Although Timothy Garton Ash is my political opponent, I’ve always admired his wealth of precise observations and found him a reliable source on the vicissi-tudes of post-Communist Eastern Europe. In his new book, The Free World: America, Europe and the Suprising Future of the West, Ash applies his signature bitterly witty approach to the growing tensions between key Western European states… return to article
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Reader Comments (19)Page 1 of 1 pagesThanks for the “arrogant elitism” but it is just an answer to, as you wrote, vulgar americanization, wich does not mean blind anti-americanism but anti-stupid-Bush-evangelism-Jerry Springer-Schwarzenneger-fox news-guns-war-selfish-fat-britney spears-americanization..
I beg for Jim Jarmush-Cohen brothers-Sean Penn-James Ellroy-Brett Easton Ellis-influence !
The triad analysis may comes from Hegel but is so simplistic that I want to eat burgers to death.
I think you should’nt write that Ash’s point of view is naive because yours about capitalism is not so subtle. And it always useful to recall a few facts about poverty, ecology,... cause as naive it can be, US government does not seem to understant that.
Posted by Doug Jeeboo on Sep 24, 2004 at 8:06 AM ...I’m guessing the Hegelian England-France-Germany passage is from Ash, not Zizek, no?
An inspiring article, but hopes in the revolutionary potential of the urban subproletariat have failed more than once, to say the least—after viewing Bicycle Thieves, Accatone, or, more recently, City of God, it would be difficult to uncritically advocate newly invented modes of “being-together”.
What I think is a necessary supplement to progressive academic discourse is the role of the new generation of student/youth/punk/anarchist activism: the fear-mongering before the RNC convention, for example, surrounding such figures as my hometown’s Jaggi Singh (he never intended to go, and didn’t) should pique the interest of anyone who works within the aberrant inheritance of Marx and Lacan…
I myself tend to see the new axis of class struggle not within the “real” space of urban subsistence, migration, and protest, but within the mediatized space of new forms of journalism: news streams, blogs, independent reportage, Lexis-Nexis analysis. Now if these aforementioned groups could only get over their either naive or implied anti-intellectualism, I’d be more willing to place my emancipatory wager on them!
Posted by Mia Chen on Sep 25, 2004 at 10:38 PM How about a margin on the left side of your newsletter?
Posted by Michael Doliner on Sep 26, 2004 at 11:51 PM ok, ‘in these times’ CENSORED this article.
the full version, with those horrible bad words that would offend your american liberal little monkey ears (oh how i want to kiss them), is below:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/zize01_.html
enjoy, mofos
Posted by cellie on Sep 27, 2004 at 3:38 PM I’d like to respond to Cellie. We did not CENSOR this article, we EDITED it because its word count was far too long for our paper edition (and because much of it had already appeared in previous pieces that Zizek had written for us, such as “What Does Europe Want?” and “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib.”)
In fact, the LRB version was substantially different from the manuscript that Zizek sent us. In particular, they removed an explicit negative reference that Zizek made concerning Henry Kissinger and his status as a war criminal. I would recommend that interested readers go to the London Review of Books website and check out the elongated version—Zizek’s dissection of the ideology behind the removal of shit is both hilarious and insightful, and it was the edit that pained me the most—but those readers should also know that they are still reading a “decaffeinated” version of Zizek’s original article. Luckily, the man is as prolific as he is intelligent, and the original, with all of Zizek’s deliriously delicious excesses, will likely appear in an upcoming book.
In closing, I’d like to say that I’ve never been offended by anything Zizek’s ever written because it is clear that the man is always thinking. But I do take some offense to unthinking insults that fail to take into account the vagaries, contingencies and finite limitations of editing and publishing a magazine. If Cellie thinks it’s so uncomplicated, I invite him to try it.
