Friday, July 26, 2024
Thursday, July 25, 2024
Digital Eunuchs...
...Serfs in Technofeudalism...
...decapitated heads in the Executioner's Basket.
Louis XVI Avenged!
Now Peasants without Bodies!...
...Unable to Summon the Hecatoncheires!
Expand the Marvel Universe...
...Cuz Their Own Decorpsified REALITY Must TRULY Suck!
A Tribute to the Tech Lords!
We're ALL Captain Pike Now!
Trapped in a Culture Industry Consumerist's Techno-Imaginarium Menagerie
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
What If...?
Why do people not rebel, even when they know their way of life leads to a global catastrophe? - a contribution from Slavoj Zizek.Written by Slavoj Zizek,
Quite by chance, I only recently saw Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010, screenplay by Alex Garland based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro), and it struck me as arguably the most depressing film I’ve ever seen. I suspect the reason why is that today, with all the crises that more and more affect our daily lives, from global warming to wars and the threat of digital control, we find ourselves in a position very similar to that of the heroes of Romanek’s film.
Never Let Me Go mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and a love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who didn’t count as fully human.
The story begins in 1978 and follows three children, the young Kathy H, along with her friends Tommy D and Ruth C, who live at Hailsham, a traditional boarding school. The teachers, called guardians, encourage students to be health-conscious and create artwork, and they have little contact with the world beyond the school's fences. Miss Lucy, a perceptive new guardian, tells her class that they are all clones who exist to be organ donors and are destined to die early in their adulthoods after a couple of donations (maximum 4); she is quickly fired by the headmistress. As time passes, Kathy grows attracted to Tommy, but Ruth wins him for herself despite his initial interest in Kathy. This love triangle is resolved years later when a broken Ruth reveals she only seduced Tommy because she was afraid to be alone; consumed with guilt, she wishes to help Tommy and Kathy seek a deferral (there is a rumor circulating among the clones that if a couple proves they are really in love, their donations will be postponed). She leaves them with the address of Madame, whom she believes has the power to help them, and soon dies on the operating table during her second donation. Tommy and Kathy, now his “carer” (the one who stands by a clone during donations to make his/her life easier), finally enter a relationship, but after they discover that deferrals are a myth, Tommy explodes with grief and anger as he did as a child. Tommy dies during his fourth donation, leaving Kathy alone, and after a decade of caring, we see her contemplating the ruins of her childhood. Finally getting ready to begin her own donations, she questions in a voice-over how different – or not so different - her life has been from normal people's.
The book’s big enigma remains unanswered: why the main characters never try to escape their fate of an early death (although they could easily attempt to disappear into society)? The story is pervaded by radical ambiguity regarding this point: do the donors accept their fate because they are not fully human or because they are, in some basic sense, more human than the rest of us, ordinary humans? Numerous comments offer a whole series of divergent answers. First, there is the obvious scientific one: the donors are “genetically engineered clones. Their genes were designed to eliminate the fight-or-flight response.” Then, there is external control: Hailsham is surrounded by an electrified fence; all donors wear bracelets which register their movements so that they can be located at any point, etc. Finally, there is the donors’ psychic stance: they have no outside perspective; they are unable to develop any kind of dream of a better outside to escape to, and they possess no legal documents to identify them in the external world…
However, when they reach the age to become donors, they are moved from Hailsham to Cottages, isolated countryside buildings where they see and interact with “‘real’ humans living their lives, growing old, having relationships, feeling and crying and laughing the same way they do. Even with the brainwashing as kids, why do they not question their rights and purpose as adults? This is how the human brain works when processing experiences: it elaborates, creates questions, and motivates changes. Why does every single ‘real’ human among them have zero ethical dilemma and not rebel against the state of things, although they clearly see that those ‘donors’ are fully human?” They even escape to a nearby small town, visit an ordinary pub, etc. – so why do not some of them at least kill themselves?
The weirdness of this feature becomes obvious if we compare Never Let Me Go with The Island (Michael Bay, 2005) - a comparison solicited by Ishiguro himself who pointed out that he wanted to do the opposite of an individual finding himself in a similar situation of total control and then rebelling against it. The Island is about Lincoln Six Echo (played by Ewan McGregor), who struggles to fit into the highly structured world in which he lives, isolated in a compound on an island, and a series of strange events that unfold make him question how truthful that world is. After he learns the compound inhabitants are clones used for organ harvesting and surrogates for wealthy people in the outside world, he attempts to escape with Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) and expose the illegal cloning movement… What we get here is a standard Hollywood-Leftist story of a heroic individual rebelling against the oppressing regime; he triumphs and ends up on a lone island with his beloved. What makes Never Let Me Go such a truly depressing masterpiece is that it provides no easy way out; part of its traumatic impact is precisely the fact that the reason why donors do not rebel (or try to escape at least) is not specified – again, in contrast to usual catastrophe movies where the external threat (evil conspiracy, virus, aliens…) is sooner or later identified. We find ourselves in a non-specified situation of mortal dread that deprives individuals of their basic tendency to survive, hope, and fight. What makes this dread all the more oppressive is its “abstract” nature of an oppressive atmosphere. Even when they still desire things (as in the love triangle of Tommy, Cathy, and Ruth where sexual passion, jealousy, and envy intermingle), the joy of love is tainted by the all-pervasive depressive background. It is too much to say that there is a contrast between the depressive atmosphere and the intricacies of the love triangle: their love is an organic part of the atmosphere, and one should not restrain from the staggering conclusion that this depressive atmosphere makes the three donors ethically much better people. The reason Ruth (superbly played by Keira Knightley) breaks down and confesses her manipulations to Tommy and Cathy is that she is well aware how close to her “completion” she is already after her first donation – one can safely presume that, without the traumatic background of being a clone raised for donations, she would remain what she was, a rather insolent seductress playing with other people’s emotions and even joyfully bringing them pain. I find the crux of the film in depicting how the depressive atmosphere of knowing one’s fate.
So let’s go to the end in these risky speculations: what one should reject is the fake “wise” concluding meditation of Cathy where she arrives at the result that, in some sense, all “normal” humans resemble clones: we are all caught in destiny imposed by an anonymous other and awaiting a certain death… Or, to put it in a different way: Never Let Me Go struggles with the big enigma of our time: why do people not rebel – even when they clearly know their way of life leads to a global catastrophe? Why is indifference emerging more and more as the predominant stance of our life which is only occasionally interrupted by wild rebellions that really change nothing? The answer suggested by the film is much more subtle than a simple critique of conformism since it introduces a key difference: we “normal” humans do not know when and how, exactly, we will die, and this uncertainty sustains our secret disavowed hope that – maybe, just maybe – we will not die. In other words, our “normal” everyday existence is based on a disavowal of what we all know well, but in an abstract, impersonal (not-subjectivized) way. To paraphrase the well-known syllogism, all people are mortal, but I am maybe not… In Never Let Me Go, we are compelled to fully assume our mortality.
So the donors in the film are not lacking a perspective on the outside reality – on the contrary, they attain a perspective which we, “normal” people fully immersed in social reality, automatically deny. It is our “normal” everyday existence which is a lie. The pessimistic conclusion to be drawn from all this is that if we fail to assume our mortality, this does not make us ethically better persons: only against the depressive background of an impenetrable deadly threat can we occasionally act in a kind and compassionate way. And is this also not the lesson for us today? Not a cheap humanist optimism but full acceptance that we are doomed. But does this mean that we should simply accept the meaninglessness of our lives? There is a notion (with a religious background, but nonetheless open to a materialist reading) which shows a way to make one’s life meaningful without falling into a trap of some higher power guaranteeing this meaning, that of vocation. In his Shattered, Hanif Kureishi notes that, much more than top specialist doctors, nurses are those who consider their job a vocation:
“In every town, in every city in the world there are hospitals that are full of nurses doing a devoted job. From the conversations I’ve had with the nurses, with whom I spend most of my days, and some of my nights – not having known any before – they consider their work to be a vocation, a calling, a whole way of life. They dress and undress me, wash my body, genitals and arse, cleaning everything. They brush my hair, change my dressings, feed and engage me in conversations; insert suppositories, change my catheter and brush my teeth, shave and transfer me from bed to chair – this is their everyday work. /…/ The nurses here are cheerful, they sing and make jokes, but they are not well paid. Wages are certainly lower in Italy than they are in the UK but they have been doing this for years and, as far as I can tell, want to carry on. One nurse told me he didn’t have a girlfriend because he was too exhausted from his work to sustain a romantic relationship.”
