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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: November 15, 2004
Latest Update: November 15, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Interpassivity through Representation"How can a pleasure be delegated to another person, just as to a machine?(3) What is the link connecting the interpassive person with her interpassive medium? How can we tell, for example, that this video recorder is now watching TV in my place - and not, for example, in yours? When someone has an artificial exterior organ, then we can see tubes that connect the body with its exterior organ, and, from the tubes, we can easily determine for whom this organ works. But in the case of interpassivity there are no such tubes that would connect a video recorder with an absent person, or canned laughter with somebody who does not pay attention. What, then, connects the person with her medium of enjoyment?. . ."The interpassive person and her medium are thus not connected by tubes, but by a representation. . . .
"This civilized lack of awareness creates a strange position of the interpassive person vis-à-vis the illusion at work in interpassivity. . . .
" 'For they know not what they believe'--this would be, in biblical terms, the formula for the civilized position towards the illusion at work in interpassivity. . . .
"Therefore, when Zizek wrote that with TV-Sitcoms 'objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time', this not only referred to the objectivity attained by the "reification" of our amusement in the canned laughter; it also pointed to the objectivity of the illusion at work in the situation. . . .
"When objective belief is there (thanks to a ritual medium), the religious subject can go away. Due to its interpassive dimension, the ritual frees the individuals from subjectivation.(10) This is what Zizek has called 'the beauty of it'.
These are the sections I would have been looking at. Ritual is a way of removing oneself from the present reality by substituting representational acts. In the classroom, the student is miles away at the ski resort, but sits with notebook ready, occasionally, writes something and looks attentive to your every word. That is all illusion. And it is disastrous, as the author describes, when we in the present day substitute such "paying attention" for the real thing, because tthe ritaul is passive, the illusion is accepted by the teacher, and the net result is that learning falls by the wayside.
Zizek's explanation that the ritual frees the individual from subjectivation would mean in this example, that the ritual of attention, gets the teacher to buy into the illusion that the student is paying attention, and that frees the student from really paying attention. So one of the problems with today's educational system is that we are so prone to the ritualized representations of learning, including tests.
It's not bad to free the student from the continuous impersonal and unrelenting demands of the institution, because we all need space and time to assimilate and process what we learn. What is bad, is no one's recognition that so much of this is illusion. This is what was so important in Dewey's approach of learning by doing. In the doing it is far less possible to replace interactivity by interpassivity. There are other ways to provide the interpassivity needed without faking it. For example, tranform-dom enables one to interact when one is in a situation that best allows that, which may not be during class time.
More later.
