The Text

From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality                      by Slavoj Zizek

Zizek’s essay investigates how the computer and virtual reality functions within our culture. In particular, for Zizek the ideology of virtual reality and the computer can be traced through Lacan’s symbolic functions and Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. Of interest to Zizek is the idea of “symbolic bliss”, that is reality is subjected to a fantasy-frame which in a sense masks the Real.  Zizek writes that the “symbolic bliss is the computer…the computer inscribes itself into our symbolic universe…”(291). Furthermore, Zizek traces the computer has an intermediary between the Marxian idea of tool and technology employing strategies of both, that is an extension of man and a thing that needs man to function. He also theorizes that the computer system is totalitarian in structure. However, the strength of Zizek’s essay stems from his investigation of artificial intelligence. Here, Zizek maps the problems of artificial intelligence as being the regulatory system of the computer in contrast to the spontaneous nature of the human machine. Interestingly, he notes that hacker’s function through finding inconsistencies with the computer systems. It is these very inconsistencies that for Zizek belie the “symbolic bliss” that then becomes present in Virtual Reality. It is not enough to say that Virtual Reality is a simulation, but rather that through the function of the symbolic bliss, Virtual Reality … “is the virtualization of the very true reality.”(295)

The Technology

Virtual Reality on Wikipedia

External Sites of Interest

Slavoj Zizek at the European Graduate School

Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

Explanatory essay on Lacan and Freud.