The Carnival Comes to Paris

Send in the Clowns!

Post-Modern Identities

...and the Surrounding Commodifying Schizophrenia:

Bao, "The Cult of Online Identity Curation and Social Media’s Fixation on Aesthetics"

This is a work in progress. More sections will be added in the future detailing the history of subcultures, as well as how community has been affected by social media and the lack of third spaces.

Picture this: On your way out to meet some friends, you’re standing in front of your mirror assessing your OOTD. Your outfit? A colorful striped tee, mustard yellow mom jeans folded twice, socks with Van Gogh’s The Starry Night printed on them, and chunky Doc Martens. Perched on your nose are a pair of circular wire-rimmed glasses — do these even have lenses? (No.) Your hairstyle consists of an artfully messy bun and an array of colorful hair clips. The straps of your Fjallraven Kånken backpack dig painfully into your back, but the iconic fox logo patch that people will surely recognize makes it so worth it. Before leaving, you bid your succulents goodbye — not before almost bumping into your ukulele that’s collecting dust because of months of disuse. As you shut the door, you don a pair of headphones, and Rex Orange County starts playing. If you’ve ever been this person — congratulations, you’re an Art Hoe.

The “Art Hoe ‘’ is just one of the hundreds of aesthetic labels that have pervaded our social media world. More known ones today include cottagecore, coquette, dark academia; these labels are synonymous to certain lifestyles and products that one must acquire to be seen as part of these communities. While we could simply consider these aesthetics as creative ways of expressing ourselves, there is much nuance involved in this topic. In this essay, I argue that social media aesthetics enable surface-level self-concept due to its ephemerality and identity commodification mediated by audiovisual mediums. We will explore how all these are interconnected and how our sense of self is impacted by our exposure to trends and labels online. Finally, we will cover how aesthetics manifest in our local context through the “anik-anik girlie”.

ON AUDIOVISUAL MEDIUMS

Even before the existence of images on social media, photography as a medium of expression had already been heavily critiqued. According to Susan Sontag, photographs “​​give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads — as an anthology of images” (Sontag 1). Sontag also writes: “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted” (18).

Despite Sontag’s work being written in 1977 when social media was non-existent, her words surprisingly ring true in today’s Internet , but unlike in Sontag’s time, our current Internet landscape has grown to encompass media outside singular images. Now, people share photographs (including image carousels) and videos accompanied by captions or text. Back then, sites like Instagram were purely a photo-sharing service but have added 15-second video sharing in 2013 (Kelly). Afterwards, with the boom of TikTok that specialized in short-form content combining trends with audio, text, and video, other social media sites have replicated this feature — think Instagram reels, Youtube shorts, and Facebook shorts (Montenegro). Through these, users can share pieces of their life with others and even connect to those with similar interests. They can also express themselves by creating cinematic visuals, adding swift transitions, and layering sound effects and music. So if social media poses all these benefits, why does it seem so unfulfilling?

To answer this, let us understand social media aesthetics, which manifest visually in the presentation of fashion and lifestyles through both photo and video. Each trend now has to have a corresponding label for people to be able to participate in them; this leads to the over-labeling of aesthetics into something new and interesting, even if they’ve existed long before the label they’ve been ascribed to. In turn, I argue that the structure of content released on social media causes these trends to become more immersive to us and therefore more aspirational, not to mention the appeal to people’s ever-shortening attention spans. Given this, we now view our lives through our camera lenses and forget to live in the present. Think about it — when we see something visually pleasing like a sunset, our first instinct is to photograph it, add filters, and generate a catchy, relatable caption to post online. Instead of observing and savoring its beauty with all our five senses, we rush to preserve the memory, too focused on getting the perfect shot.

Essentially, our feed now precedes our life — I don’t think we know how to live life detached from our screens anymore. In conjunction, social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson asserts: “… life itself becomes shaped by the logic of documentation” (22). He elaborates on the two-pronged quality of social media as public and private: “Social photography is both the miniaturization and magnification of a person, a scene, and the world… But photography equally makes its subjects smaller. Through recording, the infinity of their complexity is shrunk to the size of a document” (84). Life cannot be condensed into a single photograph or video, and our frequency and depth of self-exposure online cannot guarantee reality either. There is so much context hidden outside the four corners of our screens, whether that be intentional or not. As Sontag says, they “are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy” (17). Because we curate our feeds to seem perfect, social media becomes more about how we present an image ourselves to others and not who we really are. Our online presence comprises only a portion of our lives, which can be clumsy and messy and not at all picturesque.

ON EPHEMERALITY AND IDENTITY COMMODIFICATION

Social media aesthetic labels often experience very rapid trend cycles, so they are aptly referred to as microtrends. Quiet luxury, Old Money, That Girl, It Girl, Clean Girl, Tomato Girl, Vanilla Girl, Office Siren, Fairycore, Cottagecore, Coquette, Blokette — what are these terms even? The list goes on. Most of these terms are attributed to a certain look, whether that be makeup, fashion, or both.

