NS 2775: Slavoj Zizek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse
Premise Checker
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727751.100-slavoj-zizek-wake-up-and-smell-the-apocalypse.html
* 30 August 2010 by Liz Else
Is touchy-feely environmentalism a new opiate of the people? Why are we
paying rent to Bill Gates? Is reality incomplete? Marxist cultural
commentator Slavoj Zizek, the man they call the most dangerous
philosopher in the west, unravels it all for Liz Else
Your new book, Living in the End Times, is about the demise of global
capitalism. What is science's place in all this?
Science is completely entangled with capital and capitalism. It is
simultaneously the source of some threats (such as the ecological
consequences of our industries or the uncontrolled use of genetic
engineering), and our best hope of understanding those threats and
finding a way to cope with them.
Given the book's title, it's no surprise that it also features the four
horsemen of the apocalypse, which you identify with four major threats
you say we face.
For me, remember, apocalypse means revelation, not catastrophe. Take
the threat to our ecology. Until recently, the main reaction to ominous
news such as Arctic sea ice melting faster than predicted was, "We are
approaching an unthinkable catastrophe, the time to act is running
out." Lately, we're hearing more voices telling us to be positive about
global warming. True, they say, climate change increases competition
for resources, flooding, the stresses on animals and indigenous
cultures, ethnic violence and civil disorder. But we must bear in mind
that thanks to climate change the Arctic's treasures could be
uncovered, resources become more accessible, land fit for habitation
and so on.
So it's business as usual?
Yes. But whatever the truth of the predictions about how much oil and
gas are locked up in the Arctic, for me an extraordinary social and
psychological change is taking place in front of our eyes: the
impossible is becoming possible. We know the ecological catastrophe is
possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen.
Once the catastrophe occurs, it will be perceived as part of the normal
run of things, as always having been possible.
Does that mean the way that we think about such threats is wrong?
Yes. One reason is to do with how certain environmentalists delight in
proving that every catastrophe--even natural ones--is man-made, that
we are all guilty, we exploited too much, we weren't feminine enough.
All this bullshit. Why? Because it makes the situation "safer". If it
is us who are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour.
But in fact Mother Nature is not good--it's a crazy bitch.
So what should we do instead?
The fear is that this bad ecology will become a new opiate of the
people. And I'm against the ecologists' anti-technology stance, the one
that says, "we are alienated by manipulating nature, we should
rediscover ourselves as natural beings". I think we should alienate
ourselves more from nature so we become aware of the utter contingency,
the fragility of our natural being.
Another of your "horsemen" is research into biogenetics. What's your
problem with that?
Craig Venter may dream of creating the first "trillion-dollar
organisms"--patented bugs excreting biofuels, generating clean energy
or producing tailor-made food. There are, of course, more sinister
possibilities: for example, synthesising new viruses or other
pathogens.
But I think the problem runs deeper in many ways. For example, such
extreme genetic engineering will create substantially different
organisms: we'll find ourselves in a terrain full of unknowns. These
dangers are made worse by the absence of public control, so
profiteering industrialists can tinker with the building blocks of life
without any democratic oversight.
You were in China recently and got a glimpse of what's happening in
biogenetics there.
In the west, we have debates about whether we should intervene to
prevent disease or use stem cells, while the Chinese just do it on a
massive scale. When I was in China, some researchers showed me a
document from their Academy of Sciences which says openly that the goal
of their biogenetic research is to enable large-scale medical
procedures which will "rectify" the physical and physiological
weaknesses of the Chinese people.
Do these issues arise from problems about what humans are becoming, and
the relationships between the public and the private?
Yes. These are problems of the commons, the resources we collectively
own or share. Nature is commons, biogenetics is genetic commons,
intellectual property is commons. So how did Bill Gates become the
richest man on earth? We are paying him rent. He privatised part of the
"general intellect", the social network of communication--it's a new
enclosure of the commons. This has given a new boost to capitalism, but
in the long term it will not work. It's out of control.
Take a bottle of water: I produce it, you buy it. If I drink it, you
cannot. Knowledge is exactly the opposite. If it freely circulates, it
doesn't lose value; if anything, it gains value. The problem for
companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge.
Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying
than on developing products.
Despite your critique, you are positive about science?
I have a very naive Enlightenment fascination with it. I have total
admiration for science.
Should philosophers be helping scientists?
Yes. For the last few decades, at least in the humanities, big
ontological questions--What is reality? What is the nature of the
universe?--were considered too naive. It was meaningless to ask for
objective truth. This prohibition on asking the big questions partly
accounts for the explosion of popular science books. You read Stephen
Hawking's books as a way to ask these fundamental, metaphysical
questions. I think that era of relativism, where science was just
another product of knowledge, is ending. We philosophers should join
scientists asking those big metaphysical questions about quantum
physics, about reality.
And what is your take on reality?
There is an old philosophical idea about God being stupid and crazy,
not finishing his creation. The idea is that God (but the point is to
think about this without invoking God), when he created the world, made
a crucial mistake by saying, "Humans are too stupid to progress beyond
the atom, so I will not specify both the position and the velocity of
the atom." What if reality itself is rather like a computer game where
what goes on inside houses has not been programmed because it was not
needed in the game? What if it is, in some sense, incomplete?
All these complex ideas... how do we come up with them?
I like Stephen Jay Gould here: intelligence, language and so on are
exaptations, by-products of something which failed. Say I am using my
cellphone--I become fully aware of it only when something goes wrong.
We ask the big metaphysical questions even though we cannot solve them,
and as a by-product we come up with wonderful, solid knowledge.
Profile
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek is a senior researcher at the Institute of
Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and international
director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck,
University of London
Carl Youngblood
take on the concept of simulation. This reality with undetermined
corners sounds a lot like Pierce's pragmatism.
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