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Mind the Gap: Locating The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006)
By Andrew Klobucar
The Rain 5:1 (Summer 2007): 6-7
It was difficult to miss the irony of the situation as University of British Columbia security guards dismissed the impatient crowd of students and professors who had gathered at the Frederic Wood Theatre 1 November 2006 to hear Slavoj Žižek talk on ideologies of fear and terror, only to find that the venue had reached capacity a full hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin. Expecting to hear the famous theorist’s celebrated wit and acumen on current western politico-economic excesses and us imperialism, the crowd instead found itself facing closed doors and a decidedly less theoretical example of state forces repressing the demos. Composed mostly of academics, the growing “mob” would likely have had the internal moral discipline to disperse on its own account. Yet the theatre employees watching the door made the mistake of conveying an ambiguous understanding of how many open seats actually remained, giving the crowd a false sense of hope that a little persistence would eventually be rewarded, and when one younger student took advantage of a brief gap in surveillance to rush the theatre doors, a definite rise in dissent among those left behind became palpable. Clearly the employees saw no option but to bring in reinforcements; after all, the title of the talk was “The Politics between Fear and Trembling” and who knew what an audience interested in such themes was capable of doing.
Once again, it may seem ironic that Žižek’s own intellectual work appears to induce from time to time some of the very same social conditions that often constitute the very object of its critique. In other words, a paradox ensues, where the more successful and clear one’s critiques are, the more likely the conditions they describe may become manifest in the real world—subsequently complicating their original success as critiques. In contemporary western philosophy, emphasizing, as it does, the logic and aims of modern empiricism, this kind of paradox continues to present a particularly potent lineage of ontological critique, where an argument’s original objectives are seen as complicit with the socio-political contexts from which they derived, calling into question their supposed neutrality and efficacy. Žižek’s latest work, The Parallax View, follows fairly consistently from past major volumes, beginning specifically with The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and The Ticklish Subject (1999) to consider just how such ontological doubt in western thinking remains the core issue of dialectical materialism. The problem with contemporary “commonsensical” suspicions concerning empiricism and its epistemological limits remains, for Žižek, the persistent incapacity of western philosophy, and most cultural discourses in general, to engage with the problems of ontology without reclaiming some aspect of idealist categorisation.
A recent example appears in Amy Fusselman’s short essay for the New York Times Magazine “Lives” column (15 April 2007), a memoir-ish reflection on one person’s attempt to come to terms with one of the most atrocious experiences that any woman can endure: namely, her rape. I mention this example, not just because of the particular heinousness modern society associates with this type of crime, but also because the genre of writing Fusselman chooses for her message continues to reign as the primary discourse for contemporary cultural analysis. The memoir, as Fusselman well utilises it, expertly conveys our culture’s longstanding fascination with individual lives lived as the authentic stock behind all parables of social wisdom, combining the gritty irreverence of each worldly encounter that constitutes a single human existence with the hindsight of categorical reflection. One only need look to the popularity of the blog as the consummate genre of the Web to begin to appreciate the overwhelming appeal the memoir commands as modernity’s voice of reason. Such works are difficult to critique as their aims are partially determined by the uniqueness of the specific situation informing them. I may not agree with Fusselman’s interpretation of her terrible experience but who am I to comment on the veracity of her own feelings? What kind of expertise could I hope to use to cross-examine one’s personal construal of a past moment of subjectivity, no matter how commonly it may appear in other discourses, other records? The answer: none. The memoir’s immunity to ethical, and in many cases, logical, re-assessment remains one of its constituting attributes. Fusselman acknowledges this particular rhetorical strength of the genre in her first paragraph, a quick, unquestionable summary of her history:
“Let’s make this fast. I was molested when I was a child and then I wasn’t anymore and then I skated competitively as a kid and then I quit skating and then I started drinking when I was a teenager and then I quit drinking and then I started therapy when I was an adult and then I married and then I still had therapy and then I had children and then I still had therapy and finally I decided I was tired of all this therapy, all this talking like a talk machine.”