Posted by Brian Cook on Sep 27, 2004 at 9:41 PM hey brian, cookie man,
if that is so, then your magazine is indeed shit
look at where you’re publishing (and editing and censoring) your supposedly leftie mag
why don’t you fill out another comment card: how was your democratic experience in the usa? everything ok? enough organic food in your grocery store? is your local independent bookstore (no corporate bigshots here, thank you) stocked with ‘in these times’? yes?
good, ‘cause the rest of the world is fucking starving because you and your little american liberal friends consider it their top priority to ‘edit’ zizek and be offended at implications of censorship
the most significant point of putting out a piece like the original zizek article might have become an emancipatory one: don’t buy into the (largely american) liberal bullshit about ‘concern’ for the third world because the liberal enterprise, which permeates this mag, is itself hinged and dependent on the exploitation of the rest of the planet (the ‘undeveloped’ countries). the human rights that you enjoy ‘there’ (in the us and the west in general) are made possible by the crushing of human rights elsewhere - by the soldiers and the government for which you (brian cook included) are responsible
professing to be concerned about ‘the world’ is a comforting position that allows american liberals to reap the full economic benefits of all the american wars - and to say at the same time that this injustice, in which i directly participate, did not happen in my name. not in MY name (names of others who died to make my gasoline possible or who starved to make my bedsheets, well, they’re good and all, very beautiful actually, and i mean, i give a lot of money to charity every year to help some non-names in africa, you know, but those names just not as important as MY name)
if you really do care, shut down this piece of shit mag, renounce your citizenship, change your fucking name and move to abidjan or grozny
mofo :)
Posted by cellie on Sep 28, 2004 at 12:42 PM Is cellie in the US? Fair points if you’ve never lived there and don’t know that there’s plenty of people here that suffer as much as people in Grozny or other desolated-dark-side-of-capitalism areas (go to south Chicago, Robert Taylor Homes, there’s a third world in the midst of a world-class city).
But it’s not like renouncing citizenship and moving elsewhere would change a damn thing, except your sense of righteous exceptionalism. At least liberals can feel guilty here while participating in a capitalist system that carries the contradiction of selling its accounts of the problems of the third world and war-torn world. That, in itself, is better than a.) not having that voice available in the capitalist world, and b.) not being in a position where the material conditions do not exist to publicly expose problems that result from Western economic expansion.
So really, to just pack it in and go to Gorazde, is a kind of pathetic quietism because it will do nothing to change the conditions that created the excessive situation in the first place. But oh, wouldn’t you feel better about yourself? Get real, man, change isn’t going to come from any bathetic rejections and exiles, not when such few places control the material conditions of so many others. It has to come from within, and you put up with the cultural contradictions of a magazine like this using a capitalist system to critique that system in the meantime. Power only listens to power.
Posted by J on Oct 7, 2004 at 6:57 AM >Is cellie in the US?
no (near gorazde though)
>Fair points if you’ve never lived there and don’t know that there’s plenty of people here that suffer as much as people in Grozny
actually, it so happens i’ve lived on the south side, so fuck you
>it’s not like renouncing citizenship and moving elsewhere would change a damn thing
it will change your life. if it’s so inconsequential, then try it mofo. you obviously believe you can’t change a damn structural thing, so going with the american liberal flow suits you just fine - you get to complain, be outraged often, and ‘celebrate diversity’ everyonce in a while. if that is how you imagine your life, fine, but don’t try to shove your shit about ‘changing the system from within’ down everyone’s throat. you are the fucking system. why don’t you try changing yourself first? are you capable of that? or are you happy and smug enough about being a well-fed american liberal?
>Power only listens to power.
true. the future holds nothing else but confrontation
Posted by cellie on Oct 8, 2004 at 8:23 AM I’ve done it, mofo, watch you’re damn mouth because you’re firing it before you take aim. I’ve lived abroad and had to scratch to make rent working under the table just so I could have a view of the rats. I said you can’t change the structural elements by just avoiding them, because power don’t give a damn whether you’re here or not. And I’ve witnessed that around the world—how many people initiated Prague Spring from outside the country? The only way a country or system is changed from the outside is through war. So renounce your citizenship all you want, you won’t change people who don’t listen to you anyway, and all moving to the third world will do is remove you from any ability to make a change in something and give you that oh so superior moral glow.
