Lacan+Poverty

The Aff is the latest lottery ticket, offering to solve poverty with a simple plan, this is a fantasy only seeking to stop us from revolting from the symbolic order. The fantasy is what allows this ideological system to remain. Todd McGowan, [Author and Psychoanalyst] 2007, “The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan”, Pg. 35-37 IN ORDER TO grasp the political possibilities and consequences of film’s tendency toward the depiction of fantasy, we must first examine the politics of fantasy itself. Fantasy functions most conspicuously in a conservative way, as a vehicle for depoliticization and acceptance of the ruling ideology. It provides an imaginary enjoyment that often persuades subjects to accept their actual immiseration. We can see the most dramatic instance of this in the case of lotteries, which sell the fantasy of being a millionaire to impoverished subjects in order to render their poverty bearable. As long as I can purchase a lottery ticket (and its attendant fantasy), I endure the drudgery of my situation rather than revolt against it. In this way, fantasy functions as the direct and necessary supplement to ideology. The social law demands the obedience of subjects, and ideology serves to justify this obedience, to provide a rationale for it. But subjection to ideology nonetheless leaves subjects in a state of dissatisfaction, even if ideology does in fact justify this dissatisfaction (through recourse to original sin, human nature, the exigencies of the free market, and so on). The ideologically interpellated subject accepts this fundamental dissatisfaction, and yet a high degree of dissatisfaction among subjects imperils the functioning and stability of the social order. This places the social order in a contradictory position vis-à-vis the dissatisfied subject: on the one hand, it depends on the dissatisfaction of subjects in order to function, and on the other hand, dissatisfied subjects represent a barrier to social stability. Dissatisfied subjects are always incipiently revolutionary subjects, which is why it is precisely at this point that fantasy supplements ideology in stabilizing the social edifice. Fantasy deflects the revolutionary impulse that the dissatisfactions of living under the social law tend to produce. Ideology also needs fantasy to compensate for its constitutive incompleteness. No ideology can ever provide all the answers for the subject, and fantasy fills in the blank spaces in an ideological edifice. For instance, official Christian ideology holds out the idea of heaven as a reward for accepting Christ. Heaven (or eternal bliss) provides the incentive for the fledgling believer to abandon the seemingly more enticing life of sin. But Christian ideology never describes this eternal bliss in any detail, not because it refuses to reveal this information, but because it can’t. The description of heaven represents a lacuna in Christian ideology insofar as it represents the promise of an enjoyment that we cannot signify. Christians must fantasize about heaven in order to compensate for this lacuna, and Christian ideology depends on this moment of fantasy in order to function at all. One can’t even imagine the Christian who has never once indulged in a fantasy of heaven. Ideology is always limited because it functions on the level of the signifier. The signifier gives ideology its power to constitute identity, to provide the totality of identities that the subject can possibly adopt, but it also limits the ability of ideology to create a social reality complete unto itself. Every system of signification—and thus every ideology—is beset by lack, lacking what exists beyond the signifier. We can think of the incompleteness of the signifier—and thus of ideology—in the same terms that Kant thinks of the limits of human reason. According to Kant, reason goes astray because it attempts to extend the concepts of our understanding beyond experience. In so doing, in attempting to conceive what Kant calls cosmological ideas, reason necessarily involves itself in antinomies, speculations in which both opposing arguments are true or both opposing arguments are false. These antinomies— concerning the origin of the world, for instance—indicate the failure of reason and its constitutive incompleteness. No amount of reasoning can fill in this gap and solve the impossible problem represented by the antinomies. As Kant argues in his discussion of the first antinomy, if we try to reason about the origin of the world, we will inevitably fall into contradiction, proving that an origin cannot exist and, at the same time, that there must be an origin. Thus, both the origin and an infinite time without origin are unthinkable for us (because the world as a whole is not an object of possible experience, indicating that reason here oversteps its bounds). Fantasy, however, allows us to realize this cosmological idea of an origin, to stage the origin that we cannot conceive on the level of the signifier. We can fantasize a cosmological primal scene. In trying to think the origin with signifiers, we involve ourselves in an infinite regress in which we can always posit something prior, but fantasy provides the illusion of an absolute origin that we cannot go beyond. 