But wow they are taking Dabashi to task. What heroes. As a whole the Iranian community in the US is in no uncertain terms opposed to any kind of destablization, much less intervention--as is every poster to this list--but does our taking into account the suffering of others mean somehow, someway that we turn away from their anguish about Iran's present state which of course has meant decades of exile for many from family and friends? Is this what Ravi means by solidarity?
At any rate on the Zizek editorial
His Orientalism is very troubling. He tends to see the Orient as a wasteland of thought. Jaini multivalued logic or Buddhist antinomies would be dismissed by him as attacks on truth.; any Westerner interested in such thought is condemned. But now he praises the Taleban for character, fo revolutionary fanaticism, however misplaced. It's perverse where his desire to epater the postmodernist takes him.
I was also confused by the piece, but Jason Parker who seems to have written a critical book on Zizek articulates some of what the latter is getting at. Interesting that multiculturalists are blamed for nihilistic pluralism rather than fanatical political correctness. At any rate, about fifteen years ago I wrote a paper on Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine in which I argued that the eponymous hero in embodying Schumpeter's gale of creative destruction reflected ironically just the kind of "flexible" and "ironic" subjectivity which Parker describes here. I suggested the novel was quite cunning, meta ironical in a way. ___________________ http://www.psychminded.co.uk/news/news2003/oct03/psychologysocritical.htm
Contemporary neoliberalism, endorsed and managed by the social democrats as well as the old free-marketeers, has this in common with nascent nineteenth-century capitalism; an eagerness to embrace change. Everything that is solid melts into air as capital wipes away all obstacles to production for profit, and the latest upgrade of late capitalism requires subjects who will make themselves at home in it, whether they work in factories or work from home. Even the distinct enclosed sphere of individual identity is now a hindrance to the new fluid forms of identity that are called into being. The subject of neoliberalism must be ready to participate as a stakeholder, with the terms of their engagement being that there is a necessary degree of substitutability and an assignment of rights to those who are accepted for inclusion. They must show flexibility in order to fit the different varieties of work that might be available to them, and also tolerance for the range of different subjects they work alongside. In their participation as producers and consumers they should, ideally, be able to be relational not only in the way they think about others but in the way they think about themselves. You will already recognise, perhaps, elements of the often implicit, sometimes explicit indigenous theory of self that some critical psychology trades in. We may be told that we should give up our fixation on cognitive or intentional deliberation in favour of an attention to the 'stake' speakers have in interaction, that a quasi-systemic view of selves in community does away with the division between the individual and the social, that conversational turn-taking is the only relevant place where our rights to speak are formulated and deployed, that we should stop harping on about 'problems' and reframe our lives more positively, and that we should be alive to the richly-textured varieties of commonsense. Contemporary capitalism demands more than a simple abandonment of old models of the individual however. There has been just as dramatic a transformation in the moral texture of neoliberal subjectivity so that there is a positive value placed on the ability to balance standpoints and to hold them in suspension without opting finally for one or the other. A form of reflexivity is required that will enable the subject to assume responsibility for their position without using it as an absolute moral standard to judge others, and there is a correlative expectation that they will not even hold themselves to this standard too firmly; better that there should be a degree of cynical distance and ability to negotiate different viewpoints. The new moralising tone takes its lead from a version of liberal multiculturalism in which there is a respect for others in exchange for agreement that each category of person will refrain from criticising practices of the other's group.
Contemporary capitalism demands more than a simple abandonment of old models of the individual however. There has been just as dramatic a transformation in the moral texture of neoliberal subjectivity so that there is a positive value placed on the ability to balance standpoints and to hold them in suspension without opting finally for one or the other. A form of reflexivity is required that will enable the subject to assume responsibility for their position without using it as an absolute moral standard to judge others, and there is a correlative expectation that they will not even hold themselves to this standard too firmly; better that there should be a degree of cynical distance and ability to negotiate different viewpoints. The new moralising tone takes its lead from a version of liberal multiculturalism in which there is a respect for others in exchange for agreement that each category of person will refrain from criticising practices of the other's group. It would indeed be a surprise if these moral demands were not echoed in different sectors of academic life, and some of our 'critical psychology' has been the place where these demands have been taken up and sold to us as new virtues. Here, it is thought that the appropriate ethical attitude to adopt towards research is to aim for a point of undecidability, to elaborate some reflexive implication of the self in that inability to take a position, and to revel in irony as such. The different possible positions that are carefully teased apart so that they can all the more easily be kept at arms length are treated as collections of language games, and the default moral position that is adopted is one that will clean away any derogation of any of them. In this way a form of verbal hygiene that strips out evaluative terms takes the place of moral evaluation. And even this isn't enough if we really are going to play the game of contemporary capitalism, for there are more explicit political demands that are made on the individual subject so they will be able to rework themselves within certain limits. These political imperatives are governed by globalisation as the unquestioned expansion of practices from the centre to the periphery and the incorporation of useful local practices on condition that they do not challenge the process of globalisation itself. An openness to change then goes alongside a willingness to accept the resignification of the self in such things as mission statements and a suspicion of anything that would seem to stand in the way of that rewriting of corporate identity. A thorough relativisation of political identities thus opens the way for an endorsement of change unfettered by the past, by the sense that history is important.