Lacan+Security

__** McGowan **__, 20 07, (Todd, Prof of English @ Univ of Vermont, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, p. 131-136) SRM
 * The affirmative believes that security problems can be remedied with a few dollars, they allow the US to be hopeful in the face of __________________, but really this will never be resolved and this belief only results in the insulation of the dominant security ideology. **[[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/i/c.gif width="78" height="22"]]

Through its deployment of fantasy, the cinema of integration offers the spectator hope in the face of the impossible. Its unbridled hopefulness is one of the primary sources of this cinema’s attractiveness. Subjects long to hope because hope suggests that they are not simply condemned to the path of desire, that there is something beyond the dissatisfaction of desire. If it sustains subjects in this way, hope seems beneficial, or at least innocuous. Where does the danger lie? Why does Nietzsche proclaim that “hope. . . is in truth the worst of all evils”?1 The problem with hope is that it justifies our submission to the dictates of ideology. We submit to ideology hoping that the future will provide the enjoyment that the present denies us. Ideology sustains its control on the basis of the hopes it engenders, hopes that no subject can ever realize. All hope for the realization of our desire is in vain because we cannot access—either now or in the future—the impossible object around which desire revolves. Even revolutionary or utopian hopes, insofar as they envision a future without lack, deceive us concerning the impossible status of the object.2 Refusing hope, however, does not imply the quiet acceptance of present conditions. In fact, refusing hope represents the basis for political contestation. Rather than having faith in the possibility of a different future, we can act in order to transform the current situation. Subjects who sustain fidelity to the path of pure desire act because they recognize that no amount of obedience and no amount of waiting will bring the impossible object. In contrast, the hopeful subject obeys and waits, which is why the ideological cinema of integration focuses to such an extent on films that engender hope. The films of Ron Howard are, above all, hopeful. They depict a marriage of the realms of desire and fantasy that eliminates the impossible object and produces an accessible object of desire in its stead. In the typical Howard film, we encounter an impossible object-cause of desire, and then, through the course of the film, we discover that we can actually achieve the impossible. Howard shows us that we can realize our desire and attain an object that would satisfy our desire—or that such an object exists. Because they enact the most elementary function of fantasy—transforming an absence into a presence—Howard’s films represent the most basic manifestation of the cinema of integration. Splash (1984) depicts Madison (Daryl Hannah) as an impossible object (a mermaid) who later becomes an accessible object of desire; Cocoon (1985) depicts three old men confronting death and then transcending it through joining an alien civilization; Ransom (1996) shows Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson) save his son from kidnappers determined to kill him even after Mullen agrees to pay the ransom; and A Beautiful Mind (2001) presents John Nash (Russell Crowe) facing his psychosis and conquering it through reason. Each of these films begins by stressing the impossibility of the object driving the hero’s desire in order to maximize the enjoyment that we feel when we discover that the impossible is actually possible. By taking up this trajectory, these films create a seamless image of ideology, and they work to produce spectators invested in the rewards that ideology promises. Cocoon begins by emphasizing the dissatisfaction that Ben Luckett (Wilford Brimley), Art Selwyn (Don Ameche), and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn) experience as a result of the aging process. Living in a retirement community surrounded by other elderly people, they feel their lives winding down and sense the proximity of death. This becomes evident in the first sequence introducing them, as Ben and Art see another resident of the community die. Howard establishes the gaze as a structuring absence in this scene. Watching this death, the two men experience the gaze insofar as they see the point in the visible field that includes them: as they look at this scene of death, they see their own impending demise. Howard shoots the scene in a way that places the death of this anonymous resident of the retirement community into the position of the gaze for the spectator as well. The scene begins with a shot of Ben and Art looking in the distance with distraught looks on their faces. A subsequent long shot of the resident’s room shows doctors and nurses working frantically to revive the person. This shot is brief, however, and the film quickly returns to another shot of Ben and Art. Just as they begin to walk away, we hear a doctor pronounce the resident’s death while the camera stays with Ben and Art. Here, Howard indicates through the shot sequence and the timing of the death announcement the precise status of the resident’s death. It is the gaze, the point at which Ben and Art—and the spectator—are not just objective onlookers but involved in what they see. The verbal pronouncement stains the visual image and functions as a present absence within that image. The presence of death as an absent object in this scene indicates that it is the truth of both Ben and Art’s being. Death is the inescapable obstacle in the face of their desire, and at the same time, it is what animates this desire. In the scene immediately following this encounter with death, Joe joins Ben and Art as they walk to the neighboring abandoned mansion where they often swim clandestinely in the pool. Ben asks Joe about the results of his visit to the doctor, and Joe responds evasively, suggesting that his illness is severe. He finally concludes by saying, “Doctors don’t know everything,” a statement that implicitly affirms the terminal nature of his illness. As in the prior scene, death—here the mention of it—functions as an absent presence. Joe knows he is going to die, and yet he cannot smoothly integrate this fact into his conceptual universe. Through these two scenes, the film establishes a world of desire, a world in which the absence of the gaze leaves subjects in a constant state of dissatisfaction, a world in which subjects feel their