Chapter Eight

A Missing Public World

STAYING HOME

The idea of a public world, a neutral territory free from private interests, has lost its viability because, swept up in the promises of the society of enjoyment, we no longer want to pay the price for entering into this world. Unwilling to pay its price, unwilling to accept a requisite sacrifice of enjoyment, we recoil from the public world and confine ourselves to our private lives. This refusal to enter into the public world animates Robert Putnam’s bestseller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In this work, Putnam chronicles the massive retreat from public involvement that has occurred in recent years in the United States. According to Putnam, this retreat represents a fundamental threat to American society because it threatens to eliminate the bonds that create social coherence and allow the society to function.

Since the late 1960s, social engagement and participation have plummeted. Subjects have withdrawn in large numbers from all activities that involve entering into a public space. This includes not only civic organizations and political parties, but even—as the title of Putnam’s book suggests—bowling leagues. Rather than involve themselves in public activities, subjects spend much more time in the isolation of their private worlds, most often watching television, surfing the web, or playing video games during their leisure time. This turn to privacy produces a widespread sense of disconnection, a sense of disconnection that is on of rise today. As Putnam notes:

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into an ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.¹

We now exist largely in private worlds and rarely depart from them to encounter the public. The public world thus becomes a foreign and dangerous territory for us.

Giving up our private enjoyment—even temporarily—has come to seem too high a price to pay, especially when we can’t be sure that the Other is willing to make a similar sacrifice. We can see an example of this refusal to enter into the public world in the world of detective fiction, a genre that focuses on the interaction between public and private. In the recent Inspector Wexford novels of Ruth Rendell, the absence of public contact has become a recurring motif, a motif completely absent in the earlier novels of this series, written in the 1960s and 1970s. In Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter, for instance, Inspector Wexford, Rendell’s philosopher-detective, notes how the absence of public interaction means that very few people have verifiable alibis anymore. As he says, “something rather strange has happened to alibis in recent years. It’s getting progressively more difficult to establish hard and fast ones. That works against villains, of course, but it also works for them. It’s got something to do with people leading more isolated lives.”² People interact with others, especially strangers, so rarely, that they can provide no public record of where they have been. And in a later novel, Road Rage, Wexford continues his observations on the contemporary turn to privacy: “People stayed at home in front of the television, or if they went out, went in cars. They even drank at home and pub after pub was closed.”³ There are, in short, increasingly fewer reasons to leave the security of one’s home. I drink at home because I can remain there without being confronted with any requirements concerning the sacrifice of my private enjoyment. At home, I am able to enjoy without interruption.⁴ To go out, to involve oneself with the public world, is to break this spell. In other words, in the society of enjoyment, subjects isolate themselves at home in order to avoid any disruption of their private, imaginary enjoyment.

The explosion of interest in and traffic on the internet appears to represent a new effort to restore the public world in a new form, to create what the partisans of the internet call a “virtual community.” While online, the subject can chat with strangers, engage politically, and even join sustained discussion groups. In short, one can participate in a public world that seems to have everything save actual physical interaction. But despite all these public-oriented characteristics, the internet does not produce a public world; as Cass Sunstein argues in Republic.com, it merely increases the range of the subject’s private world. The internet provides the subject with a community that reflects the self. According to Sunstein, “New technologies, emphatically including the Internet, are dramatically increasing people’s ability to hear echoes of their own voices and to wall themselves off from others.”⁵ Hence, rather than fostering a restoration of the public world, the internet provides another imaginary escape from that world, a place where the subject can avoid the big Other and interact with a series of alter egos. Because it is an imaginary space, whatever community one finds on the internet tends to lack the key characteristic of an actual community—its otherness. This is why Sunstein claims that “new technologies reduce the ‘friction’ of ordinary life and permit people, with increasing ease, to devise a communications universe of their choosing.”⁶ This “friction” that the internet works to eliminate is, to put it in Lacanian terms, the friction of the Real. On the internet we miss the Real dimension of the other—that part of the other that resists our mode of symbolization. In this sense, the increasing predominance of the internet and its privatized version of the public world represents a further retreat from the public world as such.

The abandonment of the public world also manifests itself in the way that people actually do involve themselves in society. When people do participate in civic activities today, the mode of participation is most often completely consonant with the predominance of private worlds. According to Putnam, membership in organizations has held steady, but the form of this membership has dramatically transformed from active participation to financial support. Rather than interact with members of the organizations to which they belong, people send money. Sending money allows one to exert influence and advance one’s interests without leaving the security of the private world. Volunteerism today also follows this same pattern. Putnam does notice a resurgence of volunteerism in the 1990s, but even this trend bears the marks of the private world’s predominance. Contemporary subjects most often volunteer in ways that involve a few individuals rather than the larger community. Even when we do become engaged subjects, we do so in ways that don’t necessarily require entrance into the public world.

Despite Putnam’s ability to recognize the contemporary abandonment of the public world, his very characterization of this public world betrays the extent to which it has disappeared. He sees the public world as central to a society that has a sense of “generalized reciprocity,” in contrast to a “distrustful society.” Clearly, “reciprocity” sounds like a better recipe for society than “distrust,” but the term nonetheless suggests an attitude foreign to the public world as such. Concern for reciprocity remains concern for one’s own private advantage, which is not a public concern. If subjects agree to enter the public world because it promises reciprocity, then they already view it from the perspective of their private world. From the point of view of the public world, the question of reciprocity would never arise because this world appears as neutral turf—a level playing field. But because Putnam begins from the perspective of a universalized privacy, the public world acquires the character of reciprocal sacrifice. That is to say, in formulating the benefits of the public world in terms of the reciprocity it offers, Putnam ipso facto takes the private world as his assumed starting point. In this way, he inadvertently testifies to the power that privacy has over us today. Not only are we reluctant to enter into the public world, but, even more importantly, we see this world only through the lens of our privacy, which has the effect of increasing its foreignness.⁷

The problem with this insistence on privacy and private enjoyment is that it effectively blocks the path to actual enjoyment. Our retreat from the public world represents an attempt to insulate ourselves from the threatening enjoyment of the other—the other in its Real dimension. But in the act of retreating from the other’s enjoyment, we also retreat from our own. As we have seen in the case of Toni Morrison’s Paradise, our own enjoyment is nothing but this enjoyment of the other. Hence, when subjects in the society of enjoyment attempt to isolate themselves in their private worlds in order to safeguard their own enjoyment, they protect themselves from their own enjoyment as well as the other’s. Once again, we see here how the symptoms of the society of enjoyment evince the profound absence of enjoyment that characterizes this society.

