Slavoj Žižek & Graham Harman Duel + Duet (Mar. 2017)
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- čas přidán 1. 03. 2017
- Žižek & Harman debate Object-Oriented Ontology, which Žižek rightly criticises for a lack of subjectivity. Debate took place at Southern California Institute of Architecture on March 1st 2017.
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Slavoj #Zizek #SlavojŽižek - Zábava
I've listened to this chat maybe five or six times over the past few years. Every time I do i feel like like I understand a new word or concept that i didn't the time before. It is genuinely one of the greatest joys in my life
This is exactly how I feel, it's so motivating and fulfilling
Dude, Graham Harman is an honest to god flesh and blood saint for abiding - not just patiently, but attentively - the recurring asides of Zizek who, love him as I do, does. not. let. you. breathe.
I wish philosophers/academics were like rappers and dropped collabs with each other. Would love to see Zizek make a film with Harman.
Harman just released a colab book with manuel Delanda on realism
It does happen, but they are never the most popular books. Zizek did one with German philosopher Markus Gabriel, and as the previous response said, Harman did one with Delanda. I prefer these kinds of discussions, where two philosophers can ask precisely the questions that bring out the important stuff in their works, minimally facilitated by a moderator, who acts as object petit a.
they do pretty often hehe!
Its called books
This is the Chomsky/Foucault of 2045...or whatever year we’re living in
I love how Graham looks like a drunk lawyer.
Zizek looks like a legally literate bar owner
solidly above my head but definitely a pleasure to witness
So on and so on, end of quote. But seriously.
This seems mostly true for the questions...architects that do not understand their position in social hiergarchy....
This was interesting. Thanks for the upload.
This is an awesome debate of two amazing contemporary thinkers! Thx for the upload! I think the best ontology we have today lies between Harmans OOO and Zizeks reading of the subject, they nicely supplement each other theoretically
I 100% agree you with on that.
What a joy to watch
Graham really hijacks that introduction. "This is what Zizek thinks."
How much does Architecture allow objects, tangible or intangible to exist? or cease to exist? Natzi Architecture represented its ideology completely, as well as religious architecture (Aztec, Egiptian, and so on), and its interesting how stones from aztec temples were reutilized to build Catholic Churches. It gives structure to the ideology as well as it becomes target for other ideologies. Construction and destruction for human establishments comes from the immaterial objects.
All methods of conveying culturally relevant information become nullified by this then, because most artistic creation is deeply linked to the materials of production and some out of many are imbued with the flavor of the culture around it. There is strictly speaking no detached representative; form often reveals politics more than a political analysis detached from form might
In post-structuralist literature, Essence was problematised under the guise of post-foundationalism (which allows an essence that is contingent) not naive anti-foundationalism.
This is actually quite accessible, I was afraid for a string of zizek rands that go off topic (and they are there)...but it appears that most of his usual not staying on track is motivated by precisely the underlaying discussion made explicit here...
Zizek is best at analysing old communist structure...much of what is debated here seems a confrontation between the heideggerian reproduction of different logic stuctures. In this way this is more generally a historical discussion.
.
This is not long enough lol... I would really love to know what they discussed afterwards, which should definitely be more in depth than the video itself as they would not have needed to clarify many concepts for the audience.
The lady is like "uhhh, buildings, architecture, real estate...HULLO???"
31:14 "... most fundamental... Subject is for me a certain [...] structural deadlock... the paradox of subject... the subject is an object [unavailable] to itself..."
1940s lighting suits Harman's wise guy look
Who could successfully moderate Zizek? Please offer suggestions:
Living? No one. Dead? Maybe Stalin.
Someone with a machine gun? No he's a communist actually, he'd take that lol
Disagree with some about moderator: she's absolutely fine
right?
Actual where Graham and Zizek discuss the thing in itself and how to really get at it. (Methodologically, and kinda)
1:22:10
The moderator, by the way, is Anna Neimark, an accomplished architect with multiple published works. She is currently full-time faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, a highly esteemed school for architecture and design. She holds a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University and an M.Arch 1 from Harvard's Graduate School of Design, qualifications which I doubt critics in this comment section possess anything near in prestige to. But idiot armchair philosophers will always be drawn to these discussions, likely because they've come into contact with some of Zizek's more popular work, and think themselves "intellectual" enough to discern his finer criticisms of SR and OOO (despite their utter lack of understanding of the idea itself).
