here is a connection to the "hyperreal" and the movie universe that may
satisfy without offending (only slight sarcasm intended). the fact that it
is from a certified "thinker" (not fully captured in the word "sociologist"),
slavoj zizek, who brings a depth of intellect and experience to the
subject ,of course aids its credibility.
sincerely,
martha rosler
brooklyn, new york


-----------------
From: Dusan Rakovic [log in to unmask]
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 22:33:55 +0200
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reaction



    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
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 neighbours 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 post-modern
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 XX 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
XIX 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 real-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 labour (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 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": 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 from going on
ANYWHERE ELSE.







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