Kureishi is perspicuous enough to immediately add that vocation and sexuality are not to be opposed – they can be in competition because they are both vocations. Note also the profoundly theological Deleuzian remark that, in an authentic vocation, I don’t choose it but I am chosen by it: “There is also a sexual aspect to the notion of vocation, since such a choice, like sexuality, isn’t an option, but something you are inexorably drawn to. It chooses you, rather than the other way round.” We should take this parallel to its logical conclusion: if I fall passionately in love with a woman (or the other way around) and she is indifferent towards me or even finds me disgusting, love was still not my own free choice – my experience is that I was chosen to love her. There is a recent film which focuses precisely on vocation as a way to escape the capitalist commodification of our life, also in the form of dedicating it to some higher spiritual pursuit (a form which is still confined to the fulfillment of our ego: Krzysztof Zanussi’s late masterpiece Liczba doskonała (The Perfect Number, 2022). A young Polish mathematician-physicist is immersed in his scientific research and in the teaching of his subjects, while his elderly Jewish-Polish cousin from Jerusalem would like to donate him the wealth accumulated during his life as a businessman. The young mathematician rejects this offer, since he wants to remain poor but happy in his life of teaching and researching Physics – he knows his vocation is the elaboration of the space-time theories of Quantum Physics… simple as it may sound, this solution actually works. It provides a new version of the old and often misused formula of freedom as a recognized necessity: the necessity I recognize is my vocation. To see this, one has to be caught in it – only in this way can we leave behind the cynical distance that predominates today.
Zanussi describes a period of '(American) Exceptionalism"... and how we're NOT exceptional anymore. We no longer 'believe' in Constitutions or the principle of Negative Liberty.
More Well Deserved Zizek Hagiography
At 75, the “rock star” intellectual is at war with the left. But is his politics a strange source of sanity?
t’s a problem when you and your spouse keep different hours. Slavoj Žižek’s wife goes to bed late, at around 4am, but he goes at 1am. In the morning he cleans, goes to the store and prepares breakfast: fresh bread, soft-boiled egg and, for her, a grapefruit. By 4pm he is tired, but his wife often claims they’ve just got up. “I say f*** you! You got up!” he cries, jabbing a middle finger in the air. “I’m already seven hours on my feet!”
The evening is his wife’s golden time. “She says, ‘Now the working day for me is over, I deserve a rest.’ She sits on the couch, her legs up, she has some small things to eat – chain-smoking – and watches a film. She wants this to be our social moment; to talk and watch TV together. And I say, ‘F*** you!’ I didn’t do anything yet! I need to do some work!”
The Slovenian journalist Jela Krečič, Žižek’s fourth wife, is a fellow Lacanian. I meet her one afternoon by chance in the street in Ljubljana; a striking, dark-haired woman with a backpack, hurrying back from university. Žižek seems genuinely excited to see her. He tells me why he fell in love with her, but it’s the only thing in eight hours of interviews that is off the record.
Though I am in Slovenia, I don’t see their apartment. I’m not missing anything, he tells me: “You will not find this mythical British place – an office with books, a pipe and a tweed jacket – it doesn’t exist.” Žižek, our most famous living cultural theorist, works on the sofa next to his wife, on his laptop, and uses a Russian pirate website from which to cut and paste quotes: Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Kierkegaard, Schelling, you name it – and his own.
Žižek can’t stop talking, but he can turn up on time. He is always early for our many meetings, which take place over two days in June. While his home is off limits, his city, he claims, is entirely uninteresting – but we take a tour of it anyway in the warm rain. He has brought me an umbrella; he also has his own – he pats his top pocket – which in Žižek language is “of anal [pronounced annal] character”, meaning compact and easy to hide. Žižek has the obsession with the bodily and the filthy that often hangs around the great intellectuals, yet he is also very proper. He constantly checks for reactions to his jokes, to see if he’s gone too far.
Amid the baroque streets of the capital there’s a handful of muscular statues cast in bronze, a glimpse of the country’s communist past under Tito. To Žižek, they’re just “some bullshit” and not worth explaining. “Now we come to the centre of power,” he says, pointing to a modernist block off Republic Square. This building was the People’s Assembly under communism, then the Slovenian parliament after the breakup of Yugoslavia – “and that, with the flag, was the most feared building: the secret police. So nice! I always say this is the Hegelian triad: the people, the party and the real power!”
Žižek is a great fan of the secret police. “In many authoritarian countries they were the source of truth,” he says. “Absolutely crucial. Pragmatic. In Cuba – I’m very pessimistic about Cuba, they screwed it up – they developed technology to track vehicles and Castro said, ‘Wonderful, now there will no longer be black market smuggling!’ The secret police said, ‘Are you crazy? Our people are starving, the only thing that allows them to survive is the black market! If you do this, there will be a revolution!’”
From the secret police museum in Budapest, he bought a candle the shape of Stalin’s head. That Žižek “loves” Stalin, the unpalatable face of communism, while celebrating the failure of the regime in his own country, is one of many things that make him appear a howling paradox. Communism sounds like a right laugh in Slovenia, though Žižek was considered a dissident: “The golden era of freedom was the last years of communism. You know why? Because the communists knew they had lost.” By the late 1980s you could get 120 satellite channels for a few pounds a month.
Zižek turned 75 in March this year. His late-life, “rock star” fame as a public intellectual came in the wake of his commentary on the financial crisis, and his Lacanian world-view chimed with a renewed interest in the connection between politics and psychoanalysis. He made films, such as The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), which offered the kind of tangible pop culture critical theory not seen since Roland Barthes. He has written nine books in the past four years – and 50 (not including co-authored titles) since 1989, when he published The Sublime Object of Ideology, sometimes referred to as his masterpiece.
When the communist regime collapsed in Slovenia in 1990, he ran for the presidency with the Liberal Democratic Party. This is not as grand as it sounds, he says: he ran as one member of a collective body for the presidency, and was not elected. But while he’d take capitalist democracy over totalitarian horror any day, he has an almost erotic interest in why communism failed. He sees theory and sex in the same way. When he gets excited by an idea, his tics go into overdrive: the swipe of the nose, the sniff, the flattening of the lips with two fingers into a triangle, and, my favourite, a quick look down from left nipple to right, as though crossing himself with his own eyes.
“Why did Stalinism go so wrong?” he says, within 20 minutes of meeting. “We still don’t have a good theory as to why. The Enlightenment project had a totalitarian potential. The Nazis were obscure biologists and racists but Stalinism’s origins were pure Enlightenment – yet it turned into an even worse terror.”
We have arrived at his favourite place, “and this is morbid”: Nebotičnik, the 1930s skyscraper built by Vladimir Šubic, once the highest building in the Balkans. The interior is polished black marble, and a narrow spiral staircase stretches vertically upwards into infinity, forming a tiny shoot: “When I was younger this was the most popular place for suicide,” Žižek says. “I think we should just organise it more. You should come here” – he gestures with a sweep of his arms – “queue up, a doctor quickly examines you, assesses whether you’re depressed enough, then a team of people comes in and cleans up the mess.”
I ask whether Lacanians have any particular thoughts on suicide, and he looks a bit shocked. Žižek’s jokes often seem to come from a sense of horror. The only phrase he says more often than “obscene” is “trigger warning”, which he announces with a great roll of the “r”, and quote marks mid air with his fingers. His mind is punctuated with human stories from terrible regimes. The Bosnian women systematically raped in front of their fathers. The Chinese cooks in Russian gulags who’d undercook rice, retrieve it undigested from the latrines and then cook it again and eat it, preventing themselves from starving.
