Forget Zizek, by Slavoj Zizek

In light of recent events (the demythification of the fiat money system as reified nihlism and yet another crisis response that explicates further the inability for our social structure to observe subtlety as signs of a system ), Zizek studies move to the fore.



For two years now in the paid parking lot infront of the Galleria, a crime has taken place everynight. No. A crime has taken place each night I work. This is not a coincidence. Circumstance introduced this criminal pattern to me. This parking lot stands at ground level, over the garage parking and provides greater convinience; there are no lines to wait for parking as in the garage, and most importantly there is not a designation between customer parking areas (nearer entrances to the Galleria) and employee parking areas (available as the last possible stop in the line for parking). The parking at ground level, positioned "above" the garage parking designtates people not by vocation or function, but as participants of a very specific and isolated act; paying the kiosk, or not paying the kiosk (employee/non-employee). I chose to go where they pay, where my job presented to prohibition on my non-economic decisions outside of the physical workplace.

I resented the curtailment of my right to park where I pleased based on the fact of my employment. As an employee of the service industry, I understand the dictum of the customer first (an overinflated value that acts as perversely socially as economic organization through false statements), yet I participate in this role in as limited a manner as possible, and negotiate its terms as subtlely and forcefully as possible. I moved to the bar in order to serve people on a much more limited basis (four seats available, standing room 2 or 3 deep only on limited occasions) and under strangely augmented rights on account of my title as barkeep rather than server.

Despite the fact that I encourage recognition of all interactions during my shifts as interactions between people prior to interactions limited by social economic roles, it nevertheless limits my identity in this negotiation to that of subordinate. This binary system, however, is fragile. I can interpret the silence of those around an irrate customer as silence of dissent of their entitlement, and communicate this translation of silence to the customer with indifferent disbelief, dead stare and eat shit grin. I am subordinated through the restraint of my full reaction, just as their actions are preconditioned by a pressumed social code whereby the individual may occupy the claim: I am spending money. I may behave as I please.

I am not spending money and I may behave as I please.

As I stated earlier, circumstance introduced to me this criminal act. My restaurant closes long after the mall closes, and my duties conclude long after that. The ambulatory security systems sleep at this time; a bolt locks the cage of golf carts, their rotating blue lights dim. Only the occasional guard passes aboard their two wheel segway, the kitsch soundtrack to the ice rank ominously missing. The only contact with authority is one which you provide the contact; the green button at the exit of the paid parking, a lane which is blocked by a black and white diagonally painted board that lifts once you have inserted your paid ticket. One evening, I pressed the green button.

"Security."
"Yes. I didn't pay for my parking, and the doors to the mall are locked."
"The door all the way to the left is unlocked. You can enter and pay the kiosk there."
"Ok."

"Security."
"The door is locked."
"I assure you, Sir, the door is not locked."
I am a paying customer and I may behave as I like.
"It is."
"Okay. Return to the door and I'll send someone to unlock the door for you."

"Security. Hello?"

I have seen the morning evidence of the night before. The splinters on ground, the two teenagers inserting a new board through the iron grip of the gate. The repairs are minimal and cheap. I find this act too overt, tasteless. Instead, that night, when the security officer failed to meet me at the door, by lifting the board over the car from my open window, I left the parking lot without paying. I've carried on with this act for two years. I believe that the only reason that I haven't been caught is that the other employees, security included, also do not recognize their loss of right to behave as they please.

Zizek on Children of Men

Slavoj Zizek Commentary on Children of Men @ Yahoo! Video

The delineation of huminity as seperate from human, unpossessed by the state in principle or universal interest, appears as a Cy Twombley towards the end of the film. A skrawled line to nowhere. Nihlism fails to describe the outcome as aggression or "justified" defense overwhelms compasion. The acts of humanity carried out consist of restraint, protection, willingness to experience and suffering. The anamorphosis of human action and humanity described by Zizek here indicates his early thought in comprising "Paralax View".

Western Hemesphere Polytheist

Christianity, in the colloquial America, exists apart from history. Transplanted without a body from European historicism, no relics of past events exist as reminders of its development. The sunbelt God is an organ without a body. No Worms cathedral where a golden tablet ironically displays the 95 thesis Luther posted on a common bulletin - not driven with a nail and hammer onto a cathedral door as the American classroom myth insists. There's no contrast between a Gothic perspective of Christ and the Romantic perspective of Christ, which I argue is the vision of Christ brought to America. This not only coincides with the historical point at which the national identity of America was wrought, but also the underlying ideologies prevelant in the industrial revolution and the "second" enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The American God is a seperate God.



In Levinas' terms, a pre-ontological God. This inexperience of history and religion allows for nievite and violence, such as the reaction to the Church of Later Day Saints expresses. Yet, its only in America, that a large group of people have allowed for the return of a prophet in modernity. Perhaps the emergence of media coincides with the opening of this prophecy, this belief of the pre-ontological reified on screen, allowing us to glimpse the happenings of heaven without first braving death and the dismemberment of our egotistic consciousness that serves as our opacity to knowledge. A legal footnote protects America from outright theocracy, yet this knowledge arrives from a seperate culture, from a seperate populace. This is a rare event outside of Hegel where the law precedes public knowledge. This statement also assumes that within the process of colonization, the colonizer disconnects from the umbilical culture of inheritence.

Coffin in the Sky With Diamonds

If we, like Zizek, are allowed to induce precepts from several observations of a given set of cultures, may we not also hypothesize a cultural observation from a standard ceremony of that culture? Ascention should mean we suspend the dead in the sky or propell them outward past the reaches of our atmosphere. Perhaps the Roman tradition of cremation more accurately demonstrates the Christian concept of ascention, even though this practice was bannished by the church, declaring the soul of that burned body condemned to hell. Or is the heavenly conjecture wrong altogether, and the subteranian tradition (once practical, now obsolete and liably uneconomic) more an accurate metaphor to our beliefs concerning death?



Zizek proposes some contextual questions for our yet hetergeneous western culture.

Why should an author be restricted to a single genre, or a work itself be restricted to a single genre? Anne Carson plays with this question and short circuits the function of lyric and rhet?ric. We have always played critic. Unlike and like Rilke, poetry is the product of criticism: and by criticism I mean cognitively critical.



The you to which the I answers shifts face, is polytheist. A subject remains social, or cultural, as observations provide material for criticism; the social as text. The narcissism of creation explores the differentiation between the social and the subject, the universal and the particular, as demarcated by culture or tradition.



I seek an island, not a coffin. Seek the sublime subject disenthralled from the necessity of alienation. There's also the Wordsworth quote on my mother's tackboard: With the conflict of others we make war, with the conflict with ourselves, poetry. That's paraphrased. Poems are psychologicaly invested, subjectively imprisoned, confined to awaiting the oportunity of the prepared reader, the randomly matching context. We return to a poem and are shocked to be unmoved, or find a poem written years ago and cannot imagine ourselves as author. I've tried to organize them through subject or form or method of inquiry; none of which have satisfied. I believe this dissatisfaction rests in the restrictions of inquiry through a rigidly private belief system universally imposed, albeit tacitly; subtly. It seems that in order to free myself to work, I must remove the imposistion of origin, of orientation. To allow the cartesian square to disolve and allow the observations induce a random intersection of inductive angles, to not impose or lean them into eachother, and through this betrayal of causality, allow a voice to speak.

Bats or (anything with a heart and wings should fly straight)

I spy a hearse driver with a key map
a mobile blood bank towed down the freeway.
Are you trying to tell me something?
The loudest sounds on earth are inaudible to us.