The secrets of the Egyptians were secrets also for the Egyptians themselves.
Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Tag: Slavoj Zizek
Zizek: Berlusconi As Kung Fu Panda, And the Future of Democracy
I have just read a very good article by Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books: Berlusconi in Tehran. By “very good” I mean that he, as usual, displays an astounding amount knowledge to illustrate the problems our modern societies face today – but the fluidity of this text and the argumentative power is impressive. If you ever had problems reading and understanding Žižek, try again: with this article, you are in for a good chance to catch his flight of thought.
Although starting out by comparing the recent upheavals in Tehran to those of 1979 Khomeini revolution, Žižek doesn’t stop there. To him, the events in Iran is but a part of the major trend characterised by the breach between capitalism and democracy: “the virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe“. Moreover, democracy today is handicapped by its inability to produce an “omni-competent citizen”:
…in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.
“It is democracy’s authentic potential that is losing ground with the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are coming closer and closer to the West“, Žižek concludes. This again is illustrated by Berlusconi’s public image: as obscene as it may be, to the average Italian Berlusconi is the man next door, with money, police, and women problems. “Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism, Berlusconi’s great achievement has been to reconcile the two, to embody both at the same time. It is arguably this combination which makes him unbeatable, at least in the near future“.
As he often does, Žižek uses Kung Fu Panda (2008) to elaborate on the conundrum at hand:
The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. […] This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them.
In practice, the capitalist authoritarian state begins to function in the state of emergency: it is always on the alert against one or another intruder. In Berlusconi’s Italy these are immigrants and ‘communists’ (the latter is a dangerously vague, collective term), and, as the case with the trial against the fishermen in Sicily in 2007 demonstrates, “Agamben’s notion of homo sacer – the figure excluded from the civil order, who can be killed with impunity – is being realised not only in the US war on terror, but also in Europe, the supposed bastion of human rights and humanitarianism“.
Leaving you with enough teasers to go to read the full article, I want to say that this is one of Žižek‘s best texts I’ve read recently: very coherent, erudite, fluent, and, as a result, very powerful.
The Death of the Author, and The Birth of the Reader
To illustrate how a writer can write something unintentionally that later fits into a broader context, I’ll look no further than my own essay that I wrote at Cornerhouse in July 2007:
“I came here with the intent to carry on with my musings on self-identification and categorisation. I spent the most fulfilling half an hour on the train spilling the words out on the lined pages of a reporter’s notebook, where I’m now continuing with this. Henry Miller – and with him many a writer – would call this “dictation”. It’s this wonderful state of things when you feel as a tool in someone’s hands who, somewhere afar, is whispering these words into the tip of the tool, and they pass at the speed of light to land in your head to be heard and discovered” (Exercises in Loneliness – IV).
As you can see, I was aware of Henry Miller; but I wasn’t aware of the passage quoted below. In spite of knowing of the ideas spelt out in Barthes’s famous essay, I never read the essay itself – until recently.
“For him [writer], on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin… […] The writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum. […] Succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation” (Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author).
The Death of the Author was published in Aspen in 1968; Exercises in Loneliness-IV was written in one and half hours in 2007; and Barthes’s text was read by me in May 2009. It is evident, however, that I, without precise knowledge of his work, shared the same mystic vision of a writer as a tool with which Language expresses itself.
Although I share most of ideas expressed in this essay, I am not overly enthusiastic about it. As a writer, I can certainly state that when I write I write. As I said before, most texts are written as they are – possibly, the case of George Orwell wouldn’t be my case. And when I write I don’t think of coherence: most of it arrives naturally; the gaps are noted and filled in the process of editing. Moreover, judging by my own texts, I know that I cannot impose a single reading on them. And if I cannot do that, how can a critic or a reader?
