Kendrick-Wiesler
Initially, there is not much in the way of comparison between von Donnersmark’s 2006 piece The Lives of Others and Kendrick Lamar’s latest music video, which he has taken to label a short film. Both are anchored by domesticity but are aesthetically and intentionally dissimilar: von Donnersmark’s preoccupation being with the problem of creative and romantic individuality in the face of totalitarianism, while Lamar’s is a lament of the personal traps that such supposed individuality can lead to. One is overtly and broadly political, the other intimate, small and narrow. The nature of the two central relationships differ wildly here too. Georg and Christa-Maria are bound by mutual respect and love - so much so that the latter’s supposed betrayal of the former leads to her to a sort of suicide - while Lamar and Taylour Paige’s nameless couple are caught in a cycle of sexually charged toxic interdependency.
The sole, and vital, point of comparison here is the very end of Lamar’s video: the slow pull backwards that reveals Lamar and Paige to be on a film set. The camera lingers, tying the shorter film to The Lives of Others in the shared idea of a staging, a third party impedes upon both domestic couples. The external directly influences the internal. In the same way that The Lives of Others’ Wiesler presses upon the fate of Georg and Christa-Maria, the invocation of the film set implies a direct relationship between the arguing couple and the all-seeing, floating camera-eye through which their argument takes place.
What these two pieces help draw out is a transition from the kind of centralised, nakedly totalizing ideological and social apparatus that we would associate with Stalinism, and the self-governing, floaty, subjectification we see with late capitalism.
Mummy-Daddy-Wiesler
The Lives of Others focuses on the strange affinity that develops between Wiesler, Georg and Christa-Maria. The former, tasked with surveilling the couple to satisfy the sexual whims of a superior, quickly forms what amounts to an familial triangle with the couple. He wants them to remain together, enamoured by their love in an infantilising empathy, frequently contrasted by his own lonely, bland existence. His attempts to force intimate emotional connections with a prostitute jar significantly with the overt loving ease of the surveilled pair. In this sense, the neurotised ‘coming forth’ of Wiesler’s repressed emotional (and physical) state in relation to the couple positions the triangle as one that is Oedipal.
Like a young child, Wiesler is only able to piece together notions of meaning from the mummy-daddy binary he has been tied to. Scraps of conversations, the full meanings of which are prevented through the exclusively oral and aural nature of the Stasi’s surveillance, inform Wiesler’s actions. However, in a reversal of the triangle, Wiesler is also in a position of significant power over the pair, both literally - he has the power to incarcerate both of them - and spatially - the surveillance takes place in the attic above the bugged apartment. He slides from powerless child to all-seeing father, sometimes in the same scene.
For example, distraught at Christa-Maria’s enforced affair with Hempf, the superior who has ordered the surveillance, Wiesler retreats to a nearby bar after his surveillance shift is over. Christa-Maria, on her way to see Hempf, steps in. Wiesler, posing as a fan, engages her in conversation and encourages her to be herself in an implicit attempt to discourage her meeting with Hempf, Ulrich Mühe expressing the kind of nervous wanting associated with a needy child. In doing so, Wiesler prevents Christa-Maria from her rendezvous. She goes back to Georg, staying with him for the kid. The next day Wiesler returns to his spying from the attic, his fatherly position restored.
But Wiesler is as unwittingly caught in the power relations that inform the triangle as the spied-upon pair.
The Double Bind
Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus is about the State which is also Oedipus. As the original figure of social repression, they argue, Oedipus is the figure in the unconscious that produces repression and, when spread across the body of the socius - what they refer to as a ‘body without organs’ - creates a repressive society. A feature of Oedipus’ functioning, an originally linguistic feature they take from Bateson, is the double bind:
the simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which contradicts the other . . . oedipalizing par excellence . . . an oscillation between two poles: the neurotic identification and the internalization that is said to be normative. On either side is Oedipus
In this sense Zizek is very close to Deleuze and Guatarri when he argues that ideology reveals itself in its contradictions, when subjects know that they are in the midst of ideology, oscillating between the contradicting poles of agency (‘money is a construct’) and non-agency (‘I know, let’s grab a Starbucks’).
Inasmuch that Wiesler desires the couple to remain together while operating under the auspices of an intention to pull them apart; as much that he internalizes the role of a child while neurotically wielding the power of the father; and that the major actions that Wiesler takes have the opposite intended consequences; we can see that a becoming of a near-perfect agent of state power, carrying out its aims with a deterministic lack of agency masquerading as control.
An example. When Georg and his dissident comrades need to test whether Georg’s apartment is bugged, so as to use it as a base for anti-Soviet activity, Wiesler’s well-meaning intervention inadvertently maintains the interest of the State whilst directly impeding upon Georg (and by extension Christa-Maria). Georg’s plan is to openly and falsely discuss the smuggling of a defector to the West, without actually smuggling him. If the Stasi are listening, the plan goes, then they would intercept the supposed vehicle, alerting Georg to the presence of State surveillance. If they are not intercepted, the apartment is not bugged. In an attempt to protect Georg, Wiesler allows the ‘smuggling’ to take place, creating the false impression that Georg’s apartment is clean, allowing the Stasi’s surveillance to continue.
