In the 1968 hippie exploitation film Psych-Out, Jack Nicholson plays Stoney, a San Francisco rock musician caught up in the competing forces of hedonism, commercialism, idealism and sentimentality. Stoney has uncomplicated desires: He wants to do his thing, play his music, earn a little bread, and get some lovin’ whenever and with whomever he can. Being part of the San Francisco hippie scene seems to grant his wishes while supplying a self-congratulatory veneer for his behavior — by pleasing himself, he can believe he is changing the world, is making a stand for personal freedom.
While “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock plays on the soundtrack, Stoney pays a visit to his curmudgeonly, AWOL band mate, Dave (Dean Stockwell), who apparently lives in a rooftop lean-to built against a giant billboard overlooking Haight Ashbury. Stoney wants to convince Dave to play a gig that might secure them a recording contract. Dave proceeds to challenge several of Stoney’s articles of faith (clip): free love is nothing but a choice, he contends; selling out is irrelevant to “feeling good”; the truth is a matter of what works; common sense of the kick-a-stone variety refutes all forms of idealism. “All the games have to go, man,” Dave tells Stoney, “because it’s all one big plastic hassle.” To which Stoney retorts, “So live in a jelly jar?” Read the rest of this entry »
Is there any place where we can get away from ourselves? The insistent therapeutic command to find ourselves seems to have led to a surfeit of identity, to an oppressive self-consciousness that consists mainly of an awareness that we are fundamentally threatened with the danger of being misrecognized, of being misconstrued as someone we are not.
The nonsensical excesses of pataphysics one can now find in the very warp and weft of the social fabric, while pataphysics itself, appropriately enough, has sailed far out of sight of the shore of the normative values it once critiqued.
Zuckerberg Tyrannos: The improbable, baby-faced founder of Facebook — whose first name, for those who have been living in a cave (or, at least without Facebook) the past several years, is Mark — recently 
In the teleology of traditional Marxism, the working class was to become so immiserated by exploitation and exclusion that it would inevitably throw off its chains, expropriate the expropriators, and establish a new egalitarian social order based on the end of alienation and the maximum fulfillment of humanity’s capabilities as as species. But along the way, in the 20th century, something happened. The bondage of capitalist relations seemed to cease to be so chafing. Instead of ever-increasing misery, consumerism appeared to unleash desire and the potential for elaborate individual gratification hitherto undreamed of.
October, a journal of art criticism, devoted its Fall 2006 
You can’t be what you were. The technological changes that allow you to read this (and us to publish it) have foisted upon us a new conception of identity, one more thoroughly suited to consumerism. In particular, what began as a new-found ability to broadcast what we consume culturally and to be recognized (if not paid) for consuming well are becoming compulsions. No one any longer presumes identity to be an essence we are born with and discover; such an idea is the preferred illusion of the modern era. Rather, the newfangled notion of identity is as capital stock that we are compelled to expand roughly along the same line as that of the logic which Marx argued drove capitalists to accumulate! accumulate!
When the big banks began to fail last fall, we began to hear a lot about “toxic assets” that had “infected” balance sheets, threatening to metastasize throughout the entire body economic at any moment. The main problem with these assets — byzantine derivatives and structured financial products that came in a blizzard of acronyms — was that no one, not even the mathematics whiz kids investment firms lured away from MIT, knew how to value them.
The revolution wasn’t supposed to be televised. The idea was that we would all unplug from all the administered culture that stupefied us and transform the world with spontaneous justice and generalized, self-evident righteousness. Youth would lead us away from our square, suburbanized plastic hassle of a life and into the streets to speak truth to power and turn the military-industrial complex on its head. Our voices, buoyed by a sense of emancipation for the first time in humanity’s history clearly in view, would be raised in a deglobalized communal chorus for peace.
The Parallax View, which first appeared in February 2006, was reprinted in April 2009 in a paperback edition that includes substantial additions by the author, the ever prolific “Elvis of Philosophy,” Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is the closest thing to a rock star the academic Left is likely to get; the industry has its celebrities, to be sure, but none of such aptitudes — and amplitudes — as the man from Ljubljana. The Parallax View stands, then, as his Blue Hawaii, the “magnum opus” of his substantial oeuvre. Such a claim notwithstanding, The Parallax View proves a generally rewarding if uneven work.
Like the plot of some reform-minded Victorian scribbler’s novel, it seems that the usually suspects in the boardrooms of Wall Street are once again poised to cash in on lavish bonuses despite the ongoing economic recession and the collateral damage it’s visiting on employment numbers. How nice it must be to have the productivity of an entire citizenry (the portion of which that still has jobs, anyway) as an insurance policy against imprudent speculation!
Ylajali Hansen
Henry Brulard