Introducing Zizek and then the Crips and the Bloods
First, a note: You will see that this paper sites primarily a secondary source. That is because I have just begun my studies of Zizek, and have yet to read an entire book by him. This paper is really an introduction to upcoming articles where I will examine books by Zizek directly. For now, I am relying primarily on the work of Tony Myers of the University of Stirling. His book, Slavoj Zizek, gives what seems to me a very good introduction to the man and his ideas. I am applying my own analysis of contemporary social phenomena in the paper, so there is original thought, but my own analysis of Zizek is really in its infancy, to be detailed later as I directly examine his books. At this point, this paper will serve as a reminder that I am an interesting person to have a conversation with, but not a PhD candidate, so I feel no qualms about introducing Zizek through Myers, a much better scholar than me. And so we begin...
Throughout the year, I was obsessed with the French philosopher Alain Badiou. I still am, but all my reading lately has been on Slavoj Vivek, the Yugoslavian (well, I guess I mean Slovenian) philosopher. This post will be a very brief introduction to some of his most fundamental arguments, and then my amateur attempt to apply those arguments to the situation of gang warfare in Los Angeles.
The Postmodern Era: What Does That Mean?
Philosophers often state that we are in a postmodern era. This would indicate that we exist ‘after’ modernity. Modernity refers to that epoch when human subjects were accepting of what philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard would call “Grand Narratives”. Lyotard uses the example of ‘the emancipation of the rational and working subject’ as an example of a Grand Narrative. This sounds like the old “American Dream” - if you work hard, and you’re smart about it, you can rise out of the ashes, you can climb the socio-economic ladder, you can be free. Such a Narrative, passed on generation after generation, provided the ‘story’ of America and its influx of immigrants throughout the ages. The mark of modernity is that such a story was believed and had influence on the mental landscapes of Americans. In an age of post-modernity, we are led to feel suspicious of this Narrative. We read Howard Zinn and his more realistic account of poor immigrants in America, where, in the 1600s and 1700s, for instance, “Beatings and whippings were common. Servant women were raped... The master tried to control completely the sexual lives of the servants... (and) although colonial laws existed to stop excesses against servants, they were not very well enforced” (Zinn 44). Such stories don’t bode well for the American dream. Rather, they indicate that rising up the socio-economic ladder involves a lot more than rationality and hard-work. We can compare such horrific stories to modern day realities - like inner city neighborhoods where often times a majority of the male population is or has been incarcerated, schools are deteriorating, drugs are abundant, and poverty is overwhelming. It’s hard, given the dark narratives in competition with the “American Dream”, to believe that kids growing up in such an environment have more of a chance to rise out of it than poor immigrants had as they paid for their passage and embarked on a dangerous 12 week voyage to the United States. The narrative Zinn provides us with of power, money, and corruption, puts incredible pressure on the narrative of the “American Dream”. We therefore have competing Narratives - and this is the mark of Postmodernity.
Lyotard defines Postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard 123). This is the postmodern condition - we recognize all the different organizations of thought, from the American Dream to Capitalism to Communism to Democracy to Socialism to Materialism to Spirituality to Christianity to Buddhism to..... We have a general doubt as to the truth value of any of these narratives, so we decide which parts we will take with us and which parts we’ll leave behind. For example, many American Buddhists believe that the root of all suffering is desire, and they meditate about it and attend lectures about it, but as soon as reincarnation comes up, they’ll reject the various Japanese, Chinese, and Indian schools because they prefer a Darwinist understanding of nature and death - “I will be reincarnated in so far as my genes live on in my offspring and my memory is preserved in my influence on culture.” In other words, the “Grand Narrative” will not subsume us. We will decide our own narrative, which will be a hodgepodge of so many different stories. Such a way of thinking has tricked us, according to Zizek, into thinking that we live in a Post-Ideological Era. In other words, we are no longer subject to ideology: we rather construct our own concepts surrounding culture and human understanding and we effectively change those concepts to suit our needs.
Zizek’s Foundation
Slavoj Zizek uses the philosophy of three major thinkers to critique Postmodern realities. He draws from the work of Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, and Jacque Lacan.