However the question that still dogs the everyday reader of this particular everyday voice remains: “What kind of expertise does Fusselman bring to the narrative, other than her own empirically informed, categorical reflection?” The answer: none. And this is precisely why this type of narrative, despite its intensely personal engagement with experiential materialism, has little other recourse than to employ at some point in the development of its argument a kind of dialectical return to the very same metaphysical level of confusion and obscurity from which it literally originated. In Fusselman’s case, her attempts to understand her painful experience spawn a telling critique of every empirical methodology available to her: she counters the emotional, social and psychological alienation her rape has generated first physically with the discipline of athletics; when that doesn’t work, she proceeds towards a kind of entheogenic regimen, using depressants like alcohol to help desensitise her consciousness. Her attempts to normalise her relationship to the state via its conventional class expectations of a heterosexual marriage and children also fail, as do the more academically rigorous solutions based in professional research and therapy. What is Fusselman’s opening argument save a valiant reminder that empirical answers to the confusing and often harrowing experiences life throws at us rarely provide the universal closure for which our subjectivities constantly clamour. When she has accomplished this particular list of non-starters, she knows she can proceed with her primary purpose, that is, to assure her audience what they already suspect is true: the limitations of empiricism demand some kind of idealist belief system, whether it is Christianity, Islam, agnostic mysticism or, in her case, the spiritual cosmology of Reiki.
Fusselman is not ignorant; she realises that her audience is urbane, educated, perhaps even members of the rapidly shrinking New England/New York intelligentsia and thus particularly wary of simplistic obscurantism. Yet, even more importantly, she knows that this readership suffers also from a similar set of alienations, even if they were not molested as children. The very identification of western thinking with modern epistemological relativism along with the impressive variety of applied practices developed therein guarantees a special empathy with respect to Fusselman’s plight. Fusselman has employed a number of practitioners, ranging in age and method from “young, old, middle-aged, Gestalt and Freudian” only to conclude that subjectivity is indeed a complex, possibly impalpable entity, if it can even be singularised as such. Frustrated with these failed attempts to help her analyze and objectify her personal experience, Fusselman finds her only option lies in a kind of wilful suspension of disbelief to embrace a much more ambiguous concept of human existence—one that involves a strangely intimate mode of interpersonal communication where Fusselman must submit both body and consciousness to a declared healer of displaced human energies. The irony of how closely this somewhat invasive, new experience resembles Fusselman’s original molestation is not lost on her, and she is quite upfront about her discomfort:
“I felt as if I were having an affair, going to this meeting. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I made sure I got to the coffee shop early so I could watch Vincent [the Reiki master] walk in. Vincent told me he would be wearing a tan coat, and he was. I watched him kiss an Asian woman goodbye. I thought that was a good sign, watching him kiss her. Usually axe murderers are single, I thought.”
Fusselman scarcely believes that circumstances have in fact led her thoroughly modern, rational mindset to consider engaging in metaphysics, yet that is precisely where her despondency over materialism’s incapacity to interpret holistically everyday engagement with the ontic real has arrived. As she explains, “[w]hat I wanted was to lie there and not use my brain and believe someone was trying to help me, also not with his or her brain. I had been trying to use my brain on my problems for 20 years. I was over my brain. I was over everybody’s brain.” From this point onward, Fusselman’s narrative resembles a noir-ish thriller, as “Vincent” leads our unsuspecting protagonist to his mysterious lair to begin his unique treatment. Constantly alert to her state of increasing vulnerability, Fusselman maintains a high level of suspense until the very end of her memoir. At the climax of the tale, the Reiki healer grasps hold of Fusselman’s feet, startling her into a new level of submission: “I was wearing socks. He touched my feet. The keys clicked.” Were this an actual noir thriller, we know that we would certainly not see Fusselman again. The “keys” clicking would likely signal a second violent molestation, replaying the terror of her first experience, in effect, closing off what has been nearly a lifetime of confusion and pain the only way such vicious tearings of the psycho-social firmament can be addressed. To our relief, of course, this is not the conclusion Fusselman has planned, for she is writing a memoir, not a thriller, and while her rational suspicions continue to engage us throughout her appointment, the Reiki healer assuages all fears in the end by delivering the metaphysical relief he originally advertised. Fusselman’s parable of social wisdom, as befitting the memoir genre, can at last be revealed. To live through one’s rape or molestation is quite possibly to experience more than just a single moment of psycho-physical damage; one’s entire conceptual orientation to the world and to one’s self might be utterly transformed, made obtuse and unstable. Unfortunately, conceptual orientations of this kind are not particularly well