Meaning Beyond Question, or: Even if there is no God, there is a God.

Uno:

You’ll have to forgive me, this has become quite bloated. I’ve interspersed hilarious Spanish numbers as segment headings. Watch this:

This is an article about how music like the above is neo-atheist-Christian propaganda designed to sell you the concept of an external, immortal soul, manifested in the form of bright lights and light Indie music, and what that means for you.

In what I imagine is going to become a kind of tradition for me, I will quote Zizek:

“Western Liberals changed this into a cultural problem, like those stupid posters that you have here, you know – a cat, and a dog, live together – why can’t you live together? My God, because you are NOT cats and dogs!”

But why DO they live together? Because there is an owner, a power over them which they both recognise as being completely real. Contingent, possibly – I never saw a cat attend a funeral or refuse to take a new owner – but still completely real.

The Other, in Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan , is the place where things are recorded. Through language, we come to appreciate the notion of a world that includes us, but exists semi-independently of us; a world of words, of information, which concerns us and over which we have only marginal control. What I am saying is, through language we appreciate the notion of Truth.

But what is the Truth? For Religion, as far as I can see, the truth of a person is their Soul. Your Soul is what is recorded by the Other, by God. Everything you do, think, say, feel, is recorded in your soul – but the soul serves another crucial purpose: it has its own characteristics, needs, qualities. The Soul is more than you. (If we’re being Lacanians, the Soul is the objet petit-a within yourself that God perceives.) The soul is who you “truly are,” who you are for God – the Soul is the gaze of the superego, its appraisal. And it’s not just religious – it embraces all kinds of existential questions: “Am I truly a man?”; “Am I a Good Person?”; “Is she Out Of My League?”

(Again, for Lacanians, this can be interpreted as: “Does the Other desire my Soul? What does the Other want? Am I good enough?” – and that “I” is always a fixed, static image.)

Dos:

The notion of the Soul hasn’t gone away with atheism. There is always something there, some idea that you have True Self which can be Good, or Bad, independently of you – some incredible machine that you can easily fuck up or destroy. (And the threat that we’ll fuck it up has been levied successfully and effectively against us for thousands of years.) The Soul is marketed to us nowadays in a very complicated way, through the creation of meanings – the advert-talk of “moments,” (“your Kodak moment”) of “bright lights” (which, you’ll notice, appear now in EVERY song, in the lyrics or the video) – meanings that reference an externalised, “true” version of yourself. The Soul is evoked constantly.

And for the Soul to exist, there must be some support for its existence, an Other, a God. This God has been outsourced to some extent, either out into the world or into a dark, fetishistic black hole within the person. You can tell this by where someone gets their enjoyment – the two kinds of Narcissism, inward and outward. In bright lights or Being A Good Person or caring, it’s there – or it’s there in your fantasies about murdering other people, taking the place of the Other, fucking their Souls, what-have-you. (And don’t tell me that the idea of having some perfect moment with a woman isn’t possibly simply a desire to have sex with their immortal Soul.)

So the God is the place where the Truth is. This is what Lacan called the paranoiac basis of knowledge – all knowledge presupposes something to keep it True, to keep it correct. Some central agency that contains all the truths, towards which we work. In a sense, as we find things out, we slowly remove the veils from the Other.

But this is still slavery. Slavery to a “True Reality” superimposed upon the Real. Cats and Dogs live together because they are slaves. This, I think, is what Nietzsche was trying to get at.

But Lacan added another point – the Other doesn’t exist. It’s not real. Like the brilliant post on this website about the short film Waster – our inability to accept futility is our downfall. The man in the video is working towards his soul, trying to find out some phantasmal truth. And the only other option, perhaps, is to kill himself – to accept his futility and act on it.

The third option, I think, is to make a distinction: not to kill himself, but to kill his Soul. And thereby to kill God. Grab your backfiring guns and double-edged swords, y’all.

