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Found this, thought I would share. Still reading the rest of it
Ideologies, literary genres and theories are post-constructed categories, reflecting either present or past changes in the world around us; they are the means people use to accept and neutralise the threat of change, the destabilisation of the existing social order, chaos. They are fantasy-constructions, which serve ' as a support for our ' reality' itself' masking ' some insupportable, real, impossible kernel' --jouissance (Zizek 1989:45). Nowadays, though, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to perform their task, since they have to keep being reconstructed on continuously new bases, in a world that ' is changing so rapidly that we can hardly track the differences, much less cope with them' (Rushkoff, 2). We are living in the Information Age, during which computer technology dominates and constantly changes our lives, leading us to the oncoming age of ' Chaos' (Rushkoff, 23). Our reality, the existing symbolic order, is in danger of being ' overflowed' by the real -- information, which ' serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything -- which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance' (Zizek 1989:84). Our overwhelming fear of drowning, in today' s sea of endless information, is nothing but a mask for the nausea and despair we experience, each time we encounter the decaying body of our symbolic order. Our obsession with the threatening aspects of information technology is an attempt to prevent the advent of a psychotic world, to construct a new symbolic order, to conceal the fact that information ' in itself ... is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness...' (ibid., 173). This is why it is now the computer that must function as the ' big Other' , as the Name of the Father, if it is to be ' possible for the subject to locate himself again within the texture of symbolic fate' (Zizek 1992a:169). It would seem that the computer is the only ' nodal point' -- point de capiton which can ' quilt' the multitude of ' floating signifiers' , stop their sliding and fix their meaning (Zizek 1989:87) so that we can continue to overlook the real of our desire (Zizek 1993:17).
Ideologies, literary genres and theories are post-constructed categories, reflecting either present or past changes in the world around us; they are the means people use to accept and neutralise the threat of change, the destabilisation of the existing social order, chaos. They are fantasy-constructions, which serve ' as a support for our ' reality' itself' masking ' some insupportable, real, impossible kernel' --jouissance (Zizek 1989:45). Nowadays, though, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to perform their task, since they have to keep being reconstructed on continuously new bases, in a world that ' is changing so rapidly that we can hardly track the differences, much less cope with them' (Rushkoff, 2). We are living in the Information Age, during which computer technology dominates and constantly changes our lives, leading us to the oncoming age of ' Chaos' (Rushkoff, 23). Our reality, the existing symbolic order, is in danger of being ' overflowed' by the real -- information, which ' serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything -- which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance' (Zizek 1989:84). Our overwhelming fear of drowning, in today' s sea of endless information, is nothing but a mask for the nausea and despair we experience, each time we encounter the decaying body of our symbolic order. Our obsession with the threatening aspects of information technology is an attempt to prevent the advent of a psychotic world, to construct a new symbolic order, to conceal the fact that information ' in itself ... is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness...' (ibid., 173). This is why it is now the computer that must function as the ' big Other' , as the Name of the Father, if it is to be ' possible for the subject to locate himself again within the texture of symbolic fate' (Zizek 1992a:169). It would seem that the computer is the only ' nodal point' -- point de capiton which can ' quilt' the multitude of ' floating signifiers' , stop their sliding and fix their meaning (Zizek 1989:87) so that we can continue to overlook the real of our desire (Zizek 1993:17).