mortality impinging on them. Ben, Art, and Joe avoid directly confronting their impending death, but nonetheless the dissatisfaction that death produces structures their experience. With the spectator, they feel the lack that death and the aging process introduce. The beginning of the film establishes a world of desire in which Ben, Art, and Joe exist as dissatisfied subjects. Their desire here centers around an impossible object, since they cannot escape death or counteract the effects of the aging process. However, the film constructs a fantasy scenario that allows the three men to relate successfully to this impossibility. This fantasy scenario is triggered when aliens (disguised as humans) rent the mansion and the pool as a hatchery for the cocoons of fellow aliens who were left behind on earth from an earlier visit. Because of the life energy that the aliens impart into the swimming pool in order to hatch the cocoons they place there, the pool acquires curative powers. The first time that Ben, Art, and Joe swim in the pool after the aliens have placed the cocoons in it, the pool rejuvenates them. Howard depicts this rejuvenation through a fantasmatic montage sequence. We see slow-motion shots of each of the men exuberantly diving into the pool as upbeat music plays on the soundtrack. This display of vitality suggests that they have found a way to resolve their desire. In this way, the film provides a fantasmatic supplement for the desiring subject, showing that the desiring subject can actually find a solution to its lack. This turn from impossibility to possibility manifests itself even further in the subsequent behavior of the three men. After the swim in the energized pool, Ben, Art, and Joe display renewed sexual energy. When walking back to the retirement community, they all notice that they have erections, and that evening, they all have sex with their partners. The surprise evinced by each partner suggests that this is not a regular practice. Later, Joe learns from his doctor that his cancer is in complete remission, and Ben passes the eye test that he earlier failed in order regain his driver’s license. After the three men introduce their partners to the life-enhancing pool, the film depicts them all dancing and displaying the energy of young people. At the end of the film, the three men, along with their spouses and many of their friends from the retirement community, depart in the alien spaceship for a life without death or aging. With this denouement, the film offers us a fantasy that perfectly addresses the desire that its opening establishes. Used in this way, fantasy disguises the impossible situation of the desiring subject and renders invisible the absences within the structure of ideology. Cocoon creates a fantasy that releases us from the trauma of death and aging, but at the same time, this fantasy also works to cement our position within ideology. This dimension of the film becomes even more pronounced in the final sequence. Rather than concluding the film with the departure of the elderly group and the aliens from earth, Howard adds a coda. This coda—a mass funeral for the group—is perhaps the most important scene in the film because it emphasizes the link between the fantasy world and the world of desire. The minister presiding over the funeral says to the mourners, “Do not fear. Your loved ones are in safekeeping. They have moved on to a higher expression of life, not life as we know it, but in the spirit everlasting. Our loved ones are in good hands—now and forever more.” Here, the minister offers the standard nebulous description of heaven that is meant to offer the families fantasmatic consolation. If they will never see their lost family members again, at least they can fantasize that their loved ones are in a better place. But Cocoon gives a new twist to the standard consolation: while he undoubtedly thinks he is describing heaven, the minister unwittingly describes the actual life that the aliens have given to those who went with them. Though they are no longer visible in the image, we experience their presence through the unintended irony of the minister’s words. The lost family members are here present even in their absence from the image. This conclusion is thus the precise opposite of Citizen Kane: for Welles, the object is absent even when it is present, but for Howard, the object is present even when it is absent. Cocoon demands that we see even the absences that do exist in the visual field as obscuring a hidden presence. The film reveals to the spectator that fantasy is not a separate realm apart from the world of desire; there is no radical divide between the two. This lack of a divide allows fantasy to intervene clandestinely in the world of desire. As a result, the subject continues to experience the dissatisfaction of desire but does not experience this dissatisfaction as constitutive. Instead, dissatisfaction becomes empirical, an obstacle that one might overcome. In Howard’s films, the impossible object that produces the world of desire disappears and an attainable object of desire appears in its stead, and this transformation dramatically undermines the subject’s ability to recognize the hold that ideology has over it. In the first instance, A Beautiful Mind seems to represent a break in Howard’s filmmaking. Rather than hiding the gaze and its distorting power,it forces the spectator to confront the way in which our look—which we share with the main character, John Nash—distorts the field of representation in the film. At almost its midpoint, the film makes us aware that much of what we have seen in the first half of the film (John’s top-secret government work, his congenial roommate, the roommate’s niece) is nothing but the product of John’s delusion. In the manner of David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), the film thereby demands that we recognize how our acceptance of John’s delusional fantasy structure shaped our experience of the filmic world. Like John’s, our view of reality in the film has been stained. We become aware that the filmic world wasn’t simply there for us to see; instead, it included our look in the form of the object gaze distorting the visible field. By depicting the gaze as a distortion in the visible field, A Beautiful Mind places the spectator, with John, in the position of the desiring subject. However, the film quickly provides fantasmatic relief from desire.4 After he receives medication and becomes aware of his illness, John must endure the antagonism that accompanies the experience of desire. The subject of desire always confronts antagonism insofar