"Five Years in a PC Camp"
A couple of weeks ago I posted something on Alenka Zupancic's talk on Bergson's theory of comedy, and asked the question: what happens when a joke stops being funny? Well, now we know. A recent "discussion" of the subject of Lacan "whores" at the Weblog - ironically under the title of "Knowingness and How to Communicate It" quickly became misogynistic. Jodi Dean issued an objection, it wasn't well recieved, and the issue turned inflammatory.
Why did this happen? Two things might be said.
Firstly, there is almost always - whether latently, or this case manifestly - some aspect of sexism lurking in all determinate forms of what is now and then referred to as male bonding. I would suppose the same point to hold equally true for women. It cannot not be so - these are situations founded on the basis of constitutive exclusions. And what a joke does is to realize that constitutive exclusion, and to transform it into the basis whereby a shared identity (antipathy) can be experienced collectively - this is what Freud meant when he claimed that the function of joke was such that it was only really understandable within a parish. Why? Because, in contrast to comedy, a joke is never really funny in itself.
Secondly, the spectre of sexism in general. It it is a difficult thing to accept - particularly amongst those who would broadly identify with being "on the left" - the idea that one could be a sexist, or indeed a racist. After all: have we not all already committed to the fighting of such evil things? But then, the truth is that this is not really the question. Indeed: the truth is really more alarming: we do not need to be sexists to be guilty of sexism. Or racism, or homophobia,m or indeed, whatever - rather, it is like ressentiment - a kind of sin which one cannot help but on occasion to fall into sometimes - envy, fear - in general, in allusions - in abstract terms, in slips, in jokes. Patterns of thought - it happens. The crucial point is just to accept that it happens to ourselves as well - and why not ourselves? - and then to accept it when it does. And is this is not the fundamental lesson of Micheal Haneke's recent film Hidden? A film in which throughout, repeatedly, the character played by Daniel Auteil - an intellectual, a lover of books - is insistently, and repeatedly, given the opportunity again and again to face up to the terrible thing that he has done, only to refuse to do so every time. "My conscience is clear," he declares again and again, except his gestures betray him, and his actions betray him.
What would have happened had he done so? If in doubt, it always pays to go back to Freud. In his analysis of the dream of Irma's Injection from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud goes through it line by line, only to uncover at the end the following revelation: he had wished to be innocent of Irma's illness. And that it was the impossibility of fulfilling this wish in reality - he had botched her treatment as a consequence of it - which had pushed his psyche to produce his dream. What to take from this? The following: that resistance drives imagination. Drives it to manufacture ideologies - like racism, like sexism, or else drives it to manufacture the "magnificent fictions" which Alain Badiou spoke of in his Fall lecture at Birkbeck. What is the difference? Where is the resistance? What is the desire? One to be innocent? Or one to enact a cure?
Why did this happen? Two things might be said.
Firstly, there is almost always - whether latently, or this case manifestly - some aspect of sexism lurking in all determinate forms of what is now and then referred to as male bonding. I would suppose the same point to hold equally true for women. It cannot not be so - these are situations founded on the basis of constitutive exclusions. And what a joke does is to realize that constitutive exclusion, and to transform it into the basis whereby a shared identity (antipathy) can be experienced collectively - this is what Freud meant when he claimed that the function of joke was such that it was only really understandable within a parish. Why? Because, in contrast to comedy, a joke is never really funny in itself.
Secondly, the spectre of sexism in general. It it is a difficult thing to accept - particularly amongst those who would broadly identify with being "on the left" - the idea that one could be a sexist, or indeed a racist. After all: have we not all already committed to the fighting of such evil things? But then, the truth is that this is not really the question. Indeed: the truth is really more alarming: we do not need to be sexists to be guilty of sexism. Or racism, or homophobia,m or indeed, whatever - rather, it is like ressentiment - a kind of sin which one cannot help but on occasion to fall into sometimes - envy, fear - in general, in allusions - in abstract terms, in slips, in jokes. Patterns of thought - it happens. The crucial point is just to accept that it happens to ourselves as well - and why not ourselves? - and then to accept it when it does. And is this is not the fundamental lesson of Micheal Haneke's recent film Hidden? A film in which throughout, repeatedly, the character played by Daniel Auteil - an intellectual, a lover of books - is insistently, and repeatedly, given the opportunity again and again to face up to the terrible thing that he has done, only to refuse to do so every time. "My conscience is clear," he declares again and again, except his gestures betray him, and his actions betray him.
What would have happened had he done so? If in doubt, it always pays to go back to Freud. In his analysis of the dream of Irma's Injection from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud goes through it line by line, only to uncover at the end the following revelation: he had wished to be innocent of Irma's illness. And that it was the impossibility of fulfilling this wish in reality - he had botched her treatment as a consequence of it - which had pushed his psyche to produce his dream. What to take from this? The following: that resistance drives imagination. Drives it to manufacture ideologies - like racism, like sexism, or else drives it to manufacture the "magnificent fictions" which Alain Badiou spoke of in his Fall lecture at Birkbeck. What is the difference? Where is the resistance? What is the desire? One to be innocent? Or one to enact a cure?
3 Comments:
great post. It reminds me of my impressions of Crash, such that racism wasn't simply something held by a subject but something that flows between subjects, subjects who may or may not be racist. I particularly like the way your example from the film Hidden.
And, now the ending: resistance drives imagination, ideologies, magnficent fictions--can you say more about that?
I don't know if I can right now - I'm going to write something on Gramsci and the party in the near future which will hopefully clarify things.
Taking what you say about Crash - another way to think about this problem might be to approach it from Deleuze and Guattari and their idea of microfacism in Anti-Oedipus, and then to go via Badiou's critique of Deleuze to arrive at his notion of the truth-event qua magnificent fiction.
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