiss is, I know that there is a monstrosity in you beyond language, an abyssal potential evil, but with my kiss in you, I accept you in this dimension, and by kissing we can reach a momentary peace.

I don’t care about your ethnic dances, I want to hear your dirty jokes.

Zupančič on comedy #3

Zupančič. The Odd One In: On Comedy click to download

In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive — say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life.

There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.

It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific color to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness. This is very efficient, for who dares to raise her voice and say that as a matter of fact, she is not happy, and that she can’t manage to — or, worse, doesn’t even care to — transform all the disappointments of her life into a positive experience to be invested in the future?

There is an important difference between this and the classical entrepreneur formula according to which we are always broadly responsible for our failures and misfortunes. This classical formula still implies a certain interval between what we are and the symbolic value of our success. It implies that, at least in principle, we could have acted otherwise, but didn’t (and are hence responsible for our failures or lack of happiness).

The bio-morality mentioned above is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their bare life, and all their erroneous actions or nonactions follow from there with an inexorable necessity.

In other words, the problem is not simply that success and efficiency have become the supreme values of our late capitalist society (as we often hear from critics of this society) — there is nothing particularly new in this; social promotion of success (defined in different ways) has existed since time immemorial.

The problem is, rather, that success is becoming almost a biological notion, and thus the foundation of a genuine racism of successfulness. The poorest and the most miserable are no longer perceived as a socioeconomic class, but almost as a race of their own, as a special form of life. We are indeed witnessing a spectacular rise of racism or, more precisely, of “racization.”

This is to say that we are no longer simply dealing with racism in its traditional sense of hatred towards other races, but also and above all with a production of (new) races based on economic, political, and class differences and factors, as well as with the segregation based on these differences.

If traditional racism tended to socialize biological features—that is, directly translate them into cultural and symbolic points of a given social order — contemporary racism works in the opposite direction. It tends to “naturalize” the differences and features produced by the sociosymbolic order. This is also what can help us to understand the ideological rise of the theme of private life, as well as of lifestyles and habits.

To take a simple example: if a “successful artist” is invited as a guest on a TV show, the focus is practically never on her work, but instead on the way she lives, on her everyday habits, on what she enjoys, and so on. This is not simply a voyeuristic curiosity; it is a procedure that systematically presents us with two elements: “success” on the one side, and the life that corresponds to this success on the other — implying, of course, a strong and immediate equivalence between the two.

The objective surplus, the materialized work itself, is eliminated at the very outset. In other words, our ways of life, our habits, our feelings, our more or less idiosyncratic enjoyments — all these are no longer simply “private matters” exposed to scrutiny to satisfy our curiosity. They are one of the crucial cultural catalysts through which all kinds of socio-economic and ideological differences are being gradually transformed into “human differences,” differences at the very core of our being, which makes it possible for them to become the ground of a new racism. This is the process that aims at establishing an immediate connection between being (“bare life”) and a socioeconomic value.

We are thus witnessing a massive and forceful naturalization of economic, political, and other social differences, and this naturalization is itself a politico-ideological process par excellence.  As I said above,“naturalization” involves above all the promotion of a belief in an immediate character of these differences — that is to say, in their being organically related to life as such, or to existing reality in general.

I could also put this in the following way: the contemporary discourse which likes to promote and glorify the gesture of distancing oneself from all Ideologies and Projects (as the Ideologies of others, and because they are necessarily totalitarian or utopian) strives to promote its own reality as completely nonideological.  Our present socioeconomic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.

If the imperative of happiness, positive thinking, and cheerfulness is one of the key means of expanding and solidifying this ideological hegemony, one cannot avoid the question of whether promoting comedy is not part of the same process. Is comedy not all about cheerfulness, satisfaction, and “positive feelings”?  And is this not why Hollywood is producing huge amounts of “comedy,” neatly packaged to suit different audiences: romantic comedies, black comedies, teen comedies, family comedies, blue-collar comedies, white-collar comedies . . . ?

Well, this compulsive entertainment has in fact very little to do with comedy, just as comedy has very little to do with nature (or naturalization), immediacy, and feelings. True, comedy does not view men as an exception to nature, as the point that breaks the very laws of nature — this is more the perspective of tragedy. Yet comedy’s frequent reduction of man to (his) nature makes a further comic point about nature itself: nature is far from being as “natural” as we might think, but is itself driven by countless contradictions and discrepancies. As for the question of immediacy: comedy thrives on all kinds of short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders.