MEMBERS ONLY

If contemporary American society lacks a public world—or, rather, if its public world has been completely overrun by private expressions and interests—historically, the public world was a world (at least in idea, if not in practice) of equality. That is, in the society of prohibition everyone who entered this public world agreed to submit to the rigid domination of its conventions, and this mutual submission to the law of the public world fostered an equality of public persons, despite private differences. Most importantly, as Jürgen Habermas points out, in the public world “laws of the market were suspended,” which made the public world a site of respite from the power of capital.⁸ The public world, in its very conception, was a mode of resistance to the expansion of capitalism into all aspects of the social order.

Obviously, the idea of a public world where the “laws of the market” might be suspended is difficult to imagine today, given the current ubiquitousness of the market and its laws. In the society of enjoyment, the market—as the extension of the command to enjoy—infiltrates everywhere, as attested to by the proliferation of advertising, which prompts Habermas to lament that even “the public sphere” has taken on “advertising functions.”⁹

The existence of private advertising in public space provides an overt indication that private interests have completely overrun the public world. The signs of this invasion proliferate throughout late capitalist society. To witness it, we need only look at the nearest public bus, which one cannot ride—or even watch it driving down the road—without being bombarded by the advertisements that adorn it both inside and out.¹⁰ But the proliferation of advertising in every public space is only the most visible manifestation of the privatization of the public world. As is well known, many public functions are becoming increasingly relegated to private interests. In just the last few years, we have witnessed the birth of private prisons, public vouchers for private schools, corporate sponsorship of public high school sports teams, the inundation of public schools with corporate advertising, and express lanes on public highways that one must pay for the privilege of driving in (just to name a few of the more “publicized” privatizations). As they infiltrate the public domain, private interests do not submit to the public demand for submission to its conventions, because these private interests obey only the higher law of the market. They bring the inequality of the market with them as they invade the public world.¹¹ This proliferation of private interests in the public world has the effect of destroying the public world as an inhabitable, neutral space, staining the public world with the obscene enjoyment of privacy. The society of enjoyment is a private society.

In one sense, the obscene dimension of the public world is nothing new. Despite claims for its neutrality and openness, even in the society of prohibition the public world has never actually been free of the power relations that predominate private interactions. Instead, it has perpetuated inequality in the guise of neutrality, in the guise of “bracketing” private inequality. As Nancy Fraser puts it, “insofar as the bracketing of social inequalities [. . .] means proceeding as if they do not exist when they do, this does not foster participatory parity. On the contrary, such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates.”¹² The neutrality of the public world, rather than fostering equality, simply masks inequality. In addition, Fraser notes that we assume the public world “is or can be a space of zero-degree culture, so utterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accommodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos. But this assumption is counterfactual, and not for reasons that are merely accidental.”¹³ There is, as Fraser claims here, no neutrality that is free of the stain of private inequality or private enjoyment. To pretend that the public world is a neutral ground when it isn’t is to perpetuate—and solidify—the inequality rampant in the social order.

If the public world can never rid itself of privacy’s stain, it would appear that we are better off without it.¹⁴ At least, when we have eliminated the illusion of neutrality that the public world perpetuates, we will see social relationships as they really are; we will see inequality in its undisguised form. The disappearance of the public world would thus seem to be something to celebrate, the stripping away of an ideological fiction. Better to face the inequality that exists than to put our heads in the sand and believe that it doesn’t. Such a celebration, however, would be premature. While it is undoubtedly the case that the neutrality of the public world is—and has been—fictional, it is nonetheless also the case that this neutrality has been, to use Jacques-Alain Miller’s phrase, an “effective fiction.” Though this neutrality is only fictional, the fiction does have effects. That is, the public world, because it assumes that a neutral ground does exist, has the effect of actually bringing this neutral ground, to some extent, into existence.

Think, for instance, of the American judicial system. We all know perfectly well that jurors, despite explicit instructions from the judge, are not able to put aside their personal prejudices in a case and evaluate the evidence on its own terms. As a result, the jury trial has perpetuated—and continues to perpetuate—all sorts of injustices, most obviously, in the history of American jurisprudence, in cases where the racism of white jurors has led them to see an African American defendant as guilty a priori. Jurors cannot become neutral subjects, and the fiction that they can allows injustice, in many instances, to persist. However, even though this fiction often fails to produce justice, it does give the jury trial its illusion of justice. Here we see the value of an effective fiction. Though it is impossible for jurors to put aside their prejudices in actuality, if they believe that they can—or if they believe that this is what the judge expects them to do—this fiction can nonetheless change the way that they respond to the case (even if it doesn’t in every instance). Political activists can also point to this ideal when challenging verdicts that clearly deviate from it. In this way, the idea of neutrality has the ability to alter the way we act, even if, in practice, neutrality does not exist.¹⁵ Precisely the same thing is at work in the case of the public world. Even though the public world is not free of private interests, when we act as if it is we are actually working to rid it of this obscene stain. The key to political struggle is the embrace of the effective fiction, insisting on the “truth” of this fiction. In the society of enjoyment, however, the fiction of the public world and its neutrality has lost much of its efficacy. We now accept its privatization as an inevitable truth.

