Friday, June 1, 2018
Intense immersion into the social body, in a shared ritualistic performance
from "Britain’s royal wedding had an emancipatory subtext," at:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/428134-royal-wedding-uk-zizek/
by Slavoj Žižek
[...]
...in an authentic act of representation, people do not simply assert through a representative what they want, they only become aware of what they want through the act of representation.
[...]
We should therefore shamelessly assert intense immersion into the social body, a shared ritualistic performance that would put all good old liberals into shock and awe by its “totalitarian” intensity – something Wagner was aiming at in his great ritualistic scenes at the end of Acts I and III of Parsifal.
Like Parsifal, the great concerts of the German hard-rock band Rammstein (say, the one in the arena of Nimes on July 23, 2005) should also be called, as Wagner called his Parsifal, Bühnenweihfestspiel (“sacred festival performance”) which is the vehicle for the collectivity’s affirmation of itself.
All liberal-individualist prejudices should fall here – yes, each individual should be fully immersed into a crowd, joyfully abandoning their individual critical mind. Meanwhile, passion should obliterate reasoning.
[...]
Žižek: Britain’s royal wedding had an emancipatory subtext
Progressives who are inclined to lash out at the monarchy
and have fired their vitriol at the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex may be
missing the point.
Leftist critics were right about Britain’s recent royal
wedding, but for the wrong reason. They conceded how Meghan Markle is a
sympathetic figure - a feminist and a mixed-race woman - but they opposed the
form of monarchy that was celebrated (if we ignore a few complaints about
taxpayers’ money being spent).
What these critics failed to perceive is the emancipatory
dimension of this form itself, of the big public ritual which socially links a
community. To explain this point, we should go back to Novalis, the key figure
of German Romanticism, who is usually perceived as a representative of the
conservative turn of Romanticism, but his position is much more paradoxical.
Monarchy is the highest form of republic, “no king can
exist without a republic and no republic without a king”.
Or, to quote Nathan Ross’s resume: “the true measure
of a Republic consists of the lived relation of the citizens to the idea of the
whole in which they live. The unity that a law creates is merely coercive. /…/
The unifying factor must be a sensual one, a comprehensive human embodiment of
the morals that make a common identity possible. For Novalis, the best such
mediating factor for the idea of the republic is a monarch. /…/ While the
institution might satisfy our intellect, it leaves our imagination cold. A
living, breathing human being /…/ provides us with a symbol that we can more
intuitively embrace as standing in relation to our own existence. /…/ The
concepts of the Republic and monarch are not only reconcilable, but presuppose
one another.”
Guessing Game
Novalis’ point is not just some banality such as how social
identification should not be merely intellectual (the point also made by
Sigmund Freud in his Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis).
Instead, the core of his argument concerns the “performative”dimension
of political representation: in an authentic act of representation, people do
not simply assert through a representative what they want, they only become
aware of what they want through the act of representation.
So, Novalis argues that the role of the king should not be
to give people what they think they want, but to elevate and give measure to
their desires: “the political, or the force that binds people together,
should be a force that gives measure to desires rather than merely appealing to
desires.”
There is an important insight given here: politics is not
just about pursuing one’s interest. At a more basic level, it is about offering
a vision of communal identity which defines the frame of our interests. As for
the obvious reproach that such massive rituals were practiced by Hitler (not to
mention Stalin), one should never forget that, in organizing the big Nazi
performances, Hitler copied (and changed, of course) Social-Democratic
and Communist public events. So, instead of rejecting this idea as
proto-Fascist, one should rather look for its Leftist antecedents and
associations.
And one doesn’t have to look far. Just recall the staged
performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd
(now Saint Petersburg), on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on
7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists
worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and
frozen apples, and preparing for the performance at the very place where the
event "really took place" three years earlier; their work
was coordinated by army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists,
musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold.
Although this was acting and not "reality," the
soldiers and sailors were playing themselves - many of them not only actually
participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the
real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of
Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food.
A contemporary commented on the performance: "The
future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most
brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"; and the formalist
theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that "some kind of elemental
process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed
into the theatrical."
This was not a performance of actors for the public, but a
performance in which the public itself was the actor.
