Frankly, I have no idea, except to say that people run away from the fact of mortality and the materiality of existence, by indulging ourselves in material goods. We psychologically project our insecurities onto objects that don’t last as long as we do.

Funny, isn’t it? The flight from materiality, by indulging in the very thing we detest to be the case. No wonder chemistry is such a taboo topic!

Re: ‘will the farmer actually get the margin his family deserve’, it is my understanding that a major blockage preventing profits returning to growers is the stranglehold that large roasters and importers have over the international (read: lucrative Western) markets. This stranglehold prevents growers from selling anything other that their un-roasted beans, and thereby excludes them from participating in the most profitable part of the coffee supply chain.

As a US coffee roaster, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this?

But first, let me clear up what appears to be a misunderstanding concerning what I was saying—you wrote:

He’s definitely not saying what you’ve attributed to him in this post, a kind of rationalist analytical idea that the problem is belief in superstition in itself.

I do not attribute anything like this to Žižek in my post, nor do even make a similar claim myself. If anything, I really intend to praise Žižek for his personal willingness to engage with, and at times step beyond, what I term the ‘superstitious limit point of his own action’. By ‘step beyond’, I mean to move into an area marked out by this limit as being unavoidably superstitious. I would go further and suggest that, it is entirely necessary for any individual prescribing action directed at fundamental change, to occupy a position beyond this limit.

Zizek sees individual responses to ecological crisis in the terms of the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of the obsessional neurotic, who out of guilt engages in frantic activity effectively to ensure that nothing changes.
…its main function is an obsessional ritual to keep up the appearance that nothing really needs to change, we’ve arrived at the end of history, capitalism is the final form of human economic organization, etc.

I agree that what you describe is Žižek initial diagnosis when confronted with the phenomena of recycling—although it is unclear whether his diagnosis is principally a psychoanalytic one pertaining to the individual, or can more correctly be seen as a diagnosis of (concealed) ideology as a collective social phenomena. I would suggest that, as well as defending an ideology masquerading as a natural state of affairs, ‘asserting that the ritual really does work’ additionally serves also to defend against a more general individual impotence, both specifically in the face of the systemic conditions of capitalism, but also against the—quite proper—impotence of the individual when measured against the scale of any social order.

However, going beyond the diagnosis, Žižek is—quite rightly—unable to refrain at times from proposing action (what to do / what not to do) himself—for example: in his ribald reference to ‘the only kind of drilling’ that should be taking place in the Gulf of Mexico (during the LSE lecture). It is at these moments that he approaches/passes the ‘limit point’ I refer to. When invoking the ‘paradox of the performative’ and prescribing action himself, he clearly enacts the same superstitious activity he diagnoses.

Moving on to your comments regarding my previous post:

You say “the locus of moral choice cannot exist at any level other than that of the individual consciousness” – As a Lacanian, Zizek would certainly disagree here – it implies that we are radically self-transparent to ourselves and our actions are determined by rational, conscious decision-making, rather than out of the unconscious, which is outside of ourselves, in the discourse of the Other as Lacan would say.

Yes, I expect Žižek would disagree with me on this, but what you miss from your quote is my qualifying statement: ‘to the extent that such choice exists as a phenomena of consciousness—i.e. presupposing free will’. It doesn’t matter how opaque we are to ourselves, as that which is then ‘outside of ourselves’ simply becomes part of the landscape within which we make our choices. As long as, ‘choice exists as a phenomena of consciousness’ (which is surely a definition of ‘free will’), then such choices must take place at the level of the individual. Unconscious factors, along with social and material conditions, may determine and constrain our moral choices (and awareness of theoretically possible choices—those precluded from the outset), but they do not relocate choice itself to a level outside of the individual consciousness. Note: I am not saying that this in any way proves the existence of free will in moral choices (or in any kind of ‘choice’)—I am, in fact, technically ‘begging the question’—but simply stating that if we take it as axiomatic that if moral choices exist, then they must surely be conscious by definition.

On recycling as an act of identification with an expansive future community: yes, but this identification assumes that capitalism will still exist in that future. These symbolic gestures betray a belief that ecological problems can be solved within the parameters of the current system, so that even if we consciously identify as anti-capitalist radicals seeking to overthrow the system, our actions betray our unconscious Fukuyama-ism.

I am not sure that you can justify your assertion that ‘this identification assumes that capitalism will still exist in that future’, unless by this you mean that: none of us can be anything other than Fukuyama-ist in our unconscious thought, because our age is ‘Fukuyama-ian’—i.e. because capitalism lacks a credible competing symbolic order / ideology / materiality, the ‘unconscious landscape’ of our times (the ground against which our thoughts occur) is inescapably capitalist?

If this is what you mean, then you are right that this certainly poses a problem; however, wouldn’t Žižek see an answer in the Hegelian dialectic? Set against Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, wouldn’t it be that, even if we are not yet consciously aware of the form it will come to take, the dialectical process is already setting in motion something that will eventually come to replace capitalism? I have limited direct knowledge of Hegel, but, by way of Žižek’s discussion of the three movements of the dialectical process in ‘For They Know Not What They Do’, it appears that it is not possible to know fully what has actually transpired until its third and ‘final’ motion (the ‘negation of the negation’—which is ‘final’ in the sense of being the last of the three movements, not as in being the impossible end of the process itself).

