Morton with a different take on Žižek at Occupy Wall Street

Tim is rather critical, HERE, of Žižek’s behest that the protestors not fall in love with themselves, and goes into some detail about it.

I had a more positive reaction (see a few posts below) and maybe didn’t say enough about why. The lines in question went roughly as follows: “There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after.”

I’m a love of carnivals in every form. But I’m also sympathetic to what Žižek says here. For in my opinion, nothing is more tiresome than opposition for opposition’s sake, the making of impossible demands on everyone who seems to have “power.” We’ve reached the point where to be in opposition is an automatically cheap way to look serious. This is true not only in politics, but also in intellectual life, where being skeptical about everything you hear and fumigating all beliefs from your consciousness are for some reason considered the gold standard in intellectual depth.

In terms of Occupy Wall Street, I think Žižek was simply trying to say that the grand gestures of opposition are ultimately fruitless if they lead to nothing, and that it all comes down to whether the protestors can actually change things in some way. And as I said a week or two ago, that’s also the one thing that I consistently enjoy about Foucault’s attitude– he was never into opposition for opposition’s sake, as far as I can tell.

And this is also why I’d rather read Žižek on politics than almost anyone else, even in cases where I couldn’t agree less with what he’s saying. Despite his reputation (partly deserved) as an unfettered intellectual wildman, there’s the right kind of realism at the core of his political statements. He has no patience for any irresponsible maneuvering for moral superiority, and on that point I couldn’t agree more. He makes finite demands rather than infinite ones, and there’s something refreshing about that.

Returning to the case at hand, I think Žižek was simply saying, bluntly enough: “Don’t fall into the trap of doing this just because it makes you feel morally superior to greedy stockbrokers. That gets us nowhere.” And that trap is a lot easier to fall into than is sometimes acknowledged.