Time for another book review. Recently I finished Slavoj Žižek’s latest piece ‘The Year of Dreaming Dangerously’. Actually to be fair, when I say I recently finished it, I would have to say that was about a month or so ago. I have been putting off writing this review for a while as I just don’t know how to compress a Žižek piece into one review. But here goes.
For those of you who don’t know, Žižek is a contemporary Slovenian philosopher. His philosophy is influenced by Marx, Hegel, and Lacan, work which he brings into a modern context. He is also extremely fluent in modern pop culture, with a lot of his work reflecting on current television and film (as well as his political philosophy he is also known for his work in film theory). With all of this put together Žižek is one of my favourtite modern philosophers.
So, why do you ask, have I found it so difficult to review this piece?
Despite how much I enjoy Žižek, at the same time, he is an extremely difficult person to read. Žižek brings with him a lot of assumed knowledge, both in the areas of classical and modern philosophy, as we as a range a pop cultural references. I don’t think he’s great at explaining much of this background, meaning it can often take quite a while to really get your head around his thoughts. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously continues this trend.
The technique I have decided to adopt when reading him therefore is to assume that I will not understand everything he says in the first go. Sometimes a whole paragraph, or even a whole chapter will wash completely over your head – but the key is not to worry about it. The best you can do is keep going, because what you will get, you will enjoy. So, with that in mind, I’m going to focus on two ideas that I really took out of this piece.
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously reflects on the events of 2011, and tries to place a marxist analysis on a pretty eventful year. Žižek looks at the London Riots, the Arab Spring, the protests in Spain, Greece and Italy, the mass murder in Norway by Anders Breivik and Occupy Wall Street, aiming to connect these events into an overarching narrative.
I thought in reviewing this piece, I would look a bit at the beginning, and the end; what caused some of these events, and what’s happening now that 2011 is over.
Let’s start at the beginning – why was 2011 a year of ‘dreaming dangerously’? Obviously there are different reasons behind all of the different movements of 2011, but I think Žižek’s reflection on the London Riots is the most telling. In what he calls “The Desert of Post-Ideology” Žižek takes direct aim at our explanations for the London Riots, and the lack of “choice” people in the riots faced.
When looking at the riots, you can see two clear explanations/arguments about how they formed. From the right, there was the argument of a group of ‘hooligans’ acting out in society; hooligans who need to be punished. From the left, we saw a debate about welfare cuts in particular, and an explanation that cuts to services have lead to a revolt. Žižek argues that the unrest goes much deeper than that. Looking at the ‘lack of demands’ from the protesters, he argues that that represents the level of unrest, one in which there is no choice provided to those in disadvantaged situations:
“The fact that the protests had no program is thus itself a fact to be interpreted, one that tells us a great deal about our ideological political predicament: what kind of universe do we inhabit that can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only alternative to an enforced democratic consensus is a form of blind acting out?”
This is part of a sad fact of capitalism Žižek argues; we live in a world of choice, but for those who are disadvantaged by the system, there are no other options – you can play by the rules or engage in (self-)destructive violence. This is a social space progressively experienced as “worldless”; as space where meaningless violence is the only form protest can take. As he goes on:
“Perhaps it is here that we should locate one of the main dangers of capitalism. Although capitalism is global, encompassing the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu “worldless” ideological constellation, depriving the vast majority of people any meaningful cognitive orientation. Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalises meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist worldview”, no “capitalists civilisation” proper. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu to Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the real of the global market mechanism.”
This is an interesting thought about capitalism – a system, which in being able to be global, has had to remove meaning from itself; a system so lacking of meaning that violence is seen by many as the only way to revolt.
So, let’s jump along quite a bit, and ask ourselves the next question, with this sort of reaction to the crises of capitalism in 2011, what has been the left’s response, and what has happened after these initial revolts. Žižek notes that 2012 did not continue the level of revolt that we saw in 2011 – the Arab Spring started faced many troubles, Occupy Wall Street lost momentum etc etc. But, despite this, he says, the seeds of revolt are still there; “the rage is building up and a new wave of revolts will follow.” (p.127) As these waves of revolt come up again however, the left needs to get into gear:
“Now the economic down-turn and social disintegration the left was waiting for is here; protests and revolts are popping up all around the globe – but what is conspicuously absent is any consistent Leftist reply to these events, any project of how to transpose islands of chaotic resistance into a positive program of social change.”
And that is the challenge of the events of 2011. Not, “what should our demands be”, or that is still based on current power systems, an idea where we have to ask those in power for something that we want. The real debate has to be, how do we connect these huge pockets of revolt to change the power systems?
So there you have it, a very quick snapshot of some of Žižek’s ideas. Like any of his pieces, this work is an epic, and re-reading this, I have only covered such a tiny amount. But, I hope I have provided some idea of what he is on about – my only suggestion is to get into some of his work.