He learned this from the novels of the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, and claims he fell out with Jordan Peterson over literary representations of the gulag. Žižek does not share Peterson’s love for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Solzhenitsyn is a cheap moralist. Peterson is an idiot.” When Žižek debated Peterson in Toronto in 2019, many were bemused by the lack of friction, given that their views – on the individual, the state, the Enlightenment – could not be further apart. He says he wanted to show Peterson’s followers that there was a place for them on the left.
Throughout our two days, half a dozen young men approach him in the street, blushing, to express their admiration. He undercuts their polite requests with performatively chauvinistic humour, agreeing to selfies as long as they’re meant for a female friend.
While students recognise him, the Slovenian media ignores him and so, increasingly, does the mainstream left-wing press internationally. Žižek is in a strange place in 2024. Jokes are innate to his political pessimism, and his pessimism is offset by his energy; while humour drives his work, it also undermines its seriousness. “The fans are attracted to my dirty jokes, the idea that I am normal,” he says, “but this perception, the right-wingers use against me. They call me one of the world’s best-known ridiculous clowns.”
A few years ago, he was done for self-plagiarism by the New York Times: “It’s like calling masturbation self-rape,” he cries. He justifies this “ecological” approach to his material – or rather, recycling – via Lacan. “The continuity of Lacan’s thought is not so much theories, as stories and examples. His written words, let’s be frank, are very difficult to read – but his seminars are almost like the associations of a patient, and the public is his analyst. His ideas change – people don’t take this into account.”
He is working on a book about soft fascism – “though I will be accused of trying to redeem it… Nazism was an exception: it was suicidal fascism, kill them all. But Mussolini and Franco were soft fascism. If Mussolini had not been so stupid as to join with Hitler, he’d have been one of the godfathers of the European Union. The future is soft fascism. Deng Xiaoping changed China from a communist country to soft fascism: liberalise the economy, liberalise culture, but the party retains absolute control. Erdoğan is doing exactly the same. But Putin is closer to Hitler.”
In March this year, Žižek said the UK was on the way to being a failed state, along with France. He has little interest in UK politics – “You have one big central modest right party, called the Labour Party, then you have some fringe crazy lefties called the Conservatives” – and, though he was in London on 4 July, he did not watch the election. But the French elections captured his imagination – specifically the scale of Le Pen’s defeat, a phenomenon he thinks was achieved by French voters fully accepting the reality of her triumph, then “mobilising” themselves to change their destiny.
Ukraine is a hinge-point for Žižek: his stance has alienated some on the left. “I see the reasoning: that war never solves it,” he says. “But war does solve it, I’m sorry! Ukraine is like Gaza; in both, the attacker talks about ‘peace’, but peace means their total victory. More and more, the story of the left is self-criminalisation: didn’t we provoke Russia too much with Ukraine? F*** you, it didn’t begin with Ukraine!”
In fact, the left is so factionalised that Žižek and the Centre for Ideology Critique and Žižek Studies at Cardiff University no longer talk to one another. The course convenor, Professor Fabio Vighi, tells me he objects to Žižek’s increasing “conservatism”, calling him a “good old neurotic afraid to lose his ‘place in the sun’ under Western capitalism”. Žižek says Vighi “thinks the Ukraine war is just a plot of the big capital to keep the working class under control”.
“It feels so stupid when people accuse me of being a Nato agent in the big media,” Žižek continues. “Fifteen years ago, at least once a month, I did the op-ed for New York Times. Newsweek. Guardian. Now I’m prohibited everywhere!” He takes me through media outlets one by one, on his fingers. The New Left Review never really liked him, he says, because of what Tariq Ali calls “Slovene egotism”. “The Guardian couldn’t forgive me my Trump joke,” he says, referring to his endorsement of Trump in 2016. “I meant, before he becomes too strong, give him a chance with the hope that he will screw things up,” he says. “Today, one must unconditionally oppose Trump. His new presidency would have terrible consequences internationally – the US would become another [totalitarian] Brics country like Russia and China.”
“Dead to me!” he says, by email, a few weeks later. “This is how I feel – the outside world is dead to me!” But he earns decent money from his Substack, which is put together by Hanif Kureishi’s son Carlo.
As we sit in a café one afternoon, I notice, over Žižek’s shoulder, a man approaching slowly; cropped hair, small round glasses and the kind of umbrella made famous by spies in Soviet Russia. He starts shouting something at the back of Žižek’s head. Žižek doesn’t notice. The man retreats, then changes his mind and spins on his heel, coming back. Žižek turns. After a conversation in raised voices, he tells me, “He was saying, ‘You can sit here philosophising but what are we going to do about everything?’ He was a touch aggressive, this man.”
The question of “What are we going to do about it?” hangs in the air. We live in an age unsuited to the contradiction of dialectical reasoning. The philosopher and New Statesman writer John Gray met Žižek at a conference on Spinoza in Amsterdam. “Not a streak of modesty, the self deprecation is a form of camouflage,” he says. “Žižek has a lot in common with GK Chesterton,” Gray tells me. “He is not your standard liberal or even Marxian humanist. He tends to think in a dialectical fashion, which seeks out the weaknesses of progressive thinking, even if he is in himself a kind of ultra-progressive. He is very hard to categorise – that’s a good feature of him. There is a conservative element to his thinking; at the same time, his message is: ‘Carry on, persist in your dreams, even if you know that none of them are going to come true.’”
Gray does not think Žižek’s philosophy original: he calls him “a brilliant and witty pastichist of the highest order. He may have the suspicion that once he’s gone, once he’s not keeping them entertained on the cabaret stage, he will be forgotten – and he might be.” But he has sympathy for his treatment by the left-wing press. “Žižek is running against the grain of the sensibility of the current left, which is censorious, angry, indignant and unforgiving. These days a ‘critical thinker’ on the left is one who repeats robotic formulae. Žižek is a genuine critical thinker – that’s one reason they dislike him!”
Perhaps Žižek is bored? Politics is ephemeral: he refers to his shorter texts as “that political bullshit”. At the top of the suicide tower, before lunch, he enters a kind of automatic speech, talking for so long without pause that in my eyeline, our stomachs rumbling, he starts to go fuzzy round the edges. Later, revived by pork cutlets, he puts it like this: “I call myself a moderately conservative communist, and I mean it. Not in the sense of proletarian revolution, f*** that. Communist in the sense of the crisis we are approaching ecologically, war, immigration; even stronger state authority is not enough… This is why I’m not only against Brexit, but I’m against how Europe is now falling apart. What I like about a united Europe is that there are certain basic rights – ecology, women’s rights, welfare, healthcare – that should be the minimum. Then you can be conservative, whatever, I don’t care.”
Žižek’s sensibility is perhaps better suited to opposing the culture wars. He likes to say things like: “To be really anti-racist is to be racist towards every nation, including your own.” He offended the American philosopher Judith Butler with a joke about her sexuality. “I knew I had gone too far. I called her and said sorry; she said, ‘No apology is needed.’ I said, ‘OK. I take my apology back.’ This is the paradox of language: if I do something tasteless, the proper way for you to accept my apology is to say, ‘No apology needed.’ If you accept my apology, it means you didn’t really forgive me!”
“We are in a regressive era,” he continues. “Some points should be simply out of debate. Like when people argue against rape. I don’t want to live in a society where you have to argue all the time against rape. I want to live in a society where if someone excuses rape – with all the stupidities they use – they appear an idiot.”
That evening, we meet again, at the National Museum’s cultural centre, after a three-hour break during which he won’t say what he did. We sit in the shadow of a bush, around a corner where he won’t get recognised, and he sucks down three Pepsis – Žižek doesn’t drink alcohol – while he encourages me to eat “a shitty croque madame thing”. He sets the alarm on his phone to go off for when his wife wants him to come home: a gentle, soothing ringtone. At first he talks about how dishwashers that really get your plates clean cost around £30,000. Then he tells me about his parents.