1 Ideology fails along with the signifier because the origin of every ideological system, even that of capitalist democracy, is violent and unjustifiable within the ideology. No ideology can explain or justify its own genesis, the point at which ideology generates itself. We can see this in the way that contemporary apologists for capitalism emphasize its link to human nature rather than avowing its historical origins. Ideology must repress its own origin because this origin represents the senseless dimension of the law, the law simply proclaiming itself as law without any attempt at justification. At its origin, the law relies on a fundamentally extralegal, lawless moment in which legality itself begins. 2 The origin necessarily remains a blank space within ideology, which is why ideology needs fantasy to answer the questions that it must leave unanswered. 3 Bonds of lack exist because of the symbolic order they perpetuate. Todd McGowan, [Author and Psychoanalyst] 2004 “The End of Dissatisfaction?” Pg. 17 The symbolic order is the basis for any social order because it provides a layer of mediation connecting subjects together. Within it, no one has direct access to enjoyment. As Lacan puts it, “jouissance is prohibited by whomever speaks, as such—or, to put it differently, it can only be said between the lines by whomever is a subject of the Law, since the Law is founded on that very prohibition. 15 This shared sacrifice of enjoyment—embodied in the incest prohibition—establishes the basis of the social bond. Because subjects experience themselves as lacking, as no fully enjoying themselves they look to the Other for what they are missing, for the piece that would allow for complete enjoyment. It is subjects’ inability to enjoy completely—to have an experience of total enjoyment—that directs them to the Other, that creates a desire for what the social order seems to have hidden within its recesses. In contrast, the enjoying subject does not look to the Other for what it lacks, but rather sustains an attitude of indifference toward the Other. As a result, enjoyment as such is not conducive to social relations and the functioning of the symbolic order. The symbolic order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way, prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces. This sense of shared dissatisfaction is the salient feature of the society of prohibition, and it represents a direct point of contrast with the society of commanded enjoyment. This fantasy constructed by the affirmative only leads to subjects ceding more and more of their power to the state, in hopes of saving themselves from these situations, eventually resulting in totalitarianism. McGowan, 2007, (Todd, Prof of English @ Univ of Vermont, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, p. 110-112) SRM

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.”

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. Daly, 2004, (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. The Alternative is to traverse the fantasy— The space of lack i.e. poverty in the symbolic is where to attack it. We need to get over our need to end poverty and circle the void in society. This can create a radical break from the symbolic order as psychoanalysis authorizes more political acts that spread. McGowan, teaches critical theory and film in the English Department at the U Vermont 2004 (Todd Lacan and Contemporary Film, Ed. McGowan and Kunkle, pg 155-69 For all its ability to control both past and present, the power of ideology is not absolute. We have political possibilities because ideology does not function smoothly. The hitches in its functioning mark the points at which subjects can mount resistance, and psychoanalytic interpretation allows us to recognize such points. As we have already seen, Dark City begins with a moment at which ideological control fails. It fails because, as Detective Eddie Walenski (Colin Friels) later tells Murdoch, "Once in a while one of us wakes up while they're changing things. It's not supposed to happen, but it does. It happened to me." It also happens to Murdoch at the beginning of the film. During the process of tuning and the imprinting of memories, Murdoch wakes up before Schreber has successfully imprinted his new identity. As a result; Murdoch doesn't know who he is; he has only fragments of memories. To "wake up" means that one has become aware of the process of ideological interpellation and has grasped that ideology, produces identity. And in contrast, to sleep is to acquiesce to ideological control. This is why, during another tuning later in the film Murdoch frantically exhorts those around him to wake up so that they too can become aware of the control being exerted over the. In order to resist ideological control, the first step is to become aware of its functioning, which Murdoch does. Ideology is susceptible to this kind of awareness--and