Shieet someone just got BURNEEEDDD
it is running counter intuitive to have her input...she is not in the flow..its clearly not her subject
who are you even talking about? this seems so white knightish. she’s obviously a qualified person, that’s why she’s the moderator.
The feminist speaks 😂
Hello God!
Finally, my two heroes
I kind of wish I could understand what the guy at 1:30:00 is saying, he sounds a little bit crazy.
I don't think there's really a big difference in practice between what Zizek and Harman are saying. I don't think it makes much practical difference whether you consider the object to exist but be unknowable to the subject or for the object to be unknowable to itself (this is Zizek's position and basically amounts to "all objects are subjects onto themselves"). They seem to basically agree on what antisemitism and fascism are and I think they're mostly correct.
Where Zizek loses me is when he gets to quantum physics. He tries to legitimise his subject-object argument by showing that "it actually works that way in nature". This shouldn't really matter, we are talking about social objects and social subjects, emergent constructs and human beings, not matter-reality. Even if reality is totally deterministic and "whole" (Everettian multiverse theories suggest that it actually might be, the contingency of reality is just the part of reality that we can see, all other quantum states are present, just in parallel realities, a depressing thought and I prefer Heisenberg aesthetically), that really shouldn't matter for his argument so it's strange that he tries to justify it that way. Quantum physics is just a description of stupid matter, the fact that Zizek picks Heisenberg out of all possible theories of quantum uncertainty is unnecessary at best, opportunistic at worst.
I think he just likes the idea that it might apply to matter as well on a purely aesthetic basis, because it nicely matches his ideas, but not because it actually matters for what he says.
The point of quantum physics is that there is (to our minds at least) a disconnect between the macroscopic and quantum scale worlds. I don't think you can really bridge that gap philosophically, if you're talking about something like Egyptian religion you can say that probably to Egyptians it was also a mystery and his argument applies, but who cares how it works on the quantum level? It might be perfectly deterministic for all we care as long as subjectivity is an emergent phenomenon it doesn't matter whether it emerges on a deterministic or non-deterministic matter substrate.
So I just think Zizek throws that stuff in there to sell books honestly. I understand his reasoning perfectly but I hope he knows that the quantum stuff can only ever be an analogy or illustration of his concepts, they can't be causally related. He can't say "it's like this for humans because it's like that on the level of quantum states too", that would just be silly.
Harman also seems to think that objects have a reality unto themselves, even inanimate objects.
Zizek always talks about the Real as a gap. Isn't it much more palatable then to accept the gap between the thinking, conscious subject and the stupid, dead substrate from which it emerged? Isn't it weird to try and close the gap between the two if you're such a fan of ontological gaps in the first place, by trying to assign degrees of freedom and "psychic reality" (as Harman calls it) to the matter substrate itself?
An appeal to universality is unavoidable if your language is psychoanalysis; and I'm not saying it as a bad thing.
Plus his overall point isn't even that it is a universal thing/an "essential" thing, it is more that the factor that causes uncertainty is a factor original to the object itself (the atom), as opposed to there being an atom, which can be discerned either spatially or temporally/its momentum.
This is important for Zizek because he is trying to link it to how the condition for something like object petit a is inscribed into the precondition of the subject itself
A question for Harman: if objects are permanently withdrawn, as Harman claims, then surely reality is permanently withdrawn. But if reality is permanently withdrawn, then how do we know that it is composed of 'objects'?
I agree with Harman about reality specifically around the @1:01:00 mark where he says reality is out there and causes failures when we reach out and try to grasp it. As for being ‘composed of objects’ this is where the so-called ‘flat ontologies’ lose me, because composition in terms of objects assumes this basic sort of lego-building block construction notion of reality which I don’t think even hardcore OOO realists really think.
It’s why I definitely lean towards zizek’s point of view that we need a so much more elaborate conception of materialism. Reality is indeterminate and fundamentally incomplete, replete with ruptures and absences. It’s not so much a construction as some kind of violently individuated whole.
Can anyone identify the source of the video game analogy for ontological incompleteness of quantum physics Zizek mentions around 28:00?
