“Reading Slavoj Zizek’s 2010 Living in the End Times book, I noticed the author quoting Wikipedia a number of times. No big deal, you would say but it is significant in the light of the ongoing controversy around Wikipedia as a reliable (academic) source. Zizek is considered a leading intellectual, and arguably Europe’s most famous baby boom philosopher (b. 1949). This postwar generation entered their professional lives in the age of the (electronic) type writer, well before the introduction of the personal computer. As authors they are the ones that profit from the copyright regimes and are known to have a firm grip on the print media. Even though computer literate (read: they can type) their cultural attitude towards the WWW is ambivalent—if not absent. If a critic like Zizek includes Wikipedia in his verbal stream of consciousness it is a sign of the times that Wikipedia has become an integral part of our media environment.
So far, in the case of Zizek, referenced media have been books, followed by feature films. Forget newspapers, television and radio, or hearsay conversations and correspondences. If Zizek starts telling stories it is based on contemporary myths and current affairs that are supposed to be known to all of us, written down without detailed references. If Zizek starts to theorize he talks aloud, like in a bar, and it is this oral, narrative element that constitutes his philosophy. To include Wikipedia in these rants is part of a significant cultural shift and it is odd that Zizek himself is unaware of this Event.” via @networkpolitics
![Taken from a PDF of Zizek’s talk at the EURAM 2008. A few pages later:
“The wager of Hardt & Negri is that the new spirit [of capitalism] is already in itself Communist: like Marx, they celebrate the “deterretorializing” revolutionary potential of capitalism; like Marx, they locate the contradiction within capitalism, in the gap between the potential and the form of the capital (the private-property appropriation of the surplus). In short, they rehabilitate the old Marxist notion of the tension between productive forces and the relations of production: capitalism already generates the “germs of the future forms of life,” it incessantly creates the new “common,” so that, in the revolutionary explosion, this New should be liberated from the old social form. No wonder Negri recently more & more praises the “postmodern” digital capitalism, claiming that it already is Communist and that it will need just a little push, a formal gesture, to openly become one. The basic stategy of today’s capital is to cover up its superfluity by way of finding a new way to subsume again the free productive multitude.
The irony is that Negri is referring here to the process which the ideologists of today’s “postmodern” capitalism themselves celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of autopoietic [network] self-organization, multi-centered cooperation, etc. Negri is here effectively faithful to Marx: what he tries to prove is that Marx was right, that the rise of the “general intellect” is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making exactly the exactly opposite claim: it is the Marxist theory (and practice) itself which remains the constraints of the hierarchical centralized state-control logic, and thus cannot cope with the social effects of the new informational revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: again, the supreme irony of history is that the disintegration of Communism is the most convincing example of the validity of the traditional Marxist dialectic of force of production and relations of production, on which Marxism counted in its endeavor to overcome capitalism. What effectively ruined Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the “informational revolution”: they tried to steer the revolution as yet another large-scale centralized state-planning project. The paradox is thus that what Negri celebrates as the unique chance for overcoming capitalism, the ideologists of “informational revolution” celebrate as the rise of “frictionless” capitalism.”
More on Zizek’s notion of “cultural capitalism” here. Also, more on the “echoes” between cognitivism & ‘postmodern’ capitalism here.
And more on the new capitalist spirits, for the archive:
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks via @JohnPostill
Small is beautiful in the new capitalism via @pareidoliac](http://micro.maximalis.me/photo/1280/534250737/1/tumblr_l15bergtZE1qzc3d4)
