http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU
I enjoyed Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I’m glad to see that it bears re-viewing.
As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a London trash heap (above) is the most brilliantly conceived segment, and one gets to hear the full (and in its own way brilliant) incoherence of his position on the topic. “The true ecological attitude is to hate the world: less love, more hatred,” as he puts it in the full interview (available in the book-of-the-film, p. 180).
The complete interview shows that Taylor didn’t let him off the hook easily, but that, realizing they won’t arrive at any agreement on ecology, she wisely tried to move on. When pressed, and despite himself, Zizek of course ends up saying things we can all agree on, such as that his “ecology without nature” is one in which “You are aware that you are in an open process where the consequences of your acts are ultimately unpredictable.”
Zizek — and Tim Morton and others who’ve taken up that argument — are right that nature, in the age of Disney, has become too soppy-sentimental, too “harmonic.” But the long tradition of so-called “nature writing” (a term I’ve never liked), from Thoreau and Muir to Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams, is all about radical openness to what happens, not about the kind of predictable smoothening of life’s edges that Zizek disdains. Critiquing the first (Disney nature) is fair and useful, but pretending the second (radical nature) isn’t there is sloppy. Radical nature includes dark nature and bright nature, alongside inexplicable nature, crossed-out nature, nature sous rature, nature. To the extent that nature is conceived not as part of a duality set against culture, with one or the other triumphing in the dyadic boxing ring, but as the sense of how things are in their reliable groundedness (the kind that underpins mortality in its joys and its sorrows) and radical unencompassability, to that extent it’s still a useful concept.
Next to Zizek, Examined Life‘s best segments are Cornel West extemporizing from the backseat of a taxicab and Judith Butler strolling with artist and disability rights activist Sunauara Taylor through San Francisco’s Mission District. Timothy Stanley provides nice summaries of the film’s ten or so segments on his blog.
Actually, “incoherence” is too harsh a word. Zizek’s quite right that trash “disappears” and that we ought to pay more attention to its disappearance (since it never really does disappear). He’s also got a point about popular ecology’s potential to shield us from reality, as opposed to waking us up to reality (though any set of ideas can be used in both of these ways, as hammers or as sleeping pills). He’s simply being silly/provocative/oppositional when he says it’s better to hate the world (though I think you have to have met him to know that he doesn’t really mean these things). He’s the lovable grumpy uncle, a Mullah Nasreddin whose truthfulness is right there between the lines, in the very gestures and twitches and scratches of his head.
[…] been quite busy if offline for a bit. But I wanted to thank Adrian I. for this post on Examined Life, since I’ve assigned it to my students to watch this week, so I’ll […]
Hi—actually the influence went the other way. I sent Slavoj a copy of my book then he ran with it….Astra was kind of surprised to see how much he had been influenced when she read it, but I’m actually very happy about it. It’s an idea worth spreading.
By “book” I mean Ecology without Nature. It came out in April 2007 and I sent him a copy roughly then, so his YouTube talks on that are also based on it.
Thanks for that correction, Tim – that’s great that you influenced his thinking on the topic. I may be confusing his earlier writings on nature (such as the pieces I cite in my Zizek & his others post, e.g., “Of cells and selves” and the “Nature does not exist” section of Looking Awry) with the later ones. But I would note that he calls your book “outstanding” in the footnotes to “Nature and Its Discontents” (from 2008), so it certainly resonated with him!
I love his writing on Chernobyl, Tarkovsky, and the ecological crisis (I draw on it a lot in parts of my film book), so my taking issue with him is always a kind of love/hate thing. Here’s a quote from Looking Awry (1991):
“Herein lies the lesson of recent theories of chaos: ‘nature’ is already, in itself, turbulent, imbalanced, its ‘rule’ is not a well-balanced oscillation around some constant point of attraction, but a chaotic dispersion within the limits of what the theory of chaos calls the ‘strange attractor,’ a regularity directing chaos itself.”
What’s interesting here is that Zizek is writing this before Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies came out (which popularized the chaos ecology stuff), and before the debates over nature, chaos, ecology, etc., among environmental historians and others, catalyzed by Don Worster’s “The ecology of order and chaos” (which came out in 1990, but which Zizek is almost certain not to have seen) and later compounded by Bill Cronon’s NY Times Magazine piece “The trouble with wilderness.” The chaos theorists aren’t exactly the ruling paradigm in ecology — I would argue there’s a loose consensus that “nature” ranges between the chaotic (which isn’t really chaotic in an everyday sense anyway) and the somewhat predictable — but the fact that Zizek was on top of at least one side of that disciplinary debate testifies to his voracious ability to stay abreast of things.
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