Not only are they attributed to a certain look, they also signal a certain lifestyle. For instance, the Pilates Princess refers to those who don hyper feminine, baby pink athleisure while simultaneously participating in activities such as working out, creating healthy smoothies, and maintaining a skincare routine (Wiki). And how do you achieve this lifestyle? Well, by purchasing products that correspond to this aesthetic. On “core” aesthetics specifically, fashion commentator Alexandra Hildreth reports: “Microtrends rely on items of clothing having an expiration date: when they are in they are amazing, and when they are out you never want to be seen wearing it again. It is an exhausting, but successful marketing ploy that taps at consumer’s anxieties of not being interesting enough, making people want to buy more to feel cool” (GLITCH Magazine).

From my observations, aesthetic labels and trends on social media have only enabled the notion that identity is bought and not developed by urging individuals to make never ending purchases as trends come and go too quickly; as such, they are temporary or ephemeral. The advent of a new trend signals a brand new monetary investment in a set of items.

From a more theoretical perspective, Guy Debord critiques modern society under a capitalist economy as a spectacle. He posits that “the Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord 7), which aligns with the earlier mentioned concept of audiovisual mediums. In addition, he discusses one primary category of spectacle: the diffuse spectacle, which occurs when “commodity abundance” exists. Commodities become a source of anxiety for the consumer; they end up seeking fulfillment from the products they purchase (32). While Debord did not live to see the age of social media, he managed to capture the essence of capitalism that remains the major economic system the world functions under. Similarly, the concept of commodity abundance prevails in today’s society, as observed in the increasing anxiety people experience when they are unable to catch up with trends due to the fear of being left behind or being irrelevant.

Before, trends would last around 20 years give or take. In fashion, a season of clothing first released on the runway enters a cycle of introduction, rise, peak, decline, and obsolescence before another clothing trend begins (Ewens). Now, trends come and go in the blink of an eye with how social media affects our consuming habits. When something becomes viral, there’s already a label attached to it, so people aspire for this lifestyle by buying items in hordes. And when fast fashion stores and companies catch onto these trends, they co-opt these aesthetic labels to sell their products — it now transforms into a systemic problem. This is highly evident in the sphere of fast fashion, such as Shein that creates products based on these trends for cheap to lure individuals to spend money (Zhou). Now, consumers are never satisfied. Under the guise of bettering themselves, they end up more desperate to form a sense of identity by buying new items and discarding old products as trends pass by.

ON SURFACE LEVEL SELF-CONCEPT

Personal identity can be related to the psychological self-concept, which is one’s image of themselves: “what one does”, “how one appears”, and “material things one has” (Bailey 386). Due to the fleeting and even flimsy quality of trends and labels online, people seem to be grasping at straws when it comes to their ceaseless formation of their self-concept on social media. Philosopher Byung Chul Han introduces the concept of “negative narcissism”, which he claims is the state people are driven to as they obsessively present themselves on social media due to the “inner emptiness of their ego”. In his book Saving Beauty, Han covers the phenomenon of the selfie: “The contemporary ego is very poor in stable forms of expressions with which it may identify, which would give it a solid identity. Today, nothing endures. This impermanence also affects the ego and destabilizes it, makes it insecure” (10).

While online self-presentation consists of more than just selfies, Han’s observation is something I generally agree with. It seems like people are always looking for the next new aesthetic label like a shiny toy — goodbye clean girl, goodbye cottagecore, what’s next? Still, there are some points of contention. I acknowledge that there are those who participate in these trends with an actual appreciation for the aesthetics. As one interested in fashion myself, I do look to social media for inspiration and have stumbled upon aesthetic labels or trends like “Ghibli-esque” (think a mix of cottagecore and magical whimsy) that appeal to me. And to be fair, not everything we post on social media needs to have a deeper meaning behind it — we’re allowed to do things simply for lighthearted reasons!

But it becomes a problem when we fixate too much on aesthetics. Han expounds on this: “It [the selfie] lacks inwardness…The exhibition of the face as a façade does not require any depth of focus. Such a focus would even damage the façade” (11). We see this play out with how social media users, especially the youth and young adults, prioritize how we seem like on social media over organic growth, who we are and can be. Our generation is overly aware but not aware enough, a contradiction in and of itself. What I mean is that we are obsessed with labeling ourselves with prepackaged personas, falling victim to the capitalistic notion that we need to purchase a lifestyle to live a fulfilling life, that we build unrealistic notions of personality and fail to notice how we are nowhere near satisfaction.

THE CASE OF THE “ANIK-ANIK GIRLIES”

While people from all around the world can partake in these aesthetic trends, there is one that is unique to the Philippine context: the so-called “anik-anik girlie”. The closest translation of this word would be trinkets or knick knacks. As someone who has been collecting a variety of items over the years, I have observed anik-anik as categorized into two: kept and consumed items. Kept items refer to items we collect for practical, impractical, and nostalgic purposes. For instance, our parents own a prized collection of plastic containers that they hoard “just in case”. We may find ourselves holding onto unnecessary items like candy packaging for no discernible reason. And out of sentimental value, we may also store receipts, tickets, and letters.

