an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 4, January 2007, ISSN
1552-5112
Žižek!
A conversation with Paul A. Taylor (editor of The International
Journal of Žižek Studies)
Nicholas
Ruiz III: Might we suspect that it is always most
favorable to have conversations with the living? Or in other words, so many of
our conversations in cultural theory, philosophy and criticism seem to be with
the dead, is it time to revaluate the practice of the living philosopher? Is this one reason, at least, why there are
journals now, such as the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, and
most recently, the International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS)?
Paul A. Taylor: There seem
to be a few people for whom Žižek’s status amongst the alive and kicking is
somehow a problem. I must admit I'm rather nonplussed by such necrophilic
tendencies which reflect an under-acknowledged level of conservatism within
academe. My view is quite simple - either thinkers are worthy of our time and
intellectual energy, or they are not.
There's also a certain amount of intellectual bad faith regarding this
enshrining of thinkers in an intellectual hall of fame only after their
physical demise. For example, Walter Benjamin is a deservedly much-admired
figure yet his own theoretical project was suffused with a profound interest in
the cultural detritus that surrounded him. He was an intellectual ragpicker par
excellence and the highly topical nature of his radical thought is frequently
ignored by those who appear to need the insulation of a safe historical
distance before they are willing to engage with his work - a sentiment quite at
odds with his own intellectual practices and intentions. My preference is for
theorists like Benjamin and Žižek who deal directly with the ideology of the
times, as it is manifested at the time.
An online
journal is a better medium than most to engage most effectively with this
topicality and it avoids another major inconsistency that I point out in the
Editorial Introduction and other interviews I've done. This is the irony that
journals with a leftist or vaguely radical stance still subscribe to a
dead-tree model of publication built upon what amounts to an exclusionary,
exploitative model for knowledge generation. With miniscule numbers of individual
subscribers, the survival of these paper journals is dependent upon income
garnered from University library budgets via the charging of high institutional
prices - such institutions being disproportionately represented in the richer
parts of the globe. A likely response is that dead-tree publications are
necessary to ensure the quality of content, but this is unconvincing given that
the peer-review mechanisms they use tend to be facilitated by the very online
forms of communication they only eschew at the final stages of the publication
process. This might just be me espousing a vested interest but I've recently
noticed there is a forthcoming online International Journal of Communication
edited by no less a figure than Manuel Castells (although, judging by its
initial Editorial Board, disappointingly, only marginally more international
than Baseball's "World Series"), so I don't think (touch wood) that
it's pre-emptive to say the time of the online journal is now!
Both the
Žižek and Baudrillard Journals open up space for the critical discussion of the
contemporary mediascape with full scholarly rigour but without some of the
exclusionary physical constraints that offline scholarship necessarily
involves. The additional feature that Žižek is around to take umbrage with
particular interpretations contained within the Journal, is also a major asset.
It would only be a drawback if he was dictating Editorial policy - but his
position on the Board is an honorary one, and I am highly resistant to making
IJŽS a fanzine instead of a serious interrogation of his work.
NRIII:
What are the big ideas in Žižek’s work, or perhaps, what are
the Žižekian approaches to cultural theory, philosophy or criticism that are
most compelling? For what does IJŽS seek
to provide a forum?
PT: In reverse
order, despite the above points about its accessibility, IJŽS is first and
foremost a scholarly forum. By way of illustration, in the middle of this
interview, I have been in another email exchange with a UK TV producer genuinely
interested in bringing higher quality content to our screens. He read a paper
I'd written about Abu Ghraib for The International Journal of Baudrillard
Studies[1] and complained
about its excessive use of "jargon". This is an attitude I've
frequently encountered amongst the most well-intentioned media practitioners
and it goes straight to the heart of IJŽS's unapologetic rationale as an outlet
for scholarship - not media-friendly superficial discussion or blunderbuss
blogging.
