First Impressions Fredric Jameson The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek ·MIT, 434 pp, lb16.95 As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Zizek is supposed to incl ude, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- an d post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass- cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatol ogical as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spi noza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and ot her Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (De rrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitiv e philosophy and neuroscientific 'advances'. These are lined up in what Eisens tein liked to call 'a montage of attractions', a kind of theoretical variety s how, in which a series of 'numbers' succeed each other and hold the audience i n rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show; the only drawback is that at the e nd the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at lea st as to the major ones to be retained. One would think that reading all Zizek 's books in succession would only compound this problem: on the contrary, it s implifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. S till, one would not have it any other way, which is why the current volume &nd ash; which, with its companion The Ticklish Subject (1999), purports to outlin e the 'system' as a whole (if it is one), or at least to make a single monumen tal statement –inspires some apprehension. It will be dialectical to say that this apprehension is and is not confirm ed. The first chapter, which explains the title and seeks to ground Zizek's ph ilosophy in some definitive method, is tough going indeed; I'll come back to i t. But later chapters –on Heidegger and politics, on cognitive philosop hy and its impasses, on anti-semitism, on politics today –are luminous and eloquent, and will surely stand as major statements, with enough to provok e and irritate people from one end of the ideological spectrum to another (I a m myself attacked in passing as some kind of gullible practitioner of commodif ication theory). Nor are they lacking in jokes, as tasteless as you might wish , and in passing remarks on current films (Zizek seems to have got Hitchcock o ut of his system, if not out of his unconscious –one never does that). As for what has persisted through this now considerable oeuvre, I will sta rt with the dialectic, of which Zizek is one of the great contemporary practit ioners. The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried pr ogression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialect ical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of example s are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There i s a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the 'appearance'; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or 'essence'; finally, after all, the retu rn to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was 't rue' after all. What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Let's take a Holly wood product, say, Fritz Lang's Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz L ang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . ;.) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are wa tching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has done the inte rpretation for us, by way of Lang's capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insist ence on happy endings. But in reality –which is to say in the true appe arance –Edward G. Robinson 'is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois pro fessor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyda y life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor'. Hollywood's ce nsorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it. Zizek's interpretative work, from page to page, seems to revel in these pa radoxes: but that is itself only some 'stupid first impression' (one of his fa vourite phrases). In reality, the paradox-effect is designed to undo that seco nd moment of ingenuity, which is that of interpretation (it looks like this to you, but in reality what is going on is this . . .): the paradox is of the second order, so that what looks like a paradox is in reality simply a return to the first impression itself. Or perhaps we might rather say: this is not a paradox, this is perversity. And indeed, the dialectic is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whe reby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined. Bu t it is undermined together with its own accompanying interpretations of that reality, which look so much more astute and ingenious than the commonsense emp iricist reality itself, until we understand that the interpretations are thems elves also part of precisely that ‘first impression’. This is why the dialectic belongs to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is always h aunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlo cking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-im age of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit wi th everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of ‘what is’. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itsel f and its ‘truths’; indeed, always itself complicit in the being o f current language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of underm ining philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositio ns of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodi es of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are b etter characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that the ir practical component always interrupts the ‘unity of theory’ and prevents it from coming together in some satisfying philosophical system. Ala in Badiou has recently coined the expression ‘anti-philosophy’ for these new and constitutively scandalous modes of intervening conceptually in the world; it is a term that Zizek has been very willing to revindicate for hi mself. Still, what can be the theoretical, if not indeed the philosophical conten t of Zizek's little interpretative tricks? Let's first take on the supremely u nclassifiable figure who somehow, in ways that remain to be defined, presides over all Zizek's work. One of Jacques Lacan's late seminars has the title Les Non-Dupes errent. The joke lies in the homophony of this enigmatic proposition (‘the undeceived are mistaken’) with the oldest formula in the La canian book, 'le nom du Père', the name of the Father or, in other word s, the Oedipus complex. However, Lacan's later variant has nothing to do with the Father, but rather with the structure of deception. As everyone knows, the truth is itself the best disguise, as when the spy, asked what he does in lif e, answers, 'Why, I'm a spy,' only to be greeted with laughter. This peculiari