David Bordwell on Zizek

2/14/2014 davidbordwell.net : essays

http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek.php 1/15

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

April 2005

In The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post‑Theory(London:

BFI, 2001), Slavoj Žižek makes some criticisms of my arguments bearing on the history of film

style. I reply to those criticisms in the last chapter of Figures Traced in Light (pp. 260–264).

But there is much more to say about FRT, and this online essay supplements my remarks

inFigures.

The Book and the Background

Most of FRT offers standard film criticism, providing impressionistic readings of various

Kieslowski films in regard to recurring themes, visual motifs, dramatic structures, borrowed

philosophical concepts, and the like. Žižek also reiterates 1970s argument about how film editing

“sutures” the viewer into the text. I’ll have almost nothing to say about these stretches of FRT.

But Žižek launches the book with an introduction and two chapters criticizing arguments madein a collection of essays edited by myself and Noël Carroll, Post‑Theory: Reconstructing Film

Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). The subtitle of Žižek’s book indicates

the centrality of what he takes to be the Post‑Theory movement, even though he doesn’t pursue

arguments about it through the book. Indeed, the first two chapters seem to me awkwardlywelded onto a fairly conventional book of free-associative film interpretation.

Why invoke Post‑Theory at all, then?

The Preface to FRT by Colin MacCabe explains that he asked Žižek “to address the weaknessesand insularity of film studies as they had developed in the university sector over the previous

two decades” (vii). Film studies, MacCabe feels, has developed a “narrowness and sterility” (vii).

It’s worth pausing on the ironies here. MacCabe was one of the moving spirits

of Screen magazine in the 1970s, where the foundations of Lacanian and neo-Marxist film

theory were laid. As MacCabe put it in 1974: “Given Screen’s commitment to theoretical

understanding of film, the magazine has been engaged over the last five years in the elaboration

of the various advances in semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism.” 1 It is this

blend that has been endlessly reiterated in the precincts of academic film studies. Across many

years, it was the orthodoxy. For many of us, that trend seemed and still seems “narrow andsterile.” Judge for yourself, based on this passage signed by MacCabe from the golden age

of Screen:

The problem is to understand the terms of the construction of the subject and the

modalities of the replacement of this construction in specific signifying practices,

where “replacement” means not merely the repetition of the place of that

construction but also, more difficultly, the supplacement—the overplacing:

supplementation or, in certain circumstances, supplantation (critical interruption)

—of that construction in the place of its repetition. 2

It’s a remarkable sentence in many respects, but assuming that it can be explicated, what saves

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0851707548?ie=UTF8&tag=thefrofra-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=211189&creativeASIN=0851707548&link_code=as3&creative=373489



http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek.php#_edn1




this intellectual project from narrowness and sterility? In the 1970s MacCabe declared that this

theory was committed to Marx’s concept of class struggle. Exactly how Lacanian psychoanalysis

was to assist the class struggle, and why it should be preferred to other means of assisting that

struggle, was never made clear in Screen. In any event, MacCabe trots this claim out again as

another aim of Žižek’s book, which “intervenes” in contemporary debates “without ever

abandoning questions of class struggle and the unconscious” (viii–ix). Once more, neitherMacCabe nor Žižek explains why one cannot be a good socialist without reading Lacan. (More on

this below.)

MacCabe’s objections apply, he says, not to film historians, who have conducted “vital and

important [sic] work” (vii). This too harbors irony, since the Theoretical Correctness

of Screen and its followers blocked historical research from developing in the 1970s. Primary-

document history was labeled “empiricist” and “positivist,”Screen published almost no such

work, and for decades afterward, many historians feared being attacked for their lack of Grand

Theory acumen. Efforts to study early cinema history, the history of the U.S. film industry, and

the like emerged in quite different venues from the BFI publications.

Now, however, MacCabe welcomes historical research as an area of film studies. Rather, it’s film

theory that has become inert, “either banally rehashed or obtusely opposed” (viii). ThoughMacCabe isn’t specific, it seems that the obtuse opposition is incarnated in “ ‘Post‑Theory’ and

cognitivism” (viii). I say “seems” because this is as close as MacCabe gets to naming names: “Forthose followers of fashion who look for a retreat from Marx and Freud, a hideous mimicking of

the threadbare nonsense of the ‘third way,’ this book will be a grave disappointment” (viii). Justparsing this cryptic sentence raises questions:

What fashion dictates a retreat from Marx and Freud? One would think

thatPost‑Theory was sweeping the academy. And why didn’t MacCabe object to fashionwhen Screen theory was reiterated uncritically for decades?

Presumably MacCabe finds Post‑Theory has parallels with Tony Blair and New Labour’s“Third Way.” 3 What are these affinities? What grounds can MacCabe have for linkingideas about cinema floated by Midwest college professors to a crisis in British politics, let

alone finding the parallels “hideous”?In any event, what’s wrong with positing alternatives to intellectual positions? In any field

of inquiry, can’t there be a third, or fourth, or fifth way of asking and answering questions?

Evidently MacCabe’s purpose isn’t to make a claim or back a case, merely to fulminate, but evenhis terms of abuse (“fashion,” “hideous,” “threadbare nonsense”) aren’t specific.

Apart from reviving the allegiance of Lacan and class struggle, MacCabe says, “Žižek’s account

of Post‑Theory lays bare both its obvious fallacies and its more hidden vanities” (ix). On thecontrary. Although MacCabe designated Žižek his hitman, it’s more than a little surprising to

find that at nearly every opportunity Žižek doesn’t engage with the substantive argumentsofPost‑Theory at all.

