The Spectator's Malevolent Neutrality
Tags: aesthetics, theater, optics
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I really admire this book [Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, presumably], I was not bluffing, you know. Because what is so paradoxical about it is, I really mean it, how in the first approach, it is the most horrible book you can imagine. But then, in it, you just – do you remember those puzzles or pictures where something appears wrong, it’s chaos, but then you just change the position of one element, and it’s perfect harmony.
My favourite example: I think this is the obsession of Gerhart Richter’s so-called photo paintings, how you have this total abstraction, and then all of a sudden you have a realistic photo. For example, just to give you an example; it sounds horrible, this idea of Weininger’s that woman – he says it literally – doesn’t exist. Woman is just an imagination of men. Ontologically, woman is the result of men’s failure into sin. Woman is simply male sin embodied. But then it’s very interesting how he gives almost a feminist twist to it, because his point is, then, don’t blame the woman. It’s the man who has to purify his desire, the origin of it is man. And then he has a wonderful, I claim, radically feminist analysis of male love for women where he says that, basically, the male love for the woman is mortifying, it’s killing; that man is totally indifferent towards woman as such. Woman is, for men, only a screen for projecting male fantasies onto, and so on and so on.
Again, I think that such an approach, where you discover insights in the middle of, as it were, the enemy’s land, is much more productive, I think, than the standard politically correct feminist wisdoms.
Okay, now let me go to my topic. The title is “The Spectator’s Malevolent Neutrality.”
Of course, anyone who knows Freud knows what I’m aiming at. It’s an ironic reversal of Freud’s position of the analyst. The idea is that the psychoanalyst should listen to the patient with benevolent neutrality. Which is this malevolent neutrality? My idea would be that this is basically the position of the spectator, and since I don’t know a lot about theatre, this is all I can do here: describe a certain position which I think, from my modest knowledge, is crucial to understand properly what goes on at the very elementary level of the disposition of public actors.
Since I have some tendency towards politics, I would like to begin with the properly theatrical experience of staging which we all witnessed in the last weeks: the series of photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated. Of course, I condemn them and so on and so on, but something nonetheless interests me here. It makes these photos much more interesting than just an object to justify the hatred towards the United States. It’s that I think we should focus on the difference between these photos, this torture, how it was literally staged, and the standard torture before, let’s say, under Saddam Hussein. The standard political torture is usually hidden, the whole point is that you don’t see who is doing it. The torturers, if they take photos at all, it’s usually that their faces are covered. But here, the first surprise is not only that the torturers were recording humiliations with a camera, but that they included themselves into the picture. For me, the big shock was those stupid ordinary American faces of innocent girls and boys above the prisoners.
Then I went a step further in my analysis and asked myself a stupid question. Didn’t I already see this somewhere? Of course, if you’ve spent some time in the United States, you know that at least every 2-3 months there is usually a scandal which explodes where you can see similar pictures in all of the media. I think that this is one of the central parts of American cultural identity, these dirty half-private initiating rituals to be included, admitted, into some inner circle, and they can be very brutal. We have them all around, but I think there is something specific about how Americans are doing it.
To avoid any misunderstandings, I’m not putting the blame on America as the most perverse nation or something. It’s more complex, because I claim that every social identity relies on some kind of a dirty, unseen background. For example, you remember all the scandals in the last years about Catholic priests seducing young boys. We cannot play the same game as President Bush’s trick about the United States army and say ‘this doesn’t stand, these are simply perverts, this has nothing to do with the Catholic church.’ No, I think this is the proper obscene underside of Catholic ideology, because what is so interesting – and I’m relying here on analysis from some progressive Catholics, like my good friend from Chicago, Gary Willis; he analyzed closely these Catholic priests’ abuses of children and discovered that it wasn’t simply priests abusing their position, but that they used references to religion actively as a means of seduction.
The standard procedure of a Catholic priest was to start with this confessionary superego hard position to question the small kids (‘Are you masturbating? What are you doing?’). When the kid confessed, the next step was – okay, my God, this is horrible – ‘show me how. Like this? Like that? Was it like that? No, I will show you how it was,’ and then slowly to involve himself. It wasn’t simply some kind of Bataillean logic of transgression (e.g., ‘I’m really an atheist, let’s do something horrible). No, it was perversion aroused by some kind of severe overidentification with religious content. And I think, again, that it’s the same case here.
For example, when I was at some campus recently, I think it was some small campus in Oregon, they told me of a big scandal a couple of years ago where the initiating ritual was the one to become members of so-called fraternities, these closed circles usually of rich students. And the ritual there was that, in order to be accepted into the inner circle, you had to perform a show. You had, basically, to anally penetrate yourself with a Coke bottle in front of others. The scandal was that the bottle broke and there was blood and so on and so on.