The ramifications of this acceptance are significant. The privatization—and thus destruction—of the public world forces everyone to live in their own private world without reprieve—that is, without the reprieve from enjoyment that the public world provides. In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec points out that the contemporary retreat into privacy “entail[s] the destruction of the civitas itself, of increasingly larger portions of our public space. We no longer attempt to safeguard the empty ‘private’ space [. . .] but to dwell within this space exclusively .”¹⁶ The problem is that the destruction of the public world doesn’t represent a liberation into privacy; rather, privacy itself becomes publicized. As Copjec puts it, “from the moment the choice of private enjoyment over community is made, one’s privacy ceases to be something one supposes as veiled from prying eyes [. . .] and becomes instead something one visibly endures.”¹⁷ As the public world disappears, we lose the distance between public and private that allowed the public world to be a respite from the private one. Though the public world bars us from our enjoyment, at the same time it protects us from it as well, offers us relief from its pressure. When the private becomes public and the public loses its autonomy, we begin to suffocate. The real horror is not, as so many contend today, our failure to protect privacy, but, on the contrary, our failure to protect the public from a private assault.

The increasing refusal to enter the public world has devastating effects—namely, breaking down our ability to believe in such a world. The public world is not a substantial world but exists only insofar as subjects believe in its existence—or, insofar as they believe that someone, the big Other, believes in it. If I see others refusing to enter into this world, remaining in a private world, I surmise that the big Other no longer believes in the fiction of a neutral public world. And when I can no longer believe that the big Other believes, I myself stop believing—and everyone stops believing in a similar way. In this way, the breakdown of the public world gives rise to an incessant paranoia: without the prohibition of enjoyment that the public world demands, I am constantly confronted with the other’s enjoyment and must, at the same time, constantly fear that the other might steal my enjoyment. Even though the public world is just an illusion, it nonetheless has the effect of keeping the threat of enjoyment at bay.

If the public world has always had only an illusory existence, has always been more theoretical than actual, the idea has also persisted that a cataclysmic event, a horrible disaster, would cause a fully realized public world to emerge. Disaster, in short, begets a true public.¹⁸ Even Ronald Reagan, just after emphasizing the rift in the world with his “Evil Empire” speech, expressed a wish for an alien invasion of the earth, in order that the United States and the Soviet Union would heal the division between them and unite as members of a global community.¹⁹ In traditional disaster films, we see the fantasy of a public world fully realized again and again. It almost seems as if these films exist not for the sake of depicting the disaster, but in order to provide a vehicle for illustrating the realization of this public world. Almost without fail, in the disaster film the disaster produces a bond among people regardless of what in their private lives would keep them apart. Barriers between rich and poor, between white and black, between young and old, between popular and unpopular, all seem to disappear in the face of the disaster. The disaster—and the public world it brings to light—even has the ability to diminish the importance of private quarrels: former enemies can interact on a neutral turf. No matter how far away we have been from realizing the ideal of a neutral public world, the disaster film has consistently shown us this ideal, as if to provide reassurance that the ideal itself continues to exist and inform our everyday interactions. It is precisely this ideal that the society of enjoyment militates against.

DISASTROUS COMMUNITY BUILDING

The traditional disaster film affirms the idea of a neutral public world that characterizes the society of prohibition. Mark Robson’s Earthquake, made in 1974, provides a compelling instance of this quality in the disaster film, precisely because it appears, at first, to be revealing how the disaster results in the degradation of the public world. At the end of the film, the earthquake has completely destroyed the city of Los Angeles—rendering it almost uninhabitable—and has killed many of the film’s main characters. There seems to be no space left for a public world, and few left to exist in it. In the final line of the film, one of the survivors says to another, “This used to be a helluva town.” The use of the past tense here indicates that the city, as a public space that ties people together, has died in the earthquake. In addition, the film depicts a mild-mannered grocery manager, Jody (Marjoe Gortner), being transformed into a psychotic killer as a result of the earthquake. As a member of the National Guard, the disaster presses Jody into service, and when he is leading a patrol arresting looters, he guns down three men who mocked him earlier in the film and tries to rape one of the women arrested for looting. Because of the presence of Jody and the overall development of the narrative, Earthquake seems to break from the traditional disaster film and its depiction of a revitalized public world resulting from the disaster. Despite these contraindications, however, the film remains firmly within the tradition.

The primary manner in which Earthquake depicts the existence of a public world is very traditional for the genre: it introduces us to a variety of characters whose disparate private lives become intertwined during the disaster and its aftermath. Connections emerge among Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), a motorcycle stuntman, Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold), an actress, Lew Slade (George Kennedy), a police officer, Stuart Graff (Charlton Heston), an engineer, and many others. By establishing these kinds of connections, the film brings to light an implicit public bond that holds them all together. Even more importantly, however, it also depicts characters who renounce their own private enjoyment for the sake of the public. For instance, Miles Quade, suffering from the private disappointment of a failed motorcycle stunt, risks his life to help a stranger, Denise Marshall, and her son, and goes out of his way to take them to safety. In addition, Lew Slade, who also suffered a private disappointment (being suspended from the police force), risks his life to save people trapped in a collapsed building. The film’s main character, Stuart Graff, illustrates this turn to the public to an even greater extent. Throughout the film, we have seen him dissatisfied with his marriage to his drunken and nagging wife Remy (Ava Gardner). Just prior to the earthquake, he even initiates an affair with Denise Marshall and plans to leave Remy for her. That is, he plans to opt for his private enjoyment over his public obligation, an obligation that the film depicts as painfully unattractive. At the conclusion of Earthquake, however, as Stuart is rescuing people from underneath a collapsed building, he is faced with a choice: Denise looks back at him, already safe outside, as Remy yells for help, trapped in a rushing current of water below. Stuart chooses to dive into the water for Remy, to remain faithful to his public obligation, abandoning Denise (and the promise of a life of enjoyment, a life without Remy). This decision costs Stuart not only his enjoyment, but also his life. By highlighting his willingness to give his life for the sake of an obligation, rather than choosing the path of enjoyment, the film reveals his investment in his duty to the public world. Stuart’s risking of his life and his willingness to sacrifice himself sustain the public world as an inhabitable place.