What is interesting about The Death of the Author, of course, is that it spoke of writers who by 1968 were long dead. I find fascinating the idea posited by Umberto Eco: that, in order to translate a text correctly, we need to discern and understand the intention of the text and the intention of the author. And what is reading if not translation? Given that Shakespeare probably didn’t think that the world would live much longer after his death, the readings of Hamlet infused by Freud’s psychoanalysis are very daring translations. However, as Zizek pointed out in his talk on Wagner, it is necessary to re-read or newly translate a work of art, to breathe life in it for new generations. In case with Hamlet, there is a bigger chance that Shakespeare’s contemporaries would fathom our Freudian reading of the tragedy, than for us to step into the shoes of Tudor-Jacobean Englishmen and to understand, exactly why Shakespeare composed what he composed in the way he composed it.
Paul Ricoeur said he preferred reading a text as if the author was already dead. To me, this simply states the obvious: the desire of Ricoeur as a reader to abandon the living author as a reference point. I cannot find a fault with it, for the absense of reference point is precisely what transforms a non-critical, unattentive reader into a precocious analyst. Thus, the first problem I find with Barthes’s essay is that it proclaims the birth of the Reader but doesn’t tell us who the reader is. I’d argue the reader is an existing or prospective writer – for it is only the person who understands the making of a text that can dissect another’s narrative.
What I often notice in practice, however, is that the birth of the Reader and the death of the Author are married to make an excuse to 1) a reader’s infusion of a text with his/her personal experience and views, and to 2) an author’s (=physical body who wrote a text) withdrawal from critical discussion of their text and hence, from responsibility for having said what was said. Another problem that boggles my mind every time I read a text in Russian is grammar. It is OK to think, together with Heidegger and Barthes, that Language speaks with us – but how does this explain the fact that some texts are more accurate than others? The question is not about typos or omitted commas, for this can happen anytime; the question is about literacy in general.
After all, The Death of the Author, now that I read it, is a wonderful example in itself of how a text is appropriated by its readership. Suffices to say, if it took me as a writer years to read this text, there are doubtless writers out there who never read it. All of us, however, as the beginning of this post indicates, willingly operate from the same premise: that we aren’t in control of the text we’re making. What is curious is where we proceed from here. For me, the next questions we ought to ask are: 1) what is the role of the writer as his/her own reader? 2) when we put our name to our work, why do we do it, and what do we expect from this action?
Voyages in Lancashire and Yorkshire
I have recently been added as a Flickr contact by someone who was making pictures of Liverpool on exactly the same day – 18th of December – when I visited the 2008 European Capital of Culture. The person even took a few pictures of Walker Art Gallery where I spent some four hours exploring the collection.
This obviously means that the world IS small, but this is actually the first time I have come so close to having my virtual path cross with someone else, even without knowing it. On another note, I remember advising the gentleman in the photo on the right to get up on the staircase of Stockport’s Town Hall, to get a good picture of the Georgian building on the opposite side of the road. As you can see, he adhered to my advice. I won’t be surprised if next he adds me as a contact on Flickr.
Likewise, tomorrow when I’m travelling to Leeds to listen to Slavoj Zizek’s talk about Richard Wagner, there’s a good chance I may meet someone I know, or someone accidentally takes a picture of me. If you do see me there, please feel free to say “hello”. I don’t know yet what form of Social Media content I will be able to produce tomorrow, but I’m at least hoping to squeeze in some tweets designated by #Zizek (you’ll be able to follow them here). And there will certainly be a blog post afterwards. Anything else will depend on the venue restrictions.
I started with mentioning a Merseyside city (Liverpool), and Stockport is often “filed” under Cheshire, but generally speaking, apart from two trips to Birmingham last year, the turn on 2008/2009 has all been about trips to various places in Lancashire and Yorkshire. I went to Blackburn and Preston, and I’m about to go Leeds for the third time since the end of January. This Saturday, however, I decided to go to Southport on the spur of the moment. As you may already have learnt, this is my favourite way of travelling.
