Screening Žižek: Laconic Axe vs Lobottonised Thought

Screening Žižek: Laconic Axe vs Lobottonised Thought
By Paul Taylor – 28 March, 2012

In the second of his essays on “Screening Thought” Paul Taylor explores the wider constraints imposed on serious thinking by the media. Despite the problems caused by Zizek’s popularity, his celebrity-intellectual persona still retains an important aspect of “the return of the repressed” – abstract thought’s stubborn survival in a heavily mediated age.

In Part One Paul A. Taylor discussed how events like Screening Thought (May 20011 at the ICA, London) demonstrate the difficulty of refocusing the attention of Zizek audiences away from his individual qualities to the substance of his thought. In Part Two Taylor uses the specific experience of Screening Thought as a springboard for exploring the wider constraints imposed on serious thinking by the media.

The Media’s Ideological Wheelbarrow

“There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves … “ (Zizek, Violence: 1)

The media screens thought both literally and figuratively – whilst lots of its lowbrow content does not bear seriously thinking about, more significantly, nominally serious programmes just don’t bear thinking. The most important aspect of the media’s conceptual screening comes, like the wheelbarrow-stealing worker, from the brazenness with which it carries its empty content past its observers.

Even in news or cultural programmes that have pretensions to promote considered analysis, readers should be familiar with these generally unquestioned features of the media grammar that openly structures “serious” coverage:

– time-scales for each item that are so tightly constrained that discussions are routinely truncated with the ubiquitous line: “I’m sorry we’ll have to stop there/that’s all we have time for”

– a disproportionate, sometimes almost exclusive, dependence upon (often crass) visual metaphors and/or verbal puns (Channel 4 News springs to mind)

– the extremely narrow range (in terms of both social and political class) of the “expert” commentators from whom opinions are sought

– the predominantly unquestioned status quo-friendly nature of news content – e.g. prime time medical updates on members of the Royal Family, high-profile obituaries for media personalities/journalists

– the requirement of a topical hook without which an otherwise important story will not register on the media’s radar

– a presenter through whose celebrity persona items are invariably mediated

Zizek’s theory of violence helps to illuminate the profound implications of these otherwise standard operating media procedures. He opens up the common-sense notion of violence to show that whilst we almost exclusively tend to understood the concept in terms of individually identifiable outbursts and destructive acts, in everyday reality, the most pervasively violent aspects of life are actually contained within the only apparently neutral selection processes that determine how that everyday reality is defined in the first place.

Zizek distinguishes between subjective and objective forms of violence and asks us to:

”… learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance … there is a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms … this violence is not only at work in the obvious – and extensively studied – cases of incitement and of the relations of social domination reproduced in our habitual speech forms: there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second, there is what I call ‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” (Violence: 1)

The ‘imposition of a certain universe of meaning’ succinctly describes the ease with which the contemporary media routinely excludes conceptual analysis, not through explicit prohibition, but through its implicit, “natural” functioning. …more