as desire relates to an impossible object. When faced with antagonistic alternatives, the desiring subject cannot simply opt for one path or the other: either choice would fail to resolve desire. Either choice would leave the subject lacking something essential. Likewise, John is faced with an impossible choice: either he can take medication and lose his genius, or he can stop taking his medication and become delusional again. The impossible nature of this choice indicates the fundamental problem for the subject of desire. But the film is unable to leave John—or the spectator—in the position of the desiring subject. Frustrated with his inability to think clearly, John opts to stop taking his medicine, and the results are disastrous. Again believing in his nonexistent college roommate, John almost allows his infant son to drown while the roommate is “watching” him in the bathtub. Unable to continue to live with the danger that John’s illness presents to her and her son, Alicia quickly takes their child in the car and begins to drive away. As she drives away, the film shows John flash in front of the car. His abrupt appearance in the image seems to identify him here as a threatening figure—he has just almost allowed his child to drown—but the film quickly reveals the opposite: John has taken the first step to recovery. He proclaims to Alicia, “She never gets old. Marcy can’t be real. She never gets old.” By telling Alicia this, John informs her that he is able to control his delusions. Through the use of his reason, he can overcome the way delusion stains his sense of reality. He later says, “All I have to do is apply my mind.” By applying his mind to the problem instead of using medication, John surmounts the antagonism and resolves his desire. When he is faced with an impossible choice—sanity or genius—the film depicts John having it both ways. This fantasy transforms the nature of the antagonism. Rather than signaling an impossibility, the antagonism becomes nothing but the site of a difficult problem. By first depicting the antagonism and then stripping it of its impossible dimension, A Beautiful Mind shows us that social antagonism doesn’t really exist—or exists only insofar as it can be overcome. In doing this, the film helps to accommodate the spectator to ideology. The experience of antagonism is the key to developing resistance to ideology in the subject (which is why Marx constantly stresses the antagonism between classes that capitalist ideology attempts to obscure). The antagonism that the subject of desire experiences marks the point at which ideological explanations break down; it is a rift in the fabric of the social order. By obscuring the antagonism, the film disguises this rift. The disturbance in the visual field that we experience earlier in the film—the gaze—loses its disruptive power as John gains control of his delusions. Rather than depicting the gaze as an irreducible stain in the field of the visible, A Beautiful Mind domesticates the gaze. The gaze does not disappear from the film altogether, however. John and the spectator continue to see his delusions: we often see them looking at him in the distance or walking alongside him as he is walking. But at the end of the film, a dramatic change occurs in the ontological status of these delusions. John is able to distinguish clearly between his delusions and reality. As he explains to someone who questions him about them, “I still see things that are not here, but I choose not to acknowledge them.” With John, the spectator also gains, by the conclusion of the film, a firm sense of what is real and what is delusion. As a result, the gaze no longer represents a barrier to the experience of reality. John can—and does—treat the gaze as just another object in the field of the visible rather than allowing that object to stain the entire field. The film has transformed it from impossible object to just another possible object in the visual field. The end of the film thus marks a total victory over the gaze and desire, accomplished through the merging of the worlds of desire and fantasy. The victories over the gaze in Ron Howard’s films attest to the indefatigable hopefulness of these films. The gaze marks the limit of our ability to hope. As an impossible object in the field of the visible, it constantly reminds us of what we lack and what is absent. The films of Ron Howard work to convince us that we can overcome this lack, that we can hope even in the face of what seems impossible. The hope that they provide comes with a cost, however. When we embrace the hope that Howard’s films offer, our social reality becomes whole and unquestionable. The loss of the trauma of the gaze is at once the loss of the possibility of freedom.  __** McGowan **__, 20   __** 07 **__ , (Todd, Prof of English @ Univ of Vermont, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, p. 110-112) SRM
 * This belief constructed by the affirmative only leads to subjects ceding more and more of their power to the state, eventually resulting in totalitarianism. **

Roma, cittá aperta constitutes the spectator in a position of desire relative to the fantasmatic inducements of fascism. Later neorealist films, such as Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica, 1948), La Terra trema (The Earth Trembles, Luchino Visconti, 1948), and Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, Giuseppe de Santis, 1949), depict the fantasies of capitalism rather than those of fascism as the primary danger. These films continue and develop neorealism’s insistence on desire as a political position, and they ground desire in the concrete political context of postwar Italian capitalism. In this context, the fantasy that seduces the subject away from the path of desire is that of individual difference, of finding an object that will lift the subject out of the oppressive situation of the masses in general. As these films make clear, this fantasy is essential to the functioning of capitalist ideology because it prevents the subject from entering into a collective opposition to capitalism. In Ladri di biciclette, de Sica continually links the situation of the main character, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), to other members of the working class. Antonio is not alone, despite his fantasy of elevating himself above his peers. The film reveals Antonio’s sense of his own exceptionalism from its very opening: other workers are clamoring to hear their names called for jobs while he sits across the street not paying attention to the job announcements (despite his eagerness for a job). In fact, he