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Monday, June 12, 2006
Between Infinite Judgment and Infinite Jest - or - the Howl of ‘da Noive of!’ takes wing at dusk.
The following is my review essay on Zizek's Parallax View, which was just rejected by The Common Review for being a bit too high-Hegelian abstruse - which, admittedly, it probably is. That's OK. In writing it I decided I really wanted to turn it into a longer essay, of a different sort than they actually asked for. So that's what I'll do. Some version of the following should end up being part I. Part II will finally explain what the title means - I think. Comments welcome. Also, careful students of Holboiania will notice that I'm recycling some of my mock-pastoral notes from old posts. For once the recycling has a good point, since I'm making fun of myself, although you might not notice that. Also, life is complicated so I'm probably going to be blogging lightly for several weeks. Just so you don't wonder where I went.Slavoj Zizek’s big new book is The Parallax View [amazon - they just added 'search inside']. For his admirers this is a welcome change from less substantial offerings. Not that size matters; more the motion of the ocean – in a Hegelian sense: “It is the spirit which not merely broods over history as over the waters but lives in it and is alone its principle of movement: and in the path of that spirit, liberty, i.e. a development determined by the notion of spirit, is the guiding principle and only its notion its final aim, i.e. truth. For Spirit is consciousness.”[1]
In short, “Spirit is a bone.” This means—for one thing—the likes of Hegel plowed up through pop culture, for Hegelian reasons.
“Spirit is a bone”?
Zizek has been worrying this one since Tarrying With The Negative (1993), in which he suggests that, since Plato, the philosopher has known only “newer and newer disappointments, finding himself again and again reduced to the role of a court jester, whispering advice in the Master’s ear.”[2] Then, abruptly: “Phrenology ends with the infinite judgment ‘Spirit is a bone.’” It’s a reference to a section on phrenology from Hegel’s Phenomenology:
Of course, the intention here is not to state that Spirit, which is represented by a skull, is a Thing; there is not meant to be any materialism, as it is called, in this idea; rather Spirit must be something more and other than these bones … When in other respects it is said of Spirit that it is, that it has being, is a Thing, a single, separate reality, this is not intended to mean that it is something we can see or take in our hands or touch, and so on, but that is what is said; and what really is said is expressed by saying that the being of Spirit is a bone.[3]
We have here what Hegel calls ‘infinite judgment’, which you—who have not troubled to venture so many hundreds of pages into the Logic—might call metaphoric or metonymic identification; whatever you think Hamlet is on about, holding the skull, calling it Yorrick. Somersaulting ahead into the big new book, Zizek is more Yorrick than Hamlet. Spirit is a bone. That’s a perfectly good penis joke Hegel is holding there.
Hegel’s point is not that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination. The paradox is that the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way of missing it: it is not possible to choose the “true meaning” directly, one has to begin by making the “wrong” choice (of urination)—the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the first, “wrong” reading.[4]
But I was talking size matters. Since the publication of The Ticklish Subject, in 1999, Zizek has published a dozen books. He has spread his signature style before a yet wider readership by penning a pile of opinion journalism for the likes of LRB and The Guardian. He serves up pastiche of politics, pop culture, High Hegelism and Lacanian psychoanalysis; (always film references, sometimes opera.) Many of these pieces find their way into the final section of Parallax; they still look slight, even banded together. Yet the volume as a whole is much more impressive than several recent, hasty works with which Zizek has, apparently, been striving to plug the bursting dike—of the early 21st Century, or of his own mouth.
