The Wire or the clash of civilisations in one country
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-02-24 · 1:40:59 · 13,452 words
cinema-art-culturecapitalismideologyhegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismrace-antisemitismrevolution-violenceliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracyphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture on HBO's The Wire as a site for thinking class struggle, urban segregation, and the limits of resistance under late capitalism. He reads the series through Hegel, Marx, Fredric Jameson, and Foucault, arguing that its Greek-tragic structure reveals capitalism as an anonymous faith-like force that co-opts every attempt at reform. He maps the utopian dreams staged across the show's five seasons (welfare-state unionism, family solidarity, legalization zones, eccentric communist community, investigative media) and argues that the series' ultimate horizon is a 'Lion King' resigned wisdom that should be superseded by a more radical willingness to let the system self-destruct rather than merely prop it up.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Hegel's 'spirit of the world', invoked here to describe the migration of cultural creativity from cinema to TV series.
The post-Prague Spring Husák-era ideological message: abandon dreams of democratic socialism, enjoy petty daily pleasures, illustrated by the Czech TV series 'Hospital on the Edge of the City' and its West German copy.
as “subject realism”
Žižek's distinction between object realism (depicting a topic realistically) and subject realism (a community staging its own collective self-representation, as The Wire does).
The capacity of a community to stage its own antagonisms and being through art, analogized to the function of Greek tragedy for the polis.
David Simon's figure (appropriated by Žižek) for the absolute cultural non-communication between those who share in the American dream and those left behind, illustrated by Baltimore.
as “invisible labor”
The condition of migrant workers in Dubai who are structurally present but phenomenologically absent from the city's social world, used to illustrate intensifying class apartheid.
Žižek's thesis that advanced biotechnology will literally produce different biological races corresponding to class position, biogenetics for self-perfection for the rich vs. behavioral control for the poor.
Žižek adapts Marx's observation that market forces function like Greek gods, as an irrational, anonymous, depersonalized fate to which modern subjects submit.
Žižek adopts this Wire term for Major Colvin's pragmatic experiment in concentrating drug dealing in a designated free zone, a 'moderate ethical act' that temporarily reduces violence but is crushed for PR reasons.
The five utopias staged by The Wire's seasons (welfare-state unionism, family solidarity, pragmatic legalization, honest policing, investigative journalism) that are simultaneously authentic and functional parts of the system.
Žižek's reading of The Wire's basement investigative unit as the model for effective resistance: an illegal, eccentric, conspiratorial collective that must operate outside institutional sanction.
as “communist dream (Dickensian community)”
Žižek's figure for the ideal of communism as a free community of eccentrics (like the basement investigative unit in The Wire) operating illegally outside institutional norms.
Žižek's paradoxical characterization of Omar from The Wire, the only genuinely honest character in the series, whose honesty takes the form of systematic ethical murder of bad drug dealers.
The abstract movement of capital as the real 'desert of the real' that drives social processes, the true antagonist in The Wire which psychological realism cannot adequately represent.
The narrative mode that depicts society through coherent subjective characters, which Žižek argues mystifies abstract capitalism by closing the gap between social objectivity and subjective self-experience.
Hannah Arendt's concept, invoked by Žižek to argue that modern atrocity (Eichmann, abstract capitalism) is characterized by a radical gap between objective horror and subjective self-experience.
The dominant mode of Wire-criticism (crime and policing regenerate each other in a closed circle) which Žižek accepts but argues is insufficient because it doesn't address whether genuine resistance is possible.
A resigned meta-stance in which one recognizes that all resistance is co-opted and withdraws into a cynical 'circle of life' wisdom, which Žižek both describes and ultimately rejects.
as “reformism / Keynesianism”
The social-democratic position David Simon himself endorses, 'modest Keynesian' regulation within capitalism, which Žižek identifies as the series' ultimate political horizon and argues must be exceeded.
Cynical ideological figure in which the system perpetually reproduces itself through the very acts meant to oppose it, naturalizing class domination as cosmic inevitability.
as “second-handers vs. prime movers”
Ayn Rand's categories, cited by Žižek to extract the correct insight that those who fight to keep the system running may be its greatest enablers.
Stories he reaches for 3
Žižek uses the Lion King's 'Circle of Life' song as emblem of cynical ideology: we lions eat the poor animals but what can you do, it's the cycle of life.
“it's a very cynical basically it means we lions eat the poor animals but what can you do it's the cycle of life and so on no?”
A pupil's memoir records Wittgenstein writing that he 'understands Hitler now', cited by Žižek to show that psychological empathy with perpetrators of modern horror (humanizing Hitler) is always already wrong.
“Wittgenstein put a note in his diary in the spring of April March of saying okay Hitler is horrible but I think I understand him now.”
McNulty and Bunk investigate a murder speaking only variations of 'fuck', a full coherent detective exchange using one word, illustrating the self-irony and staged artifice at the core of Wire's realism.
“about fifty times the only word spoken is fuck or its variations like fuck, fucking fuck, oh fuck, fuck.”
Works invoked 16
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin's comedy cited as paradoxically more truthful than psychological realism for representing Hitler/totalitarianism.
Brazil film
Called 'maybe the greatest British movie of all times for me', used to illustrate bureaucratic self-reproduction and the subversive quality of simply solving a problem.
Atlas Shrugged book
Rejected ideologically but Žižek extracts a correct structural insight: those who fight to keep the failing system running are its greatest enablers; he proposes applying the capitalist-strike logic to communist politics.
Left Behind book
LaHaye and Jenkins' Christian fundamentalist series, described as 'incredibly primitive', featuring the EU as Antichrist and the UN relocating the US to Babylon; Žižek 'almost killed himself' reading the first book.
The Wire tv
The central text of the talk; Žižek praises it as high-quality and interesting while insisting it is celebrated for the wrong reasons and has limits (psychological realism, Keynesian politics, the 'Lion King' resignation). He reads it as a systematic phenomenology of class struggle, resistance, and utopian dreams.
The Lion King film
Žižek says he 'hates' the Circle of Life ideology, used as emblem of resigned, cynical naturalization of class domination ('we lions eat the poor animals but it's the cycle of life').
The Fountainhead book
Mentioned alongside Atlas Shrugged as Ayn Rand's major work, cited in passing.
Foucault's text, Žižek accepts its lesson (crime and policing reproduce each other) but argues it is the dominant framework for Wire criticism and is insufficient because it doesn't account for the possibility of genuine resistance.
Dexter tv
Cited as parallel to Wire's Omar: a killer steered by his adoptive father to kill 'the right people', illustrating the paradox of ethical serial murder.
Agatha Christie's novel used to demonstrate how bourgeois detective fiction resolves collective guilt (all are murderers) by making the victim the real criminal, Poirot doesn't report the murder.
Brecht's satirical play on the rise of Hitler/Nazism, cited alongside Chaplin as comedy that gets closer to truth than psychological realism.
Czech normalization-era TV series that encoded the Husák regime's ideological message (enjoy petty pleasures, stop dreaming of socialism) and became an exportable universal formula copied by West Germany's Schwarzwald-Klinik.
Seen 'six or seven times because of his son'; liked for the idea that Greek gods walk among ordinary American life, read as symptomatic of capital-as-fate.
West German TV series that copied the Czech Hospital on the Edge of the City without crediting it.
Thor film
Cited alongside Percy Jackson as staging the idea that ancient mythological fate (Norse gods) operates within American everyday life.
Frank Capra film referenced as a proto-model of communist community: the crazy apartment of eccentrics (ballerina, Russian madman, explosives guy) as a figure of communism as free madhouse.
People invoked 18
Used in the Cuba GPS tracking example to show how fighting black markets would have destroyed the system the markets were sustaining.
Brechtje A. Grotenhuis positive
Cited alongside Chaplin as exemplars of comedy as a more truthful mode than psychological realism for representing totalitarianism (Arturo Ui).
Ayn Rand positive
Žižek calls her 'my beloved Ayn Rand' sardonically; rejects her ideology entirely but extracts a correct structural insight from Atlas Shrugged: those who fight to keep the system running are its true enablers.
Mentioned for his Cannes remark sympathizing with Hitler, used to illustrate the problem of psychologizing modern horror.
Charlie Chaplin positive
The Great Dictator cited as comic approach to Hitler that paradoxically gets closer to the truth than psychological realism.
Jerry B. Jenkins negative
Co-author of Left Behind with LaHaye, dismissed as primitive Christian fundamentalist fiction.
Terry Gilliam positive
Brazil called 'maybe the greatest British movie of all times for me', used to illustrate bureaucratic self-reproduction and the subversiveness of simply solving a problem.
Fredric Jameson positive
Žižek uses Jameson's essay on The Wire and his figure of communism as a community of eccentrics, while disagreeing with his dismissal of ethics ('beyond good and evil') and arguing Jameson underestimates the Wire's radical potential.
Agatha Christie positive
Murder on the Orient Express cited to illustrate how a universe of systemic guilt (all are culprits) requires in bourgeois narrative that the victim be the real bad guy.
Žižek's Slovenian friend and colleague, features in the smoking/drugs party anecdote.
Michel Foucault positive
Žižek credits the Foucauldian reading of Wire (Discipline and Punish: crime and policing regenerate each other) as correct but insufficient, it doesn't address whether genuine resistance can escape co-optation.
Tim LaHaye negative
Co-author of the Left Behind Christian fundamentalist series, which Žižek reads as primitive ideology that makes the EU the Antichrist.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited for the 'banality of evil' / Eichmann, the radical gap between objective horror and subjective self-experience, used to argue against psychological realism as a mode of representing modern atrocity.
David Simon positive
Creator of The Wire; Žižek follows his stated intentions (Greek tragedy, class struggle, anti-drug-war critique) while also marking where he falls short (psychological realism, Keynesian politics, ambiguity on resistance).
Mentioned briefly as naming Omar from The Wire his favorite character.
Karl Marx positive
Marx's observation that market forces play the role of Greek gods is cited approvingly; Žižek performs a 'Marxist confession' about Dubai and defends Wire as anti-capitalist against liberal appropriation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Weltgeist used to describe TV series as new cultural dominant; Aufhebung/developmental narrative mocked as 'pseudo-Hegelian ideology' when applied to cultural authenticity.
A pupil's memoir records Wittgenstein writing he 'understands Hitler now', cited to show even great thinkers fall into the trap of psychological empathy with perpetrators.
What it argues
The Wire as Greek tragedy and class-struggle narrativeTelevision series as collective self-representation of a communityUtopian dreams embedded within a cynical capitalist systemThe co-optation of resistance and the Foucauldian codependence of crime and lawPsychological realism as ideological mystification of abstract capitalismThe 'Lion King' position of resigned wisdom vs. radical systemic ruptureBiogenetic class differentiation and the invisibility of labor
Dialectical moves 11
“It's not object realism but subject realism — the topic is not depicted realistically, but the community depicts itself.”
Inverts the usual praise of The Wire as naturalist to reveal a deeper, more radical realism: the community's self-staging.
“The series is celebrated for a wrong reason — what makes it realist is precisely the ironic, self-aware, staged moments, not the naturalist depiction.”
The markers of artifice (the fuck scene, ironic references) are paradoxically the signs of authentic realism.
“Irony and self-irony are at the beginning — the pathetic, direct mythic identification comes afterwards.”
Reverses the pseudo-Hegelian developmental narrative: the original is already self-ironic, the solemn 'authentic' version is secondary.
“Bureaucracy's greatest sin is to solve the problem — its true goal is to reproduce it.”
Inverts the apparent purpose of bureaucratic institutions: their real function is self-reproduction, not problem-solving.
“Capitalism works in exactly the same way as bureaucracy — products are not made to satisfy you but to guarantee you will again need a product.”
The market's logic of satisfaction is identical to bureaucracy's self-reproductive logic: the consumer is never meant to be satisfied.
“The utopian dreams (family, friendship, welfare state) are not emancipatory potential but are fully part of the system making it function.”
Inverts Jameson's reading: the authentic utopian moments in The Wire are not outside the system but are its ideological support.
“Those who think they are undermining the system by trading on the black market are precisely keeping it alive.”
The apparent subversion of communist economies through black markets was in fact what allowed them to survive.
“Comedy (Brecht, Chaplin) is paradoxically closer to the truth of totalitarianism than psychological realism.”
The mode that seems most distant from horror, farce, is more truthful because it preserves the gap between objective atrocity and subjective banality.
“The only real enemy of progress is not the passive second-handers but you — those who fight to keep things running.”
Extracting a communist lesson from Ayn Rand: those who struggle to sustain the existing system are its true enablers.
“The truly subversive thing is not to worry other people's worries.”
Refusing to accept the premise of 'saving the euro / financial system' as the political horizon is the genuinely subversive act.
“The Wire is more tragic than Greek tragedy — in Greek tragedy you fail against fate and get catharsis; here you may succeed and still be simply ignored.”
Surpassing Greek tragedy: the Wire's anonymous capitalist fate doesn't even dignify resistance with a dramatic confrontation.
