The Plague of Fantasies (10)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

[about how the need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order is materialized in 'unwritten rules']

p. 27: How do these two levels, the public text and its phantasmic support, interact? Where do they intersect? [....] Every belonging to a society involves a paradoxical point at which the subject is ordered to embrace freely, as the result of his choice, what is anyway imposed on him [....] This paradox of willing (choosing freely) what is in any case necessary, of pretending (maintaining the appearance) that there is a free choice although in fact there isn't, is strictly co-dependent with the notion of an empty symbolic gesture, a gesture--an offer--which is meant to be rejected: what the empty gesture offers is the opportunity to choose the impossible, that which inevitably will not happen [....]

p. 28: What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made to be rejected; the point, the 'magic' of symbolic exchange, is that although in the end we are back to where we were at the beginning, the overall result of the operation is not zero but a distinct gain for both parties, the pact of solidarity. [....] what if the other to whom the offer to be rejected is made actually accepts it? [....] A situation like this is properly catastrophic: it causes the disintegration of the semblance (of freedom) that pertains to the social order--however, since, at this level, things in a way are what they seem to be, this disintegration of the semblance equals the disintegration of the social substance itself, the dissolution of the social link.

The need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order (materialized in the so-called unwritten rules) thus bears witness to the system's vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. [....]

pp. 28-29: Or--to put it another way--the paradoxical role of unwritten rules is that, with regard to the explicit, public Law, they are simultaneously transgressive (they violate explicit social rules) and more coercive (they are additional rules which restrain the field of choice by prohibiting the possibilities allowed for--guaranteed, even--by the public Law).

p. 29: Fantasy designates precisely this unwritten framework which tells us how we are to understand the letter of the Law. And it is easy to observe how today, in our enlightened era of universal rights, racism and sexism reproduce themselves mainly at the level of the phantasmic unwritten rules which sustain and qualify universal ideological proclamations. The lesson of this is that--sometimes, at least--the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of the Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy which sustains it. In other words, the act of taking the empty gesture (the offer to be rejected) literally--to treat the forced choice as a true choice--is, perhaps, one of the ways to put into practice what Lacan calls 'traversing the fantasy': in accomplishing this act, the subject suspends the phantasmic frame of unwritten rules which tell him how to choose freely--no wonder the consequences of this act are so catastrophic.

[about how contingency as such is necessary]

It is therefore crucial to bear in mind the radical ambiguity of fantasy within an ideological space: fantasy works both ways, it simultaneously closes the actual span of choices (fantasy renders and sustains the structure of the forced choice, it tells us how we are to choose if we are to maintain the freedom of choice--that is, it bridges the gap between the formal symbolic frame of choices and social reality by preventing the choice which, although formally allowed, would, if in fact made, ruin the system) and maintains the false opening, the idea that the excluded choice might have happened, and does not actually take place only on account of contingent circumstances [....]