And just to give you an idea of how radically self-humiliating these rituals are, every half year, usually, there is a scandal about American Marines. They discover that to become a member of the Marines you have to undergo this initiating ceremony. The point there is that you have to perform, again, some humiliating acts like allowing your peers to urinate on you or allowing your breast to be pierced with needles and so on, all that stuff.
So, what I claim is that this state is crucial. This is what makes these cases specific, and here Bush was wrong. It’s not true that these photos from Iraq are not for what the United States stands for. No, in them, we got inside. This is American culture as such, it’s obscene underside. This is the true introduction of the poor Iraqis to American culture. So, when I hear the thesis of a clash of civilizations, I would say: yes, this is a nice clash of civilizations. Not if you compare these photos with the way torture was done under Saddam, this anonymous torture where the emphasis was not so much on humiliation, but on just inflicting brutal pain. Again, the logic is totally different, and it’s, more than ever, important to bear in mind these differences.
Okay, this point is clear, but now, the topic of my talk will be for which gaze were these [photos] staged? Because, for example, the best known photo, perhaps, although not the most horrible, was the one of that prisoner in a kind of almost monk – or rather, Ku Klux Klan – coat with his head covered, holding up his hands. I mean, this is pure theatrical staging. I did an experiment with some friends of mine before they saw these picture in the newspapers, they didn’t know about them; I showed them that picture and asked them what it was. They asked me, ‘did you arrive recently from New York? Is this some Lower Manhattan, avant-garde theater or what? Or some Mapplethorpe photos or whatever?’ I mean, this is American culture at its purest. But what interests me, again, is the following: for which gaze are such obscene situations, positions, staged?
Okay, the answer seems easy: it’s for their friends. The whole problem is that they were sending these pictures around (which is why, incidentally, kind of a leftist ironic remark – it’s typical that the main defensive measure of the American army against the future occurrence of such abuses was that they prohibited the soldiers from having small video cameras and photos, as if, if we don’t know about it, it’s okay). It’s the same feeling of horror I felt when I learned that the very first reaction of the Pentagon was [to say that] these events occurred because soldiers were not properly taught the Geneva Conventions, as if you have to be taught through the Geneva Conventions that you shouldn’t torture people. Okay, but I don’t think this is the answer, that it was simply for their friends.
I think that the gaze which you imagine when you stage such scenes, the gaze for which such thoughts are made, is fantasmatic, non-existing, impossible. Now, we are in the very heart of ideological traditional. I think that practically every ideology relies on such an impossible gaze. Let’s got to so-called primitive times. You might remember from art history the mystery of the great Roman viaducts, that you have, on the top, small statues which are placed such that no real person can ever see them – so, for which gaze are they there? Now you will say for the divine gaze, [in which case] it’s for a gaze which they will never experience.
It’s the same with those old Aztec or Inca drawings which we can only see now that we have planes. Again, they were making it for an imagined, impossible gaze. And I think that this reference to some impossible gaze (which, of course, in Freudian terms, is the superego gaze) at its purest is central, from so-called primitive society up to (so that you will think that I think we are any better today) today’s politics.
Let’s take the example of Stalinism, this obsession in Stalinist communism with rituals, with parades, this extreme sensitivity of Stalinism for appearances, how appearances should not be disturbed, how the illusion, the appearance should be maintained. From my youth (or not even youth, this was in the mid-80s [Žižek would have been in his mid-thirties]) I remember a disgustingly wonderful example of such a manipulation with an impossible gaze from Slovenia, my own country; an anti-abortion fairy tale written in the 80s by a Slovene right-wing nationalist Catholic poet. He wrote a fairy tale for children which takes place on an idyllic South Sea Island where aborted children live together without their parents. The idea is that if you are aborted, you are just born into an alternate reality. Although their life there is nice and calm, they miss parental love, so they spend their time in sad reflections on how it is that their parents preferred a career or a luxurious holiday to themselves, they [the parents] preferred all this to them [the aborted babies]. The trick, of course, resides in the fact that the aborted children are presented as having been born, only into an alternate universe, retaining the memory of the parents who betrayed them. This way they can direct at their parents a reproachful gaze which makes them guilty. This is the ideological trick to make you feel guilty, as if you are observed by this impossible gaze. Again: which then is this gaze?
Here I would like to make a brief reference to Lacanian theory. Lacan redefined the Freudian Triebe, the drive; according to Lacan, what Freud calls das Triebe is reflexive, it is an attitude of [what the French call] se faire. Something like, for Lacan, visual drive, it’s not that I want to see. ‘I want to see’ is the desire to see. But drive, visual drive, means not that I want to see; it’s the drive to make myself seen. I claim that Lacan thereby points towards a kind of elementary theatricality of the human condition. Our fundamental drive is not to observe but to be part of a staged scene, to expose oneself to a gaze. Not the determined gaze of a person in reality, but some non-existing pure gaze, like the gaze which can see the Roman viaducts or the gaze for which the Stalinists organized their gigantic public spectacles. To specify this gaze as divine is already to miss the point, to deprive it of what Michel Chion, a French cinema theorist, called its acousmatic nature. That is to say, it’s a gaze which freely floats in the air, which cannot be attributed to any determinate bearer.
