Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom (Zizek/Lacan 1)

For some time, I’ve been contemplating a series of posts inspired by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, and today I ran across a passage that seemed perfect for getting started. Most of the posts will concern film, but this one touches on the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the resulting protests and continuing debate (explainer).

Looking Awry was first published in 1992, but the paragraph I want to discuss reads as if written with the controversies surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others in mind. It begins with the following:

“There is, perhaps, an experience in the field of politics that entails a kind of ‘identification with the symptom’: the well-known pathetic experience ‘We are all that!,” the experience of identification when we are confronted with a phenomenon that functions as an intrusion of unbearable truth, as an index of the fact that the social mechanism ‘doesn’t work.’”

According to Zizek, successful psychoanalysis sometimes ends with the analysand clinging to something that represents the very problem. This is what is meant by “identification with the symptom.” He makes the example of a character in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Robbers force the character in his youth to play the harmonica even as he must participate in his own brother’s murder. The incident emotionally unhinges the boy, and from that time forward, the only thing that holds him together is playing the harmonica, the very item that ties him to his brother’s death.

Zizek draws an analogy to a similar phenomenon on a social scale and Ferguson is exactly such a traumatic event. Discomforting yet undeniable truths have come to light, showing us that our society is broken. The original event presents us with our broken justice system, especially with regard to young black men, and the resulting controversy brings out the worst American society has to offer: fetishization of violence and enduring racism. Even now as more evidence has come to light and the police themselves have admitted Officer Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown as he was running away, the trolls are out there blaming the victim.

Zizek uses anti-Semitism as an example to elicit a number of attitudes one may take when faced with such an “unbearable truth,” and eventually arrives at one that has been openly adopted and employed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown shootings:

“Let us take, for example, Jew-baiting riots. A whole network of strategies—simple ignorance; treating it as some deplorable horror that does not, however, really concern us . . . ; ‘sincere compassion’ for the victims—allow us to evade the fact that the persecution of Jews pertains to a certain repressed truth of our civilization. We attain an authentic attitude only when we arrive at the experience that . . . 'we are all Jews.' And it is the same for all traumatic moments of the intrusion into the social field of some ‘impossible’ kernel that resists integration; ‘We all live in Chernobyl!,” “We are all boat people!,” and so on.” (boldface mine)

This is exactly what we have seen in the “I am Trayvon Martin” and “I am Mike Brown” movements, whether it be hashtags using those words on Twitter, wearing hoodies, or confronting the police with your hands in the air. In all these cases, a number of people confronted with the usually hidden dark side of their society react not by denying the reality of the dark side, but by identifying with it, recognizing that it belongs to them, too.

The passage continues with a return to more psychoanalytic terminology:

“Apropos of these cases, it should also be clear how ‘identification with the symptom’ is correlated with ‘going through the fantasy’: by means of such an identification with the (social) symptom, we traverse and subvert the fantasy frame that determines the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society.”

In other words, we abandon the fantasy version of our society, the one that we usually hold, according to which police officers are always kindly gents who lend a helping hand, the courts never fail to deliver a just sentence, and people of all races experience equal opportunity and success. Instead, we recognize--because some blight that was always there has raised its ugly head--that this vision of our world is a fiction that serves as palliative. In reality, sometimes police officers shoot unarmed teens as they run away and that is just the beginning of the disgrace to our systems of power, to our nation, and to ourselves.

This transformation of consciousness is integral for positive change and healing.

My posts on Looking Awry are likely to be more of a learning experiment than any statement of my own original ideas. I find both Zizek and Lacan to be difficult to grasp, but hopefully I can learn something while writing about them, and without mucking up the concepts too much. In any case, the above passage of Zizek’s seemed so applicable to Ferguson that I felt compelled to return to this troubling event.

 

A Gatsbean Odyssey: The American Dream (7/7)

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

1925. 1968. 1971. 2014. Here we are 92 years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, 46 after the crest of the 1960s countercultural movement, and 43 after the appearance of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and what of the American Dream now?

If we define the American Dream as the ability of anyone to become anything they want and we measure that dream by upward mobility and a growing middle class, the obvious answer is that it is endangered. Every statistic that hasn’t been cooked by a conservative think tank so it can be pushed by a con-artist politician indicates a now decades-long trend of the vast majority of folk working harder for less. Meanwhile, the upper crust are looking a lot more like their counterparts in Gatsby’s day: beyond reach.

