Slavoj Žižek and the Quillette Hoax

“But this just shows that Žižek is right in that there is no such thing as seeing the world as it really is. There is always something that mediates perception.”

Earlier this month, an article purportedly written by a disillusioned member of the Democratic Socialists of America appeared in Quillette and was then taken down a few hours afterwards. It was written by a self-described non-doctrinaire leftist under the pen name Archie Carter, with the intention of showing that Quillette would jump on the chance of publishing something, written by a leftist, that also supported Quillette’s ideological narrative about the Left. The author spoke about how he did it and his motives for doing so in Vox, Jacobin, and The Daily Beast. The three interviews I just cited already cover how this was possible, so I have no intention of repeating what has been said already. Instead, I want to use this as a stepping stone to discuss what I see as some of the broader issues with this new conservatism that ties into this particular case and what makes all of this worrying.

Before continuing, however, I should define a term: what I will call “new conservatism” or “new right” throughout the text is a loose set of communities, public figures, and media outlets that—while not a single coherent entity—do share a few fundamental features. They all share some values with classical conservatives about tradition, for example, but some of their fundamental assumptions and approaches differ substantially. Some are radical and often turn violent, like the alt-right, and others are more serious and nuanced like Quillette itself—or the members of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). This is not meant, in any way, to say that either Quillette or the members of the IDW are part of the alt-right. Their views are certainly not so close as to be indistinguishable, but there surely are certain commonalities that have to be considered. More on that later.

The author of the hoax, as he describes in the three interviews cited earlier, took inspiration from the now famous Sokal Hoax. When Alan Sokal published his faux article, his goal was to expose what he saw as the intellectual poverty of some subsets of the humanities academia, driven more by ideology and style than by the rigorous pursuit of knowledge. Ironically, this faction that became his target was none other than the so-called postmodernists that have been so harshly criticized by those ideologically close to Quillette. As I said, however, my point is not to argue that this was caused by ideology, since I think that case has already been sufficiently argued and established. Instead, I want to try to examine this ideology more closely in order to find out what it is about it that made it susceptible to a hoax like this and what other consequences this has. But before going any further, a brief discussion about ideology is in order.

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek discusses, among other things, the way in which certain abstractions take on a kind of life of their own beyond a person’s actual abstract thought and become “real” in a way that shapes our interactions in the real world. These abstractions are what he calls sublime objects. They are designated as sublime because they are, in a way, immune to the effects of corruption and wear that physical objects endure with the passage of time. The main example he uses, taken from Marxist theory, is that of money. Money, of course, is a physical thing that can be damaged or destroyed just like any other object. But the physical body of money, says Žižek, is not really important; what matters is the abstract body which is stamped upon it by a government authority and preserved by individuals who, by means of their exchanging commodities for money, act as if this sublime body was wholly real.