The two correlative positions – that of an actor on stage and that of a spectator – are not ontologically equivalent or contemporary. I claim that we are originally not observers of the play stage of reality, but part of the tableau staged for this non-existing gaze, and it is only in a secondary moment that we can assume the position of those who look at the stage. So, again, I think that our primordial position is ‘I’m doing it for the gaze’, which is why for Lacan the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy is not so much the scene itself which you fantasize. The fantasy at its most radical is the imagined, the fantasized gaze which observes you. The most elementary fantasmatic scene is not that of a fascinating scene to be looked at, some pornographic scene, whatever you want, but the notion that there is someone out there looking at us. It is not a dream, but the notion that we are the objects in someone else’s dream.
Does not the recent trend of so-called cam websites point in this direction? Namely, these websites which realize the logic of The Truman Show, the film. On these sites, we are able to follow continuously some event or place, the life of a person in his or her apartment, the view on a street, and so on and so on. For example, for some time, I was trying to locate them on the web, and you find hundreds of incredible examples of people who simply put video cameras in their apartments, and you can watch them day and night. And it’s not commercial, it’s not that you have to pay. The mysterious thing is this need for the fantasmatic gaze to be there as the guarantee of my being. It’s as if I exist only insofar as I’m looked at all the time.
I think that similar to this is the phenomena noted by Claude Lefort of the TV set which is all the time turned on, even if we do not watch the TV. The idea is that the TV should watch us, in a way, all the time. This is very interesting, because here we have a kind of tragicomic reversal of the standard Orwellian notion, or Bentham’s notion, of a panopticon society, you know, this fear of being observed all the time, the ultimate horror. No, I think that we are afraid of being observed all the time, but we are even more afraid of not being observed at all. That’s the ultimate horror. And this explains the failure of the 2003 film The Real Cancun, referring to Mexico’s first resort. It was the first ever, not only reality TV show, but reality movie. They simply hired, the producers, 16 students, put them together for eight days in some tourist resort in Cancun for spring break student vacation, and as the movie advertisement says: no scripts, no actors, no rules – anything can happen on spring break. And it did, but of course, the shock is that the movie was a total failure, because far from giving us insight into real life, the point is that precisely nothing interesting happens, that it’s totally predictable. Why?
Let’s look into the ideological background of this film. Already from the 1950s, social psychology develops endlessly the motif of how, in public life, we are all wearing masks, adopting identities which conceal our true selves. However, wearing a mask can be – or playing a role can be – a strange thing. Sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our real self behind the mask. So, when we [play] a role, my spontaneous idea is that when somebody tells ‘oh, I was just joking, I was just acting,’ that this [acting] is probably closer to the truth than their so-called real self. Why? Let me make a simple mental experiment.
Let us presuppose that you are, or rather (since it’s an aggressive imaginary scene) that I am an impotent, shy person who plays cyberspace interactive games. In real life, I’m shy, I’m weak, I’m a coward, I’m a failure with women, whatever you want. It’s a cliché idea of a failure, but let’s say that, in the cyberspace, I adopt a screen persona of somebody who is aggressive, who gets all the women, is an aggressive, sadistic murderer, irresistible seducer, and so on. Of course, your first reaction would have been, of course, this cyberspace screen persona is just a kind of imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from the misery and impotence of my real life. But is this all? What if there is also the opposite logic at work here? What if, deep in myself, at the very core of my personality, I am a brutal sadist? What if it is exactly because I know that, when I play cyberspace games, precisely because I know that this is just a game, that I can dare to articulate the true core of my personality which I’m not able to do, which I’m afraid to articulate in real interactions with other people? In other words, what if my real person – real in the simple sense of the way I act in ordinary [everyday] life, interacting with other people – is a mask, and what if, precisely when I say to myself ‘but this is just a game’, there I bring out my true self? This is, I think, what Jacques Lacan meant when he said that the truth has the structure of a fiction. Sometimes, the only way to articulate some traumatic truth is to tell yourself ‘oh, it’s just a fiction, so because it’s not for real, I can bring it all out now.’