There are hundreds of games in which two of his examples apply. One example he refers to is "invisible walls", which is when the playing field comes to an end or you reach the very edge of the sandbox, and you can't go any further but it looks like you can. Even though you can see scenery beyond this edge, you can't go there because there is an invisible wall which is the actual edge of the playing environment. There are tons of games with such walls.
The second example is a much broader concept of "things which have an appearance or facade, like you see the front of a house, but not an inside of the house, you can't go in there". I don't make video games, but I suspect this one might be inherent to game design very generally. There are far too many games in which this type of phenomenon exists to enumerate here, at least.
I think he mentions it in several of his books, I think I remember reading it in Parallax View, and maybe elsewhere as well (he often brings it up when discussing Quantum theory and ontological incompleteness or indeterminacy).
I will always remember this one level in Call of Duty (4? I think?) I know Zizek would love it, it’s a Chernobyl map called Pripyat where the player can “glitch” out of the set boundaries of the map and wander around these sort of half-rendered areas where at times the floor or the sky will sort of disappear and reappear, and certain buildings are even explorable. It was a wonderful and strange experience when my friend’s older brother showed it to us ages ago, like discovering what it’s like to be drunk for the first time.
this chat but the camera only shows the shadows of them talking on the white wall :)
3:13
53:43 "That's my problem with Andrei Tarkovsky... He's so spiritual, but at the same time a brutal materialist, you know...?"
>>
*Andrei Tarkovsky on Stalker*
[...]
Writer and Professor, two intellectuals, are simply people who are so sure of their reasons, so much convinced of their fairness that they are able to convince Stalker in the end. They both represent this positive realistic principle which is so manifest in contemporary life. This principle will impel Stalker to re-examine his attitude toward life. *It's a story of a crisis, of the fall of an idealist. Stalker is the last of the Mohicans, a relic of a passing age, an idealist.* What is taking place is a loss of faith. Pragmatism wins or to be more precise: materialism wins as I believe pragmatism is too gloomy. I find no particular faults with Stalker's two companions. Writer and Professor are a couple of normal people, a creation of the times we live in. Why are they both intellectuals? That's simple, I know intellectual circles a little bit better.
Nice find. Besides Tarkovsky himself stating that "materialism wins" in the film, though, I definitely agree with Slavoj about the spiritual aspect in Tarkovsky's films as well. Slavoj is right, he manages to do both at the same time.
@@mikeisapro yes! But that spiritual is found in and through the material, like Zizek says, in sticking your hands in the mud, or in silences and absences.
Is Slavoj this domineering in every discussion? :D
37:07 "... pathologically jealous husband... the true point is: Why do I need this pathological jealousy to maintain my identity?.. I would define truth as opposed to simple knowledge!.."
SLAVOJ ZIZEK AND DAN HARMON DUEL
Historic ?
Moderator is fine,
Please, stop all this sexist bullshit about the moderator; she was actually brilliant in every one of her remarks. Take for instance the moment in which she makes a recapitulation of the discussion and asks a question so difficult that, for a moment, nobody knows how to answer. (1:04:00 - 1:05:45)
Why is it only sexist when people say bad things about women? In other words, it's people like you who are the real sexists - against both genders.
Magnus Karlsson why not, accuse me about other people's faults. Because, you know, sexism is soooo infrequent in the male-centric world of academia. Jesus, Of course everyone could critize her if there's a good reason. The problem is there isn't and there's no evidence in this video about her doing a bad job, the complaint baseless and colouring prejudices. Anyway this was motivated by a brief and brain-dead "the woman has no clue" comment and the fact that for years women have been treated badly in this particular context, just for their gender. Where's the evidence about this phrase? It's not a paternalistic defense like 'oh I should protect this poor woman from men'. Unfair treatment is the point. Again, you say this to me as if there wasn't historic context. (That's why I said that.)