articulated within modern empiricism, since knowledge pursued and analyzed via such methods tends to forego questions of perspective in favour of the object itself. Even traditional Freudian psycho-analysis offers a kind of unwavering, socially stable “superego” keen of judgement and able to repress most untoward challenges to its authority. What Fusselman makes clear is that the act of rape as she has experienced it, i.e., as a violent rupture in orientation, cannot be understood homogenously as a set of concrete circumstances, and since it can’t be defined as an event it can’t be analyzed as one. A closer approximation of the effect Fusselman’s rape engendered stands revealed at the end as a kind of re-conception of the body itself as a kind of vague, indeterminable locale of constantly shifting boundaries of sensation: the healer “moved his hands in the air around my body. And I began to see that I wasn’t just there to experience whatever a hands-on healer could or could not do. I was there to demonstrate a belief to myself, a belief I had never been able to articulate, a belief that actually never seemed that important but that was very important now, and it was this: I do not begin and end at my skin.” In this way, the Reiki master’s hands literally confirm what the paedophile’s hands first revealed. Fusselman’s knowledge of herself is of a nature directly deriving from a profound obliteration of boundaries. Her very consciousness has become akin to the act of molestation itself. What she knows, she knows in part because “she had a paedophile. And the time had come to just—do something more than believe it. The time had come to feel it...”
It is at this moment in the narrative that the reader is forced also to change perspectives and to realise that Fusselman’s memoir is, in fact, exactly the kind of thriller we feared it might be. Not only is our protagonist molested at the end of her story, but the protagonist has learned herself how necessary this rape is to give her the closure she needs. Even more shocking, both the reader and Fusselman likely come to the same secret realisation that this second molestation will be far from her last; in one sense, Fusselman’s original rape has been ongoing for several decades and will likely continue for the rest of her life. The only difference is that she herself will now initiate each separate violation—her sense of being clearly demands it.
Fusselman may understand the irony of her situation, but it is unlikely she comprehends the perversity that links her Reiki sessions with her previous sexual trauma. Žižek continues to stage similar paradoxical confrontations throughout his work as befits his unique appreciation of dialectical materialism’s essential purposelessness. Empiricism’s concept of the physical self, regardless of how concrete modern research has rendered it, does not adequately address the complex and perpetually unclear boundaries between a subject’s impressions of the world around it and the subsequent appearance of that world as it really is; when this epistemological variance, paradigmatic as it is of western post-enlightenment thought, jars our perceived knowledge of the things that constitute what we call “objectivity”, we experience, not just variations in perception, but also a shift in how we literally make sense of said perceptions—i.e., the epistemological foundations of subjectivity itself. Empiricism can handle variations in objectivity; they can be annoying, of course, for new hypotheses about phenomena previously theorised and defined rarely assimilate either politically or intellectually without serious ideological dispute. Such gaps in objective knowledge, however, are usually accommodated by a kind of utopian confidence that somehow, somewhere, at some point in the future, enough information will be available to allow a reasonably accurate understanding of the phenomenon in question. Part of Žižek’s ultimate project, as we learn more clearly in The Parallax View than in any other previous work, is to question and refute this poise as fully erroneous: a similar ideological idealism informing Fusselman’s newfound faith in spiritual submission can be demonstrated, for Žižek, in practically every modern philosophy of consensual reason/morality from John Rawls to Richard Rorty to Jürgen Habermas. Indeed, even the prevailing western interpretation of Hegel’s dialectical method, the tripartite process of argumentation from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, is a misreading of Hegel’s proper emphasis on the synthesis’s origins within its own apparent thesis. Subjective first impressions of the world, no matter how deceptive or flawed they may appear to the subsequent judgements and analyses we derive from them, remain thus essential determinants of our reasoning, invoking a kind of permanent fissure in awareness, or the eponymous “parallax view” Žižek ascribes in this volume to the incommensurability between subjective experience and how such experiences are inevitably imagined or understood by the individual subject. Žižek’s view of subjectivity as fundamentally split, continually navigating between multiple points of observation remains thoroughly Lacanian. Just as the various material experiences of the psyche, sexual or otherwise, can never be integrated, for Lacan, into a psychological whole, Žižek’s “ticklish” epistemological subject will continue to imagine for itself social continuities that will never completely accommodate the experiences and impressions informing them. Accordingly, Freud’s superego takes on a very different role within Žižek’s theory, transformed (and again made perverse) under the material conditions of neo-liberal capitalism into a voice that urges us to “enjoy our symptoms” and liberate all desires as responsible citizens of perpetual consumption.
