The very big Other

I'm frustrated with In Defense of Lost Causes. Zizek writes:

the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism--digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.

and

The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a 'critique' only reinforces the big Other's hold over us) but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie the social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.

These passages come from a section of the first chapter. One of the general ideas, I think, is Zizek's oft-repeated account of the claustrophobia that results from the decline of the symbolic, the loss of a space of appearances wherein something stands for something more than itself. The only way these particular passages make sense to me, then, is if one assumes a very different notion of the big Other to be at work. We could call it the very big Other or the psychotic big Other, designating thereby the monstrous imaginary other that merges with the Real when the paternal function is foreclosed. So long as no small other can appear as more than what it is, so long as it remains simply itself in its idiotic empiricality, we remain mired in immanence, seriality, strings and strings of S2.

The cyberspace example, though, doesn't work. Rejecting characterizations of contemporary media that emphasize the suspension of social ties, Zizek writes:

in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself; this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.

Can the codes and connections enabling networked communications be understood as a form of the big Other? I don't think so. Not if the big Other is indistinguishable from the Symbolic. Part of the pleasure of digital media is the sense that what one does or sees or writes doesn't register to the big Other, that it connects or enables snippets of intensity without 'counting;' shoot, even 'counting' doesn't quite count (the big Other doesn't know how many returns I get when I google my name). It makes more sense to think of the internet in terms of the merging of the imaginary and the Real, the Real networks and transactions, the matrix, combined with what we imagine these networks and transactions to be for us. So it could be the very big Other, the scary, necessary, and now inextricables codes and protocols we can't quite escape.

What could it mean for Zizek to say that the true job of untying social ties is ahead of us? that the task of radical politics is "to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to unite the social bond the big Other sustains"? It has to involve some version of seeing or experiencing the ties as representing something else.  Perhaps it means that another has to be able to appear as symbolizing something more; so we have to relinguish our human ties to enable the appearance of inhuman ones.

Comments

[Bryan Klausmeyer]

Hmm, I don't know if I necessarily agree with this. For example, why would you consider "the Real networks and transactions, the matrix" to be Real with a capital R? They hardly resist symbolization, as I would say that, anecdotally speaking, the typical fully-immersed Internet user is fully aware of the techno-material physicality of digital interaction. So, I think your conception of the Real here runs at the risk of simply sliding into the common sense notion of "reality."

Also, at the level of the Imaginary, I think the key difference here is the one between ideal ego and ego ideal. As you undoubtedly are aware of, ideal ego is linked to the Imaginary, with imago-gestalt mirror stage, whereas the ego-ideal operates at the Symbolic level, as a function of the big Other's gaze (although it is obviously more dialectical/nuanced than this, but for the sake of argument...). So, it would seem that there is some truth to conceiving the Internet as a big Other, precisely because, when you post things on blogs or setup "profiles" on various websites, esp. social networking ones, it is never conceived of as being purely outside of the register of the Symbolic, or, to use what you've written, "counting" -- in fact it seems that it counts even more. For example: when one edits their Facebook profile (to use a very tired example), one never simply views the results from one's personal, subjective standpoint. Instead, you adopt the gaze of the potential visitor, which I think also provides a minimum of enjoyment that is crucial, although it is rarely mentioned (similar to "passionate attachments" in some sense...).

But the other important point is that if the big Other is barred, that it is filled out with inconsistencies and gaps, then the Internet as big Other has the potential to give rise to something that supersedes its internal limits, that has the possibility to transgress it. Here, for example, are things where the Internet becomes really important in terms of destabilizing intellectual property rights, built around various communities. And the more "purchase" these communities gather in the subject's economy of identification, the more, one might conjecture, it results in the subject's severing of ties with traditional ideological apparatuses (family, state, school, etc.). Maybe.

[Jodi]

I don't see what your gesture to the difference between ego ideal and ideal ego does here. I disagree with your description here (the explanation for my disagreement is my discussion of 'the scoop' in Publicity's Secret)--where you see registration, I don't. There isn't a simple division between inside or outside the symbolic; that's part of the point, the irreducibility of the non-all.

On Real--the issue isn't whether users are 'aware' of the technologies and their interworkings. Maybe the 'can you hear me now?' commercial indicates here a bit the torsions and gaps of the Real: the folks trying to talk on the phones interpret the gap in service as silence, as meaningful, when it doesn't mean anything; it's just Real.

