Is education a lost cause? Žižek, schooling, and universal emancipation

Abstract

This paper discusses the work of Slavoj Žižek and links several of his ideas to educational contexts. After giving a brief background on his unique intellectual perspective, I pull three themes (control, torture, and politics) from his body of work, and I consider their educational connections and implications. I conclude by speculating on the future use of Žižek's work to educational philosophy and educational studies.

Keywords:

• education policy
• educational theory
• Žižek
• cultural studies
• politics of education
• popular culture

Notes

1. The title of this piece is a playful adaptation of the title from Žižek's recent work In Defense of Lost Causes (2008a). It is offered in a Zizekian spirit even though the meaning of a ‘lost cause’ may differ between Žižek's use and my own.

2. He has been labeled the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’.

3. As odd as it may seem, one can draw a similarity in this respect to the work of John Dewey as well as in their common questioning of elements of liberalism. Of course, Dewey would likely find many of Žižek examples offensive and his ‘appreciation’ of popular culture as un-philosophical.

4. Since there was a certain totalitarian aspect to Tito's rule, all films that might be shown had to be reviewed before release. The films, regardless of approval it seems, were catalogued at university for the avid student consumer such as Žižek (Boyton, 1998).

5. This is one of the few Žižekian jokes that can be relayed in writing or polite company.

6. See Boyton (1998): ‘Zizek once wrote a pseudonymous review attacking one of his own books on Lacan. On another occasion, Problemi published a fictional roundtable discussion of feminism in which Zizek played the boorish interlocutor, posing provocative questions to nonexistent participants. (Later, in Enjoy Your Symptom!, Zizek continued to engage in literary hoaxes with an essay on the films of Roberto Rossellini – none of which he had seen.) With the regime's aversion to Lacan on the rise, Zizek sensed a wonderful opportunity for mischief; writing in a widely read academic journal, Anthropos, under an assumed name, he published a deliberately clumsy attack on an imaginary book that allegedly detailed why Lacan's theories were wrong. The next day bookstores across Ljubljana received requests for the title’ (para. 19).

7. It is interesting to note that Žižek felt as if his life and that of other academics in Yugoslavia was more restricted than in other eastern bloc countries due to Tito's perceived greater tolerance. Boyton relays an interesting conclusion: ‘While Czechoslovakian or Polish authorities made no secret of their authoritarian tactics, the more permissive Yugoslavian communists sent out mixed signals about what was and was not permitted, thereby fostering an unusually effective, because at least partially self-regulating, system of censorship’ (1998, para. 15). This element of self-regulation has an eerie connection to Foucault's work on self-governance.

8. See Jean-Jacque Rousseau's ‘The Discourses’ and Other Early Political Writings (1997).

9. See Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942/2008).

10. 0 Another interesting connection that can be drawn here is to the work of Richard Rorty. Rorty, in his Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America (1999), makes a similar argument against the politics of the American left.

11. This is the unspoken thought as Žižek, in Žižek! (2005), gives us a tour of his apartment, which is littered with his son's action figures.

12. Žižek's view of freedom is, of course, contrarian. He states: ‘True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one's choice puts at stake one's very existence – one does it because one simply “cannot do otherwise”’ (Žižek, 2008a, pp. 70–71).

13. The former Vice President is known for a coarse attitude, as Cheney's remark on the Senate floor demonstrates (see MSNBC, 2004).

14. A second connection is the use of light torture in schools such as corporal punishment. This, to the surprise of some, is still used in school and is demonstrated – behind a closed door – on The Principal's Office.

15. Here is what they do get from popular culture: ‘in the fifth season of 24, it became clear that the mastermind behind the terrorist plot was none other than the President of the US himself, many of us were eagerly waiting to see if Jack Bauer would also apply to the President – “the most powerful man on earth”, “the leader of the free world” (and other Kim-Yong-Il-esque titles that he possesses) – his standard procedure for dealing with terrorists who do not want to divulge a secret that may save thousands of lives. Will he torture the President? … Unfortunately, the authors did not risk this redeeming step. But our imagination can go even further, making a modest proposal in Jonathan Swift style: what if part of the procedure to test the candidates for the US presidency were also the public torture of the candidate? Say, a waterboarding of the candidates on the White House lawn, transmitted live to millions? Those qualified for the post of the leader of the free world would be those who could last longer than Mohammed's two and a half minutes’ (Žižek, 2008a, p. 51).

16. The problem of the public discussing what ‘must be done’ to keep us safe is also a concern of Žižek: ‘The problem for those in power is how to get people to do the dirty work without turning them into monsters. This was Heinrich Himmler's dilemma. When confronted with the task of killing the Jews of Europe, the SS chief adopted the attitude of “somebody has to do the dirty job”. In Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher describes how Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts they performed. Most were well aware that they were doing things that brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, instead of saying “What horrible things I did to people!” they would say “What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, the temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate’ (Žižek, 2006, para. 9).

17. Here, Dershowitz (2006) is attempting to bring torture under the law and put legal distance between the state torturer and the tortured. Žižek might find this problematic: ‘But what if such a distance is possible? What if people do commit terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity’ (Žižek, 2006, para. 12). The fact that our political culture puts up with this is telling as well.

18. Cheney has mentioned his viewing of the show on many occasions.

19. Žižek ran for the presidency of Slovenia shortly after independence. At a debate, all of the candidates acknowledged he was by far the smartest of them, but this seemed to also disqualify him. There have also been rumors that he was asked to run the intelligence agency for the country. If this is true, he may in fact have accepted the post as there seems no better cover than that of an iconoclastic globetrotting academic.

20. This a typical Žižekian riff. He regularly employs the notion of a substance without an integral part of that substance, but then still carries on as if it were the same entity. Other well-worn examples are ‘coffee without caffeine’ and ‘meat without fat’.

21. ‘Ecology: in spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalisms which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe of crisis, can easily turn ecology into new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution … What looms on the horizon today is the unprecedented possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its course by triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military – social catastrophe and so on. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will carry on’ (Žižek, 2008a, p. 421).

22. ‘The inadequacy of private property for so-called “intellectual property”. The key antagonism of the new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music)?’ (Žižek, 2008a, p. 422).

23. ‘The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics) – Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that biogenetic interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his vision of the End of History’ (Žižek, 2008a, p. 423).

24. ‘And, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums. On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9 announced the “happy nineties”, the Fukuyama dream that liberal democracy had won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community was lurking just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywoodesque happy ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where leaders had not yet grasped that their time was over)’ (Žižek, 2008a, p. 423).

25. Žižek is typically contrarian and provocative as the following dialogue attends: ‘What is the worst job you've done? Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring’ (Žižek & Greenstreet, 2008, para. 22).

26. One such instance are the words of Barack Obama. Žižek contends: ‘In this regard, Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can publicly say. His greatest achievement to date is that he has, in his refined and non-provocative way, introduced into the public speech topics that were once unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with “enemies” like Iran’ (Žižek, 2008b, para. 13).

27. The real possibility of a Žižek without Žižek looms ironically on the horizon.