Zizek on Children of Men, post-apocalyptic space (Chernobyl), and the bricoleur

Slavoj Zizek's comments on Children of Men (included with the film, from which I quote below, but also on the films' website in a slightly different form), are just genius (the italics are mine):

I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or to use another political term, biopolitics. And my god, this film literally is about biopolitics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life. But again, I think the crucial point is that this obvious fact shouldn't deceive us. The true despair is precisely that; all historical acts disappear. Like all those classical statues are there, but they are deprived of a world. They are totally meaningless, because what does it mean to have a statue of Michaelangelo? It only works if it signals a certain world. And when this world is lacking, it's nothing.

This is so extremely correct, and seems to be what both Grant and I (though Grant was and is much better at this than me!) were trying to grope towards in my previous post on the film. It also, therefore, seems to completely contradict the egoistical and asinine comments of Cuarón about constructing a future--indeed, like all good art, it is more relevant than even the author's most interesting intentions.

This is Zizek at his best, when his understanding of Lacan really is just unbelievably correct and so helpful--that is, when he is elaborating another's diagnosis or interpretation, moving beyond their hermeneutic. As if to sum up the above (especially the sentence I emphasized), in his comments on the film's website he says:

Indeed, as Jacques Lacan put it, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.

That is, all that is left in the world of the film are the pure, empty rules of biopolitics, without any of the possibilities that these rules (or any resistance to these rules by the unmeaning, the rebellious, the excluded, etc.) were regulating. It is not that there is nothing left to regulate--though Zizek's language often sounds as if this is the case--but that the system of empty regulations is not developed or coherent enough to be able to sustain itself. This is why Zizek harps upon the fact that Children of Men is set in (and perhaps could only be set in) England:

It’s against this background [a world of total prohibition] that the film approaches the topic of immigration and so on. By setting in the movie in England, only there can the despair be felt. England’s one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have a constitution because it can rely on it’s substance of traditions - you don’t need it written and it’s in such a country that the loss of historical dimension, the loss of the substance of meaning is felt much worse.

In other words, the traditions--the rules that regulate behavior even more than those that could be codified (in a constitution)--are not able to sustain the reliance necessary in times of an apocalypse (the time that they should--according to that very reliance upon them--kick in the most). Thus, total prohibition is a substitute or compensation for the lack of effective regulation: this is why it is disturbing, not because the prohibition is prohibition as such.

For regulation is not an evil for Zizek. Incoherent regulation, however, is. His comments regarding the protagonist, Theo, bring this to the fore. What is amazing about the film, for Zizek, is precisely that the world that it displays does not give meaning to the protagonist's quest. Rather, the opposite is the case: Theo becomes the site in which we are able to understand the world in which he moves (the "background," as Zizek says--and one that must be kept in the background, not made into the instruments that the hero can take up). Again, I think he would agree that this is also the case in Blade Runner--indeed, this is the reason why the protagonist becomes not Deckard, the noir detective clone, but Roy. But what is crucial is that this transforms the role of the main character in this type of film: he is made into a bricoleur, a point that takes up what is around him, but which is merely a placeholder so that the structure of that very environment around him can be understood.

In other words, what Zizek likes is that it brings out the particular logic underlying bricolage: as I tried to outline in a previous post, the bricoleur is not a McGyver, but an extremely fraught, anxious placeholder for the forces that work around him. He constructs rules and practices, but only out of that material give to him by the structured environment in which he moves. He does not wield them well, he is no phronemos (in fact, he is the opposite)--in fact, we should say that the environment constructs its rules through him. He is the site of action on which the very last level of structuration plays itself out (indeed, this is why the MacGruber parodies are so hilarious: the McGyver character still has agency, but only as distraction because he can only take up what the environment gives him--his agency is still only as a function of that environment: thus getting obsessed about his appearance, whether someone said something bad about him behind his back, or, in a very interesting and subversive model, becoming an alcoholic).