That’s deatist quietism of the highest degree. What supports a system? Bastards telling us to avoid it so it can grow and alter unchecked, rather than getting involved to do something about it.
Where’d you live on the South Side? Chicago’s a big place. I’m being pretty specific, so don’t go shoving street cred down our throats until you can give more than platitudes.
Posted by J on Oct 8, 2004 at 10:50 AM Going slightly off cellie’s distraction and back into the Zizek article, a couple points: First, I don’t think the Iraq invasion has been at all “legitimized” by humanitarian means. I think this is the spin attempt, but if anything, we’re shown over and over how illegit this invasion is. I’m now getting the same from soldiers I know who are over there; things are getting bad when the software (soldiers) starts to reject the validity of its own programming (orders).
Zizek has been interested for some time now, along with Giorgio Agamben, on this notion of people who are excluded from any political process or action, yet still considered part of the polis. (Homo Sacer—someone who can be sacrificed because they’re basically already considered dead, and thus open to all kinds of maltreatment.) The symbolic class comes from Robert Reich, as far as I know—Reich had been writing about that since the 90’s, and a lot of his early “new global economy” predictions have come true. Mapping the symbolic class with the slum class seems about right. What would some sort of political movement that joined the two classes look like? I’m thinking of something like Earl Shorris’s Clemente Program, which was wildly successful, but I’m not sure if it’s still operative. That was a program at Bard College where the poor and functionally literate were given an incredibly rigorous liberal arts education; the results were these people, junkies and hookers and criminals, ended up becoming community activists and organizers. The program grew and was picked up by universities in large cities across the country, but I haven’t heard much of it since its first couple years of action.
Much to cellie’s chagrin, that’s an example where some kind of change had to come from within. Without the capital and means of the university, the program could not have been organized or maintained. And the effort was to create the means to alter the third-world conditions of US slums from within. According to cellie, those people should have just left the country and left everything as it was. They didn’t, and they made a real difference. There’s a few thousand more people in the country this year who will take part in the political process because they’ve been given the means.
Final hypocrisy: In These Times was criticized by cellie for being part of the system, and called for authentic radicals, or whatever he’s talking about, to reject it all and go live in the third world. Yet he’s posting on this site and reading this journal online. And Zizek himself does quite well participating in this system—witness the rate of books he publishes before they’re quite ready (there are some real problems in The Puppet and the Dwarf that an editor should have caught), and Zizek’s writing last year’s (Fall?) Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. At least Zizek is consistent by claiming the symbolic class—like him—need to work with the slum class in order to effect some kind of systematic political change. He’s recognized that the slum class will not be able to accomplish anything without access to the material means controlled by the symbolic classes or otherwise. Cellie hasn’t done that yet.
Posted by J on Oct 8, 2004 at 12:28 PM >Final hypocrisy: <and the rest>
like i said before, mofo, the real hypocrisy (if you’re into trading on that word) is your mindset\lifetyle: ‘i refuse to risk disrupting the reproduction of injustice that benefits me and oppresses others, but i gotta tell you, man, hip change is happening within the system. check it out, there are more people like me right here in the usa. yeah, more real liberal-arts-educated activists, not passivists or whatever, ‘cause we’re active, you know? can you dig it? get with the times, man. it’s like lotto, you gotta be in it to win it.’
ok, so charity work (dispensing pocket change and liberal arts education within the bounds of one’s own nation-state, please) makes you a happy person. that’s nice. knowing you or some noble philantropists ‘made a real difference’ (and a hundred other cliches) must make you sleep well at night, snugly embedded in the comfort of black/white opposites (outside/within the system, contradiction/consistency of thought, quietism/activism in politics). too bad the world is a big place, actually bigger than chicago, and certainly more complex than your halfwit game of opposites. you might get a feel for it if you ceased slaving to the power that you claim to resent
and for that, and just for good measure one more time, fuc you
Posted by cellie on Oct 8, 2004 at 5:43 PM Ignorant ignorant ignorant. Without knowledge. Didn’t even read the post before he decided to shoot the mouth again without any aim.
