Occasionally, Freud can sound surprisingly (well, vaguely) like Marx:
.If a culture has not yet got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share
But of course, they do share these commodities, only at the level of the image. As we know, modern technologies of reproduction mean that the semblance of things can be skimmed off them and sold as a commodity. Not wealth itself, not success, not jouissance, creative fulfilment etc but the electronic facsimiles thereof is what we are sold. There is indeed a world where people are happy, rich, where they experience intense sexual pleasure and careless freedom. It is not ours, but this does not matter, its windows are curtainless and we have that historically unique and sovereign freedom: the freedom to watch.
And gradually, our responses as watchers are folded back into the spectacle watched. An early example of this was canned laughter: someone else laughs on our behalf. Who is this someone? It is the technology itself, the machine. And isn’t ‘Big Brother’ amongst other things a kind of ‘canned boredom’ – we watch others being bored, as it were, on our behalf. Zizek notes that the original model for this was the phenomenon of designated mourners hired to cry at funerals in certain cultures. The purpose of this (to us) strange ritual was to externalise one’s grief, delegate it onto a kind of exterior apparatus (ie another human being). Someone else does for us. Research showed that although people watching comedy shows with canned laughter laughed less, the physiological effects were as if they had indeed laughed. Ditto with the hired mourners. The logic is partly that of the Tibetan prayer wheel: we insert a piece of paper with a prayer into a mechanical wheel, we turn the wheel and the prayer is relayed to the appropriate authority – the prayer wheel preys for us (this is another of Zizek’s examples). The logic of the Tibetan prayer wheel is increasingly that of post-modern culture as a whole - we delegate to the electronic apparatus what we previously did ourselves.
Freud continues:
It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants, driving them to rebellion, neither has nor deserves the chance of a lasting existence.