This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
Postmodern Identities III
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From the course by Wesleyan University
The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)
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From the lesson
Postmodern Identities
We examine short pieces by Judith Butler and Slavjo Zizek to understand how identities get formed (and performed) in a world without foundations.
Meet the Instructors
Michael S. Roth
So, the second author we've read for this week is Slavoj Zizek,
who is like Judith Butler, an extraordinarily prolific and
provocative and interesting philosophical voice.
And like Judith Butler, has become a philosopher of the world
r,eally has audiences all over the world.
In and outside of academia.
Slovoj Zizek is written a lot about popular culture, and so his
words and his schtick, I could call it really, that is his performance.
Or resonate widely because of his attentiveness
to non-academic forms of communication,
and his penchant for incisive readings of
what we thought of as very familiar forms,
whether that would be Hitchcock or other popular cinema and,
or his wonderful use of humor to instruct us
on some really complex and difficult issues.
Butler has recently seen herself in the legacy
of Fucos notion of critique, and she has
extraordinary debts to deconstruction.
Slovoj Zizek, as he says often, is a card-carrying Lacanian.
That is, he has learned a lot from Jacques Lacan,
a great French psychoanalyst and theorist,
who started off being very much influenced not only by Freud,
but also also by the surrealists, and then by Alexandre Kojeve.
May have mentioned before in this class,
cuz you have a notion of a master slave dialectic from Hegel.
And Lacan went on to write very enigmatic and
powerful works about how language, the unconscious and
desire, intersect, form a constellation of forces
that we could never fully understand, but that structure our lives,
our subjectivity, our fantasy, and our actions.
Zizek begins from that, and I think one of the first things to do is
just to get a sense of Zizek, in addition to the reading which we've assigned, and
we've just assigned a small essay from the London Review of Books called You May,
which is really the imperative of you must enjoy.
I'd like you to look at some film clips that you can see
on YouTube, and we have some little posts, some links here.
And if you have a chance to look at the film Zizek, which is
about 70 minute film, it gives you a sense of his ideas, but also of his
way of thinking, as a person moving through the world.
I think very compelling analyst of contemporary culture.
>> This is your last chance.
After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill, the story ends.
You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and
I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
[MUSIC]
>> But the choice between the blue and the red pill,
is not really a choice between illusion and reality.
Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions,
but this era, fictions which already structure our reality.
If you take away from our reality,
the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill.
So, what is the third pill?
Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill,
which enables a fake fast food religious experience.
But, a pill that will enable me to perceive,
not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.
If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too
filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality.
We have to fictionalize it.
>> Anyway, for our purposes, we are focusing on this text.
And Zizek in here talks about modernism
as a practice that orients itself around
an empty spot where we thought God was.
[LAUGH] That is that, for modernism there was this,
the notion that God is missing, that there was this spot where God or the ordering
principle or the sovereign of the world, we used to think that was there.
And then what Modernism discovers is that, that's gone,
that God is dead or there is no ideal or as Zizek puts it on page 43 of
the text we've assigned, that the thing is lacking, that the machine of the world,
our machine of the universe, revolves around an emptiness.
And he says, the post-modernist reversal, this is on page 43.
The post-modernist reversal shows,
the thing itself as the incarnated materialized emptiness.
In other words, rather than just thinking that God is dead,
a post-modernism thinks that the dead God, the materialized emptiness,
is this terrifying object that none the less
structures our very existence.
This sounds awfully cryptic, and it is awfully cryptic.
For Zizek, what happens is that we have
a notion of what he calls [FOREIGN], The Big Other,
that is some ordering principle of the universe,
some force that determines who we are and what we do.
And that in post modernism,
we realize that the force that determines what we are, and who we are,
and what we do, that the force is itself materialized emptiness.
That here is a power of absence that
controls us, that defines our existence.
It's not as if we can be free by just realizing
there is no wizard behind the curtain.
Remember the Wizard of Oz, that you realize oh,
there's no wizard behind the curtain.
It's not that we come free when we realize that God is dead, as Nietzsche said.
We don't become free there, we realize that
the force that structures us, is a force of emptiness.
On page 51 he puts it this way.
By the mere act of speaking, we suppose
the existence of the Big Other, the guarantor of meaning.
Now this is on page 51.
When we engage in a language game, when we engage in an act of speaking,
we acknowledge that there are a set of rules,
that guarantee meaning, and that if we didn't act
as if there were a set of rules that guaranteed meaning, we would be crazy.
We would be, as he says, psychotic.
Believing there is a code to be cracked, Zizek writes,
is of course much the same as believing in the existence of the Big Other.
That is, if you think there's a code behind it all,
if you think there's a conspiracy, our you think that there's a force controlling all
things, what you are doing is believing that
there is a author of a structure that gives meaning to our everyday lives.
And for Zizek, this is
a fantasy, an illusion.
And for him instead, what he's interested in,
is the ways in which what looks like prohibition actually gives rise to desire,
and what looks like desire is actually becomes a form of prohibition.
This is Zizek's typical move, that is,
what he tends to do is to emphasize that what
looks like x is really y, and
what pretends to be y is really z, and
he does this in a way that acknowledges our first perceptions of the situation.
But then reverses those perceptions.
>> Let's say you have this so-called tolerant post-modern father.
What he will tell you is the following.
You know how much your grandmother loves but
none the less, you should only visit, sir, if you really want to.
Now, every child who is not an idiot, and they are not idiots,
knows that this apparent free choice, secretly contains a much stronger order.
Not only you have to visit your grandmother, but
you have to like it >> I'm beginning to like this book all
the more.
>> That's one example of how apparent tolerance, strife,
and can conceal the much stronger order.
And that's. >> So we should go back
to more like the dad, that just says, cuz I said so.
>> Absolutely.
It's more honest.
>> On page seven.
He's talking here about what he called sometimes the post-modern father.
He says, the old-fashioned father would say, we're going
to grandma's house on Sunday, and you're coming.
You want to go play baseball, too bad.
You're coming to grandma's house.
The post-modern father seems to be very permissive, very gentle.
He says, we're going to grandma's house on Sunday, and
you know how much grandma loves you.
You know how much I want you to be there with grandma, cuz she loves you,
and I know you'll make the right decision and
you'll go to grandma's house with us on Sunday.
And for Zizek, this apparently more tolerant, more permissive,
gentler force is much more oppressive, much more pernicious,
because what it's really saying is, you will want to go to grandma's house.
The first father, the old-fashioned father, says,
you're gonna go to grandma's house cuz I'm the father.
[LAUGH] And you're gonna listen to me.
Whereas the second one, under the guise of tolerance,
under the guise of permissiveness, what the second father is saying is,
you will have the desire I want you to have.
Because I want not just to control your behavior, but
I want to control your desire.
So in a permissive society, there is a different form of repression.
In a permissive society, Zizek writes, there's a different kind of transgression.
This is from page seven of the reading for this week.
In a permissive society, the rigidly codified,
authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes transgressive.
The master/slave relationship becomes a transgressive relationship.
This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis:
psychoanalysis does not deal.
Psychoanalysis did not deal with the authoritarian father
who prohibits enjoyment, but
with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid.
The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.
So for Zizek, the obscene father is this post-modern father,
who makes you want to do something rather than just prohibit you
from doing something you originally wanted to do.
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