Lacan and Fantasy
Notes adapted from the first
chapter of Slavov Zizek’s
1997 book, The Plague of
Fantasies, published by
Verso.
(The chapter title is ‘The Seven
Veils of Fantasy’, pp. 3-44.)
These notes follow on from the first set of notes
on Lacan by supplying the promised theorisation
of fantasy for your general use. The earlier
PowerPoint (discussing the differences between
the figurative and the symbolic) suggested that
social contexts featuring works of art suspend
temporarily normal forms of symbolic exchange allowing suppressed forms of expression to come
to the fore. One way of thinking about this is to
say that theatres and cinemas allow us to engage
in cultural ‘day-dreaming’ – fantasising about
forms of social life and our possible roles within
them. But understanding – translating this
process entails that we need to become
discursive about fantasy itself.
A summary of Zizek’s ‘seven veils’
should give you the confidence to start
using Lacan’s symbolic discourse
about fantasy as the psychological
underpinnings of figuration. The
whole of the second half of the module
is designed around the presentation of
a series of figurative ‘models’ of a
form of educational experience.
The most important idea to begin with is to
recognise again the distinction between the
symbolic and the figurative itself.
The theorising that you are starting now will
involve you in a process of ‘reduction’. The
advantage is that it allows you to think about the
role of fantasy and desire in the social world: the
disadvantage is that it forces you to reduce the
figurative to the symbolic. However, nothing you
can do will undermine the integrity of a single
figure – unless we act like Cromwell’s Puritans
and ban all public art. (And perhaps our social
‘dreaming’ is not so restricted to formal contexts
anyway – it may, like metaphor, have its
foundations in the everyday.)
Just how disguised are these symptoms going to be? Zizek
encourages us to look for what is self-evident: ‘the truth is
our there’. His first example is Michael Jackson, and the
media ‘shock’ following from the revelation that his Peter
Pan image was not the whole story. Zizek stresses that
even before details of Jackson’s private behaviour with
under-age children were published, the video shots
accompanying his musical releases were ‘saturated with
ritualised violence and obscene sexualised gestures
(blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)’. His second
example is taken from Soviet-era architecture of the 1930s
which put on top of many multi-storey office buildings
gigantic statues of idealized New Men - and sometimes
Women. In the space of a couple of years the tendency to
flatten office buildings (the actual workplaces) more and
more became clearly discernable: the offices were
becoming mere pedestals for the statues. He concludes:
‘… does not this external … 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 of the future New Man, an
ideological monster which crushes actual living men under
his feet?’ For Zizek, the paradox is that had anyone in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s said openly that the vision of the
Socialist New Man was an ideological monster, they would
have been arrested immediately. However, the point was
effectively made, even encouraged, via architectural
design. His argument is, therefore, that ideology
permeates the assumed extra-ideological strata of
everyday life, and this materialisation of ideology reveals
inherent antagonisms which the explicit formulation of
ideology cannot afford to acknowledge: ‘it is as if the
ideological edifice, if it is to function ‘normally’, must obey
a kind of ‘imp of perversity’, and articulate its inherent
antagonisms in the externality of its material existence.’
As Zizek explains, the standard account of how
fantasy ‘works’ is simply not good enough. It does
not just act as a ‘fantasy-scenario’ disguising a
horror already recognised (e.g. the story told to the
little boy by his father as they get ever closer to
the death camp, in Life is Beautiful). Zizek argues
that it is more productive to look for fantasy in
marginal and in ‘utilitarian’ situations; and he gives
the example of the reassuring warnings given to
plane passengers before take-off. While
describing the procedures that must be followed,
the assumed context is a gentle ‘emergency’
touch-down in water, rather than a description of
the more likely terror and unpredictability of a
crash over land.
In the psychoanalytic version of fantasy, the
relationship between fantasy and the reality
it tries to conceal is yet more ambiguous.
