Zizek and the Media

Paul A. Taylor, Paul A. Taylor

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745643687
  9780745643670
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745658612
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Slavoj Zizek reaches the parts of the media that other theorists cannot. With sources ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Quentin Tarantino and Desperate Housewives to Dostoyevsky, Zizek mixes high theory with low culture more engagingly than any other thinker alive today. His prolific output includes such media friendly content as a TV series (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema) a documentary movie (Zizek!) and a wealth of YouTube clips. A celebrity academic, he walks the media talk.

Zizek and the Media provides a systematic and approachable introduction to the main concepts and themes of Zizek's work, and their particular implications for the study of the media. The book:

• Describes the radical nature of Zizek's media politics
• Uses Zizekian insights to expose the profound intellectual limitations of conventional approaches to the media
• Explores the psychoanalytical and philosophical roots of Zizek's work
• Provides the reader with Zizekian tools to uncover the hidden ideologies of everyday media content;
  Explains the ultimate seriousness that underlies his numerous jokes.

As likely to discuss Homer's Springfield as Ithaca, Zizek is shown to be the ideal guide for today's mediascape.

1

THE MEDIATED IMP OF THE PERVERSE

INTRODUCTION: THEORETICAL SHORT-CIRCUITS

The depth which Spirit brings forth from within … and the ignorance of this consciousness above what it is really saying, are the same conjunction of the high and the low which, in the living being, Nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 210)

The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality: ‘vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle’.¹ (Freud 2001c [1901–5]: 161–2)

Žižek’s self-styled notion of perverted analysis is manifested in the title of his UK TV documentary series The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema (Sophie Fiennes 2006). The fact that Žižek’s analysis of the contemporary mediascape is laden with perverse jokes and topical examples creates the risk that its deeply serious political and philosophical importance will be obscured and displaced by a knee-jerk misunderstanding of the theoretical importance of perversion. Like Hegel and Freud above, Žižek recognizes the mutually constituting nature of the high and the low, and his conceptual legerdemain shifts between high philosophy/psychoanalysis and low culture to create sparking contrasts illuminating our normally unexamined, everyday assumptions (Roland Barthes’s ‘what goes without saying’ [1973] and Gramsci’s ‘common sense’ [1971]). This chapter explores the various ways in which Žižek’s apparent unconventional perversity is in fact a highly useful method well suited to addressing the deceptively naturalized forms in which we tend to encounter mediated ideology. His use of obscene examples needs to be considered as part of his wider intellectual project, which draws upon a critical philosophical and psychoanalytical tradition to uncover the Heaven/Hell, high/low, dichotomies that structure our symbolic and psychological environments.

In Lacanian psychoanalytical terms, perversion is more of a technical than a moralistic category. It refers to a disproportionate² attachment to a particular ordering or structure of desire; as Karl Kraus so pithily expressed it: ‘There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman’ (Kraus 2001 [1923]: 13 n105). This attachment is typically manifested in the pervert’s reliance upon a fetish, of which the sexual variety is just one kind. The result is that, in everyday language, the term ‘perversion’ has moved away from its original sense. It now tends to denote an exclusively sexual fixation – the familiar figure of the pervert who psychologically over-invests in highly specific substances/objects (e.g. rubber/high-heeled shoes, etc.) or highly structured behaviour (e.g. sado-masochistic domination scenarios). For the dedicated pervert, the fetish become desirable for its own sake. It assumes more importance than any overarching personal relationship with another person, of which sexual activity is ‘normally’ just one aspect. Žižek’s patented form of perversion needs to be distinguished from this now standard association with highly specific, ‘depraved’ forms of sexuality. It can be better understood in its historical context; as Nobus relates: ‘… the term was appropriated by the medico-legal discourse on sexuality during the nineteenth century … the term was transferred from its original socio-religious context, in which “to pervert” (from the Latin pervertere) meant to “turn around”, “to turn upside down” ’ (Nobus 2006: 5). To the extent that Žižek is a pervert, he is an old-fashioned one. He is a theorist whose primary raison d’être is to turn conventional understandings upside down by the unremitting application of theory. The multitude of examples he draws upon from popular culture, no matter how entertaining, are all subordinated to radical, counter-intuitive theoretical purposes. He shares with Lacan a recognition that ‘an essential step was taken in the present age when psychoanalysis undertook the interpretation of the fantasy in its very perversity’ (Lacan et al. 1977: 14).