While anik-anik traditionally refers to kept items, the term has acquired a more consumerist connotation in recent times; examples include Sonny Angels or deadstock keychains from Japan Surplus stores. These are what I call consumed items as we purchase them brand new or second-hand. In relation to this, the “anik-anik girlie” has been popularized by social media, and it refers to those in their teens or twenties who show off their collections of keychains, blind box toys, and plushies on sites like Twitter and Instagram. These anik-anik are highly curated and are artfully organized in photographs or short-form content (think room or desk tours) to seem visually appealing and to some extent, perfect.

I admit that I’ve fallen into the trap of the pitfalls associated with being an “anik-anik girlie”: conflating the idea of anik-anik with overconsumption. The driving force behind my purchasing habits used to lie in the anxiety of how people would perceive me: how could I aesthetically signal that I was interesting or someone with good taste? This is contrary to the notion of anik-anik as a manifestation of a life well-lived through the tangible, often inexpensive, objects we accumulate over the course of our lives. In line with the aforementioned theorists, I and many others are misled to believe that the emotions and lived experiences of those who collect anik-anik can be purchased. It has now transformed into a mainstream trend rather than its original purpose of subverting traditional Filipino norms of practicality by collecting anything and everything.

CONCLUSION

So would it be better to stop following trends at all? Well, trends can function to allow us to discover new sides of ourselves and have fun. But it becomes a problem when we base our entire identity on the self we project online and the items we buy in desperation to create the lifestyle we want for ourselves. Amber Weir comments on this regarding personal style, but it can be easily applicable to our identity outside of fashion:

… Whereas, personal style is all-encompassing, slowly curated, and unique to each person. It slowly evolves and embodies scent, love, friendship, clothes, music, and books, and is shaped by relationships reflecting a person’s whole being. It cannot be taught by an algorithm, brand, roundup, or influencer online, because it’s specific to each person’s experience. What is truly special about personal style is the patience it takes to curate and develop (GLITCH magazine).

With the current landscape of social media prioritizing microtrends through audiovisual mediums, I find it difficult to say whether we’ll ever be able to separate ourselves from our commodified self-concept. But one thing is for certain — our search for identity should extend outwards from social media, and we can start by living in the present without our phone screens serving as a lens of the world we live in. It’s also important to develop a healthier relationship with social media and become aware of how trends, algorithms, and features can trap us in a cycle of overconsumption and dissatisfaction. We must live by engaging with the outside world, by shaping ourselves through interactions with people of various backgrounds, and by seeing that there is much more to life than prepackaged, static personalities on social media.

Works Cited

Bailey, Joseph. “Self-image, Self-concept, and Self-identity Revisited.” PubMed, vol. 95, no. 5, May 2003, pp. 383–86. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12793794.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Princeton UP, 2020.

Wiki, Contributors to Aesthetics. “Pink Pilates Princess.” Aesthetics Wiki, aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Pink_Pilates_Princess.

Ewens, Hannah. “Trends used to come back round every 20 years. not anymore.” Vice, 14 Dec. 2022, www.vice.com/en/article/bvmkm8/how-the-20-year-trend-cycle-collapsed.

GLITCH Magazine. “GLITCH Investigates: Are Core Trends Killing Personal Style?” GLITCH Magazine, 2 Aug. 2023, glitchmagazine.xyz/glitch-investigates-core-trends-impact-on-personal-style.

Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. John Wiley and Sons, 2017.

Jurgenson, Nathan. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media. Verso Books, 2019.

Kelly, Heather. “Instagram launches 15-second video feature.” CNN, 21 June 2013, www.cnn.com/2013/06/20/tech/social-media/instagram-video.

Montenegro, Lisa. “The rise of Short-Form video: TikTok is changing the game.” Forbes, 14 Apr. 2022, www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/08/27/the-rise-of-short-form-video-tiktok-is-changing-the-game.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 2001.

Zhou, Maggie. “What Are Micro Trends? How Styles Change Faster Than Ever Before — Good on You.” Good on You, 5 Aug. 2022, goodonyou.eco/micro-trends.

In Loving Memory...

Nanc and Beauty, Always in our Hearts!

Her Online Presence.

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." 

- Pericles    

tmw/FT

Are You One of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?"

by Ursula Le Guin... on a theme by Isaiah Berlin "Letter to George Kennan" (2/13/51)

Te saludo, Don Quixote!

The Ur Beachmaster & His Meaning to the Tribal Horde...

Ritual Precedes Myth

Myth Justifies Ritual

We don't perform rituals to honor stories, we tell stories to rationalize rituals.

"When Willard reaches the end of his descent into Humanity's cognitive Origins, he finds not just brutality, but ritual... or the expressionof Humanity's deep-seated desire to impose order on the unknown, and to try to make sense of the world and our place in it. According to Fraser, this desire led to the development of sympathetic magic, which in turn birthed the concept of metaphor as a means of transferring meaning between domains. The metaphor of the Dying God, for instance, was used to explain the cycle of nature. An initial reading of "Apocalypse Now" is that despite our pretentions to progress, the brutality of our Origins rears its head whenever we go to war. But a perhaps more nuanced reading is that Willard's journey is a descent from myth to Ritual, revealing our reliance on metaphor to indulge our Primal yearning to make sense of the world. The trappings of civilization: culture, surfing, music, celebrities, military decorum, even the idea of national identity can, for Fraser, be traced back to the initial collective human impulse of sympathetic magic, where imagination was wielded to exert control over a chaotic World."

