What is the parallax view?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Slavoj Žižek answers

The parallax, at its simplest, is the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in observational position — what astronomers use to measure stellar distances. But the philosophical twist is decisive: the observed difference is not simply "subjective," not merely the result of the same object sitting out there while we walk around it.¹

As Hegel would insist, subject and object are inherently mediated, so that an epistemological shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.¹ This is the move that separates what I call parallax from ordinary perspectivism. It is not that we have one stable reality and multiple partial views of it.

It is that the gap between perspectives is inscribed into the real thing itself — as if the building, in its very material existence, bears the imprint of different and mutually exclusive perspectives.² When you identify such a gap, it opens up a place for a third, virtual building — not the one you see from the left, not the one from the right, but the impossible space their incompatibility carves out.²

This is why I say the parallax gap is the inscription of our changing temporal experience when we approach and enter a building; time becomes space, in Lévi-Strauss's formula.² Now the ontological stakes. The status of the Real in this framework is purely parallactic and, as such, nonsubstantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from one to the other.³

This cuts against the standard Lacanian notion of the Real as that which always returns to its place, the hard core that remains the same across all possible symbolic universes. The parallax Real is rather what accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real — not the persistent same, but the bone of contention that pulverizes sameness into a multitude of appearances.³

The anthropological example I use in The Parallax View makes this concrete. Take the two incompatible ground-plans by which members of the same tribe map their village. The Real here is not the actual physical arrangement of houses — that is merely the ontic datum. The Real is the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members' view of the actual arrangement, the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted.⁴

It is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access.⁴ More precisely still: the Real is the very shift of perspective from the first standpoint to the second — not what either standpoint sees, but the movement between them. What follows for how we handle antinomies? When confronted with an antinomic stance in the precise Kantian sense, we should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other, or to enact a dialectical synthesis of opposites.⁵

The task is to conceive of all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to resolve this deadlock.⁵ Adorno's analysis of society illustrates this perfectly: the split between the Anglo-Saxon individualist-nominalist conception and the Durkheimian organicist conception seems like an irreducible Kantian antinomy — but in a second move, we see that this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing is already the Thing itself.⁶

The fundamental feature of today's society is the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual, and the two competing sociological theories are not two approximations to a hidden truth but two anamorphic distortions produced by that antagonism.⁶ This is also, incidentally, the precise sense in which DM2 — the dialectical materialism I defend against the vulgar Engelsian version — differs from the crude dialectics of eternal struggle between opposites.

Antagonism in DM2 is the constitutive contradiction of an entity with itself: things come to be out of their own impossibility, and the external opposite that threatens them is always the externalization of their own immanent self-blockage.⁷ The parallax is the name for this self-blockage at the ontological level.

Sources

1. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply 'subjective,' is not due to the fact that the same object which exists 'out there' is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently 'mediated,' so that an 'epistemological' shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an 'ontological' shift in the object itself.

   Sex and the Failed Absolute, p. 5

2. the gap is inscribed into the 'real' building itself—as if the building, in its very material existence, bears the imprint of different and mutually exclusive perspectives. When we succeed in identifying a parallax gap in a building, the gap between the two perspectives thus opens up a place for a third, virtual building.

   Living in the End Times, pp. 282–283

3. the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, nonsubstantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which 'always returns to its place'—as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is, rather, that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real.

   The Parallax View, p. 28

4. The Real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing.

   The Parallax View, p. 28

5. when confronted with an antinomic stance in the precise Kantian sense of the term, we should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other (or, a fortiori, to enact a kind of 'dialectical synthesis' of opposites). The task is, on the contrary, to conceive of all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to resolve this deadlock.

   Living in the End Times, pp. 282–283

6. in a second approach, however, we should merely take note of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing is already the Thing itself—the fundamental feature of today's society is the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual.

   The Parallax View, p. 28

7. Contrary to DM1 which interprets antagonism as opposition, as the eternal struggle of opposites, DM2 conceives antagonism as the constitutive contradiction of an entity with itself: things come to be out of their own impossibility, the external opposite that poses a threat to their stability is always the externalization of their immanent self-blockage and inconsistency.

   Sex and the Failed Absolute, p. 5