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Mr. Zizek, in several essays you developed a critique of the so-called "virtualization of [[reality]]" which supposedly accompanies the [[development]] of information technologies. Recently you talked [[about]] several notions of cyberspace at the Humboldt [[University]] in Berlin. There is a 'collective' [[notion]] of cyberspace that was popularized for example via the [[idea]] of The Borg in Star Trek. The Borg seems to be something like a cybernetic insect [[state]], combining the old [[image]] of the parasitic [[alien]] with a man-[[machine]] [[relationship]] which fuses the [[individual]] into 'One [[Being]]' via [[communication]] devices. This idea seems to correspond with the general trend towards a more or less predominant use of [[conspiracy theories]] to [[interpret]] the modern [[world]]... [[Slavoj Zizek]]: If I [[understand ]] this point of a one-[[mind]]-entity correctly, then it's a version of cyberspace I didn't mention. I first of all mentioned the deconstructionist version of cyberspace which is this post-[[Cartesian ]] one: Each of us can play with his/her identities and so forth. This is the [[feminist]], deconstructionist, Foucaultian version. But as you probably [[know ]] there is [[another]], let's call it the New Age [[school ]] of cyberspace-[[ideology]]. It is this neo-Jungian idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, [[false ]] individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...
...the Noosphere...
Slavoj Zizek: Yes, that's precisely the idea. We all share one collective mind. What I find so interesting about it, is the ambiguity of this [[fantasy]]: It can be presented as the ultimate horror. Already in the fifties the big [[threat ]] of [[communism ]] was the notion of brainwashing, the ability to establish "one mind". The best cold war [[paranoia ]] movie which employs this already in an ironic way is "The Manchurian Candidate" with Frank Sinatra. An American officer is [[captured ]] by North Koreans in the Korean War and brainwashed to become a killer who kills on [[order]], without being aware of it.
Today you still have on the one hand this [[negative ]] [[utopian ]] image of the collective mind, while on the [[other ]] hand you have this positive New Age image. There are two opposite versions, but what I'm tempted to disagree with is their common presupposition, which is that cyberspace means, to put it very simply, the end of individuality, the end of Cartesian [[subjectivity]]. All positive properties are externalized in the [[sense ]] that everything you are in a positive sense, all your features can be manipulated. When one plays in virtual [[space ]] I can for example be a [[homosexual ]] man who pretends to be a heterosexual [[woman]], or whatever: either I can build a new [[identity ]] for myself or in a more [[paranoiac ]] way, I am somehow already controlled, manipulated by the digital space. What you are deprived of are only your positive properties, your [[personality ]] in the sense of your personal features, your [[psychological ]] properties. But only when you are deprived of all your positive [[content]], can one truly see what remains, namely the Cartesian [[subject]].
Only in Cyberspace do we approach what Cartesian subjectivity is all about. You [[remember ]] when [[Descartes ]] elaborates the [[process ]] of [[universal ]] [[doubt]]. One doubts that anything really [[exists ]] in order to arrive at one's "ego [[cogito]]". Descartes develops this idea saying: Let's imagine an [[evil ]] god, an evil spirit who just tricks us into believing.... But isn't cyberspace, virtual space, the materialisation of this evil spirit? And it's crucial to go through this universal doubt: What if everything is just digitally constructed, what if there is no reality to begin with? It's only when you go through this [[moment ]] of universal doubt that you arrive at what Descartes means by "cogito ergo sum". For this [[reason ]] I absolutely do not [[think ]] that Cartesian subjectivity is threatened. Instead I think, it's only today that we are arriving at it.
The Borg story seems to develop a [[metaphor ]] for cyberspace, the idea of a collective [[consciousness ]] via communication tools. On the other hand, there is your idea of the computer as an asexual complement of man, something that constitutes the [[Big Other]]. Couldn't these metaphors be applied to all electronic media or even to media in general? A lot of properties which are attributed to Cyberspace today could equally be attributed to [[television ]] for example. One has millions of [[people ]] sitting in front of tv screens, being simultaneously fed the same [[intellectual ]] or emotional 'content' through the Big [[Apparatus]].