Indeed, the film’s tragic climax follows this structure of the double bind. The typewriter Georg has used to produce an anti-Soviet Der Spiegel article, the smoking bullet Hempf can use to put Georg away, is hidden from Wiesler and the State until the film’s end. In an interrogation of Christa-Maria carried out by Wiesler (yet another reversal of the mummy-daddy-me triangle, the mirroring between the bar scene is clear), the location of the typewriter is revealed. In an attempt to save Georg before the authorities arrive, Wiesler rushes to the apartment and removes the typewriter. When the authorities, and Christa-Maria, arrive and reveal the typewriter’s hiding place, she is overcome by guilt - thinking the typewriter has been found - and rushes into the road to be killed by an oncoming truck. In trying to prevent the dissolution of the couple, Wiesler hastens their end. Again, his actions are caught in a double bind of State power that seems to continuously reach its desired ends.
Wiesler as Performance
I focus on the dissolution of the couple here because it ties into the Lamar video thematically, even if the video is more a portrayal of a dissolution denied: a dissolution that should arrive but fails to, starting the wheels on another dissolution/reformation cycle. The question then becomes with the Lamar video: who is Wiesler? Where Christa-Maria and Georg have a concrete State apparatus - personified, denied and reified in Wiesler - to point to as an image of power. Who can Lamar and Paige point to? Who is their daddy?
Initially I had seen the camera’s omnipotence and single-take framing as an indication of a kind of audience complicity. In the same way that a child cannot do anything to prevent its parents arguing, the camera is suspended as a helpless onlooker as the pair savage each other. The pan out, revealing the stage, indicating a message of a kind of panopticonic neurosis that is embedded and self-governing and does not need the presence of a Wiesler to operate. It is this similar sliding between father and child that I saw a kind of embedded Oedipus, the camera’s view both helpless and all-knowing.
What undercuts this, however, is that fundamental lack of action that is so intrinsic to the Wiesler portrayal. While Wiesler is helpless to an extent, he is still able to push upon the couple from the outside. The camera is unable to do this, it’s influence no more felt by the couple than its own presence.
I think instead this is not necessarily about surveillance, or much about power either, with Lamar and Paige. It is instead about performativity, of control exercised upon the sound stage of expectation. Here control is exercised in a self-governing manner, but takes place not as a kind of internalized coercion (or Oedipus), as in Foucault or Deleuze’s Society of Control where there is a kind of invisible prison warden encouraging complicity. Instead it is a control predicated on the idea that both member of the couple should be better: be a better boyfriend, be a better girlfriend.
A look at the lyrics here indicates the source of dysfunction:
Forever late for shit, won't buy shit, sit around and deny shit (man)
. . .
Bitches starin' at me in Zara, hoes scratchin' my cars up
Shoulda followed my mind in '09 and just moved to Georgia
. . .
Bitch, you power trippin' or guilt trippin'? I held yo' ass down
You just kept me down, that's a big difference
Stressin' myself tryna figure why I'm not good enough
Goin' to church, prayin' for you, searchin' for good in us
In these cases we can see that it is the striving to be better that is a source of neurosis. It is the search for good that keeps them in a situation which is clearly the opposite, and the performativity indicated by the film set that positions this very search as something fabricated - going to church in this sense is a performance, it’s what she should do. Anyone who has been in these kind of arguments knows that, underpinning all of the anger and the strife, there is a reflexive sense that things should and can be different. The source of this kind of interdependency is, always, the expectation that things will improve and the psychopathic, anticipatory performance that this creates.
Kendrick-Wiesler
In Lamar Wiesler becomes an abstraction contingent upon performativity in the same way that Fordism becomes post-Fordism. Wiesler engenders this performativity in The Lives of Others - I remind you of the ‘false smuggling’ scene and the pervading sense of ‘keeping up appearances’ that characterises the film - but with Lamar this performativity becomes the entirety of the couple’s relationship. It is their composition, both on the level of form and content. As capital continues to decentralise, it becomes reliant upon this kind of self-engendered performative control to subjectivise and organize those beneath it. See, for example, Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. There is no need for a performance-encouraging State surveillance if you feel the pressure to perform as everyone else does: the happy couple, the good boyfriend, the good worker.
By explicating this performativity at the end of the video, Lamar is making attempts to remind the audience of their own performativity. However, like the double bind of Oedipus, drawing attention to this kind of performativity is not enough: oscillation between knowledge and action still plays out on the stage of ideological governance. And while that sounds glum (it is), the passage in which Deleuze and Guatarri address this double bind also hints at a way out, the production of the schizo, the anoedipal UberMensch:
if a schizo is produced here as an entity, this occurs for the simple reason that there is not other means of escaping this double path, where normality is no less blocked than neurosis, and the solution offers no more of a way out than does the problem
The way through is a way out, a regression. A retreat to the body without organs from which the issue sprung and that contains all the potentiality for difference: a different performance, a different relationship. What is key here is that the way through the double bind is immanent to the double bind itself, the answer is within it. A toxic relationship can be ended, in this case it is a matter of changing the script.