only learns about the job when a friend comes running to tell him. But when Antonio obtains the job, he convinces himself that he will pull himself above the crowd. Later, we see this fantasy of exceptionalism remaining intact even after the loss of his bicycle (and thus the job) when he is eating at a restaurant with his son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola). Antonio fantasizes about having a job that would pay enough to allow him to afford the opulent meal that he sees people eating at a nearby table. For Antonio, escape from poverty is always an individualized and private project. But in the face of Antonio’s individualist fantasy, the film highlights his ordinariness, the link between him and the other impoverished people we see in the film. Antonio’s kinship with the other members of his class becomes apparent when he visits the pawnshop to pawn the family sheets and retrieve his bicycle. After Antonio has pawned the sheets and is in the process of picking up the bicycle, the camera pans, following the worker who is in the process of storing the sheets. We see him climb a storage area several stories high, in which there are thousands of sheets that people have pawned. This pan does not advance the narrative movement of the film, but de Sica includes it in order to show that Antonio is not at all exceptional in the way that he fantasizes. 5 De Sica turns from narrative progression to social exposition in order to illustrate the illusory status of the individualist fantasy that leads the subject away from the path of desire and the possibility of politicized activity. Ladri di biciclette pushes us in the direction of this politicization because it reveals the failure of capitalism to deliver the object that its fantasies promise.6 After it has been stolen, the bicycle comes to function as the impossible object in the film, an object whose impossible status underscores capitalism’s failure. De Sica emphasizes that the impossibility of the object stems not from its scarcity but from our inability to distinguish our particular object. That is to say, capitalism offers the subject the fantasy of the individualized object—the object that is one’s own and that one can own—and at the same time, capitalism works, as a mode of production, to eliminate all difference between objects. In this sense, it becomes impossible to own the object. Hence, capitalism itself renders its own individualistic fantasy impossible. 7 This becomes most apparent in Ladri di biciclette when Antonio enlists the help of his friends to search for his stolen bicycle. The day after the theft, Antonio and his friends go to the market where bicycles are sold in order to find Antonio’s. As they walk amid the many vendors, de Sica shoots a series of tracking shots that reveal hundreds of indistinguishable bicycles that vendors are selling. Here, the tracking shot communicates the multitude and the similarity of the objects that the group must search through. The way that de Sica shoots this scene—depicting bicycle after bicycle—reveals the impossibility of isolating one particular object from the many. In addition, Antonio also learns that stolen bicycles are often sold in pieces, so that the group must identify the individual pieces of the Antonio’s bicycle rather than the object as a whole. Such a task is impossible because its object is impossible: within the capitalist world that the film depicts, one cannot distinguish one’s own privileged object from any other object. As a result, the subject cannot live out capitalism’s individualist fantasy within the world that capitalism creates. It is this contradiction that Ladri di biciclette highlights. For the subject who succumbs to it, capitalism’s individualist fantasy transforms a political situation into a purely economic one. This is what befalls Antonio. He invests himself in this fantasy right up until his final act of the film, when he attempts to steal a bicycle to replace his own. This act indicates that Antonio remains within the capitalist fantasy, but as the film concludes, de Sica emphasizes—for the spectator, if not for Antonio—the illusoriness of this fantasy. After the owner of the bicycle declines to press charges against Antonio, de Sica ends the film with a shot of Antonio and Bruno disappearing into a mass of people as they walk away from the camera. This concluding shot shows that Antonio has not raised himself above the crowd, but in fact merges into it. Though he does not recognize it, the film’s conclusion inserts Antonio back into the position of desire as it dissolves the last vestiges of his individualist fantasy. Only by traversing such fantasies and sustaining the path of desire, the film suggests, can we become politicized subjects. By sustaining absence within the structure of narrative, Italian neorealism suggests a model for political action. Rather than basing political activity on a fantasy of the future that we work to realize, we can base it on desire’s resistance to the commands of symbolic authority. This is not simply resistance for its own sake—a kind of anarchism—but instead resistance that insists on the subject’s freedom. When the subject accepts the fantasmatic resolution of desire and obeys the strictures of symbolic authority, it cedes this freedom to a big Other that exists only through the subject’s positing of it. In short, the abandonment of desire itself brings symbolic authority into existence: fascism emerges because subjects eschew the traumatic freedom of their desire. If Italian neorealism has one overriding idea, it is its insistence on the political importance of sustaining desire. This is a conception of politics that centers around the rejection of the respite that paternal authority—up to and including that of fascist authority—provides for the subject of desire. But there is a danger inherent within the cinema of desire. Through its emphasis on the absence of the object, this type of cinema, even as it encourages us to resist the lure of fantasy, pushes us toward fantasizing a scenario that would resolve the deadlock within which it leaves us. Few have the ability to sustain the path of desire, and those who do, like Welles, often find insurmountable barriers placed along this path. The path of desire is not that of pleasure but its opposite. In Seminar V, Lacan makes this equation: “Desire has an eccentricity in relation to every satisfaction. It permits us to understand what is in general its profound affinity with pain. At the limit, it is to this that desire is confined, not so much in its developed and masked forms, but in its pure and simple