Claims 19
asserts
TV series, not cinema, is currently the dominant creative form in popular culture — the new Weltgeist of cultural production.television vs. cinema
reframes
The Wire is not celebrated for the right reason: its realism is not object realism depicting Baltimore's poverty, but subject realism — a community staging its own collective self-representation akin to Greek tragedy.The Wire's realism
asserts
The Wire is fundamentally a series about class struggle — the absolute non-communication between two Americas sharing geographic proximity but no cultural contact.The Wire's political content
asserts
Irony and self-irony are not late or secondary features of popular art but are originary; the pathetic mythic version comes afterwards — the original Antigone myth is more comic than Sophocles.popular art and authenticity
asserts
The drug war in the US is not a war on narcotics but a war on an urban underclass that is no longer needed as a labor supply.US drug policy
asserts
Biogenetic technology will produce literally different biological races corresponding to class — biogenetics for self-perfection for the rich and behavioral regulation for the poor.biogenetics and class
asserts
The capitalist market functions exactly like bureaucracy: it does not satisfy needs but produces needs so that products will be reproduced — satisfaction is manipulated, not fulfilled.capitalism and bureaucracy
asserts
Psychological realism is ideologically mystifying when applied to modern abstract capitalism because it covers up the radical gap between social objectivity and subjective self-experience.psychological realism and capitalism
asserts
Comedy (Brecht, Chaplin) is paradoxically closer to the truth of totalitarianism than psychological realism, because it preserves the gap between objective horror and subjective banality.representing totalitarianism in art
asserts
The Wire is an anti-capitalist series, not merely a critique of bureaucratic inefficiency, because capitalism itself functions by reproducing the problem it claims to solve.The Wire's politics
rejects
Fredric Jameson is wrong to dismiss ethics in favor of 'beyond good and evil' — the utopian dreams in The Wire are precisely part of the system and are not genuine emancipatory potential.Jameson's ethics-dismissal
asserts
The Wire is more pessimistic than Greek tragedy: Greek tragedy gives cathartic purification through failure, but in The Wire your heroic act is either co-opted or simply ignored by an indifferent system.The Wire vs. Greek tragedy
asserts
Smoking is stigmatized more harshly than illegal drugs as a matter of pure class distinction — the upper middle class normalizes private drug use while demonizing smoking.class and social norms around substances
asserts
The truly subversive act is not to worry 'other people's worries' (saving the euro, saving the financial system) but to accept letting the system self-destruct in order to make radical change possible.political strategy and European crisis
reframes
The lesson from Ayn Rand (stripped of its reactionary content) is that those who fight to keep the system running are its greatest enablers — a communist strike logic can be derived from Atlas Shrugged.Ayn Rand and radical politics
rejects
Making the central bank 'independent' is a neoliberal ideological mystification, not a neutral technocratic measure — lumping it with press freedom is an obscenity of European ideology.central bank independence
asserts
The only way to do something good in today's society is to establish an illegal, conspiratorial 'good gang' — The Wire's basement unit as model for emancipatory politics.modes of political resistance
rejects
The collective self-representation of a community in art is NOT fascism — the left's equation of collective identity with fascism is wrong.collective representation and fascism
asserts
Communist systems were sustained by the black market they were officially fighting — the very phenomenon they tried to oppress was what enabled the system to function.Soviet/communist economies
Quotes 15
“It's not object realism in the sense of the object the topic is presented in a realist way. It's more a subject realism.”Slavoj Žižek · subject realism vs. object realism
“Also tragedy Greek tragedy was you know a collective event of a polis a city staging its own self-representation experiencing its own being its antagonisms.”Slavoj Žižek · collective self-representation as Greek tragedy
“Irony self-irony and so on is at the beginning. Precisely this kind of a pathetic direct mythic identification comes afterwards.”Slavoj Žižek · irony precedes pathos in popular art
“We pretend to a war against narcotics but in truth we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as a labor supply.”Slavoj Žižek · drug war as class war
“They are there but you don't see them. This total invisibility.”Slavoj Žižek · invisible labor in Dubai
“For bureaucracy the ultimate prohibition bureaucracy is made in its irrationality to reproduce the problem the greatest sin you can do from the bureaucratic standpoint is simply to solve the problem.”Slavoj Žižek · bureaucracy reproduces the problem
“Got to, this is America, man.”Slavoj Žižek · systemic compulsion as American ideology
“Comedy (Brecht, Chaplin) are paradoxically much closer to the truth. You cannot do a totalitarian or even abstract capitalist society where you still stick to the psychological realist model.”Slavoj Žižek · comedy over realism for representing totalitarianism
“Precisely where you think that you show it all you already formally mystify the situation.”Slavoj Žižek · realism as mystification
“The only way to do something good in today's society the only way to fight the dark gang is to establish a conspiracy a good gang illegal conspiratory group.”Slavoj Žižek · illegal conspiracy as only ethical politics
“Communism as a Jameson has very some very nice view of it where he says communism should be as a kind of a free madhouse you know a community of eccentrics.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as community of eccentrics
“The truly subversive thing is not to worry other people people's worries. It's not our problem will the European bank survive.”Slavoj Žižek · subversion as refusing the system's problem-frame
“Faith itself can be changed faith means here the entire system. And that you have to go through this point of let's call it zero level and then opt for a more radical change.”Slavoj Žižek · zero level / systemic rupture vs. reformism
“Precisely the phenomenon they were fighting black market and so on was what effectively enabled the system to function.”Slavoj Žižek · resistance sustaining the system
“If you fight within the existing faith that's to say global system of course the ending is always the one like this. But there is a chance to change faith itself.”Slavoj Žižek · changing the system vs. fighting within it
Transcript 21 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much my great my gratitude to the giant of Greece in whose person the spirit of Plato and Aristotle has come alive again and okay will not go on. Maybe you will be disappointed today because I will really stick to the topic The Wire. Now I know I come a little bit late like when I told this to my friends they told me okay what were you doing the last ten years were you sleeping or whatever. But still I think precisely in view of the ongoing crisis new emancipatory movements we should return to The Wire. First a general remark it is already a commonplace to say that what Hegel called Weltgeist the spirit of the world the focus of what goes on in popular culture is it seems that it's moving from cinema to TV series that TV series are to put it bluntly the place where in a creative sense things are happening. I think that up to a point this is true and I'm well aware of the emancipatory potentials of this move. For example much more than in cinema Hollywood lost its power here. Hollywood encountered a great competitor in as we all know first the Latino American telenovelas Brazilian Venezuelan Mexican and so on which are an interesting phenomenon. I spoke when I visited Brazil with some people close to producers and they told me they were the most surprised how could it have happened that something that they perceived as limited to their own specific experience there becomes so crazily madly popular in the most unexpected places. For example I remember already some thirty years ago in my own country Slovenia a Brazilian TV melodrama series called something like The Slave Isaura or something like that. Yeah was an absolute myth. By this I mean the following. The actress visited Ljubljana the capital of Slovenia and rumor spread that she is in some central hotel. So okay the police blocked the street there of traffic I mean expecting some one two hundred people it was seventy eighty thousand people. The whole was blocked and but but and then so it's Central Europe I was also told Russia Eastern Europe it's an incredible phenomenon. And so I was always fascinated but I'm not I don't know enough to do the analysis by what are the grounds that some series catch up at some place and not somewhere else. For example even before Isaura or at that time maybe at least you've heard about it there was there were two of these American rather boring I think series first Dallas then Denver. But for example in my country the whole of Yugoslavia at that point Denver was a triumph but Dallas totally failed for mysterious reasons. On the other hand I spoke at that time with a friend from Algiers who told me that there Dallas was a myth and he gave me a very vulgar explanation. He said it's a little bit richer but it's like our society big families everybody plotting betraying the other and so on you know. Then another interesting thing you know that this TV series where the only genuine popular success of East European communist countries. I don't know if you remember it but even in the darkest time of Czech counter-revolution the Husák years of the seventies they invented a formula and people usually don't know that they did it which then was taken over in West Germany and all around. It was a TV series called Hospital on the Edge at the End of a City. And it was I have a whole theory for which I don't have now today how it this series fits perfectly the ideological constellation of the after Prague Spring Husák years where the implicit ideological message of those in power after the Soviet crackdown of the Prague Spring to the people was no longer now we will build socialism but was openly a kind of a hedonist cynical message. It was you can have just leave politics alone and you can have with your small pleasures your daily life your passions your petty conflicts and so on. And this is how the series worked. You know that there was then much later a West German series which maybe some of you heard about it became very popular also in Central Europe called Schwarzwald-Klinik. But what people don't know is that this one is copied from the Czech one. You know so it's something very why because the basic message of this one was wisdom and this is what I will talk about you know this kind of a withdrawal into wisdom in the sense of we all have our petty struggles but ultimately life turns around everything goes on you know something like which is why I hate the movie Elton John's musical isn't there a this kind of a wisdom song in The Lion King? It's called The Circle of Life you know like it's a very cynical basically it means we lions eat the poor animals but what can you do it's the cycle of life and so on no? And I claim I claim that but again the surprise was how something which was specifically destined at that at the Czech population to enforce what they called normalization like enjoy your small daily life stop dreaming about democratic socialism or whatever how it proved to be a universal formula. So but nonetheless I will now make a further thesis in spite of all this creative or ideologically interesting at least developments I don't think that this TV series form has already found its inner structure. I think it's still looking for it because till now we had three models. We had first this classical BBC model mini-series based on big classical novels all the Jane Austen stuff and so on or more popular novels. Then we had this detective story model where each story is a unity of its own like Columbo and so on. I mean you can watch anyone you don't have to follow it. And then we did have this endless series like Peyton Place which just go on but nonetheless the way they were made is you know this whole structure of it's always ended at a point of tension and then you have to to look at it again a week after. It functioned in this weekly rhythm. While an interesting phenomenon is going on today. These relatively good series like The Wire I don't think they function like this. I even read somewhere that much more people see them afterwards on DVD. That is to say that David Simon the author of The Wire said this openly he said forget about seasons and whatever basically we did a sixty hours movie. And he said that the ideal way to see it is to I don't know to take drugs not to fall asleep and just watch it three days or whatever. I think there is something in this. Furthermore although I think Wire is not what people claim you know officially it's the greatest series of all times but it is very interesting and high quality. The first thing that interests me is maybe the series is celebrated for a wrong reason. Usually it's proclaimed the high case of realism like you know no longer Hollywood ideals but real miserable life of drug addicted people in Baltimore and so on and so on. I think this is too simple to say. The first thing to say is that yes it is a realist series but it's not object realism in the sense of the object the topic is presented in a realist way. It's more a subject realism and I find this quite touching and unique. It's as if a community and here a community in this case the community of people of Baltimore wanted to stage their own collective self-representation. It's incredible I read how the series was shot. It was really a kind of almost like I don't want to make this bad taste megalomaniac parallels but since David Simon the creator of The Wire often emphasizes how he wanted to do a new form of the Greek tragedy. There is maybe this similarity with Greek tragedy but just in this sense that also tragedy Greek tragedy was you know a collective event of a polis a city staging its own self-representation experiencing its own being its antagonisms and so on. There is something of this here and it's quite funny to look into how for example how you know this how many people who play lawyers drug addicts policemen even politicians there were in real life Baltimore politicians drug addicts and so on. Even even the names contain often the names of the characters ironic references to real life person. For example Stringer Bell this kind of a business oriented mobster is a composite of two real Baltimore drug lords Stringer Reed and Roland Bell and so on. So it's this I find quite unique today because officially the party line even in Marxism is that in today's society this is not possible. We live in an atomized society where the moment you present you try to stage this collective self-representation you are close to fascism as people even claim. So I think that this self-representation of a community makes the series much more fundamentally realist. It's not realism in this naturalist sense of depicting the city the way it is. It's much more radically realist. It's a real community staging itself. It is that would be my point in this sense it's precisely those details or passages which function in an ironic way like reminding you that this is a staged series and so on which I think are a marker or a sign of realism. I will now begin with my first clip. You must know it I hope so it's from the number four of the first season the famous fuck scene. Why fuck scene? You know what happens there no? The two good guys McNulty and Bunk go to a room to investigate there were some new clues in an old murder and well you will see I think it's about fifty times the only word spoken is fuck or its variations like fuck, fucking fuck, oh fuck, fuck. But I did something I didn't have time to do this in my own country in Slovenia where I was able to count on the fact that many people didn't know the series. I dubbed it and it's incredible how people thought it is like this. Every fuck I replaced it with what naively it stood it stands for you know like oh my god there is a clue there, oh this hurts, how could we miss that. And it works perfectly. So if there ever was poetry this is poetry. You can imagine a perfectly normal dialogue but with the use of only one word. And I think this has a series of overdetermined meanings. The first one is that it's a kind of it also has a commercial strategy because you know that HBO presents itself as it's not you know that publicity slot it's not just TV it's HBO like we can do what other public channels cannot do. And precisely what you cannot do there is the F word. So it's this is the first point. The second point and it's a very nice reading of it I got it in some is that you know till till the fourth installment of the first season it's pretty boring. It's just police descriptions and it's as if the TV series is playing gentle game with you the spectator like okay you were a good guy you suffered for three weeks now you deserve some fun you know like it's like you know like final seduction now you get it no? The the the last one is I think precisely as a joke making it clear that it's staged you know making you aware that no it's not naive naive realism. It's very important. Okay so nonetheless I couldn't resist it. Of course just pray that it will work. Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Motherfuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking A. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck. Fuck. Okay I stop here it goes on but nonetheless it was the first sound which was not F word it was just whoa or whatever so. And again why it was not just to amuse you why did I show this clip? Because I think it's this is a crucial component of so called popular genuine popular art. And I did a couple of research I don't have time to present it here how for example when you are represented with some traditional popular piece and you have let's say an original version and a later artistic version. It's how measured by our standard ideological notions of authenticity it's usually the later official version which is much more pathetic authentic while the original truly popular is much more comic self-ironic and so on and so on. I mean we can go again I don't have time to it but let's take Antigone my god. No don't be afraid those who know me I will not repeat again the three versions of Antigone or not. Something different that how the story that we know is as you maybe know if you know Greek mythology it's a secondary elaborated version of the original myth of Antigone which is much more funny. If I were to present to you the real original Antigone story and Sophocles you would have said ah Sophocles is the authentic and the other one is some kind of a later postmodern ironic version. Because you know what happens in in the original myth. Antigone escapes with Haimon they screw they have a child who comes twenty years later to avenge the father another melodrama falls in love and so on and so on. So this is an important lesson that again we should drop this pseudo-Hegelian ideology of you have an authentic pure whatever minimal beginning and then it gets complex ironic and so on. No irony self-irony and so on is at the beginning. Precisely this kind of a pathetic direct mythic identification comes afterwards. I mean I know listening I did sometimes had the misfortune of listening to some popular people's theater pieces it's incredible how self-ironic they are. All the time making fun of themselves and so on. Okay so let's go on. So again with what kind of realism then are we dealing here? What is Wire about? It's clear the title refers to put it simply to class struggle. I quote David Simon the title refers to an almost imaginary but unviolated boundary between the two Americas between those who participate in the American dream and those left behind. I cannot notice here the ironic reference to another to another popular series of movies TV movies and which is the worst. You know who are these two great guys Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They are the Christian fundamentalist writers who wrote one of the most popular Christian series of novels called Left Behind. You know it starts I read the first one then I almost killed myself. It starts on a plane where one ten percent of passengers all of a sudden disappear. And then the main pilot who is having an affair with the stewardess gets it that it's the time of you know God before Armageddon takes to himself the and the novel is so incredibly the series primitive like you know who is the bad guy. This is one of the reasons I still moderately support European Union. The bad guy is European Union. The thesis of the theory is that there is a world crisis and United States and Israel are threatened by Arab terrorists but then some American agents discover that Arab terrorists are just instruments. That it's European Union which is controlling everything trying to destroy United States and all the stuff and so on and so on. And the new dictator this is what happens United Nations take over on behalf of European Union and they propose to move the seat of United States for to to fulfill the biblical prophecy from New York to Babylon. You know the horror of Babylon and so on and I love this. The the new leader reference to Romania is called Nicolae Carpathia
