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Real Virtuality: Slavoj Zizek and
"Post-Ideological" Ideology
James S. Hurley
University of Richmond
jhurley@richmond.edu
� 1998 James S. Hurley.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
1. Richard Rorty has for the last several years been advising
intellectuals on the left to "start talking about greed and
selfishness rather than about bourgeois ideology, about
starvation wages and layoffs rather than about the
commodification of labor, and about differential per-pupil
expenditure on schools and differential access to health care
rather than about the division of society into classes" (229).
All of those old Marxist buzz-phrases on the back-end of Rorty's
parallelisms are, he argues, the unfortunate baggage of the
revolutionary romanticism attached to Marx-Leninism, and speak,
more than anything else, to a delusional self-importance on the
part of leftists who have wanted to cast themselves as heroic
players on the world-historical stage. For Rorty, this kind of
discourse was never very good at achieving what it ostensibly
wanted to in the first place; now that Marxism has been
universally discredited, this discourse is less useful and more
masturbatory than ever. But do progressive critics and theorists
really have to make Rorty's severe amputational choice? And
indeed, might such a choice finally be less a pragmatic,
smell-the-coffee adjustment to present-day political realities,
enabling the left to further its goals more effectively, than it
is the carrying out of a sort of Solomonic chop, sundered
progressive baby going out with the bloody bath water?
2. Slavoj Zizek insists on speaking in much of the Marxist language
Rorty repudiates. Beginning with his 1989 book The Sublime Object
of Ideology, Zizek has produced a large and remarkable body of
work, arguing (among other things) that in order for the left
really to address the kinds of social inequities that Rorty
enumerates, it must take into account the ways in which
capitalism and its current political support system (a.k.a.
"liberal democracy") attempt to maintain their smooth functioning
by constructing self-naturalizing horizons of belief and
practice. Whereas thinkers such as Rorty and J�gen Habermas pin
their egalitarian social/political hopes on a view of language as
a relatively unproblematic instrument that merely needs to be put
to the right (which is to say, left) uses,[1] Zizek, following
Jacques Lacan, sees language as necessarily partial, occlusive,
deformed by some "pathological twist." These deformations and
blockages are for Zizek ideological, are indeed the very logic
and structure of ideology, in that they obscure the antagonisms
and contradictions that systems of power both require and yet
cannot truly acknowledge if they are to operate successfully.
3. Zizek's most recent book, The Plague of Fantasies, takes its
title from a line in Petrarch, and refers, as Zizek puts it, to
"images which blur one's clear reasoning"; this plague, he says,
"is brought to its extreme in today's audiovisual media" (1).
According to Zizek, his new book "approaches systematically, from
a Lacanian viewpoint, the presuppositions of this 'plague of
fantasies'" (1), but I suspect that we encounter in this last
claim some of the impish wit that is part of what makes his work
so enjoyable. Zizek has said elsewhere that his books operate
along the lines of CD-ROMs: "click here, go there, use this
fragment, that story or scene."[2] This dislocative approach was
evident in even his earliest work; in his more recent books,
however--those following 1993's Tarrying with the
Negative--Zizek's mode of theorizing has grown increasingly
urgent and frenetic, the collage-like argumentational strategies
of the earlier books becoming in the later well-nigh
kaleidoscopic. In The Plague of Fantasies, this freneticism and
urgency take their most pronounced form to date; his
argumentational zigzags and narratological discontinuities here
become positively vertiginous, to the point where the text
effectively forestalls accurate or even adequate summary, snaking
away from all attempts at a synoptic grasp. If this book is
systematic, it is so according to a rather eccentric systemic
logic. In reviewing Plague of Fantasies, then, I don't want to
offer a strict explication of the text's highly intricate
theoretical apparatus (although this very intricacy means that
some explication is in order); rather, I wish to place its
theoretical insights in the context of the urgency I've described
above, whose concomitant is the text's seeming
self-discombobulation. Plague of Fantasies, I will argue, shows
Zizek in something of a theoretical deadlock: he unfolds in this
text a theory of the workings of postmodern ideology that is
often breathtaking in its scope and acuity; but his theory also
constructs for itself what may be its own greatest stumbling
block, causing it to fall into a logic uncomfortably close to
that of the ideology he critiques.
