Apocalypse Now: Slavoj Zizek at Birkbeck College

Arriving some forty minutes before the scheduled start time, the room was already packed full. I just about managed to get one of the very last available seats, by inconveniencing several other attendees, having them get up, shuffle about and excuse me, as I slipped through to the centre of the row. Within minutes, the aisles at the side, and the back of the room were full of people standing, jostling for position and murmuring in anticipation of the man who has been called "the Elvis of cultural theory." 

With about twenty minutes still to go before time, a man who looked so much like a university lecturer he could have been in an episode of The Young Ones bellowed to the crowd that anyone without a seat would have to leave due to fire regulations. People started jeering their dissent, a man who had travelled all the way from Birmingham asked if the college would refund his train fare. One wag in a seat at the front cheered, "Let's all leave!" Pretty soon people started shuffling together, going two to a seat to fit people in (including, mercifully, our friend from Brum).

After such auspicious beginnings, it was almost a surprise to see Slavoj Zizek and his comedy sidekick, Costas Douzinas (truly the Cannon and Ball of critical theory) take to the dais entirely without fanfare, no stentorian announcer in a dickie-bow and tails, no trumpeting herald, no spotlight. Stripping off his fleece to reveal a brown v-neck t-shirt, already caked in sweat, Zizek announces that he is "tired of the old stand-up routine of the latest jokes and attacks on liberalism," before warning us that today's lecture will be mostly very boring and journalistic, with a lot of Hegel at the end. The crowd remain, undaunted, aware that this is just a part of his patter, his self-confessed tactic to "First kick the guy, then comes the theory - but kick him violently, and in the head."

Today's lecture, dramatically entitled 'Apocalypse Today' (a promise or a threat, I wonder), kicks off with Zizek identifying the three modern horsemen of the apocalypse: the techno-digital, the New Age, and the Christian fundamentalist, of which the last of the three is both the most dangerous, the most ridiculous, and also the closest to any kind of desirable emancipatory politics. The other two, at the limit, seem to pass over into each other, as techgnosis. For increasingly, modern bio-genetics tends towards the creation of entirely new life forms "from the zero level", and computer science, in, for example, Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense interface, tends towards the direct gestural interaction between computers, humans and physical reality. We become, then, through the aid of advanced technology, like gods.

The important thing for Zizek, though, is neither, like the Catholic church to decry such manipulation as immoral, dangerous and dystopian, nor, like the World Transhumanist Association (now known by the somewhat catchier soubriquet, Humanity+), to triumphantly celebrate our own self-overcoming. In their belief that the rational individual subject will ultimately survive every transformation to then decide ethically and sensibly how to use such bio-technological 'improvements', the transhumanists, for Zizek, are still too humanist. The opposition between techno-dystopia and new age optimism is a false one, the latter but the symptom of the former. We must confront technological change in order to understand it. The true miracle is not that thought might soon be able to directly influence material reality - the miracle is the gap, the distance that allows us to think and reflect.

Zizek has no time, however, for those who speak of the "proper measure", so much but no further ... and mourn the loss of our former organic connection with nature. This has happened three times already, he claims. First, the shift from mythos to logos that Alain Badiou identifies with Parmenides; next, the Christian break with the pagan cosmology; and finally, the modern disenchantment of the Cartesian subject. "The problem is not, my god, we have lost immediate contact with reality - the problem is that we see this as a problem." So, the true apocalyptic threat to society is this will to return to a "holistic civilization" of organic unity, and "restore the balance" with nature.

Of course, despite his opening caveat, we were given our fair share of laughs along the way, frequently with Costas feeding him a line and Slavoj supplying the punchline ("don't provoke me!"), and the usual attacks on liberalism ("Let us always emphasise how Really Existing Socialism was a nighmare, but let's look at Really Existing Liberalism ...":Islamic fundamentalism is the symptom of capitalist globalisation; UNESCO dismissed as "bullshit" at one point), and yes Hegel cropped up a fair bit too. Alongside Zizek's usual set of references though (Freud, Heidegger, etc.), we hear increasingly cited a cast of "friends": "My chinese friends", "My biologist friends", "My friends in Iran", even "My military specialist friends". He remains confrontational, sniggering of his lecture at LSE the next day, "We should go to the bastion of the enemy." In summing up, clearly eagre to carry on talking to anyone who will listen but with Costas, ever the martinet, desperately trying to reign him in, he claims simply, "I just want to create new enemies."