Thank you very much my great my gratitude to the giant of Greece in whose person the spirit of Plato and Aristotle has come alive again and okay will not go on. Maybe you will be disappointed today because I will really stick to the topic The Wire. Now I know I come a little bit late like when I told this to my friends they told me okay what were you doing the last ten years were you sleeping or whatever. But still I think precisely in view of the ongoing crisis new emancipatory movements we should return to The Wire. First a general remark it is already a commonplace to say that what Hegel called Weltgeist the spirit of the world the focus of what goes on in popular culture is it seems that it's moving from cinema to TV series that TV series are to put it bluntly the place where in a creative sense things are happening. I think that up to a point this is true and I'm well aware of the emancipatory potentials of this move. For example much more than in cinema Hollywood lost its power here. Hollywood encountered a great competitor in as we all know first the Latino American telenovelas Brazilian Venezuelan Mexican and so on which are an interesting phenomenon. I spoke when I visited Brazil with some people close to producers and they told me they were the most surprised how could it have happened that something that they perceived as limited to their own specific experience there becomes so crazily madly popular in the most unexpected places. For example I remember already some thirty years ago in my own country Slovenia a Brazilian TV melodrama series called something like The Slave Isaura or something like that. Yeah was an absolute myth. By this I mean the following. The actress visited Ljubljana the capital of Slovenia and rumor spread that she is in some central hotel. So okay the police blocked the street there of traffic I mean expecting some one two hundred people it was seventy eighty thousand people. The whole was blocked and but but and then so it's Central Europe I was also told Russia Eastern Europe it's an incredible phenomenon. And so I was always fascinated but I'm not I don't know enough to do the analysis by what are the grounds that some series catch up at some place and not somewhere else. For example even before Isaura or at that time maybe at least you've heard about it there was there were two of these American rather boring I think series first Dallas then Denver. But for example in my country the whole of Yugoslavia at that point Denver was a triumph but Dallas totally failed for mysterious reasons. On the other hand I spoke at that time with a friend from Algiers who told me that there Dallas was a myth and he gave me a very vulgar explanation. He said it's a little bit richer but it's like our society big families everybody plotting betraying the other and so on you know. Then another interesting thing you know that this TV series where the only genuine popular success of East European communist countries. I don't know if you remember it but even in the darkest time of Czech counter-revolution the Husák years of the seventies they invented a formula and people usually don't know that they did it which then was taken over in West Germany and all around. It was a TV series called Hospital on the Edge at the End of a City. And it was I have a whole theory for which I don't have now today how it this series fits perfectly the ideological constellation of the after Prague Spring Husák years where the implicit ideological message of those in power after the Soviet crackdown of the Prague Spring to the people was no longer now we will build socialism but was openly a kind of a hedonist cynical message. It was you can have just leave politics alone and you can have with your small pleasures your daily life your passions your petty conflicts and so on. And this is how the series worked. You know that there was then much later a West German series which maybe some of you heard about it became very popular also in Central Europe called Schwarzwald-Klinik. But what people don't know is that this one is copied from the Czech one. You know so it's something very why because the basic message of this one was wisdom and this is what I will talk about you know this kind of a withdrawal into wisdom in the sense of we all have our petty struggles but ultimately life turns around everything goes on you know something like which is why I hate the movie Elton John's musical isn't there a this kind of a wisdom song in The Lion King? It's called The Circle of Life you know like it's a very cynical basically it means we lions eat the poor animals but what can you do it's the cycle of life and so on no? And I claim I claim that but again the surprise was how something which was specifically destined at that at the Czech population to enforce what they called normalization like enjoy your small daily life stop dreaming about democratic socialism or whatever how it proved to be a universal formula. So but nonetheless I will now make a further thesis in spite of all this creative or ideologically interesting at least developments I don't think that this TV series form has already found its inner structure. I think it's still looking for it because till now we had three models. We had first this classical BBC model mini-series based on big classical novels all the Jane Austen stuff and so on or more popular novels. Then we had this detective story model where each story is a unity of its own like Columbo and so on. I mean you can watch anyone you don't have to follow it. And then we did have this endless series like Peyton Place which just go on but nonetheless the way they were made is you know this whole structure of it's always ended at a point of tension and then you have to to look at it again a week after. It functioned in this weekly rhythm. While an interesting phenomenon is going on today. These relatively good series like The Wire I don't think they function like this. I even read somewhere that much more people see them afterwards on DVD. That is to say that David Simon the author of The Wire said this openly he said forget about seasons and whatever basically we did a sixty hours movie. And he said that the ideal way to see it is to I don't know to take drugs not to fall asleep and just watch it three days or whatever. I think there is something in this. Furthermore although I think Wire is not what people claim you know officially it's the greatest series of all times but it is very interesting and high quality. The first thing that interests me is maybe the series is celebrated for a wrong reason. Usually it's proclaimed the high case of realism like you know no longer Hollywood ideals but real miserable life of drug addicted people in Baltimore and so on and so on. I think this is too simple to say. The first thing to say is that yes it is a realist series but it's not object realism in the sense of the object the topic is presented in a realist way. It's more a subject realism and I find this quite touching and unique. It's as if a community and here a community in this case the community of people of Baltimore wanted to stage their own collective self-representation. It's incredible I read how the series was shot. It was really a kind of almost like I don't want to make this bad taste megalomaniac parallels but since David Simon the creator of The Wire often emphasizes how he wanted to do a new form of the Greek tragedy. There is maybe this similarity with Greek tragedy but just in this sense that also tragedy Greek tragedy was you know a collective event of a polis a city staging its own self-representation experiencing its own being its antagonisms and so on. There is something of this here and it's quite funny to look into how for example how you know this how many people who play lawyers drug addicts policemen even politicians there were in real life Baltimore politicians drug addicts and so on. Even even the names contain often the names of the characters ironic references to real life person. For example Stringer Bell this kind of a business oriented mobster is a composite of two real Baltimore drug lords Stringer Reed and Roland Bell and so on. So it's this I find quite unique today because officially the party line even in Marxism is that in today's society this is not possible. We live in an atomized society where the moment you present you try to stage this collective self-representation you are close to fascism as people even claim. So I think that this self-representation of a community makes the series much more fundamentally realist. It's not realism in this naturalist sense of depicting the city the way it is. It's much more radically realist. It's a real community staging itself. It is that would be my point in this sense it's precisely those details or passages which function in an ironic way like reminding you that this is a staged series and so on which I think are a marker or a sign of realism. I will now begin with my first clip. You must know it I hope so it's from the number four of the first season the famous fuck scene. Why fuck scene? You know what happens there no? The two good guys McNulty and Bunk go to a room to investigate there were some new clues in an old murder and well you will see I think it's about fifty times the only word spoken is fuck or its variations like fuck, fucking fuck, oh fuck, fuck. But I did something I didn't have time to do this in my own country in Slovenia where I was able to count on the fact that many people didn't know the series. I dubbed it and it's incredible how people thought it is like this. Every fuck I replaced it with what naively it stood it stands for you know like oh my god there is a clue there, oh this hurts, how could we miss that. And it works perfectly. So if there ever was poetry this is poetry. You can imagine a perfectly normal dialogue but with the use of only one word. And I think this has a series of overdetermined meanings. The first one is that it's a kind of it also has a commercial strategy because you know that HBO presents itself as it's not you know that publicity slot it's not just TV it's HBO like we can do what other public channels cannot do. And precisely what you cannot do there is the F word. So it's this is the first point. The second point and it's a very nice reading of it I got it in some is that you know till till the fourth installment of the first season it's pretty boring. It's just police descriptions and it's as if the TV series is playing gentle game with you the spectator like okay you were a good guy you suffered for three weeks now you deserve some fun you know like it's like you know like final seduction now you get it no? The the the last one is I think precisely as a joke making it clear that it's staged you know making you aware that no it's not naive naive realism. It's very important. Okay so nonetheless I couldn't resist it. Of course just pray that it will work. Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Motherfuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking A. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck. Fuck. Okay I stop here it goes on but nonetheless it was the first sound which was not F word it was just whoa or whatever so. And again why it was not just to amuse you why did I show this clip? Because I think it's this is a crucial component of so called popular genuine popular art. And I did a couple of research I don't have time to present it here how for example when you are represented with some traditional popular piece and you have let's say an original version and a later artistic version. It's how measured by our standard ideological notions of authenticity it's usually the later official version which is much more pathetic authentic while the original truly popular is much more comic self-ironic and so on and so on. I mean we can go again I don't have time to it but let's take Antigone my god. No don't be afraid those who know me I will not repeat again the three versions of Antigone or not. Something different that how the story that we know is as you maybe know if you know Greek mythology it's a secondary elaborated version of the original myth of Antigone which is much more funny. If I were to present to you the real original Antigone story and Sophocles you would have said ah Sophocles is the authentic and the other one is some kind of a later postmodern ironic version. Because you know what happens in in the original myth. Antigone escapes with Haimon they screw they have a child who comes twenty years later to avenge the father another melodrama falls in love and so on and so on. So this is an important lesson that again we should drop this pseudo-Hegelian ideology of you have an authentic pure whatever minimal beginning and then it gets complex ironic and so on. No irony self-irony and so on is at the beginning. Precisely this kind of a pathetic direct mythic identification comes afterwards. I mean I know listening I did sometimes had the misfortune of listening to some popular people's theater pieces it's incredible how self-ironic they are. All the time making fun of themselves and so on. Okay so let's go on. So again with what kind of realism then are we dealing here? What is Wire about? It's clear the title refers to put it simply to class struggle. I quote David Simon the title refers to an almost imaginary but unviolated boundary between the two Americas between those who participate in the American dream and those left behind. I cannot notice here the ironic reference to another to another popular series of movies TV movies and which is the worst. You know who are these two great guys Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They are the Christian fundamentalist writers who wrote one of the most popular Christian series of novels called Left Behind. You know it starts I read the first one then I almost killed myself. It starts on a plane where one ten percent of passengers all of a sudden disappear. And then the main pilot who is having an affair with the stewardess gets it that it's the time of you know God before Armageddon takes to himself the and the novel is so incredibly the series primitive like you know who is the bad guy. This is one of the reasons I still moderately support European Union. The bad guy is European Union. The thesis of the theory is that there is a world crisis and United States and Israel are threatened by Arab terrorists but then some American agents discover that Arab terrorists are just instruments. That it's European Union which is controlling everything trying to destroy United States and all the stuff and so on and so on. And the new dictator this is what happens United Nations take over on behalf of European Union and they propose to move the seat of United States for to to fulfill the biblical prophecy from New York to Babylon. You know the horror of Babylon and so on and I love this. The the new leader reference to Romania is called Nicolae Carpathia
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like Ceaușescu and so on it's madness. But okay let's go on. So the first thing to note is that it's really a series simply a series about class struggle. About two or even more social spaces which although they are part of the same totality culturally simply don't communicate with each other. I quote here from Fredric Jameson's nice essay on The Wire so here in absolute geographic proximity two whole cultures exist without contact and without interaction even without any knowledge of each other like Harlem and the rest of Manhattan like the West Bank and the Israeli cities that once part of it are now still a few miles away. And this is our situation more and more. Let me make a Marxist confession to you in the sense that where I betrayed my Marxism. For the New Year I was with my son in in Dubai in an expensive hotel I will not tell you the name. It was just that it looks like a safe from the top. I will not yes I did a crazy thing. But I did my Marxist duty. I immediately established contact there with a cleaning person it wasn't even a lady it was so that you will not accuse me of sexual harassment it was a man and with a Pakistani taxi driver and they gave me they simply taught me to see what you see and what you don't see. You know all the madness like I noticed that in all my time there I did not meet officially not even one citizen of Dubai. All you meet are European immigrant sorry workers for higher posts then mid-level workers from
like Ceaușescu and so on it's madness. But okay let's go on. So the first thing to note is that it's really a series simply a series about class struggle. About two or even more social spaces which although they are part of the same totality culturally simply don't communicate with each other. I quote here from Fredric Jameson's nice essay on The Wire so here in absolute geographic proximity two whole cultures exist without contact and without interaction even without any knowledge of each other like Harlem and the rest of Manhattan like the West Bank and the Israeli cities that once part of it are now still a few miles away. And this is our situation more and more. Let me make a Marxist confession to you in the sense that where I betrayed my Marxism. For the New Year I was with my son in in Dubai in an expensive hotel I will not tell you the name. It was just that it looks like a safe from the top. I will not yes I did a crazy thing. But I did my Marxist duty. I immediately established contact there with a cleaning person it wasn't even a lady it was so that you will not accuse me of sexual harassment it was a man and with a Pakistani taxi driver and they gave me they simply taught me to see what you see and what you don't see. You know all the madness like I noticed that in all my time there I did not meet officially not even one citizen of Dubai. All you meet are European immigrant sorry workers for higher posts then mid-level workers from
Slavoj Žižek
Egypt Philippines and so on and then the lowest ones from Indonesia India Pakistan Nepal. And for a strange reason and I cannot guess why I was told that those who do the most dangerous works building those high high towers and falling down like flies of course are from Nepal. I don't know why my primitive idea is that they thought that they are used to high altitude you know like Himalaya they can do it and what fascinated me is how if you don't know you really are not even aware of this. For example that the only way to meet citizens of Dubai is maybe in shopping malls you recognize them but never you know it will never be the one for example hotel no person in hotel was a citizen of Dubai. And again it's strictly classified those below you they are literally invisible like they don't even live in the city they live in some usually they call it industrial city some totally secluded part and so on and all the madness of it. So again what fascinates me is this you know they are there but you don't see them. This total invisibility. I just hope that this will also bring some well emancipatory revolutionary chance because can you imagine what they must be terribly afraid those in power full citizens how totally dependent they are on the functioning of this anonymous machinery. A strike they cannot even do what I read when you had this big general strike when was it or here in the UK. I remember how for patriotic reasons middle and upper middle class even rich kids were mobilized you know cleaning the streets or whatever to keep the state functioning. They cannot do this there I mean if those invisible workers don't work everything comes to a standstill. We can go further here. I think that it's even that this different cultures basically there are more than two but we can simplify two are more and more approaching even I would say a different ontology a different way to relate to reality. We or those of us who are at least more or less in this upper level we worry but of course in our own hypocritical way of the lifestyle ecology you know where you recycle one bottle and you think you did something for Mother Earth and so on. We are ecologically oriented we are hedonists but strictly how should I call it moderate rational hedonists no? We have sex but because we read that you know sex is good for blood circulation it's better it's better than two hour jogging and so on you don't have time and so on. It's our kind of a carefully screened universe where you can see this even with names. For example it's only in this our secluded universe that someone can claim that waterboarding is not torture. An American friend of mine and a theologian but very much leftist theologian told me something wonderfully simple he told me but how can you even claim that boarding is not torture. Why then are they using it to wash the prisoners or what? I mean is it just think about the situation. Somebody is there who you think at least that he knows something you want to know and you know that he absolutely doesn't want to tell you this. And then you do something to him and in a couple of minutes he tells you. Isn't this by definition torture? Why why would he tell you this? I mean it's totally irrational not to call it torture. Of course it's torture which is why it works because they must be terribly terrified or whatever to tell you. So what I'm again tempted to say is that things are developing even further here. I think that not only is class struggle not out but what I suspect is that with new biogenetic technologies and so on we are even approaching a situation where quite seriously it will not just be the poor and the rich having enjoying different objects and so on but that they will gradually develop literally into different races. For example when I visited Shanghai I discovered there that they have in the suburb of Shanghai already where why not I don't blame the Chinese you earn money whatever but nonetheless they have many hospitals specialized for rich western patients where if the wife is pregnant you go there and you know you do all the biogenetic stuff they even already try to try to do some genetic changes and so on and I think this will I think that biogenetics the way it develops I mean I'm really afraid of it not because I think humans have an immortal soul etc but precisely because humans don't have an immortal soul it can really affect us. That is to say I really think that there will be one biogenetics for the rich how to perfect your child and so on and there will be another biogenetics human biogenetics for the poor you know how to make them less aggressive or whatever. I mean don't don't I mean again to repeat my old joke it's not a joke sorry if I already used it here when I was also in China I met a guy from their Academy of Sciences biogenetics