Readers who have omitted stepping into this verbal river even once might start with Rebecca Mead’s 2003 New Yorker profile, “The Marx Brother”, subtitled “How a philosopher from Slovenia became an international star.” Zizek is perhaps the biggest Big Thinker in the academic humanities today. “Here Zizek is a celebrated and pampered guest, bristling with authenticity.” Not only is he a hedgehog of authenticity, he’s a fox in the henhouse of liberal/PC pieties. He praises totalitarianism. “Stalin … functions for Zizek as a kind of stock gag. ‘It doesn't mean that he's glorifying Stalin,’ his friend Eric Santner says. ‘In part, what he means is that there is no avoidance of the complexities of entering into a power struggle—that the left can't just occupy a position of critique, and that there are risks involved.’” Mead also quotes Gayatri Spivak: “I've said to him, ‘Slavoj, you have a politically correct soul, and you are deeply suspicious of it.’ If he ever does say something that is very boldly politically incorrect, he tells you that he's doing it. I think that, at the end of the day, he is even susceptible to feminism.’”
Still only in his fifties, Zizek is already susceptible to critical
parallax generated by not one but two books entitled, simply, Slavok Zizek: A Critical Introduction
(one in a series on ‘Modern European Thinkers’, the other on ‘Key
Contemporary Thinkers’.) Why such fuss? Mead provides a decent summary:
Zizek's aim, in his work, is to combine a Marxist critique of capitalism with a psychoanalytically informed unmasking of the ways in which capitalism works upon the public imagination. His favored form of argument is paradox, and his favored mode of delivery is a kind of vaudevillian overstatement, buttressed by the appearance of utter conviction.
She notes the man’s most characteristic rhetorical tic. “As Zizek might put it, he may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?” Mead is no Zizek. We’ll see real examples soon enough. The technique is to blow through the scene outrageously. By the time the other guests think to ask whether you are entitled to their conceptual trousers, the time for questions has passed.
A proper, Groucho-Hegelian upshot: “The howl of ‘da noive of!’ takes wing at dusk.”
Why always late? The beat is necessary for reasons of cosmic temporality—er, comic timing—Zizek theorizes in chapter 4: cartoon cats don’t fall until they notice they’ve run off the cliff; cartoon idiots must smile, beneficently, at the joker who has stolen their cartoon car; then they notice it is their car.
In Zizek, the traditional, Hegelian sense of ascendant World-Spirit gives way to—what to call it?— World-Esprit d’escalier. Zizek extracts from Hegel the need, “to reintroduce the openness of the future into the past, to grasp that-which-was in its process of becoming.”
Is this not why we have to conceive the Absolute “not only as Substance, but also as Subject?” [you see how he uses these things?] This is why German Idealism explodes the coordinates of the standard Aristotelian ontology which is structured around the vector running from possibility to actuality: In contrast to the idea that every possibility strives fully to actualize itself, we should conceive of “progress” as a move of restoring the dimension of potentiality to mere actuality, of unearthing, at the very heart of actuality, a secret striving toward potentiality. (p. 78)
World-Spirit slaps forehead, realizes what it should have said during the French Revolution; lurches against banister. The view spins and swims. The banister is moving away from us, flashes of light between wooden slats, which also resemble prison bars. (Come to think of it, the scene looks like that stairwell out of Hitchcock’s Notorious. Hank of hair and piece of bone, indeed!)
***
I
count myself as pretty thoroughly hostile to Zizek. Maybe my antipathy is elective. I
encountered Zizek first when he was at a low intellectual ebb, with
works like On Belief. What revolted me was the strident
Leninism, plus inaccurate Kierkegaard exegesis. This political mind,
dripping blood; these conceptual fingers, dripping butter—this
Slovenian frame, churning it together; distasteful.
The bloody-mindedness is on view in Parallax:
It is easy to fall in love with the crazy creative unrest of the first years after the October Revolution, with suprematists, futurists, constructivists, and so on, competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor; it is much more difficult to recognize in the horrors of the forced collectivization of the late 1920’s the attempt to translate this revolutionary fervor into a new positive social order. There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognize, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom. (p. 5)
It is easy to fall in hate with the crazy restiveness of this failure to notice that if the horrors are implications of the dreams, then the dreams were not true but false. Also, it’s sloppy. Suprematists, Futurists—Filippo Marinetti, say—were not ‘Beautiful Souls’. [UPDATE: in comments it is pointed out that I'm the one with butter on my fingers at this point. Which indeed would seem to be the case.] In On Belief, Zizek complains about liberal leftists who “want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep their hands clean.” Zizek prefers a Leninist—someone who, “like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power.”[6] Very well, but compare Marinetti:
War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame-throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. [7]
Hardly clean-handed. One could respond that he is not affirming the stench. Anyone who did so seriously would, at any rate, not frivolously compare it to a symphony. The difference between a Beautiful Soul and a Futurist is the difference between two flavors of failing to affirm consequences, perhaps: falling short and radically overshooting (pun intended.)