…in the dialectical process, “things happen before they effectively happen”; all is already decided, the game is over before we are able to take cognizance of it…

Slavoj Žižek, “For The Know Not What They Do”, p.63

It appears plausible that practices such as recycling, might equally be either: neurotic symptoms, signifying attempts to keep the system in place; or otherwise, come to be recognised as aspects of an—as yet unknown—phenomena, eventually to be revealed as a key shift in the movement of history.

When framed in these terms, it is difficult to see how it is possible to make a determination of either possibility in advance of the ‘completion’ of the process. Once again, I see attempting to address this situation as both the condition and the task of a ‘positive’ superstition.

Zizek sees individual responses to ecological crisis in the terms of the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of the obsessional neurotic, who out of guilt engages in frantic activity effectively to ensure that nothing changes. The point is not really that recycling doesn’t really do anything and that it’s just a superstition that displaces effective action. It’s more that even if it does help the environment in some minimal way, its main function is an obsessional ritual to keep up the appearance that nothing really needs to change, we’ve arrived at the end of history, capitalism is the final form of human economic organization, etc. This is why the most common response to this observation is to assert that the ritual really does work. He’s definitely not saying what you’ve attributed to him in this post, a kind of rationalist analytical idea that the problem is belief in superstition in itself. It’s equally mistaken to ask him to provide us with a ritual that does work, since it’s the excessive, desperate need to Do Something about the situation that is in itself a way to avoid the truth of the situation. The key point here is that just because the obsessional neurotic can find rational reasons for his rituals if he looks hard enough doesn’t mean they don’t function for him in this way.

A comment on your previous post:
You say “the locus of moral choice cannot exist at any level other than that of the individual consciousness” – As a Lacanian, Zizek would certainly disagree here – it implies that we are radically self-transparent to ourselves and our actions are determined by rational, conscious decision-making, rather than out of the unconscious, which is outside of ourselves, in the discourse of the Other as Lacan would say.

On recycling as an act of identification with an expansive future community: yes, but this identification assumes that capitalism will still exist in that future. These symbolic gestures betray a belief that ecological problems can be solved within the parameters of the current system, so that even if we consciously identify as anti-capitalist radicals seeking to overthrow the system, our actions betray our unconscious Fukuyama-ism.

Original
Similarly, when addressing recycling, Žižek contends that at an individual level recycling cannot be anything more than a superstition, since any single practice of recycling cannot make a meaningful contribution to the efforts necessary to prevent ultimate environmental collapse. Again, this is an oversimplification of personal motivations. It is perfectly possible for an individual to be motivated, not from a belief that personal recycling will ward off environmental disaster, but simply because it is one of the actions that they are capable of taking individually in the face of this likely outcome. Wholesale transformation of the system might offer the only true possibility of avoiding catastrophe, but since the individual is unable to mobilise the collective agency necessary for such a transformation, they instead simply choose actions that are possible. In doing so they do not seek to superstitiously ward off environmental disaster, but rather to take what little action is practically available to them as an individual.

Updated
Similarly, when addressing recycling, Žižek contends that at an individual level recycling cannot be anything more than a superstition, since any single practice of recycling cannot make a meaningful contribution to the efforts necessary to prevent ultimate environmental collapse. Again, this is an oversimplification of personal motivations. It is perfectly possible to be motivated, not from a belief that personal recycling will ward off environmental disaster, but from the belief that it makes a smaller contribution to bringing about this inevitable disaster. (However, it should not be forgotten that reduction and reuse—in that order—are both preferable to recycling. Nor should it be forgotten that—unlike recycling—both of these options are antithetical to an expanding economy based on increasing material consumption.) Wholesale transformation of the system might offer the only true possibility of avoiding catastrophe, but since the individual is unable to mobilise the collective agency necessary for such a transformation, they instead simply choose from actions that are possible. In doing so they do not seek to superstitiously ward off environmental disaster, but rather to take what little action is practically available to them as an individual.

Original
The first is that to make such a claim with confidence, it is also necessary to answer both an epistemological and an ontological question. Epistemological—is it possible to determine the fundamental ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ of the capitalist system as a whole (and also the nature of ethical consumerism as a subset of this larger system) and, if such a determination is possible, is this nature—to speak simplistically—‘good’ or ‘bad’? The ontological question—is it even valid to consider such things as possessing a nature or essence in the first place?

Amended
The first is that to make such a claim with certainty, it is necessary to answer both an epistemological and an ontological question in the affirmative. Epistemological—is it possible to make a valid determination about the fundamental ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ of the capitalist system as a whole (and also the nature of ethical consumerism as a subset of this larger system)? Only if such an epistemic determination is possible, can we then reason about its ethical nature—to speak simplistically—is it ‘good’ or ‘bad’? The ontological question—is it even valid to consider such entities as possessing a nature or essence in the first place? Only if the system can be said to possess a nature, can ethical judgments regarding this nature be held to be valid judgments about the system. To put these questions more simply and the other way around: does it possess a nature? and can this nature be known (in order to then pass judgement upon it)?