and he showed me the program of their biogenetic institute and it says openly the goal of biogenetics in People's Republic of China is to regulate physical and mental welfare of the Chinese people. So we are approaching this. But again crucial is the radical distinction. And this is what again Wire is about. I quote again David Simon we pretend to a war against narcotics but in truth we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as a labor supply. The Wire was not a story about America it's about the America that got left behind. The drug war is war on the underclass now that's all it is it has no other meaning end of quote. So again with this I tend to with this I tend to agree and this is also why I claim without class reference you cannot understand a strange phenomenon without class distinction. It happened to me let me tell you another story maybe you know it when I was a year ago with my Slovenian friends in LA at Irvine staying there no just at a dinner party with a friend my Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar his name I can tell not the other one was is a heavy smoker so he asked towards the end of the if he can take a smoke and he said yeah yeah I know I shouldn't do it in the house so he offered to step out onto the big garden. And the owner professor our good friend otherwise leftist Lacanian whatever you want of course said no absolutely not there also you can pollute the house through the window whatever. Then Mladen my friend said okay I understand it can I step out onto the street and walk? The answer was no because this may give wrong impression to our neighbors we would not be so no. Okay then Mladen said okay what can I do? Okay no. But then immediately after this the party came at an end and the host distributed drugs to us. So I find this like why smoking is so mythically stigmatized? Like just ask yourself a question and to avoid a misunderstanding I don't smoke and I'm totally for the punishment of of tobacco tobacco companies and so on. But nonetheless I find it symptomatic how although drugs are also stigmatized oh war against drugs and so on this stigmatization did you notice how it works in a totally different way at a private level. We may be against drugs but it's considered not me don't be afraid I'm the only person that I know who did not even once in his life taste not even marijuana. And I'm not praising me here it's simply my Stalinist paranoia. My idea is enemies always waiting to attack you you take drugs you lose your attention you become a target the enemy can attack it's strictly paranoia you know. But nonetheless isn't it strange how although we know that if anything drugs are nonetheless more dangerous how you can take drug privately it's part of normal upper middle class situation while just ask yourself who smokes today in Hollywood? Where are the good old days when Lauren Bacall to seduce Humphrey Bogart says can I get a light from from you? No today basically the only clear cases who regularly smoke I notice are maybe some of your friends Oscar like some Latino drug smugglers and terrorists terrorists who are afraid before just before they had to blow themselves up to calm themselves down they they take a cigarette or whatever. I think again it's pure it's pure class distinction this this difference. So let me go on. This bleak picture provides the background for Simon's David Simon's fatalistic world view. This is why he says that the Wire is a Greek tragedy. And he's not even very original here if you are a little bit of a Marxist you must know that you must remember that Marx already said this. He says that for ancient Greeks they had Mount Olympus they had gods blah blah today our Greek gods are market forces and so on the same irrational faith and so on and so on. Now here we encounter one ambiguity of The Wire which allows a liberal appropriation re-appropriation even against the explicit intention of the creators David Simon and so on. Namely some radical liberals libertarians in United States but in the right wing sense praised Wire claiming that no the true target is not capitalism free market but but the but the the inefficient state bureaucracy. You know how bureaucracy sabotages itself doesn't work properly and so on. So they even tried to read The Wire as a kind of a right wing liberal plea how to fight the war on drugs. Don't play the old Democratic Party game of big state institutions. State bureaucratic institutions are by definition inefficient because their main goal is to reproduce themselves not to solve the problem and so on and so on. Of course there is a truth in it. For example you know maybe the greatest British movie of all times for me Brazil Terry Gilliam. You remember towards the beginning of the film that wonderful scene when in the guy's played by Jonathan Pryce the hero apartment some I don't know electricity or leaking something so he calls to state approved plumbers or whatever. And they come and they do their usual bureaucratic job they don't even look at the pipes they just fill out many forms and say maybe at some point you will hear from us whatever. Then immediately afterwards in a small cameo appearance Robert De Niro character comes and presents himself as the ultimate subversive he says what he said I'm here really quickly just to repair you know he just wants to really solve the problem. Which is experienced as the ultimate subversion because this is the cause of all the troubles for the hero. Because then authorities somehow learn this and come back and arrest him like how could you get that guy simply to solve the problem and so on and so on. So I I I know this and I know that this is also the tragedy of of how for of bureaucracy because for bureaucracy the ultimate prohibition bureaucracy is made in its irrationality to reproduce the problem the greatest sin you can do from the bureaucratic standpoint is simply to solve the problem of course no. So but I claim nonetheless that it is anti-capitalist series up to a point The Wire. You know why? Because these liberal guys who want to appropriate the Wire don't get something of which David Simon is aware. That it is true bureaucracy works like that. It its main goal is to reproduce itself not to and then you have all this wonderful you have all this wonderful problems even I was told in today's Russia by my friends who some of them were even I'm no longer their friend pro-Putin. They admitted to me how difficult it is for example one of them was robbed no on the street and went to the police. And then they told him sorry we cannot start a procedure why because they told him because we had a plan and according to our plan in this year the number of robberies violent robberies should diminish for five percent. If we take your case it would ruin our statistics and so on and so on no. This is one side the other side the Stalinist one which is also alive is that on the other hand they also get a quota how many crimes they should solve. So then sometimes they had to invent crimes to higher the statistic of I mean we know all this but in some nice passage David Simon says something intelligent he says yes but doesn't capitalism in general work precisely the market capitalism in exactly the same way. It appears that it is selling you products to satisfy you. But no it is selling you products which guarantee that you will again need a product and so on and so on you know. It's exactly in the same way as bureaucracy. Products are not made to satisfy you your satisfaction is manipulated so that more products will be reproduced and so on and so on. Now back to this Greek idea of Greek tragedy. I think there is something in it. Now I will do something crazy. I propose to you to classify Wire to put Wire into the same series as maybe they are in an imaginary ideological way part of the same symptom namely two movies which are very interesting ideologically not that they are very good in which ancient gods are treated as if they are here today among us. The first one I've seen it about I don't know how often maybe six seven times because of my son Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief. You know what's the idea the idea is that there is conflict among the gods and Perseus is expelled and lives as an ordinary guy in a small American city and so on and so on and then you have of course the other the Nordic one Thor where again Thor has a struggle with Anthony Hopkins that is to say Odin if you don't know Wotan and it's says but I like this idea of American provincial everyday life and gods walking there. Maybe maybe these movies are aware I mean the idea is very nice one is precisely that the Greek faith still rules here rules here. So again another good thing about Wire is that it doesn't just make this general point. Here things come become interesting now. It doesn't just make this general point about we are all victims faith of capital sorry victims of this new form of faith which is market capitalism. The fifth five seasons proceed in a very nice systematic way as if a kind of a complex reasoning of what to do. The first season presents the conflict drug dealers versus police. The second season steps back to the ultimate cause of this it focuses on the disappearance of the working class you know that Frank Sobotka trade unionist guy in Baltimore harbor. The third season season three deals with police strategies to resolve the problem. It has maybe the most touching wonderful I will talk about it later episode on so-called Hamsterdam as a strategy you will immediately see what I mean. Season four asks the question why education doesn't help you know the usual liberal answer we need more education and so on and season five focuses on the role of the media why don't we know how things stand. So at this level I think this is the first real greatness of the Wire is that it does not limit itself simply to harsh reality. It presents stages different utopian dreams as part of this reality. And it's done in a beautiful systematic way. For example season two Frank Sobotka focused on Frank Sobotka worker in the harbor trade union organizer who in a first approach he may appear a typical corrupted trade unionist. He makes a deal with drug distributors that through his port drugs are delivered and so on and so on. But then soon you get to see that he is a very tragic honest person. He has still this old Roosevelt welfare state dream of you know honest capitalism workers organized make a deal welfare state and so on. He sees the new economy as ruining this I mean Baltimore harbor is half abandoned and so on. And in his desperate strategy getting the money profiting from drugs it was for him strictly a way to revitalize the port to get the money to reorganize the trade unions. It's a very tragic dream to bring this relatively prosperous Roosevelt welfare state America back to life. Of course it miserably failed. Then also in season two D'Angelo one of the younger guys black guys involved in drug trading and speaking about race. This is I think what is for me also one of the great things about the Wire. It is mostly about the blacks but this becomes irrelevant in a good sense. It's no longer this white attitude of you know oh poor blacks there whatever. It is simply by blacks about the blacks. It lacks this false liberal fascination with poor subjects it's a different level. So this D'Angelo he decides to turn state's witness he is kind of a tormented by ethical problems and almost decides already to denounce his family his uncle who is the gang boss. And then who comes his mother and convinces him not to collaborate with the police referring to what to family values of course. It's the big family dream we should stick together. So you see you have here another utopian dream happy big family helping each other and so on and so on. In season three maybe the most beautiful utopia Major Colvin another honest black policeman decides to do something which seems quite obvious. He knows this is not a long term solution but in immediate terms it works wonderfully. He constitutes so called Hamsterdam of course it's a reference to Amsterdam where as you know in that central part you can buy simply in cafeterias soft drugs no. It's even I didn't get it when somebody drew my attention to if it says coffee shop it means drugs. If it says cafeteria it means just coffee no because a friend of mine made this he went to a cafeteria and said just some you know and they told him no no wrong place go to coffee shop for this no. But you know so he does this does this. And I think this is a wonderful moderate ethical act. He makes a deal with the drug dealers gangster telling them look this part of the city a couple of blocks you will have the whole freedom to do whatever you want with drugs we will not even control you even people will be free to come there you can do just of course don't do the killing. Do drug dealing in whatever way you want and but don't do anything don't even think about outside this limits. We will be and it worked wonderfully there is much less even drug violence much less violence all parts of the city around starts to flourish and so on. But then of course the usual thing it doesn't look good for publicity no and the mayor decides to crack it. But it's a beautiful utopia I think no. And incidentally you know that it's a mistake of the movie makers of the TV series makers to call it Hamsterdam. When I was recently in Zurich Switzerland you know the evil Nazi bankers and so on they told me that no the city of Zurich was the first to do this back in the 1980s. There is a square a little bit north I think from the Hauptbahnhof from the main train station where they did legalize it. But it didn't quite work but up to a point it did work. Okay so let's go further. Then there is I hope I didn't then there is in season three another wonderful utopian moment of friendship like you know the way it's a scene of two gangsters Avon Barksdale the gang boss and Stringer Bell his executive lieutenant who is kind of a modern business oriented gangster. It's a very touching scene and I think it's totally wrong to read it as a hypocrisy. They already betrayed each other. The one betrayed the other to the police the other ordered the murder of the first one. It's already done. But nonetheless they decide to have a last supper drink together and how they talk about good old times we may do this and so on. It's totally wrong I claim to read it as hypocrisy. It's although they knew and they knew about the other that they already betrayed it's this kind of a utopian longing of what it might have been. I hope it will function. It's a shorter scene than the other way than the other one. You been getting dreaming of home, man. Gabriel's Horn, the day is today, I can touch. I can't get too fucked up tonight, man. I got some shit I got to go over inside tomorrow. Plus, that fucking Pollack y'all working for... I got to put that Clay Davis bullshit, man, I'm have to cut his money, little faggot. Tell me y'all meet. Uh, what time, uh, I think. Why, you want me to do something for you? No, just see where you gonna be at. You need to relax more, man. When the time is right, I will. You know I don't take my work too seriously. That's right. It's just business. Again, what I like in this scene is that you got it, they both know they already betrayed each other and this is why even more the dream is authentic the dream of friendship. Then you have other you have again the utopian dream the technocratic dream and so on and so on. So now things get even more complex I claim because here I slightly disagree with Fred Jameson who likes to play the game of beyond good and evil claiming that every ethical critique of capitalism is naive wrong all radical thought has to move in the dimension again beyond good and evil he even talks about outmoded ethical binary of good and evil and so on and so on. But I I don't agree with this. I think that what the TV series what The Wire struggles with is something much more interesting and I think even generally as to our ethical position. I never liked this idea which appears so radical you know beyond good of good and evil in the sense that every notion of good that we have is already within the horizon of existing ideology and so on and so on. It's so I think Fred Jameson got it here exactly in the wrong way. He mocks good and evil but at the same time he likes he sees a genuine emancipatory potential in this kind of utopian dreams you know like even if the guys are bad there is an authentic utopian dimension. I'm tempted to to see things exactly in the opposite way. That is to say the tragedy of these utopian dimensions family friendship whatever is that precisely they are fully part of the system making the system function. But that what The Wire really tries to do at its most radical is to answer this question in a situation like that of Baltimore how can we it's a very naive question I think there is absolutely no reason to make fun of it. Can we do anything? What can we do to resist? What are the modes of activity? And here I think that it should be read the series as a kind of a phenomenology a typology even of what can you do to be minimally ethical. And you have for example McNulty the drunken honest policeman who just fights his way fails at the end. You have his boss who is tries to be honest in a different way they all end tragically but nonetheless. And I think this is quite an honest typology of course with this pessimistic message that in order to really do something good you have in some way to break the law. For example the most beautiful example very touching is here that of McNulty the main character you know if you saw it what he does in the last season. He gets it as Fred Jameson emphasizes it that in today's media nobody really cares about drug dealers gangsters. There are two types of crime which makes big headlines no? It's serial killers and terrorists. This is where it is in. So McNulty wants a new drug lord who established himself under police control listening devices and so on. He cannot get the money so he does something which I find totally ethical and brilliant. He there is a body found of an old drunk man not even a crime. He McNulty planned some false leads so that this appears as a work of a serial killer. You know and then there is another body found and he planned some clues and then he goes to the press serial killer in Baltimore city. Of course he immediately gets all the money you know that he used for that. But that's then his downfall. Police discovers his and he is fired at the end. So another lesson here this one was put very nicely by Jameson here I agree with him. Namely that the other message of the film and that sorry just another thing. There is then the other message of the film is that the only way to do something good in today's society the only way to fight the dark gang is to establish a conspiracy a good gang illegal conspiratory group. And I think this is maybe almost I would say the most this is and I am I don't think Jameson even notices it enough he should have. This is for me the most beautiful if you seen it poetic moment of the Wire. You will show it you know what I will do now this is not so important what happens I will just show to you the clip. Good afternoon. We have gathered to provide an update on the progress of the investigation into the serial murders that have occurred over last several months. Now we believe that we have identified the person responsible for the murders of dozens of victims. Detective McNulty... The group organized the police acknowledges the need to fight drugs but they want to keep it aside. So they give to the anti-drug group a small dirty room in the basement half abandoned with all the sounds. And this is for me the genuine communist dream of the series. It's the same I think it's this a new version of you know those wonderful I really seen them a proto-model of a communist society. Even in Charles Dickens you know those crazy eccentric houses like in an abandoned ship where or Frank Capra you know watch that film You Can't Get It What You Want that crazy apartment you have a crazy ballerina a Russian madman a guy who does explosions and so on. This kind of a communism not as this Soviet oh we are all like machines. But communism as a Jameson has very some very nice view of it where he says communism should be as a kind of a free madhouse you know a community of eccentrics. Some a guy thinks he's Napoleon the other guy wants to kill us all and we somehow manage and this look you have a lesbian woman you have that guy who is just making small wooden toys and so on. You have this kind of a Dickensian group which of course has to operate illegally with regard to the with regard to the institution itself. Here you have as Jameson points out some wonderful characters like the guy you saw clipping some wood he is Lester Freamon he is a policeman who lost his who was sidetracked because of his honesty and he is as Jameson notices the type of the intellectual threatened by this Bologna reform we need knowledge we can be useful this kind of a totally useful making toys and so on a lot of unnecessary knowledge but he is the guy who solves things with his ideas this kind of intellectual in the best sense of the term. Ah then there is another person which is which is absolutely crucial the person of Omar. You know which even that goes to his honor nonetheless Obama the guy the boss whatever said that this is his favorite character. He is the paradox he is the only who guy who really efficiently fights drug crime and what is he? He is a serial murderer systematically killing bad drug dealers as an ethical task and it's something like did you see I didn't but I read about it the TV series Dexter. You know it's about a policeman how did he become what he is? His stepfather discovered that it's in his genes to kill and he says okay then at least do the policeman's job and kill the right people so that you can do your killing and so on something like that. I think that in this sense this is again the beautiful paradox of The Wire how all these eccentric types up to a honest absolutely honest the only person in the whole Wire who is rigidly honest is Omar. The ultimate honest serial killer and so on and so on.
