Bradley Kaye

“Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe'' that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized.”
― Bradley Kaye

“Even though the threat of violence constantly lingers in the air, we can laugh and be amused while watching endless amounts of entertainment in which “transgression itself is solicited, [and] we are daily bombarded by gadgets and social forms which not only enable us to live with our perversions, but even directly conjure new perversions,” and which allege to express the “truth” of our concealed desires. We are on the brink of extinction-level catastrophes such as global warming, which are making large parts of the Earth uninhabitable for human life, and yet life goes on in the realm of myth, a realm of denial. Myth is thus the Real of logos: the foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, yet simultaneously impossible to remain fully within.”
― Bradley Kaye