I arrived to Southport before noon and was greeted with a light drizzle which I braved. A musician who lives in Preston and with whom I had a pleasure to work earlier this year has said that Southport was his favourite place in England: he liked the sands and the sight of Blackpool Tower in the distance. I’d been to Blackpool quite a few times (though not once since 2006), but never to Southport, although I might have gone past it in a car. I contemplated going to Blackpool, but chose Southport. Judging by the rainy clouds over Blackpool, I may just have been right.
As always, I brought photos back with me. I haven’t gone much beyond the city centre, but even strolling down the central streets was something of an adventure. There were two teenagers with an advertising board for Bojangles, a fashion accessories shop, touring the backstreets of town in the hope to attract more customers (left). A little bit away from the city centre there was the Holy Trinity church of the diocese of Liverpool, built in 1913 and adorned with distinct Gothic details (right). Not far from there was a small restaurant, Little Gourmet, where I had a very pleasant and very filling luncheon, including fish&chips, although my fondest memories treasure a homemade tartar sauce, a lemon and chocolate cake, and a Roma coffee (with Sambuca liquor).
And then I went to Southport Pier, and now I’ll only post a couple of pictures I took there, saving a few more for later. It really was an interesting experience considering how many people go to the pier, in spite of a very strong chilly wind and little to see apart from people and dogs who play and walk on the sand, and the Blackpool Tower, barely seen through the mist. But I think I can see the beauty of going to the pier and back. It’s almost like walking on water. I was practically intoxicated by the fresh air and ended up sleeping most of the remaining weekend, although I managed to go out on a Sunday afternoon and took a few pictures of the building where I presently work. But I’m sure I’m still wearing the scent of the sea. And the cold wind yet blows in my ears.
From Shakespeare to Wagner (via Zizek)
Before the end of this week (before Friday 13th, that is) you have the chance to vote for the 13th member of the Shakespeare Hall of Fame. The names range from Sarah Bernhardt to David Tennant, with the inclusion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Boris Pasternak. The Russian LiveJournal users (including me) would very much like to see the Nobel Prize winning Russian author Pasternak to be included. However, as I remarked jokingly in my LJ post, if I send the link to my Italian friend, he will certainly choose Virginia Woolf.
And now there is a plenty of time to plan your visit to Leeds on March 10th. You can do this either because of Richard Wagner… or because of Slavoj Žižek. In the talk and on-stage interview, chaired by Professor Derek Scott of the University of Leeds, Prof Žižek is going to delight his listeners with the talk titled “Brunhilde’s act, or, why was it so difficult for Wagner to find a proper ending for his twilight of the gods?” The event is at the Howard Assembly Room, and tickets cost just £3. Read on for more information. Many thanks to Kishore Budha for announcing the event on Facebook.
To finish, a quote from the very end of Maugham’s Theatre, very appropriate, given our different attitudes to theatre, Žižek, Wagner, and, well, even Shakespeare:
A head-waiter came up to her with an ingratiating smile.
‘Everything all right, Miss Lambert?’
‘Lovely. You know, it’s strange how people differ. Mrs Siddons was a rare one for chops; I’m not a bit like her in that; I’m a rare one for steaks’.
How To Protect Your Ideas From Being Stolen?
WebProNews is currently taking on Digg.com showcasing how a story submitted by an “ordinary mortal” is ignored by the majority, whilst exactly the same submission by one of the elite Diggers soars freely on the front page. Ironically, I have had a conversation with a Cheshire-based SEO agency just before Christmas, and they asked me if I knew (or could suggest) any ways of getting “dugg”. I said what I believed was the real picture: that 1) there are cliques that stand on guard of their authority and that 2) the process of “digging” is a pure chain reaction. This is confirmed by the majority of Digg users who aren’t satisfied with the service:
“The coalition of outcasts has primarily blamed two Digg.com features pretty standard on Internet social networks: the ability to form friends lists and “shout” to those friends about news stories a user wants promoted”.