We should therefore shamelessly assert intense immersion
into the social body, a shared ritualistic performance that would put all good
old liberals into shock and awe by its “totalitarian” intensity –
something Wagner was aiming at in his great ritualistic scenes at the end of
Acts I and III of Parsifal.
Like Parsifal, the great concerts of the German hard-rock
band Rammstein (say, the one in the arena of Nimes on July 23, 2005) should
also be called, as Wagner called his Parsifal, Bühnenweihfestspiel (“sacred
festival performance”) which is the vehicle for the collectivity’s affirmation
of itself.
All liberal-individualist prejudices should fall here –
yes, each individual should be fully immersed into a crowd, joyfully abandoning
their individual critical mind. Meanwhile, passion should obliterate reasoning.
Thus, to conclude, and circle back to the marriage of
Meghan and Harry: criticize it as much as you want, but don’t forget to look
for a radical emancipatory version of what this spectacle achieved.
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Jeff Bezos Announces Customers Can Delete All Of Alexa’s Stored Audio By Rappelling Into Amazon HQ, Navigating Laser Field, Uploading Nanovirus To Servers
SEATTLE—Responding to news of
the digital assistant recording users’ conversations without their knowledge,
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos assured critics Tuesday that Alexa’s stored audio can be
deleted by simply rappelling into company headquarters, maneuvering through an
intricate laser field, and destroying every server with a nanovirus.
“We take privacy concerns
seriously, and I want our valued customers to know they can erase all the
information their Amazon Echo has gathered just by being dropped from a
helicopter over one of our towers, using a diamond-tipped glass cutter to carve
out a hole in a 32nd-story window, and then employing advanced cyberwarfare
techniques to compromise our data centers,” said Bezos, who added that users
merely need to have their demolitions expert blow through a 7-foot steel
barrier and reach Amazon’s highly complex cloud storage system to access the
audio captured by Alexa.
“If, by this point, you
haven’t been detected by our surveillance system and attracted the attention of
our CIA-trained super soldiers, you’ll only have to wait while your team’s
martial arts expert silently neutralizes several armed guards and cuts out one
of their eyeballs to open the doors secured by retina scanners.
Then, assuming you’ve trained
for months in a full-scale model of our headquarters that you built in an old
warehouse to plan your exact path through this labyrinth, it’s a relatively
straightforward matter of uploading the nanovirus and shooting your way out of
a building that is rigged to self-destruct within 60 seconds of a data breach.”
Bezos added that once
customers complete this process, they will still need to erase the backup
copies of their Echo data stored in the drive he wears around his neck, a task
that requires finding him in Amazon’s caverns miles below Seattle and fighting
him to the death.
Israel’s Premature Celebration: Gazans Have Crossed the Fear Barrier
MAY 28, 2018
by RAMZY BAROUD
60 Palestinians were killed in
Gaza on May 15, simply for protesting and demanding their Right of Return as
guaranteed by international law.
50 more were killed since
March 30, the start of the ‘Great March of Return’, which marks Land Day.
Nearly 10,000 have been
wounded and maimed in between these two dates.
‘Israel has the right to
defend itself’, White House officials announced, paying no heed to the
ludicrousness of the statement when understood within the current context of an
unequal struggle.
Peaceful protesters were not
threatening the existence of Israel; rock throwing kids were not about to
overwhelm hundreds of Israeli snipers, who shot, killed and wounded Gaza
youngsters with no legal or moral boundary whatsoever.
8-months old, Laila al-Ghandour
was one of the 60 who were killed on May 15. She suffocated to death from
Israeli teargas. Many, like her, were wounded or killed some distance away from
the border. Some were killed for simply being nearby, or for being Palestinian.
Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump,
daughter of US President, Donald Trump, ushered in a new era of international
relations, when she and her companions unveiled the new US Embassy in
Jerusalem.
She was ‘all smiles’ while, at
the exact same moment, hundreds of Gazans were being felled at the border. The
already dilapidated hospitals have no room for most of the wounded. They bled
in hallways awaiting medical attention.
Ivanka has never been to Gaza
– and will unlikely ever visit or be welcomed there. Gazans do not register in
her moral conscience, if she has any beyond her immediate interests, as people
deserving of rights, freedom and dignity.
