BACKGROUND NOISE IN IDEOLOGY

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, 1979

Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

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When we read an abstract ideological proclamation, we are well aware that this is not how actual people experience it: in order to pass from abstract propositions to people’s “real lives,” one has to add to the abstract propositions the unfathomable density of a life world context – and ideology are not the abstract propositions in themselves, ideology is this very life world density which “schematizes” them in Kant’s sense, renders them “livable,” part of our daily experience. Take military ideology: it becomes “livable” only against the background of the obscene unwritten rules and rituals (marching chants, fragging, sexual inuendos…) in which it is embedded.

Which is why, if there is an ideological experience at its purest, its zero-level, it is at the moment when we adopt the attitude of wise ironic distance and laugh at the follies we are ready to believe – at this moment of liberating laughter, when we look down on the ridicule of our faiths, we are pure subjects of ideology, ideology exerts its pure hold on us. This is why, say, if one wants to observe today’s ideology at work, all one has to do is to watch some of the Michael Palin’s travel reports on BBC which were popular a couple of decades ago: their underlying attitude of benevolent ironic distance towards different customs, taking pleasure in observing local peculiarities while filtering out the truly traumatic data, is postmodern racism at its purest.

So when we talk about “objective spirit” (the substance of mores) as the cobweb of unwritten rules which determine what we can say/see/do, one should complicate further Foucault’s description of a discursive episteme: “objective spirit” also and above all determines what we know but have to talk about and act as if we don’t know, and what we don’t know but have to talk about and act as if we do know it; it determines what we have to know but have to pretend we don’t know. The rise of today’s so-called ethnic and religious fundamentalism is a rebellion against this thick network of manners which support freedoms in a liberal society. They do not fear the uncertainties of freedom and permissiveness – what they fear is, on the opposite, (what they experience as) the oppressive web of new regulations.

It would have been interesting to reread Marcel Proust against the background of this topic of unwritten customs: the problem of his In Search For a Lost Time is “How is aristocracy possible in democratic times, once the external marks of hierarchy are abolished?”, and his reply is: the complex network of unwritten informal habits (gestures, tastes) by means of which those who are “in” recognize “their own” and identify those who just pretend to belong to the inner circle and are to be ostracized.[1]

So where is ideology? When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real one, the ideological designation-perception introduces its invisible mystification. Say, tolerance designates a real problem – I am as a rule asked, when I oppose it: »But how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners, for antifeminism, for homophobia?« Therein resides the catch: of course I am not against it, but what I am against is the (today's automatic) perception of racism as a problem of tolerance. Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as the Welfare State or various socialist projects: “tolerance” is their post-political ersatz. (The same goes for “harassment”: in today’s ideological space, the very real harassments (rape, bigotry…) are irreducibly intertwined with the narcissistic notion of the individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his/her private space.) “Ideology” is, in this precise sense, a notion which, while designating a real problem, blurs a crucial line of separation.

This is also why Lacan claims: “I am not even saying ‘politics is the unconscious,’ but only ‘the unconscious is politics’.” The difference is crucial here. In the first case, the Unconscious is elevated into the “big Other” which exists: it is posited as a substance which really dominates and regulates political activity, in the sense of “the true mobile of our political activity are not ideology or interests, but unconscious libidinal motivations.” In the second case, the big Other itself loses its substantial character, it is no longer “THE Unconscious,” it changes into a fragile inconsistent field overdetermined by political struggles.

During a public debate with Bernard-Henri Levy at NYPL more than a decade ago, he made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance (“Would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it? Where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they love?”), while I made a similarly pathetic case for Communism (“With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis, uncertainties how to deal with intellectual property and biogenetics, with the rise of new Wall between countries and within each country, is there not a need to find as new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration?”) – the irony of the situation was that, when the case is stated in these abstract terms, we both couldn’t but agree with each other. Levy, a hard-line liberal anti-Communist proponent of free market, ironically remarked that in this sense, even he is for Communism... This mutual understanding was the proof that we were both knee-deep in ideology: “ideology” is precisely such a reduction to the simplified “essence” which conveniently forgets what comes up with it as the price to be paid, the “background noise” which provides the density of its actual meaning. Such an erasure of the background noise is the very core of utopia.

What this background noise conveys is – more often than not – the obscenity of barbarian violence which sustains the public law and order. This is why Benjamin’s thesis that every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism has a precise impact on the very notion of being civilized: “to be civilized means to know one is potentially barbarian.”[2] Every civilization which disavows its barbarian potential has already capitulated to barbarism. This is how one should read the report about a weird confrontation in Vienna of 1938, when SS thugs entered Freud’s apartment to examine it: the old dignified Freud standing across a young SS bull as a metaphor of what was the best in old European culture confronting the worst of the new emerging barbarism. One should nonetheless add to the clarity of this image that the SS perceived and legitimized themselves as the defence of European culture and its spiritual values against the barbarism of modernity with its focus on economy and sex, the barbarism which, for the Nazis, was epitomized by the name “Freud”… What this means is that Benjamin’s claim that every document of culture is at the same time a document of barbarism should be pushed a step further: what if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity? This, perhaps, is one of the ways to read Paul Celan’s succinct paraphrase of Brecht:

“What times are these

when a conversation

is almost a crime

because it includes

so much /implicitly/ told?”[3]

