Slavoj Žižek, Music, and the End of Capitalism

“The basic thought is that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

There is an interesting idea which originally came from American Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson but which has been perhaps more widely popularized by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The basic thought is that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Žižek expands on this idea in the introduction to Mapping Ideology, a collection of essays by various authors that he edited. He contrasts the post-Cold War landscape with the one just a few years before when it was unclear whether communism and fascism existed as plausible alternatives to liberal capitalism.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism became the only imaginable mode of production. But in this new era, issues like ecological catastrophe became much more present in people’s imagination. This, says Žižek, is what reveals that it is easier to imagine the world’s end than a much more modest change in the mode of production, however radical it may be. But this fact is not just a mere interesting curiosity. Rather, for Žižek it showcases how ideology shapes our understanding of the world. He writes that it is “as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.” And he continues: “one can thus categorically assert the existence of ideology qua generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.”

This can be easily understood through his brief discussion of the 1988 film They Live. In the movie, protagonist John Nada discovers a pair of glasses that, in Žižek’s words, function like a critique of ideology. They allow him to see the ‘real’ that is hidden behind what is presented to us every day. Ideology is what makes us perceive reality the way we do, rather than seeing the ‘real’ that hides beneath. In this way, the ideology of post-Cold War capitalism is what makes this observation by Jameson and Žižek true: it makes capitalism seem pervasive and inevitable. In turn, what makes the observation relevant is the fact that it reveals the effects of this.