But that still doesn’t make Marinetti a Beautiful Soul. (Pardon me for insisting on wiping butter off Zizek’s fingers. I am fastidious.) This is significant because, it turns out, Zizek himself is probably like Marinetti, but with extra irony; that is, he is basically just clowning in that Lenin suit. He is posturing as someone who insists on “fully assuming the consequences of his choice.” He is not actually fully assuming the consequences of actually assuming the assumptions of someone who actually fully assumes the consequences of some choice. (Taking Zizek seriously when he preens himself on his seriousness only produces lurid, grotesque comedy.) Under the metallized armature, I suspect a Beautiful Soul. But is that an excuse?
In Alan Pakula’s 1974 film, The Parallax View (Zizek scrupulously avoids mentioning it), Warren Beatty’s character, Joe Fraidy, intrepid reporter, gets an earful from Bill, weary editor: “curb your talent for creative irresponsibility.” No more baiting cops into busting in on innocent couples by ringing their doorbell, pretending you have a ‘sick parrot’ in their backyard, walking through before they think to stop you—knowing the cops will figure these folks for your sources and jump them. Joe: “You gotta admit, it’s funny.” Bill: “Makes me laugh, but I don’t think it’s funny.” Joe: “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bill explains about offensive comedians, who make the audiences squirm. “They’re amused, but they’re not happy about it.” Bill didn’t enjoy being maneuvered into having to maneuver Joe out of the interrogation room.
In 2005, Interrogation Machine, Laibach and NSK, was published by MIT Press, part of the ‘short circuits’ series, along with The Parallax View. The series editor is Zizek, who declares in his introduction that “Today, the lesson of Laibach is more pertinent than ever.”[8] Laibach? Lesson? Zizek murmurs something about “direct confrontation with the obscene fantasmic core,” but it’s just the flipside of Bill’s coin. As an NSK manifesto puts it: “In art, we appreciate humor that can’t take a joke.”[9]
A 2003 Daily Telegraph profile, “Warriors of Weirdness”, begins: “Laibach, one of Europe's most provocative and dangerous bands, have fought off accusations of fascism and Stalinism.” Of a concert: “Any casual visitor to this event would be flummoxed. Is it a neo-Nazi rally?” But, the author concludes,
Laibach's method is extremely simple, effective and horribly open to misinterpretation. First of all, they absorb the mannerisms of the enemy, adopting all the seductive trappings and symbols of state power, and then they exaggerate everything to the edge of parody.
The author feels compelled to assure us: offstage, the raging monster of a lead singer turns out to be a “slightly balding, wiry, bespectabled intellectual.”
In the early 1980’s, while still an unknown, borderline dissident in the former Yugoslavia, Zizek was associated with the Neue Slowenische Kunst collective. Laibach was part of NSK. “Activists from the NSK did attend Zizek’s lectures, but later insisted it was Laibach that first used the ‘method’ of overidentification, and that Zizek then theorized what they did.” [9] In 1982 Laibach released a manifesto, which:
pitted itself against the rest of the Slovenian ‘alternative culture’ scene, and against the realm of ‘dissidence’ as a personal free space in which individuals imagine that they are able to be distant from the party apparatus and so free of its effects … A key strategy introduced by Laibach—and one taken up by the different arts projects as part of the ‘retro-avant-garde’ deconstruction of the claims of the state to be socialist, progressive, and unassailable’—was that of ‘overidentification.’[10]
‘Laibach’ is what the Nazis renamed Ljubljana. That
might be overidentification. Getting back to Zizek, part 1 of chapter 6
is subtitled “The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and
Resistance.” Rumspringa is an Amish term for the practice of
letting children venture forth into the ‘English’ world at 17; sex,
drugs n' rock n' roll. After a few years, return or not. Almost all
return. But: “Far from being permissive and allowing the youngsters a
truly free choice … such a solution is biased in the most brutal way” (p. 331).
