Of Excrement and Men

First, let me qualify this by saying I am all hopped up on muscle relaxants right now, so my coherence may not be the best. Second, let me add that this may be the best way to read Zizek!

Ok, so Tibet represents our hidden Western desire to colonize the imaginary. We do not want the Tibet that is actually there, but instead want the idealized version that we dream of in our own imaginations. Shit is a problem for us in the West because it is a reflection of our inner-most selves and once it is out in the open, we become vulnerable. Because being vulnerable is linked, at least in part, to being weak, then our shit makes us weak. Tibet as it actually is does not match our created, imagined version, so we seek to enforce our own view point upon it. The travel diaries are a good reflection of that. The biggest problem with the Tibetans for those early explorers was that they were weak. We wanted their secrets, but we also wanted them to be just like us. Because they were weak, they reminded us of our own vulnerabilities, our own weakness, our own shit.

Tibet also acts as a sounding board for our own insecurities with paradox. Here is the great, imagined mystical land, the paradise we all have been dreaming of, and yet it is populated by people who are supposed to be (in our imaginations) spiritually pure, at peace and ease with the universe, and in full acceptance of the lot they have in life. Yet these spiritually pure people accommodate magic, and strange sexual practices into their religious lives (again, in our imagined view of them). Due to the Christian / Gnostic separation between pure spirit and the dirty body, this paradox becomes something the Western mindset has trouble reconciling. How can something be spiritually pure, and at the same time, involve practices of the body, in particular carnal practices? How can we venerate these spiritually pure people when they resort to superstition in their practice of worship, when we have set our benchmark upon the altar of rationality?

To fix this paradox, to make it work inside our imaginations, we move the fixation of purity from the people to the idealized place. We treat the citizens as second class, we ignore their ‘strange and backward ways’ and instead place the emphasis on a sacred location. Thereby we correct the paradox that we have trouble reconciling. That paradise we envision becomes a part of our inner-most desires, our inner-most selves, it therefore becomes sacred. In a way, then, our shit, which is a reflection of our innermost selves, also becomes sacred, and untouchable. Shit then becomes, by way of Zizek’s thinking – if I am interpreting it correctly – something we are in awe of, and I mean awe in the ‘terrifying, afraid of’ sense. We remove this sacred part of ourselves and flush it away so that we may not appear to be weak, in the same way that we remove the weakness from our conception of paradise, reflected in our imaginary views of Tibet!

For the non-academics out there who have not had to suffer through Zizek, he is a post-modern scholar who seems to enjoy playing games with language, desires and the world as the West sees it. It can be downright painful t read, which I believe is a part of the game for Zizek. This critique comes from his book, On Belief from a chapter entitled "Why you should give a shit!"

I R Ranty

Where do our virtues lie in terms of the post-modern sacred? Are we actors (activists) or responders to the new moral conditions and imperatives? How does Al Gore become the face of environmentalism and as that face, does he have the role of moral saint or moral hero? Is his environmentalism one of life-politics or emancipation politics or both?

These are very interesting times for scholars of nature, scholars of technology and scholars of the sacred, it would seem. You cannot turn on a newscast without hearing about an environmental related story, or some sort of political rhetoric about such. All of the major political parties in Canada have developed a stance as we stream towards the next election. Suddenly nature and its sacredness has come into the forefront of the political agenda. So does that make Stephen Harper a moral saint, does it make Stephan Dion a moral hero or is there a third category missing from this list? Does it make them actors or responders? Is the key difference in their motivations, or does it really matter what their motivations are? Neither politician has made a lifetime’s work of the cause, though they make it seem like they have. And neither of their lives would seem, on the surface, to be extremely arduous. So I guess, according to Giddens’ definitions as told by Szerszynski, they would not fit the saint category. Does that then make them moral heroes, acting on happenstance?

Have we as people then re-sacralized nature to the point that we have made it a political vehicle? If so, then how does this post-modern ordering of the sacred fuel a moral, ethical, social and political agenda? The people who are speaking the loudest about environmental reform today are not doing so out of loyalty to a sacred idea, they are using a sacred idea as a way to influence the voters. Giddens needs a third category, I think, rather than just life-politics or emancipation politics. There should be a category of politics for the sake of politics, where moral rhetoric can be espoused without the fear of having to buy into it, where the usage of a public persona can be used to sell the concept of the sacred to the consumer based society we live in.

A federal election is rapidly approaching in Canada, and the parties will all spout environmental platforms, until the country is tired of hearing about its importance. The campaign will involve many non-biodegradable plastic signs, attached to wooden posts, scattered all over the landscape. Many cross-country jaunts will be taken, and I would be willing to bet, there will not be many of those on the campaign trail driving smart cars, or tour buses fueled by ethanol. And yet they will be campaigning about reducing green-house gases, and teaching us how to save the environment from ourselves. I guess that means that moral hero is out as a category too.