Jim Crosswhite, University of Oregon (25 September 2001)
An acknowledgment of the difference between the real and the imaginary is a condition for social criticism that has a real relation to suffering. And critical humility in the face of real suffering is a condition for social criticism that will remain humane. The writer of "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" seems almost to believe that reality has collapsed into a hyperbolic critical parody of itself, as if he can't quite tell the difference between real people and the social powers with which those real people are contending. This approach to real suffering by way of fantastic conflations and exaggerations might be tolerable if it had some purpose, if it led us somewhere, but it does not. Zizek is not alone in this (and he sounds a little like a Baudrillard tape in this piece), but to preach this fantastic sermon in the context of September 11 is to move away from critique and toward the grotesque.
The idea of a "sphere" and the notion of a faked reality are as old as Plato's cave and its ("spectral") shadow makers. Even there the inhabitants would resist and then kill anyone who tried to force them to recognize the fakery and acknowledge an "outside." Even there the flickering shadows have achieved near immateriality. The "ultimate American paranoiac fantasy" is more a genre with a long history than it is a national property of Americans. We generate social criticism with this form. We imagine our reality as deficient in reality in order to imagine ways to break through (to use the metaphor of the reality hackers) to a better reality, one that is less fake, less impoverished, not so thoroughly managed by the wrong people, not so completely in the dominion of the wrong powers.
Of course the genre twists with the time. Philip K. Dick's paranoia is shaped partly by the cold war era, partly by drugs, partly by Dick's weird psychology. And no one would want to deny the new appropriateness of the genre to capture all the new virtuality produced by technology—electric lights, telephones, film, television, satellite communication, the WWW and all the rest. Gibson's Neuromancer forced us into imagining online virtuality as the real site of what still tries to be decisive, heroic action. And as far as the fantastic goes, any well-lit supermarket or department store displays the Consumable Irreal. There is no question that there are good grounds for highlighting and exaggerating the irreality whose power to eclipse the real keeps growing.
But to say that what happened on September 11 is like the scene in the Matrix where Morpheus introduces the Keanu Reeves character to the "desert of the real" is to say something that belongs on a Fox Network talk show. For what Americans is it true that the events of September 11 broke into an "insulated artificial universe" that generated an image of a diabolical outsider? Let's not consider the 5,000 incinerated and dismembered men and women and children who suffered from disease and injury like all people, who cleaned toilets and coughed up phlegm and changed diapers and actually occupied with what was once their real bodies those towers which, for Zizek, stand for virtual capitalism. They can't be the ones whose delusions generated the fantasy of a diabolical outsider. None of them, none of their surviving children, none of their fellow citizens fantasized Bin Laden's ruling that it is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, to kill the Americans, military and civilians.
So for whom has the fantastic "outside" broken in and smashed, with "shattering impact," an immaterial world of delusion? For whom does Osama Bin Laden appear as a character from a James Bond film? For whom did the events of September 11 arrive with the painful awareness that we were living in an artificial insulated reality? For whom do the people and events in this massacre of innocents appear solely in the shapes of film and television?
Perhaps, perhaps the Americans living in an insulated, artificial reality are the characters in American television shows and in increasingly intertextual American films. Perhaps these are the Americans Zizek is listening to, watching, imagining.
But here is the true "shattering impact:" that 5,000 innocent people who lived real lives in real, vulnerable human bodies, who bore real children, suffered real disease and injury and pain, bled real blood; 5,000 real people who helped to sustain a cosmopolitan city of millions and millions of other real people of different ethnic groups and religions and languages, real citizens who had achieved a great measure of peace and hope, who had been slowly and successfully bringing down the New York City crime rate; that 5,000 of these people would have their real bodies and lives erased in a matter of minutes, and that only body parts, the vapors of the incinerated, and the grieving and the sorrowful and the orphans would remain.
This is the shock. This is the disbelief. Not the shattering of an illusion but the shattering of those real people and their real bodies. Not the shattering of a virtual reality, but the erasing of what was real. This is why the people of New York wept in the streets, why the tears and grief will continue. And this is why, in their grief, the survivors will struggle to preserve a memory of what was real, and to keep this memory of what was real from evanescing into someone else's symbol, or fantasy, or tool. Were the real lives they led less real for any happiness or peace they achieved? Are the unfathomable sufferings of Rwanda and what happened in Sarajevo to be the measure of what is most real?
And yet in Zizek's writing, what happened on September 11 is not real but symbolic, as it seems to have been for the murderers, too: "the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real." We are just "getting a taste of" what goes on around the world "on a daily basis." OK, perhaps we are insulated and ignorant. But where are 5,000 innocents being incinerated by murderers on a daily basis?
If Zizek is saying that Americans should be more knowledgeable about the lives and sufferings of other peoples whose lives and sufferings are entangled with America's own history, then who would disagree? If Zizek is saying that American power and its direct involvement in international affairs create a special responsibility for our educational systems and our media to provide us with a knowledge of global matters that we have not yet achieved, then who would disagree? If he is saying that Americans should comprehend more deeply how people in other parts of the world comprehend us, once more, who would disagree? If he is saying that real understanding of geographically distant others is endangered and distorted by the fantasies of film and television, are there educated Americans who have not heard this? Is the struggle to educate a democratic citizenship adequate to our time and the realities of globalization unique to the United States? That would be hard to believe. However, it must be conceded by all that the U.S. faces one special difficulty and so a special but obligatory struggle here. Many of its citizens will never have a first hand experience of Europe or the Middle East or Africa or Asia or even South America. I can drive or fly 3,000 miles and never leave my country. At best, I can get to Mexico or Canada. This would take someone living in France through all of Europe and into central Asia, or into the center of Africa. The problems of truly comprehending these others whose languages are rarely spoken anywhere near you and into whose actual presence you will never come are not trivial.
