Reality and Simulation

Ever since I was very young I've had a very difficult time with holidays and special occasions, as I've often felt as if I was required to feign a particular emotion or way of feeling on these occasions without genuinely feeling it. This would be a variant of the superegoic command to enjoy, though I suspect that Lacan's analysis of the superego and enjoyment pertains more to prolonging infantile narcissism and the demand to satisfy aggressive drives, than enjoyment as it is sometimes characterized by Zizek or McGowen. That aside, the difficulty I've experienced with these sorts of occasions seems to revolve around the way in which they feel simulated or artificial, leading them to be haunted with the sense of the uncanny.

Recently I've noticed that this sense of the simulated has come to extend itself to my reactions to a number of other domains of experience such as films, television shows, politics, and so on. When I view the outrage of a politican or a political event (such as the concerts after 9-11) or watch a film, I increasingly find myself feeling as if I'm viewing a mock narrative, a play, an activity of going through the motions, rather than something genuine. To make matters worse, I experience these things as genuine and desparate attempts to produce a reality-effect-- and consciously so --without being successful in doing so. Everything appears staged, repeated, simulated, but as a desparate attempt not to be staged. This extends to the domain of philosophy as well. When I read Badiou calling for an ethics of the event, I find myself wondering whether one can consciously maintain commitment to an event in this way would producing a simulated or artificial distance to that event. Doesn't rendering such processes conscious and theorized already render the event null somehow? Did the Galileans think of themselves as subjects of the Galileo-event, or were they simply doing what Galileans do? Isn't there something paradoxical in Zizek calling for an act, when an act is precisely that which cannot be called for? There seems to be a desire to find a way out of the endless labrynth of the determinants of the encyclopedia or the world of doxa, but somehow attempts to theorize this transform these lines of flight, subtractions, and acts into one more element of the encyclopedia.

Am I alone in feeling this strange sense where all reality comes to feel simulated, staged, and artificial? Already we find talk of this between Neo and Morpheus in the Matrix, when Morpheus first asks Neo whether he hasn't always felt as if there wasn't something slightly off about the world of the matrix, something unreal and simulated. Of course, the Matrix proposes, like Plato, a true reality behind the artificial reality of shadows and images. Today we've given up on the reality/appearance distinction. Nonetheless, it seems that a fundamental mutation has taken place at the level of the symbolic and how the symbolic is organized. On the one hand, the constant accusations of voting fraud (now occuring in Mexico and Germany as well) suggest that we are living in the midsts of a crises of legitimacy where the social tie itself is somehow collapsing. This isn't to suggest that worries about voting fraud aren't real, only that the social tie no longer seems to hold or has become destabilized. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that political news coverage today spends all its time talking about strategy and on the part of politicians and parties, rather than their platforms and proposals. That is, Nietzschean suspicion, Nietzschean critique, the hermeneutics of suspicion is now the reigning doxa or common sense, rather than the explosive force that it once was with regard to naive acceptance of ideology. It is suspicion itself, doubt, that sustains the current system, not ideological mystification hiding other motives. Nobody today is believed to say what they mean or mean what they say... Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud have won the day, but not in the way anyone might have expected.

For this reason, Zizek seems to be essentially correct when he argues that the truly radical gesture is to genuinely believe. When we talk about multicultural ethnic and religious tolerance, aren't we really saying that no one should genuinely believe in what they profess to believe, that any system of believe is just an "arbitrary signifier" clothing a "signified" that is the same for all of us? That deep down we're all really alike? Genuine belief, by constrast, if it exists, is premised on the exclusion of certain things on the basis of the affirmations that it makes. In Zizek!, there's a scene where Zizek takes Judith Butler to task for chastising him for being a Lacanian. "Look," he says, "there's no secret here. I am a Lacanian!" It is precisely this, perhaps, that is traumatic... That he doesn't simply dabble in Lacanian theory or treat it as a "toolbox" taking from it what he finds useful, but that he's genuinely commited to Lacanianism. And similarly in the case of the fundamentalist that recognizes that his religious belief isn't simply an optional set of practices that are "true of him", but the very nature of his being and non-negotiable at the level of how he lives and how he engages with the world. The problem is that I can't will to believe. The very desire to believe already separates me from belief and suspends what it is that I strive to believe, pushing me back into the world of simulation. My belief becomes a simulated belief, the phantom of a commitment.