[...]

The desire to control and influence the world is the same driving force that propelled Humanity from the stages of Mythology, to religion, and ultimately to Science, he [Fraser] said. Magic, like Science, assumes a certain established order of nature on which man can surely count, and which he can manipulate to his own ends. While "The Golden Bough" has faced criticism since its publication, its' core message remains powerful, that humankind abhor uncertainty, and the imagination will go to extraordinary, even horrifying lengths, to convince ourselves that we can conquer it. Whether that producing beautiful things like movies, or less beautiful things like ritual sacrifice, the "horror" that Kurtz laments at the end isn't merely the savagery at the heart of humanity, it's the abyss of the unknown and the Monstrous potential of the human imagination to fill that dark chasm. "Apocalypse Now", a stone cold capital 'M' Masterpiece, is both a testament to the beauty of the imagination and a reminder of the utter horror it can unleash... "the horror, the horror".

The Ur Super-Ego Dominating the Horde

The Schizoid Age - Navigating MetaNarratives in a MetaModern Realm

On Byung-Chul Han's "The Crisis of Narrative"

Biological Origins

The ability to create complexity at scale.

Existence + Copying = Biology

Schizophrenic Advertising... and Why it Works.

^^Which Barbie? becomes an Identity-affiliating push-poll^^

The On-line Self as a Second Order Production... to help one construct a Cohesive Narrative out of the Chaotic Order of Signifier data presentation and tie subject's affiliated flaneurian identity/ role models and derived aphorisms together with products and create a consumerist System of Objects while in parallel, forming an on-line "identity" from disparate pieces of the subjective experiences, of celebrities and other role models, obtained via adverts/ film/ video/ audio of other culture industry products.

From the above video:

This is a quiz titled, "Which Barbie doll are you", sponsored by Barbie on BuzzFeed. You may think of the central question of this video as "What kind of culture or society is this quiz a symptom of." Pretty much everyone has heard of BuzzFeed, but what many might not know is that BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, when he was younger, was somewhat of an anti-capitalist and an aspiring theorist who wrote an essay called "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," drawing on the kinds of philosophers that this channel talks about. And it is precisely in this essay that we can find an answer to our question.
One of the central themes in this essay is Lacan and his theory of the mirror stage. According to Lacan, we aren't inherently unified as individuals. In infancy, we do not experience ourselves as a bound person living through a coherent narrative of events. Instead, we experience things in a disorganized way, without unity. A loud noise over there, a bright color over there, a pang of hunger there, a pain here. In general, a sequence of unconnected "presents" in time.

However in normal development, this changes, during the mirror stage. This happens when the child sees itself in the mirror, typically along with encouragement from a guardian, who points out the child's reflection saying, "See? That's you!" The mirror stage is when the child for the first time comes to see itself as a coherent and unified individual, identifying itself with the reflection in the mirror. This is how the Subject is formed.  It's a radical departure from older accounts of the Subject. In modern philosophy, philosophers like Descartes and Kant saw the Subject, the Individual, as having an inherent unity, a unity that is independent of circumstances. For Lacan, on the other hand, this unity needs to be developed over time through socialization. The experience of oneself, as an individual, must be in a sense "manufactured" and is thus dependent on the circumstances one grows up and lives in.

One of the biggest influences on Lacan's psychoanalysis is structuralism in linguistics, which were extremely popular in France in his time, as my subscribers should know. Because of this, Lacan sees the individual as being made up of Signifiers. Such Signifiers could be anything from the nationality one identifies with, one's religion, one subculture, one's ethical code, life experiences in the normal course of development. All these signifiers connect to one another in a unified way, producing a person's experience of being an Individual.

However, it is possible for this unity to dissolve, for the Signifiers to become disconnected. And in such cases, a person is no longer capable to experience oneself as a coherent Subject. According to Lacan, this is what happens in Schizophrenia, and this is why Lacan defines Schizophrenia as being a breakdown in the signifying chain. The signifiers no longer connect to produce a coherent narrative. Instead, they become disorganized the way that they were in infancy.

The reason that I'm talking about this is because this notion of Schizophrenia was later used by theorists to talk about Culture and Society. One of the most famous examples is the Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. According to Fredric Jameson, under Modernity, people were able to see themselves as being part of a greater whole, as being a part of a narrative. Perhaps they saw themselves as part of history, or as part of some religious tradition, or even just a part of their community. This ability for people to place themselves into a narrative gave the meaning, the sense of playing some meaningful role in life, and the ability to tell a coherent story about oneself.

However under Post-Modernity, mainly starting in the second half of the 20th Century, all such narratives that previously gave people meaning began to disappear, and this is why Fredric Jameson identifies Postmodern culture with Schizophrenia. See, what happens to the individual in Lacan's account of Schizophrenia has happened on the Societal and Cultural level. According to Jameson, the Signifiers that were previously unified to give Societies, cultures, and communities meaning, have disconnected and people are no longer capable of seeing themselves as part of a greater and coherent narrative.