The return rate is due to the fact that being thrown so abruptly from a
sheltered environment into the outside world is very anxiety-provoking,
hardly a fair test of which way is better. Zizek maintains that
contemporary society is a wellspring of such inauthentic choice
situations; the dealer—liberal democracy—only permits games the house
will win. The specifically academic rumspringa that bother him are
Amish-like retreats from capitalism. He quotes Simon Critchley,
wondering what to do if the state isn’t going away, if Marx is wrong
about revolution. Then “politics has to be conceived at a distance from
the state.” Don’t run off, “to protest at some meeting of the G8. You
shouldn’t meet your enemy on their ground, but on your own, on the
ground that you have made your own. Also, think of the money and time
you save on travel!” (p. 332). Zizek points out that Critchley is relying on the
fact that someone else will run the bureaucracy; it’s a ‘Beautiful
Soul’ solution, the sort of thing the Laibach manifesto protests.
Admittedly it is less clear how a mash-up of fascist aesthetics and
Stalinist symbology is a better idea. Somehow you should excessively
inhabit, rather than retreat. “Practice a parallax shift of perceiving
a gigantic machine of obscene jouissance in what previously looked like
a dignified edifice of the legal Order" (p. 335).
There’s a bit I like very much from William Empson, where he interprets Shakespeare’s sonnet 94—perhaps you remember the line, “They that have power to hurt and will do none”? Perhaps written to his patron, who was perhaps a spectacle of parvenu jouissance. On that premise, Empson amusingly glosses the complex irony that sends the structure wheeling: “I am praising to you the contemptible things you admire, you little plotter.” [11] Zizek would like art that does that. But is it more politically efficacious? Empson suggests it is “an evasion of the problem.” It helps entertainer and patron—king and jester—get along, if they can smooth an unequal relationship with superfine ironizing.
***
Let’s take up that first angle again—the high-low, ‘spirit is a bone’ one. In Parallax, expect a good deal of this sort of messing about:
In Holzwege, apropos of Anaximander, Heidegger deploys all the dimensions of the word Fug, fügen, of the tension between Fug and Unfug, ontological accord and discord, what about indulging in speculation about how the f … word itself is rooted in this cosmic Fug, along the lines of the pagan notion of the universe as resulting from the primordial copulation of the masculine and feminine cosmic principles (yin and yan, and so on)—so, to put it in Heideggerian terms, the essence of fucking has nothing to do with the ontic act of fuck itself; rather it, concerns the harmonious-struggling Fucking which provides the very composition of the universe. (p. 5)
Again, the questioning technique hustles you along before you think to ask. Speaking of Holzwege, in tinhorn Teutonic terms, why this veritable Yggdrasil of a cosmic slapstick? Why this Ratatosk of a Slovenian philosopher squirrel mediating traffic in nuts and insults from bottom to top? Is this quite in order?
Let’s reconsider urination/insemination regarding our bone. The idea must be, I think, that in order to arrive at a proper conception, you have to take the piss for a good long while. I have a way I like to think about this, actually. It’s idiosyncratic. As I've said before, I like William Empson’s notion of ‘mock-pastoral,’ of which sonnet 94 is allegedly an example. He defines ‘pastoral’, non-standardly, as ‘the complex in the simple.’
