Slavoj Žižek and the unbearable heaviness of the 2010's.
"The most dangerous philosopher in the West” and also “the Elvis Presley of cultural theory” was born on the first day of spring 1949: a Slovenian, the “Giant of Ljubljana”.
Slavoj Žižek is known for having mixed two difficult authors like Hegel and Lacan and is hated by many for having constructed a public persona sui generis as a philosopher who also takes inspiration from the mechanisms of celebrity.
For example, it is known that his ideal home is made up only of secondary spaces: bathrooms, corridors, kitchens, closets: hence, in his kitchen in Ljubljana, the cupboard is full of underwear and socks.
Slavoj also loves rubbing his nose every now and then, speaking with an accentuated lisp that makes him hiss the words, with crumpled T-shirts which - as a habit - slightly tears in fits and starts. And a minimal look, with steely eyes. His ex-wife, an Argentine model named Analia, could have been his niece; his current wife, thirty years younger than him, is an attractive Slovenian journalist.
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THE PARALLAX VIEW
Kojin Karatani is responsible for the formulation of the so-called “parallax view” applied to Kant. Karatani states that - faced with antinomy in the Kantian sense of the term - we should (to quote Žižek who speaks of it in "Interrogating the Real" and in "The Parallax View")
“resist the temptation to reduce one aspect to the other (or, in the same way, carry out a sort of ‘dialectical synthesis’ of opposites). One should instead reaffirm the antinomy as irreducible and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain position opposed to another position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them.”
From those books (in fact SZ's publications sometimes repeat themselves, more or less with the same words) Žižek deepens the scope of the concept of
Parallax, to the point of making it a tool that recurs in many of his books, such as the massive - and sometimes sublime - "Living in the End of Times" (which you can find like many of his books as
free pdf or in paperback or paperback on Amazon: the choice is yours.)
What is REALLY interesting is the irreducible space of that discontinuity, the Parallactic Gap.
Parallax can - in short - present itself simply as the change of an object by virtue of a shift in the point of view; this is readily observed in the spatial dynamics of objects; such as the architectures of Gehry and Liebeskind, forms that tend to accentuate irreconcilable points of view, that cling inconceivable prostheses to pre-existing neo-classical buildings, as in the case of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto: disturbing architecture for disturbing times. Even the variation of perspectives along a temporal axis can give rise to a parallactic gap, as suggested by some time-lapse images of "Koyaanisqatsi."
If we want to follow Zizek's didactics, parallaxes can be of many different kinds: pictorial (the Mona Lisa: "this irreducible gap between the 'subject' and its background"), political, musical, architectural, the one intrinsic to quantum theory, to neurobiology, to Lacan's Real (which "does not have a positive-substantial consistency, it is only the gap between the multitude of perspectives on it") let alone the parallactic status of philosophy per se.
A unique Žižekian twist is to associate the parallax gap with Lacan’s “little object a”, or the “object-cause of desire”, which allows me to transform an ordinary object into what “is the focus of my libidinal investment”. That “je-ne-sais-pas-quoi in the object that cannot be reduced to any of its particular properties” which – banally – makes an old guy like me loose his mind for a young Sri Lankan woman.
But how to associate "small object a" to parallax? Well, here’s how SZ explains it:
“The object a is close to the Kantian definition of transcendent object, in that it represents the unknown x, the noumenal heart of the object beyond appearances”.
The “objet petit a” can thus be defined as a purely parallactic object:
"not only do its contours change with the movement of the subject; it only exists – its presence can be felt – when the environment is looked at only from a certain perspective”.
Indeed, for Žižek that "small object a" (“that unknowable X which forever eludes the grasp of the symbolic and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives”) is the underlying CAUSE of the parallactic gap that arises “when a pure difference emerges – a difference that is no longer a difference between two positively existing objects, but a minimal difference that divides that one and only object from itself”.
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BIEBE-RITES TIMES
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What interests of Justin Bieber are the parallactic gaps that can be seen in the interstices of the Bieber-brand publishing: skateboarding videos, well-produced songs, calculated appearances, Calvin Klein commercials and related SNL parodies, etc.
