WHAT CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS TELL US ABOUT CYBERSPACE? (PART ONE)

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THE RETREAT OF THE BIG OTHER

The Informational Anorexia

Today, the media constantly bombard us with requests to choose, addressing us as subjects supposed to know what we really want (which book, clothes, TV program, place of holiday...) - "press A, if you want this, press B, if you want that," or, to quote the motto of the recent "reflective" TV publicity campaign for advertisement itself: "Advertisement - the right to choose." However, at a more fundamental level, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants, i.e., the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants - the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, insofar as he does not know what he wants. What, then, happens in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign as to what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one here to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears, i.e., is replaced by its mere semblance. One is tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoyevsky ("If there is no God, nothing is permitted at all."): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

This suspension of the function of the (symbolic) Master is the crucial feature of the Real whose contours loom at the horizon of the cyberspace universe: the moment of implosion when humanity will attend the limit impossible to transgress, the moment at which the coordinates of our societal life-world will be dissolved. At this moment, distances will be suspended (I will be able to communicate instantly through teleconferences with anywhere on the globe); all information, from texts to music to video, will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a far-away foreigner is that, due to the gradual disappearance of contact with "real" bodily others, a neighbour will no longer be a neighbour, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen spectre; the general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; the excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; the universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it. The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, etc., conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure. This, then, is the Real awaiting us, and all endeavours to symbolize this real, from utopian (the New Age or "deconstructionist" celebrations of the liberating potentials of cyberspace), to the blackest dystopian ones (the prospect of the total control by a God-like computerized network...), are just this, i.e., so many attempts to avoid the true "end of history," the paradox of an infinity far more suffocating than any actual confinement. Is therefore one of the possible reactions to the excessive filling-in of the voids in cyberspace not the informational anorexia, the desperate refusal to accept information?

Or, to put it in a different way, digitalization cancels the distance between a neighbour and a distant foreigner, insofar as it suspends the presence of the Other in the massive weight of the Real: neighbours and foreigners, all are equal in their spectral screen-presence. That is to say, why was the Christian injunction "love thy neighbour like thyself" so problematic for Freud? The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbour neighbour is that of jouissance: when the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And what is the contemporary "postmodern" racism, if not a violent reaction to this virtualization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbour in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The feature which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food...) is thus precisely the little piece of the real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order.

We are thus far from bemoaning the loss of the contact with a "real," flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we encounter are digital phantoms: our point is rather that cyberspace is not spectral enough. One of the tendencies in theorizing cyberspace is to conceive cybersex as the ultimate phenomenon in the chain whose key link is Kierkegaard, his relationship with Regina: in the same way Kierkegaard rejected the actual proximity of the Other (the beloved woman), and advocated loneliness as the only authentic mode of relating to a love object, cybersex also involves the nullification of the "real life" object, and draws erotic energy from this very nullification - the moment I encounter my cybersex partner(s) in real life is the moment of desublimation, the moment of the return to vulgar "reality"... Convincing as it may sound, this parallel is deeply misleading: the status of my cyberspace sexual partner is NOT that of Kierkegaard's Regina. Regina was the void at which Kierkegaard addressed his words, a kind of "vacuole" weaved by the texture of his speech, while my cyberspace sexual partner is, on the contrary, over-present, bombarding me with the torrential flow of images and explicit statements of her (or his) most secret fantasies. Or, to put it in another way: Kierkegaard's Regina is the cut of the Real, the traumatic obstacle which again and again unsettles the smooth run of my self-satisfying erotic imagination, while cyberspace presents its exact opposite, a frictionless flow of images and messages - when I am immersed in it, I as it were return to a symbiotic relationship with an Other in which the deluge of semblances seems to abolish the dimension of the Real.

