Thoughts on Realism and Solidarity (or, Celebrity Deathmatch: Zizek vs. Chomsky)

Several posts on this blog have discussed 21^st century attempts at realism (Griffin’s post on Zero Dark Thirty, Owen’s post on Syriana, my post on The Wire). That topic is, I think, closely tied to how peoples movements (the current protests in Turkey and Brazil, the Occupy movement etc) are documented and received. In this piece I want to offer my own take on Zero Dark Thirty’s attempt at realism, discuss historicism in Slavoj Zizek’s and Noam Chomsky’s appraisals of protest movements, and tie that in with problems I see with American solidarity with revolutionary movements abroad.

Noam Chomsky

            The first half of Noam Chomsky’s 2010 book “Hopes and Prospects” contains transcripts of talks he gave around Latin America in the four years preceding the book’s publication. One recurrent theme in Chomsky’s work is “historical amnesia”. Chomsky describes the historical trends surrounding American imperialism in Latin America; the US government’s main foreign policy concerns (with that region among others) throughout its history have centered around increasing military surveillance and corporate exploitation. The press, because of “historical amnesia”, ignores rather than documents events (the state-sponsored kidnapping of democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Arstide in 2004, one among countless examples) which would point to easily discernable historical trends in military and corporate interests. In this way, the American view of the world is de-historicized. This jibes with Griffin’s criticism of Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the manhunt for bin Laden; that the film presents “Central Asia as a place where bad things happen”,  “We never get an inkling of perspective on the causes or even many of the consequences of the American war machine”. Because of this lack of historical awareness, the film is a failure as a work of realism. But I think there is more to it than that. If “Zero Dark Thirty” dealt with terrorists and their motives, then history would matter- bin Laden’s rage was mostly directed towards forces of globalization and empire, his religious fervor more of an incidental cultural artifact than a motivating cause. However, the film deals with CIA strategists on the ground- they may be agents of History, but they don’t know they are. They work in an ahistorical world, one where military strategy and goals are designed to line up with the expansion of empire. Chomsky writes, “By the end of WWII… US industrial production more than tripled, while industrial rivals were severely damaged or destroyed. The US had literally half the wealth of the entire world, along with incomparable security and military power, including nuclear weapons. High level planners and foreign policy advisers determined that in the new global system the US should ‘hold unquestioned power’ while ensuring the ‘limitation of any exercise of sovereignty' by states that might interfere with its global designs… Since then, fundamental policies have changed more in tactics than in substance.” Zero Dark Thirty’s realism would have been more than just an affectation if it had confronted the disparity between the moneyed “strategic interests” that deemed the war a useful tool and the CIA operatives who risked life and limb to capture and kill Osama bin Laden- essentially participating in an ideologically constructed narrative rather than a mission of real pertinence. This disparity creates people like (now disgraced) General Stanley McChrystal, who essentially lived to be biographied and had no stake in the war effort, as well as characters like Maya (portrayed by Jessica Chastain), whose insatiable drive to capture and kill bin Laden comes off as increasingly Quixotic as the al Qaeda leader disappears from the headlines.

Slavoj Zizek

            Slovenian philosopher and “Original Gangster” Slavoj Zizek offers a different critique of realism, and his own historicism. He assesses The Wire’s representation of the present and the Occupy movement’s reaction to the present through a Marxist lens. In my post from couple months ago  that dealt with Zizek explicitly I quoted from his book “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”; he stated that The Wire had failed to perform the “formal task” of rendering “in a TV narrative, a universe in which abstraction reigns.” That is, a world where neoliberal economic policies all-too-often (and all-too-arbitrarily) determine the living conditions of entire communities. Zizek, however, doesn’t offer any advice on how to go about fulfilling this “formal task”. His assessment of the Occupy Movement is similarly oracular (and perhaps obtuse). He urges us to look for “signs from the future”, i.e. events in the present that contain kernels of a future beyond capitalism. This line of thought is, I think, dangerously dualistic. Although far from being an orthodox Marxist (socialism or barbarism!, etc) Zizek maintains that our world is determined by our economic-philosophical epoch (in our case, capitalism), and that we ought to look for signs of the coming communist epoch within the present. It is no wonder, given the utterly abstract status he affords capitalism and communism, that he ends his book with theological musings rather than concrete advice for protestors or artists. Zizek’s attempt to tie protest movements from around the world together because of their shared connection to an utopian future rather than their shared interpretation of intolerable aspects of the present is dangerous, if only because it leads to navel-gazing rather than discussion.  Chomsky uses the term “really-existing-capitalism” to refer to the web of strategic interests that determine and interfere with economic practices. Here lies an important distinction between these two thinkers. Chomsky studies unjust tendencies that are continually asserted throughout history and applauds movements that recognize these tendencies and rise up against them, however rudderless the movements themselves are. The tone of his work is detached, yet tentatively optimistic. Zizek, and other strict anti-capitalists, is probably too radical to be widely relatable, and too prone to waxing philosophic about a human condition which claustrophobically oscillates between blindness and fatalism (we're blind to the forces determining us, yet aware that those forces will do us in). Marx wrote that truth is without

