I was going to write a funny post about literal shit for April First, but I changed my mind. I was watching a documentary about modern philosophers and their ideas and a section of the movie was all about Žižek discussing garbage and defecation.
“Part of our daily perception of reality is that this disappears from our world. When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it. Of course rationally you know it’s there in canalization and so on, but at a certain level of your most elementay experience, it disappears from your world. But the problem is that trash doesn’t disappear.”
Žižek is talking about a really interesting phenomenon. How can we as people make the amount of trash that we do when it is as incredibly detrimental as it is? We only hurt ourselves as we damage the earth, yet humankind continues on. Even those who profess to love recycling don’t go zero-impact. Why is this?
One of the biggest, practical reasons is that we simply do not have a choice. Todays men and women have inherited a world wherein they must consume to survive. And to consume is to produce a certain amount of waste. Unlike that of our distant ancestors, today’s waste is fairly permanent. It is extremely challenging to make no impact on the environment, if not impossible. I recommend the documentary No Impact Man.
Watching this family try to have zero impact on the environment is like watching someone lose an arm. If forces one to confront the insane levels of waste that everyone produces. This is what Žižek wants people to accept. We make waste. We make garbage and we shit. None of that simply disappears at any point.
Žižek thinks that people form subconscious fantasies that take the place of reality. We live in a world where garbage and shit do not exist. We, on a subconscious level, believe that these things disappear from the world as soon as we stop looking at them. We flush the toilet and the waste is gone. We take out the trash and it ceases to be. We need to accept that these things only transport themselves to a new location. It moves out of our sight, but it must not move out of our minds.
johngrey 