4. Within Plague of Fantasies' argumentational vortex, I want to
isolate three points to which Zizek recurs in various and
entangling ways, momentarily disentangling them here for purposes
of clarity. First, the collapse of the Stalinist Eastern bloc has
brought with it the apparently across-the-board disabling of
Marxism as a viable geopolitical force. Zizek suggests that this
has eliminated for the capitalist West its only competing,
full-scale politico-economic model of modernization, leaving it
instead with a number of less monolithic adversaries it can
characterize as atavistically "premodern"--the multiple
fundamentalisms, nationalisms, "tribalisms," and their
metonymically associated "terrorist" groups and movements--and
thus demonize as wholly external forces of irrationality. The
supposedly bounded liberal-democratic "inside" of the capitalist
socius is then in contrast presented as a space of unambiguous
progress, pragmatic reason, and "common sense"--as a
"non-ideological" or "post-ideological" zone. It should go
without saying that for Zizek this zone is as ideological as ever
(if not more so).
5. Second, accompanying this collapse of Marxism as active
geopolitical presence and the concomitant move in the West to a
post-ideological self-representation has been the implicit or
explicit abandonment of ideology as a tool for cultural analysis
by progressive Western critics (especially those in
Anglo-American humanities departments). In place of ideology
critique, many left cultural critics have turned to one or
another spin on Gramsci's notion of hegemony (e.g., Laclau and
Mouffe; the legatees of the Birmingham school) or Foucault's of
micropolitics (as in much queer theory, somatic theory, etc.). In
Zizek's view, these are modes of critique that, however well
intentioned, finally work in the service of capitalist liberal
democracy rather than in opposition to it.
6. Finally, this ostensibly post-ideological moment is also, for
Zizek, a charged economico-technological one in which new
mediatic spaces and practices such as the Internet enable the
Symbolic Order--i.e., ideology--to inscribe itself isotopically
on and in subjects' most intimate bodily zones and deepest
libidinal recesses. But this facilitation of the Symbolic Order's
full colonization of the subject opens up a paradoxical problem,
in that these postmodern technologies also bring the subject into
dangerously close proximity to objet a, the "sublime object" that
is ideology's phantasmatic place-holder, thus threatening to
collapse the distance between the subject and the sublime object
that ideology requires in order to maintain itself as a frame
within which the subject's psychosocial fantasies are organized
and managed.
7. Of these three points, it is the first that is most familiar to
us from Zizek's other work (this is one of the reasons he so
often returns to the military conflicts in the Balkans as a
tribalistic fantasy for the West), and it is the third that he
addresses at greatest length in Plague of Fantasies. But it is
the second that is most surprising, and perhaps finally most
pivotal, in that Zizek, while never a neo-Gramscian, has
typically (and often voluntarily) been associated with the
post-Marxism whose great avatars are Laclau and Mouffe.[3] In his
recent work, however, Zizek has been increasingly prone to talk
in a theoretical language largely alien to post-Marxism, a
language of "totality," "late capitalism," and "class antagonism"
which seems much more consonant with that of, say, Fredric
Jameson than it does with that of Laclau, Mouffe, Tony Bennett,
Michele Barrett, et al. Indeed, in Plague of Fantasies, Zizek
emphasizes late capitalism's status as "global system," and its
predication on economic struggle--and the need for left critics
in general to do likewise--with a frequency and specificity we
have not seen matched in his earlier work,[4] and it is worth
looking at his treatment of this problematic at some length.
Zizek writes that,
according to Hegel, the inherent structural dynamic of civil
society necessarily gives rise to a class which is excluded
from its benefits (work, personal dignity, etc.)--a class
deprived of elementary human rights, and therefore also
exempt from duties towards society, an element within civil
society which negates its universal principle, a kind of
"non-Reason inherent in Reason itself"--in short, its
symptom. Do we not witness the same phenomenon in today's
growth of the underclass which is excluded, sometimes even
for generations, from the benefits of liberal-democratic
affluent society? Today's "exceptions" (the homeless, the
ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are the symptom of the
late-capitalist universal system, the permanent reminder of
how the immanent logic of late capitalism works. (127)
Zizek goes on to say that capitalist liberal democracy addresses
its own structurally necessary inequities by positing patently
insufficient solutions: in the United States, for example,
conservatives typically claim that such gross inequities would be
abolished through the assumption by these social "exceptions" of
greater responsibility for themselves and through stronger
adherence to "traditional values"; liberals, for their part,
argue that such inequities would be remedied through appropriate
welfare-statist moves. Both "solutions," of course, are doomed to
fail and thus guaranteed to maintain these economic imbalances,
in that, whatever their superficial differences, both look to the
symptom rather than to "the inherent structural dynamic" itself.
