HOW SHALL I PUT IT? THE WORD OF GOD SLAVOJ ZIZEK MASTERCLASS
0 Comments Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | 12:56 am.
'I like it that it's (sincerely) not so crowded, because I hope you won't be really disappointed, because this time, I really want to do it in a very naive way, what the title says.'
Notes Towards a Definition of Comunist Culture, the masterclass given by Slavoj Zizek at the The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities was a five-day long affair analysing 'phenomena of modern thought and culture with the intention to discern elements of possible Communist culture'. The masterclass was supposed to moves at two levels: 'first, it interprets some cultural phenomena (from today’s architecture to classic literary works like Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) as failures to imagine or enact a Communist culture; second, it explores attempts at imagining how a Communist culture could look, from Wagner’s Ring to Kafka’s and Beckett’s short stories and contemporary science fiction novels'.
Although even in the introduction, Zizek would dismistify this overall plan, in what seemed a more organic (even naive) construction of reflections on 'where we may find utopian and non-utopian (or whatever) traces of what, retroactively, may/will/have been the beginning of a communist culture', the (naive) reflections were intertwined with the 'usual' bad taste jokes, which most of the times presented the most crucial point of his argument, or at least, the seed to it.
From a broadcasting perspective, Zizek would be this difficult public character that producers would want to put a 20 seconds delay, so they could control his sometimes uncontrolled language and apparently lack of politeness, but then everyone would loose the brilliance of his unresting quest, challenging everything, all the time, in every possible way.
Day 1 Utopias
Zizek started with wild animal parks, a kind of utopian fantasy, where the observer is reduced to a pure gaze: the scene is only there for our gaze. Watching the ('boring') channels like National Geographic (or Wild Life), we pointed out that 'animals don't need coaching, they just do it', and therefore a glimpse of a utopian mode is offered to us, a mode without language and any coaching need, 'a world untamed by language', where everyone has his/er place and is in his/er place. In a way, 'animals can have sex a-historically', and with that they overpass the phantasmatic narrative that always entaisl and impossible gazer, the gaze as object, the stain in the image.
Foccusing on historian utopias, through references to Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Empire, the dark middle Ages, miracles and science, Kafka, communist utopias, the television series 'Heroes', Lacan, Badiou's notion of 'subtraction', Zizek pointed that there is a third way to the duality fundamentalism/ liberalism, a collective emergence of 'freakshiness', a kind of freak disciplined collectivity, the ultimate utopian dream, a group of outcasts living together.
Zizek actually started with a reference to 'Blindeness' (the movie by Fernando Meirelles, based on the Nobel Prize José Saramago book, 'Ensaio sobre a Cegueira') where an apocalyptic event, arises in the existing society a kind of animal egotism and then the building of a community, a communist community. In the discussion afterwards, Zizek warned the audience to what he (precisely) had not said: 'I am not saying that everyone would be happy', but this was not really the issue.
Day 2 Architecture as Ideology: the Failure of Performance-Arts Venues to construct a Communal Space
In his introduction on Day 1, Zizek warned that the masterclass would be a rather naive take on the title and warned the audience that Day 2 would be a new domain in his own 'bluffing': '...because tomorrow I will do Architecture!' Referring to an invitation to participate in a conference he explained: 'Things like this make us believe that God exists, literally, when I was approaching my computer to say: NO!, to this invitation, someone rang at the door with a present from a friend, a book on architecture. The book is purely (just) descriptive, on these (how does the Queen calls them here?), these new Performance-Art Venues, but immediately I thought that I could steel all my ideas from it.'
From Lucia Costa/Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia to Stalinist Neo-Gothic Architecture, Zizek pointed out the materialization/embodyment of ideology in architecture, a kind of ideological edifice, where ideology is 'acted out, staged and even stated', staging in a 'mute way' the truth.
