The Real Internet

Abstract

At first glance, Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cyberspace from the late 1990s don’t hold up. The primary problem is the separation of cyberspace, or virtual reality, from the communicative exchanges that are part of everyday life in real capitalism. When Žižek wrote these pieces, computer-mediated interactions seemed to be on their way to constituting a new, separate reality that people might “jack into” (William Gibson had already supplied a compelling term for this cybernetic space in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer). Nineties theorists of technoculture, virtual reality, and cyberspace focused on the lawlessness of this new realm, particularly on the ways its anonymous, real-time, textual interface facilitated identity play and sexual experimentation.² That cyberspace was considered a separate domain let Žižek treat it not only as a world with its own dynamics, but more fundamentally as a specific sociocultural symptom. Thus, much as the neuroses of Freud’s hysterics provided a point of access into the pathologies of bourgeois modernity, so did the psychotic character of virtual communities enable Žižek to begin theorizing the decline of symbolic efficiency constitutive of the “postmodern constellation.”³ My intent here is to reconsider Žižek’s early account of cyberspace in light of the intensifications of communicative capitalism. What appear as glitches, I argue, open up the possibility of theorizing the Internet as Real. Networked media’s capture of subjects follows the circular movement of the drives.

I am grateful to Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman for their critical remarks on an initial draft of this essay.