I’m taking a critical theory class (on “the Debilitated Subject”) with Avital Ronell, and Slavoj Žižek as an occasional guest lecturer, and today he said in class that he is going to Wall Street this weekend to speak. So, if you would like to see him speak (about the situation), make sure you’re there this weekend. Unfortunately, he didn’t specify exactly when, just that he’s going this weekend, and that he meant to go yesterday evening but slept for 16 hours instead…

Anyway, his discussion about the whole Wall Street situation gave me some things to think about, I’m a dork and transcribed it for you (as well as for myself, for my own studies):

“I am getting tired of this enthusiastic moment where we are all happy, together, and so on. What happens next? … For example, I got in a conflict with some of my Greek friends. Like, ooh you know all this revolution, people will take power, and whatever, but then I learned that they had, in helping organize the demonstrations, a big debate about what to do, and … they don’t know what to do, so they continued in the comfortable position of proposing demands onto those in power… They said to me in a very Stalinist way, okay, that there are two stages in revolutionary protest, first, revolt, protest, and then, the position of imposing a new order, and said I was confusing the two— that I am already thinking about the second one. They said that in protest, people have invented a totally new form of social interactivity, that people simply without any authority, organize themselves, everybody is allowed to speak but everybody is limited to two minutes and so on. Okay, so I said, so imagine this movement somehow taking power, imagine, each party, smuggling money like crazy out of the country, declared an emergency state, stores half empty, so what would you do? Gather, and each of you would talk for two minutes? No, I mean it seems totally prohibited to talk about anything apart from these negative demands about which we all agree… What do we want, what do we really want? Is it the old Keneysian welfare state? Is it a state of socialism where the state will take control? Is it some kind of a reduction of society to some kind of anarchist, local self regulating communities, or what? No, it’s kind of a total blockade… Also, there are problems… yes, we all agree against Wall Street and so on, I have no sympathy of course [for Wall Street, etc] … But I remain here, an old fashioned Marxist, the problem is not how evil are these people, I mean, people are the same shit, they’re always evil, no? … You cannot change people… First, you know, it’s in the nature of capitalist system that you cannot play the game which was popular two years in a row, against Wall Street and for Main Street. Because the condition of today’s capitalism is that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. Which is why I can understand why Obama and others were vulnerable to this black mail, these countries saw billions fall to the United States, it’s how the system works, change the system, not the people. Don’t fall into this logic which at its most extreme is either anti-Semitic— or, you know we will find the bad guys, corrupted, whatever, liquidate them— and then what? I mean, you should ask, how does the system allow for this? What can you do there? And also, it’s easy, almost fashionable to be, today, anti-capitalist, no? I am afraid of this type of anti-capitalism— I think, uh, it’s a capitalism which focuses, again, on these excesses of corruption , and this, in a way, does not interest me, I don’t think this is how we should fight capitalism. I mean, the problem is, the normal state which opens up the space for corruption. Now, I’m not saying, I’m not a complete idiot, that this means either a new communist revolution, or nothing. A lot can be done, also, in present circumstances, like perhaps I am for a larger degree of state control and so on and so on. But what I am saying is that we should locate what is the problem and not fall into this simple anti financial rhetoric: that there is real hard working people and then some debt from the financial circulators. This is basically the very core of the fascist ideology: that there is good productive capitalists, but then the bad bankers, whatever, are not productive… It doesn’t work like this.”

Posted 1 year ago with 17 notes
Tagged as: zizek  occupywallstreet  avital ronell  text