Chapter Three

Embracing the Image

IMAGES EVERYWHERE

It is a truism to note that we live in an increasingly image-dominated society. This dominance of the image is integral to the society of enjoyment because it provides an avenue for the imaginary enjoyment that characterizes this society. The image allows subjects to imagine that they are complying with the command to enjoy, though the enjoyment that one derives from the image is only imaginary. In this sense, an emphasis on the image is symptomatic of the society of enjoyment because it provides the illusion of total enjoyment and freedom without the kind of enjoyment that might disturb the functioning of the social structure itself. Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. According to Mitchell Stephens, “the image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport.”¹ Or, as Roland Barthes describes it, “The image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image.”² This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. Juliet Flower MacCannell points this out in her Regime of the Brother: “the modern symbolic has been displaced and modified by an increased power in the imaginary.”³ This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words. When we prepare to cross the street, rather than seeing a sign that says “walk,” we see an image of a person walking. When we turn on the computer, rather than typing in the name of the program we wish to begin, we click on an icon indicating the program.⁴ In these commonplace examples, the image is now doing the work that the word once did. But the turn from the symbolic order to the imaginary extends far beyond this kind of mini-revolution.

We can see the effects of the prevalence of imaginary experience today not only in the ubiquity of television and video, but even more significantly in its effect on older art forms that must accommodate themselves to the imaginary if they are to survive in this video age. The novel is primarily a symbolic, not an imaginary, form. That is to say, it attests to the primacy of words because it uses words to form images. However, the contemporary novel has not been able to ignore the increasing power of the imaginary. Many novelists writing today are attempting to transform the novel, to create a narrative form that is somehow adequate to—or indicative of—this new subject matter. This kind of effort is apparent in the fiction of, for example, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, and Toni Morrison, as well as many others. But perhaps no novelist has taken this project as far as Don DeLillo, who has engaged it in some way in each of his novels, from Americana to White Noise to Underworld.

DeLillo’s fiction grapples with the way in which the increased power of the image has transformed our existence. As one of the characters in his novel The Names points out:

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. It’s the filmed century. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. The whole world is on film, all the time.⁵

What DeLillo’s character articulates here is that the turn to the imaginary changes our fundamental experience of the world. Events become imaginary even before they become images because events occur as ready-made images.

DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), makes this structural priority of the image evident on the level of its form. In fact, the very effort of the novel to depict the prevalence of the imaginary betrays the structure of narrative, which is fundamentally a symbolic structure. That is to say, the novel fails on the level of its narrative because it becomes just a series of images. But it is precisely this failure that testifies to the novel’s grasp of the contemporary situation—to the power of the imaginary over the symbolic order. The image predominates today to such an extent that one cannot narrativize it successfully or contain it within a symbolic form.

In Americana, DeLillo creates a world in which the image is the ultimate measure of reality. In the world of this novel, the image determines what exists. This is why David Bell, the narrator and protagonist of Americana, tells his lover, “There are no old times, Wendy. The tapes have been accidentally destroyed.”⁶ If a recorded image of an event doesn’t exist, then the event itself hasn’t really happened. In the second half of the novel, David begins to shoot footage for a film while traveling through a small Indiana town. When David films the various people in the town, they are immediately cheered, as if being on film authenticates and justifies their hitherto unnoticed lives. The image provides for them a sense of being present, a sense of actual existence. It does this because all of the characters in the novel believe in the authority of the image: the image is truth. Being captured on film thus supplies them with a sense that their lives have been realized. This kind of logic devalues language—truth can no longer be found in words, only in images—as it grants absolute primacy to the image. In DeLillo’s novel, nothing can be more real than an image, and no one questions the image’s foundational status.

