Poetic-Military Complex part 1

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm no academic. I'm no scholar, not in any meaningful sense of the word. Scholastic and academic proofs (of anything, usually) are tedious and boring tend to be unsatisfactory. Is this a confession?

Further, I've never been a fan of Zizek, not because, after a thorough and considered read-through of his body of his work I came to the conclusion he was no good (no such reading has ever taken place--not one of his books even have I read in toto, though I've watched some videos and sped-read some shorter essays). Rather, I never became a fan simply out of disdain for Zizek's fans. My perception of the philosopher himself--a flawed apprehension I'm sure--was of a teacher taking the long way to reach simple truths. You may call it rigor, the squirreling through Hegel and Lacan to reach the moral of the contemporary story, the secret of all of our terror, but it felt like stagecraft to me. Seemingly ignorant of the stagelights, the black velvet curtain, the magician's hat he wore, and even of the rabbits he pulled out of it, Zizek's conclusions seemed to me based on a fallacy of endurance: you've come with me this far, so I'm right.

As I say though, it was his fans that gave me this perception, those with me in the audience staring vacantly at the spotlit stool, the podium and the glass of water, those who--I felt--were certain, if they just held out til the lights came up, they'd understand what the hell was going on.

For all the flaws of my perception, that Zizek is one who tells you how it is, is I think right (and for that reason his online kerfuffle with Chomsky is all the more interesting, the two knowers of the tribe in honor dual for the right to wear the biggest best purplest robe... would that it were Bill Hicks).

(So, I guess if you've endured that... )


Given my (perhaps specious) disdain for Zizek, you might expect a few nasty (or at least specious) words on his recent essay in Poetry Magazine.

There's plenty to grist on here. Zizek, never one to shy from grandiose (perhaps specious) claims is in fine form. Poetry (not the magazine) is actually responsible for ethnic cleansing. Or, almost. Really, it's the poets he holds responsible. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Zizek claims (and, I wish to express no doubts about the truth of his claims, though defense of his claim is tenuous, is based on the fact that two of the political leaders of the Greater Serbian ideology, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, were also poets; likewise, Zizek's use of "we" and "our" Yugoslavia insists on a kind of authority of ownership that comes to him from being there, a dubious sort of truth) the poets of Yugoslavia were undercutting the strictures of the cultural superego via a poetry of total permission. No doubt, an interesting idea, and one that likely has truth to it. Poetry has great power to affect minds. This is especially true when coupled with a political environment receptive to the poetry.

In Dungeons and Dragons, the Bard character class has some magical abilities, some fighting abilities, but primarily, the bard's role is to amplify her fellows. In a combat scenario, the Bard improves the abilities of the warriors. If the sorcerers must concentrate for days to summon the Kraken from the depths, a Bard chanting alongside them can lift their spirits and give them greater endurance. The Bard can enhance concentration in the lock picking thief. The Bard's powers are extra-moral, and so too are the powers of poetry, insofar as poetry is a communicative artform. It is true that Karadžić (and his homologues through the world) could use poetry to stoke hatred. It is likewise true that dominant poetic forms have enforced modes of thought and action and oppressed capacities for expression from time immemorial, and notably in colonial and post-colonial contexts. I'm sure someone could easily compile a book of hate verse. Certainly, I can agree that language (and poetry) can carry messages of hate and violence, but can't it also carry the opposite. For Zizek (that is, for Lacan) it cannot; Language is a torture-house, capable only of torture.

Zizek dismisses Benjamin's notion that "among private persons... there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language," as -- quoting Zizek now --

"belong[ing] to the mainstream tradition in which the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order is that of the medium of reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful coexistence, as opposed to a violent medium of 
immediate and raw confrontation. In language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words — and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum recognition of the other."

Though I recognize the utopianism in this ideal--especially from the context of an increasingly tribalizing world (one in which the static oppression of the nation-state crumbles to the aggression of powerful factions)--I can't throw the model out, not, at least, for Zizek's model where "language and the symbolic order" is a torture house. I have simply taken too much pleasure in them, have felt the peaceful coexistence Benjamin promises.

To sum up then, I have no doubt that language has its violences, that it commits and abets violence. I won't argue that the subject is spoken (as the disappeared are disappeared, or the stepped-down are stepped-down). Likewise, I won't disagree that we are born a la Heidegger into language (etc.) we didn't create. That the world into which we are born is inherently and only torturous, however, strikes me as a kind of puritanical nihilism homologous with a 'best of all possible worlds." It's sensationalistic in the extreme. 

Most villainous though is Zizek's harumphing envoi:

This is also why, in order to get the truth to speak, it is not enough to suspend the subject’s active intervention and let language itself speak — as Elfriede Jelinek put it with extraordinary clarity: “Language should be tortured to tell the truth.” It should be twisted, 
denaturalized, extended, condensed, cut, and reunited, made to work against itself. Language as the “big Other” is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves, but a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. The most elementary form of 
torturing one’s language is called poetry.

Decades after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry's demise (yeah right! They run the damn academy! Hush, we're making a point), he'd resurrect it as our one great savior. After we've endured its excesses, its straight-jacket, its totalitarianism in the name of counter-totalitarianism. Twist it, denaturalize it, extend it, condense it, cut, and reunite it--please do! But do not, and this is the heart of my discontent, do not confuse tropes and effects as the sign-posts for truth. There is no magic in the cut-up or the montage, no magic in the automatic writing session. There is no magic or short way. It takes all avenues to "tell" "the" "truth". Sometimes that even means speaking in clear, complete sentences.