Excerpts from The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek
…“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”[1] These lines should surprise us, since they invert the standard procedure of demystifying a theological myth, reducing it to its earthly base: Marx does not claim, in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that critical analysis should demonstrate how what appears to be a mysterious theological entity emerged out of the “ordinary” real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in what appears at first sight to be just an ordinary object. In other words, when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him in not “The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it is really just a reified expression of relations between people.” The real Marxist’s reproach is, rather, “You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that money, for example, is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you—in your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers.” In other words, we can imagine a bourgeois subject taking a course in Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism; after the course is finished, however, he comes back to his teacher, complaining that he is still a victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him: “But you know now how things are, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothing magical about them!”, to which the pupil replies: “Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with don’t seem to!”[2]
In one of the Marx Brothers’ films, Groucho Marx, caught out in a lie, answers angrily: “Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?” This apparently absurd logic perfectly expresses 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 corrupt weakling], but nonetheless I treat him with respect, 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 actually believe his words, not my eyes: I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen. Thus the cynical reduction to reality is inadequate: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of Law) than there is in the direct reality of the person of the judge—if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. [3]
“Consequently, the first rule of properly dialectical sociopolitical analysis is that the Two (the basic antagonism) as a rule always has to appear as three: the way a given sociopolitical field is explicitly structured, the open struggle which defines its dynamics, is never the “true” underlying antagonism—if we are to unearth the force which is the only stand-in for this antagonism, we have to look for a third agent. […] In our perception, today’s ideological constellation is determined by the opposition between neoconservative fundamentalist populism and liberal multiculturalism—both parasitizing on each other, both precluding any alternative to the system as such. And this enables us to propose the correct formal concept of a “revolutionary situation”: a situation in which, exceptionally and momentarily, the antagonism appears as such, is directly “experienced”; in which the masks of the official ideological struggle fall off, the official opponents discover their “deeper solidarity” and start to share their concerns, and the situation is reduced to its true underlying antagonism—there are no longer conservatives and progressives, totalitarians and democrats, legalists and populists, fundamentalists and liberals, and all other false oppositions—there are only Us and Them.[4]
