Sometimes Žižek's writing can be so dense as to be almost impenetrable and because of that we've only had one post on a fairly interesting guy. From 2011 an antipasto, and then the main course:
....We noted the arrival at Zucotti Park of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in the October 10 post "Ossify Wall Street: Russell Simmons/Kanye West; Richard Trumka, Tim Robbins Swing By; Jesse Ventura only Gets as Far as Minneapolis".
Here's what he said, via the Slovenian Government Communications Office:
...Zizek encouraged the protesters to think about the work ahead of them and not be misled by the festive atmosphere in the park.Saying that he supported George Soros, he compared the billionaire to a chocolate laxative, as he exhibited an internal contradiction. "First, they take billions from you, then they give back half. And that makes them the world's greatest humanitarians," said Zizek.He advised the protesters to take the money, but keep fighting against the system....The Observer had an extensive piece on Žižek's speech but somehow failed to mention that he writes for Adbusters, the folks who put the original September protest together.From the New York Observer:Slavoj Žižek Speaks to Occupy Wall Street....MORE
An allegedly old Chinese curse (which has nothing to do with China – it was probably invented by some Western observer) says “May you live in interesting times!” Interesting times are the times of troubles, confusion and suffering. And it seems that in Western “democratic” countries, we are lately witnessing a weird phenomenon which proves that we live in interesting times.
One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” It is easy to understand what Mao meant here: when the existing social order is disintegrating, the ensuing chaos offers revolutionary forces a great chance to act decisively and assume political power. Today, there certainly is great disorder under heaven: the Covid-19 pandemic, global warming, signs of a new Cold War, and the eruption of popular protests and social antagonisms are just a few of the crises that beset us. But does this chaos still make the situation excellent, or is the danger of self-destruction too high? The difference between the situation that Mao had in mind and our own situation can be best rendered by a tiny terminological distinction. Mao speaks about disorder UNDER heaven, wherein “heaven,” or the big Other in whatever form—the inexorable logic of historical processes, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly regulates social chaos. Today, we should talk about HEAVEN ITSELF as being in disorder. What do I mean by this?
In Divided Heaven (1963), Christa Wolf’s classic GDR novel about the subjective impact of divided Germany, Manfred (who has chosen the West) says to his love Rita, when they meet for the last time: “But even if our land is divided, we still share the same heaven.” Rita (who has chosen to remain in the East) bitterly replies: “No, they first divided the heaven.” The novel offers the right insight into how our “earthly” divisions and fights are ultimately always grounded in a “divided heaven”; that is, in a much more radical and exclusive division of the very (symbolic) universe in which we dwell. Today, the situation is not the one in which Heaven is just divided into two spheres, as was the case in the Cold War period when two global world-views confronted each other. The divisions of Heaven today appear increasingly drawn within each particular country. In the United States, there is an ideological and political civil war between the populist alternative Right and the liberal-democratic establishment. In Europe, the Covid-deniers are becoming a true popular movement… places for common ground are ever diminishing, mirroring the ongoing enclosure of physical public space, and this is happening at a time when multiple intersecting crises mean that global solidarity and international cooperation are more needed than ever. What is preventing global solidarity and cooperation?
Many Leftists in the West are so obsessed with the critique of neoliberal capitalism that they neglect the big change, the passage from neoliberal capitalism to a strange post-capitalism which some analysts call “corporate neo-feudalism.” When, due to the crucial role of the “general intellect” (social knowledge and cooperation) in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are more and more out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, the result is not, as Marx expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor into rent appropriated by the privatization of the “general intellect” and other commons. Let us take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become one of the richest men in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling (one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary), i.e., Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher exploitation of his hired intellectual workers. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft imposed itself as an almost universal standard, (almost) monopolizing the field, a kind of direct embodiment of the “general intellect.” Things are similar with Jeff Bezos and Amazon, with Apple, Facebook, etc.etc. – in all these cases, commons themselves – the platforms (spaces of our social exchange and interaction) – are privatized, which puts us, their users, into the position of serfs paying a rent to the owner of a common as our feudal master. We recently learn that “2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity organization”[1] – a clear indication of corporate neofeudalism.
With regard to Facebook, “Mark Zuckerberg ‘has unilateral control over 3 billion people’ due to his unassailable position at the top of Facebook, the whistleblower Frances Haugen told to the British MPs as she called for urgent external regulation to rein in the tech company’s management and reduce the harm being done to society.”[2] The big achievement of modernity, the public space, is thus disappearing. Days after the Haugen revelations, Zuckenberg announced that his company will change its name from “Facebook” to “Meta,” and outlined his vision of “metaverse” in a speech that is a true neo-feudal manifesto:
“Zuckerberg wants the metaverse to ultimately encompass the rest of our reality – connecting bits of real space here to real space there, while totally subsuming what we think of as the real world. In the virtual and augmented future Facebook has planned for us, it’s not that Zuckerberg’s simulations will rise to the level of reality, it’s that our behaviors and interactions will become so standardized and mechanical that it won’t even matter. Instead of making human facial expressions, our avatars can make iconic thumbs-up gestures. Instead of sharing air and space together, we can collaborate on a digital document. We learn to downgrade our experience of being together with another human being to seeing their projection overlaid into the room like an augmented reality Pokemon figure.”[3]....
