User:Jules/essayonideology

The pervert's guide to ideology is a film essay directed by Sophie Fiennes in 2012, written by Slavoj Zizek and aims to demonstrate how we experience reality through ideology within our “postmodern” societies. The whole demonstration is supported by the inclusion of various extracts from fairly popular movies. Episode III : Enjoy poverty is presented by Renzo Martens as a 90 minutes film from 2008, recording his activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Renzo documents his journeys across the country with the aim to demonstrate that poverty is the main financial resource of the nation and that it should benefit the population. He also tries to convince Congolese image makers to adapt their practice in order to adapt to the needs of the international market. Using those two objects as a basis for thinking, I will try to show that images create a frontier between what is to be seen and where we see things from and that our perspective relates to where we see them from. Then I will try to see how we create a hybrid space when we internalise them that influence our cultural construction of reality.

AN IMAGE IS A FRONTIERE
As Baudrillard stated a simulation is an experience of reality brougt to us through images. The sense of space, time, or the documentary style are nothing but effects. Images relate an absence of the world. Behind the images, reality has vanished. Once away from reality, the represented object is reborn with a different identity and a certain autonomy. They have their own theater which isn't informative. And those images rewrite something into us.

In The Deshumanization of Art, Jose Ortega y Gasset makes an interesting distinction between Modernist and Realist Art, actually to identify ways of looking at Art. He compares the work of Art to a window pane. The work of realism tries to erase the glass by making the viewer look through it. This enables the viewer to have an affective connection with the scenary. The modernist work focuses on the qualities of the glass itself, the process of making the image and how it can translate a space for the viewer. This was aimed at differenciating the way two distinct categories of people look at images : people with an education in Art and the others. What's interesting is that in both ways the viewer remains on his very own side of the window by looking at the image of something.
Renzo Martens is a a window maker, preoccupied by the aesthetic level of his action more than infiltrating the land where he produces representation objects. He also wants to target specific types of viewers, which means that he has to think about how those images will infiltrate their realm, weather they care about the glass or the landscape.
“Imagine a man dying in his bedroom, his wife, the doctor, a journalist and a painter being present. In this example the painter is supposed to be the most dissociated and the least spiritually involved. He reaches the aesthetic level. It is emotional distance towards the drama taking place that allows the painter to deal with the formal elements: the countours of the humans, the play of light and shadow, the shades of colours etc.” Maria Joao Neves (The deshumanisation of Art. Ortega y gasset's Vision of New Music)
It is interesting to note that Slavoj Zizek tells us about ideology and our construction of reality through cinema, narrations of potential worlds through screens. The etymology of the term “screen” relate to the Medieval European “scherm” (middle Dutch), with the connotation of a “barrier”.

WHERE WE STAND WE GET REACHED BY SIGNALS
In both ways, when we look at images, we stand on one side of the window. Renzo didn't experience the lives of the people he “came to save”, which differenciate his process from George Orwell's for instance, who tried to put himself within the position of a begger (For the writing of Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell went tramping in East London). Renzo Martens built the window for the Art galleries public to look at. Is work is primarily an aesthetisation of his gesture towards poverty.
The video is aimed to be seen by the western people, under a certain set of conditions. It will be in Art galleries, therefore seen by a very little amount of the population, who have an interest for image creators. If you want to look it up online, legally, you will have to pay the sum of 30 euros, which makes the film fall into the category of quite a luxury product. (a monthly subscription to Netflix costs around 10 euros)
Renzo Martens operates a translation of the poor people's milieu into a frame that is aimed to be viewed by the rich. As he is making these images, he couldn't be more outside the situation. Therefore, at no point he does not experience a proper immersion into the poor people' milieu, there is no cognition through empathy. There is no empathy, no assimilation of the poor's situation through the eyes of the poor, or their glasses as in John Carpenters film They live. This invalidates his assumption of “empowering them” because every single frame of the film and its articulation is completely directed towards a Western public.
At the end of the film, it is very clear who Martens addresses his film to. When he asks the man in the plantation if he has a television, a bike and shoes, the process of asking this question is actually directed at the viewer. The congolese man who never possessed such things doesn't really feel the cynicism. Nevertheless, the viewer, owning these goods of not so much value might feel bad about the idea of the loss of these objects in their lives.