Clarity is
often desirable but its ideological components are frequently overlooked by
those who use the term as an apparently neutral category. Those demanding more
clarity are seldom confronted with the supplementary question - clarity for
whom? So I would strongly argue that
clarity is not a neutral category -
there is a great paper by Douglas Aoki[2] defending
such purportedly impenetrable theorists as Lacan. Invariably, when media
figures request more clarity they are promoting a desire for a mode of
communication that is saturated with presuppositions of the way the media is
supposed to work. In my direct experience, colleagues at the professional
practice end of communications studies tend to be so uncritically inculcated in
a very particular way of doing things that they are very resistant to
acknowledging that their way is a very particular way of construing things and
that things could be significantly otherwise. If you ever get access to a media
professional - try asking them about a particular programme and why it wasn't
produced another way and you'll be inundated by comments "but that's not
how it works", "that's not how it's done" etc.
In this
context, a hugely impressive feature of Žižek’s work is the manner in which he
seems to largely overcome this ideological use of clarity to enervate
intellectual life. He culls an unusually high number of illustrations from
readily accessible media content to accompany his complex discussions - but
unlike the media chatterati, he does not shy away from the full import of this
philosophical content. I have never come across a philosopher who combines the
demotic with the esoteric so impressively and IJŽS aims to reflect this whilst
maintaining its scholarly focus. Even if, along the way, it proves we've
misrepresented certain aspects of his work, Žižek himself defends
"productive misreadings" as the motivating force of Western
Philosophy.
Regarding
Žižek’s big idea - what consistently impresses me about him is the degree of
reflexivity he brings to his work. He not only reflects upon this amazing range
of elements from popular culture, but juxtaposes them inventively with high
theory to produce fascinating new perspectives. He even manages to incorporate
a constant theoretical awareness of the nature of his method as he goes along.
It is thus fitting that his latest book which he regards as one of his most
important is called The Parallax View - I think it is a very good
summary of his key intellectual project to date - the constant shifting of
position to look at things "awry" - to quote from another of one his
books’ titles.
An obvious
danger for someone who holidays so regularly in the belly of the media whale is
the subsequent muffling of his message by the medium. But once again, here
Žižek exhibits unusually high levels of perspicacity. In addition to his theoretical reflexivity,
Žižek also exhibits an impressive level self-understanding. Thus, in the movie Žižek!
he not only plays with the conventions of the documentary form by staging his
own suicide at the end of the film and, at one point, lying in bed wrapped in a
sheet like a recumbent, togaed Socrates, but there are also some quite poignant
moments. For example, he is fully conscious of his own need to placate his son
with a Happy Meal and Disney videos in order to help pass fraught father-son
"quality time" and in a Buenos Aires restaurant he passes a
photograph of himself to the film’s director and rhetorically asks "would
you let your daughter go to the cinema with this man?"
So, to
reiterate, I think his main contribution is this consistent desire to look at
things askance. He may not always succeed and the media may continue attempting
to co-opt the radicality of his analysis but he keeps making the effort and I
love that pig-headedness. In my own work on critical theories of mass media
culture I frequently encounter examples of theorists presenting themselves as
critical when in fact they are merely servicing the status quo as in the
previously mentioned blind spots of "critical" dead-tree journals.
Another major illustration can be seen in the whole history of cultural studies
- a disciplinary debacle that is often a sophisticated exercise in willfully
denying the central insights of the
NRIII:
What do you make of Žižek’s
“rehabilitation of dialectical materialism” set forth in The Parallax View?[3] Is it an example of what Todd McGowan refers
to as the ‘serious theory’ that philosophers so often fail to offer, or might
such rehabilitation suffer only for a romanticism of class liberation that
Capital will not allow?[4] McGowan claims that serious theory must
reject the edifice of orthodox philosophical legitimacy, in favor of a
speculative illegitimacy that a thoughtful rendering of the world requires; how
might Žižek satisfy McGowan’s criteria in The
Parallax View?
PT: I've dealt directly with the
importance of the parallax view above but to expand upon its importance for
notions of dialectical materialism I would comment further upon this notion
that Žižek provides a breath of fresh intellectual air. One of the reasons that
I admire figures such as Adorno and Baudrillard so much is that unlike so many
other theorists they tend to be unashamed to acknowledge fully the dark
implications of their analyses. They seem to understand better than most that
the word "critical" as it applies to cultural theory may involve the
connotation it has in Mathematics and Physics of relating to the transition
from one state to another, but then again, it may just refer to a damning,
pessimistic indictment of present conditions.
