As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.
Letter from Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to Slavoj Žižek, read the rest here.
Continental Drift 
November 18, 2013 at 11:37 pm |
I find this to be an incredibly moving set of letters, from the sides of both participants. The quote above alone is wonderful, summing up what so many of try to say in our torrents of words, but here it is managed much more succinctly. Zizek, too, is lucid, clear, and largely free from the sorts of grandstanding he usually engages in these days – “The very existence of Pussy Riot tells thousands that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.”
Thanks for putting this up, Brian.