All too briefly, I will say that, from Hegel, Zizek understands the world in terms of dialectical thinking. This means, for Zizek, that there will be an internal contradiction in every idea about something. The scholar Tony Myers puts it: “By this he means that an idea about something is always disrupted by a discrepancy and that this discrepancy is necessary for the idea to exist in the first place” (17). Let’s take an example: I have the idea that “all people are free”. In order to have this idea, there must be an antithesis: “George is not free”. Why must there be such a contradiction? - Because the idea of freedom only makes sense if there exists real states of suppression. Only by having some unfree agents, can we have all free agents. The idea gets its sense from comparison. So, applied to the meta-narrative “The American Dream” - “All people can rise up the socio-economic ladder” only makes sense if “Some people can not rise up the socio-economic ladder”. So, if the inner-cities didn’t exist, and people weren’t hindered by a lack of education and constant subjection to a depressed and drug-ridden environment, and all people really could apply hard work and rationality and actually move up the socio-economic ladder, we wouldn’t think this idea. It gets its sense and its power from its internal contradiction.
Inspired by Karl Marx, Zizek’s philosophy is essentially a critique of ideology. As mentioned, it’s often argued that we are living in a post-ideological era, because we have great freedom to select from various narratives and fashion our own narrative, if you will. Zizek disputes this, saying that, while more elusive, the modern age is still an age of ideology, and as Marx exposed and critiqued the ideology of Capitalism, it’s his project to expose and critique it.
Zizek’s method of critique utilizes psychoanalysis, as developed by Jacque Lacan. This means that he understands human psychology in terms of three levels: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. For Zizek, every ‘level’ has a profound effect on the others.
We can compare the Imaginary to ‘The Fall’ in Christianity - the birth of the ego. When Adam and Eve first ate the fruit of knowledge, they became ashamed of their naked bodies and ran for cover. They then perceived themselves as essentially flawed. Likewise, for Lacan, when a baby reaches a certain stage of development, she recognizes herself in a mirror, thereby externalizing her self understanding as a fully synchronized and united body. It’s at this stage that the baby can start to co-ordinate her movements and not move about awkwardly. Myers writes, “However, while seeming a stabilizing fiction, this process of identification actually resides within the child as a desperately capricious force, constantly undermining the very rectitude and unity it seeks to impart. This is because the discrepancy remains between the child’s sensation of itself and the image of wholeness with which it identifies. As the ego is formed by this identification, an identification that assumes powers the child does not yet have, the ego is constitutionally sundered, riven by the division between itself and the image of itself. It is thus left forever trying to reconcile the other to its same” (22). It’s as though, upon eating the apple, the first thing Adam and Eve saw was God, and they therefore recognized themselves as fundamentally inferior to Her, and they spent the rest of their days trying to attain that vision of perfection. So too is our plight when, lacking unity and coordination, we recognize for the first time, a unified and coordinated being staring us back in the eyes.
The Symbolic refers to language and the way it organizes our experience. When we learn a language, we learn how to compare and contrast raw experience (this is a color, and its redness is to be compared with this other color’s greenness - or, more complex, this is Capitalism and it is a great thing, to be compared with Communism, a very bad thing). The thing with words is that, because of all the internal comparisons and values placed on them, learning them provides the impossibility of attaining a neutral vantage point. We get the value of slicing up the world in a certain way, but lose the value of understanding that world objectively.
Myers says, “The Order of the Real describes those areas of life which cannot be known” (25). The Symbolic provides us with “the known” (the slicing up of the world such that we can say ‘this slice is true’ and ‘this slice is false’), so that which cannot be consumed in the Symbolic is therefore not known. We have no words to describe it and while present and powerful, it is neither true nor false. Myers notes, “the Real is the world before it is carved up by language” (25). According to Zizek, the Real and the Symbolic exist as two sides of one coin - they are inseparable. Let’s consider an example. Gang warfare in Los Angeles can be ‘carved up’ by language in many different ways. Some might describe it as ‘the irrational behavior of irresponsible teens who need guidance’. Some others might describe it as ‘the result of oppressive economic conditions’. Some others might see it as ‘the work of the Devil’. However it’s described, the Real conditions of violence and murder continue unabated. Our explanation of it (the Symbolic), whatever it is, relies on an exposure to it (the Real).
