“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Shopping with Žižek at Walmart

What would he say? Would anyone get out intact? My friend Chris just posted on this very experience, which he related to me last year when I visited him in New Orleans.

This is just one of the many gems:

As we walked toward the store, perhaps exuding a bit of guilt or shame, Slavoj launched into an expostulation about the sheer visibility of consumerism, and how the warehouse-y, cavernous-feeling Walmart was so much better than high-end places, like for instance Dolce & Gabbana stores that conceal consumerism behind a sheen of glamour and minimalism. We were standing on the threshold of the store, taking in Slavoj's tirade and watching him gesticulate and begin to dominate the space, when I remembered that we were on a tight schedule. So I grabbed Slavoj's arm and I led the way back to the electronics department...

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

Ah, Tim, this is what I like about your blog, or at any rate, one of the things. All these very specific person-to-person connections. As you know, I'm currently reading my way through Latour's Reassembling the Social. And he talks about the myriads of very specific connections between agents and the need, in principle if not exactly in achieved praxis, to describe them all. And so here you tell of two specific people discoursing on consumerism among all the specific goods consumerism offers up for consumption.

And that one of those people is a famous thinker and court jester, well, that too is interesting. But it doesn't trump the specificity of his interaction with Chris. Nor the specificity of all the sitings of specific consumables and what they might have said about each.

How many ANT connections in that anecdote alone?

And all of them connected to other anecdotes through your blog.

And so on.