Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 09:44:52 -0400
Subject: Re: Jouissance in the Dark


At 09:16 AM 23/10/00 -0400, you wrote:

>> http://www.gradnet.de/pomo2.files/pomo2.frames/ep2Frame.htm
>
>I don't think it's erroneous, I'm just jealous that my rejoinder didn't get 
>published.  ; )

Yet....

>I haven't seen The Idiots or Dancer in the Dark... are they both Dogma95
films? 
>Incidentally, what I find to be revealing in BtW is the *miracle* at the end, 
>which contrasts with the 'real world' style of the film. Without the miracle, 
>which from a modernist perspective appears absurd, then the film loses all of 
>its critical fitness.

"The Idiots" is a Dogma film, "Dancer" isn't. What you might find
interesting about them is that they have a similar plot line to BtW, yet
contain no miracle. In the Idiots, the mentally-unstable woman pushes her
self-effacement farther than anyone else in the collective, when she is
willing to "spaz" in front of her family and so is rejected. Now, in this
film she doesn't die, but after the collective dissolves, I'm not sure where
she will go...... In Dancer, Bjork is hung - although the suggestion is that
her sacrifice was 'the right thing to do' - the supposed healing of her son
(which the viwer doesn't witness, so perhaps the report is made simply to
pacify Bjork's character) is not a miracle, but simply a medical procedure.
It woud be interesting to hear what you thought of these films without what
you consider to be crucial to BtW, which is the miracle (which, as you know,
I consider precisely to have been BtW's great flaw).


>Isn't this the plot line of a children's story, by Sheldon Silverstein (name?) 
>- something about a boy and a tree - where the tree is cast a female... 
>eventually the boy cuts down the tree to make a house and the tree is happy 
>that they could be of service... awful stuff.

The Giving Tree - a terrible book. The tree is happy every time the kid
takes a piece out of it. Finally it ends up as a stump that the kid (now old
man) can sit on, "and the tree was happy."


>> Hmmmmm. So, we should avoid suggesting that consumers are duped?
>
>Not completely, but we might consider that the error is not completely on the 
>side of the consumer, but also on the side of reality. "Reality" is lacking 
>(this is the double split that Lacan introduces - the split in the subject and 
>the split in the object). This is one of the points that Zizek talks about in 
>his introduction to the volume Mapping Ideology.

<snip>

>Tis a difficult question. I don't think the consumer is duped by the
>advertiser, we all know that Coke isn't actually going to satisfy us much
more >than a Pepsi or another name-brand cola 

Yes, well, I'm in no position to offer deep insights at the moment about
this complex issue (although I don't buy Coca Cola or Pepsi, or shop at the
GAP, although certainly wouldn't claim to be free from advertising's
influence). But the essay by Zizek above often puzzles me, when it almost
become suggested that reality IS the capitalist dynamic - (reality is
lacking, etc.). It's almost an apology for capitalism, and for endless
consumption, which gets my suspicious mind questioning what is really going
on in Zizek's work?

Chris