The traditional disaster film, such as Earthquake, is able to depict a viable public world because it resurrects the figure of paternal authority, the symbolic Father. Stuart is just such a figure, despite the temptation toward enjoyment that he endures. Earlier in the film, we see Stuart inherit the role of the father from his father-in-law, Sam Royce (Lorne Greene), and we see the importance of this role. Stuart works for the engineering company that Sam runs, and when the earthquake strikes, Sam and his staff are stuck atop a skyscraper without a means to get down. They try to climb down, but there is a two-story gap in the stairs, a gap that sends two people falling to their deaths. This gap, just like the gap in the social order itself, allows us to see the function of the father in full flower. Undeterred by the gap, Sam uses a fire hose and an office chair to lower his staff down to safety (where Stuart is waiting to help). The father here fills in the gap, which is, as Lacan insists, his function. Sam’s efforts at saving the members of his staff end up costing him his life, but this sacrifice sustains the public world, covering over the gap that would threaten it. After this point in the film, Stuart takes over the role of the father from his father-in-law, and he then begins to place the public good over his own private enjoyment. Earthquake sustains the public world, but it can only do so by erecting figures of strong paternal authority, willing to sacrifice their private enjoyment in the name of public obligation. In this sense, the film is a work of nostalgia, harkening back to the society of prohibition and its traditional paternal authority.

Even though it was made in 1997, Mick Jackson’s Volcano contains all of the elements of the typical disaster film of the 1970s, like Earthquake. It begins by focusing on several different individuals whose disparate lives will be, we can assume, linked by the incipient disaster. We see, for instance, geologist Dr. Amy Barnes (Anne Heche), chief of emergency management Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones), and Dr. Jaye Calder (Jacqueline Kim), along with several minor characters. As the disaster strikes, the lives of these characters become intertwined: the disaster makes evident a public world that unites not just the main characters, but all the people of Los Angeles. The disaster even has the effect of healing racial strife. During the fight against the spreading lava, a white police officer who had earlier harassed an African American man orders the fire chief to send fire trucks to the (previously neglected) African American neighborhood. Immediately prior to this, the victim of the officer’s harassment assisted the police in their effort to build a dam against the lava flow. Both of these developments illustrate the effect of the volcano on intersubjective relations. Even the gap between the most virulent racist and the most outspoken critic of racism cannot resist, it seems, the healing power of the disaster. The disaster inaugurates this kind of interracial healing precisely because it makes evident the bond that exists within the social order, the public world that unites everyone. This public world can only exist today, in the society of enjoyment, through the aid of a disaster that thrusts everyone out of their private worlds.

Despite being foregrounded in the film, interracial healing is but the beginning of the indication of the public world in Volcano. The villain of the film, Norman Calder (John Corbett), is villainous because of his insistence that the public is unimportant, that one has no responsibility to it. Throughout the film, he tries to convince his wife, Dr. Jaye Calder, to leave the hospital (where she is treating the victims of the volcano), because she should be looking out for her private interests, not patients who have no connection to her. He pleads, “These people are strangers, Jaye. Are you going to die for them? . . . Answer me!” Busy attending to these “strangers,” Jaye never looks up but simply says, “I am answering you.” Here, Jaye explicitly rejects her husband’s demand that she turn away from a public obligation and retreat into the security of her private world. Jaye’s rejection is later mirrored by the film itself. In order to divert the lava flow away from the hospital and toward the ocean, Mike, the chief of emergency management in the city, has a new building knocked down to create a dam—a skyscraper that Norman Calder has just built. This private building—and the advocate of privacy who built it—must be knocked down for the sake of the public welfare.

By depicting this sacrifice of privacy as the only possible means for saving the public world, Volcano makes clear where its sympathies lie. After the disaster has been thwarted, the film shows this neutral public world in full flower. Ed Fox (Keith David), a police officer, picks up a stranded boy, Kevin (Marcell Thedford), and takes him to look for his mother. Fox says to the boy, “Let’s go find your mom. What does she look like?” Kevin starts to answer—“She looks like . . .”—but as he looks out among the throng of people, everyone looks the same, because they are completely covered by ash. Kevin concludes, “Look at their faces. They all look the same.” The ash creates a kind of metaphorical manifestation of the public world, where all private differences evaporate, because it renders all the markers of difference—even race or gender—indistinct. This metaphorical public world doesn’t last long—a rain ensues that washes the ash away, allowing everyone to return to their private identities—but nonetheless the neutrality and equality of the public world did, however momentarily, manifest itself. The appearance of the public world here is the culmination of the film; in fact, we might even risk the hypothesis that all of the destruction in the film prior to this scene only existed insofar as it was necessary to bring about a fully realized public world. The public world is, in this sense, the constant motif of the disaster film and its raison d’être. The traditional disaster film longs nostalgically for the social bond that characterized the society of prohibition—as the presence of the strong paternal authorities, Stuart Graff and Mike Roark, in Earthquake and Volcano makes clear—and it thus indicates the extent to which this bond no longer exists in the society of enjoyment.