Moreover, Zizek sees left coalition politics, its radical
ambitions notwithstanding, as informed by this same logic:
it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity
of the [socio-economic] situation, all particular
progressive fights will never be united, that "wrong" chains
of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of
the fight for African-American ethnic identity with
patriarchal and homophobic attitudes), but rather that
occurrences of "wrong" enchainments are grounded in the very
structuring principle of today's progressive politics of
establishing "chains of equivalences": the very domain of
the multitude of particular struggles, with their
continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is
sustained by the "repression" of the key role of economic
struggle. The leftist politics of the "chains of
equivalences" among the plurality of struggles is strictly
correlative to the abandonment of capitalism as a global
economic system--that is, to the tacit acceptance of
capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic
politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life.
(128)
These comments have a striking, literal centrality to Zizek's
text that underscores their significance, appearing at almost
precisely Plague of Fantasies' mid-point, and they give us, I
think, a clue to the synoptic difficulty of Zizek's later work,
and to that of Plague of Fantasies in particular. Like Jameson,
whose theorizations often similarly resist summary, Zizek is
attempting to think the global system of postmodern capitalism
even as it necessarily outruns and outflanks his thinking (we
meet here, of course, our old friend, cognitive mapping and its
discontents), but he is doing so in a way that takes the system's
elusiveness into account by writing it, in a kind of invisible
ink, into his own theoretical dislocations and interstices. This
is to say that we can view the nearly hypomanic discursive and
argumentational approach of Plague of Fantasies as a strategy
that mimetically internalizes what Zizek wants to see as the
absent cause--i.e., the Real--in the structure of late capitalist
societies: the totality of late capital itself.
8. Indeed, looked at even more specifically in terms of their
placement in the text, the passages I've quoted above take on
greater importance still: They introduce Zizek's chapter on
cyberspace, in which he charts the effects on postmodern
subjectivities of the new technologies of postmodernity, and
directly follow his chapter "Fetishism and its Vicissitudes," in
which he examines the historically distinct workings of commodity
fetishism in the postmodern moment. They then act as a hinge
between--and, I would argue, theoretico-political frame
for--Zizek's most sustained discussions of late capitalism's
vastly expanded reification of contemporary life, and of the
material instrumentalities--the hardware and the software--that
have facilitated that reification.
9. In "Fetishism and its Vicissitudes," Zizek returns to and then
significantly extends some territory he has covered in previous
works. Postmodernity, he argues, is a moment of "cynical reason"
in which subjects no longer believe the official line delivered
by society's authorizing institutions; it is now taken for
granted that governments routinely dissemble and that advertisers
perpetrate shams. But this disbelief does not bring with it a
freeing from or resistance to ideology. Instead subjects respond
according to the fetishistic logic of disavowal: "I know what I'm
doing is meaningless, but I do it nonetheless." Zizek argues that
postmodern ideology's crucial mystifying move is its own
"demystification"--that ideology paradoxically maintains its
misrecognizing force over subjects by exposing its own
operations. In one of the book's most concise yet far-reaching
sentences he writes, "The central paradox (and perhaps the most
succinct definition) of postmodernity is that the very process of
production, the laying-bare of its mechanism, functions as the
fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of the form, that is
of the social mode of production" (102). Zizek addresses here a
number of contemporary cultural phenomena, such as
self-lampooning advertisements that call attention to their own
hyperbole, and the "bloopers" and "behind-the-scenes" television
shows that reveal the artifice of culture-industry productions,
the laying-bare of such mechanisms in no way endangering the
commodity status of the advertised product or the movie or TV
show whose seams and imperfections have been opened to view. What
happens in these cases, according to Zizek, is a kind of double
disavowal: the disavowal by the cynical postmodern subject I've
mentioned above, but also a disavowal by the Symbolic Order, by
ideology itself. Zizek follows Lacan, of course, in seeing the
Symbolic Order's existence as predicated on a castrating cut
which forever separates it from the Real; however, the Symbolic
Order arrogates authority to itself by bandaging this cut with
the objet petit a, the "sublime object" which "hold[s] the place
of some structural impossibility, while simultaneously disavowing
this impossibility" (76). In revealing its own processes of
production, the Symbolic Order, like Dirk Diggler at the end of
Boogie Nights, in effect whips it out--the Symbolic Order
demonstrates that it isn't castrated, that it does possess the
phallus ("I have nothing to hide! Come and watch the messy
procreative reality that is at work in the production of the
commodity!"). But again like Boogie Nights' Dirk (although we
should now say Mark Wahlberg), the phallus flaunted here is a
fake, a prosthesis, another sublime object set into place to
occlude ideology's unsymbolizable Real, the total system
itself.[5] As Zizek writes, "the postmodern transparency of the
process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the
immaterial virtual order which runs the show" (103).
