The Democracy of Objects

3.5. Žižek's Objecting Objects

Characterizing objects as split-objects onticology naturally invites comparison with Žižek's conception of objects as developed in his ontology. In concluding this chapter, I will discuss both where onticology is in agreement with Žižek and where it diverges from his thought. In The Parallax View, Žižek remarks that,

The parallax object of which Žižek here speaks is “the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight”. [129]

The concept of the parallax summarizes a long line of development in Žižek's thought revolving around the non-identity of the One with itself. As Žižek remarks elsewhere, “[t]he Hegelian Twosome, rather designates a split which cleaves the One from within, not into two parts: the ultimate split is not between two halves, but between Something and Nothing, between the One and the void of its Place”. [130] As a consequence, “the Real is the 'almost nothing' which sustains the gap that separates a thing from itself”. [131] With respect to the ontology of objects, Žižek's concept of the parallax functions to surmount the Kantian opposition between the thing-in-itself and phenomena or between reality and appearance.

It will be recalled that one of Kant's central claims is that we only ever have access to phenomena (appearances) and never things-as-they-are-in-themselves (reality). As a consequence, in the best case scenario, we are unable to determine whether reality or things-in-themselves are anything like they appear to us, while in the worst case scenario it is possible that reality or things-in-themselves are entirely different from how they appear to us. The Hegelian gesture for overcoming this duality advocated by Žižek lies not in showing how we can overcome appearances, but rather in arguing that this split between phenomena or appearances and things-in-themselves arises from within appearance itself. [132] In other words, the split between reality and appearance is a sort of illusion of perspective. As Žižek remarks,

In short, the parallax that Žižek effects with respect to the relation between appearance and reality is not to show us how we can get beyond appearances to reach or touch reality, but lies rather in showing how this apparent gap between appearance and reality lies, in fact, on the side of appearance itself. Not only is appearance internally split, but this split is itself an appearance, a sort of optical illusion. If, then, this constitutes a parallactic shift, then this is because where, in the first figure of subjectivity, we experience ourselves as trapped within appearances, unable to touch reality, we now see this as an illusion qua illusion. Put differently, we come to see that appearances themselves are structured in such a way as to produce this very illusion. It is for this reason that we can say, in Žižek's sense, that objects are split. And as a consequence, reality is not something beyond or behind appearances, but is rather appearance itself.

But why do objects or phenomena produce this sort of illusion whereby phenomena appear to be manifestations of an inaccessible reality? Žižek's answer is that this effect arises from the split in the object embodied in the relation between the object and the void of its place. As Žižek remarks, the

Because entity, according to Žižek, is this non-identical identity divided between the object and the empty place of its inscription, it creates a “reality effect” in the object such that the object simultaneously appears to be an appearance through predicates and the expression of an unreachable reality in excess of this appearance. As Žižek argues elsewhere,

And, as Žižek will go on to remark a moment later,

The key point not to be missed is precisely that the “reality effect” is a result of inscription in the symbolic. Everywhere Žižek is careful to remark that the fundamental opposition is not between a signifier and an opposing signifier such as the opposition between wet and dry, but rather that the fundamental opposition, the founding opposition, is between a signifier and its place of inscription. [137] However, insofar as a signifier simultaneously embodies itself and the emptiness of its place of inscription, it is always non-identical to itself in its identity, thereby suggesting an excessive being beyond itself. Yet this excessive being or reality is something that can never be reached precisely because it is a radically void or empty place. In other words, this being, this transcendence, is an “optical illusion”.

The fundamental point is that it is not a domain distinct from the symbolic, but rather is a peculiar twist in the symbolic. As Žižek explains,

In short, the real is not something other than the symbolic, but rather is a sort of effect of the symbolic resulting from the difference that haunts every signifier by virtue of the split between the signifier and its place of inscription. Because the signifier always embodies this difference between itself and its place of inscription, the signifier always and everywhere necessarily fails to attain identity with itself. However, this very failure to attain identity with itself is precisely the very essence of its identity. As Hegel playfully remarks in the Science of Logic, if A were identical with itself, why would I need to repeat it? The repetition of an identity in a tautology like “A = A” actually marks the difference or non-identity of A with itself. Along these lines, Žižek will compare the shift from viewing the real as a prediscursive reality that is then “chopped” up by mind to viewing the real as an effect of the symbolic, to the shift from special to general relativity in Einstein's theory of gravity.

And to complete Žižek's sentence, we can say that the gaps and inconsistencies in the symbolic produce these effects of the real. The shift from the “special theory of the Lacanian Real” to the “general theory of the Lacanian real” is thus a shift from viewing the real as a prediscursive reality that is subsequently formatted by the symbolic and that perpetually perturbs the symbolic, to a theory of the real as an effect of the symbolic or deadlocks of formalization within the symbolic such that any reference to a prediscursive real is mythological or a sort of optical illusion. As a consequence, any defense of pre-discursive reality becomes the height of dogmatic thought.