Foccusing on Hitchcock's Psycho main character, Norman Bates, running between two ideological edifices (the 'horizontal' motel and the 'vertical' house) and referring to the main goal of post-modernist architecture in ofuscating ideology, Zizek proposed that if Frank O'Gehry had intervened in the motel/house, Norman Bates would not have killed his victims, as the split between these two architectures as ideologies would be resolved. Continuing with post-modernist arhcitecture (and his analysis of performance-arts venues) he foccused on the relation between inside and outside, where the outside is no more an expression of its inside, where there is a cut in the link between function and form, where organs seems to be floating inside a box.
Referring to Koolhaas, skin and organs, Liebskind, multiple axis boxes , the minimal aesthetization, and the 'Kinder Surprise' (the chocolate egg) effect in architecture, shells and sculpture, 'Junk Space' and the 'Bilbao Effect', terrain buildings and lord of the Rings hobbits' villages and 'a house within a house' and the envelope approach, Zizek tried to reflect on the message of this redoubling as proof of the new public spaces being privately developed, stating that Performance-Arts Venues are the Holy Grail for architects.
In discussing the possibilities of a progressive architecture, he noticed the existence in the performance-art venues of intersticial spaces with no function, and that the occupation of these space could be a possibility: new communism begins with new spatial configurations.
Afterwards in the discussion, and taking the reflections back to the centre of communism, when presented with the substituion of the burned down cathedral (religious symbol) with a community swiming pool and then the rebuilding of the cathedral as it were, and questioned to what we would prefer, he replied: 'a swiming pool covered by a cathedral, where people could jump from the towers'.
Day 3 Wagner's Ring as a Communist Narrative
In the first day, Zizek announced Wagner as his favourite, where all his love lies, and actually the foccus on Wagner's Ring was about love. Waht Zizek proposed to do was a total rehabilitation of wagner, claiming that he was actually struggling with a communict project, albeit an unfinished one.
First, we have to reject the historicist reading of Wagner, but not in a sense of idealism of eternal art. as art can be redone in every epoch, work in different contexts, therefore going beyond historical contextualizations. Secondly, we should read Wagner like we read Hegel, study both in detail.
Then, if you connect the music with the stage action, you will discover the modern rule of Wagner's music: the fantasy of reality, the myth. The music becomes the phantasmatical envelope of the stage words/action.
Drawing his reflections on a series of extracts of a recording of Wagner's Ring, Zizek foccused specially in a moment in the end, where the remaining community (of extras in the stage) turn to the audience and remain there in silence looking towards the us. Zizek ended with the notion collective love, stating that love is needed above everything else, love as a call to act, the end of Wagner's Ring is exactly that: a open space for action of the collective, it is up to us now, the true path starts here (after the finalle), in the passage to the collective mode.
And tomorrow, we are back to the 'old boring stuff', here comes the regime totalitarian discipline.
Day 4 Populism and Democracy
Starting as usual with a theoretical point followed by an obscenity, Zizek pointed to the gap between master signifier and proper knowledge, stating that we should make our own cannons, to which he contrasted the 'false avant-garde arrogance' totally integrated in the market system: 'if you think something is disgusting in an art work is simply because, you didn't get it' (which Zizek explored fully with a reinvention of an article on Andres Serrano Piss Christ, 1987, but foccused on an hipothetical recording of Mr. Zizek Shitting).
Proving his point, Zizek stated that truth does not lay in the extreme (and here Zizek positioned himself on the side of the 'stupid' common society), defending that 'extreme' does not mean 'authentic'.
Referring to Ernesto Laclau, Populism as a reactive strategy, Democracy and freedom of choice, Lacan's Lost Object, Obama and the emancipatory dimension of Isalmism (beyond turkish proto-market and islamic fundamentalism), Berlusconi and Putin, the Foucauldian reinvention of the subject and contemporary capitalism, Zizek pointed to out that in the market economy, you can choose between, say 'Coke' and 'Pepsi', but you can never make any radical choice. The eternal dynamic questioning of the subject in consummerist culture only renders the feeling of guilt: making you look 'non-authentic'.
There is always an authentic moment (but they are exceptional), there is a moment when the people discover something has changed, and they are not afraid anymore. Those in power are playing the same 'shock game' as avant-garde (after 1968): 'No dignity! No moral!' Politics have become economics! The public space is becoming more aand more a 'collective shared private dream'. Public space is truning a universalised private space.
