FW: zizek

[aasci at xs4all.nl]

hi there!

i re-subcribed recently and i'm glad to see old syndicate
runing, after all the doubts expressed about it some time ago.
checking the mailing of last several days i couldn't find this one,
so i hope i'm not posting something you already had. hovewer
unfortunatly wrapped this text might be worth reading.

greetings
ademir arapovic



> 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.