At the border, many Gaza kids
have been coloring their bodies in blue paint, dressing up in homemade costumes
to imitate characters from the Hollywood movie, ‘Avatar’. They hoped that, by
hiding their brown skin, their plight and suffering could be more relatable to
the world.
But when they were shot, their
blood gave them away. They were still human, still from Gaza.
The international community
has already condemned Trump’s decision to relocate his country’s embassy to
Jerusalem, and declared his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital ‘null
and void’, but will it go further than mere words?
Will the international
community remain trapped between hollow statements and no action? Will they
ever truly recognize the humanity of Laila al-Ghandour and all the other
children, men and women who died and continue to perish under Gaza’s besieged
skies? Will they ever care enough to do something?
The plight of the Palestinians
is compounded with the burden of having a useless ‘leadership’. The President
of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has been busy of late, demanding
allegiance from the occupied Palestinians in the West Bank. Large signs and
larger banners have been erected everywhere, where families, professional
associations, unions and companies have announced, in large font: the “Renewal
of Loyalty and Support to President Mahmoud Abbas.”
‘Renewal’? Abbas’ mandate
expired in 2009. Besides, is this what Abbas and his Fatah party perceive to be
the most urgent matter that needs to be addressed, while his people are being
massacred?
Abbas fears that Hamas is
using the blood of the Gaza victims to bolster its popularity. Ironically, it
is a shared concern with Israeli leaders, the likes of Israeli army spokesman,
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. The latter said that Hamas has won the PR war at
the Gaza border by a ‘knockout.’
This propaganda is as false as
it is utterly racist; yet, it has persisted for far too long. It proposes that
Palestinians and Arabs lack human agency. They are incapable of mobilizing and
organizing their collective efforts to demand their long-denied rights. They
are only pawns, puppets in the hands of factions, to be sacrificed at the altar
of public relations.
It did not dawn on Conricus to
note that, perhaps, his army lost the ‘PR war’ because its brutes shot
thousands of unarmed civilians who did nothing, aside from gathering at the
border demanding an end to their perpetual siege; or that, just maybe, the PR
war was lost because Israel’s top leaders announced proudly that Gazans are
fair game, since, according to Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, “there are
no innocents in Gaza.’
Ivanka will go down in
Israel’s history as a hero. But Palestinian Resistance is not fueled or subdued
by Ivanka, but by the sacrifices of the Palestinians themselves, and by the
blood of Laila al-Ghandour, who was denied even a celebration of her first
birthday on God’s besieged earth.
The US government has
decisively and blatantly moved to the wrong side of history. As their officials
attended parties, galas and celebrations of the Embassy move, whether in Israel
or in Washington and elsewhere, Palestinians dug 60 more graves and held 60 more
funerals.
The world watched in horror,
and even western media failed to hide the full ugly truth from its readers. The
two acts – of lavish parties and heartbreaking burials – were beamed all over
the world, and the already struggling American reputation sank deeper and
deeper.
Israeli Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, may have thought he had won. Comforted by his rightwing
government and society on the one hand, Trump and his angry UN bully, Nikki
Haley, on the other, he feels invulnerable.
But he should rethink his
power-driven logic. When Gazan youth stood bare-chested at the border fence,
falling one drove after the other, they crossed a fear barrier that no
generation of Palestinians has ever crossed. And when people are unafraid, they
can never be subdued or defeated.
Fathi Harb Burnt Himself to Death in Gaza. Will the World Notice?
MAY 29, 2018
Fathi Harb should have had
something to live for, not least the imminent arrival of a new baby. But last
week the 21-year-old extinguished his life in an inferno of flames in central
Gaza.
It is believed to be the first
example of a public act of self-immolation in the enclave. Harb doused himself
in petrol and set himself alight on a street in Gaza City shortly before dawn
prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.
In part, Harb was driven to
this terrible act of self-destruction out of despair.
After a savage, decade-long
Israeli blockade by land, sea and air, Gaza is like a car running on fumes. The
United Nations has repeatedly warned that the enclave will be uninhabitable
within a few years.
Over that same decade, Israel
has intermittently pounded Gaza into ruins, in line with the Israeli army’s
Dahiya doctrine. The goal is to decimate the targeted area, turning life back
to the Stone Age so that the population is too preoccupied with making ends
meet to care about the struggle for freedom.
