The Specular Spectacular: Žižek on 9/11

The rhetoric of Slavoj Žižek’s cultural critique is steeped firmly in spectacle and popular culture. He is a vibrant and colourful public intellectual who assaults his listeners with a Leftist dialectic that nonetheless seems to revel in the products of the capitalist system – without them, Žižek’s work would surely be maimed of its characteristic verve. A good example of this would be ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’, a film directed by Sophie Fiennes for which Žižek served as a ‘guide’, providing commentary on some classic films, old and new, steeped in Freud and Lacan that nonetheless remained accessible. While his openness to popular media gives him a rhetorical edge that is perhaps not so discernable in other intellectuals of our time, it is not the only thing that makes him a ‘love him or hate him’ figure. There is a persistent ‘gruffness’ in his delivery, an almost uncouth tendency towards the rude, lewd and raw. A hilarious example from his essay ‘Fantasy as a political category: a Lacanian approach’¹ illustrates this approach with shocking clarity. At the beginning of the essay, Žižek attempts to explain the omnipresence of ideology within the context of the symbolic co-ordinates under which we live.  He invokes the Levi-Straussian hierarchy of preparing food (raw, baked, boiled) as a framework through which to begin his controversial twist on that very structural ‘pyramid’:

As a supplement to [Levi-Strauss’] brilliant work, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matiere-a-penser: do not the three basic types of toilets form a kind of excremental correlative counterpoint to the Levi-Straussian triangle of cooking? In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way in front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is in the back: shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible. Finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles – the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected […] Thus, while it is easy for an academic to claim at a round table that we live in a post-ideological universe – the moment he visits the rest-room after the heated discussion, he is again overtaken by ideology.²

The same visceral approach is evident in the first chapter of his Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, ‘Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance’.³ The way Žižek handles a commentary on the world after 9/11 is bound to make people both curious and edgy. He progresses with his usual methodology, piling up one popular reference after another whilst being consistently fuelled by Lacanian logic throughout. The ‘Real’ and our relationship to it in the contemporary world remains a preoccupation. He begins the chapter by quoting a statement by Alain Badiou, who claims that the twentieth century was in fact characterised by a craving for the ‘real’, as opposed to the nineteenth century, which was driven by a positivist scientific strain that emphasised exploratory progress, as driven by a distinctly utopian vision. Žižek defines this new desire as a violent one; he defines it in terms that are nearly hubristic:

The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality – the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality.⁴

The declarative tone, particularly in the telling words ‘defining moment’, signals that Žižek aims to critique the zeitgeist. The view that what bars us from the Real is purely ‘deceptive’ is clearly not his own; it is an ironic rhetorical device when viewed in light of his Lacanian leanings. For Lacan, the self remains intact by its mediation of the world through the Imaginary (our ‘visual’ apprehension) and the Symbolic (the linguistic sphere which coheres the imaginary). The Real is that which can never be truly be grasped – it exists outside of both the imaginary and the symbolic orders. It is therefore chaotic and a source of anxiety.⁵ So it is easy to see how, within this logic, an excessive fascination with the Real is viewed as destabilising and perverse. One should not stare into the abyss for too long. Žižek, in a typical move, first illustrates this through the example of a Japanese cult film, Empire of the Senses, in which a couple embrace torture as a consummation of their love. He then moves on to a more disturbing, ‘real life’ example:

Is not the ultimate figure of the passion of the Real the option we get on hardcore websites to observe the inside of a vagina from the vantage point of a tiny camera at the top of the penetrating dildo? At this extreme point, a shift occurs: when we get too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into disgust at the Real of the bare flesh.⁶

If slightly extreme in its visceral approach, this example manages to pinpoint a particular aspect of contemporary culture whilst still working within a Lacanian framework. But what does all this have to do with the World Trade Centre attacks? One of Žižek’s main points throughout the chapter is that ‘so-called fundamentalist terror [is] also an expression of the passion for the Real’.⁷ For Žižek, the terrorist attacks (or more importantly, our subsequent reactions to them), are viewed as being symptomatic of the passion for the Real precisely because they operate on the intricacies of the images that surround us. Žižek states what the terrorist attacks did very briefly and very quickly, and most of the essay is concerned with how and why this was done. To wit, the idea is that the attacks served to ‘awaken us, Western citizens, from our numbness, from immersion in our everyday ideological universe’.⁸