form; it is the pain of existing.”8 To sustain the path of desire is to sustain the pain of existing—and this is difficult for both filmmakers and audiences. Even overtly political films like those of Italian neorealism often slip into a form that presents the gaze as a possible object, if only to provide hope for the spectator. When the cinema opts for this path and chooses to resolve the deadlock of desire, it produces a kind of film that functions ideologically by integrating desire and fantasy. This process results in what I call the “cinema of integration.” __** Daly **__, 20   __** 04 **__ , (Glyn, Risking the Impossible, [] ) SRM Zizek has been concerned crucially to demonstrate the way in which ideology serves to support reality as a concrete fully integrated totality - reality cannot be reproduced without initial ideological mystification. Ideology does not conceal or distort an underlying positivity (the way things really are), but quite the opposite. What ideology attempts to do is provide a certain positive consistency against the distorting and traumatizing effects of the Real (Zizek, 1989: 45). All ideology presents reality as a full ontological totality, and in this way tries to repress the traumatic fact that the latter is ultimately a delusion; it tries to eliminate all traces of (Real) impossibility (Zizek, 1989: 49). The exemplary figure here is that of the cynic. The typical cynic is someone who is "pragmatic", who distances themselves from sincerely held beliefs, dismisses alternative visions of social existence as so much juvenile nonsense...and who, for all that, relies even more deeply on some absolutist conception of an independent fully-formed reality. The cynic is the very model of an ideological subjectivity insofar as s/he is radically dependent on the idea of an externally ratified reality ("human nature", "the way it is" etc.). What the cynic fears most is that they might lose the support of this independent (Other) reality and consequently their sense of "place" in the world. The cynic gets involved in a certain short-circuiting procedure that is, in fact, generic to all ideological functioning: s/he is cynical towards every kind of ideological belief except his/her own fundamentalist belief in objectivist reality. The cynical attitude is more widely reflected in today's predominant inclination towards "postmodern ironizing". The key philosopher is arguably R. Rorty. Rorty wants a world where individuals are free "to pursue private perfection in idiosyncratic ways" (Rorty, 1991: 19) and where the public realm is restricted to minimal functions and is essentially aesthetic in orientation (Rorty, 1989: 125). For Rorty the central obligation is to be sceptical towards any projects of substantial social engagement for fear that it might curtail individual pursuits of happiness and lead towards despotic forms of cruelty in the name of a higher (collective) Truth (see Daly, 1994). The basic inconsistency in Rorty's position is that "we" should exercise an ironic distancing towards every socio-political project except the liberal one: the one true reality whose (private/public) structuring of social relations represents "the last conceptual revolution" (Rorty, 1989: 63) and effectively suspends history. This is why so much of what passes for contemporary postmodern thought should be understood as strictly ideological in character. With all its ironic distancing, disavowals of the authentic gesture and so on, it relies even more heavily on the functioning of the existing order as if it were a naturalistic, or immaculate, Other - a kind of preservation of the ontological dream through symbolic mortification. In other words, it tends to involve the very form of ideological identification which is formulated along the lines of "we know very well that there is no such thing as Reality but nonetheless we believe in it". So how does ideology deal with its immanent impossibility, with the fact that it cannot deliver a fully integrated social order? Zizek's answer is that ideology attempts to reify impossibility into some kind of external obstacle; to fantasmatically translate the impossibility of Society into the theft, or sabotage, of Society (see Daly, 1999). Transcendental impossibility is projected into some contingent historicised Other (e.g. the figure of "the Jew" in Nazi ideology) in such a way that the lost/stolen object (social harmony/purity) appears retrievable; an object which, of course, "we" have never possessed. By synonymizing the impossible-Real with a particular Other (Jews, Palestinians, Gypsies, immimgrants...), the fantasy of holistic fulfilment through the (imagined or otherwise) elimination/suppression of the Other is thereby sustained. Zizek has recently given this perspective a further more radical twist. Thus ideology not only presents a certain ideal of holistic fulfilment (Plato's Republic of Reason, Habermas' transparent modernity, Rorty's liberal utopia, multiculturalist harmony and so on), it also serves crucially to regulate a certain distance from it. The paradox of ideology is that it advances a particular fantasy of being reconciled with the Thing (of total fulfilment) but with the built-in proviso that we do not come too close to it. The psychoanalytic reason for this is clear: if you come too close to the Thing it either fragments irretrievably (like a digitally produced image) or, as in the Kantian sublime, produces unbearable anxiety and psychical disintegration. The point is that ideology is always already engaged reflexively with its own impossibility. Impossibility is articulated through ideology and in such a way that it both structures reality and establishes the very sense of what is considered possible. Here we have a double inscription. First there is the basic operation of translating impossibility into an external obstacle (an Other). But second, there is a further deeper stage whereby the ideological objective itself is elevated to the status of impossibility precisely as a way of avoiding any direct encounter with it (see Zizek & Daly, 2003). Ideology seeks to maintain a critical distance by keeping the Thing in focus but without coming so close that it begins to distort and fragment (see Daly, 1999: 235). The paradigmatic example is of someone who fantasises about an ideal object (a sexual scenario, a promotion, a public performance etc.) and when they actually encounter the object they are typically confronted with a de-idealisation of the object; a return of the Real. By keeping the object at a certain distance, however, ideology sustains the satisfaction derived from