[Nettime-bold] Response to monsieur Slavoj Zizek: <nettime> Slavoj Zizek - Welcome to The Desert of The Real!

["Milan Lukic" <milanl@b92.net>]

what about your story...??!!
so - ...what...?
could you tell us something that might be useful
for the "freshly awaken" citizen od NYC, and elsewhere
their IRREAL-HYPERREAL world is not less fiction than your
High-Edu-Temple
& :
...what about your family...?

they are OK...??!!???

OK...?

...really...?

really OK...?

then...
 .
.
 .
...OK...!

so,please,don't try to fuck your brain around
from your lazy  Uni-chair
comparations and remindingzzzzz
shitting around is dangerous, especially if the COW

HOLLY COW
LIKE
YOU
doin'
det
shit

and
whataboutallthose films,books, and your fucking KENT.EDU
whyahell we need to suck your pseudo connections
between osama bin laden and-4exxxzempl- some book-motion
picture-characters...?

so,mister, could you find some other topic to make your High-Edu salary,OK?

lets talk about weather

no need 2 produce articulation about WTC disaster instead of me
'cause your articulation is
so artificial
so irreal
unreal
at last
as your world-wide-lazy chair

regards from
BELGRADE (YOU MENTIONED TO PUT THAT TOWN IN YOUR
PROCLAMATION...?...NO-OOO...YOU FORGOT, MY DEAR ...(( --- ;... )



greasy opinions
so lazy ass is yours,mister
move it around and
after that
sit on your lazy chair
again

BEST TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY

Milan Lukic,
B92 Radio Station
Belgrade


----- Original Message -----
From: Harsh Kapoor <aiindex@mnet.fr>
To: <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 01:49
Subject: <nettime> Slavoj Zizek - Welcome to The Desert of The Real!


> Unverified from Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society
> <APCSLIST@LISTSERV.KENT.EDU>
>
> 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 them, 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 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 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 safehaven, 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 in opportune 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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