Returning, then, to the quotation with which I began this section, why is it that the real or the split object in Žižek's sense “tickles” the subject? If the real tickles or perturbs the subject, then this is because it creates the illusion of the Thing that the subject simultaneously lacks access to and that blocks its access to this Thing. This Thing is the illusion of something that would satiate and satisfy the subject’s unsatisfied desire.

However, this Thing from which we are blocked is precisely an effect of the internally split nature of the object between the object and its place of inscription. If the object appears suggestive of a Thing, of a complete object beyond appearances that would satisfy our desire once and for all, then this is precisely because, at the level of appearances, predicates fail to capture the object. However, if predicates fail to capture the identity of the object, then this is precisely because the object is internally fissured by the void of its place of inscription in the signifier, suggesting a fullness through its very absence that can never be filled.

As a consequence, this split within the object becomes the site of social antagonism. “The 'Real'” is “the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts” our view of actual social organization. And, as Žižek goes on to remark, “the parallax Real is [...] that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances”. [141] Earlier Žižek remarks that the Real, the parallax gap, is “that unfathomable X which forever eludes the symbolic grasp, and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives”. [142] Insofar as the symbolic is haunted by an irreducible and ineradicable kernel of the Real, it becomes the site of social struggle as different groups strive to fill in the void that perturbs the symbolic.

In the preceding pages I have not done nearly enough justice to the complexity of Žižek's ontology and his account of the relationship between the subject and the object, but have only sought to outline the most relevant features of his account of being. In the next chapter we will see how a good deal of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Žižek's critique of ideology can be retained within the ontological framework proposed by onticology. However, it is clear that ontologically onticology and Žižek must diverge markedly from one another. The first point worth noting is that for Žižek the object is a pole in a relation between subject and object. In other words, there is one type of being, the subject, and another type of being, the object. The object is always an object for a subject and the subject is always a subject for an object. As such, Žižek’s ontology is a variant of absolute correlationism or the position that there is no being apart from the subject.

Within the framework of onticology, by contrast, there is no special category referred to as “the subject” that is necessarily and irrevocably attached to an object. Rather, the central thesis of onticology is that being is composed entirely of objects or primary substances. To be sure, objects differ from one another and have different powers or capacities. Moreover, there are objects which we refer to as persons. However, the category of objects composed of persons possesses no special or privileged place within being, nor are all beings necessarily related to persons in some form or another. As Latour remarks, the zebras gallop across the steppes just fine without the benefit of our gaze. Humans are among beings and are beings among being, they aren't at the center of being, nor are they the necessary condition for being. Were Žižek's claims true, there could be no being apart from the human insofar as language, no matter how alien and alienating, only exists for humans and perhaps some other animals.

By way of a second point, while both onticology and Žižek argue that objects are split, the two do so for radically different reasons. For Žižek, objects are split between their appearance and the void of their place of inscription in the symbolic. As a consequence of this divide between place-holder and place, objects can never be identical to themselves. Insofar as objects are split between their appearance and the void of their place of inscription, objects are effects of the symbolic or the signifier. Here Žižek directly follows Lacan, for as Lacan remarks in Encore, “[t]he universe is a flower of rhetoric”. [143] The claim that the universe is a flower of rhetoric is the claim that the universe is an effect or product of rhetoric. The universe, for Lacan, is that which blooms out of language and speech. And indeed, earlier we find Lacan remarking that, “[t]here isn't the slightest prediscursive reality, for the very fine reason that what constitutes a collectivity—what I called men, women, and children—means nothing qua prediscursive reality. Men, women, and children are but signifiers”. [144] Presumably Lacan would claim the same thing of flowers, zebras, subatomic particles, burritos, stars and all other entities.

The thesis that objects are an effect of the signifier, the symbolic, or language is a variant of what I call the “hegemonic fallacy”. Put crudely, in political theory a hegemonic relation is a social, ideological, cultural, or economic dominance exerted over all other members of the social field. For example, Christianity and, in particular, evangelical Christianity, has a hegemonic influence on United States politics in comparison to other religious beliefs or the absence of religious belief altogether. Onticology shifts the concept of hegemony from the domain of political theory to the domain of ontology and might be fruitfully compared to the concept of ontotheology. Within the framework of onticology, the hegemonic fallacy occurs whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or explanans of all other entities.

In treating language or the signifier as the ground of being or the universe as an effect of the signifier, this is precisely what takes place in Žižek and Lacan. Beings are hegemonized under the signifier or language, just as they are hegemonized under mind in Kant. Lurking in the background of Žižek's argument is, I suspect, a variant of the epistemic fallacy and actualism as discussed in the first chapter. Just as Locke rejected the coherence of the concept of substance on the grounds that we are not given any access to substance in consciousness, the grounds for rejecting anything like prediscursive reality would lie in the fact that we can only speak about prediscursive reality through signifiers or language and that, no matter how hard we strive to escape language, we only produce more signifiers. Here language is the actuality that is given and we are invited to think of all being in terms of the epistemological or how beings are given to us through language.

