Notes on - 'The Spectator's Malevolent Neutrality' a Lecture by Slavoj Zizek

The title of this lecture is aimed at an ironic twist of the traditional position of the psychoanalyst, whose job is to listen to the patient with benevolent neutrality.

What is foregrounded by this modification? And what kind of Clearing in the social sphere does it seek to map through its analyses? These are initial questions which my notes will seek to clarify.

Malevolence, the word itself refers to ill will; often the explicit desire to hurt someone. The politically correct position would go as far as to say that a spectator is in principle incapable of malevolence. Yet inasmuch as a spectator remains a spectator they are not even partisan.

So let us begin with the worst of circumstances that our civilization has permitted to arise and come to the light of day - torture and its depiction in photographs.

Zizek notices a change in the pictures representing torture that came out of Iraq during Saddam Hussain's regime and those which followed the invasion by American soldiers. The earlier pictures were of the victims of torture alone, perhaps behind bars, handcuffed etc. Following the arrival of American soldiers - the torture still continued, the only difference in the photographs, such as those released from Abu Gharib was that the American soldiers started including themselves, or rather posing in the pictures representing prisoners of war being tortured.

He makes a point regarding how a similar gesture is made by Catholic priests who abuse young children. They do not do so, in many reports by a progressive friend by the name of Gary Willis - discretely, but in the name of religion itself, using it to seduce the child. The act of questioning the child, invoking guilt about masturbation, for instance - being an example.

Unlike President Bush who disavows the acts of the soldiers as some perverse individuals, Zizek acknowledges perverse initiations as essential elements to the formation of any, in this case, Catholic ideology. This seems to be a driving point in his lecture. He cites his own experience in the Yugoslav army where it was publicly required that the chain of command, party hierarchy, and rank be respected, but privately no one would really trust you unless you could insult someone in the bureaucracy.

In military training, even among marines, stories of fairly horrid initiatory practices like having your nipples pierced are circulated. The argument brought forth is that these are not just the dirty underside of any official ideology, but the glue that binds it together. Initiatory rituals are common in all cultures, however the presenter, Zizek remarks that there is something particular about how Americans do it.

The point which seems to inform this trajectory is the idea that a clean front, and the effort to keep it up necessarily demands or condones perverse private behaviors. This itself is not entirely a new thought, and its roots, at least as formalized in the recorded English language can be traced to Bernard Mandevilles' 'The Fable Of The Bees: Private Vices Public Benefits' (1714).

Regarding the sense of inclusion or belonging that Slavoj Zizek is referring to however, he does not stress the sublime theatre of religions for instance in characterising how an individual is included, but precisely the obscene initiatory rituals such as marines having their nipples pierced or urinated on. I think it is useful to draw a parallel here with the kind of initiatory rituals fraternities, sororities, and hostels may have for instance. A friend told me over the phone that her seniors forced her to dance sexually when she joined a shared apartment in a new city she had traveled to for college; ragging, at least prior to the lockdown was a very real phenomenon.

Zizek's question here in taking up the pictures of tortured prisoners is this - for which gaze are these pictures, of smiling soldiers and prisoners in humiliating positions, staged - and the answer is simple; for their friends.

The response of the army as a countermeasure to such an occurrence equally perverse was the prohibition of soldiers carrying video cameras...

These pictures surfaced publicly in 2004. It is to be noted that not long after, in the very next year on the other side of the Atlantic, the United Kingdom started experimenting with body cameras, a feature which most western democracies came to adopt in the following decade.

Zizek's insight however is clear, and is reflected in the Pentagon's response to the situation. The reason presented was that the soldiers did this because they were not taught the rules of the Geneva convention, as if the fact that we should not torture fellow humans requires sanction from the Geneva convention to be followed. The point that is made is the perversion; a kind of secret fetish in authority itself.

The question or rather the point of such actions which needs to be raised is this. For which gaze are such shots staged? At one level the answer is clear, for their friends ie. those in similar situations or positions etc. At another level, Zizek's hypothesis is that they were staged for an impossible gaze, or one which is imagined. He draws parallels for this argument from examples of statues, which were positioned on top of Roman aqueducts in such a way that no onlooker from below would even be able to see them. The apprehension here is that they were positioned for a divine gaze. This, Zizek reads to be the gaze of the superego.

The superego here however is one which is acutely attuned to the aesthetic sensibilities of a viewer or indeed a spectator, and is not some blind compulsive drive.

A moving example Zizek sites is by a right-wing Catholic poet from the Slovenia of his youth. The poem recalled is about children aborted in real life but in an alternate universe were born but raised on an island somewhere on the south sea. Their life while calm lacks parental love. Yet, from this position they can nonetheless direct their gaze and vision back to their parents who may be pursuing their careers or a holiday or whatever. This is how the ideological staging of an impossible gaze is supposed to work.