The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way). [12]
Mock-pastoral is what you get when it becomes obvious that shepherds talking like scholars is ridiculous, so you instead have the bumpkins talk about the highest things in the crudest ways. Midsummer Night’s Dream is perhaps the best example; especially if you stage the play within a play so the sophisticated audience is moved to dab a sentimental tear, despite the crudity of the mechanism (as in the 1999, Michael Hoffman-directed film version.) Empson:
The simple man becomes a clumsy fool who yet has better ‘sense’ than his betters and can say things more fundamentally true; he is ‘in contact with nature,’ which the complex man needs to be, so that Bottom is not afraid of the fairies; he is in contact with the mysterious forces of our own nature, so that the clown has the wit of the Unconscious; he can speak the truth because he has nothing to lose. [13]
Pastoral says the plain man can be as wise as a king, because the important things in life are so plain (even a fool can understand.) Mock-pastoral says the simple man can be as wise as a king because the important things in life are so uncanny (not even a king can understand.) In one, the fool speaks truth more plainly, in the other he is a plainer symptom of unspeakably deep truth. When you put it this way, it’s clear it is not about shepherds. It’s an ambiguous, ambivalent attitude. Empson makes the point that “good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral.” Certainly Zizek is very stern about the need for violent clowning, to realize unconscious wit. He says the gay US soldier who beat up another for harassing him, “should first have beaten himself up, that is, got rid of his own libidinal investment in the rituals of his humiliations.” It is only after we have beaten ourselves up, like Ed Norton in Fight Club, that we can find ourselves in “the position of the proletarian who has nothing to lose.” [14]
I mention this because you might complain that Zizek’s penchant for capering from Lacanian objet petit a to B-movies is kitschy. But, for better or worse, that’s the point. (Which is one reason why I get impatient with profoundly unconvincing denials that Zizek is kitschy at all. That's no way to apologize for the man.) NSK and Laibach produce kitsch, only not just. With this Hegelian high-low ‘spirit is a bone’ business, Zizek is playing at the most provocative wise-foolery, which I personally concede puts him in a noble line of leg-pulling, extending back to Socrates.
Whether he pulls it off or not, the consideration that in principle I like wise-foolery makes me object a little less if Zizek gets Kierkegaard wrong (which he actually does rather less in Parallax.) Suppose someone wrote Fear and Trembling For Dummies. Suppose someone was transported to Abrahamic depths and heights by reading it? Better still if this someone has a roommate—earnest Kierkegaard scholar, who finds the sloppiness distracting. They have a sort of Felix and Oscar, Odd Couple-style relationship. Possibly it ends violently. Kierkegaard: “why doesn’t some poet take up situations like these instead of the stuff and nonsense that fills comedies and novels.” [15]
Zizek really is playing at this. The long opening section of Parallax concerns Kant and Hegel. Hegel wins, in Zizek’s eyes, not by ‘overcoming’ the Kantian divisions he is generally credited with attempting to overcome. “Kant is not unable to reach the Infinite—he is unable to see how he already has what he is looking for. This reversal provides the key to the infamous “Hegelian triad.” And: “This is what ‘negation of negation’ is: the shift of perspective which turns failure into true success" (p. 27). And that is the trick of all wise-fool literature, whatever you make of it as Hegel scholarship. There is something Hegelian about it. Minus the penis joke, Hegel does say that ‘spirit is a bone’ has twofold significance: the right answer, ‘infinite judgment’, is only arrived at by the wrong answer, which is a sort of “natural honesty”, a “disgracefulness” of “irrational, crude thought,” redeemed by the naiveté of openly not knowing itself as such.[16]
***
The Parallax View is an improvement over earlier works. Before I would have said: don’t read it. Now (to adapt Kierkegaard): read it or don’t read it, either way you will regret it. His journalism has never been satisfactory, mostly because his technique needs a large canvas to splay its limbs—like a B-wrestling pic; or a monumental museum piece. But writing the columns has smoothed the prose—something has. Parallax is more agreeably garrulous, like Montaigne’s essays. I’m thinking about how, at the end of “Apology For Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne opines that true wisdom consists in realizing you cannot grasp infinity except by giving up, like the painter who only rendered the motion of the foam around the horse’s mouth after throwing in the towel—at the canvas. Which did the trick.