Forming friends and sending “shouts” is precisely the ‘chain-reaction’ mechanisms. But is it only peculiar of Digg.com? Or does Digg.com represent the world at work: a cluster of mutually supportive coalitions that keep an individual user at a distance while also being keen on feeding off his/her ideas?
On this occasion, WebProNews refers to Digg.com as a failed democratic model; however, ironically, Digg.com may be that very democratic model – at its worst, of course. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who is reportedly still studied in the States for all things democratic, predicted in his treatise that a democratic regime can degrade into the tyranny of many – exactly what we see on Digg.
Yet again, is it only Digg that we should blame? What about campaigns pro or contra something on Facebook? What about the whole nature of Social Media whereby you share the content only to find out that someone else has appropriated it? The example that is discussed on WebProNews involving Digg.com may not be entirely relevant, but it does give a perspective to the problem.
So, how to protect your ideas from being stolen?
As I write this, I must admit: I do not know the answer. Two things come to mind, however. One is a comment I recently had on my article drawing on the interview I made with Dave McKean. Turns out that The Jim Hanson Company were very positive about the artwork of Tanya Doskova, a Canadian artist who worked at the Company’s studios in London for a period of time. You will get the gist of the problem as you read the comments. I said to Tanya what I felt was well relevant to me at times. As once an insider of a huge media corporation, I am confident that my inkling about the ‘preferential’ attitude to the native citizens is grounded. This is not to accuse anyone of something bad; but this is not deny that ‘foreign’ and ‘alien’ are synonyms, after all.
The second is a seminar at the London Book Fair 2007. One of the talks centred precisely on the possibility of copyrighting an idea. We looked at what then was the very popular case of Dan Brown vs. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. The answer wasn’t bringing a relief to anyone of us who is concerned about the issue: you cannot copyright an idea. Indeed, if we suppose that all things exist as ideas, then imagine, say, Dante being issued with a copyright on the idea of Love. Just because he composed The Divine Comedy, to be sure.
For my part, I have never really publicised my ideas, and as far as writing goes, I very rarely let anyone read the text before it is finished. I am sure not to publish the entire text online (except for short stories or those that were inspired by a contemporary art work), but only a selection because – forgive me my audacity which is supported by comments I receive about my work – I think I do have brilliant ideas that just doesn’t visit some people. But this is different with blogging where the whole idea is about publishing and publicising your content.
Now, ideas are beautiful in that they are in the ether: if one idea didn’t visit me, it may surely land in someone else’s head. If this happens ‘naturally’, i.e. I didn’t mention this idea in another’s presence (a blog post included), then I don’t have a problem. But when I do mention those ideas and then I see other people trumpeting exactly the same (and by the look of it, they didn’t quite trumpet this idea before my mention) and without crediting me, I do ask: what do I do? Especially if I am still going to act on the idea that I voiced?
To an extent, this is a problem of pre-eminence: who was the first to mention something? But even if you can survive not being credited as the original communicator of an idea, the question remains: when and how should you start throwing your idea around, to gain feedback or support? To get back to that example with Digg.com and to use it symbolically, when should you submit your content to Digg?
By the look of it, unless you’re among the top users, you shouldn’t submit it at all. Yet Digg is but one of the places that operates as a ‘network’, and you may not be a part of it even if you seem to be. What to do? Maybe to follow Zizek who said that today the criticised and ostracised Socialists should recognise their legacy precisely because it is theirs and should know their facts better and thus make their critics play on their, Socialist, terms. Ignore ‘Socialist’, and you’ll find a plenty of individuals and smaller groups that are trying to use the Internet to promote their causes against networks of other individuals and groups. However hard it is, self-belief and the ability to see through the polite facade of today’s relations may be the only things that can get you through any difficult times. And to quote my preferred Dali, ‘the difference between Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist‘.
The illustration is the courtesy of WebProNews.