Prince and Bordwell: Žižek’s Missed Chances

There are three essays in the anthology that directly criticize the psychoanalytic project in film




theory: Stephen Prince’s “Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing

Spectator”; my “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory”; andNoël Carroll’s “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment.” How does Žižek address the

challenges these essays propose?

His chief strategy consists of invective and rhetorical questions. “Does what[the Post‑Theoryattacks] describe as Theory, or what they attribute to Theory, not read as a

comically simplified caricature of Lacan, Althusser et al? Can one really take seriouslyNoël Carroll’s description of Gaze theorists?” (4). Žižek takes you no further. No argument, no

evidence, just dismissal à la MacCabe. Then, Žižek asks, who are the “Lacanians” referred toin Post‑Theory? “Except for Joan Copjec, myself, and some of my Slovene colleagues, I know of

no cinema theorist who effectively accepts Lacan as his or her ultimate background” (2). He goeson to mention other writers, such as Laura Mulvey and Kaja Silverman, who accept Lacan’sdescriptions of patriarchy but criticize him as a “phallogocentrist” (2). What’s odd here is that

Carroll, Prince, and I don’t attack “Lacanians”; the phrase is not to be found in our essays.Prince concentrates on Freud, while Carroll discusses Lacan as one ingredient of 1970s and

1980s film theory. My essay emphasizes what I call subject-position theory, of which Lacaniandoctrines form only part. All three essays speak ofpsychoanalytic film theory

andpsychoanalytically inclined theorists. To use a term Žižek employs often in FRT, one mightsay that the Lacanians in these essays exist only as his phantasms. In any event, he doesn’t try

to fight these phantoms by defending Lacan’s account of mental life against its many rivals. Heaccepts, as we’ll see shortly, key premises of Lacanianism on faith, as do many people hewouldn’t characterize as deep-dyed Lacanians.

Žižek’s complaints about lumping Lacanians together diverts our attention from the point atissue. Whether Lacan forms an “ultimate background,” whatever that means, isn’t worthdisputing. Žižek knows perfectly well that a great many film scholars have cited Lacan and used

his work to bolster theoretical or interpretive claims. Although the three essays invoke manywriters by name (and my essay analyzes one essay by the Žižek-endorsed Lacanian Copjec), the

crucial issue is the role Lacan’s theories play within the intellectual doctrines of contemporaryfilm theory. This Žižek doesn’t address.

Once we get past rhetorical questions and diversionary tactics, Žižek is given an excellent

opportunity to engage with Post‑Theory by Stephen Prince’s essay. Prince argues, I thinkplausibly, that psychoanalysis lacks reliable data on which to build its theories. Records of the

clinical session are available only to the analyst (yielding “nontraceable disclosures”); there areno established standards for interpreting the patient’s discourse; and the analyst inevitably

filters the full range of the patient’s reports, summarizing and inflecting them in herinterpretation. Prince then argues that these failings are present in Freud’s own classic paper,

“A Child is Being Beaten.” Prince goes on to suggest that psychoanalytic theory of cinema is at a

disadvantage because of its weak account of perception and its resolute ignoral of the ways in

which cinema resembles the world, both of which can be better accounted for by rival theories.

There are many things Žižek (and MacCabe, the book’s patron) would object to here. But Žižek

never discusses any of them. It’s entirely possible that Prince has mischaracterized

psychoanalytic method, or has misread Freud’s paper, or has misunderstood Lacanian film



theory. But Žižek doesn’t make any effort to show weaknesses in the essay. He merely mocksthe title (p. 1).

Likewise, you’d think that he’d slice my essay to ribbons. “Contemporary Film Studies”

delineates two trends in the field, what I call subject-position theory (the Screen legacy) andculturalism. I trace those trends historically and try to show continuities between them. The

conceptual continuities I argue for involve social constructivism, theories of subjectivity, the

centrality of identification, and an underlying commitment to semiotics. I also argue that

subject-position adherents and culturalists follow similar argumentative routines, notably acommitment to doctrine-driven inquiry, a fondness for pasting together ideas from quite

divergent theorists, a reliance on association rather than linear reasoning, and a commitment to

hermeneutic applications of theory to films (producing “readings”). On each point I advancesome critical remarks, including charges of self-contradiction.

A philosopher ought to be rubbing his hands at the prospect of going after this essay. I could be

vulnerable from many angles. Žižek could attack my characterization of Freud, Lacan, and therest; my critiques of same; and above all my outline of the two trends. Most important, although

I didn’t have Žižek in mind when I wrote the essay, he himself instantiates all the conceptual

commitments and rhetorical habits I criticize. His work is a pastiche of many, widely varying

intellectual sources (from Ernest Laclau to Stephen Jay Gould). He is an associationist parexcellence. His use of films is purely hermeneutic, with each film playing out allegories of

theoretical doctrines. And he never doubts his masters Hegel and Lacan, exemplifying the

tendency I characterize this way: “The pronouncements of Lacan, Althusser, Baudrillard, etcie are often simply taken on faith” (21).

