a symposium of 'pata-noology...
So, in the 'desert of the Real' Lacan is the cell leader - the departure point for our highly reflective psychosomatic noo-ville. The master of ceremonies swinging from the mirror ball, neuroses embellished on a freshly screen printed T-shirt, under a 'nice' tweed jacket and a new pair of hemp shoes. The audience has become despondent, frantically checking, sending, and re-checking their PDA's for an emphatic reassurance that they are indeed still alive. No wonder the good Doctor has cracked, "they just won't listen anymore" he screams as the mirror ball lets go, sending him hurtling across the theatre crashing head first into the belligerently drunk Debord, freaking out Trocchi, high on acid as usual. Guattari sniggers and steps outside for a smoke with Deleuze, Leary seizes the moment to spike the punch while Foucault goes down on Barthes in the mensroom. Guyatat takes photo's then calls his pimp, and Manovich, the pragmatist as always gets the whole thing on film. "Artaud would have loved this" Sontag says to Lippard, who places her book mark back into the fold, turning to Derrida to see if he has noticed, he hasn't, he's to engrossed in the hyper-text Zizek has recently emailed him...
posted by David O'Donoghue at 11:12 PM
2 Comments:
Desert of the Real -
How does Zizek survive the hypercritical intellectual millieu? It seems all he has to say is polemical bigotry. One might as well ask 'How does Kareem Abdul Jabeer shoot baskets?'. The answer is the same. Both use a triangulation to score. By aiming not at the target but at something completely divorced from it and... for Z it is a case of then imaginitively tying it together.
But what is the target? Maybe your link to consumer society is more appropriate than it first seems. Baudrillard's talking car seems to have just been invented. The automaton pod, as if silver 4WDs weren't enough, together with an ability to talk comes with an ability to interrupt - to constipate the passage to the real. I don't think this is the nub of Zizek's debate though. I think the nub, the target, is the prospect of a slippery sheen of society becoming rootless. Perhaps Greenberg's assertion of the flat plane is interpreted by Zizek as the screen which we now inhabit.
Perhaps the only means we have of conceiving of his project is to automatically alienate it, as a symptom of our own alienation. Perhaps what he targets is the flat membrane of our world whose horizon cannot know the real.
Name dropping is one thing, actually engaging with the subject is another. Scramble egg's or some home spun criticality...?
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