But Zizek seems to be saying something more than all of this. He seems to know more than most of us know. He knows that "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." This is difficult to comprehend. Is this the "ultimate truth" about a real nation, about real people, about a real, existing economic system, about an ethical theory, about a fantasy of real people, or about movies or television or what? The problem may be that many of us cannot imagine that "capitalism" (is it one thing?), which is after all something historical, has an "ultimate truth."
And it is difficult to understand what he is asking at the end: "Or will America finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the long-overdue move from 'A thing like this should not happen HERE!' to 'A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!'." Of course, to abandon the "here" for the "anywhere" would be foolish. We are in real bodies in real places with real limitations and with real work to do. It is not simply a "fantasmatic screen" that deeply attaches people in a unique way to the sufferings of their neighbors and their fellow citizens.
But the demand that Zizek makes is neither unfamiliar nor inappropriate. It is more than worth pursuing. What can we do to work to see that what the people of New York City suffered on September 11 does not happen anywhere,;neither in the U.S. nor anywhere else? The reactions of the American government now threaten regions all over the world and seriously threaten liberty and privacy and tolerance in the United States. The American past carries humanitarian successes and catastrophic failures and genocide. Perhaps fantastic critique has a role to play. Certainly we must struggle to sustain serious social criticism through threatening times, but unless we are simply displaying critical virtuosity, we must achieve a kind of criticism that is reasonably concrete, less pretending to ultimate truths of history, more capable of acknowledging the real suffering of real people, criticism that is not too proud to descend to the practicable.
What do we seek now? First, to avert a catastrophe. We must undo the terrorist networks and prevent American anger and power from leading us into the catastrophic roles that seem to have been scripted for us. Five thousand innocents are murdered in New York City. That is more than enough. Every dead innocent fuels more anger, either from the powerless or from the powerful. Averting an escalation of global violence is the immediate and pressing task. Undoing and weakening the terrorist networks, withdrawing support from them, arresting the guilty—everyone who is not already a monster must be persuaded to join in this. Restraining American power and calming American anger—all Americans must work tirelessly on this in their own ways. Steadily and powerfully and consistently exposing and addressing and undoing the intolerance that threatens—all Americans must engage in this struggle.
However, undoing the terrorist networks already threatens to become an excuse for the suppression of Muslim minorities in Russia and China and of minority sects in other nations—a price to pay for cooperation. Where is the critical knife that cuts finely enough to do the necessary work? Where is the democratic theory that can account for the voices of the oppressed when their hopes and language are those of the Taleban? Who now can speak to Beijing of the deep wrongness of the spectacle that took place this week in Kashgar, where Islamic prisoners were, as a final insult to their faith, humiliated by being made drunk, then paraded through the streets, and finally shot in the backs of their heads—while hundreds of officials looked on?
The other enormous task before us is a new decolonizing that will address the recolonizations that have taken place in the last several decades. The Middle East and other regions are now the sites of complicated entanglements of powers in which the U.S. has consistently sought the advantages of the colonizer in new and shifting formations. How do the western powers and the U.S. especially give their power away? This is not a morally or politically simple question and there are no ultimate truths about this. We all know more than we did during the decolonizations of the past. The current entanglements of power are functional and dysfunctional, productive and destructive, liberating and oppressive. Power is never simply relinquished, it is always handed over to some other power or powers. The U.S. is not only responsible for the despair and rage produced by its past uses of power but will also be responsible for the consequences that follow from any new withdrawal or disposition of its power. To whom should power go? The development of new democratic theory for a new decolonizing could shed real light, but this will be no simple task with results that will be equally clear for all.
And of course, there are many other obstacles. To persuade Americans to give up power that generates significant wealth and advantage will be a great challenge. The evil of September 11 can perhaps help here. At no other time in recent history have Americans felt the rage and helplessness that might engender blind violence against innocent people. There is an unprecedented interest in how such hatred and evil were produced in the lives of the murderers of the thousands of New Yorkers. There is a new interest in the many Islams. There is nascent hope that somehow some shared understanding, some more accurate reimaginings of each other's lives, might take place on a more global level.
So, along with developing democratic theory for this new decolonization, let's work tirelessly on this framework for a truer imagination of each other's lives, and on the practical infrastructure for it, the educational and communicative and technological and intellectual framework for the kind of understanding that will make the massacre of innocents less likely, that will strengthen American restraint, and that will open a way to a new decolonizing and a new development of the peoples and lands that are suffering now.
This task is creative and productive and will require continuing critical exposes of the material and fantastic spheres in which we all live, but it will also require a humility in the face of real people, their real lives, their real suffering, and an acknowledgment of the truth that comes from their actual historical work, which will certainly be modest, and of mixed provenance, and imperfect, and which may or may not align with the ultimate truths of fantastic critique.