<nettime> Reply to Zizek

[John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk>]

Hi all,
Here is a reply to Zizek from John O'Neill, originally posted to the
Cyber-Society-Live list. 

Some may find it useful.

Best wishes

John
=================================================
DESERTING THE REAL / GOING TO THE MOVIES

John O'Neill

Should we run into the movie house with S/Z every time we see something
on TV? Don't we miss TV's attempt to make a movie that we are just about
to see but for which its commentators lack narrative power?

(1) We know what hit WTC  and possibly who --but we don't know what WTC
is nor who we are;

        (2) If we pair WTC and WTO we get a better sense of them and
ourselves, recalling their contested status in protests played out
world-wide (Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa) beyond the newly improvised
walls of capital democracy;

        (3) If we twin the WTC towers with WTO, we achieve intellectual
perspective by connecting iconology to the material practices of global
capitalism. The WTC was a glass house of capital brains and bodies,
young, powerful, plugged into money, style, and the nomadic life of the
twenty/eighty split that rules symbolic capitalism's division of social
labour into highly and lowly valued services;

        (4) The terrible destruction of WTC demands in the first
instance that its bodies be Americanized, familized and averaged into
"anyone of us". At the same time, there is staged the recovery of these
bodies by civic bodies (firemen / women, police men and women, security
men and women and other citizens willing to sacrifice themselves on
behalf of capital bodies who at other times seek to be unburdened by
such duties, charity, and the taxes that underwrite these municipal
services.

        (5) The critical challenge is to connect the intellectual
perspective we might gain with the moral perspective offered to us in
the scenes of extraordinary civic responses to the disaster which fell
upon New York and Washington. TV is witness to these moral events but
lacks any liturgical knowledge to fill in its otherwise empty icons
whose endless repetition begins to numb our minds and hearts. Perhaps
this is because we know our resolve to learn from them is weak and soon
overwhelmed with cries for revenge that do not close the wound but keep
it open for ever;

        (6) Any pop commentary, eked out by comparing movies to movies,
is weak in its response to civic events that require us to think through
the daily toll upon workers, families and communities. It is they who
bear the human capital sacrifice that calls for witness at the site of
WTC. Here the hidden injuries of modernity mark us all.

        (7) It is a conceit of commentary that the world's integrity can
be filtered through its analysts and anchor persons whereas it is the
inalienable gift of everyone who lent a hand to anyone else in need. The
catastrophic events that opened this week also tore out of us an
unfinished prayer to anyone's god anywhere......It is in the silence of
those gods that we must learn to think and to hold together.

John O'Neill
Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology
227 Founders College,
York University, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada
(Home) 416-653-8838
(Office) 416-736-5148
 (Fax)    416-653-7323

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