Economists tell us economic collapses are cyclical, so there will be more. As the Great Recession that began in 2008 taught us, the individuals and institutions where wealth has accumulated the most are largely immune. A couple years later, the very designers of the crisis begin posting record profits and raising executive compensation to new levels. This isn’t the old money of the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby, it’s the new money of Wall Street, but in the 21st Century, those with it are much like the Buchanans in that they ruin lives and then withdraw behind their money.

But seeing the American Dream in terms of money and what it can buy, whether goods or good times, is part of the problem. Against it, Fitzgerald offers Gatsby’s incredible self-control and aptitude for self-reinvention, and Thompson offers the liberating movements of the Sixties. Neither seemed to believe the orthodox American Dream--the pursuit of money--had much to offer in the way of personal fulfillment.

What is available to us today as a counter-American Dream? Money and technology dominate our lives more than ever, and ever since the rise of capitalism, increasingly the only means of fighting back are part of the very system that is the problem. Many intellectuals of the left, since at least the Frankfurt School, have been skeptical that any significant revolution, even spiritual, is possible under such conditions, but perhaps social improvement can be made in small increments.

It’s better than nothing. And if I learned anything wrestling with Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy, it is that progressive change is part of that peculiarly American brand of philosophy known as pragmatism. So perhaps there is hope for us as Americans and we are not doomed, like Gatsby reaching for the green light on Daisy’s pier, to never grasp what we seek.

 

And with that, I return to Ithaca, hopefully having achieved a better understanding of The Great Gatsby. Odysseus had a lot of work to do after his return, and I doubt I am done with The Great Gatsby, but for the present, I’m content to put the book back on the shelf.

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: Where the Beasts Roam (6/7)

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”  –Dr. Johnson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

My copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas looks like this:

 

And it says it right there on the cover:

“A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”

This is the essence of The Great Gatsby, and I guess I knew it all along. I knew Jay Gatsby was a man in search of the American Dream because English teachers had told me so, as had every introduction to every copy of the book I’ve ever read. I knew it, but I didn’t really know it. I didn’t grasp it. I didn’t have it by the ears.

At least not until I embarked on this study.

The Great Gatsby presents two visions of the American Dream, one ideal and the other real. The ideal vision is exemplified by Gatsby’s superior characteristics. Taking him for a superman wasn’t entirely wrong, for he truly is a marvel of intelligence, talent and optimism. Given an honest chance, he would certainly succeed. To this extent, he represents what every good American is told from birth: with hard work, you can be anything you want.

But Gatsby also represents the reality of the American Dream: money and fun by any means. His astronomical wealth comes from illegal activities conducted with the likes of Meyer Wolfshiem, a man with whom you would not trust your children. As for fun, Gatsby himself has little of it, but he provides it for others through his parties, where everyone behaves like there’s no tomorrow. They get drunk and dance wildly, they make out and fight, they ogle and gossip, they collapse in piles of giggles and sweat.

In short, they act like beasts.

I was stunned when I realized that this is exactly what occurs throughout most of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson was showing us the same reality of the pursuit of the American dream--only 50 years further down the spiral. The alcohol is still there, but now there’s a lot more to mess you up:

“The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”

And the effects on human dignity are no better:

“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.”

Just as in The Great Gatsby, Thompson’s novel shows us a nation teeming with the frenzied pursuit of money and fun by any means. Alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, hustling . . .  This is how you attempt to reach out and grab the American Dream by the nuts. But it seems to do about as much good as the hijinks of Fitzgerald’s revelers. Like all roads to Las Vegas, these means lead nowhere.

 

Nowhere good, anyway.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also presents the ideal of the American Dream. Thompson touches upon it in random, brief, melancholy moments of clarity. His vision of it, however, shares little with Fitzgerald’s. Instead of Gatsby’s industriousness and self-control, it is freedom of spirit, a spirit Thompson had glimpsed in the 60s and seen disappear in the Nixon years:

 

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: Fear and Loathing (5/7)

 

I feel closer to understanding The Great Gatsby now, but first the journey must get weirder. Our odyssey has reached the land of the Lotus Eaters, only instead of idylls, the drugs here induce paranoid ravings, for the legendary substance abuser Hunter S. Thomson held The Great Gatsby in the highest regard. His own attempt at the Great American Novel was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so now I turn to this unlikely companion for help in understanding Fitzgerald’s work.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is another book that I failed to understand at first. As with The Great Gatsby, my difficulty stemmed from authorial intention. In The Great Gatsby, I thought Fitzgerald intended Jay Gatsby to represent the ideal man, but he turned out to be a crook. On my first reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I thought Thompson was presenting a nightmare America he despised, yet in his own life he exemplified the drug-induced lunacy of his alter ego Duke in the novel.