In psychoanalytical terms, rather than a pervert, Žižek can be more accurately described as a hysteric. The hysteric/ theorist knows only the truth that knowledge is inherently ambiguous whereas the pervert (tautologically reinforced by his fetishistic practices) knows that he is correct. The pervert is thus ‘[t]he subject caught in the closed loop of perversion’ (Ticklish Subject: 248). It is for this reason that the charge of perversion can be turned back on to those of Žižek’s detractors who fail to see beyond the surface level of his obscenities – the importance of his theoretical insights is missed due to a perverted reliance upon disciplinary and professional techniques and structures. Whilst nominally more objective and rigorous, discipline-based (in both senses) scholarship tends to fetishize quantifiable data-gathering methods as the sine qua non of ‘legitimate’ understanding. In a conceptual version of Diogenes’ physical acts of public indecency, Žižek routinely ‘practices concrete universality by confronting a universality with its “unbearable” example’ (Parallax: 13). Drawing upon Kant’s notion of the transcendental illusion, Žižek considers the relationship between phenomena that are normally incomparable in order to create through theory an ‘impossible short circuit’ (ibid.: 3). These short-circuits are valuable aids for dealing with the media’s paradoxical problem of lost perspective owing to excessive closeness, or, as Marshall McLuhan put it: ‘Whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish.’

LOOKING AWRY AT THE UNCANNY WHEELBARROW ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE STREET

These photographs in the papers of children with cleft palates. I don’t know what is precisely being bought or offered for sale, of what is being collected and on behalf of whom, but I’m so used to these eaten-away pictures by now, that when the other day I opened a magazine and saw a picture of a beaming and intact baby, I recoiled with utter horror. (Lewis 2009: 126)

… you know that what is already familiar is not exactly unessential. But when what is already familiar seems to you to leave a lot to be desired, seems to you to be based on a false premise, then it has very different repercussions. (Lacan 2008: 7)

Epitomized by book titles like Looking Awry and The Parallax View, Žižek’s critical perspective upon otherwise deceptively self-evident representations encourages the reader to question conventional understandings of seemingly commonplace phenomena by viewing them askance. This produces the sort of counter-intuitive recognition contained within Lacan’s above emphasis upon the unfamiliarity of the familiar and, in this vein, Lewis’s sardonically provocative description of the sorts of photographs used in magazine advertisements for charities. It enables us to learn about something that was already (in this particular case, literally) under our noses so that we can avoid making the mistake of the security guard who suspects a factory worker of stealing: ‘Every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves’ (Violence: 1). Žižek argues that Western media excel at using this sort of ideological bluff – the clever feature being that the ideological effect is felt in the very guise of ‘non-ideological’ media content. Pursuing this insight in a political context, one can see how the concept of democracy effectively acts as the inviolate background for political discussion in Western media discourse (see Totalitarianism). For Žižek, this inviolate status is suspicious; it produces in the theorist the need to develop a ‘palpable critical distance towards the very notion of democracy’ (They Know: xviii) … we need ‘to look for the wheelbarrow which is stolen from the people when they are bombarded by claims that “things are nonetheless better in a democracy”’ (Parallax: 378).