In addition to depicting the ubiquity of this imaginary mode of experience, DeLillo also produces characters who are isolated within the imaginary realm and who evince a total devotion to the image. David Bell works producing television programs for a network, disseminating images to the American public. Not only does David work for a television network, but both his father and grandfather were advertisers. His entire existence revolves around the image. He claims that in his childhood movies functioned as his religion, and in college, he studied film. The novel culminates with David’s effort to make his own film. In all of the work he does and with most of the people who surround him, David is immersed in the image and its promulgation. This professional devotion to image making has its complement in David’s personal life: he spends his private time admiring his own mirror image. He recounts, “I had almost the same kind of relationship with my mirror that many of my contemporaries had with their analysts. When I began to wonder who I was, I took the simple step of lathering my face and shaving. It all became so clear, so wonderful. I was blue-eyed David Bell.”⁷ The mirror image provides an ideal ego for David with which he identifies fully. This ideal ego finds further support in another image—the figure of Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, a figure in which David also sees himself. David is nothing but the series of images with which he identifies; he has no sense of an underlying symbolic identity that grounds this series of images. But his imaginary identity, this ideal ego, allows him to avoid bouts with alienation and questions about his identity. It allows him, in short, to avoid the experience of alienation that accompanies one’s insertion into the symbolic order. David never experiences alienation or questions about who he is or what he is doing. His traffic with images provides an instant answer to any question that might arise.

But the image also leaves David completely unable to interact with other characters in the novel. At one point, he is unable to have sex with a woman because he cannot conjure up an image of what they would look like together. Because David has no experience of his alienation into the symbolic order—no experience of a symbolic bond that constitutes him in the big Other—he lives a completely isolated life. His encounters with other characters lack proper symbolic mediation, and hence they are inevitably awkward. He interacts comfortably only when he is filming. But the film that he constructs is just a series of images. David shoots a series of scenes of people in Fort Curtis, Indiana, the small town where he is staying while traveling. However, nothing links these scenes to each other: DeLillo offers no sense of any narrative structure that David is constructing, and it’s clear that none exists. But what’s even more important than this is what happens to the narrative structure of DeLillo’s novel. Like David’s film, it becomes a series of images strung together. The narrative continuity that animates the first half of the novel disappears in the second half, when David begins making his film.

It is as if the intrusion of an image-driven film into the novel’s narrative cripples that narrative, overpowering the logic of words with a logic of images. Novelistic narrative relies on the logic of cause and effect and the interplay of subject and object, even when it plays with these structures. But the image introduces a different logic, radically undermining symbolic narrative. As Jean Baudrillard points out, because of the predominance of the image, “It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the ‘active,’ critical mode, the analytic mode—the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the end and the means.”⁸ Narrative that occurs in words necessarily relies upon this “traditional world of causality,” but imagistic narrative—if this can still be called narrative at all—abandons this world. According to Mitchell Stephens, imagistic mediums such as video will soon largely abandon narrative altogether. But “when it does deign to tell stories,” Stephens contends, video “will want to tell them from an excess of perspectives.”⁹ This excess, while appropriate for the television commercial, has disruptive effects when introduced into the narrative structure of a novel such as Americana.

After David begins making his film, the novel’s narrative comes to an abrupt halt. He remains in Fort Curtis working on the film but without any sense that this activity is leading to some result. And at one point, David simply decides to leave, and he ends up wandering around the country. The final scene of the novel depicts David in a wild orgy with strange men and prostitutes. But this scene, like the scenes in David’s film, doesn’t follow from the other events in the novel. It represents a break from the novel’s narrative structure. DeLillo produces images, like this final scene, that have no evident relationship to what has already happened. The images appear not because they advance the narrative but because they are striking images. In this way, DeLillo’s novel attempts to capture the rise of the imaginary at the expense of a symbolic narrative structure. But because it attempts to capture this in a symbolic form (the novel), its very success causes Americana to fail as a novel: if the image really dominates the word, then one should not be able to contain the flow of images in the linguistic form of the novel. In the imaginary, there is no distance; everything is immediately present, though it is present as image. This ubiquitous presence makes traditional narrative impossible because narrative requires distinction and distance. By depicting narrative giving way to the image, DeLillo offers us a sense of the contemporary power of the imaginary.¹⁰

In following the trajectory of the career of filmmaker Wim Wenders, we can see another attempt to wrestle with the predominance of the image. The power of the imaginary has led Wenders to turn away from films centering on images and to embrace narrative as a way of resisting this power. Wenders began his career making films that attempted to capture a series of images without subjecting those images to a narrative context. His early film Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road) (1976) exemplifies this style of filmmaking, as it follows two characters on the road without providing an aim or direction for their journey. What the characters see—and the spectator watching them sees—is important, not what they do or where they are going. With this and his other early films, Wenders hoped to present the spectator with pure images in order to inaugurate a more authentic way of seeing. But his faith in the power of the image to revolutionize experience diminished as the image became increasingly predominant in the culture at large.