But what mostly interests him is the way in which spectacle comes into the equation. In fact, Žižek claims that what in fact happens after the passion for the real has been asserted is the persistence of ‘its apparent opposite […] a theatrical spectacle’.⁹ According to Žižek, ‘the postmodern passion for the semblance ends up in a violent return to the passion of the Real.’¹⁰ The reference to a specifically ‘postmodern’ obsession is doubtless a nod to the kind of malaise Jean Baudrillard identified in ‘Simulacra and simulations’, where the illusion envelops reality so completely that reality ceases to be a reference point but is rendered obsolete by an accumulation of endless simulacra. Thinking along those lines, Žižek is suggesting that this entanglement, post-911, calls us back into the real precisely because the acts of terrorism operate on the same simulated plane and thus shattered our perceptions at a point where we were ‘still listening’. By playing into our fascination with spectacle, they have malignantly tapped into the zeitgeist. Žižek identifies how a particular aspect of capitalist economy operates and the implications it carries for this process of virtualisation.

On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol…And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare […] What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual reality. For the great majority of the public, the WTC explosions were events on the TV screen, and when we watched the oft-repeated shot of the giant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower, was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in catastrophe movies, a special effect which outdid all others, since […] reality is the best appearance of itself?¹¹

Žižek therefore offers a materialist explanation for our obsession with the simulation. What he is saying is that the removal of the ‘malignant property’, if the idea is carried through to the representation of the attacks in the media, allows us to view them as a spectacle. In fact, it leaves us with no choice but to view them in this way. Reality has an edge over the simulation, but only because it has now perversely gained the title of the ultimate simulation. And in another move that is typical of his rhetoric, Žižek makes the distinction clear by equating the attacks to snuff pornography and Hollywood disaster films to the ‘acceptable’ (and legal) sadomasochist pornography. Sadomasochism implies that any damage caused will not be permanent and that the exchange will be consensual. Therefore the arousal on the part of the viewer is mediated through a relatively ‘safe’ fantasy-mechanism. With snuff, on the other hand, the violence is real and usually involves death. So those who experience snuff would be aroused by genuine violence, and not the ‘simulated’ kind, while still being at a safe distance from it. We can therefore see the varying levels of ‘danger’ at play here. Žižek then goes on to make the inevitable connection to reality television.

It was when we watched the two WTC towers collapsing on the TV screen, that it became possible to experience the falsity of ‘reality TV shows’: even if these shows are ‘for real’, people still act in them – they simply play themselves. The standard disclaimer in a novel (‘Characters in the text are fictional, any resemblance to real-life characters is purely accidental’) also holds for participants in reality soaps: what we see there are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for real.¹²

This contributes towards the ‘thrill of the Real as the ultimate ‘effect’,¹³ because it deflates any inherent value to reality. For Žižek, this is a process that reveals the undignified state of Western culture, as the over-saturation of information and spectacle (sometimes information as spectacle) leads to a blasé acceptance and vicarious enjoyment of disaster. He once again invokes pop-culture artefacts to prove his point: The Truman Show and Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint, both of which are run on a panopticon-conspiracy concept as their protagonists are duped into a staged life. According to Žižek, ‘[t]he underlying experience of Time out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late-capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyperreality, in a way unreal, substanceless, deprived of material inertia.’¹⁴ The connection to 9/11 here is that this leads to a ‘derealization of horror’¹⁵ that leads to a sanitised presentation of the attacks in the news. Žižek makes the striking point that although the spectacular aspect of the attacks was exploited to the full, the news never showed any actual carnage. He contrasts this with footage of Third World catastrophes, ‘where the whole point is to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: Somalis dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women, men with their throats cut.’¹⁶ What Žižek identifies here is an insistent ‘segregation by simulation’, that the differing representations of catastrophe seem to point towards the fact that blood is elsewhere: ‘[i]s this not yet further proof of how, even in this tragic moment, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens there, not here?’¹⁷

In so coordinating the way we perceive these catastrophes, Žižek moves on to give his take on how and why this perception sustains itself. He manages to rapidly connect our time with the early twentieth century by invoking the case of the Titanic. He claims that ‘this, also, was a shock, but the space for it had been prepared in ideological fantasizing, since the Titanic was the symbol of the might of nineteenth-century industrial civilisation. Does the same not hold for these attacks?’¹⁸ An equivalent ‘preparation’ for 9/11 is to be found, once again, in popular films, particularly in films such as Independence Day, where the destruction of significant American landmarks such as the White House is portrayed with an almost fetishistic glee. What underlies the connection between 9/11 and sensationalised disaster on celluloid is the fact that Americans have in fact been prepared for this by Hollywood, arguably its most wide-reaching and persistent ideological-state-apparatus: ‘in a way, America got what it fantasised about, and that was the biggest surprise.’¹⁹ It is eerie to recall that just two years before the attacks, in 1999, two films celebrating governmental subversion were released: The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, from which Žižek takes the title of his book, and David Fincher’s Fight Club. In the former, hackers feature as heroes and their rhetoric resembles that of ‘freedom fighters’. In the latter, an underground movement that sustains friendly brawls amongst males who also feel numbed by contemporary society gets turned into a small-scale guerrilla unit that aims to battle capitalism in its various manifestations.