The gap between the official text of the Law and its obscene supplement is not limited to Western cultures; in Hindu culture, it occurs as the opposition between vaidika (Vedic corpus) and tantrika: tantra is the obscene (secret) supplement to Vedas, the unwritten (or secret, non-canonic) core of the public teaching of Vedas, a publicly disavowed but necessary supplement. No wonder tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate »spiritual logic of late capitalism«[4] uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material profit, divine experience and unlimited shopping. It propagates permanent transgression of all rules, violation of all taboos, instant gratification as the path to Enlightenment; it overcomes old »binary« thought, the dualism of mind and body, claiming that the body at its most material (the site of sex and lust) IS the royal path to spiritual awakening. Bliss comes from »saying YES« to all bodily needs, not from thwarting them: spiritual perfection comes from the insight that we already are divine and perfect, not that we have to achieve this through effort and discipline. Body is not the stuff to be cultivated/belabored into an expression of spiritual truths, it immediately is the »temple for expressing divinity.« Note here the opposition to Tarkovsky's spiritual materialism: for Tarkovsky, the very material corruption (decay, decomposing, rotting, inertia, dump, wet stuff) is spiritual, while here the ethereal incorruptibility of the flesh is celebrated.

This tendency reaches its apogee with cyberspace: it is not a simple accidental fact that tantra is one of the constant references of the cyberspace New Age ideologists who insist on the fusion of body and spirituality in the guise of the virtual »incorporeal spiritual body«(253) able to endure extreme pleasures. Our biological body itself is a hardware that needs re-programming through tantra as the new spiritual software to release (unblock) its potentials. Tantra notions are here translated into cyberspeak: phone wires become nadis of the virtual subtle corpus, computer terminals chakras (nodes of energy), the flow of vital prajna the infinite stream of informations - we thus obtain »a cyborgasm that combines the incorruptibility of cyberspace with the most this-worldly sensual pleasure of the self«[5]:

»Real Tantric sex blows your mind completely because it takes you beyond all our conceptions of everyday reality. /.../ Understanding that our bodies are temples for expressing divinity we can /.../ expand, celebrate and share VIBRATIONAL ENGORGEMENT in every cell of our being /.../ blending sex and spirit.«[6]

What we should always bear in mind is that there is nothing »spontaneous« in such transgressive outbursts. A close look demonstrates that we truly enjoy smoking and drinking only in public, as part of a public “carnival,” the sacred suspension of ordinary rules. The same goes even for swearing and sex: none of them is at its most radical an activity in which we “explode” in spontaneous passion against the stifled public conventions – they are, on the contrary, both practiced “against the pleasure principle,” for the gaze of the Other. (A personal note: I like to swear only in public, never in private where I find doing it stupid and inappropriate, indecent even.) Violating the public rules is thus not done by the private ego, but is enjoined by the same public rules which are in themselves redoubled, divided. This is what distinguishes such violations from tolerant wisdom: the stance of tolerant wisdom (like the proverbial Catholic attitude of ignoring – suggesting even – occasional infidelities if they help keeping the marriage) allows for private transgressions, for the transgressions outside the public gaze.[7]

How does one really become adult? By way of knowing when to violate the explicit rule one is committed to. So, with regard to marriage, one can well say that one becomes an adult when one is able to commit adultery. The only proof of reason is occasional laps into “irrationality” (as Hegel knew very well). The only proof of taste is that one knows how to occasionally like things which do not meet the criteria of high taste; the one who strictly follows high taste thereby displays his lack of taste. A person who expresses his admiration for Beethoven’s 9^th symphony or other masterpieces of Western civilization immediately bears witness to his tastelessness – a true taste is displayed by praising a minor work by Beethoven as superior to his “greatest hits,” like Mladen Dolar, an absolute Schubert fan who prefers Schubert’s unknown male-chorus peaces (celebrating hunters’ reunions, etc.) to his much better known songs.

Perhaps, one should turn around the terms of Bertrand Russell’s well-known barber-paradox (does the barber who follows the rule of shaving all the people who do not shave themselves shave himself?) which led him to prohibit self-inclusion, i.e., inconsistent self-redoubling, as the only way to avoid contradiction: what if, on the contrary, the “consistent” sticking to one’s rules which is truly self-contradictory, i.e., which turns into its opposite? (If you want to follow high taste consistently, you display your tastelessness, etc.) And what if the only way to truly be reasonable or to truly display taste is to fully engage in self-redoubling, to self-reflexively violate the rule one follows (to occasionally lap into tastelessness or abandon reason)?

It is as if, in today’s permissive society, transgressive violations are permitted, but in a “privatized” form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of its public-spectacle-ritual dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our private weird practices, but they remain our private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps, one should turn around here the standard formula of fetishist disavowal: “I know very well (to obey the rules), but nonetheless… (I occasionally violate them, since this is part of the rules).” In today’s permissive society, the predominant stance is rather: “I believe (that permanent hedonist transgressions are what makes life worth living), but nonetheless… (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but just a fake coloring which re-asserts the grey social reality.”

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[1] I owe this reference to Proust to Mladen Dolar.

[2] Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la penitence, Paris: Grasset 2006, p. 53.

[3] Poems of Paul Celan, New York: Persea Books 2002, p. 319.

[4] Hugh B. Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press 2003, p. 22, 207.

[5] Urban, op.cit., p. 252-4.

[6] “Sexual Energy Ecstasy,« quoted in op.cit., p. 253.

[7] I rely here on the reflections of Robert Pfaller.