Interesting video here showing Slavoj Zizek at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York. His speech can be read in full here, but what I love about the video is that, for some technological reason no doubt, he cannot himself speak. The crowd around him who can hear directly have to shout out what he’s saying so that others further away can hear. In a strangely symbolic way, his message is internalised, and is only heard when the crowd themselves amplify it.

I like that, partly because Zizek has been in danger for a while of becoming a caricature of himself – and thus able to be ridiculed and dismissed without his message being heard. And his message is good.

In particular I like these lines, which I think fit well with my post on the protests:

Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like, ‘Oh, we were young, it was beautiful…’ Remember that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives.’ A taboo is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want, but what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember: The problem is not corruption or greed; the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt.

He goes on to ask what exactly Christianity is… and outlines briefly that this is Christianity: people gathered in empathy, in solidarity with the poor, concerned to get a grip on a corrupt system and change it together. That’s not happening in church on Sundays people. Just admit it.

Thanks to @designbygecko for putting me on to this extraordinary talk by Jim Gilliam at a web conference recently. Jim was brought up a fervent evanglical – and remains so, except that his faith is now truly in the Internet.

He has his reasons for his conversion: he’s suffered multiple cancers and had to have bone marrow and dual-lung transplants, and each step of the way it was other people on the web who pushed for him to be given access to procedures, campaigned for him and gave him encouragement.

Gilliam is serious: the internet is his religion. He believes fervently in its power to build a new world, by connecting people together and giving them a voice and an opportunity to create.

God is what happens when humanity is connected. Humanity connected is God. Each one of us is a creator, but together we are THE creator.

A couple of things I’d want to say about this. Firstly, it connects quite well with Zizek’s view of Christianity. He proposes that in the crucifixion we see the actual death of God, and it is then in the community of the Spirit (who like Google will, as John 14:26 puts is, teach you all things and remind you of everything I’ve said ) who become the risen Christ – embodying God on earth in Marxist collectives.

Marx’s contention was that we are alienated from our labour, and this fits well with Gilliam’s vision, because he sees the internet as the way for us to rid ourselves of this alienation and become fulfilled people. As Zizek put it in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:

Enclosure of the commons is a process of proletarianization of those who are excluded from their own substance… The present conjecture compels us to radicalise it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination.

In this sense, the internet is one way of radicalising the commons to a level that would have been beyond Marx’s imagination. What I am convinced about is that the route out of our capitalist malaise is via a reinvigoration of ‘the commons’ in its broadest sense: we need to rediscover what it means to share a common life, to act communally and regularly beat down enclosures where we see them encroaching on the common ground which is the theatre within which community life is lived.

But I have my doubts about Gilliam’s internet fervency. Perhaps he is more right than he believes: the internet is rather like a religion, and is thus open to serious power abuse and practices of disinformation. What appears to be ‘free’ and ‘abundant life’ can actually a whole lot of wasted time getting anxious on Facebook, or trying to pump some deadened hashtag into life.

Whereas Gilliam believes the internet will redeem people, unshackle them and allow them to reach their potential, I believe that only other people can do that. The web can inspire people to great acts of altruism, but it can also drag people into grand selfishness and vanity. It is, in other words, only a technology, and, as such, it deserves our worship only as much as a golden calf.

The things the web achieves boil down to connecting people because community structures have failed. The web couldn’t save Gilliam’s life, only an actual donor could do that. So what we should celebrate is community and generosity, rather than modes of connection.

If you watch to the end of the video, I think you may detect a level of discomfort with Gilliam’s ending, and the applause is slightly tinted with sympathy, rather than easy acceptance. I think that this suggests a deep-rooted reflexive skepticism of the internet as saviour. Gilliam’s story is emotionally charged, but we should be careful not to give ourselves to a new religion on the basis of a few ‘signs and wonders.’

Good health to him, and all the best for his start-ups, which look to increase activism and political engagement. But while the internet can help us engage, as I’ve said here before, I’m convinced that it works best only as a tool for arranging physical engagement between actual people.

The net may be a sacrament, but it is not God. God’s ‘absence’ – however we interpret that – has left a troubling hole in our sense of self and community. The net has grown to fill some of that, but we need to be careful.

Whilst doing some sessions at St John’s College in Durham recently, the question of what community is was raised. There’s a whole lot of talk about ‘living in community’ and ‘faith communities’ and going out to plant ‘missional communities’ – but whilst a lot is written about what faith and mission may be, there seems to be a tacit understanding of community, and the word is often used without much thought – something I’ll admit I’m guilty of too.