I agree with you, there is historical context for women having less political/public authority compared to men (for reasons that are not sexist by the way). But the fact is that men have always been much more likely to get hate and threats both off- and online than women. Ever watched an interview with a celebrity here on youtube? Then you'd know that the gender of the interviewer doesn't matter, he or she is going to get shit on by the fans either way. I watched the VICE interview with Karl Ove Knausgård, and the comment section was more cancerous than usually. One guy commented: "the narrator's voice is so annoying he sounds like he has cum stuck in his throat". If this was said about a woman interviewer, then you would no doubt have reacted even more strongly since it is even more obscen than "The woman has no clue". And the irony is that, if I were to tell you that people make such comments about men too, you would no doubt respond "about getting cum stuck in the throat? I don't think so". But the fact is, people say all kinds of shit, especially to and about men. And you know what the other significant difference is? There is no one sticking up for the poor VICE guy, or any other male interviewer/host/narrator who regularly gets shit on in the comment section. No one defends him, no one gives a shit simply because he's a man and not a woman. There you have it, it's called sexism. And as previously stated, this positive discrimination of women and negative discrimination of men is actually bad for both men and women, since you can't, at least in intratribal relationships, have negative discrimination without positive discrimination and vice versa.
Magnus Karlsson I agree in one particular thing that floats over all this discussion, and it's the fact that we live in an oversensitive/politically correct time to the point of absurdity. I don't know to what degree I'm responding in this way, but I guess I'm sometimes there too. I bet that the woman in this video never went here to read this section and does not care at all about what we say (I hope), but YT comments is like a paralell hell in which all kinds of shit are taking place. In that sense, my comment trying to balance the needlessy negative comments is as unnecessary as the rest. But that depends on what we are talking about. Yes, I agree we have today that bias, but it's often mixed with other dreadful aspects of our culture. Anyway, if a man is treated badly for whatever reason by other YT users it's equally shameful and we should never undervalue it. In that regard we should not make a difference between genres. It's common sense.
I agree. People in general are either too sensitive and politically correct or too resentful and hostile, which has created a kind of destructive backlash culture in which people just attack each other for no apparent reason, and it's threatening to tear the social fabric apart from within.
Harman's ontological position is a walking one-sided antithesis, inadvertantly
advertising the need for dialectics. As if there could be "objects" qua objects without the processes and relations (thinking, desire, gravitation, what have you) with respect to which they take on the status of "object." A theory of objects that doesn't think -- or arbitrarily begins with definitions that preclude such thinking -- the objectality of objects may well be "non-modern" but it also lags far behind ancient philosophy.
I think that is not what he is saying. On the contrary, its more like he applies the "mind body problem" to everything. He keeps everything, except the special status of the human mind. All objects are given the same status.
40:00 "... universality has a certain actuality... in a way identity precedes activity... reduction of objects to relations..."
40:47 "Maybe here is the understanding:.. Objects cannot be reduced to a set of [actual] relations. There is always an excess..."
// Communism
41:35 "... paradoxical entity ... All social causes.. exist only through incessant activity of individuals... nonetheless they cannot be reduced to it..."
42:07
42:56 "... posited by relations themselves as their in-itself..."
Not communist, please see comments by Trone de Marchandises below,
32:45
50:30 counter-factual argumentation à la Wolfenstein 3D, yo.
19:32
So many adverts on a Marxist video
Hey.... what's with the sexist comments.... Don't understand. Doesn't help the discussion at all.
Eliot!
Does Zizek give an answer at all to Harman's question about "what he gets from Heidegger that he does not get from Hegel"? (56:20) For me it seems he kind of evades the question or forgets to answer it. Ok, maybe Haman interrupted him but he had had plenty of time to answer (also, this does not seem to me like a normal dialogue. Too much fancy worlds and no clear train of thought)
Zizek is brilliant, but Jesus someone get him a Xanax. Every time Harman or the moderator is making an interesting suggestion, Slavoj interrupts. It’s very difficult to follow the conversation. Follow the code, my man: he/she talks, then you talk, and so on and so on....
34:17 "Levi Strauss: Do Dual Organizations Exist?.. experience with -- not 'Native Americans' -- ... Indians... [35:06] 'Draw me the map of your village!' ... Two totally different drawings... Hierarchic, concentric... / Dualist... Levi Strauss says that:.. Their truth is in the way they miss reality... [36:27] This failure to represent social reality tells you the deepest truths about social reality... class society in the beginning... social antagonism registered in the failure..."
I claim! "sniff" Seriously "ajust t-shirt" In a Lacanian way "points finger up" this is a catastrophe "rub nose" in a obscene way "wipe face" And so on, and so on.
Chavena De Hemoglobina I doubt Slavoj would wear a unjust t-shirt. Must you be so rude?
I agree, everybody does. just listen, dont watch :)
Haha!! "No, i was applauding myself. Fuck you!"