Egypt Philippines and so on and then the lowest ones from Indonesia India Pakistan Nepal. And for a strange reason and I cannot guess why I was told that those who do the most dangerous works building those high high towers and falling down like flies of course are from Nepal. I don't know why my primitive idea is that they thought that they are used to high altitude you know like Himalaya they can do it and what fascinated me is how if you don't know you really are not even aware of this. For example that the only way to meet citizens of Dubai is maybe in shopping malls you recognize them but never you know it will never be the one for example hotel no person in hotel was a citizen of Dubai. And again it's strictly classified those below you they are literally invisible like they don't even live in the city they live in some usually they call it industrial city some totally secluded part and so on and all the madness of it. So again what fascinates me is this you know they are there but you don't see them. This total invisibility. I just hope that this will also bring some well emancipatory revolutionary chance because can you imagine what they must be terribly afraid those in power full citizens how totally dependent they are on the functioning of this anonymous machinery. A strike they cannot even do what I read when you had this big general strike when was it or here in the UK. I remember how for patriotic reasons middle and upper middle class even rich kids were mobilized you know cleaning the streets or whatever to keep the state functioning. They cannot do this there I mean if those invisible workers don't work everything comes to a standstill. We can go further here. I think that it's even that this different cultures basically there are more than two but we can simplify two are more and more approaching even I would say a different ontology a different way to relate to reality. We or those of us who are at least more or less in this upper level we worry but of course in our own hypocritical way of the lifestyle ecology you know where you recycle one bottle and you think you did something for Mother Earth and so on. We are ecologically oriented we are hedonists but strictly how should I call it moderate rational hedonists no? We have sex but because we read that you know sex is good for blood circulation it's better it's better than two hour jogging and so on you don't have time and so on. It's our kind of a carefully screened universe where you can see this even with names. For example it's only in this our secluded universe that someone can claim that waterboarding is not torture. An American friend of mine and a theologian but very much leftist theologian told me something wonderfully simple he told me but how can you even claim that boarding is not torture. Why then are they using it to wash the prisoners or what? I mean is it just think about the situation. Somebody is there who you think at least that he knows something you want to know and you know that he absolutely doesn't want to tell you this. And then you do something to him and in a couple of minutes he tells you. Isn't this by definition torture? Why why would he tell you this? I mean it's totally irrational not to call it torture. Of course it's torture which is why it works because they must be terribly terrified or whatever to tell you. So what I'm again tempted to say is that things are developing even further here. I think that not only is class struggle not out but what I suspect is that with new biogenetic technologies and so on we are even approaching a situation where quite seriously it will not just be the poor and the rich having enjoying different objects and so on but that they will gradually develop literally into different races. For example when I visited Shanghai I discovered there that they have in the suburb of Shanghai already where why not I don't blame the Chinese you earn money whatever but nonetheless they have many hospitals specialized for rich western patients where if the wife is pregnant you go there and you know you do all the biogenetic stuff they even already try to try to do some genetic changes and so on and I think this will I think that biogenetics the way it develops I mean I'm really afraid of it not because I think humans have an immortal soul etc but precisely because humans don't have an immortal soul it can really affect us. That is to say I really think that there will be one biogenetics for the rich how to perfect your child and so on and there will be another biogenetics human biogenetics for the poor you know how to make them less aggressive or whatever. I mean don't don't I mean again to repeat my old joke it's not a joke sorry if I already used it here when I was also in China I met a guy from their Academy of Sciences biogenetics and he showed me the program of their biogenetic institute and it says openly the goal of biogenetics in People's Republic of China is to regulate physical and mental welfare of the Chinese people. So we are approaching this. But again crucial is the radical distinction. And this is what again Wire is about. I quote again David Simon we pretend to a war against narcotics but in truth we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as a labor supply. The Wire was not a story about America it's about the America that got left behind. The drug war is war on the underclass now that's all it is it has no other meaning end of quote. So again with this I tend to with this I tend to agree and this is also why I claim without class reference you cannot understand a strange phenomenon without class distinction. It happened to me let me tell you another story maybe you know it when I was a year ago with my Slovenian friends in LA at Irvine staying there no just at a dinner party with a friend my Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar his name I can tell not the other one was is a heavy smoker so he asked towards the end of the if he can take a smoke and he said yeah yeah I know I shouldn't do it in the house so he offered to step out onto the big garden. And the owner professor our good friend otherwise leftist Lacanian whatever you want of course said no absolutely not there also you can pollute the house through the window whatever. Then Mladen my friend said okay I understand it can I step out onto the street and walk? The answer was no because this may give wrong impression to our neighbors we would not be so no. Okay then Mladen said okay what can I do? Okay no. But then immediately after this the party came at an end and the host distributed drugs to us. So I find this like why smoking is so mythically stigmatized? Like just ask yourself a question and to avoid a misunderstanding I don't smoke and I'm totally for the punishment of of tobacco tobacco companies and so on. But nonetheless I find it symptomatic how although drugs are also stigmatized oh war against drugs and so on this stigmatization did you notice how it works in a totally different way at a private level. We may be against drugs but it's considered not me don't be afraid I'm the only person that I know who did not even once in his life taste not even marijuana. And I'm not praising me here it's simply my Stalinist paranoia. My idea is enemies always waiting to attack you you take drugs you lose your attention you become a target the enemy can attack it's strictly paranoia you know. But nonetheless isn't it strange how although we know that if anything drugs are nonetheless more dangerous how you can take drug privately it's part of normal upper middle class situation while just ask yourself who smokes today in Hollywood? Where are the good old days when Lauren Bacall to seduce Humphrey Bogart says can I get a light from from you? No today basically the only clear cases who regularly smoke I notice are maybe some of your friends Oscar like some Latino drug smugglers and terrorists terrorists who are afraid before just before they had to blow themselves up to calm themselves down they they take a cigarette or whatever. I think again it's pure it's pure class distinction this this difference. So let me go on. This bleak picture provides the background for Simon's David Simon's fatalistic world view. This is why he says that the Wire is a Greek tragedy. And he's not even very original here if you are a little bit of a Marxist you must know that you must remember that Marx already said this. He says that for ancient Greeks they had Mount Olympus they had gods blah blah today our Greek gods are market forces and so on the same irrational faith and so on and so on. Now here we encounter one ambiguity of The Wire which allows a liberal appropriation re-appropriation even against the explicit intention of the creators David Simon and so on. Namely some radical liberals libertarians in United States but in the right wing sense praised Wire claiming that no the true target is not capitalism free market but but the but the the inefficient state bureaucracy. You know how bureaucracy sabotages itself doesn't work properly and so on. So they even tried to read The Wire as a kind of a right wing liberal plea how to fight the war on drugs. Don't play the old Democratic Party game of big state institutions. State bureaucratic institutions are by definition inefficient because their main goal is to reproduce themselves not to solve the problem and so on and so on. Of course there is a truth in it. For example you know maybe the greatest British movie of all times for me Brazil Terry Gilliam. You remember towards the beginning of the film that wonderful scene when in the guy's played by Jonathan Pryce the hero apartment some I don't know electricity or leaking something so he calls to state approved plumbers or whatever. And they come and they do their usual bureaucratic job they don't even look at the pipes they just fill out many forms and say maybe at some point you will hear from us whatever. Then immediately afterwards in a small cameo appearance Robert De Niro character comes and presents himself as the ultimate subversive he says what he said I'm here really quickly just to repair you know he just wants to really solve the problem. Which is experienced as the ultimate subversion because this is the cause of all the troubles for the hero. Because then authorities somehow learn this and come back and arrest him like how could you get that guy simply to solve the problem and so on and so on. So I I I know this and I know that this is also the tragedy of of how for of bureaucracy because for bureaucracy the ultimate prohibition bureaucracy is made in its irrationality to reproduce the problem the greatest sin you can do from the bureaucratic standpoint is simply to solve the problem of course no. So but I claim nonetheless that it is anti-capitalist series up to a point The Wire. You know why? Because these liberal guys who want to appropriate the Wire don't get something of which David Simon is aware. That it is true bureaucracy works like that. It its main goal is to reproduce itself not to and then you have all this wonderful you have all this wonderful problems even I was told in today's Russia by my friends who some of them were even I'm no longer their friend pro-Putin. They admitted to me how difficult it is for example one of them was robbed no on the street and went to the police. And then they told him sorry we cannot start a procedure why because they told him because we had a plan and according to our plan in this year the number of robberies violent robberies should diminish for five percent. If we take your case it would ruin our statistics and so on and so on no. This is one side the other side the Stalinist one which is also alive is that on the other hand they also get a quota how many crimes they should solve. So then sometimes they had to invent crimes to higher the statistic of I mean we know all this but in some nice passage David Simon says something intelligent he says yes but doesn't capitalism in general work precisely the market capitalism in exactly the same way. It appears that it is selling you products to satisfy you. But no it is selling you products which guarantee that you will again need a product and so on and so on you know. It's exactly in the same way as bureaucracy. Products are not made to satisfy you your satisfaction is manipulated so that more products will be reproduced and so on and so on. Now back to this Greek idea of Greek tragedy. I think there is something in it. Now I will do something crazy. I propose to you to classify Wire to put Wire into the same series as maybe they are in an imaginary ideological way part of the same symptom namely two movies which are very interesting ideologically not that they are very good in which ancient gods are treated as if they are here today among us. The first one I've seen it about I don't know how often maybe six seven times because of my son Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief. You know what's the idea the idea is that there is conflict among the gods and Perseus is expelled and lives as an ordinary guy in a small American city and so on and so on and then you have of course the other the Nordic one Thor where again Thor has a struggle with Anthony Hopkins that is to say Odin if you don't know Wotan and it's says but I like this idea of American provincial everyday life and gods walking there. Maybe maybe these movies are aware I mean the idea is very nice one is precisely that the Greek faith still rules here rules here. So again another good thing about Wire is that it doesn't just make this general point. Here things come become interesting now. It doesn't just make this general point about we are all victims faith of capital sorry victims of this new form of faith which is market capitalism. The fifth five seasons proceed in a very nice systematic way as if a kind of a complex reasoning of what to do. The first season presents the conflict drug dealers versus police. The second season steps back to the ultimate cause of this it focuses on the disappearance of the working class you know that Frank Sobotka trade unionist guy in Baltimore harbor. The third season season three deals with police strategies to resolve the problem. It has maybe the most touching wonderful I will talk about it later episode on so-called Hamsterdam as a strategy you will immediately see what I mean. Season four asks the question why education doesn't help you know the usual liberal answer we need more education and so on and season five focuses on the role of the media why don't we know how things stand. So at this level I think this is the first real greatness of the Wire is that it does not limit itself simply to harsh reality. It presents stages different utopian dreams as part of this reality. And it's done in a beautiful systematic way. For example season two Frank Sobotka focused on Frank Sobotka worker in the harbor trade union organizer who in a first approach he may appear a typical corrupted trade unionist. He makes a deal with drug distributors that through his port drugs are delivered and so on and so on. But then soon you get to see that he is a very tragic honest person. He has still this old Roosevelt welfare state dream of you know honest capitalism workers organized make a deal welfare state and so on. He sees the new economy as ruining this I mean Baltimore harbor is half abandoned and so on. And in his desperate strategy getting the money profiting from drugs it was for him strictly a way to revitalize the port to get the money to reorganize the trade unions. It's a very tragic dream to bring this relatively prosperous Roosevelt welfare state America back to life. Of course it miserably failed. Then also in season two D'Angelo one of the younger guys black guys involved in drug trading and speaking about race. This is I think what is for me also one of the great things about the Wire. It is mostly about the blacks but this becomes irrelevant in a good sense. It's no longer this white attitude of you know oh poor blacks there whatever. It is simply by blacks about the blacks. It lacks this false liberal fascination with poor subjects it's a different level. So this D'Angelo he decides to turn state's witness he is kind of a tormented by ethical problems and almost decides already to denounce his family his uncle who is the gang boss. And then who comes his mother and convinces him not to collaborate with the police referring to what to family values of course. It's the big family dream we should stick together. So you see you have here another utopian dream happy big family helping each other and so on and so on. In season three maybe the most beautiful utopia Major Colvin another honest black policeman decides to do something which seems quite obvious. He knows this is not a long term solution but in immediate terms it works wonderfully. He constitutes so called Hamsterdam of course it's a reference to Amsterdam where as you know in that central part you can buy simply in cafeterias soft drugs no. It's even I didn't get it when somebody drew my attention to if it says coffee shop it means drugs. If it says cafeteria it means just coffee no because a friend of mine made this he went to a cafeteria and said just some you know and they told him no no wrong place go to coffee shop for this no. But you know so he does this does this. And I think this is a wonderful moderate ethical act. He makes a deal with the drug dealers gangster telling them look this part of the city a couple of blocks you will have the whole freedom to do whatever you want with drugs we will not even control you even people will be free to come there you can do just of course don't do the killing. Do drug dealing in whatever way you want and but don't do anything don't even think about outside this limits. We will be and it worked wonderfully there is much less even drug violence much less violence all parts of the city around starts to flourish and so on. But then of course the usual thing it doesn't look good for publicity no and the mayor decides to crack it. But it's a beautiful utopia I think no. And incidentally you know that it's a mistake of the movie makers of the TV series makers to call it Hamsterdam. When I was recently in Zurich Switzerland you know the evil Nazi bankers and so on they told me that no the city of Zurich was the first to do this back in the 1980s. There is a square a little bit north I think from the Hauptbahnhof from the main train station where they did legalize it. But it didn't quite work but up to a point it did work. Okay so let's go further. Then there is I hope I didn't then there is in season three another wonderful utopian moment of friendship like you know the way it's a scene of two gangsters Avon Barksdale the gang boss and Stringer Bell his executive lieutenant who is kind of a modern business oriented gangster. It's a very touching scene and I think it's totally wrong to read it as a hypocrisy. They already betrayed each other. The one betrayed the other to the police the other ordered the murder of the first one. It's already done. But nonetheless they decide to have a last supper drink together and how they talk about good old times we may do this and so on. It's totally wrong I claim to read it as hypocrisy. It's although they knew and they knew about the other that they already betrayed it's this kind of a utopian longing of what it might have been. I hope it will function. It's a shorter scene than the other way than the other one. You been getting dreaming of home, man. Gabriel's Horn, the day is today, I can touch. I can't get too fucked up tonight, man. I got some shit I got to go over inside tomorrow. Plus, that fucking Pollack y'all working for... I got to put that Clay Davis bullshit, man, I'm have to cut his money, little faggot. Tell me y'all meet. Uh, what time, uh, I think. Why, you want me to do something for you? No, just see where you gonna be at. You need to relax more, man. When the time is right, I will. You know I don't take my work too seriously. That's right. It's just business. Again, what I like in this scene is that you got it, they both know they already betrayed each other and this is why even more the dream is authentic the dream of friendship. Then you have other you have again the utopian dream the technocratic dream and so on and so on. So now things get even more complex I claim because here I slightly disagree with Fred Jameson who likes to play the game of beyond good and evil claiming that every ethical critique of capitalism is naive wrong all radical thought has to move in the dimension again beyond good and evil he even talks about outmoded ethical binary of good and evil and so on and so on. But I I don't agree with this. I