Slavoj Zizek’s argument begins with a treatment of two famous dreams analyzed in the history of psychoanalysis, namely Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection and the Freudian dream of the burning son’s appearance to his father. Citing Eric Ericson, Zizek points out that when the dreamer encounters “the Real in all its unbearable horror, the dreamer wakes up; i.e. escapes into ‘reality’” (Druckry ed., 291). If Freud’s dream (looking into a patient’s amorphous throat) contained the horror of the Real, Zizek argues, then he would have awakened and escaped into a “reality” built upon the symbolic bliss which, according to Lacanian theory, is “the ultimate support of reality” (290). Having thus constructed a theory of a reality constructed over layers of fantasy and symbolic bliss, Zizek then undertakes to portray the computer and “virtual reality” as constituted by these very crutches against the Real.
Zizek argues that “the computer inscribes itself on our symbolic universe” (291) and the claim guides us through the rest of the essay, accompanied by the simple question “how?”. Zizek spends a portion of the essay explaining that the computer’s identity as an “evocatory object” (291, 292); perhaps through its refusal to be summarized or fully analyzed it raises the phenomenological questions it does.
In asking the simple questions about the nature of the device that he does (what effect does the computer have on us? is computation different than human thought?) Zizek reaches a number of conclusions. Firstly that the computer in our conception of it is “a medium of mastery and control” (292) both in the control it is thought to have over society and in its use as a tool. Secondly he contends that this conception “is countered by wonderment and magic” (292). The computer’s ability to produce what seems to be an illogically grand result from a very small number of operations on the part of the user is an example of this wonderment, and this discrepancy between input and output contributes to the nontransparency of the computer phenomenon.
Zizek goes on to discuss the questions that artificial intelligence brings up in relation to human thought. The answer to the question of whether human thought can be broken down into programs as with computer operations is that the computer exists in a “regulated universe” (293), where errors are made consistently and the environment of self-reference that the computer exists in always cycles back upon itself (its point of inconsistency) at the same point. In this way the inconsistencies of the computer are in themselves consistent, enabling the existence of a hacker culture whose only goal is to “exploit the fault, the symptom of the system” (293).
In further examination of the computer’s self-referentiality Zizek offers Hegel’s distinction between “proper infinity” and “bad infinity” (294). The basic difference between the two is bad infinity’s descent into a continual reproduction of the same self-referential error as opposed to proper infinity’s conversion of the process into its own other. Through its consistent self-referentiality the computer is immersed in “bad infinity” and thus continues to slide over the same error in the fallacy that it has solved the problem. Zizek points out “The computer’s self-referentiality remains on the level of bad infinity in that it cannot reach any position of turnaround where it begins to change into its own other” (295). This is the evidence Zizek provides to the camp that insists the computer does not think.
The provocative close of the essay brings up a claim similar to the suggestion that human thought may operate like a computer posed earlier. “Instead of the computer as model for the human brain, we conceive of the brain itself as a ‘computer made of flesh and blood’” (295). He brings up Freud’s dream of the throat from the start of the essay and reminds us that “in the dream of Irma’s injection, the Real is excluded by the dreamer’s descent into symbolic bliss” (295) only to suggest “yet what we experience as the ‘true, hard, external reality’ is based upon exactly the same exclusion. The ultimate lesson of virtual reality is the virtualization of true reality” (295). Thus the bad infinity which characterized the thought of the computer is characteristic of our own reality in its existence on a foundation of symbolic bliss and ignorance of “the other”.
Zizek’s argument contributes to media theory by continuing the lines of thought regarding the simulation forged by Baudrillard. In Zizek’s account of the computer, the simulated universe which it creates operates on the same fundamental crutches against the Real that our experience into reality, a reality which we “escape into” rather than confront the real of trauma. Though there is a clear difference in Zizek’s conception of the computer’s universe as opposed to the universe of human thought (the question of consistency for one) the metaphor is powerful. In his final comparison of the computer’s “virtual reality” which our own “virtualized reality” Zizek gives further evidence for a conception of the world as constituted by media more than anything else.