Navigating Zizek
Intro: Slavoj Zizek seems to be everywhere, all over
YouTube, presenting papers, and teaching at three different schools at least,
while at the same time still managing to publish 2-3 new books per year. Granted, much of what Zizek puts out is
rehashed or recycled ideas and anecdotes from previous books and essays, it is
nonetheless mystifying how much this guy’s engaged. To say that he’s prolific is an
understatement. I’ve already read a lot
of Zizek, but I doubt that I’ve read even half of what he’s written so far, and
the dude keeps on writing. So it’s a bit
of a catch up game for me.
Now, I understand there’s a lot of criticism out there of
Zizek already and there is a question whether my voice will add anything at all
to the conversation, already in progress.
If anything, my voice will most likely get drowned out in the sea of
critique of Zizek’s ideas, this I understand.
The reason I’m doing this is personal. There are lots of other writers I’d
like to take a stab at in the near future, Angela Nagle comes to mind, or Mark
Fisher, but Zizek is something different.
First, he’s Slavic, born in Slovenia, I’m Slavic, born in
Czech Republic. This may seem at first
like nothing important, but to me it’s absolutely essential. It means that his world-view and mine are in some
sense conditioned by similar forces. Continental philosophy is dominated by
western thought, mostly coming from France and Germany, with a smattering from
the British Isles and the US, but Chomsky, Foucault, or Heidegger share an
entirely different world-view, one that is based on expansive thought and
ideas, progress and even optimism. Zizek,
it seems, deals more with pessimism and the burden of a small nation. It’s not always there in his writing, but if
you’re not from that world, it’s easy to miss.
For someone from that world to be this big is doubly an
achievement.
Second, he fights his own demons. This I appreciate very much in Zizek’s
writings on psychoanalysis and film. It
is as if this particular mode of writing is a way for Zizek to self-diagnose. It is this that attracted me to
psychoanalysis first and philosophy later.
Zizek combines both to a great effect, which is largely absent from a
lot of other writing on similar subjects, peppering his word smithing with a
particular Eastern European flavor. Zizek
wrestles with, as do other writers from Eastern Europe, his own shadow.
This is the motivation for me to write these posts and the
blog in general. It is a way for me to
investigate a bit of my own shadow side, via the thought of Zizek.
Part 1: Uncanny Happiness
In the most famous American dictum ‘Life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness,’ which attempts to describe the unalienable rights of,
well, everyone, it is the last third that is possibly the most ambiguous and
for a good reason. There is a different
version of the above phrase that serves as the header to the 5th
Amendment and it reads ‘Protection of rights to Life, Liberty and Property.’ It is obvious that the authors of the
Amendment were trying to insert objectivity into the phrase and simply
substituted ‘pursuit of happiness’ with ‘property’ which could have easily also
read ‘pursuit of property.’ Property is
tangible, it can be measured and has a certain value, whereas happiness does
not. But this is why the first phrase is so much more interesting. In some way it gives us a glimpse into the
uncertain future of those that wrote it, namely Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,
Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. But it also sheds light on the present
situation in the United States, which doubled down on its ‘pursuit of
happiness’ as a vehicle for the ‘pursuit of prosperity, pleasure and wealth,’ a
perversion of the original meaning behind the phrase.
Happiness is in itself a simple thing, but to achieve it one
has to learn it. At least this seems to
be the case in much of western culture that practices postmodern neo-liberal
capitalism. In South Korea suicide rates
are at an all-time high, despite the country’s economic prosperity and the use
of anti-depressants in the US is so prevalent nobody seems to question
them. The happiness presented to us, through
‘happiness quotients’ and ‘happiness studies’ of cities masks a harder truth,
that happiness isn’t solely dependent on wealth, prosperity or relative comfort
of living. It would appear that life and
liberty have and their pursuit, have a negative effect on the achievement of
happiness, and the ownership of property isn’t and end in itself that can
arrest the individual in a state of happiness.
In some way we may continue discussing happiness apropos of
Zizek who writes
‘Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t
know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But
to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life
of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with
oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are
never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.’
It is interesting to note that the qualifier
‘pursuit of’ is found in front of the word happiness in the Declaration of
Independence, as if the authors realized that happiness is not a category in
itself. According to this wording,
pursuing happiness is elevated above happiness on the grounds that, as Zizek
mentions, eternal struggle or pursuit is the only thing worth doing. This
wording is grounded in the Enlightenment’s emphasis on knowledge and the
intellect, both directly opposed to the sterile and hypocritical happiness
through redemption promised by Christianity.
But apart from happiness being a category of
human emotion, it is also a commodity.
In the study of the evolution of faces in photos over 110 years done at
UC Berkeley smiles predominate in photos since the 1950s with the grinning
smile taking hold in the 1980s, while in the years pre-1950 faces appear more
stoic. On Instagram pictures of users with big smiles or laughing typically get
more likes per image than sober, stoic ones.
The injunction seems to be ‘enjoy’ because this way one fulfills their
duty in producing the commodity of happiness.
The endless reproduction of happiness and smiles is predicated on a type
of late capitalist anti-intellectualism.
The stern faces of academics and the sober manners of the old guard
literary figures are a sure-fire way to alienate a majority of those under 30
and those who click. Even the worst of
news, is today carried with a kind of detached whimsy, because news after all
still has to appeal to the masses and sell air time. From ads and magazines, to TV presenters,
celebrities and athletes, the injunction to enjoy and appear happy is tactically
opposed to the burden of appearing ‘intelligent’ and therefore smarter than
their audience, a toxic condition to the corporations whose profits rest on
appearances that everything is in its proper place. This was the driving force
behind Google in its early days, making the work place into a quasi-playground
for the young adults employed in their offices and a standard tactic behind
much of contemporary intra-office public relations between the bosses and the
workers. By making the workplace ‘fun’
there is a greater pressure exerted on the employees in the form of guilt but
also in deferred rise in compensation, something that trickles down to the
economy at large. Today if one truly
enjoys their work there appears the idea that this same person may not need to
be compensated for their work, given that they would probably be ok doing the
work for less or for free. Working for less that one’s labor is worth is so
commonplace in the 21st century workplace that it’s been given a
name, self-exploitation, and it, among the other evils of modern labor, is
discussed in detail in Peter Fleming’s Resisting Work. The ‘you’re having a good time, so why should
I pay you’ is a duplicitous tactic, deployed by corporations and institutions,
small and large, and it bleeds into the lives of individuals in such a way that
working for less or for free with the vision of higher future income or profits
becomes a natural state of things.
It would be easy to blame corporations for
their influence over the masses. In a way the masses have to be willing to be
controlled. In the 21st
century we have arrived at a juncture in which state, institutional and
corporate control becomes omnipresent through their infiltration into the
public sphere via mass communications and social media. The corporate logic of enjoyment in the
workplace led directly into the corporatization of personal lives in the form
of the ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self,’ the indefatigable self-promoter and self-commodifier. In order to be viable in the 21st
century marketplace one has to be continually marketing and branding oneself. Happiness,
enjoyment and staying positive are crucial qualities for potential ‘consumers’
of ‘products’ and ‘content.’ The logic
of ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ applies to happiness more than ever, when even
within internet social relations, one’s ‘market value’ rises and falls based on
the perceptions of a potential audience.
Put on a fake smile and get 100 more likes per image is the credo of the
new ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self.’
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