I also don't agree with the way you talk about transgression in the last paragraph--it's too conventional a notion of transgression, as if being non-traditional were really radical.

[patrick j. mullins]

"And the more "purchase" these communities gather in the subject's economy of identification, the more, one might conjecture, it results in the subject's severing of ties with traditional ideological apparatuses (family, state, school, etc.)."

Yes, but..therefore this...

"the typical fully-immersed Internet user is fully aware of the techno-material physicality of digital interaction."

...is impossible unless he just 'likes this sort of life-style'. Otherwise, he wouldn't be aware of it but in passing or when there was some glitch. The point is to see the physicality of it as a minor intrusion from time to time, because there is a sense of pleasure in it.

"in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself; this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen."

I think that is exactly right except the 'being connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen' is also part of the 'guise of cyberspace', which was the good part, and why you don't have to be immersed in it. Once seen as a 'guise', it's really rather flimsy, however charming you may still imagine it, and the intimidating part is calling it 'virtual', I've decided. It's really just another form of the really physical, and if the idea of the 'virtual' is excluded, only then can you begin to see its real dangers and how it can be navigated. If you really think it's all that powerful, there's little reason to pretend anything else is of any importance at all, the quicker it is freeze-dried into this illusory 'virtual' the better.

"Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever"

That might be right, especially if i'm right that the virtual is illusory and doesn't really exist all that separately, is part of bastard evolution, and therefore part of the physical. But it seems like in terms of Zizek, he is discovering this now having not thought it before. The old social ties are scrambled in cyberspace very easily, as far as Big Others of various species and colours, I probably am not deeply concerned, especially if their are strings of S2 (no clue what that is.)

"so we have to relinguish our human ties to enable the appearance of inhuman ones."

But we've already done that, so what's the big deal? I mean, most have, and if they haven't, I want to see the 'nice ones that still observe all their protocol and don't really push the envelope' demonstrate it so that seeing will be believing.

[patrick j. mullins]

In other words, we still have new versions of the old bonds to untie, because the new versions are based on an attempt to both keep and destroy the old ties, therefore we have relinquished them for the purpose of discovering the joys of the 'inhuman', even if it is only to find after having done the relinquishing, that we have done it badly, and neither kept ties nor relinquished enough. So we have to set more stringent goals which will allow us to get to a point at which at least something is cancelled out enough and there is enough agreement on this to know that we have finally figured out what is human and inhuman, and that we surely want neither of them. In any case, it cyberspace is all that powerful, we don't have to work at any of the relinquishing of anything 'human', but rather against this relinquishing, but since cyberspace is almost as irresistible as Chinese Barbecued Pig, we probably can't do any non-relinquishing..

Where are the lines of correlation between small others relinquishing or not being able to because the Big Other in form of foreclosed paternalism has caused a monstrous imaginary married to the really Big Other and must include a Feminism as well, mustn't it, if this is all the result of paternal foreclosure? And exactly where is located the Imaginary Big Other, the Real Big Other, the Monstrous Big Other, and the Psychotic Big Other? I mean where ARE they located, not where IS they located?

And just HOW do graduation ceremonies with or without rain fir into such a tortured schema?

[Jodi]

graduation ceremonies are symbolic. But their ability to confer significance or a stable symbolic identity has been in decline for a long time. Eric Santer discusses this as the decline of symbolic investiture. He makes his argument via a reading of Schreber.

The 'entire world' and 'universalized form of sociality' are fantasies invested into digitally mediated interactions. Zizek repeats this fantasy notion rather than challenging it.

Zizek in Tick Subj and Par View talks about new kinds of attachments and bonds and constraints, about how the promises of sexual and commercial freedom and all this result in new forms of unfreedom, statis, stuckness, entrapment. So the interpretative issue (for me) with these social ties is knowing whether he is just repeating his older view or whether he is changing it.

[Nathan A. Franklin]

Z's radical politics notion appears to be mediated by an inhuman ethics (as opposed to an ethics that relies on disavows) and an act. What strikes me is how Z (seemingly) abandons fantasy and tries to develop a small Other and big Other dialectic in order to “go beyond” the simulacrum-of-coordinates that fantasy ultimately provides social actors with.
Perhaps cyberspace, to Z, thrives on a disavowal ethic which permits us to, in our isolation, imagine a global network like us, a conceptual gesture that allows us to bypass the much needed inhuman appearance.

[patrick j. mullins]

Oh well, thanks, clear as mud, I like seeing the full hatefulness of all this and am glad I have escaped it so well.