Wenders began to turn to narrative as a way of counteracting the influence of images, realizing that his image-driven films had become symptomatic of the culture that they aimed to critique. Narrative became for Wenders a way of resisting the image. As Wenders himself puts it at the time of this transition, “I have put more emphasis on a concise use of language [. . .] in order to have language control the images and not just accompany them: language not only as dialogue, because that’s something you find in every film, but language as something above the images.”¹¹ Language or narrative has to play this role because of the changed status of the image. In his later films (such as Paris, Texas [1984], Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] [1987], and Bis ans Ende der Welt [Until the End of the World] [1991]), the image becomes the danger rather than the source of a critical vision. Through these films, according to Gerd Gemünden, Wenders depicts “the threat of the seduction through images within a world of simulacra.”¹² As a result, Wenders’s later films abandon the attempt to follow the flow of images and begin to follow a narrative logic, as we see in the case of Paris, Texas, which chronicles a character’s search for his origin. Images remain an important part of Paris, Texas, but unlike in the earlier films, they exist within a narrative logic. Ironically, it is in turning away from the image and toward this kind of film that Wenders attests to the image’s power over narrative today. Whereas DeLillo uses language to expose the primacy of the image, Wenders uses the primarily imagistic medium of film to counter it.

A POSTMAN WITHOUT LETTERS

It is sociologist and popular cultural critic Neil Postman who has most emphatically detailed in the popular press the historical turn toward the image and its consequences. Postman points out that images have replaced words as our vehicle for interacting with each other. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he claims that “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images.”¹³ For Postman, the point is not only that images outnumber words in the contemporary world, but that the predominance of the image produces an epistemological revolution: we begin to believe on the basis of images we identify with rather than arguments that we find convincing. Postman traces the development of advertisements, which prior to 1900 relied primarily on argumentation to sell their products. At the turn of the century, however, a radical shift occurred: advertisements abandoned all propositional claims and replaced them with images with which consumers could identify. Postman notes that

the picture forced exposition into the background, and in some instances obliterated it altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was not only worth a thousand words, but, where sales were concerned, was better. For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing.¹⁴

Today, what counts as truth is what can be shown, not what can be argued.

The ultimate support for Postman’s contention that our epistemology has changed—that image has replaced argument—lies in the public response to the Rodney King beating. In the public consciousness, none of the accounts of this event by the various participants revealed its truth. Instead, the image of the beating provided the truth of the various (symbolic) accounts of it that the participants gave. No account in words could possibly have had the truth-value that the images on videotape had. When the white police officers were acquitted in the first trial, even those of us who didn’t hear the testimony were outraged—we had seen their guilt. (Which is not to say, of course, that this wasn’t the proper reaction to the verdict.) As a juror in the second trial put it, “We went through the video forwards, backwards, frame by frame, slow motion, regular motion. I think the tape basically speaks for itself.”¹⁵ For the jurors, the image, in short, tells it all. And if the jurors who actually heard the testimony displayed this degree of faith in the image, the public at large displayed even more. The images from the video gave us all the truth we needed to see.¹⁶ The images were the truth behind whatever words either the police or Rodney King himself uttered: while we regarded all testimony to the event as tendentious or unverifiable, we regarded the image as epistemologically pure—nonfalsifiable.

This belief in the truth of the image leaves us especially vulnerable to ideological coercion (which is not to say, of course, that the image cannot be subversive as well). The image, much more than the word, inspires trust, and this trust is precisely what ideology hopes to engender. This is why fascists rely so heavily on imagery. In fact, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy links the rise of the image to the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. According to Gilroy:

The application of image-building and image-maintaining techniques has created a condition in which icons severely qualify and often dominate the vivid authority of the spoken word in ways that recall the operations of fascist propaganda. The power of speech, already substantially reduced by the imperative to supply empty but memorable sound bites, has declined even further since Hitler’s innovations.¹⁷

In valuing the image over the word, we fall victim to the image’s appearance of full revelation. Whereas the word prompts suspicion and questioning, the image produces belief and devotion. It is in this sense that Gilroy sees a latent fascism in the contemporary elevation of the image. The image today signifies the possibility of a completely successful process of manipulation.