the fantasy of holistic fulfilment: "if only I had x I could achieve my dream". Ideology is the impossible dream not simply in terms of overcoming impossibility but of constructing the latter in an acceptable way; in a way that itself yields a certain satisfaction of both having and eating the cake. The idea of overcoming impossibility is subsists as a deferred moment of realisation but without having to go through the pain of overcoming as such. Ideology regulates this fantasmatic distance as a way of avoiding the Real in the impossible - the trauma involved in any real change. Let's take the case of Iraq and the so-called New World Order. With extensive military mobilisation, widespread social upheaval and a terrible human cost, the invasion of Iraq was undertaken precisely in order that the underlying structures of Western-U.S. socio-economic power can continue to function in a relatively undisturbed way. While the invasion was initially justified on the grounds of international security this has, subsequent to a profound lack of evidence, been largely rearticulated in terms of a project of emancipation. And it is here that we get the ideological twist: "we are here to liberate/democratise Iraq...while recognising that a full implementation of the latter is impossible under present (any) circumstances". Thus the occupation of Iraq continues in full force. The message is, "in principle (you can have liberation), yes; in reality, no". It is this hidden clause of deferral that effectively prevents any real attempt to realise the publicly stated objective. Along the lines of Henry Ford's famous declaration ("you can have any colour you like, as long as it's black") we see the same kind of forced choice at play: "the Iraqi people can have all the democracy they want, all the popular control over their oil and natural resources...as long as it is modelled on U.S.-Western liberal capitalism, as long as it does not undermine U.S.-Western interests". With New World Order discourse we see a similar ideological process. Any genuine attempt to realise such an order would involve massive (traumatic) changes: power sharing, the eradication of poverty and systematic social exclusion, a globalisation of equal rights/participation and so on, as integral reflexive elements. In reality, the New World Order is routinely conjured as an indefinite ideal that serves precisely to prevent any real movement towards it. The same type of ideological clause is secretly functioning: "we are moving towards a New World Order that will not tolerate the Saddam Husseins of this world...while recognising that a true implementation of such an order (one that would be intolerant of all the autocrats and corporate profiteers/dictatorships) is currently/always impossible". In this way, the category of impossibility itself functions as an implicit-obscene ideological supplement in today's realpolitik; in today's cynical assertion of the way things actually are. __** Daly **__, 20 __** 04 **__ , (Glyn, Risking the Impossible, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm) SRM Zizek affirms that psychoanalysis is the direct descendant of German idealism and that it articulates this dimension of self-relating negativity in terms of the idea of death drive (Zizek, 1999: 65-66). Death drive is the existential consequence of the very gap in the order of Being identified in German idealism. It is neither a cancellation nor any kind of physical death but is rather a certain excessive impulse that persists beyond mere existence or biological life. As Zizek argues: "Human life is never just life, it is always sustained by an excess of life" (Zizek, 2001b: 104). The human being is precisely that entity that is sustained by a "more than human". It is this "inhuman" excess - born of a fundamental alienation - which is the death drive and which is constitutive of humanity as such. Death drive is a constant impulse to resolve the gap, or heal the wound, in the order of Being; to overcome dislocation and establish the full presence of subjectivity by finding its ultimate name/place in the world. In this context - and against the grain of standard postmodern thinking - Zizek insists on the validity of the notion of subject (Zizek, 1999: 158-59). The subject is neither a positive entity nor an identifiable locus but is thoroughly de-substantialised - it is precisely "this empty nothing" of which Hegel speaks. This is why the Lacanian mark for the subject is $ (S-barred, the empty place or void that cannot be filled out in an ultimate sense). In the earlier works of Zizek, the subject is presented in terms of an inherent point of failure (the limit) in all forms of subjectivity - the bone stuck in the throat of signification - that shows the ontological gap of Being. The subject is the subject of the signifier precisely because of its status of void/impossibility that is the very condition of possibility for an infinitude of signification (Zizek, 1989: 175). Subject and subjectivity exist in a symbiotic and dynamic relationship. Subjectivity will be more or less stable according to context. Under the impact of a traumatic experience, however, we experience a certain "night of the world" where coherence and cohesion become radically undermined: that is, the condition of subject. In later works, Zizek gives an added twist to the notion of subject. Thus the subject is not simply the gap/void in the order of Being, it is also "the contingent-excessive gesture that constitutes the very universal order of Being" (1999: 160). As in Russell's paradoxical set of sets, the subject also functions as an excluded particularity that nonetheless generates the frame of universality as such. The frame of subjectivity is not constituted against an external force (the elimination of which would yield true subjectivity) but through an inherent blockage which is the subject (Zizek, 1999: 159). We might say that the subject gets caught in an impossible attempt to produce a framework of subjectivity (to find its name/place), but from which it is already ontologically excluded. In this sense, the subject marks the site where an irresolvable economy of lack and excess are played out. This economy is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between subject and its objects a (objets petit a - objects small Other). Lacan's object a refers to the object-cause of desire: that which is in the object more than the object and which makes us desire it in the first place. It alludes to the originally lost object (the missing element that would resolve drive and "restore" fulfilment) and, at the same time, functions