Day 5 Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Problem: Does this multi-centric world (in which western culture in not any more privileged) compels us to renounce every project of a single universal history no matter how critical it is?
From evolution to historicism, post-colonialism and the provincialization of Europe, abstract history and concrete life world, the 'not-yet' of capital and universalism, the ecological crisis, post-modernism as the fullfilment of modernity and the return to a religious state (after the reign of the secularized evolution in reference to Peter Sloterdijk) as actually the ultimate death of religion, Zizek claimed that 'we always misunderstoo ourselves': particular multiple life worlds are in fact universal capitalism.
Human universality remains in the ruptures, 'the breaking point', the discontinuities of cultural identities, in the sameness of the politics of diversity. In a rather apocalyptic tone, Zizek pointed out that there is no return to 'normal' when the (bad) situation is normalised: the only way is to die. Beyond psychonalisis and sado-masochism, this is the tragic position you have to adopt in radical political struggle. The truly heroic thing is to radically sacrifice family and dedicate yourself to the struggle. 'The true heroism is not to return to normal life!', assuming that he is this kind of hypocrite leftist, devoted to the struggle who gets invited to a conference in the united states, but ty to get a business class ticket.
In a very modest (and naive) conclusion, Zizek asked us if we (including himself) really know what is going on today? 'We have all the jargon, but do we really know what we mean and what that means (second modernity, what does it mean?)'. One thing he was aware that the shattering of all existing world (in a rather apocalyptic approach) could render a new order without possible repetition of the existing one: 'We need Dark Ages!'
The recordings of the masterclass may be downloaded from the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website.
[ The title refers to the debate at the ICA on 18 June 2009, between Slavoj Zizek (atheist, Marxist) and John Milbank (‘radical orthodox’ theologian), where Zizek quoted passages from the Bible, reading the Holy Spirit as as an inauguration of radical communitarianism and in order to proof his accusation to Millbanks of liberalising the Gospel. ]
Notes Towards a Definition of Comunist Culture, the masterclass given by Slavoj Zizek at the The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities was a five-day long affair analysing 'phenomena of modern thought and culture with the intention to discern elements of possible Communist culture'. The masterclass was supposed to moves at two levels: 'first, it interprets some cultural phenomena (from today’s architecture to classic literary works like Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) as failures to imagine or enact a Communist culture; second, it explores attempts at imagining how a Communist culture could look, from Wagner’s Ring to Kafka’s and Beckett’s short stories and contemporary science fiction novels'.
Although even in the introduction, Zizek would dismistify this overall plan, in what seemed a more organic (even naive) construction of reflections on 'where we may find utopian and non-utopian (or whatever) traces of what, retroactively, may/will/have been the beginning of a communist culture', the (naive) reflections were intertwined with the 'usual' bad taste jokes, which most of the times presented the most crucial point of his argument, or at least, the seed to it.
From a broadcasting perspective, Zizek would be this difficult public character that producers would want to put a 20 seconds delay, so they could control his sometimes uncontrolled language and apparently lack of politeness, but then everyone would loose the brilliance of his unresting quest, challenging everything, all the time, in every possible way.
Day 1 Utopias
Zizek started with wild animal parks, a kind of utopian fantasy, where the observer is reduced to a pure gaze: the scene is only there for our gaze. Watching the ('boring') channels like National Geographic (or Wild Life), we pointed out that 'animals don't need coaching, they just do it', and therefore a glimpse of a utopian mode is offered to us, a mode without language and any coaching need, 'a world untamed by language', where everyone has his/er place and is in his/er place. In a way, 'animals can have sex a-historically', and with that they overpass the phantasmatic narrative that always entaisl and impossible gazer, the gaze as object, the stain in the image.