10. Zizek's language here--"immaterial virtual order"--immediately
begs some serious materialist questions: how can an ostensibly
Marxist theory of ideology have as its linchpin something virtual
and immaterial? Is not this total system a vast, fantastically
complicated, yet finally and irreducibly material network of
economic mechanisms and political switch-points?[6] One of
Zizek's most important moves in Plague of Fantasies is to go some
way towards answering such questions. The Real for Zizek is
immaterial in the sense that it is inaccessible to and thus
unknowable by the Symbolic--the Symbolic can only "virtualize"
the Real, can only posit an inadequate simulacrum of it. And the
Real is transhistorical in that it has a purely "formal"
existence apart from and parallel to any symbolization, whatever
its historical site. Crucial to keep in mind, however, is that
the Real does not pre-exist the Symbolic, but comes into being at
the same time as the Symbolic: the subject does not leave upon
entry into the Symbolic some discrete psychic space that had been
and continues to be the Real; rather, the subject leaves a space
that upon entry into the Symbolic retroactively becomes the Real.
We can then think of the Real as both transhistorical and
historically contingent, that is to say, as something that
inevitably exists as long as the Symbolic Order does, but that
exists differently for different Symbolic Orders--each
historically specific articulation of the Symbolic brings into
being its own historically specific Real. Zizek points to exactly
this in Plague of Fantasies, and moreover points to the
historical specificity of our own current, "post-ideological"
Real when he writes that
[o]ne of the commonplaces of the contemporary
'post-ideological' attitude is that today, we have more or
less outgrown divisive political fictions (of class
struggle, etc.) and reached political maturity, which
enables us to focus on real problems (ecology, economic
growth, etc.) relieved of their ideological ballast.... One
could... claim that what the 'post-ideological' attitude of
the sober, pragmatic approach to reality excludes as 'old
ideological fictions' of class antagonisms, as the domain of
'political passions' which no longer have any place in
today's rational social administration, is the historical
Real itself. (163)
11. There are then two valences to this charged, idealist terminology
upon which Zizek's discussion hangs. The order which runs the
show is virtual because in its ideological casting of itself it
follows the logic of the fetish, constructing a fantasy frame
that "possiblizes" an impossible structure. And it is further
virtual in that the sheer immensity of this order as global
system overwhelms attempts to accurately trace or even adequately
imagine its operations--to return to Jameson's term, it defies
cognitive mapping--so that it can only be thought or imaged
(Jameson would say allegorized) as impoverishing simulacrum or,
alternatively, amorphous, God-like force.[7]
12. But in his chapter "Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of
Being," Zizek develops a third valence for this terminology,
suggesting that, through its deployment of the new technologies
of postmodernity, this order realizes the oxymoron of being
actually virtual--that these technologies materialize virtuality.
Zizek is quick to acknowledge the benefits offered by
cybertechnologies: they create new modalities for the performing
of certain tasks, facilitate the enjoyment of powerful pleasures,
etc. But against postmodern celebrants of the liberatory
potential of cyberspace, Zizek urges that we take a
"conservative" position towards it; cyberspace, he argues, is an
unheimlich place in which we should resist making ourselves too
readily at home. This is so not because virtual reality differs
radically from social reality, but because virtual reality
carries the phantasmatic logic of social reality to its extreme
(in this way cyberspace is literally unheimlich, simultaneously
familiar and unfamiliar). For Zizek, cyberspace "radicalizes the
gap" that is constitutive of subjectivity, externally
materializing in the VR universe the subject's ego, which in the
Lacanian formulation functions for the subject as an intrapsychic
alterity, the ego existing as the "self" from which the subject
is internally split. VR's radicalization/externalization of this
gap replicates and displaces the subject's ego--with all of its
apparent Cartesian self-consistency--into the symbolic regime
outside the subject proper, producing a kind of doppelg�ger
effect: the subject at once has a detachable, surrogate self,
able to engage in all manner of activities unavailable to the
subject in the non-virtual world; but the freeing-up of this
externalized alter-ego has the consequence of locating agency
outside the subject itself, in this way situating the subject so
that it is vulnerable to control or manipulation from its own
exteriorized self, this a result of the exteriorized self's
vulnerability to manipulation or control within the virtual
universe. As Zizek puts it, "Since my cyberspace agent is an
external program which acts on my behalf, decides what
information I will see and read, and so on, it is easy to imagine
the paranoiac possibility of another computer program controlling
and directing my agent unbeknownst to me--if this happens, I am,
as it were, dominated from within; my own ego is no longer mine"
(142).
