Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson Debate

Zizek and Peterson Debate

Much can be said and unsaid about this debate. The tickets were expensive and scalped even higher, showing the Brandens were ultimately right and Ayn Rand not. People will pay for philosophy lectures.

The Intro listed the academic credentials beginning with Z who was immediately disgusted. The ritual of the accounting and awards of the institutions of the repressive states that have granted their seals of approval - read BRANDS - for the presence of Z and Peterson on this stage, before this audience, presented for the cameras and manufactured for the prestige and brownie points - gold stars? - that will be received by the producers. Slavoj Zizek of course is being pimped for Peterson, his western supporters and their institutions.

Peterson presents a formidable and fashionable image, carefully trimmed beard, hair, and I bet finger and toenails. A Simulacrum of the early T.S. Eliot Virginia Woolf describes in her diary.

I invited X - sorry forget? - for lunch. Do come. Eliot will be here in his four piece suit. 

And this is how Wyndham Lewis has painted his portrait as a young man in Ezra Pound's salon.

T.S.Eliot Portrait by Windham Lewis

The simulacrum also smacks of the great, brilliant and unwavering man of integrity, charm and charisma, the older Leo Steinberg, who said, "Psychoanalysis saved my life." Those of us who have experienced analysis - experienced is the only valid familiarity that really counts when one is talking, writing, thinking about analysis - have all been saved by it, by Freud, and all those already saved, in order to suffer ordinary normal unhappiness rather than neurotic misery.

The other statement among many Steinberg tossed off was that in art school he graduated with first prizes in all his exhibited senior work. "And I knew then that I would never be great." So he stopped, because anyone who has personally experienced the presence of Steinberg, knew that he wanted to be great. He was superb in seeing what he called the watershed moment - 

The Foucaldian CUT

 -  in a painter's life or in painting in particular. That moment when Jasper Johns first exhibited, Steinberg was disturbed. He didn't like the work but it disturbed him so he went back and he made the Foucauldian CUT that ended Abstract Expressionism with John's breakout work. He tells of this in his book Other Criteria. 

Anyway Peterson mimics the image of those two men: urbane,cultured, educated, an extremely attractive and articulate man of his time. Z is Z, rumpled T-Shirt, roughly groomed and shaved, and wildly gesturing. A man utterly himself, warts and all, who exhibits a mass and mess of thinking that defies all linearity, continuity, persuasive progressions, categorizations and lists. 

Ah those fascist ever present lists that delineate all knowledge for us.

Two Choruses from The Rock-Eliot

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. p. 81

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

And Foucault:

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not knowing. Knowledge is made for CUTTING

Peterson is a clinical psychologist by training and he sees - saw? - patients. In the part of the debate about ethics and morality he uses the example of the patient that cannot stop wrong actions, but who has also formulated a goal for therapy. To reach his goal in therapy these obstructions to getting to the goal must be confronted. Peterson employs stopping the action of wrongness in one of small seemingly unimportant instances as a point of a beginning, an initial starting place.

A series of wrong actions? A repetition of wrong actions? And Peterson is using Wolpe and Goldstein's Behavior Therapy method of "thought stopping" turned into "action stopping" while Z has quoted Hegel, "To act is always to err," which Peterson seizes on.

The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.- Hegel

Here is where I might have intervened with, "If your patient repeatedly performs the 'wrong' action," reading through Simone Weil here, "What is the value of the opposite, the 'right action' and consider if the patient almost always knows the wrong action, then your patient almost always knows the 'right action' and avoids it. Does the patient know the right action or does your patient know the right action but does not know she knows?"

This is what would interest my knowing in just one of these exchanges lost in the morass of communication - discourse? - between Z and P.

The civilized discussion Peterson feels has taken place has occurred on the surface, yes. Because Zizek has not probed deeper to expose the contradictions, and Peterson's use of The Communist Manifesto - which was written for the workers in the factory - instead of a deep and thorough reading of Capital. The Grundrisse is not even mentioned. And Althusser's unsurpassed reading of Marx in his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses of Reproduction.

The inadequate scholarship of Peterson, the Western debater, is visible, but only to those who have some grasp of the invisible scholarship here in this debate. The scholarship displayed by a celebrity figure the west has manufactured and produced to be pimped by the incomparable, irreplaceable, anti-xeroxible Slavoj Zizek.

The reader might also remind herself that the USSR employed many therapies, to its dissidents especially. Behavior Therapy based on Pavlov's Conditioned Response and Skinner's Operant Conditioning was especially honored. The only one that was banned, disallowed, punished was psychoanalysis.

So of course, that was the one I wanted most to experience since I was/am a negatively suggestible person. Did I write about Happiness and Capitalism here?