Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 The Sublime Object Revisited: Paranoia and Symmetry in Who Is America? In this paper I intend to return to the terms of an investigation I began at the summer meeting of this group in July 2016, which is to say: in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum and just prior to the US presidential election. There I embarked on an elaboration of Žižek’s concept of the “sublime object of ideology”, first using Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as a means of its illustrating its logic, before turning to a lecture on Wagner and Europe that Žižek had delivered in London a week before, in order to begin an analysis of some features of the Brexit discourse. While we are perhaps bound now more than ever by the terms of this debate, clearly much has changed in the intervening period – particularly across the Atlantic – and so now seems a timely opportunity to revisit some of these ideas and attempt to refine my critique of the contemporary ideological landscape. I should begin by observing that, despite its title, Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology never develops a full definition of its eponymous concept. In fact, it is not until The Plague of Fantasies – I’d claim – that Žižek really lays his cards on the table in explaining that “the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew” is “the example of the sublime object” (1997: 97). In a more recent update to his formulation of this logic, Žižek compares the structure of ideology to the mobile video game, Pokémon Go, which uses augmented reality to place digitallyrendered cartoon creatures into our world as it is presented on the screen of a smartphone. He notes, the world remains the same inconsistent multitude, we simply add to it an element that gives the chaos a meaning and allows us to orient ourselves. Apropos of this, he adds: “did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology which made them see a specific Pokémon—‘the Jew’—popping up all around, and providing the clue to what one has to fight against?” (2017: 116). Not unlike a master signifier, the sublime object adds nothing new at the level of positive content but effectively “quilts” a given field and determines its 1 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 meanings; however, as we see with the “figure of the Jew”, it is a sort of master signifier that must itself be excluded from the social order. Žižek’s argument does not tend towards a naïve “false consciousness” – we do not escape into the “Matrix” of an alternative or virtual reality – instead, he claims, it is “our ‘direct’ experience of ‘real’ reality” that is already structured like augmented reality in that it relies on such an unconscious fantasy for its consistency (2017: 119). And this further allows Žižek to delineate the hard distinction between the fascist and Marxist understandings of society, which otherwise might seem to collapse at this point: the formal distinction being that, in the Marxist case, “the ‘secret’ beneath all the confusion of social life is social antagonisms, not individual agents which can be personalized (in the guise of Pokémon figures), while [the] Pokémon Go [logic of fascism] does inherently tend toward the ideologically personalized perception of social antagonisms” (2017: 116). In a sense, the structure of society is the same in both instances – but the Lacano-Marxist perspective allows us to discern here the contours of the Real beyond the veil of Imaginary-Symbolic obfuscations. The figure of the Jew is, for Žižek, the sublime object as “negative magnitude”: a displaced embodiment of impossibility. It is not, he emphasises, “the Jew who prevents Society from existing (from realizing itself as a full organic solidarity, etc.); rather, it is social antagonism which is primordial, and the figure of the Jew comes second as a fetish which materializes this hindrance” (1997: 97). To take up the Freudian reference, then, the figure of the Jew is the hairbrush or underwear that allows a society to disavow the big Other’s own castration. The significance of Žižek’s theory is two-fold. Firstly, the anti-Semitic idea of the “Jew” has nothing at all to do with Jewish people but with a particular structural position. Žižek insists: “We must remember that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object 2 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding” (2008: 221). Therefore, it is not enough to combat anti-Semitism simply by stating, “But Jews aren’t like that!”. Once we engage in a debate at this level, the steel trap of racist ideology has snapped its jaws shut around us: we have accepted its premise and are now bound to the terms of its discourse. If we attempt an anti-racist critique only at this level, we have already failed. And further, any seeming confirmation of the anti-Semitic stereotype, such as Jewish people who work in finance, or whatever, is entirely beside the point: we are not dealing with the details of lived experience, but an unconscious fantasy formation. Žižek compares this to a case of pathological sexual jealousy: even if my partner really is unfaithful, “this does not change one bit the fact that [my] jealousy is a (…) paranoid construction” (2008: 49). The paranoiac fantasy precedes and determines any experience of reality, rather than the other way round. Secondly, Žižek’s theory allows for any figure of the Other to occupy this sublime, structural position, and this is clearly borne out in today’s political landscape. Of the Pokémon Go example, he notes: “One can easily imagine a contemporary anti-immigrant version of [the game] where the player wanders about a German city and is threatened by Muslim immigrant rapists or thieves lurking everywhere” (2017: 116). And, moreover, as I previously argued: this xenophobic