[Jodi]

mud can be wonderful for facials and body wraps, all sorts of exfoliating and impurity-removing qualities. or so I'm told...

[Joe]

"In other words, we still have new versions of the old bonds to untie, because the new versions are based on an attempt to both keep and destroy the old ties..."

Zizek gives a nod to something like this in an earlier essay he's written on cyberspace, available in The Zizek Reader, which I'm sure appears in full sections in his new book:

"...what if it is wrong and misleading to ask directly which of the four versions of the libidinal/symbolic economy of cyberspace we outlined is the 'correct' one (psychotic suspension of the Oedipus complex; the continuation of the Oedipus complex by other means; the perverse staging of the Law; traversing the fantasy)? What if these four versions are the four possibilities opened up by cyberspace technology, so that, ultimately, the choice is ours, the stake in a politico-ideological struggle? How cyberspace will affect us is not directly inscribed into its technological properties; rather, it hinges on the network of socio-symbolic relations (of power and domination, etc.) which always already overdetermine the way cyberspace affects us."

This is in an essay where Zizek (I think for the first time) contemplates the potential for cyberspace relations to foster a traversal of the fantasy. Ending it with this paragraph, though, makes a nod towards the social ties still left untied as more people immerse themselves in the internet.

I think Zizek's suggesting that the Symbolic decline has a saving-grace in the internet: it foregrounds those already weakened "old social ties" enough to make it possible to traverse them qua Symbolic fantasy rather than foreclose the possibility of Symbolic identity. In other words, thinking of "The Father or Worse," the internet shows up as a last-ditch effort at making use of the Symbolic before it declines too much to be used, much less believed in.

[patrick j. mullins]

"I think Zizek's suggesting that the Symbolic decline has a saving-grace in the internet: it foregrounds those already weakened "old social ties" enough to make it possible to traverse them qua Symbolic fantasy rather than foreclose the possibility of Symbolic identity. In other words, thinking of "The Father or Worse," the internet shows up as a last-ditch effort at making use of the Symbolic before it declines too much to be used, much less believed in."

I bet he is suggesting this, but I want something even MORE depressing, and don't believe a fucking word of it, and think it is extremely important to find something more explicitly loathsome.

The way I see it, the internet is a good way to round up people.

[Bryan Klausmeyer]

I think Joe stated far more clearly what I was attempting to get it, which is that if the Symbolic dimension of the Internet is foreclosed, then we lose the merciless, revolutionary potential. Even if the Symbolic is the dimension of the big Other, it is a barred big Other, a big Other permeated by various gaps/cracks within it, so I think it isn't useful to reduce it to the "Real" of technological nodes (I still don't agree that this is Real, which you avoided mentioning) nor purely Imaginary (and I think here you misuse Imaginary as being simply the "faculty of the imagination"). While, by and large, the Internet simply reifies the hegemonic ideological constellations of society or, worse, produces digital solipsists who gather around some ordained figure of the Master (e.g., Ron Paul's bewildering success amongst the most solipsistic of Internet addicts), it nonetheless provides a revolutionary movement with the potential to mobilize (outside the dimension of superegoic [ego-ideal] social networking modicums), especially as in regards to the issue of intellectual property, which the logic of capital has yet to overcome. An example of this would be found in Estonia and China, where the Internet and cell phones are used to anonymously rally protests, etc.

Another point: in terms of Zizek reformulating his thoughts on the Internet, at least from the early 1990s to the present, in both cases he uses the same anecdotal story about the man who is polite in everyday reality, but a sadomasochist (or whatever) in virtual reality. In earlier interviews, Zizek asserted that the "virtual" (Imaginary-Real) reality was a more authentic reality than the everyday (Symbolic) one, arguing that that fantasy was what was "in the subject more than himself," to use Zizekian parlance. In the first section of *In Defense of Lost Causes*, however, Zizek asserts that the virtual identity is merely a defense against the depressing fact that the subject really is just a boring, average person. However, it would be too hasty to say that this is Zizek changing his mind on some issue. It could mean he's simply refining his thought, or it means he's updated it to fit the changes that the Internet has seen since its inception, which, in terms of this entire discussion, seem far more likely... (i.e., not necessarily a theoretical change, but simply a change in circumstance).