Zizek’s Critique of Postmodernity
Taking stock of what’s been said, Zizek argues that we are not in a post-ideological age. We still slice up the world in terms of a meta-narrative - that while we may feel incredulity toward “the Other” (feeling, for instance, cynicism towards the stories told by Democrats or Republicans or Multi-National Corporations or Presidents), we still put our faith in “the Big Other”. Allegiance to “the Big Other” can be easily witnessed in our actions. We feel disdain for the way global capitalism has brought on an ecological crisis, yet we buy stock in these companies, we purchase their products, and we manifest the conditions in which they can exist. As Zizek notes, we think the world will end, but Capitalism in its current state will not. We are more willing to imagine apocalyptic visions than we are to creatively re-think economics. Also, in the United States, many consider politics corrupt and, split as we are, we contest the two-party system and the way it doesn’t adequately represent the multitude of interests in its citizens. So many feel disenfranchised, as though they aren’t truly represented by either party. Yet, we vote for one or the other, because not doing so would be ‘throwing away our vote’ (in other words, instead of throwing away our vote, we toss it to the side, where at least it won’t be in the garbage). This indicates that we are more willing to support a two-party system then we are to actively and creatively re-think our political institutions. The point is that, while we think the institutions with a degree of cynicism, we still act as though they are entirely legitimate. In our cynicism, we still feel inert, because we still believe there is some uncontrollable force (the Big Other) directing the show. We therefore submit. Such action can only be accounted for as governed by ideology.
According to Zizek, we can reveal that ideology when we are good Hegelians and discover the inherent contradiction of those Symbolizations that, consciously or not, guide our actions. We reveal those contradictions in the Real. If the Real did not exist alongside the Symbolic, there would be no evolution of thought. The power behind MLK Jr’s non-violent civil rights movements was the confrontation it presented of the Real against the Ideology of the time. Alongside the Symbolic order of American Democracy (‘all men are created equal’, ‘the American Dream’, ‘Democracy requires that everyone have a vote’) were presentations of people being beaten in the streets by police, people being arrested for appearing a certain color, businesses taking huge financial hits due to boycotts, and we witnessed shootings, hangings, and death. For Zizek, the Symbolic Order MLK contested existed because such inequality existed, and as such Symbolic Orderings still exist, we can safely say that MLK's work is not finished. (Consider, if all men really were created equal, why would we need to say it, believe it, or represent it? Remember the movie The Incredibles, when the kid says something to effect of, “If all people are special, than nobody’s special.” The same can be said for equality - “If all people are equal, than nobody’s equal.” “Equal” would be a meaningless term.) The Civil Rights Movement forced a confrontation with the Real (not only the non-violent protests that were incredibly violent, but a confrontation with more militant groups too like the Black Panthers), and forced a reorganization of the Symbolic Order (black people needed to be brought under the blanket of civil liberties - they needed to be understood in a different way). Having dealt with the Real, racism would have to take on more subtle forms to preserve classic American ideology.
A Case Study: The Crips and the Bloods
Crips and Bloods: Made In America is a movie designed to present its viewers with the Real. We watch mothers crying, see bloodied corpses lying on the side of the road, hear gunshots, see dilapidated neighborhoods, watch videos of rioting and extreme violence, and we see the bandanas of rival gangs colored in red and blue, with white inlay on each. We are presented with a geographical perspective. Watts exists just 10 miles from the Pacific Coast Highway, 5 miles from Rodeo Drive and Beverley Hills, 7 miles from the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and 25 miles from Orange County and Disneyland. In other words, the geographical location of the two most infamous African American gangs is right amidst the ‘American Dream’, as though movie stars and Mickey Mouse need the collapse of civilization right by their doorstep in order to understand the freedom and power they wield. Forrest Whitaker narrates the film, starting off by saying, “Surrounded by the California Dream, this region has its own legacy. On its streets erupted the country’s most violent outbreak of civil unrest not once, but twice. It’s also the home of America’s two most infamous African American gangs, the crips and the bloods, who’s bloody, 40 year feud, has taken 5 times as many lives as the long-running sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, and who’s devastating body count continues today.”
The movie breaks down the ideological notion that we’ve moved beyond racism (such guiding notions were paramount in fueling the battle in Arizona this last year to remove ethnic studies classes). Watts was originally developed as a neighborhood black families could move into when nicer white suburbs had legal restrictions prohibiting black families from purchasing homes there. Black kids started creating clubs of their own when they were excluded from white organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America. Kumasi, a resident of Watts in those days says, “We couldn’t be cub scouts, we couldn’t be boy scouts, we couldn’t be explorer scouts, we couldn’t get involved in organized activity that would take us anywhere that would bear us any kind of good fruit. So we built an ancillary, an alternative.” These clubs became what many consider the first African American gangs. Rivalries developed between these clubs. In those days, however, it was not about destroying the other, just competing.