failure-because the symbolic authority is itself incomplete It suffers from lack just like the subjects under its control. That is to say, symbolic authority does not simply exert its power over subjects; it also wants something from them. In Dark City the figures of symbolic authority (the Strangers) seek the human soul the source of human individuality. Schreber points out that they believe human individuality will save them-a collective species-from death. He explains to Murdoch, "it is our capacity for individuality, our souls, that makes us different from them. –They think they can find the human soul if they understand how our memories work All they have are collective memories. They share one group mind. They're dying, you see. Their entire race is on the brink of extinction. They think we can save them."10 ' The strangers represent resent the symbolic authority in the film, and yet they themselves desire. They want to discover the hidden secret of humanity -the objet petit a, the kernel of jouissance, within the human subject. They take a special interest in Murdoch precisely because the pro­cess of ideological control fails with him, and thus he seem, to possess this kernel of jouissance that cannot be reduced to ideol­ogy. What they seek in humans is not successful ideological con­trol, but the ability to resist it. Through this depiction of the Strangers, Dark City reveals not only that symbolic authority desires (i.e., that it is lacking and therefore not absolute), but also that it desires the very jouissance that it forbids. Symbolic authority demands obedience, but it de­sires resistance-the kernel of jouissance in the subject that can­not be assimilated through ideology. Its desire cannot be reduced to a demand: authority articulates its demand-"Obey the Law! "­but its desire appears between the lines of the demand. As Lacan (1966-1967) points out in his Seminar XIV entitled La logiaue du fantasme, "it is from the demand-and thoroughly from the demand-that desire arises" (1966-1967, session of June 21, 1967). It is, Lacan adds, "only a by-product of the demand" (1966-1967, session of June 21, 1967). Because desire emerges from demand, it remains-in direct contrast to demand-fundamentally enigmatic and irreducible to any positive realization in signifiers. According to Lacan (1989), desire "cannot be indicated anywhere in a signi­fier of any demand whatsoever, since it is not articulatable there even though it is articulated in it" (p. 62). Unlike demand, desire is elusive: whenever it is made completely articulate, it slips away. So while the Strangers demand that the city's human subjects suc­cumb to their manipulation, what they really want-what they desire-is to discover someone who will successfully resist. Re­sistance indicates the presence of the "soul" or objet petit a, that extimate part of the subject-what is in the subject more than the subject-that remains the same despite constant changes in symbolic identity. All mastery is constrained and haunted by the desire for this little piece of the Real that has the ability to completely topple its authority. It seems odd, of course, to say that mastery wants subversion rather than obedience. But this results from the fact that the position of mastery is itself split and therefore inconsistent. This desire of the master is evident in the paternal figure who favors the rebellious son over the dutiful one, as in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Big Daddy, the father of the family depicted in the play, clearly prefers his son Brick over his other son Gooper, despite the rebellion of the former and the obedience of the latter. Gooper is a successful lawyer, and he takes care of the family estate. In addition, he has a stable marriage and has fathered grandchildren for Big Daddy. Gooper has done all of these things in order to please Big Daddy, to conform to his demand. Brick drinks, disdains his inheritance, has a rapidly dissolving marriage, and, perhaps most significantly, has sexual desire for men rather than women. However, even the revelation of Brick's attraction to men does not alter Big Daddy's preference for him; in fact, it seems to increase it.'' The more Brick acts against Big Daddy's demand, the more Big Daddy desires him. Brick's resistance to Big Daddy's authority attracts Big Daddy's desire because it indicates the presence of the objet petit a-something that absolutely resists assimilation to the demands of authority. Big Daddy, like the Strangers, seeks out this object that seems to hold the secret of jouissance that always remains just outside the reach of those in power. Symbolic authority's lack constitutes a political open­ ing for the subject, which is why the subject must constantly rem ain aware of it In addition to revealing the desire of symbolic authority Dark City also illustrates the inability of symbolic authority to experi­ence jouissance. Perhaps the Strangers experience some jouissance in their mastery, but sexual jouissance completely escapes them. This failing becomes apparent in an exchange between Schreber and one