I’m incredibly busy this week (more on that later) but people keep clamoring for a post on Slavoj Zizek and his attitude towards the #Occupy movement. I can never deny anything to my readers, so I decided to read and analyze Zizek’s most recent article in the Guardian titled “Occupy First. Demands Come Later.”
Zizek’s article is, in my opinion, very symbolic of the entirety of his work. He offers a sentence or a paragraph that starts well but then fizzles out on a tremendous platitude. The article in the Guardian is full of this kind of sentences. Here are a few examples:
So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed
I was very glad to see this statement. Every time, I see protesters hold placards denouncing greed I feel vicarious shame for people who don’t manage to realize that protesting a character flaw is not a legitimate political act. Then, however, Zizek continues this sentence:
the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt.
Even though the philosopher begins the article by being somewhat critical of the hippyish tint of the protests, he slips into the fully 60ies rhetoric of the bad system that causes all ills. The statement that “the” system pushed people into corruption is probably the most inane thing I have read for a while. Is anybody aware of any system that existed at any point in the history of humanity where corruption did not exist? Isn’t that proof that people don’t need to be pushed into being corrupt by systems?
A little later in the article, Zizek says the following:
The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.
I agree wholeheartedly that the Main St. vs Wall Street binary is simplistic and useless. However, the problem is not that Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. The real issue is that the White House cannot. In their zeal to blame the greedy banksters, protesters are forgetting to mention the real culprit: the politicians who have sold us all down the river. This is where real corruption is located. This is the true problem that needs to be addressed.
Zizek slips into sheer ridiculousness when he attempts to mimic the Christian rhetoric in order to make the #Occupy cause more attractive to the conservatives:
When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.
Zizek is forgetting that it is always a mistake to adopt a language of which you only have a smattering and hope to be convincing to the native speakers. A Christian can only feel compassion towards the ultra-rich who have even less chance of getting into heaven than. . . well, I’m sure that even Zizek has to be aware of this. In his attempt to employ Christian terminology, Zizek sounds as silly as a Christian would who’d try to tell a Marxist that the fair distribution of the means of production awaits us all in the Kingdom of God.
(To be continued. . .)
Clarissa's Blog 
“the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt”
Um, a system is made up of people. It’s not its own entity. People can change a system. People just choose NOT to change the system because they’re benefiting from it and they don’t care about the people who don’t benefit.
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Now this is an intelligent analysis of the issue.
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Why, thank you. *takes a bow*
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“A Christian can only feel compassion towards the ultra-rich who have even less chance of getting into heaven than. . . well, I’m sure that even Zizek has to be aware of this.”
This is an offensive comment. Is it supposed to be sarcastic??
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What’s offensive, I ask as a Christian? Or do you mean it’s offensive to Zizek?
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“A Christian can only feel compassion towards the ultra-rich ”
this statement
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I’m basing this on “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:23-24. From this, I conclude that the rich people are to be pitied because what is the true treasure for a Christian person is inaccessible to them. I happen to believe this. Then there is also this:
“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”
Matthew 6:24–33
This is something I happen to believe as well.
How is this offensive?
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I don’t see how those quotes imply that Christians can *only* feel compassion for the *rich*. I took this as they can only feel compassion for this group and not the others involved.
Even if I am emphasizing the wrong word, and you mean compassion is the only emotion a Christian can direct toward the rich, I disagree. why can’t Christians feel anger and call to action if they observe exploitative behavior toward others?
And I don’t think pity and compassion are the same thing.
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Anger is not an emotion that Christianity sees as positive. And the pursuit of worldly reaches is also not a Christian goal.
I do use pity and compassion interchangeable.I just checked several sources and they all list these two words as synonyms.
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“Even if I am emphasizing the wrong word, and you mean compassion is the only emotion a Christian can direct toward the rich, I disagree. why can’t Christians feel anger and call to action if they observe exploitative behavior toward others?”