I have a
strong sense that much contemporary cultural theory is hamstrung by its
persistent desire to have a side order of optimism with its critical analysis.
This is a debate I'm currently conducting with Prof Scott Lash who despite
writing a book entitled A Critique of Information seems determined to
adopt a Panglossian attitude to the life-world of the new information order
that seems to stretch the etymology of "critique" to breaking point.[5] A
few lines further on than the sentence you quote, Žižek reasserts the need to
develop 'dialectical materialism, not the much more acceptable, and much
less embarrassing, "materialist dialectic"; the shift from
determinate reflection to reflective determination is crucial here' (The Parallax
View pages 4-5). Reflective determination is a nice way of
describing the reactive, accommodationist tendency of a lot of theory at the
moment. Currently, a head-in-the-sand attitude seems to be the dominant voice
within academe. Worryingly, the Panglossian cultural studies approach is now
spreading its influence into various information society accounts of
bio-politics. Most disappointing in this regard perhaps is Mark Poster's recent
Information Please! (2006) and Jenkins's Convergence Culture (2006). Such commentators seem determined to make a
silk purse out of the sow's ear of a culture in which people's transformation
into human/information-hybrids is apparently something to be celebrated
uncritically.
As with
the previously discussed failure to ask "clarity for whom?" – works such as these embrace the various
implosions brought about in digital culture but seem loathe to look awry at who
is disproportionately benefiting. They conveniently ignore the depressing
predictability with which such "innovations" always seem to favour
the usual suspects. At the end of his introduction to Organs Without Bodies:
On Deleuze and Consequences, this is what leads Žižek to accuse
Deleuze of being an apologist for today's digital capitalism . Reading further on
in The Parallax View from Žižek’s desire to rehabilitate dialectical
materialism, he points out that, from the earliest times, philosophers have
played a survival game whereby they have hidden the truly subversive nature of
their endeavours. In contrast, too many cultural theorists today are playing a
radical game - but only in order to disguise their essentially quietist nature.
They are hibernating versions of Marx's revolutionary mole - they have
forgotten how to break to the surface again.
NRIII:
I suppose we might say that there is a critical currency
deficit.
Much in cultural theory
and criticism seems unevenly enamored with the Ancients. Not to say there is not value in the
polishing of old gems, but perhaps there is an eternal return to the seductive
beauty of the antiquated Text: texts about texts about texts—unfiltered,
uncompressed—an unending loop of noise and feedback. Notwithstanding evolving concepts of novel
interest: the Network, the Order, the Multitude, Becoming, Capital and so on—the
Law states that all of these need end in a fuzzy liberal emancipation. The sign of orthodoxy in philosophy, must it
be that of a Modern emancipation politics?
And the subversive, must it be unorthodox? And even if we believe in the viability of a
democratic space, can such a concept exist apart from its Administration?
PT: If I've understood the question/comments properly ... I think, yes,
we've actually reached a stage at which the nominally subversive or radical have
exchanged places as I've argued above. This is true of the type of works I've
already mentioned, particularly, the perennial body of works that could be
labeled under the general term cultural populism. A consistent theme in
my responses to your questions is how, in this body of work, the worst
attributes of the culture industry are disingenously re-imagined as examples of
empowerment. There is still a pressing need to directly address the disturbing
implications so forcefully raised by Adorno - they haven't gone away they've
just become a more insidious part of our cultural environment. Adorno told a
truth too unvarnished for some when he described how the masses are not so much
cleverly duped as they are active connivers at their own oppression. Similarly,
Žižek rejects the notion that the masses are suffering from false consciousness
- they do know what they are doing, but they keep on doing it anyway. There's a
migraine-inducing irony that Adorno tends to be dismissed as unfashionable and
irrelevant when his insights have never been more obviously validated by
history - a great example of someone being beaten with the stick of their own
predictive success.
