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INTRODUCTION F D SCOTT

THE SEVEN VEILS OF FANTASYSLAVOj ZIZEk

THE RADIANT CITYLE CORBUSIER

TOWARD THE CONTEMPORARY CITYREM kOOLHAAS

CAPITALISM AND ARCHITECTUREADRIÁN GORELIk

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introductionfelicity d. scOtt

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The recent swell of public discourse on contemporary architecture seems to have taken the discipline somewhat by surprise; the unremitting scrutiny and visibility cast upon it on account of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) competition for the World Trade Center site was met by an uncanny (ordisquieting) silence of ideas.1 Following a tragic and traumatic violation of Manhattan—“Capital of the Twentieth Century” and long-standing site of modernist and experimental fantasies, even of retroactive manifestoes — the architectural vanguard was called on to fulfill public aspirations that were, for most, distinctly out of sync with contemporary concerns.2 It was interpolated into roles such as enhancing the symbolic legibility of the skyline, ameliorating a sense of loss or tragedy, and engaging social and political processes in order that rebuilding be debated in terms beyond the bureaucratic and financial. The discipline was thus (post) modernization of the city.3 Most of the architects, like those to whom they promoted their schemes, did not question historical forces conditioning the competition program, but fell back on cliché versions of social tropes—heroes, monuments, rebirth, public space, “visionary architecture,” “defensible space,” spiritual and symbolic legibility—without offering critical

On

the silen

ce Of id

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Nothing is more common than the mass media technician who, after a hard day at work, goes off to the movies and cries.

— Paulo Virno

1. “It’s an interesting time,” Charlie Rose noted of this visibility, “because tragedy . . . has brought about a great sense of architecture. . . . And for the first time in a long time, there’s more conversation about the role of architecture.” “We have never seen publicity all over the world about New York City,” Peter Eisenman responded, adding (in a departure from his long-standing commitment to architecture’s autonomy) that “architecture �nally is where it should be, in the political, social process.” See Charlie Rose, january 8, 2003, transcript no. 3374. 2. Manhattan has long been a testing ground for “fantastic architecture,” from Emilio Ambasz’s 1969 fable “Manhattan: Capital of the Twentieth Century,” to Rem koolhaas’s Delirious New York of 1978, to the work of the Italian Superstudio, Austrian experimentalists, and others from this period. 3. That this was unlikely to be affected was noted by many: “Ultimately, the market is going to dictate what’s needed and when it’s needed,” a “major downtown landlord” was reported to have said (Charles V. Bagli, “The Debate: Architect’s Proposals May Be Bold, but They Probably Won’t Be Built,” New York Times, December 19, 2002, sec. B, p. 11).

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strategies to address the political issues they raise. 4 Taking them to be self-evident (and as easy vehicles to garner public and media support), architects missed an occasion to problematize the discipline ’s imbrication within complex and shifting historical, social, institutional, and geopolitical contexts. 5 They missed an occasion in which aesthetic practices and emergent technologies might have been regarded not just as palliative or functional but theorized as politically engaged sites of encounter, dissensus, and contestation.6

The symptoms of this disengagement are many and vary in their visibility and combination: a “postcritical” turn in contemporary practice and discourse that is at once a posttheoretical and postpolitical one; the recuperation of experimental strategies from the 1960s and early ’70s, but voided of any contestatory dimension; the implicit resurgence of a mode of signi� cation or iconography with both expressionist and monumental (and in both cases spectacular) tendencies; the ascendancy of the signature architect (replete with glasses and cowboy boots) alongside a cynical disclaimer of such modes of authorship; a delirious immersion in information technology seemingly ignorant of the dystopic lessons of architecture ’s earlier postwar engagement with cybernetics; and a call for avant-gardism that is, in fact, a vanguardism without critical or institutional stakes. This constellation of symptoms is not, of course, con�ned to the LMDC competition; it emerged during the waning of the discipline ’s interest in theoretical debates.7 In many senses these symptoms seem to be the residue of earlier polemics. We see, for instance, the persistence of a dichotomy forged in the late 1960s and dominant throughout the following decades, an increasingly unproductive one that persists in various ruses today. According to this polarization, architectural practices are understood as situated at poles along an axis: at one end was the unwitting integration into the dominant technological and socioeconomic forces; at the other the dialectical withdrawal into an autonomous disciplinary domain of formal

