False Consciousness and the Displaced Subject
May 6, 2020
There’s a point Mark Fisher made that has stuck with me (I believe it was in his Anti-Vital lecture). He remarks that one of the biggest challenges faced historically by anti-capitalism is that it has often had difficulty persuading people that their economic system oppresses them. Orthodox Marxism has typically explained this by appealing to “false consciousness”: the idea that the system itself distorts people’s perception of their own economic conditions, blinding them to their own oppression. What Fisher points out is that this explanation has not been persuasive. Any effective critique of the system we currently inhabit, he argues, must not assume that we are all suffering from some kind of mass illusion. Instead it must begin with a recognition of our own complicity in creating and sustaining the situation we are in.
The concept of false consciousness is a familiar one. When the rise of Donald Trump (or of Boris Johnson, or of Brexit) is raised in leftwing circles, it is common to find the conversation moving directly to the question of how so many people were deceived, bypassing the question of how they were persuaded, or of why conservative narratives have often proved more appealing than progressive narratives in the years since the financial crisis of 2008. A similar idea also seems to underly attempts to understand consumerist culture as a kind of spiritual deficiency, the product of a Western materialist metaphysics, a modern veil of Maya all sugar and neon light. Awakening to a better world is thus understood as a matter of piercing the veil, of swallowing the red pill and escaping the Matrix for good. It is the appeal to this kind of image that Fisher thinks is a bad move.
Still, if false consciousness is not to blame for the strange stasis of consumer capitalism—perhaps most vividly dramatised in its inability to respond meaningful to looming eco-catastrophe—then this leaves quite a puzzle. Why would we choose this fate? Fisher himself seems to me to have been inconsistent on this point. One of his key conclusions in Capitalist Realism (see my summary) is that effective critique must aim to point out capitalism’s own internal contradictions, or “aporias”. This advice always felt a bit toothless to me, not least because one glance around the cultural landscape reveals aporias being pointed out everywhere already, in novels, films, nonfiction books, ironic-not-ironic social media posts, the mission statements of social enterprises, etc. Wander into any contemporary art gallery and you will have several uncomfortable encounters with aporias within the first ten minutes. There is an industry in pointing out aporias.
It is probably unfair to say Fisher was inconsistent on this point, and indeed no-one has been more attuned to the paradoxes of commodified anti-capitalism. But it does seem to me that when he starts suggesting ways to respond to these paradoxes, he risks sliding back into the false consciousness narrative he warns against. The problem is not how to point out the contradictions of a system that hides them, but how to resist a system which is able to perfectly neutralise its own contradictions while leaving them in plain view.
Puzzling over this tension in Fisher is what originally led me to start reading Baudrillard. One crucial insight I think Baudrillard can offer this puzzle is that the ineffectiveness of pointing out the aporias has little to do with the status of the aporias themselves, and everything to do with the act of pointing out. Baudrillard draws attention to the fact that there are at least two different ways of noticing. We can notice from a perspective internal to a situation (as when we notice the wave coming up the beach towards our clothes), or from an external perspective (as when the tourists on safari notice the cheetah ready to spring at the gazelle). The internal perspective is tied to involvement and action, the external to critical or aesthetic contemplation.
One of the key ideas in Baudrillard’s claim that we live in simulation is the idea that we inhabit a world—more specifically a media environment—in which the internal perspective is always being covertly swapped out for the external perspective, in which the subject is always-already displaced from the perspective of a participant into the perspective of an observer. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (Debord, 2014) has been interpreted by many as a theory of false consciousness: the consumerist spectacle is a distraction from the material suffering produced by the capitalist machine. But for Baudrillard what is important about the spectacle is rather the way that it re-casts the subject in the role of a spectator. Given this re-casting there is no need to mask the horrors, as the displaced subject no longer experiences themselves as actively involved with them. In fact it is often the horrors—or the aporias—that make for the best spectacles. (If eco-catastrophe does unfold according to worst-case predictions, we can be sure that Hollywood will be ready with a string of blockbusters dramatising the apocalypse in real time. Has it not started already?)
