4 thoughts on “Zizek on Garbage and Ecology”

1. I love the implications involved in labeling the ecology movement “conservative”. And I love how Zizek has pointed out elsewhere that this New Age Spiritual Hedonist/ Environmentalism is no longer counter-cultural, its pretty much the New Order. The popularity of the new film Avatar is case in point. It sums up what a lot of people feel and think nowadays. But this belief system is struck through with contradictions and self defeating strategies. And at heart it is a consumer ideology. Life for life’s sake. Just live close to the land. Local communities. Subsistence living. Everything we don’t need is indulgent. How can it challenge capitalism by resorting to a philosophy of pared down consumerism? We need smarter progress; a way of turning all our waste and trash into energy. Its part of capitalism’s magic that it often seems to find ways of looking at what we don’t need or disregard as superfluous as sources of new value. When we throw out our drive for novelty we lose the very thing that makes us human and we are left with a purely consumer based ethic that eschews all complexity as parasitical, solitude as a violation of the community, and any higher vision, abstract value/ capital as a breaking of a sacred chain. If we were smart we would keep capitalism yet help it embrace that cycle of resources, of our sacred waste and sacred consumption, so we may sustain not just our world and our lives, but our quest for higher values.

2. Zizek is calling into questions the perspective on nature/culture that reifies environmentalism in terms of nature = trees, sky, earth etc. Others such as James Lovelock (Gaia Hypothesis) and following him cultural historian W.I. Thompson have been calling these categories into question for many years. The logic being if humans are natural beings then their byproducts must also part of nature. Gregory Bateson seems to be getting at the same thing when he speaks of mind/nature as a necessary unity.

   >If we were smart we would keep capitalism yet help it embrace that cycle of resources, of our sacred waste and sacred consumption, so we may sustain not just our world and our lives, but our quest for higher values.<

   Is it possible in this age of global hyper-capitalism -in the twilight of humanism- to separate Capitalism from the ideology of consumerism ?

3. In Raj Patel’s new book, he says “The opposite of consumption isn’t thrift it’s generosity.”
   This is obviously a difficult and nuanced issue. I don’t mean to oversimplify with these short comments, but merely mean to suggest that our critiques of this system shouldn’t go so far that we demonize and lose faith in what we do everyday and neutralize any possible efforts at reform. Rhetoric that talks of “capitalism” as some abstract entity that controls everything further entrenches the concept that our system is either a “free market” or its full fledged “socialism” with corrupt government running everything. As Zizek has said elsewhere we need more politics and more theory. There is too much mystification of how decisions get made, how are food is made, and what the costs are.
   Americans are getting fat and stupid not because they are simply over consuming or being duped by media and entertainment culture. They are not being shown the reality behind the consumer choices they make. Tele-technology and entertainment culture don’t destroy deep attention/ deep time awareness, they are just frequently reflecting a culture that is having a hard time understanding and representing the long term consequences of its decisions. If we are to have any hope of making sense of our situation, we need to focus the debate on what kind of Nature we want, rather than on what it really is and whether we are part of it or not. We are all connected in this place, and we need to learn from each other (humans and otherwise) without fear of us losing our selves or our humanity- whatever that was. There are ways we can clean up pollution (i.e. there are mushrooms that digest the pollution out of the soil), ways we can get off of oil, ways we can turn all our trash into the fuel for the next cycle, but first we need to believe in our power to do so. That seems impossible as long as we stick to this anti-power polarizing rhetoric that gives people no options but a depressed guilt about what we do every day. We do not overcome our lust for power by feeling more righteous than those that wield it, just as we don’t overcome our hunger for material goods or food by consuming less. We need food and power, and we need to be better informed about what the better types of power and food may be. When one gets food with the right stuff in it, one isn’t so hungry for the other; when one has a feeling of responsibility in the state of the world, one’s motive changes from lust to legacy. When corporate “fat cats” are told they must only seek the bottom line, that they owe the shareholders more than the consumers or the environment, than they will settle for dehumanizing kinds of power rather than renouncing what they do as inherently exploitive. Given a different value climate, all this changes.

4. AP: They are not being shown the reality behind the consumer choices they make. ….

   Rc: And why not? Its a free country, the information is out there isn’t it?

   AP:Tele-technology and entertainment culture don’t destroy deep attention/ deep time awareness, they are just frequently reflecting a culture that is having a hard time understanding and representing the long term consequences of its decisions

   Rc: Then why do so many children suffer attention deficit disorder ? Why do so many people flock to watch reality TV? Whats more disconcerting than describing Capitalism as an abstract entity is to imply that culture can in any possible way be decoupled from economic system that sustains it or abstracting culture as a monolithic entity. Why is Fox news the most watched news channel? Why do the top 1% control (according to M Moore) 95% of the wealth? Have you read William Burroughs?

   People consume what is spoon fed into them since birth that then becomes internalize systems of self-governmentality as adults. I dont think it is as simple a matter as switching out one set of values for another when the climate changes, especially when the climate has wholly been appropriated by the machinery of Economic Barbarity. (both figuratively and literally)

   Are there solutions out there? You Bettcha, but whats their chance at working when these solutions cut into profit lines of Exxon, GM, Microsoft. Microsoft and Intel were instrumental in lobbying against the one lap top per child project -killing it in India- because the machines and software used were not part of their supply chain. Why did no climate agreement get signed with Co2 levels trending toward 400ppm? Whose fault is that Naomi Klein or the the Oil and Coal Industry?

   So no I dont think its simply a matter of anti-power poloraizing rhetoric. IMO to argue so is akin Bill O’Reilly arguing “class warfare” when tax cuts are announced for the top 2% of wage earners.

   Moreover although Zizek argues for more theory and less action, one certainly senses a nostalgia in his rhetoric for good old fashion revolution