The Act of Smoking, and A YouTube Trouble
A rather unpleasant update as per 13 Dec 2008:
I have just found out that the English version of the video which was in this post has been taken down on YouTube for “the violation of Community Guidelines”. Here is the screen grab with the message:
Interestingly, clicking on any of the hyperlinks takes me to precisely the same page telling me about the violation of guidelines. I am expected to acknowledge it, but I cannot acknowledge something when I don’t know what it is. It never occurred to me to save YouTube Community Guidelines to a file, and when I google “youtube community guidelines” and click on the relevant link, I once again see the violation message. I am happy to acknowledge my fault, if there is any indeed, but I need to understand exactly what I did wrong. Unfortunately, YouTube sends me the message about guidelines’ violation, but it doesn’t offer me an option to communicate with them, to find out what was wrong. The video in question is my original work, it is my poem translated into English by myself. The video does use other artists’ images (who are all credited), to illustrate the idea, but over two years ago I quoted an extract from Adrian Darmon’s interview with Andy Warhol, in which the subject of plagiarism was briefly discussed:
AD: Where do you find yourself vis-a-vis Picasso?
AW: He’s dead, and I’m in his place. On the artistic level, I think I’ll be a milestone.
AD: Do you take yourself seriously?
AW: I’m doing things seriously, with aesthetic taste.
AD: And without plagiarism?
AW: I don’t understand the meaning of your question. In any case, the artists are inspired by the works of others.
To sum it up, another quote, taken from Slavoj Zizek’s book; this is what Fidel Castro said to Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban crisis: “You may be able to convince me that I am wrong, but you can’t tell me what I am wrong without convincing me”. For your reference, here is the English file uploaded to Google Videos:
22 Nov 2008
Yesterday René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter, turned 110. I’ll start by giving the links to a few of Magritte places online: René Magritte Museum and Magritte Foundation.
I cannot say I ever took serious interest in pin-up art, but back in 2003/2004 I had a CD with the songs from 1950-60s, and some of the pin-up images were used on the cover illustration. The day before I went to London for the first time ever – and incidentally, on the April Fool’s Day, 1 April 2004 – I suddenly envisaged a vivid similarity between Magritte’s pipe and one of those pin-up girls. And really, you cannot say they are totally dissimilar, when you look at them this way (see the images on the left and right; the image on the right is by Greg Hildebrandt).
The Russian poem was written instantly, but it was only this year that I began to think seriously of adding a video montage to it, to illustrate the whole idea. Surprisingly or not, it took Magritte to celebrate his 110th birthday upstairs for me to finally create what was rather difficult at first. I hope you enjoy the English result below.
The Act of Smoking
…………………………………..Ceci n’est pas une pipe
……………………………………………….René Magritte
That what you see is not a pipe.
Imagine: two tender feet
Enter your mouth in a slow movement,
And you breathe in a tangy aroma of sex,
Watching in front of you a beautiful head
Trembling in the fumes of passion.
And, giving in fully to love,
You mentally move your finger
From feet along the legs
Reaching to the cherished curve
Full of the finest tobacco,
Which is what you adore –
Bosom or ass –
And finally, deciding to surrender to lust,
You tightly squeeze the bosom (or ass?),
Drawing in as deeply as you can stand, –
As you can afford,
As you can –
The scent of the Belle Dame,
Of a whore, or a choir girl, or a student,
Of a music-hall dancer,
Of Justine, Mary or Greta,
And let the smoke out through your nostrils,
Relishing how the taste
Sinks deep into your stomach,
And then, taking a woman out of your mouth,
You gently slap her at the front or on the back,
Shaking off the remains of love into an ash tray
And putting the body away into a slip –
Till next time.
© Julia Shuvalova 2004
English translation © Julia Shuvalova 2008.