spectre haunted the Brexit debate in the UK, with the poster campaign of the UK Independence Party marking a particular low in the political discourse. The resonances of this image [Figs. 1 & 2] with Nazi propaganda of the 1940s was quickly seized upon by media commentators, and really tells us all we need to know about the place of the refugee as sublime object in such contemporary, far-right racist ideologies. It’s at this point, then, that I’d like to turn to Sacha Baron Cohen’s recent satirical series, Who Is America? Following very much in the footsteps of previous work such as Ali G 3 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 and Borat, here Baron Cohen uses a variety of costumes to disguise himself as characters embodying certain types in the contemporary social landscape: for example, the playboy photographer, Gio Monaldo, who attempts to pay for a confession from OJ Simpson, joking to him that they are both “ladykillers”; or Israeli counter-terrorism expert, Colonel Erran Morad, who probably deserves a entire paper in his own right. His hyper-masculine frame and Mossad backstory make him cat-nip to a neoconservative warmonger like Cheney (with whom he asks to take a “Dick pic”); and allowed him to submit alleged sex offender Roy Moore to a “pedophile detector”, while convincing Jason Spencer to drop his trousers and scream the N-word, an incident which led to his resignation as a Georgia state representative. The character I want to focus on, however, is Dr Nira Cain: a “Lecturer on Gender Studies” at famously liberal Reed College in Oregon and self-described “Proud Democrat”. He is – he tells us – on a mission to “Heal the Divide” in the wake of the US Presidential election, and in the first episode visits a couple in South Carolina to learn about their support for Trump. Perhaps the most striking event in Cain’s quest comes in the second episode, where he travels to Kingman, Arizona. Now, I’d like to play the sketch in full here – as I’m interested in what interpretations we might have of the ideological dynamics at play. [CLIP: WHO IS AMERICA? S01E02 00:21-19 – 00:27:30] Clearly, there’s a lot to unpack here, but – in the first instance – I’d be willing to risk a claim that the dominant reading of this scene would be along the lines of the paranoiac logic of anti-Semitism that I have already delineated: albeit with Islamophobia replacing the figure of the Jew with the figure of the Muslim. Thus we witness a collection of exclusively white, apparently working class citizens express nakedly racist sentiments against this paranoiac figure of the Other conjured by Dr Cain. The conclusion we might be led to draw, then, is simply that we have confirmation of what Hillary Clinton notoriously referred to as the 4 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 “Deplorables”, those “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it" people who would vote for Trump, residing here in Arizona: a state that overwhelmingly backed him in the Republican primary, and gave him a 4 point lead over Clinton in the election. Concomitantly, we might see the sketch as being of a piece with Clinton’s assessment itself: another instance of a liberal elite who hate the working class; and poor folks condescended to not just by the character of Cain but also by Baron Cohen himself in his efforts to set them up for the cameras. However, I would claim that neither of these interpretations gives a sufficient account of the ideological formations in this scene. A crucial part of Žižek’s claim for the logic of anti-Semitism is that it involves a fundamental asymmetry. He observes that, where Hitler infamously claimed, “We have to kill the Jew within us”, the statement “says more than it wants to say: against its intended sense, it confirms that the [Nazis] need the anti-Semitic figure of the ‘Jew’ in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that ‘the Jew is within us’ what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew" (2012: 707). However, this should strictly not be interpreted as suggesting that, for example in Germany in the 1930s, Jews also somehow needed the figure of the Nazi in order to maintain their own identity. Hitler is “in the Jew” only insofar as he depends – for his ontological consistency – on the figure of the Jew as distinct from any living Jewish person. There was, to be clear, no Nazi sublime object of ideology that embodied the antagonism of any particular Jewish society at this point. Conversely, however, and it is here that I really stake the claim of this paper, what I am suggesting is that – in the contemporary political landscape – we do indeed find a kind of symmetrical paranoiac logic in the way in which “Left” and “Right” address each other (or perhaps do not address each other). In the first instance, I come back to this image [Fig. 3] from the Brexit campaign, which I discussed in my earlier paper. Beyond the dominant 5 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 reading – wherein the accusing finger of the “skinhead” interpellates his ideological “object as negative magnitude” as, for example, the “outsider” who is “ruining the country” – there is another, more revealing dimension to the image, in the fact that this perfectly balanced seesaw bar would insist that the “skinhead” occupies an exactly equal and opposite position to the “immigrant” granny. He too functions, then, as a sublime object: but here – I suggested – it would be a positivisation of the void that subtends a different ideological formation, as it structures the social reality of, for example, the bourgeois Remain voter. I concluded my previous intervention by noting that Žižek suggests the final stage in the critique of ideology is the traversal of fantasy. He states, “we must recognize in the properties attributed to ‘Jew’ the necessary product of our very