Oh this is cool. Isabel, it’s an interpretation of the good life according to Christian principles that goes back at least to the 6th century with Boethius, and has roots in the scripture Clarissa cites. Basically Boethius made a reasoned argument that because all humans desire to be happy, what makes one truly happy is good by human standards, so that the pursuit of true happiness is the most reasonable course of action. Now what makes one truly happy, according to Boethius, is the sense of harmony with the universe, which for the Christian is to say unity with God, that comes only with performance of selfless acts of virtue in God’s name. (Being an atheist, I would replace “God” with “humanity,” but tomayto, tomahto.) So selflessness and virtue in the name of God, who is all goodness and the source of all things, is the highest good and best exercise of the human faculty of reason. Meanwhile people who pursue material things (power, wealth, pleasure, etc.) in an effort to be happy are wretched, since the focus on material interest is a focus upon the self, which necessitates a breaking away from the unity that comes with doing good. Therefore they can never attain true happiness. Instead they make a vice of their pursuit, carrying it to excess, in a futile attempt to fill the void with satisfaction of an urge that because it is partial can only ever demand more. Therefore even the poorest (true) Christian, who is happy in harmony with creation and so lacks for nothing, can only feel pity for the richest lord, who has no peace from desire, his own and that of other vicious parties who envy him. Now if you buy this then spite is simply not very worthwhile, because at best it arises from a sense of personal offense that is at odds with the unity that is true happiness, and at worst it can provoke acts of retributive violence that shame the entire human race. (Not to say that efforts toward change are never worthwhile, or that justice is ever unnecessary, but retribution is never anything more than vicious indulgence in violence to satisfy what is felt as a personal affront, and which often provokes reciprocal acts of retribution.)
Shortly after writing his argument Boethius was either hacked or clubbed to death on orders of Emperor Theodoric the Great, but the thought consoled him in his miserable final months of exile and imprisonment. It was also very influential to the Christian theological tradition, and, obviously, remains relevant. See F. Nietzsche and others for a general rebuttal.
“And I don’t think pity and compassion are the same thing.”
I guess if I were to get all anal and make a strict distinction then I would define “pity” as the emotion raised by a judgment that something or someone is wretched, which provokes “compassion,” the sentiment that something should be done to upraise the wretched. Philology’s not really my specialty, though, and anyway it’s perfectly clear that in practical speech pity and compassion are synonymous, and not worth the quibble outside of a philosopher’s debate.
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Actually the words are often used somewhat differently. “pity” more often has a negative connotation. You might call a poor attempt at an argument by a despised adversary “pitiful” and even say that you pity him, but the word compassion just wouldn’t work there. You might feel say that you feel compassion for someone going through a hard time even when pity might seem too strong a word. In that case it is used more like “empathy”. Compassion rarely has a negative connotation (in my experience) but pity runs the risk of seeming judgmental. Maybe it is a US thing.
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I suppose you’re right. Contempt is the other sentiment that can be provoked by a judgment that something is pitiable (or what provokes that judgment … however that works). And indeed when people call things pitiful they often mean them to be held in contempt, or at least condescension.
There. I argued about words on the internet. Do I get some kind of pedantic nutbag award?
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I don’t see how that relates to his statement. Christians should only feel pity and compassion for the ultra rich and that’s the end of it?
Exactly what is your position, since you have only been critical of the movement?
My branch of Christianity has a long tradition of helping the poor, and even political involvement to that end.
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I’m very happy that the movement exists. Irrespective of how things work out, the very fact of the movement’s existence is undoubtedly positive and healthy for this society.
However, two things bother me about the movement and make me doubt that it will achieve anything practice. First, is the rhetoric of compassion and greed. These things cannot be addressed through political activism and have no place in any political struggle. You can’t improve human nature through political means. An attempt to achieve that was undertaken in the USSR and it failed spectacularly.
Another problem is the 99% vs 1% slogan. I simply don’t get it. I don’t understand, for example, where I am supposed to be placed according to this slogan. There are people who really suffer from poverty, from disease that they can’t take care of because they have neither money nor health insurance, people who live on food stamps, people who can’t turn up the heat in winter and sit there shivering. And here am I, choosing which expensive restaurant to go to. How can I possibly lump myself with these truly suffering people and claim that I’m in the same situation?
Do you remember this quote from a professor I placed on the blog a while ago? The one with the great job, health insurance, and a house he owns? I find his attempt to claim the suffering that is not his to be shameful. And I don’t want to participate in this round of self-pity by people who, like myself, have pretty comfortable lives. I want to concentrate not on some imaginary anxieties I might experience but on real struggles of so many people who are right now, today, going through hell. Such people exist and there are many of them. We should all shut up and listen to them instead of trying to colonize their voices by pretending like we are all in the same kind of trouble.
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I don’t take it as a claim that the middle class and the poor are in the same situation. I take it as a political statement that the middle class have more interests in common with the lower class than with the upper class, which I think is the appropriate antidote to the Reagan revolution and its demonization of economically marginalized folkx, and perhaps a bit of exploitation of widespread ignorance of probability.
