Big Red Jeff Rubard
2010-02-01 01:31:07 UTC
Zizek’s Refusal
By Adam Kotsko
Within the last few years, Slavoj Zizek has gained a name for himself
as a political commentator. After his essay on 9/11, “Welcome to the
Desert of the Real,” he steadily increased his popular writing,
publishing in seemingly every possible venue (including In These
Times) in response to virtually every major news story. Meanwhile,
Zizek was said to be hard at work on another long book, The Parallax
View, which he was already claiming as his magnum opus months before
its recent release.
Frankly, a magnum opus is exactly what Zizek needs right now. His
performance as a public intellectual has met with decidedly mixed
reviews, with much of his new audience wondering if they should take
his counterintuitive and often outrageously provocative assertions
seriously. At the same time, many of his long-time readers have grown
impatient with Zizek’s failure to produce more work of the caliber
that made his academic reputation in the 1990s.
Zizek is known for his frequent use of film and pop culture, his huge
range of philosophical and literary references, and his obscene jokes—
all packaged in overarching metaphors involving something like a
rollercoaster (or in one particularly bizarre case, a mulcher). The
Parallax View includes all of these things: extended riffs on the
Matrix trilogy, a section on Henry James’ prose style, a Hegelian
approach to sexual positions, a highly questionable analysis of anti-
Semitism and a wide array of other digressions, often brilliant,
sometimes plodding, with varying degrees of relevance to the topic at
hand. More significantly, however, The Parallax View consolidates
Zizek’s work as a whole and decisively moves it forward.
Zizek uses “parallax” to refer to situations in which the “same
thing,” when viewed from two different perspectives, presents itself
to the observer in two completely irreconcilable ways. A good example
of this is light, which can be viewed as both a wave and a particle,
with no way of mediating between the two positions. Rather than a
conflict of two opposing principles, parallax names “the inherent
‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence” of reality with itself.
His ambition here is to develop a new dialectical materialism. The
philosophical idea of materialism is simple enough: no God, no souls,
etc. Matter is all there is. What a specifically dialectical
materialism adds is the idea of the conflictual and inconsistent
character of matter itself, in contrast to the idea of the universe as
a machine running smoothly in accordance with transparent physical
laws. Zizek uses this fundamental insight into the conflictual
character of existence to investigate three kinds of parallax—
philosophical, scientific and political. (This division allows for, in
Zizek’s words, “a minimum of conceptual order.”)
The philosophy section is the most loosely organized. One chapter
expands on his recent work on Christianity. For Zizek, part of
Christianity’s “subversive core” is the idea of Christian love: “the
excessive care for the beloved, a ‘biased’ commitment which disturbs
the balance” of normal reality. The space for this love is opened up
by the believer’s act of “unplugging” from all social ties in order to
be completely faithful to Christ. For Zizek, St. Paul’s relativization
of all social roles, indicating that the believer does not “belong” to
the present order, is a subversive action of refusal. It explains
Zizek’s interest in Christianity in the first place: This refusal to
identify with the present order is a vital precursor to any attempt at
revolutionary change.
The science section is the most important: No one is going to be
impressed by a materialism, dialectical or not, that cannot make sense
of science. Embracing cognitive and brain science—a subject many
psychoanalysts have viewed with suspicion—Zizek rejects the idea that
science can somehow “go too far” and destroy something essential to
humanity, in this case, the idea of consciousness and free will.
Rather than fretting that discovering the brain processes that
underlie consciousness will somehow undermine our experience of
consciousness, Zizek wants to determine what happens at the level of
neuronal processes to give rise to the dimension of consciousness, and
of human free agency.
To determine this, Zizek surveys a range of cognitive scientists,
pointing out inconsistencies in their accounts of how consciousness
arose. Acknowledging the field’s diversity, he lays out several basic
positions, ranging from the idea that consciousness simply doesn’t
exist to the idea that consciousness cannot be explained by other
forces and must be taken as an independent force analogous to gravity
or magnetism. But he rejects these ideas in favor of a more
materialist position. Zizek agrees with those who think consciousness
emerges out of a kind of short-circuit in the neuronal circuitry.
Essentially, according to cognitive scientists such as Antonio
Damasio, the “mental map” of the human being’s surroundings increased
in complexity until it finally reached the point where there was a
representation of the “self” in the map. Thus, the mind was able to
think about itself, and for Zizek this reflexive move produced the
unintended consequence of consciousness.
