Well one of the definitions of po-mo provided by Caissa also indictated that po-mo is a rejection of modernity. That seems it essence and what of these nameless scholars who have no info provided here?
Zizek's defenders seem to want to make all definitions so murky that he can avoid any of the indictments he so richly deverves.
By obscure language, I should clarify and say inpenetrable. Lacan's concept of Other/other is meaningless nonsense and many serious writers (if the Guardian's publishing Zizek's work is itself proof of its worth my use of 'serious writers' can be useful too!) such as Chomsky have pointed out that he is charlatan.
I never made the distinction between low culture and high culture; stop playing games. I described commericial culture; a Madonna album is the product of Madonna, her record producer, and the record executive. It is may have lyrics that describe certain scenarios that play out in everday life; it might be an example of something but it is not proof of something.
All of the discourse on this thread only serves to prove that nobody can give a meaningful clear defense of Zizek. You have time to produce lengthy texts of that serve no particular meaning or purpose but you will not give a clear defense of what Zizek's can be quoted to have said about Kosovo. Zizek is a destructive waste of time, a man with no purpose but to entertain himself and exploit the commerical culture tendencies to disquise or lie about reality. Zizek does not further the cause of real change but only serves to distract others from it. That is why he gets featured in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog and his willingness to participate in such a project only serves to prove what a self-serving clown that so many of his fans want to deny that he is. This is akin to those who want to pretend that Sarah Palin is anything other than an empty political fashion model.
I see postmodernism as a rejection of modernity including the Enlightenment, a type of discourse that includes contradictory ideas simutaneously,So far so good, except many scholars see both modernism and postmodernism as continuation of the Enlightenment project, so it's not quite a "rejection." I might call it an extension of the metaphysical crises brought out by modernism. Your point about "contradictory ideas simultaneously," for example, is a seminal modernist concern. F.Scott Fitzgerald, one of modernism's poster boys, once wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
using an obscure language that explains little of nothing (ie Lacan, Derrida)Have you ever read Hegel or Kant? You don't know from obscure. I don't deny that clarity can be an issue in academic discourse, although I maintain that difficult concepts require difficult language, but these radical philosophers (many of whom are anti-establishment) bear too much of a brunt of these criticisms. Do legislators, lawyers or policy makers receive the same grade and quantity of criticism? Absolutely not. At any rate, the "obscure language" you deride is constant throughout Western philosophy, since Plato.
and uses commercial references (often referred to as pop culture but that term is misleading) as evidence.Hrm. Not quite true, although part of postmodernism's departure from high modernism was recognizing the cultural and political content of mass culture. I wouldn't call them using it "as evidence," which sets up a binary between mass culture (evidence) and high culture (non-evidence) which is not present. Rather, postmodernist scholars opened the door to see culture as a continuum--but they are not unique in this. See also Raymond Williams' wonderful essay "Culture is Ordinary."
Can anyone tell me after reading the previous link in the quote from below what Zizek's actual position on Kosovo was or is?I don't have time to read that interview right now, and I'm not sure what I could tell you, since I don't know much about the Kosovo conflict. Cueball, were he still around, could probably speak to that. If you want a better idea of how cultural texts fit into geo-political acts, I'd suggest reading part of his freely accessible How to Read Lacan, which is actually more about Zizek's writings than Lacan's. It contains a nice mixture of his psychoanalysis, philosophy and Marxism, as well as elucidating readings of cultural texts. A very good example of his style.
What we are dealing with here is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation that is proper to human speech. In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleague's intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say: "It was interesting." So, if, instead, we tell our colleague openly "It was boring and stupid", he would be fully justified to be surprised and to ask: "But if you found it boring and stupid, why did you not simply say that it was interesting?" The unfortunate colleague was right to take the direct statement as involving something more, not only a comment about the quality of his paper but an attack on his very person.Does exactly the same not hold for the open admission of torture by the high representatives of the US administration? The popular and seemingly convincing reply to those who worry about the recent US practice of torturing suspected terrorist prisoners is: "What's all the fuss about? The US are now only openly admitting what not only they were doing all the time, but what other states are and were doing all the time - if anything, we have less hypocrisy now!" To this, one should retort with a simple counter-question: "If the high representatives of the US mean only this, why, then, are they telling us this? Why don't they just silently go on doing it, as they did it till now?" So when we hear people like Dick Cheney making obscene statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask them: "If you just want to torture secretly some suspected terrorists, then why are you saying it publicly?" That is to say, the question to be raised it: what is there more in this statement that made the speaker tell it?
The same goes for the negative version of declaration: no less than the superfluous act of mentioning, the act of NOT mentioning or concealing something can create additional meaning. When, in February 2003, Colin Powell addressed the UN assembly in order to advocate the attack on Iraq, the US delegation asked the large reproduction of Picasso's Guernica on the wall behind the speaker's podium to be covered with a different visual ornament. Although the official explanation was that Guernica does not provide the adequate optical background for the televised transmission of Powell's speech, it was clear to everyone what the U.S. delegation was afraid of: that Guernica, the painting supposed to be depicting the catastrophic results of the German aerial bombing of the Spanish city in the civil war, would give rise to the "wrong kind of associations" if it were to serve as the background to Powell advocating the bombing of Iraq by the far superior U.S. air force. This is what Lacan means when he claims that repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same process: if the U.S. delegation had abstained from demanding thatGuernica be covered up, probably no one would associate Powell's speech with the painting displayed behind him - the very change, the very gesture of concealing the painting, drew attention to it and imposed the wrong association, confirming its truth.
