Peaceful Dreams

By Viktor Warg

We usually do not speak about peace or peacefulness as the mere absence of war and violence, we think of it as something more than an absence. It would not suffice to attach people to some cords in incubators, through which they would be fed the necessities to survive and then speak about a peaceful life of the blobs. Acknowledging their biological needs, observing, securing, administering and maybe even extending their lives would not be enough. We usually describe such a pure biopolitical approach, in which the mere integrity of the living creature is all that matters, as a dystopia. We want something extra from peace, something reflecting our pleasures and positive convictions, not a mere absence. Don’t we?

According to Robert Pfaller’s and Slavoj Zizek’s theory of interpassivity, we might not! Religious imagery should not be thought of as a means of actively confronting our problems and fulfilling our dreams, but on the contrary as a solution for escaping what it would mean to confront them in reality; interacting with a medialized representation of a conviction to become passive in relation to the very dream.

One of the prime examples, "grounding interpassivity" comes from Zizek who found the modern day example of the old Greek choir (The chorus in Classical Greek drama was a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation) in the so-called canned laughter. Canned laughter refers to the recorded laughs incorporated in tv-shows such as the American show Seinfeld or the Swedish Svensson, Svensson, that laughs in your place. Zizek made the uncanny observation that people were actually laughing less when the symbolic laugh is added, representing or delegating their enjoyment through the means of a representation. Enjoy! - An imperative and a burden it seems.

Another example are Buddhist monks writing their prayers on notes, attaching the notes to a praying wheel to spin them around, letting the wheel pray for them in their place, while they themselves can engage in whatever “dirty and obscene fantasies” they prefer; as Zizek’s psychoanalytical jargon would have it. A third behavior that Pfaller often refers to consists in people setting up video cameras in front of their TV’s, recording a “beloved” show while they can escape their enjoyment through a symbolic representation of them watching (the camera), and do something else.

According to Pfaller this problematic relation to one’s so-called pleasures speaks of a thievish joy in the way interpassive people represent

Illustration by Selma Sasivarevic

them and then sneak away. The joy would not have been if they had merely escaped the shows by simply not attending or thrown off their monk robes. The joy rather consists in doing something for and against it, being absent but represented, represented in the eyes of somebody else judging the behavior, extending the experience of not having to confront the cause of the unfulfilling activity. Akin to the popular movie trope in which a child, no longer fulfilled by its childhood, puts a pillow underneath the blanket to escape into the adventurous night; tricking the gods of the house with a formal representation. This results in an (often frantic) ritualistic activity of producing soothing obstacles for not having to confront one’s lost convictions; in the last example found in the act of staging one’s presence with a pillow to escape the confrontation with one’s parents. Alenka Zumpacic explains this peculiarity of our last man in the post ideological “free” society: “religion is not so much the opium of the people, a tranquilizer that constitutes an escape from (harsh) reality, as an “excitation-raiser” which binds us to this reality by activating some mortifying passion”. To continue the above analogy - the discomfort of having to confront our feeling of being stuck inside the open ended house that is our free society, takes the form of us soothing ourselves “by crises and states of emergency in which a subject feels alive. But this “alive” is nothing other than “undeadness”, the petrifying grip of surplus excitation and agitation”.

Zizek similarly notes this with regards to shopping: “you buy “this” but then you are shocked and realize “this” is not it. You didn’t really want “this” so you buy another object. But it doesn’t work. Today’s consumerist shopping is an obsessive activity - obsessive in the sense of perverted, and perverted in the sense of: when you buy a new object, you already know in advance that it’s not really what you need. The pleasure is in the process. You say, “Fine, in half a year I will buy a new one that’s even better.” You enjoy the process itself.” The child running away from home does not take on the consequences of what a real confrontation would mean in terms of an adult free life, but rather prolongs not having to be substantially free, leaving it with a mortifying obsessiveness of acting as if it is free; ironically reproducing the authority of the one’s judging the performance - the free adult. From this perspective, shopping is a childish but rather ascetic activity, limiting oneself by temporal excitation-raisers.

Vector by pch.vector on freepik

This leaves us with a new, not so soothing picture of the relation between people’s wants, actions and dreams. Obsessive activity with regards to representing some sort of authentic belief seems to hide an inability of actually appreciating it, and instead, exacerbates it by engaging in the process that lets you escape the lost cause. How are we then to judge everyday statements with regards to our current situation? Ukrainian flags on our profile pictures, a voiceover in a SVT documentary on Ukraine saying “the thing we did not believe could happen, nevertheless happened” or people’s obsessive mantras of “one would have thought that we, living in the 21st century, had reached an end to this kind of barbaric violence”. From an interpassive perspective the representation of loyalty, politically correct opinions or grief in a virtual media, function much as the praying wheel for the monk. Preoccupying oneself with a virtual representation that makes one practice what the monk does, that is, not being overly sensitive to one’s surroundings. And with regards to the statement, should we maybe read them literally? The things we did not believe could happen, happened not despite our disbelief, but because we did not believe in it. And the 21st century is not the backdrop that animates barbaric violence, but a backdrop responsible for a disbelief in war, which leaves our kind of peace with a negative vision, the mere absence of barbaric violence; nothing less than the undead living of blobs. This, the integrity of life itself, devoid of any future plans, seems to be the peace we really want. ♦