The Politicization of Disaster

In regards to the nearly 10,000 children who’ve died in China’s most recent earthquake, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the way the disaster has become politicized at local levels, leading to demonstrations against the government for having failed to address the unsafe building conditions prior to the earthquake, as well as exaggerating the role they played in disaster recovery. Concerning the issue, the Times has this to say:

The protests threaten to undermine the government’s attempts to promote its response to the quake as effective and to highlight heroic rescue efforts by the People’s Liberation Army, which has dispatched 150,000 soldiers to the region. Censors have blocked detailed reporting of the schools controversy by the state-run media, but a photo of Mr. Jiang kneeling before protesters has become a sensation on some Web forums, bringing national attention to the incident.

… The authorities in Beijing appear to recognize the delicacy of the issue. On Monday, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, Wang Xuming, promised a reassessment of school buildings in quake zones, adding that those responsible for cutting corners on school construction would be “severely punished.”

The article goes into more detail regarding the protests aimed against specific officials who the parents have identified as being negligent in regards to building safety conditions. What makes this particularly interesting is that it demonstrates that even so-called “totalitarian” states (in truth, China’s politics could be more aptly described as pragmatic authoritarianism) must be responsive to their citizens. The distribution of power between the (Party-)State and its People is never fully one-sided, even at the very limits of delegitimization. The events have spurred, to varying degrees, a form of local collective action against party bosses that are forced to acquiesce to the demands of the rightfully enraged parents. The only truly serious political question is whether this politicized message will come to play a crucial role at the level of national politics, against any predictable depoliticizing logic of “victimization.”

But I think what’s especially breathtaking here is that, while this development seems somewhat unremarkable, can anyone imagine the same procedure taking place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Not at the level of talking-head-faux-outrage, but the direct politicization of the disaster and the mobilization of the poor against the state apparatus and its varyingly corresponding parties. The irony is that in the U.S., contrary to China, such a development would be truly unfathomable, despite the latter’s aforementioned “totalitarianism.”

With the Olympic games coming up in a matter of months, the question that remains will be what, if anything, will occur in China. On the one hand, it is more than likely the case that things will continue running smoothly and any events that appear to disturb the smooth run of things will simply appear as “blips” on the radar screen. Yet, the reduction of such events to mere “blips” ignores a key Marxist insight apropos capitalism’s cyclic fluctuations (as well as Freud’s insight in regards to the symptom): these these momentary lapses represent the repressed “truth” of a ruling order. To varying degrees, they are capable of carrying with them a deeper truth-procedure towards an Event. On the topic of politicization, however, the crucial question is what kind of Truth emerges in the midst of an event. Will the masses opt for neoliberal ideology as did a number of post-Communist countries (including Russia), or will something new emerge? Obviously, then, one shouldn’t blindly throw a monkey wrench in a machine without in some way discerning out of that action what will emerge in its aftermath.

On a more macroscopic level, what humanitarian ideology, a thoroughly depoliticizing bourgeois ideology if there ever was one, has taught us is that natural disasters, which render people into victims, require the benevolence of some privileged third party capable of administrating the affairs. Yet, what if the appearance of disaster (e.g., global warming) and its after effects points to a general failure at the level not only of state-citizen interaction, but at the level of Capital as well. That is to say, what if the logic of Capital does not accommodate itself to disaster relief, and hence relies upon the ideological mystification of humans reduced to the status of “victims” to elicit support at the individual level. Consequently, the politicization of disasters and the formation of local collective action seems like a positive development for the most marginalized members of society (those are disproportionately affected by such disasters) against the ruling strata. And this, of course, is not simply the case for impoverished Third World countries: we should recall the events of Katrina and keep them in mind when developments such as these arise, in order to seize them before they dissipate under the guise of mere “blips” on the radar.

Bryan Klausmeyer 7 Comments

Indiana Jones and the Family Myth

I recently saw the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and was pleased to find a film that so easily accommodated itself to a psychoanalytic interpretation. I suppose, as a general principle, however, that the majority of mainstream Hollywood films are perfect terrain for examining the contours of today’s ideological constellation from a variety of angels: in this respect, Indiana Jones did not surprise in the least.

