Ideological Distortions

Slavoj Žižek, "Iraq Angle: Upper Winnebago, Lower Winnebago "

(before: The Truth of the Approachative Shear)

Claude Lévi-Strauss's exemplary analysis in Structural Anthropology can serve to clarify the 'divergence angle': What is the spatial arrangement of houses in Winnebago, where a tribe lives in the Great Lakes region?The tribe is divided into two subgroups ('two halves'), 'upper Winnebago' and 'lower Winnebago'. If you have a person draw the layout of his village (the spatial layout of the huts) on a piece of paper or sand, you will get two completely different answers; which answer you get also depends on the subgroup of the person you're asking.

In the perception of both groups, the village is in the form of a circle, but:

— According to a subgroup, in this circle there is another circle of central houses, there are two concentric circles.
— Relative to the other subgroup, the circle is divided in half by a clear line.

In other words:

— In the perception of the members of the first (let's say 'conservative-integrative') subgroup, the layout of the village consists of ring-ring houses placed symmetrically around the central temple.
— In the perception of the second (say, 'revolutionary-conflicting') subgroup, the two discrete sets of houses in the village settlement are separated from each other by an invisible border.

This example in no way leads Lévi-Strauss to cultural relativism, nor does he say that 'the perception of social space depends on the observer's group belonging'. The division of the village into two 'relative' perceptions refers to an underlying hidden constant; but this is not the objective, 'real' placement of fixed houses.

It is a traumatic nucleus: it is a fundamental conflict that the inhabitants of the village are unable to symbolize, to reckon, to 'adopt', to settle accounts, it is an imbalance that prevents the community from stabilizing as a harmonious whole, it is a reality that warps social relations.

The two different perceptions of the settlement plan are two (mutually exclusive) attempts to deal with this traumatic conflict, an effort to heal the social wound by imposing a balanced symbolic structure...

Thus ultimately the status of Truth consists of the 'angle of divergence' and is substanceless: Truth has no material concentration in itself, it is only the rift between two points of view, you can perceive it only when you are diverging from one angle to the other.

From the Angle of Iraq

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

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Slavoj Žižek, "The Angle of Iraq: The Truth of the Approachary Shear" (Google translated from Turkish)

Not everything is just about obvious games, there is a Truth.

But this Truth is not the inaccessible Thing, it is the crack that prevents us from accessing that Thing, the conflicting 'rock' that warps our view of the perceived object with biased approaches.

Accordingly, 'truth' is not a state of 'real', it is not seeing the object 'directly' without being warped by any approach, but rather it is the conflicting Truth that causes the warping of those approaches.

The field of truth is not 'what things really are like in their own way' (without being warped by approaches), but the crack that separates one approach from another, the transition, the degree that transcends the limits between disproportionate approaches.

'Real/impossibility' is the reason why you can see the object from a 'neutral' roof that is not warped by any approach.

There is a truth, not everything is in relative idling; But this truth is the truth of the approach-oriented warp, not a truth that is warped by one-sided approaches and opinions.

From the Angle of Iraq

(after: Upper Winnebago, Lower Winnebago)

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

See "Excerpts from Menkibe on Nejativity", "Excerpts from Menkibe on Cosmological Superstition (astroanalytic myth status)", "Hegelian Nejativity/Menfiyet" Slavoj Žižek

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Slavoj Zizek, "The Tickling Object" (from "The Parallax View")

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss's exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups ("moieties"), "those who are from above" and "those who are from below"; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group. Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it "conservative-corporatist") perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second ("revolutionary-antagonistic") sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier... 20 The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer's group-belonging: the very splitting into the two "relative" perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant - not the objective, "actual" disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to "internalize", to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the "actual," "objective," arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the "real" is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members' view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.

The Real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is SIMULTANEOUSLY the Thing to which direct access is not possible AND the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp AND the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint. Recall the old well-known Adorno's analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic and Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible, we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher "dialectical synthesis," and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself; however, in a second approach, one should merely take not of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF - the fundamental feature of today's society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual. What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: is has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which "always returns at its place," i.e., as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real - it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances. In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are "all that there actually is."