Two books. Two mysteries.

And yet, with the connection to Hunter S. Thompson I feel my first frisson of understanding. It comes with a simple and perhaps not even essential insight: Fitzgerald liked fantasy, specifically modern fantasy.

In this, he is like Hunter S. Thompson, whose love of fantasy--often hallucinatory--is hard to miss. The bat scene on the first page of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one that has crept into the popular consciousness, if only through the film starring Johnny Depp and homages like “Bat Country” by Avenged Sevenfold:

“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’”

At first glance, F. Scott Fitzgerald would seem leagues from this. We associate him with early 20th-Century America, expats in Paris, the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, swingin’ jazz, and swank parties where everyone drinks highballs or absinthe.

For me, however, there has always been a fly in this ointment. Gatsby’s mansion, his parties, his staggering wealth always seemed unbelievable, even by pre-Black Tuesday standards. I now suspect this is because Fitzgerald was presenting a fanciful picture of wealth.

This made Baz Luhrmann, visionary director of Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001), a fitting choice for a new film adaptation. The parties at Gatsby’s begin as one hell of a house party, then morph into an MDMA-infused rave on a downward spiral to lethargic nightmare. Women wearing massive plumage, giant champagne bottles that pour glitter, a “dubious descendant of Beethoven” emoting on a gilded pipe organ, poolside dance parties with blow-up zebra pool toys, trapeze artists drifting through seas of balloons, a jazz history of the world accompanying fireworks . . . Luhrmann lets it all out.

 

That Fitzgerald wrote fantasy should be obvious. After all, he wrote The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, about a family living in extravagant wealth atop a secret mountain-sized diamond, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who ages backwards. The Great Gatsby is not as fantastical as those stories, but it has a dash of that aesthetic, and identifying that removes one of my biggest obstacles to feeling as if I understand the book.

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: American Modernity (4/7)

We tend to see The Great Gatsby as a picture of the 1920s, but backwards through the lens of the present. We focus on what characterizes the past for us in retrospect, but we might try to see what was significant to Fitzgerald writing from within those times. The introduction by Guy Reynolds to my copy of The Great Gatsby does this nicely:

“Fitzgerald was born into the America of the horse, gaslight and railroad, but by 1925 the world was made of electricity, cars and telephones.”

When we encounter The Great Gatsby, we focus on bootleggers, speakeasies, flappers, big-band jazz and kooky dances, but Reynolds shows how Fitzgerald was also focused on technology: telephones, photography, cinema, home appliances, motor cars, skyscrapers and artificial illumination. Whereas Georgie in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons could scoff at horseless carriages as a newfangled invention that would soon fade away, cars in The Great Gatsby are undeniably here to stay, they are ubiquitous, and they are part of the pulse of city.

Fitzgerald is also focused on money, class disparity, the fabulous excess of capitalism high on financial speculation, and the dishonest who thrive in such a climate. Reynolds sums up as follows:

“In The Great Gatsby the American is a [cheating] sportsman, a stockbroker or a crook inhabiting a fluid, mobile, society.”

Fitzgerald’s attitude toward his times was cynical. Reynolds has a number of great phrases describing what the author saw: “dizzying, narcissistic wealth and its sudden corruption,” “febrile superficiality,” “glamour, allure and ultimate artificiality,” “consumerisation of the self,” “trickery, imposture and conning,” “fetishisation of good clothes” and “conspicuous consumption.” Luhrmann highlights these themes by adorning his film with hip-hop music from artists like Jay-Z who are known for their celebration of extravagant wealth.

 

Jay-Z's "$100 Bill":

 

The use of a music genre that didn’t even exist in Fitzgerald’s day doesn’t clash with the subject matter because America today is so similar. The technology may have changed, but the powerful role played by technology and money in our society has not. If there is a big difference, it is that we the normal people are more jaded than the characters in Fitzgerald: We know their world crashes.

 

And soon.

America had bought the ticket, and beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, it had to take the ride.

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: The Compact Marvel (3/7)

Structurally, there is no doubt The Great Gatsby is a compact marvel. Watching Baz Luhrmann’s film, I was struck by the mirroring love triangles. One is the married couple Tom and Daisy plus Tom’s lover Myrtle. The other is Tom and Daisy plus Daisy’s love Gatsby. Each extramarital couple engages in a tryst, and Nick Carraway is an observer on both occasions.