In other words, we have lost the power to historicize. What we have instead, is a bunch of disconnected experiences and events that we can't make sense of. We have more information than ever before, but with the lack of a narrative to identify with, we only become more lost in the midst of this information we keep being bombarded with. Images with advertisements, with brands, with videos, with movies, and tweets, and we have no ability to take all of these disconnected experiences and make sense of them in a meaningful way. On TV as well as many parts of the Internet, entertainment news, events, scientific claims, and art all become mashed together in a single stream of content. Instead of a coherent narrative, we have a whole bunch of disconnected Signifiers. And despite all of the societal improvements that have been made, wenstill feel exhausted in the face of all this incoherence. This is the way in which Jameson applies Lacan's notion of Schizophrenia to Society and Culture as a whole. Presumably a Jamesonian solution would be to try to overcome this cultural condition and discover new narratives to identify with.

Now, as Jonah Peretti points out, the conception of the mirror stage has been used extensively by media critics to explain the force images have in the regime of Consumer Capitalism. The mirroring that Lacan describes happens when a woman looks at idealized images in a fashion magazine, when a teenager stares at a poster of a rock star, or when the man on the street gazes up at the Marlboro Man on the Billboard. The Subjective Unity that Lacan talks about is nothing natural, it is a social construct that must be maintained, and many of us spend our entire life's trying to maintain it.

One of the things that many advertisements do is promise to give us this Unity that our Identity depends on. whereas in the past, the signifiers that make up one's Identity were found in religious iconography, historical figures, or art pieces like paintings and sculptures, today, to an increasing extent, the Signifiers come from Mass Media, especially entertainment and advertising. But this doesn't just change the kind of identities we form, it also changes how fast we form them, and how fast we get rid of them.

Once again, Peretti says, "I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in Late Capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume, and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with Late Capitalism. And further, to promote Consumer Capitalism, the images must have some content to create the possibility for a mirror stage identification. It is this identification with the model, athlete, or actor that encourages the purchase of the product being pitched. In order for an advertisement in GQ to be successful, it must provoke an Ego formation that makes the product integral to the viewers identity. This fragile Ego formation must persist long enough for the GQ reader to purchase the product."

What's amazing is how well this applies to BuzzFeed's advertising model. See, they do what is called "Native Advertising". They don't do ad banners, or pop-up ads, or anything that disrupts the content of the website itself. Instead, the advertising is woven into the content of the website, and the quizzes are an especially good example.

Usually, when someone does a sponsored quiz on BuzzFeed, they don't even experience it as advertising. They are asked personal questions, and then their answers are connected to some kind of branded product. Thus, the Lacanian Ego formation is extremely explicit. Your self-identity is directly connected to the brand you're being exposed to. And ideally, it makes you feel like the ensuing branded product will then affirm the identity you have formed. This is obviously not accidental. BuzzFeed's managing editorial director, Burton said, "targeting specific niches, fandoms, and identities is very important. People love it when you're speaking directly to them."

So the challenge for advertisers under Late Capitalism is to create Identity formations that could be created as quickly as possible, persist long enough for the consumer to buy the product, but also disappear quickly enough for new formations to form for new products. Of course, with our media technology, this formation does not have to last long at all. Most of us can immediately order a product at the click of a button, or consume brands through streaming services. The result is a cultural tempo unparalleled in history. People assume and shed identities like never before, leading them to consume like never before. And the result is exactly what Fredric Jameson was talking about when he applied Lacan's theory of Schizophrenia to culture.

Peretti summarizes the result of this, "This type of acceleration encourages weak Egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily. An essentially Schizo person can have a quick Ego formation and buy a new wardrobe to complement his or her new Identity. This Identity must be quickly forsaken as Styles change and, as contradictory media images barrage the individual psyche. The person becomes Schizo again, prepared for another round of Lacanian identification and catalog shopping. The "Ideal-I"s that the Capitalist Media offer are perhaps even less complex than the infantile Imago of the child's own reflection. Needless to say, such an ego wears out fast, inspiring the consumer to shop around for another one." 

The lay theorist, Mark Fisher, talks about this too, as he saw the effect of this cultural condition on the education of the students he was teaching. "The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix his twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. Students' incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation."

Jameson observed..."that Lacan's theory of Schizophrenia offered a suggestive 'aesthetic model' for understanding the fragmenting of Subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment industrial complex." With the breakdown of the signifying chain, Jameson summarized, "the Lacanian Schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time."

"Jameson was writing in the late 1980s, ie- the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical anti-mnemonic blip culture - a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices."

Now, the postmodern theorists, Deleuze and Guattari, also apply Lacan's notion of Schizophrenia to Society, but in a very different way than Fredric Jameson does. And here is one example of the distance between Marxist theory and Postmodern theory. Unlike Jameson, they do not identify Schizophrenia with Late Capitalism, nor Capitalism in general, but with the limit of Capitalism. Schizophrenia is that which Capitalism moves towards, but never actually reaches. A bit like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick. Capitalism, just like Schizophrenia, breaks down Signifiers. It destabilizes them. In DeLeuze's language, Capitalism deterritorializes things.