The easiest way to discern the set of social relations which overdetermine the mode of operation of cyberspace, is to focus on the predominant "spontaneous ideology of cyberspace," the so-called cyberevolutionism which relies on the notion of cyberspace (or World Wide Web) as a self-evolving "natural" organism. Crucial is here the blurring of the distinction between "culture" and "nature": the obverse of the "naturalization of culture" (market, society etc. as living organisms) is the "culturalization of nature" (life itself is conceived as a set of self-reproducing information - "genes are memes"). This new notion of Life is thus neutral with respect to the distinction of natural and cultural or "artificial" processes - the Earth (as Gaia) as well as global market, they both appear as gigantic self-regulated living systems whose basic structure is defined in the terms of the process of coding and decoding, of passing information, etc. The reference to World Wide Web as a living organism is often evoked in contexts which may seem liberating: say, against the State censorship of Internet. However, this very demonization of State is thoroughly ambiguous, since it is predominantly appropriated by right-wing populist discourse and/or market liberalism: its main targets are the state interventions which try to maintain a kind of minimal social balance and security - the title of Michael Rothschild's book (Bioeconomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism) is here indicative. So, while cyberspace ideologists can dream about the next step of evolution in which we will no longer be mechanically interacting "Cartesian" individuals, in which each "person" will cut his substantial link to his individual body and conceive itself as part of the new holistic Mind which lives and acts through him or her, what is obfuscated in such direct "naturalization" of the World Wide Web or market is the set of power relations - of political decisions, of institutional conditions - within which "organisms" like Internet (or market or capitalism...) can only thrive.

What Can Meteorology Teach Us About Cyberspace?

In what, then, resides the key feature of la coupure digitale? Perhaps the best way to approach it is via the gap which separates the modern universe of science from the traditional knowledge: for Lacan, modern science is not just another local narrative grounded in its specific pragmatic conditions, since it does relate to the (mathematical) Real beneath the symbolic universe. Let us recall the difference between the modern satellite meteorology and the traditional wisdom about weather which "thinks locally." Modern meteorology assumes a kind of meta-language view on the entire atmosphere of the Earth as a global and self-enclosed mechanism, while the traditional meteorology involves a particular viewpoint within a finite horizon: out of some Beyond which, by definition, remains beyond our grasp, clouds and winds arrive, and all one can do is formulate the rules of their emergence and disappearance in a series of "wisdoms" ("if it rains on the first of May, beware of the drought in August," etc.). The crucial point is that "meaning" can only emerge within such a finite horizon: the weather phenomena can be experienced and conceived as "meaningful" only insofar as there is a Beyond out of which these phenomena emerge following the laws which are not directly natural laws - the very lack of natural laws directly connecting actual weather here and the mysterious Beyond sets in motion the search for "meaningful" coincidences and correlations. The paradox is that, although this traditional "closed" universe confronts us with unpredictable catastrophes which seem to emerge "out of nowhere," it nonetheless provides a sense of ontological "safety," of dwelling within a self-enclosed finite circle of meaning where things (natural phenomena) in a way "speak to us," address us.

This traditional closed universe is thus in a sense more "open" than the universe of science: it implies the gateway into the indefinite Beyond, while the direct global model of the modern science is effectively "closed," i.e., it allows for no Beyond. The universe of modern science, in its very "meaninglessness," involves the gesture of "going through fantasy," of abolishing the dark spot, the domain of the Unexplained which harbours fantasies and thus guarantees Meaning: instead of it, we get the meaningless mechanism. This is why, for Heidegger, modern science stands for the metaphysical "danger": it poses a threat to the universe of meaning. There is no meaning without some dark spot, without some forbidden/impenetrable domain into which we project fantasies which guarantee our horizon of meaning. Perhaps this very growing disenchantment of our actual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyberspace: it is as if, in it, we encounter again a Limit beyond which the mysterious domain of the fantasmatic Otherness opens up, as if the screen of the interface is today's version of the blank, of the unknown region in which we can locate our own Shangri-las or the kingdoms of She.