of the Strangers. While Schreber works in his lab prepar­ ing a new identity for a human subject, a Stranger approaches Schreber as the latter begins to reflect on one of the memories he puts into this identity: "What is it? The recollections of a great lover? A catalogue of conquests? We will soon find out. You wouldn't appreciate that, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is. Not the sort of conquests you would ever understand." Schreber's com­ ment here underlines the distinction between mastery and jouissance. Because they occupy the position of mastery, the Strangers continually seek the jouissance that their very position denies to them. This is the fundamental impasse of all mastery: not only does it need those it controls and subjects to sustain its own position of mastery, but it cannot escape being obsessed with the secret jouissance of these subjects. Hence, in addition to leav­ ing open the space for resistance, symbolic authority actually encourages its own subversion. Through its depiction of the desire of symbolic authority, Dark City reveals one of the ways that psychoanalytic critique and psychoanalytically informed inquiry serve political action. Often, the strongest barrier to overcome in the political act is the belief that symbolic authority is without fissure, that there is no opening in which the act can occur. By showing the Strangers' desperate search for the jouissance of the subject, the film shatters this belief. Rather than embodying an invariable mastery that thwarts all challenges to it, the Strangers betray the inconsistency of mastery, it's lack. And because even symbolic authority lacks, we need not succumb to its demands.12 Symbolic authority's lack  creates the space at which we can oppose it, and taking up this opposition is what it means to act politically. But the primary barrier to such an act is our investment in the fantasy that fills in symbolic authority's lack. Because symbolic authority is lacking or split, ideological control is not absolute. This means that it needs a fantasmatic support in order to entice subjects to buy into it. If ideology simply demands submission, subjects will be reluctant to buy into it. But fantasy fills in this lacuna, offering a reward (an image of the ultimate jouissance) that ideology offers in exchange for submission. Hence, far from subverting ideological control, fantasy perpetuates it and follows from it. The Strangers provide the inhabitants of the city with fantasies-images of an experience beyond ideological control-and these fantasies assist in rendering the people docile. In the case of Murdoch, we see clearly how ideological control depends on a fundamental fantasy. For Murdoch, this fantasy is that of Shell Beach, a place of warmth and light in contrast to the dark, dreary city. Shell Beach occupies this important place in Murdoch's psychic economy because it represents his point of origin-home. He believes that if he can return to this point, he will find the answers to all of his questions about his identity and gain a sense of completion. The contrast between the social reality of Dark City and Murdoch's fantasy reveals the crucial role that fantasy plays in keeping subjects satisfied with the social reality as it is. Murdoch and everyone else in the city live in perpetual darkness-a hopeless world of unending night. Proyas emphasizes this absence of light in the different aspects of the film's mise-en-scene. Every setting within the city is very dimly lit; the characters wear dark colors and often appear in shadow; and no scene takes place during the day. This world would seem to be conducive to widespread dissatisfaction, but fantasy intervenes to foster contentment through an imaginary satisfaction. Fantasy allows subjects to take solace in the image of past (and future) satisfaction. Whereas the social reality is dark and hopeless, fantasy presents a world brimming with light. In Murdoch's fantasmatic image of Shell Beach, a bright sun shines on a beautiful shoreline. This fantasy seems to offer an opening to a point beyond ideological control-hope for a different future--but ideology actually relies on this image of an opening in order to keep subjects satisfied with their existence within ideology. In order for fantasy to supplement ideology in this way, it must remain amorphous and unarticulated. On several occasions during the film, Murdoch asks about the way to Shell Beach. But each time his interlocutors stumble in mid-sentence, despite expressing certainty about their knowledge of the directions. An exemplary instance of this occurs when Murdoch questions a cab driver: Murdoch: Hey, do you happen to know the way to Shell Beach? Cab Driver: You're kidding. Me and the Mrs. spent our honey-moon there.... All you gotta do is take Main Street west to .. or is the Cross-. . . that's funny, I can't seem to remember if it's Main Street west or the Crosstown. This initial feeling of knowledge and the subsequent uncertainty clue us in to the fantasmatic status of Shell Beach. Because it functions as the locale of fantasy, subjects