The film takes place in 1957 when Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) leads a convoy of Soviets (disguised as American soldiers) to infiltrate an American military base in Nevada, where they force Indiana Jones to lead them to a crate containing the remains of a mysterious alien creature. Following Dr. Jones’ escape, he learns from a young greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LeBeouf) that the Soviets are after the alien’s crystal skull in Peru.

The film gets interesting when Indiana flies to Peru in order to rescue his kidnapped colleague, Dr. Harold Oxley, and retrieve the crystal skull before the Soviets, with the help of Mutt Williams. After coming across a long lost love in Peru, Dr. Jones discovers to his surprise that Mutt is in fact his son. It is from this development that the film should be properly understood. As Slavoj Zizek outlines in his In Defense of Lost Causes, a common trope in Hollywood cinema, ranging from Deep Impact and Armageddon to Reds and Doctor Zhivago, is to place a family drama against the backdrop of a catastrophic global conflict or event. This is quite common in a number of Steven Spielberg’s films, where the cataclysmic tale obfuscates the truth located at the level of the so-called “family myth.” To name several examples Zizek gives, Jurassic Park is effectively a story of a paleontologist (Sam Niell) coming to terms with the role of the father. In the very beginning of the film, the dinosaur bone acts as an objective correlative to the paternal superego, which manifests itself in the incarnation of the dinosaur’s unrestrained fury. As Zizek points out, it is precisely when the dinosaur bone is dropped from the tree in the scene where Sam Niell and the kids are hiding from the dinosaurs, where he finally comes to terms with fatherhood, that the dinosaurs emerge as friendly and herbivorous. The same logic of the family myth is operative in Schindler’s List, in which Schindler is plays the father figure in contrast to the infantilized Jews; the Nazis here are merely a poor substitute for dinosaurs. And, again, the family myth can be found in E.T., in which E.T. merely stands as a “vanishing mediator,” a substitute father, until the young boy’s single mother befriends the male scientist at the end of the film (signaling the entry of the “true” father figure and, consequently, E.T. can now “phone home”).

In Indiana Jones, the true “lost object” is here not the crystal skull: what the crystal skull stands for is objet petit a, a positivized lack that merely obfuscates the “true” lack, that of Indiana Jones himself as father figure. In returning to Peru, Dr. Jones effectively returns to his “rightful place” within the Oedipal family model, just at the moment that the son’s rebellion begins to threaten their non-Oedipal cohesion (which would, following this model, require the mother to adorn the phallus). In re-reading the developments of the latest film, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Indiana Jones left behind the chance to be a father: this is how to read his pathological fear of snakes, as a fear of the father’s phallus. However, after coming to terms with his fatherhood, Dr. Jones immediately reprimands his son for a transgression he formerly had condoned (“But you said not attending college was fine!” “That was before I knew I was your father!”). The change in perspective is merely at the level of the Symbolic Law, of assuming the Name-of-the-Father. Consequently, the family myth in Indiana Jones, unsurprisingly, simply reifies the ideological apparatus of the nuclear family as a normative model, a model which reached its apogee (as an ego ideal) precisely during the 1950s.

Thus, far from depicting a Cold War showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (and, humorously, none other than the Russian Communist Party has denounced the film for “distorting history” and “provok[ing] a new Cold War”), the film stages a conflict between the Oedipal nuclear family and the radically anti-Oedipal matriarchal order, embodied in the figure of Irina Spalko, who commands a large army of disposable male concubines. It is thus no surprise that her weapon of choice is the sword, the necessary correlative to the snake. The sword fight between Mutt, who fields his small retractable blade, and Irina thus stages a rather absurd spectacle at the level of phallic imagery.

