Prosopopoeia and geopoetics
Each individual perceives market as an objective system confronting him, although there is no objective market but just the interaction of the multitude of individuals - so that, although each individual knows very well that there is no objective market, just the interaction of individuals, the specter of ‘objective’ market is this same individual’s fact-of-experience, determining his beliefs and acts. Not only market, but our entire social life is determined by such reified mechanisms. [...]
Prosopopoeia is usually perceived as a mystification to which naïve consciousness is prone, i.e., as something to be demystified. At the beginning of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the goddess of music introduces herself with the words “Io sono la musica...” - is this not something which, soon afterwards, when ‘psychological’ subjects had invaded the stage, became unthinkable, or, rather, unrepresentable? It is therefore all the more surprising to see ‘objective’ social scientists practicing the ‘primitive’ art of prosopopoeia. Dupuy recalls how sociologists interpret electoral results: for example, when the government retains its majority, but barely does so, the result is read as ‘the voters prolonged their trust into the government, but with a warning that it should do its work better’, as if the electoral result was the outcome of the decision of a single meta-Subject (voters) who wanted to deliver a ‘message’ to those in power.
- Zizek
Perhaps as never before, prosopopoeia dominated the UK election, which was presented to us as a faltering exchange between just two meta-Subjects: the "markets", which we were continually warned would take fright at the continuation of the New Labour administration or, worse, a hung parliament, and the gnomic speech of the electorate, whose unintelligible "message" to the political class was "interpreted" by psephologists with all the fervour of sorcerers picking over entrails. Melanie Phillips moaned last week on BBC Question Time that "no-one voted for a hung parliament" - but no-one could vote directly for a hung parliament, and, in any case, Phillips' argument assumes that elections should be decided by what the majority of individuals think. However flawed and faltering the various prosopopoeiac attempts to divine the "electorate"'s intentions might have been, they at least looked for something in excess of individuals, for some - albeit degraded - approximation of a general will.
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