The negative of this wearing-a-mask, it’s counterpoint, is a strange prohibition, and this tells us a lot about theatricality, I think. The strange prohibition which rules hardcore pornography. Did you notice a very strange thing about standard hardcore pornography films? So, on the one hand, you see everything sexually; but on the other hand (you cannot be so stupid not to know) is the extreme stupidity of the narrative which is usually introduced. The story, you know, they cannot just fornicate, there must be some 3-4 minutes of introduction, and I claim that there is something compulsive about it. Nobody can be so stupid not to be able to do a better story. I mean, they are embarrassingly stupid, comical, like, for example, I don’t know, a housewife alone at home and the plumber comes, fixes up the hole that was leaky, and then she tells him ‘oh, I have another hole to fill, can you also help me?’ It’s so embarrassing, but I think that this is a kind of negative form of censorship. I think this is what makes pornography a conservative genre. It is as if you can see it all, they are really fornicating there, but the price to be paid is that the story must be ridiculous, it must be too stupid to identify with. The true transgression would have been to have pornography, but at the same time a really engaging story where you fully identify. That is the impossible conjunction. And it’s interesting how there were four or five years ago, a couple of attempts, first steps in this direction. Do you remember, for example, Lars Von Trier’s Idiots where you see, in that orgy scene, that they are really doing it. You have that second of real fellatio in Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy and so on and so on. But still, somehow, it doesn’t work. But nonetheless, this tendency to do it, to do the impossible – which, for me, the impossible would have been not just hardcore pornography, but a standard Hollywood film, the most classical one, let’s say Casablanca, but imagine that it’s exactly the same as it is, but then, you know that scene where Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman meet and they embrace and then, of course, you have the fade out. Imagine the movie going on so that the movie would have been exactly the way it is with 10 minutes of hardcore sex.
Incidentally, a guy – I forgot his name [perhaps Michael Walsh] – wrote a strange short story, it’s called “As the Time Goes By”, where he does exactly this. He takes this scene, and writes a 20-page short story which begins with this scene from Casablanca, you know, Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart to get the visas, and then they embrace. In the movie, you jump directly then through some mysterious fade out to what happens later, so it’s not clear what happens. But here [in the short story], the story goes on. They start to make love, and then you have 15 pages of absolute hardcore fucking; Bergman licking him, double penetration, whatever you want. And what’s even more obscene is that many phrases that we remember from Casablanca as famous standard Humphrey Bogart phrases – like, you remember when he says, ‘here’s one to you, kid’ [the line in reference is “here’s looking at you, kid.”] – are given very strange twists in this story. Like, Humphrey Bogart puts his penis in her mouth and says, ‘here’s one to you, kid.’
But what I want to say is that this precisely is unimaginable. But today people try to imagine it. Why? Is it true that we no longer have this censorship since we can combine the two levels? I claim that, at a different level, we are paying the price. What price?
Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint, but I claim in a different way than the old notion of the right measure. The old Aristotelian law is the logic of the right measure. Aristotelian ethics is, you know, an ethics of moderation; not too much sex, not too much whatever, the proper measure. But today, it’s not that. It’s a much stranger logic. It’s that you can have as much as you want of that excessive pleasure because pleasure itself is already, as it were, deprived of its substance. Today, it’s no longer ‘don’t drink too much coffee’, it’s ‘have as much coffee as you want because it’s decaf coffee.’ It’s ‘have all the beer you want because it’s beer without alcohol.’ This goes on at all levels of products, like, for example, you can have all the sweets you want because it’s diet sugar. It’s even, I claim, in politics. What is this call-in power, the doctrine of war? It is ‘we can have all the war, because call-in powers are on our side. So, I claim that what Americans are sustaining now, it’s a kind of decaffeinated war. We can go on that we even have decaffeinated politics, but what’s so interesting is how opposites coincide here. The perfect example that I remember from my own embarrassing private experience is, 2-3 years ago in California, I had a strange… well, the point is that I needed a laxative. And I bought one, and they offered, in the store, a chocolate laxative. I found this idea ingenious, because usually the association with chocolate is that it does the opposite. But the publicity for this one is ‘do you have constipation? Not a problem, eat more of this chocolate.’ I think that’s the fundamental idea.
Now, if I can make a fast jump to a different level, isn’t somebody like George Soros a kind of chocolate laxative capitalist? In the morning, he is chocolate, doing financial speculations and so on. In the afternoon, he is the laxative, giving money back and so on. It’s as if you can do as much dirty financial speculation as you want, only if, through charity or whatever, you somehow buy your way out of it, which is why I think the notion of charity is crucial for today’s capitalism. No wonder that all the symbols of today’s capitalism, like Bill Gates, [do charity]. First, you amass $40 billion, then you give back $20 billion, and you are celebrated as the greatest humanitarian of all times. I even think that it’s no wonder marijuana is so popular today because marijuana is precisely a kind of decaffeinated opium along the same time. The problem is how to have things not in moderation, but all you want because you don’t pay the price for it.
