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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Slavoj Zizek reviews The Lives of Others:"To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: "Good Bye Hitler" instead of "Good Bye Lenin." Doesn’t this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany toward the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a Lenin-statue carried by the helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may appear.
This, of course, in no way implies that Good Bye Lenin! is without faults. The weak point of the film is that (like Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful) it sustains the ethics of protecting one’s illusions: It manipulates the threat of a new heart attack as the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty. Isn’t the film then unexpectedly endorsing Leo Strauss’ thesis on the need for a “noble lie”? So is it really that the emancipatory potential of Communism is only a “noble lie” to be staged and sustained for the naive believers, a lie which effectively only masks the ruthless violence of the Communist rule? Here mother is the “subject supposed to believe”: through her, others sustain their belief. (The irony is that it is usually the mother who is supposed to be the caretaker, protecting children from cruel reality.)
The lesson of all this? We are still waiting for a film that would provide a complete description of the GDR terror, a film that would do for the Stasi what Varlam Shalamov, in his unsurpassed Kolyma Tales, did for the Gulag."
I find myself in agreement with Zizek that The Lives of Others is a far from complete description of the Stasi, an organisation that simply never witnessed one of its agent showing mercy towards a subject in the way the film depicts. This article presents a rather more acute political criticism of the film:"No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. (We'd know if one had, because the files are so comprehensive.) Unlike Wiesler, who runs a nearly solo surveillance operation and can withhold the results from his superior, totalitarian systems rely on thoroughgoing internal surveillance (terror) and division of tasks. The film doesn't accurately portray the way totalitarian systems work, because it needs to leave room for its hero to act humanely (something such systems are designed to prevent)... To understand why a Wiesler could not have existed is to understand the "total" nature of totalitarianism. Knabe talks of the fierce surveillance within the Stasi of its own men, of how in a case like Dreyman's there might have been a dozen agents: everything was checked and cross-checked. This separation of duties gives some former Stasi men the impression that they were just "obeying orders", or were "small cogs" in the machine, and that therefore they couldn't have done much harm. Perhaps this is partly why repentance like Wiesler's is rare. To my mind, hoping for salvation to come from the change of heart of a perpetrator is to misunderstand the nature of bureaucratised evil - the way great harms can be inflicted in minute, "legal" steps, or in decisions by committees carried out by people "just doing their jobs"."
With this, however, the agreements ends. The illusions perpetuated in Goodbye Lenin! are effectively a form of propaganda, something that the film is explicitly critiquing and which ensures that the ostalgie it depicts is decidedly ambivalent. But what I find most striking is Zizek's insistence on the 'emancipatory potential' of communism alongside his admission that The Lives of Others is far from adequate in depicting the nature of state surveillance in East Germany. It is, for instance, rather difficult to see Stalin displacing Lenin in the title and helicopter scene, although Lenin was far from having different methods (a fact I rather thought Zizek had endorsed). More generally, surely it was the utopian 'emancipatory potential' of both fascism and communism that lay at the root of their danger, both being essentially religious rather than political phenomena.
Christianity asserts spirit as the ground of being for the presence of matter, while communism asserts materialiasm as the ground of becoming for the emerging mind. The invisible God promising the invisible Heavens was faced with the visible God promising the visible Earth. Dialectical idealism was opposed by dialectical materialism, and contemplation by action. Both are absolutist, both are deterministic, and both accept deductive logic as valid and the principle of noncontradiction as sound. The relationship between communism and christianity was essentially that of thesis and anti-thesis. As Koestler put it "the two poles of the Communist's faith are longing for Utopia and rejection of the existing social order."
posted by Richard 11:04 am