When Žižek’s mother was dying of cancer, 20 years ago, there was a period of four days when she was conscious and trying to speak, but couldn’t: “This was a trauma for me.” The bribery system in hospitals was an open secret. Žižek is fascinated with corruption, but these memories upset him. His mother had been put in a room with seven beds. For 300 German marks, he could get her into a room with three; for a thousand, she could be alone. You had to put the cash in an envelope, and place it in a paper bag, with a bottle of brandy. “I was so ashamed. The doctor took the bag, then immediately came out and said he had found a room for her. Where is the dignity? I thought he would be a little more discreet. I thought he would leave it a couple of hours.”
His phone bleeps: his son is using his credit card to order a takeaway.
“If someone close to me died, I would ask one question: was it quick? If it was, no problem, I’ll have another Coke – if not, I don’t know if I would survive.”
What was his relationship with his parents? “In the usual way, I loved them, but I didn’t really like them,” he says. “My mother was too inquisitive. One of my nightmarish memories: in high school I had a crush on a girl from my class, very dramatic. She didn’t want me. My mother found out about it, and went to the mother of the girl and complained. The mother told the girl. And the girl mockingly told me. This was traumatic.”
His father was a civil servant for the Tito regime: “In some sense honest, but self-convinced, and so arrogant. He was a communist, but at the same time an opportunist. He was controlling, but he was envious. When I ran for the presidency, he went crazy: ‘This will ruin your life!’ He refused to help my mother with the housework, out of principle. I was so ashamed. He had small rituals, which I resented. When I was 13 or 14, he’d come home from work, sit down on a comfortable chair and ask me to untie his shoes. Then he’d say, please talk some nonsense to distract me a little bit. It was so humiliating.” When Žižek was 16, his parents moved with his father’s work to Stuttgart, and he lived alone in Ljubljana: “This saved me.”
Though he is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, his own experience of analysis was limited to just two or three months in the 1980s, when a love affair had left him suicidal. At the time of the affair, he was married to his first wife with whom he had a son, and studying psychoanalysis at University Paris 8. He lived on 100 francs a day, and the sessions for personal analysis, with Lacan’s son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, were 200 francs each. The Lacanian tradition includes a variable approach to time, which he now parodies: “Psychoanalysis helped me very much, but in a bureaucratic way,” he says. “In the true Lacanian way, sessions were a maximum of five minutes and an analyst can tell you to come back immediately, or one hour later. To avoid any unpleasant surprises, I always prepared enough stuff for two or three sessions in advance – it’s my bureaucratic attitude. I thought: ‘I could kill myself, but the day after tomorrow I have the analytic session and the analyst would be annoyed.’ That’s why I love bureaucracy! It saved my life.”
Žižek met Lacan only once: he says Lacan would dip a madeleine cake in his tea and suck it noisily while a patient spoke about their trauma. Miller wanted to establish a Lacanian school, and hoped Žižek would train as an analyst: “You do a one-hour interview with me and you get to ask me one question!” he says. “Can you imagine me just sitting there and listening to my patient? Half a minute, then I’d begin to talk.”
It is in this setting, and on these themes – subjectivity, illusion, the unconscious – that Žižek comes alive. In the failing light, with a church bell chiming nine times in the background, he looks like a Greek philosopher talking to invisible acolytes. Soon it is dark and I cannot see his face at all. “With Lacan, the unconscious is a fake, it’s a lie!” he cries. Does Žižek not believe in the unconscious? “I do, but I prefer not to know about it. I don’t want to know too much about myself because I will discover that I’m full of s***, deep within myself. I believe in surface. Nice manners.”
He tries to forget his dreams. “If I have sexual dreams, they are never dreams of enjoyment,” he says sadly. “There is a lady I want to have sex with. She’s emitting the proper voices, but then all of a sudden I notice that she’s a doll, all plastic, and then I don’t even have an erection. All is fake. This is my typical sex dream.”
If he could have dinner with anyone, it would not be Lacan or Marx but, indeed, GK Chesterton, whose critique on the Book of Job partially inspired Žižek’s new book on Christian atheism. The concept – that only through the structure of Christianity, with its innate sense of subjectivity, can true atheism be attained – is the kind of paradox pleasing to Žižek: it is rooted in Hegel. At the moment Christ, on the cross, cries, “My Lord, why have you forsaken me?” he extinguishes God, creating an egalitarian community of believers on Earth with no higher power.
The theologian John Milbank agrees with Žižek’s reading of Hegel. Žižek’s world-view, Milbank says, is “very negative and pessimistic… Yet he’s not a gloomy person – it’s fascinating! He is laughing. Even though he comes across as crazy, in a way he represents sanity. There is a weird common sense about him. He rejects wokery, but is not tempted towards populism. He may prove to be a transitional figure, but an important one.”
Back at the museum, in the dark garden, Žižek’s wife alarm sounds. “Now,” he says, with flair, “I will go directly to the point. As for tomorrow, something came up. I am very friendly with my heart doctor – it’s the only way to survive – and I have an appointment, so morning is s***. Evening is s*** because I have to visit my first wife and son. So if you want to do a quickie, I have a gap around half past three.”
I see him one last time, after his regular cardiogram: he has heart palpitations and diabetes. He also has regular colonoscopies: “These are no problem for me – I have a very straight bowel.” He complains that he’s been feeling tired this year, and it stops him working so much.
“Yes, I have all these jokes,” Žižek tells me, “but I write serious, fat books. I still believe in the Big Other, in the sense of some real public who read them.” Not that he’s always pleased with them. “The one I thought would be doing better – though I’m not really into it – is Hegel in a Wired Brain [about AI]. Then I thought Freedom: A Disease Without Cure would be the big one, but it’s a little bit too confused!” Less Than Nothing, a philosophical mega-work first turned down by MIT Press and later published by Verso, outsells his political texts. “No, people are not idiots! I still have this naive trust that if you really put an effort into it, there still is some serious public which is interested.”
Žižek has an insatiable desire to connect, and correspondents are instantly “friends”. He refers constantly to his friends – from Rowan Williams to the late Toni Morrison (“totally my style”) to the Native Americans of Missoula, Montana. He still has fierce armies of supporters in the academic world and travels internationally, speaking at conferences on German idealism. But his life is also very small: “Wives, children, a couple of theorists and that’s it!” He has written to the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli. “Ontological questions are returning with a vengeance,” he says. “The past is not self-enclosed: it is open, waiting for the future.”
He has long had a tradition of taking his sons on holidays in places with totalitarian, “capitalist” regimes. “Big sinful holidays”, he calls them. He has been to Macao for the super-casinos; Shanghai and Hong Kong, all business class. “No sinful holiday this year,” he says, by email, a few weeks after we meet. “Too busy, plus too old and too tired.”
The Flynn Effect
What does the generational rise in IQ (cognitive ability) scores have to do with leadership, Machiavellian traits, unresolved guilt, shame, and maladaptive behaviours we see in the West?
My perspective is informed by extensive studies, 50 years of lived experience, and professional practice as a counsellor, along with a licence to administer various psychometric tests. I scored high on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (IQ) test at the age of 48, but most of my childhood I was made to feel dumb, probably with undiagnosed ADHD (resolved itself in early adulthood). Teachers and family members who were too quick to judge me labelled me a loser for my frequent failures. It was only in my thirties that I learned to manage my energy, select meaningful goals, and exceed them. I achieved a private pilot’s licence, grew a successful business and completed a psychology qualification with distinction between the ages of 30 and 50. I have grappled with anxiety, poverty, alcoholism, anorexia, trauma, low self-esteem, and injustice. Despite these challenges, I have succeeded in developing my competencies, increasing my autonomy, and finding love, purpose, and meaning. I aim to share these insights to enrich others’ lives and initiate hope for those who might be grappling with similar obstacles.
When one compares the mental health of Western nations with that of the rest (non-Western nations), we see higher levels of reported pathology and medicalisation. This implies a crisis within Western culture. Arguably, we have descended into the hedonism that seems to plague successful civilisations. I agree with others, like the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who points to materialism and the culture of consumption that has misled many to raise their children to be mere consumers. Creativity is “monetised”, and humans become miniature incubators of consumable content. We produce bits of data for consumption rather than using our creativity to produce life, build, grow food, or inspire passion through the arts. Many consumers are being consumed.