social system; we must recognize in the ‘excesses’ attributed to ‘Jews’ the truth about ourselves” (2008: 144). And so I closed with a question: what might the libidinal investment be in the figure of the “skinhead”? How might it touch upon a jouissance as sublime object? If we traverse this fantasy, what do we find? Clearly Who Is America? is not answering precisely this question, but I do detect a comparable issue of symmetrical relation at play, and – I’d venture – a similar issue of self-critique being raised. Perhaps it is the situation of being forced into a binary opposition of yes/no, Trump/Clinton that condemns discourse to taking this form, but I’d suggest that what we find in such contemporary politics is not a debate in good faith between two equally engaged interlocutors; instead, we have two self-enclosed fantasies ostensibly aimed at each other but talking past the other like a bastard version of the Lacanian sexual non-relation. We had – for example – a Clinton-discourse that summoned the sublime figure of the “Deplorable” to explain her opponent’s popularity, while we have in the Trump-discourse the negative magnitudes of the liberal elite and the migrant that helped drive him to the White House. The so-called Left summons the spectre of the far right in order 6 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 to avoid addressing its own shortcomings and to maintain its own inconsistent ideological position, while the disaster capitalist Right needles “progressives” for being out-of-touch, and shifts blame for their own excesses onto the Mexican and the Muslim. At no point are the fundamental antagonisms and inequalities of the social order addressed because the libidinal appeal of these mutually-sustaining fantasmatic formations locks everything into place. This, I’d suggest, is hinted at in the Cain sketch in the first instance by the presentation he makes to residents of Kingman: on the basis of huge economic investment into a town where the nearby coal-fired power plant has been shut down, and into a state that has the eleventh-worst poverty rate in the country. Nonetheless, we have to be very careful about what sort of conclusions we draw from the sketch itself. Local press reports suggest how meticulously the production crew put together the audience at Kingman, and we can see how skilfully the footage has been edited to emphasise the sensational effect. Moreover, I’m put in mind of Žižek’s assertion about the jealous husband: that, even if my partner is unfaithful, this doesn’t make my paranoid jealousy any less pathological. It is an undeniable fact that we witness violently ugly behaviour from Cain’s audience but this does not necessarily serves as proof for ideological the figure of the “Deplorable”, any more than we might find “proof” for the figure of the Jew. In short, dismissing the white working class simply as racist does not give a satisfactory account of our present situation. Both the audience and Dr Cain are – to an extent – fictional constructs, existing in a similar ideological equilibrium to the Brexit see-saw pair. He is clearly a satire on the worst excesses of the American “liberal progressive”, loudly proclaiming his “wokeness” at every opportunity while having little contact with, and even less understanding of, those for whom he claims to stand – as further evidenced in another episode by an excruciatingly patronising encounter with an African-American hip hop artist in Atlanta. And my point here is not about 7 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 Baron Cohen’s personal politics; but rather at the level of the of the program itself, we might detect a certain, vague leftward-leaning in that figures such as Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein come out of it rather better than their conservative colleagues; and where the strategy with Erran Morad – for example – seemed to be a sort of performative accelerationism, pushing right-wing figures further and further into the contradictions of their own positions – his engagement with the NRA to endorse the “KinderGuardian” program to arm small children in schools being a salient example – the approach with Nira Cain, I’d suggest, is more of a dialectical high-wire act. If we equally recognise the “Deplorable” as sublime object of a certain soft-Left ideology embodied by Cain – just as surely as Cain, as “Social Justice Warrior”, is a negative magnitude for the alt-right – then we might see Who Is America? as taking a step towards traversing the fantasy. It suggests a willingness to interrogate and critique positions on the (American) Left and to recognise – like Žižek’s jealous husband – the self-implication, even the jouissance, in their own demise. The true object of derision here, I claim, is not so much the people of Kingman as it is Cain himself, in his pompous moral posturing and self-congratulatory closed-mindedness: the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of which is perfectly encapsulated in his declaration “I’ve been cycling through our fractured nation listening respectfully, without prejudice, to Republicans with the hope of changing their racist and childish views, trying to heal the divide”. And, I’d suggest, the potential for selfexamination here puts us on a track to begin the necessary analysis of the contemporary political landscape. Moreover, as those stunning final moments of Spike Lee’s recent, BlacKkKlansman have shown us, at a time when the President of the United States can claim – following an act of domestic terrorism that killed an anti-fascist protestor in Charlottesville, Virginia – that there were “very fine people on both sides”, a thoroughgoing critique of every angle of this symmetrical ideological obfuscation is urgently required. 8 Dr Ben Tyrer 7/10/18 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 9