no logo

yeah well while i was rambling earlier i produced the following sentence which sums it up pretty well

they can be useful on a personal level but to implement them in any sort of self-definition is sad.

hence we can agree to disagree, and also agree 0_o

maybe, depends who you ask / uh not really? / categorically untrue

lookin' forward to yr reply though

― I got gin but I'm not a ginger (bernard snowy), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 4:35 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

not really sure what your specific problem with capitalism is, yet!

once you've articulated i might get round 2 engaging. but n.e. way i linked to a categorical demonstration of sz's antisemitism yesterday: can't really be bothered to do it again.

his characterization of "capitalism" is basically supernatural; his attempt to counterpose "ideology" and, uh, whatever it is he trades in, was misbegotten enough when althusser tried it;* and there isn't time to engage with him. he doesn't merit it.

but i suppose it really depends on what you want to see there. what kind of society *is* zizek advocating? what is his (or your) dream of perfection? im not saying there's anything wrong with having such dreams or that *all* such are doomed to russian-style failure/tyranny. im just asking which dream it is that he/his fans would make reality. what is the other game in town?

(of course, language itself is so soaked in ideology that... this can't be articulated! amirite? genius.)

*I think Zizek is right to follow Althusser in making ideology a question of what people do, rather than what they think

that would be to follow... the tenets of materialism. and not just even marx. to credit this to althusser (an arch-idealist) is just idiotic.

(I find the "No Logo" stuff a bit condescending at this point in my life. The mere idea that the stuff we possess has some semiotic importance is much older than capitalism and can't really be avoided, and the fact that capitalism hyper-emphasizes the semiotic value of brand-name stuff can be mitigated by just not hyper-emphasizing it yourself, which most people I know don't. Admittedly, some people DO do this, and the fact that I don't is probably influenced by my having read no-logo-type stuff when I was younger. At this point I just don't think about it. I got a Blackberry recently because I needed to be able to get school/work e-mail very quickly, and I don't care that much about what it says about me (if anything I'm a bit embarrassed when I pull it out on the Subway).

― Bay-L.A. Bar Talk (Hurting 2), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 4:51 PM (51 seconds ago) Bookmark

needless to say, the RIM corporation is not greatly bothered by this state of events.

must have really tired you out to have linked to that categorical demonstration of sz's antisemitism nrq

i don't want to bang on the same drum is all, but it's on the most recently bumped bob dylan thread.

though reading his stuff should sort of alert you to him being a creep.

i don't want to bang on the same drum is all, but it's on the most recently bumped bob dylan thread.

also just oxygen of publicity stuff. he's a highly effective operator partly by trolling. getting into it only helps him, if only in a tiny way. he hardly exists outside global capitalism himself, so i don't get how any of this rigorous purism of bernard's stands up, or what end it's aimed at.

hahaha oh man it's the exact awful TNR article that I expected this is great

good reasoning. the article has direct quotes from zizek that i don't think can be justified. what say you?

I say that I don't know how a literate person could arrive at the ridiculously distorted out-of-context readings that Adam Kirsch provides; therefore he is either illiterate or did not really read the books in question

i have a fairly decent track record on literacy; i've read as much zizek as i'd like to; and i haven't seen anyone explain how a quotation can be "distorted". "out of context" of course i understand, but it needs to be demonstrated.

basically Zizek's own response (to Kirsch's *first* article calling him anti-semitic based on a bunch of out-of-context quotes) says it better than I ever could: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-who-are-you-calling-anti-semitic

Back to Mr. Kirsch, often it is enough to continue my quote and the meaning (opposite to the one imputed to me) becomes clear. Mr. Kirsch quotes my passage “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough”--but is this really a call for even more killing than Hitler afforded? Here is how my text goes on: “Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews). This is why one should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions--but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”

In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.

I've learned to stop worrying and love my mobile phone.