So my complaints should strike very close to home. Yet not a peep from Žižek on any of these

points. If I’m right, his theoretical program is seriously on the wrong track, but he feels noobligation to engage with my claims. This isn’t the thinker MacCabe says is “determined to

follow the logic of any concept or text through to its bitter or sweet end” (FRT, viii). 4

Carroll and Žižek 1: Reply as Confirmation

Žižek is a philosopher, so perhaps we’d expect him to engage most fully with another of his

profession. Noël Carroll’s essay “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment” presents

criticisms that are severe and pointed. Carroll argues that proponents of Grand Theory embracea monolithic conception of theorizing, conflate theorizing with interpreting specific films, use

political correctness to attack their opponents, unwontedly charge opponents with “formalism,”

and exhibit a bias against the concept of truth.

Remarkably, Žižek responds to not a single one of these charges. He doesn’t, contra MacCabe,

lay bare any fallacies, nor does he mount what he promises in his introduction will be a “critical

dialogue with cognitivist/historicist Post‑Theory” (7). What he does lay bare, apparently all

unawares, are statements wide open to Carroll’s objections.

Here is Carroll:

Proponents of the Theory let on that the Theory grew out of the student




movement and out of a resistance to oppression everywhere. Consequently, fromtheir point of view, criticism of the Theory virtually represents a clear and

present danger to the very Revolution itself. Anyone who opposes the Theory, for

whatever reason, is politically suspect…. Criticisms of the dubious psychoanalytic

premises of the Theory are denounced as reactionary—in a political sense!—as if abelief in the equality of races requires assent to Lacan and the rest of the pet

paraphernalia of the Theory…. (45).

MacCabe’s evocation of the class struggle in his introduction strikes this note, as does Žižek’spromise to show how Kieslowski’s work, “the site of antagonistic ideological tensions [sic], of the

‘class struggle in art’, can be redeemed by a Lacanian approach” (7).

Žižek begins his book by saying that the Post‑Theory trend is “often sustained by a stance of

profound political resignation, by a will to obliterate the traces and disappointments of political

engagement” (13). The one piece of evidence he supplies for this is startlingly shaky. Žižek takes

the scholar Ben Brewster as “emblematic of the present-day state of cinema theory” (13). Why?Because Brewster shifted from being a proponent of Screen theory to becoming a film historian

displaying an “exclusive preoccupation with pre‑1917 cinema” (13). Why does this matter?

Because Brewster focuses on a period “prior to the October Revolution, as if to emphasise the

will to obliterate the trauma of the failed leftist involvement in Theory” (13). About Žižek’sdiagnosis that Brewster’s research constitutes a form of fetishistic disavowal reminiscent of a

reluctance to look at feminine genitals, I shall say nothing. I just want to point out that Brewster

has not restricted his research to cinema before 1917, not even in the book Žižek mentions in afootnote, 5 so the tenuous thread of association fails even as a literary conceit. On its first

page, FRT presents a strained reach for cleverness at the expense of nuance and accuracy. We’ll

encounter this strategy again.

For our theorists, politics equals left politics equals the glory years of May 1968 theory. Marx is

always invoked, with nods to Eurocommunism, Althusser, and, surprisingly, Mao. In 1974

MacCabe saluted the Chinese Cultural Revolution as proof that ideology remained a potent

force. 6In a recent DVD liner note on Godard’sTout va bien, he describes the CulturalRevolution as Mao’s effort to have the Red Guards “revolt against the ruling state and party

apparatus…. The young were encouraged to question authority and to insist on the importance

of the class struggle.” 7 MacCabe doesn’t mention that Mao stirred up the young in order toregain his power over that same party apparatus, or that the Red Guards were not encouraged

to question hisauthority, or that the ten years of Cultural Revolution shut down China’s

education, exiled intellectuals to labor camps, destroyed centuries of cultural artifacts, killed

hundeds of thousands of people, and ruined the lives of millions more. Žižek also invokes theGreat Helmsman: “To put it in good old Maoist terms, the principal contradiction of today’s

cinema studies…. To continue in a Maoist vein, I am tempted to…[identify a given opposition] as

the second, nonantagonistic contradiction of cinema studies, to be resolved through discussion

and self-criticism”(1, 2). Needless to say, why Maoism is good as well as old doesn’t concernŽižek—perhaps because, like many of his other citations, this tip of the hat to the cult of

personality serves merely as an effort at knowing rhetoric. Certainly self-criticism doesn’t enter

his text.






So Carroll’s diagnosis—that theoretical sallies are often justified by an unwarranted link to aparticular brand of politics—is borne out by the very book seeking to demolish Carroll’s views.

Similarly, Carroll’s essay argues that in general film theories don’t necessarily bear traces of the

theorist’s political orientation. “I have evolved theories of movie music and point-of-view

editing, but they do not, in any sense that could be called logical, imply my political positionabout anything from gun control, to sexual harassment, to communal ownership of the means of

production” (46). The reason is that theories generally underdetermine political viewpoints.

“Given theories may be espoused by either the forces of light or the forces of darkness” (47). Wemight expect this to arouse a sustained critique from Žižek, who obviously doesn’t believe in the

underdetermination of theories; but no such luck. He remains silent.

There’s yet another moment in which Žižek confirms Carroll’s critique. Carroll’s essay criticizestotalizing conceptions of theory:

Under its aegis, the film theorist sets out to subsume every aspect of cinematic

phenomena under the putative laws and categories of his or her minimallycustomized version of the reigning orthodoxy. Theorizing becomes the routine

application of some larger, unified theory to questions of cinema, which procedure

unsurprisingly churns out roughly the same answers, or remarkably similar

answers, in every case. The net result, in short, is theoreticalimpoverishment (41).