 passion and passion is without truth. The stark truths documented by Noam Chomsky bring to light a sea of moral relativism and cynicism that send one on excursions of philosophic passion which contain no essential relation to the truths that launched them. Finding a balance between the soft-spoken pragmatism embodied by Noam Chomsky and the brazen polemics of Zizek is a task for artists who hope to create works of realism as well as revolutionaries striving for a working understanding of the modern situation. Chomsky is occasionally bitterly sarcastic, and Zizek often narrates his own wooly solipsism, but neither of them gives in to those transgressive tendencies as far as I can tell.

         The current protests in Brazil and Turkey were widely reported in a blizzard of articles that were abundantly shared on Facebook. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has essentially turned on his people, mobilizing military forces to violently terrorize peaceful protestors. In Brazil, the government has been more positively (if superficially) engaged. But in both cases, the us vs. them mentality is the product of immediate material conditions, rather than a learned anti-capitalist viewpoint. The struggle in South America is between US-backed elites and peoples movements. For Zizek, capitalism is a transgressive abstract force; for Chomsky, it is a collection of historical tendencies. In Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere, people are standing up and saying “no” to these historical tendencies, which are for them a daily fact of life. 

               In his “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel equates abstraction with indifference; it makes sense then that living in an age where increasing overpopulation and increasing wealth inequality coexist (an increasingly few people who benefit from an economic paradigm are indifferent towards an increasingly huge number of people who are being fucked over by it) creates the impression that we live in a “universe where abstraction reigns”, as Zizek writes. Indifference reigns. Indifference towards historical tendencies. If American liberals are going to attain solidarity with protest movements abroad, it won’t be by occasional memetic appropriations in social media. Either we wait until the material conditions of our lives are determined as starkly as they are for people living in Latin America and Central Asia, or we confront the blithe indifference that exists beneath the surface of mainstream liberal narratives of progress. Otherwise, our solidarity will be worthless at best, toxic at worst.

Zero Dark Thirty: Operation National Catharsis Is in the Motherfucking House

To start off with an appropriately Nixonian passive, a lot has been said about Zero Dark Thirty. Mostly it has to do with whether or not the movie condones torture; there's a welter of opinions on either side of that issue, and I don't want to touch it. Both sides, with the exception of articles by Slavoj Zizek and Kathryn Bigelow, have been sloppy in their reasoning and dishonest in their motivations. What interests me is the broader issue of "normalization": the common axiom is that the question of whether or not it normalizes torture is only pertinent because the movie is brilliant.

And it is: Zero Dark Thirty is an astonishing, terrifying movie, head and shoulders above most of the movies up for Best Picture this year (i.e. the movies that weren't Amour). It's a wildly ambitious film with an icy narrative focus, meticulously shot and designed, emotionally devastating and resonant on a level that few movies even try to approach anymore; at the very least it beats the hell out of Argo's one-liners and cheap tricks. In fact, if Get Your War On didn't exist it might even be the defining statement about the War on Terror.

Movies that attempt to peer into the oily depths of the American psyche have been pretty rare since 9/11, and Zero Dark Thirty occasionally seems to be trying to make up for every inch of lost ground. For hours it feels like the movie's whole mission is to reveal—from the barbed wire and sandbags of the black sites to the intelligence-community jargon of its heroes to, of course, the explicit depiction of waterboarding, the movie dedicates itself to showing us how things really were during the War on Terror. And not only through set pieces like the torture scenes; shots upon shots are crammed with Bush-era kitsch like AIM and old-model Toyotas. The movie frantically tosses things into discourse, knowing that over the course of the ridiculously retro decade it chronicles we got perilously close to complete aesthetic detachment from our own time. Fredric Jameson would probably sniff at the idea that a single movie could restore our culture's sense of its own continuing history, but futile or not, that's exactly what Zero Dark Thirty attempts: a total aesthetic excavation of the last decade, leading effectively right up to yesterday.