What this means is that Capitalism rips things out of the territories that they previously rigidly occupied. It breaks apart things that were previously combined. I know, this sounds very abstract, so I'll try to give some examples.

Before Capitalism, there were certain things that could not be bought, or sold, or exchanged. For example, Holy items. And these Holy items were bound up with specific religious traditions, and the traditions were connected to specific groups of people, and these people occupied specific territories. Capitalism deterritorializes, by breaking apart all of these elements that were previously tied together. It takes Holy items apart from their tradition and exchanges them for other things. It moves communities of people away from their original homes, and into factories. It breaks up traditions, and commodifies them to be bought and sold. In short, it deterritorializes. That which previously was connected to a specific territory, starts to circulate around the globe.

As Jonah Peretti explains, "Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the Capitalist machine as monolithic or Unitary. It does not have an "I", an Ego, or a Unified Identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that creates territories and limit exchange."

Once again, you might see the similarity between Capitals deterritorialization and Lacan's notion of Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia breaks down that which was previously unified just like Capitalism does. The Schizophrenia as a mental condition could be described as the territorialization of Subjectivity.

But now, why do Deleuze and Guattari identify Schizophrenia not with Capitalism, but with the limit of Capitalism? Well, because despite all of its' deterritorializing tendencies, Capitalism still requires a minimum amount of stability in order to function, the stability of private property rights, of capital circulation, of markets. If Capitalism reached its' limit, it would lose this minimum amount of stability and would destroy itself. Therefore, Capitalism must inhibit its' own Schizophrenic tendencies by using the State apparatus. This is why Schizophrenia is the limit of Capitalism. It is that which Capitalism always moves towards, but can never reach without destroying itself in the process. And because of this, for Deleuze and Guattari, there is a revolutionary potential in Schizophrenia.

And this is where the crucial difference lies between Deleuze and Fredric Jameson. While Jameson identifies Schizophrenia with the exhaustion condition of Late Capitalism, and therefore as something to be overcome, Deleuze identified Schizophrenia as a latent tendency within Capitalism, which in order to reach its revolutionary potential must be accelerated, not overcome. For them, the way to fight against Capitalism is not to resist its deterritorialization, but to go even further with it, accelerate until it becomes too much for Capitalism to bear, and it collapses. This is why the political tendency known as acceleration-ISM is so influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. It's not that Deleuze and Guattari believe that the Schizophrenic breaking down of Signifiers is always a good thing, but that a system becoming too rigid and unchanging is a dangerous thing because it causes the system to be averse to anything that is new.

And Schizophrenia is something that has the power to fight against that which is rigid and stagnant. It is the Schizophrenic tendency to break things down that opens up space for new possibilities, new political movements, new artistic movements, new cultures, new theories, even new modes of Subjectivity.

So, to oversimplify in conclusion, the crucial difference is that Jameson used the Schizophrenic state negatively, while Deleuze and Guattari view the Schizophrenic state as not necessarily positive, but at least possibly liberating. And this fundamental difference manifests itself in very different ways, in the political theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and philosophy of the respective authors.

When Peretti wrote his essay, he was writing as an anti-capitalist. Today, as the CEO of a huge company, he is applying the very concepts he once used critically to accelerate the advertising culture himself. I think the fact that he was able to create such a successful advertising model testifies, at least to an extent, to the validity of the theories here discussed.

But for most of us, who are neither CEOs nor professional advertisers, the task is to find possibilities of liberation. The solution is not merely to adopt an elitist attitude towards those who are easily affected by the Ego-forming advertisements of Late Capitalism. It is important to see that both Jameson's hope to overcome Schizophrenic culture, as well as Deleuze and Guattari s hope to liberate the revolutionary potentials of Schizophrenia, will require massive changes in the very foundations of the Societies we live in. Whether hope is to be found in overcoming Schizophrenia, or liberating it, I will leave up to you to decide.

Now, if you'll excuse me, the result I got is "Astronaut Barbie", and I've got some Ego formations to complete. I would also like to thank these Ego formations from my Patreon...

Labour, Culture, and Life... Commodified.

...Late Capitalism and the Tragedy of South Korean K-Pop.

A Burn-Out Society on Steroids!

Xenia - Against Xenophobia, An Assembly Theory of Civilizational "Intelligence"

Contrast and Compare - Xenia is THE prerequisite for BOTH Reason AND Rationality

When xenia is lost, it is time to leave (with no regrets)

On Xenia (from Wikipedia):

Xenia consists of two basic rules:

1) The respect from hosts to guests. Hosts must be hospitable to guests and provide them with a bath, food, drink, gifts, and safe escort to their next destination. It is considered rude to ask guests questions, or even to ask who they are, before they have finished the meal provided to them.

2) The respect from guests to hosts. Guests must be courteous to their hosts and not be a threat or burden. Guests are expected to provide stories and news from the outside world. Most importantly, guests are expected to reciprocate if their hosts ever call upon them in their homes.[5]

Xenia was considered to be particularly important in ancient times when people thought that gods mingled among them; if one had poorly played host to a stranger, there was the risk of incurring the wrath of a god disguised as the stranger. Notable among them is the Greek god Zeus, who is sometimes called Zeus Xenios in his role as a protector of strangers. This normalized theoxeny or theoxenia, wherein human beings demonstrate their virtue by extending hospitality to a humble stranger (xenos), who turns out to be a disguised deity (theos).[5]

These stories caution mortals that any guest should be treated as if potentially a disguised divinity, due to both a deity's capacity to instill punishment or grant reward for their behavior, who highly valued generosity and welcoming attitudes towards strangers,

A renaissance painting displaying traditional exchanges of gifts between gods. This represents the material and social exchanges involved with Xenia.

