REVIEW | Žižek’s Version: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
Dir: Sophie Fiennes
May 5 at the DOXA Film Festival

Sophie Fiennes’ new film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, follows Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on a Virgilian tour through the labyrinths of popular culture. As in many of his seventy or so books, Žižek deploys the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin to shed light on the intricate operations of ideology in cinema, TV ad campaigns, and popular music. Here, the emphasis on pop culture serves a two-fold purpose: it exposes the extent to which we denizens of a supposedly “post-ideological society” are entangled in the cobwebs of ideology, and it makes abstruse psychoanalytic and philosophical optics thoroughly palatable to large audiences (a tactic that in large part accounts for Žižek’s veritable intellectual guru status both inside and outside of academia).

For Žižek, following French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (whose revival in academic circles Žižek has played no small part in instigating), ideology is not merely a false screen that obstructs our perception of the way things really are. Reality, for Lacan, necessarily “takes on the structure of a fiction.” We understand the world around us and our roles within it primarily through fragmentary narratives that permeate the cultural sphere. As such, television, film, advertising, and the social networking sites to which so many of us are addicted teach us not just what to desire, but how to desire in an increasingly virtual world.

Trickle-down Affordability and the City’s ‘Rental 100’ Program

This week the city approved a subsidy exceeding 1 million dollars to a real estate corporation for a market housing development. The project, located in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood, will not be affordable but has been put forward by city council under the false guise that an unregulated rental market is inherently affordable.

The new housing development was approved under the city’s Rental 100 program, formerly called the STIR program. The five story mixed-use building in Kitsilano will offer 83 units of market rental housing, located at 3002-3036 West Broadway. Following the STIR model, the Rental 100 program offers the developer subsidies in return for the construction of rental housing, with no upper limit on rents.

REVIEW | Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest — Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada

Over the past decade, the Canadian economy has become increasingly dependent upon exploited temporary foreign workers, in large part through the Canadian government’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), an arm of the government’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. A new book, titled Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy, explores with scholarly attention and detail many of the problems inherent in this program.

Written by Leigh Binford, professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, this timely book weaves together compelling evidence from the past ten years to show how the SAWP scheme has created an economy based on oppression — providing Canadian employers with a steady stream of cheap labourers who are themselves silenced by the constant possibility of capricious deportation.

In addition to being denied labour and political rights, temporary workers are forced to endure unsafe conditions. Binford points out that SAWP participants “are sometimes poorly housed, frequently overworked, occasionally maltreated, exposed to dangerous chemicals without adequate training and/or protective gear, socially excluded from active participation in community life, and told to “aguantar” (endure) by the very officials charged with defending their rights.”

Why did the NDP lose?

Adrian Dix and the NDP have been defeated in an election that was widely expected to yield a comfortable win for the centre-left party. Over the course of the month-long race, BC politics threw off the political intensity often associated with battles of left and right. Instead of attacking the BC Liberal record, Dix and the NDP chose a strategy of passive precaution, waiting for the other side to falter.

Even if the campaign was marked by few highlights, Dix framed his party’s approach in both lofty and strategic terms, arguing that the new BC NDP had risen above partisan bickering and the petty politics of the BC Liberals. Supporters framed this “21st century” approach as a necessary path for winning government. Beneath the media strategy — the story went — a progressive platform was held waiting to be implemented once in power.