Community is, at its most basic, people sharing something in common. This ‘life together’ might be geographical – sharing the same place – or tied to some other interest, like a local club or society. The strength of community is proportional to the importance of the thing held in common.

Christian community is, however, called to be something different. Where community draws people into commonality around a shared place or interest, Christianity draws people around…an absence. At the centre is an ascended, transformed, disappeared figure.

Let’s be clear about this: as Christians we do not gather around Christ. Though we may metaphorically talk about Christ being present with us, this is not physically true. Remember: it could have been. Jesus appeaered in flesh and blood after the resurrection, and shared life with his followers for a short period of time. There is no reason why this could not have continued, but it didn’t: Jesus left.

The Zizekian understanding of this – which I think fails to deal with the post-resurrection appearances properly – is that on the cross God really did die: we are left to take responsibility for our actions in the absence of a Big Other, and this draws us into community.

I’d want to modify that in the light of the resurrection: God has not died, but has chosen to be paradoxically present-absent, and thus chosen to leave us to gather around an absence. Why? Because it is only by gathering around absence that we begin to care for the other.

Communities that form around a present commons tend to work to protect and enclose that commons. This is the history of priestly religion: we gather in the holy temple because this is where our special common grail is. What is distinctive about Christian community is that it gathers around this paradoxically present absence. The resurrection thus entitles us to hope, to faith in the Big Other, but denies us the opportunity to collapse this into an enclosed religion that simply serves those on the inside. It is the absence – the divine ‘black hole’ as it were – that creates the gravity around which we gather, but with nothing at the centre we cannot enclose it, and are thus urged on by the present/absent spirit of Christ to serving those who are other.

To be honest, I think this is something that has been very rarely modelled as it is too challenging. It requires us to be the true atheists – to live as if there were no God – and thus to be the god that the other requires.

Jonny has written again defending the ‘in and out’ stance he wants to take with institutional forms… And though it often seems to be falling on deaf ears, I want to support this view too! Jonny wrote a response to my posts reflecting on whether those who had been involved in the Emerging Church movement had retreated to institutions more recently, calling it ‘romantic tosh‘, and has now responded to an article in the Guardian (which was partly an overview of Other) in which Theo Hobson wrote:

We must simply dump all that ghastly old baggage, of bishops and buildings, rules and power, and start a new sort of Christian cultural presence.

I had to laugh when I read this, as I knew that it would cause a stir to say the least. I don’t, however, think that support for this view can be found in my book – at least I hope not.

That said, I do have very serious questions about institutions, and I feel that a critique of them is both valid and timely. My experience is that (naturally) those who want to defend them are those who have invested most heavily in them. I’m reading Zizek’s new book Living in the End Times, and he has a good section in the introduction (which he expanded upon in a talk I went to last week) in which he talks about our relationship to ideologies.

I wonder if this might be a helpful perspective (not a totally complete view) of part of what an institution is: it is a people collected formally around an ideology. Zizek draws on Paul, and does a loose translation of Ephesians 6:

“Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it.“

It is this aspect of ideological mystification that I think it troubling for all large institutions. It is this that allowed the paedophile priest scandal to carry on for so long, and be covered up so deeply. That is an extreme example, but makes the point perfectly: institutions mystify ideologies and this can both sustain and excuse behaviour which would otherwise be immediately taken as unacceptable. Zizek made this point about Stalinist Russia: people carried out terrible actions precisely because they were involved in an absolute ideology: once the absolute was removed their cover was taken and they had to take responsibility for what they had actually done as individuals.

I’m well aware that institutions are everywhere, in all sorts of softer and harder forms, and all sorts of sizes. But this shouldn’t stop us from reflecting on them carefully. It is not unfaithful to do so, it is right and healthy.

In ‘No Exit’ – what is considered to be his best play – Sartre wrote the line ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres‘ which is commonly translated as hell is other people.

I was reminded of this last night hearing AC Grayling introduce Zizek, who had written in the Guardian that the worst job he had ever had was teaching: ‘I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.’

He is being facetious, but the problem of dealing with other people is central to all of his writing: violence, psychotherapy, communism – all of these key themes are issues of how we relate to ‘the other’, and that’s obviously the thrust of my book ‘Other‘ too.