And yet, we know that these same societies have benefited from a generational increase in intelligence scores over the last one hundred years. This was discovered by James R. Flynn in 1984. He noted that the increase in IQ was reported as early as 1948 by Read D. Tuddenham. Once coined by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their 1994 book The Bell Curve; this phenomenon became known as the Flynn Effect. I see no value in rehashing the debate around the value or utility of IQ here, many of the criticisms have been thoroughly addressed by Russel T. Warne in his 2020 book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence. Also, I have personally administered the Raven’s test (IQ) in South Africa, and I have no doubt in my mind of the value of eductive aptitude, which involves making sense of disorder, identifying patterns, and investigating new insights. Flynn and Murray may disagree on how we use IQ to manage society, but they both accept how important IQ is to human growth. In 2014, the Flynn effect was re-confirmed by a meta-analysis of 285 studies, IQ gains of around 3 points per decade are still happening in certain groups of people, while some nations languish below global averages. We will see more and more high IQ people (Hi-Q hereafter in this document).
This brings me to my first point. Eductive aptitude would benefit leaders and many employees in the technology-driven “fourth industrial revolution”. Potentially, Hi-Q would stand out in a group and be appointed to leadership or high-skill positions. This means that over time, where IQ rises so does inequality. We generally recognise this occurring within a meritocratic system. Adrian Wooldridge unpacks the value of meritocracy in his 2021 book titled The Aristocracy of Talent. He advocates for allowing those with talent, competencies, and capacity to rise up in a meritocratic system that abandons nepotism and cronyism. Other systems, like theocracy, artificially suppress or destroy variations in human achievement to maintain power dynamics.
It would be difficult for most people to discern natural ability in eductive aptitude versus a functional psychopath seeking leadership power. Most people do not have the skills or the inclination to distinguish the difference until a tyrant or bully threatens them directly. Often, we simply rely on intuition to make this assessment. Unfortunately, some activists who want to undermine Western societies denigrate meritocracy. For example, many postmodernists believe power is inherently unfair. Others become motivated by a survival instinct that compels them to isolate a leader who appears to be gaining power. The leader’s success could pose an existential threat to a weaker ego captured by envy and jealousy. A successful group could coerce the powerless into social roles they did not choose. These fears are understandable when one looks at human history. But benevolent leaders with eductive aptitude have advanced human progress more than any other.
My second point concerns the taboo around “Machiavellian” traits. Here I must begin by quoting a wonderful paper that addresses the nuances of Dark Triad traits versus colloquial understanding of malevolent traits:
“The primary problem is that most current measures of Machiavellianism correlate positively with traits related to disinhibition, such as impulsivity, laziness, incompetence, and lack of perseverance. This is problematic because Machiavelli described the use of deception, manipulation, coercion, intimidation, and violence to achieve and maintain power, status, and control through prudence, calculation, and careful consideration of risk-traits that are the antithesis of disinhibition”. – Research Handbook on the Dark Triad (2024).
Being more disinhibited will make one lean towards psychopathy rather than Machiavellian. One can be a benevolent Machiavellian. We already know transformational leaders will have Machiavellian traits because they also seek to change their followers’ values and beliefs. Colloquially, we believe that a malevolent Machiavellian will be more ruthless, while a benevolent leader will knowingly manipulate others for a desirable outcome and avoid short-term opportunism. Can you see how Hi-Q may be perceived as “Machiavellian” without the distinction of whether they are malevolent or benevolent? There is an overlap that can cause confusion if one does not understand the nuances of these behaviours and their outcomes.
My observation is that we succeeded in raising IQ scores in the last 100 years, but we did not inoculate Hi-Q individuals against the shame, guilt and social isolation that the resulting leadership role or gain in status could initiate. And today’s parents did not grow up with these conditions or challenges so they would not have known how to prepare their kids. Further, Western society, specifically Gen Z, now devalues intuition and embraces dehumanising doctrines delivered by algorithms, soothed by pharmacology, and incessant entertainment. This imbalance leaves Hi-Q individuals adrift, searching for ways to assuage their resulting unresolved emotions.
My third point is that we already know IQ has increased while EQ (emotional intelligence) has not. Otherwise, why have we adopted Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL) across the West? I will not critique SEL here, but others have revealed the flaws in adopting SEL too broadly in educational systems. However, it is well known that we can all benefit from psychoeducation about expressing one’s emotions effectively. Leonard Mlodinow unpacks the research comprehensively in his 2022 book Emotional. He explains that emotions drive human societies, not cold logic alone. Iain MacGilchrist also dives into this in his book The Master and His Emissary, where he traces the dominant characteristics of the brain’s two hemispheres and how this impacts individuals and entire movements in human growth over the ages. He makes a compelling argument for mapping wisdom by detailing the tendency for the left side of our brains to be action and logic-oriented while the right brain is more intuitive and emotional. Many other authors, researchers and psychologists agree that society cannot simply be a cold rational system that mindlessly consumes, or an overly emotional system unchecked by wisdom.
We can see how having high IQ scores can expose one to novel circumstances that have no precedent in common Western cultural memes. Hi-Qs and their communities are all in uncharted territory. Even most teachers and parents have not adapted to the new paradigm of increasing complexity. This is important because many people try to escape the guilt or shame of being “Machiavellian” when they really don’t have to, unless they are malevolent or antisocial. My previously published “Letter to a Narcissist“ might provide some insight for these individuals. Having the capacity to make sense of disorder, identify patterns, and investigate new insights beyond others’ cognitive ability levels might put you in a position to manipulate others to achieve a goal that eludes them. Manipulation could be Machiavellian in nature, but it won’t automatically be psychopathic unless the intention is malevolent. This means that one who uses Machiavellian strategies to achieve goals does not necessarily need to feel guilt or shame. But the culture we live in does not teach these people how to process emotions effectively, so we end up with anxious, smart people seeking deflections for their anxiety.
I should point out here that not all Hi-Q people will be natural leaders. Activation of leadership takes other skills and traits such as Openness, Conscientiousness, patience, perseverance and the skills to persuade, explain, and suggest.
Here is another category of Hi-Q people who will experience elevated anxiety: those who seem to self-sabotage. These individuals will struggle unless they have moderating traits like openness and conscientiousness. This means that many Hi-Q people will “fail to launch”; they won’t develop the necessary competencies to exercise their cognitive abilities in a gainful manner. This then triggers existential guilt and shame, which in turn feeds the anxiety. But recall that people with Hi-Q are likely to have a developed eductive aptitude (making sense of disorder, identifying patterns, and investigating new insights). Problems arise when someone experiences an event, perhaps a global existential crisis like a deadly virus pandemic, and what we see is Hi-Q people now failing to make sense of disorder, imagining patterns that are not there, and entertaining novel insights that do not produce meaningful outcomes. In short, they become misguided and are vulnerable to ideologies, cults and intellectual silos that presume to explain their ‘failure to launch’ and the resulting crippling anxiety.
Finally, what are the maladaptive behaviours these people would develop? In people suffering with unresolved emotions like shame and guilt, we see anger and self-isolation. It is well known these responses can lead to depression. During this period, one would ruminate incessantly, partly due to the relative deprivation of novel insights and information. This state then triggers hopelessness that the brain would desperately be trying to resolve or relieve. The problem escalates in Western society as we have infinite ways to deflect and distract ourselves. We perfected this during the Covid crisis. Isolation can be relieved by going online. Anonymous “communities” begin to distort their relatedness. Anger is resolved by using downers like alcohol or marijuana. Time is distorted and the past begins to project disproportionate fear into the future. The immediate, irrational moment appears pivotal. Fragile self-esteem is pursued over enduring self-compassion. Wisdom is abandoned. A cascade into nihilism begins.
Through evolutionary psychology, we know that animals will mimic behaviour for survival, and victims of this nihilistic state will resort to mimicry. The internet mimics relatedness, and substances mimic wisdom. They begin to mime life. Often, they will mimic successful others who exude the most libidinal energy (as Freud intended). This can lead to irrational hedonism as the id, or the narcissistic shadow, takes the reigns of the psyche. Eventually, psychopathology develops, and one gets some letters added to their name: OCD, ADHD, BPD, etc., often by a Machiavellian medical professional. The sad irony of this myopic system does not escape many of us.
