Ben Wright's "Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual," a filmed lecture by Slavoj Zizek.
In the film, the logorrheic Slovenian philosopher discusses the efficacy of the virtual and argues for a rethinking of the categories of materialism and of utopian politics --
by way of the usual references to Donald Rumsfeld, Hollywood Cinema, and chocolate laxatives.
Zizek's writings include Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, and most recently
Daniel Berchenko talks to Ben Wright about the importance of Zizek's work in understanding materialist filmmaking practice, and about the relationship between film and philosophy in general.
First of all, how did this project come about? Why Slavoj Zizek?
This was really very simple, he was doing a
Why Slavoj Zizek? Well his work has been very influential in the project of rethinking psychoanalysis for film theory, and practice, so I was initially interested in the theory as a filmmaker. Until Zizek (together with Joan Copjec and a handful of others), psychoanalysis and particularly Lacan had become a bit of a theoretical spanner in the works for filmmakers I think, it seemed necessary to criticize it without really knowing why it was being talked about in the first place. I think he managed to rework the ideological critique without getting lost in post-structuralist deconstructionism, post-theory, etc., and this has had (or will have had) quite considerable consequences for the thinking of filmmaking as a political practice, Marxist, Feminist or otherwise. Since then things have come a lot further, but that's how I got involved.
Can you tell us a bit about what it was like working with him? Did you find it intimidating, as a filmmaker, to work with someone who claims that “The Sound of Music” is one of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization?
No I don't think so, I actually hadn't seen the film at the time, I watched it afterwards and it’s pretty good - the chief Nazi is also played by [the actor] Ben Wright. Otherwise it was a very enjoyable experience.
How was the film informed by your previous work?
Well, the film is quite different insofar as it can be considered a documentary (this wouldn't be my choice, but it can be). As regards technique I have used the same procedures as ever, The takes are longer here because he has a lot to say (bear in mind an hour is very short for Zizek who has a reputation of talking for hours at a time). Colour film, sync sound and the apparently controversial non-subjective camera are all here. Film has a completely different temporality from that of video (the image and motion also looks very different but that's obvious so I won't go on about it). I see filmmaking more as a staging than a document, regardless of what goes on in front of the camera. It has a temporality which lies somewhere between performance (the image as objective spectacle) and sound which I think is subjective. Perhaps the real of film is to be found in this 'subjectively-objective' temporality or duration. Video is so often used in what is supposed to be a very subjective way, I think as a reaction to its technological nature - that of documenting and recording - however I don't see film as a documentary medium. Even with say, Lumière, the films are a production of a kind of virtual-real which video is not. Because video and TV are constantly used in place of reality and as a document, I think a kind of presupposed denial of duration is already built into the image. This is equivalent to saying that as a medium there is no lack, it's like [Zizek’s example of] chocolate laxative, shoot as much footage as you want because it is already deprived of its dangerous duration, reality TV shows just how dull this flight from reality can get. All the supposedly materialist ideas of demystifying the film process... I think a certain amount of mystification - all that which is cut out before, during and after - is crucial for something of the film to be grasped, in a second stage, as real. Did you see “Eloge de l'Amour” for example, or Steve Dwoskin's last film? Here they have to introduce a lack of reality into the video footage straight away, so it can then be worked on like film.
Why did you choose to employ a non-subjective camera here – long, static shots separated by abrupt cuts and slight changes of position?
In part the technique was inspired by the Lacan films, which I adapted in the way that I thought would suit Slavoj - his manner being very different from Lacan's which is far more theatrical. Most important was the sound, the voice rather than the image, it is first and foremost a film of speech. Secondly the cuts are quite important and the fact that the camera reframes each time - this keeps a sense of duration - you could compare it to the analytic session insofar as he knew roughly how long each session would last but the camera would always have the final say, or myself by punctuating in the editing. I think it works quite well as a structure because each time the question is going to be re-framed he has to summarize so you get a pattern of six summaries which each time reframes not only that section but the whole film, becoming more precise and urgent as time runs out. I have just been reading Agamben's book about
Early in the lecture, Zizek describes the functioning of what he calls “the imaginary-virtual” in our phenomenological experience. The “imaginary-virtual” structures our relationship with people and objects by presenting idealized images of them that erase certain of their features whose presence in our experience of them would be unbearable. As an example, he cites the fact that when interacting with people, we must forget that they are constantly sweating, defecating, etc. In contrast, your film presents Zizek in all of his sweaty, disheveled materiality. Was the tension here intentional – or is Zizek’s appearance just inevitably uncanny?