And here is Žižek, claiming that Post‑Theory

…starts to behave as if there were no Marx, Freud, semiotic theory of ideology,

i.e. as if we can magically return to some kind of naivete before things like the

unconscious, the overdetermination of our lives by the decentred symbolicprocesses, and so forth became part of our theoretical awareness (14).

Žižek can’t entertain the prospect that ideas can be “part of our theoretical awareness” and still

be invalid. Suppose, just suppose, that all these “things”—points of doctrine—are shot through

with conceptual and empirical mistakes. This is what Prince, Carroll, and I are saying. We don’t

ignore this theory; we criticize it. Being skeptical about weak theories isn’t a return to innocence.It’s an advance; it can cast out error. The task is not to call us naïve but rather to show that the

unconscious, the overdetermination of so on and so forth remain valid ideas. The way to show

this is not by waxing nostalgic for the days when everyone read Althusser, but by overcoming

our criticisms. Yet in Žižek’s hands, confirming Carroll’s objections once more, Lacanian theory

functions as a set of axioms or dogmas rather than working ideas to be subjected to critical

discussion.

Post‑Theory argues against the very idea of Theory and supports the idea

of theories andtheorizing (p. xiv). Theories operate at many levels of generality and tackle

many different questions. Theorizing is a process of proposing, refining, correcting, and perhaps

rejecting answers, in the context of a multidisciplinary conversation. But for Žižek, the

unconscious, the overdetermination of our lives, and all the rest is Theory entire and whole. No

intellectual activity (save “historical research”) lives outside it, and it can be discussed only by

those already accepting the premises of its sacred texts. And once the only correct Theory is



packaged with the only correct political attitudes, you have a powerful weapon against anyone

who differs. FRT confirms Carroll’s claim: “The Theory has been effectively insulated from

sustained logical and empirical analysis by a cloak of political correctness” (45).

Carroll and Žižek 2: Dialectics of Inquiry and of Nature

Žižek ignores almost all the substantive points Carroll makes in his essay. The one issue he

singles out is Carroll’s proposal that film studies should be more self-consciously dialectical.

Carroll explains at several points what he means by this. In his sense, dialectics is an alternative

to the method Žižek embraces, that of deriving a film theory from axioms or first principles.Instead, dialectical exchange is a form of debate, “defending one’s own theory by demonstrating

that it succeeds where alternative theories falter” (56). More extensively:

Theories are framed in specific historical contexts of research for the purpose of

answering certain questions, and the relative strengths of theories are assayed by

comparing the answers they afford to the answers proposed by alternative

theories. This conception of theory evaluation is pragmatic because: (1) itcompares actual, existing rival answers to the questions at hand (rather than

every logically conceivable answer); and (2) because it focuses on solutions to

contextually motivated theoretical problems (rather than searching for answers

to any conceivable question one might have about cinema) (56).

Žižek does object to Carroll’s point, but he misconstrues it. He says that this conception of

dialectics is “simply the notion of cognition as the gradual progress of our always limited

knowledge through the testing of specific hypotheses” (14). Now this is plainly not what thepassage quoted above says. Žižek eliminates the communal and comparative dimensions of

inquiry Carroll invokes, and introduces “the testing of specific hypotheses.” He goes on to add

that the process is “unending,” assigning to Carroll “a modest view of endless competive

struggle” (15). But again, Carroll does not say that the process is infinite. He says that by

eliminating error and mounting sound theories, we can arrive at reliable if approximate truths.

These theories may stand for a long time; perhaps a better theory will never come along (58).

“There is no reason to concede that we cannot also craft film theories in the here and now thatare approximately true” (58). There is nothing inherently unending about this process.

So Žižek has misunderstood Carroll’s conception of dialectical inquiry. But that’s not all. Having

rewritten Carroll’s claims, Žižek blurts out: “Well, if this is dialectics, then Karl Popper, the most

aggressive and dismissive critic of Hegel, was the greatest dialectician of them all!” (15). This

expostulation encapsulates many assumptions, all of them questionable. First, Carroll’s

conception of theory-building doesn’t follow Popper, since Carroll has made no reference to

falsifiability as the key criterion for conjecture and refutation. Carroll’s view of collectiveproblem-solving through debate is a far broader position in the philosophy of science than

Popper’s account. Secondly, as Carroll points out in a subsequent version of his essay, “an

unbiased examination of the history of philosophy will show, I believe, that Hegel has no patent

on dialectics.” 8 I’d go further and observe that the concept of dialectic derives from ancient

Greece, and it simply means “conversing.” Carroll is using the concept in its most basic and

uncontroversial sense. Žižek could have distinguished Carroll’s use from that of other thinkers,




notably Hegel, but that would require a careful and painstaking response, not acri de cœur. To

assume that Hegel possesses the only valid concept of the dialectic is something of anundergraduate howler.

Finally, Carroll uses the concept of the dialectic as a regulative and pragmatic principle of

inquiry. Žižek, like Hegel, believes that the dialectic also exists in the world, as

a constitutive principle of nature, society, and indeed being itself. Thus Žižek says that there is a

dialectic informing the history of film style (pp. 22–25). In this way, a particular version of

dialectical inquiry is justified by an ontological assumption. Žižek brooks no dispute on this: again

and again he refers to the “proper” use of dialectics—the one forged by Hegel and, mysteriously,Freud (25). But he nowhere defends Hegel’s idea of dialectic against the hosts of objections that

have been raised by over a century of critics; nor does he defend his somewhat idiosyncratic

version of Hegel. 9Another philosophical slip—Žižek confuses epistemic criteria with ontological

ones—and another moment at which a canonical thinker becomes a security blanket.

