I think Zizek does reasonably well in this venue. He sets himself apart from facile crisis-mongering, and he handles the questions about greed and tolerance very well. Al Jazeera, as far as I can tell, seems to be the best mass TV station on the planet. Their programming has more substance and, unheard of in the West, a certain amount of sympathy for oppressed and exploited peoples, particularly in the global South. I'm not saying their politics are perfect, but, as I say, for mass commercial TV, they are reasonably good.
Showing posts with label zizek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zizek. Show all posts
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Žižek on Al Jazeera
Monday, July 13, 2009
Why is the single mother 'typical'?
Zizek writes:
"In the rejection of the social welfare system by the New Right in the USA, for example, the universal notion of the welfare system as inefficient is sustained by the pseudo-concrete representation of the notorious African-American single mother, as if, in the last resort, social welfare is a program solely for black single mothers -the particular case of the 'single black mother' is silently conceived as 'typical' of social welfare and what is wrong with it." (from his "Multiculturalism: Or, the logic of multinational capitalism" in New Left Review in 1997).
As he continues: "it is at this level", that is at the level of what is to count as 'typical' or 'politically uncontroversial', "that ideological battles are won or lost". The fact that "this link between Universal and particular content that acts as its stand-in" in the case of social welfare and 'black single mothers' "is the contingent outcome of a political struggle for political hegemony".
Thus, Zizek concludes, "Etienne Balibar was fully justified in reversing Marx's classic formula: the ruling ideas are precisely not directly the ideas of those who rule. How did Christianity become the ruling ideology? By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of the oppressed -truth is on the side of the suffering and humiliated, power corrupts and so on -and rearticulating them in such a way that they became compatible with the existing relations of domination".
Friday, October 10, 2008
Žižek on the Crisis
Some excerpts:
"Faced with a disaster over which we have no real influence, people will often say, stupidly, ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ Perhaps, lately, we have been doing too much. Maybe it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about doing something instead of actually doing it – but sometimes we do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them. Like quickly throwing $700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it came about..."
[...]
"If the bailout plan really is a ‘socialist’ measure, it is a very peculiar one: a ‘socialist’ measure whose aim is to help not the poor but the rich, not those who borrow but those who lend. ‘Socialism’ is OK, it seems, when it serves to save capitalism. But what if ‘moral hazard’ is inscribed in the fundamental structure of capitalism? The problem is that there is no way to separate the welfare of Main Street from that of Wall Street. Their relationship is non-transitive: what is good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street, but Main Street can’t thrive if Wall Street isn’t doing well – and this asymmetry gives an a priori advantage to Wall Street."
Read it all here.
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