feel as if they know it intimately. But because it is fantasmatic, they cannot put this "knowledge" into words. In Seminar VII, Lacan points out that "fantasms cannot bear the revelation of speech" (1992, p. 80). To articulate the fantasy-to give directions to Shell Beach-would destroy. it insofar as this would expose the imaginary status of the fantasy scenario. By stressing the inability of other subjects to tell Murdoch the way to Shell Beach, the film again insists on the link between the individual's relationship to his or her private fantasies and the political situation of the entire society. Even though Murdoch's fantasy is individual and private-Shell Beach is not the fantasy of everyone in the city-other inhabitants assist him in sustaining the fantasmatic status of Shell Beach through their failure to direct him to it. In other words, their silence allows Murdoch to sustain distance from his fantasy. The fantasy of Shell Beach continues to hold sway over Murdoch in part because everyone shows such respect for this private fantasy. The subjects of Dark City unconsciously recognize the danger for everyone-the public danger-if even one subject traverses her or his private fantasy. If the fantasy of one subject breaks down and ceases to obscure the void at the heart of the symbolic structure, then everyone's fantasy becomes questionable. Leaving his fantasy unarticulated and unrealized, Murdoch's fellow citizens protect him from facing the void that it obscures. Just as the subject's traversal of the fantasy has political consequences for the whole society, the whole society's (political) commitment to keeping fantasy hidden acts as a barrier to the subject's traversal of the fantasy. Perhaps the most insightful moment in Dark City occurs when Murdoch tries to take the subway to Shell Beach. This scene offers an exact depiction of the impossible status of the fantasy within the symbolic order. When Murdoch takes a local train to Shell Beach, the train stops before arriving, and an announcement tells the passengers that they must exit the train. After disembarking, he is told that only the express train goes all the way to Shell Beach. But it turns out that there is no station at which one can board the express train, and so all one can do is to watch it go by. Here we have the dilemma of fantasy in a nutshell: the local train that we can take never arrives at the destination, and only the express train that we can't board actually makes it there. We miss the object one way or the other.' 3 These failures are not simply empirical obstacles to the realization of the fantasy but work to constitute and sustain the fantasy. The fantasy only continues to function insofar as we find ourselves in the situation of Murdoch-unable to track it down. Fantasy relies on the subject's distance from it in order to be effective. Shell Beach must remain inaccessible and always on the horizon. When the subject gets too close to the fantasy, the fan­ tasy breaks down, as // Dark City // illustrates. Dissatisfied with his inability to find Shell Beach, Murdoch finally corners Schreber and demands that Schreber take him there. The course is circuitous: they travel by boat down an isolated river and then walk through a series of narrow passages. When Murdoch opens the final door leading to "Shell Beach" the camera is positioned behind him, so that we see Murdoch looking at what appears to be a bright blue vista. By first introducing us to "Shell Beach" obscured by a door­ way and through a long shot. Proyas plays with our expectations, forcing us as spectators to become aware of our own investment in fantasy. It initially looks as if Murdoch has actually realized his fantasy, that he has finally arrived at Shell Beach. A quick cut to a closeup of Murdoch looking at the scene seems to confirm this his expression connotes amazement. However, when we finally see “Shell Beach” through a subjective shot from Murdoch’s perspective, it becomes apparent that the reason for this amazement is not the realization of the fantasy. It turns out that Shell Beach, once one actually arrives at it, is nothing but a poster of Shell Beach plastered on a brick wall. What seemed from the initial long shot to be the bright colors of an actual beach turn out to be the faded colors of a mere poster. This is why the fantasy resists complete articulation: if one collapses the distance separating oneself from the fantasy, the imaginary nature of the fantasy becomes readily apparent. In addition to revealing what happens to fantasy when a subject comes face-to-face with it, Dark City also makes evident what fantasy obscures. The most important role of fantasy within the psychic economy is its ability to cover over the traumatic Real on which all ideology rests. As Zizek puts it, "The fantasy which underlies the public ideological text as its non-acknowledged obscene support simultaneously serves as a screen against the direct intrusion of the Real" (1998, pp. 64-65). Fantasy allows us to avoid an encounter with the Real that always threatens to swallow the subject. Dark