The Return of the Atheist Bus Campaign

"Please don't label me," begs the Benetton child on the billboard poster that marks the latest phase of the notorious, and increasingly inacurrately named, Atheist Bus Campaign, "Let me grow up and choose for myself." The target this time is not buses but faith schools, those Orwellian mind re-processing plants for the nation's youth, responsible for deluding our children into praying before false idols, robbing them off that most fundamental of consumer rights: choice. If last year's buses promised us the freedom to "enjoy" our lives, today's billboards, much like the defenders of private health care and private education, asseverate "choice" as their mantra and raison d'etre.

Religion here - and not just religion - is just one more case of brand loyalty amongst formally free consumers. We thence must damn faith schools in much the same way as we would advertisements in children's television scheduling - as premature, unfit for impressionable young minds, who, at any rate, lack the proper purchasing power for such commitment. And so the poster reminds us, in the silhouetted list that forms its backdrop, of the many and varied goods on the doctrinal market place: "Libertarian child, Buddhist child, Agnostic child, Scientologist child, Humanist child, Catholic child, Anarchist child, Zoroastrian child, Atheist child, Muslim Child, Capitalist child, Socialist child, Sikh child, Marxist child, Mormon child, Protestant child ... " All beliefs are apparently equal and free to choose amongst, like a sort of Argos catalogue for our most personal convictions. Nobody, claims Richard Dawkins, would think of labelling their child a Marxist child or a post-modernist child, after all.

The chief problem with the new posters is their implict assumption that some kind of neutral and ideology-free upbringing is both possible and desirable. That we might be able to raise our children without importing to them any values whatsoever (or at least, any values sufficiently coherent to add up to some sort of system or grand recits), so that they might then choose for themselves upon reaching an age of sufficient responsibility - say 17 or 18, around the same time as their first credit card, one presumes - seems as fanciful as it is naive. There are of course rare examples of children who appear to have grown up outside the human symbolic network - poor Kaspar Hauser, out in the woods, and little Isabelle Queresma, raised by chickens - but it would be a rare parent indeed who would hold them up as the very paragons of a healthy upbringing.

In the end, there is really no such equality amongst the various 'options' on offer in the background of this poster. One sort of 'child' is not quite equal to all the others. For to raise one's child ("unideologically") in a capitalist society is always already to raise a 'Capitalist child'. Its values will be those of capitalist society, up to and including the belief that one can shop for religions just as one might pick and choose amongst washing machines. Indeed, perhaps the only defence against this auto-engendering of the capitalist child is precisely to explicitly label and raise your son or daughter as a 'Marxist child' or - why not? - a 'Protestant child', 'Muslim child' or 'Catholic child'. With the the almost wholesale collapse of any sort of Left opposition in Western societies, religion has become practically the only bulwark, the only mainstream voice of opposition, against the excesses of capital, from the trademarking of the human genome to the rapidly escalating gap between rich and poor. So, "label me" cries my inner child, "and label me clearly," for there is no label so indelible as that which claims it is none.

Capture the Fun

It is curious how, the more 'fun' becomes the all-consuming mantra of modern times, the harder it apparently is to grasp. I am thinking of the new mobile phone ad which demands that we "capture the fun, share the moment." The 'fun' must be captured. It is trying to escape. Fleeting, elusive beast, this 'fun'. And then we are expected to share this precious thing? We must, we are told, first individually grab and store fun, and then, through our own beneficience, distribute this fun philanthropically amongst our friends and acquaintances and indeed, thanks to the magic of Twitter, the whole world.

Of course, the notion of 'sharing' has a particular resonance these days. Thankyou for sharing, implies the off-loading of some emotional debt in the manner of an at least semi-public confessional. It's AA speak gone mainstream. The underside of a 'fun' defined by consumption is of course precisely this debt, as the vogue for organic food and the subprime mortgage crisis both testify in their different ways. This is the double movement of modern hedonism: to seek out and seek to master this ubiquitous dyad of fun and debt, then, in failure, the penitential act of sharing and confessing in an endless circuit of the drive.

If fun is to be made our prisoner, caught and detained, shackled and hooded in extraordinary rendition, it seems to beg the question, well, where's the fun in that? Privatised and atomised, plugged into our iPods to keep the world at bay and bathe in that curiously tinny, infantalisingly oedipal, aural womb, we crave fun to the precise degree that it imprisons us. This fun is starting to look increasingly like work, and the technical prostheses through which we might access both are, of course, the same. Just as Blackberrys and mobile phones offer us a sharing shorn of any real sense of community, we are left with a fun drained of pleasure. The hardest prison to break is the one that you choose.