Fantasy may conceal a horror, and yet at
the same time it creates in a disguised form
that which ‘it purports to conceal, its
‘repressed’ point of reference’. Zizek points
to horror movies and asks, ‘are not the
images of the ultimate horrible Thing, from
the gigantic deep-sea squid to the ravaging
twister, fantasmatic creations par
excellence?’
First veil: fantasy’s transcendental schematism
This sounds much more formidable than in fact it
is – Zizek is making reference to a way of
thinking that derives from Kant. He stresses
that fantasy ‘does not simply realize a desire in
a hallucinatory way’. Instead, he argues, it
constitutes our desire, it literally ‘ teaches us
how to desire’. So, Zizek’s reading of Lacan is
that fantasy mediates between the symbolic and
the Real, i.e., fantasy correlates with what we
have been calling the figurative.
Fantasy provides a ‘schema’ within which certain
‘positive objects in reality’ can function as objects
– not so much as of knowledge, as of desire. Zizek
describes this process as filling in the ‘empty
places opened up by the formal symbolic
structure’.
For example, in the film, Billy Elliot, the boy shows
proto-dance phases within his play repertoire; but
it takes the rest of the film, a host of resistances,
set-backs, but also steady forward movement,
before he can recognise and accept that formal
ballet allows him to express his heart’s desire.
Second veil: inter-subjectivity
Zizek draws attention to the ‘radically intersubjective character of fantasy’. This is an idea
that persists throughout Lacan’s authorship: that
both the subject and the object do not exist
independently of social relations: ‘the subject’s
relation to his/her Other and the latter’s desire is
crucial to the subject’s very identity’ – the
‘original question of desire is not directly ‘What
do I want?’, but ‘What do others want from me?
What do they see in me? What am I to others?’.
Zizek offers a summary of Lacan’s shifting
interpretation of this relationship. He suggests it is
best understood by focussing on the object’s
characteristics. Early Lacan ‘depreciates’ the
object – it features only in the inter-subjective
struggles for recognition and love. Later, the
object stands in the place of what Zizek calls ‘the
big Other’ - the anonymous register of symbolic
exchange – of language itself. And finally, in late
Lacan, there is a further shift in focus to the thing
that gives value to the subject. This is said to be
what the subject ‘is’ – the agalma as Lacan calls it –
the secret treasure which ‘guarantees a minimum of
fantasmatic consistency to the subject’s being’ – as
that which is worthy of the Other’s desire.
In relation to the first interpretation – the prioritisation
of intersubjectivity itself – any ‘buddy’ film serves as
an illustration, i.e., Thelma and Louise. For the
second, narratives tend to represent the problem of
induction into the symbolic register by featuring some
aspect of discourse, e.g. The King’s Speech, but also
the pain of ‘transforming’ oneself into a being capable
of a specialised discourse form, e.g. Avatar, and Good
Will Hunting. Finally, there is the agalma. Films such
as Pretty Woman provide a familiar illustration – the
hooker with the heart of gold – but Bilbo Baggins, in
The Lord of the Rings, or any Harry Potter film, also
illustrate subjects where we see these protagonists
eventually constituting themselves around selfrecognitions of value that they do not initially accept.
Third veil: the narrative occlusion of antagonism
Fantasy is the ‘primordial focus of narrative, which serves
to occult some original deadlock’. Lacan’s point here is
not that we tell stories to one another in order to hide,
disguise, or simply forget and gloss over past, present,
and future terrors. The answer to the question ‘Why do
we tell stories?’ is that ‘narrative as such emerges in
order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by
rearranging its terms into a temporal succession’. It is
therefore the very form of narrative structure which bears
witness to repressed antagonisms, contradictions, or
dilemmas, the opposing terms of which are present within
the symbolic register concurrently.
The film of King Kong illustrates this.
Initially serving as an emblem of the power of
nature, Kong’s power is subsequently harnessed
and eventually liquidated, revealing in his
acceptance of slavery and death a nobility of
spirit which exceeds that of contemporary,
collectivised and civilised humanity. In other
words, the sentimental pathos of the film’s
narrative trajectory occludes the dilemmas
created by humanity’s continuing exploitative
relationship with the rest of creation.