Žižek has one more cluster of objections to Carroll’s conception of dialectical theory-building.

“Dialectics proper,” he says, is distinguished by “the way the subject’s position of enunciation isincluded, inscribed into the process: the cognitivist speaks from the safe position of the excluded

observer who knows the relativity and limitation of all human knowledge, including his

own” (15). These are presumably the “hidden vanities” to which MacCabe alludes. The easy

answer to this claim is this: Žižek uses enunciation theory as the basis for his objection. If you

don’t accept a theory of enunciation (which neither Carroll nor I do), the objection fails. (Note, in

passing, Žižek’s invocation of enunciation theory rests upon the oft-cited liar paradox: the

semantic contradiction involved in saying “I am lying” supposedly exemplifies split subjectivity

in all of language.) The equally obvious riposte is that Carroll, cited above, doesn’t believe in therelativity of all human knowledge (he in fact argues against relativism) and instead argues that

truth is to some degree attainable. Once more Žižek has misunderstood the claims he’s

criticizing.

Žižek goes on to create a sort of theoretical ad hominem. Having ascribed “modesty” to the

position he attacks, he goes on to say that it’s actually an arrogant view. But he does this by

again caricaturing the claims. “When I say, ‘The theory (which I am deploying) is just animpotent mental construct, while real life persists outside,’ or engage in similar modes of

referring to the wealth of pre-theoretical experience, the apparent modesty of such statements

harbours the arrogant position of enunciation of the subject who assumes the capacity to

compare a theory with ‘real life’” (15). In passing, I note that Žižek here seems to equate the

subject with an entity like an individual, capable of actions like assuming; but this is a

philosophical error, as I point out in myPost‑Theory contribution (14–15). Also in passing, I note

that until Žižek shows that enunciation theory is a plausible account of language or mental

activity, his diagnosis, which wholly depends on this theory, need cause me no worries. Moresubstantially, Carroll, Prince, and I never say or imply that our theoretical conjectures are

“impotent mental constructs” when faced with the teeming reality outside our theories. Where

does he get this stuff?

And what’s so arrogant about comparing a theory with real life? Žižek does it all the time.

Consider this passage from an interview, in which Žižek is asked about his fondness for Lenin’s


http://eserver.org/bs/59/zizek.html



theories:

What I like in Lenin is precisely what scares people about him-the ruthless will to

discard all prejudices. Why not violence? Horrible as it may sound, I think it’s a

useful antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating, politically correct pacifism.

Let’s take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more

suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be.

If Žižek can apply Leninist politics of violence to anti-smoking legislation (will he found a Chekato purge nonsmokers?), I assume that other theorists aren’t being arrogant in talking of how

comparatively harmless movies relate to the world we live in.

Dialogue versus Monologue

Throughout Žižek’s objections to Carroll’s notion of dialectical inquiry, one blind spot is evident.

In his references to “testing hypotheses” and the isolated “subject of enunciation,” in his

accounts of dialectical thinking by the solitary theorist, he ignores the intersubjective dimensionof theorizing. Dialectical inquiry proceeds because a researcher belongs to a community

committed to both rational and empirical investigation. Whatever one’s personal feelings about

people arguing against you, the regulative ideal of a research community is respect for

argumentation and evidence. People who don’t agree with you aren’t your enemies; their

criticisms may be painful, but one cooperates with them in an effort to attain more conceptual

precision and empirical adequacy.

Yet consider what Žižek claims in another book, in commenting on an essay in Post‑Theory:

Lenin liked to point out that one could often get crucial insights into one’s own

weaknesses from the perception of intelligent enemies. So, since the current essay

attempts a Lacanian reading of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it may be useful to

start with a reference to “Post‑Theory,” the recent cognitivist orientation of

cinema studies that establishes its identity by a thorough rejection of Lacanian

cinema studies. 10

Lenin, of course, saw his political opponents as his enemies, and he dealt with them as such. But

to characterize one’s intellectual opponents this way is revealing of Žižek’s attitude toward

debate. One doesn’t cooperate with enemies.

Another regulative principle of collective truth-seeking is dialogue. Whatever their personal

motives, scholars are united in seeking logically sound theories that illuminate a range of

phenomena. That’s what allows debate to flourish. When the community norms flag, debatewithers and theory becomes a chorus of monologues. Arguably, though, Žižek fails to grasp the

intersubjective dimension of theorizing because he doesn’t believe in theory as a conversation

within a community, a process of question and answer and rebuttal. This construal of his

attitude toward theory fits what we know of his intellectual demeanor. Consider these reports

from an admiring journalist: 11

Bearded, disheveled, and loud…Barely pausing to sit down, Žižek launches into a





monologue so learned and amusing that it could very well appear—verbatim—in

one of the many books he has written (42).

“Discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing for Slavoj. I’ve seen him talk about

theory for four hours straight without flagging,” says UC–Berkeley’s Judith

Butler. When not mediated by the printed page, however, the obsessive-

compulsive quality that makes his hyperkinetic prose so exhilarating is somewhat

overwhelming—even, evidently, for Žižek himself. Popping the occasional Xanax

to settle his nerves, he tells me about his heart problems and panic attacks. As his

eyes dart around the room and his manic monologue becomes more frantic, I fearthat I may be his last interviewer. Žižek is like a performance artist who is

terrified of abandoning the stage; once he starts talking, he seems unable to

stop (42).