13. Cyberspace thus presents a heightened version of what Zizek sees
as a key tendential shift characterizing the logic and life-world
of postmodernity: the greatly increased handing-over of the
subject's "self" to the Symbolic Order, which
virtualizes/realizes that self in the subject's stead. Zizek
argues that what is often viewed as the most emancipating aspect
of postmodern technologies--their seemingly bi-lateral,
interactive relation with the subject--must also be seen as the
very opposite: the liberating interactivity subjects experience
with postmodern technologies is at the same time a troubling
"interpassivity." The ability of postmodern technologies to
construct and mobilize a surrogate self for the subject means
that even as the subject is "active" in ways previously
unimaginable, its capacity to "passively enjoy" its widened field
of experiences resides in this surrogate self, in the Symbolic
Order--the Symbolic Order finally "enjoys" for and in place of
the subject. In an example that will resonate with any serious
movie fan, Zizek describes a common dilemma: there is never
enough time to watch all the movies one tapes off of cable
television; week after week the movie-lover tapes more films than
he or she can possibly see, to the point that stacks of unwatched
videos come to fill the movie-lover's living space (and yet the
taping continues). But these stacks of unviewed tapes are
themselves a source of enjoyment, in that the film fan takes
satisfaction in his/her mere possession of and proximity to this
largely unseen archive of movie classics. For Zizek, the true
locus of enjoyment here is in the VCR itself, stand-in for the
Symbolic Order, which has "watched" the films for a subject who
is too busy to do so. The consequences drawn from this apparently
inconsequential sliver of postmodern life are crucial. "In the
case of interpassivity," writes Zizek, "I am passive through the
other--that is, I accede to the other the passive aspect (of
enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to
work in the evening while the VCR passively enjoys for me...)....
[T]he so-called threat of the new media lies in the fact that
they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive
experience, and thus prepare us for... mindless frenetic
activity" (115, 122, original emphasis).
14. When boosters of cyberspace enthuse over its radical unburdening
of the subject through the interactive technologies coming soon
to a virtual universe near you, they obscure this forfeiture and
relocation of the subject's self, agency, and enjoyment. In so
doing they are complicit with (or are unabashedly promoting)
postmodern capitalism's ideological self-projection as an
absolutely open space of interchange among identically able and
valued subjects, as a socio-economic order undarkened by
conflicts or blockages; cyberspace becomes, in this rendering,
the model--the attainable ideal--for what Bill Gates has called
"friction-free capitalism." Zizek cites this phrase from Gates to
great effect, extrapolating from it a devastating critique of the
ideological operations it embeds and enacts:
the "friction" we get rid of in the fantasy of
"friction-free capitalism" does not only refer to the
reality of material obstacles which sustain any exchange
process but, above all, to the Real of the traumatic social
antagonisms, power relations, and so on which brand the
space of social exchange with a pathological twist. In his
Grundrisse manuscript, Marx pointed out how the very
material mechanism of a nineteenth-century industrial
production site directly materializes the capitalist
relationship of domination (the worker as a mere appendix
subordinated to the machinery which is owned by the
capitalist); mutatis mutandis, the very same goes for
cyberspace: in the social conditions of late capitalism, the
very materiality of cyberspace automatically generates the
illusory abstract space of "friction-free" exchange in which
the particularity of the participants' social position is
obliterated. (156)
Zizek presents a gloomy prospect here of a massive phantasmatic
externalization of an always already phantasmatic subjectivity, a
shift from an intra-virtualized subjectivity to an
extra-virtualized one that is effectively bereft of self-hood or
agency. The Gatesian promise of postmodern capitalism would seem
for Zizek to leave just the faintest trace of subjectivity,
subjectivity existing, if at all, as a virtual image of a virtual
image, a simulacral remnant kept in place only to maintain the
smooth running of the system.[8]
15. Zizek, however, concludes this chapter on cyberspace--which is
"officially" Plague of Fantasies' final chapter (three appendices
follow)--by posing a surprisingly hopeful question. "Perhaps," he
asks,
radical virtualization--the fact that the whole of reality
will soon be "digitalized," transcribed, redoubled in the
"Big Other" of cyberspace--will somehow redeem "real life,"
opening it up to a new perception, just as Hegel already had
the presentiment that the end of art (as the "sensible
appearing of the Idea"), which occurs when the Idea
withdraws from the sensible medium into its more direct
conceptual expression, simultaneously liberates sensibility
from the constraints of Idea? (164)
In order to understand this unexpectedly optimistic note, we
might keep in mind the Nietzschean/Derridean axiom that "truths
are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten."[9] For
Zizek, we are in the transitional moment of "forgetting" the
virtuality of cyberspace: the continuing novelty of cyberspace
reminds us of its virtual status; but users' growing familarity
with cyberspace, and the promotional discourses of its celebrants
and gatekeepers, threaten to routinize it to the point that its
self-evident virtuality will recede--virtual reality will come to
seem as commonplace and "natural" as social reality. When Zizek
argues that our attitude toward cyberspace should be
conservative, it is because we are currently in a position in
which we can observe a Symbolic Order in its making; by focusing
on the nascency and incompletion of the virtual universe, we
sustain our own awareness of its phantasmatic constructedness.
