We don't know where we are: no hologram for the present

00:32:15 — We cannot afford such a hologram today

The Marx move has a second half: once capitalism exists, it retroactively reorganizes all prior history as an approach toward itself — the hologram effect. Žižek’s diagnosis of the present is that no analogous hologram is available to us. Nothing in contemporary conditions has crystallized with enough coherence to make prior history readable as its anticipation. We are, in his phrase, in the interval: we don’t know where we are.

00:30:18 — Grundrisse Marx: no teleology, capitalism was contingent

Against the evolutionist Marx of the 1859 preface — primitive societies, ancient despotism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism — Žižek points to the Marx of the Grundrisse and the chapter on primitive accumulation. There, capitalism is the contingent precipitate of New World gold, enclosures, and assorted accidents. It did not have to arrive; nothing in feudal Europe was ‘pointing toward’ it until it had already emerged.