E(nmity)-Mail

You don't need to be a confirmed Lacanian to realise that to read an email is, already, to misread an email. One could evoke the old Russian formalist distinction between fabula and syuzhet: there is the actual bare words of the email itself (syuzhet), and then there is the story, and the affect, we interpret and, in a sense, invent ourselves, from these words (fabula). As in film, the two can never fully coincide, nor do we have any guarantees that that latter conforms in any way to the author's intentions. In a film, it could certainly be argued, this does not matter. With Stanley Cavell, we can argue that the filmic object is what we remember of it and how we interpret it. When dealing with emails, this presents fairly obvious practical problems. 

Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, authors of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (a book which I have not read, so please forgive me if I repeat anything they say) are fond of saying that "email is an affectless medium" and offer various tips for better, friendlier, more productive, email communication. But why should this be so? Why do we need to overcompensate for the coldness of electronic communication with emoticons and multiple exclamation marks? Why is it so hard to imagine a book of the collected emails of some great author, poet, or statesman, when so many similar collections of 'snail mail' letters exist? 

I suspect one reason is the way email simulates intimacy. Its model has really never been the letter, and it is rare to apply the formal rules of letter writing - even to a complete stranger - that come so naturally when using the postal service. When writing emails, we tend to write as though we were talking ("Hi, how's it going?" scarcely "Dear Sir,") and so we read as though we were listening. Email fakes an imaginary presence which tends towards the illusion of making the medium seem invisible, whereas a letter will always remind us of its own frame. When reading, we tend to superimpose a tone of voice - and almost inevitably a different tone of voice to the one with which it was written - onto an email without thinking about it. This then skews our understanding, creating a kind of paranoid hermeneutic which would be quickly dispelled if we were talking in person (due to cues - themselves as good as invisible - such as tone of voice, facial expression, etc.).

Yet, despite all the formal signs to the contrary - the dear sirs, the letterheads, the yours sincerelys - a handwritten letter actually is more intimate. For even without any understanding of graphology, a letter retains the mark of the body (it's grain, if you like, following Barthes) - the slope of the characters, the pressure on the paper, little crossings out - all speak to us directly from the fingers whether we consciously realise it or not. We can pour our heart out in a letter, somehow we can only vent spleen in an email. And it wouldn't take much surfing (pick a message board or a comments box at random to see what I mean) to find evidence that this problem of false, forced directness is far from restricted to email, but infects almost all web-based communication.

Then again, perhaps behind my words (and those of Messrs Shwalbe and Shipley), there is an implied idealist vision of communicational utopia, wherein, if only we all understood the medium better we would all just get along fine and all the world's problems might be boiled down to a simple matter of misunderstanding. I can't help thinking of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which, by removing all barriers to effective communication between different cultures, causes "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation". The crucial thing, perhaps, is to recall, with Lacan, that we understand the other's speech best when we recognise the impossibility of our own understanding, the necessary and constitutive gap which makes any communication possible. 

Protest Today

Reading the various commemorative pieces on the twenty year anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin wall, I am struck by a curious thing: the numbers. From The Observer, "In early November, a mighty Berlin demonstration drew half a million to thunder calls for change ... on the night of 9 November, 50,000 East Berliners rushed to the Wall." Half a million people, 50, 000 people... No small change by anyone's standards. But then, a little under fifteen years later, on the 15th of February, 2003, over a million people protested against the Iraq War. The effect? None whatsoever. So, in East Germany, a supposedly totalitarian state, half a million people can bring about regime change - in the UK, a supposedly liberal-democratic nation, twice the amount of people are nonetheless totally impotent. A little later in the same article, we read that the rumoured death of one student at the hands of the police in Prague on November 17th was enough to bring half a million people to the streets and ultimately kick start the Velvet Revolution. It later turned out that the rumour was in fact false. On the 2nd of April this year, after kettling in several thousand protestors, the police are caught on video beating a newspaper salesman, Ian Tomlinson, to death. The consequences? One officer is interviewed on suspicion of manslaughter. Now, what, ultimately, were the demonstrations across eastern Europe in 1989 about? What did they want? Well, supposedly, democracy, liberal freedom, the right to dissent. In other words, they were protesting for the right to protest. Evidently, this was a freedom they basically already had, and we no longer do.