James S. Hurley

Department of English
University of Richmond
jhurley@richmond.edu

 

Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

 

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?

 

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 Jürgen 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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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)

 

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

 

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 doppelgänger 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).

 

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).

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.