User:Lbattich/On Žižek and Ideology

On Žižek and Ideology

What is Žižek's view on ideology in relation with poverty, and how does Tadashi Kawamata’s project Favela Café fit within his anlysis?

Abstract

This essay examines Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek's view on ideology, especially as it is presented in the film A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), in realation the artworld's treatment of issues of poverty. I examine Tadashi Kawamata’s artistic project Favela Café, realised for Art Basel 2013, according to the insights and arguments of Žižek. According to Žižek it is very easy, precicely because the current capitalist ideology allows it, to disregard the explotation in certain areas of the world caused by the wider economical system, and to expect an ethical redemtion in the act of cunsuming itself. This essay tries to show that this ideological illusion also applies to artistic approaches to a delicate subject such as favelas.

Introduction

In Sophie Fiennes’ film A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek boldly, and rightly in my opinion, asserts that the current ideology we live in in the West is one of “pure consumerism.” Under this ideology, we are compelled to fullfil our full potential by indulging our desires and pleasures. This demand is impossible to meet, for desire and consumption only engenders more desire. This excess of desire generates a state of continuous urge to consume. In this essay I will briefly consider what may be Žižek’s stand and criticism on this ideology. By borrowing Marc Augé’s call for the responsibilities of artists and designer within the phenomenon of cultural and economic globalization, I will then consider Tadashi Kawamata’s project Favela Café may serve as an case study on the artist’s role in realtion to Žižek’s ideological analysis.

Ideology and Capitalism

In A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology Žižek introduces the notion of ideology as a material force that blinds us, the trashcan from which we are continuously eating, without seeing what we are being fed. Ideology is something that distorts our strait view on reality. Yet we are quickly dispelled from this illusory viewpoint: ideology is not something imposed on ourselves from the outside; rather, in Žižek’s words, “ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world and how we perceive each other.” Even when we think we are escaping ideology, and accessing our deepest dreams, then we are in ideology. We enjoy ideology. The film provides a critique of ideology by analyzing popular films and their relation to communist, religious and capitalist ideologies, often highlighting their common features – such as the use of fear and the appeal to individualist desires in order to maintain the status quo. Neo-liberal capitalism, however, is Žižek’s main point of focus. In a talk delivered at the Royal Society of Arts, Žižek shortly refers to the development of capitalism after 1968 as a cultural capitalism, “post-modern, and caring ecology,” where the damaging activities of the free market are closely intermixed with the pretense and promise of charitable, ethical and ecological awareness.

Žižek introduces the Marxian notion that capitalism is always on crisis, in a permanent state of self-reproducing. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote on this economical and social trait of capitalism (and modernity as a whole) in the Communist Manifesto:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. …
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire
surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

This continuous expansion across the globe has accelerated with use of newer communication technology and the development of an interconnected neo liberal market system around most of the world. Within this scenario Marc Augé, in his book 'Non-Places', argues for the responsibility of artists, architects and designers in the face of global access to information and markets, and the relation to the unprivileged population that have no control on the negative effects that capitalist globalization imposes on them – as well as no access to the wealth of cultural information.

In the domains of architecture, art and design … the involvement of forms and objects …
proceeds from a considered choice and has meaning in privileged circles aware of the immense
possibilities offered, theoretically and ideally, by making the entire planet accessible to everyone’s gaze.

Augé remarks that the flexibility of the global system is particularly adept at appropriating what is inimical to it for it’s own growth. In this scenario, all calls for a redefinition of criteria and for openness to other cultures are absorbed and trivialized by the capitalist system, and in more concrete terms by the media and commodity markets.

The Poor as Others: Favela Café

The complexity of dealing with other cultures, and particularly with poor areas of the world, is exemplified in the outside café designed for Art Basel 2013, an international art fair held annually in the Swiss city and other cities in the US and China. In 2013 Art Basel commissioned Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata to create an “installation” that would also serve as an outdoors café for the fair visitors. Kawamata created Favela Café, a series of structures carefully designed by appropriating the aesthetics of impoverished architecture. Favela refers to the slum areas in Brazil. The work seems created in part to generate controversy and point a finger at the paradox of having the allusion – or the allure – of poverty in the middle of the international art event. Yet the impression it gives is one of a wealthy art-saturated crowd relaxing at the expense of the poor – in the very sense of cynical slum tourism. The work fails to engage constructively with its delicate subject matter, for all its intended paradoxical feel. In many of his gallery works, Kawamata uses precarious material in order to construct ephemeral structures that often recall shanty-town constructions, and are driven by a creative spirit of improvisation. For these works, however, there is a distance between the piece and the viewer, which allows the works to serve as evocations not only of social issues implied, but also of more general and vague notions of ephemerality and precariousness. In short, the works are isolated and protected, so to speak, by the gallery context in which they function as artworks. This distance can of course be criticized, but they function in a different setting than Favela Café. This “installation” was a fully functional café serving food, drink and providing musical entertainment, as well as a place for international fair-goers to relax and enjoy the Swiss mild summer weather. Its function was to engage with people in a very real and social sense, a sense in which the gallery works do not engage. As much as the café can be called an artwork, it’s social dimensions – and it’s social responsibility – will not disappear. In these grounds, the Favela Café was an unmistakable appropriation of poverty for the benefit of a wealthy few.

Ethical Consumerism is Part of the Ideology

While analyzing the ideological message in James Cameron’s film Titanic, Žižek asserts that when the upper class losses vitality, it uses the contact with lower classes in order to reconstitute its ego. In this sense, the poor are often needed as Others in order to find reassurance in our own situation. Favela Café is an example where this Othering is put on stage to the detriment of actual favelas. As the gap between the very rich and the very poor continues to increase, the act of fetishizing favelas seems to be a way to distance oneself from this reality. (Incidentally, cafes in actual favelas have not much to do with Kawamata’s vision, and his work serves to perpetuate a Western myth of how favelas may look, and to stereotype a general view on other people’s poverty.) Even if the work was meant as a critique to Art Basel’s ostentatious artworld scenario, Favela Café was nevertheless an intrinsic part of that scenario.

Žižek reminds us that other approaches are as much cynical and detrimental – particularly the approach to poor areas in the spirit of charity and welfare. This is exacerbated in the current post-1968 neo liberal capitalism. According to Žižek, the current free market ideology imposes two distinct demands:

1. A demand of the circulation of capital.
2. A demand for environmental, ecological and social awareness.

The basis for the current system is that capital must circulate, for this anything must be sacrificed: this is the perverted duty of capitalism. Yet we as consumers are able to feel redeemed from guilt, because our share of charitable and environmental duties are already included in the product we buy. This allows us to be consumers without the bad conscience that may come from seeing the social and environmental effects of the capitalist system – which ultimately makes for better consumers and for more capital growth and circulation. This charitable solution embedded in the product is no solution at all, rather it serves to perpetuate and exacerbate the current system and the current ideology of consumerism. In this context Žižek's quote from Oscar Wilde is very timely:

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that
result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Conclusion

As Žižek asserts, leaving ideology is a painful thing – we are too much accustomed to the privileges afforded by the current institutions and the free capitalist system. But a critical stance is better than a mere reflection of this dominant ideology – like in the case of Favela Cafe. Žižek’s analyses and the example of Favela Café may remind us that these impoverished areas are not external and alien to the West, rather they are the product and keeping of the ever-expanding capitalist ideology that we form part.