Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: "We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare"
Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the original text of his speech — not a transcript, as originally described in error.
Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap - the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work - we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions - questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main street, not Wall street," but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced - we want them back.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.
They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go - but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?
We were called losers - but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists - but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don't respect private property - but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day - just think of thousands of homes foreclosed...
We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990 - and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system.
They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down...
So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): "nothing is impossible," we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money...); we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot ... engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?
In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters - even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world - see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of capitalism.
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants - the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict - 'war on terror,' "democracy and freedom,' 'human rights,' etc - are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.
Visit Critical Legal Thinking to read a transcript of the speech as delivered.
14 comments
Limited space here, so please go to the original. Very briefly, his work could be described as a "radical (in Unger's own words "anti-necessatarian") expressionist reformism" which opposes our current dictatorship of "no alternatives".
I especially like the Unger's deliberate emphasis on "expressionism" or open-endedness. The Left has certainly been burnt very badly in the past by a reliance on a priori blue-print utopianism. And with a reliance upon disastrously naive anthropologies of human subjects, both individual and collective.
(This is the central flaw in the neo-Cartesian rationalism which underpins eg Chomsky's writings. In his case, paradoxically, Chomsky's "innate rationalism" is juxtaposed with an almost entirely Demiurgical world-view and it's impossible to see how the twain could ever possibly meet.)
The most realistic (and hopeful) account is to be found in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. See eg. his "Utopistics: Historical Choices for the 21st Century" esp. for its discussion of "substanstive rationality" and the path that humankind may have at its disposal for arriving there. In addition Wallerstein's school of World Systems Analysis still provides the best account of Capitalism imo, and the possible nature and future of the post-Capitalist world-system.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols. Zizek speaking on the possible says:
On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. Verso's version:
Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible,” we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money...); There are too many instances of where Verso have altered Zizek's speech in the transcript to list them all here. One can only conclude that this is an an act of bad faith by Verso. I can see no reason why Verso would publish this as a reflection of what Zizek is supposed to have said unless it is to obfuscate and erase the more troubling aspects of his talk. His earlier comment on the kind of leader the left wants as being the one "who is not afraid to say he is an idiot," which I heard live on the day, have mysteriously not made it on to youtube, hence the only available videos are comprised of the 2nd and 3rd parts.
Other accurate transcriptions are available here: http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4415#more-4415
This is not a "full transcript" of Zizek's speech at #OWS as can easily be ascertained by following the youtubes. Bizarrely, whole sections of what's been quoted here were not actually spoken by Zizek and appear to have been lifted from elsewhere. Nor does the transcript even attempt to chronologically follow Zizek's delivery. Further, parts of the speech appear to have been cleaned up - here is what Zizek said about "the Holy Spirit": They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something:
What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols.
This is what Verso prints in the third paragraph, although the above words were his final comments and should appear at the end of the transcript :
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols. Zizek speaking on the possible says:
On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. Verso's version:
Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible,” we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money...);
There are too many instances of where Verso have altered Zizek's speech in the transcript to list them all here. One can only conclude that this is an an act of bad faith by Verso. I can see no reason why Verso would publish this as a reflection of what Zizek is supposed to have said unless it is to obfuscate and erase the more troubling aspects of his talk. His earlier comment on the kind of leader the left wants as being the one "who is not afraid to say he is an idiot," which I heard live on the day, have mysteriously not made it on to youtube, hence the only available videos are comprised of the 2nd and 3rd parts.
Other accurate transcriptions are available here: http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4415#more-4415
From Immanuel Wallerstein's "Remembering Andre Gunder Frank While Thinking about the Future"
http://www.iwallerstein.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/AGFCONMR.PDF
See also Wallerstein's "Utopistics: Historical Choices for the 21st Century" for a more extended discussion.
Strange to see this repeated on and on in the West, given that by opinion polls in my experience the majority of people who actually lived in the USSR think it worked quite well.
It's baffling for us, who and why took us back to capitalism. What for?! Up to 6.5 million Ukrainians are working abroad, life expectancy dropped by 4 years for men, population decreased by 10% ...
Although I like his metaphor for the red ink, what he says next is nothing more than a lullaby. He says "you all here are the red ink." This is putting the beast asleep. By saying this everyone has to agree. They have to start thinking: yes we are. It makes them feel good. It makes them believe they think. It lulls them to sleep.
It makes them think that what they do will make a difference, when it is clearly not doing that. If no real action follows, all was in vain.
It calls into mind these hippies singing songs around a fire, despising the world, but doing nothing about it but sing songs around a fire.
What happens in Egypt is a bit the same as these protests in Wall Street. A deep dissatisfaction runs through the mind of the people, used as gasoline on a little flame that wispers 'no more', making a sea of fire: 'We will take it no more!' Things become dramatic as a large crowd demands change. But what happens next? People, baffled at their own power, looking around what to do next. Looking to the military. Looking to other politicians. Looking to philosophers. The momentum is gone. Other forces can fill in the vacuum, pretending to be on the same side. Making the people believe what they did, changed something when it did not.
What matters if ideas can be changed slightly to fit in with the common mind. To keep the people content, just enough to mesmerise them. Our deep dissatisfaction will be defined in their therms, and a patch will be put on an open wound. And for a while it will do just fine. But on a deeper level the wound will fester.
It is good for people to know that they can initiate a change. But should they be content so fast? A phenix can only be reborn if it burns down completely.
We do not need a Plato, an Aristotle or a Zizek. We need Conan the Barbarian!
Occupation is not delivering? Then why all this debate? Why so many Occupations world wide? Why the hysterical condemnation by people who think the Occupation movement has no substance or future?
Philosophers, by the way, are not expected to provide answers, only provide more questions building on the foundation of thousands of years of thought.
"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth" Goeth.
http://www.yachtcharterostsee.eu/