Voices: 'Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets': Part 2, 'Behold the Man'

Is it possible to learn from an imbecile? If this sounds like a completely politically incorrect question, it is. I ask it as it comes from a self-described imbecile who has also been called the most important philosopher in the world today: Slavoj Zizek.

And he prides himself on trying to unsettle virtually every group in the world.

His lectures are rock star events, with thousands in attendance. He has films and an unending stream of books. He puts out one a year or, as with this year, two. His Book on Hegel, his self-described magnum opus, is what initially motivated me to write about him now.

He is, again, self-described mad man. I have already profiled another mad man, Hassim Nicolas Taleb, the author of the recent Antifragile and the propounder of embracing the need to understand the world of black swans.

Zizek is also obsessed with economics, philosophy, and the way we choose to live our lives. And he is also angry at how many people live in willful blindness to the important issues facing most of the world today.

But Taleb is a renowned Wall Street guy and Zizek is a one time presidential candidate of Slovenia who has a range of interests and expertise that is wide, deep, and eclectic. In Part I of this overview and book review I want to put forward changes he has advocated for during the past 15 years that are only now coming to be a part of mainstream discourse.

Ezra Pound, another mad man I have mentioned before, has called artists ‘the antennae of the race’. They are out in front of the rest of us picking up on things well before most of the so-called ‘experts an pundits’ who fill the airwaves and blogosphere. I would say, like most prophets, Zizek has been prescient and also blind. He is, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, “all too human’, in every sense of these words.

Given Zizek’s range of references and interests it would be impossible to summarize his work in a blog entry. His greatest influences are names that some of us have heard, but few have actually read 'deeply': Hegel, Lacan, Marx, and Deleuze, are just a few philosophical luminaries. But he also likes to quote dirty jokes, has commented on porn, and is famous for bringing in the densest thinkers in history to bear on popular culture in all its many forms. For those who wish a great introduction to his approach to ideas and popular culture, his Looking Awry is the best place to start. It is funny, wise, and full of great insight while at the same time providing a framework of seeing the world through Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.

To hear him speak in public is to bear witness to performance art. His associative mind creates innumerable connections across disciplines, epochs, and languages. Some of what he says is brilliant, and some of it terribly funny, and some of it is disturbing in both good and bad ways. He loves his role as the 'enfant terrible' of philosophy and revels in his role as the imbecile or fool who gets to reveal what many of us know but are not willing to say. Here is the way Zizek opens his incredibly dense and wonderful book Less Than Nothing:Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism:

There are two opposed types of stupidity. The first is the (occasionally) hyper-intelligent subject who just doesn’t “get it,” who understands a situation logically, but simply misses its hidden contextual rules. For example, when I first visited New York, a waiter at a café asked me: “How was your day?” Mistaking the phrase for a genuine question, I answered him truthfully (“ I am dead tired, jet-lagged, stressed out …”), and he looked at me as if I were a complete idiot … and he was right: this kind of stupidity is precisely that of an idiot. Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot: a man of extraordinary intelligence, but a proto-psychotic unable to process implicit contextual rules. In literature, one cannot avoid recalling Jaroslav Hašek’s good soldier Švejk, who, when he saw soldiers shooting from their trenches at the enemy soldiers, ran into no-man’s land and started to shout: “Stop shooting, there are people on the other side!” The arch-model of this idiocy is, however, the naïve child from Andersen’s tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is naked— thereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath our clothes.

This opening salvo is typical Zizekian prose. He moves from a depicting himself as an idiot in a comic set piece to references to the inventor of the computer, Alan Turing, to an example of surreal action in a great Eastern European novel to the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale commented on by an obscure French precursor to the avant-garde composer John Cage. If zigging and zagging at lightning speed cross multiple levels of high and low culture is your idea of great fun, then Zizek is a man you must read. I can think of no one writing today who brings so many different worlds of words together in ways that I think are often fruitful and insightful.

But it also means that much of the reading is very dense. Early on in this book, for example, his long discourse on Plato’s dialogue Parmenides assumes the reader has a familiarity with an astonishingly large range of thinkers. The more Zizek one reads the more the references echo, but even those new to his work will still find nuggets of insight nestled alongside seemingly impenetrable prose and multiple references. Part of his point is that all language is ideological and that insights into the way we live in the world can be learned from commercials or Shakespeare or terribly off color jokes. In this he follows Freud and others who see the transgressive as social commentary and not just lowbrow or avant-garde efforts. He wants to push boundaries to get us to redefine the way we speak; for in doing so, it will redefine the way we act as well. To get a sense of why I think he is a vital figure for those who wish to think about larger social issues, I will take as a case study just one tiny thread of his work. As it pertains to education, I thought it might appeal to readers of this blog.

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What I wish to focus on in this entry is his critique of the American academic and intellectual left. He has long been writing about how the leaders of the left have been duped into acting in ways that fail to address the central issues that face the great majority of the human who populate the planet.