Sartre’s view was that we need ‘the other’ in order to verify our own existence. He also believed that our self consciousness had a masochistic desire to be limited – that we were afraid of the ‘abyss of person’ at our core – and that the reflective consciousness of the other provides this limitation. This is what Sartre means by ‘hell is other people’: we need other people in order to verify our existence, but the act of doing this is limiting to us. Thus we are trapped in some kind of hell: unable to fulfil our potential because of the limits of others, but unable to be at all without them.

We can read Zizek’s quip in this light: without an audience his thinking is neutered as he can’t disseminate it; with the audience he can’t fulfil his thinking as most of them are not at his level.

One might might reflect on Jesus’ mindset in light of this. Did being a perfect person leave him frustrated and angry at having to deal with ‘mere mortals’? Perhaps Jesus’ time in hell was no more than having to live with a bunch of irritable, unreliable, stubborn and ignorant disciples.

As a teacher myself I can strongly empathise with this view. My profession is inherently about communicating with people less knowledgable than you are, and this can become irritating. It requires a great deal of patience.

But clearly I wouldn’t be carrying on doing it if I thought that ‘other people’ meant hell… So what route out of Sartre’s dark world can we find? Is it possible to be fulfilled while dealing with ‘the other’ too? I’ll try to cover that in the next post…

London is continually fascinating. As humans we are always quick to project personalities onto our creations; London the person is complex, darkly funny, steeped in history, welcoming all but criticising many, intelligent, crafty… a heavy drinker who enjoys the night.

‘London Nights‘ looks like a brilliant series of 10 radio programmes, looking at the city after dark, following police helicopters, newspaper sellers and inner-city farmers. It begins tonight, so tune in or grab the podcast.

I’ll be using iPlayer to listen to it later as tonight I’m off to hear Slajov Zizek at the Queen Elizabeth Hall:

Headlining the 2010 London Literature Festival, he brings his unique perspective to the biggest subject – the end of capitalism. ‘There should no longer be any doubt – global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis’ and Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse. But how can we face up to living in the end times? Zizek discusses his vision.

I’m very much looking forward to this as my next book seems to be heading towards a synthesis of Marx and Christ’s views of alienation and the need for radical change.

Then on Wednesday it’s the final Apple before the summer, which beautifully brings these themes together. Speaking on ‘Is The City a Machine for the Making of Gods?’ Anthony Paul Smith will be examining whether the city is actually going to be the path to salvation from ecological and apocalypse.

Seriously – you have to try to come along. It’s free. The beer is wonderful. It’s at 7:30. At the Betsey Trotwood.

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2] | Election Thoughts [3]

In the previous post I concluded that the terrorising dimension of the pressure to choose is not simply down to our ignorance of what the choices might mean, or even our ignorance of what we actually want, but our fear of not really knowing who we are and who we want to be. Thus, when we are asked, as Zizek puts it, whether we’d like soft or hard pillows in our hotel room, we are unsure what sort of person we are trying to be, and whether that person ought to be a ‘hard pillow’ or ‘soft pillow’ person. Fortunately, pillow choices are trivial. Unfortunately, political choices are a more significant bed-fellow.

However, even though the choices we are going to make are profoundly non-trivial, our energy levels – outside of the political class- in making those choices are fantastically low. But simply: most people couldn’t care less. More people will vote with more passion – and having given more focused attention to their choice over a number of weeks – about a reality TV show than about how they are to be governed.

This has been the cause of huge consternation to political theorists. Marxists in particular are generally furious with the working class for not rising up from their apathy and joining the revolution. As Zizek notes:

Why is it that the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This problem was the main motivation for the turn to psychoanalysis, evoked precisely in order to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms which were preventing the rise of class consciousness.

We are likely to see this frustration played out even more as delamination from politics continues, and thus more likely to see politicians turn to national-psychoanalysis to try to work out why people don’t really want to engage. This could be one of the fulcra of this election, as Cameron runs on a ticket of giving power back to people – people may well turn round and say ‘we don’t want it, we’re too busy watching Pop Idol,’ and vote Labour instead.

The answer that the shrinks in the media ought to give is that this ‘terrorising dimension of the pressure to choose’ – from hundreds of breakfast cereals when we wake up to scores of television channels and millions of websites when we get home – is causing people to retreat. Rather than helping people to extend themselves and find out something of the answer to the question ‘who do we want to be,’ the over-abundance of choice simply leaves us exhausted.

