The Pervert's Guide To Ideology - Slavoj Žižek on "They Live"

We often say you can't wake up someone who is pretending to sleep, and those asleep don't appreciate being woken up. The sunglasses scene above summarises this beautifully.

It refers to the underlying ideologies that drive our the pseudo reality most inhabit; fake money, fake food, fake relationships, fake egos, fake incorporated bodies pretending to be humans (corporations), fake brands, fake advertising, fake media, fake wars, fake journalism and so on and so forth. Who want's to really see that?

Some of us have no choice.

Slavoj Žižek does a nice explanation of this in the clip above using a cult movie I've blogged about called They Live by John Carpenter. I've also commented on its similarities with the Banksy Movie

Freedom Hurts, and nobody knows this more than the seasoned corruption and conspiracy researchers. The only people in my experience apart from the powerful who understand a little of what is going on. An unusual match I think you'll agree.

Finish Him

Bernard-Henri Lévy - Grotesque Peacock

A while back, I was getting into Slavoj Zizek and I watched this debate called Violence & The Left In Dark Times, held between Zizek and Bernhard-Henri Levy at the The New York Public Library with host Paul Holdengräber.  I was repulsed by what I heard and infuriated with what I saw; I wrote the following in the comments:

"I'm reluctant to say this as a generalism but the French are insufferable here. The host/MC is a sycophant of the highest order. If manners are about direct eye engagement then Bernard is a philistine of courtesy being fellated by a pygmy of enlightenment".

You can imagine how delighted I was just now to learn, that quite by chance the other moral spirit-level of the times (with respect to who I find inspirational), Tariq Ali has now pursued Bernhard Henri-Levy for a mock trial just recently on January 28, along with activists belonging to the PIR (Parti des Indigènes de la République). Both Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali were the only non-French who gave evidence against Levy.

It's a good feeling to see my sentiments echoed from those first few hours I watched BHL in action defending the indefensible with dripping arrogance.

Tariq writes: "I’ve always regarded BHL as a comic figure. On the two occasions — in Berlin and New York– that I’ve shared a platform to debate him he reminded me of a puffed up peacock in heat (hence, I thought, the permanently unbuttoned shirt).

You can read more of that over at Tariq's blog as this now leaves me to pursue the other buffoon in the shape of Paul Holdengräber who portrays Zizek as taking up too much time in the debate. A point I aim to make sure is vindicated as untrue. It's evident he gives too much of the floor to Levy in the video below in pursuit of sycophancy. See for yourself because the next time I watch it, the stopwatch is out and Paul Holdengräber will be acquainted with the facts. Any New York friends go to the public library?

Slavoj Žižek On Advertising Vs. Academia

I love Slavoj Žižek though as our existential crisis moves up the hierarchy of needs, I find his musings on spirituality (for an atheist who says my God more than anyone else) somewhat threadbare. Particularly so when in this 2004 interview he wades into a shameless defence of St Paul while pointedly ignoring the Archontic threat articulated in the Gnostic texts....or maybe he just doesn't know.

However he's still brilliant and likeable given his shtick is to offend everyone while rarely stating what he believes in. I loved the end of this interview where he talks about taking money for some advertising work.

The Believer Magazine: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?

Slavoj Žižek: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics have attacked me saying, how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company? I said, with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system.

Alan Rusbridger & Slavoj Zizek Interviewed On Al Jazeera

Alan talks about his visit by the head of Scotland Yard to pressure him into dropping the phone hacking story. Zizek talks about the radio silence of the massacre and depravity in The Congo. Both specifically distance themselves from using the conspiracy word and yet are they not saying that corporate media is controlled? That some stories have the lowest possible odds of informing people?

It is controlled though mostly by (profit driven) agenda than micro managed orders being issued from Wizards behind curtains. That's what middle managers are for. However this is an even graver allegation than conspiracy which comes from Old French and before that Latin language of 'to breathe together'. 

Until the Anglo American media axis views all life as equal the media are a sizeable part of our problem. There are signs for hope but it does require more people to speak up in the public domain, and yet the silence on the most important issues of our times is a butchered and bleeding elephant tusk on the coffee table that the materialists would prefer not to talk about.

Even Al Jazeera showed us their line in the sand during the Arab Spring uprising though they are currently along with Russia Today providing a news service that is superior to most of the traditional Western media apertures.

Zizek on Egypt

Zizek saves his most explosive logic till the end in relation to Israel's hand wringing over Egypt. He asks that since the decline of suicide bombings in Israel over the last five years has increased the velocity of stolen land off the Palestinians, has Israel tacitly proved that terror is the only language it respects?

Radovan Karadzic

I just realised I got it wrong in that post the other day. It wasn't Slobodan Milosovich (who of course was an oaf) that wrote the poetry about staring at the sun like the BMW retina burning advertisement. Of course it was Radovan Karadzic. He was also a psychiatrist. Worth remembering in a world where people are all to easily persuaded of handing over the consciousness or limits of consciousness to the state. Here's the poem. I first heard it quoted by Slavoj Zizek:

Convert to my new faith crowd

I offer you what no one has had before

I offer you inclemency and wine

The one who won’t have bread will be fed by the light of my sun

People nothing is forbidden in my faith

There is loving and drinking

And looking at the Sun for as long as you want

And this godhead forbids you nothing

Oh obey my call brethren people crowd

The Comeback Kid

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the street fighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? - ZIZEK - 23 July 2009

Some of you (all two of you on a good day) by now know that my political antenna are twitching in small spastic gestures, myopically groping their way to the disconnected future, uncovering micrograms of evidence that we're living in dramatically changing times.

