Hopefully, I’m not wandering too far off the subject of Zizek here; but in the process of reading Tony Myer’s Routledge guide to Zizek, I think I may have found an overlap (or hybrid: the thing I’m always looking for in my studies) between my proposal for the possibility of a participating self in the non-linear feedback loop (based on chaotics), poststructuralism, Deleuze, my metaphysical proposal that all perceiving things are the eyes and ears of God in that they give intentionality to the nothingness they could be, the self as primarily a particular point in space and time, Douglas Hofstadter’s symbolic webs, and Dennett’s multiple drafts model of mind.
We start with Myer’s point concerning the post-structuralist view on the subject that Zizek half rejected:
“Building upon these theories, the post-structuralists rejected the notion of the cogito with its associated individualism and advanced in its stead the idea of the decentred subject. As I have already suggested, this subject is not an autonomous being with the power of self-determination but rather an effect of the structure of discourse where competing discourses intersect and speak through the subject.” -Myers, Tony (2007-03-16). Slavoj Zizek (Routledge Critical Thinkers) (p. 34). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.
Now, on one hand, Zizek sort of accepts this view in the same way Deleuze (an influence on Zizek) as a kind of model for how the mind (as a machine) interacts as an individual system with the vast system of systems interacting with other systems (machines exchanging flows of energy with other machines). At the same time, he refuses to give up the notion of a participating self and gets around it by starting with Schelling’s mythology of God starting as a nothingness that, because of some inherent mechanism in nothingness, must become something. As Sartre pointed out in Being and Nothingness: a pure nothingness would nihilate itself. This, in turn, suggests that our existence (and that of all perceiving things) primarily serves the function of giving intentionality (directedness) to nothingness. This is why Zizek defines the subject as that which exists after you take away all its conscious content (thoughts, impulses, whatever might run through a mind). In other words, the subject is this nothingness (a particular point in space and time( projecting into something and, thereby, constitutes the manner by which we, as selves, participate in the machinery and input that post-structuralism describes: that which must interact with the machinery of the brain as Dennett describes it in his multiple drafts model: that in which data is passed around through the various physiological modules until a conclusion is reached about what is being perceived.
But getting back to the underlying nothingness:
“For Zizek, Descartes’s cogito is not the substantial ‘I’ of the individual, but an empty point of negativity. This empty point of negativity is not ‘nothing’ but the opposite of everything, or the negation of all” -Myers, Tony (2007-03-16). Slavoj Zizek (Routledge Critical Thinkers) (p. 37). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.
Myers then goes on to say:
“It is this void that, for Zizek, enables the transition from a state of nature to a state of culture. This is because if there was no gap between a thing (or an object) and the representation of that thing (or word), then they would be identical and there would be no room for subjectivity.”
And can’t we tie this all up by bringing in chaotics and make the argument for a participating self, that is in opposition to the eliminative materialist view, by recognizing in it a non-linear feedback loop between the self as constituted by its terminal function for the various flows of language from the symbolic order, as described by Post-Structuralism, and the nothingness projecting into something through the symbolic webs described by Douglas Hofstadter in We are a Strange Loop?