4. That Oscar Newman’s notion of “defensible space” might enjoy a return in response to the terrorist attacks on New York was posited by Anthony Vidler prior to the LMDC competition. See “A City Transformed: Designing ‘Defensible Space,’” Grey Room 07 (Spring 2002), pp. 82–85. 5. On architects acting like “media-age politicians,” see julie V. Iovine, “Turning a Competition into a Public Campaign,” New York Times, February 26, 2003, sec. E, p. 1. The LMDC competition was initiated as an “innovative design study” following the widespread rejection of the six initial variations presented by Beyer Blinder Belle. Out of 406 submissions, seven teams were selected and commissioned to develop proposals in response to “one recurring public suggestion—the desire for additional creative and inspiring plans” (LMDC brochure, Plans in Progress, 2002). There were many public forums: an exhibition of the finalists, Plans in Progress, at the Wintergarden of the World Financial Center, December 20, 2002–February 2003; a two-part symposium in mid-january 2003, jointly organized by the Architecture League, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and widespread television and print media coverage.6. On other logics of democracy, see jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (New York: Verso, 1992). 7. For a demonstration of this reactive turn away from theory, see Assemblage 41 (April 2000), the journal’s � nal issue dedicated to a questionnaire on theory. This stance did not re� ect that of the editors, nor of many contributors, but was present in a large number of responses.

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and semantic investigation. It seems important, however, not only to ask how these symptoms are related to this dichotomy and to the competition itself—the role it called on architecture to perform, and the visibility and public voice it conferred to certain streams of contemporary practice — but to ask what they are symptoms of, what they reveal about the state of contemporary architecture.

In his initial, euphoric response to the unveiling of the six LMDC entries on December 18, 2002, Herbert Muschamp, critic for the New York Times, noted of the project by Richard Meier and his collaborators that “It may strike some as a throwback to the megastructural superblocks of the 1960s,” glibly adding, “So what?” Buckminster Fuller was also invoked with respect to the lofty ambitions of the towers, as was Louis Kahn (presumably the early experimental collaborations with Anne Tyng and Robert le Ricolais) on account of the twin lattice structures of the THINK team. 8 Experimental practices might well have been on the critic’s mind following the recent exhibition of the Howard Gilman collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: The Changing of the Avant-Garde included a diverse eld of important “visionary” drawings, ranging from work by Yona Friedman, Arata Isozaki, Cedric Price, and members of the Archigram group of the 1960s to the radical practices of Archizoom, Superstudio, and Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) from the early 1970s through to the emergent postmodern “paper architecture” of Peter

Arata Isozaki. joint Core System (elevation). Project. 1960. © The Museum of Modern ArtLicensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

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Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Aldo Rossi. Curator Terrence Riley went so far as to position the work as “the root sources of our architecture today.”9 From exhibitions of the equally remarkable collections of the Fonds Régional d’Art contemporain d’Orléans (FRAC) and the Centre Georges Pompidouto retrospectives of Archigram and the inclusion of key protagonists of experimental architecture in Cities on the Move, the 1960s and ’70s neo-avant-garde has indeed returned to haunt architects’ imaginations. We can also, however, �nd retrievals of experimental work founded less on historical premises than on an operative program of return. In publications such as Daidalos’s 2000 issue on “Diagrammania” (a response to ANY 23, “Diagram Work” of 1998) and a 1997 issue of Lusitania, “Sites and Stations: Provisional Utopias,” the postcritical camp implicitly or explicitly situated this experimental legacy as a paternity.10

The specificity revealed by historical analysis, as Michel Foucault has argued, “is certainly one of the best defenses against this theme of return.”11 The historical significance of earlier experimental practices and the radical stakes that haunted aspects of the work warrant critical investigation, and an important body of scholarship is emerging on this front.12 Exemplifying an earlier engagement with new technologies —not only structural but cybernetic, information, and transportation technologies — the work does seem relevant to a contemporary condition characterized by the capitalist project of globalization, expanded media networks, and increasingly immaterial forms of labor and aesthetic practice.13 If the optimistic 1960s discourse of social liberation (with which the work was frequently coupled) seems in retrospect naive, and if it soon gave way to a dystopic counterpart as ideals of “open” relations proved all too effective at training � exible social subjects for a “control society,” we might nevertheless lament the elision—in this return to

