The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously - Slavoj Žižek

THE YEAR OF DREAMING DANGEROUSLY - SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

A problem that Slavoj Žižek has is that even though his public profile is pretty large, nobody actually reads his books. This then begs a few questions: is it just that the mediums of television, YouTube and public speaking are more suitable for him and what they provide to the public discourse? If so, does that mean those mediums are the most effective in terms of communication? If so, does that then mean the effectiveness of books as tools for communication has now been surpassed? And does it actually even matter because is it all not just entertainment at the end of the day, anyway? Is Slavoj Žižek essentially just  entertainment for the high-browed?

To understand what Žižek is talking about half the time it helps if you have prior awareness of Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lacan and a few others that he's always referring to. If you do indeed know these great writers and philosophers then it probably means you've read them or at least read of them? If this is the case then we can all probably agree that Hegel, for example, isn't really very entertaining. He's important without any question but he's a bit of a slog. A bit light on the having a laugh level. In comparison to Hegel, Žižek is one of the funniest men in the world which perhaps explains rather than books why the platforms of stage, television and YouTube are more suited to him and his peculiar brand of entertainment?

The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously is Slavoj Žižek ruminating over the events of 2011, from the Arab Spring, to the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the riots in the UK triggered by the killing of Mark Duggan. All water under the bridge now, you might say? Things have moved on a bit since then. And yes, things have moved on but in terms of significance to the modern era, Žižek puts it very well by citing an old Persian expression - war nam nihadan - which means 'to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it'. And isn't that just a wonderful expression? Isn't that just the way the world is these days? Isn't that just a wonderfully entertaining expression?

Nobody seems to point out that it's the application of austerity that is one of the prime drivers to social discontent, and in the case of the events of 2011 one of the prime causes of the urban riots that swept the UK, the student riots and the attempted storming of Conservative Party HQ in London the year previously, the riots in Greece, and to some extent the emergence of the Occupy movement. Nobody seems to point out that it's austerity that acts as a catalyst for the Far Right to rise within Western Europe. Nobody, that is, apart from Žižek and a few other like-minded political thinkers.

Of course, it's not as black and white as that - to simply lay the blame entirely upon austerity - and if we're talking Slavoj Žižek then nothing is ever black and white because with him everything always comes with multiple tangents and off-shoots.

Žižek's strength is in his capacity to throw up ideas and insights regarding geopolitics and culture, quite often simultaneously and in tandem. It's not mine to diminish such a strength and in fact it's one that I applaud and appreciate. This strength, however, is limited to just that. There are really no avenues open for Žižek to take his ideas and insights, which means they remain on the platforms from which he generates them, as in upon the stages on which he's invited to speak and the media channels viewed by - what is in the scheme of things - his limited audience. Which means that when Žižek says something insightful such as 'the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode', it goes no further than his own estate, serving ultimately only to add to his profile as a man of ideas, and going no further. It's a problem that Žižek never addresses so he remains stuck in aspic as a novel but niche entertainment. As the world goes by outside.

The irony is that Žižek recognises this very same thing in others, for example in the Occupy Wall Street movement where his critique of it is spot-on. In what is one of the best sections of The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously, Žižek highlights a danger the Occupy protesters face: that of falling in love with themselves, with the fun they are having in the 'occupied' zones. 'Carnivals come cheap,' Žižek writes 'but the true test of their worth is what happens the day after, how our everyday life has changed or is to be changed'.

Does Žižek not recognise this in himself? In love with his position as a political philosopher, enjoying the acclaim and the plaudits from his fellow travellers? Surely he does. To step out of and beyond it, however, is no easy thing. There are no immediate answers, not helped by the fact that it's an ongoing process. As with the Occupy movement, Žižek offers a formal gesture of rejection that initially is more important than any positive content because only such a gesture opens up the space for a new content.

Žižek's gestures of rejection, however, are failing to open up such a space and just as with the Occupy protesters when they were physically removed from their occupied zones by baton-wielding police - it's a painful truth to face up to when after all the words, the world has not changed one iota and if anything, continues to get worse as the engine of capitalism drives it inexorably towards its own grave. Entertaining and amusing us all to death in the process.