He emphasizes that to define such a gaze as divine is to miss the point. The assertion he makes is a powerful ontological position which takes the example of an actor on stage, and the spectator as an example. The two positions are not equivalent and there is a dialectic which we should notice here. The assertion that the gaze is omnipotent, in other words - godlike is precisely the one which misses what Michel Chion, the French cinema theorist refers to as the acousmatic nature of the gaze, the sense of the incomprehension regarding the source of a sound, being the instance which the word defines generically. But as Lacanians, can we not think of a gaze as in a mode of perception that is itself acousmatic, or as Zizek states, 'free-floating or hanging in the air?'

The ontological position which Zizek makes is that our very coordinates of existence are not that of a spectator. In other words we are 'originally not mere observers', but part of the tableau that is staged (perhaps in a clearing) for this nonexistent, sublime gaze.

The fantasy for Lacan is not the scene itself which we fantasize, fantasy at its most radical is the fantasized gaze which observes you. In other words it is not the dream itself but the belief that we are the objects in someone else's dream. As an example he cites the emergence of cam websites which have sprung up which allow a gaze into the everyday life of people in their apartments. This does appear to be a reversal of the Orwellian or Bentham's notion of the panopticon, ie. we are not merely afraid of being observed all the time. We are even more afraid of not being observed all the time.

Since the 1950's social psychology has been advocating the notion that in our public persona we are all wearing masks, and this phenomenon seems to have lost some of its metaphoricity in today's world where because of coronavirus we are all actually wearing masks in public; sadly in fear of some invisible contagion.

Yet even without this, the point of the mask in this presentation which Zizek delivered all the way back in 2004, is precisely the mask as an ideological screen, or our personal form of mediating and assessing what can and cannot be said or done in public. The point however does not end here, in our screen personas, let us say when we are playing an online game, is it not the fact that we can tell each other and ourselves that 'this is only a game' which allows a kind of release from social straight jacketing to be able to express, in the game world - whatever we may mean by our true selves?

Sartre makes a similar point in 'Being And Nothingness', that the performance of even regular jobs, which when we internalize them into our very own identity, they take on the guise of what Judith Butler may call performances. Think the obsequiousness of a clerk at the office or the bored indifference of a fat receptionist etc.

Zizek likens this to what Lacan means when he says that truth has the structure of a fiction; a line which today bears an eerie resonance where at least personally speaking here in India we do not really know exactly where we are in containing the contagion ie. do we still need to wear masks even if we are vaccinated? And here, we are not alone. There are others who are raising similar questions across the world. Here the ambiguity of clear and even contradicting protocols are indicative of where we are effectively at.

In returning to the question of our (avowed or disavowed ideological masks) - we do see, clearly in perhaps the predominant form of cultural production today, hardcore pornography, a resistance, or rather an inhibition inscribed into the very genre itself. Before the actual fucking begins there are usually a few minutes where the characters are introduced in a loose plot, which is corny beyond measure. Eg. A nurse treating a patient, a plumber coming over to fix a hole, not to mention the fake taxi driver. The stupidity of the narrative proper here effectively accomplishes the same gesture, we are allowed to disidentify with the characters and their actions because "oh well, this is only porn". Here I concur with Zizek that amidst this negative form of censorship, the truly radical gesture would have been to make an engaging narrative that actually risks the possibility of a viewer identifying with the characters, in other words, empathy, and not a safe distance which is maintained between the actors and the spectators.

It is humourous to note how far Zizek goes here. Insisting that even the more experimental movies which do go in this direction; such as those directed by Lars Von Trier which often have nuanced plots and layered characters, where even in scenes of fellatio, there is still somehow a way in which the encounter between the characters distances us from emotional involvement with the sex itself; in Zizek's words - somehow it doesn't work.

The other example which he invokes is an imagined scene at the end of Casablanca, the film - where instead of the actor and the actress embracing and the camera fading out, we have ten minutes of hardcore sex. It is precisely such a conjunction which even canonized art finds impossible, for it risks consummating an involvement which is eluded to, a silent prohibition which holds like an accursed string, the whole plot together.

Slavoj Zizek then makes an observation which I believe is truly remarkable, for it entails a schism, if it is not too religious a word in the history of the human experience of pleasure.

The hedonism of today, even its restraint is not sophrosynic - or about moderation and proportion as Aristotle would have had it. Today, we in fact as consumers are impelled to consume as much as we want, and more - yet the inhibition or rather the intoxication lies in the very desubstantiation of the quality which we desire in what we consume, non-alcoholic beer, and sex without love are the kind of examples which Zizek is eluding to. In terms of taste I guess this may be similar to a stale cigarette.

Are not weapons technologies too, developing in this direction? Today we have drones which can replace reconnaissance teams, and even bombers as these unmanned vehicles are remotely controlled to conduct missions deep behind enemy lines. Arguably, a war without casualties would be an agreeable analogy locatable within such a pattern of course, only in blindness to the structural and economic violence necessary to sustain the military-industrial complex.