Zizek has always been playful. Nietzsche says philosophers should have dancing feet. Zizek’s early big books introduced, as it were, a craze. Famously, Alma Cummings danced the jitterbug (or whatever it was) for 27 hours, launching the marathon dance craze of the 20’s and 30’s. You might say Alma was ‘the early Zizek of jitterbugging’. But now he’s better, so perhaps there will be no need, after all, for David Lodge to update Nice Work as a rewrite of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.
“Discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing for Slavoj.”[20] Judith Butler marvels at how, like Alma, Zizek wears out partner after partner. It could mean his talk about the heavy stuff is too light. Or it could mean he is a heavy breather. But in Parallax I think he has forged a synthesis. The Kant-Hegel discussion is no monument of scrupulous exegesis, but contains some interesting thoughts and opinions. The long cognitive science and Heidegger sections are the same. Delivered as lectures, complete with animated gestures, I am sure the effect would be spirited. The audience would carry away bones to gnaw.
It turns out Parallax advances in a sort of curve, so it is hard to see where you are going; easy to lose sight of where you started, but your guide keeps track. I’m quite sure he is making a funny, for once genuinely precise joke by means of his title. If you read it, see if you can see it.
NOTES:
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (London: Clarendon, 1971), §549.
2. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), p. 34.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), p. 208.
4. Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, ed. Slavoj Zizek, Short Circuits (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), p. 33.
5. Parallax, p. 78.
6. Slavoj Zizek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 4.
7. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1969), p. 241-2.9. Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, ed. Slavoj Zizek, Short Circuits (Cambridge: MIT, 2005), p. xv.
8. Quoted in Interrogation Machine, p. 53, from NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst (Los Angeles, Amok Books, 1991), p. 56.
9. Ian Parker, Slavoj Zizek, a Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 32. I am grateful to Scott McLemee for bringing this passage to my attention.
10. See the NSK website. The quote is from the Parker book, p. 32.
11. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 100.
12. Pastoral, p. 11.
13. Pastoral, p. 13.
14. Slavoj Zizek, ed., Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October, 1917: V.I. Lenin (London: Verso, 2002), p.226, p. 252. I take the quotes from the Parker book, p. 102.
15. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. A. Hannay (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 59.
16. Phenomenology, p. 210.
Comments
A reviewer takes his subject too seriously.
A critic takes himself too seriously.
What do people who leave comments in comment boxes take too seriously?
I’d say it pulls off just the right balance of seriocomedy. Bravo. Mind you, that is by far the worst title I’ve ever come upon in my life. In any arena.
It may be a limitation that academic-philosophic comedy can’t seem to get beyond bloke-philosophers making knob jokes. Is that all there is, really? Terry Eagleton in the Ideology of the Aesthetic riffs on Heidegger that way, I seem to remember: how Dasein is ‘always ready-at-hand’ and ‘upstanding’ and so on, which means, says Terry, that Dasein is actually a willy. Which I don’t think is as funny as he thinks it is.
You mean ‘worst’ in the sense of ‘best, most clever’ I take it. (thankyou, thankyou.)
Best in the sense that it makes the reader think ‘Hey, Hegel, no wait, David Foster Wallace, or perhaps Ginsberg, maybe Henry James, and anyway what’s “da Noive”, is it a foreign version of the Valve? but, wait, how do these parts relate to one another in a ... is it, maybe the ... I’m confused.’ So, yes, best in that sense.
"Delivered as lectures, complete with animated gestures, I am sure the effect would be spirited.”
Spot on! He’s currently delivering Parallax View as masterclasses in London, and they’re definately spirited. (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/lacan.shtml).
The rhyme “motion / ocean” was used by John Heywood in his translation of Janus Vitalis’ “Rome” poem.
John Skelton had Bono’s annoying thing of piling up abstract nouns on “-tion” when he couldn’t think of a rhyme.