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Well, there are systems that “push” you to be corrupt, I am sure. The language Zizek uses seems deliberately vague, although this vagueness may be related to the constraints of writing a short newspaper article. On the other hand, Zizek seems a little tired, these days. I saw him on national TV in Australia, and he wasn’t really listening closely to some of the questions before he answered them.
On the issue of being “pushed” into corruption, of course there are all sorts of ways of resisting that. Even in Zimbabwe, where everybody is “pushed” into corruption by force of material circumstance, I find that people are only as corrupt as they feel they need to be, to survive. I didn’t experience any extremism or aggressiveness in corruption that made corruption too uncomfortable for either the one demanding a bribe or the one giving it. If one really didn’t have the money to provide the bribe, one could generally argue one’s way out of the dilemma. So, corruption was a two-way street.
I’m not sure why it should be any different in America.
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Yes! The source of all the problems does seem to like in the Reagan ideology, from what I can gather. I’m basing it on the ideologies of the trolls I’ve met Internet-wise.
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n8chz and scratchy888 are right.
And n8chz really has his finger on it: this is about rolling back the ideology of the Reagan “revolution,” Thatcher, etc. I think people are misguided when they try to compare it to other processes and I note that many conservative critics of this bash the occupiers precisely in Reaganite terms – students and workers and youth are lazy/entitled, etc.
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And why Reagan? Why was he popular, and successful? This compulsion to find a politician or other scapegoat to blame is disturbing. I think this impulse is why we are doomed to repeat the past and ultimately get nowhere. It’s all Reagan’s fault! Or GWB’s. Or some pundit’s. Or the Puritans. Or the feminists. Or the religious fundamentalists. Or the ignorant people who refuse to vote in their own interests.
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No – the set of policies for which Reagan was a figurehead and vendor in US was rooted in a series of economic plans made in 70s and implemented internationally (cf Thatcher,
Latin America, more). He was known as the “Great Communicator” because of his role as ideological worker in this.
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So exactly who was involved in the “series of economic plans made on the 1970’s”? And what preceded this development? i.e. what drove it’s conception and inception? Or do “ideologies” just pop up and roll out successfully in a random fashion?
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Too long a question for a blog thread. Look up Thatcherism for a start. Consider opposition to Keynesian economics and what goes into it. Consider fears from elites about what was stirred up by decolonization, desegregation, and other liberation movements of 50s, 60s, 70s. The stagflation of the late 70s and all the discussions of what to do about it. 70s energy crisis and discussions of what to do about that. What did and didn’t happen during the Carter presidency, how he was viewed in his (actually pretty good, but much maligned) handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. US involvement in Latin America / Caribbean and reasons for it. And much more. History isn’t a conspiracy or a soap opera, but there are a huge number of factors that determine what happens; political decisions that stick, stick partly because of how they are framed for the public, etc., etc.
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My point exactly.
“Too long a question for a blog thread.”
and reaganism or thatcherism is too short an explanation, and it is also too easy for progressives, as a source of blamei.e. as stated above “The source of all the problems does seem to like in the Reagan ideology” which you agreed with.
Just as relatively well-off upper middle class activists dominate the OWS movement, they dominated the anti-war movement of the 60’s, leading to class resentment from the lower class soldiers who were demonized and worse, ignored on their return from Vietnam. Nixon (main instigator of the extremely destructive Drug War) hated hippies for similar reasons. Yet the left continued to ignore the lower classes, didn’t learn this lesson at all, and instead shrug and blame it all on stupid ignorant racists and Reaganism.
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Well “Reaganism” is one way to codify the weird attitude of victim blaming that started around his era and presumably, at least from what I can gather, in the US (whereupon it proceeded to afflict the rest of the Western world). This peculiar attitude of victim blaming is not so present in Asian culture, so it is not part of “human nature”.
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Weren’t you the person who complained about dichotomous thinking? 🙂
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That’s a huge distortion – and cliche – how old are you, do you remember this era at all? You are also limiting yourself to US and within US to “hippies”, you forget that one of the big issues during Thatcher’s time was the miners’ strike and what is the social class of miners?, and you’re not considering anything in rest of world during this time. “Reaganism” is
shorthand for a lot; this is a blog thread; and I think you’re out of league if I may say so.
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Well, excuuuuuuuuse me.
What is a cliche, btw? That the left ignored the lower classes, and still does (the recent rediscovery notwithstanding).