9. Terrence Riley, “Introduction,” in The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 14. 10. Not all of the contributions to these publications were “operative” in this sense even if the project of the publications remained so. For exceptions see, for instance, the articles by Anthony Vidler and Mary Lou Lobsinger in Daidalos 74 (October 2000), and Celeste Olalquiaga, Miwon kwon, Aaron Tan, Friedrich kittler et al., and others in Lusitania 7 (1997). 11. “For me,” Foucault continued, “the history of madness or the studies of the prison . . . were done in that precise manner because I knew full well—this is in fact what aggravated many people—that I was carrying out an historical analysis in such a manner that people could criticize the present, but it was impossible for them to say, ‘Let’s go back. . . . ’” (Michel Foucault, “Space, knowledge and Power,” [1982], trans. Christian Hubert, in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984 [New York: Semiotext(e), 1989], p. 343). 12. See, for instance, the catalog essays in The Changing of the Avant-Garde, especially Sarah Deyong’s “Memories of the Urban Future: The Rise and Fall of the Megastructure,” other catalogs to the exhibitions noted above, and Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 04 (Summer 2001), pp. 82–122. 13. If the processing capacities of digital media were widely embraced by architecture in the 1950s and ’60s, the most recent generation of information technology has radically transformed the discipline once again. Research into the earlier, historical turn to electronic technologies, however, offers not only prehistories of contemporary interest in information technology and virtual space, but also important lessons regarding their historical and political implications for architecture.

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introduction

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the seven veils of fantasyslavOj zizek

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When, a couple of years ago, the disclosure of Michael Jackson’s alleged ‘immoral’ private behaviour (his sexual games with underage boys) dealt a blow to his innocent Peter Pan image, elevated beyond sexual and racial differences (or concerns), some penetrating commentators asked the obvi- ous question: what’s all the fuss about? Wasn’t this so-called ‘dark side of Michael Jackson’ always here for all of us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases, which were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexualized gestures (blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)? The Unconscious is outside, not hidden in any unfathomable depths - or, to quote the X Files motto: The truth is out there ’.

Such a focusing on material externality proves very fruitful in the analysis of how fantasy relates to the inherent antagonisms of an ideo- logical edifice. Do not the two opposed architectural designs ofCasa del Fascia (the local headquarters ofthe Fascist party), Adoifo Coppede ’s neo- Imperial pastiche (1928) and Giuseppe Teragni’s highly modernist transparent glasshouse (1934-36) reveal, in their simple juxtaposition, the inherent contradiction ofthe Fascist ideological project which simul- taneously advocates a return to pre-modern organicist corporatism and the unheard-of mobilization of all social forces in the service of rapid modernization?

An even better example is provided by the great projects of public buildings in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, which put on top of a flat multistorey office building a gigantic statue of the idealized New Man, or a couple: in the span ofa couple ofyears, the tendency to flatten the office building (the actual workplace for living people) more and more became clearly discernible, so that it changed increasingly into a mere pedestal for the larger-than-life statue does not this external, material feature of architectural design reveal the ‘truth’ of the Stalinist ideology in which actual, living people are reduced to instruments, sacrificed as the pedestal for the spectre ofthe future New Man, an ideological monster which crushes actual living men under his feet?

the tr

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The paradox is that had anyone in the Soviet Union of the 1930s said openly that the vision ofthe Socialist New Man was an ideological monster squashing actual people, they would have been arrested immediately. It was, however, allowed - encouraged, even - to make this point via architectural design... again, ‘the truth is out there ’. What we are thus arguing is not simply that ideology also permeates the alleged extra-ideological strata of everyday life, but that this materialization ofideology in external materiality reveals inherent antagonisms which the explicit formulation of ideology cannot afford to acknowledge: it is as if an ideological edifice, if it is to function ‘normally’, must obey a kind of ‘imp of perversity’, and articulate its inherent antagonism in the externality of its material existence.

This externality, which directly embodies ideology, is also occluded as ‘utility’. That is to say: in everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparently innocent reference to pure utility - one should never forget that in the symbolic universe, ‘utility’ functions as a reflective notion; that is, it always involves the assertion of utility as meaning (for example, a man who lives

Moskow State University Boris Iofan made a mistake placing his

draft skyscraper right on the edge of Sparrow Hills. The site was a potential

landslide hazard. He made a worse mistake by insisting on his decision and was promptly replaced by Lev Rudnev,

a 53-year-old rising star of Stalin's establishment. Rudnev had already built

high-profile edifices like the 1932-1937 Frunze Military Academy and the 1947

Marshals' Apartments (Sadovaya-kudrinskaya, 28), which earned the highest

credits of the Party

the seven veils of fantasy

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Much like the man who lives in a large city and owns a Land Rover does not simply lead a no-nonsense, ‘down-to-earth’ life; rather, he owns such a car in order to signal that he leads his life under the sign of a no-nonsense, ‘down-to- earth’ attitude, so does architecture reflect what our fantasies are. The Gherkin and the Bata factory are two sides of the same coin, one cannot exist without the other.