The movie focuses so much on this mandate that it narratively obliterates Osama Bin Laden, who is a total cipher throughout the movie. Zero Dark Thirty isn't a story about a hunt, isn't even really a procedural. We never see Jessica Chastain staring murderously at picture of her nemesis, and in fact we never get the sense that Bin Laden is doing very much at all, apart from hiding. The bombings and shootings that dot the film are never really attributed to Bin Laden, or even necessarily to Al Qaeda; in many cases they seem as random as gang violence, just workplace hazards whose narrative function is built on our understanding of Central Asia as a place where bad things happen. The bureaucracy embodied by Chastain's Maya operates in a dangerous environment; there's nothing more than weak implication to blame that danger on Bin Laden. There's no villain, just an environment. The hunt for Bin Laden is just a lens through which we watch that environment develop; more in the tradition of The Godfather than The Battle of Algiers, Zero Dark Thirty is an epic about America.

I'd like to dwell on that word, epic, as the basis for the rest of my analysis, because Zero Dark Thirty, for all its journalistic trappings, is well and truly a myth-making film. In fact, I'd argue that the hyper-journalistic style it affects is a critical tool in its myth-making.

Watching Zero Dark Thirty, as I've said, we're struck with the sense of a massive, disembodied process taking place: the American organization is so big and has tendrils in so many places that it's impossible to reveal all of it from the worm's-eye perspective the movie adopts, and the most it can do is point us, through Maya, at the greatest number of salient details in every scene. We never get an inkling of perspective on the causes or even many of the consequences of the American war machine; word just comes down from on high that torture is out, and so torture is out.

The point, though, is that the disembodied processes that govern life in Zero Dark Thirty start to feel a lot like magic. Their causes are obscure and their effects are unquestionable. American empire moves in mysterious ways. This is what really poisons Zero Dark Thirty: its realism is just a stylistic affectation, skin-deep, like its investigation of changes in American society.

This rule is best demonstrated by its exception, when Maya gets on a helicopter out of Central Asia. In maybe the only overtly "literary" moment in the movie, the pilot asks her where she wants to go next, and she stares at him, baffled, before bursting into agonized tears. This is a mawkish way of getting at the central message of the movie—that there's nowhere to go after we've killed Bin Laden—but it's redeemed by Jessica Chastain's heartbreaking performance. For just a few moments, the movie has the ability to see the forest for the trees, and Maya seems like a national avatar, broken enough by the War on Terror to stand in for all of us. It's raw catharsis, and it's all the more shocking because the only comparable end to a movie we've had for years is in The Social Network, which hinges on our jealousy and contempt for Mark Zuckerberg. Zero Dark Thirty's almost feels redemptive. But even this ending is ultimately hollow, because Maya's ascension to national avatar status comes too late; the whole movie has focused on her as a single actor in a complex system, a rigorously independent character who signifies nothing, and now suddenly she becomes a metaphor. Maybe it feels like a tragedy, but a personal tragedy, not a national one.

And that's the problem with Zero Dark Thirty: it focuses relentlessly on the personal at the expense of the national. The passive-voice ills that befall its antiheroes damage their sensitivities, but like Zizek identified in his review, the movie never gestures towards any damage to a whole ethical system, and certainly never looks for agents to attach to that passive voice. Maya's life is convincingly ruined by her pursuit of Bin Laden and the changing world around her, but the movie never imputes anything more far-reaching than that. The hunt for Bin Laden only hurts Maya, and the movie only lets Maya become a pharmakos at the very end, once the danger of disrupting its gearheaded visual style has passed.

I think this is what the movie's critics must be driving at when they accuse it of "normalization"—the movie's fetish for reporting detail necessarily means taking that detail at face value, seeing it as the inevitable product of social changes beyond our ken. It accepts ethical degradation dutifully, and restricts itself to examining the implications of that degradation insofar as they fit into the lives of its characters.

This is exactly how cultural hegemony works: it makes top-down change seem mythical, necessary and universal, reserving compassion and anger for the smallest and most ineffectual scales. Zero Dark Thirty implies that injustice is systemic and not simply interpersonal, but it's only an implication, and the only responses it can imagine to that systemic injustice are despair or, worse, obedience.

I've taken it for granted that this movie is attempting to make a political statement about the decay of the United States, because despite protests in support of its "apolitical" nature, Bigelow's avowed pacifism and the personal tragedy of the ending convince me that the movie is, if not a social critique, at least social. In this, I think it betrays one of the most disturbing trends in liberal thinking today: even in political movies like Zero Dark Thirty, "systemic injustice" is treated as a basically unknowable force, a fog that hangs in the air or, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, creaks in social machinery that we can't understand. It's de-historicized, de-materialized, turned into magic. This is the failure, both aesthetic and political, of Zero Dark Thirty. For all its reportage, it's really oriented towards mystification, and for all the noise it makes, it's as critical of the bureaucracy as a sheaf of paper in one of Maya's binders.