Paradigmatic here are the last chapters of E.A. Poe's Gordon Pym, which stage the fantasmatic scenario of passing the threshold into the pure Otherness of the Antarctic. The last human settlement prior to this threshold is a native village on an island with savages so black that even their teeth are black; significantly, what one encounters on this island is also the ultimate Signifier (a gigantic hieroglyph inscribed into the very shape of the mountain chain). Savage and corrupted as they are, the black men cannot be bribed into accompanying the white explorers further south: they are scared to death by the very notion of entering this prohibited domain. When the explorers finally enter this domain, the ice-cold polar snowscape gradually and mysteriously turns into its opposite, a domain of thick, warm and opaque whiteness... in short, the incestuous domain of primordial Milk. What we get here is another version of the kingdom of Tarzan or She: in Rider Haggard's She, Freud's notorious claim that feminine sexuality is a "dark continent" is realized in a literal way: she-who-must-be-obeyed, this Master beyond Law, the possessor of the Secret of Life itself, is a White Woman ruling in the midst of Africa, the dark continent. This figure of She, of a woman who exists (in the unexplored Beyond), is the necessary fantasmatic support of the patriarchal universe. With the advent of modern science, this Beyond is abolished, there is no longer a "dark continent" which generates a Secret - and, consequently, Meaning is also lost, since the field of Meaning is by definition sustained by an impenetrable dark spot in its very heart.

The very process of colonization thus produces the excess which resists it: does the mystery of Shangri-la (or of Tarzan's kingdom, or of the kingdom of She or...) not reside precisely in the fact that we are dealing with the domain which was not yet colonized, with the imagined radical Otherness which forever eludes the colonizer's grasp? Here, however, we encounter another key paradox. This motif of She relies on one of the key mythical narratives of colonialism: after white explorers transgress a certain frontier which is taboo even for the most primitive and cruel aborigines and enter the very "heart of darkness," what they encounter there, in this purely fantasmatic Beyond, is again the rule of a mysterious White Man, the pre-Oedipal father, the absolute Master. The structure is here that of Moebius band - in the very heart of Otherness, we encounter the other side of the Same, of our own structure of domination. This figure of the white Master who rules in this fantasmatic domain of radical Otherness is split into two opposites: either the horrifying embodiment of the "diabolical Evil" who knows the secret of jouissance and, consequently, terrorizes and tortures his subjects (from Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim to the feminine version of it Rider Haggard's She), or the saint who rules his kingdom as a benevolent theocratic despotism (Shangri-La in The Lost Horizon). The point, of course, resides in the "speculative identity" of these two figures: the diabolically evil Master is "in himself or for us" the same as the saintly sage-ruler, their difference is purely formal, it concerns only the shift in the perspective of the observer. (Or, to put it in Schelling's terms, the saintly wise ruler is in the mode of potentiality what the evil Master is in the mode of actuality, since "the same principle carries and holds us in its ineffectiveness which would consume and destroy us in its effectiveness".¹) What the hundreds-year-old monk who runs Shangri-La and Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness share is that they both have cut their links with common human considerations and entered the domain "between the two deaths." As such, Kurtz is the Institution at its fantasmatic pure: his very excess merely realizes, brings to the end, the inherent logic of the Institution (the Company and its colonization of the wilderness of Congo). This inherent logic is concealed in the "normal" functioning of the Institution: the very figure which literally realizes the logic of the Institution is, in a properly Hegelian way, perceived as an unbearable excess which has to be finished off.image.jpg

What, then, does all this tell us about cyberspace? Cyberspace, of course, is a thoroughly technological-scientific phenomenon; it develops the logic of modern meteorology to extreme: not only is there no place for the fantasmatic screen in it, it even generates the screen itself by way of manipulating the Real of bytes. However, it is by no means accidental that the modern science, inclusive of meteorology, inherently relies on the interface screen: in the modern scientific approach, processes are simulated on the screen, from the models of atomic subparticles, through the radar images of clouds in weather reports, up to the fascinating pictures of the surface of Mars and other planets (which are all manipulated by computer procedures - added colorization, etc. - in order to enhance their effect). The outcome of the suspension of the dark spot of Beyond in the universe of modern science is thus that the "global reality" with no impenetrable dark spot is something accessible only on screen: the abolishment of the fantasmatic screen which served as the gateway into the Beyond turns the entire reality into something which "exists only on screen," as a depthless surface. Or, to put it in ontological terms: the moment the function of the dark spot which maintains open the space for something for which there is no place in our reality is suspended, we lose our very "sense of reality."