City depicts this dynamic almost literally. Confronted with the poster of Shell Beach and the brick wall underneath, Murdoch (assisted by Inspector Bumstead) takes a hammer to the wall, breaking down the fantasy in order to reveal what lies beyond. After they break through the wall, what they see horrifies them: the image of Shell Beach covered the void of infinite space. Murdoch and Bumstead now recognize that the city is not located on a planet (such as earth, where the film seemed to be set), but is free-floating through the vastness of space. This immediately renders meaningless the entire ideological edifice upon which their world rested. Murdoch and Bumstead see that there is, in the last instance, no ground under their feet, that void is at the bottom of everything. At this point, Murdoch recognizes that he will never attain his fantasy and that the object of his desire is the product of his own positing. As Schreber tells hi, “There is no ocean, John. There is nothing beyond the city. The only place home exists is in your head.” Breaking down the wall forces Murdoch into this recognition, and it is akin to what Lacan calls the traversal of the fantasy-the end of psychoanalysis. When a subject traverses the fantasy, he or she moves from desire (continually seeking the object) to drive (circling around an objectless void). One resists this transition because it entails the loss of any hope for escape. Desire promises a transcendent future, a future beyond present constraints. But the drive makes no promises; it involves only a perpetual circling. Murdoch is not the only character in the film to pass from desire to drive. Detective Eddie Walenski also made this transition prior to the beginning of the time depicted in the film, but he was unable to face the horror of the drive's monotony and became mad (thus leaving him unable to assist Murdoch in his political action). On the walls of his office and home, Walenski draws spirals that close in on themselves in order to represent the inescapabilitv of the drive. He tells Bumstead, "I've been spending time in the subway, riding in circles, thinking in circles." Whereas desire proceeds in a linear fashion, metonymically moving from object to object. the drive is circular and thus is completely self-encloscd. It is a circular motion constantly turning in on itself. Walenski eventually kills, himself in order to escape the monotony of the drive, which indicates that the fantasy of an other place (such as Shell Beach) retained a hold over him. In its hope for relief from present conditions, literal suicide is necessarily accompanied by a fantasmatic supplement an image of a better place somewhere else (even if this is only oblivion). In opting for suicide, Walenski reveals that he is unable to reconcile himself to the object's nonexistence. Murdoch, on the other hand, is able to break from fantasy's hold, and this frees him from the power of ideological control, preparing him for a final battle with the Strangers. The ideological control of the Strangers depends not so much on the symbolic identity that it produces in the subjects of the city as in its fantasmatic hold over them. This is why Zizek claims that "the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to `traverse the fantasy' which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master-makes us accept the frame-work of the social relationship of domination" (1998, p. 48). Traversing the fantasy frees the subject from the power of symbolic authority by subverting the subject's libidinal investment in that authority. Murdoch cannot become a fully radicalized subject until he abandons the hope that Shell Beach might bring him complete satisfaction. This hope represents an investment in the authority of the Strangers because it is this authority that has created Shell Beach. Hence, challenging the authority of the Strangers, prior to traversing the fantasy, would threaten to undermine the fantasy. It is for this reason that fantasy plays such a crucial role in keeping subjects in line. However, when he traverses the fantasy of Shell Beach (his fundamental fantasy), nothing stands in the way of Murdoch mounting a political challenge to the hegemony of the Strangers. I ` The point at which Murdoch shatters the Shell Beach fantasy and lays bare the void that it covers marks the radical moment of Dark City. But the film is unable to sustain this radicality, this confrontation with the void that underlies the symbolic structure. After Murdoch and Bumstead break through the Shell Beach poster and expose the void, the Strangers appear, and during the ensuing struggle, Bumstead and one of the Strangers fall through the hole in the wall and are thrust into the vacuum of space. This seemingly horrific event is actually a wholly ideological development, as the subsequent shot indicates. After Bumstead's body leaves the world of the city and enters into space, the next shot depicts the city subjectively-from the impossible perspective of Bumstead as he floats lifelessly through space. We gradually see that what seemed like a