Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime

[Dave Monroe]

... now if there's one recent, important title on the sublime that I
didn't list earlier, it's Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology
(New York: Verso, 1989).  The cutting edge of Slovenian psychoanalytic
theory, which is, interestingly, the cutting edge of theory these days,
apparently.  Had intended to post this for months now, and, given recent
uses, mentions of excess, the ridiculous, the sublime, the traumatic,
not to mention the pulp beneath the enamel, the flesh beneath the
tattooed skin, that is, the Real beneath the surface, of "reality," of
the symbolic, from Marek Wieczorek, "The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of
Slavoj Zizek," i.e., his Introduction to Slavoj Zizek's The Art of the
Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (Seattle: U of
Washington P, 2000) ...

Zizek's Lacan is not the Lacan of post-structuralism, the theorist of
the floating signifier, but the Lacan of the Real, the first category in
the famous Lacanian triad of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
The most under-represnted of the Lacanian categories, the Real is also
the most unfathomable because it is fundamentally impenetrable and
cannot be assimilated to the symbolic order of language and
communication (the fabric of daily life); nor does it belong to the
Imaginary, the domain of images with which we identify and which capture
our attention.  According to Lacan, fantasy is the ultimate support of
our "sense of reality."  The Real is the hidden/traumatic underside of
our existence or sense of reality, whose disturbing effects are felt in
strange and unexpected places: the Lacanian Sublime.  Lynch's films
attest to the fact that the fantasmatic support of reality functions as
a defense against the Real, which often intrudes into the lives of the
protagonists in the form of extreme situations, through violence or
sexual excesses, in disturbing behavior that is both horrific and
enjoyable, or in the uncanny effects of close-ups or details.  The
unfathomable, traumatic nature of the situations Lynch creates also
makes them sublime. (viii-ix)

"Lynch's entire 'ontology,'" Zizek writes, "is based upon the
discordance between reality, observed from a safe distance, and the
absolute proximity of the Real.  His elementary procedure involves
moving forward from the establishing shot of reality to a disturbing
proximity that renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment,
the crawling and glistening of indestructible life." (ix, quoting Zizek,
"David Lynch, or, the Feminine Depression," The Metastases of Enjoyment,
p. 114)

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Zizek writes that "there is
nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object--according to Lacan, a
sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance,
finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding [the Thing],
the impossible-real object of desire.... It is its structural place--the
fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance--and not
its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its sublimity." (ix, quoting
Zizek, TSOOI, p. 194, ellipses in Wieczorek's text)

Zizek's reading is structured around a complex set of complementary
oppositions: that of reality and its fantasmatic support, and of the law
and its inherent transgression, which in Lynch's universe are marked by
the opposition of the ridiculous and the sublime. (x)

... those sublime, hyperactive, life-enjoying agents against which the
characters in Lynch's films attempt to protect themselves by resorting
to a fantasy, equally ridiculous, of something innocuously beautiful.
"The gap that separates beauty from ugliness, " Zizek writes, "is the
very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality
is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to sustain the
horror of the Real."  (x; Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 66; cf
TSOOI, pp. 202-7)

By using extreme oppositions, Zizek argues, Lynch shows that evil is
mediated, that there is a speculative identity to good and evil, that
instead of being a substantial force, evil is reflexivized and composed
of ludicrous clichés.  He presents reality and its fantasmatic support
on the same surface, as a complementarity or coincidence of opposites,
as in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent.  It is this
enigmatic juxtaposition or coincidence of opposites in Lynch's films--of
the protagonists' comical fixation on an ordinary yet "sublime" object;
of an unbearably naive yet deadly serious vision; or the redemptive
quality of cliches--that makes them paradigmatically postmodern,
corresponding to what Zizek here qualifies as the enigma of
"postmodernity." (xi)

There is a radical decentering of human subjectivity characteristic of
Freudian/Lacanian theory ....  The uncanny specter of the automatic,
mechanical production of our innermost feelings provides the model for
Lacan's notion of the "empty subject," the barred subject (represented
by the mathem $) whose innermost fantasmatic kernel is transposed onto
the "big Other," "the symbolic order which is the external place of the
subject's truth." [Zizek, TPOF, p. 49]  Since our desire is always the
desire of the Other--that is, both drawn from the Other and directed to
it--the disturbing thing is that we can never be certain what this Other
demands of us, what we are expected to be.  (xi)

