Our far flung correspondents

My friend Tom makes a Lacanian analysis of the Baghdad statue destroying party yesterday. We were corresponding about coining a new word for throwing down statues (he suggested de-erection -- we suggested tumescoclasm) - and we referred him to Fred Kaplan's article in Slate. This is his reply.

"The crowds seemed to know what was expected of them. A man went up to one of the marines, whose tanks now controlled the circle and both sides of Sadoon Road, a main artery in east Baghdad, and asked for permission to destroy the statue."

Thanks for the hint toward Kaplan's piece - not bad for an on-the-spot report; esp. his comparative recollections from 1991. Of course, of course, I am looking forward to a somewhat more Lacanian reading of this type of event from Zizek. Like I always say (rather: I promise to say it like this from this point forward, for this is the inaugural use): while you can have too much psychotherapy, you can never have too much psychoanalysis because you can always be dead wrong.

Yes, damned right Fred Kaplan, that Marine is a "moron" for draping the stars and stripes over the face of the statue (let's skip the obvious issues of The Face and erasure here; they aint that much fun), but not for reasons of painting a "picture of neo-colonialism"; no, he is a moron for therapeutic reasons.

Lets face it, the picture of colonialism, neo-, retro-or other, is quite complete; it is developed, mounted, framed and hung for exhibition.

Let me back-up, step aside and circle away from my point. I'm thinking now of Zizek's Introduction to his book Tarrying With the Negative. I'm envisioning an image similar to the one he recalls in this Intro.: the celebrations in the streets of Bucharest after the overthrow of Ceausescu; a national flag waving above the crowd; the red star, the symbol of Communism, has been cut-out of the field. Z. declares that this is a "sublime" (yes, Kantanian sense) image: a moment just following the departure of the Master-Signifier, when It has yet to be replaced, an "open" moment, a moment of "becoming" wherein the incompleteness of the Big Other became apparent.

There is somewhere else in Zizek's books where he gives his account (his imaginings) of the beginning of the Iranian revolt against the Shah. He imagines a provincial police check-point where some one Irani defies the police, he will not follow the order to leave the area. Therefrom, the assembled crowd confronts the police and attack the police station. This is proposed as the first (given ordinal preference merely for conveniences of logical sequence) instance of the demise of the power of the absolute injunctions of the Big Other; that it is only from one such moment that the revolution could take place at all. The falling of statues comes only much much later.

From a statue to a gap in the flag (thus my proposal: de-erection). Whether it was Lenin or Stalin, whether it was brought down by hand tools or cranes or Finnish engineers contracted by Estonians, without drinking too deeply of fantasia, I think that it was done locally, by some version of "the people". Thus, those Iraqis in Firdouz square were (they have been and will be) deprived their "open" moment free of the previous concrete contingencies of threat and collaboration; they are occupied, the Master-Signifier is torn by an invading force, they had to ask permission to be granted but a moment of pleasure. The psycho-social trauma is perverse and boundless: the only relief granted by the "taking" of Baghdad is a relief from a compound terror (arbitrariness compounded): life under S.H. and foreign military violence; but terror remains in town. One species of inhumanity immediately replaced by another; inhumanities of epic proportions. The US (in the guise of the military) is the evil therapist: the one who needs the needs of the analysand; the one who establishes new dynamics of dependencies; the one who authors new fantasies under threat of violence.

Took me a long time to get not very far; these things sometimes steep for days, and then finally saturate me. Really, I promise, I have not converted to or taken vows as an orthodox Lacanian; its just a way for me to keep seeing the world as filled with people and pleasures and pains and not merely architecture.