ty of truth, to express itself most fully in deception or falsehood, plays a c rucial role in analysis, as one might expect. And as one might also expect, it is in that great non- or anti-philosopher Hegel that we find the most elabora te deployment of the dialectic of the necessity of error and of what he called appearance and essence, as well as the most thoroughgoing affirmation of the objectivity of appearance (one of the deeper subjects of The Parallax View). T he other great modern dialectician, Theodor Adorno (whose generic tone compare s with Zizek's, perhaps, as tragedy to comedy), was fond of observing that now here was Hegel closer to his heroic contemporary Beethoven than in the great t hunderchord of the Logic, the assertion that 'Essence must appear!' Yet this insistence on appearance now seems to bring us around unexpectedl y to the whole vexed question of postmodernism and postmodernity, which is sur ely nothing if it is not a wholesale repudiation of essences in the name of su rface, of truth in the name of fiction, of depth (past, present or future) in the name of the Nietzschean eternally recurring here-and-now. Zizek seems to i dentify postmodernism with ‘postmodern philosophy’ and relativism (an identification he shares with other enemies of these developments, some of them antediluvian, some resistant to the reification of the label), while on the other hand he endorses the proposition of an epochal change, provided we d on't call it that and provided we insist that it is still, on whatever scale, capitalism –something with which I imagine everyone will nowadays be pr epared to agree. Indeed, some of his basic propositions are unthinkable except within the framework of the epochal, and of some new moment of capitalism its elf; Lacan is occasionally enlisted in the theorisation of these changes, whic h have taken place since Freud made his major discoveries. Take the new definition of the superego. No longer the instance of repress ion and judgment, of taboo and guilt, the superego has today become something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: 'Enjoy!' Of course, the inner-directed Victorian must equally have been directed to enjoy his own specific historica l repressions and sublimations; but that jouissance was probably not the same kind of enjoyment as that taken by the subject of consumer society and of obli gatory permissiveness (Marcuse called it ‘repressive desublimation&rsquo ;), the subject of a desperate obligation to ‘liberate’ one’ s desires and to 'fulfil oneself’ by satisfying them. Yet psychoanalysis always involves a tricky and unstable balance between the theorisation of an eternal human psyche and the historical singularity of culture and mores: the latter tilts you back into periodisation, while the 'eternal' model is secured by the simple reminder that desire is never satisfied, whether you are a Vict orian in thrall to duty or a postmodern intent on pleasure. This is the point at which we reach the most persistent of all Zizek's fun damental themes: namely, the death wish, the Thanatos, or what he prefers to c all the 'death drive'. Modern theory is indeed haunted by Freud's death wish, that better mousetrap which any self-respecting intellectual owes it to himsel f or herself to invent a theory of (Freud’s own version having satisfied nobody). But we also owe it to ourselves to retain everything that is paradox ical (or perverse) in Zizek’s (or in Lacan's) version of the matter; for here the Thanatos has nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death mercifully relieves us (all the operatic overtones of T he Flying Dutchman are relevant here, all the mythic connotations of the Wande ring Jew, or indeed the vampire, the undead, those condemned to live for ever) . The death drive is what lives inside us by virtue of our existence as living organisms, a fate that has little enough to do with our biographical destinie s or even our existential experience: the Thanatos lives through us ('in us wh at is more than us'); it is our species-being; and this is why it is preferabl e (following the later Lacan) to call it a drive rather than a desire, and to distinguish the impossible jouissance it dangles before us from the humdrum de sires and velleities we constantly invent and then either satisfy or substitut e. As for jouissance, it is perhaps the central or at least the most powerful category in Zizek's explanatory resources, a phenomenon capable of projecting a new theory of political and collective dynamics as much as a new way of loo king at individual subjectivity. But to grasp the implications it is best to s ee jouissance as a relational concept rather than some isolated ‘ultimat ely determining instance’ or named force. In fact, it is the concept of the envy of jouissance that accounts for collective violence, racism, national ism and the like, as much as for the singularities of individual investments, choices and obsessions: it offers a new way of building in the whole dimension of the Other (by now a well-worn concept which, when not merely added mechani cally onto some individual psychology, evaporates into Levinassian sentimental ism). The power of this conception of envy may also be judged from the crisis into which it puts merely consensual and liberal ideals like those of Rawls or Habermas, which seem to include none of the negativity we experience in every day life and politics. Zizek, indeed, includes powerful critiques of other cur rent forms of bien-pensant political idealism such as multiculturalism and the rhetoric of human rights –admirable liberal ideals calculated to sap t he energies of any serious movement intent on radical reconstruction. All these ideals presuppose the possibility of some ultimate collective ha rmony and reconciliation as the operative goal or end of political action. It would be wrong to identify these ultimate aims with utopian thinking, which on the contrary presupposes a violent rupture with the current social system. Ra ther, they are associated, for Zizek, with that quite different absence of ant agonism denounced in his very first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989 ), a target also identified by Lacan and which has always been central in Zize k's tireless explanations and propagation of Lacanian doctrine. This is the co nviction that human subjectivity is permanently split and bears a gap within i tself, a wound, an inner distance that can never be overcome: something Lacan demonstrated over and over again in an extraordinarily complex (and dialectica l) articulation of the original Freudian models. But taken at this level of ge nerality it is a view that might easily lead to social pessimism and conservat ism, to a view of original sin and the incorrigibility of some permanent human nature. It is to forestall and exclude just such a disastrous misunderstanding of the social and