Ok we didn't turn up the heating on purpose, but to some extent I suppose. Obviously with film there is always the choice of making an image more palatable, but I think this is a less interesting approach. The example of James Joyce which he mentions is interesting in this respect, as Joyce tried precisely to subtract the imaginary dimension from his writings and this passion for the real, it seems, was also characteristic of his sexual life. Lacan in Benoit Jacquot's films was apparently very meticulous about his appearance, performance, script, etc. He says at one point in the film "I am a self-made man," and he was very conscious of constructing a public image of himself, with Zizek perhaps it was more a case of subtracting him from his public image to find the minimal difference between the two.
Zizek also states here that universality, Truth, can only be achieved by adopting a partial, engaged, subjective stance towards a particular event or antagonism (one whose reality is precisely “virtual”). He consistently denies any attempt to grasp situations objectively in their totality. How do you reconcile this stance with the ascesis of your camera, which seems bent on obtaining Truth by abandoning its subjective position?
This is a question of subjectivity. I don't think that just because the camera doesn't move around, it isn't subjective - or that the film isn't subjective. The fantasy that it might be possible to grasp a situation in its totality from an objective point of view (and the opposite tendency of wanting to show that this isn't possible) may well be what leads people to shake their cameras around, cutting manically between multiple psuedo-subjective points of view. Perhaps a good comparison here would be Oliver Stone's film of Castro, “Commandante,” which seems to do pretty much everything to avoid being truly subjective, for a start Oliver Stone is in it, so the director himself is included objectively as the interviewer, then to compensate for the supposed lack of a director he organizes a whole number of cameras to move around all over the place catching each other in the shots which frequently cut between each other, the sound of the cameramen, etc. This is an example of the logic of attempting to grasp situations objectively taken to the extreme - from multiple perspectives all at the same time. I think that this understanding of subjectivity divides the film between the objective image, and the excluded subjective position of exception behind (or even in front of) the camera. The truly universal logic, however, would not presuppose an external point of view at all, but would simply include the director's absence as an authentic subjective position. So to answer the question, I am very much in favour of filmmakers adopting engaged subjective stances with regard to their work, but I think the only way to do this in the technical sense is by resisting the temptation to identify with the camera (or anything else for that matter).
The relationship between film and philosophy is not usually a reciprocal one. Philosophers, and certainly Zizek among them, often interpret films to suit their own ends, but filmmakers rarely engage directly with the work of philosophers and critics. Do you think that it is possible for film to interpret and inflect works of philosophy? If so, how does your film accomplish this in its engagement with Zizek?
I would tend to disagree here, there seems to be a whole wave of films on philosophers at the moment, and we shouldn't forget the good old TV documentary as well. I think that perhaps your question (or at any rate my answer to it) has more to do with the relation between art and philosophy than film in general, however, this does then raise the very interesting question of film as an art form. I'll try and say something about these two points with reference to the philosophy of Alain Badiou (and the French group of which he is part, L'Art du Cinéma) who I think has made some very interesting contributions to this debate. As to the accomplishments of the film in this sense I have no idea - what do you think?