planet is actually a vast, self-contained spaceship, unattached to any solar system. The problem with this shot is that it is purely fantasmatic: it posits a "real world" (a la Shell Beach, though perhaps not as attractive) beyond the confines of our present world. At this point, the film implies that there is a vast universe of space (and possibly, somewhere, Earth, a "real" home) beyond the ideological world of the city. It presents space itself as the "real world," as the place at which we arrive after traversing the fantasy. But this is the fantasmatic gesture par excellence. Traversing the fantasy doesn't allow us to escape the limits of our present situation; instead, it allows us to see that there is nothing beyond those limits, that the image of the beyond is the product of the limits themselves. That is to say, fantasy doesn't conceal the "real world" (however bleak), but instead works to convince us that such a place exists, just beyond our reach. Traversing the fantasy involves the recognition that there is no beyond-or, rather, that the beyond exists within the present world.15 In this sense, Dark City, though it depicts Murdoch traversing the fantasy, almost immediately restores the dimension of fantasy for the spectator. But despite this lapse into fantasy, the film soon reveals the political possibilities unleashed through fantasy's traversal. After he breaks from the fantasmatic control of the Strangers, Murdoch finds himself under their physical control: he becomes their prisoner, and they plan to imprint their collective identity into his mind. They believe that because Murdoch has successfully resisted them, he can become the vehicle for their deliverance. But instead of imprinting the identity of the Strangers into Murdoch, Schreber imprints Murdoch with a series of memories. These memories include a tutorial designed to teach Murdoch how to develop his power of tuning in order to thwart the Strangers. Because he no longer has any (fantasmatic) investment in their authority, Murdoch is not seduced by the memories themselves and uses them solely as a tool for battling the Strangers. He knows that he has nothing to lose in destroying the symbolic edifice that the Strangers have authored. Thus assisted by Schreber, Murdoch defeats the Strangers and frees humanity from their control. His private victory over the Strangers' authority is at once a collective victory as well. It is at this point that we see most clearly the link between psychoanalysis and political action. Psychoanalysis assists the analyst and in traversing the fantasy and thereby breaking from her or his investment in symbolic authority. As we have seen, in the film Murdoch undergoes a process similar to psychoanalysis, concluding with his traversal of the Shell Beach fantasy. This is the process that makes possible Murdoch's subsequent political act of overthrowing the Strangers. There is no authentic political act without a prior traversing of the fantasy. Thus, psychoanalysis--and the psychoanalytic critique of ideology-leads us to political action. As long as Murdoch remained invested in the authority of the Strangers at the level of fantasy, he could not even see the opening for a political act. But by traversing the fantasy, he broke down this barrier, thereby revealing the essential role that psychoanalysis plays in politics. While Murdoch does not, of course, undergo actual psychoanalysis, his trajectory in the film-culminating in the traversal of the fantasy-follows that of analysis. Thus, Dark City indicates not the political necessity of submitting everyone to analysis (which is clearly an unworkable proposition) but the political importance of adopting the psychoanalytic path and its attitude toward fantasy. Psychoanalysis is integral to the authentic political act because of the nature of symbolic authority. Symbolic authority has mastery not as a result of superior force: though there are far fewer Strangers than humans, the Strangers nonetheless have control. Instead, it relies on the fact that those who are under its control are themselves invested in that control. That is, the humans submit to the authority of the Strangers because it provides them with symbolic identity and a fantasmatic support for that identity. This investment in symbolic authority acts as a barrier to political action, giving the humans a reason to sustain the status quo. It is only through the act of traversing the fantasy-an act that psychoanalysis promotes-that subjects can escape this investment and act against symbolic authority. Thus, the apparent short-circuit between psychoanalytic analysis and political action that critics have noted within contemporary Lacanian thought must be seen in a new light. Far from working against concrete political activity, psychoanalytic critique is in fact the basis for it. Without psychoanalysis, politics remains micropolitics, caught within the very symbolic structure that it is trying to contest. With psychoanalysis we can attain the authentic political act, one that eschews symbolic authority and authors a radical break.