Lastly, it seems like a lot of this discussion is for naught, at least if one privileges his eternal Word:

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-the-cyberspace-real.html

[Robert Jackson]

What we need here is a good dose of contemporary Media Theory, I suggest everyone reads Alex Galloway's 'Protocol', a theory of cyberspace, not has unmitigated freedom of virtual identity but simply protological control. Control as structure inherent to the protocol.
Its clear Zizek's arguement against cybespace still resides in resistance to a pre 1997 Utopian vision of cyberspace, when quite simply digital Ideology has moved on. It would be interesting to view the very Big Other as algorithm itself, an external invisible wall that a virtual subject can measure him/herself/itself against online. A counterpoint needs to made, cyberspace algorithm is a neutral symbolic order. Needless to say is damn near executable,

[Jodi]

Robert--I've read Protocol. To my mind, going in the direction of algorithms is going away from the category of the big Other. And this could well be the right thing to do. Textually, I'm trying to figure out if I think you are right about Zizek's late 90s vision. That was my first inclination on this, but I don't want to be hasty. So I would say either algorithm or symbolic, but not both.

[patrick j. mullins]

"In earlier interviews, Zizek asserted that the "virtual" (Imaginary-Real) reality was a more authentic reality than the everyday (Symbolic) one, arguing that that fantasy was what was "in the subject more than himself," to use Zizekian parlance."

It is clear that this means that it was more authentic then and should be now, but isn't. So something else had to be written, or it needed to seem like something else had been written. It was destructive then, and I see with today's new offerings that it is destructive now.

"however, Zizek asserts that the virtual identity is merely a defense against the depressing fact that the subject really is just a boring, average person."

That's because he hasn't been around the block. He has remained a boring, average person without knowing it. He has been appropriated by the internet and its minions and is now talking about them as if they were virtual people. His problem, and trying to pass the buck to the poor schmucks he's rightly identified as rounded-up smart-asses using sitcom language in chatrooms, but not been inclusive enough.

"It could mean he's simply refining his thought, or it means he's updated it to fit the changes that the Internet has seen since its inception, which, in terms of this entire discussion, seem far more likely.."

In that case, all too likely, it was primarily to show the weakness of the dose of Media Theory (which we have already had quite a large enough dose of, thank you) compared to the changes in the Internet. This 'updating' is what passes for 'refinement' on these things. Actually, it cancels out the previous theoretical navel-gazings about the internet, dishes up some new ones while not really releasing anyone from the old ones, and proves that this kind of parasitic writing is in conjunction with the internet, defined by it, and offering nothing outside it except a more baroque and decorative description for a specific kind of audience than would just be found by just reading the science. He is himself 'stuck in the internet' and the new things Jodi quoted sounds like he now wishes it was someone else--and that he originally thought it was. I hadn't realized this when I first read them, and it seems there is some problem 'untying' that is not someone else's fault...

'Everyone read Alex Galloway's 'Protocol'? Are you KIDDING? The solution is to quit being a boring, average person. All else is continued middle-class rhapsody which focusses on fantasy since there is concealed within the inability to live the fantasy a determination to remain unfulfilled--this is achieved by a kind of work-ethic guilt which exists in the space between desire and fulfillment and takes the form of a pushing motion most of the time, and then reproduces itself virally. Constant pushing movements require effort that allows for no rest, you can't get anything that way...and these ensure that the fear of success and the fear of fulfillment of desire will never darken one's doorstep.

[Robert Jackson]

I might have been slightly hasty in Zizek's resistance to Utopian 90s cyberspace. Certainly he disproves of the Internet's rhizomatic nature, but he need not worry, as I would argue that the form of the Internet allows it to work too well, as Galloway states, if the web were truly rhizomatic, it would resist identification.

Algorithm like Ideology may be the filler of the symbolic gap of hiding the real and not the Big Other. It could be part of protological control that makes sense of what does not make sense, lets not forget, unlike other media, the Web is structurally the most inherently controlled network invented, it is not time based or narrative based, but instead like a Lacanian Order, there is an application layer that provides immersing continuity.

The real perhaps would be something like Dead Links, server crashes, pages that don't go anywhere, that don't lead anywhere, all pages need a hyperlink or some sort.

Now that we are full swing into the realm of Web.2.0, we need a Zizekian re-reading of the current political organizational structure that which is networks vs networks. Cyberspace is not 'cut off' from reality, what zizek needs to come up with is some coherent topology that theorizes the unhuman element of networks, thus the unhuman in cyberspace. Another symbolizing something more could be something 'unhuman'.