from Mount Olympus

"This image has made the front pages because it is exciting. Its violence is liberating to contemplate, in a dangerous, Dionysian way. The ancient Greeks mythologised the irrational, savage, destructive side of the human psyche in stories of the wine god Dionysus and his crazed followers. Down the centuries, pictures of social protest have summoned up those same wine-dark powers or recognised them in moments when the quiet of the city is turned inside out and all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot."

A recent column in the Guardian by Slavoj Zizek managed to include a quotation that was anti Jewish in tendency and anti Gypsy in substance. This week, Jonathan Jones's column manages to misrepresent the students' protest against increased tuition fees, and provide an example, in the author's muddled prose, of the priggishness and petty ignorance that the present university system is alleged to inculcate.

Jones attempts to explain Nietzsche's concept of the "dionysian" in art, of which he is reminded by some pictures he's seen of the students' protest. Perhaps imagining himself to be writing from Mount Olympus, he sees no reason to mention Nietzsche, who existed in a particular historical context, preferring to regard his theory as holy writ. Jones either feels his readers don't deserve to know the context of the ideas they're being fed, or Jones wants to take credit for them: either as their originator, or as a Derek Acorah of philosophy, channeling the voices of the ghosts.

The students' protest was entirely rational in intention. It clearly expressed an open antagonism. It didn't coincide with Jonathan Jones's personal plans and intentions, and so is presented as its opposite: "irrational, savage, destructive", "all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot". With or without the intervention of all the gods of wine, beer and stout, Jonathan Jones seems to be having trouble getting out of his own head.

The Pepsi Challenge

Zizek's latest thing might be thought of as a sort of Pepsi challenge, where Guardian readers get to decide if they like the cool flavours of Robert Brasillach - if reading a newspaper is tasting blind.

Zizek's shoddiest op-ed yet

A good method for analysing things is, start with what is really happening.

Some British workers get that the point of immigration is to keep wages low. Those that are both self interested and economically literate tend to be opposed to immigration for this reason. The media and government apparatus responds to this constituency by shrilly accusing them of racism, and offering them various ways of expressing this purely economic grievance, involving shrill expressions of racism, in various strengths, and no programme for improving their economic circumstances. The notion that British workers are seeking to preserve a pure British race, or a pristine British culture, is part of this process of recuperation, by which the plutocracy seek to defame or divert people critical of its policies. But this imposture is absurd, because Britain has been racially diverse for a long time, and its culture is capitalism.

Dr Zizek’s shoddiest op-ed yet basically rehashes the British plutocracy’s propaganda, in an attempt to convince Guardian reading “progressives” that the working class are “a paranoid multitude”, subject to violent racist fantasies, with the inference that the “progressive” middle class ought to rally round the oriflamme of plutocratic “liberalism”.

I realise this simple explanation doesn’t account for all of Zizek’s rhetoric: his nonsensical history, his neglected fascist “thinkers”, his collages of disparate ideas dressed up as an argument, and his media personality, apparently delighted to talk about “half-Jews” “and so on“. I’m not sure that Zizek “ironically” represents the true spirit of European plutocracy, while posing as its adversary, or anything like that. Really, I think he’s just a bit of a cock.

Zizek update

The world of Zizek studies was rocked this week with the publication of a five year old article by Ian Parker, which was basically sympathetic to Zizek, and which went some way toward explaining his writing, but which also contained an apocryphal anecdote about Zizek. The article is available as an MS Word file here:

www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc

According to Parker, one of the themes addressed in Zizek's work is "how it [is] possible to engage in transformative personal change", which, if we really are "caught by ideology" and "caught by fantasy", literally coincides with the problem "how it is possible to be revolutionary". Zizek's greatest wheeze was probably his discovery of a new role model for "transformative personal change", previously unknown in the world of Mind Body Spirit publishing: Vladimir Lenin.

This is Zizek's "mischevious" side. What is strange is that Parker really has to spell it out, for those otherwise gifted souls involved in "artistic practice, personal change and political transformation", not to mention "quite difficult theory", who might otherwise "overidentify" with Zizek's drollery for no good reason whatsoever. In this Parker has done a great service to advanced education. In fact, one wonders whether Zizek himself wanted to signpost the article, in order to reign back some of the Ultra-Zizz graduate students.

The weaknesses of the rest of the article are the weaknesses of advanced education, which is dominated by people who are good at believing anything. One might have thought that pro "philosophers" would be able to decompose the Freudian system into the logical operations that constitute it (i.e. the "Freudian proof" underwrites each otherwise unrelated development of the Freudian system), but apparantly this isn't possible. Instead, all the "advanced studies" are layered on top of each other, as in a Hanna Barbera monster sandwich: "Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis", "Marxist politics".

Parker compares Zizek's "lessons" with "hysterical" explanations:

"Psychoanalytically speaking, and drawing on the work of Lacan, we could put it like this. The hysteric finds a way of speaking the truth through lies."

It is precisely the "Freudian proof" that guarantees for the "hysteric", that is, the client, their inevitable, though unconscious, omniscience over their own history. For Zizek to perform the same function for his readers, his particular clients, he would have to have the same omniscience over universal history. Zizek seems to have read maybe two books in the last five years (not counting the books he's written), and he's not really that clever anyway.

(see also Colonel Chabert's latest Zizek studies masterpiece, here.)