---------- From: John Armitage <john.armitage at unn.ac.uk> Reply-To: John Armitage <john.armitage at unn.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 08:39:55 +0100 To: nettime-l at bbs.thing.net Subject: <nettime> Reply to Zizek
Hi all, Here is a reply to Zizek from John O'Neill, originally posted to the Cyber-Society-Live list.
Some may find it useful. [[THAT WOULD BE KELLEY. ;-) -- JF]]
Best wishes
John ================================================= DESERTING THE REAL / GOING TO THE MOVIES
John O'Neill
Should we run into the movie house with S/Z every time we see something on TV? Don't we miss TV's attempt to make a movie that we are just about to see but for which its commentators lack narrative power?
(1) We know what hit WTC and possibly who --but we don't know what WTC is nor who we are;
(2) If we pair WTC and WTO we get a better sense of them and ourselves, recalling their contested status in protests played out world-wide (Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa) beyond the newly improvised walls of capital democracy;
(3) If we twin the WTC towers with WTO, we achieve intellectual perspective by connecting iconology to the material practices of global capitalism. The WTC was a glass house of capital brains and bodies, young, powerful, plugged into money, style, and the nomadic life of the twenty/eighty split that rules symbolic capitalism's division of social labour into highly and lowly valued services;
(4) The terrible destruction of WTC demands in the first instance that its bodies be Americanized, familized and averaged into "anyone of us". At the same time, there is staged the recovery of these bodies by civic bodies (firemen / women, police men and women, security men and women and other citizens willing to sacrifice themselves on behalf of capital bodies who at other times seek to be unburdened by such duties, charity, and the taxes that underwrite these municipal services.
(5) The critical challenge is to connect the intellectual perspective we might gain with the moral perspective offered to us in the scenes of extraordinary civic responses to the disaster which fell upon New York and Washington. TV is witness to these moral events but lacks any liturgical knowledge to fill in its otherwise empty icons whose endless repetition begins to numb our minds and hearts. Perhaps this is because we know our resolve to learn from them is weak and soon overwhelmed with cries for revenge that do not close the wound but keep it open for ever;
(6) Any pop commentary, eked out by comparing movies to movies, is weak in its response to civic events that require us to think through the daily toll upon workers, families and communities. It is they who bear the human capital sacrifice that calls for witness at the site of WTC. Here the hidden injuries of modernity mark us all.
(7) It is a conceit of commentary that the world's integrity can be filtered through its analysts and anchor persons whereas it is the inalienable gift of everyone who lent a hand to anyone else in need. The catastrophic events that opened this week also tore out of us an unfinished prayer to anyone's god anywhere......It is in the silence of those gods that we must learn to think and to hold together.
John O'Neill Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology 227 Founders College, York University, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada (Home) 416-653-8838 (Office) 416-736-5148
(Fax) 416-653-7323
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