Zizek on HARDtalk
T
his, perhaps, is what happens when you mix Lecan, Baudrillard and Marx. An odd kind of nervous explosion. He apologises for himself at the end, which is strangely sweet.
Also somewhat a testimony to the failures of TV-show format in accommodating ‘serious’ philosophical thinking/talking. One side spends most of his time saying ‘but’, the other telling you to go read more, ‘to be more specific’. Is the TV-medium (the TV-show time slot; the 30-min slice, etc), in how it forces the quick answer/quick question dynamic of a dialogue really capable of providing the space for large ideas which inherently resist abstraction, reduction, simplification? Or is it simply the best we have, and is such a reduction thus the necessary side-effect (casualty) of ‘bringing philosophy to the people’ through television. And what of philosophy that cannot be reduced… thinking that refuses to be paraphrased? It is then forever isolated to its own kingdom of meaning, lost in the incapacity for systematic reduction? If ‘truth’ is nothing but simulacra, does that spell the death of ideas which do not ‘fit’ into media-vehicles?
This begs the question of Zizek’s new book: if the End-time is coming, and the new Communist moment is on us, will our media-form be able to ‘iron-out’ the implicit hierarchy of ‘philosophical ideas’ and ‘critical thinking’?
Or do we need a new philosophy, built not apart from media, but built through it, and by it?
I have to confess I love Zizek despite what some of his theoretical excesses may be. A book I will now buy and read it in Copenhagen where the “end of the world” discussions will be interesting to observe.
By the way, have you read Echographies of Television, which discusses (among a few other books) these themes?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Echographies-Television-Jacques-Derrida/dp/074562037X
Thanks Josh for posting this, I had never watched Zizek’s performances
If I may go a bit off topic form Josh’s questions, I’m fascinated by Zizek’s political thinking when he talks about democracy and I think we should discuss about where this liberal/representative democratic model is going and the evolutions the democratic model is experiencing.
In saying so I think of his claim “I don’t think people really want to decide, people want the appearance of deciding, but effectively they want to be told what is right, what is not right”.
With this claim in mind, I would be very interested in a discussion taking as examples the sort of “post-democratic” drift Italy, for example, is experiencing and, what could be seen as the opposite, the popularity of Obama in the US which has driven so many people to vote because a “will to change”.
To put it clearer, it seems to me that progressively the democratic model is focusing on these “political rock stars” that gather fame and political consensus more than real ideas of how to cope with the “end of an era”.
Don’t know if that makes any sense… just some random thoughts.
@salvo – definitely agree that these are some of the more important questions facing more radicle politics today. They’re maybe not new, however – in his bashing of democracy Plato warns us that democracy is nothing but the consensus of people not led by the ‘right ideals’, but a rhetorically dominated sense of ‘fashion’. Of course, to Plato, these ideals were Gods sitting on clouds and philosophers with wings (ah… to be an Ancient Greek) but his objections are still valid. And this weirdness in Plato also maybe gives us a direction to our own thinking. Because, in order to bash democracy, don’t we need a perspective to bash from (whether fascism, liberalism, or Olympus)? For Zizek, its a strange, new, non-historically-bound sort of Communism – a communism somehow separate from the failures of communism (stalinism, etc) we’ve seen over the world in the last century. Maybe this is the important thing to consider in looking at the global shifts in Democracy (from Democracy-freedom-capitalism to Democracy-incarceration-capitalism to democracy-incarceration-communism to ….. democracy-freedom-communism?) in terms of from what perspective we perceive these changes.
[ie: does the difference between Democracy-incarceration-capitalism and Democracy-freedom-capitalism not depend on where in society and on the political ladder you stand?]
just some thoughts. Thanks for the interesting questions.
@objetpetitm thanks for the reference. Haven’t come across that one yet. I’ll give it a look.
on a technical note for those of us outside the UK where BBC player doesn’t play;
here are the YouTube links:
(part1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8cIagiKwkw
(part2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpgRHm7BOMQ&NR=1
(part3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7FMM21Qxg&feature=related
I must say, being back in the Gulf now, I am glad to know that the issue of labour laws here is finally coming up in discussions and debates about the greater, global picture of economics, politics, and social growth.
Thank Joshua SO MUCH for this link and comments.
I love it with my heart. Though I have to admit that I never heard of Zizek before, I almost totally agree with him on many issues. I have been working on a similar topic as part of my essay and hope I can post a short raw version here.
I personally do believe that all of us are experiencing a dramatic shift in every area. The market has failed. The state-bureaucracy has failed. The new inventions such as the Internet have been kidnapped by either the so called democratics or dictators with a communism skin or capitalists. Unfortunately like Zizek says “we don’t have the answers yet.”
Watch Zizek on Al-Jazeera, about 645 onwards. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETSrQm7_2lU&feature=player_embedded
Being far less interested in philosophy and more interested in media, I particularly enjoyed what Josh had to say about the failings of the TV-show format.
It does perhaps explain somewhat the rise and rise of “rock stars” like Noam Chomsky, alongside actual political ones as suggested by Salvatore.
In essence, because Chomsky deals with putting certain facts together and calling America a hypocrite, it is easily digestible in Western broadcast formats.
And perhaps that is why many contemporary thinkers in the TV era, never really got their 15 minutes of fame, let alone a 30-minute TV show. And Zizek’s performance here does highlight why many stations would baulk at showing millions of viewers what might appear an incoherent stream of hippie rambling.
But it ironically funnels back to Zizek’s concluding argument and how the dynamism of capitalism is really leading us into the exclusion of a possible solution to problems of the 21st century.
As media technology manages to squeeze more and more data into as small a space-time imprint as possible, then quite certainly there is no room for the large ideas that someone like Zizek might want to propagate.
As both time and real estate are now legitimate forms of capital, Zizek would pretty much need to “buy” his way into the minds of the greater TV-watching majority because seriously, who buys books anymore?