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in a large city and owns a Land Rover does not simply lead a no-nonsense, ‘down-to-earth’ life; rather, he owns such a car in order to synal thzt he leads his life under the sign of a no-nonsense, ‘down-to- earth’ attitude). The unsurpassed master of such analysis, of course, was Claude Iivi-Strauss, whose semiotic triangle ofpreparing food (raw, baked, boiled) demonstrated how food also serves as ‘food for thought’. We probably all remember the scene from Bunuel’s Phantom of libertyi n which relations between eating and excreting are inverted: people sit on their lavatories around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they silently ask the housekeeper, ‘Where is that place... you know?’ and sneak away to a small room in the back. So, as a supplement to Iivi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matibre- h-pensen do not the three basic types oflavatory form a kind ofexaemental correlative counter point to the Iivi-Straussian triangle ofcooking?

In a traditional German lavatory, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way infront,so that the shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of some illness; in the typical French lavatory, on the contrary, the hole is in the back - that is, the shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible;finally,the Anglo-Saxon (English or American) lavatory presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles - the basin is full ofwater, so that the shit floats in it - visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that Erica Jong, in the famous discussion of different European lavatories at the beginning of her half-forgotten Tear of Flying, mockingly claims: ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception ofhow the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement which comes from within our body is clearly discernible — again, for the third time, ‘the truth is out there ’.

Hegel was among the first to interpret the geographical triad Germany- France-England as expressing three different existential attitudes: German reflective thoroughness, French revolutionary hastiness, English moderate utilitarian pragmatism; in terms ofpolitical stance, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English moderate liberalism; in terms ofthe predominance ofone of the spheres of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economy. The reference to lavatories enables us not only to discern the same triad in the most intimate domain of performing the exaemental function, but also to generate the underlying mechanism of this triad in the three different attitudes towards exaemental excess: ambiguous contemplative fascination; the hasty attempt to get rid ofthe unpleasant excess as fast as possible; the pragmatic approach to treat the excess as an ordinary object to be disposed of in an appropriate way. So it is easy for an academic to claim at a round table that we live in a post- ideological universe - the moment he visits the restroom after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology. The ideological investment of such references to utility is attested by

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their dialogical character: the Anglo-Saxon lavatory acquires its meaning only through its differential relation to French and German lavatories. We have such a multitude of lavatory types because there is a traumatic excess which each of them tries to accommodate — according to Lacan, one of the features which distinguishes man from the animals is precisely that with humans the disposal of shit becomes a problem.

The same goes for the different ways in which one washes dishes: in Denmark, for example, a detailed set of features opposes the way dishes are washed to the way they do it in Sweden, and a close analysis soon reveals how this opposition is used to index the fundamental perception of Danish national identity, which is defined in opposition to that of Sweden.1 And - to reach an even more intimate domain - do we not encounter the same semiotic triangle in the three main hairstyles of the female sex organ’s pubic hair? Wildly grown, unkempt pubic hair indexes the hippie attitude ofnatural spontaneity; yuppies prefer the disciplinary procedure of a French garden (one shaves the hair on both sides close to the legs, so that all that remains is a narrow band in the middle with a clear-cut shave line); in the punk attitude, the vagina is wholly shaven and furnished withrings (usually attached to a perforated clitoris). Is this not yet another version of the Iivi-Straussian semiotic triangle of ’raw’ wild hair, well-kept ‘baked’ hair and shaved ‘boiled’ hair? One can see how even the most intimate attitude towards one’s body is used to make an ideological statement.2 So how does this material existence of ideology relate to our conscious convictions? Apropos of Moliire ’s Tartuffe, Henri Bergson has emphasized how Tartuffe is funny not on account of his hypocrisy, but because he gets caught in his own mask of hypocrisy:

1 See Anders Linde-Laursen, ‘Small Differences - Large Issues’, The South Atlantic Quarterly94:4 (Fall 1595), pp. 1123-44.2 The most obvious case - which, for chat very reason, I left out - is, of course, that of the ideological connotation ofdifferent positions in the sexual act; that is, ofthe implicit ideological statements we are making by doing ‘it’ in a certain position.3 Henri Bergson, An Essay on laughter, London: Smith, 1937, p. 83.

