This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek...

3/5 iirc

nice leap from 'people don't want to be blown up' to 'people want terrorists locked up without charge.'

― laughing out loud lol (history mayne), Monday, 4 October 2010 10:17 (7 hours ago)

thart's a bit of a wilful misreading.

zizek at this point is like telemann writing hundreds of subtly different concertos w/ material endlessly recycled, but that's a pretty good article.

"The others are OK, I respect them," the liberals say, "but they must not intrude too much on my own space. The moment they do, they harass me – I fully support affirmative action, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music."

lol

thart's a bit of a wilful misreading.

no it isn't, read it again

idk, seems tarded to me, i don't think many european liberals are in favour of affirmative action

not sure where zizek stands on either that or rap music

i think you 'know what he means'

i imagine zizek is in no way ready to listen to loud rap music

when he says wanting beer without alcohol is like wanting outsiders without the danger, what does he mean?

i don't think slavoj even gets his facts right here. like, a lot.

Incidents like these have to be seen against the background of a long-term rearrangement of the political space in western and eastern Europe. Until recently, most European countries were dominated by two main parties that addressed the majority of the electorate: a right-of-centre party (Christian Democrat, liberal-conservative, people's) and a left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties (ecologists, communists) addressing a narrower electorate.

Recent electoral results in the west as well as in the east signal the gradual emergence of a different polarity. There is now one predominant centrist party that stands for global capitalism, usually with a liberal cultural agenda (for example, tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities). Opposing this party is an increasingly strong anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by overtly racist neofascist groups.

i don't think this is true.

After decades of hope held out by the welfare state, when financial cuts were sold as temporary, and sustained by a promise that things would soon return to normal,

hard to tell which events in which countries he means, but i'm p sure those anti- the welfare state were never saying things would return to normal.

we are entering a new epoch in which crisis – or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency, with its attendant need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting benefits, diminishing health and education services, making jobs more temporary) is permanent. Crisis is becoming a way of life.

"a kind of economic state of emergency" dude where the f have you been 08 - now. "crisis is becoming a way of life," you say? how could have possibly have happened.

goole I think yr quibbling

i ain't quibbling with shit! there's a whole pile of rong here

also as far as how this ties into the larger body of his thought, I think maybe the more important point is that, as he writes somewhere, the 'liberal progressives' already sorta-won this fight, in the sense that it's no longer cool to be openly racist or xenophobic... but now they (we?) have trouble conceiving of effective political action on any level beyond the purely reactionary condemnation of 'populist racism'/fundamentalism/whatever, i.e. turning our attention to the messy 'structural inequalities' that somehow seem to persist without anyone (that we know of?) consciously saying "hey I wanna make sure fucktons of black kids end up in jail" or w/e

I don't think zizek would, like, deny that the economic crisis was a real thing that was going on in 08, he's just saying that the character of the public response has changed as people stopped deluding themselves that it was gonna be 2001 pt.2

oh sure, zizek is the only person who's noticed. no-one else has seen that there is a structural bias in society against immigrants.

xpost

he's just saying that the character of the public response has changed as people stopped deluding themselves that it was gonna be 2001 pt.2

this is irrelevant in europe; 2001 wasn't anything like the recent crisis, barely a blip. in the uk this is more like the end of the 1970s. the common cliche about the continent is that they never had their thatcher, so idk how the 1970s played out for them.

also I think that, from the late-70s onward (the first 401(k)s appeared in 1981), the kind of "welfare state" zizek is talking about has functioned by continually drawing a greater proportion of individual 'savings' into the financial markets, thus allowing a whole bunch of pro-business policies to pass under the "rising tide lifts all boats!" promise that booming stock market now = comfy life for you and your grandkids

I'm a little fucked-up tho and just throwin' shit onto the board to see what sticks

obviously the picture I paint (in discussing this article about europe with someone from the uk...) is highly americacentric

After the disintegration of the communist regimes in 1990, we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticised expert administration and the co-ordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this kind of politics...,

ok hold up here -- "passion" enters into politics of its own accord whether pols like it or not. what's the implication here? a basic marxian one i guess -- if folks weren't all skeered by various specters paraded by the official parties (enumerated below) they would be agitated by their basic material deprivation eg revolutionary. this is base level but i think that just isn't so. the animating passions of the electorate/the people/whatev may be gross bullshit but it's not fake

the only way to actively mobilise people, is through fear: the fear of immigrants, the fear of crime, the fear of godless sexual depravity, the fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), the fear of ecological catastrophe, as well as the fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).

last sentence is a beaut -- old line marxist contempt for interest-group politicking in a polivalent social space. "political correctness" (if it exists) is not about fear, it's about power (to force the terms of how people talk about you)

Such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid multitude – the frightening rallying of frightened men and women. This is why the big event of the first decade of the new millennium was when anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected it to far right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – "it is our country, love it or leave it" is the message.

eh fair enough. point seems obvious to me tho: lots of people are kinda racist and always have been.

would you agree that 'the electorate' seems to get much more 'passionate' about whatever BLATANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL (or TOTALLY UNAMERICAN) shit the other side is trying to pull of than about, like, how the medicare prescription drug benefit works?

point seems obvious to me tho: lots of people are kinda racist and always have been.