These similar affairs are also contrasted. Socially, Tom reaches down to Myrtle, while Gatsby reaches up for Daisy. When the former meet, it is a haphazard and drunken affair that, at least in Luhrmann’s treatment, includes noisy screwing. When Gatsby arranges to meet Daisy, the reunion is tightly choreographed and leads to quiet conversation. These encounters show the difference in the two men’s characters: Tom loses his temper and grows violent, but Gatsby maintains control even under duress.

Fitzgerald and his cinematic interpreters also make heavy use of echoes. Tom and Daisy’s marriage is regularly interrupted by phone calls from his mistress. Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship is disturbed by phone calls from his business partners. When Nick first attends a party at Gatsby’s mansion, he witnesses a fender-bender involving drunken revelers, and of course, this is foreshadowing for the deadly accident toward the end.

The latter accident is a good car accident. The Car Accident has long been a deus ex machina for many a pretentious author and filmmaker. Just when all the plots and subplots have tied themselves into a knot--bam!--one of the characters is in a car accident. It’s shocking, tragic, easy and can cut through any dramatic impasse. Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but in The Art of Fiction she wrote that random accidents are the perfect tool for a lazy writer, and she was right.

The Car Accident in The Great Gatsby is coincidental, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere for the reader because Fitzgerald has laid groundwork. As mentioned, a previous accident foreshadows it, and automobiles and the danger they present appear as a motif throughout the book, such as when Gatsby takes Carraway for a wild ride into the city. Decisions made by various characters lead to the victim running out into the street, as well as to who is riding with whom and who is driving when the hit-and-run occurs. Then, the accident itself leads the characters to decisions that further define them.

Also skillful is the pairing of opposites through which Fitzgerald pulled within this book as much of Roaring-Twenties America as possible: fidelity and infidelity, self-control and self-abandonment, true love and false, city and country, black and white, rich and poor.

All of that is very well and good, but marveling at the structure of a book isn’t the same as grasping its essence. Like Odysseus, I’m still trapped in the darkness of the giant’s lair, wracking my brains for a way into the light.

A cover from 1925:

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: Failed by Its Characters? (2/7)

The disjointed central character of The Great Gatsby is a good indication of the overall workmanship of the novel and has at times made me doubt its quality. My copy of the book is only 115 pages, which makes this Great American Novel a Mini Great American Novel. But is it actually great?

My copy of The Great Gatsby:

 

 

Sometimes, I think The Great Gatsby is failed by its characters. I have already discussed the opacity of the great Gatsby himself, but he is not the only character to present obstacles to understanding this stubborn book.

A prime example is Daisy Buchanan. As the love of Jay Gatsby’s life, the one he has spent five years striving to obtain, we might expect her to be an outstanding example of feminine virtue, but she invariably has something maddeningly superficial to say. One of the most baffling is while she is hanging with Gatsby at his house and reveling in the wonders of his wardrobe:

"’They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’"

Perhaps there is something beneath the vapid façade. Indeed, Carey Mulligan is such a fine actress that she invests the scene with real emotion in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation, but can she save the character from its source material? When Daisy says that every girl must learn to be a “beautiful little fool,” this may be an indication that she has adopted such a mask merely to satisfy society’s demands, but Daisy always seems to me to be nothing more than that, so that it isn’t a mask at all, but who she really is.

Daisy is not only hard to read, she is also unlikable--and The Great Gatsby has more where she came from. Perhaps the most unlikable is her husband Tom. He’s a big, strapping, gruff and dumb polo player, vain and short-tempered. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’s a philanderer, a woman–beater and a white supremacist. But he’s rich, which means he can get away with it. When all has come to pass, Nick Carraway has a perfect description of the Buchanans:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

This description fits Daisy’s friend Jordan perfectly. She’s a well-known golfer who is prone to cheating. Nonetheless, I always find her to be the book’s most likable character. I sense that somewhere inside she is weary of the upper class and in her own clumsy way is begging Carraway to take her away. She is the book’s most sympathetic character, and Luhrmann’s film suffers for showing so little of her.

Ahh, the perfection of Lois Chiles as Jordan in the 1974 film . . .

 

But maybe I have this all wrong. After all, Jordan is not the only character with a good side. Perhaps the book works precisely because of its characters, even the same obtuse and unlikable ones.

Tom Buchanan is the perfect example. Despite his massive failings, his love for the mechanic’s wife Myrtle is touching. She is more to him than an easy lay. She is an escape from the quaint, sanitized, polite and restrained existence of his class. She is something visceral, and when he loses her, his grief is genuine.

Tom is a perfect example of how a number of the book’s characters at first appear flat but are actually multifaceted. This makes them hard to grasp but also intriguing. Perhaps that is what calls readers like myself back to the book again and again.

 

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