think that what the TV series what The Wire struggles with is something much more interesting and I think even generally as to our ethical position. I never liked this idea which appears so radical you know beyond good of good and evil in the sense that every notion of good that we have is already within the horizon of existing ideology and so on and so on. It's so I think Fred Jameson got it here exactly in the wrong way. He mocks good and evil but at the same time he likes he sees a genuine emancipatory potential in this kind of utopian dreams you know like even if the guys are bad there is an authentic utopian dimension. I'm tempted to to see things exactly in the opposite way. That is to say the tragedy of these utopian dimensions family friendship whatever is that precisely they are fully part of the system making the system function. But that what The Wire really tries to do at its most radical is to answer this question in a situation like that of Baltimore how can we it's a very naive question I think there is absolutely no reason to make fun of it. Can we do anything? What can we do to resist? What are the modes of activity? And here I think that it should be read the series as a kind of a phenomenology a typology even of what can you do to be minimally ethical. And you have for example McNulty the drunken honest policeman who just fights his way fails at the end. You have his boss who is tries to be honest in a different way they all end tragically but nonetheless. And I think this is quite an honest typology of course with this pessimistic message that in order to really do something good you have in some way to break the law. For example the most beautiful example very touching is here that of McNulty the main character you know if you saw it what he does in the last season. He gets it as Fred Jameson emphasizes it that in today's media nobody really cares about drug dealers gangsters. There are two types of crime which makes big headlines no? It's serial killers and terrorists. This is where it is in. So McNulty wants a new drug lord who established himself under police control listening devices and so on. He cannot get the money so he does something which I find totally ethical and brilliant. He there is a body found of an old drunk man not even a crime. He McNulty planned some false leads so that this appears as a work of a serial killer. You know and then there is another body found and he planned some clues and then he goes to the press serial killer in Baltimore city. Of course he immediately gets all the money you know that he used for that. But that's then his downfall. Police discovers his and he is fired at the end. So another lesson here this one was put very nicely by Jameson here I agree with him. Namely that the other message of the film and that sorry just another thing. There is then the other message of the film is that the only way to do something good in today's society the only way to fight the dark gang is to establish a conspiracy a good gang illegal conspiratory group. And I think this is maybe almost I would say the most this is and I am I don't think Jameson even notices it enough he should have. This is for me the most beautiful if you seen it poetic moment of the Wire. You will show it you know what I will do now this is not so important what happens I will just show to you the clip. Good afternoon. We have gathered to provide an update on the progress of the investigation into the serial murders that have occurred over last several months. Now we believe that we have identified the person responsible for the murders of dozens of victims. Detective McNulty... The group organized the police acknowledges the need to fight drugs but they want to keep it aside. So they give to the anti-drug group a small dirty room in the basement half abandoned with all the sounds. And this is for me the genuine communist dream of the series. It's the same I think it's this a new version of you know those wonderful I really seen them a proto-model of a communist society. Even in Charles Dickens you know those crazy eccentric houses like in an abandoned ship where or Frank Capra you know watch that film You Can't Get It What You Want that crazy apartment you have a crazy ballerina a Russian madman a guy who does explosions and so on. This kind of a communism not as this Soviet oh we are all like machines. But communism as a Jameson has very some very nice view of it where he says communism should be as a kind of a free madhouse you know a community of eccentrics. Some a guy thinks he's Napoleon the other guy wants to kill us all and we somehow manage and this look you have a lesbian woman you have that guy who is just making small wooden toys and so on. You have this kind of a Dickensian group which of course has to operate illegally with regard to the with regard to the institution itself. Here you have as Jameson points out some wonderful characters like the guy you saw clipping some wood he is Lester Freamon he is a policeman who lost his who was sidetracked because of his honesty and he is as Jameson notices the type of the intellectual threatened by this Bologna reform we need knowledge we can be useful this kind of a totally useful making toys and so on a lot of unnecessary knowledge but he is the guy who solves things with his ideas this kind of intellectual in the best sense of the term. Ah then there is another person which is which is absolutely crucial the person of Omar. You know which even that goes to his honor nonetheless Obama the guy the boss whatever said that this is his favorite character. He is the paradox he is the only who guy who really efficiently fights drug crime and what is he? He is a serial murderer systematically killing bad drug dealers as an ethical task and it's something like did you see I didn't but I read about it the TV series Dexter. You know it's about a policeman how did he become what he is? His stepfather discovered that it's in his genes to kill and he says okay then at least do the policeman's job and kill the right people so that you can do your killing and so on something like that. I think that in this sense this is again the beautiful paradox of The Wire how all these eccentric types up to a honest absolutely honest the only person in the whole Wire who is rigidly honest is Omar. The ultimate honest serial killer and so on and so on.
unknown
So then now we nonetheless encounter a problem here. Okay we have this is the
So then now we nonetheless encounter a problem here. Okay we have this is the
Slavoj Žižek
constellation of the Wire again all these utopian dreams these different types of honesty which all of them fail more or
constellation of the Wire again all these utopian dreams these different types of honesty which all of them fail more or
unknown
less. There is nonetheless I claim a limit with regard to this Greek tragedy model. The limit is that Greek Greek that the Wire is much more pessimistic. Okay you have a tragedy in Greek tragedy you try to combat faith you cannot you fail. But nonetheless something happens in Greek tragedy that your failure is the great cathartic purification whatever. And as good analysts note here Wire is in a way more tragic than Greek tragedy. Because faith is not personalized like Zeus and so on but this anonymous indifferent machinery you don't get this cathartic moment of purification. You lose not in the sense that you make a compromise or what. But in the sense that you
less. There is nonetheless I claim a limit with regard to this Greek tragedy model. The limit is that Greek Greek that the Wire is much more pessimistic. Okay you have a tragedy in Greek tragedy you try to combat faith you cannot you fail. But nonetheless something happens in Greek tragedy that your failure is the great cathartic purification whatever. And as good analysts note here Wire is in a way more tragic than Greek tragedy. Because faith is not personalized like Zeus and so on but this anonymous indifferent machinery you don't get this cathartic moment of purification. You lose not in the sense that you make a compromise or what. But in the sense that you
Slavoj Žižek
heroically stand up and then you see it simply indifferent things go on and so on and so on. You know even it's not a question of I want to be heroic but I break down because of the pressure of society whatever. It's that even if I don't break down I afterwards discover that a) my heroic act was functionally exploited for the better functioning of power or b) it simply ignored indifferent and so on and so on. Here I think it is also wrong to celebrate as some people are doing the Dickens aspect of the Wire. Like it's fashionable to say The Wire is Dickens Charles Dickens you know. No Charles Dickens nonetheless has a series of let's call it these melodramatic moments like confrontation of good and evil or you know this secret rescuer benefactor who intervenes in the last minute all this miserably fails in the Wire. Why? Because again here I think we slowly encounter maybe the limit of the series. Because the faith is market anonymous irrational market the real the desert of the real is the abstract movement of the capital. And now the problem is who is then the culprit? Jameson said the culprit is of course the system as such. It's a whodunnit where the answer is not this or that guy but all of them. You have already one example of this in classical detective novel you know Agatha Christie Murder on the Orient Express where the culprits are all the entire but because we are in the classical bourgeois universe the necessary consequence of this is that if all are murderers then the victim should be the really bad guy. So at the end as you know the murder is justified and Hercule Poirot doesn't even report it. Here how to do it? Here I think we get the ultimate limitation of The Wire. It the problem is how to stage in narrative fiction this faith the modern faith capital as an abstract power. I claim for reasons we don't have time to go now in detail that we and this is what was clear to authors like Brecht and Chaplin when we are dealing with modern horror totalitarian capital capitalist and so on psychological realism no longer works. You can and for me if there is again a limit to The Wire is that it it remains too much embedded in traditional psychological realism. What do I mean by this? Did you notice how in order how all psychological realist movies or whatever on Hitler somehow fail? Like it's always then you know this was all the trouble of Lars von Trier you know when he made that remark at Cannes Festival press conference but I can sympathize with Hitler there. You know what's the ultimate irony? That he was there quoting Wittgenstein. I have a book of memoirs on Wittgenstein where one of his pupils reports that Wittgenstein put a note in his diary in the spring of April March of saying okay Hitler is horrible but I think I understand him now. How horrible he must feel now alone in the bunker there everything and. So there is something wrong with it. What? Why? I think that precisely and already Hannah Arendt saw this. What characterizes modern abstract capitalism is a radical gap between let's call them objective social processes and subjective psychological self-experience. This is her big point for example no about Eichmann you know that the banality of evil. Horrible things were being done. It is wrong to think you will find a subject who in the first person is the agent of this horror or even is aware of what he is doing. You must have a gap if you play the game of let's try to understand it how Hitler or whoever was able to do it you do it wrong you are lost you are lost. You precisely humanize the crime too much. Which is why I think that those who try to represent Hitler as a or Nazism or other horrors as a stuff of comedy you know like Brecht in his Arturo Ui or Chaplin in Great Dictator are paradoxically much closer to the truth. You cannot do a totalitarian or even abstract capitalist society where you still stick to their psychological to their psychological realist model. Now you will say but why not? Isn't it part of a social totality also our self-experience certain things are happening we. No you know why not? Because if you portray society the way it is today in psychological realist way you cover up the radical gap that separates let's say social objectivity from subjective self-experience. Precisely where you think that you show it all you already formally mystify the situation. So again where do we see this limitation of Wire? Let me begin with where the Wire comes nonetheless closest to this authentic modern tragic vision. I will now show you the very first famous three minutes first scene where the beginning of the series where McNulty and a black boy who informs him talk about the body found there in front and you will see it in a way it effectively condenses the entire series. You got your name, what? Snot. Snotboogie. Snotboogie? Yeah, Snotboogie. I like your name. What? Snotboogie. This kid, his mama went to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts. You know, he forgets his jacket, his nose starts running and some asshole instead of giving him a Kleenex calls him Snot. So he's Snot forever. It doesn't seem fair. Life just beat him way, I guess. So, who shot Snot? I ain't going to no court. Motherfucker had no cap in his rap, definitely not. He could have just whipped his ass like we all whipped his ass. Why'd you kill Snot? Snot been doing the same shit since I don't know how long. Kill a man over some bullshit. I'm saying, every Friday night in an alley behind the corner we roll the bones, you know? I mean all the boys, from on top, from down way, roll bones and play, really crap game, right? Every time Snot, he fade a few shooters, play it out till the pot's deep, snatch and run. Every time? Couldn't help himself. I mean, stay, every Friday night you and your boys shoot craps, right? But every Friday night your pal Snot, he wait till there was cash on the ground and then he grab the money and run away? They'd catch him and beat his ass, but nobody ever moved past that. I gotta ask, if every time Snotboogie grabbed the money and ran away, why'd you even let him in the game? What? If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play? Got to, this is America, man. Okay. So again the point of this famous beginning is that precisely you have a victim it's not a tragic victim you even don't know the name victim is meaningless but so this would be the first point. The second point is you got it why he was killed this strange ethical insistence. You are beaten but you go on robbing the robbers and so on and so on. Now so again now comes my just to conclude my crucial point. We have then all these different modes of resistance. We have McNulty who tries to do something through a little bit of cheating. We have Omar the good killer. We have Snot who was stealing money from drug dealers after their their their their games every Friday and so on and so on got beaten but insisted. I think that the crucial question to be approached here is the following one. It is easy to show how how in Michel Foucaultian way and it's interesting how most of the readings of the Wire are under the influence of Foucault's Discipline and Punish you know repeating endlessly this point of how crime and police prosecution of crime regenerate reproduce each other are part of the same circle and so on and so on. I get this point I totally agree. How I even experienced it in my own this inconsistency of the law how you have to generate what you are trying to oppress. For example a funny story from my own youth when I was serving the army. We had once twice a week in the morning political education where once the officer chief of my battalion was teaching us this you know this international rules of war. For example did you know that it's a prohibited to shoot on parachuters before they touch the ground. We all learned this blah blah. Then as if by some divine grace to make the point the next hour we were doing some lessons in shooting. The same officer was teaching us. And on that day the same day the lesson was how to shoot a parachuter no? And it was you know you know the trick maybe that how you have to take into account how quickly the body is going down and there is a primitive system if you make a judgment through your fingers how much lower you should aim at no? And then total idiot as I am I asked him a question no? Like like comrade officer but isn't there like how do you bring this together with what you were telling us one hour before no? And I got what I deserved. He looked at me and told me aren't you an intellectual how can you be so utterly stupid don't you get it or what and so on and so on. Okay I got it. I know this. But the problem is this one. Here is for me the limit of the Wire. Okay this type of codependence between police bureaucratic work and crime how you know they need each other blah blah they generate each other I got this Michel Foucault lesson. But does the same hold for resistance? What about all these subversive acts like what McNulty is doing what Omar is doing you know these honest people trying to change? Are they also in the same way resistance which is in advance co-opted which functions as the part of the system? And I claim that here the series remains totally ambiguous. And it's kind of objective social limitation. First here David Simon himself is ambiguous. Because on the one hand his official party is party line is the Greek tragic line no? Like the system always wins it's we cannot really blah all this faith wins through our very attempt to win over it. So the conclusion from this would have been which is quite sympathetic for me that maybe the way to stop the system is not to resist it in the wrong way but to let it function and make it sure that in this way it will destroy itself. It would have worked. For example an example from Cuba. I read some ten years ago that Castro got to know how you call this I don't know that system of tracking that most of the taxis have or yeah you will or whatever you know where you know where that Castro said one because you know in Cuba there was a big problem of trucks trucks owned by state being used for smuggling even in the office distributing black market goods and so on. So Castro's idea was it's not so expensive let's let's give to each state owned truck this machine and some controller can know at every point where they are and so on and so on. But you know all I can say is that luckily for Castro and his system this didn't work because an elementary economic analysis would have told you that like at that point now it's maybe worse between thirty and forty percent of food in Cuba was distributed in this black market way. Which means that if this fight against corruption were to succeed it would have meant I don't know instant breakdown revolution or whatever. This was the great tragedy of all communist systems that that precisely the phenomenon they were fighting black market and so on was what effectively enabled the system to function. Look at the Soviet Union all good books about Soviet economy under Brezhnev tell you this like thirty percent practically the majority of of of vegetables and so on were from black market farmers and so on and so on. So then if you are cynical you should say that precisely those who think that they are undermining the system we do it illegally black marketing and so on and so on they are keeping the system alive. So now we come to this ambiguity that I want to confront. It is easy to withdraw when you have this insight to withdraw into what I'm tempted to call the position of the absolute. It's nothing mystical. Simply you know let's say you are fighting struggles against corruption and so on and so on. But then you withdraw into what I already called the Lion King position no? You but isn't all of it one crazy circle where our very fighting against the system makes the system function it's all a big circle like acquire a wise distance it and so David Simon himself on the one hand is tempted by this pessimist position at the same time he he is not a Marxist. He openly says at some public confrontation I have it on DVD you are not looking at a Marxist here no and then obviously he is asked okay fuck you what we are looking at no? And he says a modest Keynesian no like he's kind of a he says openly capitalism is the only game in town is the most productive still what we should and he gives then the usual Keynesian social democratic stuff more social control more regulation and so on and so on. So is this the only option? Now I would like to show you the last clip finale and we're just conclude which is precisely I claim this withdrawal into the position of the absolute. Nothing sorry I hope this will work. Ah okay. It will be just McNulty with the friend it's kind of a reflexive moment at the end. He will stop at the bridge or overpass whatever seeing the harbor half abandoned harbor you know because he was already fired he had to retire and then it will be a kind of a condensed reflection of the state of Baltimore all different scenes and so on. This is the Lion King moment of you know circle of life goes on. You know like drug dealing still going on et cetera. Okay. So again the point of this famous beginning is that precisely you have a victim it's not a tragic victim you even don't know the name victim is meaningless but so this would be the first point the second point is you got it why he was killed this strange ethical insistence you are beaten but you go on robbing the robbers and so on and so on. Now so again now comes my just to conclude my crucial point. We have then all these different modes of resistance. We have McNulty who tries to do something through a little bit of cheating we have Omar the good killer we have Snot who was stealing money from drug dealers after their their their their games