According to Postman, however, the great danger of this epistemological transition—toward faith in the image—is not the possibility for manipulation but the inescapability of distraction. The flow of images in contemporary society serves to keep subjects constantly entertained and distracted. We are amused, but we are also isolated and docile. In the final pages of his treatise, Postman articulates this danger in dramatic terms: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”¹⁸ What Postman labels “culture-death” is the breakdown of symbolic mediation, the inability of language to link subjects to each other. There is no symbolic authority demanding that subjects leave the imaginary realm and enter into the social world. Without this authority, subjects remain within the private world of the image, confined to what Jean Baudrillard calls “the hell of the same.”

Postman laments the contemporary rise of the imaginary order because he sees in this the possibility that subjects will choose enjoyment over societal obligations and bonds. With all the opportunities for immediate enjoyment that the image offers, there seems to be no reason to forego this enjoyment for the sake of the public good. In this way, Postman suggests an implicit link between the turn to the image and the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy. In a society predominated by the image, the subject has innumerable opportunities for enjoyment: the possibility of enjoyment is always close-at-hand. Furthermore, the image seems to allow the subject to avoid the sacrifice of enjoyment that the symbolic order demands. The image liberates the subject from the symbolic world of prohibition, offering a route to enjoyment that bypasses the threat of castration. The turn from the symbolic to the imaginary order that Postman identifies thus functions as a symptom of the transformation to a society of enjoyment. The imaginary provides a way for the subject to respond positively to the command to enjoy, offering the immediate enjoyment that the symbol denies.

THE EGO AND THE IMAGE

By allowing the subject seemingly to escape the prohibition of enjoyment, the image cuts the subject off from the Other. Postman links—implicitly following Lacan on this point—the predominance of the image with narcissistic isolation. And if we now turn from Postman to Lacan, the ramifications of this narcissistic isolation will become clearer. The subject in the society of enjoyment exists predominantly in a state of narcissistic isolation, an isolation that provides a sense of imaginary enjoyment. The narcissist, of course, takes his or her own ego as a love object, and Lacan emphasizes that the ego is itself imaginary: the ego first develops as a bodily image, as a way that the subject sees itself. According to Lacan, the ego forms as a result of a mirror relationship: one sees one’s image in the mirror, and the image offers an illusion of wholeness (an illusion that covers over the fragmentary state of the real body). This illusion prompts the infant to love the image and to take the image as its ego. The ego is thus an imaginary other that the subject showers with love in exchange for the illusion of wholeness.¹⁹ This illusion of wholeness that the ego provides for the subject serves to obscure both the lack in the subject and the lack in the big Other. Through the illusion that the ego provides, the subject can visualize an image of enjoyment, an image that seems to overcome all lack.

In the narcissistic relationship with the ego (the bodily image), the subject avoids facing the lack in the Other—the objet petit a. As Lacan puts it in Seminar X, “through [. . .] my image, my presence in the Other is without a remainder. I cannot see what I am losing there.”²⁰ That is, the ego serves to obscure the fact that there is a remainder, the objet petit a, that cannot be made present in the Other. This is why narcissistic enjoyment is only imaginary and never actual. Narcissism precludes the possibility of actual enjoyment because it obscures the subject’s relation to the objet petit a, the lost object that is the source for the subject’s enjoyment. Even though the subject can never attain this object, it nonetheless opens the sole avenue through which the subject can access enjoyment in the Real. Thus, the narcissism of the subject in the society of enjoyment reveals in yet another way the inability of this subject to obey the command to enjoy. Real enjoyment involves an experience that the Other is incomplete and lacks the objet petit a, an experience that the narcissist does not have.

If the Other is lacking, this means that not only doesn’t the subject know what the Other wants from it but the Other itself doesn’t know. That is to say, an Other that lacks is an Other that doesn’t know what it wants from its subjects. This is why the subject so often retreats to the illusory security of the ego: it is bad enough if I don’t know what I must do to comply with the Other’s desire, but it becomes unbearable when the Other itself doesn’t know. If, for instance, the secret of popularity eludes me, I can at least take consolation in the fact that someone knows this secret, that someone has grasped the essence of popularity, because I can then hope to one day acquire this knowledge as well. But if no one knows the secret of popularity, my search for it becomes ipso facto interminable. I’ve lost this object before I have even begun to search for it. Faced with the lacking Other, then, a subject’s desire is perpetual—and perpetually dissatisfied—because it seeks after this desire of the Other, this objet petit a, that remains obscure. The lack or hole in the big Other proves an objective barrier to the subject’s desire, a barrier that is ontological rather than epistemological. No matter how diligently the subject seeks, its desire will remain dissatisfied because the Other’s desire is itself inconsistent. Symbolic authority doesn’t know what it wants from the subject when it utters its commands—even the most popular people don’t know the secret of popularity because the secret does not exist—and this is the rock against which desire always crashes. But narcissism closes off this openness in the Other and thus also closes off the possibility of enjoyment.

