“Here also, however, it is much more productive to look for this notion of fantasy where one would not expect to find it: in marginal and, again, apparently purely utilitarian situations. Let us simply recall the safety instructions prior to the takeoff of an aeroplane -are they not sustained by a phantasmic scenario of how a possible plane crash will look? After a gentle landing on water (miraculously, it is always supposed to happen on water!), each of the passengers puts on the life-jacket and, as on a beach toboggan, slides into the water and takes a swim, like a nice collective lagoon experience under the guidance of an experienced swimming instructor. Is not this ‘gentrifying’ of a catastrophe (a nice soft landing, stewardesses in dance-like style graciously pointing towards the ‘Exit’ signs…) also ideology at its purest?” –from Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies
This is exactly the kind of thing that puts Žižek in my holy triad (along with Rorty and Deleuze). Not only have I experienced the performance he describes above, but I can easily see the analogical overlap (the candy coated tyranny at work (with other utilitarian and everyday experiences. And as Žižek also explains, when it comes to the unconscious, the truth is out there. And the message implied by the performance above is:
“Don’t worry; market Capitalism has your back. No matter what catastrophic events we bring into your life, we will always be there (for a profit that is (to fix it.”
Of course, we all know the limits on this as concerns plane crashes. And we see the overlap with TV commercials that advertise debt relief services as well as Identity theft protection services: both of which will provide protection (and they say this with the same smile as the stewardesses (from problems they created in the first place –that is, once again, for a small fee.
And we see this same candy-coated dynamic at work in the local news which is incapable of taking a position on anything. They just report the news pretty much in the same way they do the weather: detached. And to offer an interesting anecdote here: an old friend of mine, one that went from republican to libertarian to what seemed like frustration, confessed to me (and I am summarizing here( that he no longer wanted the news to express its opinion about anything. He just wanted it to report the news as compared to (I assume ( MSNBC and FOX News. And I have to give him credit for ‘baby steps’. And I assume that he was prioritizing local news.
But here’s my problem: we can easily imagine the local news (much as media in general (going right along with its smiling, candy-coated view of the world while the rest of the country succumbs to a totalitarian regime. We can see it performing the same absurd scenario as the stewardess during safety instructions. I mean it already seems to be doing so while our government is bullying children.