He immersed himself so well into the role of a hypocrite that he played it, as it were, sincerely. This way and only this way he becomes funny. Without this purely material sincerity, without the attitude and speech which, through the long practice of hypocrisy, became for him a natural way to act, Tartuffe would be simply repulsive.3

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Interitor of the abandoned Bata factory in East Tilbury and it’s polar opposite, the 1.6 billion pound shopping mall in Shepherd’s Bush, London.

The full impact Westfield London will have is not yet understood but it is anticipated that the centre will attract trade which otherwise might have gone to the West End and may have a strong negative impact on nearby kensington High Street.

The arrival of such a substantial new development however has not been without criticism. The full impact Westfield London will have is not yet understood but it is anticipated that the centre will attract trade which otherwise might have gone to the West End and may have a strong negative impact on nearby kensington High Street.[20] The development has also pushed up rents in the Shepherds Bush area which is expected to impact on the value retail offer in the area with many businesses as well as the Shepherds Bush Market expected to suffer.

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Bergson s expression ofpurely material sincerity’ dovetails perfectly with the Mthusserian notion of Ideological State Apparatuses - of the external ritual which materializes ideology: the subject who maintains his distance towards the ritual is unaware ofthe fact that the ritual already dominates him from within. As Pascal put it, ifyou do not believe, kneel down, act as if you believe, andbeliefwillcomebyitselfThisisalsowhatMarxian’commodity fetishism’ is about in his explicit self-awareness, a capitalist is a common-sense nomi- nalist, but the ‘purely material sincerity’ ofhis deeds displays the ‘theological whimsies’ of the commodity universe.4 This ‘purely material sincerity’ of the external ideological ritual, not the depth of the subject’s inner convictions and desires, is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice.

The standard notion of the way fantasy works within ideology is that of a fantasy-scenario which obfuscates the true horror of a situation: instead of a full rendering of the antagonisms which traverse our society, we indulge in the notion ofsociety as an organic Whole, kept together by forces of solidarity and co-operation ... Here also, however, it is much more productive to look for this notion of fantasy where one would not expect to find if in marginal and, again, apparently purely utilitarian situations. Let us simply recall the safety instructions prior to the take off of an aeroplane - are they not sustained by a phancasmic scenario ofhow a possible plane crash will look? After a gentle landing on water (miraculously, it is always supposed to happen on water!), each of the passengers puts on the life-jacket and, as on a beach toboggan, slides into the water and takes a swim, like a nice collective lagoon holiday experience under the guidance ofan experienced swimming instructor. Is not this ‘gentri- fying’ of a catastrophe(anicesoftlanding,stewardessesindance-likestyle graciously pointing towards the ‘Exit’ signs...) also ideology at its purest? However, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy cannot be reduced to that of a fantasy-scenario which obfuscates the true horror of a situation; the first, rather obvious thing to add is that the relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference (are not the images of the ultimate horrible Thing,fromthe gigantic deep-sea squid to the ravaging twister, phantasmic creations par excellence?).5 Furthermore, one should specify the notion of fantasy with a whole series of features.6

4 For a more detailed elaboration of the paradoxes of fetishism, see Chapter 3 below.5 The example of conservatism’s reference to the horrifying origins of power (their prohibition against talking about these origins, which precisely creates the Horror ofthe ‘primordial crime’ by means ofwhich power was instituted) perfectly expresses the radically ambiguous functioning of the Horrible with respect to the fantasy-screen: Horror is not simply and unambiguously the unbearable Real masked by the fantasy-screen - the way itfocusesour attention, imposing itselfas the disavowed and,forthat reason, all the more operative central point of reference. The Horrible can also function as the screen itself, as the thing whose fascinating effect conceals something ‘more horrible than horror itself, the primordial void or antagonism. For example, is not the anti-Semitic demonic image of the jew, the jewish plot, such an evocation of the ultimate Horror which, precisely, is the phantasmic screen