You know fuc all about me, my lifestyle, any of it. But you’re assuming an image of me already. Who’s thinking in black and white opposites?
Where the hell are YOU gonna make any change? You gonna sit in Grozny and bitch all your life? What the fuc are you doing? Tell me—we’re all real interested since you’ve got it all figured out, and anyone here who might not be able to afford to up and go touring abroad and pull the ex-patriot pose, any one like that who does something to help their own community, is somehow a villain.
Tell us, superman, what the fuc have you done but complain?
When people take an active part in their own damn community and make it better, that does change things. People become less petty become their immediate concerns aren’t always at the top of their heads, so they can think beyond themselves on occasion. The Black Panthers had that all figured out. When people are hungry and afraid and desperate, that doesn’t happen, and they put despots in to take care of everything. That’s history. Ever thought beyond your own hipster self? Didn’t think so. Because you’ve done fuc all to change anything, you just bitch about it and blame everyone else.
You got nothing, man. Like hell you lived in Chicago. If I’d said Milwaukee, you’d have been there. If I’d said New York, you’d have been there. Fact is, since you can’t do anything but lob word bombs at all Americans because they don’t leave America (as if America would still be an evil place if there were no people) doesn’t seem like you really know what’s going on in the world. I doubt you’re in Grozny. Probably at some Starbucks right now writing this between shifts at the Gap. And you’ve proven yourself to be so closed-minded as to not even engage in discussion or respond to suggestions or, hell, even the article, in anything but the “those rotten Americans” way—who’s thinking in black and white terms?
I’m writing to the damn problem right now. Polarized minds who can’t see distinctions in anything with underlying racist attitudes—hey, that sounds a lot like our current administration. You’re in powerful company, shithead.
Posted by J on Oct 9, 2004 at 4:37 AM heh heh heh, very funny exchange :)
>Where the hell are YOU gonna make any change?
hm, i didn’t know you cared… frankly, i’m almost flattered by the attention, and it’s awful sweet of you to ask, but i already told you before: fuc you
you’re obviously threatened by something i’ve written (perhaps the suggestion that the world might be a better place with fewer, not more, american liberals pissing up and down the place), yet you want to dismiss it as insignificant or ignorant (as opposed to your relevant and knowledgeable ‘work’, whatever it is - and you’re right, i don’t care what it might be). now you’re suddenly interested in what i’m doing, but since i’m not very trusting with silly persons, i gotta tell you to wizen up and ask again if you’re really interested and not just shitting up a storm
>I’m writing to the damn problem right now.
sounds like you are ‘speaking truth to power’. good for you! that’s a wonderful way to build self esteem in young americans. it must make you feel good to make a difference and be active and push the envelop or whatever.
and, just in case you missed it above, that’s the fucking point: the american liberal enterprise is not about justice or equality in the world - it is about making american liberals feel good about themselves (preferably in, but occasionally outside of the usa). in the end, it is about ‘you’, it’s about j from milwaukee, or brian cook or whoever is hawking the liberal cliches to make their own role in the horrorshow machine seem more noble or meaningful. of course, there are a lot of people who are doing the right thing whereever they live, including the usa - but i’m sure that ‘you’ are not one of them. are your delicate, superdeveloped feelings hurt by these crude assumptions about ‘you’? don’t you find this kind of confrontational questioning offensive? if you’re ready to say a heartfelt yes, then i’ve got a word for you… i think you can guess what it is
yeah, it’s fuc you
Posted by cellie on Oct 9, 2004 at 8:56 PM Well, we’re done here. You think all Americans are bad, and the only way to change anything is for all Americans to leave America. That’s just dumb. Sorry, it’s dumb. It’s not thought through. It’s a racist attitude—which is why I got in on this one in the first place; assigning bad or evil intent to an entire group as a whole is racism. I don’t truck with that. That’s why I responded in the first place. And you can’t offer anything here other than all Americans should leave America. Worthless.