And by seeing the virtual universe as a Symbolic Order that is in
process, not yet fully set into place, we can read virtual
reality back onto our own social reality, and see that it, too,
is a Symbolic Order that shares this same virtual logic, but a
Symbolic Order whose virtuality has been heretofore forgotten.
16. This virtualization of the Symbolic, though, poses its own
hazards, for if on the one hand it can show the fictionality
(i.e., ideological constructedness) of social reality, and point
subjects to the historical Real post-ideological ideology
represses, on the other it can move subjects into overclose
proximity to the formal Real, the unsymbolizable swirl of
pulsions that subjectivity must foreclose if it is to remain
ontologically consistent. For Zizek, the key dilemma of
postmodernity might be expressed as follows: the ongoing
virtualization of reality allows subjects to see the sublime
object as arbitrary ideological place-holder bearing no intrinsic
value or meaning; but having lost the object which kept the
Symbolic Order intact, the potential is then opened up for the
subject to fully accede to the Real--a "hole" now appears in the
fabric of the subject's reality that threatens to precipitate its
whole-cloth unraveling. Postmodern subjects therefore find
themselves in a situation that is simultaneously promising and
imperiling. Promising, in that subjects have the foregrounded
possibility of negotiating an appropriate distance from the
sublime object and the Real it occludes, one that will allow them
to see the ideological contours of their social reality, and thus
allow them to intervene in that reality in ways they otherwise
could not, but that will also permit accession to the virtuality
of their own subjectivity, to the truth of self-hood being its
orchestration through a fantasy frame. Imperiling, because at the
same time, subjects stand a heightened chance for the
disintegration of subjectivity, the virtualization of their
reality causing the fantasy frame that sustains them as subjects
to collapse, leaving them in the incoherent and paralyzing space
of the Real.
17. Zizek argues that the question of the subject's appropriate
position in relation to Symbolic versus Real is finally one of
ethical choice. In the final section of Plague of Fantasies, the
appendix entitled, "The Unconscious Law: Beyond an Ethics of the
Good," Zizek, in order to establish the conceptual framework and
psychic economy within which such a choice must take place, turns
to Kant's theory of radical evil and Hegel's "corrective" reading
of that theory. In what is, to the best of my recall, the most
compressed twenty-eight pages in his corpus, Zizek relentlessly
reads Kant and Hegel against each other, augmenting this reading
with brief side-trips into Pascal, Arendt, Lacan, Deleuze,
Laclau, and even John Silber. I will not attempt, in this limited
space, to unpack Zizek's argument in "The Unconscious Law,"
(although I will return to the tortuousness of its articulation,
in that here we see the "urgency" and "freneticism" I've remarked
in this text taken to near-scarifying extreme), except to note
that it hinges on where for Kant and Hegel the line between
subject and object should be drawn, where it is that the Law thus
resides, and what is therefore the subject's proper relation to
the Law. Although it is an appendix, and therefore implicitly
given a "semi-autonomous" status in relation to the main body of
the text, in which is ostensibly contained Zizek's argument per
se, "The Unconscious Law" is where he comes closest to attempting
to resolve the multiple dilemmas, paradoxes, and contradictions
he has unspooled throughout Plague of Fantasies. But despite its
obligatory examination of the Holocaust and the evil of the
ideology that produced it, this appendix plays out largely at the
level of the individual subject. That is to say that while the
pressing issues for postmodernity Zizek addresses in Plague of
Fantasies are structural and even global in nature (class
struggle, capitalism as total system, the ideological configuring
of cyberspace, postmodernity's cynical transparency, hegemony as
model for social critique, etc.) he moves at the book's
conclusion to a privativistic theoretical space: the subject's
ethical self-positioning in relation to Symbolic and Real--and
thus to the virtual order running the postmodern show--becomes
here a kind of higher-stakes lifestyle choice.