What does this mean for us as we approach the election? Well, if you are reading this you are probably of a class of person who is already more engaged politically than the norm. So make it your business to read manifestos carefully, question your prospective representatives closely and reflect for a while on the sort of community and country you want. Once you’ve done that, lament the fact that, in all likelihood, a majority of people in this country will vote without having done any of this:

Voters were asked to say which party had proposed eight key manifesto pledges. They wrongly identified four: reducing the increase in national insurance contributions (naming Labour not the Tories); allowing unsuccessful schools, hospitals and the police (the Tories, not Labour); tightening up takeover rules (the Tories not Labour); and requiring foreign workers employed in public services to speak fluent English (the Tories not Labour).

In only one case, the £150-a-year tax break, did more than half of voters (60 per cent) correctly identify the party making the proposal.

[Source: The Times]

Who’s to blame for that is another matter. But with all parties having been caught with the snouts in the trough, and with so little done on issues that matter, it appears politicians have really only themselves to blame.

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2]

In the previous two posts I’ve tried to set out a critique of the choice agenda that main parties are promoting, and also the ‘rights’ / devolved power agenda that is a central tenet of the Conservative Party manifesto.

The key question that was rightly asked yesterday was ‘is there a desire in the population for all these devolved powers?’ On top of working more hours than ever before as well as looking after children, do people want to be running their own schools, sitting on the boards of hospitals and police forces, and working out if they should be sacking their MPs? I’ll get to this problem of perceived apathy in a later post, but first I want to return to the issue of choice.

In the first post, I posited two problems with ‘choice’. Firstly, our democratic choice is actually fairly limited, and this is a systemic problem that those in power don’t have much will to change. Secondly, choice in public services must mean surplus capacity, which would imply waste – something that all parties are keen to show they can eradicate.

However, there are deeper problems with choosing that Žižek notes in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce:

The incessant pressure to choose involves not only ignorance about the object of desire, but, even more radically, the subjective impossibility of answering the question of desire.

In other words, not only are we not informed enough about what we are choosing, we are also not entirely sure what we want in the first place. In the voting context: not only do very few people really read party political manifestos in any depth and know the ins-and-outs of the differences in policy, but we are not even sure which of these policies would be best for ourselves and/or our nation anyway.

Beyond even this though, the problem of so much choice actually reflects back on us a deeper anxiety. Not only are we not sure what the choices mean, nor what we actually want – we are also not sure who we are. Using a typically banal example, Žižek gets to the heart of the issue:

Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose – what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room (“Soft or hard pillows? Double or twin beds?) is the much more radical probing: “Tell me who you are?”

This then I think leads us to a much more radical conclusion about our task in these next few weeks before the General Election: not only do we need to probe our representatives for what they are actually offering to do, we also need to reflect carefully on what we really want – personally and as a nation. But even beyond that lies the deeper question that this period of campaigning should prompt us to spend time reflecting on: who are we, and what sort of people do we want to be?

The terrorizing choice is thus not between Conservative or Labour. The choice is between the kind of self that I want to become, the kind of nation we want to be. Whoever can provide the environment within which this self-development can occur is the one who deserves our vote.

In the previous post, I argued that the ‘choice’ agenda that all parties are keen to promote is actually something of a fallacy. Genuine choice of political representation in the kind of democracy we have is pretty much an illusion, and choice in delivery of services like health and education would actually require surplus capacity, which would have to mean wasted resources.

In other words, choice has become a fetish – pinned up in manifestos and speeches to mean anything real, but just to tempt us into thinking that these are the sort of people who are giving us power. What this means is that throughout this campaign, along with the fetishisation of choice, we are also going to see the fetishisation of rights.

All parties will be offering us new rights. Both Labour and Conservatives are keen to promote their ‘devolving power’ agenda, (indeed, the launch of the Conservative manifesto today is focusing exactly on that) but again, I think we need to be careful here. In First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Zizek quotes Jean-Claude Milner:

“Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission… A right in the strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it.”

What we must then ask when we are promised new rights in manifestos – rights to see our police forces improved, rights to hold the NHS to account, devolved power to local organisation – is whether these are rights or simply permissions.

