Nemo, Zizek – Make Up

This reading was somewhat confusing but I believe that I understand the main ideas that were discussed. “We find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties…” (231). Zizek starts this article by discussing how in our culture we are given the option of consuming the real product removed of its core – making the product a simulation of the real thing – which gives us this pretense that we are experiencing the real product. He then relates this idea to the idea that as a culture we believe that we have experienced certain things because we have seen them in TV shows or Movies. It is this sense of a Virtual Reality. “Virtual reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance…Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so…What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity” (231). I interpreted this passage to mean that as a society we are sheltered from what is really going on. We see events in history happen through the screen of a television. For example when someone talks about 9/11 and the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center I immediately play the image that I saw on TV – the smoke and the buildings crumbling to the ground. At the same time, however, TV has the ability to force us to “experience what the ‘compulsion to repeat’ and jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again, and again…” (231). Once we experienced such a tragedy be became transfixed with those images and could not help looking at them – a guilty pleasure you could say. Before 9/11 I believe that Americans lived in a bubble where they believed that nothing remotely close to that kind of catastrophe could ever happen in this country. However Americans had seen catastrophes of different sorts for decades. “The authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing through the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate ‘effect’, sought after from digitalized special affects, through reality TV…” (232). We had all seen movies and TV shows that simulated such events but we did not perceive them to be real.
Zizek, from what I understood, believes that our culture is sheltered from the horrific images of the horrible events that are taking place currently around the world. He believes that we should be shown the horrific images from the wars, the genocides, and the fight against poverty and deadly infections, so that we understand that those things are actually happening and they are real. But he fears, as do I, that Americans will continue to believe that nothing like that could ever happen in the United States – even poverty which affects about 12 to 13% of the nation. I believe that 9/11 was a wake up call for Americans, it was a horrible tragedy I do not disagree with that, but in a way I unfortunately feel like something of that magnitude had to happen in order to show Americans that we are a country that can be vulnerable at times.