And I think that it is against this background that we should confront what is false in so-called reality TV shows. The real life we get in them is as real as decaf coffee. In short, even if these shows, reality TV, are for the real, people still act in them. They simply play themselves. And I think this is what I find so great about (and I think that this was his greatest period before he fell for this New Age mysticism) Krzysztof Kieślowski’s early documentaries, where he was well aware of how in documentaries, you don’t simply get real life, you get people playing themselves. So the standard disclaimer in a novel, ‘characters in this text are a fiction, every resemblance with real life characters is purely contingent’, holds also for the participants of so-called reality soaps. What we see are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for real. The best comment on reality TV is the ironic version of this disclaimer recently used by a Slovene writer. He put the following disclaimer in a novel: ‘all characters in the following narrative are fictional, not real, but so are the characters of most of the people I know in real life, so this doesn’t amount to much.’
So, back to The Real Cancun; no scripts, no actors, and no rules turned out to mean that people played themselves, that they followed the most flat, stupid rules of social interaction, and that nothing even minimally unpredictable happened. However, now, let’s complicate this analysis a little bit.
On a closer look, the gaze for which we play ourselves turns out to be more complex. Let me return to the scene from Casablanca, that very short scene, you remember, in the night Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart to get the visas just for her and her husband. Then, after some talk, they embrace, kiss, fade out. Then you get for three and a half seconds that famous shot of the Casablanca airport light tower circling around. Then you return to the two of them, and the same conversation seems to go on. Humphrey Bogart, smoking a cigarette, simply says ‘okay.’ And what went on, I think, if somebody asks me ‘where is ideology in Hollywood?’, you find it here at its most elementary, at its best. Why?
Because, of course, what is the enigma of this three-and-a-half-second shot? The big enigma is the following: did they do it or not? That is to say, is this just the standard Hollywood stand-in for the half hour when they made love, or is it just a real time break, so that nothing happened, the conversation went on, etc.? And here you should analyze – here I’m following the English cognitivist who is very much against psychoanalysis, especially Lacan, Richard Moby. He did a wonderful analysis of this scene, and what he emphasized is: it’s not so much that this scene is ambiguous as to this point [whether they had sex], it’s rather consciously self-contradictory. If you analyze this scene closely, you can see that it consciously gives signals, signs, which point to one and to the other direction.
First, you have a whole series of codified signs that they did do it; for example, in classical Hollywood with Hayes code production rules, when the couple embraces and you have a fade out, it means they did it. Further proof: when, after this fade out, you see the couple smoking a cigarette, this is always a sign that they did it. Classical Hollywood was very codified at this level, everything was possible to say, even if everything was prohibited. Like, prostitution was not allowed to be mentioned, so you know what the code was? When somebody says ‘this woman is from New Orleans’, it meant she was a prostitute. Or, for example, homosexuality was not allowed to be mentioned, even, as a topic, but the sign was when somebody remarks about another man, ‘doesn’t he wear perfume’, it meant he was gay. Along the same lines, when, after seeing them embrace, when one of the partners is smoking a cigarette, it means they did it. So, there is a whole series of signs, on top of the obvious vulgar phallic metaphor of the tower, that they did it.
But at the same time, there is a whole series of signs that they did not do it. First: the same conversation seems to go on. Second: they are all dressed neatly, and there is a sofa behind them which is not disturbed in any way.
The nice thing is how this ambiguity is maintained up to the end; in the final confrontation at the Casablanca airport with the three of them (Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Victor Laszlo, the virtuous anti-fascist resistant husband), there is a very mysterious conversation between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Victor Laszlo:
Rick tells him, ‘you said you knew all about Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman’s character) and me.’
Victor, the heroic husband, says ‘yes.’
Rick says, ‘you didn’t know she was at my place last night. She came there for the letters of transit, isn’t that true?’
Ilsa says ‘yes.’
Rick says, ‘she tried everything to get them and nothing worked. She did her best to convince me that she was still in love with me. This was all over long ago. For your sake, she pretended it wasn’t, and I let her pretend.’
Victor says, ‘I understand.’
Well, I don’t understand, because this can be read as if she did everything (sexually), or it can be read as if they did not do it; and, again, I think this ambiguity is crucial. Here, Richard Moby is very precise: this is how Hollywood worked, it addressed you (to use the standard Lacanian term) as a split spectator. At the same time, it allows you to watch the movie in a totally naïve way. You can say ‘sorry, nothing subversive or morally ethically prohibited or illegitimate is going on, I’m totally covered, nothing happened,’ but at the same time, it gives you a whole series of clues for your dirty imagination.
What’s crucial is the coexistence of these two levels. It is as if the ideological Big Other, the ideology of the film, is addressing you with the following message: ‘let’s make a deal – we will put up a front so that, confronted with the Big Other of ethical censorship, we will be able to pretend that everything is clean, so that then you will be able to have all your dirty imaginations.’ But the crucial thing (and here I disagree with many of my American deconstructionist friends) is that in these two levels – in how you have the official purely moralistic level where nothings, people behave properly, and then all of this dirty imagination of what could have happened –, I don’t think that the dirty underside is in anyway transgressive, ethically liberating, emancipatory, or whatever. I think that Hollywood ideology is precisely two at the same time, that this obscene underground which can only be hinted at is what the ruling ideology not only tolerates but needs to reproduce itself.
