Real Virtuality: Slavoj Zizek and 'Post-Ideological' Ideology

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...