[Nettime-bold] Slavoj Zizek: Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

lbo-talk-digest     Thursday, September 13 2001     Volume 01 : Number 4854

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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