NOT DECENTRED BUT DESUBSTANTIALISED

In discussing the notion of the parallax subject as the gap between physical and digital worlds, the emergence of the subject and its constitution as gap must be interrogated. Žižek tells us that the subject “‘is’ a non-substantial void…the empty Nothingness of pure self-relating”

(2007, 124). If the subject is nothing but a void from and around which consciousness posits itself, we must question the nature of this void. Žižek highlights the fact that “cyberspace phenomena render palpable in our everyday existence the deconstructionist ‘decentred subject’” (2006, 99), removing the distance of the illusion of centring and requiring a critical understanding of a new type. For Žižek, however, the subject is not simply located elsewhere but nowhere, or rather, there is no substance of the subject to be located anywhere. The nature of this void of the subject is integral to our understanding of consciousness and how it emerges, for the void refers here to what is commonly termed the unconscious. The

antagonism between consciousness and the unconscious determines not only how both are brought into being, but the entire function of parallax. This is one of the fundamental dilemmas of psychoanalysis, the shift into or creation of the human as a ‘subject’, the emergence of consciousness from the unconscious that separates human reason from the instinctual behaviour of animals. Here we must confront the Lacanian problem of the

“‘beginning of the world’…the passage from the pre-symbolic chaos of the Real to the universe of logos” (Žižek 2007, 7). If our understanding of the universe is always from an impenetrable position of parallax, in which we cannot observe the point of our own

perspective it is because the position of our subjectivity is the void. The ‘stain’ in the gaze that forms the function of parallax and allows us a speculative glimpse at the nature of this process is the subjective void itself, a desubstantialised position from which the entire universe is brought into cognition and reality. Thus within the appearance of substance is no hidden truth or a trail outwards to a subject that is merely dislocated, but rather “the subject is interior to substance precisely as its constitutive gap; it is the void” (Žižek 2006, 40). The construction of the subject emerges from nothing, around nothing, and remains in-itself nothing. Against, or beyond, the poststructural trend of viewing the subject as decentred, we must insist on a view of the subject as desubstantialised.

In terms of the digital realm, where the familiar functions of consciousness can be inverted, a realm of fiction and fantasy where Meaning precedes Existence and the interplay of the Real and the Virtual can be staged, reconceiving the subject as desubstantialised

provides a major point of clarity in our understanding of our relation to any given world.

Focusing on decentring implies that the subject is wholly shifted from one realm to the other, from the symbolic system and social/physical realities to the logic of computer code and the fleeting images of digital reality. Although such an approach suggests the constant relocation of the subject between worlds, it can be reduced to the suggestion that the subject simply exists in an alternative symbolic space to the one in which it perceives itself. The key point of a parallax reality is that the subject does not exist in any of the symbolic spaces in which it might be engaged, whereby “an individual is paradoxically more present as subject in the traces he leaves about himself than in his full presence” (Vighi 2012, 104). Desubstantialisation brings to the fore the functional nature of the subject as a machinic array of processes in the ever self-positing emergence of consciousness. The relations of consciousness to physical and digital worlds must be approached outside of substance, in order to gain an understanding of the nature of the void of subjectivity.

2.1.1 ONE OR MANY GAPS?

In its most reduced form, the question of the nature of the subject-void entails a question of whether all subjects are formed of one singular void or whether a distinct void exists for each individual consciousness. However, the differentiation of the void into one or more subjects is less a matter of the substance of the void, although this is a consistent concern throughout this chapter, than a matter of the differentiation itself. Žižek tells us that “consciousness arises from the primordial act which separates present-actual consciousness from the spectral, shadowy realm of the unconscious” (2007, 33) but also that the unconscious itself is

“the highest deed of my self-positing” (Ibid., 34). That is, the subject, as the functions of consciousness, emerges in the act of separating itself from the void. By positing something rather than nothing the void is separated and defined as the contents of either a single subject, a group of subjects or indeed as a collective subjectivity. This gesture of distinction is the symbolic passage from the chaotic Real to a world that humans can comprehend. Žižek marks this shift as a differentiation between the Thing (das Ding) and the objet petit a as two forms of the void: “das Ding is the absolute void, the lethal abyss which swallows the subject;

while objet petit a designates that which remains of the Thing after it has undergone the process of symbolization” (2008a, 105). The Thing is the primordial horror of the abyss of subjectivity, the void-core of humanity that underlies subjective reality. The objet a, however, is the function of the Real within consciousness, the objectification of this void. Thus the void is neither singular nor multiple, for the notion of the void escapes classification as any form of countable substance, and is rather the unknowability as such of the subject to itself. This void,

although it constitutes the very ‘substance’ (or de-substance) of the subject, remains always inaccessible to consciousness. Žižek labels this fundamental level of the self the “void that is nothing in itself…which nonetheless serves as the unrepresentable point of reference” (2006, 102). From this desubstantialised reference point of subjective parallax, however, the Real forms the void as it is knowable to consciousness, as a function within thought. Here the role of the objet a becomes clear: in its most basic form it is the lack of substance of the subject itself and the lost cause of desire that instigates the necessary illusion of substantiality of the subject in our everyday perceptions. The formation and smooth running of the subject necessitates this objectified void brought into the functioning of consciousness in a way that remains elusive but is not entirely inaccessible.

Thus the question of one or many voids is not between subjects but within the subject itself. The void as such remains unknown and chaotic, while the void that forms the Real is the functional pull towards the void that keeps the Virtuality of self-positing consciousness from a constant flight into pure abstraction (or insanity). The need for substance is the quasi-causal relation that enables and inspires human subjects to construct itself through symbolic traces, and the presence of this rupture of the void as lost within any world we engage with allows for a critical confrontation of the self-perpetuating illusion of Virtual consciousness. In this sense, the void is not to be conceived as a morbid force, even though the Real is often associated with the death drive, but rather as an affirming negation that creates a space in which the antagonism of parallax can be sustained and a minimal (critical) distance towards it achieved.

As Fabio Vighi illustrates, “the subject qua abstract negativity can only apprehend itself through an “objective correlative” of such negativity – the very “stuff” of which objet a is made” (2012, 104), and it is here that we insert a conscious mark or ‘stain’ in the smooth experience of subjective reality: contact with the void and its ‘materialisation’ as objet a through expression. This separation of the unrepresentable void and a representable-as-lost form in the Real is the integral function of the void in the structures of signification that support the entire process of our construction of reality within consciousness. Rancière states:

Some things are unrepresentable as a function of the conditions to which a subject of representation must submit if it is to be part of a determinate regime of art, a specific regime of the relations between exhibition and signification. (Rancière 2007, 136)

It is here the act of distinction itself that is necessary. There must be some element that cannot be representable in order for representation to occur, just as in our formation of reality there must be the inaccessible void in order for an accessible form of reality to appear to consciousness and in which a conscious subject can engage. As Žižek insists, “‘atoms’ are nothing but configurations of the void” (2009c, 148), and it is this antagonistic relation

between the void and any structure of reality that creates the parallax of the subject and through which we can approach the formation of the subject from the functions of

consciousness, inserting a critical intervention between the subject of void (the objectified Real as void-function) and the subject as void (the desubstantialised position of parallax).