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."

Artist-Critic

"Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,
worthy of the name ... All fine imaginative work
is self-conscious and deliberate."

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

As both a critic and a practitioner, someone who both does and makes stuff and also writes about the stuff that other people do and make, I seem to find myself in a slightly precarious position. A friend who is both an actor and a screenwriter recently wrote to me on Twitter, having just read some film reviews I had written for The Quietus, "You sound like a real critic. Are you sure that's a good idea?" Knowing the man in question, I suspect that this was intended with a certain arch good humour which might tempt us to dismiss the comment as mere banter, were it not for the fact that it is by no means in isolation. In film and pop music alike, anyone who attempts to cross the great divide is often regarded with a certain suspicion - as are auto-critical works of popular art. 

"Pop music about pop music," sniffed Popjustice dismissively a propos The Pipettes, and K-Punk recently asked of popular films that they "dare to be a symptom," as though the work must stand dumb and inert awaiting outside critical enlightenment. Is it not the case though that being a mere symptom is in fact the least that a work of popular art can do? It can hardly help but be a symptom - but isn't it somehow more exciting if the work is both symptom and diagnostician? Able not only to exhibit the trace of some greater syndrome but also, in a further step, to comment on and analyse, either explicitly or implicitly, the syndrome itself as well as its own relationship to that syndrome, to make us think and pose new questions to us, rather than simply providing example to an answer we have already decided upon. This needn't be dismissed as mere po-mo eyebrow-raising, and works of this nature go back much further than anything we might sensibly call post-modernism - indeed, isn't the verse philosophy of Parmenides just that? 

It is therefore my contention that the world might profit from greater consort between critics and those they critique and that some fine work might result from this collusion. The nouvelle vague and British Free Cinema movements provide some support for this assertion, likewise the horror films of Dario Argento, and Paul Morley's involvement in ZTT records, but otherwise examples in popular culture have been relatively unusual. In 'classical' music however the opposite is almost true, and has been for nearly two hundred years now. Mendelsohn, Lizst and Wagner all wrote extensively about music, both in the form of prescriptive essays and more standard review articles. In the twentieth century, the career of Pierre Boulez has almost been defined more by his polemical writing about other composers than by his own actual music (anyone who doubts Boulez as a writer would be wise to recall that roughly half of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts are lifted straight from the pages of Boulez), and lest we forget, no less a music writer than Theodor Adorno had a parallel career as a composer. These two are far from alone in proving that aestheticians need not fail ontically in order to fully grasp artistic ontology.

Under market capitalism, critics and producers are engaged in a curious dance. Each is basically addressing the other at all times and acting as big Other for the other, whilst constantly pretending otherwise. The artist claims to be working for some reified and mystified entity called the Audience, secretly aware that it is the critics' judgement that will more decisively shape their future, and the critic claims to speak for the consumer, the man on the street (this obscure beast, the Audience again), but really longs for recognition by practitioners and prays that their barbed comments will strike the artist to their very marrow, perhaps even encourage them to work differently. For some reason, however, full assumption of this dance - for the dancers to actually look each other in the eye, perhaps even kiss - is strictly taboo.

On the part of critics, this may be due, at least in part, to the roots of popular cultural criticism in anthropology, to engage would thus be to 'go native' and any work that is itself critical can safely be dismissed as being 'uppity'. For practitioners, it may be an odd mix of fear and envy towards the subject supposed to know. In fact, I rather suspect that people who make films and pop music regard critics more highly and rate the power of the critics more highly than anyone else does - and this precisely is the source of their resentment. The critic can then safely become a scapegoat for all personal feelings of failure. If these two can be overcome, what of the notion of critical distance? Where goes the critic's objectivity if they are forever canoodling with the objects of their discourse? Surely, the only good materialist response here is to admit that there never was any critical distance in the first place, that critics do not stand aloof from the world, able to pass objective judgement on it from some olympian height, nor should we want them to. Granting this, I fail to see how a more intimate 'insider' knowledge of the process of production could possibly harm the critic, nor how greater critical reflection, or even academic abstraction, could possibly harm the author. Artists are not children and it is time we stopped treating them as such. Critics of the past have hitherto sought only to comment on the world of popular culture, the point is to change it.