Given such views, it is not surprising that, while Žižek’s works have earned him an especial popularity within cultural theory and aesthetics, his relationship to more conventional western Marxisms (and philosophy in general) has been somewhat less celebratory. Yet these particular conflicts seem to be consistent with his overall theoretical schema, for by transplanting Lacan’s model of the psyche onto the Marxist subject, Žižek has effectively reversed the traditional structure/superstructure ordering to prioritise politico-ideological levels of engagement over economic ones. Economic processes are important to Žižek, of course, constituting the “objective” outlines of nearly all social practices. However, to imagine that the many discrepancies between economic configurations and our own political interactions as subjects in the world can ever be resolved is to succumb to an even greater ideological fantasy where our experiences are re-cast and our lives re-imagined according to whatever ideals and purposes stand economically dominant.
The Parallax View, with all its emphases on epistemological gaps, split subjectivities and perpetual ontological fracture does not actually offer much that is fresh to radical post-enlightenment thinking, yet Žižek’s project has staunchly avoided constructing new philosophical systems in favour of a highly consistent critique of the dialectic as modernity’s most important and obviously, for him, most misunderstood approach to epistemology. In his lecture, “Love without Mercy”, delivered live in New York City in 2003 for the journal Lacanian Ink, he once casually dismissed his work as a simple continuation of Hegel’s phenomenology, since, in his words, Hegel had said it all, making most attempts at additions completely superfluous. At that lecture, presented one cold early March evening at Deitch Projects in Greenwich Village, over 600 people showed up, far surpassing the building’s fire code allowances. As a result, as at UBC, many were forced into a crowd outside the building, blocking sidewalks as they pressed their faces and hands eagerly against the windows and each other, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man himself. The topic that night was not political security and fear, but a rather different “state of emergency”: the Lacanian notion of love as a mode of permanent excess, insatiable by nature and impossible to signify. The political consequences of the evening, however, were almost identical to the UBC event. Once again, police forces needed to be called in and the crowd was physically obliged to disperse under penalty of the law. Perhaps the real political value behind Žižek’s unique engagement with the dialectic needs no further evidence than the consistent antagonism with law enforcement that his live lectures seem to inspire. Few conventional political philosophers can claim the range of influence and general social excitement that Žižek’s blend of psychoanalysis, Marxism and cultural theory tends to instigate with mass audiences. Of course, it’s difficult to imagine that Žižek is at all surprised at such developments in the reception of his work. For Žižek, the ideological arena of cultural production, whether politically motivated or based in entertainment, has continued to manifest some of the consumer state’s most acute transgressions. What political radicalism in the United States can claim more damage to the moral order than Janet Jackson’s exposed breast at the 2005 Super Bowl? (Perhaps Žižek came close to this level of aggravation in 2006 when he shocked many of his readers and most leftist intellectuals in general by contributing the text for Abercrombie and Finch advertisements.) That said, it may not be too far in the future when Žižek’s movements and works will be regularly pre- monitored by state security to make sure the many who are inevitably turned away at the door during his appearances do not organise to overthrow the local ticket sales agency.
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