ARTICLE THREE

The THIRD GENERAL ARTICLE against ZIZEK, entitled:

HE LIVES!

(WE SLEEP)

We, yes, the so-called COMMITTEE FOR PLANETARY SAFETY will not condemn Mr. Slavoj Zizek for being merely pedantic and repetitive. These are only the customary symptoms of any sell-out thinker who instinctively acts as a proxy mouthpiece for the cultural mainstream. His crimes are worse. We are not concerned that he is a poseur whose ostensibly radical thinking is like candy to over-educated youths, humorous medias & Euro-soft intellectuals.

Zizek (and we are told this name is the Slovenian slang-word for "semen ejaculate") is like all populist marketers. He badgers us into death-like tedium with an endless "sales repetition" of the same old jokes, observations and... cinema references.

For the example: John Carpenter's "THEY LIVE!"

So many times the sniffling bugbear performs his hyperlinguistic zealot routine using this minor sci-fi comedy as a prop! So often to hear about the hero, John Nada demonstrates a profound truth with his adoption of the ideology-revealing sunglasses?

Flummery! Zizek would have us believe that the world is not divided neatly into the mystic's categories of (a) socially conditioned thinking (b) natural thoughtless direct perception. He denigrates humanity's ancient spiritual ideal that one can release the programming and return to the truth. No. In his mind there is always (c) the hidden ideological field which cannot be discerned by naive, unbiased vision but must be revealed by the ADDITION of a special prosthesis! Only when John Nada puts on the "x-ray glasses" can he break the spell of natural perception and enter into the demonic mechanisms which structure our social intercourse.

A revelation? Hardly. This is the same old story, isn't it? It is the myth enacted by every delusional paranoid, every reactionary nutjob, every... modern corporate citizen. The message of THEY LIVE! is pure indoctrination into the ideological myth that ideological myths structure the very form of our perception.

And, worse, in reinforces the dominant contemporary myth that a hip, progressive consumer product (anything from magical sunglasses to... a book or lecture by Slavoj Zizek) can put place into a critical-liberating relationship to the invisible protocols of the cultural dream in which you are embedded.

The true hidden messages are not so simplistic as Zizek would have us believe. He, like John Carpenter, offers us red herrings -- decoy ideologies. The idea that "Obey" and "Marry and Reproduce" and "Stay Asleep" "Find the Missing Father" are the secret social messages hidden in everything from Hollywood cinema to Stalinist propaganda is no more than the normative phantasy about the intellectual hero who pierces the veil of popular delusion. This phantasy itself is among the most popular delusions. So now we are knowing why that hero is called John Nada -- because he is the Nothing Man whose perceptions breed Nihilism.

The very obviousness of the ideological dimension in the films which attract Zizek (e.g.- his claim that Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" is the greatest American movie) is our clue. He does not want to unveil the mechanisms which maintain our social field but rather to delude us into fascination with well-known and easily deciphered decoy ideologies. The overt appearance of cultural influence in these film functions as a direct invitation to a certain style of critique. One can hardly watch THE FOUNTAINHEAD, or THEY LIVE! or THE FALL OF BERLIN without falling into the pre-given options of "naive gullibility" and "critical gullibility."

A man with an obvious lump in his pocket who tells you that there is nothing in his pocket WANTS you to think you are outwitting him.

Thus Zizek's increasingly popular "analysis" is a last-ditch structural move by the dominant ideological system to prevent the observation of its functional mechanisms.

He is the enemy of the humanity that is trying to be born.

So:

HE MUST CONFESS!