The November National Holiday: From Revolution to Union
When I was little, on the 7th November my mother and I once went to see my gran’s sister. Back in 1980s, this day was celebrated as the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. In the evening there were usually fireworks that people cheered. My mother and I stood at the bus stop when the fireworks began. Since childhood I’ve had a very loud voice for the festive occasions. I was enthusiastically shouting ‘hooray’ at the top of my lungs at every burst of fireworks when an elderly woman who happened to be waiting at the same bus stop turned to me and said: “Why do you scream so loud? You can lose your voice”. For one reason or another, she didn’t approve of my patriotism.
When 1990s came, the Revolution started to be treated with disdain. If you read chapter 4 of Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, you’ll instantly understand what I’m about. It was impossible to ignore the whole event, like you can’t ignore the French Revolution, so the attempts were made to either condemn the event or to ‘apologise’ for it. Finally, the late Boris Yeltzin renamed the ‘Great October Revolution Day’ into ‘Day of Concord and Reconciliation’, thus inviting people of Russia to leave the conflict-bearing watershed behind and think ‘positively’.
But clearly that was still not enough. To quote Zizek again:
Days before the second round of the presidential elections in May 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy formulated the exorcism of the ghost of May 1968 as the true choice facing the electorate: “In this election, we should learn whether the inheritance of May 68 is to be perpetuated, or whether it should be liquidated once and for all. I want to turn the page of May 68”.
In what sounds like a precise analogy to Sarkozy’s statement, the Russian Government in 2004 has shifted the national holiday to 4th of November and called it the ‘Unity Day’. You see, there’d be no happiness yet the misfortune happened yet Russian history was rich and eventful enough to have something memorable, apart from Revolution, happening in November. Namely, it was the victory over the Polish intervent forces in 1612. Following the death of Boris Godunov in 1605, the so-called Time of Troubles, or Mutiny Time, and the Polish intervention had started and lasted more or less until 1618. 
One of the decisive victories over the Poles that shaped the future of the Polish presence in Moscovia was in November 1612. The Time of Troubles was marked not only by the Polish intervention, but also by civil war, and the Unity Day thus celebrates – and commemorates the example thereof – the unification of the country against the threat of foreign rule. In pre-Soviet times 4th of November also celebrated the day of the Kazan Icon of Our Lady, with whose help the Second Volunteer Army under Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky had stormed the Polish forces in Moscow’s Kitai-Gorod. The Kazan Cathedral in St. Peterburg was built by Paul I in honour of the icon, and the icon (or possibly its copy) was moved to the cathedral in 1811.
There seems to be a difference in intentions between the Russian Government and the French President, but it is likely to be only nominal. In truth, both countries are trying at all costs to annihilate the events that may disrupt either liberal or conservative status quo. And while there may be nothing wrong with this sort of tendency in general, in particular it highlights the attempt to veil the rupture or the real problem facing the society. Having said so, it is unclear if Sarkozy had much to offer to either the French electorate or the Government in exchange of the memory and experience of May’68. Russia’s case is potentially much more fecund, as the year 1613 saw the proclamation of Mikhail Romanov as the Russian tzar, thus giving the rise to the Romanov dynasty. I don’t suppose that Russia may one day see the Restoration of the monarchy. But one can certainly expect some kind of political continuity between the Russian leaders, and to judge by the comments from Russia, this is precisely what is happening.
Illustrations:
The Icon of Our Lady of Kazan
Ernest Lessner, Poles Surrender Moscow Kremlin to Prince Pozharsky in 1612.
The Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg (the photo I took in 1999, during my first visit to the city).
The New Izvestia 2005 report of the new holiday.
On Human Identities and Language
I pondered a lot on the problem I have with identifying myself or other people in one way or another. The generic “identity-search”, to which we are so often subjected these days, is usually a kind of labelling, with all consequences. To take myself as an example, since I am originally Russian, some people rather honestly marvel at the fact that I don’t drink much alcohol. This is not the most complimentary trait of the Russian character those people are looking for in me, but so it goes. On the other hand, I sometimes have to wear glasses that are round in shape. They date back to the time when I was head over heels in love with The Beatles and John Lennon, in particular. Eleven years of quasi-Britishness paid off this May when my Russian compatriots who came for Zenith match mistook me for an Englishwoman because of my glasses.