HOBBES TODAY

In addition to witnessing the continuation of the traditional disaster film with Volcano, the late 1990s also saw the birth of a new kind of disaster film, a disaster film apropos of the universalized privacy one finds in the society of enjoyment rather than a work of nostalgia for an earlier epoch. At first glance, however, The Trigger Effect (David Koepp, 1996) seems to be just another entry in the genre. Like Earthquake and Volcano, Trigger Effect explores the ramifications of a cataclysmic event on the social order and on the interrelations between the people caught in the aftermath of the event. One difference, however, becomes evident very quickly. In the case of Trigger Effect, rather than a natural disaster, it is an area-wide power outage that occasions the primary disruption of everyday life in the film. Thus, Trigger Effect seems to signal a change in the very conception of disaster: “natural” disaster is no longer something that stems only from nature; now, technology itself is capable of producing a disaster that is indistinguishable from the “natural” variety. This reconception of the natural disaster is, however, but the beginning of the change that Trigger Effect brings to the genre. In both Earthquake and Volcano, disaster disrupts social life but also brings out what lies dormant in social life: an underlying sense of a public world, of people united together toward a common goal. In the face of disaster, as we have seen, people discover the bonds that are “really” there in the society—the public world—and also manage to form new bonds—to realize the public world in a way that was hitherto only fantasized. In Trigger Effect, no such connections emerge; instead, we discover a Hobbesian world—a terrifying world where, in the absence of a strong central authority, everyone seems to be at war with everyone else.

Trigger Effect depicts the effects of the power outage through its focus on the lives of a young suburban couple, Matthew (Kyle MacLachlan) and Annie (Elizabeth Shue). This narrow focus provides an indication of a turn to the private world, away from the public one. Unlike traditional disaster films, which typically focus on many groups of characters, Trigger Effect deals only with an isolated couple, their young child, and those with whom they interact. The film takes pains not to provide shots of the city as a whole or of other neighborhoods, outside of Matthew and Annie’s small subdivision. This has the effect of making it seem as if no world exists beyond their private one, which is precisely the effect that the breakdown of the public world has on us. Through the sense of isolation developed in the mise-en-scène of Trigger Effect, we experience the privatized nature of the society of enjoyment.

Soon after the power outage, Matthew arms himself with a shotgun and resorts to stealing to “protect” his family. As Annie begins to feel alienated from Matthew because of these changes in his character, her desire for Joe (Dermot Mulroney), a family friend, starts to become apparent. After a neighbor shoots and kills a young boy who had broken into Matthew and Annie’s house, they decide to leave town with Joe and their infant daughter Sarah. On the road, however, they find only increased hostility: a man holds them up when they stop to see if an abandoned car has any gas left in it. This man shoots Joe, and then leaves in their car, forcing Matthew to go to a nearby house to try to procure a car. In the climactic scene of the film, Matthew and the owner of the car face each other with guns drawn, at which point Matthew puts down his gun, asking the other man to trust him. The man then agrees to drive Joe to the hospital. The film then ends with a concluding shot of Matthew and Annie back at their home, with power restored, creating the sense that everything now is as it was prior to the outage.

The power outage—the fundamental event of the film—occasions a “time,” as Hobbes puts it, when “men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe.”²⁰ In the traditional disaster film, the disaster makes the bonds between people more evident; here, it causes them to disintegrate. After the power outage, all the rules that govern social interaction start to break down: a law-abiding citizen steals from a pharmacy, suburbanites kill to defend their property, and an encounter on the highway comes to resemble a shootout from an old Western. The lawlessness that ensues after the power outage appears to suggest that beneath the thin veneer of civilization lurks widespread aggression and brutality, waiting for an opportunity to emerge when social controls are relaxed or collapse. Seen in this light, the film would be a conservative plea—much like Hobbes’s own in Leviathan—for the maintenance of strict social authority. Without a strong authority to check aggression, the film seems to suggest, we will fall back into a state of nature, a war of all against all. Such an understanding of Trigger Effect, however, necessarily elides what happens prior to the power outage.

From the opening frame, this film shows us a world where every public encounter between people feels like a collision, a world without a symbolic bond or a public sphere to mediate human interaction. The fact that this kind of world is present even before the power outage suggests that the power outage itself doesn’t change anything; at most, it makes explicit what was implicit in the prior interactions. The power outage actually functions as a fetish, allowing viewers simultaneously to acknowledge and to disavow the reality of the film’s world. This is why the key to Trigger Effect lies in its first ten minutes—the time prior to the power outage—in which we experience the raw, violent encounters that characterize contemporary experience.

The world of those first ten minutes is a world almost completely devoid of a symbolic bond capable of facilitating intersubjective contact. It depicts life in a large city, where we would expect to see public interaction and other indications of a symbolic bond.²¹ The city has traditionally been the public space in which such a symbolic bond might be realized. Once thoroughly privatized and stripped of its publicness, however, the city becomes a war zone, a place in which various private interests conflict. As such, the city in Trigger Effect no longer facilitates the formation of a public; instead, it has become the site at which private interests violently collide with each other. This privatization of the public world makes public interaction impossible and social encounters unbearable.

“Symbolic exchange,” according to Lacan, “is what links human beings to each other.”²² The public world is a manifestation of the symbolic bond, providing a ground through which intersubjective contact is possible. Without the mediation of the public world, every intersubjective encounter is necessarily violent—an experience of two private worlds with no common ground colliding with each other. This is what we see at work again and again in Trigger Effect. In the film, subjects do not acknowledge the existence of a public world, and hence they have no means other than collision of interacting with the other. A world predominated by privacy and bereft of publicness—the world depicted in Trigger Effect—is a world that “consists not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.”²³ In this world, people live in “continual fear,” a fear that makes their lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbes’s famous terms.²⁴ This world is not a “natural” world lurking beneath civilization, but the very nature of “civilization” itself when enjoyment becomes a social duty.