as an embodiment of lack; as a loss positivised (Zizek, 1997: 81; Zizek, 1999: 107). Object a bears witness to an empty structure of desire - a structure that can never be filled out. Desire is always elsewhere and alludes to an absence whose central reference is a fundamental void around which drive constantly circulates and constantly misses its target. It is in this sense that Zizek refers to object a in terms of a Kantian "negative magnitude": something that acts as a stand-in for Nothingness (Zizek, 1999: 107). There exists a metonymy of lack whereby any empirical object can act as this stand-in. Object a is doubly paradoxical in that it refers to an original "lost" object (of completion/unity) that never existed, and also in that its own existence depends on its very unattainability. The subject subsists in a kind of diabolical symmetry with its object(s) a wherein the latter (partially) embodies the lack designated by the former; a lack that constantly strives to be recognised/resolved in positive terms but which can never be fully achieved - subject and object never coincide. A well known e-mail circular is illustrative. A mock audit of staff morale is sent as an attachment in which the final exercise is one where you are asked to "click here" if you want a bigger salary, better conditions and so on. Of course, when you move your cursor to the relevant box, the "click here" simply moves and pops up somewhere else on the screen no matter how quickly or stealthily you try to approach it. In this sense, fulfilment (the satisfaction of desire) is always just a click away; a promise that is sustained by the very lack/impossibility of (total) fulfilment. The subject strives for a fullness in the object that it lacks. This accounts for the passionate attachment to certain objects and toward which people may risk everything. Q. Tarantino's film, Pulp Fiction, is illustrative. In the boxer's story, the Bruce Willis character refuses to take a dive in a fixed fight and as a result falls foul of a local gangster. Instead of leaving town immediately, however, Bruce returns to his apartment to pick up his (dead) father's watch - thereby risking his life. Why do this? The answer is that this particular watch represents object a: a partial embodiment of the lost parent-child unity. It is this watch, and no other, that holds the promise of an ultimate reconciliation (to restore "lost" unity) and, at the same time underscores the fact that such reconciliation is always lacking; always a "click" away. Every object a is a reminder/remainder of a kind of pre-big bang consummate unity that has never existed. It is here that both lack (subject) and excess (identifications) - every "pathological" gesture to positivise void - may be said to coincide (Zizek, 1999: 107). The "many" identifications and forms of collective objective life are made possible through the persistence of the "one" of radical negativity. The infinitude of signification is the result ultimately of the one true signified...void. For Zizek this is the starting point of a new approach to politics We are political animals not in the sense of Aristotle who understood by this a certain capacity to recognise a pre-existing order of the good, but the opposite. It is precisely because there is no pre-existing order that we are "condemned" to be political animals. Without an ecology of Being, we are confronted with what Zizek, in his discussion of Schelling (1997), calls an unbridgeable abyss of freedom; an abyss that is simultaneously the source of universal rights and ethnic cleansing.  __** McGowan 20 07 ,**__ (Todd, Assoc. Prof of English @ Univ. of Vermont, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, p. 175-178) SRM
 * This fantasy of security includes more ideology than it seems, instead of accepting the impossibility of security in international politics they continually seek to secure it. This ideology fails to ever make good and instead more and more threats are constructed to be secured. **
 * What constitutes the modern subject is the endless drive to fulfill our desires. A constant search which can never be completed. This is fed by quick fix solutions, such as the plan, one such object they promise to make our ever dream come true just by signing a ballot. **
 * Alternative: we will commit to the burden of rejoinder and defend the status quo to solve case. In asking you to accept these impacts constructed by ideology as inevitable and choosing the impossible options we are able to break down this security ideology at it’s weakest point and free us from its confines. **

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN the theorist and the cinema as such becomes most evident in the cinema of intersection. This cinema has an implicit po¬litical urgency that derives from its effort to depict the gaze directly. By de¬picting the gaze directly, the films of the cinema of intersection aim at encouraging subjects to recognize that they themselves, on the level of fan¬tasy, hold the key to the secret at the heart of the Other. In clear contrast to the cinema of integration; this cinema directs subjects away from their pro¬clivity to seek fantasmatic support in the Other. The cinema of integration tends to produce subjects who believe in a nonlacking Other. This cinema, as we saw in the case of Steven Spielberg, is one that posits; whether explicitly orimplicitly, a symbolic father filling in the absence in the Other. The filmic world of the cinema of integration fosters the belief that absence in the Other does not really exist. Each time it depicts an absence, this cinema reveals a hidden presence. According to this cinema, the Other as such never fails. In the cinema of intersection, we encounter the absence in the Other di¬rectly. The strict separation of the worlds of desire and fantasy in this cinema allows it to depict these worlds intersecting. At these moments, we experi¬ence the absence in the Other in a privileged way. Hence, rather than pro¬ducing dependence, the cinema of intersection produces an experience of freedom. The encounter with the real is the encounter with the Other's failure, and this encounter traumatizes the subject because it deprives the subject of support in the Other. The subject derives its symbolic identity from the Other, and as a result, the encounter with the Other's lack leaves the subject without any sense of identity. The subject loses the security that derives from its link to the Other. But at the same time, this loss of support in the Other frees the subject from its dependence on the Other. Freedom depends on the recognition that