The end of the film, moreover, should be read very precisely: when Dr. Jones remarks that Irina was after knowledge, this should be understood essentially as a necessary error due to his newly adorned status as father (Master). What Irina was after, what reduced her to rubble, was her search for Truth, which, in the analytic sense, refers to the articulation of the analysand’s desire. In contrast, Lacan conceives of Knowledge as a signifying chain (S₂, S₃, S₄, etc.) that supplements the discourse of the Master (S₁), its “quilting point” that ensures signification. We should therefore read the film symptomatically: the “kingdom,” which is found inside the ‘skull’ of a rock formation shaped as a man’s face, is none other than the dimension of Indiana Jones’ unconscious. Consequently, Indiana Jones, like a true obsessional neurotic, staves off the realization of analytic Truth in favor of the Master’s Knowledge, in order to retain his desire, that of being an adventurous archaeologist (no wonder “every kind of archaeological treasure” is found within the “kingdom,” it is simply the objective correlative to Dr. Jones’ “traversing of the fantasy”). Consequently, if Dr. Jones had chosen the side of Truth, he, like Irina, would have been reduced to rubble, undergone “subjective destitution”: what would have been left go under so many names, from the Hegelian “night of the world” to the Cartesian “cogito.” Instead, we end with a very typical marriage scene, thus confirming the results of his having chosen Knowledge over Truth. This is not surprising, as Dr. Jones makes the very same quip apropos “Truth” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, remarking on how “archaeology is about fact. If you want truth, philosophy courses are right next door.”

The true reading of the film, therefore, is not to conceive of it along strictly political lines. The rather pointless and disposable “capitalist” character points to this fact, as his inclusion simply attempts to oppose the film to standard Cold War narratives that demonize Communism. Spielberg here attempts to show how capitalism too, if gone unchecked, can be excessive as well, and thus we need patriotic, good-hearted liberals like Indiana Jones, who represent both the epitome of physical strength (Achilles, along with his own kind of “Achilles’ heel”) and cunning (Odysseus and his “myth of Enlightenment”). As has been examined, the true ideological element of the film resides in its trumpeting of the Oedipal model in the form of the family myth, a recurring motif throughout both numerous Spielberg films as well as throughout Hollywood cinema in general, against the anti-Oedipal matrix of unbalanced matriarchal jouissance.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to point out the numerous and rather odd references to Werner Herzog’s films in Indiana Jones: from the myth of Don Lope de Aguirre to the shooting location of Iquitos, the same location as in Fitzcarraldo, and finally the horribly animated monkeys that attack Irina, similar to those on the flotilla with Klaus Kinksi at the famous ending sequence of Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes.)

Bryan Klausmeyer

Zizek: Theory, Politics, Culture

I recently read Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique, which, for those that don’t know, is an analysis of Marxian political economy from the transcendental perspective of Kantian ethics, and Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, which I thought was tremendously well written considering the breadth of abstruse theory dealt with. Not to say that Karatani’s wasn’t, in fact Karatani’s was probably just as equally well written, although it was translated, so maybe I should just thank the translator.

Anyhow, I started reading Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes and, although it’s whimsically riveting, I can’t help but hope that Zizek’s next book will be a much more condensed attempt at touching upon the real core of his work (transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, according to Johnston). Essentially, In Defense of Lost Causes seems to me to be applying this Kantian notion of “bracketing” by limiting intense theoretical discussion in favor of a Hegelo-Lacanian analysis of politics and popular culture (but I’m only fifty pages into it, so perhaps this isn’t the case, but the lack of citations and the title of the book is highly suggestive…). If In Defense of Lost Causes brackets “high” theory, then perhaps we may look forward to a text that brackets (“low”) popular culture and politics as sources of deviation from a more rigorous thesis. This, I think, would be interesting, as it would concretize the essentially theoretical notion of “parallax,” as developed by Karatani (vis-a-vis Kant) and later expanded on by Zizek in The Parallax View, by putting it into practice in regards to his publishing.

So, again, it would be really interesting, then, to have a very focused work (akin to Tarrying with the Negative or The Parallax View) deploying, in his own words, a more coherently formulated account of self-relating negativity (Hegel’s “night of the word,” Descartes’ cogito, etc.). Perhaps even more interesting would be a direct engagement with Johnston’s text and, perhaps, drawing concrete political conclusions from it, which Johnston’s text, for a variety of reasons I’m sure, usually abstains from (with a deliberate reference to Kantian bracketing, in his case). And I would say this would still abide by this bracketing principle since any political discussion would be held off until the very end of the dialectic.

Bryan Klausmeyer

On Speculation

V. I. Lenin:

We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot.

(Via Lenin’s Tomb.)

Bryan Klausmeyer