On both occasions, as you can deduce, I don’t feel obliged to drink because I am Russian, and I have been wearing the “British” glasses long before I adopted the second citizenship. This can be taken further and wider. One doesn’t have to subscribe to the code of conduct of a group they socially, culturally, nationally, religiously, etc. belong to (as an example, on Flickr there is a group called “gay but not GAY”). But the pressure to “find your identity” or “express your identity” seems to be mounting.
Interestingly, this pressure has to do with what Diane Arbus described in the following phrase: “the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be“. This isn’t non-sensical. The more one tries to follow the code of conduct of a group they identify themselves with, the more they become identifiable with the group. They will be less individual and more generic, as a result. This is why we are so obsessed with the quest for one’s identity: because we are constantly looking in the wrong direction. We assess the particular and specific, whereas it seems the New World is somewhere way off this track. On the other hand, the more inventive, the less specific an individual is, the less it is possible to shove him or her into a particular category. For this, Arbus had another beautiful quote:
“Invention is mostly that kind of subtle, inevitable thing. People get closer to the beauty of their invention. They get narrower and more particular in it. […] Some people hate a certain kind of complexity. Others only want that complexity. But none of that is really intentional. I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. We’ve all got an identity. You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of“.
So, identity is “what’s left when you take everything else away“. “Everything else” should be understood precisely as “everything else”. That is an interesting junction to Exercises in Loneliness-4, when I said that the last thing that remains, after all those socially demanded identities had been stripped off, is our human nature – however, this human nature, strictly speaking, should also be stripped off, if we were to reveal some kind of “true”, quintessential identity of one’s self.
In the poem The Word, which was obliquely inspired by various texts by Martin Heidegger, I raised the very problem of trying to apply a word to the infinite nature of a being. The problem is born in the ultimate complexity of the latter and the ultimate limitations of the former. Why is this? Supposedly, if our, human, language is produced by ourselves in the process of historical development of the mankind, then why should it be so difficult to describe anyone in one word – that is, to give them a fathomable identity?
Two viewpoints come to mind. First, is Nietzsche: in Human, All Too Human he asserts that the biggest flaw of all philosophers is that they do not recognise the evolution of a human character. They regard and study a man of the past from their, philosophers’, contemporary point of view. This phrase can be applicable to the point I am making in a variety of ways. We can remember the late Edward Said with his studies into how the Western thought “domesticated” the Eastern culture, whereby the pre-existing misunderstandings were aggravated by further misinterpretation. We can thereby also extend the notion of translation, and see it in a more general sense, as a multi-format interpretation, which will help explain why philosophers whom Nietzsche decried had this flaw: because they interpeted a man of the past within, and for, the context of their present time, whereas a correct approach would have been to interpret a man of the past in the context of the past. So, the first problem with “identifying” someone or something is that the researcher may be standing on the essentially wrong point of view, i.e. putting an object of enquiry into the context to which the object doesn’t belong. Notwithstanding our awareness of the historical evolution of the language and mankind, we tend to forget about it when it comes to identifying and interpreting.
And second comes Zizek with an array of quotes and interpretations, which can be found in the very first subchapter of his recent book, In Defense of Lost Causes
And then comes this beautiful quote, which can be difficult to grasp, but an attempt is worth its own fruits:
“…when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards the unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow man, can sustain true universality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbour-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular” (Zizek, pp. 16-17).
What we read here is precisely the assertion of Arbus’s “the more specific, the more general“. The more “humanity” we invest in the Neighbour, the more general they will be, and hence, the less obvious will be their flaws or even danger. A true individuality resides where everything particular has been taken away – this becomes the identity, but it’s no longer a “human” identity, but rather an identity of someone as a subject: a subjective singularity that becomes a true universal singularity.