John Serpico

Into The Valley - Richard Jobson

 INTO THE VALLEY - RICHARD JOBSON

Everybody likes The Skids, surely? And if you don't then you've obviously not been paying attention? And everybody loves lead vocalist Richard Jobson, don't they? What with his Sunday matinee film idol looks and his high-kicking dance routines on Top Of The Pops, how could you not? So as night follows day, everybody's going to want to read Jobson's autobiography, aren't they? Of course they are.

Published in 2020, Into The Valley by Richard Jobson is the story of his childhood up until the point of when his band, The Skids, split up. Interestingly, the immediately striking thing about it is how it reads because it's not well-edited at all. In fact, I wonder if before publication anyone apart from Jobson even went over it to check not so much for spelling mistakes but for composition and syntax? It's something that Jobson acknowledges in his introduction, however, where he tells us he didn't write his story in the conventional way of sitting down with pen and paper or even sat at a keyboard typing it. Instead he spoke it, recording his thoughts as they came into his head. It makes for a distinctive and somewhat more personable style, particularly if you can keep in mind that he's talking in a Scottish accent though at times admittedly it does jar.

Another striking thing about it is the absence of tales from the coalface of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. At the time of The Skids initial success and them appearing on Top Of The Pops, Jobson was just 19-years old, straight out of a small mining village near Dunfermline. He tells us he was never interested in drugs, and that's fair enough but surely he would have been meeting a few girls along the way even if it was Cynthia Plaster Caster's British cousin? The years 1979 and 1980 was also the time of a rise in skinhead violence at gigs and surely The Skids would have encountered this also? It's not important to have this kind of stuff in an autobiography of a lead singer of a punk band, of course, but it's just that it's noticeable by its total absence. 

What we get instead - and the main, underlying theme of the book - is the story of Jobson's relationship with fellow band member and lead guitarist Stuart Adamson. Following The Skids splitting up in 1982, Adamson went on to form Big Country but then in 2001 he took his own life. Throughout the whole book Jobson speaks of Adamson as though he was a troubled soul but there's absolutely no clue or indication of what Adamson was actually troubled about or where his troubles stemmed from. 

Adamson was in the habit of suddenly walking out on the band and not being seen for days, and there was also an obvious divide between his wish for security and a family life and Jobson's London and Berlin-centred more freewheeling life but you get that in a lot of bands. There are probably things that Jobson isn't telling us about and of course that's his prerogative, but it tends to leave a large, unexplained hole at the centre of the book.

Jobson and Adamson obviously had a very special creative, working relationship together and so even after The Skids split they remained friends. On the subject of Adamson's passing, Jobson remembers his big smile, his amazing talent, and the way they passed each other in mid-air during a live gig - young and free. It's a wonderful image and very heartfelt. The way that Adamson's presence is there throughout the book and more so than any other person in Jobson's life tells us that getting all this down in book-form is probably a kind of catharsis. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in the slightest.

Beyond this, it's interesting to note the path that led Jobson to meeting Adamson and forming The Skids. Starting with a somewhat isolated childhood, then the joy of Marvel comics, listening to John Peel, reading the weekly music newspapers, then to reading the more 'difficult' books you tend to read as a teenager such as those by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. It's classic stepping stones and a well-worn path taken by many of the same generation. And the outcome, the question always arrived at particularly when coming from a working class background is 'how do you make a move into the arts when the arts are completely controlled by the class system?' By 'the arts' this also means playing music in a band and for Jobson and others of his generation the answer was 'punk rock' - it being the metaphoric and even for some the physical key to the door.

As for his views on punk rock, Jobson offers up various observations: The Clash were majestic and terrifyingly brilliant, The Slits were a crazy noisy mess, The Damned were confusing because punk was meant to be much more than mere comedy, the Buzzcocks (when The Skids supported them) were drunken arseholes, and Richard Hell was a 24-carat tosser. His criticisms are also at times aimed inwardly, advising one of the most frequently requested Skids songs, TV Stars, with its chorus of 'Albert Tatlock' is idiotic and stupid, whilst he - Richard Jobson himself - is sometimes a bit of a wanker.

It's all good stuff and all makes for an interesting read. Into The Valley isn't the best rock'n'roll autobiography by any means and I'd say Jobson should probably have employed a proper editor to go over it with but for all that, for any fan of The Skids it's probably essential reading.

John Serpico