The fuse is now lit. What follows is a series of nihilistic modern-day rituals that further disassociate the victim from themselves and from their body. Without proper intervention, the behaviour escalates. More anger, more isolation. Family and friend’s reactions often inadvertently reinforce these misguided responses, loved ones are confused and resort to misguided empathy to relieve their own fears. Shame and guilt increase in the victim. This will often trigger the drama triangle, where one person becomes the saviour while the other is positioned as the persecutor in relation to the victim. They perform these positions until the triangle breaks. This can break families, not surprisingly, this is a stated goal of many myopic “social activists” who reject meritocracy.
But for some of these people, the cascade is not over yet; anxiety increases further because now they are adding existential anxiety and dread. Life becomes “unlived”. Libido crumbles, energy collapses and one’s world view narrows until no light can enter and dread becomes their only companion. I am also a suicide crisis counsellor; I have seen this many times.
Does this mean that high IQ scores are a curse? Certainly not. But it does mean we need to adapt society to inform and support those who have been raised to achieve high IQ scores. Raising them to merely consume or produce meaningless “content” isn’t working. With elevated IQ, they have the capacity for making sense of disorder, identifying patterns, and investigating new insights; they will seek complexity in their lives. These individuals need support and space to create. Distracting them from using these new abilities will only lead to existential anxiety. We should be engaging them at a higher level or discourse, modelling emotional competencies and giving them opportunities to explore their eductive reasoning while teaching them mindfulness and self-compassion. I think many who started the “gifted” child programmes intended this outcome, but studies on gifted programmes have mixed results. Perhaps they only legitimise the isolation and fail to prevent the underlying anxiety.
Flynn commented near the end of his life that we might see a levelling-off of IQ scores as we divert tasks to technology. This could be true, but we still have pockets where IQ scores continue to increase. The resulting inequality must be understood so that the stratified nature of human diversity is not lumbered with guilt and shame. We all have a place, Hi-Q people can create new areas of human growth, while other-IQ people balance society and enjoy the fruits of those creations so we can live rich emotional lives unencumbered by the anxiety inherent in overthinking. In the absence of meaningful complexity, most humans will fill the void with whatever is available, but HI-Q will be vulnerable to complex systems that mimic this depth and meaning. It is time we stop treating IQ as a taboo topic and use it constructively to build a healthier society.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
On Byung-Chul Han's, "Topology of Violence"
Excerpted from the above video:
Let's read so some passages about the psychologization of violence. How violence has turned from being something, a phenomenon or a set of phenomena outside of the psyche, to a phenomenon inside the psyche.
So we read: "Violence is increasingly internalized, psychologized, and thus rendered invisible. More and more, it rids itself of the negativity of the other or the enemy, becoming self-referential. External violence unburdens the psyche."
He's not saying that external violence is good. When a person is violent to other people, but he's saying that the form of violence is easier on the psyche. External violence unburdens the psyche because it externalizes suffering. The psyche doesn't antagonize itself with endless internal discussion. So this is the advantage of externalizing violence, presumably.
Han says, "In Societies in the past, we let to people staging violence, to having ceremonial relationships with violence including, but not limited to, religious sacrifices." So he continues: "In archaic culture as well as in Antiquity, the staging of violence was an integral, even Central component of societal communication. Violence did not conceal itself, it was visible and manifest. It had no shame, it was eloquent. And signifying, it signified something. It expressed itself. It was not shameful. Rather than staging its magnificence, now violence conceals itself in shame. It continues to be wielded, but not publicly staged. It does not expressly draw attention to itself. It lacks all language and symbolism."
And it makes sense, the more you read, the more you follow his arguments about the "self-referentiality of violence". The violence is something that we do to ourselves, that a person in our contemporary culture, the "entrepreneur of the self", the self-exploiting subject with their "projects". Of course, it shouldn't enter into language. The fact that they are exercising self-violence. It should not become symbolically expressed in thought. The very fact of violence should be invisible and repressed.
Which brings us to Freud. We read: "Freud's psychoanalysis is Possible only in repressive societies, such as the Society of Sovereignty" or "the Disciplinary Society" which base their organization on the negativity of prohibitions and commands. The late-modern "Achievement Subject"...."
The Achievement Subject is a big theme in Han's work: "...The late-modern Achievement Subject possesses a completely different psyche than the "Obedient Subject" to whom Freud's psychoanalysis refers. The work performed by Freudian Ego consists above all in fulfilling a duty." And then he makes a comparison to Kant.
Let's move on: "The modal verb that dominates the Society of Achievement isn't the Freudian "should", but rather "can". This societal shift entails restructuring within the psyche."
We should take a step further than that, okay? The modal verb is "can". "I can do this." "I can do that." But that "can" very quickly translates to "I must." "If I can, therefore I must." That's why it becomes "Force", "push".
Let's continue: "The 'Dialectic of Freedom' entails the development of new constrictions. Freedom "from the Other" becomes a narcissistic relationship to the "Self", which is responsible for many of the Achievement Subject's psychic disorders."
Okay, there's implication on health, physical bodily health, of this kind of Society. We read: "Faced with the atomization of society and the erosion of the social..." because every everybody develops a much stronger self-referential mode of being. So, Social Community, those aspects of Life, are eroded, they become much weaker. "...Faced with the atomization of Society and the and the erosion of the "social", all that is left is the body of the Self, which must be kept healthy at all costs."
Why? Elsewhere we read that it's because everything that you have, everything that you are and you have, is a commodity. It's Capital, and it should be leveraged for production and productivity. So, the body has to be prepared at all times to do work.
"The capitalist economy absolutized 'Survival'. It is not concerned with the 'Good Life', it feeds on the illusion that more 'Capital' generates more 'Life', and more 'ability to Live'. The Mania for' Health' arises where life has become bare like a piece of currency, and void of any narrative content. Bare life, void of narrative content.
So we become "healthy", not for the perpetuation and continuation of a narrative. We become "healthy" just for the sake of readiness for work. Bare life.
In connection to narcissism, going back to narcissism, and how that's not the same thing as love, "Self-love."
We read: "To love oneself is to position oneself expressly against the 'Other'. In the case of Narcissus, on the other hand, the border with the 'Other' blurs entirely. Those who suffer from a narcissistic disorder sink into themselves... [which means] no stable conception of the 'Self' can form."
Narcissism, of course, is connected with depression. "In depression, all bonds break, even bonds with the 'Self'. [...] [It] makes sense to differentiate Depression from Melancholia. Melancholia is preceded by an experience of loss. Thus it always exists in a relationship, namely, in a negative relationship to the absent. Depression, on the other hand, is cut off from all relationships and bonds."
Somebody breaks up with you, or you lose a family member to death, or for whatever reason. And that loss results in Melancholia, or Mourning. But Depression is cut off from all relationships and bonds.
"The late-modern 'Self' expends most of its' libidinal energy on itself. What is left of the libido is spread thin across steadily increasing contacts and fleeting relationships. Burnout is the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation, the imperative to personal expansion, transformation, and reinvention which is the flip side of Depression, presumes a wide array of products associated with Identity."
"Contrary to Baudrillard's thesis, social antagonism is not developing between the global and the singular today. Contemporary society, which displays increasing erosion of the Social, produces scattered self-focused selves with weak connections to the "We". Existing under intensely competitive conditions, they are micro-entrepreneurs who can only have business relations, if any."
Related to loneliness and isolation... and here Han is commenting on Hart and Negri... he writes: "It is not Multitude, but Solitude that typifies contemporary social composition. Isolation doesn't generate power. Hart and Negri fail to take this Social Development into account. Contrary to Hart and Negri's conclusion, today the communal is in a state of increasing decline. The decline of the communal makes Collective action ever less likely. They overestimate the strength of the resistance against the capitalist neoliberal system."
"Agamben (he also he's also also criticized), Agamben completely misses the topological shift of violence that is the basis for the shift from the "Society of Sovereignty" to the "Society of Achievement" when he's discussing a Homo Sacer, which is a concept referring to the margin of the social order.
