Here the truth values begin to gain currency though willful act of aligning oneself with it, mainly as a belief system and then as the very truth procedure being realized through its partisan avowal and repetition. Ideology in that sense has more to do with beliefs than reason. and according to Zizek ideology is not an abberation but something of a destiny and its grip is total and unconditional – irrespective of its historical contents.

This approach informs Zizek’s attitude, where he keeps repeating that it was in the course of Europe’s tryst with enlightenment project that pinnacle of abstract formal thought was reached and that therefore, it remains the only possible benchmark for drawing out a new universalist project. Zizek’s approach towards any other social and political identities, thus becomes marginal foot-note to his central project of founding the universal singularity of Communist utopia. Though one does not here deny the fact that – both in its progressive and regressive forms, the European enlightenment values of rationalism, secularism and such political practices as imperialism and colonialism, etc have been responsible for comprehensive and lasting political transformations and other cutural and social changes in many parts of the world – to go further and insist that we must therefore, unconditionally accede the historical ground (of effective causality) to Europe (and most recently his affinity to millenarian Christianity) as bases for shaping of historical and political subjectivity is just going a bit overboard.

The old colonial legacy as much today’s hyper-globalisation no doubt, blunt and blur the distinctions and differences among various political constituencies and communities within the third world by shifting cutural and political limelight on external factors but to see this adumbrated process, as if it were an irrevocable singular totality is conceding far too much. A singular global universality, in the guise of either global capitalism or communism that foreshadows many regional local particularities is untenable and is perhaps the reason behind the historical blunders that communist movement witnessed in the past and is going through till date.

Zizek;s effort to see that that such a universal project can only be a continuation and further extension of the European enlightenment project and thereby deny that any cultural forms of freedom, creativity, systems of formal thought, that have their origin outside Europe to be just traces of medieval oppression/obscurantism can only be nothing but a a haughty claim that should be firmly questioned.

Building alternative media is quite valuable: I watch Democracy Now! quite often, for example, and it’s a great source and watched by many.

But the idea that we can “just build an alternative” is just like saying we could do that in terms of worker ownership: let’s just build worker-coops and combat capitalism!

The problem is that it leaves the very dominant productive relations, or in this case: media structure quite in tact and doesn’t directly challenge it. And that’s what we need to be doing. Just because Zizek did an awful job here doesn’t mean that other Marxists should refrain from getting air time. And besides, he usually doesn’t represent Marxism quite this poorly.

“What I think can be best learned here is how this plan to “break into” traditional bourgeois media with famous intellectuals or activists is a complete dead end. The Communist left ought to take a page from the anarchist movement and begin collaborating on the task of building independent media institutions/outlets beyond a party paper.”

Why be so one-sided? Is it not possible to do several things?

I deeply agree on the opening that now exists for alternative media — thanks mainly to digital media and networking.

But does this really prove that using the mainstream press is a “COMPLETE dead end”? How?

Zizek could have done better (and has on other topics done better). Why couldn’t better performances be at least part of our effort?

It’s an uneven playing field and the cards are stacked against dissident voices in this arena. Rather than putting our valuable talent, time, and effort into the Sisyphean task of getting our message out through a hostile institution, we ought to be working to undermine it.

Badiou did do much better, but we really need someone a bit tougher to go on. Maybe Eagleton would be better, though he isn’t as famous.