Ideology is Dead, Long Live Ideology
I guess it happens from what people tell me, but I've personally never seen Powell's close down the Pearl room for a reading before. Slavoj Zizek—philosopher and cultural icon—read September 9th to an audience eight deep into the aisles.
I came half an hour early and was lucky to get a spot on which to lean on the front of a bookshelf.
He was here to promote his new book Violence, but as he said he would early on, he talked about far more than the book, bringing in chicken jokes, dinner party conversations, late-Platonic notions of discourse and the inadequacies of hard-core porn to further his cultural critique of our particular historical moment.
The idea that jumped out to me was this persistence of ideology. Zizek proposed we are living in a time of ideology, that we are engrained with certain attitudes that seem ostensibly moral and high-minded, like all good doctrines should, but actually interfere with practical political solutions to the problem in question.
The inability to discuss racism was one example he gave, how PC attitudes make it very difficult to address the latent racism which remains dysconsciously in our society. This seems obviously true in at least the American context. No one wants to admit they have any prejudiced attitudes, right? Yet systemic problems remain, such as the overrepresentation of people of color in the prison system, of students of color in special education systems, the underrepresentation of people of color in the higher echelons of the professions or the political system. The same might be said of women for that last one, actually. These are problems that could be solved, imo, but it would take a brutally honest societal conversation about the legacies of racism and colonialism.
The last time we saw a conversation like that was in the late 60's.
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