To examine the alternatives of narcissistic identification with the imaginary other and desire initiated by the objet petit a, we can look to contemporary cinema. The difference between these alternatives becomes clear in David Fincher’s The Game (1997). The film begins with a depiction of the narcissistic self-satisfaction of Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), an obscenely wealthy corporate executive who lives a life of near-total isolation. In its miseen-scène, the film emphasizes both the self-satisfied nature of Nicholas’s life and his disconnection from other subjects. He lives in an opulent mansion with all the signs of wealth (expensive décor, a servant preparing his meals, a security fence guarding the entrance, etc.), but he exists alone in the mansion’s largely empty space. But from the moment Nicholas’s brother Conrad (Sean Penn) introduces Nicholas to the “game,” he exchanges the imaginary satisfactions of this narcissistic world for the dissatisfactions of desire. Organized by an illusive corporation, the enigmatic and amorphous “game” is designed for the person who has everything, and it promises to provide this person with the one thing she or he is missing. In the case of Nicholas, a subject without desire, it provides him with dissatisfaction—destroying the wealthy, stable life that sustained his imaginary world. By ruining Nicholas’s business, stealing his fortune, and turning him into a fugitive, the game produces desire in Nicholas, even as it takes everything else away from him.

As the film develops, Nicholas becomes increasingly desperate to figure out the secret of the game: he realizes that the Other has taken everything from him, but he doesn’t know why. Which is to say, he doesn’t know the desire of the Other, and he desperately pursues the secret of this desire. The second half of the film depicts this frantic pursuit as Nicholas becomes the model of the desiring subject: he is certain that the secret of the game is located somewhere within the Other, but he has no idea where. This fundamental uncertainty about the desire of the Other constitutes the subject itself as desiring. In this way, the events of the film transform Nicholas from a narcissistic subject who exists in a state of imaginary satisfaction to a desiring subject who perpetually searches for an answer he cannot find. When it turns out that Nicholas hasn’t really lost everything (that this was just part of the game), Nicholas nonetheless remains within the world of desire, pursuing Claire (Deborah Unger), the woman from the game who was central in upsetting his life, as the film ends. He pursues Claire because he is still uncertain as to her desire, uncertain that the game has really come to an end. Through this denouement, The Game indicates its investment in desire over narcissism, but it also reveals the uncertainty and dissatisfaction that necessarily plagues desire as it seeks out the secret of the Other.²¹

The Game reveals what also becomes apparent in Lacan’s account of narcissism—the source of its power over us as subjects. The great attractiveness of narcissism stems from its ability to obviate this perpetual dissatisfaction of desire. In the narcissistic relationship, rather than relating to a point of lack in the big Other (the point of the objet petit a, that which is in the Other more than the Other), one relates to a nonlacking image, an image of wholeness. The narcissist (i.e., the subject in the society of enjoyment) avoids the aporia of desire itself—not knowing what the Other wants of the subject—by clinging to the image and avoiding the objet petit a.²² In The Ecstasy of Communication, Jean Baudrillard draws attention to this transformation of desire enacted by narcissism, this shift from the objet a to the image: “Images have become our true sex object, the object of our desire. The obscenity of our culture resides in the confusion of desire and its equivalent materialized in the image.”²³ Turning desire narcissistically toward the image (which is a turning away from desire itself) allows respite from the subject’s own lack and the lack in the Other. Thus, the narcissist avoids recognizing the effects of castration.

When narcissistic subjects experience their egos as strong and healthy, they necessarily feel that a barrier exists between subject and Other, that they are independent of the Other. Strength implies independence—and hence isolation as well. However, this isolation that corresponds to the ego does not eliminate social restrictions; it leaves one within the domain of the social order and its restrictions, precisely because it is only an imaginary isolation. Even if a subject’s self-image is one of strength and isolation, this in no way frees this subject from the actual influences of the social order. To believe that a strong ego frees the subject would be the equivalent of believing that closing one’s eyes has the effect of rendering one invisible. But the relationship to the imaginary other does allow the narcissistic subject to avoid facing the traumatic fact of her/his initial subjection to the symbolic Law. In the midst of the narcissistic sense of isolation, the subject in the society of enjoyment doesn’t see that lack is constitutive for its existence as a subject, that subjectivity emerges out of lack itself. By avoiding this recognition, such a subject never has to acknowledge the inaccessibility of total enjoyment.