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You will have to expand on why you think I am thinking dichotomously. I can’t account for the framework that you choose to employ to try to understand anything I say.
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[P.S. in order, my comment #23 would actually be 20.5]
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Scratchy:
Before 1980’s no victim-blaming. After 1980 victim-blaming.
Western world=victim-blaming. Non-western world =no victim-blaming.
How is this helpful?
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““Reaganism” is
shorthand for a lot; ”
But it puts the blame squarely on conservatives, republicans, etc, and implies that everything was going along swimmingly until those stick-in-the-mud neandertals crashed the party. Leftists and progressives stood by helplessly and were completely blameless I suppose.
And from that point on they were helpless and impotent to act. I guess that’s why Clinton was forced to put more people in jail for a drug he admitted using than all previous Republican presidents combined.
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btw I am not disagreeing with anything specific you are saying (though not necessarily agreeing) – I just see the political situation the way Clarissa sees women blaming all their problems on men, etc. There can be no progress while in thrall to any sort of blaming ideology (as we have seen in the political sphere).
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This is why I love blogging. While I’m getting soused at a Halloween party, people are discussing Zizek and referencing Boethius in a very lucid, profound way.
Boethius was very popular among the leading Soviet scholars who were imprisoned by Stalin and forced to conduct their research while in jail. Their incarceration differed from that of regular citizens in that they were reasonably fed and allowed to work behind a desk instead of in the taiga.
Even in Stalin’s GULAG, any commonality of interests or any shared fate between the educated middle classes and the uneducated lower classes never happened.
Of course, the educated middle class loves to pretend that commonality of interests and that shared fate do exist. Both in the GULAG and today in the US.
(If anybody decides to draw a conclusion on the basis of this that I think today’s US is the same as the GULAG is an idiot. This is a fair warning.)
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“middle class loves to pretend ”
And flatter themselves that the lower classes do not see right through their charade. They end up shocked, and then angry, that the lower orders do not go along with their agenda.
Hint: people *always* know when they are being condescended to, and even when they suffer in silence they are likely to become bitter about it.
That is why I have always said that the only solution in the US is to actually include lower class people as part of any progressive liberal movement.
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‘And flatter themselves that the lower classes do not see right through their charade. They end up shocked, and then angry, that the lower orders do not go along with their agenda.
Hint: people *always* know when they are being condescended to”
-Exactly! I’m very glad that I’m getting heard on this because I’m starting to feel like I’m clamoring in the desert. I’ve worked as a union organizer, and the rhetoric of working for the dispossessed was all there. But whenever the actual dispossessed spoke out and addressed the issues that mattered to them, you should see the exasperation, the boredom on the faces of the oh-so-progressive union leaders who had been born with an entire silver dinner set in their mouths. They need the blue-collar workers to stand there silently and applaud any wisdom they feel like offering. When the blue-collar folks actually begin to have an opinion, then an outrage sets in. How dare they not conform with the image of the silent, grateful unwashed that has been assigned to them?
“That is why I have always said that the only solution in the US is to actually include lower class people as part of any progressive liberal movement.”
-That would mean that the current leaders of the progressive movement would actually get off their high horses and recognize that they DON’T know best what the unwashed masses need and want.
Do you think that is very likely?
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“Do you think that is very likely?”
No, but what other choice is there?
How is the party?
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Oh, and it goes without saying (I hope) that I am not referring to token involvement. If they are 70% of the population, well than they should be 70% of the participants in the movement and a representative number of the leaders. That is the only way for the inclusion to be successful.
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This is precisely why I’m so worried that yet again the middle-class and the upper-middle-class folks will appropriate the protest movement and pretend like their grievances are the grievances of the workers, the blue-collar folks.
The middle classes love doing that. They colonize the voices of the dispossessed and actually say (I’ve heard this said out loud many times by tenured college professors), “I’m in the same situation as a truck driver, a factory worker, or a hotel maid.”
And whenever I hear it, I just get livid. Yes, there are problems middle-class people (like I am today) experience. But these problems are not even located on the same planet as the problems of a hotel maid or a seasonal worker in the fields. And, of course, the moment I say that, I become a traitor to the cause of progressives everywhere because I’m causing divisiveness.
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Hahaha. But then, the progressives themselves also cause “divisiveness” with intersectionality and identity politics, so it can’t be that much of a sin, can it?
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You know what’s funny? I’ve dedicated years of research to criticize any kind of identity-building, bit for most of my colleagues I’m now “The person who’s into identity politics.”