We will now return to regularly scheduled programming.
A quibble: I haven’t read the book or seen the context you’re quoting from, but isn’t Žižek talking about the Russian Futurists, not the Italian Futurists? Politically, the Russian Futurists (Mayakovsky etc.) were an enormous distance from Marinetti & his Italian Futurists. (The two groups were also separated in time: the prime of the Italian Futurists was well before the Russian revolution). Judging one group on a representative from another is about as inaccurate as you’re judging Žižek to be.
Hi Dan, that’s potentially a completely valid point, which might require a complete retraction of that particular criticism. I’ll have to look into that. I guess the answer might turn out to be: I don’t know enough about Russian Futurism.
IIRC, Mayakovsky was the most prominent Russian futurist. He tried to be a good Communist, but wasn’t completely accepted. He committed suicide in 1930.
Early on Lenin described one of Mayakovsky’s poems as “stupid, monstrously stupid, and pretentious.”
That the reviewer has not heard of Mayakovsky, yet feels free to preach about what the Soviet Union was like during the twenties, is revealing. Moreover, I detect not a lick of understanding of psychoanalysis in this review. To criticize Zizek and not deal with his base in psychoanalysis (which is the reason why he is so rife with condensations, displacements, etc.) shows a blatant disregard for both his politics and his theory.
Zizek strikes me as the apotheosis of a certain kind of Continental philosophy, but not in a good way. I haven’t read a lot of his stuff, though I’ve tried, but he seems to have these fluent, slippery ways of showing that commodity fetishism, repression into the unconscious, the emic-etic distinction, the surplus of the signifier, Being towards Death, the cunning of history, and god knows what else are really all pretty much the same thing. (The Eternal Return? Biopower?)
People have been doing something like this for 60 years or more, but he’s more slick.
This coincides with a crisis of left politics, where a lot of people still want to be Left even though no one knows what that means any more, and where the world itself seems to be moving Right.
So I ask whether Zizek’s performance art wasn’t mostly a way of getting off the Slovenian plantation. Singing for his supper and getting free vacations. Being a big fish in the small Slovenian pond has to get tiresome after awhile.
Sweet Lenin’s Ghost on a stick, Pete! To suppose that I have not heard of Mayakovsky, just because I said I maybe didn’t know enough about him, is quite a leap. Also, there is a lot more to what was going on in Russia in the post-Revolutionary period than just whatever Mayakovsky thought, whatever it may have been. So to infer from the fact that I don’t know enough about Mayakovsky that therefore I am intolerably ignorant of Soviet history generally - well, that’s quite a leap. Finally, if you haven’t noticed how important Hegel is for Zizek then, well, I can only conclude you have a blatant disregard for both his politics and his theory. Lacan is important, of course. But Hegel is right there at the bottom. Zizek reads Hegel through Lacan. (Do you deny it?) So starting with Hegel, in discussing Zizek, makes a sort of sense. (No?) You may reply that it isn’t complete. But to object to something advertised as part I of II that it is incomplete ... seems to fall somewhat short in the objection department.
Yes, Mr. Emerson, Zizek writes only to be a star. You’ve pinned the tail on the greasy Eurotrash donkey. Thank you! Now I never have to read him.
As far as John’s review goes, I found one aspect particularly interesting. Largely, Holbo focuses on Zizek’s style of writing and thinking. One would be hard-pressed to finish the review with any clear sense of the book’s primarly theses. But that’s not what interests me. Holbo implies that Zizek’s kitsch *is* his content, that sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, Zizek’s power emerges frp, his overidentification with what he abhors. (Although that’s more like parody than pastiche, and kitsch is more like pastiche than parody.) But as with Zizek’s work, the subject of Holbo’s review is Holbo’s style. It strikes the reader right from the outset, with the (humorously) ridiculous title. And it belabors the same weenie puns it makes a point to point out have been belabored by others.
What’s at stake is a style weenie-size comparison?