Tres:

The Soul comes from our fixation with still images – the grotesque pictures we get when we pause a video mid-play – fixed images of ourself. Every symptom is a kind of fixed image, something stagnant, stale and dead. And if we are, in true Zen tradition, to cease to be things and become occurrences (in Alan Watts’ kind of terms, not to be a person but to be a person-ing of nature) and transitory things, we must forget our obsession with still images and Souls.

And once we are able to do that, perhaps, we become, in the true Deleuzian sense, machines. Machines for going to the Moon, or helping people, or killing them.

Music like the above, the Ellie Goulding music and the majority of modern music, evokes the notion of an ideal self, a Soul, through a series of carefully designed still images, because this is that is what the creators of the music think you want to hear. You are important here, listen to the music: you can tell. It’s all for you. That’s why it’s so interchangeable: you’re being cold-read. You want to believe that there is some accessible, perfect version of yourself, and they want you to fetishize this: to adopt a Master-Slave relationship in which aligning yourself with an external aesthetic allows you a kind of existential freedom. If there is a Soul, you are protected: “I can do this, I can kill these Jews or undergo an Inquisition because it’s not how I really am. I know how I really am.”

This is the appeal to History. It’s what the SS were told: “We know this is tough. This is hard. This won’t be in the history books, the terrible things you did. But it needs to be done.” Or – in the Real History, in the Real Gaze, you will be seen, and take note of, and your Soul will prevail because the gaze wants you, it desires you, it needs you. You are its objet-a. It’s like that for Kierkegaard: far worse than sinning, being bad, being punished, is being forgotten – losing your soul altogether. Not being desired by the Other, for reward OR punishment.

Zizek goes on: “What I hate is when people impose their dreams on others, and when their dreams don’t function – they blame you, primitives! You know, the poster – this is the result. What’s wrong with that poster: “A dog and a cat, they can live together, why can’t you?” Well we all know, dogs and cats, they cannot live together. It’s a very bad, racist example: you need a lot of training to make them live together. They treat you like spoiled, primitive half-natural children, whom the benevolent Western trainers should teach to live together. And my answer to that poster is that you should move the camera twenty, thirty meters back, so that you see all the trainers and the whips who are controlling the cat and the dog!”

The psychotic position, in simple terms, is the attempt to take the place of the Other in the Real. To, in effect, enter into the hallowed temple and shit all over the walls, do something – anything – to change reality. In Norman Bates’ case, the Master, the Other, was his mother, dictating to her neurotic, miserable son what he “truly” was through insults, characterizations, innuendo. And when he tried to become her, he not only inherited her power over his reality, but also her madness, her insanity. And when we, too, try to force our dreams on others, when we adopt the doctrine of a Soul, when we think we know what should happen in the East, how people should act in Afghanistan, for example, or in Serbia or Kosovo – we should ask ourselves the question, what exactly is this shadow that seems to lurk over there, and what madness do we inherit by trying to take its place. And why do we try? For ourselves? For our souls? To try to change what we “truly are”?

When I say that we inherit something from the Other when we try to take its place, I am saying that the dialectic of the Master/Slave that is encircled by the Other, of which the Other is one pole in relation to the subject – this dialectic is frozen in place by the notion of the Soul, and becomes a kind of symptom. But the Soul must exist in order for it to function – once again, in true Deleuzian sense: a machine that has to break down in order to function at all. And the actions that take place when we try to become the Other, to control, to take a place in the dialectic that is not ours, – when we try to do this, the actions are not our own. The symptom is speaking, or acting. The machine, in a sense, is jammed.

Kator-hey:

Zizek: “Till now, we had two main parties – centre-right, a centre-left party, exchanging power in some regular electoral rhythm. Now, more and more, one party is emerging as THE party of the existing liberal-capitalist democratic order. Normally it’s a pro-capitalist party, but at the same time, socially relatively progressive, for gay rights, abortion, whatever you want. And then, the only real opposition, the only opponent which really introduces passion, are no longer leftists, but some kind of anti-immigrant populist nationalists.”