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Not to mention the distance of the academic left from the lumpen proletariat or those severely marginalised:
SMASH, GRAB, RUN BY DAMBUDZO MARECHERA
Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise
The pictorial myths complacency devises
Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass
Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies
I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons
In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat
Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.
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It’s the problem with distinguishing between being aware of something and advocating it. For instance, I am aware of how people use the lower, most primitive parts of their minds, to set national and other boundaries for identity. I think this has all sorts of implications, many of which are very negative indeed. But this is very different from advocating that everybody must necessarily behave towards each other in a very primitive manner.
It’s a subtle distinction, but lost on many people, even some academics.
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I really wanted to post an eloquent reply to this comment, which I totally agree with, but I really need to write my grant that is due in a couple days!
While writing these remarks and trying to work on my grant, I am watching “The Dirty Dozen” on PBS. Is this supposed to be a story of redemption?
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Good luck with the grant, Isabel!
A post about the party is coming right up. 🙂
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I should clarify that I *wanted* it to be eloquent, not that it would have been. 🙂
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Thanks! I’ll look forward to that post.
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No need for false modesty. We all know you here, and you would have been very eloquent, without a doubt.
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The direction of this comment thread has got me thinking: Concerning the novel Age of Reason by Jean Paul Sartre, I’m now recommending it as required reading not only for everyone under 41, but also everyone who has ever used the word “professoriat” in a fit of politically incorrect snark. Such people will adore it.
Also: The IWW has a slogan: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” The slogan of the bulk of the commenters here might as well be: “The educated middle class and the uneducated working class have nothing in common.” If passive voice should trigger one’s BS-meter, then so too perhaps should copious modifiers (“educated,” “uneducated”) in league with universal quantifiers (“nothing”). In Europe (particularly Italy, it seems), for several years now, there’s been a ‘precarity movement.’ From what I can see of it via the Internet ( when I was a kid I never said “someday I want to be a 46-year-old American w/o a passport, but surely we all disappoint ourselves somehow or another) it seems to revolve around two particular personalities, holy man San Precario, and Italian Supermodel™ Serpica Naro. One claim is stated explicitly: There is at least one thing free-lance “yuppies” and migrant workers have in common, and that’s zero job security. Around that single issue, if no other, they are natural allies, with specific shared political interests. Whether migrant workers and other authentically po people represent themselves within this movement I have no fracking idea. Like I sez, the on-the-ground situation in Europe may as well be the situation on Mars given my particular window on the world. But it seems viable as a style pointer for the 99% of which I AM ONE.
Also: Being a blog with such an international following, we see the middle class/working class contrast familiar to everyone except Americans. In my ‘Reagan revolution’ reference, I was speaking American, so by middle class I meant people with steady income who are solvent at least as often than not, and by lower class, everyone else. Also, at least 99% of Americans will self identify as middle class, including many who are well outside that class by any definition. While the American precariat is probably well south of 99% (largely because unions and tenure haven’t been entirely wiped out yet) I’d say, extrapolating current trends, give it a decade. For the under-30 crowd? Let’s say I definitely don’t envy them.
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With all due respect, I can’t see this precariat terminology in any sense other than the purely psychoanalytical. Yes, human life is precarious. Our health, our personal relationships, whether we live or die and when we die – all that is precarious. One can either consume oneself with anxiety over this or find psychological mechanisms of accepting it.
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Good points, good analysis. And no, this “precarity” isn’t a psychological problem. My mother’s belief that she is broke, *is.*
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Just some random thoughts:
— everyone has a different “rock bottom” and it’s always interesting to find out what one’s own is.
— people in the USA don’t know what poverty is, or how it is possible to survive it and be relatively happy, until they’ve visited parts of Africa.
— Zizek is right up to a point–there is a “system” in place that capitalises on anxiety and perpetuates it. If one grows up on television and takes the commercials to heart, one is never pretty/handsome enough, rich enough or poised enough to warrant self-satisfaction.
— many people are terrified because they associate a different meaning to reaching “rock bottom” than they ought to, in the absence of reified forms of consciousness.
— In Zimbabwe, since the majority of the population has hit “rock bottom”, they all pull together with a feeling of camaraderie and mirth (also a fair dosage of stoicism). But this concerns cultural differences, not just psychological differences between individuals.
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Sorry, the comma here is wrong (I’m still waking up this morning). It should be:
many people are terrified because they associate a different meaning to reaching “rock bottom” than they ought to in the absence of reified forms of consciousness.
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