Zizek also demonstrates the idea of the big Other through reference to
Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful.  Here a father attempts to
shield his little son from the atrocities (the unbearable,
unrepresentable Real) of a Nazi concentration camp through the
competitive evocation of the Other's desire, as though they were simply
playing a game of survival, a metaphor for the symbolic fiction that
renders reality bearable.  Although this film remains problematic, in
part because it also treats its spectators as children, Zizek prefers
Benigni's scenario to that of Spielberg's Schindler's List, which
portrays the experience of a Nazi camp commander who seems torn between
his racist prejudices and sexual attraction to a Jewish prisoner, as
though it were simply an expression of his immediate psychological
self-experience.  The problem with this and other attempts to represent
the Holocaust, according to Zizek, is that it tries to explain the
horrors of Nazism (or Stalinism) through the "psychological profiles" of
the individual perpetrators of atrocities.  (xi-xii)

He explains the crimes committed in Stalin's or Hitler's name not
through the psychology or perverse nature of the individuals involved,
but through the logic of the big Other.... the question is not a matter
of the psychic economy of individuals versus the objective ideological
system of the symbolic order.  Lacan has show, precisely, how the
subject is a function of the gap between the two, that, as Zizek writes
here, "the difference between 'subjective' pathologies and the libidinal
economy of the 'objective' ideological system is something ultimately
inherent to the subject."  Although nobody really believes in the ruling
ideology, we nevertheless strive to keep up its appearance, which
illuminates "the status of deception in ideology: those who should be
deceived by the ideological 'illusion' are not primarily concrete
individuals but, rather, the big Other; we should thus say that
Stalinism has a value as the ontological proof of the existence of the
big Other." [Zizek, TSOOI, p. 198]  Zizek argues that the institution
exists only when people believe in it, or, rather, act as if they
believe in it.  The institution not only numbs people; they can also be
indifferent to the effects of their own actions because the system acts
(and hates) on their behalf.  As Terry Eagleton notes, "Zizek sees
ideological power as resting finally on the libidinal rather than the
conceptual, on the way we hug our chains rather than the way we
entertain beliefs."  (xii; Eagleton, "Enjoy!," London Review of Books,
27 November 1997)

According to Lacan, the drive is inherently ethical because, as Zizek
elsewhere explains, the drive "is not 'blind animal thriving,' but the
ethical compulsion which compels us to mark repeatedly the memory of a
lost cause."  [Zizek, For they know not what they do, p. 272]  Zizek has
expanded this psychoanalytic insight into the realm of politics.  The
drive is the compulsion to revisit, to encircle again and again, those
sites of lost causes, of shattered and perverted dreams and hopes not
out of nostalgic longing for something that was believed to be good and
only contingently corrupted (Communism), nor as a cautioning against the
recurrence of gruesome and traumatic events (Nazism), but because the
marking of all lost causes signals the impossibility of all totalizing
ethics and morals.  In this sense, Zizek's method shares much in common
with Ernesto Laclau's notion of an "ethical bricolage," a kind of
mediation between deconstructionist undecidability and Levinasian
ultra-ethics.  (xii-xiii)

Zizek sees the "end of psychology" in contemporary culture despite (or
precisely because of) what appears to be an increasing
"psychologization" of social life": through the personal confessions in
game shows and sitcoms people increasingly talk like puppets, and
politicians' public confessions of their private feelings about
political decisions mask a widespread cynicism.  Against the ideology of
"psychologically convincing" characters, Zizek favors Lynch's
"extraneation" of the characters, the effects of which are strangely
de-realized or de-psychologized persons.  There is a method to Lynch's
madness, so to speak.  The psychological unity of the characters
disintegrates into a "spiritual transubstantiation of common clichés,"
as Zizek calls it here, and into outbursts of the Real, with reality and
its fantasmatic supplement acting side by side, as though existing on
the same surface. (xiii)

Both in their own way provide proof that our fantasies support our sense
of reality, and that this is in turn a defense against the Real. (xiii)


... the big Other = They?  Big Other is watching you, at any rate.
Anyway, much here perhaps applicable to those Pynchonian texts, I
think.  Also reminds me, anybody see that film adaptation of  Time
Regained, the last novel of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps
perdu?  Saw it twice, myself (without having read past Swann's Way, mind
you), think that, if anyone ever attempted Gravity's Rainbow: Now a
Major Motion Picture, that might well be the way to go.  Though I also
saw a stark and very poignant animated short a while back that also
struck me as having Pynchonian potential, so ...