From: "michael pugliese" <debsian-AT-pacbell.net> Subject: AUT: FW: Zizek Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 14:48:27 -0700 >--- Original Message --- >From: Dusan Rakovic <dusanx-AT-pogled.net> >To: psn-AT-csf.colorado.edu >Date: 9/14/01 1:33:55 PM > > Dear members of the list, > > I wish to express my deepest feelings to all of you who are in/directly > affected by what happened and what is still going on in this area. > > Here is a text that came to me (here in Serbia), hope you might find it > interesting regarding the symbolic impact of the tragic events in USA. It >is written by Slovenian sociologist. > > Dusan > > > >WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL! > >Slavoj Zizek > >The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in >a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly star >ts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to c >onvince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are >effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example o >f this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the >small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a > 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic stud >io set, with cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors, it >is worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero > living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late > 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him >satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Trum >an Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in > its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the ma >terial inertia. > So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life depri >ved of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consu >merist society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of >a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in "real" life as stage actors >and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-sp >iritualized universe is the de-materialization of the "real life" itself, i >ts reversal into a spectral show. Among others, Christopher Isherwood gave >expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the > motel room: "American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately desig >ned to be unreal. /.../ The >Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, >like hermits going into caves to contemplate." Peter Sloterdijk's notion of > the "sphere" is here literally realized, as the gigantic metal sphere that > envelopes and isolates the entire city. Years ago, a series of science- >fiction films like Zardoz or Logan's Run forecasted today's post-modern pre >dicament by extending this fantasy to the community itself: the isolated gr >oup living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for the experience of t >he real world of material decay. > The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its cl >imax: the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual > one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are > all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "rea >l reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what >remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utte >rs the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real." Was it not som >ething of the similar order that took place in New York on September 11? It >s citizens were introduced to the "desert of the real" - to us, corrupted b >y Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the collapsing towers co >uld not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe bi >g productions. > When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how the > unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other defining cat >astrophe from the beginning of the XX century, that of Titanic: it was also > a shock, but the space for it was already prepared in ideological fantasiz >ing, since Titanic was the symbol of the might of the XIX century industria >l civilization. Does the same not hold also for these bombings? > Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about > the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested >- just recall the series of movies from Escape from New York to Independenc >e Day. The unthinkable which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a >way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surpri >se. > It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catast >rophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordina >tes which determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collap >se of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the "ce >nter of financial capitalism," but, rather, the notion that the two WTC tow >ers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculatio >ns disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impa >ct of the bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of > the borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the >Third World "desert of the Real." It is the awareness that we live in an in >sulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous ag >ent is threatening us all the time with total destruction. > Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the > bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the maste >r-criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the acts of global >destruction? What one should recall here is that the only place in >Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity is > when James Bond penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates > there the site of intense labour (distilling and packaging the drugs, cons >tructing a rocket that will destroy New York...). When the master-criminal, > after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, >is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud pres >entation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond's interve >ntion, of course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allow >ing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with th >e "disappearing working class." Is it not that, in the exploding WTC towers >, this violence directed at the threatening Outside turned back at us? > The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat > from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificin >g AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. Whenever we >encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endor >se the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the disti >lled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative >) prosperity and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of >ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian" >Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Co >ngo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than e >ver, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more sym >bolic than real. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world > on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Groznyy, from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra >Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York snipers and gang rapes, one > gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago. > It is when we watched on TV screen the two WTC towers collapsing, that > it became possible to experience the falsity of the "reality TV shows": ev >en if this shows are "for real," people still act in them - they simply pla >y themselves. The standard disclaimer in a novel ("characters in this text >are a fiction, every resemblance with the real life characters is purely co >ntingent") holds also for the participants of the reality soaps: what we se >e there are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for the real >.. Of course, the "return to the Real" can be given different twists: > Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the > end of the American "holiday from history" - the impact of reality shatter >ing the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural St >udies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with >real enemies in the real world... However, WHOM to strike? Whatever the res >ponse, it will never hit the RIGHT target, bringing us full satisfaction. T >he ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the eye: if >the greatest power in the world will destroy one of the poorest countries i >n which peasant barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultima >te case of the impotent acting out? > There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of civilizations" > attested here - witness the surprise of the average American: "How is it p >ossible that these people have such a disregard for their own lives?" Is no >t the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact that we, in the First Wo >rld countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or >universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one's life? > When, after the bombings, even the Taliban foreign minister said that >he can "feel the pain" of the American children, did he not thereby confirm > the hegemonic ideological role of this Bill Clinton's trademark phrase? Fu >rthermore, the notion of America as a safe haven, of course, also is a fant >asy: when a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings, one can no lon >ger walk safely on the city's streets, the irony of it was that, well befor >e the bombings, the streets of New York were well-known for the dangers of >being attacked or, at least, mugged - if anything, the bombings gave rise t >o a new sense of solidarity, with the scenes of young African-Americans hel >ping an old Jewish gentlemen to cross the street, scenes unimaginable a cou >ple of days ago. > Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we dw >ell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic impact, l >ike in those brief moment after we are deeply cut, and before the full exte >nt of the pain strikes us - it is open how the events will be symbolized, w >hat their symbolic efficiency will be, what acts they will be evoked to jus >tify. Even here, in these moments of utmost tension, this link is not autom >atic but contingent. There are already the first bad omens; the day after t >he bombing, I got a message from a journal which was just about to publish >a longer text of mine on Lenin, telling me that they decided to postpone it >s publication - they considered inopportune to publish a text on Lenin imme >diately after the bombing. Does this not point towards the ominous ideologi >cal rearticulations which will follow? > We don't yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics, wa >r, this event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, pe >rceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing > this kind of things only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now d >irectly involved. So the alternative is: will Americans decide to fortify f >urther their "sphere," or to risk stepping out of it? > Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the attitude of "Why >should this happen to us? Things like this don't happen HERE!", leading to >more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac > acting out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the >fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arri >val into the Real world, making the long-overdued move from "A thing like t >his should not happen HERE!" to "A thing like this should not happen ANYWHE >RE!". America's "holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was boug >ht by the catastrophes going on elsewhere. Therein resides the true lesson >of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE again >is to prevent it from going on ANYWHERE ELSE. > > > > > > > > --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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