This girl is in way over her head, half the questions are just nonsensical and more jargonny than Zizek. She clearly has no idea what she’s talking about, which is understandable since I believe she study’s architecture.
awful space...
John Smith
He is a quasi philosopher created employed by new world order masters.
I suggest him to study philosophy and history of art again as well as to learn proper English.
Nobody cares dip shit
52:17 "... What you call 'immaterialism', I'm almost tempted to call materialism, you know..! [...] materialism, for me, has nothing to do with 'matter'..." -- "... What's the point in calling it materialism, if it involves nothing 'material'?.."
Q&A
1:04:14 "... Trump... defamiliarisation... " -- "... extraniation... estrangement..."
2:03:47 "... left Fukuyama-ism... problems of the commons... I remain a Communist... I want to live in a properly/ nicely alienated society... We need large scale decisions... 'What is Your model?' ... Well structured alienation in an efficient, bureaucratic socialism..." (:/ ?)
I don't think it's sexist to call this moderator out. It's one thing to ask questions pertinent to the discussion once the speakers finished their parts; but she did a terrible job keeping Slavoj in check and basically let the whole thing fall apart into a freeform talk. And then she kept interrupting their points as if she was up there to be a speaker as well - you aren't, fucking shut up and let us hear what they have to say.
why is she talking?
Zizek num deixa ninguém falaaaaaaar dá raiva
This girl is all anticlimatic I like her
Russglish or russianglish.
hahahahahahahaha zizek is such a racoon lmao, why he keep interrupting him lmao, i love him what a babe
Who is this moderator? Awful.
these guys indeed not only need no moderator (or moderation) - moderation just distracts from their pace.
gawd I m so embarassed because of her pushy egoic interuptions...what has she got to do with these topics?, she hasnt lived enough to but in like this its awkward as!!
it is what it is lol maybe she got nervous energy
Philosophy is just for fun. It is nothing serious and nothing is serious. Death is the only serious thing because death is nothing. - random wannabe intellectual on the internet who is really just a mediocre person with no exceptional talent Alec Rodriguez.
chomsky is sooooo boring to me :(((
Trump wasn't about electing a business man. He was elected because Americans are sick of political correctness and mainstream politics.
And now we have 'fuck Trump', dehumanization of immigrants, damn near open racism towards Arab Muslims, widespread disdain for journalism, open sexism, constant lambasting of the CoC, and so on. And now people are sick of incivility, and want political correctness back (though we now call it civility). Democracy in a nutshell, overcorrecting and then regretting it.
Bill Clinton was saying decades ago that "government should be run like a business". And he did just that, too. Ever since Reagan, every US president has been a right-wing authoritarian enacting neoliberal economic policies that help the rich and hurt the middle class and the poor. Some, like Clinton and Trump, are more blatant and overt about doing it, but the idea that government should be run like a business- or that big business plays a major role in government and therefore those running for office should appease business interests if they want to be elected (campaign funding is a hugely accurate predictor of a candidate's success)- has been fully integrated since Reagan, for the last 40 years.
stochastic24 The sad part is that Trump is effectively just as mainstream as Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Reagan were. He's right where he is supposed to be. He's not any different where it counts.
The woman has no clue.
"the woman"
hey, why don't you get up on stage with two giants of philo-social critique and think up witty insightful Qs/interjections ?
You can't seem to pin point your own critique in the form of youtube comment...
She's awful.
because shes a woman.. jk
I think Zizek can decide whether or not he wants to be on the stage with this girl.
Cringe-worthy interviewer. Just let the dudes talk.
She barely spoke at all. What is noticeable in comments such as this is actually 3 fold:
1.) The manifestly distorted perception of that chauvinist commenter.
2.). The apparent obliviousness of the commenter to his or her chauvinism and the distortions it creates.
3.) The experience of need within the commenter to express chauvinism (of which they are unaware) in the form of a comment.
Such pathology.
It really is, though. You're reading into it even though the exact same phrasing would've been used even if the moderator were a guy. Not only that, but in my experience misogynists don't really differentiate males from females by calling them "dudes." Men, sure. Guys - maybe, can be misinterpreted. But dudes? Come on now. It's ironic that so many of you people are jumping in on the fact that she's a woman given the content on the video. It's almost like you didn't listen to that part where they're talking about antisemitism and essentialism. Maybe learn to be a little more charitable in the future.