Between 1950 and 1966, the police department was run by the racist Chief Parker, who ran the police like the military. According to Dr. Josh Sides, “It was an open secret that one of the tacit duties of the LAPD was to make sure people were in the right neighborhoods at the right times. And Alameda Boulevard was the white curtain in LA.” If you were black and you crossed Alameda, you would be harassed by the LAPD. Says a Watts resident, “We’d get stopped, we’d get harassed, ‘what are you doing here? You’re supposed to stay in your neighborhood.’” It was assumed if you were black, you were up to no good. This type of segregation is covered over in the ideology of the times. Segregation is thought to be a pre-Civil Rights ‘Southern’ phenomena. To not understand the degree of segregation occurring in California history is to have been subject to the narrative that California has always been an open, liberal, modern state. Presentations of the real images of 1960s police brutality and blatant racism don’t fit well within those narratives, and the movie does well in presenting such images. Psychologically, segregation in California bred hatred, dissent, and eventually violence. Kusami described himself in those days as “a walking time bomb” that’s going to go off, “someday, somewhere, on somebody. The question is, upon whom?”
The first Watts riot occurred when 21 year old African American Marquette Fry was pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving. It was a routine traffic stop until police insisted on impounding Fry’s car even though it was two blocks from his home. Crowds grew in numbers and became more and more angry. When a scuffle broke out, Fry and his family were taken into custody. The first Watts riot ensued: black residents facing off against 200 LAPD, rocks thrown against gunfire. More authorities were called in later, including the National Guard. Kumasi notes that the weapons used against the troops were the very material that caused civil unrest in the first place. Bricks from dilapidated buildings were thrown. “You didn’t fix it, you didn’t remove it. It ain’t nothing but a pile of bricks anyhow. That’s coming at you.” It’s almost as if the Real and the Symbolic were joined perfectly together in the act of throwing a brick. Symbolically, the brick is an unfinished construction project - a symbol of poverty, a symbol of neglect, of racism. As thrown, it embodied the Real as a blunt object flying at you through the air.
There’s a fascinating quote in the movie that perfectly brings out the distinction between the Symbolic and the Real in Lacan: “The cops had weapons and they had a law behind them. The Citizens don’t have anything behind them but their own heart, their own desire, their own determination. And they’re really fighting to survive.” The important thing is that the cops had a law behind them. The law is the Symbolic Order. The cops are protected as they beat rioting teens because they’ve been legitimized, whereas the teens are outlaws and have no real protection. But their struggle is in destroying the Symbolic Order and wiping out those laws that legitimize racism and segregation. The violence incurred in the first Watts riots was the Real which put incredibly pressure on the prevailing ideology. Myers writes, “Zizek refers to the law throughout his work. The term ‘the law’ signifies the principles upon which society is based, designating a mode of collective conduct based upon a set of prohibitions. However, for Zizek, the rule of law conceals an inherent unruliness which is precisely the violence by which it established itself as law in the first place” (53). In the irruption of violence in Watts, the penned up anger and hatred that the law of segregation in California imposed on Watts residents overflowed into anarchy. It’s interesting to consider the more subtle violence imposed by laws such as those that prevent, say, gay marriage, and how they will come to be rewritten. I use the term violence because it is a violent act to bar someone from marrying the person they love, even if, as it’s decided in a courtroom, it is blanketed with the facade of civility.
The first Watts Riot ended in blood. Los Angeles Mayor, Sam Yorty, described it in this way: “This is a criminal, a lawless element with which we’re confronted and the only thing they understand is force and power.” How much more clearly can we see ideology in all its grandeur! Yorty’s statement was an attempt to bring the events under the racist ideology of the time. Such an ideology, as with today’s, relies on a number of assumptions: again, the American Dream, American Freedom, Democracy, etc. Again, when confronted with the Real - the graphic images of the violence itself, we come to doubt this characterization. Why, when we just consider the images, are the dark people alone a lawless and criminal element? The images depict police shooting weapons, swinging clubs, standing over bloodied bodies. Only ideology can account for our taking sides on the matter. “That’s been the one taboo, is that black people and other oppressed people in this country are never to use violence to achieve what it is they want. But this country uses violence whenever it chooses, and then it legitimizes the violence.” It legitimizes it in the Symbolic Order, a device of Ideology.