Žižek has developed an elaborate set of psychological tricks to manipulate his

American students and enable him to have as little contact with them as possible.

At the first meeting of each course, he announces that all students will get an Aand should write a final paper only if they want to. “I terrorize them by creating a

situation where they have no excuse for giving me a paper unless they think it is

really good. This scares them so much, that out of forty students, I will get only a

few papers,” he says. “And I get away with this because they attribute it to my

‘European eccentricity.’ ”

Žižek says that he deals with student inquiries in a similar spirit. “I understand I

have to take questions during my lectures, since this is America and everybody isallowed to talk about everything. But when it comes to office hours, I have

perfected a whole set of strategies for how to block this,” he says with a smirk.

“The real trick, however, is to minimize their access to me and simultaneously

appear to be even more democratic!” Initially, Žižek scheduled office hours

immediately before class so that students could not run on indefinitely. Then he

came up with the idea of requiring them to submit a written question in advance,

on the assumption that most would be too lazy to do it (they were). Žižek reserveswhat he calls “the nasty strategy” for large lecture classes in which the students

often don’t know one another. “I divide the time into six twenty-minute periods

and then fill in the slots with invented names. That way the students think that all

the hours are full and I can disappear,” he claims (49).

There’s a lot to digest here—particularly the rich image of a theorist who pronounces on all

things political, historical, aesthetic, and psychological criticizing Americans for being “allowed to

talk about everything”—but you don’t need to be either a cognitivist or a psychoanalyst tohazard one conclusion. An insistent monologist and a teacher confessing himself uninterested in

student response might not be able to appreciate the community-driven nature of inquiry

postulated by Post‑Theory.

This, then, is what Žižek’s “critical dialogue” withPost‑Theory amounts to. Once more Carroll

proves prophetic: “Sustained, detailed, intertheoretical debate and criticism is rare in the



history of film theory…Nowadays this tendency is particularly pronounced in discussions of

cognitivism, which view is swiftly dismissed by castigating buzz-words like ‘formalism,’ ormaybe ‘idealism,’ uttered just before the author goes on to repeat, at length, yet again, the

received wisdom of Theory” (57).

Some final comments

Žižek obviously thinks that he has engaged in a critical dialogue, and he’s not alone. A review

12of FRT praises Žižek as “formidably well-read,” a “subtle theorist” able to operate “at the

highest levels of psychological and philosophical abstraction.” The book offers, in the reviewer’sopinion, “A mode of aesthetic analysis that fully describes the most spectral and intangible [sic]

of film without compromising the underlying theoretical rigor.” Everything I’ve said so far

indicates that I can’t agree. Where are the subtleties? Where is the rigor? The reviewer doesn’t

say, passing over the book’s avowedly theoretical chapters in a couple of paragraphs. Perhaps

the reviewer accepts Žižek’s own conception of Post‑Theory. The reviewer says that Žižek’s

“fierce critique” rests on the idea thatPost‑Theory “attempts to move away from a reliance on

theory and back toward more empirical accounts of film.” Since anyone whoreadPost‑Theory would understand that we plead for better theories, not the elimination of

theoretical work, I have to conclude that the reviewer relies on Žižek’s characterization of the

book’s project. And this is a mistake, for Žižek makes several errors.

First, he claims that the Post‑Theory collection is “a kind of manifesto” of cognitive film theory.

13This flies in the face of the introduction toPost‑Theory, where Carroll and I say, “It needs to

be stressed that though a number of the articles in this volume are cognitivist, the volume itself

is not a primer in cognitivism…. The unifying principle in this book is that all the researchincluded exemplifies the possibility of scholarship that is not reliant upon the psychoanalytic

framework that dominates film academia (xvi).” Moreover, there is cognitivist film theory that

isn’t “post-theoretical”; presumably many people pursuing cognition-based answers to

theoretical questions don’t reject psychoanalysis from the standpoint we adopt. Many

psychologists studying filmic perception have probably never heard of Jacques Lacan. I conclude

that Žižek uses the term “Post‑Theory” to sum up a broad movement he takes to be emerging

within film studies as the principal rival to the psychoanalytic (specifically, Lacanian) paradigm.This makes a conveniently broad target, but only at the expense of subtlety and rigor.

When Žižek treats the Post‑Theory movement as “the cognitivist and/or historicist reaction” to

Grand Theory (FRT, 1), he displays a second confusion. To call the historical essays collected

inPost‑Theory “historicist” is at best ambiguous. In the relevant sense, historicism involves the

belief that concepts held by historical agents at a given time are sui generis and can’t be

unproblematically translated into terms available at the historian’s moment. For example,

Foucault’s position in “What Is an Author?” can be described as historicist. He posits that themodern concept of the author came into existence at a particular time and place and can’t be

presumed to operate in earlier circumstances. But historicism in this sense plainly isn’t

advocated or even presupposed by the historians in thePost‑Theory collection; their essays

don’t take a position on this issue. Of course it’s possible that Žižek simply means to indicate

that the essays are historical studies; but then he’s misusing the term “historicism.” As a

philosopher, Žižek should be committed to clarifying terms rather than fogging them.





At some point someone is likely to say that Žižek is elusive because he’s playful. His flights of

fancy try to get you to think outside the box; he’s a provocateur. I suppose this comes down totaste, but I find Žižek not provocative at all. Praising Lacan, Lenin, and Mao seems to me not

rebellion but a retread. And we come at some point to a matter of sincerity. When is he not

being playful? When is he putting forth a claim he’s committed to?