Foccusing on historian utopias, through references to Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Empire, the dark middle Ages, miracles and science, Kafka, communist utopias, the television series 'Heroes', Lacan, Badiou's notion of 'subtraction', Zizek pointed that there is a third way to the duality fundamentalism/ liberalism, a collective emergence of 'freakshiness', a kind of freak disciplined collectivity, the ultimate utopian dream, a group of outcasts living together.
Zizek actually started with a reference to 'Blindeness' (the movie by Fernando Meirelles, based on the Nobel Prize José Saramago book, 'Ensaio sobre a Cegueira') where an apocalyptic event, arises in the existing society a kind of animal egotism and then the building of a community, a communist community. In the discussion afterwards, Zizek warned the audience to what he (precisely) had not said: 'I am not saying that everyone would be happy', but this was not really the issue.
Day 2 Architecture as Ideology: the Failure of Performance-Arts Venues to construct a Communal Space
In his introduction on Day 1, Zizek warned that the masterclass would be a rather naive take on the title and warned the audience that Day 2 would be a new domain in his own 'bluffing': '...because tomorrow I will do Architecture!' Referring to an invitation to participate in a conference he explained: 'Things like this make us believe that God exists, literally, when I was approaching my computer to say: NO!, to this invitation, someone rang at the door with a present from a friend, a book on architecture. The book is purely (just) descriptive, on these (how does the Queen calls them here?), these new Performance-Art Venues, but immediately I thought that I could steel all my ideas from it.'
From Lucia Costa/Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia to Stalinist Neo-Gothic Architecture, Zizek pointed out the materialization/embodyment of ideology in architecture, a kind of ideological edifice, where ideology is 'acted out, staged and even stated', staging in a 'mute way' the truth.
Foccusing on Hitchcock's Psycho main character, Norman Bates, running between two ideological edifices (the 'horizontal' motel and the 'vertical' house) and referring to the main goal of post-modernist architecture in ofuscating ideology, Zizek proposed that if Frank O'Gehry had intervened in the motel/house, Norman Bates would not have killed his victims, as the split between these two architectures as ideologies would be resolved. Continuing with post-modernist arhcitecture (and his analysis of performance-arts venues) he foccused on the relation between inside and outside, where the outside is no more an expression of its inside, where there is a cut in the link between function and form, where organs seems to be floating inside a box.
Referring to Koolhaas, skin and organs, Liebskind, multiple axis boxes , the minimal aesthetization, and the 'Kinder Surprise' (the chocolate egg) effect in architecture, shells and sculpture, 'Junk Space' and the 'Bilbao Effect', terrain buildings and lord of the Rings hobbits' villages and 'a house within a house' and the envelope approach, Zizek tried to reflect on the message of this redoubling as proof of the new public spaces being privately developed, stating that Performance-Arts Venues are the Holy Grail for architects.
In discussing the possibilities of a progressive architecture, he noticed the existence in the performance-art venues of intersticial spaces with no function, and that the occupation of these space could be a possibility: new communism begins with new spatial configurations.
Afterwards in the discussion, and taking the reflections back to the centre of communism, when presented with the substituion of the burned down cathedral (religious symbol) with a community swiming pool and then the rebuilding of the cathedral as it were, and questioned to what we would prefer, he replied: 'a swiming pool covered by a cathedral, where people could jump from the towers'.
Day 3 Wagner's Ring as a Communist Narrative
In the first day, Zizek announced Wagner as his favourite, where all his love lies, and actually the foccus on Wagner's Ring was about love. Waht Zizek proposed to do was a total rehabilitation of wagner, claiming that he was actually struggling with a communict project, albeit an unfinished one.
First, we have to reject the historicist reading of Wagner, but not in a sense of idealism of eternal art. as art can be redone in every epoch, work in different contexts, therefore going beyond historical contextualizations. Secondly, we should read Wagner like we read Hegel, study both in detail.
Then, if you connect the music with the stage action, you will discover the modern rule of Wagner's music: the fantasy of reality, the myth. The music becomes the phantasmatical envelope of the stage words/action.