Those considerations aside, the point that Zizek makes at the level of the commodity, decaf coffee or whatever is also tangible in our experience of everyday life, and yes indeed even art.

Characters in reality TV for example and even in documentaries are not the characters just as they are in real life, devoid of any fictional, ideological or political semblances. They are first and foremost characters who are playing themselves. This is an insight Zizek attributes to the Polish director Krystof Kieslowski, who made 'The Three Colours Trilogy'. We are however pointed to his early documentaries before his turn to new age cinema to observe where this facet is most noticeable.

The thematic which emerges here amidst the flatness of the characters is simply this. Nothing even minimally unpredictable happened. We return to the last scene of 'Casablanca' to pinpoint where Slavoj identifies the ambiguity within which the most elementary kernel of ideology persists, even in our supposedly post-ideological times. Humphrey Boggart and Ingmar Bergman meet at the end of the movie, and embrace. The camera then pans out to a shot of the airport lighthouse whose light is spinning, and then we return to the couple, Boggart now smoking a cigarette. What does that cut signify? Is it an extended duration, during which they did it - or was it simply those three seconds?

Such an inference of course draws on tropes embedded in classical Hollywood cinema regarding fadeouts, the phallic metaphor of the tower, and the man smoking.

This ambiguity was the way, Zizek points to how Hollywood addresses us as a split subject. It keeps the screen clear while giving you all the clues as to what may be happening in the cut. Admittedly this may be more relevant to films in the 80's, yet the point is to be made in any study of cinematic history as undertaken.

The split subject which Zizek isolates here regarding a clean cover, or front to put it in more townsy language, and the dirty underside does seem to be a dated one today. As a reminder this lecture was delivered at the Theaterformen festival in Brunswick, 2004, Germany.

I think even he realizes or at least notices a way in which this hypocrisy in the ruling ideology loses even its conceitedness and becomes simply banal, and do we not already see this in genres operating, indeed originating from that era, ie. noir films which focus explicitly on crime and often featuring a femme fatale who occasionally is also a double agent?

The theme of the impossible gaze which ideology addresses however still holds, even when such duplicity, naive or jaded is in effect. In Vertigo, there is a scene following Scotty's rescue of Madelaine where the camera pans past the kitchen sink where Madelaine's underwear is hanging. Zizek makes a marvelous point here - if the scene is put on freeze-frame it is noticed that the cloth is not really underwear there. The question that he raises here is who was this act of censorship trying to protect? Clearly none of the spectators who are as blind to such a facet as they are to the statues placed on top of Roman aqueducts. The gaze which such a detail is hidden from is precisely what Jaques Lacan spoke of as the gaze of the Big Other.

The insider scoop, not to mention the political implications of such a decision are obvious - with a sense of the party always being right, seemingly being embedded in practically invisible freeze frames, even if millions of people have seen it. You can imagine some gentle soul in the production crew who the director and his associates decide not to show the underwear to - hehe, so his chastity may not be offended. Not our real gaze; this has no such protective censure.

Please do watch the lecture for we are introduced to a few more touching examples which I think you may identify with.

I would like to place emphasis here in a criticism against reading Zizek in terms of some caricaturized orthodox Lacanian , who makes cartoonish divisions between the ego and the superego. When he presents for us, the gaze which sees such films, he is aware that for the illusion to work it has to presuppose a naive innocent gaze. Yet it is in the structure of the shot itself, in the very cut or the split scene which elicits the imagination of the spectator to imagine what 'dirty' things may be happening behind, with the camera passing by the hanging innerwear in the kitchen. He is far from making a sweeping remark regarding some sense of generalized cynicism ala Sloterdijk.

And can we not see this point, perhaps homologously in how genre formalizes itself in the first place? The term post-structuralism for example used to characterize French theorists who emerged after WWII was applied to them primarily by American academics, almost as though a congruence emerged only when seen from that position, which itself was still not privy to everything. Most of the French intellectuals themselves to whom this term refers to - Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Althusser themselves place a guarded distance between themselves and such a characterization. Yet the reverse moment, or rather the reverse gaze was happening simultaneously. French cinema critics, such as Michel Chion - who are witnessing the changes in classical Hollywood, without really knowing what is going on there, are able to discern the emergence of film noir, as a genre that seemingly digs ups the details of society that the golden era glides over.

I think, as psychoanalysts, we can identify even an obsessive dimension in the need felt by a political power to react to naive obscenities, even if they know that the spectacle, let's say a poem published in a public newspaper - was meaningless. The fact that we are anecdotally informed that the central committee chose to read it as dissent reminds us today of just how old this tendency is, even if you were to disagree with the poem's characterization of Stalinist policies. Compulsive precisely because they still felt the need to censure the possible gaze of the Big Other, or should I say the gaze of a possible Big Other.