Despite the fact that Žižek follows the psychoanalytical method by often showing us something that we already really know, these are the truths we tend to be least willing to hear, a point that can be emphasized through a small digression on the subject of love. Falling in love is a process in which two individuals find each other amidst a sea of contingent factors – apart from relationships deliberately arranged by friends or family, most people’s relationships start through chance encounters, coincidental work placements, etc. – only later re-symbolized as ‘fate’, along the lines of ‘We were soul mates always destined to meet.’ A successful act of analysis involves overcoming this tendency to impute false meaning and significance to an essentially contingent situation. In the psychoanalytical context, the tendency assumes the form of transference. In its positive form, the analysand projects feelings of admiration and love onto the analyst as an emotional reaction to the analyst’s powerful insights, whilst in its negative form, the uncomfortable feelings caused by those insights provoke resentment. According to Žižek:

The main ethical injunction of psychoanalysis is therefore not to yield to the temptation of symoblization/internalization: in the psychoanalytical cure the analysand, as it were, passes through falling love backwards: at the moment of ‘exit from transference’ which marks the end of the cure, the subject is able to perceive the events around which his life story is crystallized into a meaningful Whole in their senseless contingency …. (Indivisible Remainder: 94–5)

There is a certain contrariety in the fact that, in practice, empirically minded detractors of the psychoanalytical method have a paradoxically romantic attachment (transference) to a meaningful Whole substantiated by rigorously verifiable facts and figures. The resulting ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills 2000 [1959]) is of limited practical use when attempting to understand actual lived (mediated) experience within the mediascape. Freud saw those who resist moving beyond transference as akin to ‘children of nature who refuse to accept the psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet’s words, are accessible only to the “logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments”’ (Freud 2001e [1911–13]: 166–7). Likewise, Lacan is dismissive of the self-defeating nature of ‘rigorous methods’ that are hamstrung by their own passive reactivity: ‘When thought is not too empirical, it does not consist in standing and gaping, and waiting for inspiration to come from the facts’ (Lacan 2008: 47).

There is an irony in the fact that the unpopularity of psychoanalysis amongst empiricists is a largely emotional, (negative) transference-based response, whilst psychoanalysis itself, despite its focus upon emotional categories, is driven by a desire to move beyond the emotional so that it can describe and explain reality more accurately. The psychoanalytical attitude seeks the patterns and structures of the empirically existing but otherwise inchoately experienced effects we regularly witness as a normal part of our everyday, lived environment. Both Freud and Lacan highlight how nominally empirical methods are innately unable to deal with those undeniably existing phenomena that we intuitively already know about but that evade conventional (social) scientific measurement. Keeping with the theme of dumplings, this distinction is demonstrated in medical research about the US obesity epidemic and the contradictory phenomenon of the French Paradox (France has less of an obesity problem than America, despite having a national diet rich in saturated fats). Empirical researchers concluded that a significant causal factor in US obesity is the larger average plate – and, by extension, portion – size compared to countries like France (see Wansink and Cheney 2005). Thus, whereas psychoanalysis tells us something we already knew at some level but are nonetheless surprised to reflect upon explicitly, excessively empirical thought is hidebound by the rigour of its methodology. It risks telling us something that we not only already knew explicitly, but are also unsurprised to be reminded about – in this case, the less-than-shocking conclusion that the disproportionately high level of American obesity is caused by Americans, on average … eating too much.

An apocryphal story relates how a cop finds a drunk under a street-light looking for his car keys that he dropped on the opposite, dark side of the street. When the cop asks why the drunk is looking for the keys in the wrong place, he receives the defensive retort: ‘Because this is where the light is.’ The drunk can be seen as emblematic of those analysts of the media for whom the light of methodological rigour is more important than the admittedly dark areas of the situation that nonetheless contain the keys to clearer insight. Additionally, the cop can be viewed as representing the psychoanalyst who questions the wisdom of ignoring where the keys actually lie because of the relative difficulty of the searching process beyond the light. The drunk’s truculence also mirrors the resistance frequently displayed to psychoanalysis as so acerbically encapsulated in Karl Kraus’s comment that ‘[p]sychoanalysis is the disease of which it claims to be the cure’ (cited in Szaz 1990: 24). There is, however, also the contrasting danger, particularly relevant to Žižek the academic celebrity, of idealizing the seductive analyst who seems to have all the answers. In either case, ‘[w]hether the analyst is blamed or idealized, the result is the same: the neurosis is protected against the encroachment of analysis’ (Thompson 1994: 184). Mindful of both positive and negative resistances to psychoanalytical insight, this book shows that it still (like a famous beer familiar to the drunk under the street-light) tends to refresh the parts that other methods cannot. Emotional reactions to Žižek’s highbrow interrogation of popular low culture represent an unwillingness to deal with the basic, traumatic nature of the knowledge that results. Žižek’s radical materialist theology is based upon facing up to the fact that ‘reality’ needs confronting without recourse to false abstraction and simultaneously recognizing that a key aspect of reality is its non-material, but no less powerful, libidinal impulses and drives.

