[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Reply to Zizek

[camille acey <camillesname@yahoo.com>]

what is this supposed to be ? It is just barely
comprehensible. What does "familize" mean ? give us a
break. whereas zizek's piece was an astute analysis of
the event and its aftermath, o'neill's piece is a step
below an ignorant rant. i am looking for intelligent
and radical ways to think about this situation, not a
pseudo-intellectual play-by-play.

camille 
--- John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> Here is a reply to Zizek from John O'Neill,
> originally posted to the
> Cyber-Society-Live list. 
> 
> Some may find it useful.
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> John
> =================================================
> DESERTING THE REAL / GOING TO THE MOVIES
> 
> John O'Neill
> 
> Should we run into the movie house with S/Z every
> time we see something
> on TV? Don't we miss TV's attempt to make a movie
> that we are just about
> to see but for which its commentators lack narrative
> power?
> 
> (1) We know what hit WTC  and possibly who --but we
> don't know what WTC
> is nor who we are;
> 
>         (2) If we pair WTC and WTO we get a better
> sense of them and
> ourselves, recalling their contested status in
> protests played out
> world-wide (Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa) beyond the
> newly improvised
> walls of capital democracy;
> 
>         (3) If we twin the WTC towers with WTO, we
> achieve intellectual
> perspective by connecting iconology to the material
> practices of global
> capitalism. The WTC was a glass house of capital
> brains and bodies,
> young, powerful, plugged into money, style, and the
> nomadic life of the
> twenty/eighty split that rules symbolic capitalism's
> division of social
> labour into highly and lowly valued services;
> 
>         (4) The terrible destruction of WTC demands
> in the first
> instance that its bodies be Americanized, familized
> and averaged into
> "anyone of us". At the same time, there is staged
> the recovery of these
> bodies by civic bodies (firemen / women, police men
> and women, security
> men and women and other citizens willing to
> sacrifice themselves on
> behalf of capital bodies who at other times seek to
> be unburdened by
> such duties, charity, and the taxes that underwrite
> these municipal
> services.
> 
>         (5) The critical challenge is to connect the
> intellectual
> perspective we might gain with the moral perspective
> offered to us in
> the scenes of extraordinary civic responses to the
> disaster which fell
> upon New York and Washington. TV is witness to these
> moral events but
> lacks any liturgical knowledge to fill in its
> otherwise empty icons
> whose endless repetition begins to numb our minds
> and hearts. Perhaps
> this is because we know our resolve to learn from
> them is weak and soon
> overwhelmed with cries for revenge that do not close
> the wound but keep
> it open for ever;
> 
>         (6) Any pop commentary, eked out by
> comparing movies to movies,
> is weak in its response to civic events that require
> us to think through
> the daily toll upon workers, families and
> communities. It is they who
> bear the human capital sacrifice that calls for
> witness at the site of
> WTC. Here the hidden injuries of modernity mark us
> all.
> 
>         (7) It is a conceit of commentary that the
> world's integrity can
> be filtered through its analysts and anchor persons
> whereas it is the
> inalienable gift of everyone who lent a hand to
> anyone else in need. The
> catastrophic events that opened this week also tore
> out of us an
> unfinished prayer to anyone's god anywhere......It
> is in the silence of
> those gods that we must learn to think and to hold
> together.
> 
> John O'Neill
> Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology
> 227 Founders College,
> York University, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada
> (Home) 416-653-8838
> (Office) 416-736-5148
>  (Fax)    416-653-7323
> 
>
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