"distortion" in this case would consist of taking an isolated passage from a book entitled Violence, which is almost entirely dedicated to exploring and developing a theoretical concept of violence, and presenting it to the reader without giving them any inkling of A.) its place in the broader argument being advanced, or B.) the specific meanings or senses of words that are being used.

i don't mind people who use the technology discreetly. but those who celebrate an empty, technological 'togetherness' are complacent and usually oppressive towards the poor, homeless and afflicted.

The word that pops (sorry) out at me in this sentence is "discreetly." It sounds like what bothers you is conspicuous consumption, which has connotations of self-indulgence and self-centeredness, rather than anything to do with the technology itself.

that's a superb defence of revolutionary violence, but doesn't explain how the quotes were out of context.

surely zizek's original quote *does* call on hitler to have been even more (or just as) violent. it's nice to talk about disturbing the "capitalist social space" but what do we mean here, really? could get into debate about whether nazi germany really was in the end a viable space for capitalism -- an idea that really shows up the looseness of his definition of "capitalism".

the last line about the "precise sense" of violence is just fatuous rubbish. is that what you're really offering as an argument?

(of course, gandhi's precise views on the holocaust are interesting to recall, aren't they? of course we wouldn't want to take them out of context. yet more interesting that zizek chose that example.)

xpost zizek actually talks about his instictive reaction to a story as being antisemitic -- jews "of course" trade in human blood. so one can blame his cultural background/upbringing or whatever but it's sort of right there for you. again, though, if you read him and don't find him a creep that's entirely up to you. it makes no difference to the future of socialism.

I don't think you can really call "the capitalist imperative to sell your labor-power" an "entirely functional reason" but then again I'm kind of an idealist
― I got gin but I'm not a ginger (bernard snowy), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 8:57 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

please tell me precisely what is non-functional about selling your labor-power

also reading this ON IPHONE

I always find it disconcerting when someone argues for the disassociation of the term "violence" from actual physical violence against people (such as the mechanized murder of millions) and prefer instead to use the term to refer to abstractions (like capitalism, "the state", etc.) GTFO is my reaction.

x-post

re: antisemitism, it's also been mentioned before that zizek in that rebuttal of his anti-semitism implies, falsely, that jews didn't die in the holocaust in slovenia - or that if they did, it was only a handful, so it's no big deal. then in a recent piece for the guardian, he used the phrase "palestinian-frei" to describe israel's policies in gaza and the west bank, which he also called the world's largest concentration camp. "jews are the real nazis" is the number one trope of modern antisemitism and holocaust denial.

zizek may not really hate jews in his heart of hearts, but he goes around making these hateful statements, and we've already established that ideology is what you do - which makes him an anti-semite.

and we've already established that ideology is what you do

I think I missed something here - when was this established?

not really, but bernard snowy endorsed the view: "I think Zizek is right to follow Althusser in making ideology a question of what people do, rather than what they think."

yeah, which earned me this response:

*I think Zizek is right to follow Althusser in making ideology a question of what people do, rather than what they think

that would be to follow... the tenets of materialism. and not just even marx. to credit this to althusser (an arch-idealist) is just idiotic.

― Dean Gaffney's December (history mayne), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 5:07 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

but ideology, according to Althusser, was based a lot on what people think!

still haven't gotten around to addressing this:

surely zizek's original quote *does* call on hitler to have been even more (or just as) violent. it's nice to talk about disturbing the "capitalist social space" but what do we mean here, really? could get into debate about whether nazi germany really was in the end a viable space for capitalism -- an idea that really shows up the looseness of his definition of "capitalism".

the last line about the "precise sense" of violence is just fatuous rubbish. is that what you're really offering as an argument?

I'm not anti-mobile, mobile is anti-me

bernard otm i hate philosophical writing and this isn't that hard to follow

but ideology, according to Althusser, was based a lot on what people think!

― sarahel, Wednesday, December 23, 2009 6:03 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.