MEDIA PSYCHOSIS AND NEUROSIS: THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS

While the commemorative ambivalences of neurosis are linked and limited to literature, literacy, and the printing press – and to their visualizable extensions, photography and film – only the psychotic witnesses the media-technological institutions of ‘liveness.’ And although perversion may be the developed image of a negative associated with neurosis, its link to psychosis is conveyed via the mass media analogues specific to group psychology which turn on this ‘live’ transmission and broadcast – and turn around into devices of surveillance. (Rickels 1990: 50)

He’s loved of the distracted multitude,

Who like not in their judgement, but their eyes.

(Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. iv)

The diagnostic approach of psychoanalysis relies upon the identification of symptomatic acts which Freud defines as ‘those acts which people perform, as we say, automatically, unconsciously, without attending to them, or as in a moment of distraction’ (Freud 2001c [1901–5]: 76). Significantly, in his seminal paper on the cultural impact of the earliest media technologies, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), Walter Benjamin (1936) also identifies the deceptively simple term distraction (zerstreuung) as the key mode of receptivity in which people experience media technologies. More than the relatively superficial and vague term ‘distraction’, however, psychoanalysis enables us to address two deeper media symptoms: neurosis and psychosis. In Freud’s terms: ‘… neurosis does not disavow the reality; it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it’ (Freud 2001f [1923–5]: 185). The modern mediascape is a manifold of these psychological conditions. Its various formats disavow and ignore reality in subtly conflated ways, as indicated by Rickels’s above association between psychosis and technological mediation. Media spectacles embody layered belief structures explored throughout this book. In one sense we know that they are ‘only’ spectacles. In another sense, in many ways we act as if they are real and we only pretend to pretend to believe that they are mere representations – despite what we might say, in terms of actual doing, we treat them as if they were real.

According to Freud, a defining feature of neurotics is their failure to reach a workable accommodation between the competing pulls of reality and fantasy that constitute an inescapable feature of the human condition. This occurs to the extent that ‘[i]f what they long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it; and they abandon themselves to their phantasies the most readily where they need no longer fear to see them realized’ (Freud 2001c [1901–5]: 110). For Žižek, psychoanalysis is a form of understanding significant not just for individuals but for the mediascape at large. For example, from a Žižekian perspective, the US Government’s post 9/11 declaration of war upon an abstract noun (the War on Terror) constituted a blend of acting out and passage à l’acte³ – symptomatic of the world’s most militarily powerful nation’s inability to confront its own neurotic relationship with reality and its representations:

… an act proper is … the very opposite of the violent passage a l’acte. What is a passage à l’acte? Perhaps, its ultimate cinematic expression is found in Paul Schrader’s and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in the final outburst of Travis (Robert de Niro) against the pimps who control the young girl he wants to save (Jodie Foster). Crucial is the implicit suicidal dimension of this passage à l’acte: when Travis prepares for his attack he practices in front of the mirror the drawing of the gun; in what is the best-known scene of the film, he addresses his own image in the mirror with the aggressive-condescending ‘You talkin’ to me?’ In a textbook illustration of Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror stage,’ aggressivity is here clearly aimed at oneself, at one’s own mirror-image. This suicidal dimension ree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About The Book
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Mediated Imp of the Perverse
• 2 Žižek’s Tickling Shtick
• 3 Big (Br)Other: Psychoanalysing the Media
• 4 Understanding Media: The Sublime Objectifi cation of Ideology
• 5 The Media’s Violence
• 6 The Joker’s Little Shop of Ideological Horrors
• Conclusion: Don’t Just Do It: Negative Dialectics in the Age of Nike
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index