WHAT WE MAKE UP FOR THE LACK OF DATA
In the little animation made by RSA after Zizek's refers to Oscar Wilde in relation to cultural consummerism. Cultural capitalism happens when Starbucks and others sell their products telling the consummer that their purchase will have a positive impact towards poor producers, ecosystems, animals and more. Oscar Wilde said in “The man at the age of Socialism” that “It is easier to have empathy for the suffering than for thoughts.” The ethymology of empathy conveys the idea of internalising the sufferance of the other.
The effects of this internalisation seems to relate to the actual way of internalising the experience of the other. We could seperate two distinct ways of processing. The first one could be an actual physical experience of the other's reality, for instance George Orwell's attempt to go and beg in the streets in order to absorb the experience of the poor to understand their perspective. (It's not perfect but we get the idea of immersion). It is a cognitive experience because it comes from direct learning (being cold, waiting for money, social interaction, etc). The other to gain a sense of awareness is experienced through the mediation of the others' struggles. More affective, this process integrates an idea of the others' struggle by fantasying the lacking data through one's own experience. Therefore the object of one's empathy is more of an hybrid materialisation of the sufferance of the other through one's very own constructed reality. The mediation of potential realities, “being poor”, “living in a dangerous zone” or even “owning an iphone” always creates some breach in ones mind that opens that hybrid zone where this potentiality and the reality of the viewer associate. The position taken by the subject will then be influenced by certain factors, how the viewer positions themselves within the society and according to it.
In the pervert's guide to ideology, Zizek evokes the case of the Ode to Joy by Beethoven and how this piece is an empty container for ideologies. This music is the european anthem, was used in Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, and has been used by even more political movements, which are kind of opposed to each other. Distributed in different contexts, the same piece of art will still manage to move populations in a way that remains coherant with their beliefs. It is that, once it has been assimilated within their specific environments, those populations will fill associate meanings to the song that will make it a complete object, or bring the song back to a reality.

OUR PERCEPTION OF REALITY IS A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION
In Symposium, Plato identified the “lack of something” at the very core of desire. This is the void Perhaps this lack of experiencing the simulacre of reality brought to us through images drives our capitalist consumption. Taking the kinder egg as an example, Zizek tells us that the higher goal located within the void in the object is what enables us to appreciate the banal surface of the object even more, and that this makes commodities desirable.
When we buy a starbucks coffee, as Zizek points, we try to buy our redemption from being the lucky consumers of goods coming to us from poorer places were they cannot be enjoyed at such a price. The communication campain and the discourse generated to convince our purchase is actually articulated to maintain our enjoyment intact. It provides a dedramatisation of the workers position with the promise that our comfort is for their own good as much as ours.
In the case of “Enjoy poverty”, the whole film functions in a way that aims to destroy the potential redemption a first world viewer might usually feel about engaging with actions aimed to benefit populations of the third world. Nevertheless, the film does also play with the wish from a certain Art audience to receive some politically strong artistic engagement. The product is disseminated through specific circuits for its distribution that will enable the rising of its value to a certain level. That's how this film can be attributed the price of 30 euros for its online viewing. The film is playing the game it aims to analyze. Renzo makes some statements to underline his acknowledgement of this “The piece is the third in a series of films that, by enacting their own parameters, try to make visible their own complicity in a world obscured by depictions of it.” Still, it is possible to feel like one has gotten closer to the truth by watching it. Renzo has plenty of other ways to help people buy a brand new redemption, their “Indulgence”.

“We do not have externally given to us some fixed conception of reality which we can compare with our ideas, and thereby see how much agreement with reality the latter have. Reality, like everything else that has meaning, is a function of our ideas.”
John Dewey “knowledge as idealization”

There is no way out, this is a closed circuit, we are still on a certain side of the communication interface constructing our cultural representation of reality. A society's reality is nothing but a cultural artifact; it is a “social achivement, directed by the community of needs and interests and fostered in the interests of cooperation”
Therefore we have adapted a way to solve our ethical problems in accordance with how we provocked them in the first place. Ideology intervenes when reality gets analysed through a predefined system of ideas or categories.
Or as Zizek would say : “Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on.”

Cultural capitalism resides more in our relationship to images than in the product they try to sell to us. An image isn't a reality, if we are not part of the whole scenary then all we get is weigthless signals. We naturally aim to reconstruct the whole space that has vanished behind the image. By doing so, we internalise what we see and append our personal vision to it. An image always leaves some free room for idealising the missing aspects of the space it evokes to our mind, located between our reality and our perception of a space which doesn't exist anymore. When it comes to cultural capitalism, things can be sum up this way : if we want to reach this hybrid space then we spend money, otherwise we can spend money too.