Han does something really interesting, and very topological. He writes: Homo Sacri of a Totalitarian Society are at the outermost edge of a societal order. So the edge of society, the margin of society. Homo Sacer is a marginal figure. He, or she, or they... "they" are located in a non-Place. A non place like the Concentration Camp. And the late-modern Homo Sacer, the "Achievement Subject" is centrally located. The typical Homo Sacer now is the typical citizen, centrally located. Directly at the center of an order, social order. "Labor camps" are no longer located on the outskirts, rather, every Achievement Subject carries the camp with it. The Achievement Subject is Prisoner and Warden at once. It cannot defend itself from the violence, because, it is committed by itself. The center becomes indistinguishable from a non-place. Related to invisibility, and the psychic nature of violence. How center of a social order, becomes its margin, becomes the locus of a non-place, becomes non-place.
Burnout Bonus:
BioMassing the Masses
It is a fantasy to think that our trash- and commodity-filled environments can be left behind and replaced by life in some idyllic “natural,” ecologically sustainable environment. But perhaps the loss of that option can become the basis for a new, global sense of solidarity.LJUBLJANA – In a recent commentary, philosopher Michael Marder looks beyond the immediate horror of what is taking place in Gaza to consider the ontological implications of what we see in the long-distance drone shots of the ruins. Allow me to quote him at length:“… Gaza is rapidly transformed into a dump, where high-rise buildings and human bodies, ecosystems … and orchards are mutilated beyond recognition and reduced to organic-inorganic rubble. A solidarity with dumpified lives, places, and worlds requires something other than compassion. So what could that be?”Marder’s answer is to propose “another kind of solidarity based on the shared condition of biomass.” To say, “I am biomass” is to “identify with a vanishing life,” to see Gaza as “a condensed and particularly blunt version of a planetary tendency.” The rendering of all life into mere biomass – chaotic heaps of organic and inorganic matter – can be found everywhere, but it has been “accelerated in Gaza at the cutting edge of the most recent technologies of devastation. Rather than compassion, then, what is required is the solidarity of the dumped, who dare assert, ‘We are biomass.’”
This notion of biomass echoes an insight from philosopher Levi Bryant: “In an age where we are faced with the looming threat of monumental climate change, it is irresponsible to draw our distinctions in such a way as to exclude nonhuman actors.” And yet, in today’s capitalist societies, efforts to mobilize a large majority of people in the name of our shared ecological condition consistently fail. We all know that we are part of nature and fully dependent on it for our survival, yet this recognition does not translate into action. The problem is that our choices and outlook are influenced by many other forces, such as biased media reporting, economic pressures on workers, material limitations, and so forth.
In her 2010 book, Vibrant Matter, philosopher Jane Bennett has us picture a polluted trash site, where not only humans but also rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons, and so on each play some active role. This scene of biomass exists on the same spectrum as the situation in Gaza, though the latter is an extreme case. Around the world, there are numerous large physical spaces, especially outside the developed West, where “digital waste” is dumped, and thousands work separating glass, metals, plastic, mobile phones, and other man-made materials from the chaotic heaps. One such slum, Agbogbloshie, near the center of Accra (the capital of Ghana), is known as “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Life in these environments is a horror show, and the communities that live in them are strictly hierarchically organized, with children forced to do the most dangerous work, under extremely hazardous conditions. Yet because this exploitation of biomass appears ecologically attractive (under the banner of “recycling”), it responds perfectly to the demands of modern technology: “In the technological age,” writes philosopher Mark Wrathall, “what matters to us most is getting the ‘greatest possible use’ out of everything.”
After all, the whole point of using resources sparingly, of recycling, and so forth is to maximize the use of everything. The ultimate products of capitalism are piles of trash – useless computers, cars, TVs, VCRs, and the hundreds of planes that have found a final “resting place” in the Mojave Desert. The idea of total recycling (in which every remainder is used again) is the ultimate capitalist dream, even – or especially – when it is presented as a means of retaining Earth’s natural balance. It is yet another testament to capitalism’s capacity to appropriate ideologies that seem to oppose it.
However, what makes the exploitation of biomass different from the capitalist logic is that it accepts a chaotic wasteland as our basic predicament. Though this condition can be partly exploited, it can never be abolished. As Marder puts it, biomass is our new home; we are biomass. It is a fantasy to think that such environments can be left behind and replaced by life in some idyllic “natural,” ecologically sustainable environment. That easy way out has been irretrievably lost to us. We should accept our only home and work within its confines, perhaps discovering a new harmony beneath what appears to be a chaotic heap.
This will require us to be open to the objective beauty of different levels of reality (humans, animals, ruins, decaying buildings), and to reject a hierarchic ordering of aesthetic experiences. Are we ready to do this? If not, we are truly lost.
The NATO View of the World According to Mike Benz - Mission Creep on Steroids!
NATCon Again... with their MAGA entryism VP and their WAR against POPULISM!
A) "War is a continuation of politics by other means".- Carl von Clausewitz
B) "The true cost of not meeting our defense requirements will be a lessened capacity for American global leadership and, ultimately, the loss of a global security "
- NeoCons PNAC
A+B= Forever Wars that know no Peace under the US Constitution
Why fight wars when you can just overthrow Governments? (including the USA)
...war's just a continuation of politics "by any means necessary" (BAMN) - The World is Our Oyster!
Monday, July 22, 2024
On Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" & the Rise of Neo-Nazism
More Tech, more... Tech, more....... TECH.........? How about MORE FREE MARKETS?
Sunday, July 21, 2024
Elysium Dream
IngVar Grijs, "Healthcare Inequality and Biopolitical Dynamics: Insights from Žižek"
In his article “Bring me my Philips Mental Jacket,” Slavoj Žižek explores the implications of biogenetic intervention and the ethical, psychological, and philosophical challenges it poses to human identity and autonomy.
Žižek examines how advances in biogenetics might alter our understanding of ourselves and the consequences of reducing human beings to objects of manipulation.
This discussion extends into the realm of healthcare, particularly how healthcare accessibility and financial barriers impact marginalized populations such as the Black community in Chicago.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) attempted to bridge the gap in healthcare accessibility, providing a gateway to healthcare for a larger segment of the American population. However, financial barriers such as high deductibles and insurance costs continue to create a divide between those who can afford quality healthcare and those who cannot. This financial divide has significant implications for the quality of life and health outcomes of individuals. Those with better financial resources can access superior healthcare services, leading to better health outcomes and quality of life.
Conversely, those marginalized by lack of wealth and political power do not receive the promised healthcare benefits.
Žižek’s exploration of biogenetics brings to light several key points related to healthcare. Advances in biogenetics enable the manipulation of human organisms, raising ethical concerns about the alteration of human nature and the potential for creating inequality based on genetic modifications. The knowledge of one’s genetic predispositions can have profound psychological impacts, influencing individuals’ decisions about their health and sense of identity.
This knowledge can also lead to ethical dilemmas regarding the extent to which genetic information should be used or disclosed.
The control over biogenetic technologies and healthcare resources shapes societal power structures. The availability and quality of healthcare, influenced by financial capabilities, determine who can access life-enhancing and life-prolonging treatments. This creates a stratified society where the wealthy can afford better healthcare and potentially genetic enhancements, while the less affluent struggle with basic healthcare needs. See Elysium, 2013
Good healthcare not only extends life expectancy but also enhances the quality of life. Those with access to superior healthcare will likely enjoy better health and productivity, reinforcing existing social and economic inequalities.
The traditional physician-patient relationship has been disrupted by the increasing role of financial actors in healthcare. Hospital administrators and private equity owners prioritize profit, which exacerbates healthcare inequalities. Despite political promises to limit profit margins in healthcare, the focus on profit undermines patient-centered care. Marginalized populations such as the Black community in Chicago continue to face significant barriers to accessing quality healthcare, perpetuating cycles of inequality.
Extending Žižek’s analysis of biogenetics to healthcare reveals significant parallels in how economic and biopolitical control perpetuate inequality.
Financial barriers and the prioritization of profit in the healthcare system shift the focus from racial disparities to economic ones, yet marginalized populations continue to be disadvantaged. The disruption of the physician-patient relationship by financial actors further exacerbates these issues, highlighting the need for a more equitable healthcare system that prioritizes patient care over profit.