Yet again, the immediacy that comedy thus puts forward is not that of a smooth, imperceptible passing of one into another, but that of a material cut between them. If we think of the simplest examples of this procedure (like the one frequent in the Marx Brothers’ comedies when, say, A says “Give me a break!” and B pulls a brake out of his pocket), is it not that its fundamental lesson is always this: the only genuine immediate link between these two things is the very cut between them?

And as for the question of comedy’s nonaffinity with our subjective feelings and emotions — this point has been systematically made in literature on comedy, and is splendidly epitomized by Horace Walpole’s remark: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Yet this divorce of comedy and feelings is not simply comedy’s way of keeping a distance from feelings, but above all its way of introducing a distance (or nonimmediacy) into the feelings themselves.

This is especially interesting in the case of happiness: comedies have very ingenious ways of showing us that happiness can indeed be largely independent of how we feel….In other words: there has been some philosophical discussion lately about the difference between what people think they feel and what they really feel. One of the fundamental axioms of what is now officially called “happiness studies” is that there is no difference between the two. In this respect, comedy definitely aligns itself with the opposite camp, which insists that it often happens that we don’t know how we really feel, and that emotions (far from constituting a direct insight into the Real of the subject) can lie and be as deceptive as anything else.  6-8

Comedy is materialistic because it gives voice and body to the impasses and contradictions of this materiality itself. This is the true incarnation involved in comedy.

Comedy is materialistic because it sees the turning of materiality into pure spirit and of pure spirit into something material as one and the same movement, driven by a difficulty inherent to materiality itself. 47

Alenka does not like this theory of comedy

Comedy is a genre that strongly emphasizes our essential humanity, its joys and limitations. It invites—or even forces—us to recognize and accept
the fact that we are finite beings. It teaches us that we are only human,
with all our faults, imperfections, and weaknesses, and it helps us to deal affirmatively and joyfully with the burden of human finitude.

And this is why

The prizing of comedy as a porte-parole of human finitude (and of everything that is supposed to be related to it: acceptance of our weaknesses, limitations, and imperfections; reconciliation with the absence of the transcendent and acknowledgment of the equation “a human is [only] human,” “life is [only] life”) is conceptually highly problematic.

Is not the very existence of comedy and of the comical telling us most clearly that a man is never just a man, and that his finitude is very much corroded by a passion which is precisely not cut to the measure of man and of his finitude? Most comedies set up a configuration in which one or several characters depart violently from the moderate, balanced rationality and normality of their surroundings, and of other people in it.

“man,” a human being, interests comedy at the very point where the human coincides with the inhuman; where theinhuman “falls” into the human (into man), where the infinite falls into the finite, where the Essence falls into appearance and the Necessary into the contingent.

the true materialistic axiom, promoted by comedy, is, rather, “a man is not a man.” This is what the above-mentioned metaphysics of finitude fails to see when it encloses itself within a heart-stirring humanism of accepting human weaknesses and flaws. 50

A man comes home from work earlier than usual, and finds his wife in bed. She is visibly upset by his arrival, and claims to be in bed because she has a terrible headache. While he is expressing his concern for her, a phone starts to ring.

An example

The man reaches for his phone and answers, but the ringing continues. He is perplexed, and keeps looking at the phone in his hand; then the door of the bedroom closet opens and another man, wearing only his socks, comes out. He apologizes for the inconvenience and heads for the heap of clothes lying in the corner of the room, in search of the phone, which continues to ring. He finds it, answers it, and gets very seriously engaged in conversation. Meanwhile he is gesticulating to the (staring) husband and wife, to express his regret at intruding on them with his phone conversation. As if to minimize this impolite intrusion, he moves back towards the closet, climbs in, closes the door behind him, and calmly continues his conversation inside. . . . 57

What makes this irresistibly comical? Precisely the impossible sustained encounter between two excluding realities. Comedy stages this encounter in its very impossibility.

In “ordinary reality” this kind of intrusion of the other side would cause an immediate reaction and adjustment of both sides, enabling the linear continuation of the story.

The lover would be embarrassed, the husband humiliated, the wife embarrassed and perhaps scared; there would be a confrontation—that is to say, some kind of acknowledgment of what happened, and of its necessary consequences.

In our comic example, however, it is precisely this acknowledgment that is suspended, enabling the two mutually exclusive realities to continue to exist alongside each other, and, moreover, to be articulated within one and the same scene.

The actual link between them, the way the two realities meet and are articulated together (the lover politely apologizing to the couple for the disturbance caused by his phone, and considerately retreating back to his closet so that he does not disturb them with his talking) is, of course, highly illogical and “fantastic,” yet it works. In other words, it is not only that this comic procedure presents us with two mutually exclusive realities as visible in one and the same “shot,” it also has to find and offer us a form of their articulation which, in all its “absurdity,” somehow works.