For example, in FRT he proposes that pictures have two frames, one external, one internal, “the

frame implied by the structure of the painting” (130). “These two frames by definition neveroverlap” (130). 14 Yet in his prologue, Žižek explains that at a conference, asked to comment

on a picture, he “engaged in a total bluff” (5) by positing the existence of these two frames. Hegoes on to make fun of people who took it seriously:

To my surprise, this brief intervention was a huge success, and many followingparticipants referred to the dimension in-between-the-two-frames, elevating itinto a term. This very success made me sad, really sad. What I encountered here

was not only the efficiency of a bluff, but a much more radical apathy at the veryheart of today’s cultural studies (6).

The postmodern emperor doesn’t need a child in the crowd to point out his nakedness; he doesso himself, and mourns the fact that he fooled so many. But the question nags us: Are we to

believe the two-frames theory when it’s floated later in the book? Evidently not, since it’sadmittedly a bluff. But perhaps Žižek really believes the theory, so that in the prologue, when hesays that his theory is a bluff, he’s bluffing. This compels us to ask: Might not everything he says

about Lacan, Post‑Theory, and the rest be a bluff akin to the two-frames bluff? No wonder Žižektakes the Liar’s Paradox to be the prototype of language use.

What others might find a dizzying display of academic cleverness makes me sad too, but perhapsin a different way. Are we wasting our time in expecting Žižek to offer reasonable arguments?Fundamental questions of responsibility arise here, especially in relation to a writer not hesitant

to condemn the beliefs and actions of others. It’s tedious to be lectured on morality and ethicsfrom someone who casually announces petty acts of deceit, like sneaking out of office hours or

fooling gullible academics who are eager to take a master’s every word as a revelation.

“Well,” Žižek or a sympathetic reviewer might ask me, “can’t we say that he engages seriously

and straightforwardly with your claims? He has much to say about your book, On the History ofFilm Style and your claims about contingent universals in one essay of Post‑Theory.” He doesindeed. I was surprised, however, that when he turns on his analytical powers, how little his

objections amount to. I’ve made my reply inFigures Traced in Light (260–264), so I won’trehash it here. I think I show that when Žižek tries to be serious and dismantle an argument

critically, the results are vague, digressive, equivocal, contradictory, and either obviouslyinaccurate or merely banal. This might explain why he so seldom tries to be analytical.

Vagueness, digressions, equivocations, etc. are less apparent if you’re playful.

But we can forgive all this, others will reply, because Žižek is such a lively writer. Recall thatBoynton, above, calls his prose “hyperkinetic” and “exhilarating,” and names him “a dazzlingly

acute thinker and prose stylist.” Frankly, I can’t imagine Boynton and I are reading the samewriter. As with many contemporary theorists, Žižek’s dominant register is what Frederick




Crews has called ponderous coyness. 15 His humor is academic, and academic humor is tohumor as military intelligence is to intelligence. As for the texture of the prose, try to find the

acuteness and hyperkinesis here:

The underlying principle and support of this thesis of the symbolic order is that, in

each field of meaning, if this field is to be ‘totalised,’ there has to be anadditional/excessive signifier which, as it were, gives a positive figure to thatwhich cannot be properly included into this field, somewhat like Spinoza’s well-

known criticism of the traditional personalized notion of God: at the point at whichour positive knowledge of the causal links fails, we supplement this lack with the

idea of ‘God,’ which, instead of providing a precise idea of a cause, just fills in thelack of this idea. (FRT, 64–65).

Not only is this an obscure and pretentious way of recycling a familiar post-Structuralist idea,

the sentences aren’t minimally well-written. (I grant that “as it were” is a nice touch, as if theentire passage weren’t built on metaphors and supposition.) In all, this writing style isn’t a good

way to achieve Žižek’s goal of distinguishing “Theory proper” from “its jargonisticimitation” (FRT, 5).

What makes people think that Žižek writes gracefully, I think, is the casual way he drops inmovies, current event, and homely examples. So this: “These partial objets petit a are neithersubjective nor objective, but the short-circuit of the two dimensions: the subjective stain/stand-

in that sustains the order of objectivity, and the objective ‘bone in the throat’ that sustainssubjectivity” (FRT, 65) is followed by: “Does this not provide the reason why, in so-called caper

films…?” (FRT, 66). A stretch of churned mud is softened by a stream of colorful, if far-fetched,examples.

Cutely illustrating an ontological concept through mundane instances seems to make for a user-friendly approach. In every appreciation of Žižek, there is a sentence somewhere marveling athow his vision sweeps from lofty abstraction to pop-culture examples. “He takes in subjects

including national cuisines, the Cathar heresy and the literature and film of the GDR, citingPlato, Hegel, Derrida, Heidegger and more” (Monroe, “Fright of Real Theory”). But such potshot

erudition is in fact quite easily achieved, as Umberto Eco showed long ago. If academics are thiseasily impressed by name-dropping, no wonder Žižek’s bluffs find success. And from this

standpoint, Žižek’s claim that correct thought moves from universal concepts to singularmanifestations can be seen to serve the strategic purpose of justifying his grandiloquentrhetorical leaps from the sublime to the ridiculous, from Leninist strictures on violence to anti-

smoking legislation.

