I didn’t know Colbert read Lacan!

America used to live by the motto “Father Knows Best.” Now we’re lucky if “Father Knows He Has Children.” We’ve become a nation of sperm donors and baby daddies. But there’s more to being a father than taking kids to Chuck E. Cheese and supplying the occasional Y-chromosome. A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?
- I am America (And So Can You!) – Stephen Colbert

Here is some theory for you: Zizek on how to read Lacan:

The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious

In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. These two dispersed statements should be treated as the pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection (plus the reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn’t know that he is dead) that enables us to deploy Lacan’s basic thesis in its entirety:

As you know, the father Karamazov’s son Ivan leads the latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist… – If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naïve notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

Form vs Function

I just found a cool new blog! This is a perfect blog post to read after my Consumers as Citizens class had a bought of Mac-product-love, to my never-ending disgust. I was actually shocked at how vehementalty my professor professed her love for the cuteness and sterility of Apple products. I have never seen her so unreserved with lusting after something. Especially Ipods. I’m just amazed she fell into that. Anyway, this blog post is simply awesome. It’s not very long, so I recommend everyone read it. It’s an analysis over the excitement over the Macbook Air, and how form is more important than function (although this is what I believe about all Mac products). I’m going to reproduce a section:

But the most interesting – and incendiary – post has come from Devin Coldewey at Techcrunch who has called the Macbook Air “basically useless“. The writer goes through a series of very practical criticisms – the proprietary ports, the lack of an optical drive and the slow CPU etc – and they are all very valid critiques. Trouble is, he totally misses the point. Coldewey is trying to suggest that people buy consumer goods like iPods and Macbooks purely out of a need for how they are used; they do not. It is precisely the ’sexiness’ of the device – i.e. the desire it elicits in us – that creates its success. When Coldewey asks “What is losing that last half an inch doing aside from attracting stares?” what he refuses to understand is that the stares are the important thing. This is not about how ‘people are shallow’ – it is the difference between use value and exchange value. In most circumstances, there is in fact less use value to a Macbook Air than a regular Macbook – it can do less. But its exchange value – i.e. its worth to us as a cultural item rather than just a practical tool – is far higher, precisely because it “looks so damn cool”, because our friends want one and because owning one will be a marker of not only our savviness but also of our success.