Rand, Zizek

Over the weekend, I played Bioshock at my friend’s house for the first (only?) time. It was pretty fun and creepy, and the plot is that an experimental city which was the outgrowth of a Randian philosophy turns (surprise) into a dystopian nightmare.I was thinking about it as I was walking to the subway today and I started to think about the guy that wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and why these people have such large followings when their ideas are just rehashed bits of pseudo-philosophy with no larger significance in the history of ideas, and well, right there is the appeal. Basically, if you want to talk and write about the world philosophically, one is required - as long as one is being intellectually honest - to delve into the history of philosophy and join in the conversation. What typically makes my students’ papers bad is when they write at length about their own opinions without ever connecting those opinions to anyone else. Let’s be frank, who gives a shit what a nineteen-year-old thinks about the world dissociated from any other opinion? What is interesting is seeing that viewpoint play off against other viewpoints (i.e., a nineteen-year-old’s philosophical understanding of the world isn’t a priori uninteresting, just uninteresting if it never breaks out of a self-centeredness). So, what makes people like Rand popular is that reading her, you get easy answers and you get an entire worldview boiled down into some horrendously written books. In other words, people like Rand instantaneously appear on the scene, and to understand them requires little to no work on the reader’s part. Not simply that their ideas are naive and silly, but moreso than that, that one doesn’t have to do any intellectual archaeology in order to understand what someone like Rand is talking about. Whereas, to understand Foucault, you need to understand Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Hegel and Kant and Plato and etc. (or at least be familiar with them). Which is also why pop-philosophy is ultimately shallow and unrewarding. What makes someone like Heidegger interesting isn’t merely his ideas, but also the journey one has to go through to understand those ideas.

Anyway, to switch gears, a friend posted this Zizek piece on a messageboard I post on today, and I thought it was fairly interesting, although somewhat seemed to miss the point about a lot of struggle on the left and a lot of the different strategies, or in fact, was rather dismissive of these different tactics without any fair evaluation. Since it was a book review, I’d imagine there are space constraints, and in addition, I’m not so super-familiar with Zizek enough to know what his usual writing is like; I’ve only read a few essays of his online. They’ve always struck me as rather dissociated from life despite the fact that he’s very much into referencing pop culture. But anyway, he might have been so dismissive simply because he didn’t have the room to be anything but.

Regardless, my problem with what he’s written lies not so  much with his methodology, but rather with his unreflective acceptance of using the machinery of the state to force change in a top-down fashion, which he seems to endorse in his lauding of Chavez. It’s perhaps my own unfamiliarity with the specifics of Venezuelean politics, but I’m not sure how what Chavez is doing is creating “a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics”. Of course, I favor more Bourdieuian approaches to understanding social systems, so it could just be that I can’t see the moves Zizek is making, but what’s more apparent than that is that every single one of the tactics he lists, including Chavez’s, are problematic simply because the dominant economic system is capitalism, and even creating new spaces within which to work and new ways of governing outlier parts of the periphery of the system don’t address the overall concerns. Again though, utilizing all these strategies at once perhaps has the ability to affect change in that it has the ability to push the entire system across some threshold of stability (e.g., if Venezuela becomes internally stable, it could always be an exemplar or it could even effect the periphery in a way that the core of the system becomes destabalized, especially if the core is also being destabalized by internal pockets of dissension and internal pockets which exhibit new ways of existing).

In one sense, Zizek is right in that to actually affect change, one has to be in a position of power or one has to place oneself in a position where the powerful are affected, but all of that is meaningless if it doesn’t affect and create new and different practices that can be implemented successfully in everyday life; a strategy he derides here:

“Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).”

I’m not sure why one would laud a unitary strategy anyway. Aren’t all the methodologies he lists, including Chavez’s, useful in the global struggle against capitalism? Some perhaps more than others, but still?

Filed by andyb at November 7th, 2007 under philosophy