To take England as an example, we have three parties, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal. In the recent election, the leaders of each party stood in front of a large audience and answered questions. Their answers were fairly similar, pausing only to halt on a matter like nuclear arms, or a specific facet of social care. What was happening was what came after Thatcher, as the nineties began – consensus politics. The three parties had merged into one, and the ultimate outcome was a stalemate between the Conservatives and the Liberals, probably largely precipitated by the fact that the Labour leader was a bumbling, po-faced arsehole.

It wasn’t that there were no longer any conflicting ideologies. It was that there was only one ideology, and three very similar interpretations of it. There was no passion or fire or idealism, or even any real down-dirty pragmatism – there was only an appeal by each of them to a general interest, a common sense of Good and Bad, a purely ideological sense. This is all the Soul – the idea was, with this election, that the leader would be determined not so much on specific elements of policy, but on how well they articulated their position in an externalised world of Truth, a world of “what is really happening.”

One of the leaders, I think it was the Liberal, actually coined the phrase “alarm clock Britain,” to refer to the majority of people who get up early to go to work. Once again, evoking still images of Souls in order to appeal to some kind of innate “Truth.” The irony was that shortly after a coalition was formed, the Liberals fell into heavy disrepute, breaking a major policy promise.

What am I trying to say here? All I am trying to get at, with all this talk about Souls and the Other and God, is that the ideological political space, the idea of a consensus-governed Truth About What’s Really, Really Going On, is a religious phantasm. Where the quote from Zizek comes into it is here: if we monopolize these concepts of Truth, if we try to “spread Democracy” by utterly and completely convincing people with our exported culture and our high ideas that it is Definitely Right, the only opposition will be to radically and completely reject ALL Westernisation. Even in the West. And this takes interesting forms. If I am right, then they are right also, – right about there still being Crusades. We are still trying to reclaim something from them that we feel is ours, that concerns us.

And as for the East, our wars – if we want to create a democratic Gulf, a democratic East – well, it’s just like that poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, by Cavafy. A democracy like ours always needs something in order to keep it going, – either it exists in a kind of dialectic with an ourside world, or it becomes frozen into a symptotic still image. Or: Either the evil is outside of it, or it takes the evil into itself.

Chinko:

The question is, if we need them to be like they are in order for us to be democratic, what will we need to be in order for them to be democratic? Or is that an impossibility altogether? If we need their gaze as the Other, the Barbarian Other, in order to consolidate ourselves into its Superego – well, Comus said on my last article:

“So the problem with parents who are indecisive, who load the responsibility to the child, who are violent and can’t control their impulses, is that the child will have to become the superego to the parents. This process is not allowed to generate naturally but is being forced, leaving the child in an unsustainable situation. In other words, unlike the optimal development, where the master is replaced, and the parent slowly diluted, here the parent is the slave. The child is not a superego to him-/herself but to the parents. Stage is all set for the neurotic or depressive positions.” (Is it that the child HAS to – or DECIDES to? Wants to? Intends to?)

If we need the gaze of the East as a kind of way to reach the Other – if we need it to be a slave also, to something else, to “fundamentalism,” or “insanity,” or “endemic ancient Eastern brutal blood-feuds,” – then in the process of trying to achieve our goal with them, we’ll have to switch places. A concept is re-emerging: The concept of the wise Eastern sage with his pipe and his Koran, and us with our stupid lives, lacking in spirit, working away. If the Other is this subterranean, evil spirit of patriarchal fundamentalism, and the East is a puppet, a parent whose violence we feel we must control, then in the process of controlling that violence we lose ourselves. We colonize their planet by taking the atmosphere from our own, by tearing apart our buildings to furnish theirs.

Like Norman Bates, we try to share power with the Mother in order to get rid of her, and end up becoming her ourselves. Not in reality, but in that “real world” of Truth.