Slavoj Zizek: I definetely agree with this, but I'm tempted to say that we maybe can go even further! This is my big [[thesis ]] a propos [[sexuality]]. What was so shocking about virtual space was not that before there was a '[[real]]' reality and now there is only a virtual reality, but through the [[experience ]] of VR we have somehow [[retroactively ]] become aware of how there never was 'real reality'. Reality always was virtual, we just weren't aware of it. I think what is so horrible about virtual sex is not: My god before we had a real partner whom we touched, embraced, squeezed, and now you just masturbate in front of the [[screen ]] or you don't even masturbate, you just [[enjoy ]] [[knowing ]] that maybe the other [[enjoys ]] it through the screen or whatever. The point is we become aware of how there never was real sex.
It's not only that [[masturbation ]] is having sex whith an imagined partner. What if real sex is only masturbation whith a real partner? That is to say, you think you're doing it with a real partner but you use the real partner as a masturbatory device, the real partner just gives you a minimum of [[material ]] so you can act out your [[fantasies]]. In other [[words ]] there are always at least [[three ]] in sex, its never you and the partner, you must have a fantasy to sustain it. When the fantasy disintegrates, the partner gets disgusting. It's horror. In [[Shakespeare]]'s "[[Hamlet]]" for example; in the middle of the play Hamlet looks at Ophelia and has this moment of 'Realitaetsverlust': What a disgusting person she is. Because precisely what gets lost is this phantasmatic support. I think a certain [[dimension ]] of virtuality is co-substantial with the [[symbolic ]] order or the order of [[language ]] as such.
There is another point, which is maybe connected to the phenomenon of collective mind you evoked. I [[claim ]] one should approach the dimension of being 'undead'. In this precise sense that undead doesn't simply mean 'alive', it means [[dead ]] but nonetheless alive. Think about Stephen King, zombies and vampires. Here I connect cyberspace with what [[Lacan ]] calls tissue of [[libido]], '[[lamella]]', a substance of [[life ]] which cannot ever be destroyed. The problem here is no longer [[mortality ]] but the opposite: It's this kind of horrible life [[form]], like that of vampires, which you can never get rid of.
The ultimate horror becomes the very 'Unsterblichkeit', this very immortality. In the new text which I'm writing now, I'm trying to establish this [[impossible ]] connection, a link between Kleist, [[Wagner ]] and cyberspace. If you read Wagner's operas closely, the fundamental complaint, I think, the "Klage" of all the big Wagnerian arias, is the following: Their heroes - except in Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, Wagners big failures - are not allowed to die. This I think is the [[true ]] horror of Cyberspace, that one has this [[spectral ]] dimension of life beyond [[death]], an undead life, which is even true at the most banal, everyday level.
Do you know the function 'undelete' in computers? The problem with computers is not that something can be erased: you worked all afternoon and then have a [[power ]] failure and it's gone. Okay, these things can happen. But you know that it's sometimes even more horrible that you cannot really erase it. Once it's in, it's in. Here I see also the problem with clonin= g. It's not the problem of: "Will I lose my individuality, will I be in the [[position ]] of precise doubles etc." The problem of cloning is that you cannot ever die. You kill yourself and they find (ideally [[speaking]], of course it is not yet scientifically possible) just a little bit of you and they can reconstitute you. You are endlessly reproductable. Nobody [[knows ]] how this will effect individuality.
You interpret the [[situation ]] one encounters in front of the computer screen - for example when [[communicating ]] via e-mail - as a situation of [[Hysteria]]. There is actually a great deal of uncertainty in these forms of communication: You can never be sure who is [[reading ]] your input or in what way. Vou are aware of this situation all the [[time ]] and try to anticipate the other's reactions. Also, important additional features of face-to-face communication like gestures or tone of [[voice ]] are [[missing]]...
Slavoj Zizek: The [[Freudian ]] [[unconscious ]] is very much like what one does in front of the computer screen. The Freudian unconscious is not all this [[body ]] language or tonality, no. The Freudian unconscious is precisely this [[helplessness]], where you are talking to someone, but at the same time you do not even know at whom it is addressed exactly. You are radically not sure, because basically this is a [[symptom]]. When you have some hysterical symptom it has precisely such a [[structure]]. So my point here would be along the lines you drew, that cyberspace often functions in the hysterical way, which is exactly this radical uncertainty: I don't know whom my [[letter ]] will reach. = I don't know what the other wants from me and thus I try in advance to reflect this uncertainty. Cyberspace is open in the sense that we cannot decide from its technological properties whether it functions in a [[perverse ]] or in a hysterical way.