the Other does not exist, that the Other cannot provide the subject a substantive identity. The encounter with the gaze in the cinema of intersection permits us to experience directly the Other's insubstantial status. In none of the cinematic structures that we have looked at thus far does the gaze appear as an object that we can encounter. Each type of cinema, in its own fashion, suggests the impossible status of the gaze, though the cinema of integration does so unwittingly, through its failure to present the gaze as either an absence in the visible field or as a distortion of that field. In this sense, these three types of cinema affirm Lacan's contention that "the real is the impossible," and they allow us to see—except in the case of the cinema of integration—the lack in the Other and the incomplete status of ideology. Though the cinema of desire and the cinema of fantasy affirm the impos¬sible status of the gaze and its irreducibility to the field of the visible, neither is able to show us how we can experience and accomplish the impossible. That is to say, both kinds of cinema conceive of the gaze as impossible in the strict sense of the term. However, Lacan's conception of the real as impossi¬ble does not mean that the real cannot be reached, but that it does not fit within the logic of our symbolic structure. As he explains in Seminar XVII, it is impossible "not on account of a simple stumbling block against which we bang our heads, but on account of what is announced as impossible by the symbolic. It is from there that the real arises."2 Though the real marks the point of impossibility within any symbolic system, this point of impossibility is not out of reach. The impossible status of the real stems from our inability to trace a path to it through the symbolic order. We can identify it—and we can mark it symbolically but we can't find a way to access the red in the way that we access other empirical objects. The example of the square root of -1 indicates the problem that the real presents to us. We can, of course, think and symbolize the square root of —1. But we cannot symbolize with real numbers what results when we try to take the square root of —1 because no squared real number will be negative. The square root of —1 requires us to create an imaginary number that exists solely in order to be the solution to this operation. This imaginary number is, in a sense, more real than any real number insofar as it indicates the point at which a certain mathematical system of symbolization breaks down. This system invites us to take the square root of numbers, but it cannot accommodate this operation being performed on every number. The square root of —1 represents what the system of real numbers cannot symbolize, and when we create imaginary numbers in order to perform this operation, we do the impossible and thereby radically transform the system of symbolization itself. To return from mathematics to ideology, one can accomplish the impossible by refusing to accept the choices that ideology offers. Ideology functions by defining the possibilities that subjects have, by creating options that remain within ideological bounds. One can choose today, for instance, between fundamentalism and capitalist democracy, but both choices remain within the ideological orbit of contemporary global capitalism. Even opting to combat capitalist democracy by choosing fundamentalism doesn't challenge the ideological landscape. Even fundamentalist terror attacks affirm rather than question capitalist ideology as they provide an opportunity for this ideology to align itself falsely with freedom. Capitalist democracy understands fundamentalism as the other that allows it to function and to define itself. That is to say, ideology establishes the game so that it wins no matter which side a subject chooses. Within an ideological structure, every possibility affirms the ideology and feeds its overall logic. The only way to break from the controlling logic of the ideology is to reject the possibilities that it presents and opt for the impossible. The impossible is impossible within a specific ideological framework, and the act of accomplishing the impossible has the effect of radically transforming the framework. The impossible thus marks the terrain of politics as such. As Slavoj Zizek points out, "Authentic politics is ... the art of the impossible—it changes the very parameters of what is considered 'possible' in the existing constellation." If a political act is not impossible in this sense, it is not really political because it lacks the ability to transform the contested ideological field.5 To create authentic change demands an act that does not fit within the possibilities that ideology lays out. Ideology prevents subjects from opting for the impossible choice precisely by making it seem impossible to do so. That is to say, we tend to believe that the impossible really is impossible because this is what ideology tells us again and. again. Herein lies the great value of the cinema of intersection. Through enacting a traumatic encounter with the gaze, this cinema shows us that we can do the impossible. At the moment we encounter the gaze, we see the field of representation thrown into relief and redefined. Everything out¬side of the gaze loses its former significance in light of this encounter. Through this cinematic experience, we can glimpse the impossible. We see the filmic world from the perspective of the gaze rather than seeing the gaze from the perspective of the filmic world (as occurs in the cinema of inte¬gration). After this encounter, the normal functioning of the world cannot continue in the same way and undergoes a radical transformation. Though we can accomplish the impossible, we can't do so without simultaneously destroying the very ground beneath our feet. By facilitating an encounter with the gaze, the cinema of intersection en¬courages the spectator to identify with this object. Though other forms of cinema push the subject in the direction of freedom, it is only the cinema of intersection that emphasizes identification with the impossible object. In doing so, this cinema allows the subject to grasp its own nothingness—to see itself in the nothingness of the object. The reduction of the subject to the nothingness of the objet petit a is the most extreme form of freedom avail¬able to the subject. It implies a rejection of the world of the Other and an af¬firmation of the subject's private fantasmatic response to that world. To identify with the object is to insist on one's particular way of enjoying at the expense of one's symbolic identity.