So the next day the New York Review (7-12-12) arrives with a piece on Zizek. I learn (1) that he sees in Hegel "a new kind of 'paraconsistent logic' in which a proposition is 'is not really suppressed by its negation.'" and (2) that whether Marxian ideas "correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant."
Is that latter a defect, as it would be according to traditional tests of the worth of an idea? "No," explains Zizek, "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.
General Strugar couldn't
have put it better. The NYR piece makes me, as the author of Post #151, feel like a fool. Why was I trimming fingernails when all these bones are broken?
It also makes me feel helpless. I need the talent of a satirist like Swift or Pope, and I don't have it. All I can come up with is the crudest transposition of Zizek's words, and anybody who has followed me on my Balkan tour will have already put them in the mouth I hear them coming out of, General Strugar's. "No. no." he is saying at his trial, "that about the Croatian troops in Dubrovnik was only a falsehood in your sense. In the paraconsistent sense it was what we call a self-relating truth, measured by the way it affected the subjective position of enunciation." In other words, "It worked for me — and on the boys in the army and the people in Belgrade." We can go on from there to re-measure every inflammatory appeal to bloodlust in history.
In the state I am in coming back from the Balkans I simply cannot see Zizek as a fellow academic, despite his credentials as an honoree (visiting professor) at the best American Universities — Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Minnesota, Michigan, California at Irvine. I have spent too much time there (not just in Serbia; they all had a General Strugar, more or less) asking, "Where were the academic standards?", with no doubt about what "academic standards" in that question had to mean: "application of reliable tests of belief." If you can say that people in their eighties have passionate yearnings I think you could safely say that we were, with every bullet-riddled building we saw, yearning more and more passionately to hear of people who tested for truth, people, anybody, who just cared about the truth.
I should say a word about yearning for different behavior. Displayed in a foreign country it is, like indignation, often an assertion of national superiority: "Oh that they might rise to our level." Or displayed anywhere, personal superiority: "Oh that human nature might change — as mine has." But then there's the display to each other, modestly, over an evening drink or a morning coffee: "Oh if only the things that could have been done had been done." That's what you get to after you've done enough reading and lived enough life to have given up on a change in human nature and asserted enough national vanity to be tired of it.
What could they have done here, what that's important and doable? Reduce the inflammatory rumors. Stop one pre-emptive strike based on rumor and you have, in this land of the pre-emptive strike, done something. But how do you do that, reduce inflammatory rumor?
"By teaching writing standards," the retired composition teachers (there's always a sprinkling in Elderhostel) jump in to say. "In practice, getting students to scratch out, from each sentence, every unjustified or intemperate word. Until a habit is formed."
So there's how we get what we're yearning for. "Wasn't there somebody, anybody, in that situation who just wanted to make sure of the facts?" Yes, our guide answers, there was this kid who believed his comp teacher and became a reporter.
And there's my problem with Zizek. How can I, who taught composition for 35 years, call myself a colleague of somebody who blows its standards away?
"Here's how," says a defender of Zizek — say the one who invited him to the conference. "The academy is a place open to all views, and you yourself are not an academic if you fail to tolerate a view or allow its full expression in our circle."
It's a common reply and it's based on the same failure to grasp a fundamental truth about the academic circle: that admission to it depends on acceptance of its supporting rules, most of them set by Plato in the first Academy. Those rules are what allow the famous tolerance, culminating in the openness of scientific inquiry. If you claim that you belong in the circle no matter the rules you make yourself indistinguishable from creationists, who also would like to be taken as colleagues.
Now here's a point of strain that I would like to see my genuine colleagues address. We hate to be caught in a self-contradiction, right? And people in philosophy departments, our leaders, hate it most, right? (Have you ever heard them debate over there? "One cannot say, on pain of contradiction, that x...." and, when it's demonstrated, nobody says x any more.) Now I want you to picture a teacher who, after his English Composition class, walks across the hall to listen to, or even, by assignment, teach, what Zizek teaches. (Of course it doesn't have to be exactly Zizek; there are plenty of others now who will keep on saying x without respect to demonstration or evidence.)
Now I think all who still feel the pain of contradiction will feel the pain that the composition teacher, alternately holding to and abandoning traditional academic standards, is feeling. So I hope they will understand his request (or, my request in his name) to his leaders in the philosophy departments of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Cal, Minnesota, and Michigan, insofar as they have influence as faculty senators or administrators or members of curriculum committees: either have your university give up English Composition or quit honoring Slavoj Zizek.
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