There is not a certain psychic economy inscribed in the functioning of cyberspace as such. But much more often then we think cyberspace is still caught in a hysterical economy. That's why I distrust not only the paranoiac versions of cyberspace, I also deeply distrust the liberating version, "we play with multiple identities" and so forth.
I think, if I may simplify, that there are three or four predominant versions of cyberspace. There is the common sense version, where we are still real people who talk to each other, cyberspace is just another medium. This is too simple, because cyberspace of course does [[affect ]] what it means to be a subject. Then we have the paranoiac version: cyberspace, the [[maternal ]] [[thing]], we lose [[autonomy]]. Then we have this perverse liberating notion, we get rid of patriarchal [[authority]]. And the other one is the New Age version of the Noosphere. People are so fascinated by phenomena which are really very exceptional. I don't know anyone who, when sitting in front of the computer really regresses to some kind of [[psychotic ]] immersion, who becomes a member of the Noosphere, it's not like that. The hysterical experience is the fundamental experience.
One can read your emphasis on hysteria in this [[discussion ]] as an answer to a certain kind of current [[left]]-wing [[politics ]] which has been inspired by [[gender ]] theory, which proposes the [[transgressive ]] and therefore subversive potential of '[[perversion]]' ...
Slavoj Zizek: Something which makes hysteria interesting is how these modern [[leftist ]] [[ideas ]] share the disqualification of hysteria with radical Leninist and Stalinist politics. It would be very interesting to find out when the [[signifier ]] of the hysterical subject emerges as a swearword in Stalinist politics. Even earlier, already with [[Lenin]], the [[internal ]] enemies, the revisionists were disqualified as [[hysterics]]: They don't know what they [[want]], they doubt.
When I [[speak ]] of perversion I do not mean perversion as a certain [[practice]], for example [[anal ]] intercourse. For Lacan, perversion designates a very precise [[subjective ]] attitude that is an attitude of [[self]]-objectivization or self-instrumentalization. Whereas the typical hysterical [[fear ]] is to become a tool of the other. So the basic constituent of subjectivity is hysterical: I don't know what I am for the other. Hysteria, or [[neurosis ]] in general is always a position of questioning.
That's the crucial [[message ]] of [[Freud]]: The hysterical subject doesn't materialize his [[dreams ]] in a perverse scenario, not because he or she is afraid of [[repression ]] or the law, but because he always has this doubt: I can do this, but what if even that won't [[satisfy ]] me. What if even this perverse scenario is a fake, a false mask.
Of course there is also a [[political ]] axis to this: My answer to some popularised version of [[Foucault ]] or [[Deleuze ]] which praises this multiple perverse post-modern subject with its no longer fixed paternal authority, which shifts between different self-[[images ]] and reshapes itself all the time, is: Why is this supposed to be subversive? I claim, and this got me into a lot of trouble with some feminists, I claim that, to put it into old fashioned [[Marxist ]] [[terms]], the predominant structure of today's subjectivity in "Spaetkapitalismus" (Advanced [[Capitalism]]) or whatever we want to call it, is perverse: The typical form of psychic economy of subjectivity which is more and more predominant today, the so called narcissist personality, is a perverse structure. The paternal authority is no longer the [[enemy ]] today. So this idea of an explosion of multiple perversions just describes what fits perfectly today's late-[[capitalist ]] order...
... the flexible economy.
Slavoj Zizek: Yes, you can put it that way. No firm identity, shifting and multiple identities. This is how subjectivity functions today. To cut a long story short, in this sense perversion is not subversive, and the first step towards [[subversion ]] is precisely to reintroduce this hysterical doubt. I think the [[present ]] [[social ]] relations can fully acknowledge multiple identities. I think that today the [[ideal ]] subject is bisexual: I play with men, I play with [[women]], anything goes and it's not subversive. And the strategy of imagining the nastiest perversion will not create a situation which the [[system ]] will not be able to sustain. I think it's politically wrong and I think it doesn't [[work]]. When you have a look at the art system for example: Perverse transgressions are directly organized by the establishment to keep the [[market ]] functioning and alive.
