Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Slavoj Žižek made an interesting point in a movie entitled "Predictions of Fire", which is about the Slovene band Laibach and the kindred artistic movement which they're a part of, NSK, or Neue Slowenische Kunst, New Slovene Art.

Talking about the theory that we challenge the state and the dominant spheres of society by purposely transgressing the standards etc.., i.e. by not following rules or doing shocking things or engaging in criminality, all topics (under the broad category of transgression) which have attracted attention from academics as means of resistence, meaning resisting the dominant paradigm by transgressing it, isn't really effective.

There are quite a few books about the necessity of challenging society by transgressing, "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks, but more commonly books of social history which have charted the transgressive activity of people who were marginalized, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, so the theme is a strong one.

Žižek argues that all of this really isn't a good strategy for challenging the status quo for the simple reason that the powers that be, the people who make up the status quo themselves, already transgress the standards that they themselves set; corruption, both in the State and, to extend his argument, in Capitalism, is endemic. They're already breaking their own laws, whether they proudly pronounce it like the Bush administration does or keep it secret, like Nixon and, say, Enron, did. So the fact that transgression is already part of the game, however informally, seriously challenges the idea that to effectively counter state power all you have to do is to be self-consciously transgressive against the ideals that the State promotes, whether in a counter-cultural way or otherwise. The same thing could be said of capitalist culture in general. The idea of a "Rebel" has been so thoroughly assimilated that it in itself holds almost no power as something which could challenge capitalism. During the '90s, in fact, the capitalists associated with the dot com boom self consciously used revolutionary rhetoric to describe what they were doing, a fact copiously documented by Thomas Frank in his book "One Market Under God". The fact that Henry Rollins, hardcore punk rocker extraordinaire has morphed into something of a pro-capitalist figure is another sign of the loss of relevance of the traditional 'rebel' figure, as is the general institutionalization of Punk rock as a sort of "Permanent Revolution" a kind of rebellion which never ends. The phrase "Permanent Revolution" originally came from Trotsky and Trotskyist political groups; seeing the self importance and general irrelevancy that many of those groups have I see the paralells between them and Punk as it stands today to be pretty strong.

Be that as it may the general point stands, which prompts Žižek to ask just what is effective. The answer he gives, being that it's in the context of a film about Laibach, is justifiably that Laibach itself represented just such a real, effective, threat to the Yugoslav system, but the details of that are beyond this post. More generally, the question of what exactly is effective could be answered, or at least indicated, by what exactly is not, according to this model, effective, which is infantile thumbing your nose at authority.

I think that what Žižek indicates is a need to get beyond pure negativity and engage the system through some sort of positive concepts, whether that means spitting the biases of the state back at it through self conscious parody, as Laibach did, or by doing the harder job of identifying the positive features of whatever sort of society that we want to construct and going from there---although the result of this exercise is almost necessarily bound to be fragmentary and disjointed.