Fall into the Gap

(This review also appears on amazon.com.)

The Parallax View, which the ever-prolific Slavoj Zizek has declared the "magnum opus" of his substantial oeuvre, is a generally rewarding if uneven work.

I took from it this: every posited antinomy, opposition or other binarism conceals in itself a more pluriform nature, the terms themselves irreducible to themselves (a challenge to Western thoughts principle of identity: an entity is identical to itself[?]), leaving an irreducible bare difference(the old Derridean stand-by) that remains largely unaccountable but ontologically substantial nonetheless -- a locus of "the Real." Ultimately uncognizable, this difference, which for Zizek is the Lacanian "objet petit a," opens a parallax gap wherein this difference, though uncognizable, nevertheless serves as a common referent among the actors of any ideological disagreement.

I found this a compelling thesis, and Zizek, though often given to an over-reliance on rhetorical questions, ellipses, and anacoluthon (this latter tendency perhaps inspired by St. Paul, himself an inveterate employer of anacoluthon, whom Z. frequently discusses in the early portions of TPV), is in the main persuasive. (I have to balk, however, at Z.'s frequent recourse to pop-cultural examples. Are overwrought, pandering summer blockbusters like The Matrix and The Revenge of the Sith really so fraught with important theoretical implications?) The real shortcoming of TPV, as I see it, comes in the final pages, wherein Z., having explicated his theory, waxes prescriptive, encouraging his readers to embody the "Bartleby-parallax" in order to avoid being caught up in the Hegelian pseudo-negations of counterhegemonic practices. We must be as resistant to the latter in our "preferring-not-to's" as to the hegemonic ills the latter are intended to redress -- I prefer not to eat factory-farmed, adulterated, GM food; I prefer not to purchase food from an organic farming co-op. Because not to do so and to remain, rather, in the old dialectic of resorting to alternatives to dismaying hegemony, is to remain ensnared in the Foucauldian circuits of power that result in the eternal recursion and reinscription of extant relations. The parallactic Bartleby disrupts the workings of ideological apparatuses by cultivating an inner disposition of refusal until, according to Z., there opens up possibilities that are not determined by the dialectic.

This is precisely where Z. lost me. I recall Bartleby's fate: blind, starving, homeless, jailed ... eventually dead. And, for all of Z.'s hostility to what he calls "postmodern techno-gnosticism," Bartleby seem an odd exemplar, given the fact that Herman Melville, Bartleby's creator, often mused upon the tenets of Gnosticism (He composed a poem on gnosticism, and The Confidence Man, his last published novel, arguably lends itself to a gnostic reading). Z.'s recommendation here seems too close to Baudrillard's injunction to "be silent" in the face of popular media -- essentially to choose a mode of resistance likely futile, all while consoling oneself that futility is inevitable, until from the inchoate parallax gap of the Real messianically springs, like Athena from the head of Zeus, the possibility of truly efficacious revolution.