We’ve started digging the plot. DD has taken the lead, a farmer from Ghana, he is showing me how to work the garden using my digging hoe. This was bought in Spain from a Chinese shop. It is a very different way to work the ground from the ways I have learned.
DD works across the soil in a system where the mound he is intending to create is the width of one person’s reach with the hoe.
Is this an evangelical graffiti artist? A lesbian angel? Parson Cross, Sheffield.
In response to the encroaching privatisation and cost of University in England, there is a movement to found Free Universities.
Some friends working in North Sheffield around Parson Cross have recently been awarded an Arts Council grant and as part of their work they are founding a Poly-Technic.
In the past Universities were the better of the higher education institutes, Polytechnics the lesser. The latter were given University status in 1992.
I like the irony of this: the re-appropriation of a term and its re-emergence as a radical title.
Another line of Zizek’s is illustrated by the spoonerism of James Naughtie on the Today programme.
James Naughtie is barely, but just about manages, to suppress his hysterical laughter. Everyone who has heard the clip knows he is pissing himself laughing and covering it with a cough. I have heard no criticism of him for this; the fact that he didn’t burst out with uncontrolled giggles but smothered them saved him.
However he was laughing, it was funny and his name is Naughtie, making it all the more ridiculous. For whom was he suppressing his laughter? Everyone knows he was laughing. It is clearly funny. Why couldn’t he just laugh out loud?
He is supressing hysteria to keep the big other innocent. The big other is that which gazes at us but that we don’t percieve except in moments like this, when we can not publically (in this case) express ourselves. Not because people don’t know what we think but because we can’t enact that thought.
Zizek uses many examples of this to illustrate the point. The point that it was worse to admit in Soviet times that it was forbidden to criticise Stalin than to criticise him being one.
Today I was listening to a talk by Zizek relayed on youtube. In it he spends time, as ever, trying to describe the big other. He uses Freud’s idea of the drive and in the case of sight he notes that Freud considers drive to be reflexive, mentioning the French reflexive form of the verb prefixed by se faire. Thus the drive to see is the drive to be part of some staged scene, to be seen rather than to see. The drive is to expose yourself to a gaze. This he admits as the fulfilment of the Benthamite idea of the Panoptican: it is not that people wish to avoid being observed but that they do not fully consider themselves alive unless they are observed. Various understandings of reality TV are deployed to illustrate this.
Zizek has been on my mind over the last few days in the context of Breivik. Zizek insists that the form taken by contemporary ideology, the ideology that is the support of the ‘system’, of various forms of exploitation as well as localised forms of liberation, is one that says you should search for inner oneness, get to the true self, indulge your passions and express your inner self. In his courtroom presentations Brevik explains:
When asked how he could describe his actions without any emotion, Breivik explained how he had prepared himself by doing meditation and “de-humanising” his own feelings.
Now this could make Zizek laugh but not out of lack of compassion. Breivik is showing us where the current ideological construct is being used to produce the very opposite of what it is understood to promote. He becomes violent rather than peaceful and compassionate. Now a ‘true’, I am tempted to write ‘believer’, in the value of meditation might suggest his is a distortion of meditation which in its true form cannot produce such excess, that such use is a deviation from something pure.
However it is the whole which expresses the real of an idea, the excesses far from being not part of the meditation process are integral to it. In the case of capitalism, the exploitation of natural resources in say Africa is as much a feature of capitalism as the charitable works of Bill Gates. In religion, the excesses of medieval Papacy are part of Christianity as much as the mystical insights of an ascetic Saint.
Zizek has used elsewhere the example of D.T. Suzuki, a favourite author of mine in the early 80s. Suzuki as well as being a promoter of Zen Bhuddism in the West was also, in his earlier writing, an apologist of a sort for the excesses of the Japanese War machine. He wrote, I am told, that for the common person with little chance to indulge long training in meditative practices, following the orders of the military commander is the best way to satori, abolition of the self by the following of orders without though. These are ideas repeated by Eugen Herrigel in Zen in the Art of Archery.
This is a film that starts with emotional retardation at it’s heart, a lack of passion, indeed it’s impossibility. The hero, Walter is an introvert as well as being a muppet who discovers his muppetness in the film and, of course, his happiness at the same time.
Worth watching sister dear. The film is most remarkable by being in the genre of classic Hollywood epics. It has a feel of the fifties and sixties.
Otherwise what I noticed was the coherence in what is deemed acceptable by censors. Heads cut off and varied scenes of a gory nature are allowed but any sexual proximity forbidden.
Fear is preferable to physical passion it would seem. A fearful citizen is prepared. A passionate one left in ignorance. Where is the film directing the viewer then? To war not love?
The idea is that film as a medium, as a form, emerged with women always already objectified ;by the format, the simple act of framing and representing any figure, of giving, however temporary, a fixed form ;by its practitioners, practically exclusively men, women further objectified in particular form. The latter held as achieving a patriarchal, sexist, representation from which it is inordinately difficult to emerge. Continue reading “journey 2: the mysterious island”
My good friend Steve P got hold of this film. It tells the story of Machete, the eponymous hero who, wielding said machete saves the day numerous times while bringing justice to bear against a set of corrupt politicians, police and drug barons all involved in a plan to use anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican sentiment to further their own ends. Continue reading “machete”