Fourth veil: after the Fall
Zizek indicates that, contrary to a popular
understanding of fantasy (a means by
which the subject indulges in the
hallucinatory transgression of prohibited
desires) Lacan sees fantasy as reenacting the installation of the Law – ‘of
the intervention of the cut of symbolic
castration’.
By this dramatic phrasing Lacan indicates the radical
change in being that language acquisition brings about –
the child enters a ‘register’ in which reality itself
becomes anonymously symbolic, and its own
subjectivity is constituted by mere linguistic placeholders: ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ – words which can be used by
anyone – and so the ‘impossible’ Real of the child’s
former existence is lost.
This entails that fantasy is close to perversion, in that
what the fantasist wants is what the pervert wants, to
be fully acknowledged by the Law – to be integrated
into its functioning. For example, almost any narrative
in which the principal protagonist is seen as striving to
get his or her own way – ranging from both Dr. Lecter
and ‘Buffalo Bill’ in The Silence of the Lambs, to
Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
Fifth veil: the impossible gaze
As we have seen, narrative disguises
synchronous, social antagonisms, imposing a
before and after, but Lacan is yet more radical.
He argues that the two sides of the antagonism do
not exist as such until narrativisation begins. In
other words, narrative does not simply pick up
existing antagonisms and place them in temporal
order, it reconfigures the social fabric by
constituting the terms of a new understanding,
and because of its temporal drive, this act of
constitution creates not only that which is now
said to be, but also that which is now lost!
Zizek therefore argues that the
fantasmatic narrative always invokes an
impossible gaze: ‘the gaze by which the
subject is already present at the act of
his/her own conception’. It follows that,
for any fantasmatic scene, it is always
appropriate to ask for whom is it being
staged? Almost any narrative of lost
origins serves as an illustration, ranging
from The Lord of the Rings, through Harry
Potter, to the stories of Moses and Oliver
Twist.
Sixth veil: the inherent transgression
In order to operate, fantasy must remain implicit
– must maintain a distance between itself and the
explicit symbolic structures which it sustains, but
which it also subverts. The ‘art’ of Art is to
manipulate the censorship of an underlying
fantasy so as to reveal its radical falsity. Zizek
indicates that every work of art is, by definition,
fragmentary, in that initially it has no place in the
symbolic register: the ‘trick’ of artistic success
resides in the artist’s capacity to skilfully
manipulate this central void and its resonance
within the encircling elements.
Zizek provides this example:In the supposedly anti-war film, MASH, the
principal characters joke amongst themselves
and view their military surroundings with irony,
and yet as members of an emergency medical
team they remain effective – the Vietnam War
and its ideologies continues. For Zizek, this
suggests that the natural condition of becoming a
subject of ideology is one in which a distance is
maintained between an instrumental notion of the
ideology itself (and oneself as its operative) and
a fantasmatic conception of oneself as a warm,
richly human person.
Seventh veil: the empty gesture
How do the two levels – the symbolic structures rendered through
language and practice, and their fantasmatic supports, interact?
Zizek offers the following explanation, based on a ‘learning play’ by
Bertolt Brecht, Jasager.
… where the young boy is asked to accord freely with what will in any
case be his fate (to be thrown into the valley). As his teacher explains
to him, it is customary to ask the victim if he agrees with his fate, but it
is also customary for the victim to say yes …
As Zizek adds, ‘every belonging to a society involves a paradoxical
point at which the subject is ordered to embrace freely, as a result
of his choice, what is anyway imposed upon him’ – this is an empty
gesture offering the impossible – made on the understanding that it
will be rejected, i.e., the unwritten rules are the material expression
of the fantasmatic support for this system of symbolic exchange.
Many ‘tragic’ love stories employ this device.
(D.M.B. 2011.)