WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN? Slavoj Zizek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% – can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough – they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

The Shawshank Redemption--Or Stephen King's Perverse Universe

I have always been attracted to Stephen King's stories (and some of the films based on them), but why? On one level King is a genius at creating a literary space of the dark sublime--that is, he composes his narratives in such a way so as to heighten the tension in the plot to its most extreme point or zenith. But then, just as the story reaches for its climax everything turns a 180 and the remainder of the story simply falls into place.

It is this logical unfolding of the plot that makes the story worth your time. But if you notice this attribute in King's pen stroke may in fact be his Achilles' Heel. Why? Because, I think, nearly all of his stories unfold in such logical terms--in terms so perfect that it becomes deeply disturbing if only because they are so clean and, well, perfect. It is this perfect distribution of justice that puts King well within the genre of the fantasmic (fantasy). King is a perfect ideological writer on this score because he's creates his narratives in the perfect four-fold fashion. First, we encounter a middle-class "normal" man/woman with whom we (the reader/viewer) are able to easily relate. Then, the twist happens in King's second movement--a tragic event confronts our innocent character. Moreover, this tragic event creates a series of further events which increase and heighten the original tragic moment until finally...the third stage is ripe: enter the dragon, that is, "the 180" (i.e., the reversal). The forth and final stage happens in nearly mathematical form. What you have here is a simple deduction that in one way or another rights the wrongs.

There is a theological doctrine for this logical movement that "rights the wrongs" called Atonement. King's entire plot, at least in the Shawshank Redemption is obsessed with Atoning --setting the record straight. Yet there are many records that need straightened, but King's "record" is nothing short of "cosmic"; King wants to set the entire world back on the straight record--which said differently is called Justice. The mechanism he employs for achieving cosmic "Justice" follows the Biblical injunction: "what you sow you shall reap". In other words the antagonists in King's stories really do get what they deserve--and they get what they deserve in terms that perfectly correspond to the unjust acts committed against the protagonist. It is this exacting manner of atoning the world back together again that makes the novel/film so satisfying to read/view. And it is this "satisfaction" that clues us into why King's works are so ironic and thus ideological. For this rigid view of "Justice" being served in the narrative simply reproduces a blindness to actually existing unjust actions that happen in the world on a deeper and certainly less mathematical level. In this way, King un-trains the reader/viewer to see views of cosmic atonement in ways that fail to conform to easily discernible corresponding actions that will "set the world back on its just and true course." The underlining problem with King’s theology of Atonement is that it comes over as cliché and analytically perfect and thus insulting to the reader/viewer. It is insulting because it underestimates the intelligence of the reader/viewer by assuming that the world does in fact operate in these perfect terms. So the upshot of King's work is that the reader/viewer is satisfied and insulted at the same time. In this way, King delivers his package to us that gives us a great feeling of pleasure and yet totally cuts us down. Thanks you Mr. King for gracing us with such a gift as this.

Burn After Reading

I just viewed the Coen Brother's film Burn After Reading, and if someone where to hold a .38 to my head and ask me to tell them what this film REALLY means, I would say something like: This film presents America with an ideology without a center-point, which is another way to say that after the unravelling of the Cold War (in which ideology was relatively stable on a basic level) the ideology we are left with is akin to Hitchcock's MacGuffin-Effect but with a twist: A Pure Phallus Signifier that signifies NOTHING at all! The Coen Brother brilliantly weave together two fundamental themes: The first emerges from the unknowability of a women's desires (What does a Women Want?) and the second is the logic of signification grounded in the signifier of the phallus that means nothing at all! But this nothing is that one which all else functions as meaningful signification.

In regards to the first motif viz. the mystery of a women's desire, really does not ever exist (in the Hegelian sense of the intrinsic "In-Itself"). This mysterious drive (of a women's desire) motivates and moves the plot, and it moves in relation to the nothing qua S, that is the subject is the nothing at all. And because the subject (and lets be clear, the subject here is totally male centered) does not exist as a self-referent (or pure signified) it can only be defined in relation to a women's sexual desire.

April Fool's Day!

No doubt, this is Gmail's attempt to pull the old April Fool's Day Joke on us!

Gmail & Time

I wanted to attend to something that struck me strange this morning. As I opened my gmail sign-in page, I was confronted with new magical possibilities packaged up by Gmail. It seems that Gmail now has the power to manipulate time and space, LITERALLY! They're calling this "Gmail Custom Time" which is a program that allows you to date your emails hours before they were even composed. This allows you to have a lapse in memory (about a birthday, an crucial special day etc.) and cover it over.

I cannot help but to draw a theological parallal: It was Augustine, while composing his CONFESSIONS that meditates on the nature of time & memory (something that Henri Bergson does in the 20th century cf. MATTER & MEMORY). For the Bishop of Hippo, memory was only possible as a gift from God: God is the condition of possibility for our very memories, which is why the very act of recalling one's life is already placed in the mode of grace and confession. But here, in a stroke of genius, Gmail is marketing it own divine attributes.

Here is the exact quotation from Gmail!


New! Gmail Custom TimeTM

Ever wish you could go back in time and send that crucial email that could have changed everything -- if only it hadn't slipped your mind? Gmail can now help you with those missed deadlines, missed birthdays and missed opportunities.
Pre-date your messages
You tell us what time you would have wanted your email sent, and we'll take care of the rest. Need an email to arrive 6 hours ago? No problem.

Mark as read or unread
Take sending emails to the past one step further. We let you make emails look like they've been read all along.

Make them count
Use your custom time stamped messages wisely -- each Gmail user gets ten per year.

Worry less
Forget your finance reports. Forget your anniversary. We'll make it look like you remembered.