Welcome To The DESSERT Of The Real

Shannon Fernandes

SYBA 2019

Oreo Red Velvet Cake

“I’m already eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology”

Slavoj Žižek

Mark Hamill...I mean, Slavoj Žižek mentions a joke, which goes as follows - Once a man went to a coffee shop and asked for coffee without cream. The waiter replies, “Sorry sir, we don’t have coffee without cream, but we have coffee without milk”. The emphasis of this joke is on negation and ideology, two major themes we will be taking into consideration while discussing a dessert that’s dear to my in-group (only on some days and not the rest), Cakes. Just the way a cake has layers, this answer does too. We begin with the hard crust found at the bottom, discussing the essence and structure of cakes, then we move to the next sponge layer with the ‘ideology glasses’, then we move up another layer, this one is the chocolate layer where we explore the cultural aspect, and finally for the frosting we have the structural transformation (no more spoilers, I promise). The joke tells us how our reality is not just what is there but also what isn’t there, the negation to make sense of it the real, of course. But where does this real lie? The title of this essay is a pun version of the line from The Matrix, which is used when the protagonist is introduced to the real world, after being trapped in the matrix for years. 

Our matrix is ideology as it dictates what is real and what isn’t, and also how a particular thing forms real when it possesses certain properties or rather those properties need to be absent. You see this with cakes too. Just do a quick google search - “cake without” and let google complete it for you, going from eggs, sugar, baking soda. As far as common knowledge goes, a cake is usually made using flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder and flavoring, but a cake can still be made without any (one or all) of these ingredients, so what makes a cake is not the ingredients. The essence of a cake can’t lie in its structure because of how malleable that is, ranging from spongebob cake to the so-damn-simple-I’m-depressed-now cake. So this can make a cake exist without being a cake, a cake without cake. It’s very similar to Zizek’s (2002) ideas of decaf coffee without coffee being related to ideology. Oh you want coffee but you also don’t want coffee? No problem bud, I gotcha fam, here’s coffee without coffee. So what does that make reality? The Real without REAL. Is this a false real then? Not so simple, I’m afraid. Zizek (1989) mentions in his masterpiece ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’- 

“Ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ - ‘Ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence…. Ideological is not ‘false consciousness’ of a social being but this being in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’”. 

Sounds a lot like the matrix doesn’t it? Well, it’s elementary, my dear Watson, for it is our matrix. I know that you’re gonna ask this, - “But wait a minute brilliant Sherlock, don’t you think it’s too far to go from cute cakes to demonizing it into an ideology?”, to which I reply “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact, obviously. Cakes don’t form an entire ideology, John, they are a part of it, an apparatus, and the game is afoot.” Cakes are a part of an ideological apparatus, for it clearly has a material existence and also has turned itself into a bourgeoisie fetish, a necessity. Althusser (1971) mentions “The ultimate condition of production is therefore the production of the conditions of production”. Thus, cakes have produced the conditions needed for production, ranging from birthdays, weddings, parties, many festivals, etc. It will keep itself going forever,  making it ‘eternal’, the way Althusser would put it. To paraphrase Rick Sanchez (from Rick and Morty), that’s just ideology with extra steps. Take the case of organic food, for example. The REAL world is troubled with problems like climate change and oh I don’t know - THE EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE!, but the way ideology gets rid of this real from our conscience is through the illusion of organic food. So that way you think you’re saving the earth and also producing new conditions of production. Well you’ve done your part, phew long day eh? 