Zizek is clear: new permissions are not nothing, they may make life easier. But the point of easing our lives is often to allow the powerful to remain in power. No actual change in the power structures occurs. This is why he is so critical of the ’68 uprising in Paris:

While May ’68 aimed at total (and totally politicized) activity, the “spirit of 68″ transposed this into a depoliticized pseudo-activity (new lifestyles etc.), the very form of social passivity.

This connects with Marcuse’s critique in One Dimensional Man. Those in power, and the systems they oversee in order to stay there, use three methods to tempt those who might rise up to change things into thinking it’s not worth it:

1. You are too small to make any significant difference. Yes, you have a vote, but only one vote, and probably not in a marginal seat.
2. If you do act to try to change things, people will laugh at you. Fringe parties and independents are regularly laughed off and trivialised.
3. If you do act, you have to realise that it will be very costly to you. Changing/Not Changing government will hit your pockets and your family will suffer.

Instead, new rights, like the idea of free choice, are strung up for us to gloat at and be transfixed by. Opposing any real critique of electoral reform, things are done to make our lives easier, and huge arrays of choices are apparently placed before us, even though this amounts to little genuine power-shift. In this way, in the words of John Gray: we are forced to live as if we are free.

It’s to this ‘incessant pressure to choose’ that I’ll turn to in the next post, but to conclude these thoughts: have a healthy skepticism when talk turns to ‘rights’. Are these new rights actually devolving power, or simply temporary permissions from those who retain all meaningful power?

In the previous two posts { [ 1 ] [ 2 ] } I’ve been wondering whether a certain symmetry of relationship is needed if empathy is going to flow between two people. The springboard for this was Zizek critiquing the adage ‘an enemy is a friend whose story I have not yet heard’ by applying it to Hitler. Surely, he argues, even after hearing Hitler’s story we could not be friends?

My argument has been that this is precisely true – not that the adage is wrong, but because Hitler was a sociopath who, because of his inability to empathise with the other, could not know true friendship, where one’s life is reachable by an-other. I then extended this to argue that situations where there are major power imbalances also prevent true friendship too, and wondered what this meant theologically: is it even possible to call God friend, especially with ‘His’ sociopathic tendencies we see in the Old Testament.

I think it’s worth extending these thoughts in one final direction, prompted by Clare’s comment in the last post about corporations. I’ve not seen ‘The Corporation’ but I recognise the description of organisations that display sociopathic characteristics: no empathy, no ability to change, no sense of responsibility to their environment. Indeed, it seems that the church is one of the worst examples of such a sociopathic organisation. It’s ideals are sky high, yet scandal upon scandal emerges about sexual abuse, poor treatment of women and minorities, and a pathological inability to respond to local situations or be ‘reachable.’

I think this touches on a previous series of posts I did on self-organizing leadership, in which I used some work done by Douglas Griffin about our views of corp-orations and organ-izations. These words are just metaphors for embodiment – and they leave it too easy for us to ignore the fact that we are meant to just see them ‘as if’ they were bodies – not to actually think that they are:

“This designation of a ‘body’ to a group of people is purely hypothetical, ‘as if’. Forgetting this ‘as if’ and attributing direct agency to these groups has become a habit of thought leading us to think and talk about groups as objects, as things…”

He goes on:

“we locate ethical responsibility in both the ’system’, simply taking it for granted that a ’system’ can be ethically responsible, and in a few individuals. In doing this we adopt a particular view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, or praised when they go right. The rest of us are allocated to passive roles as victims of the system and of manipulative leaders, and our salvation lies in the actions of heroic leaders. In thinking in this way, we are obscuring how we are all together involved…”

I think this should help us to get round some of the problems of corporations like the church being perceived as sociopathic. This only happens when those involved in them become passive, and allow relationships to get asymmetrical. This then prevents empathy flows, and thus the ability of the body to respond appropriately.

In other words, if we are to befriend our enemies, if we are stop them becoming sociopathic, then we need to adjust the power relationships, if that is possible. For some, like Hitler, they well remain unreachable. For others, like the Israeli soldier, the institution they are involved in (the Israeli state) may be so powerful that symmetry may be impossible. For yet others, like the church, we may need to do some rethinking of our view of the corporation, and those who lead it, in order for symmetry to be achieved. In particular, it will only be if the church takes the same attitude as that of Christ, as Paul puts it in the beginning of Philippians, and discard power that any empathy flow will be possible.

And it’s to that church-stripped-of-divine-power that I’m hoping to look at next, in some thoughts on Zizek’s ‘Marxianity’