Madeira, and the Birth of the Invisible Doctrine

Excerpts:

...if ever the issue of Capitalism is raised, you hear people discussing it and come to the clear conclusion that they don't know what Capitalism is. You have fierce defenders of Capitalism and fierce opponents of Capitalism, but actually no clear definition of what they're talking about. And, a lot of people confuse it with Commerce, with buying and selling things. Commerce has been happening for thousands of years, and Commerce and Capitalism are absolutely not the same thing. In fact, in some respects Commerce and Capitalism are opposites.

Now, with my wonderful co-author, Peter Hutcherson, we trace the origins of Capitalism following the great geographer Jason Moore to the island of Madeira in about 1450, and we say this is really when the thing we call Capitalism kicks off. Now, one of the best definitions of Capitalism, or partial definitions of Capitalism, was provided by the great social anthropologist Carl Palani, who said that these three conditions need to be met for Capitalism to occur: the commodification of land, and we can see that as meaning natural wealth in general; of Labor; and of money. And all those three things need to happen simultaneously for us to be able to say this is a Capitalist System. And there's pretty strong evidence that the first place where they happened, where they all came together, was Madeira in 1450 or thereabouts.

The Portuguese had come across the island of Madeira in 1420. It was a genuinely uninhabited Island. There weren't many, but this was one. And they named it after the resource which they rather fancied ,which covered the island Madeira, or wood, Timber. They were very short of Timber, they couldn't build the battleships they wanted because they didn't have enough of it, so they were delighted to find this. And so to begin with, they just did what they had been doing on the mainland, they cleared some forests, they ran a few pigs and cattle in it, they shipped out the Timber. And then someone realized that this was a great place for growing sugar, perfect climate, perfect soil, Etc.. And sugar did very well there. And then they realized, well, we're in an unusual position here because there's no constraints on how we use the land. There's no church here, there's no land owners, there's no custom, there's no culture, there's no Society. We can just do exactly what we want on this land!

So, they could fully commoditize the land, just turn it into an object for making money! And then they thought, "well, where are we going to find the labor? Oh, we can just bring people in to work." And who are the cheapest people to bring in? Slaves. So they started importing slaves, first from the Canary Islands, then from Africa. And of course, slaves are fully commoditized labor. You've stripped away everything that gives them their Humanity, stripped away their social context, their cultural context, their religious context (a whole lot of it). And it's pure 100% commoditized. Labor is what slavery is. Then, they needed money to finance the operation. Previously on the mainland, you would have gone to the landowner or someone, and being charged extortion at rates of Interest. But no, they could shop around, and they could just say, "We just want money. We don't want any attachments to that money. We'll just pay the lowest rates of Interest we can get. And so, they went to Flanders and Genoa to get their money. So they'd commoditize the money as well.

And what happened was a very rapid rise in sugar production. I mean this, you know if you're trying to make a lot of money, this system works very well. But alongside it was a remarkably rapid rise in ecological destruction. And the reason for that was that this great sugar industry, which had created so quickly, absolutely devoured Madeira. You need 60 kilograms of wood to refine a kilogram of sugar. And what that meant was that as the slaves used up the timber in in the surrounding areas, they had to go further and further to get it. And suddenly, productivity fell off. By about 1470, Madeira was the top producer of sugar on Earth. The sugar industry on this tiny Island, by 1500, had collapsed by 80%. It was a very sudden boom, and a very sudden bust. And then, and this is an absolutely crucial component of it, they did what Capital has gone on to do all over the world. They left. Boom - bust quick.

Those are the three components of capital; that is what capitalism does. And then they move the operation to another Island that recently stumbled across, did exactly the same... even quicker destroyed it, used it up with extraordinary speed. Boom-bust-quit. Moved across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil, moved up the coast of Brazil, bang, bang, bang! Just taking out ecosystems, one after another. Moved into the Caribbean, by which time they've been joined joined by the Spanish, the English. And the model started to proliferate all over the world. Very profitable, but fantastically destructive. And what capitalism is, is a system of colonial looting which creates and destroys its' own Frontiers. It creates these highly lucrative Frontiers. It burns through them, literally or metaphorically, with extraordinary speed. And then, it has to move on to find the next one. And that's the product of bringing together these three Commodities at one and the same time.

And it's moved on to destroy Frontier, after Frontier, after Frontier. Ecologically, socially, culturally. It's a planet trashing machine.