FIGHTING FOR OUR RIGHT TO ENJOY

Without even the ideal of a neutral public world in the society of enjoyment, all interactions verge on being violent collisions between disparate private worlds. Trigger Effect begins with wolves devouring a carcass just on the outskirts of the city—a clear prelude to the human behavior that will follow.²⁵ The next scene, which occurs outside a movie theater, reveals the exact nature of human interaction in this world. Here we witness the first encounter between two people in the film, and this encounter takes the form of a literal collision. We see a sharply dressed German man (Edhem Barker) walking with his head down—a posture indicative of his immersion in a private world, despite the fact that he is walking in a public place. A teenager (Tyrone Tann) trips in front of him, spilling his Coke all over the man. This seemingly innocent accident has great significance, because it shows that intersubjective contact is not running smoothly. After the accident, the friction present is exacerbated by the language barrier between the two individuals. The teenager apologizes, but the German man responds in German, which the teenager interprets as hostility. The language barrier works here as an obvious metaphor for the lack of symbolic mediation between the two. They literally have no words that they can say to smooth over the violence of their interaction. The teenager answers back with increasing agitation, “I don’t understand what you’re saying, man.” They continue walking away from each other, both frustrated by the rudeness of the other, both seeing the other only as a threat to their own private enjoyment. Before the collision, each of them was walking with his head down, immersed in his own private world. From the perspective of this private world, every person one encounters is not just another person, but a lethal threat to the private enjoyment that this world offers.

In the absence of a public world in the society of enjoyment, I feel as if everyone else has access to a secret enjoyment that I lack. I am surrounded by images of enjoyment without experiencing enjoyment myself. In this situation, it seems as if the other is not lacking, not subject to castration. Thus, if I fail to experience enjoyment myself—if I experience a sense of lack—I inevitably feel like I am, to borrow the terms of chapter 5, “playing the sap” and allowing the other to enjoy at my expense. In this way, the encounter with the other necessarily becomes a proving ground where the subject can assert her/his noncastration. This becomes especially evident in the film’s male characters. ²⁶ All of them feel compelled to prove that no one has gotten the better of them, that no one has stolen their enjoyment or obtained enjoyment at their expense. To allow one’s enjoyment to be taken offers evidence that one is not a “real man” capable of sustaining and defending his enjoyment. The first indication of this dynamic occurs just after the spilling of the Coke in the film’s opening sequence. The collisions don’t end with the spilling of the Coke. Obsessed with trying to wipe off his stained shirt and coat, the German man runs into the shoulder of a young woman walking in the other direction. He then collides with another woman who is walking with her boyfriend. The boyfriend immediately steps up to defend his woman, in order to leave no doubts about the sanctity of his enjoyment. He says to the German man, “Hey, hey, you don’t say ‘excuse me.’” And even though the man has walked away, the boyfriend continues to belabor the event, obviously feeling as if he hasn’t defended himself fully enough. He tells his girlfriend, “Did you see that? I can’t believe what he did to me.[. . .] I can’t believe what he just did to me.” Even though seemingly nothing happened to the boyfriend himself, he is obsessed about the wrong done to him. In simply walking away, the other man deprived the boyfriend of an opportunity to display his noncastration, which is why he talks about how the man has wronged him, not his girlfriend. For the subject in the society of enjoyment, such an opportunity is precious because displaying one’s noncastration “proves” that one really enjoys completely, like the anal father himself.

Inside the movie theater (where the couple from the previous incident has entered), Matthew and Annie are sitting and watching a movie. In the row behind them, a man begins complaining loudly to his friend about someone cutting in front of him in the snack line. The act of talking in a movie theater exemplifies the turn to a society of enjoyment, insofar as it displays one’s private enjoyment at the same time that it intrudes upon everyone else’s. It evinces the absence of the public world in the clearest terms. The talking clearly has an effect upon Matthew’s enjoyment. He whispers to Annie, “They have to talk about this right now? It can’t wait?” After the talking continues for a bit longer, Matthew feels that he must assert himself. Rather than just say something to the men, however, Matthew tells Annie, “I got to say something.” The fact that he tells Annie he has to say something before he does it suggests the importance the event has acquired in his mind.²⁷ The decision to turn around and say something acquires a wildly inflated importance because, for Matthew, it is a test of his relationship to castration. In his mind, the chattering men are publicly revealing his castration insofar as he simply allows them to interrupt his—and, more importantly, his wife’s—viewing of the movie (that is, their enjoyment) without reproving them. He feels that he must step up and assert the prerogatives of his own enjoyment. Annie even pushes him in this direction, saying “you should” after he professes his intent to confront the men behind them. Matthew, however, falters, and it falls to Annie to turn to the men and compel them to be quiet. First, she simply gives them a look, and after this fails, she says, “shhhh,” to which one of the men responds, “Hey, fuck you. You want to fucking shut the fuck up bitch. You better turn your narrow ass around and watch the mother fucking movie.” This is precisely the response that Matthew feared and the reason why he hesitated to confront the men himself. In this exchange, we see once again the violence of an encounter without a public world, but, in addition, we also see the stakes involved in every such encounter. Every encounter is an opportunity for subjects to prove that they have “it”—that they really hold the secret of enjoyment.

Matthew has no retort to the verbal assault on Annie—and thereby fails to prove himself in this encounter. Hence, he must retreat from the other in order to avoid simply wallowing in his humiliation. He asks Annie, “Do you want to move? Come on, let’s move.” Moving into different seats seems to put an end to the problem. They watch the rest of the movie without incident, but outside the theater, Matthew sees the men and feels it necessary to subtly direct Annie away from them. And in the parking garage, he continues to obsess about the encounter. Annie, however, wants to let it drop, because she realizes the light it casts upon Matthew, revealing his castration. Their exchange illustrates the importance of Matthew’s lack of action for both of them:

MATTHEW: You think I should have said something?

ANNIE: What?

MATTHEW: Should I go back in there? They’re probably gone by now.

ANNIE: You know, I’m almost certain we’re on [parking level] three.

Matthew can’t stop thinking about the incident because it showed him so clearly what he didn’t have, which is precisely why Annie doesn’t want to think of it at all. The proliferation of enjoyment within the social order has transformed the most insignificant encounter into a proving ground where one attempts to establish oneself as an enjoying subject, as noncastrated.