Perhaps a useful starting point is to quote him from an interview:

I think it's too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let's withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I'm an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible. This is why I supported - ok, my support doesn't mean anything, but as a public gesture- Obama.

When he says he supports Obama but it is meaningless he at least in part means that because he is not a US citizen he is not eligible to vote. Zizek is critiquing many intellectuals on the left who comment from Olympian heights (perhaps Ivory or Ivy towers would be more appropriate), on the power of big business and the hegemonic influence of Western rationality, but who are not willing to do more than write books or articles that help with tenure and help with promotions rather than taking more specific and real actions in the larger world. Zizek wishes the left to get down from its idealistic perch in order to try to effect positive change, at least as he defines it.

The issue with which he has fought with the left over the years has been the interrogation of the meaning  and the usefulness multiculturalism and cultural studies In short, Zizek critiques the left’s  implementation of the acceptance of moral relativism as the de facto sanctioned form of belief in academia. He finds the willingness to tolerate and make equivalent all points of view both morally sterile and not in keeping with a genuine commitment to significant social change. Why? His point is that the system of capital is more than happy to have the left support the promotion of certain groups or races who have previously been marginalized (African Americans for example), as the effect is basically still safely within a system in which the haves will still dominate the have nots.  The end result, he notes, is that the larger issue of economic disparities across all races has not been addressed.

If a great deal of effort has been put into helping certain races have access to education and then to the power that will then result, it still comes at a cost. If one group of marginalized people is given extra benefits in admission or jobs, this will only mean that those who are not part of these groups will be left out in greater percentages.

As colleges and universities have spent millions designing programs and strategies to encourage under-represented groups on campuses it has meant that the percentage of racial diversity has increased but at a significant cost.  The sad fact is that at most elite colleges and universities there are very few students, of any race, who come from the low end of the economic spectrum. Zizek has again and again said it is this issue which is much more important to the long-term health of any country.  He has said that intellectuals have taken the easy way to feel good about their liberal credentials by focusing on racial preferences rather than class issues.

A glance at the data would indicate he has a point. At most highly selective colleges and universities, the percentage of low income students is woefully low. Some schools with huge endowments have addressed this issue but for the most part, the gap between students who have money and those who don’t has followed a line similar to the widening gap between income in society as a whole.

Zizek is mad that the left has been blind to the needs of most of the people who struggle to make ends meet. . It is easy, he says,  to applaud diversity as it comes at little cost. Many of those under-represented students who populate prestigious schools are from the high end of the economic scale. His point is that this fails to address the large numbers of low income students who do not have access to schools, resources, and opportunities that would  prepare them for future success. While many schools have created and maintained offices of diversity, they do not have offices for low-income students. Financial aid offices distribute limited resources but they do not serve as mentors or guides. And then there is the fact that the vast majority of low-income students who pursue higher education in this country are white. Over the past several generations there has been very little effort on the part of educational institutions to put money and resources towards helping them. So too for Asians. 

These 2 groups comprise nearly 80% of the low-income students who are truly marginalized in terms of access to elite educations. Schools often spend a great deal of money buying lists of under-represented students from low income backgrounds who have test scores that are in the range of a school's academic profile. Very little has been spent on the vast majority of students who could use similar help but are not grouped in with those who have been deemed as bringing in diversity to classes and dorms.

But now it appears that much of this might change. It is not so much that schools are willingly changing their approach. Instead, it is the belief that the Supreme Court is on the verge of striking down racial preferences while encouraging a greater representation of the diversity that can be learned from those from different economic classes. It is a great irony that one of the leftist leaning thinkers in the world of academia has been arguing for the same things that a conservative Supreme Court may now call into law.

But it also appears that some of the media elite are finally willing to give the issue more scrutiny than they have ever done before. Just this week the New York Times published several pieces on the issue of class-based diversity.  In other words, Zizek is no longer standing alone in his emphasis on the importance of economics and class when it comes to promoting social change in this country or any other. More and more traditional liberals are now supporting his calls for large term change that will more actively alter economic disparities. 

Whether the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, as it now exists, is an open question. So too is whether academic institutions are prepared to change their definition of ‘diversity’. To adopt a new paradigm is never easy and is never quick. There are many stakeholders who are convinced that the emphasis on promoting diversity through race is necessary for the country. And there are many reasons to think they have good arguments to make on this issue. But at the same time, there seems to be a growing body of data that demonstrates that the focus on racial preferences has come at the cost of many people who have been left out of the special programs and incentives to help them rise above their economic circumstances.  If there is a significant change, then Zizek will be put forward as a prophet. Or at least he will on this issue.

In a subsequent entry, I will address the more troubling issue of whether a man who can at times be brilliant can also be someone we should not take all too seriously if we actually read him closely. His efforts to promote social change extend beyond simply encouraging a change in the discourse on class. As he has said in his interviews he is not one to sit on the sidelines. And the implications of what this really means raises troubling questions about whether his words might actually be a provocation which encourage far more radical changes to the world order than the way colleges and universities, and the intellectual elite as a whole, address the way to promote access to education.