Fascism!

[vimothy]

Zizek is typical of a very contemporary perspective, no? There is indeed a corner of the blog-world were Zizek is king. Seems to me that his 'politics' is a reaction to the failed '68er style of 'tactics but no strategy', of (Deleuzian) anti-fascism without ideology, etc. He represents is a turn back to old certainties (Lenin, e.g.) and the resurrection of a definite alternative to liberal democracy (even if it's not actually that much of an alternative).

Scared of being out in the forest with the rest of us, I believe. And that's especially ironic given the generic trope about none being more damned than Nietzsche's last man at the end of history picking and chosing beliefs as though it were all a supermarket and politics were lifestyle choices, you a-political losers, blah, blah, blah -- Zizek is in many ways the apogee of this trend: fraudulent, hipster totalitarianism, 'of course you shouldn't take him seriously... isn't it obvious?'

 

[josef k.]

i feel that a lot of that is about looking and feeling clever, intellectual circle jerking.

the content isn't important- it's not new, its just couched in a slightly different language, ala most PoMo (in his case a adding psychoanalysis into the mix).

why he's a cultural phenomenon IS interesting. maybe it can be explained along similar lines to the above- marxism has failed, lets wrap it up in a new language and call it new.

i might be spouting rubbish here, as i don't read a lot of the blogs that centre around k punk etc, but if you strip away the layers and the popular culture refs, many are marxists

I'm not sure if they are Marxists... Though I recognize that they certainly seem to appear this way. But I'm not even sure if it's still really possible to BE a Marxist. Or what it really means when someone says: "I am Marxist..." or "I am a feminist, or I am a Lacanian..." or whatever. Sometimes I play football - am I a footballer? This gets to some of the stuff we were talking about in the "My Life as a Fake" thread.

but. like Matt i, for whatever reason, am tending to home in on the emperor's new clothes aspect, if we wish to explain Zizek as phenomenon.

This aspect is certainly there... All I would say is that we should look at the fashion system around this aspect. "This season, Zizek is the new black."

 

[crackerjack]

fraudulent, hipster totalitarianism, 'of course you shouldn't take him seriously... isn't it obvious?'

So he's (pigeonhole ahoy!) the new Sartre?

 

[swears]

Interesting thing about this is that whenever he mentions postmodernity/ism, it's always with contempt; he professes to hate it, like it's part of the larger 'enemy' (liberal capitalist democracy, of course). Can anyone more familiar with the guy shed some light on this? Is he a 'postmodern' thinker (or 'thinker'), despite his what he claims?

I always had him pegged as a post-structuralist, in the same vein as Derrida or Deleuze, although this is probably just as inaccurate. Postmodernism is a condition, "the way things are" after the failure of modernist projects like communism, not an ideology per se. So in that sense, we are all "post-modernists" in the sense that all late 19th century Britons were "Victorians".

 

[scottdisco]

not ENTIRELY unrelated

another TNR writer puts the boot into Naomi Klein

well i enjoyed it

i think posters are agreeing that the TNR man's piece was contributing to the denuding of the term fascist, rather than anything else.
so that's something..

pace Mr Tea, methinks doth Zizek mebbe protest too much at the PoMo accusation when it is scented in his tailwind?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Right, right...but you could still have been a Victorian who loved being a Victorian and identified with the age, or you could have hated it and hankered quasi-nostalgically for the Middle Ages, or you could have been anxious for it to end and the 20th century to get going.

pace Mr Tea, methinks doth Zizek mebbe protest too much at the PoMo accusation when it is scented in his tailwind?

So it seems to be applicable to someone who professes not to be it, and to hate it? Funny that this description also fits the word 'hipster', which has also just popped up in this thread.

 

[scottdisco]

Mr Tea

So it seems to be applicable to someone who professes not to be it, and to hate it? Funny that this description also fits the word 'hipster', which has also just popped up in this thread

yes i noticed that

 

[jambo]

i was told once that Dermot Morgan who played Father Ted had concluded after his university studies that everybody was a fascist, incidentally.

Maybe he read Willhelm Reich?