That’s how it operates with cakes too, the real exists but ideology allows us to modify that to our needs, be it cake without sugar or cake for vegans or cake without cake for that matter. Although we can have cakes without cake, we can’t have events without cakes. A birthday party, for example, without a cake would make a lot of people really uncomfortable and anxious and clueless. There’s one major event of [almost] every birthday party - cutting of the cake, the absence of this act would make us face the real, of how structure can be in a different way than we have all accepted and that’s what causes the discomfort. If I may get interdisciplinary, this ideology takes the place of our superego, our ethical agency, and decides what’s right and what’s wrong [for us, for the world and for the really ‘real’]. It would be a very interesting idea to study this transition in Indian context. In places where this cake cutting ritual isn’t practiced, it would be a good idea to see how the superego gets affected once ideology swoops in and takes over. Since the time cakes have been introduced to India, it has transformed itself into the middle classes’ illusion of being an elite, the unattainable object of desire (as I’ll talk about that next), while forming new identities by adopting it as one’s own. Säävälä (2009) mentions this - “They [Indians] are both having their cake and eating it too – giving a high value to certain practices that manifest their Indianness, such as concern for vegetarian versus non-vegetarian distinctions, while playing with features that refer to their competence in. Western cultural imagery, such as cutting a birthday cake, without the need to claim an uncontradictory identity. In this respect, they could be called a ‘postmodern’ new middle class compared to the ‘modern’, new Euro-American middle class.”

This commodity fetishism, as Zizek (Hawkes, 2003) calls it, leads to the Lacanian objet a [french for the ‘other object’]  and the jouissance [french for pleasure or enjoyment]. The objet a is the unattainable object of desire. Cakes, in themselves, don’t form the objet a for they’re very much attainable, but the absence of it would cause the problem, as ideology has trained our desires in a certain way. I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t have a cake for my birthday and I think that I would be happy once I get it, but if I already have it, it does not cause any happiness. It’s the negation that matters. The absence of the cake (ideological apparatus), of ideology and the ideological real (as mentioned above) would steal my jouissance (pleasure or happiness) causing discomfort as I stare at everyone singing “Happy Birthday”, not doing anything, just standing. Zizek (1989) mentions that we encounter a phase of fetishistic misrecognition, maybe while being presented with the real. He says “Being-a-king is an effect of the network of social relations between a king and his subjects; but and here is the fetishistic misrecognition to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form:  They think they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to this subjects, a king; as if the determination of ‘being-a-king’ were a natural property of the person of the king.” (1989, p.25).

But I think this is just one kind of misrecognition, the other kind follows a different direction where one assumes the essence one is dependent on the other, for example, the essence of a birthday party (or even a traditional Catholic wedding) is dependent on a cake. Without those commodities, the ideological real is disturbed and the individual is forced to confront the desert of the real, leading to one of the two possibilities - 1) denying the real and claim the ideological real as the real, 2) letting oneself look into the abyss, while it looks back at you, of having the poststructural thought take over you and the way you perceive the ‘real’. 

This structural transformation or negation of the ideological structure would be the most difficult choice because it demands incredulity towards everything you grew up believing was real. I’m well aware of the fact that a commodity like cake is a bourgeoisie tool of control, a biased hegemony if you may, but even then I would be uncomfortable to have my birthday party without one because it’s a reality I’ve accepted for so long and would end up justifying it by saying that I bought it because I like it. To reject this pre-existing ideological real [our matrix] would be a scary venture because we don’t have the answer to the question - “Where do we go from here”, if we reject it. Since Ideology has manipulated the three most [relatively] fundamental things - death, food and sex [in the order of its fundamentality], rejecting it would make us confront the real, and I don't think we're ready for that. The real is like our unconscious, if we become aware of it, we might go crazy for we are forced to confront our deepest sexual desires and fantasies, our true beliefs and fears, the will to die and the will to live, and finally - who we really are.  This leaves us with the final question - ‘Can we leave our Matrix ever?’, answer: who knows, I don't think we've ever seen the really real, and even if we did, we wouldn't recognize it, but maybe one day we will. Until then, imagine Sisyphus is having a cake.

References

 

Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays. London: New Left Books.

Hawkes, D. (2003). Ideology, 2nd Edition. The New Critical Idiom Series. Routledge

Säävälä, M. (2009). Occidentalism and Asian Middle-Class Identities: Notes on Birthday Cakes in an Indian Context. In Kolig E., Angeles V., & Wong S. (Eds.), Identity in Crossroad Civilisations: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalism in Asia (pp. 133-146). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Retrieved January 26, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n248.12

Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology.

Žižek, S. (2002). Welcome to the desert of the real! : five essays on September 11 and related dates. London ; New York :Verso.

Image reference

Doshi, H. (2020). Spoon_it. Retrieved from: https://instagram.com/spoon__it?igshid=1gcgeizvojfbf