Within this scheme, conscious free choice does not directly “cause”
human action in a straightforward way. Instead, free choice is first
of all a negative move of refusal, because only the refusal to
continue along in the chain of instinctual reactions opens up space
for other possibilities. Far from being the pinnacle of evolution,
then, humanity becomes the ultimate anti-adaptive species, with
consciousness opening the way for the expenditure of huge amounts of
energy on pursuits—such as language, art, and above all, non-
procreative sex—that have nothing to do with “survival of the
fittest.” Thus, Zizek is proposing a model of human freedom that
avoids both pure mechanical determinism and the illusion of pure
Promethean self-creation, where humanity creates itself by continually
turning the given reality toward surprising new ends. As with his
analysis of Christianity, this vision also has a political punch: We
are most human when we refuse to act according to a supposed
historical necessity or biological laws.
The final section on politics is probably of greatest interest to a
general audience that came to Zizek through his popular articles and
hope to learn of the positive program that underlies his criticism of
various politicial movements. However, a large chunk of this section
is taken up with those very same articles, including pieces on why
Stalinism is to be preferred over Nazism, on Thomas Frank’s What’s the
Matter With Kansas?, etc. While these articles actually do make more
sense when presented together, their inclusion contributes to an
overall feeling of anti-climax. This feeling is only deepened when he
advocates as a model revolutionary Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose
constant refrain, “I would prefer not to,” is the exact opposite of an
inspiring political slogan.
Even here, however, Zizek is making a serious argument. As he has
demonstrated throughout, negativity or refusal was at the core of both
the Christian movement and the evolutionary emergence of human
consciousness and culture. In both cases, what has been most valuable
has stemmed from continued refusal, for example, the refusal to submit
to the laws of nature by settling for the satisfaction of one’s animal
needs. And so Zizek’s vision of revolution is one in which “an
underlying ‘I would prefer not to’ … forever reverberates,” in which
the refusal never lets up, even and especially in the building of a
new positive order. If Zizek is correct that, “there is no final
solution on the horizon today; Capital is here to stay; all we can
hope for is a temporary truce,” then perhaps the true task of those
who hope for revolution is to imagine what such a thorough-going
refusal might mean.
-----
Slavoj Žižek "The Parallax View" *NLR* 2004
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/parallax_view.pdf
-----
As a Society Thinketh (Cogito and “the Idea”)
Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is John Holbo’s
complaint about Zizek’s use of the word “cogito” to refer to a thing,
rather than an argument. Now, I probably have read less Zizek than
Holbo (after a certain point I determined that perfecting my Lacanese
would not be viewed as conducive to wellness), but I think in
Continental context this complaint is slightly disingenuous: everybody
does it. Specifically, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty use “cogito”
without a definite article to refer to an indelible structure of
subjectivity, rather than talking about “the cogito” which one finds
valid or invalid, compelling or irrelevant. Adam Kotsko told Holbo
this was Zizek’s position, too: “‘Cogito’ does not name the argument,
but one aspect of subjectivity, which Zizek takes to be more originary
and important: namely, the sheer abyss of self-relating negativity.”
Me being me, and books costing what they cost, instead of checking
this out in the Zizek corpus I’m going to invite the reader to
consider what seems like the relevant part of Hegel’s oeuvre: I think
that Hegel’s doctrine of the “idea” amounts to an attempt to defuse
what Hegel called philosophy’s not assenting “to the concept of
Cartesian metaphysics, that being and thinking are in themselves the
same, not to the thought that being, pure being, is not a concrete
reality, but a pure abstraction; and conversely that pure thinking,
self-identity or the essence, is partially the negative of self-
consciousness and therefore being, partially as immediate simplicity
is nothing other than being: thinking is thinghood, or thinghood is
thinking.”
Of course, the Idea is the adequate concept, or the thought which is
equally a reality, so it could be argued Hegel has simply
definitionally brought Descartes into line with his views: but I think
the further contours of the Idea’s development show the signs of some
hard thinking about problematic aspects of Cartesianism. Hegel
identifies life as the immediate ideal sphere, and purpose (Zweck) as
the immediate form of the idea. What makes these ideal? After the
demolition of vitalism and the rise of teleosemantics they certainly
seem like unproblematic natural phenomena which hardly require such a
treatment. Well, what Hegel is doing is collecting together all the
things which exhibit reflexivity: thinking can only truly equal being
if that being is objectively reflected into itself, i.e. already
capable of in some way addressing itself — making phenomena which are
“one-sided” and merely are, lacking the ability to articulate
themselves, only spurious entities.
In other words, it seems to me that he is picking out a class of
“objectively spiritual” things which might very well deserve the mass
term “cogito”, since they are not merely phenomenal experiences
suggesting self-conscious unity, but phenomena which contain self-
conscious unity in their “objective” constitution, reinforcing the
weak point of Cartesianism’s inability to justify the human mind
oriented towards the world of others: Hegel has decentralized
Cartesianism, distributing the force of the cogito as argument to all
points in the human world. Perhaps this is Zizek’s intention as well.
-----
A dream *decouverte*:
/Zizek as Rubard/
Clothilde, cloth, tildes.
