Who's Laughing Now?
THE Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, mentions in the introduction to one of his books that during the communist period in the former Yugoslavia he witnessed the humiliation of a fellow soldier. Forced to line up at the army clinic alongside several other men, one soldier - who was illiterate - complained to the company's notoriously dictatorial and uncompromising doctor that when his penis was erect the foreskin became very tight and painful. As a result, the sadistic physician ordered the soldier to masturbate himself to a state of arousal, so that he could examine him properly. When the man found this difficult, particularly in front of his peers, the doctor even provided him with a postcard of a half-naked woman. Needless to say, the fact that both the doctor and his other patients greeted this tortuous episode with such great hilarity caused the man a large degree of personal distress. As Žižek rightly notes, at that moment the barrier which ordinarily exists between controller and controlled appeared to evaporate completely due to there being an
"agency of power which shouts severe orders but simultaneously shares with us, his subordinates, obscene laughter bearing witness to a deep solidarity".
The doctor, it seems, through the medium of humour, suddenly became like any other man. Žižek also mentions in a footnote that the same process happened elsewhere during a communist radio programme, when a state bureaucrat was not only asked to discuss politics but also expected to answer questions about his sexual proclivities. With communism on the verge of collapse, the broadcasters hoped that the combination of seriousness and sexuality would create a more subversive image and make the bureaucrat appear as one of the people. Not only does authority become remarkably suspended during these moments, but by doing so creates an ironic justification for its own existence. In Žižek's words,
"One could also say that this scene renders the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short-circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously and thereby consolidating his power."
What is even more interesting is that Žižek was discussing this as far back as 1996 and was, of course, talking about his experiences as a young man in the 1970s. Indeed, over the course of the last few years, and particularly in America, we have witnessed the rebirth of this exact phenomenon. Donald Trump, set up as a man of the people, may sound extremely stupid and uncouth from time to time but has around him a canny team of public relations experts - not to mention being able to rely on the convenience of mass media regurgitation - who are able to exploit many of his 'throwaway' remarks. Be they misogynist, anti-liberal, pro-Zionist or otherwise, these calculated platitudes soon have his supporters rolling in the aisles and it thus becomes a fulfilment of what Žižek says about power "winking" at us from across the divide. It is, in short, Stockholm syndrome of the highest order.
The consequences of this process, as we know well from the last century, often becomes a brutal justification for all kinds of political excess. And when the boot is on the other foot, a new administrator steps in to apply the same treatment to those whose inane laughter is beginning to pale. The 'doctor' may change from time to time, but all that really happens is that the grinning 'patients' and the humiliated 'soldier' merely trade places.