political consequences of the Lacanian 'gap' that is the task o f The Parallax View. The book does so, however, not by any immediate extrapola tion of the gap or constitutive distance from individual to collective; but ra ther by juxtaposing the theoretical consequences of split subjectivity on a va riety of disciplinary levels (whence the difficulty of the opening chapter). A parallax, Webster's says, is 'the apparent displacement of an observed o bject due to a change in the position of the observer'; but it is best to put the emphasis not on the change or shift, so much as on the multiplicity of obs ervational sites, for in my opinion it is the absolute incommensurability of t he resultant descriptions or theories of the object that Zizek is after, rathe r than some mere symptomal displacement. The idea thus brings us back to that old bugbear of postmodern relativism, to which it is certainly related. (Popul ar locution mutes this scandal by way of narrative: X tells the story of quant um theory, or modern dictatorship, this way; Y tells a different story. These convenient and widely accepted turns of phrase efface all the serious philosop hical debates about causality, historical agency, the Event, philosophies of h istory, and even the status of narrative itself, which is probably why Zizek, assimilating the problems themselves to ‘postmodern philosophy’, h as often been dismissive of narrative as such.) The more fundamental difference at issue can be measured by comparing the parallax idea with the old Heisenberg principle, which asserted that the objec t can never be known, owing to the interference of our own observational syste m, the insertion of our own point of view and related equipment between oursel ves and the reality in question. Heisenberg is then truly ‘postmodern&rs quo; in the assertion of an absolute indeterminacy of the real or the object, which withdraws into the status of a Kantian noumenon. In parallax thinking, h owever, the object can certainly be determined, but only indirectly, by way of a triangulation based on the incommensurability of the observations. The object thus is unrepresentable: it constitutes precisely that gap or i nner distance which Lacan theorised for the psyche, and which renders personal identity for ever problematic (‘man’s radical and fundamental dis -adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs’). The great binary opposit ions –subject v. object, materialism v. idealism, economics v. politics –are all ways of naming this fundamental parallax gap: their tensions and incommensurabilities are indispensable to productive thinking (itself just such a gap), provided we do not lapse into some complacent agnosticism or Ari stotelian moderation in which ‘the truth lies somewhere in between&rsquo ;; provided, in other words, we perpetuate the tension and the incommensurabil ity rather than palliating or concealing it. The reader will judge from the case-studies in this volume whether paralla x theory has been fruitful. In particular, the chapter on the dilemmas of cogn itive science –the material brain and the data of consciousness –is a superb achievement which transcends Spinozan parallelism towards the ult imate Hegelian paradox: ‘Spirit is a bone.’ As far as politics is concerned, it seems to me that Zizek’s lesson is as indispensable as it is energising. He believes (as I do) that Marxism is an economic rather than a political doctrine, which must tirelessly insist on the primacy of the econom ic system and on capitalism itself as the ultimate horizon of the political si tuation (as well as of all the other ones –social, cultural, psychic an d so forth). Yet it was always a fundamental mistake to think that Marxism was a ‘philosophy’ which aimed at substituting the ‘ultimately determining instance’ of the economic for that of the political. Karl Ko rsch taught us eighty years ago that for Marxism the economic and the politica l are two distinct and incommensurable codes which say the same thing in radic ally different languages. So how to think about the concrete combinations they present in real life and real history? At this point, we glimpse what is clearly Zizek’s basi c Lacanian model for parallax: it is the Master’s scandalous and paradox ical idea that between the sexes 'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel' (Seminar XX) . 'If, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship,' Zizek writes, 'then, for M arxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no ";meta-language" enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint.' The practical consequences are startling: To put it in terms of the good old Marxist couple infrastructure/superstructur e: we should take into account the irreducible duality of, on the one hand, th e 'objective' material socioeconomic processes taking place in reality as well as, on the other, the politico-ideological process proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently 'sterile', a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless cr ucial in transforming reality? So, although economy is the real site and polit ics is a theatre of shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and id eology. This is a far better starting point for the left than the current interminable debates about identity v. social class (it also seems to me a more appropriat e climax than the enigmatic reflections on 'Bartleby' that actually close the book). But it is appropriate, in the light of the earlier discussion, to ask just how dialectical this now turns out to be. I think an argument would run somet hing like this: that third moment of the dialectic which returned to appearanc e as such is sometimes described (in Hegelian jargon) as returning to ‘a ppearance qua appearance’, to appearance with the understanding both tha t it is appearance and that nonetheless as appearance it has its own objectivi ty, its own reality as such. This is precisely what happens, I believe, with t he two alternatives of the parallax, let us say the subjective and the objecti ve one. To discover that neither the code of the subject nor the code of the o bject offers in itself an adequate representation of the unrepresentable objec t it designates means to rediscover each of these codes as sheer representatio n, to come to the conviction that each is both necessary and incomplete, that each is so to speak a necessary error, an indispensable appearance. I would on ly want to wonder whether there are not more complex forms of the parallax sit uation which posit more than two alternatives (on the order of subject and obj ect), but which rather confront us with multiple, yet equally indispensable co des. I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about Zizek 's project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for i t not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter's imposs