Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom (Zizek/Lacan 1)

For some time, I’ve been contemplating a series of posts inspired by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, and today I ran across a passage that seemed perfect for getting started. Most of the posts will concern film, but this one touches on the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the resulting protests and continuing debate (explainer).

Looking Awry was first published in 1992, but the paragraph I want to discuss reads as if written with the controversies surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others in mind. It begins with the following:

“There is, perhaps, an experience in the field of politics that entails a kind of ‘identification with the symptom’: the well-known pathetic experience ‘We are all that!,” the experience of identification when we are confronted with a phenomenon that functions as an intrusion of unbearable truth, as an index of the fact that the social mechanism ‘doesn’t work.’”

According to Zizek, successful psychoanalysis sometimes ends with the analysand clinging to something that represents the very problem. This is what is meant by “identification with the symptom.” He makes the example of a character in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Robbers force the character in his youth to play the harmonica even as he must participate in his own brother’s murder. The incident emotionally unhinges the boy, and from that time forward, the only thing that holds him together is playing the harmonica, the very item that ties him to his brother’s death.

Zizek draws an analogy to a similar phenomenon on a social scale and Ferguson is exactly such a traumatic event. Discomforting yet undeniable truths have come to light, showing us that our society is broken. The original event presents us with our broken justice system, especially with regard to young black men, and the resulting controversy brings out the worst American society has to offer: fetishization of violence and enduring racism. Even now as more evidence has come to light and the police themselves have admitted Officer Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown as he was running away, the trolls are out there blaming the victim.

Zizek uses anti-Semitism as an example to elicit a number of attitudes one may take when faced with such an “unbearable truth,” and eventually arrives at one that has been openly adopted and employed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown shootings:

“Let us take, for example, Jew-baiting riots. A whole network of strategies—simple ignorance; treating it as some deplorable horror that does not, however, really concern us . . . ; ‘sincere compassion’ for the victims—allow us to evade the fact that the persecution of Jews pertains to a certain repressed truth of our civilization. We attain an authentic attitude only when we arrive at the experience that . . . 'we are all Jews.' And it is the same for all traumatic moments of the intrusion into the social field of some ‘impossible’ kernel that resists integration; ‘We all live in Chernobyl!,” “We are all boat people!,” and so on.” (boldface mine)

This is exactly what we have seen in the “I am Trayvon Martin” and “I am Mike Brown” movements, whether it be hashtags using those words on Twitter, wearing hoodies, or confronting the police with your hands in the air. In all these cases, a number of people confronted with the usually hidden dark side of their society react not by denying the reality of the dark side, but by identifying with it, recognizing that it belongs to them, too.

The passage continues with a return to more psychoanalytic terminology:

“Apropos of these cases, it should also be clear how ‘identification with the symptom’ is correlated with ‘going through the fantasy’: by means of such an identification with the (social) symptom, we traverse and subvert the fantasy frame that determines the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society.”

In other words, we abandon the fantasy version of our society, the one that we usually hold, according to which police officers are always kindly gents who lend a helping hand, the courts never fail to deliver a just sentence, and people of all races experience equal opportunity and success. Instead, we recognize--because some blight that was always there has raised its ugly head--that this vision of our world is a fiction that serves as palliative. In reality, sometimes police officers shoot unarmed teens as they run away and that is just the beginning of the disgrace to our systems of power, to our nation, and to ourselves.

This transformation of consciousness is integral for positive change and healing.

My posts on Looking Awry are likely to be more of a learning experiment than any statement of my own original ideas. I find both Zizek and Lacan to be difficult to grasp, but hopefully I can learn something while writing about them, and without mucking up the concepts too much. In any case, the above passage of Zizek’s seemed so applicable to Ferguson that I felt compelled to return to this troubling event.