Now, what is crucial is that this does not make him a compulsive, trauma-laden subject, though he nears this. It is simply that the structure of which he is a function has not structured itself as coherently as it can. It is precisely when the environment places its prohibitions upon this subject in order to compensate for its own disorganization that there is dominance, and we have the possibility for the subject in question to become a mere traumatic site for this environment. What is more important is that this subject has a form of agency as a function of the system--nothing positive, but relationally, dispersed over a determinate field. For Zizek, looking at this field is crucial--precisely because we want to turn the bricoleur into a phronemos like McGyver: this is the level at which ideology works, channeling this want. Indeed, this is precisely how the "post-modern" idea of a generalized traumatic subject (cf. Cathy Caruth) is precisely able to be turned (with the utmost degree of cynicism) into an object that sustains late capitalistic ideology.

But the bricoleur, Theo, is not this traumatic subject: what he does is not repetition, not compulsion (at least in the popular sense of these terms). We should not require traumatic subjects produce themselves as evidence of the decline of civilization (this seems to be the demand of some--usually American--thinkers): rather, we must conceive of the post-apocalyptic actor as someone who regulates himself and others with the insufficient rules he is given--so that he turns these rules into more refined, and yet equally incoherent, products.

The bricoleur is the site of displacement, therefore, not the site of compulsion. His action, and not his existence, is evidence or rather expression of the psychosis of society (if it were the latter, then he would merely be traumatic). He is similar not to McGyver (in the crude sense of a handyman), but similar to those who document the post-apocalyptic space of Chernobyl. If one looks at Google Earth around the nuclear facility, one begins to notice (and this is just one example of the extensive documentation) all sorts of labels made by users of where and what is going on. This is actually quite an extensive process taking place all over Google Earth--but the tone here becomes visibly different. It is not merely curious. The entire abandoned town of Pirpyat is completely labeled, furnished with photos and relevant documents, stories and ruminations. The fascination with this ghost town (and this is the case with the ghost town in general), however, would be lost if one were to explain it as merely reactionary or compulsive, the attempt to make up for apocalyptic nuclear disaster. Indeed, this is the threat of this activity of documentation--that it makes Chernobyl and the surrounding "Zone of Alienation" into a romantic, melancholic, aestheticized atmosphere (full of a mysterious and fetishized radioactive ether, like Newton's long ago) where one can just reflect on the depravity of humanity in general. Rather, what is going on is a precise act of bricolage, of trying to take the incident and its construction and flesh it out more, move it around, bring it into a sort of play that would, in stopping (and it needs to stop, if anything the compulsion is here, in refusing uninterrupted, continuous play), sets up limits, defines spaces in which meaning does not exist, but perhaps would be possible. This working-out of the apocalypse that was Chernobyl and that documents the disaster zone endlessly, then, would be similar to those acts of Theo: they aren't trying to make sense of the environment so much as be better functions of it, thereby bringing that environment into a tighter density in which it may subjectivize still with prohibition, but without incoherent or near-psychotic prohibitions. This doesn't mean this "making sense" is rational, not by any means. But it does mean that it is a representation of an environment (and a subjectivity) that must be accounted for and not lumped together into an unspeaking, traumatic irrationality. This is not to impugn trauma--it is to leave it space in which it can develop its own representations of itself and that of which it is a function and constitute (or have constituted for it) its own particular activities towards betterment.

In other words, while being able to define post-apocalyptic activities and practice, Zizek's thoughts give trauma room to operate as a condition, and does not make it meaningless or a mere exterior to "authentic" activity. And on this note, we must end with Derrida, for whom the bricoleur is a mere compromise (conceived by Lévi-Strauss) and a way to exit the responsibilities to the other(s)--this is why he opposes this figure so vigorously. Zizek is on the way to this conclusion, yet (rightly, I think, in this case) believes theorizing the limits of this particular subject (and not that one who would respond and is already responding to these others) is more important--and is again why he is able to give us such a profitable analysis.