[Nettime-bold] That Lovable Zizek Guy

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

>BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being
>authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is
>explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think
>there's something furtively authoritarian about such apparently
>freewheeling structures?

>Zizek: Absolutely. And I'm not bluffing here; I'm talking from
>personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it's not
>limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England,
>France, Germany, and more - and all the time, beneath the mask of
>this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten rules
>as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense
>that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him.
>The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the
>boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of
>affairs couldn't be articulated. Which is why I'm deeply distrustful
>of this "let's just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion." I'm
>more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a
>more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others
>to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not
>just theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught
>in this strange dialectic.

*Hey, I've got one of those.
http://www.viridiandesign.org

*An online, feudal-theocratic organization since 1998.

bruces, Viridian Pope-Emperor

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