heroically stand up and then you see it simply indifferent things go on and so on and so on. You know even it's not a question of I want to be heroic but I break down because of the pressure of society whatever. It's that even if I don't break down I afterwards discover that a) my heroic act was functionally exploited for the better functioning of power or b) it simply ignored indifferent and so on and so on. Here I think it is also wrong to celebrate as some people are doing the Dickens aspect of the Wire. Like it's fashionable to say The Wire is Dickens Charles Dickens you know. No Charles Dickens nonetheless has a series of let's call it these melodramatic moments like confrontation of good and evil or you know this secret rescuer benefactor who intervenes in the last minute all this miserably fails in the Wire. Why? Because again here I think we slowly encounter maybe the limit of the series. Because the faith is market anonymous irrational market the real the desert of the real is the abstract movement of the capital. And now the problem is who is then the culprit? Jameson said the culprit is of course the system as such. It's a whodunnit where the answer is not this or that guy but all of them. You have already one example of this in classical detective novel you know Agatha Christie Murder on the Orient Express where the culprits are all the entire but because we are in the classical bourgeois universe the necessary consequence of this is that if all are murderers then the victim should be the really bad guy. So at the end as you know the murder is justified and Hercule Poirot doesn't even report it. Here how to do it? Here I think we get the ultimate limitation of The Wire. It the problem is how to stage in narrative fiction this faith the modern faith capital as an abstract power. I claim for reasons we don't have time to go now in detail that we and this is what was clear to authors like Brecht and Chaplin when we are dealing with modern horror totalitarian capital capitalist and so on psychological realism no longer works. You can and for me if there is again a limit to The Wire is that it it remains too much embedded in traditional psychological realism. What do I mean by this? Did you notice how in order how all psychological realist movies or whatever on Hitler somehow fail? Like it's always then you know this was all the trouble of Lars von Trier you know when he made that remark at Cannes Festival press conference but I can sympathize with Hitler there. You know what's the ultimate irony? That he was there quoting Wittgenstein. I have a book of memoirs on Wittgenstein where one of his pupils reports that Wittgenstein put a note in his diary in the spring of April March of saying okay Hitler is horrible but I think I understand him now. How horrible he must feel now alone in the bunker there everything and. So there is something wrong with it. What? Why? I think that precisely and already Hannah Arendt saw this. What characterizes modern abstract capitalism is a radical gap between let's call them objective social processes and subjective psychological self-experience. This is her big point for example no about Eichmann you know that the banality of evil. Horrible things were being done. It is wrong to think you will find a subject who in the first person is the agent of this horror or even is aware of what he is doing. You must have a gap if you play the game of let's try to understand it how Hitler or whoever was able to do it you do it wrong you are lost you are lost. You precisely humanize the crime too much. Which is why I think that those who try to represent Hitler as a or Nazism or other horrors as a stuff of comedy you know like Brecht in his Arturo Ui or Chaplin in Great Dictator are paradoxically much closer to the truth. You cannot do a totalitarian or even abstract capitalist society where you still stick to their psychological to their psychological realist model. Now you will say but why not? Isn't it part of a social totality also our self-experience certain things are happening we. No you know why not? Because if you portray society the way it is today in psychological realist way you cover up the radical gap that separates let's say social objectivity from subjective self-experience. Precisely where you think that you show it all you already formally mystify the situation. So again where do we see this limitation of Wire? Let me begin with where the Wire comes nonetheless closest to this authentic modern tragic vision. I will now show you the very first famous three minutes first scene where the beginning of the series where McNulty and a black boy who informs him talk about the body found there in front and you will see it in a way it effectively condenses the entire series. You got your name, what? Snot. Snotboogie. Snotboogie? Yeah, Snotboogie. I like your name. What? Snotboogie. This kid, his mama went to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts. You know, he forgets his jacket, his nose starts running and some asshole instead of giving him a Kleenex calls him Snot. So he's Snot forever. It doesn't seem fair. Life just beat him way, I guess. So, who shot Snot? I ain't going to no court. Motherfucker had no cap in his rap, definitely not. He could have just whipped his ass like we all whipped his ass. Why'd you kill Snot? Snot been doing the same shit since I don't know how long. Kill a man over some bullshit. I'm saying, every Friday night in an alley behind the corner we roll the bones, you know? I mean all the boys, from on top, from down way, roll bones and play, really crap game, right? Every time Snot, he fade a few shooters, play it out till the pot's deep, snatch and run. Every time? Couldn't help himself. I mean, stay, every Friday night you and your boys shoot craps, right? But every Friday night your pal Snot, he wait till there was cash on the ground and then he grab the money and run away? They'd catch him and beat his ass, but nobody ever moved past that. I gotta ask, if every time Snotboogie grabbed the money and ran away, why'd you even let him in the game? What? If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play? Got to, this is America, man. Okay. So again the point of this famous beginning is that precisely you have a victim it's not a tragic victim you even don't know the name victim is meaningless but so this would be the first point. The second point is you got it why he was killed this strange ethical insistence. You are beaten but you go on robbing the robbers and so on and so on. Now so again now comes my just to conclude my crucial point. We have then all these different modes of resistance. We have McNulty who tries to do something through a little bit of cheating. We have Omar the good killer. We have Snot who was stealing money from drug dealers after their their their their games every Friday and so on and so on got beaten but insisted. I think that the crucial question to be approached here is the following one. It is easy to show how how in Michel Foucaultian way and it's interesting how most of the readings of the Wire are under the influence of Foucault's Discipline and Punish you know repeating endlessly this point of how crime and police prosecution of crime regenerate reproduce each other are part of the same circle and so on and so on. I get this point I totally agree. How I even experienced it in my own this inconsistency of the law how you have to generate what you are trying to oppress. For example a funny story from my own youth when I was serving the army. We had once twice a week in the morning political education where once the officer chief of my battalion was teaching us this you know this international rules of war. For example did you know that it's a prohibited to shoot on parachuters before they touch the ground. We all learned this blah blah. Then as if by some divine grace to make the point the next hour we were doing some lessons in shooting. The same officer was teaching us. And on that day the same day the lesson was how to shoot a parachuter no? And it was you know you know the trick maybe that how you have to take into account how quickly the body is going down and there is a primitive system if you make a judgment through your fingers how much lower you should aim at no? And then total idiot as I am I asked him a question no? Like like comrade officer but isn't there like how do you bring this together with what you were telling us one hour before no? And I got what I deserved. He looked at me and told me aren't you an intellectual how can you be so utterly stupid don't you get it or what and so on and so on. Okay I got it. I know this. But the problem is this one. Here is for me the limit of the Wire. Okay this type of codependence between police bureaucratic work and crime how you know they need each other blah blah they generate each other I got this Michel Foucault lesson. But does the same hold for resistance? What about all these subversive acts like what McNulty is doing what Omar is doing you know these honest people trying to change? Are they also in the same way resistance which is in advance co-opted which functions as the part of the system? And I claim that here the series remains totally ambiguous. And it's kind of objective social limitation. First here David Simon himself is ambiguous. Because on the one hand his official party is party line is the Greek tragic line no? Like the system always wins it's we cannot really blah all this faith wins through our very attempt to win over it. So the conclusion from this would have been which is quite sympathetic for me that maybe the way to stop the system is not to resist it in the wrong way but to let it function and make it sure that in this way it will destroy itself. It would have worked. For example an example from Cuba. I read some ten years ago that Castro got to know how you call this I don't know that system of tracking that most of the taxis have or yeah you will or whatever you know where you know where that Castro said one because you know in Cuba there was a big problem of trucks trucks owned by state being used for smuggling even in the office distributing black market goods and so on. So Castro's idea was it's not so expensive let's let's give to each state owned truck this machine and some controller can know at every point where they are and so on and so on. But you know all I can say is that luckily for Castro and his system this didn't work because an elementary economic analysis would have told you that like at that point now it's maybe worse between thirty and forty percent of food in Cuba was distributed in this black market way. Which means that if this fight against corruption were to succeed it would have meant I don't know instant breakdown revolution or whatever. This was the great tragedy of all communist systems that that precisely the phenomenon they were fighting black market and so on was what effectively enabled the system to function. Look at the Soviet Union all good books about Soviet economy under Brezhnev tell you this like thirty percent practically the majority of of of vegetables and so on were from black market farmers and so on and so on. So then if you are cynical you should say that precisely those who think that they are undermining the system we do it illegally black marketing and so on and so on they are keeping the system alive. So now we come to this ambiguity that I want to confront. It is easy to withdraw when you have this insight to withdraw into what I'm tempted to call the position of the absolute. It's nothing mystical. Simply you know let's say you are fighting struggles against corruption and so on and so on. But then you withdraw into what I already called the Lion King position no? You but isn't all of it one crazy circle where our very fighting against the system makes the system function it's all a big circle like acquire a wise distance it and so David Simon himself on the one hand is tempted by this pessimist position at the same time he he is not a Marxist. He openly says at some public confrontation I have it on DVD you are not looking at a Marxist here no and then obviously he is asked okay fuck you what we are looking at no? And he says a modest Keynesian no like he's kind of a he says openly capitalism is the only game in town is the most productive still what we should and he gives then the usual Keynesian social democratic stuff more social control more regulation and so on and so on. So is this the only option? Now I would like to show you the last clip finale and we're just conclude which is precisely I claim this withdrawal into the position of the absolute. Nothing sorry I hope this will work. Ah okay. It will be just McNulty with the friend it's kind of a reflexive moment at the end. He will stop at the bridge or overpass whatever seeing the harbor half abandoned harbor you know because he was already fired he had to retire and then it will be a kind of a condensed reflection of the state of Baltimore all different scenes and so on. This is the Lion King moment of you know circle of life goes on. You know like drug dealing still going on et cetera. Okay. So again the point of this famous beginning is that precisely you have a victim it's not a tragic victim you even don't know the name victim is meaningless but so this would be the first point the second point is you got it why he was killed this strange ethical insistence you are beaten but you go on robbing the robbers and so on and so on. Now so again now comes my just to conclude my crucial point. We have then all these different modes of resistance. We have McNulty who tries to do something through a little bit of cheating we have Omar the good killer we have Snot who was stealing money from drug dealers after their their their their games
unknown
every Friday and so on and
every Friday and so on and
Slavoj Žižek
so on got beaten but insisted. I
so on got beaten but insisted. I
unknown
think that the crucial question to be approached here is the following one. It is easy to show how how in Michel Foucaultian way and it's interesting how most of the readings of the Wire are under the influence of Foucault's Discipline and Punish you know repeating endlessly this point of how crime and police prosecution of crime regenerate reproduce each other are part of the same circle and so on and so on. I get this point I totally agree. How I even experienced it in my own this inconsistency of the law how you have to generate what you are trying to oppress. For example a funny story from my own youth when I was serving the army. We had once twice a week in the morning political education where once the officer chief of my battalion was teaching us this you know this international rules of war. For example did you know that it's a prohibited to shoot on parachuters before they touch the ground. We all learned this blah blah. Then as if by some divine grace to make the point the next hour we were doing some lessons in shooting. The same officer was teaching us. And on that day the same day the lesson was how to shoot a parachuter no? And it was you know you know the trick maybe that how you have to take into account how quickly the body is going down and there is a primitive system if you make a judgment through your fingers how much lower you should aim at no? And then total idiot as I am I asked him a question no? Like like comrade officer but isn't there like how do you bring this together with what you were telling us one hour
think that the crucial question to be approached here is the following one. It is easy to show how how in Michel Foucaultian way and it's interesting how most of the readings of the Wire are under the influence of Foucault's Discipline and Punish you know repeating endlessly this point of how crime and police prosecution of crime regenerate reproduce each other are part of the same circle and so on and so on. I get this point I totally agree. How I even experienced it in my own this inconsistency of the law how you have to generate what you are trying to oppress. For example a funny story from my own youth when I was serving the army. We had once twice a week in the morning political education where once the officer chief of my battalion was teaching us this you know this international rules of war. For example did you know that it's a prohibited to shoot on parachuters before they touch the ground. We all learned this blah blah. Then as if by some divine grace to make the point the next hour we were doing some lessons in shooting. The same officer was teaching us. And on that day the same day the lesson was how to shoot a parachuter no? And it was you know you know the trick maybe that how you have to take into account how quickly the body is going down and there is a primitive system if you make a judgment through your fingers how much lower you should aim at no? And then total idiot as I am I asked him a question no? Like like comrade officer but isn't there like how do you bring this together with what you were telling us one hour
Slavoj Žižek
