The Plague of Virtuality 
Slavoj Zizek reads VR through the Lacanian interface 

Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 248 pp., ISBN 1-85984-193-7 
 

Since the publication of his first English book The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989, Slavoj Zizek, the ‘Giant of Ljubljana’ (Voice Literary Supplement), has become notorious for his highly original interventions in philosophy, political and ideology theory, cinema theory, feminism (note his discussions with Judith Butler), and the analysis of many cultural phenomena - from pornography to the opera - including, of course, cyberspace, Virtual Reality and the Internet. As Ernesto Laclau has remarked in his preface to the The Sublime Object, Zizek arranges his books in a way in which the reiteration of a given thesis does not merely repeat the latter but partially re-constructs it over and over again, yet from different angles - be it through Hitchcock, Robert Schumann, David Lynch or Hegel. 

In his new book The Plague of Fantasies we can observe a similar ‘combined and uneven development’ of themes and topics. Here it is the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy which is re-constructed throughout the chapters: from the role it plays in ideology to its relation to enjoyment  and fetishism. Yet the book is turning around its chapter on Cyberspace for the plague of fantasies ‘is brought to its extreme in today’s audiovisual media’, as Zizek maintains. 

For him, Cyberspace must be read as a key symptom of our ideological condition which is characterised, for instance, by the neo-gnostic desire to leave one’s body and to enter a purely spiritual domain. At some passages, hence, his account is not without resemblances to historical variants of ideology critique, for example when he silently draws on Althusser and calls Cyberspace’s hidden evolutionism and biologism the ‘spontaneous ideology of Cyberspace’. However, Zizek himself claims to follow the opposite path in comparison to Ideologiekritik - while the latter deduces abstract notions of religion or cyber-evolutionism etc., from their material roots in concrete ‘social reality’, he claims to take the opposite direction ‘from pseudo-concrete imagery to abstract (digital, market...) processes which effectively structure our living experiences’ (p.1). 

In Zizek’s reverse symptomology of VR, now, the key notion is ‘interface’, understood as a fantasmatic screen. Zizek’s theorisation of interface, though, is not compatible with either a pure modern or a pure postmodern account. A postmodern approach (identified by Zizek with Stone and Turkle) would focus on the arbitrary nature of the relation between our off-line self and our on-line selves, where things on the screen must be taken at their (inter)face value - there is nothing behind the mask; whereas a modern approach would focus on the universe (of wires and chips, perhaps) hidden behind a transparent screen. According to Zizek, both of these myths share the same error: although there is in fact no reality behind the screen of VR it would be wrong to assume - from a kind of caricatured postmodernist stance - that reality itself is only one more Virtual Reality. The point is, rather, that the screen presupposes ‘a background of the scientific digital universe’ (which is not to be conflated with the hardware): ‘bytes - or, rather, the digital series - is the Real behind the screen’ (p.132). In a typical Lacanian move Zizek turns the problematic of an external reality into a question of the Real in its digitised form, i.e. mathematical calculation (witness Lacan’s ‘mathemes’ as a way of touching at the Real through ‘mathematisation’). 

This doesn’t imply that Zizek does away with the whole notion of virtuality - quite on the contrary. He assumes a strict correlation between the symbolic order and a phantasmatic scene of the interface, that is, the virtual dimension: No symbolic order without virtuality, or to put it in Zizek’s words: every access to the symbolic order ‘has to be supported by an implicit phantasmatic hypertext’ (p.143). In the case of cyberspace he goes so far as to claim that our fascination with the screen of the interface bears some resemblance with the fascination with the ‘mysterious domain of phantasmic Otherness’, as it is exhibited by colonial narratives like Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, Poe’s ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’ or Rider Haggard’s ‘She’: ‘as if the screen of the interface is today’s version of the blank, of the unknown region in which we can locate our own Shangri-las of the kingdoms of She’ (p.160).  

The key paradox of these stories has to be seen in the fact that in the non-colonised core of the New Continent, in the ‘Heart of Darkness’, in this phantasmatic beyond, we find again our own law, the law of the ‘white man’; in the center of otherness we discover the other side of the same, of ourselves: our own structure of domination. Or in case of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’, what he finds on his way to the Antarctic Pole after passing through a village inhabited by completely black ‘natives’ (even their teeth are black) is ‘a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow’ (1). The structure of these tales, according to Zizek (who obviously applies here the Lacanian communication formula), is that of the Moebius-strip: If you go on long enough what you’ll find is not the complete other place - but your own one in its reversed - that is ‘true’ - form. 

One might have many objections to a Zizekian reading of VR-technologies. Cultural Studies might denounce his style as overtly schematic, philosophers as populistic, and others might feel irritated by the torrent of rhetorical questions and dialectical reversals which are so typical for Zizekian rhetoric. At the end of the day, however, we should remind ourselves that Zizek’s theoretical endeavour does not aim at a simple application of psychoanalysis to the cultural field since it is simply not his intention, to paraphrase an earlier dictum by himself, to ask what Lacan can teach us about VR but what VR can teach us about Lacan. 
 

Notes: 

(1) Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in Complete Tales & Poems, New York: Dorset Press, 1989, p.852