I don't think that this is saying that ideology is solely about actions and what is material, but instead, is saying that ideas cannot be separated from the material.

okay, but I would argue that you're still guilty of "hyper-emphasizing the semiotic value" of the Blackberry "brand". you've detached the brand from its embodiment in the realm of concrete material objects and practices, and made it into some sort of abstract reference point which you define yourself in opposition to. this allows you to buy and use a Blackberry without "buying in" or being a "Blackberry person"; all the negative aspects are subsumed under the heading of "brand", allowing you to avoid them, even as you use the product, simply by not believing in the brand.

needless to say, the RIM corporation is not greatly bothered by this state of events.

― I got gin but I'm not a ginger (bernard snowy), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 12:09 PM Bookmark

I really don't define myself in opposition to it though - I'm not running around saying "Hey, I'm not one of those Blackberry people" I'm just saying that the product's primary interest to me is functional. I mean if you really want to get into the significance of it, I think it's probably more interesting to look at how a Blackberry's "functionality" implicates me in capitalism than its semiotic significance (after all, its effect is to make capitalist work more of a presence in my life at all times, with a little vibration that interrupts whatever I'm doing and tells me to look at another law school or work message).

Perhaps if anything the real semiotic significance of a Blackberry stems from this - it projects a sense of "I am a busy, serious professional who prioritizes my work and I'm 'important'" as opposed to the iPhone's "I am a creative, fun, youthful person." So maybe the BlackBerry's branding is a little less obvious in that sense.

I mean underneath it all I know how I'm complicit in capitalism by my default "pragmatic" attitude, but the thing is when you're not a chaired academic with a platform it's pretty hard to oppose capitalism in a non-futile way, especially when you're being presented with the choice of an imperfect system that feeds you versus a big question mark.

what if we could eat questions marks

please tell me precisely what is non-functional about selling your labor-power

― deej--nuts, butthurt, and yelly (gbx), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 5:50 PM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark

and of course, individuals can also arrive at very distorted perspectives on what their own 'needs' are. daycare may be a necessity for a single mother whose only source of income is paid labor, but one can easily imagine a society in which this wouldn't be the case. similarly, I know a lot of people who wish that they could cook more, because it's cheaper/healthier/tastier, but they just don't have the time... because they're always busy working, in order to make money, which is then spent on expensive prepared/packaged foods. or look at the domestic 'chores' (for some reason denied the status of legitimate employment) traditionally assigned to housewives: from the perspective of the husband, things like cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes appear as 'needs', when their status is really more like 'preconditions for the continuation of gainful employment'.

what condiment would you put on your question marks

it would tell me a lot about you

what if you didn't have time to prepare your own question marks, so busy working for the man that you order take out

I hope you remember the ones living off government question marks

maybe they're the really free ones

have you ever tried exclamation points

"work or starve" is kind of an easy decision from the individual's perspective, but the choice to work ends up expressing more than simply a desire not to starve; intentionally or not, it lends legitimacy to the ruling order.

Work or starve is pretty much a human imperative. I mean it's work, starve, or make others do work for you, whether by force or by some kind of social contract. You could quibble with the AMOUNT of work required by capitalism and whether it's really way beyond what's necessary and a means for the ruling class to skim, but work itself can't be quibbled with.

Unless you're using "work" as a shorthand for selling your labor to someone else. In which case I'd probably bring up some arguments about efficiency.

But I'd also add that capitalism does give you a pretty wide range of options in terms of selling your labor - I mean you can work 20 hours a week in a Starbucks and then spend the rest of your time growing food, knitting clothes and building furniture if you really want.

I mean underneath it all I know how I'm complicit in capitalism by my default "pragmatic" attitude, but the thing is when you're not a chaired academic with a platform it's pretty hard to oppose capitalism in a non-futile way, especially when you're being presented with the choice of an imperfect system that feeds you versus a big question mark.