Žižek’s discussion emphasizes the critical intersection between financial power, healthcare access, and societal control. The financial barriers in healthcare contribute to a biopolitical landscape where access to healthcare and biogenetic advancements can reinforce and exacerbate societal inequalities, shaping the power dynamics of future generations. Understanding these implications is crucial for developing ethical policies and ensuring equitable access to healthcare and biogenetic technologies.
For further insights, refer to Žižek, S. (2003). Bring me my Philips Mental Jacket: Improve Your Performance. *London Review of Books*, 25(10). Available at [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n10/slavoj-zizek/bring-me-my-philips-mental-jacket](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n10/slavoj-zizek/bring-me-my-philips-mental-jacket).
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Ur Fascism? What about Ur Totalitarianism?
...after all, Stalin wasn't a fascist, was he?
Wasn't he pUrported to be an Anti-Fascist!
Achieving Information Superiority by Suspending Judgement?...
Aspects of Xenia?
...and Detecting Variations from Baselines... Cal Lightman, what country are you visiting today?
Friday, July 19, 2024
Framing Social Identities... Whether using Sincerity, Authenticity, or Profilicity based Identity Technologies
...and why it often fails, as many of us now insist that we alone are "allowed" to "define" our Identity... and that its' non-negotiable. That we don't have to "play nicely" with Others and "negotiate" our social identity/ relationships. For we have MANY personal AND constantly changing and evolving social identities and relationships, and only one of them is the one that WE alone get to define... the one we define when we 're home alone by ourselves. The rest of them must be socially NEGOTIATED with Others, often "in the moment". Friend, boss, employee, father... which negotiated relationship are we playing now?
"So what were your "preferred pronouns" again? Never-mind, I really don't care to indulge your sexual fantasies right now, sorry. Save it for when you're with your partner in the bedroom. I may have to show you xenia, but I don't intend to get THAT friendly with you here and now. You do realize that social relations require negotiation and MUTUAL consent, don't you? Anything less is just a Power grab. Social and political equality is a two-way street, after all. What, you're going to tell your Mommy on me? Go ahead, I've got two Daddy's, and they can beat the cr*p out of her!"
Where from Here?
The Dilemma...
btw - What kind young person writes a memoir in his mid-30s? One who needs to "shape" or "conceal" his past, of course.
Face it... We're All F*cked!
Xenia: Framing both "Reason and Rationality"
from Google AI:
Reason and Rationality are related concepts, but they operate on different levels:Reason
The faculty of rational argument, deduction, and judgment. It can also refer to a sound mind or sanity. Reason can also be characterized by a peculiar orientation towards the whole, or a reaching outwards for totality.
Rationality
The quality of being guided by or based on reason. For example, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. Rationality can also involve evaluating choices to achieve a goal or find the optimal solution to a problem.
So what is the necessary environment required for supporting these two fundamental premises and making them successful? I believe it lies in the Greek Concept of Xenia
Xenia (Greek: ξενία) is an ancient Greek concept of hospitality. It is almost always translated as 'guest-friendship' or 'ritualized friendship'. It is an institutionalized relationship rooted in generosity, gift exchange, and reciprocity.
This Xenia MUST constitute the environmental conditions under which a Dialectical discourse proceeds so as to arrive at Truth. Without it, no amount of reason or rationality can arrive at a truthful conclusion.
From Byung-Chul Han's "The Expulsion of the Other"
"Hospitality is the highest expression of a Universal Reason, Universal Human Reason that has come into its' own. Globalism doesn't result in Hospitality."
"How civilized a society is can be judged by its' Hospitality. In particular, indeed, its' friendliness. Xenophobia is hatred, and ugly. It is an expression of a lack of Universal Reason, a sign of a sign that Society is still in an unreconciled State."
Byung-Chul Han also stated that:
Tasos Kokkinidis, "Philoxenia: The Ancient Roots of Greek Hospitality"
"Philosophy is the translation of Eros into Logos"
And Plato stated in his "Symposium" (Aristophanes' Speech) that:
"...and the desire and pursuit of the Whole is called, 'Love' "
More from Google AI:
In Greek mythology, Zeus Xenios is the god who protects strangers and is the patron of xenia, the custom of offering hospitality to strangers. Xenia was considered a fundamental part of civilized life, and in ancient times, people believed that gods might mingle among them. As a result, if a host treated a stranger poorly, they risked angering a god who might be disguised as the stranger. This led to the concept of theoxenia, where humans demonstrated their virtue by showing hospitality to a stranger who turned out to be a god.
The Greek word Philoxenia, literally translated as a “friend to a stranger”, is widely perceived to be synonymous with hospitality.
For Greeks, it is much deeper than that. It is an unspoken cultural law that shows generosity and courtesy to strangers.
Greeks are enormously generous when inviting others to their home, or being invited themselves. In villages, it is not uncommon for villagers to show up at the door of a resident foreigner (or even a temporary visitor renting a room) with a sack full of fresh tomatoes, or even a bottle of local olive oil.
Philoxenia today can be as simple as a smile, helping a stranded motorist, buying a meal for a homeless person, or opening your home to friends and family.
Zeus XeniosThis cultural law has its origins in Ancient Greece. The Greek god Zeus is sometimes called Zeus Xenios — as he was also a protector of travelers. He thus embodied the religious obligation to be hospitable to travelers.Trojan War
The beautiful story written by the Roman poet Ovid in 8 A.D of Zeus and Hermes disguised as poor travelers, narrates the sacred relation between host and guest, embodying the ancient Greek tradition.
The two ancient Gods, the story goes, visited many villages in search of refuge for the night. A poor elderly couple — Baucis and Philemon welcomed them as guests in their home and generously served them food and wine.
After refilling her guests’ cups many times over, Baucis noticed that the wine jug was still full. Philemon then realized the visitors were actually gods and she offered to kill their only goose to feed them. Touched by this gesture, Zeus rewarded their generosity by transforming the humble cottage into a beautiful stone temple.
Zeus also granted the couple their ultimate wish: to be the guardians of the temple, die at the same time, and stay together for eternity as they were turned into trees, guarding each side of the temple’s door.According to legend, even an event as momentous as the Trojan War began because of a guest’s violation of xenia. The Trojan prince Paris was a guest of King Menelaus of Sparta when he abducted Menelaus’ wife, Helen.Reasons for philoxenia
Both the Odyssey and the Iliad are filled with episodes in which xenia is either honored or ignored and the subsequent consequences are notable. For instance, when Odysseus sails to the island of the cyclops, the monster’s treatment of Odysseus and his sailors is a violation of the custom of xenia. The cyclops is punished for the transgression. Odysseus blinds his “host” and escapes. The cyclops episode depicts an abuse of xenia.
In another story, Odysseus’ wife Penelope is forced by custom to entertain an entire household of suitors. The guests not only make unreasonable, burdensome requests that were impolite for guests but they do so with the assumption the host himself is no longer alive. The conclusion of the poem involves Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors. This violent ending can be seen as retribution for an egregious abuse of xenia, or conversely, a violation of its very precepts.There are many possible reasons why hospitality was more prevalent in those times.
Traveling in Homer’s time was much more extensive and lengthier than in modern times. Because of this, many more nights were spent away from home in many different locations. Also, there were not hotels or inns where travelers could pay and stay the night.
Because of this, travelers had to rely on the hospitality of others for shelter, food, and protection. There was, however, some payment for this hospitality in the form of a gift exchange.
Another possible reason for this hospitality was the fact that there were not nations that would allow travelers to enter their territory safely. Without such hospitality, strangers could be captured or even killed for entering a foreign land.
Another possible explanation for the amount of hospitality shown is that the Greeks believed the gods wanted them to show hospitality to anyone who showed up at their homes. It was also believed that turning away someone and not providing them this hospitality would result in some form of punishment from the gods.
Finally, hospitality could have been used to spread ones name and bring them a sense of fame if they provided a high standard of hospitality to strangers. It also could have been a way to show how wealthy one was.
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