A perfectly fair review of a somewhat predictable record raises a bizarre but haunting thought. Reviewing Negativland's new CD, an extensive, brutal satire on Pepsi, Greg Beato noted how old its message is: "Does anyone not know that large corporations try to colonize our imaginations through pervasive advertising and other marketing techniques? That our love for celebrity and convenience and novelty and hype often makes us complicit in the process?"
The question is obviously rhetorical. But what is really being asked here is something much stranger: Beato is saying that it's exactly because everyone already recognizes this thesis as true that it makes no difference, spurs no response, or at least isn't much fun to listen to. Can we imagine a possible Negativland CD, the result of a comedy/theory breakthrough, that would transmit a radically more effective message? Can we imagine an idea like Monty Python's Lethal Joke, so profound that it would instantly transform anyone who understands it?
No.
Probably, anything really different or more complex would be so strange as to be incomprehensible (and after it became simplified, it would be repeated until it too had to be prefaced by, "Does anyone not know...?"), but that's hardly the problem. There's no reason to believe a new truth or a more profound analysis would help if even this fairly obvious one doesn't make a rat's ass of difference to us. The paradox we have to get our heads around here is that Negativland's very success in telling the truth about a central facet of our lives shows up this kind of truth-telling as impotent.
The gap between our lives and the way we see them: Examination of this tricky subject, only visible out of the corner of the eye, is the study of ideology. Marx, whose understanding of "ideology" set the stage for ours not least in its massive inconsistency, suggested that ideology wasn't a thing but an action: "They don't know it, but they're doing it."
But is that our problem? It certainly doesn't feel like it. If there's one thing we feel, it's that we know, and if there's one thing that the various "Generation X" books and articles got right, it's this knowingness. We know we're doing it, even if we're not totally sure what we know. (Are you complicit in the market if you know the market is itself an ideological construction? Are you selling out if what you're selling makes no difference?) We feel like we know. Whatever it is we're doing.
The solution to the paradox comes from a man I imagine wearing a white lab coat, in a white room ... thinking. "Cynicism as Ideology" per Slavoj Zizek, a "researcher" at an "institute" in Slovenia, uses the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (apparently a bestseller in Germany) to provide a new model: "They know damn well they're doing it, and they're doing it anyway!" Cynicism recognizes the distance between the ideological mask and reality, but keeps the mask. Confronted with robbery, "the cynical reaction consists in saying that legal enrichment is a lot more effective and, moreover, protected by the law."
Because the hard, cold ground of reality on which we land is itself a sort of fantasy, we act as if we believe in the legitimacy of the law that allows banks to steal and robbers to be jailed, as if the legislators enact the will of the people, as if ... we know it's not true, but we have to act as if it is because it's necessary. Ideology never had to do with what we believed; it was what we did. More, the thing with which we blind our eyes is reality, the distance between what we "know" and what we act "as if." Enforcing and measuring t he distance is the job of debunking, of cynical stripping away, in the interest of what cynicism itself is covering. Behind that hard, cold smack of coming down to earth, perhaps you can hear a distant, soft, and gentle thud.
This article appeared originally in Suck.