― Bay-L.A. Bar Talk (Hurting 2), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 6:50 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark

just one more thing to add, and then I gotta run: I don't think of 'ideology criticism' (or whatever you wanna call it) as a way to separate myself from and denounce the unenlightened, false-consciousness-having herds; my motivation is more along the lines of "god DAMN it, why is it so hard to change this system when everyone knows that it's constantly fucking people over, again and again, in the same predictable ways?" but as long as people acknowledge that we have now is a seriously flawed system, and they aren't actively stanning for the World Bank or something, I'm fine with them doing whatever.

ut the thing is when you're not a chaired academic with a platform it's pretty hard to oppose capitalism in a non-futile way

I'd say most chaired academics with platforms are deluding themselves that they're opposing capitalism in any way whatsoever

especially if they have blackberries or iPhones, right?

haha

why is it so hard to change this system when everyone knows that it's constantly fucking people over, again and again, in the same predictable ways?

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/quiz/266000/266151_1248794026596_350_349.jpg

I just, in general, find the idea that you can stand OUTSIDE a system and criticize it ridiculous. you will always be inside the system. man is a social animal and is bound by social constructs. even the most ascetic drop-out unabomber type, living in the woods wearing handmade clothes and burning his shit for fuel or whatever, is still living in relation to some external system - the thoughts he has are ordered by a language, his actions are defined by their opposition to the existing system, etc. there is no outside. we're all in it.

criticizing a system you are inside of often makes for a more informed, nuanced critique.

have you ever read an sb thread

Read an sb thread? I've gotten multiple sb threads locked by mods as a result of my posts to them!

I just, in general, find the idea that you can stand OUTSIDE a system and criticize it ridiculous. you will always be inside the system.

frankly I don't even know what this means

like how ridiculous was black folks' criticism of the racist power structure in the american south

or are you just calling the unabomber on his shit

but regardless of questions about Althusser's philosophical persuasion (given that his most famous essay about ideology includes a detailed discussion of his thesis that "Ideology has a material existence", I'm going with "materialist"), that seems to be the view most people here are working with

yeah, maybe read some of the lit on althusser? it's fairly well established (by marxists!) that his basic outlook was idealist. been saying this on ilx for years so excuse lack of patience, but basically althusser was so comprehensively "done" in the 1970s that it is ludicrous to me that people continue to talk about him.

I think Zizek's original quote, taken in full, says exactly what it says: Weimar Germany was a nation with a lot of problems, and Hitler's solution (unifying the population around the exclusion and extermination of an ethnic minority) was an easy way to make people feel better without changing anything. whether or not you think it's legitimate to define the term "violence" broadly enough that it encompasses both genocide and social change is irrelevant; it's pretty clear that that Zizek does think it's legitimate, and the only way to arrive at the "ZOMG HE SAID HITERL SHOULD BE MORE VIOLENT!!1!" criticism is to ignore the author's intent (or to have it obscured for you by a charlatan like Adam Kirsch).

"without changing anything"? yeah, you're going with that? ok.

i think the violence he meant was probably more than "social change", wasn't it? more like violent leninist revolution? under third period comintern that would have been just lovely. probably not as bad as nazism, but "social change" -- no. i think he means rather more. why is kirsch a "charlatan"? more than zizek, the guy who extols "emancipatory violence" from various well-protected lectures halls to the children of the rich west.

"the last line about the "precise sense" of violence is just fatuous rubbish. is that what you're really offering as an argument?"

the idea that a philosopher will sometimes use a word in ways that are different from its everyday use? yes, that would be my argument. this is why e.g. the Kantian "transcendental subject" is not "maths"

well, he said "precise" didn't he? how would you "precisely" define violence to include the most-famous advocate of non-violence? (his world is altogether lacking in precision. history is messy. even the collapse of the raj.)

or are you just calling the unabomber on his shit

^^^this. but not just the unabomber basically all ivory tower academicians