File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0109, message 147


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.
>
>
>
>
> 
>
>
>




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