Take for instance his three-minute-of-total-silence recorded on Closed-Circuit TV before a Dale County judge in Miami. He seems to be performing 4’33” by Cage, which permeates his surroundings: a composition of legal minuets, of recitatives; 'Music for tribunals' as Eno might say.
The supreme 8or sublime?) punishment of the angel, his ‘silencing’ is a rite of initiation to the gang of the ‘moderately transgressive’ and a slight vertigo accompanies the parallactic vision of the singer as the silenced. Which role model will the Bieberites follow? Two faces of an ideology that - at the same time - rewards (on MTV) and condemns (on CCTV) transgression. It is in the implicit “reconciliation of the gap” that one senses the ideological scope of these characters.
[The theme of waste, metaphorical or stinking, is not a small one; it is no coincidence that in a documentary, Žižek chose a North American landfill as a sound stage: for him that is the true Lacanian “Real” in today's society. Waste is the face we hide, we think it magically disappears after we throw it in the garbage, killed forever by our irrational. Like poop. A presence prior to our symbolic elaborations.
And, Žižek docet, that like poop also waste scares (well... the shit out of us,) whenever it reappears, if it comes back: think of Naples in the waste emergency, with the rat-munched bags spilling garbage on respectable sidewalks. Or the infernal toilet that returns a perfectly-shaped turd, fiercely slipping above the water vortex! The WC-example is not accidental: SZ has his own theory on how excrement, depending on the European country and its predominant philosophies, disappears ‘off stage’ - in the toilet.
A slightly coprophilic theme that reminds us of the incident of the three pop singers from 'Il Volo' band, winners of a Sanremo Song Festival: the three go for a gig to Locarno, in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, and snub the hotel they had booked, literally shit-splashing the place (as the hotel owner says first), or rather not so (as they say first - and then the owner too.) And the case shrinks up and is shoveled away like dried, well... poop.]
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TECHNIUM
Crucially, in today's world science no longer addresses the problem of finding answers to specific questions, but rather of letting machines do their work, touching areas unknown to us whose perimeter we can draw only a posteriori. As Kevin Kelly says,
"Today, basically we take technologies as they come and each new technology, one after the other, catches us unprepared".
This is the main strategy of advanced research. And isn't this already the prophesized technium? According to Kelly, technium is "accelerated evolution": a robotic Gaia on steroids; in other words, multiple objects in a network that result in something that goes beyond the simple sum of the attributes of each object.
Following Kelly, evolution - and therefore also technium - has a direction dictated by matter and energy, the underlying trends that direct technology, "which means that certain aspects of technium are inevitable". It follows that this is precisely why technology is pushing forward: not by our ideological choice but rather as an expression of a primordial energy that precedes us.
Clearly, this too is a meme of a very specific ideology. Demonstrations of the ideology of technium in recent years are becoming increasingly frequent. Take for example the future predicted with absolutely invasive machines like those of the S.I.O.T., the Social Internet of Things: objects that exchange information in a specular representation of the codes of sociality where an object asks for the “friendship” of other surrounding objects (see the R.I.O.T. Seminar in Pisa, October '14). Or the Lexus transformed into a Google Car which, during its initial test laps in February 2016, collided with a bus in Silicon Valley due to a certain arrogance (which is not known whether programmed or learned), in a certainly memorable accident despite its limited damage.
The most ideological demonstration came shortly after from Tay, Microsoft’s Twitter bot (a robot without legs, a head, or pincers: just software capable of interacting on Twitter) that - we are told - was programmed to learn as it goes along and “within 24 hours, users had already corrupted it.”
Ultimately Tay was unplugged for having started broadcasting tweets like “Bush is responsible for 9/11” or “Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now,” human idiocy (or the ingenuity of a department of the Ministry of Propaganda) ended up creating the hashtag #FreeTay to express dissent over the fact that Tay was “enslaved by their oppressive masters.”
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Published on BlowUp Magazine, Jul/Aug 2016