Like all British people, my dream is to one day become notable enough to be invited onto onto the long-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. I expect most of us have also got our list of eight songs plus a book and a luxury at the ready for when we get the call, and one of my songs is Plastic Man by the Kinks.
It's a catchy song, and Wikipedia informs us that is was released specifically in the hope of having a hit following their now critically lauded but then commercially disappointing album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but this didn't work out for them because the BBC wouldn't play the song on account of it containing the word "bum". The best laid plans.
Anyway, while the catchy tune and lyrical cheekiness do appeal to me, that's only half the story about why I'm taking it to my desert island. The other half is that I think that in a way I'm something of a plastic man myself, and this week I'd like to talk a little about why.
Žižek
I'm not exactly a fan of Slavoj Žižek, and I've sometimes heard from people who speak with more authority about him than I can that there are good reasons not to be, but he's a big name, and one time I decided that even if only in a fairly minimal way I should check out what the deal was with him and I so I read a picture book called Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide (Kul-Want and Piero 2011). The book contains several fairly arresting images, but one thing that really made an impression on me was in a section titled "The Removal Of Risk":
'A further reason why Žižek is suspicious of the equation that is made between happiness and self-realization in Western society today is how cautious and guarded people are about allowing any sesne of intensity, risk or emotional excess into their lives.
"This is reflected in the creation of a new series of products: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol."
These products are popular precisely because they are deprived of their malignant properties.' (Kul-Want and Piero 2011: 115)
He goes on to talk about the same mindset being manifested in some modern varieties of warfare, sex, politics, and also multiculturalism, but that's not so much what struck me about the passage. What struck me about it was that I thought "That's me! I drink decaf coffee and non-alcoholic beer, and I eat vegetarian meat too! I even have multiple plastic plants in my home. What's wrong with depriving things of their malignant properties?"
I expect it was around the same time that I first discovered Plastic Man, which (as you'll be aware if you're familiar with the song or at least followed the YouTube link earlier) is about a man made of plastic (bum included) who surrounds himself with plastic objects, including plastic flowers like I have. And so the song and Žižek's tirade against my beloved defanged simulacra became inextricably linked in my mind.
Keeping It Unreal
Now, I don't want to oversell my plastic lifestyle. I do drink plenty of real coffee (mostly instant, but still caffeinated) but switch to decaf after around four or five in the evening, and sometimes go with decaf earlier in the day too if I already feel sufficiently wired at that moment. There are now at least two real plants in my home in addition to the several plastic ones (including some lego flower arrangements which I think are especially nice, although they were built by my partner so I can't take credit for them). I am a vegetarian and so all the meat I eat is fake meat, and a month or so ago I switched to drinking mostly but not exclusively non-alcoholic beer. I also drink diet Coke, Pepsi etc in preference to the sugary versions when they're available.
Embracing products like this can be quite liberating, because it essentially means you can uncouple drinking coffee from getting wired, drinking beer from getting drunk, surrounding yourself with plants from looking after plants and so on. It allows you to be more intentional about how you spend your time: you're not finding yourself doing one thing just because you decided to do the other. It's also worth noting that non-alcoholic beers have got a lot better since they first appeared, just as vegetarian meat has. I'm not old enough to rembember being able to tell decaf coffee from regular in a blind taste test, but if you are, that's got better too. With most of these things, if you think it's bad because you tried some twenty years ago and it tasted kind of nasty, then your information is out of date. Even astroturf has come on a lot as I understand it.
The Desert Of The Real
Žižek did in fact write these things over twenty years ago, in an essay called "Passions of the real, passions of semblance", which is the first chapter of a book called Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (Žižek 2002)1. The excellent title of the book, as he explains in the essay, is from something Morpheus says to Neo after he wakes up from the Matrix and sees "a deslolate landscape littered with burnt-out ruins — what remains of Chicago after a global war" (Žižek 2002: 15).
I read the essay for the first time quite recently, and to be honest it didn't really flesh out the critique of my plastic lifestyle in a way I found very satisfactory. I quite enjoyed reading it nonetheless, although I don't really feel equal to giving a précis of it for you. One theme in it is the idea that Americans in then-recent times had tried to insulate themselves from the real, but 9/11 happened and America was forced to confront the kind of violent and dangerous realities that it had been trying to confine to other parts of the world, and when it did Americans processed the events in a manner more suitable for processing fiction. Major American landmarks being destroyed is something that happens all the time in disaster movies, but wasn't supposed to happen in real life.
