'(This is a little critical note I wrote on the dialectics of jokes and seriousness in Zizek's work and at the same time a draft for seriousness manifesto - a sort of "In Praise of Seriousness", if you will; finished on 15/1/2014 around 1 AM (GMT + 1 time zone); copyleft Davorin Mikleušić)
DARE TO BE SERIOUS!
There is a famous popular culture saying made by the character of Joker in Christopher Nolan's “The Dark Knight” (2008). There he, “joker” as he is, asks people “Why so serious?” This dictum has become something of an Internet meme, popular among many users of social networks like Facebook, 9gag, 4CHAN, Twitter, etc. These three words even became a part of the chorus of American singer Pink’s relatively new hit song “Raise Your Glass” released in October 2010. “Why so serious?” Seriousness is not too valuable these days. But, to paraphrase Zizek, what if light-heartedness and joviality (as opposed to seriousness) are deeply unethical categories, (like Zizek, in my opinion, rightly claims that happiness is)? So why not, in a Zizekian manner turn this popular phrase to its contrary – “Why so light-hearted?”, “Why so jovial?”, “Why so trivial?”, “Why so superficial?”, “Why so uncommitted?”, “Why so flippant?”, “Why so negligible?”, and so forth. If superficiality is something that is contrary to seriousness, then we should make no compromise with superficiality.
Some three decades ago, Fredric Jameson categorized superficiality as one of the symptoms of postmodernity as a cultural logic of the late capitalism. If we have never been modern (like Bruno Latour suggests in one of his works) maybe it is time for us to become such now. Sure, jokes are important part of our lives. But, as I wrote some time ago now already, jokes are too serious to be treated too light-hearted. When Zizek jokes, he doesn’t joke for the sake of the jokes themselves, he rather jokes in order to seduce and interpellate subjects supposed-to-read, subjects supposed-to-listen as well as real subjects who are physically and mentally present when he is speaking. Seduce them into thinking, into being serious. In the age of “new literacies”, lolcats, lolspeak and illiteracy (remember Deleuze: “literacy is not capitalism’s thing”), you need the Hegelian “the Cunning of Reason”, you need to use “enemy’s” means to turn the things to your own agenda. Like the proverbial Lenin’s rope, Zizek uses jokes in a dialectical manner to make people read Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud and other people as well as he provokes you to think. Not to agree with him so much as to THINK. Sapere aude! Dare to think (for yourself)! Dare to know! Dare to be serious! So there is a sort of Hegelian speculative identity of “the highest” (high-brow culture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, economy, political theory) and “the lowest” (low-brow culture, obscene jokes and so on) in Zizek’s work. But they who think of Zizek as a mere entertainer, they who come to see his talks in order to have their share of stand-up comedy got it all wrong. Of course, they have that liberal right and so on, but that still doesn’t make them right.
So I repeat that when Zizek uses jokes, he uses them to seduce its audience and interpellate them into new ways of thinking. What we need today on the Left is a strategy. Strategy can be achieved through thinking, but not just from empty speculations. Combination of theory and practice, speculation and empirical data, our experience and desire to fight for commons and, yes, for the better world for all of us will have to do. Light-heartedness and joviality are conformist categories and if we don’t change the fact that “situation is catastrophic but not serious”, no amount of fetishist disavowal, no God and no train of history will save us. Dare to be serious!'
