On Slavoj Zizek: Thinking Though the Gaps in the World

(ONDIT-PEDIA)

- Words, Brendan De Paor-Moore. Illustration, Chloe Langford.

Slavoj Zizek, love or hate him, has earned the dubious and paradoxical title of ‘academic rock star’. The persona and style the Slovenian philosopher has established is vital to understanding the position he’s opened up in the public intellectual space. Zizek’s oratory is a headlong rush of trenchant observation and exclamation, wrapped in a garland of ceaseless nervous tics (and a thick Slavic accent). His writings are similarly peripatetic and restless, driven by a commitment to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist revolutionary politics. He’s easily intellectually distracted – the subject of each of his books is all and everything. (According to Terry Eagleton in the Times Literary Supplement, Zizek’s “forty or so books …are disheveled collages of ideas, ranging from Kant to computer science, St Augustine to Agatha Christie.”). Zizek’s wide range and rapid movement bizarrely replicates the hypertext ‘mode of consciousness’ – but his work is not so much a celebration of this multiplex mode of consciousness as it is an effort to show the way that truths are scattered and dispersed through this fragmented space of representation. Zizek shows a way to use the distractedness of popular culture to create an active and critical consciousness, as opposed to the atomised form usually created by such fragmentation.

One of Zizek’s typically counterintuitive readings of culture is his off-hand reading of the Gap: Gap sells blue jeans to both upper class and working class people, and this coincidence of fashionable objects of consumption could easily be seen as evocative of the end of class antagonism in the so-called ‘post-industrial age’, but when you look at the attitudes taken by the different subjects we see that even in this tiny phenomena we find the formal basics of an antagonism remain. For the lower-class consumer, the jeans represent the emulation of the wealthy, the attainment of enviable status, and so on, but for the upper-class patron, the same jeans represent their informal attitude – the fact that even though they are wealthy they are comfortable in the same clothes as everyone else. Consumers buy the same item to purchase different kinds of social identity. We can allow Zizek his satisfaction at the irony that the very name ‘the Gap’ is strangely suitable to this state of affairs.

It would hardly be laudable if Zizek’s work was a reduction of political issues of class and identity to this kind of cultural analysis of signs in consumerdom. My feeling is that it’s the other way ’round – Zizek works to reconnect severed images and signs to fundamental political structures. If Jean Baudrillard was the theorist who declared that culture had unhinged itself from any fundamental symbolic features, and become dictated only by the drive to infinite and accelerating self-expansion, Zizek is the theorist who gambles on it being still dictated by the basic co-ordinates of capitalist society. These co-ordinates are defined by a basic antagonism between the drive of profit to infinitely maximise itself and the interests of other social structures and agents to both derive benefits and protect themselves from the damage that is often a consequence of the unburdened capitalist will to power. Hence, the seemingly flippant use of ‘the Gap’ actually indicates something far more significant: the fact that our society does not fit together into a harmonious whole, but is riven with cracks and fissures which are the domains of struggle. The basic identifying feature of ideology at its purest is the attempt to paint over these cracks with a harmonious portrait.

Zizek is the first public intellectual whose mode of address corresponds fully with the globalised world. Because he himself is a media entity (the subject of two films – Zizek! and A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – a commentator in several papers and reviews, and a constantly updated presence on YouTube) his very occupation of this specific domain enables him to appropriate it for a use against its own grain. Working in an absolutely post-modern style, Zizek insists on modern themes of fundamental social dynamics, struggles for emancipation and a fundamental ground of human freedom. In this way, he exposes the superficiality of the post-modern – able to sustain itself only as a style.