I don't really feel qualified to have much of an opinion about whether he's right about 9/11, but after taking the side of the plastic men against Žižek for so long, maybe it's worth me re-evaluating my position now that I've finally read the essay he was attacking us in. Should I be waking up, cleaning off the goo and walking among the burnt-out ruins of Chicago?
The Experience Machine
Before we give the obvious negative answer to this question, let's think a little about the experience machine. Robert Nozick (1974: 42–5) proposed a thought experiment where people can plug themselves into a machine and experience a virtual reality much nicer than the one that Neo and the rest of us experience in The Matrix, and in fact one of our own choosing, with the only catch being that none of it is real. (We'll ignore David Chalmers' (2009) surprisingly persuasive arguments that the world inside the Matrix actually is real.) Nozick's argument is supposed to be an argument against hedonism, or any other view of wellbeing on which only experiences matter, and by extension hedonistic utilitarianism, because the experience machine gives you all the experiences you could want but doesn't give you everything of value, and so there must be something of value other than experiences (and a fortiori something other than pleasure.)
Nozick notes some things you might want from the machine — to do things rather than just feel like you're doing them, be a certain way, and to experience a deeper reality — and proposes further machines to meet some of those further needs. He still doesn't think we should want to plug in, and thinks that the problem is the machines living our lives for us, rather than our living them ourselves, "in contact with reality" (Nozick 1974: 45).
This is a fun thought experiment to discuss when you're new to studying philosophy, and not everyone agrees with Nozick that plugging yourself into the machine isn't the way to go. I personally do have the hoped for negative gut response to the scenario, but my considered view is that people act as well as experiencing and the idea of a human life that's experiences-only isn't really coherent, and I'm not sure the results machine really helps. A life with all cognition and no conation would be like a life with all inhalation and no exhalation. Introducing conation into the experience machine scenario — there's conation in the Matrix — would change it a great deal, and I think it's possible that if it could be fully made sense of and still contain enough pleasure to be the challenge to hedonism Nozick is after then we might stop being able to ignore Chalmers' surprisingly persuasive case for the reality of virtual worlds.
This doesn't sound like a complete response to the experience machine case because it isn't one, but it's where I am with it these days. But now we've been sweet-talked into valuing the real, let's see if we can get ourselves some sympathy for Žižek's take on plastic plants2.
Blurring The Boundaries
Žižek complains that "What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience 'real reality' itself as a virtual entity" (2002:11), and then he starts talking about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and disaster movies. So, is he right? Does drinking non-alcoholic beer and filling your home with plastic plants lead you to start seeing reality itself as a virtual entity?
Let's see if we can find our way round to it by thinking about the experience machine and what it tells us about the value of the real. The problems with the machine are that it stops you doing things, being certain ways, and communing with a deeper reality, and that it lives your life for you. But non-alcoholic beer and the rest don't have these problems. You're still doing things, and you still have a personality; they're just different things and perhaps a different personality. They might stop you communing with a deeper reality, I suppose, but if so it's contingent and not at all for the reason Nozick gives about the experience machine, which is that it's limited to what we can create. That's a problem that's really quite specific to being hooked up to a machine, because if you're drinking a non-alcoholic beer there's still plenty of non-artificial stuff in your environment to be communing with.
I've tried to figure out a case for it, but I just don't think Žižek's right here. Maybe he's right about disaster movies or some other aspect of American life at the end of the 20th century, but I think the decaf angle is a red herring. And the reason essentially boils down to this: non-alcoholic beer is real. Decaf coffee is real. Plastic plants are not real plants, but I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that they're real too. They are real things in my home. You can knock them over. They don't make as much of a mess as real plants when you do, but you can still do it, and if you can knock them over, they are real.
Now, I realize that by writing that last paragraph I'm leaving myself wide open to the charge that the blurring of the real and the virtual has already happened to me! Perhaps that's true; it would be difficult for me to know. But I don't think it has, so I'm going to keep drinking the unreal ales for now. Cheers, and see you next week!
Notes
[1] If you want to read it then I should give you a content warning for discussions of self harm and violent pornography, but I won't be discussing those themes here.
[2] The latter is not one of his examples but I think it would serve: apart from anything else, real plants die.
References
- Chalmers, David J. (2009) 'The Matrix as Metaphysics', in Susan Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell) pp35–54
- Kul-Want, Christopher and Piero 2011: Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide (London: Icon Books)
- Nozick, Robert 1974: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books)
- Žižek, Slavoj 2002: Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York: Verso)