Structural Dynamics and Temporality page 129

deadlock antagonism in social reality

From Žižek’s The Year of Living Dangerously 2012

As Marx already recognized, the “objective” determinations of social reality are at the same time “subjective” thought-determinations (of the subjects caught up in this reality), and, at this point of indistinction (at which the limits of our thought, its deadlocks and contradictions, are at the same time the antagonisms of objective social reality itself ), “the diagnosis is also its own symptom.” Our diagnosis (our “objective” rendering of the system of all possible positions which determines the scope of our activity) is itself “subjective,” it is a scheme of subjective reactions to a deadlock we confront in our practice and, in that sense, is symptomatic of this unresolved deadlock itself.

Where we should nonetheless disagree with Jameson is in his designation of this indistinction of subjective and objective as “ideological”: it is ideological only if we naively define “non-ideological” in terms of a purely “objective” description, a description free of all subjective involvement.

But would it not be more appropriate to characterize as “ideological” any view that ignores not some “objective” reality undistorted by our subjective investment but the very cause of this unavoidable distortion, the real of that deadlock to which we react in our projects and engagements? [3]

Ž agrees with Butler and ideology

Žižek audio of his talk given in June 2012 and there is a video of Žižek in conversation with Jonathan Derbyshire June 12 2012

This following is based on his talk June 15.

On Butler’s Performativity

Yes I agree, but this precisely IS the reality of the Cartesian subject.  We experience ourselves as an abstract subjectivity where all our concrete embodiments are perceived as something ultimately contingent.  Marx was very clear about this which is why he always emphasized the ambiguous character of the bourgeois order: which is of course the order of alienation and so on but at the same time an order creating the conditions for liberation.  Namely, let’s take Descartes with his Cogito: It is precisely because Descartes saw the CORE OF THE SUBJECT abstraction I think therefore I am, in abstraction from all my particular features he was able in a wonderful way I know a formula of radical multicultural openness.  It’s not enough just to be patronizingly open to others every arrogant Eurocentric can do this.  Descartes says something else: he says when I was young, when I encountered people from other cultures I perceived their  manners as stupid ridiculous and so on, but then I started to ask myself a question, what if from their standpoint our own particular are no less stupid and ridiculous and so on.  This is quite a redemptive feature of modernity.  YOU ACCEPT the relativity, historical contingency of YOUR OWN CULTURE. Of course, things are not as simple as that.  This UNIVERSALITY is not a pure universality, it is a universality grounded in a concrete bourgeois constellation.  But we must remember nevertheless for Marx it is this, the reduction of the subject to UNIVERSALITY and for Marx this is what defines PROLETARIAT.  The Proletarian position is SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT SUBSTANCE.  As a worker all the result of your work is taken, you are reduced to abstract labour force,

This abstraction is at the same time a medium for freedom, it creates this position outside of substantial determinations you know, you are created by this and by that.

What is the Lesson: Marx emphasizes this: IT is NOT enough when creating bourgeois ideology … no no no idealism is wrong, we are always in material reality, suffering people working hard, exploiting NO! this is a form of ideology.  I did take my son, to stock exchange and showed him what ideology is, you get free leaflets, people wrongly think stock exchange is abstract, but its really about concrete people exchange and so on … Marx says NO. We should avoid this DIRECT MATERIALISM.

On Commodity Fetishism:  A commodity appears at the first glance as a simple object out there, nothing mysterious, it is ONLY THE THEORETICAL analysis which discovers THEOLOGICAL SPIRITUAL mysteries of a commodity.  MARX IS NOT saying in ordinary life we are dealing with mystifications etc.  Marx says almost the opposite, in our ordinary experience we think we are dealing with

In other words, that the world of commodities is a Hegelian world, he is not describing our wrong perception he is describing social reality. When Marx proposes as a formula of ideology:

They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it.

It’s not that we are doing one thing and we misperceive it

NO. Marx knew very well, a concrete bourgeois subject is not a Hegelian, but but British nominalist, only concrete objects, no abstraction, it is only in his market action that he acts in a theological way.  Your theological presuppositions, theology of the market, commodity fetishism, it is not in your awareness, but in your social interaction.

Lacan says the true formula of atheism is not “God is dead” but “God is unconscious.”

even if we are subjects of capitalism, we don’t believe, we are cynical. But BELIEF IS EMBODIED in our very SOCIAL PRACTICES.

You see a teenager, he think his father is a stupid jerk.  He is right. But nonetheless, when you see this same teenager interacting with his father you will see a mixture of fear, respect, even love and so on. One thing is what he thinks, “My father is a jerk” but unconsciously he has a much more traumatized affectionate relationship with his father.

