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11. Sep 2006

'The fire in the minds of men'

 
Tankevækkende kommentar i dagens Guardian af Slavoj Zizek - med udgangspunkt i de to nye, store filmatiseringer af begivenhed og deres "myreperspektiv", dvs. deres fokus på almindelige menneskers oplevelse af katastrofen løsrevet fra den politiske kontekst:
Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda". The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message.
Selv uden noget ønske om at propagandere er der film, vi kun kan lave på en bestemt måde, fordi alt andet ville være undergravende og i værste fald en form for fjendtlig propaganda - og der er film, f.eks. om et tilsvarende angreb på Beirut, som vi ikke kan lave på præcis samme måde, fordi det også ville være propaganda. Vi ønsker måske vitterlig blot at oplyse og ikke at propagandere, men ikke desto mindre er der en (politisk bestemt) implicit konsensus, der begrænser hvordan vi kan oplyse hvis vi stadig skal virke neutralt fortællende.

Hvilken rolle spiller begivenheden så i det rent politiske billede - hvad er den kontekst, Zizek efterlyser?

For Zizek repræsenterer 11. september (idet han ikke synes den mindste smule bange for at tage munden for fuld) afslutningen på den demokratiske utopi, som Murens fald markerede den kommunistiske utopis endeligt:
Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history.
Zizeks kommentar rummer mange flere tankevækkende pointer - så go read!

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