I’m hardly threatened by you, otherwise I wouldn’t be engaging in this debate, but it’s come down to he said/she said, and it’s just dumb. You’ll get no more attention here. You don’t warrant that. This discussion doesn’t warrant any more attention. You’re obviously in love with your own false radical romance. Perhaps you’d be happier if you had more American conservatives bombing your buddies. It must make you feel good to congratulate yourself for being so out there on the political fringe. Got your Che t-shirt on?
So go on to your next little silly squabble, let whoever it is you’re going to argue with know that whatever they say, you’re just going to call them a fake liberal poseur who only wants to feel good about himself, and I’m sure you’ll feel very superior and that empty thing you’re filling up with all this bile will be all the more satisfied. Because you don’t want to have any dialogue, you won’t engage in any, and that’s the same kind of attitude that’s getting people killed right now.
Fuc you too, we’re done. When the next friend of mine dies in another battle because of attitudes as strident as this, I’ll be sure to keep cellie in mind when I break something. You’re posting on the wrong board, man. Besides, if you were as far-radical as you claim, shunning the man and all that, you wouldn’t be posting here to begin with, fraud.
Posted by J on Oct 11, 2004 at 1:06 AM poor j, left all alone to defend the beautiful progressive tradition of his country against some anti-american ‘racist’... worse yet, that bastard won’t engage in dialogue, i mean, won’t acknowledge the greatness of the likes of me, just won’t take part in community action, ‘cause that’s where it’s at, you know… that alone is disturbing enough to shun, once again, the larger questions about the role of american liberalism in the usa’s murderous campaigns across the world in our lifetimes
perhaps by posting on this board somebody might (or in j’s case, might not) get a clue that doing charity work in the usa (and voting for kerry or bush, among other things) is a contribution to the perpetuation of the same system that enabled the enormous proliferation of american power (with a physical military presence in well over a hundred countries) in the last twenty years. in that context, bush is just a small part of the problem. getting him out of office will only please ‘you’, the brave and ever-dissenting american liberals. in much of the world, it won’t matter. while ‘you’ will be reading ‘in these times’, munching on organic food snacks and giving compassionate, well-informed commentary on the latest world crisis, your soldiers and proxies will be killing more people so that you can have that luxury. luckily for you, your conscience will be relieved by american liberal ngo’s, staffed by supersmart liberal-arts-educated activists, that will soothe the survivors with aid and stories of gradual progress and working within the system. all works out, right?
if you have any control over your own life and any desire to cease participating in that cycle, you’ll find a way out
Posted by cellie on Oct 11, 2004 at 7:25 AM though well written and intellectual beyond belief, this is a pile of crap, the sort of intellectual masturbation one finds in graduate departments at even our best universities. no, the proletarians in the slums are not going to rise up. no, they’re not going to form revolutions. no, they’re not going to change the world. the people who have controlled everything and will continue to control are the people with guns, money, power and access to the powers that be. people in slums are going to subsist, rob, fuck, have more babies and kill some people. things are going to get worse for them before they get better. hell, they’re getting worse for the working and middle classes. but, i regret to inform the author of this article and the respondents who agree with him, that the lumpen proletariat and the permanent slum underclasses, be it in sao paolo or st. louis, are not going to be the ones we turn to for social awareness, cultural revolution and change. it has always been the elites and the intellgentsia who have altered the consciousness of the ages, be it aristotle, rousseau, marx or thomas jefferson. and it is to the chomskys, naders and soroses and their kin to whom thinking and compassionate societies will continue to turn.
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