And does not something similar happen in Pokémon Go? To simplify things to the utmost, did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology that made them see a specific Pokémon—“the Jew”—popping up all around, and providing the clue to what one has to fight against? And does the same not hold for all other ideological pseudo-entities that have to be added to reality in order to make it complete and meaningful? One can easily imagine a contemporary anti-immigrant version of Pokémon Go where the player wanders about a German city and is threatened by Muslim immigrant rapists or thieves lurking everywhere. Here we encounter the crucial question: Is the form the same in all these cases, or is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which makes us see the Jewish plot as the source of our troubles formally different from the Marxist approach which observes social life as a battleground of economic and power struggles? There is a clear difference between these two cases: In the second case, the “secret” beneath all the confusion of social life is social antagonisms, not individual agents which can be personalized (in the guise of Pokémon figures), while Pokémon Go does inherently tend toward the ideologically personalized perception of social antagonisms. In the case of bankers threatening us from all around, it is not hard to see how such a figure can easily be appropriated by a Fascist populist ideology of plutocracy (as opposed to “honest” productive capitalists). … The point of the parallel between Nazi anti-Semitism and Pokémon Go is thus a very simple and elementary one: Although Pokémon Go presents itself as something new, grounded in the latest technology, it relies on old ideological mechanisms. Ideology is the practice of augmenting reality. [...]
“First-person operationalism” thus emphasizes how, even in our “direct (self-)experience,” there is a gap between content (the narrative inscribed into our memory) and the “operational” level of how the subject constructed this content, where we always have a series of rewritings and tinkerings: “introspection provides us—the subject as well as the ‘outside’ experimenter—only with the content of representation, not with the features of the representational medium itself.”3 In this precise sense, the subject is his own fiction: The content of his own self-experience is a narrativization in which memory traces already intervene. So when Dennett makes “ ‘writing it down’ in memory criterial for consciousness; that is what it is for the ‘given’ to be ‘taken’—to be taken one way rather than another,” and claims that “there is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and, hence, on memory),”3 we should be careful not to miss the point: What counts for the concerned subject himself is the way an event is “written down,” memorized—memory is constitutive of my “direct experience” itself, i.e., “direct experience” is what I memorize as my direct experience. Or, to put it in Hegelian terms (which would undoubtedly appall Dennett): Immediacy itself is mediated, it is a product of the mediation of traces. One can also put this in terms of the relationship between direct experience and judgment on it: Dennett’s point is that there is no “direct experience” prior to judgment, i.e., what I (re)construct (write down) as my experience is already supported by judgmental decisions. [...]
It is crucial to note that the patient “wasn’t ‘consciously’ confabulating”: “The connection between the chicken claw and the shovel was an honest expression of what ‘he’ thought.”5 And is not ideology, at its most elementary, such an interpreter confabulating rationalizations in the conditions of repression? A somewhat simplified example: Let’s imagine the same experiment with two pictures shown to a subject fully immersed in ideology, a beautiful villa and a group of starving miserable workers; from the accompanying cards, he selects a fat rich man (inhabiting the villa) and a group of aggressive policemen (whose task is to squash the workers’ eventual desperate protest). His “left brain interpreter” doesn’t see the striking workers, so how does it account for the aggressive policemen? By confabulating a link such as: “Policemen are needed to protect the villa with the rich man from robbers who break the law.” Were not the (in)famous nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that justified the United States’ attack on Iraq precisely the result of such a confabulation, which had to fill in the void of the true reasons for the attack?