Amidst Baudrillard's texts and films like the Matrix, we often forget the extent to which our everyday, even political life is a staged spectacle. And here we have a rare anthropological report from our philosopher:- when he was taken to the demilitarized zone in South Korea. Where, from the southern side you can see a village set in a theatre actually managed by the North Koreans, for the South Korean Gaze, ie. people going for walks, electricity not being cut etc. basically the performance of a civil democracy.

I would like to return briefly to the question regarding the gaze of the other which seems to be the centerpiece of Zizek's lecture. He presents the thesis that like the post-structuralists or perhaps drawing on their example - deconstruction is perhaps essentially an American misreading of Derrida, maybe along with the Germans. The irony, or rather the opportunistic incorporation which arises, however, is when Derrida himself identifies with the misreading; which becomes immensely productive for him and deconstruction via it - being taken up as almost the de-jure ideology of the Yale school of literary criticism.

Can we not see a perverse productivization of this strategy at a far more vulgar, comedic level even? When for example, a man and a woman are chatting on a street and then a third external gaze, bearing malevolence - attributes to the conversation the intimations of a love affair, hence creating a scandal. This is the cynical ideology very much operating in the society of the spectacle, even in developing economies in the third world, particularly so in those places rife with social conservativeness.

It is interesting to imagine the opposite of such as scenario - crudely, when the theatricality of politics is enacted or staged as it were, in the service of a true revolution. The opposition established here is not merely between the theatrical and the non-theatrical; the question is what is this theatricality put in service of? An explicit criticism of the Benjaminian notion of the aestheticization of politics is where Zizek seems to be aiming at.

"In order to establish a sense of self - the masses must manifest themselves. This is possible only if they become a spectacle on top of themselves": - this is a quote by Lunacharsky - the Soviet minister of culture, who - in this sentence, seems to be prefiguring the later works by Guy Deboard by decades.

An example of the re-enactment of the October revolution in a village is described to present a depiction of how such a people acquire a sense of themselves, via staging a history they identify as their own.

It is here that I believe there is a truth we must identify in Slavoj Zizek, as a philosopher. When he says for example that there is more truth in theatre than in the life behind the theatre, he is pointing at the dimension of life which requires an elementary level of reification as such for it to be even recognizable as living - as capable of affecting us. In his words, in the opposition between fantasy and reality; the real is on the side of fantasy.

In the question and answer session that follows, we can witness a clear resistance to Bakhtin; particularly his opposition between the strict rules of society and its other - the carnival. Zizek's point however is that, and drawing on references attributed to Bakhtin; even the Stalinist mock trials were a carnival, policemen stepping out and beating protestors are a carnival too. This highlights the importance of civil discourse, where working conditions can actually be discussed - to exist in a society. The obscene side of this exists as well, when we degrade the public sphere. Arguing against racism for example, cannot remain to be a progressive position. Like Zizek, I would like to believe that racism is a phenomenon that requires no argument in its dismissal. This would be a preliminary ethical position.

In charting the relation between the center and the periphery we see that what changes with the waging of the Iraq war is not the war itself, casualties, the occupation and all. What also changes via such brutality, and is pointed out to is what is discussable in the heart of American society. The emergence of torture for example as a subject of public debate.

I would like to point here that is not the archetypical Jewish resistance directed against such a dichotomy? As a people who until very recently were without a homeland, their only act of resistance was to follow the explicit rules while ignoring the unwritten ones which held society together. They were hence de-facto on the side of the periphery.

In another way, there are transgressions which undermine the system and there are transgressions which are a part of the system; a clear pointer to the feminist critique of phallogocentric power, even to the extent of resisting the Word in those terms.

This of course is tied to the thesis of tolerance. ie. when we cannot tolerate someone it means they are harassing us. This seems to be the operating logic in some bourgeois neighborhoods. Zizek however makes a more radical point vis-a-vis art and crying. He thinks that when we cry we are able to do so only when we are at an appropriate and safe distance from the phenomenon; ie. when it is depicted in a melodrama for example.

The thread that holds these postulations together is that this minimal degree of theatricality which operates in our relation to art, even in vulgar and comedic art which is mechanized - such as canned laughter, are we not able to relate to it with a sense of relief because it is, as it were, performed for us? An acousmatic audience does the laughing for us. Perhaps not unlike the chorus of weepers in Greek tragedy.

There is, like art a theatricality implicit in our actions in everyday life. A theatricality that may even be necessary for the appearance of the public sphere and our engagement with it. This is what permits for the production of intersubjectivity, via which we can begin to start understanding each other. This is my very basic sociological thesis. - This is how we are fundamentally actors; but for an impossible gaze.

Friday, 12th November, Chennai, 2021.