On the one hand our reality is cynical, nominalist on the other ideology and financial speculations, even if we experience ourselves as cynical atheists, we practice religion, TRUST IN THE MARKET. Did you notice how we can make fun of prosopopoeia, when objects can speak.  In the early operas, you still have abstract concepts appearing as persons, poetry appears and sings, with psychological realism this becomes impossible. In Bertolt Brecht this prosopopoeia returns.  This prosopopoeia returns with a vengeance, although we all know MARKET does NOT EXIST, it is not a subject, all there is we concrete individuals interacting, but this is NOT what we are saying, MARKETS expressed their doubt about these measures, MARKETS are not satisified, they will demand more sacrifice, what you effectively say is more important than what you want to say.

It is not that you say something, but you mean something else.  The true SYMBOLIC cheating, you think you are just pretending to do something ha ha, I’m just pretending, but you don’t know that what you experience as a mask is the truth, and the inner distance you have towards it is a lie.

When you do something, this is the usual way we dupe ourselves through hypocrisy, no your inner life is a joke, what you think is a mask, the truth is what you do, the truth is out there. Marx and Freud, the unconscious truth is not, I go deep in myself, no the TRUTH IS OUT THERE, in the social relations and so on.

COMMODITY FETISHISM:  An ideological formation, perverted spiritualism.  An ideology that is the very core of the economic infrastructure.  An objectively necessary illusion.  It is an illusion that is embodied in social relations themselves.  So even if you don’t believe in it subjectively, you still practice it.

It strangely persists even after you denounce it, you may grasp it as an illusion but it still persists.  The mystery of the mask, then I pulled the mask off, look its still your stupid dad, then I put the mask on again and he was afraid, he knew it was me behind, a mask is never simply a mask,  There is more truth in the mask.

Individual capitalists are the carriers of social roles, we can play the game, this humanist idea, we should not be reduced to our social roles, there is so much more depth in me, I love flowers etc.  I can’t be reduced to a mask. THIS IS IDEOLOGY.

We are not monsters Israel soldiers, we are ordinary people, we have fear like you, we have ordinary feelings.  This abstract pacifism.  War is horrible, nonsensical killing.  Yeah we are all human.  Ok.  Brecht precisely in a vulgar anti-psychological way, to reduce figures to masks, abstract social roles.  A guy comes on stage, Hi I am a journalist, I am corrupted by bourgeoisie to exploit worker etc.   There is a truth in it. In your personal experience all your psychological depth trauma is not your truth.   YOUR TRUTH IS WHAT YOUR DOING OUT THERE

Lesson of Hegel: The structural necessity of illusion.  Illusion constitutes reality.  IF YOU TAKE AWAY THE ILLUSION REALITY ITSELF DISINTEGRATES.

The reality is the opposite one.  Male chauvanist bonding, screw, get laid, but then in our cloud, one guy I like to do it on the forest, or on the beach, or reading a book and getting it from behind, I’ don’t care I’m reading my book.  Freud is not vulgar pan-sexualism, what we are thinking about when we are doing that.  There is no sexual relationship, even in the most passionate love, there is still NO complete coincidence or identity.  You always need a fantasy, you are never alone, a certain fantasy scenario must be present.  THIS WAS CLEAR TO MARX.  This is why commodity fetishism is not an ideology.  Commodity fetishm is not something in superstructure, an effect of the economic, it is something that makes consistent and livable the production process.

interpellation althusser

From Protic, N. notes from Literary Theory

The term is central to his account of ideology as the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. It names the non-coercive process whereby a subject is called upon by a particular social formation to misrecognize themselves as a subject and thereby forget that they are constituted by society rather than constitutive of society as they henceforth imagine themselves to be. Ideology recruits individuals and transforms them into subjects (which for Althusser implies that they are simultaneously the subjects of society, meaning the products of society, and subjected to society, meaning subordinate to society) by persuading them to occupy a subject position it has prepared for them and see themselves in that otherwise vacant position. … But this process should not be thought of as a kind of becoming; for Althusser ideology is eternal, so one is always already interpellated, or to put it another way ideology has no outside—one is always already inside ideology. The pivotal notion of misrecognition is drawn from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s account of the mirror stage. … Althusser hypothesizes that just as babies look in the mirror and misrecognize their virtual image as their actual self, so under conditions of ideology individuals misrecognize socially produced virtual representations as their actual self. This concept (directly and indirectly) has been used to great effect by a variety of radical minority groups to argue the social and cultural importance of affirmative representations of politically marginalized groups.