The first Watt Riot brought attention to the segregated conditions of LA and it accelerated the consciousness of blacks in California. It brought with it a burgeoning Civil Rights movement. The Black Power movement took hold in California. Gangs stopped fighting each other, and started fighting against oppression, working with groups like the Black Panthers to create community programs. While blacks certainly took a big step forward in terms of civil liberties, the more radical groups that were creating solidarity within the black community were in danger. Not so interested in coexisting with whites but rather interested in establishing proud, educated, and nourished black communities, they were systematically eliminated by the FBI. Black Panther leaders were literally hunted down and killed. These groups were of particular importance for a place like Watts because it was segregated and low on the socio-economic ladder. What were needed were not programs to integrate blacks and whites (as though it’s merely a matter of opening the doors of UCLA so anyone living in Watts could then decide to become an engineer and walk straight from the slums to prestigious university programs - as though their schools could prepare them, as though they could afford it, as though racist institutions didn’t prevent a rapid transformation in race relations), but rather programs that focused on enriching the lives of blacks from within their communities. As these solidarity movements were eradicated, Watts was left again without a cohesive vision, just extreme poverty and the constant threat of incarceration. Looking for allegiance with something, gangs sprang up again and started fighting, this time with guns. The Crips came first, the children of parents involved and then disillusioned by the Civil Rights Movement. The Bloods followed after. Kusami wisely notes, “Part of the mechanics of oppressing people is to pervert them to the extent that they become the instrument of their own oppression.” With this statement he makes the persuasive case that gangs are a product of oppression. This argument gains power from a confrontation with the Real that doesn’t cohere with the generally accepted argument from Mayor Yorty. We’re not merely dealing with a ‘lawless element that only understands force and power’. We’re dealing with an economically devastated region infiltrated with guns that is almost exclusively black. Such a reality doesn’t cohere with a simple Symbolic ordering that involves equal opportunity and the unfortunate irresponsibility of certain teens. We are dealing in Watts with a problem that has deep roots, a living testament to Racism in America.
The remainder of the movie exposes the lived experience of gang members in LA. What’s important in terms of this paper is that we understand the prevailing ideology. It’s argued that we are in a post-ideological era. We’ve thereby transcended racism. We have incredulity toward narratives, so we are distrustful of the racist narrative that argues that black people are animalistic, for instance. While we may feel distrustful of such a narrative, Zizek argues that this is not ultimately the case - that we are still prone to a more subversive meta-narrative, because we are more convinced that the problem of gang violence in LA will continue on forever than we are interested in confronting the problem with a fresh and radical perspective. We vote for politicians who don’t confront the problem directly and we tolerate politicians and talk-show hosts that make the same kinds of comments Mayor Yorty made (recall Hurricane Katrina). In other words, our actions don’t seem to indicate we’ve moved beyond a racist meta-narrative. When I taught Moral Issues at San Jose State University, people got up in arms when I suggested that all US citizens did not have the same opportunities to excel in society. In their view, anyone can get out of Watts if they just put their mind to it (even if their father’s in jail, their school is crumbling, and they can’t walk down certain streets for fear of being shot at). So, when violence erupts, how else can they explain it than in the way Mayor Yorty did? Such an attitude is to take the position that things should continue as they are, for they are just. It’s to essentially categorize the violent images of the Watts riots in the early 90s in the way the prevailing ideology dictates, not with an interest in developing a radical reorganization of thought and action.
Concluding Remarks
When I read Zizek, I can’t help but search for the inherent contradictions that sustain prevailing ideologies. The idea is not to one day reach a post-ideological era, for that’s the day we stop being human subjects. At that point, we’ve no longer ‘sliced up the world’ into a Symbolic Order, so all that’s left is the Real - that which cannot be known (or categorized). In other words, we no longer exist. The idea is rather to confront the Real, not to disregard it. We must stop focusing on the narratives we find offensive or stupid or outdated or suspect, thinking, then, that we’ve moved beyond the narrative. We must rather critique our actions to locate the narratives that actually have a hold on us (perhaps the same narratives we feel incredulity towards). Can we imagine a post-Capitalist era? It appears we must, as the Capitalist era has generated an ecological crisis and abundant inequality and social unrest. But what would that post-Capitalist system look like? The fact that we can’t even imagine it means that we’ve internalized Capitalism through and through. Again, we can imagine the end of the world, but not a post-Capitalist era. What does that mean? I agree with Zizek: it means we are wrapped up in an ideology. Zizek invites us to think radically, and Lacan gives us some handy tools to work with. I will be writing book reviews on Zizek as I make my way through his vast catalogue, and I invite you to join me.
Works Cited
Crips and Bloods: Made in America. Directed by Stacy Peralta. Produced by The Gang Documentary, Balance Vector Productions, and Verso Entertainment.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” The
Postmodern Reader, Foundational Texts. Ed. Michael Drolet. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Myers, Tony. Slavoj Zizek. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 2003.
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