The problem with today's social functioning of cyberspace is thus that it potentially fills in the gap, the distance between the subject's public symbolic identity and its fantasmatic background: fantasies are more and more immediately externalized in the public symbolic space, the sphere of intimacy is more and more directly socialized. The inherent violence of cybersex does not reside in the potentially violent content of sexual fantasies played out on the screen, but in the very formal fact of seeing my innermost fantasies being directly imposed on me from without.

Oedipus or Anti-Oedipus?

So, again: how does cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity? What are the consequences of cyberspace for Oedipus, i.e., for the mode of subjectivization that psychoanalysis conceptualized as the Oedipus complex and its dissolution? The fact that cyberspace involves the suspension of the symbolic function of the Master seems to confirm the predominant doxa according to which cyberspace explodes or at least potentially undermines the reign of Oedipus: it involves the "end of Oedipus," i.e., what occurs in it is the passage from the structure of symbolic castration (the intervention of the Third Agency which prohibits/disturbs the incestuous dyad and thus enables the subject's entry into the symbolic order), to some new post-Oedipal libidinal economy. Of course, the mode of perception of this "end of Oedipus" depends on the standpoint of the theoretician: first, there are those who see in it a dystopian prospect of individuals regressing to pre-symbolic psychotic immersion, of losing the symbolic distance which sustains the minimum of critical/reflective attitude (the idea that computer functions as a maternal Thing which "swallows" the subject who entertains towards it an attitude of incestuous fusion) - in short, today, in the digitalized universe of simulation, Imaginary overlaps with the Real, at the expense of the Symbolic.

This position is at its strongest when it insists on the difference between appearance and simulacrum: "appearance" has nothing in common with the postmodern notion that we are entering the era of universalized simulacra in which reality itself becomes indistinguishable from its simulated double. The nostalgic longing for the authentic experience of being lost in the deluge of simulacra, as well as the postmodern assertion of Brave New World of universalized simulacra as the sign that we are finally getting rid of the metaphysical obsession with authentic Being, both miss the distinction between simulacrum and appearance: what gets lost in today's digital "plague of simulations" is not the firm, true, non-simulated real, but appearance itself. So what is appearance? In a sentimental answer to a child asking him how does God's face look, a priest answered that, whenever the child encounters a human face irradiating benevolence and goodness, whomever this face belongs to, he gets a glimpse of His face... the truth of this sentimental platitude is that the Suprasensible (God's face) is discernible as a momentary, fleeting appearance, a "grimace," of an earthly face. It is THIS dimension of "appearance" which transubstantiates a piece of reality into something which, for a brief moment, irradiates the suprasensible Eternity, that is missing in the logic of simulacrum: in simulacrum which becomes indistinguishable from the real, everything is here and no other, transcendent dimension effectively "appears" in/through it. We are here back at the Kantian problematic of the sublime: in Kant's famous reading of the enthusiasm evoked by the French Revolution in the enlightened public around Europe, the revolutionary events functioned as a sign through which the dimension of trans-phenomenal Freedom, of a free society, appeared. "Appearance" is thus not simply the domain of phenomena, but those "magic moments" in which the other, noumenal, dimension momentarily "appears" in ("shines through") some empirical/contingent phenomenon. Therein resides also the problem with cyberspace and virtual reality: what VR threatens is NOT "reality" which is dissolved in the multiplicity of its simulacra, but, on the contrary, APPEARANCE itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, imaginary and real become more and more indistinguishable. The key to today's universe of simulacra in which real is less and less distinguishable from its imaginary simulation resides in the retreat of the "symbolic efficiency." This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the real) and appearance is easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography "shows it all," "real sex," and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of sexuality, while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing.