It’s the same, again, as with American soldiers in Iraq, all these obscene spectacles. This is part of the ruling ideology, not its obscene transgression, so the split we have here is the one between symbolic Law, ego-ideal, morality, all these rules being respected, and what Lacan calls the superego, the obscene agency of excessive enjoyment. You can watch it in a naïve way, and at the same time, it gives you clues for how to imagine all the dirty things. Here, we encounter the impossible gaze.
You’ve all seen – it’s part of our Western cultural canon, of course – Hitchcock’s Vertigo. If you don’t believe me [about the above paragraph], rent the movie and check something. You remember the scene after Scotty (James Stewart) saves Madeleine (Kim Novak) from San Francisco Bay, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. He brings her to his home, undresses her, and puts her to sleep. The first shot there is that we see him, James Stewart, sitting at the table. Then, there’s a slow panning shot to the bedroom door, and on the way to the bedroom door, the camera passes by the kitchen sink, and there, on a rope, Madeleine’s underwear is hanging, a sign that he undressed.
Now, there is something very strange going on here, to which you should be very attentive. If you don’t believe me, know that I didn’t discover this. Even I was duped. I read, in a very good new book about Vertigo, about this detail. Put the image on freeze at that very precise moment when you see those pieces of cloth there, and you will see that there is not one element of underwear. There are only abstract pieces of cloth, a towel, and so on and so on. But, from the narrative’s logic, we all automatically assume that it is underwear. Then, I read in a book on Hitchcock that this was the compromise with censorship boards, that censors insisted there should be no real underwear there, because that would give material proof that Scotty has seen her naked, and that would be too much.
But you can see that there is something wrong here, because who is protected by this censorship? None of us even noticed it. We all (I asked my friends) automatically assume that what we see there is underwear, so who were the censors trying to protect? Not us. It was precisely the, let’s call it, gaze of the Big Other-as-innocent-bystander. That gaze should be protected. It’s not our real gaze. So, you see when we Lacanians speak about the Big Other, we are not dreaming. You have it here, this imaginary pure gaze. It’s the gaze of appearances, and it should be protected.
Nonetheless, this gaze is radically ambiguous. On the one side, it is radically naïve, operating under the conditions of the so-called suspension of disbelief. It wants to be deceived, caught into the lure. This is the reason why cinema lovers are obsessed with small mistakes. For example, to take another example from Hitchcock, there is a wonderful mistake in North by Northwest, towards the end of the film, when, beneath Mt. Rushmore, in a café, Eve Marie Saint confronts Carrie Grant and shoots him with a blank. Put your video or DVD on slow motion and watch carefully before she pulls out the gun, you can see (because this takes place in a busy restaurant) a small boy in the background [covering his ears]. They were repeating scenes 10-15 times, and the boy was tired of hearing the sound, so he knew there would be a shot.
But why are we so deeply satisfied when we see this? My point is that it does not ruin our identification. In a way, we want to be deceived, we love Hitchcock even more. It’s not ‘oh my God, now we’ve unmasked Hitchcock.’ We want to be deceived, it’s much more mysterious. So, this is one aspect of this gaze.
This is what I want to focus on now. For me, the malevolent neutrality of this gaze on the one hand. This is the pure gaze for which appearances have to be maintained. You can also find this gaze operative in another everyday experience. Have you ever been in a situation where, for example, you were talking with some people about some dirty, traumatic thing, whatever, and you all knew what it was about? There was nobody else, but nonetheless you were embarrassed to say it publicly. Who did you want to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of? It’s as if we presuppose an invisible, impossible gaze which is, again, [the gaze of] proper appearances, the innocent gaze.
But my point is that, at the same time that this gaze is ignorant, it must be deceived. Appearances must be maintained, but at the same time, it’s a malevolent suspicious gaze, and this ambiguity is crucial. It is ignorant, the gaze for which appearances are to be maintained, but at the same time, it is the gaze which excessively fantasizes and projects dirty meanings. This is what goes on repeatedly in Hitchcock’s films.
We even find this paradox operative in theory. Let me go into this so-called category, which is now a little bit out of fashion, post-structuralism, as characterizing French thought. After the first big wave of structuralism (Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan), the idea is that we then got post-structuralism (Derrida, and so on). But there is one mystery: nobody in France uses the term post-structuralism. It’s simply a term. You perceive the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism only if you look into France either from Germany or from the United States. It’s basically that you perceive a gap only if you look at it [from a perspective where] you don’t see it all.
