Slavoj Žižek tends to make occasional offhand references to videogames. Here’s one from an interview in New Scientist from last month (read it here instead if you don’t have a subscription)

And what is your take on reality?

There is an old philosophical idea about God being stupid and crazy, not finishing his creation. The idea is that God (but the point is to think about this without invoking God), when he created the world, made a crucial mistake by saying, “Humans are too stupid to progress beyond the atom, so I will not specify both the position and the velocity of the atom.” What if reality itself is rather like a computer game where what goes on inside houses has not been programmed because it was not needed in the game? What if it is, in some sense, incomplete?

I feel like I ought to make some sort of synthetic comment, but I’m not sure I have one. I’ll leave it to you.

published September 25, 2010

Comments

  1. Tim Morton

    Incompletion–>radical contingency–>realism–>world not correlated to humans specifically–>Zizek poses a pseudo problem.

    Why? He is a Marxist theologian. And vice versa.

    Synthetic? Maybe not. But nice to see Z slip on his own banana skin.

  2. Ian Bogost

    Nice summary Tim. I suppose there is some room for a generous interpretation of computational abstraction as a kind of withdrawal, but that’s not what Ž is after.

  3. Ben Abraham

    What’s the metaphorical “banana skin” in this example? What am I missing?

    (As an aside, the pull-quote got me interested in the rest of the interview, but when I read it it annoyed me.)

  4. Robert Jackson

    Indeed; I was going to offer some sort of long-winded comparison between Jespers Juul’s A Certain Level of Abstraction essay and Zizek’s remark. But again, we know that Zizek is aiming his sites at pinpointing a Lacanian blockage in reality rather than something tangible and in-itself.

    An acknowledgement of C++ wouldn’t have gone a miss either.

  5. Alonso Almenara

    Zizek has made this comment several times before, at least on video interviews (you can find these on youtube). I believe he takes this idea from Jean-Pierre Dupuy.

    Anyway, I wonder what is so nice about Tim Morton’s comment, and which “banana” he is referring to… I actually find the idea rather charming.

    Saludos.