Reich said that fascism was the basic emotional mode of humans brought up in (repressive, patriarchal) authoritarian societies. I'm probably paraphrasing very badly. Reich's analysis of the psychological roots of fascism is surely essential reading on this topic though. You don't have to buy it all of course but I think there's plenty of value there and he knew what he was talking about. I think Zizekians usually prefer to talk about Lacan because fewer people have knee jerk negative reactions to Lacan.

This would seem to fit with those figures showing BNP by profession by the way, although there are other factors involved there too.

To the detriment of genuine endeavors for freedom, fascism is still regarded as the dictatorship of a small reactionary clique. My character-analytic experience, however, shows that there is today not a single individual who does not have the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure. Fascism as a political movement differs from other reactionary parties in that it is supported and championed by masses of people.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism
http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf

 

[jambo]

Um, here's the ADD version.

http://www.notbored.org/reich.html

 

[scottdisco]

oh wow thanks Jambo, that had never occurred to me.

 

[vimothy]

Interesting thing about this is that whenever he mentions postmodernity/ism, it's always with contempt; he professes to hate it, like it's part of the larger 'enemy' (liberal capitalist democracy, of course). Can anyone more familiar with the guy shed some light on this? Is he a 'postmodern' thinker (or 'thinker'), despite his what he claims?

Don't think of 'post-modernism' as describing some kind of philosophical school, think of it as the conventional wisdom, as a description of the age we live (post-historical, post-political, etc): Zizek sets himself against all that.

 

[josef k.]

"So it seems to be applicable to someone who professes not to be it, and to hate it? Funny that this description also fits the word 'hipster', which has also just popped up in this thread"

That is probably the best one-sentence definition of "hipster" extant. Very precise.

 

[Mr. Tea]

To the detriment of genuine endeavors for freedom, fascism is still regarded as the dictatorship of a small reactionary clique. My character-analytic experience, however, shows that there is today not a single individual who does not have the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure. Fascism as a political movement differs from other reactionary parties in that it is supported and championed by masses of people.

Is that last sentence really true, though? Look at Britain, and how many people here read the Daily Mail, the Express, the Sun, the Telegraph - it'd be a gross exaggeration to call most of them fascists, though presumably some of them are (on the basis that BNP members probably don't take the Guardian), but by definition most of them are going to be pretty reactionary.

 

[Mr. Tea]

twas ever thus its obvious that the pc nazis are helping their scottish comrades because they are anti-american isn t it obvious bring back mary whitehouse the last to leave please turn out the light

Liberal_lefty_bias Birmingham

 

[scottdisco]

i love the letters page in the Manchester Evening News.

Patriot, Gorton

Teacher, Stockport

Pensioner, Newton Heath

Grandma, Failsworth

etc.

 

[josef k.]

Don't think of 'post-modernism' as describing some kind of philosophical school, think of it as the conventional wisdom, as a description of the age we live (post-historical, post-political, etc): Zizek sets himself against all that.

In a manner quite similar to William F. Buckley's old statement that the cultural mission of the National Review was to "Stand athwart history, yelling Stop."

Here is a link to the statement:

http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406290949.asp

Interesting, I think, how much of it can be applied to Zizek's own approach.

 

[vimothy]

Well, I suppose that the cold war was a kind of high-point for both communists and the American right.

 

[john eden]

Is that last sentence really true, though?

Well it was true when Reich wrote it!

 

[vimothy]

But ultimately, is a hipster fascist still a fascist? I'd say no, and that without a social existance, without a real mass movement (and this goes for the BNP as well, to the extent they are fascists and not just un-educated racists), fascism is just idle fantasy.

 

[josef k.]

"fascism is still regarded as the dictatorship of a small reactionary clique"

Bolshevism, too, aimed to set up the dictatorship of a clique - though Lenin's claim was that the Bolshevik clique would be a) progressively minded and b) only the custodians of the masses.

In certain respects, neither point is entirely wrong. I don't want to collapse the one into the other. The Bolsheviks were not essentially racist, or sexist, or nationalist for example, even though in practice the USSR did sometimes shade into these areas.

Zizek also is in favor of a small authoritarian clique. This position is tacit as well, I believe, in the minds of many of his academic readers - who believe in a more or less unconscious fashion that the academically educated and philosophically informed should take command...