It is unfortunate that Baudrillard’s simulation theory lends itself so readily to being read as a theory of false consciousness, when what it actually offers is an alternative. (The Wachowskis seemed to have been inspired by it when they wrote The Matrix, which earned them a summary dismissal from Baudrillard, who said they had not understood his point.) The displacement of the subject is not a form of false consciousness because it involves no alteration in the content of consciousness. It is more akin to the insertion of a theatrical fourth wall between consciousness and its object. Rather than this causing any kind of distortion of the world it actually renders it more visible, in the same sense that a rattlesnake becomes more visible once you are no longer in the tank with it, safely separated by glass and free to admire the patterning of its scales.
The idea of a displaced subject helps to make sense of the problem of complicity. Displacement provides a kind of separation from the narrative space of the world at the same time as increasing the capacity to observe, consume, and theorise it. It offers both the safety of non-involvement and the thrill of aesthetic proximity: the impunity of the tourist.1 Simulation is seductive because it allows us to be tourists in our own lives, exploring and trying everything but never more than a phone call away from being helicoptered out by the embassy. It is the liberation that comes from identifying with oneself from the 3rd-person as if watching a music video, where obligations have been replaced by aesthetics and one is free to change channel at any moment.
That some form of separation lies at the root contemporary alienation is not an uncommon idea, but it has been triangulated in many different ways. Charles Eisenstein, for example, has argued that separation comes in the form of something like a worldview or a meta-narrative, that it is part of a story we have been socialised into. This is an appeal to false consciousness, separation as metaphysical illusion. From Baudrillard’s perspective the relevant kind of separation is not a story at all, but a concrete situation that is constantly being produced and regulated by the refraction of the world through its own abstract representation in our various media spaces. From this perspective the portrayal of separation as a story is just another simulation effect, a way of displacing oneself from the reality of immersion in a situation by treating it as if it were being projected on a screen.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2013 documentary The Act of Killing provides a harrowing study in the reversal of a simulation effect. It follows group of small-time gangsters turned national heroes who acted as death-squads during the Indonesian mass killings of the mid-60’s as they perform Hollywood-style re-enactments of the events. They enter the process in good faith, as respected elders documenting heroic deeds. But as they play out scenes of torture and death the reality of the events starts to intrude on the mythic space of the re-enactments. The film culminates when Anwar, its primary protagonist, becomes tearful while playing one of his own victims before walking out onto the roof to retch repeatedly, for the first time inhabiting the reality of his act. The film is striking for its vivid illustration of two related phenomena. The first is the banality of evil: the perpetrators of these acts of extreme violence were not inhuman monsters, and they never lacked any fundamental capacity for empathy. The second is the power of the displacement of subjectivity: Anwar was never under any illusions over the content of his actions, but their abstraction in an officially sanctioned story of national ascendency was sufficient to separate him from their interpersonal reality, as the reader is separated from the fictional space of a novel.
If displaced subjectivity rather than false consciousness explains the robustness of the consumerist status quo, then the problem is not that we cannot get outside our own culture, but that we can never quite get inside it. Not illusion but hyperreality, a willful exchange of the labour of active involvement for the hallucinatory liberation of aesthetic and critical detachment. If this is right then any breach in the status quo will not be experienced as a piercing of the veil, but as a breaking of the fourth wall. Its arrival will not be announced by an ecstatic awakening, but by something more like an onrush of vertigo.
References
- Debord, G. (2014). The Society of the Spectacle (K. Knabb, Tran.). The Bureau of Public Secrets. [PDF]
Notes
-
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin makes the somewhat elliptical suggestion that the force driving the rapid adoption of photography and film in all areas of culture is “the desire of the masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” At the same time he argues that to reproduce a thing as an image always involves a loss of its ‘presence.’ Benjamin never really resolves this tension between presence and closeness that he sets up. It seems to me that what is he means by ‘presence’ is something like interiority or narrative involvement, while ‘closeness’ is more like the aesthetic closeness that comes with narrative exteriority. This would explain why these two terms—which taken at face value seem to denote something similar—are being placed in opposition by Benjamin. On this reading, the desire of the masses to bring things closer is in fact a desire for displaced subjectivity. I have written more about this here. ↩