It would be easy to be mischievously
snippy when offering explanations for the types of misguided analyses I've been
criticizing but I think there is an element of middle-aged, middle-class angst
about pointing out the culpability of the bovine masses for their own
situation. By contrast, figures like Baudrillard and Žižek seem to derive at
least part of their subversive status from their gleefully recalcitrant and
unfashionable willingness to make exactly these sorts of
non-politically-correct value judgments. They volubly undermine what you term
"evolving concepts of novel interest". Take Baudrillard, for example,
when he is salvaged from the misleading label as a "po-mo theorist"
and inane misreadings of his razor-sharp descriptions of the mediascape as
praise for its vacuity, one can see him for what he is - a traditional Durkheimian who, over many
years, has consistently defended the value of symbolically-laden culture over
its empty symbol-lite manifestations in the totalitarian semiotic order that
dominates social discourse. Similarly, Žižek unapologetically criticizes
"politically correct" dogma that shies away from the real issues
underlying ideology and power. His novelty is paradoxically garnered from a
dutifully close reading of the canonical triumvirate of Kant, Hegel, and Lacan.
He breathes fresh life into these thinkers by applying them critically
to popular culture. If something isn't broken there's no point trying to fix
it. With that aphorism in mind, I find Žižek’s loyalty to seminal thinkers
genuinely novel in comparison to the numerous acts of intellectual bad faith
exhibited by theorists more interested in glorifying capitalism's flows with
various forms of Jesuitical casuistry than they are actually calling an
essentially commodified spade an ultimately dis-empowering digging implement.
Specifically regarding the notion of a
democratic space and its relationship to administration - Žižek points out that
Western intellectuals often want revolution without revolution. They are indeed
radical in their imaginations but when it comes to the crunch they hide behind
bureaucratic structures, disciplinary tribes and professional
"standards"/unvoiced assumptions (e.g. the previously noted tendency
to assume that a theorist needs to be dead before one can seriously study
them). The concept from Žižek I keep
coming back to time and time again is his notion of the chocolate laxative
- the process/object that acts as an agent of its own containment. I think this
is a an extremely illuminating concept when applied to conceptions of democracy
and their tendency to have their substantive content swamped by administrative
minutiae (a perfect trope for this is the way in which academics frequently
betray their intellectual responsibilities to the pursuit of knowledge by an
indecent [perverse as Lacanian terminology would describe it] attachment
to committee life, the micro-management of research and teaching etc.).
It strikes me that a particularly good
example of the chocolate laxative is the intellectual field of enquiry
surrounding "online Democracy". In a New Age happy-clappy homeopathic
sort of way, the symptom of the illness is proposed as the cure. Various
well-funded sexy new university institutes and think tanks actively pursue what
can only be termed administrative research. They exhibit jaw-dropping
levels of insensitivity to the cynical political and ethical values lying
behind the enthusiastic creation of a point-and-click polity and shameless
chutzpah in presenting it as a positive democratic development. This mode of
thought is depressingly accommodationist in a manner that plumbs new depths in
terms of Marcuse's notion of one dimensionality.
I like Chomsky's rule-of-thumb notion
that that those most interested in politics are invariably those who should be
automatically excluded from it for exhibiting such interest - they embody a problematic will to power,
they are not the solution to it. In this context, Žižek is, as ever, a
fascinating character - the ethos of his narrowly unsuccessful bid for the
Slovenian presidency is periodically bolstered by mischievous comments such as
his claim that if he took a job in government it would have to be something
like Chief of the Secret Police. I think in Žižek’s work there is this
ambivalence between the ethical injunction of "first, do no harm" and
the related Bartelby response of "I prefer not to" and his avowed
admiration for figures of such practical conviction as Lenin and
All of the above qualities combine to
make Žižek’s interpretation of Western media culture and democracy-in-practice
one that is radically critical of the disingenuously blithe notion that its
lousy but the best system we have. Whilst I suspect that any future revolution
led by most contemporary intellectuals would more than likely involve an
inordinate amount of clipboards - I sincerely doubt that, whatever other
disasters it would involve, this would be not be true in the bright new dawn of
a Žižekian world.
NRIII: Is revolution
a material goal today? It seems that,
with regard to the formations of polity, we have painted ourselves into a
theoretical corner. Is there life after
democracy? Certainly, there are locales
that seem to believe so, in an applied and theoretical sense.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 4, January 2007, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes