Letter to a friend

You were talking about whether you should take Zizek seriously when he has become something of a philosophical rock star to your age peers. You feel a split, in general alienated from them, and want to be critical of their choices, or of how they see Zizek. From them you have gathered that he supports their interest to stand above politics and not to engage, and this turns you away from him. There are many interesting questions here: one of them is, what are we really trying to do when we read someone who brings with him or her a certain aura, a frisson of fame/notoriety? What are we looking for? All of our reading of serious non-fiction is motivated by some kind of desire, which can't be symbolized by and reduced to specific questions we want answered. We may be attracted by two seemingly contrary motives that succeed each other as moments. Seeing the crowd forming around Zizek, for instance, we are partly attracted in the same way they are, asking ourselves, "what is the charisma here that draws them, what message does he have that I might also want?" We must then accept that we are in this moment part of that "crowd mentality" that wants to consume him for the same reason others do. We see everyone screaming for the beautiful package and we can't help asking, as they also do, what's the mystery inside? Here we must confess to having no identity apart from others. Yet in the very next moment, seeing ourselves do this repels us as a betrayal of our independence, our desire not to consume like the others but to be genuinely interested for myself as an individual who can pick and choose for my more intimate, personal needs. These I do not necessarily share with others--the mind I say I value as "my own". So we feel a contrary impulse, to recuperate ourselves with an almost violent reaction, which means to explore him against the crowd.

This then splits into two possibilities: either to discover that the crowd is foolish to find anything of value in him, OR to find that the crowd is attracted only for the wrong or superficial reasons. Wrong reasons would be that he does not in fact profess what he does--and we are then obligated not only to point out the mistake but to say why others would choose to misread him. The superficial reason would be because they are attracted to the package only, wanting to be seen as a hip follower, etc. rather than to his hidden, in a sense more mundane message, which to pursue they would have to lose their hipness and not pretend to be so knowing about him. In other words, if Zizek is the fool we denounce him as a charlatan or if the crowd is foolish we defend him against his false followers, who are using and distorting him unconsciously for their own purposes. In either case we are drawn to engage him in a genuine way, that is non-academic, where we get to define and assert our own motives for and uses of this labor of understanding, rather than as part of the institutional project. This brings in the element of passion, which is blind and destablizing, and for these reasons anathema to the disengagement academia prefers.

What is interesting in what you say about the crowd's take on Zizek is that their passion for him would partly conform to the quietism the traditional academy would prescribe. That academy would advocate only the freedom not to make "absolute" judgments, that is, commitment to judgments based on reasons outside the current standards of accepted science. In fact, what I get from Zizek himself is quite the opposite, that there is no avoidance of choosing; one cannot choose not to choose, and all choices are political in that they relate to our well-being on the planet. If the "buzz" around him is that he exudes an aloof cynicism and withdrawal, then people have isolated some texts I haven't come across, or it would be worth knowing how such a distortion could take place. I suspect that people are drawn, right now at least, to the image, the personification of engagement, but don't know how to take the further step to being such a person. If Zizek is the Father, the Moses, then we surely must know that he can't enter the promised land himself; everyone must, as the gospel says, go through that lonesome valley by themselves. His young followers must leave the academic Mother (or the rebellious Child of more politicized faculty) and walk out into the lonely world where no one will bless them and shelter them, where they will have to take the consequences for every mistake they make. The same was true with the coffee-house existentialist engagés of the fifties; they had to first feel their way into the role of being actually politically committed before they--or at least their sixties successors--could actually find themselves doing it.

Above I say "we" I can see my own patterns of following/rebelling, not with regards to Zizek--when I stumbled on him I had no knowledge of how hip he is today--but with regards to other heroes. Usually I wait until they are safely obsolete, and then abandon them if they come in vogue again! We cannot escape being consumers, satisfying our need for goods material and spiritual by means of choices that seem to come from our personal knowledge. But to do this we can't ignore what the world around us is doing, that is, the open-air marketplace, which arouses doubts about our choices: why is everyone rushing over to that table? Are their asparagus better than these I just picked up? On the one hand we are confident in our knowledge, on the other, we prudently allow for our ignorance. These two seem to come in percentages and we can observe how people, including ourselves, work with the imbalances that are bound to appear in our various personalities.

Loosely related to these two moments I would pose two opposing ideal types: the specialist expert, the savant, the one who needs to trust to the highest degree all that he or she pronounces, and so must restrict authoritative statements to a narrow range of competence. In relation to others one feels a great need to be trusted, to reduce challenge and conflict to a minimum, observing clear rules of how to deal with opposition and associating with others who share that commitment. Here is the traditional academy that I refer to above, it is the rule of a self-defining community. There is a hierarchy of one's own knowledge with the "area of competence" at the peak, and a community is founded on this ideology. Ostensible security then is a cover for a vast sea of insecurity; in saying one thing I tacitly acknowledge my huge uncertainty about everything else, to the point of fearing to tread on another's bailiwick, recoiling in horror that I might offend the other and provoke a hostile attack on my own small tract. To paraphrase Sartre, the hell of insecurity is other people, who don't respect property lines and like wandering cows come trampling on my grapes just to find something more to eat, something that is not appropriate to them. At the other extreme is the generalist, the wandering cow, who takes in a huge amount of information about all kinds of things, and does not hesitate to opine on practically anything. This one might make bold assertions but doesn't have the command of details to back them up with an authority that would be respected by the specialist. This figure can be often be refuted as inaccurate, ill-informed, and confuted as the egoist who weaves theory out of thin air for the sake of dazzling the gullible (I think the so-called intellectual "babe magnet" fits in here). So the specialist appears confident in his/her mental powers but in fact must limit the field of judgment in order to appear so; the generalist appears confident but is vulnerable to charges of building castles of theory on the sands of ignorance, so it is a confidence that seems to come from personal boldness, extraversion, rather than being rooted in anything solid. This figure is scorned as one who has the answer to everything, and therefore the truth about nothing.

What confuses the picture is that while the specialist is authority, and has respectability enough to turn all opponents into rebels, it has this for an inescapable price: all authority is suspect--even the most buttressed academic knows that. Specialized authority (think of the academic philosophers who don't think Zizek--or Deleuze--is even worthy of being called a philosopher) is based on a fear-driven ego, and may at best be accurate and precise in statements but in the end cannot say what purpose that knowledge (the kind of knowledge the university still enshrines as sacred) is for. Simply to have it? To even speak of a desire to know means to drive towards a place beyond safe boundaries, it is to ignore the safety of boundaries.

I tried to conceive this as a balanced two-pole image, with the specialist on one side and the generalist on the other, with the mean as the position of choice, the should. But I fooled myself, I couldn't help but find the generalist more attractive, as if this were the role of the intellectual, as opposed to the scholar. The generalist takes the greater risk of being ignored and condemned as wasting his or her own time as well as that of others who pay attention to them; this would bother some but instead attracts me. So ultimately this is an argument that has reached my life--my life as an academic, renunciation of that for a committed politics, renunciation of that for the specialization of playing one kind of music on one instrument, then back into generalized study, etc. I go to the marketplace thinking I know just what I want to buy, see the crowd moving--history itself envelops me, then I feel deceived, "I want my life back", etc. Now I am moving again, after a long period of specialization, and what I do is no longer of any importance, instead it is what the world does that is beautiful.

For a brief coda, Zizek is attractive partly because he is a generalist, and this is a good reason for people to be attracted to him before they know anything of his ideas. He stirs people up, and we need to be stirred up in order to get moving under our own steam.  ¶ 12:06 PM