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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, January 17, 2003
Interesting piece from Slavoj Zizek on the role of disaster films in modern life. Certainly, I recall that the phrase 'just like a film' kept on recurring ad nauseam after September 11th, as if they was no other way to process what had happened only through analogy. As ever, I find Zizek extremely interesting while disagreeing with his fundamental proposition. In particular; "I believe that liberal democracies are paradoxical in the sense that they contain a fundamental blindness about the ideological mechanisms which operate within them. Take, for instance, the liberal principle of free choice. Choices made by people in democratic states are not necessarily less compulsory, and yet they experience these choices as though they are free." I suspect the obvious reply would be that of Tocqueville, that liberty and democracy are arguably cultural matters more than affairs of institutions held by the dead letter of the law. On the other hand, I have noticed that terms like liberty and democracy are frequently empty signifers, used glibly by individuals less than committed to either concept. I'm certainly sceptical of any simplisitic causal relationship between democracy and liberty, i.e. that free markets make free people. Democracy has been known to create conditions of instability extremely conducive to totalitarianism, as the Wemar Republic illustrates. That said, I am still not quite persuaded that no such relationship exists. Niall Ferguson has some interesting perspectives on this.Labels: Politics
posted by Richard 9:49 am