On the other hand, there are those who emphasize the liberating potential of cyberspace: cyberspace opens up the domain of shifting multiple sexual and social identities, potentially at least liberating us from the hold of the patriarchal Law; it as it were realizes in our everyday practical experience the "deconstruction" of old metaphysical binaries ("real Self" versus "artificial mask," etc.). In cyberspace, I am compelled to renounce any fixed symbolic identity, the legal/political fiction of a unique Self guaranteed by my place in the socio-symbolic structure - in short, according to this second version, cyberspace announces the end of the Cartesian cogito as the unique "thinking substance." Of course, from this second point of view, the pessimist prophets of the psychotic "end of Oedipus" in the universe of simulacra simply betray their inability to imagine an alternative to Oedipus. What we have here is another version of the standard postmodern deconstructionist narrative according to which, in the bad old patriarchal order, the subject's sexual identity was predetermined by his/her place and/or role within the fixed symbolic Oedipal framework - the "big Other" took care of us and conferred on us the identity of either a "man" or a "woman," and the subject's ethical duty was limited to the effort to succeed in occupying the preordained symbolic place (homosexuality and other "perversions" were perceived as simply so many signs of the subject's failure to succeed in going through the Oedipal path and thus achieving "normal"/"mature" sexual identity). Today, however, as Foucault allegedly demonstrated, the legal/prohibitive matrix of Power which underlies the Oedipal functioning of sexuality is in retreat, so that, instead of being interpellated to occupy a preordained place in the socio-symbolic order, the subject gained the freedom (or at least the promise, the prospect of freedom) to shift between different socio-symbolic sexual identities, to construct his Self as an aesthetic oeuvre - the motif at work from the late Foucault's notion of the "care of the Self" up to deconstructionist feminist emphasis on the social formation of gender. - It is easy to perceive how the reference to cyberspace can provide an additional impetus to this ideology of aesthetic self-creation: cyberspace delivers me from the vestiges of biological constraints and elevates my capacity to construct freely my Self, to let myself go to a multitude of shifting identities...

However, opposed to both versions of "cyberspace as the end of Oedipus" are some rare, but nonetheless penetrating theoreticians² who assert the continuity of cyberspace with the Oedipal mode of subjectivization: cyberspace retains the fundamental Oedipal structure of an intervening Third Order which, in its very capacity of the agency of mediation/mediatisation, sustains the subject's desire, while simultaneously acting as the agent of Prohibition which prevents its direct and full gratification - on account of this intervening Third, every partial gratification/satisfaction is marked by a fundamental "this is not THAT." The notion that cyberspace as the medium of hyperreality suspends the symbolic efficiency and brings about the false total transparency of the imaginary simulacra coinciding with the Real, this notion, while effectively expressing a certain "spontaneous ideology of cyberspace" (to paraphrase Althusser), dissimulates the actual functioning of cyberspace which not only continues to rely on the elementary dispositif of the symbolic Law, but even renders it more palpable in our everyday experience. Suffice it to recall the conditions of our surfing along in the Internet or participating in a virtual community: first, there is the gap between the "subject of enunciation" (the anonymous X who does it, who speaks) and the "subject of the enunciated / of the statement" (the symbolic identity that I assume in cyberspace, and which can and in a sense always is "invented" - the signifier which marks my identity in cyberspace is never directly "myself"); the same goes for the other side, for my partner(s) in cyberspace communication - here, the undecidability is radical, I can never be sure who they are, are they "really" the way they describe themselves, is there a "real" person at all behind a screen-persona, is the screen-persona a mask for a multiplicity of persons, does the same "real" person possess and manipulate more screen-personas, or am I simply dealing with a digitalized entity which does not stand for any "real" person? In short, INTER-FACE means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never FACE-TO-FACE, that it is always mediat(iz)ed by the interposed digital machinery which stands for the Lacanian "big Other" as the anonymous symbolic order whose structure is that of a labyrinth: I "browse," I err around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the Whole of it - this immense circuitry of "murmurs" - remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension. (In this sense, one is tempted to propose the proto-Kantian notion of the "cyberspace Sublime" as the magnitude of messages and their circuits which even the greatest effort of my synthetic imagination cannot encompass/comprehend.) Furthermore, does the a priori possibility of viruses disintegrating the virtual universe not point towards the fact that, in the virtual universe also, there is no "Other of the Other," that this universe is a priori inconsistent, with no last guarantee of its coherent functioning? The conclusion thus seems to be that there IS a properly "symbolic" functioning of cyberspace: cyberspace remains "Oedipal" in the sense that, in order to circulate freely in it, one must assume a fundamental prohibition and/or alienation - yes, in cyberspace, "you can be whatever you want," you're free to choose a symbolic identity (screen persona), but you must choose one which will always in a way betray you, which will never be fully adequate; you must accept to be represented in cyberspace by a signifying element which runs around in the circuitry as your stand-in... Yes, in cyberspace, "everything is possible," but for the price of assuming a fundamental impossibility: you cannot circumvent the mediation of the interface, its "by-pass," which separates you (as the subject of enunciation) forever from your symbolic stand-in.