However, as we saw in the first chapter, this argument only follows if it is possible to transform properly ontological questions into epistemological questions. The reasoning through which we arrive at the existence of objects is found not in our access to objects through language or consciousness, but rather through a reflection on what the world must be like for our practices to be intelligible. And indeed, it is difficult to see how language could ever have the power to divide or parcel in the way suggested by the linguistic idealists were it not for the fact that the world is itself structured and differentiated. Absent a world that is structured and differentiated, the surface of the world, as a sort of formless flux, would be too slippery, too smooth, for the signifier to structure at all.

The point here is not that we should ignore the signifier, language, and signs, but that the signifier cannot function as the ground of being. Here the “hegemon” of the hegemonic fallacy needs to be taken seriously. A hegemon is a monarch that stands above, overdetermining everything else in a collective of objects. A hegomonic relation is a vertical relation from top to bottom, where the entity serving as the hegemon functions as a monarch governing all that falls underneath the hegemon. In Žižek-Lacan's schema, this is precisely how language functions. The hegemon of the hegemonic fallacy thus functions like an active form giving structure or formatting a passive, structureless matter. Rather than thinking in terms of hegemonic conditioning, onticology recommends that we instead think in terms of entanglements of objects. Without sharing all the conclusions of her agental realism (especially her relationist ontology), while nonetheless being deeply sympathetic to her project, I borrow the term “entanglement” from the work of Karen Barad. [145] Barad encourages us to think in terms of entanglements of different agencies and the diffraction patterns these entanglements produce. As described by Barad,

The concept of diffraction patterns proposed by Barad embodies a much “flatter” conception of being than the sort of vertical conception of being we encounter in hegemonic ontologies. Where a hegemonic ontology treats one agency as making all the difference, an ontology premised on entanglements is attentive to how a variety of different objects or agencies interact in the production of phenomena. Just as new patterns emerge when waves intersect one another or encounter an obstacle with no one agency entirely responsible for the pattern, networks of objects interacting with one another produce unique patterns that cannot be reduced to any one of the agencies involved. Thus, Barad remarks, “diffractions are attuned to differences—differences that our knowledge-making practices make and the effects they have on the world”. [147] And here the crucial point is that “these entangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter: different intra-actions produce different phenomena”. [148] Within an entanglement and a diffraction pattern there can be no hegemon, which isn't to say that some objects might not contribute more differences within a particular constellation than other objects. It is precisely this tangled contribution of differences that an obsessive focus on the signifier blinds us to. And once again, the point here isn't that signifiers and signs don't contribute differences, but that we need to be attentive to the role played by other, non-signifying differences within a collective.

With reference to Barad, we thus arrive at the profound difference between Žižek's conception of split objects and the conception of split-objects proposed by onticology. For Žižek, the object is internally split between its appearance and the void of its place of inscription within the symbolic order, whereas for onticology objects are split between their manifestation and their virtual proper being. Here local manifestion is not manifestation to a subject or humans, but rather actualization in the world. Moreover, local manifestation would take place regardless of whether or not any humans existed to receive it and whether or not the symbolic existed. And, in this respect, the multiplicity of perspectives Žižek discusses are not the product of the split between appearance and the void of the place of inscription in the symbolic, but rather are a product of different intra-actions among objects. As we saw in our discussion of virtual proper being, the virtual dimension of objects is such that it can actualize itself in different ways as a function of the various exo-relations into which an object enters with other objects. There is nothing special or privileged here about the human-object relation. What is true of the human-object relation is true of any object-object exo-relation, regardless of whether or not humans are involved or exist. And insofar as this is true of object-object relations regardless of whether or not humans exist, it follows that the signifier cannot play a constitutive role in the constitution of objects. The key point here is that local manifestations are, in part, a product of how objects act on one another when they enter into exo-relations. Salt brings about different local manifestations in water than, for example, wood.

However, while local manifestation is a phenomenon that takes place regardless of whether or not humans exist, the concept of exo-relation and local manifestation does encourage us to be particularly attentive to questions of how humans act on objects through their instruments and under specific conditions in the production of local manifestations. In short, so long as we remain within the framework of representation, asking how we mirror or reflect objects, we have posed the questions of epistemology poorly. The logic of representation, based as it is on visual metaphors of reflecting and mirroring, raises only the question of whether there is a similitude between the representation and the represented. As such, it necessarily misses the field of exo-relations and inter-actions among objects in the production of local manifestations. What onticology instead recommends is a particular attentiveness to fields of action among objects that enter into exo-relations with one another, examining how these inter-actions produce a variety of local manifestations in a diffraction pattern.