18. My objection to this final move in Plague of Fantasies is not
that Zizek insists on addressing the ways in which ideological
forces operate at the level of the intrapsychic; Zizek's tracing
of these operations is in fact one of the appeals of his theory,
providing a component that is missing from, say, Foucault's
theory of power, in which the subject's interior life is elided
almost entirely. What bothers me about this move, and in this it
is rather typical of Zizek's work, is its implication that it is
ultimately the intrapsychic where the ideological action is,
including, presumably, the action that can problematize and
constructively modify ideology's interpellative precepts. In
reframing the larger structural questions he has so frequently
and provocatively raised in Plague of Fantasies in terms of the
individual subject's ethical choice, Zizek achieves a position at
the end of the book that is, curiously, a kind of "Lacanized"
existentialism: what is imperative for the subject is a
self-constitutive choice in the face of a spiritually
impoverished and politically disempowering life-world; but unlike
the autonomous, self-identical subjectivity that is the Sartrean
ideal, the Zizekian subject's self-constitution results from an
act of willing self-destitution, an acceptance of the primordial
splitting that is subjectivity's necessary condition of
existence. In the context of the dropping from Zizek's discussion
of the "global" issues he has raised, the famous Lacanian symbol
for this split subjectivity--$--seems, unfortunately, all too
appropriate: Zizek's theorization of postmodern subjectivity may
finally accord even better with the privatizing logic of
postmodern capitalism and liberal democracy than does the
neo-Gramscian model of left-alliance politics he criticizes.
19. But as problematic and disappointing as this position may be,
Plague of Fantasies, through its very formal (dis)organization,
complicates our seeing it as Zizek's final and finalizing word. I
return again to the extraordinary compression I've noted in this
appendix: one of the reasons it is so dense is that Zizek
insists, to an almost feverish degree, on rephrasing, reframing,
and repositioning virtually every point in his argument; favorite
Zizekian tropes that are by now familiar to us from earlier
works--"that is to say," "in other words," "to put this another
way," "to put this in yet another way"--are piled atop each other
here until they reach, like the bowling-shoe monolith in The Big
Lebowski, higher than the eye can see. It is in "The Unconscious
Law" that Zizek seems most driven in this book to get his theory
precisely right--and where getting it right proves most elusive.
In this respect, the operational logic of "The Unconscious Law"
parallels that of the Symbolic Order itself as Zizek has so often
described it, the Symbolic perpetually scrambling to get to the
Real, but forever doomed to under- or overshoot it. The Real that
Zizek is missing in the argumentational fury of this appendix is
the one he has pointed to earlier in the book, the
post-ideological Real of capitalism's totality and class
antagonism. This is a Real that works with especially disruptive
force here, as though exacting payback from Zizek for his
privatizing theoretical turn.
20. Ernesto Laclau has recently written that "the end of the Cold War
has also been the end of the globalizing ideologies that had
dominated the critical arena since 1945. These ideologies,
however, have not been replaced by others that play the same
structural function; instead their collapse has been accompanied
by a general decline of ideological politics" (1). That such a
claim can come from one of the seminal left thinkers of our time
speaks to the urgent necessity of Zizek's ongoing project:
whether or not we want to accept all of his theoretical
specifics, I think we must pay close attention to his charting of
the presence and force of postmodernity's "ideological
politics"--Zizek consistently provides remarkable insight into
the ways in which liberal democracy is working to naturalize
itself, effacing in the process its own corrosive economic
energies, and forestalling our ability to imagine social and
political alternatives. But I also think we must take Zizek's
insights further than he does, unfolding them from the level of
the intrapsychic, where in Plague of Fantasies they come to a
rest, and out onto the social; however well-aimed is his
criticism that left-coalitionism is trapped in the logic of
"capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics,"
at least left-coalitionism is a politics. This is not something
we can readily say about the theory Zizek offers in its stead.