― goole, Monday, October 4, 2010 5:57 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

[T]he development of racism within the working class (which, to committed socialists and communists, seems counter to the natural order of things) comes to be seen as the effect of a tendency allegedly inherent in the masses, Institutional racism finds itself projected into the very construction of that psycho-sociological category that is 'the masses'.

idgi

to your point about people not understanding the medicare benefit, yeah, but i don't know what you're arguing by bringing it up

Such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid multitude – the frightening rallying of frightened men and women. This is why the big event of the first decade of the new millennium was when anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected it to far right fringe parties.

in england nakedly racist rhetoric was pretty common in the 1960s iirc

From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – "it is our country, love it or leave it" is the message.

this is interesting: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/abdelkader-benali-immigration-prejudice

balibar is a fucking choad, hilariously he and zizek are both big men in my college

(then he goes on to talk about how instead of asking questions like 'what made the petit-bourgeoisie racist?' we should ask 'how did racism help create a petit-bourgeoisie?')

my point (with the Balibar stuff, not the medicare benefit) is that you can't treat racism as some kind of basic social tendency, where in any society some people (the 'masses', who aren't educated enough, or in the right ways, to have it thoroughly expunged from them) end up ruining it for the rest of us by succumbing to the temptation to be racist. what you can do is look at how rac(ial)ist can work in the first place to set up and maintain class stratifications, which would seem to be pretty well-established (Bacon's Rebellion and all that shit).

my point with the medicare was, uh, I dunno, I guess that politics generally *does* seem like pretty boring technocratic stuff? which it's maybe always been, but the CONTRADICTION between this reality of government as opaque administrative technocracy and the ideal of democracy we still hold to seems to grow steadily more insoluble.

should read "rac(ial)ist ideology"

oh i don't think it's the masses that are of-course racist

then who???

we should ask 'how did racism help create a petit-bourgeoisie?'

this doesn't sound very marxist to me

it's not a tendency that people fall into out of weakness, it's an idea that has, i dunno, a certain appeal to a lot of people, since it makes sense of the world on an emotional level. this is not a class-bound thing. it ends up being a tautological thing: who are The Racists?? i dunno, the people who believe racist shit, whoever they are...

ziz's two points seem to be a) politics isn't politics anymore since communism died and it's just mechanical tinkering and interest group jockeying and complaining, and b) liberals are to blame for racism partly because they talk about every culture being of value, presumably in its own way/space, allowing racists to say "stay in that space then, wog" or whatever.

i don't really buy either point. there's something there about the language of anti-immigration, in polite circles anyway

he doesn't really talk about any of the concrete realities of immigration in europe. it'd be kind of novel to have no restrictions at all, and to sustain a welfare state, yes? so where do you start?

other than 'communist revolution' i guess

ftr i am for the free movement of people at will, and the welfare state, and no i don't know how to get that to work out ok.

impossible. do you believe in unicorns as well?

equality is not possible with democracy. in democracy the incorrect will always get a voice, and corruption inevitable.

the only way to improve society is to transform it totally and completely.

fuck off troll

corruption inevitable

defrag

this might be the most tendentious bit:

From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – "it is our country, love it or leave it" is the message.

what was the old spirit? how was immigration treated hitherto? i guess austria has had more immigration than ever before, but the piece i linked to on holland is worth reading. 'cultural values' is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence. most people would say that immigrants would have to accommodate themselves to the law of the host nation, but is that really in the spirit of christian love? he would never lower himself to debate a specific issue, but he may on draw random anecdotes in order to tell his usual story.

defrag

― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Monday, October 4, 2010 6:41 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

"lol"

banaka l jagger sock no

really?

wethinks you are intoxicated.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbhhjdb8qR1qdcvb4o1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1289237755&Signature=%2BUE33PGej4z76lXL1lyp%2B7iGy6k%3D

lol gross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjEtmZZvGZA

Was this posted yet? It's awesome. I love it.

"Confuses Major Philosophers" -- does this mean that Slavoj Zizek gets major philosophers mixed up, or that major philosophers who are in attendance at the lecture feel confused?

"when Zizek critiques liberalism, which he does a lot, he almost always uses ‘liberal’ to mean, narrowly, economic neoliberalism. Forces of economic globalization. The Washington Consensus. Liberalism is: Sarkozy trying to make France more Anglo-ish. It’s never: John Rawls. I think it’s fair to say that Zizek is hereby basically strawman-ing liberal democracy, and liberalism qua political philosophy, by identifying both with the Washington Consensus. This is not only philosophically unsatisfactory but rhetorically odd, because Zizek ends up sounding weirdly like a Fox News commentator, talking trickle-down as if it were an Iron Law of Prosperity, under any conceivable, market-based system.

There is one major exception to Zizek’s liberalism = neoliberalism tendency: namely, he not infrequently uses ‘liberalism’ to refer to academic-style, ironist-relativistic multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism. Then he sounds sort of like P.J. O’Rourke yelling in your ear at a Laibach concert"

http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/17/zizek-on-the-financial-collapse-and-liberalism/

It's a silly complaint since liberalism as it is practiced in America IS economic neoliberalism. People who oppose neoliberalism are either the detoothed hippies who cannot engage the system in a meaningful way, or the radical terrorists who move the battlefield from an economic confrontation to one of violent force. But if you're gonna take about liberal democracy in the US you have to talk about economic neoliberalism.

I think the whole "academic-style, ironist-relativistc, multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism" thing is better to challenge Zizek on, but is it surprising that a guy who mainly associates with the academy (and particularly with departments like NYU's German Dpt, or that silly Humanities in Europe program thingie) would harp on multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism? I remember a professor in grad school defending clitoridectomies on the basis of multiculturalism, so it's definitely possible to blow the sentiment out of proportion because of close exposure to one particular institution.

liberalism = liberal democracy = US liberal democracy = economic neoliberalism seems like a hell of conflating imo.

xp