Slavoj Zizek, Against the Populist Temptation
Guy Debord's old formula about the “society of spectacle" is thus getting a new twist:
One can buy today laptops with the keyboard artificially imitating the resistance to the fingers of the old typewriter, as well as the typewriter sound of the letter hitting the paper - what better example of the recent need for pseudo-concrecy? Today, when not only social relations but also technology are getting more and more non-transparent (who can visualize what is going on inside a PC?), there is a great need to re-create an artificial concrecy in order to enable individuals to relate to their complex environs as to a meaningful life-world. In computer programming, this was the step accomplished by Apple: the pseudo-concrecy of icons. Guy Debord's old formula about the “society of spectacle" is thus getting a new twist: images are created in order to fill in the gap that separates the new artificial universe from our old life-world surroundings, i.e., to “domesticate" this new universe. And is the pseudo-concrete populist figure of the "Jew" that condenses the vast multitude of anonymous forces that determine us not analogous to a computer board that imitates the old typewriter board? Jew as the enemy definitely emerges from outside the social demands that experience themselves as frustrated.
Slavoj Zizek, Against the Populist Temptation
Slavoj Zizek, Against the Populist Temptation