‘Project Mayhem’s final act of vandalism, in which credit-card buildings are blown up, seems to foretell 9/11 with an alarming precision: not only does the image reverberate on a visual level, the implications of the destruction of those particular buildings are also the same: it is an attack on a central metonym for the capitalist economy (interestingly, the bombs in Chuck Palahniuk’s source novel fail to detonate – which only fortifies Žižek’s claim for the centrality of spectacle, as film seems to place things centre-stage once again). And this association is not just limited to the fictional plane, as Žižek details how Hollywood was actually employed by the Pentagon to help envisage and pre-empt future attacks. Žižek, however, is also sure to point out that:

Of course, the point is not to play the pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a catastrophe version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked ourselves as we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: Where have we already seen the same thing over and over again?²⁰

Žižek’s answer is: in dreams. He claims that the materialisation of the attacks in films, before they actually happened, is indicative of the way dreams work, which therefore opens up the whole situation to psychoanalytic scrutiny: ‘it is easy to account for the fact poor people around the world dream about becoming Americans – so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilized in their well-being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that will shatter their lives’.²¹ The idea that the attacks served as a ‘wake-up call’ that made us realise the plight of the Third World, which is the ‘desert of the Real’, has to be foregrounded within the fantasmatic co-ordinates under which we live. It is not the case that we got a jolt of reality through the attacks.  All that happened was that our preconceptions of the Third World, through their televised versions, crept into our own world, so that in a sense all that was added was another layer of simulation. Before the attacks, we would look at:

[the] Third World horrors as something which was not actually part of our social reality, as something which existed (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen – and what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not the reality which entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e. the symbolic co-ordinates which determine what we experience as reality).²²

Žižek’s dissection of the post-9/11 world is both merciless and perceptive, involving as it does a heady brew of psychoanalysis and popular culture, which somehow seems to pick on the key pressure points of the situation. He is the philosopher to go to for an analysis of spectacle, however, and we find that that element is far from lacking in the way September 11, 2001 was treated by the media. Ostensibly, a nation’s psyche and lifestyle was turned entirely topsy-turvy, but Žižek reveals that there is far more to the story than benign capitalists and evil Muslim fundamentalists. In privileging a Lacanian worldview that is pivoted on our virtual co-ordinates, Žižek illustrates how the many layers of illusion under which Western society is wrapped are not to be underestimated.

Endnotes

¹ First published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (1996), here quoted from Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 3rd. ed (Harlow: Pearson, 2008) pp. 695 – 705.

² Žižek, in Lodge and Wood, p. 696.

³ Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, pp. 5 – 32.

⁴ Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, p. 6.

⁵ Celia Britton, ‘Structuralist and poststructuralist psychoanalytic and Marxist theories’ in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From formalism to poststructuralism ed. by Raman Selden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 197 – 221.

⁶ Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, p. 6.

⁷ ibid., p. 9.

⁸ ibid, p. 9.

⁹ ibid., p. 9.

¹⁰ ibid., p. 10.

¹¹ ibid., p. 11.

¹² ibid., p. 12.

¹³ ibid., p. 12.

¹⁴ ibid., p. 13.

¹⁵ ibid., p. 13.

¹⁶ ibid., p. 13.

¹⁷ ibid., p. 13.

¹⁸ ibid., p. 15.

¹⁹ ibid., p. 16.

²⁰ ibid., p. 17.

²¹ ibid., p. 17.

²² ibid., p. 16.

References

Lodge, David and Wood, Nigel, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3^rd ed. (Harlow: Pearson, 2008), pp. 695-705.

Palahniuk, Chuck, Fight Club (London: Vintage, 1996).

Selden, Raman, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From formalism to poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 197–221.

Žižek, Slavoj Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, pp. 1-32.

Films cited

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 20^th Century Fox. 1999

The Matrix. Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros. 1999

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dir. Sophie Fiennes. Amoeba Film. 2006

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