Badiou's idea about the relation (or non-relation) between art and philosophy is that it is one of absolute separation - that art insofar as it has a relation to truth can only be seized by a discourse which is absolutely separate from itself. This is a polemic against the poeticization of philosophy and the blurring of boundaries between art and theory. Art needs philosophical discourse to seize it insofar as it has a relation to truth (and not just experience or perception) just as philosophy needs art as an object which embodies the real of its discourse. However, to come back to the question, I think that film is a very specific kind of art, and the real of film cannot be seized as an object of philosophical discourse in the same way, it is a virtual-real. It can be experienced and perceived but does not exist except as a temporal passing. Badiou has written an article called "Peut-on parler d'un film?" (“Can One Speak About a Film?”) which seems to me an absolutely crucial question to ask, especially as regards film that approaches art. Of course not all films are art, insofar as they tend generally to function, to use Zizek's terminology, only at the levels of virtual-symbolic and virtual-imaginary (for Lacan the cross-section here is that of meaning which has nothing to do with truth or the real). The virtual-real (that which would make it an object of potential philosophical enquiry) would come through adding a level of formalization - this real as a purely formal category. This is very interesting in relation to the history of film and where we stand today, as according to Badiou, it has until relatively recently been divided between the classical narrative (identification, narrative, representation) and its modern formalization to greater and lesser degrees (which includes everything from say Bresson to the pure formalism of the avant-garde). In other words we have in the history of film, first of all, the imaginary and symbolic virtual of classical cinema (identifictation, narrative and representation), and on the other side we have the virtual-real formalization or purification thereof (subtraction of the actor and narrative construction, indiscernibility of fiction and documentary etc.). The question today, is one of adding to this modern formalization, the imaginary and symbolic realities of the world so that there is some new material for the formalization to act upon that is not simply modernity's reaction to the classical schema. Now this material can have content of any type, so long as it isn't art (which includes poetry and the novel (thus literature), theatre (thus acting), painting, etc.) Why must it not be art? Because the modern reaction to the classical
The principle thrust of Zizek’s lecture is that the real is a formal, rather than a material category. The real, the primordial, the essential, is virtual in its being, and only actual in its effects. He therefore argues for a purely formal materialism – one which takes into account the primacy of “pure difference” or what he calls the “structural gap” that inheres in every situation. Do you think that this concept of formal materialism is of any use to materialist filmmaking practice, which in some sense has always given primacy to filmic form as opposed to narrative or representational content?
Yes I think so, but primarily as an analytic tool, so we can identify what's going on in materialist film (then we can see how useful it was). My first reaction would be to question this opposition between form and content - if what you say is the case, then I would reply that materialist film needs to take a step further by fully and subjectively assuming this pure difference rather than sustaining a dialectical relation to an excluded content/representation. This comes down to the question of a "pure" formalism which is perhaps the limit of the avant-garde. However, there are two ways in which you can conceive of the notion of pure formalism, the first as having excluded or repressed or purified itself of all representational content - this is the logic of exception, or the second, which is Zizek's way, which includes content precisely as form - which formalizes content directly as representation.
I see materialist film a bit like the Finnegans Wake of cinema - the ultimate modernist gesture which locates the real by purifying itself of pretty much all imaginary content (Gidal's interest in Beckett too is surely no coincidence). However, the problem with this is that the films relegate themselves to an area outside of discourse - as a kind of modernist mysticism. You are left with what is sometimes a very beautiful pure aesthetic experience, or alternatively an anti-aesthetic experience - it's not quite abstract, but [it is] nonetheless a dialectic of modernist aesthetics. Jacques Rancière is very precise when it comes to this question of modern aesthetics (I will quote a long section, sorry, I don't want to go into too much detail, but it makes an interesting connection with Zizek's discussion of alternative modernity in the film):
"In due course a defence against [the] modern disorder was invented. This defence is called modernism. Modernism is that conception of art which affirms its aesthetic identification whilst refusing those forms of dis-identification through which the latter is effectuated. Modernism endorses the autonomy of art but refuses its heteronomy (which is nothing other than the name of its autonomy). Modernism sought to make this inconsistency seem consistent through the invention of an exemplary fable that serves to bind the homonymy of art to the self-contemporaneity of the modernist era. This fable simply identifies the modern revolution in art with the discovery of art's pure and finally unveiled essence. It assimilates the retreat of mimesis to an insurrection through which, in the course of the preceding hundred years, the arts would seem to have liberated themselves from the representational obligation and thereby rediscovered the end proper to art, hitherto perverted and reduced to the status of a mere means, itself subordinated to an external end. The aesthetic identification of art is thereby brought back to the autonomization of each art, henceforth devoted to demonstrating art's one and only power, in each case identical with the revelation of those powers of thought immanent to the materiality of each specific art."