The fact that the characters in Trigger Effect and subjects in the society of enjoyment feel compelled to display their noncastration indicates that their private worlds and private enjoyment is not as private as they imagine. If the subject truly eschews the public world for a private one, then she/he would have no desire to make a show of her/his ability to enjoy. The widespread displays of private enjoyment in the society of enjoyment testify to the failure of the contemporary retreat into privacy. We abandon the public world, and yet we continue to demand that the big Other acknowledge us as enjoying subjects. Here the fundamental contradiction of the society of enjoyment becomes apparent: in this society, subjects depend on the public world that they reject to supply the recognition that they demand. The society of enjoyment strips us of the protections that the public world provides while leaving us still dependent on it as the source for recognition.

Many of the encounters that populate Trigger Effect have the added element of racism to feed the tensions that stem from the absence of a public world. Because the men seated behind them in the theater are African American and because Matthew and Annie are white, it is clear—though it never becomes explicit in the film—that Matthew feels even more pressure to assert his noncastration than if the men were white. Matthew feels this pressure because, as his actions clearly show, when he sees the two men, he sees their enjoyment. The tremendous importance that Matthew attributes to this encounter suggests that he assumes the two men have a privileged relationship to enjoyment. Because he is confronting African American men, Matthew undoubtedly figures that he is at an enjoyment disadvantage. Within the prevailing white fantasy, the African American male occupies the position of someone who has not succumbed to the sacrifice of enjoyment, who has an unmediated access to sexual enjoyment. This sexualization of the African American is, of course, the apogee of white racism, as it allows the white to conceive of himself as “above” this sexuality and at the same time to enjoy it through the fantasy. Nonetheless, this fantasy clearly informs Matthew’s encounter in the theater, causing an increased trepidation on his part, as he fears that his own lack of enjoyment, his own castration, will become obvious. The underlying racial dynamic thus has the effect of raising the stakes in the struggle for enjoyment that underlies every interaction within the society of enjoyment. But racism only exacerbates the prevailing sense that the other is enjoying in our stead.

This feeling vis-à-vis the other, created by the predominance of privacy, manifests itself in all the security devices present in the film and in the society of enjoyment. Security—securing one’s private enjoyment—becomes the predominate way of interacting with the public. When Matthew and Annie come home from the movie theater and pull in their driveway, we see right away an effect of their home security system—a spotlight, triggered by the motion of their car, lights the front of the home. After they walk inside, the house alarm begins to beep until Matthew disengages it. Home security here is an indication that everything outside represents a danger to the harmony of the private world within the walls of the house. It is a sign that the house is closed off to the public world. The widespread proliferation of security systems today indicates most forcefully our entrance into the society of enjoyment. In the act of installing a security system, I proclaim an insistence upon my private enjoyment to the exclusion of all else. In doing so, I establish the other as a threat to that enjoyment; I put the other, a priori, into the position of the criminal. That is, the mere existence of the security system attests to the fact that I view the other as a threatening other, as someone out to steal what is rightfully mine.²⁸ There is something immediately slanderous to the other in the mere existence of an alarm. This becomes most clearly evident in the recent phenomenon in car alarms of the “talking alarm.” This type of alarm admonishes anyone who strays too close to the car, proclaiming (in so many words), “Please step away from the car—you have come too close.” Security systems, as the talking car alarm demonstrates, establish a firm barrier around my private enjoyment.

The problem with this barrier is not just that it has a deleterious effect on the public world, though this is certainly the case. The main problem is that the security system fails completely at its central task—the protection of private enjoyment. Because it establishes the other as a threatening other, the security system can produce a threat where none had heretofore existed. For instance, when I hear the talking car alarm, which assumes that I represent a threat to the car, I may decide to actually become that threat and to damage the car—even if, prior to hearing the alarm, I had no such intention—since I am already assumed to be a threat anyway. If I am assumed guilty, I may figure that I might as well actually be guilty, which means that rather than protecting the car, the talking alarm has actually endangered it further. But even this is not the most significant problem. The primary error behind security systems is the idea—an idea which informs all of them—that enjoyment can be protected. To protect my things so that only I can enjoy them is to thwart my enjoyment of them because the act of protection necessarily protects these things from me as well as from the other. There must be a fragility to our enjoyment. The precariousness of our relation to what we enjoy is the source of our enjoyment; we enjoy the precariousness itself. To enjoy is to forget about preserving and conserving, and hence the security system—which has as its essential function preserving and conserving—represents a barrier to any enjoyment. As Lacan puts it in Seminar VII, “what is meant by defending one’s goods is one and the same thing as forbidding oneself from enjoying them.”²⁹ The more I try to protect my things in order to enjoy them, the less I am able to actually enjoy them. Hence, security systems represent a double loss: they have the effect of destroying the public world, and they don’t, despite their promises, do anything to protect private enjoyment. Thus, the proliferation of security systems attests to the lack of actual enjoyment in the society that commands it. We have protected our enjoyment so successfully that we have entirely lost it.

In addition to its emphasis on home security, Trigger Effect also depicts the insistence on privacy in other ways. Later on in the film, when the neighbors hold a conference concerning how they should respond to the power outage, some present lament their decision, before the outage, not to gate their street. Another proposes that they now park a car at the end of their street to act as a gate during the outage, but, of course, no one is all that eager to volunteer a car for this duty. They want to establish a “gated community.” The driving force behind the idea of a gated community is that everyone else is out to steal one’s private enjoyment, and hence, we need a gate in order to protect ours. When this is the predominant psychic disposition, one has no public world and no community. The very idea of a “gated community” is an oxymoronic attempt to reconcile the desire for a symbolic community with demand for privacy. It fails, however, to reconcile public and private in actuality. Precisely because the community only exists behind a gate, it fails to become a community, which is necessarily public and open. We see firsthand evidence of this failure in the attempt of the neighbors to get together and map out a strategy for dealing with the power outage. The public meeting quickly descends into a verbal war between competing factions, prompting Annie to walk out in frustration. A “gated community” necessarily produces this frustration because of its attempt to form a miniature public world at the same time that it sets itself up in antithesis to the public world.