A hasty search produces this link:
Differences rapidly emerged between the Italian and Russian
followers of Futurism. Marinetti enthusiastically greeted the
outbreak of the First World War: “We want the war—the
only form of hygiene in the world—we glorify militarism.”
Mayakovsky, after an initial burst of enthusiasm when war was
declared, turned against it in horror as soon as the first battles
took place: “The war was repulsive, the hinterland was even
more repulsive.” Together with his Futurist colleges Mayakovsky
prepared a hostile reception for Marinetti when the latter undertook
a public tour of Russia in 1914.Mayakovsky’s interests and occupations were manifold. He collaborated
in the writing of film and theatre; after the October Revolution
of 1917 (“whether to recognise the revolution or not?—for
myself (and the other Moscow Futurists) the question did not arise—it
was my revolution”) he developed the text and pictures for
propaganda posters and placards for a number of Soviet ministries.
Looks like I missed that one. Plausibly, by 1917 Mayakovsky was - as Zizek would call him - a ‘beautiful soul’. I had a quite distinct memory that Marinette and Mayakovsky were ideologically aligned. Looks like I was off by a couple of crucial years.
In my defense, Luther, that’s what part II is for: from style to substance. I really do think with Zizek it’s a mistake to start with substance. That would be cart before the horse.
I would also like to point out that Adam Kotsko made your other point a couple months ago: size-wise, my whole beef with Zizek may boil down to a narcissism of little differences, er, bone to pick, style-wise. And I was pleased to be able to point out where I’d, wisely, preemptively confessed to the crime.
That’s perfectly OK, Luther, you’re very welcome.
Emerson,
If you had a group blog with a guy named Lake and a guy named Palmer would your posts be long winded, rambling kilo-word exercises with no unifying theme?
My side of the family abhors and abominates ELP. We also have condemned John Emerson, Dred Scott’s owner. John Emerson the movie producer is cool, though I haven’t actually seen any of his movies.
Hoblo never writes about the content. He just likes to caricature Zizek as a pastische artist with no substance without ever discussing the substance. He’s done this for about a dozen posts and a few articles now.
As to the content question: I guess it depends on whether you count arguments as form or content. I tend to think of them as both. So I guess I would have to disagree with komikul to some degree.
If an argument has a form but no content, it is useless. If an argument has content, but no form, it’s damned hard to figure out.
Very true, no sense that the reviewer understands psychoanalysis. It is also true that Zizek reads Hegel through Lacan. Therefore, it is really important to understand a bit of what the Lacanian reading means. Zizek deploys a Lacanian reading machine against many philosophical texts, and without appreciating that all you can do is express annoyance at his style. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t really care if the reviewer doesn’t like Zizek’s style (which is not the same as the form of his argument, the form of the argument you need Lacan to grasp. The review is mired in the most surface level of content). What about his substantive political claims? I see the reviewer trying fairly hard to be clever, but it’s all style and no substance. I would say the reasons this essay didn’t get published might have more to do with it’s intellectual light-weightedness, and overly personal reactionary tone. In general, and especially in America, Zizek doesn’t get the respect he deserves for his philosophical rigour. He is possibly the best reader of Lacan currently writing on politics (which doesn’t mean I agree with all the interpretations, but he is not at all sloppy). To claim that he reads a given philosopher ‘wrong,’ without providing an argument or interpretation is a waste of time. i would challenge the reviewer to actually do this.
Not a very helpful review, gives no context to the contemporary debates on biopolitics, Law, sovereignty, political action that Zizek is directly engaging in a responding to (let alone the debates among Lacanians). These debates are serious and the stakes high. I think the error on Russian and Italian futurism exemplifies the level of intellectual rigour and textual engagement at work in the whole review. Spend less time thinking about penis, and more on close reading.
at least you were intellectually honest enough to admit that your first hit of ziz was “on belief.”
I did not laugh once when reading this. Nor did I find anything of value.
I should cry that have come to this poor stage of fools.