Looking back on my own political wakening I genuinely gulp now how little and how shallow it really was, yet how vociferously it was argued. We argued rowdy politics over calming joints in the early 90's before heading out to the student parties. Ending for me by falling in love with an East German girl only to find employment working for the US army bases in Germany. It is here I started to fully grasp the empirical might the United States.

I really lucked out later on with a political mentor who had read more than anyone I knew and threw more valuable books my way in a few short years than I've read in a decade since. I pickled myself in rum and politics on tropical beaches interspersed with Asian tiger adland bouts and occasional Euro runs.

What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that growing up politically in the Clinton years that criss crossed and spanned, living and working in the two continents of Europe and Asia is a pespective that only now do I grasp was the solid foundation for moulding my undying love for the idea of ideas. The politics of politics. The meaning of what I mean.

I've slumped countless ideological times since those Hacyonic days of living in the Clinton era to learn of how much damage the financial market liberalisation is the responsibility of the former president. How say the market liberalisation of Haitian rice farmers to choose just one small devastating example, was destroyed by the subsidies of the American rice farmers, is personally down to Bill Clinton. An example I now know extends back into deeper  'merkan history.

Yet does one ever really forget all the merits of a past love affair? Not me. I see what it is that I adored. The only regrets I have now, emerging into middle age is the the frequent bouts of bad taste I've sailed with. Taste is both something we acquire and if we're honest with the definition of taste, are occasionally forced to dispense with as we evolve.

I worry about America. The putrid silence on the part of Capitalist Baconistas. The self evident insanity of the main stream right wing. The endlessly disappointing performance of the wishy washy left and those who hailed hope and change only to strand aspirational ships on sharp rocks of granite despair.

Then I see you again. The Polymath. The Comeback Kid, who with blow-job bravado takes on the Whitehouse press corp in a manner we haven't seen since the late nineties. And I want to believe you're going to make it. To silence the reptiles in the C Suite who control the Oval. I want to believe. I want.

I watch as the self evident principles of neo-sharing mysteriously take place at the highest level of office on the planet. I want to believe again in you America. Eight years of happiness and prosperity for me were pummelled with brutal annihilation into a hazy amnesia.

Please watch this. It's not just about the man, even though it's not just what you say it's how you say it. This is about the nature of ideas. Ideas that live and breath, that change and evolve, adapt and mutate to withstand the most colossal compression of evolutionary terminating forces we're facing. 

This is our karma. This is our responsibility. We're all in it together.

Shitty Semiotics

Above is an Anglo Saxon toilet bowl most readers of this blog should be familiar with. It's very centred isn't it?

Next is the French loo with it's rearward mechanic situated most closely to the flush pipe.

And finally above is the German toilet design, with a completely opposite forward-emphasis arrangement in comparison to the French version.

The visuals are the support material for the clip below. The first time I listened to Zizek deconstructing European toilets, I loved it and wanted to write it up as a post, but as somebody has generously uploaded a clip of his toilet-architecture rap I can include post it instead. It's hard to find any fault between his analysis of the Teutonic, French and Anglo Saxon toilet designs, and for those who haven't embarked on a tranhumanism voyage yet is fucking funny.

Disavowal - Zizek On Intolerance of Tolerance & Only Foreigners Should Vote

Al Jazeera has to be the only media outlet giving people like Slavoj Zizek (who can talk for hours, his friends call him Castro) at least half an hour to discuss some of the most important challenges of our times. Zizek's deconstruction of tolerance is why I'm leaning towards his somewhat humorous reframing of a Stalinist mandate to fix things. 

This is a topic I've been straddling the fence on since I first challenged it in a theoretical sense with Sandrine in Hong Kong. It's not as if the answers are easy, but at least Zizek makes the point that there's an imperative for all of us to be philosophers here.

Update: Zizek on only foreigners should vote is kind of the big thinking I'm attracted to.

Careless Lisper

Slavoj Žižek had me raising my hand in objection by the first minute over a throwaway comment of reality as abstraction but he quickly settles down to unfurl a devastating rapid response to a series of embarrassingly superficial market capitalists who are increasingly beginning to exude the air of polyester flare-wearing, Boomer swingers. Wealthy but morally bankrupt. Rich but fucking clueless. Wedged up but drenched in Hai-Karate aftershave. The epitome of dangerous anachronisms. Naturally they're the last to realise it in much the same way that Louis XIV was puzzled when the peasants arrived at Versailles and proved themselves to be natural vivisectionists in response to the brutality that small groups of greedy people invariably inculcate through financial and most importantly historical myopia.

I loved watching this and I now have a bit of a man-crush on the Slovenian dissident who I recently struggled with his Lacanian analysis in A perverts guide to cinema. Žižek also tackles some more concrete issues in this so hang in there for some honest critique of why the left are very hypocritical on Afghanistan and so forth. There's a certain amount of professional jealousy from here, as unlike me he got to bone Miss Brazil as the Elvis of cultural theory. 

It's not right, but it's OK.