CHOOSING BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

The private world is the world of the ego. In the society of enjoyment, the ego, like one’s house, is a fortress to be defended and enhanced, if possible. But the more desperately the ego tries to defend and promote itself, the more it feels itself under attack. The more security devices we install in our house, the more unsafe and threatened we feel. This is the inescapable logic of the ego. It is always looking to defend or expand its territory and realizes that every other ego it encounters is trying to do the same. As Teresa Brennan puts it, “the ego fears that the other will do to it as it does to the other.”³⁰ No matter how much space there is, it isn’t enough, because the very existence of the other threatens the security of the ego. For the ego, no space is public or shared. This is why the characters in the film, acting as almost pure ego, feel that they must zealously guard the private space they occupy. This leads Matthew, despite his avowed opposition to guns, to purchase a shotgun as the outage begins to linger on. It also leads to Matthew and Annie’s neighbor shooting a young man who had tried to steal from Matthew and Annie. But most importantly, it leads to the flight of Joe, Matthew, Annie, and their daughter Sarah from the city. The city means spatial restrictions and inevitable interaction with others, which is why they flee.³¹ They flee seeking more space—a space where there are fewer people. This movement toward open space is characteristic of the ego, as Lacan points out. He says, “already in the Lebensraum (‘living space’) in which human competition is becoming keener, an observer of our species from outer space would conclude we possess needs to escape with very odd results.”³² The ego, however, can never escape far enough and always remains trapped within its own walls. The great barrier in the society of enjoyment is not the absence of additional space but the very walls of the subject’s own ego—its own security system. One only enjoys by breaking down this security and the profound sense of insecurity it fosters. The ending of Trigger Effect points toward this possibility for the subject in the society of enjoyment.

Though Trigger Effect illustrates the suffocating privacy and absence of a public world symptomatic of the society of enjoyment, it does also suggest that this society produces the possibility of a new kind of public bond. Unlike the traditional disaster film that envisions a public world that the mediation of a paternal figure authorizes, the conclusion of Trigger Effect depicts a public bond established without such a figure. Here, the public bond has its foundation in the lack that subjects share rather than the symbolic authority that one subject has. After Matthew, Annie, Joe, and Sarah have fled the city and after Joe has been shot, Matthew walks back to the nearest house, in which Raymond (Richard T. Jones), one of the men from the confrontation at the movie theater, happens to reside. Raymond refuses to let Matthew borrow his car to take Joe to the hospital, so Matthew breaks in and takes Raymond’s car keys, holding Raymond off at gunpoint. However, Raymond also has a gun, and they end up facing each other in a standoff, each pointing his gun at the other. Matthew breaks the stalemate by laying his gun down, giving up his instrument of private enjoyment. This gesture makes possible a bond between the two men:

MATTHEW: I’m taking your car. I’m going to bring it back.

RAYMOND: Why the fuck should I trust you?

MATTHEW [laying down his gun]: Because I’m going to trust you.

Raymond allows Matthew to walk out to the car, and then, moments later, he comes out himself, with his daughter, and offers to drive Matthew. The bond they form here occurs not through the mediation of a paternal authority but through the recognition of a shared absence, a shared failure: they both realize that no one has “it.”

It is only when Matthew gives up his own self-protection—completely ceding himself to the enjoyment of the other—that this recognition and this connection between the two can occur. So long as Matthew feels as if he must guard against becoming the object of the other’s enjoyment he cannot engage the other nonviolently. Here, we can see clearly the ramifications of the difference between Trigger Effect and similar films such as Earthquake and Volcano . The latter films manage to sustain a sense of a public world, but they do so only through the presence of the Law of the Father, embodied, respectively, by Stuart Graff (Charlton Heston) and Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones)—both figures of extreme paternal authority. The strong presence of these characters is, in each case, the glue that holds the public together. In this sense, both Earthquake and Volcano are films of nostalgia, calling for a return to the symbolic Father and his Law. Trigger Effect is a fundamentally different kind of film. It refuses this nostalgia and opens itself to the possibility of a public world without the Father’s mediation. The film suggests the possibility of forming a symbolic bond around a lack, rather than around the authority of the Father. The difficulty with such a bond is that it would lack the clear limits and delineated borders that the Father’s authority provides. It would be a bond, in other words, that no authority authorized—thus its tenuousness. This is the kind of public world that only becomes possible with the turn away from prohibition and its emphasis on paternal authority.

Trigger Effect, then, is a plea for the disconnection of car alarms, home security devices, and all the things that insulate us from encounters with the other. Even though we erect these defenses in response to the threats of a world increasingly dominated by privacy, what we fail to see is the way our response creates the world it is responding to. We look out from behind barricades and see a world in which there is no public bond, all the while failing to recognize that it is our barricades that destroy it. Most subjects in the society of enjoyment do not take the path that Matthew takes at the end of Trigger Effect. His gesture of abandoning security and opening himself to the other’s enjoyment involves a sacrifice of the ego and its imaginary enjoyment that few are able to make.

In the society of enjoyment, the absence of the idea of a neutral public world leaves us trapped within the shell of the ego, intent on safeguarding our private enjoyment. We become isolated monads, without even windows allowing us access to the larger world.³³ From the perspective of this isolation, it seems almost inevitable that we should view the other with suspicion and even hostility. Thus, just as the society of enjoyment deprives us of a public world, it also leads to widespread incivility and aggressiveness. The idea of a public world provides support for civil interaction, offering a neutral ground for this interaction. In its absence, civility increasingly ceases to be a viable mode of interaction. For subjects invested in a society of commanded enjoyment, an ethos of zealously defending and asserting one’s private enjoyment becomes the prevalent “moral” philosophy.