This type of modernist materialism I think is a bit like Lacan's notion of Woman (the fantasy of woman as seen from the male perspective) - people can enjoy her and she can even tell you something about her experiences, but she will always exist only as that which is beyond discourse. Materialist film, insofar as it subscribes to this modern aesthetic criteria, remains outside the reach of philosophy and only within reach of the modernist fable (and its post-modern supplement), i.e. culture. It's almost tempting to see Gidal's classic article “Against Sexual Representation in Film” as symptomatic of this problem. Perhaps the challenge for materialist film today (if you don't mind me carrying on using this Lacanian terminology) is thus to move from the masculine logic of exception to the feminine logic of not-all: to reintroduce the imaginary and symbolic dimensions without losing sight of the commitment to the real - in other words to locate the real according to a process of subtraction rather than purification. In more concrete terms this would mean locating the minimal difference between representation and itself as form, rather than purifying the image of all representational content and destroying meaning in favour of form. To put it another way, to formally render the difference inherent to representation as such, rather than purify representation of that which it is the difference between. To use the Maoist logic it is a question of the essence of dialectics - whether One divides into two (the real of pure difference divides into imaginary and symbolic dimensions of representation), or two fuse into One (the symbolic and imaginary dimensions of reality collapse in an impossible attempt to present pure form). The artistic operation of materialist film would therefore be to act upon or purify representational meaning or non-art content, rather than trying to eradicate it. Without taking this step, materialist film will remain confined to the psychotic or mystical domain of purified (or modern) aesthetics and the mindless satisfaction of the drive - has materialist film thus ended up doing precisely the thing it set out to avoid? I think not entirely. It's interesting, Badiou identifies something like this problematic in Beckett's work, a change in the perception of the sexual relation, and the end of the nihilistic Beckett who is still waiting for Godot. I think Beckett is perhaps the crucial reference for materialist film today.
Zizek ends his talk by suggesting that our task today is to re-invent a space of utopia: a real rather than an imaginary utopia; an immediate rather than a future utopia. This is to by accomplished by daring to enact the impossible – by changing the co-ordinates of a determinate situation. How do you think that filmmaking can contribute to this task, if at all?
I am quite optimistic here, I think film making has an important role to play, a) insofar as it is intrinsically a mass art, and b) insofar as (or more precisely, because) it has the potential to remain an art whilst resisting abstraction, in other words it is uniquely equipped with the power of representation, without losing its universal/real dimension. The point is that film is an art in a very different way from other contemporary arts. Firstly let's just clarify that it's not so much a case of film representing, documenting or otherwise contributing to another utopian political project of some sort, this would be the role of media and communication. Film practice is concretely utopian only insofar as it is an art, just as the practices of politics or love can be utopian only through their universal subjective engagement. What is interesting, as Badiou identifies, is the fact that film, unlike the other arts (with the possible exception of theatre) does not take as its internal referent the artistic past of forms, which would suppose an educated spectator. Instead, and perhaps this clarifies a little what I was saying earlier, it must take as its material that which is not art. While contemporary art must take as its material that which doesn't exist and become art through a process of abstraction, film begins with reality, with the concrete situations of the times. So in this sense the artistic operation of film is to change the co-ordinates of a determinate situation through the formal operation of subtracting (non-art) symbolic and imaginary material from the rest of the world. The impossible leap of faith required today consists in a second stage - that of turning around the traditional opposition of reality and its illusionary filmic shadow, document, or capture, by giving up the belief that the real lies beyond representation. The same goes for politics, it is the belief that there is some form of real life (for example that designated by universal human rights) beyond subjective political representation that sustains the ever-increasing numbers reduced to bare life. Perhaps this leap of faith will be the first move towards drawing a new line of separation between two antagonistic and very different universalities in the field of cinema: on the one hand, that of art, politics, and representation, and on the other that of the decaffeinated reality of global capitalism's media and culture.
© Daniel Berchenko / Ben Wright
Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual (
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