AMERADD: 'Oh my godness.'
By Adam Kotsko
Within the last few years, Slavoj Zizek has gained a name for himself
as a political commentator. After his essay on 9/11, “Welcome to the
Desert of the Real,” he steadily increased his popular writing,
publishing in seemingly every possible venue (including In These
Times) in response to virtually every major news story. Meanwhile,
Zizek was said to be hard at work on another long book, The Parallax
View, which he was already claiming as his magnum opus months before
its recent release.
Frankly, a magnum opus is exactly what Zizek needs right now. His
performance as a public intellectual has met with decidedly mixed
reviews, with much of his new audience wondering if they should take
his counterintuitive and often outrageously provocative assertions
seriously. At the same time, many of his long-time readers have grown
impatient with Zizek’s failure to produce more work of the caliber
that made his academic reputation in the 1990s.
Zizek is known for his frequent use of film and pop culture, his huge
range of philosophical and literary references, and his obscene jokes—
all packaged in overarching metaphors involving something like a
rollercoaster (or in one particularly bizarre case, a mulcher). The
Parallax View includes all of these things: extended riffs on the
Matrix trilogy, a section on Henry James’ prose style, a Hegelian
approach to sexual positions, a highly questionable analysis of anti-
Semitism and a wide array of other digressions, often brilliant,
sometimes plodding, with varying degrees of relevance to the topic at
hand. More significantly, however, The Parallax View consolidates
Zizek’s work as a whole and decisively moves it forward.
Zizek uses “parallax” to refer to situations in which the “same
thing,” when viewed from two different perspectives, presents itself
to the observer in two completely irreconcilable ways. A good example
of this is light, which can be viewed as both a wave and a particle,
with no way of mediating between the two positions. Rather than a
conflict of two opposing principles, parallax names “the inherent
‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence” of reality with itself.
His ambition here is to develop a new dialectical materialism. The
philosophical idea of materialism is simple enough: no God, no souls,
etc. Matter is all there is. What a specifically dialectical
materialism adds is the idea of the conflictual and inconsistent
character of matter itself, in contrast to the idea of the universe as
a machine running smoothly in accordance with transparent physical
laws. Zizek uses this fundamental insight into the conflictual
character of existence to investigate three kinds of parallax—
philosophical, scientific and political. (This division allows for, in
Zizek’s words, “a minimum of conceptual order.”)
The philosophy section is the most loosely organized. One chapter
expands on his recent work on Christianity. For Zizek, part of
Christianity’s “subversive core” is the idea of Christian love: “the
excessive care for the beloved, a ‘biased’ commitment which disturbs
the balance” of normal reality. The space for this love is opened up
by the believer’s act of “unplugging” from all social ties in order to
be completely faithful to Christ. For Zizek, St. Paul’s relativization
of all social roles, indicating that the believer does not “belong” to
the present order, is a subversive action of refusal. It explains
Zizek’s interest in Christianity in the first place: This refusal to
identify with the present order is a vital precursor to any attempt at
revolutionary change.
The science section is the most important: No one is going to be
impressed by a materialism, dialectical or not, that cannot make sense
of science. Embracing cognitive and brain science—a subject many
psychoanalysts have viewed with suspicion—Zizek rejects the idea that
science can somehow “go too far” and destroy something essential to
humanity, in this case, the idea of consciousness and free will.
Rather than fretting that discovering the brain processes that
underlie consciousness will somehow undermine our experience of
consciousness, Zizek wants to determine what happens at the level of
neuronal processes to give rise to the dimension of consciousness, and
of human free agency.
To determine this, Zizek surveys a range of cognitive scientists,
pointing out inconsistencies in their accounts of how consciousness
arose. Acknowledging the field’s diversity, he lays out several basic
positions, ranging from the idea that consciousness simply doesn’t
exist to the idea that consciousness cannot be explained by other
forces and must be taken as an independent force analogous to gravity
or magnetism. But he rejects these ideas in favor of a more
materialist position. Zizek agrees with those who think consciousness
emerges out of a kind of short-circuit in the neuronal circuitry.
Essentially, according to cognitive scientists such as Antonio
Damasio, the “mental map” of the human being’s surroundings increased
in complexity until it finally reached the point where there was a
representation of the “self” in the map. Thus, the mind was able to
think about itself, and for Zizek this reflexive move produced the
unintended consequence of consciousness.
