Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 20:27:20 -0400
From: Malini Schueller <mschuell-AT-english.ufl.edu>
Subject: Re: FW: Reflecting and Thinking


Do you have the citations of hte articles by Chomsky and Zizek?
Malini









At 12:59 PM 9/16/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Reflecting and Thinking
>-----Original Message-----
>From: North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
>[mailto:NASSR-L-AT-WVNVM.WVNET.EDU]On Behalf Of Amanda Berry
>Sent: September 16, 2001 12:58 PM
>To: NASSR-L-AT-WVNVM.WVNET.EDU
>Subject: Reflecting and Thinking
>
>
>Two (articles) that may be of interest to the list at this time:
>
>
>Noam Chomsky on the attacks: http://www.zmag.org/chomnote.htm
>
>
>And here is the text of an article by Slavoj Zizek:
>
>
>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 starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake,
>> a spectacle staged to convince 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 of 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 studio
>> 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 Truman Show is that the
>> late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very
>> hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the
>> material inertia.
>>
>> So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life
>> deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late
>> capitalist consumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow
>> acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving
>> in "real" life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate
>> truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the
>> de-materialization of the "real life" itself, its 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
>> designed 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 postmodern
>> predicament by extending this fantasy to the community itself: the
>> isolated group living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for
>> the experience of the real world of material decay.
>>
>> The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its
>> climax: 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 "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape
>> littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global
>> war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting:
>> "Welcome to the desert of the real." Was it not something of the
>> similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its
>> citizens were introduced to the "desert of the real" - to us,
>> corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the
>> collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking
>> scenes in the catastrophe big productions.
>>
>> When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how
>> the unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other
>> defining catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that of
>> Titanic: it was also a shock, but the space for it was already
>> prepared in ideological fantasizing, since Titanic was the symbol of
>> the might of the XIXth century industrial 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 Independence 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 surprise.
>>
>> It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a
>> catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and
>> fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception. If there is
>> any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much
>> the old-fashioned notion of the "center of financial capitalism,"
>> but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center
>> of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected
>> from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact 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 insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some
>> ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.
>>
>> Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind
>> the bombings, not the rel-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld,
>> the master-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 labor (distilling
>> and packaging the drugs, constructing 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 presentation of the
>> production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of
>> course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing
>> us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with
>> the "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-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive
>> barbarians. Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we
>> should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this
>> pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled 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 Congo. Cruel and
>> indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than ever, bear
>> in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more
>> symbolic than real. The US just got the taste of what goes on around
>> the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, 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": even if this shows are "for real," people still act in them -
>> they simply play themselves. The standard disclaimer in a novel
>> ("characters in this text are a fiction, every resemblance with the
>> real life characters is purely contingent") holds also for the
>> participants of the reality soaps: what we see 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
>> shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and
>> the Cultural Studies 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 response, it will never hit the RIGHT
>> target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America
>> attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the eye: if the greatest
>> power in the world will destroy one of the poorest countries in which
>> peasant barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate
>> 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 possible that these people have such a disregard
>> for their own lives?" Is not the obverse of this surprise the rather
>> sad fact that we, in the First World 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?
>> Furthermore, the notion of America as a safe haven, of course, also
>> is a fantasy: when a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings,
>> one can no longer walk safely on the city's streets, the irony of it
>> was that, well before 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 to a new sense of solidarity,
>> with the scenes of young African-Americans helping an old Jewish
>> gentlemen to cross the street, scenes unimaginable a couple of days
>> ago.
>>
>> Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we
>> dwell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic
>> impact, like in those brief moment after we are deeply cut, and
>> before the full extent of the pain strikes us - it is open how the
>> events will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will be,
>> what acts they will be evoked to justify. Even here, in these moments
>> of utmost tension, this link is not automatic but contingent. There
>> are already the first bad omens; the day after the 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 its
>> publication - they considered inopportune to publish a text on Lenin
>> immediately after the bombing. Does this not point towards the
>> ominous ideological rearticulations which will follow?
>>
>> We don't yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics,
>> war, this event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till
>> now, perceived 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 directly involved. So the alternative is:
>> will Americans decide to fortify further 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 arrival into the Real world, making the
>> long-overdued move from "A thing like this should not happen HERE!"
>> to "A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!". America's
>> "holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was bought 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 going on ANYWHERE ELSE.
>
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