Thoughts on Three Texts
Theory-wise, I can cite three written works that have recently had a major impact on my thinking: Slavoj Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (of which I’ve only read about 70 pages); John Leland’s Hip: The History; and David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." These are somewhat disparate works, but especially after reading Wallace’s essay, I’ve really started to pay attention to the way concepts of cynicism, irony, and “hipness” all work together in our culture.

Zizek is of course the most difficult of any of these authors, since he’s writing for an academic crowd, but his ideas are important and kind of fundamental for my current critique of cultural resistance. In a paper I wrote a few years ago about William Burroughs, I tried to examine the way in which Burroughs resisted certain literary functions, such as the postmodern “death of the author.” I got to the point where I was able to demonstrate how Burrough’s work was subversive ( in that it resists certain literary conventions which could be seen as symptomatic of larger negative social structures), but I found myself unsatisfied that this was actually somehow productive.

We activist-types tend to get all excited when, say, a movie has some kind of seemingly subversive theme running through it; or when we think an artist (an author or a musician) seeks to challenge or illuminate the status quo through their art. But when I take a step back from these (pleasurable) “discoveries” of resistance, I find myself deeply unsatisfied. The fact is that understanding how things are fucked up is vastly removed from taking steps towards making them less fucked up. This is why Zizek is so important to me right now. Cynicism, for Zizek, is simply a function of our consciousness, which in many ways allows us to distance ourselves from trauma by allowing us the pleasure of understanding it.

This is why the Matrix (along with its other many, many flaws) is such an unsatisfying model for our social constructions. Ideology isn’t something hidden from us, as Marx said (they do not know it, but they are doing it, etc.). The fact is, a lot of us are well aware of what we’re doing, and how absurd and injust the social and cultural systems we take part in are. But (and correct me if I’m wrong) we also get pleasure from this knowledge, pleasure that in many ways forestalls any real change ever taking place. Think about it: how many times have you sat down to watch the Simpsons, thinking, I wonder why Fox lets them get away with this? Well, it’s not hard to figure out. First of all, you’re still watching, aren’t you? Fox makes its money regardless.

But it goes deeper than that. As David Foster Wallace points out in "E Unibus Pluram," television in America has basically absorbed all of the postmodern cynicism or the 60’s and 70’s. Poststructuralism is basically all about the collapse of unified meaning in language. In popular culture, this concept often manifests as irony, a lack of cohesion between what is said and what is meant. And television, as Wallace argues, is perfectly suited to show irony because of its combination of (and often the clash between) the heard and the seen. Television, especially comedy on television, is the embodiment of irony and cynicism.

The sitcom used to be based around an affirmation of the status quo in the form of patriarchal authority—but these early sitcoms were already a longing for something that the counterculture was starting to question and unravel. There was no way for them to hold on against the influx of the hip, the cynical, and the ironic, and television was quick to incorporate these instead of continuing to resist them. Think about it—sitcoms, like MTV, mock paternal authority instead of celebrating it.

This is old news, of course, but what’s important to note is that this use of irony is vital to maintaining a certain status quo in late-late capitalism. And of particular importance, to me at least, is to pay attention to how such cynical detachment has crept into the “field” of cultural studies—for instance, the pleasure that academics get from deconstructing and figuring out what’s going on “behind the curtain” of mass culture.

This is a lot of the reason that I’m staying away from grad school, probably forever. I’m not opposed to education (though we could discuss at length what the real function of “eductation” is our society), but I am opposed to getting caught up in the rather self-indulgent theoretical rambling that seems to constantly defer activism and real work for social change. I don’t want to just understand what’s wrong with our current system. I want to work to dismantle it and build something better in its place.