And we end with Unthinkable, the 2011 movie about a man who is brave and loyal and a fundamentalist, a man who has a Soul, blowing up nuclear bombs in crowded downtown basements because That’s What He Has To Do, and Who Are We To Stop It? You can pratically hear his inner monologue: it’s all sitar music and ghazals. We’re already taking ourselves apart, starting with the intelligentsia and working our way downwards to the people who listen to Ellie Goulding and accept Comic Relief’s mixture of jocularity and vivid tragiporn offhand as something inherently good and beyond analysis.

In short, we are ceasing to look, and now being looked at. – and in being looked at, we are told that what we are seeing in the television, the tragedy, is nothing more than the reflections in the eyes of those who observe us.

- And I think the fascination with the East, this unconscious notion that They might be right, that America is just a doomed, dysfunctional quasi-master tired of itself and waiting fetishistically to be overthrown, expressed itself quite well. “Obama’s dead?”

Six:

Here’s where it all comes together. The problem I have with “bright lights” is that they place meaning beyond question – something is meaningful, you just FEEL it, and so it’s meaningful. Meaning is something you feel, not something to be analyzed or understood. Popular science programs do this too – they imply heavily that the universe is meaningful, simply because of its size, its vastness, its complexity. It is a meaning beyond question, necessarily. Any explanation is simply a furthering of the initial statement: “It’s meaningful because it’s so big! You’re so small!” This is how it is with a lot of meanings. “Love is just… good!”

This is the Soul. It is meaning beyond question, something that refuses to be analyzed. “I’m just trying to have fun”; “I’m just trying to do what I think is right.” They have a way of reducing analysis to nothing by making it a purely scientific goal, completely depoliticizing it while at the same time over-politicizing it. For example: “Science, analysis about who we are, will simply teach us how special and unique we are. But it will also show us how we should live. (Because Religion is illogical and wrong.)”

If there is a You that is not here, a You on another level – and that’s what adverts want you to think, because it’s easier to sell you the idea of an experience than the experience itself, and you don’t want to have to soul-search in order to remove yourself from the terrorisation of others’ deams – then there will be problems. You come to hate your boring life, to see it as one constant sin against who you Ought To Be, and in your frantic desire to redeem yourself you begin to tear apart all the things your fathers and the Masters built before you, in order to recast them as slaves in order to praise a new master, a meaning beyond question. (“Everyone in history was wrong whom we do not actively recast in the spirit of our own times.”)

And it’s not a person. It’s not the companies. We did this to ourselves. Because in refusing to be the Master, in demanding that someone else take on the burden, – well, you see where I’m going. Let’s wrap this fucker up. Religion is the obsessive iteration and reiteration of the desire of the other, the Rules*, the creation of a soul in the eye of an externalised entitiy who can desire or not desire, but can never be neutral. Why do you think God did all those murders?

(*hint: so was Stalinism.)

Nietzsche: “He who fights monsters, blah. Abyss.”

If we inaugurate this dimension where we are all slaves, all domesticated animals, serving a master whose identity we consolidate by giving ourselves proper names, making ourselves accountable to a True Reality via our souls, (the Ancient Egyptians actually had a specific soul simply for the proper name itself) – if we do this, then we serve a Master. The Master’s gaze upon us is the Soul, the objet petit-a, his fetish inside us, his desire – and our gaze upon him is what we see in him – it is objet petit-a, our desire for him.

What I say about the East is quite simply that if we recognize there some dark object, some shadow – the looming shadow of Fundamentalism – then we must ourselves become the unstable Master that Comus talked about, but also the child who turns himself into a kind of superego. The East has nothing to do with it – (it’s like in movies where a great historical backdrop, like the Cold War, is really an excuse to get two lovers together) – and like a dysfunctional family, we will tear ourselves apart piece-by-piece. Again, in the “real” world of Truth. Not in the actual world, not at first. But soon.

The meaning beyond question is always a fetish, a hollow organizing centre that structures the Master-Slave relationship – a fetish that disguises itself in the same way as the Scientific Method disguises itself as the true discourse: “We have no motive, we are simply looking.” Looking at what, exactly? And what is looking back at you? 

No related posts.