Another example: film noir. It’s typical that we use the French term, because in America, they were not even aware of it. It was French theorists after World War II who put some films together and characterized them as film noir. It was only from France that you saw it in Hollywood. They were not even aware that these films belong together. It can be shown how it was only from the limitations of the French that this [genre] appears to you.
So we have here, in a way, two non-existing entities. We have film noir, which emerges as a category only if you look at it from France, if you don’t really know what went on in Hollywood. And you have deconstruction or post-structuralism, a category which does not exist for France itself, although it’s supposed to be French deconstruction. It’s something which appears only from the limited external American gaze.
The ultimate irony is there when you put the two together. For example, the classical example of the American academy in the ‘80s-‘90s: post-structuralist deconstructionist analyses of film noir. Wonderful. A non-existent theory analyzing a non-existent genre. But my point, nonetheless, is that it works, that this kind of misreading can be productive. I don’t have time to develop how wonderfully this works apropos Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, where it’s clear that deconstruction or post-structuralism basically means the American and German misreading of Derrida. But what is so interesting is that, at a certain point, Derrida identified with this misreading, and this misreading was very productive in a way. It gave to Derrida’s deconstruction a much more radical political twist.
What we are dealing here with is (what in cinema theory is called) the drama of false appearances, how you have two/three heroes, for example, in a film, who are in a certain situation, and then their innocent acts/gestures which are in-themselves innocent are misperceived by an external malevolent observer as having some perverse meaning. For example, a woman and a man are just chatting, and the observer thinks ‘oh, it’s a love affair’ and creates a scandal.
But what interests me is how this misreading is often more true than what the two people themselves think. The classical example here is a wonderful Lillian Hellman play, The Children’s Hour, which was twice filmed by William Wyler. It’s the story of a private school for girls run by two women, the domineering Martha and the warm affectionate Karen, and then there is the third person, Joe, the fiancé of Karen. But the plot of the play is that Mary, a vicious preteen pupil, a small, really evil girl, is punished by Martha, and she retaliates by telling her grandmother that on one late evening she saw Martha and Karen kissing, embracing, and whispering, Of course, the girls pretends ‘I didn’t know what was going on,’ but her idea is to create this [suspicion] that they are lesbians so that her grandmother will take her out of the school. She succeeds, their lives are ruined, but the elementary point is that, through this false accusation (and this is the tragedy of the play), the two women become aware of their lesbianism, of which they were not even aware before this accusation. And at the end, the older woman, Martha, kills herself. It’s too much, she cannot confront it. So, again, the story turns about the evil unlooker, witness, Mary, the evil girl who, through her lie, unwittingly realizes this external naïve view, and, precisely in its misreading, sees your inner truth, sees more than you see.
My point is that the same ambiguity pertains also to the political dimension. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of the Stalinist staging of appearances for the invisible gaze – and I think this is the true enigma of Stalinism. On the one hand, Stalinism is maybe one of the most brutal regimes in the sense of what the French philosopher Alain Badious called the passion of the Real, this brutal disposing/instrumentalizing/using of the people, but Stalinism is not simply that. The paradox is that, at the same time, I don’t know of a regime more sensitive to appearances than Stalinism. In Stalinism, if somebody were to publicly say something bad about Stalin, it would be a total catastrophe, and this is the key the Stalinist (let’s call it) Symbolic economy. For example, I remember from my own youth, when I was half-playing some kind of modest dissident, how in a small student journal we published a poem which, if you read in a very paranoiac way, you could say was kind of a dissident critique of the communists in power. The Central Committee met for that poem, they accused us, but in a way, I find a certain poetic beauty in it, in the sense of how seriously they were taking this stupid poem. They created the scandal they feared. Nobody would even have noticed it. The typically Stalinist fear is that if they don’t react, it’s horrible. If somebody says it publicly, it was not that they worried what people privately thought, they knew that nobody really believed in it, but the innocence of the Big Other’s gaze had to be maintained, which is why you also have this mystery of why so many Soviet writers and functionaries, after Khrushchev’s ’56 report – you know when Khrushchev delivered his famous address on the 20th congress of the Soviet communist party, there were dozens of doctors prepared in the back, and there were six heart attacks and some 10-20 suicides in the days immediately afterwards.
Let’s take a very interesting suicide, that of Alexander Fadeyev (at that point, the president of the Soviet Writers’ Association), the big Stalinist writer, he killed himself. Why? It’s very enigmatic. You cannot say, ‘oh my God, he saw now,’ no, he didn’t see or learn anything new. He was denouncing his fellow writers to the police all the time. So why did he kill himself? He couldn’t stand the public disclosure, in the sense that the Big Other saw it.