Drawing his reflections on a series of extracts of a recording of Wagner's Ring, Zizek foccused specially in a moment in the end, where the remaining community (of extras in the stage) turn to the audience and remain there in silence looking towards the us. Zizek ended with the notion collective love, stating that love is needed above everything else, love as a call to act, the end of Wagner's Ring is exactly that: a open space for action of the collective, it is up to us now, the true path starts here (after the finalle), in the passage to the collective mode.
And tomorrow, we are back to the 'old boring stuff', here comes the regime totalitarian discipline.
Day 4 Populism and Democracy
Starting as usual with a theoretical point followed by an obscenity, Zizek pointed to the gap between master signifier and proper knowledge, stating that we should make our own cannons, to which he contrasted the 'false avant-garde arrogance' totally integrated in the market system: 'if you think something is disgusting in an art work is simply because, you didn't get it' (which Zizek explored fully with a reinvention of an article on Andres Serrano Piss Christ, 1987, but foccused on an hipothetical recording of Mr. Zizek Shitting).
Proving his point, Zizek stated that truth does not lay in the extreme (and here Zizek positioned himself on the side of the 'stupid' common society), defending that 'extreme' does not mean 'authentic'.
Referring to Ernesto Laclau, Populism as a reactive strategy, Democracy and freedom of choice, Lacan's Lost Object, Obama and the emancipatory dimension of Isalmism (beyond turkish proto-market and islamic fundamentalism), Berlusconi and Putin, the Foucauldian reinvention of the subject and contemporary capitalism, Zizek pointed to out that in the market economy, you can choose between, say 'Coke' and 'Pepsi', but you can never make any radical choice. The eternal dynamic questioning of the subject in consummerist culture only renders the feeling of guilt: making you look 'non-authentic'.
There is always an authentic moment (but they are exceptional), there is a moment when the people discover something has changed, and they are not afraid anymore. Those in power are playing the same 'shock game' as avant-garde (after 1968): 'No dignity! No moral!' Politics have become economics! The public space is becoming more aand more a 'collective shared private dream'. Public space is truning a universalised private space.
Day 5 Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Problem: Does this multi-centric world (in which western culture in not any more privileged) compels us to renounce every project of a single universal history no matter how critical it is?
From evolution to historicism, post-colonialism and the provincialization of Europe, abstract history and concrete life world, the 'not-yet' of capital and universalism, the ecological crisis, post-modernism as the fullfilment of modernity and the return to a religious state (after the reign of the secularized evolution in reference to Peter Sloterdijk) as actually the ultimate death of religion, Zizek claimed that 'we always misunderstoo ourselves': particular multiple life worlds are in fact universal capitalism.
Human universality remains in the ruptures, 'the breaking point', the discontinuities of cultural identities, in the sameness of the politics of diversity. In a rather apocalyptic tone, Zizek pointed out that there is no return to 'normal' when the (bad) situation is normalised: the only way is to die. Beyond psychonalisis and sado-masochism, this is the tragic position you have to adopt in radical political struggle. The truly heroic thing is to radically sacrifice family and dedicate yourself to the struggle. 'The true heroism is not to return to normal life!', assuming that he is this kind of hypocrite leftist, devoted to the struggle who gets invited to a conference in the united states, but ty to get a business class ticket.
In a very modest (and naive) conclusion, Zizek asked us if we (including himself) really know what is going on today? 'We have all the jargon, but do we really know what we mean and what that means (second modernity, what does it mean?)'. One thing he was aware that the shattering of all existing world (in a rather apocalyptic approach) could render a new order without possible repetition of the existing one: 'We need Dark Ages!'
The recordings of the masterclass may be downloaded from the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website.
[ The title refers to the debate at the ICA on 18 June 2009, between Slavoj Zizek (atheist, Marxist) and John Milbank (‘radical orthodox’ theologian), where Zizek quoted passages from the Bible, reading the Holy Spirit as as an inauguration of radical communitarianism and in order to proof his accusation to Millbanks of liberalising the Gospel. ]
Labels: architecture, Birkbeck, capitalism, communism, communist narrative, communist space, democracy, environment, identity, ideology, marxism, opera, populism, Slavoj Zizek, universalism, utopia
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