Sunday, October 02, 2005
(11:05 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Assessing Žižek's Work as Public Intellectual
At the Valve, Sean McCann argues that Žižek's "theory of revolution" is "absurd," on the strength of a paragraph from one of Žižek's popular essays. In comments, he comes to a more nuanced position, namely that Žižek's theory of revolution is absurd in a different way than he initially thought, but the original post raises a valuable question: What exactly is Žižek accomplishing by being a "public intellectual"?We here at The Weblog are no less prone to snipe at Žižek's latest popular article than are those at The Valve, the only difference being that we tend to lament that he's hurting his reputation through his largely incoherent bundles of copy-and-pasted jokes from two or three articles ago, hastily applied to a new series of events. I would argue that his occasional pieces used to be better around 9/11 and then in the lead-up to the Iraq War, and I would contend that there are a couple likely reasons for this. First, he was dealing with manifestly more important and pivotal events, just as Get Your War On was better back then because there was more to be angry about. Second, it hadn't yet become such a grindstone -- many of his pieces were published first at lacan.com, which is his own personal vehicle, rather than being submitted under deadline to an outside publication (again, the parallel with Get Your War On might work here).
Some of the problems with his more public-oriented works that were covered over by the circumstances of his initial public engagements (in the American sphere, at least) are now becoming much more manifest. First, his arguments simply aren't self-contained enough -- he invites people to critique his larger project without being in a venue that allows him to present it adequately. This leads to the inevitable and tedious arguments that "you Theory people are so snobbish, always expecting everyone to read all the works of your little messiah before they can critique..." -- yeah, fine, you're right. It'd be great if Žižek hid a little more of the intellectual infrastructure from the uninitiated masses, so that they could just focus on his actual topic rather than on discrediting his entire academic career.
Then you might ask, "What's the point? If he's not going to bring his philosophical perspective into the public sphere, out of the ivory tower, then why should we listen to him at all? After all, it's not like we have any reason to believe he has special insight into foreign policy, etc., since that's not really his 'area.'" Point taken. Žižek could go the Chomsky route and read every shred of information published in the English-speaking world in order to back up his claims, I suppose, and then he could also go the Chomsky route by completely separating his academic specialty from his political writings -- but that doesn't work for Žižek because he's doing political theory and intends his work to be a political intervention in itself, according to his own explicit statements.
I'm tempted to say that Žižek might seem like a better "public intellectual" if we didn't have such a sucky public -- a public that is hostile to most ideas originating in continental Europe, a public that prides itself on "realism," etc. That is, his approach might have worked better in Slovenia, where the antagonism in the political elites broke down along the lines of the Heideggerians and the Lacanians. The prospect of his giving a genuinely public lecture series along the lines of For they know not what they do in America is just unthinkable to me -- and it quickly became unthinkable in Slovenia as well, by all accounts.
Structural issues don't account for the whole problem, obviously -- social structures did not write Žižek's latest article in In These Times (or did they?!). But I don't want to talk about Žižek's idiosyncrasies anymore. I want to talk about "the situation," the set of all things that are the case. I want to know what an "intellectual" is to do. (Yes, I know they don't really exist.) Is it time for a strategy of hibernation? For an even more entrenched ivory tower? I don't know. The university doesn't seem like it will be a very hospitable nook for very long; except for a very few, it is already an openly hostile environment of exploitation rather than intellectual nurturing.
So I don't know.
