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June 14, 2006

Zizek in London/Police Shooting

I’ve just been down in London while the stories about police shooting a unarmed man have been unfolding (this is being typed on the train back home). The Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Zizek is giving some lectures at Birkbeck College, which seems fitting enough given the political events taking place at the moment. I’m not going to try to summarise Zizek’s lectures here (the Different Maps blog has been doing a much better job than I could), but much of the content of his talks seem appropriate given the political situation – so I’ll look at how the two relate.

Among other things, Zizek spoke about how - from a Freudian/Lacanian perspective - it is after the failures of representation shown by Freudian slips that we construct ‘deeper’ meanings for these slips. This can be seen in current responses to the fact that a highly trained armed police officer here in London shot an unarmed, innocent man in the chest, apparently without warning and while looking straight at him. Responses to this have to be a wonderful example of how ‘deeper’ meanings for our failures after the event – whether the man was shot because he was a terrorist, or because MI5 gave the police false intelligence, or because high-ranking police officers gave the wrong order….

All of these meanings are interesting, but Zizek also offers us a way to move beyond this. In a lecture last week, Zizek used Hegel’s philosophy of history to argue that, when allowed an ‘open field’, a system can be forced to collapse when its own inconsistency is made apparent. As we begin giving the police and security services in Britain more powers, supposedly to deal with terrorism, this ‘cunning of reason’ means that the inconsistencies in the system are increasingly revealed. At the same time as the government is pushing for ever-newer and more complex technological ‘fixes’ for the security problems it faces, the system reveals that, regardless of all this, policing can still be radically disrupted (and, potentially, innocent civilians killed) by old-fashioned, low-tech, human errors such as inadequate analysis of intelligence on terrorist threats and an armed policeman who, regardless of training, got a bit too trigger-happy. These failures are worth remembering.

Posted by jon_mendel at June 14, 2006 10:59 AM