Technofeuadliam's twist?   Just throw in the Commodification of Information.  Big Data

More excerpts from the above video (but very confused and illogocal v. Neoliberalism):

...You've created a commoditized money supply through your capitalist Enterprise too, so it's a sort of self-perpetuating machine until the point at which it crashes and burns. And so, for several hundred years they had pretty well a clear run. But then, it ran into a problem, a problem called Democracy. Because, when adults began to have the vote, they started to use that vote in ways that Capitalists don't like very much, like saying, "Well, perhaps we should have a bigger share of the money which is being produced through our labor. In fact, perhaps our labor should not be commoditized to the extent that it is, and we should reclaim some of our Humanity. Perhaps we shouldn't allow Machinery to rip our arms off. Perhaps we shouldn't live in places which are so choked with pollution, that we die by the time we're 40. Perhaps we want a better world for everyone, not just for Capitalists. Perhaps we want outrageous things like weekends off!"

And this was a huge problem, because it greatly limited the ability of Capitalists to make money to extract from this system, and it is an extractive system. That's what it is. And suddenly you have this limitation put in front of your extraction. And Neoliberalism is one of the two most effective means of solving Capitalism's biggest problem, which is democracy. The other one, incidentally, is Fascism, which is always backed by Big Money wherever it arises, but we're talking about neoliberalism today.

So Neoliberalism is a full-on assault on political choice that, that's its fundamental characteristic. And what it says is, we should not seek to resolve our problems and our questions in the political sphere, in other words, through democracy. We should seek to resolve them in the economic sphere. We should seek to resolve them through this thing it calls "the Market." Which, like almost all the terms involved in Neoliberalism, is the opposite of what it says it is. You know, you think about a market, what are you thinking about? You think about little little stalls with stripy awnings, and more or less an egalitarian sphere. Of

course Capitalism is the exact opposite of that, arguably the very opposite of markets. It's a sphere in which some people exploit, and other people are exploited. And so these these confusions are baked in from the very beginning. And you know, one of the primary purposes of our book is to try to resolve these confusions and explain what the terms really mean.

So but the market, in the hands of Neoliberals, means the power of money. And so, we move this away from the sphere where we don't have control , where Capital does not have control (politics), into the sphere where Capital does have control, which is the economic sphere. And of course, some people have far more power in the economic sphere than other people have. It's not one person, one vote. It can be one person's millions of votes... millions of dollars, and other person's far fewer dollars. And so they tell you, if you can shift the decision making into that sphere, you've got us where you want us.

So the the term "Neoliberalism" was developed in 1938 at a at a colloquium, a meeting in Paris. But it didn't really take off, and it wasn't really formalized, until the publication of two books in 1944, which was Friedrick Hayek's book "The Road to Serfdom", and Ludvig Von Mises's book "Bureaucracy". And they had an almost identical theme. They claim that any attempt to interfere in the workings of this thing they call "the Market", to interfere with the power of money in other words, would lead inevitably to totalitarianism.

It might look like something benign, the incipient welfare state and economic safety net, public funded services, but that would inevitably lead to Hitler or to Stalin. It was a classic slippery slope fallacy. And it was, you know, put forward with some Force by them. They're quite readable books. I mean they're absolutely chock full of holes, but you know you can sort of see there's there's a thread that you can follow, an argument that is more or less coherent, but very easy to tear apart.

And they were saying that "such impediments to Capital as high taxes, as regulation, as trade unions, as protest, should be stripped away in order to enable a kind of "natural order" to be discovered of winners and losers. There are the those who have the grace of money, and those who do not have the grace of money. And you can see from who has money, who is deserving, and who is not deserving. And if you try to alter that natural order of the righteous and the unrighteous (it's a very Calvinist approach), if you try to interfere with that, then you will sap Humanity of its Vitality. You will strip away the Spirit of Enterprise and make everyone poorer. Because if you allow the rich to get richer, they will through the "Invisible Hand" generate the money that will shower down upon the rest of us.

And you say, "Well hang on moment I thought the rest of us weren't meant to get richer. I thought we were meant to stay poor because we're unworthy!" So, straight away we start to see these enormous contradictions in it. And many peoplereacted with absolute horror and disgust towards these ideas. At the time, the dominant form of political economic thought was Keynesianism, Keynesian social democracy, which was very much distributive within the rich Nations. It was still highly exploitative between rich and poor. It was obviously a form of Capitalism. But it was far more distributive within the rich Nations tham we've ever seen before, and was about building up Public Services, was about ensuring that everybody had a decent standard of life so they could spend into the economy, and that generates economic growth. And so, this Neoliberalism was at the time very much out of tune with the times.

Popular Modernism... The Post-Punk Form

Formal Experimentation - Opposing the Culture Industry - Seeking an Artistically Induced Freedom

"Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world."

- Adorno, "Aesthetic Theory"

Born in eschewing commercialization, yet like all things, subsequently succumbing to it. 

 Neo-liberally integrated. Capitalistically appropriated!  :(

Proof of Life? Or Exotic Chemistry? New-ish Venusian Discoveries

Spy Tips for Hacking Memory

Cramming helps!  All those long nights in college... pay off!

White Pills for Digital Eunuchs...

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

They Keep Expanding the Marvel Universe...

...Cuz Our Own Must TRULY Suck!

What If...?

Hanif Kureishi, "What If I Want You to Let Me Go?"

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

Kate Mossman, "Slavoj Žižek, the court jester of late capitalism"

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.”