|
 Tuesday
SECOND THOUGHTS FURTHER THOUGHTS
More, re Zizek.
Maybe my fear is that with Lacan and Derrida and others, you were forced to engage with it on its own terms - it was difficult, almost alien to begin with. You had to work through it, and that could take months, years, decades even; and in the process of doing this work, you would find changes in your self taking place, almsot imperceptibly, but gradually, until your whole way of looking at the world (not just Groovy Movies) changed. And what I fear or am suspicious of in Zizek is that it is Lite Age theory, Theory Lite (ironic, given what Zizek himself has said about such things in the past), where we are given the End Result, without having to do any of the work ourselves. See, look here, at this dizzying scene from a sexy dark movie like Mulholland Drive or The Matrix - "we can see clearly here" that this "illustrates" Lacan's notion that X = petit a. Or whatever. And new viewers or readers can go - 'Ah, great, that's that and that's that out of the way then...' Or, if they proceed to "do it themselves" then it just becomes an all too easy filter you stretch across The Next Groovy Movie, to produce an all too effortless 'Zizekian' or 'Lacanian' "reading" ...
I was thinking all this while/after reading this illuminating interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson from a few years back...
PLW: "I would say that I think there really does have to be a refusal of what's called "information" on behalf of what we might call "knowledge," or even "wisdom" if you wanted to use dangerous words. My personal response to this is to refuse the data. You know, how much more do I need to know? Do I really need to know over and over and over again that governments are bad and that human beings are made to suffer? Do I need to know a thousand new details about the ways in which poor humanity is being stepped on once again? Is that really news? It's also a psychological truth that information that you don't work for, that you don't go after, that you don't struggle to get, really doesn't mean very much to you on a deep level. So when you can press a button and get 6,000 hits -- and you saw the same thing happening after 09/11, it doesn't take any work at all, not the least bit of effort, not even physical effort -- so what is it going to mean ultimately, to the development of your higher consciousness shall we say? I don't think it means very much. In fact I think it can have a paradoxical counter effect, which is that the more of this information you take in, the darker things get. I call it the "lite age" as opposed to the dark ages. A situation where you have all the information all the time -- completely accessible -- where in other words there are no secrets, or there's a perception that there are no secrets, that there's no information that we can't get. This kind of false omnipotence, this superman of information. It's an image that we all have of ourselves now, in the age where nothing remains, well, secret, where there are no mysteries. In this way, there is also no knowledge: None of these data have any more value than any of the other data. It's never processed into knowledge. And knowledge is never processed into wisdom. So, yes, I think that you do actually have to refuse, or at least to a certain extent. Years ago a friend of mine called it "media fasting." The idea is that in order to overcome the difficulties that certainly the unconscious gets into when you just immerse yourself in this data flow night and day, you just have to stop, at least for some time. My solution in recent months was to limit myself to print, which is poisonous enough, believe me, really poisonous, and I can only imagine how awful the electronic media must be...."
posted by Ian 7/04/2006 01:41:00 PM
|
 |
THE PILL BOX 