Finally, I’m left with the question: Why do Žižek and MacCabe elevate a single anthology

(Post‑Theory) into a movement (Post‑Theory)? The book has won little attention, and no oneelse has built it into a mighty opposite to Lacanian theory. I can only speculate.

My hunch is that both Žižek and MacCabe see intellectual work as a struggle for power. Recall

their admiration for the likes of Lenin and Mao, note their rhetoric of enemies and obtuseopposition, and then observe that other passages suggest that by calling for conceptual and

empirical theorizing, Post‑Theory aligns itself with science. And science is a threat. After telling




us that no quantum physicists worry about the ontology of what they observe (I suspect this will

depend on what you mean by ontology), Žižek complains:

The objectivised language of experts and scientists. . .can no longer be translated

into the common language, available to everyone, but is present in it in the modeof fetishized formulae that no one really understands, but which shape our artisticand popular imaginary (Black Hole, Big Bang, Superstrings, Quantum

Oscillations). The gap between scientific insight and common sense isunbridgeable, and it is this very gap which elevates scientists into the popular

cult-figures of the ‘subjects supposed to know’ (the Stephen Hawkingphenomenon) (FRT, 6–7).

As usual, any few lines of Žižek demand both glossing and interrogation. He starts by talkingabout common language, then shifts to talking about common sense; but the two aren’t thesame. Although many scientific ideas violate common sense, they can be put in intelligible

language. Can it really be said that science writers like Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins,Matt Ridley, Jared Diamond, Deborah Blum, Helena Cronin, John Gribbin, and James Gleick

can’t explain difficult scientific concepts to readers prepared to spend a little time thinking?Moreover, given Žižek’s tortured style, does heseem to have any regard for writing in a

“common language, available to everyone”? And if it’s wrong for scientists to be elevated as“subjects supposed to know,” why isn’t the same stricture applied, say, to Freud and Lacan, whohave become far more Delphic oracles than Einstein or Hawking? Or even applied to the

“popular cult-figure” of the larger-than-life, I-am-ze-bull European intellectual who saysoutrageous things in order to rouse us from our bourgeois slumber?

Needless to say, Žižek is strategically vague; his comments evoke attitudes, not arguments. Nordoes he mention that, whatever cult value may attend to scientists in the popular press, the

general public remains remarkably resistant to scientific findings and scientific thinking. MostAmericans believe in angels and a literal place called Hell. Most accept astrology, consider thetheory of evolution unfounded, and think that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.

This state of affairs, surely related to the class struggle, won’t be changed by another gloss onthe concept of suture.

Someone will remark that at least Žižek loves movies.

To this there’s an easy reply. Who doesn’t?

Notes

1 : Colin MacCabe, “Days of Hope-A Response to Colin McArthur,” Screen 17,

1 (Spring 1976), 103.

2 : Ben Brewster, Stephen Heath, and Colin MacCabe, “Comment,” Screen 16,

2 (Summer 1975), 87.

3 : Thanks to Benjamin Noys for pointing this out to me.

4 : I can’t resist adding that Žižek’s third chapter, devoted to the notion of suture, misses

http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek.php#_ednref1






another opportunity. Instead of recycling confused 1960s and 1970s claims about point-of-viewcutting, he could have attacked the cognitivist criticisms of suture theory that I float

in Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, 1985), 110–113.

5 : Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early FeatureFilm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See the many discussions of 1917 releases in the

book, as well as the analysis of (1919), 133-136. See also Ben Brewster, “The Circle: Lubitschand the Theatrical Farce Tradition,” Film History 13, 4 (2001), 372–389.

6 : Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe, “Editorial: Semiology and Sociology,” Screen 15,1 (Spring 1974), 7–8.

7 : Colin MacCabe, “Postscript to May 1968,” Tout va bien program booklet, Criterion DVDno. 275 (2005), 20.

8 : Noël Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 399–

400.

9 : I say idiosyncratic because Žižek says (and he’s apparently not being playful here): “The

basic rule of dialectics is thus: whenever we are offered a simple enumeration of subspecies of auniversal species, we should always look for the exception to the series” (27). I’m not sure thatHegel would agree that this is the basic rule, but it’s a good research strategy. Always look out

for counterexamples to universal claims—especially those made by psychoanalytic theory!Remarkably, Žižek goes on: “For example, it is my conjecture that the key to Hitchcock’s entire

opus [sic] is the film which is integral and at the same time an exception…. The Trouble withHarry (1954)” (27). Ontology and epistemology, not argued for but rather illustrated, and by a

Hitchcock movie at that: such is the zigzag of the Žižekian dialectic.

10 : Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway(Seattle:University of Washington and Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000), 4.

11 : All these quotations come from Robert S. Boynton, “Enjoy Your Žižek!” Lingua Franca 8,7 (October 1998): 41–50.

12 : Alexei Monroe, “The Fright of Real Theory,” in Kinoeye: New Perspectives on EuropeanFilm, available at <http:/www.kinoeye.org/01/04/monroe04.php>.

13 : Žižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 4.

14 : To be fussily philosophical, if this distinction is true “by definition” it can only be a deductivetruth (which it obviously isn’t) or a stipulative definition posited by the speaker. If it’s the latter,

we require further conceptual or empirical proof that the stipulation is reasonable. Žižekprovides none.

15 : Frederick Crews, “‘Kafka Up Close’: An Exchange,” New York Review of

Books (7 April 2005), 80.













http://www.davidbordwell.net/www.kinoeye.org/01/04/monroe04.php




David Bordwell on Zizek

Documents

Transcript of David Bordwell on Zizek