Both of these kinds of assault
have had a devastating impact on inhabitants’ psychological health.
Harb would have barely
remembered a time before Gaza was an open-air prison and one where a 1,000kg
Israeli bomb might land near his home.
In an enclave where two-thirds
of young men are unemployed, he had no hope of finding work. He could not
afford a home for his young family and he was about to have another mouth to
feed.
Doubtless, all of this
contributed to his decision to burn himself to death.
But self-immolation is more
than suicide. That can be done quietly, out of sight, less gruesomely. In fact,
figures suggest that suicide rates in Gaza have rocketed in recent years.
But public self-immolation is
associated with protest.
A Buddhist monk famously
turned himself into a human fireball in Vietnam in 1963 in protest at the
persecution of his co-religionists. Tibetans have used self-immolation to
highlight Chinese oppression, Indians to decry the caste system, and Poles,
Ukrainians and Czechs once used it to protest Soviet rule.
But more likely for Harb, the
model was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire
in late 2010 after officials humiliated him once too often. His public death
triggered a wave of protests across the Middle East that became the Arab
Spring.
Bouazizi’s self-immolation
suggests its power to set our consciences on fire. It is the ultimate act of
individual self-sacrifice, one that is entirely non-violent except to the
victim himself, performed altruistically in a greater, collective cause.
Who did Harb hope to speak to
with his shocking act?
In part, according to his
family, he was angry with the Palestinian leadership. His family was trapped in
the unresolved feud between Gaza’s rulers, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority
(PA) in the West Bank. That dispute has led the PA to cut the salaries of its
workers in Gaza, including Harb’s father.
But Harb undoubtedly had a
larger audience in mind too.
Until a few years ago, Hamas
regularly fired rockets out of the enclave in a struggle both to end Israel’s
continuing colonisation of Palestinian land and to liberate the people of Gaza
from their Israeli-made prison.
But the world rejected the
Palestinians’ right to resist violently and condemned Hamas as “terrorists”.
Israel’s series of military rampages in Gaza to silence Hamas were meekly
criticised in the West as “disproportionate”.
The Palestinians of the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, where there is still direct contact with Israeli Jews,
usually as settlers or soldiers, watched as Gaza’s armed resistance failed to
prick the world’s conscience.
So some took up the struggle
as individuals, targeting Israelis or soldiers at checkpoints. They grabbed a
kitchen knife to attack Israelis or soldiers at checkpoints, or rammed them
with a car, bus or bulldozer.
Again, the world sided with
Israel. Resistance was not only futile, it was denounced as illegitimate.
Since late March, the struggle
for liberation has shifted back to Gaza. Tens of thousands of unarmed
Palestinians have massed weekly close to Israel’s fence encaging them.
The protests are intended as
confrontational civil disobedience, a cry to the world for help and a reminder
that Palestinians are being slowly choked to death.
Israel has responded
repeatedly by spraying the demonstrators with live ammunition, seriously
wounding many thousands and killing more than 100. Yet again, the world has
remained largely impassive.
In fact, worse still, the
demonstrators have been cast as Hamas stooges. The United States ambassador to
the UN, Nikki Haley, blamed the victims under occupation, saying Israel had a
right to “defend its border”, while the British government claimed the protests
were “hijacked by terrorists”.
None of this can have passed
Harb by.
When Palestinians are told
they can “protest peacefully”, western governments mean quietly, in ways that
Israel can ignore, in ways that will not trouble consciences or require any
action.
In Gaza, the Israeli army is
renewing the Dahiya doctrine, this time by shattering thousands of Palestinian
bodies rather than infrastructure.
Harb understood only too well
the West’s hypocrisy in denying Palestinians any right to meaningfully resist
Israel’s campaign of destruction.
The flames that engulfed him
were intended also to consume us with guilt and shame. And doubtless more in
Gaza will follow his example.
Will Harb be proved right? Can
the West be shamed into action?
Or will we continue blaming
the victims to excuse our complicity in seven decades of outrages committed
against the Palestinian people?
Žižek, Dolar, Zupančič - Philosophy, Psychoanalysis & the Spaces Between (Nov. 2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K81xpxYLcsQ&t=2s
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