Although this is obviously not the place where such an unfolding
can be properly considered, it does seem to me that we might
think of ways of joining Zizek's theory of ideology, with its
focus on postmodern capitalism's historically particular Real, to
contemporary theorizations of hegemony. This would mean, of
course, that theories of hegemony would have to engage more
directly with late capitalism's globalizing dynamics--that, in
other words, hegemony would be thought in terms less neo- and
more Gramscian, taking better into account "the necessary
reciprocity between structure and superstructures, a reciprocity
which is nothing other than the real dialectical process"
(Gramsci 366).
Department of English
University of Richmond
jhurley@richmond.edu
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Notes
1. I am, for purposes of brevity, being somewhat reductive here
when I refer to Habermas's "view of language as a relatively
unproblematic instrument," and overly generous to Rorty when I
associate him with the left.
2. See Lovink, http://www.ctheory.com/a37-society_fan.html.
3. Laclau, for example, wrote the preface to Sublime Object of
Ideology; Zizek the appendix to Laclau's New Reflections on the
Revolution of Our Time.
4. I am excluding here Zizek's introduction to the collection he
edited, Mapping Ideologies, a brief but remarkable piece that
explicitly adumbrates a number of the concerns I have been
tracing above.
5. Zizek writes that "Crucial for the fetish-object is that it
emerges at the intersection of the two lacks: the subject's own
lack as well as the lack of his big Other.... [W]ithin the
symbolic order... the positivity of an object occurs not when the
lack is filled, but, on the contrary, when two lacks overlap. The
fetish functions simultaneously as the representative of the
Other's inaccessible depth and as its exact opposite, as the
stand-in for that which the Other itself lacks ('mother's
phallus')" (Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies 103).
6. Although they haven't couched the problematic in precisely
these terms, critics such as Mark Seltzer and Judith Butler have
asked similar questions of Zizek's use of the Lacanian psychic
topology as model for the workings of ideology, suggesting that
Zizek's theory, as Seltzer puts it, "stalls" on what is finally
its non-material, transhistorical assumptions. As I will argue
below, Zizek's theory does indeed stall on itself, but not quite
for these reasons. (See Butler 187-222 and Seltzer 175-6.)
7. These two alternatives are often merged into each other, of
course. An example would be The X Files, in which power of a
preternatural order of magnitude is attributed to, as an article
in The New York Times Magazine has recently put it, "nameless
middle-aged men who not only manipulate our Government but also
in effect run the solar system from a mysterious, dark-paneled
club on West 46th Street (it looks a lot like the Council on
Foreign Relations, actually)..." (McGrath 58).
8. A general objection we can raise about Zizek's theorization of
the subject--that it is inattentive to specificities of, for
starters, class, gender, and race--seems to come into especial
prominence here; Zizek writes as though cyberspace opens itself
up equally to all subjects, rather than giving privileged access
to the better-educated, relatively affluent computer users/owners
who are in fact its denizens (in this Zizek inadvertently
rehearses Gates's own "friction-free" ideology). While I
obviously think this objection is merited, I also think we can
see the implications of Zizek's claims about the virtualization
of subjectivity as going beyond the immediate boundaries of the
cyber universe per se. Journalist William Greider, for example,
reports the following scene involving workers in a Malaysian
electronics plant owned by Motorola:
Once inside [the operations room], the women in space suits
began the exacting daily routines of manufacturing
semiconductor chips. They worked in a realm of submicrons,
attaching leads too small to be seen without the aid of
electronic monitors. Watching the women through an
observation window, Bartelson [the American manager of the
plant] remarked, "She doesn't really do it. The machine does
it." (Greider 83)
9. This pithy line is Jonathan Culler's (181).
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
"Sex." New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans.
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International
Publishers, 1971.
Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of
Global Capitalism. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Laclau, Ernesto. "Introduction." The Making of Political
Identities. Ed. Ernesto Laclau. London: Verso, 1994. 1-8.
Lovink, Geert. "Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality: A
Conversation with Slavoj Zizek." C-Theory Feb. 21, 1996.
http://www.ctheory.com/a37-society_fan.htm.
McGrath, Charles. "It Just Looks Paranoid." The New York Times
Magazine June 14, 1998: 56-9.
Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume
3. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound
Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1998.
Zizek, Slavoj. "Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology." Mapping
Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1994. 1-33.
---. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
Zizek and the Post Political