And again, that’s what’s so mysterious about Stalinism, and today, in the only true surviving regime which follows the rules of Stalinist ethical greatness, which is North Korea, this [the logic of the above paragraphs] is developed up to the point of madness. For example, when I visited South Korea recently they took me to the demilitarized zone and showed me a unique thing. On the southern side, you have some point from which you can see a North Korean village, and there you have almost a kind of theater setting, literally. What you see as a theater set is simply North Korea.
Now comes the paradox: North Koreans know about it, so what they did what the village is that the life is organized for this southern gaze. The buildings are nicely painted but only the side turned towards the South, people get special, better dresses, they don’t cut electricity there, people are ordered to talk walks in the afternoon and evening. So, again you have this madness of staging, but I don’t think this is all. I don’t think that in an authentic revolution, you don’t get this staging. I’m not saying theatricality is false. I think that, if anything, you get a more radical theatricality in authentic revolution. I think that the authentic revolution is precisely a moment when – here I would like to quote Lunacharsky, the Soviet minister of culture, who said apropos of the great enacting in 1920 of the third anniversary of the October revolution. He said in order to acquire a sense of self, the masses must manifest themselves, and this is possible only when they become a spectacle onto themselves. There’s this idea of people playing themselves, and I think this accounts for this mysterious thing which is, I think, almost a kind of transubstantiation, this mysterious theatrical event of the October revolution, and this third anniversary. You know what happened there? In Petrograd, they restaged the October revolution. All the avant-garde artists were still there, Malevich and so on, they participated in it, and the whole city [acted] with it. They were starving, but – and it wasn’t those Stalinist parades – the real fighters [acted] their revolution, they went immediately to the front, so I think that this kind of self-staging is something which should – and here I follow my friend, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière – make us maybe rethink this old Benjaminian condemnation of the aestheticization of politics as proto-fascist. I think there is a certain aestheticization in the sense of theatricality, which is absolutely a crucial ingredient, part of a revolutionary process, but there is a more radical dimension.
What is, for me, theater at its most radical – usually people think that music is more radical, especially in the German tradition, you know, Schopenhauer’s idea that theater and visual arts only imitate appearances, that it’s only music which renders the will itself directly, the noumenal will, this life drive. But I think there is something more horrible than this pure encounter of the life drive itself in music. What would be the opposite? Usually, we say that music renders what you cannot see, what is too strong for representations, for what you cannot see, this pure life force, it is rendered in music. But isn’t it even more horrible to have vorstellungen, representations deprived of life, where you, in a way, see Death? And you can correct me here, but if somebody asked me, ‘when did you encounter theater at its most radical’, my experience is very modest. Some years ago, I saw it on TV, but in a ballet staging of a piece by Anton Webern, and as you probably know, the good thing about Webern if you want to be a snob and listen to modern music, but you are too lazy to listen to long pieces, Webern’s longest pieces are seven minutes. The standard of Webern is like one or two minutes. So, what did Balanchine [the choreographer] do? You have the usual three-minute piece, the dancers dance, then the music stops, and the dancing goes on. There was something so shocking about it. It is as if the ballet dancer’s movement went on, but deprived of its life substance. As if, all of a sudden, they were turned into the living dead. Their movements, lacking vocal support, allows us to see not the voice, but I claim they stood for silence. It was possible, literally, to see silence. This is the counterpoint to Wagner’s modernism, you know, when Tristan is dying, you have those key lines when he says, “I hear the light.” This is Wagner, Schopenhauer. But what we get in theater is not “I hear the light” but ‘I see the silence,’ and this is, for me, the sublime moment of theater, and we should stick to this more than ever, which is why I am always (that’s the limit of my knowledge of theater) distrustful about this ‘real theater’, theater of cruelty. It can be very ambiguous, it can move in this direction, and it can also be the worst of American ideology in the sense of this authenticity you must have. Like, if you don’t slaughter chicken on the stage, it’s somehow false, it’s not real life, or whatever. I think that the fundamental lesson of theater is precisely that there is more truth in theater than in the reality behind the theater.
The logic I’m aiming at is that of cartoons. Why are they so fascinating for me? Because think about Tom and Jerry, and these elementary cartoons. What kind of image of social life do you get when they’re fighting each other all the time, plotting, killing, so on? The image of social relations there is much more cruel than you get in an ordinary movie. This logic is what I’m aiming at, that, with what Lacan calls the Real, the traumatic core that we are afraid to sustain, fantasy is closer to the Real than reality. In the opposition between fantasy and reality, the Real is on the side of fantasy, which is why I think we need theater. When you act, you are more real than in reality. So, I think that you should be proud if you deal with theater, and turn around the usual phrase, you know, like when people say ‘[pets] are for those who cannot stand children’, I think, on the contrary, children are for those who cannot stand pets. It’s the same that reality is for those who cannot theater acting. We literally escape into reality. I’m not some kind of subjective idealist when I say reality – I mean social reality, our real life interactions, are already staged as an escape from a traumatic excess which you encounter precisely in theater.