Within this scheme, conscious free choice does not directly “cause”
human action in a straightforward way. Instead, free choice is first
of all a negative move of refusal, because only the refusal to
continue along in the chain of instinctual reactions opens up space
for other possibilities. Far from being the pinnacle of evolution,
then, humanity becomes the ultimate anti-adaptive species, with
consciousness opening the way for the expenditure of huge amounts of
energy on pursuits—such as language, art, and above all, non-
procreative sex—that have nothing to do with “survival of the
fittest.” Thus, Zizek is proposing a model of human freedom that
avoids both pure mechanical determinism and the illusion of pure
Promethean self-creation, where humanity creates itself by continually
turning the given reality toward surprising new ends. As with his
analysis of Christianity, this vision also has a political punch: We
are most human when we refuse to act according to a supposed
historical necessity or biological laws.
The final section on politics is probably of greatest interest to a
general audience that came to Zizek through his popular articles and
hope to learn of the positive program that underlies his criticism of
various politicial movements. However, a large chunk of this section
is taken up with those very same articles, including pieces on why
Stalinism is to be preferred over Nazism, on Thomas Frank’s What’s the
Matter With Kansas?, etc. While these articles actually do make more
sense when presented together, their inclusion contributes to an
overall feeling of anti-climax. This feeling is only deepened when he
advocates as a model revolutionary Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose
constant refrain, “I would prefer not to,” is the exact opposite of an
inspiring political slogan.
Even here, however, Zizek is making a serious argument. As he has
demonstrated throughout, negativity or refusal was at the core of both
the Christian movement and the evolutionary emergence of human
consciousness and culture. In both cases, what has been most valuable
has stemmed from continued refusal, for example, the refusal to submit
to the laws of nature by settling for the satisfaction of one’s animal
needs. And so Zizek’s vision of revolution is one in which “an
underlying ‘I would prefer not to’ … forever reverberates,” in which
the refusal never lets up, even and especially in the building of a
new positive order. If Zizek is correct that, “there is no final
solution on the horizon today; Capital is here to stay; all we can
hope for is a temporary truce,” then perhaps the true task of those
who hope for revolution is to imagine what such a thorough-going
refusal might mean.
-----
Slavoj Žižek "The Parallax View" *NLR* 2004
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/parallax_view.pdf
-----
As a Society Thinketh (Cogito and “the Idea”)
Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is John Holbo’s
complaint about Zizek’s use of the word “cogito” to refer to a thing,
rather than an argument. Now, I probably have read less Zizek than
Holbo (after a certain point I determined that perfecting my Lacanese
would not be viewed as conducive to wellness), but I think in
Continental context this complaint is slightly disingenuous: everybody
does it. Specifically, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty use “cogito”
without a definite article to refer to an indelible structure of
subjectivity, rather than talking about “the cogito” which one finds
valid or invalid, compelling or irrelevant. Adam Kotsko told Holbo
this was Zizek’s position, too: “‘Cogito’ does not name the argument,
but one aspect of subjectivity, which Zizek takes to be more originary
and important: namely, the sheer abyss of self-relating negativity.”
Me being me, and books costing what they cost, instead of checking
this out in the Zizek corpus I’m going to invite the reader to
consider what seems like the relevant part of Hegel’s oeuvre: I think
that Hegel’s doctrine of the “idea” amounts to an attempt to defuse
what Hegel called philosophy’s not assenting “to the concept of
Cartesian metaphysics, that being and thinking are in themselves the
same, not to the thought that being, pure being, is not a concrete
reality, but a pure abstraction; and conversely that pure thinking,
self-identity or the essence, is partially the negative of self-
consciousness and therefore being, partially as immediate simplicity
is nothing other than being: thinking is thinghood, or thinghood is
thinking.”
Of course, the Idea is the adequate concept, or the thought which is
equally a reality, so it could be argued Hegel has simply
definitionally brought Descartes into line with his views: but I think
the further contours of the Idea’s development show the signs of some
hard thinking about problematic aspects of Cartesianism. Hegel
identifies life as the immediate ideal sphere, and purpose (Zweck) as
the immediate form of the idea. What makes these ideal? After the
demolition of vitalism and the rise of teleosemantics they certainly
seem like unproblematic natural phenomena which hardly require such a
treatment. Well, what Hegel is doing is collecting together all the
things which exhibit reflexivity: thinking can only truly equal being
if that being is objectively reflected into itself, i.e. already
capable of in some way addressing itself — making phenomena which are
“one-sided” and merely are, lacking the ability to articulate
themselves, only spurious entities.
In other words, it seems to me that he is picking out a class of
“objectively spiritual” things which might very well deserve the mass
term “cogito”, since they are not merely phenomenal experiences
suggesting self-conscious unity, but phenomena which contain self-
conscious unity in their “objective” constitution, reinforcing the
weak point of Cartesianism’s inability to justify the human mind
oriented towards the world of others: Hegel has decentralized
Cartesianism, distributing the force of the cogito as argument to all
points in the human world. Perhaps this is Zizek’s intention as well.
-----
A dream *decouverte*:
/Zizek as Rubard/
Clothilde, cloth, tildes.
AMERADD: 'Oh my godness.'