before no? And I got what I deserved. He looked at me and told me aren't you an intellectual how can you be so utterly stupid don't you get it or what and so on and so on. Okay I got it I know this. But the problem is this one. Here is for me the limit of the Wire. Okay this type of codependence between police bureaucratic work and crime how you know they need each other blah blah they generate each other I got this Michel Foucault lesson. But does the same hold for resistance? What about all these subversive acts like what McNulty is doing what Omar is doing you know these honest people trying to change? Are they also in the same way resistance which is in advance co-opted which functions as the part of the system? And I claim that here the series remains totally ambiguous. And it's kind of a objective social limitation. First here David Simon himself is ambiguous. Because on the one hand his official party is party line is the Greek tragic line no like the system always wins it's we cannot really blah all this faith wins through our very attempt to win over it. So the conclusion from this would have been which is quite sympathetic for me that maybe the way to stop the system is not to resist it in the wrong way but to let it function and make it sure that in this way it will destroy itself. It would have worked. For example an example from Cuba. I read some ten years ago that Castro got to know how you call this I don't know that system of tracking that most of the taxis have or yeah you will or whatever you know where you know where that Castro said one because you know in Cuba there was a big problem of trucks trucks owned by state being used for smuggling even in the office distributing black market goods and so on. So Castro's idea was it's not so expensive let's let's give to each state owned truck this machine and some controller can know at every point where they are and so on and so on. But you know all I can say is that luckily for Castro and his system this didn't work because an elementary economic analysis would have told you that like at that point now it's maybe worse between thirty and forty percent of food in Cuba was distributed in this black market way. Which means that if this fight against corruption were to succeed it would have meant I don't know instant breakdown revolution or whatever. This was the great tragedy of all communist systems that that precisely the phenomenon they were fighting black market and so on was what effectively enabled the system to function. Look at the Soviet Union all good books about Soviet economy under Brezhnev tell you this like thirty percent practically the majority of of of vegetables and so on were from black market farmers and so on and so on. So then if you are cynical you should say that precisely those who think that they are undermining the system we do it illegally black marketing and so on and so on they are keeping the system alive. So now we come to this ambiguity that I want to confront. It is easy to withdraw when you have this insight to withdraw into what I'm tempted to call the position of the absolute. It's nothing mystical. Simply you know let's say you are fighting struggles against corruption and so on and so on. But then you withdraw into what I already called the Lion King position no you but isn't all of it one crazy circle where our very fighting against the system makes the system function it's all a big circle like acquire a wise distance it and so I think David Simon himself on the one hand is tempted by this pessimist position at the same time he he is not a Marxist. He openly says at some public confrontation I have it on DVD you are not looking at a Marxist here no and then obviously he is asked okay fuck you what we are looking at no? And he says a modest Keynesian no like he's kind of a he says openly capitalism is the only game in town is the most productive still what we should and he gives then the usual Keynesian social democratic stuff more social control more regulation and so on and so on. So is this the only option? Now I would like to show you the last clip finale and we're just conclude which is precisely I claim this withdrawal into the position of the absolute. Nothing sorry I hope this will work. Ah okay. It will be just McNulty with the friend it's kind of a reflexive moment at the end. He will stop at the bridge or overpass whatever seeing the harbor half abandoned harbor no because he was already fired he had to retire and then it will be a kind of a condensed reflection of the state of Baltimore all different scenes and so on. This is the Lion King moment of you know circle of life goes on. So I want to emphasize the ambiguity of this moment. Unfortunately the the how to call it the main tone of the series is this kind of a resigned wisdom you know. We are fighting our small fights ultimately we lose the same cynical circle of life goes on but what can we do we have to go on fighting even if we know that we will lose. You know this kind of as they say stepping back from your naive ethical engagement to this attitude of wisdom how again it's all part of the great circle of life and so on and so on. Is this the ultimate horizon? I claim no. What I claim is that we should take here now don't kill me for saying this we should take here the lesson from our great enemy and apply it to us to the radical cause. The great enemy is of course my beloved Ayn Rand you know Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged. What is nonetheless there is a correct insight in Atlas Shrugged you know the crazy idea capitalists go on strike and so on and so on. The correct idea is this one. You know what's the structure of Atlas Shrugged. You have the second-handers the non-creative people the crowd and the prime movers the creative capitalists and so on. And the the heroine of the novel Dagny something the big railway owner she fights this terrible Roosevelt
before no? And I got what I deserved. He looked at me and told me aren't you an intellectual how can you be so utterly stupid don't you get it or what and so on and so on. Okay I got it I know this. But the problem is this one. Here is for me the limit of the Wire. Okay this type of codependence between police bureaucratic work and crime how you know they need each other blah blah they generate each other I got this Michel Foucault lesson. But does the same hold for resistance? What about all these subversive acts like what McNulty is doing what Omar is doing you know these honest people trying to change? Are they also in the same way resistance which is in advance co-opted which functions as the part of the system? And I claim that here the series remains totally ambiguous. And it's kind of a objective social limitation. First here David Simon himself is ambiguous. Because on the one hand his official party is party line is the Greek tragic line no like the system always wins it's we cannot really blah all this faith wins through our very attempt to win over it. So the conclusion from this would have been which is quite sympathetic for me that maybe the way to stop the system is not to resist it in the wrong way but to let it function and make it sure that in this way it will destroy itself. It would have worked. For example an example from Cuba. I read some ten years ago that Castro got to know how you call this I don't know that system of tracking that most of the taxis have or yeah you will or whatever you know where you know where that Castro said one because you know in Cuba there was a big problem of trucks trucks owned by state being used for smuggling even in the office distributing black market goods and so on. So Castro's idea was it's not so expensive let's let's give to each state owned truck this machine and some controller can know at every point where they are and so on and so on. But you know all I can say is that luckily for Castro and his system this didn't work because an elementary economic analysis would have told you that like at that point now it's maybe worse between thirty and forty percent of food in Cuba was distributed in this black market way. Which means that if this fight against corruption were to succeed it would have meant I don't know instant breakdown revolution or whatever. This was the great tragedy of all communist systems that that precisely the phenomenon they were fighting black market and so on was what effectively enabled the system to function. Look at the Soviet Union all good books about Soviet economy under Brezhnev tell you this like thirty percent practically the majority of of of vegetables and so on were from black market farmers and so on and so on. So then if you are cynical you should say that precisely those who think that they are undermining the system we do it illegally black marketing and so on and so on they are keeping the system alive. So now we come to this ambiguity that I want to confront. It is easy to withdraw when you have this insight to withdraw into what I'm tempted to call the position of the absolute. It's nothing mystical. Simply you know let's say you are fighting struggles against corruption and so on and so on. But then you withdraw into what I already called the Lion King position no you but isn't all of it one crazy circle where our very fighting against the system makes the system function it's all a big circle like acquire a wise distance it and so I think David Simon himself on the one hand is tempted by this pessimist position at the same time he he is not a Marxist. He openly says at some public confrontation I have it on DVD you are not looking at a Marxist here no and then obviously he is asked okay fuck you what we are looking at no? And he says a modest Keynesian no like he's kind of a he says openly capitalism is the only game in town is the most productive still what we should and he gives then the usual Keynesian social democratic stuff more social control more regulation and so on and so on. So is this the only option? Now I would like to show you the last clip finale and we're just conclude which is precisely I claim this withdrawal into the position of the absolute. Nothing sorry I hope this will work. Ah okay. It will be just McNulty with the friend it's kind of a reflexive moment at the end. He will stop at the bridge or overpass whatever seeing the harbor half abandoned harbor no because he was already fired he had to retire and then it will be a kind of a condensed reflection of the state of Baltimore all different scenes and so on. This is the Lion King moment of you know circle of life goes on. So I want to emphasize the ambiguity of this moment. Unfortunately the the how to call it the main tone of the series is this kind of a resigned wisdom you know. We are fighting our small fights ultimately we lose the same cynical circle of life goes on but what can we do we have to go on fighting even if we know that we will lose. You know this kind of as they say stepping back from your naive ethical engagement to this attitude of wisdom how again it's all part of the great circle of life and so on and so on. Is this the ultimate horizon? I claim no. What I claim is that we should take here now don't kill me for saying this we should take here the lesson from our great enemy and apply it to us to the radical cause. The great enemy is of course my beloved Ayn Rand you know Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged. What is nonetheless there is a correct insight in Atlas Shrugged you know the crazy idea capitalists go on strike and so on and so on. The correct idea is this one. You know what's the structure of Atlas Shrugged. You have the second-handers the non-creative people the crowd and the prime movers the creative capitalists and so on. And the the heroine of the novel Dagny something the big railway owner she fights this terrible Roosevelt
unknown
Obama style
Obama style
Slavoj Žižek
in the movie that they did now of Atlas
in the movie that they did now of Atlas
unknown
Shrugged one is clearly Obama state bureaucracy she desperately tries to keep things running against this eternal bureaucratic welfare state obstacles from from
Shrugged one is clearly Obama state bureaucracy she desperately tries to keep things running against this eternal bureaucratic welfare state obstacles from from
Slavoj Žižek
Washington and
Washington and
unknown
so on. And then this guy you know who is John Galt the ultimate hero appears to her and basically gives her a lesson. He says no the true enemy of progress which means good capitalism egotistic and so on are not the second-handers the inert people it's you. It's you who still try to keep things running fighting the inertia of the system. He says that you are keeping you should break down you should go on strike and everything will collapse. Okay I think that false as it is of course I don't agree with Ayn Rand version but are don't do we not need in order to even see the perspective of a more radical social change. I claim it's easy to condemn this surrendering to the absolute moment of oh it's one circle of life. Yeah but we have to go through that point to get if you excuse me for using this traditional terminology to get out of the limitations of social democratic reformism.
so on. And then this guy you know who is John Galt the ultimate hero appears to her and basically gives her a lesson. He says no the true enemy of progress which means good capitalism egotistic and so on are not the second-handers the inert people it's you. It's you who still try to keep things running fighting the inertia of the system. He says that you are keeping you should break down you should go on strike and everything will collapse. Okay I think that false as it is of course I don't agree with Ayn Rand version but are don't do we not need in order to even see the perspective of a more radical social change. I claim it's easy to condemn this surrendering to the absolute moment of oh it's one circle of life. Yeah but we have to go through that point to get if you excuse me for using this traditional terminology to get out of the limitations of social democratic reformism.
Slavoj Žižek
For example now with European Union. You know it's what we should avoid is to worry other people's worries how to put it you know oh my god will Euro survive oh my god again here I
For example now with European Union. You know it's what we should avoid is to worry other people's worries how to put it you know oh my god will Euro survive oh my god again here I
unknown
agree with Costas and others oh my god Greece how will the Greeks pay the debt should we help the you know this no no Greeks
agree with Costas and others oh my god Greece how will the Greeks pay the debt should we help the you know this no no Greeks
Slavoj Žižek
should be
should be
unknown
our worry in solidarity with them but the whole problem is false. We shouldn't approach it in this way which is always how to keep the system basically functioning. Of course I'm not saying we should just sit back and watch everything falling apart. We should worry very well totally for people starving jobless and so on. But we should avoid the trick of imperceptibly translating this type of worry into how nonetheless to keep the system going. You know all the approach to the crisis is like this it's basically what
our worry in solidarity with them but the whole problem is false. We shouldn't approach it in this way which is always how to keep the system basically functioning. Of course I'm not saying we should just sit back and watch everything falling apart. We should worry very well totally for people starving jobless and so on. But we should avoid the trick of imperceptibly translating this type of worry into how nonetheless to keep the system going. You know all the approach to the crisis is like this it's basically what
Slavoj Žižek
is for me the German scene not just their racist attitude towards Greek and so on but this automatic premise save the euro save the financial system. But my god what is if exactly in the same way sorry for the obscenity as in Ayn Rand novels what if precisely this worry is a false worry. What if you should accept that in a way when you get this insight this wisdom our faith thing that the only way the only radical change it's not the change within faith faith itself can be changed faith means here the entire system. And that you have to go through this point of let's call it zero level and then opt for a more radical change. At some point the truly subversive thing is not to worry other people people's worries. It's not our problem will the European bank survive and so on. It's not our problem Euro can be a good thing but as part of what project. Definitely not as part of the what is Europe now project. Or to give you another political example I was shocked. This is for me the ultimate obscenity political of our moment. Did you notice something strange about Hungary how okay it's now fashionable to criticize Hungary this nationalist proto-fascist government you know doing all the crazy things an incredibly harsh law controlling the press whatever you want and so on. But then in the series of these reproaches to Hungary there is another reproach which is not so self-evident. It is and it reminds me you know that famous phrase of Marx ironically when he says capitalism is freedom equality and Bentham Jeremy Bentham as it's basically what Western Europe reproaches to Hungary is against press sorry freedom of the press legal system controlled by political party blah blah and and and canceling the independence of the national bank. All of so the obscenity is as if the thing which is no less even which is absolutely not even economically self-evident the idea that the central state bank should be independent and so on. If anything the lesson of latest capitalist crisis is that it's even in the interest of capitalism to have the state to have the state regulate the bank. This is why incidentally China and Singapore survived the present crisis much better than we in the West because contrary to your great Gordon Brown they precisely reestablished the state control of the bank it worked triumphantly. So is it the strange obscenity where some typical neoliberal yes I will immediately over measure like giving the banks independence to technocrats all of a sudden is put into the same series as you know freedom of the press and all that all that. This is an obscenity. Here this is European ideology today at its most dangerous. So again my lesson here is that in a way if we this is maybe the non-intended lesson of the Wire that this conclusion does not mean simply okay let's go home in the sense of we did our heroic duty nothing can be changed the life cycle goes on. No the lesson is just that if you fight within the existing faith that's to say global system of course the ending is always the one like this. But there is a chance to change faith itself. And to do this you should precisely not worry the other people other people people's worries. Don't accept the premise of now oh my god outside Euro outside I don't know our banks there is total catastrophe. No it's not the total catastrophe. We have to go through that risk of allowing the system up to a point to self-destruct itself to start something new. Otherwise on behalf of saving the system we will just go deeper and deeper. So it's an open ending it's much more ambiguous I claim. I'm sorry if I was too length but it's in my nature thanks very much for your patience. Now we have minutes for democracy.
is for me the German scene not just their racist attitude towards Greek and so on but this automatic premise save the euro save the financial system. But my god what is if exactly in the same way sorry for the obscenity as in Ayn Rand novels what if precisely this worry is a false worry. What if you should accept that in a way when you get this insight this wisdom our faith thing that the only way the only radical change it's not the change within faith faith itself can be changed faith means here the entire system. And that you have to go through this point of let's call it zero level and then opt for a more radical change. At some point the truly subversive thing is not to worry other people people's worries. It's not our problem will the European bank survive and so on. It's not our problem Euro can be a good thing but as part of what project. Definitely not as part of the what is Europe now project. Or to give you another political example I was shocked. This is for me the ultimate obscenity political of our moment. Did you notice something strange about Hungary how okay it's now fashionable to criticize Hungary this nationalist proto-fascist government you know doing all the crazy things an incredibly harsh law controlling the press whatever you want and so on. But then in the series of these reproaches to Hungary there is another reproach which is not so self-evident. It is and it reminds me you know that famous phrase of Marx ironically when he says capitalism is freedom equality and Bentham Jeremy Bentham as it's basically what Western Europe reproaches to Hungary is against press sorry freedom of the press legal system controlled by political party blah blah and and and canceling the independence of the national bank. All of so the obscenity is as if the thing which is no less even which is absolutely not even economically self-evident the idea that the central state bank should be independent and so on. If anything the lesson of latest capitalist crisis is that it's even in the interest of capitalism to have the state to have the state regulate the bank. This is why incidentally China and Singapore survived the present crisis much better than we in the West because contrary to your great Gordon Brown they precisely reestablished the state control of the bank it worked triumphantly. So is it the strange obscenity where some typical neoliberal yes I will immediately over measure like giving the banks independence to technocrats all of a sudden is put into the same series as you know freedom of the press and all that all that. This is an obscenity. Here this is European ideology today at its most dangerous. So again my lesson here is that in a way if we this is maybe the non-intended lesson of the Wire that this conclusion does not mean simply okay let's go home in the sense of we did our heroic duty nothing can be changed the life cycle goes on. No the lesson is just that if you fight within the existing faith that's to say global system of course the ending is always the one like this. But there is a chance to change faith itself. And to do this you should precisely not worry the other people other people people's worries. Don't accept the premise of now oh my god outside Euro outside I don't know our banks there is total catastrophe. No it's not the total catastrophe. We have to go through that risk of allowing the system up to a point to self-destruct itself to start something new. Otherwise on behalf of saving the system we will just go deeper and deeper. So it's an open ending it's much more ambiguous I claim. I'm sorry if I was too length but it's in my nature thanks very much for your patience. Now we have minutes for democracy.