Read Online Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek - Free Book Online
Authors: Slavoj Žižek
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problem will be that the crisis will become much more metaphysical and economically spiritual . There will be no catastrophe and everything will go on as normal, then, all of a sudden, we will learn that it’s catastrophic and everything is wrong. This gap between financial circulation, which follows its own speculative rules, and reality is growing rapidly. I think where we are now is extremely dangerous. I think we are moving toward a much more authoritarian global apartheid society .
There are multiple levels. I even tried to enumerate them. I see this problem of exclusion , which is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but simply about not allowing some people to participate in public life . They are considered as the invisible ones. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.
So we might say that new forms of apartheid are appearing. When we read the book Planet of Slums , written by Mike Davis, it’s shocking to learn that more than one billion people already live in slums. Slums are exploding, even in China. So we have those who are “ part of no-part ,” the “supernumerary” element of society, in slums, which is a very interesting phenomenon because, contrary to what people say, that we live in a society of total control, there are larger and larger populations outside the control of the state. It is as if states allow large parts of their state territory to become off limits. I see a tremendous problem here.
If you go to Los Angeles, everybody knows where the slums are. They are, of course, around the airport. You have huge slums in Inglewood. Do you know why they are there? Because no one cares if there’s a lot of noise where only poor people live, so they built the airport there. LA International Airport is located in a perfect place: not far from the airport to the north, for example, is Beverly Hills, which is the richest part of the city. But at the same time, it’s a slum area.
In addition to this slum situation, there are other big problems, which I think are economically insolvable. One of them is so-called intellectual property . Intellectual products are, in a very naive sense, communist by nature. Everybody knows this. Take a bottle of water, for example: when I drink it, then you will not drink it – and vice versa. When we use it, it loses its utility. But with knowledge, it’s exactly the opposite. The more it circulates, the more it grows. It’s a totally different logic. The difficult task for companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge. Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying than they do on developing products. This is why what is happening now is totally arbitrary.
So it is clear that what Bill Gates did is one big kidnapping. The problem is the following: with physical products, at least up to a certain level, who owns what? You can see this book. I bought it and it’s a material object. But when you talk about intellectual products, which circulate, it’s always very arbitrary to say they are private property, especially when you apply patents.
Indian farmers – they explained it to me in India – have discovered that certain agricultural methods and materials, which they have been using for centuries, are now owned by American companies, just because an American company patented them. So this American company wants the Indian farmers to pay for what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years. The next problem will be that when the biogenetic companies patent genes, we will all discover that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others. In the end, your genes will literally be owned by a certain company. So what is you, which is not owned, is just pure Cartesian cogito . This paradox is totally absurd.
In all these domains, I think, we can find proletarian positions. Frankly, I don’t see any easy way out. But it’s
There are multiple levels. I even tried to enumerate them. I see this problem of exclusion , which is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but simply about not allowing some people to participate in public life . They are considered as the invisible ones. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.
So we might say that new forms of apartheid are appearing. When we read the book Planet of Slums , written by Mike Davis, it’s shocking to learn that more than one billion people already live in slums. Slums are exploding, even in China. So we have those who are “ part of no-part ,” the “supernumerary” element of society, in slums, which is a very interesting phenomenon because, contrary to what people say, that we live in a society of total control, there are larger and larger populations outside the control of the state. It is as if states allow large parts of their state territory to become off limits. I see a tremendous problem here.
If you go to Los Angeles, everybody knows where the slums are. They are, of course, around the airport. You have huge slums in Inglewood. Do you know why they are there? Because no one cares if there’s a lot of noise where only poor people live, so they built the airport there. LA International Airport is located in a perfect place: not far from the airport to the north, for example, is Beverly Hills, which is the richest part of the city. But at the same time, it’s a slum area.
In addition to this slum situation, there are other big problems, which I think are economically insolvable. One of them is so-called intellectual property . Intellectual products are, in a very naive sense, communist by nature. Everybody knows this. Take a bottle of water, for example: when I drink it, then you will not drink it – and vice versa. When we use it, it loses its utility. But with knowledge, it’s exactly the opposite. The more it circulates, the more it grows. It’s a totally different logic. The difficult task for companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge. Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying than they do on developing products. This is why what is happening now is totally arbitrary.
So it is clear that what Bill Gates did is one big kidnapping. The problem is the following: with physical products, at least up to a certain level, who owns what? You can see this book. I bought it and it’s a material object. But when you talk about intellectual products, which circulate, it’s always very arbitrary to say they are private property, especially when you apply patents.
Indian farmers – they explained it to me in India – have discovered that certain agricultural methods and materials, which they have been using for centuries, are now owned by American companies, just because an American company patented them. So this American company wants the Indian farmers to pay for what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years. The next problem will be that when the biogenetic companies patent genes, we will all discover that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others. In the end, your genes will literally be owned by a certain company. So what is you, which is not owned, is just pure Cartesian cogito . This paradox is totally absurd.
In all these domains, I think, we can find proletarian positions. Frankly, I don’t see any easy way out. But it’s
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