Yes, these categories are Platonic, as Zizek recognises, but they are important for the enquiry: only if we introduce these “extra-human”, “inhuman” (= not grounded in our actual experience) categories, will we be able to comprehend their “human” dimension. Zizek demonstrates this with the title of Walter Benjamin’s work, On Language in General and Human Language in Particular: language-in-general is introduced in order to provide “a minimal difference” between the particular and the general. He then shifts to a quote from G. K. Chesterton’s Napoleon of Nothing Hill, to show that “there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are “not-all human”“.
What this means is that this inhuman core can be comprehended in its own terms, but that it cannot be properly described in human language precisely because the “inhuman” relates to the universal, and “human” to the particular. Hence, when trying to actually spell out one’s true identity, which is the very “inhuman core”, we are effectively domesticating this identity to the limitations of our, human, language. (Cue Heidegger’s Wozu Dichter? again). Add to this that the language itself can be limited by a huge variety of factors, and it will become apparent that (and why) all socially demanded or attributed “identities” are false.
One last question that remains is whether or not it is actually possible to perform some sort of trick to help us put the “inhuman” substances into “human” words without losing the touch with the “inhuman core” of those substances. To quote from another chapter in Zizek’s book, there are two possibilities. One is that an eternal Idea that survived its historical defeat regresses “from the level of Notion as the fully actualised unity of Essence and Appearance, to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its Appearance“. Another is that “the failure of reality to fully actualize an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself continues to hold“. Therefore, “the gap that separates the Idea from its actualisation signals a gap within the Idea itself” (Zizek, p. 209).
Precisely what Idea are we pursuing in our identity-quest? The actual quest, may it be provoked by the demands of the society, is spurred by a somewhat selfish but very humane desire to comprehend oneself. So, while looking for an identity, we are actually trying to find out what a man is. And this is where we get back to Heidegger, to that place in Wozu Dichter? where he discusses the impoverishment of Time. It happened, on the hand, he argues, because God had died; but, on the other hand, it also happened because the mortal people haven’t fathomed their mortality. Mortals don’t comprehend (and hence don’t own) their essence, but they continue living because the language survives. I would like to come back to this thesis later, but at present it is this thesis that answers the question of why the identities are so magnetic, and yet why the gap between the “inhuman core” and the “human” language hampers the quest. The gap is in the very Idea of man, the way we like to understand it in this part of the world, but, contrary to what one would be tempted to assert, the gap has to do with death, not survival. And it is for the protection against death that we look for identities and cultivate them, so that they can be preserved in the human language and memory as the living identities.
Zizek Video in the International Journal of Zizek Studies
We’ve had it all: Slavoj Zizek’s live talk during his “tour of the North”, the audio extracts I used in my account of the lecture, there were materials at the Subaltern Studies, and now there is a dedicated issue of the International Journal of Zizek Studies, edited by Dr Paul Taylor – Zizek On Video. Without saying much more, there is now just one definitive site to visit if you want to have a firsthand experience of Zizek in action, and that is the video issue of IJZS.
Before I leave you to click on Zizek on Video, I’d like to note the particularly interesting point Dr Taylor has made about this edition of IJZS. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I linked previously to the podcasts and videocasts at the University of Berkeley, one of which was actually an open lecture by David Lynch. To quote Dr Taylor, “the presentation of this issue of IJZS using video material is additionally significant. It clearly demonstrates that the online format not only competes effectively with its dead-tree alternatives in terms of traditional textual scholarship, but it is also able to make full use of technology to provide scholars with other important aspects of intellectual thought – the interview and the public lecture“. If my opinion about both these initiatives is to be summed up, this is a healthy and perspective way not only to enrich the actual educational process (I dare say it is easier to read Zizek if one has once heard and seen him speak), but also to create a lasting archive of great men on video.