Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Phil Hessler
Do ideological irons restrain the mouth or the arms? Is it our lot to succumb to unutterable resistance in a silent cry or to thrash about with our limbs? Or does providence just have us show up at work?
A lost critical language can be dated to 1968 in Paris and elsewhere 1, and ultimately everywhere, as some critical potential energy dissipated into abeyance/obedience, depending on how one looks at it (based on the promise of renewed contests to capitalism, it is likely the former). It is probably this moment in history that, again, brought that language to heel; that in thinking oneself free, one resigns to unfreedom. But how lost is a language that can be relearned?
Maids are emblems – devices, even - of unfreedom. In Sebastian Silva’s 2009 film La Nana, the protagonist is such a thing, played with scary accuracy by Catalina Saavedra. The maid/nanny, Raquel, is compelled to have an abiding, affective attachment to those for whom she is ultimately a tool, a joke, a companion, a surrogate mother. She befriends the children, loves them, cleans for them – but she is nothing more than a tool. When the tool breaks, (she gets sick) the result is only difficult for the tool – the function of the household must remain uninterrupted. The household, the employer, bring in a new device. They, too, were under compulsion.
The relationship between employer and employee is magnetic. It draws together as much as it pulls apart and both actions are equally natural and unnatural. In this, the compulsion can give way to the idea of freedom that, when weighed out, is merely the choice of becoming attached magnetically to a comparable household, comparable institution, with comparable students, comparable wages; but with the added disincentive of relocation cost, unfamiliarity, and the notion that intrusion into these spheres is most of all resisted from within them. She who would find this confrontation from without will be the instrument of confrontation to those who represent her within that context – the interloper, the outsider, the new employee, the replacement device.
The cinematic reference is in keeping with Zizek’s form, but here I turn to Roland Barthes for insight into the missing critical language which may also be a question of time. He points to what he calls “paper time:” “[here, language] tends to “de-chronologize” the historical “thread” and to restore, if only as a reminiscence or a nostalgia, a complex, parametric, non-linear time whose deep space recalls the mythic time of the ancient cosmogonies, it too linked by essence to the speech of the poet or the soothsayer: […]it is insofar as he knows what has not yet been recounted that the historian, like the agent of myth, needs to double the chronic splitting of events by references to the actual time of his speech.”2
Our speechlessness is then complicated not only by deficient language, but by a disjointedness of time that editing deceptively sews together. That moment in 1968 can be merged with 1848, when Marx published his manifesto. What language, and what times, could better articulate the proprietary ‘unfreedom’ of capitalist structures?
1 “The Beautiful Language of My Century” Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968, MIT PRESS, 2007 by Tom McDonough. Lessons learned from this text actually point to an emergent language, even if loss was still experienced in ‘68.
ii. “The Rustle of Language,” Roland Barthes, University of California Press, 1989.
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Phil Hessler
Do ideological irons restrain the mouth or the arms? Is it our lot to succumb to unutterable resistance in a silent cry or to thrash about with our limbs? Or does providence just have us show up at work?
A lost critical language can be dated to 1968 in Paris and elsewhere 1, and ultimately everywhere, as some critical potential energy dissipated into abeyance/obedience, depending on how one looks at it (based on the promise of renewed contests to capitalism, it is likely the former). It is probably this moment in history that, again, brought that language to heel; that in thinking oneself free, one resigns to unfreedom. But how lost is a language that can be relearned?
Maids are emblems – devices, even - of unfreedom. In Sebastian Silva’s 2009 film La Nana, the protagonist is such a thing, played with scary accuracy by Catalina Saavedra. The maid/nanny, Raquel, is compelled to have an abiding, affective attachment to those for whom she is ultimately a tool, a joke, a companion, a surrogate mother. She befriends the children, loves them, cleans for them – but she is nothing more than a tool. When the tool breaks, (she gets sick) the result is only difficult for the tool – the function of the household must remain uninterrupted. The household, the employer, bring in a new device. They, too, were under compulsion.
The relationship between employer and employee is magnetic. It draws together as much as it pulls apart and both actions are equally natural and unnatural. In this, the compulsion can give way to the idea of freedom that, when weighed out, is merely the choice of becoming attached magnetically to a comparable household, comparable institution, with comparable students, comparable wages; but with the added disincentive of relocation cost, unfamiliarity, and the notion that intrusion into these spheres is most of all resisted from within them. She who would find this confrontation from without will be the instrument of confrontation to those who represent her within that context – the interloper, the outsider, the new employee, the replacement device.
The cinematic reference is in keeping with Zizek’s form, but here I turn to Roland Barthes for insight into the missing critical language which may also be a question of time. He points to what he calls “paper time:” “[here, language] tends to “de-chronologize” the historical “thread” and to restore, if only as a reminiscence or a nostalgia, a complex, parametric, non-linear time whose deep space recalls the mythic time of the ancient cosmogonies, it too linked by essence to the speech of the poet or the soothsayer: […]it is insofar as he knows what has not yet been recounted that the historian, like the agent of myth, needs to double the chronic splitting of events by references to the actual time of his speech.”2
Our speechlessness is then complicated not only by deficient language, but by a disjointedness of time that editing deceptively sews together. That moment in 1968 can be merged with 1848, when Marx published his manifesto. What language, and what times, could better articulate the proprietary ‘unfreedom’ of capitalist structures?
1 “The Beautiful Language of My Century” Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968, MIT PRESS, 2007 by Tom McDonough. Lessons learned from this text actually point to an emergent language, even if loss was still experienced in ‘68.
ii. “The Rustle of Language,” Roland Barthes, University of California Press, 1989.
