Zizek on Anthropology

Zizek on Anthropology - fairly old but a few points

1. Shame (excess jouissance, the real) comes first, culture is how to deal with the embarrassment

2. We are a society of "belief" more today than in the past but the modality of distance has changed. ie from respect for power of appearance of rituals to mistrust of symbolic institution and "really meaning it"

3. Anthropological errors started with "phenomenological evolutionary illusion", ie "when researchers found a certain gap between reality and beliefs or between form and content, they mistakenly posited an original moment when people really 'meant it.' 

4. Cultural as institution: Even if you superstitiously change an 'unlucky' number on a house you must go through the proper channels for it to be symbolically effective. Institutions act as minimum reification to take the game seriously.

5. Alienation is irreducible (cf some marxist, phenomological), can't reconstitute an early pre-alienated moment or a future when authenticity of meaning is reinstalled.

6. Anthropology of everyday life moves from implicitly racist attitude of studying the eccentricity of others, to adopt the same view of ourselves. It is much better as a double alienation.

7. (Linking to that newspaper series I cant refind the link for):

 You remember Florida, the scandal elections and the first Bush victory. A guy somewhere from Africa wrote an article imitating that sort of journalistic report, you know, an enlightened Western journalist goes to Africa, where they allegedly have some election and he mocks the election, "ha, ha, what corruption." Well, this guy wrote about Florida in the same way, saying there are votes disappearing, the brother of the candidate is the local government, you know, describing Florida as a provincial Banana Republic case of cheating. It was a wonderful result. It was anthropology at its best.

8. Concept of "habit" -  not  rules, habits tell you how to obey or disobey rules. Especially social prohibitions never mean what they appear to mean.  Zizek claims that at precisely this level, ideology has survived.

9. Lacanian ethics and desire: Lacan of the fifties and sixties, it is the ethics of desire to not compromise your desire. But later Lacan, desire is a priori something hypocritical, inconsistent. Realisation of desire is to stage a scene where that desire as such emerges. There is a pleasant obstacle preventing it all the time. This is fantasy.

10. Sometimes, respect is the most disrespectful category. Respect here is like telling a child false things so not to hurt him, not taking them and their beliefs seriously.

11. Some other stuff: Brain sciences, western universalism and Islam...

12. On Neoliberalism as a category:

But my first doubt would be about the process of describing the fact that something new is emerging. I don't think it is adequately described by the way neoliberalism describes itself. For example, saying "the rule is no longer state intervention, but free interaction, flexibility, the diminishing role of the state." But wait a minute, is this really going on? I mean, take Reagan's presidency and Bush's presidency today. While bombasting against big spending Democrats - that is to say, big state - the state has never been as strong as it is today and there is an incredible explosion of state apparatuses. State control today is stronger than ever. That would be my automatic reaction: yes, there is something new but, when covered by the label neoliberalism, it is not adequately described. The self-perception of today's era as neoliberal is a wrong self-perception.

Even leftist critics all too often accept this self-description on its own terms and then proceed to criticize it, saying, "no, we can't leave everything to the market." Wait a minute, who is leaving everything to the market? If we look at today's American economy, how much support there is for American farmers, how much intervention, military contracts, where is there any free market? I mean, sorry, but I don't see much free market here.

Just look at this paradox, which I think is the nicest icon of what goes on today. You know the problem of cotton in the state of Mali I think, which is the producer of cheap cotton far better than the United States' cotton. The country is going to ruin because, as you know, the American cotton producers get more state support than the entire Gross Domestic Product of the state of Mali. And they say there, we don't want American help, what we want is just when you preach about corrupt state intervention and the free market, you play by your own rules. You know, there's so much cheating going on here.

So that would be the kind of anthropological study that's needed: what neoliberalism really means. That's what we have to do.