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enabling us to avoid confrontation with the social antagonism? The logic ofthe horror which functions as a screen masking the void can also be illustrated by the uncanny power of the motif of a ship drifting along alone, without a captain or any living crew to steer it This is the ultimate horror not the proverbial ghost in the machine, but the machine in the ghost: there is no plotting agent behind it, the machine just runs by itself, as a blind contingent device. At the social level, this is also what the notion of a jewish or Masonic conspiracy conceals: the horror of society as a contingent mechanism blindly following its path, caught in the vicious cycle of its antagonisms.6 We can leave aside thefeaturewhich acquired commonplace status: the answer to the question ‘Who, where, how is the (fantasizing) subject inscribed into the phantasmic narrative?’ is far from obvious; even when the subject himselfappears within his narrative, this is not automatically his point of identification - that is, he by no means necessarily ‘identifies with himself. (At a different level, the same goes for the subject’s symbolic identity; the best way to render its paradox palpable is to paraphrase the standard disclaimer from the movie credits: ‘Any resemblance to actual events or persons is purely accidental’: the gap between f and S, between the void ofthe subject and the signifying feature which represents him, means that ‘any resemblance ofthe subject to himself\s purely accidental’. There is no connection whatsoever between the (phantasmic) real of the subject and his symbolic identity: the two are thoroughly incommensurable) Fantasy thus creates a multi- tude of’subject positions’ among which the (observing, fantasizing) subject is free to float, to shift his identification from one to another. Here, talk about ‘multiple, dispersed subject positions’ is justified, with the proviso that these subject positions are to be strictly distinguished

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The first thing to note is that fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way: rather, its function is similar to that of Kantian ‘tran- scendental schematism’: a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire ’. The role of fantasy is thus in a way analogous to that ofthe ill-fitted pineal gland in Descartes’s philosophy,thismediatorbetweenresayitansznd resextensmfantasymedi- ates between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity ofthe objects we encounter in reality - that is to say, it provides a ‘schema’ according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects ofdesire, filling in the empty places opened up by the formal symbolic structure. To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in thefirstplace? This is what fantasy tells me. This role of fantasy hinges on the fact that ‘there is no sexual relationship’, no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship with one ’s partner: because of the lack of this universal formula, every subject has to invent afantasyofhisorherown,a’private ’formulaforthesexualrelationship -fora man, the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as she fits his formula.

Recently, Slovene feminists reacted with a great outcry against a large cosmetics factory’s publicity poster for sun lotion, depicting a series of well-tanned women’s behinds in tight bathing suits, accompanied by the slogan ‘Each has her own factor’. Of course, this publicity is based on a rather vulgar double entendre: the slogan ostensibly refers to the sun lotion, which is offered to customers with different sun factors in order to suit customers’ different skin types; however, its entire effect is based on its obvious male-chauvinist reading: ‘Any woman can be had, if only the man knows her factor, her specific catalyst, what arouses her!’

fan

tasy’s tr

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scend

enta

l schem

atismThe Freudian point regarding fundamental fantasy would be that each subject, female or male, possesses such a ‘factor’ which regulates her or his desire: ‘a woman, viewed from behind, on her hands and knees’ was the Wolf Man’s factor; a statue-like woman without pubic hair was Ruskin’s factor; and so on. There is nothing uplifting about our awareness ofthis ‘factor: such awareness can never be subjectivized; it is uncanny - even horrifying - since it somehow repossesses the subject, reducing her or him to a puppet-like level ‘beyond dignity and freedom’.

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The second feature concerns the radically intersubjective character of fantasy. The critical depreciation and abandonment of the term ‘inter- subjectivity’ in late Lacan (in clear contrast to his earlier insistence that the proper domain of psychoanalytic experience is neither subjective nor objective, but that of intersubjectivity) does not in any way involve an abandonment of the notion that the subject’s relation to his/her Other and the latter’s desire is crucial to the subject’s very identity - paradoxically, one should claim that Lacan’s abandonment of ‘inter- subjectivity’ is strictly correlative to the focusing of attention on the enigma of the impenetrable Other’s desire (Che vwff ). What the late Lacan does with intersubjectivity should be opposed to early Lacan’s Hegelo-Kojivian motifs ofthe struggle for recognition, ofthe dialectical connection between recognition of desire and desire for recognition, as well as to middle Lacan’s ‘structuralist’ motif of the big Other as the anonymous symbolic structure.

Perhaps the easiest way to discern these shifts is byfocusingon the changed status of the object In early Lacan, the objea is depreciated as to its inherent qualities; it counts only as a stake in the intersubjective strug- gles for recognition and love (the milk demanded by a child firom the mother is reduced to a ‘sign oflove’, that is, the demand for milk effectively aims at prompting the mother to display her love for the child; a jealous subject demands firom his parents a certain toy; this toy becomes the object of his demand, because he is aware that it is also

inter

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jectivity