"L'autre n'existe pas"...

Our contention is that both versions miss the point; they are either too strong (claiming that cyberspace involves a kind of psychotic suspension of the "big Other" qua the symbolic Law) or too weak (positing a direct continuation of Oedipus in cyberspace). The fact is that today, in a sense, "the big Other no longer exists" - however, in WHAT sense? In a way, with the big Other, it is the same as with God according to Lacan (it is not that God is dead today - God was dead from the very beginning, only that He didn't know it...): it never existed in the first place, i.e., the inexistence of the "big Other" is ultimately equivalent to the fact that the big Other is the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality. (In this sense, the only subject for whom the big Other does exist is the psychotic, the one who attributes to words direct material efficiency.) In short, the "inexistence of the big Other" is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, credence, of taking what others say "at their word's value."

In one of the Marx brothers' films, Groucho, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?" This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-mandate matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask and/or assumes this mandate. This functioning involves the structure of fetishist disavowal: "I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupted weakling/, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him." So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e., I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen... The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge - if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his "les non-dupes errent": those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most... What a cynic who "believes only his eyes" misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbours: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrements, etc. - a minimum of idealization, of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis of our co-existence.

Today, with the new digitalized technologies enabling perfectly faked documentary images, not to mention Virtual Reality, the motto "believe my words (argumentation), not the fascination of your eyes!" is more actual than ever. That is to say, the crucial point here is to keep in sight how the logic of "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?", i.e., of "I know well, but nonetheless... /I believe/", can function in two different ways, that of the symbolic fiction and that of the imaginary simulacrum. In the case of the efficient symbolic fiction of the judge wearing his insignia, "I know very well that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him as if /I believe that/ the symbolic big Other speaks through him": I disavow what my eyes tell me and I choose to believe the symbolic fiction. In the case of the simulacrum of virtual reality, on the contrary, "I know very well that what I see is an illusion generated by the digital machinery, but I nonetheless accept to immerse myself in it, to behave as if I believe it" - here, I disavow what my (symbolic) knowledge tells me and I choose to believe my eyes only...

This reversal signals the fact that, today, the big Other's inexistence has reached a much more radical dimension: what is more and more undermined is precisely this symbolic trust which persists against all sceptical data. Perhaps the most eye-catching facet of this new status of the "non-existence of the big Other" is the sprouting of "committees" destined to decide upon the so-called ethical dilemmas which pop up when technological developments in an ever-increasing way affect our life-world: in medicine and biogenetics (at what point does an acceptable and even desirable genetic experiment or intervention turn into an unacceptable manipulation?), in the application of universal human rights (at what point does the protection of the victim's rights turn into an imposition of Western values?), in sexual mores (what is the proper, non-patriarchal, procedure of seduction?), not to mention the obvious case of cyberspace (what is the status of sexual harassment in a virtual community? How does one distinguish here between "mere words" and "deeds"?). So, to resolve the deadlock, one convenes a committee to formulate, in an ultimately arbitrary way, the precise rules of conduct... The work of these committees is caught in a symptomal vicious cycle: on the one hand, they try to legitimate their decisions in the most advanced scientific knowledge (which, in the case of abortion, tells us that a foetus does not yet possess self-awareness and experience pain; which, in the case of a mortally ill person, defines the threshold beyond which euthanasia is the only meaningful solution); on the other hand, they have to evoke some non-scientific ethical criterion in order to direct and posit a limitation to the inherent scientific drive.

1. Schelling, F.W.J.: Die Weltalter. Fragmente. In den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813, ed. Manfred Schroeter, Munich: Biederstein (reprint 1979), p. 105.image.jpg

2. See Flieger, Jerry Aline: "Oedipus On-line?," Pretexts, No. 1 / Vol. 6 (July 1997), p. 81-94.