To explore the relationship between narcissism and the possibility of total enjoyment, we can again turn to the cinema. In fact, this relationship is the explicit subject matter of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963). In 8½, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastoianni) is a famous director who, when given the freedom to make the film of his choice, cannot decide what film to make. But his inability to choose a film to make is only the beginning of the indecisiveness that plagues every area of his life. Guido’s indecisiveness in the film stems from his inability to accept that enjoyment must necessarily be partial. He believes in—and insists on—the possibility of an enjoyment that would allow him to become complete. This becomes most obvious in Guido’s relationship to the different women in the film. Guido enjoys the arrival of Carla (Sandra Milo), his mistress, to the site of the film shoot, but he subsequently invites his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée) to join him there as well. Because he can’t decide between the two women—a decision that would require abandoning the image of total enjoyment—Guido tries to have both of them at once. This inevitably creates tension between Guido and his wife when she sees Carla, but Guido remains powerless to choose between them. Choosing would imply a movement from the image of total enjoyment that accompanies narcissism to the dissatisfaction and partial enjoyment that accompanies desire.

Wedded to the possibility of total enjoyment, Guido is unable to move in the direction of desire. This is also why he cannot begin (let alone finish) his film: to choose a direction that the film will take would be to cut off all other directions, to abandon the total for the partial. This inability to rid himself of the image of total enjoyment leaves Guido isolated within his own imaginary world, and the film is constantly drifting back into Guido’s childhood in order to convey this. Fellini seamlessly moves back and forth between Guido’s childhood experiences and those of the present in order to emphasize that for Guido, a subject immersed in the imaginary, there is no difference. Guido wants to sustain the plenitude of the imaginary—where he can have all women simultaneously, not just one at a time, and where he can make a film that involves no compromises—and not give in to the exigencies of castration and desire.²⁴ To leave the imaginary world would involve giving up this imaginary plentitude, which is why Guido opts to remain within the imaginary. The genius of 8½ stems from its ability to illustrate precisely where the appeal of the imaginary lies—in the image of an enjoyment that would be complete and that would complete the subject.²⁵

Nowhere is this sense of completion more manifest than in cyberspace. The “wired” experience is the apotheosis of imaginary satisfaction.²⁶ When I am in cyberspace, I no longer have to deal with an intersubjective partner that I might potentially find dissatisfying. Cyberspace promises an other both perfectly suited to us and constantly changing so as not to bore us. Thus, it eliminates the need for any dissatisfaction—for any encounter with the other in her or his Real dimension. It even allows me to overcome dissatisfaction with myself: through a cyber identity, I can create a “realized” version of my ideal ego. The image delivers a satisfaction that the symbol doesn’t—and hence leaves us without the feeling that we are lacking, without desire.

This imaginary world of the narcissistic subject is the necessary complement to the transformation from the explicit prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy. The society of commanded enjoyment finds itself in a paradoxical position: it drives the subject toward an enjoyment that would threaten the society’s very existence. Hence, this enjoyment must be given a direction that sustains it while securing social stability. The image provides this direction. Rather than allowing for enjoyment in the Real, it allows for an image of enjoyment—enjoyment without its traumatic dimension. Real enjoyment occurs when the subject abandons the security of its symbolic identity and thereby breaks from the constraints of the symbolic order. In this enjoyment, the rules of the symbolic game cease to apply. The subject neither obeys nor disobeys: she/he enjoys through a disinterest in these prevailing rules. Thus, enjoyment in the Real is a radical experience, but at the same time it is necessarily traumatic because it leaves the subject without any ground on which to stand. Whereas imaginary enjoyment promises completion and plenitude, Real enjoyment depends on the refusal of the image of completion. This kind of enjoyment also disrupts the symbolic order because it evinces an indifference toward all symbolic barriers. But imaginary enjoyment—the image of enjoyment, not enjoyment as such—allows the subject to remain securely rooted in its symbolic identity; it respects symbolic barriers, even as it offers the subject the illusion of transgressing them, which is why it doesn’t threaten the stability of the symbolic order. To take the simplest example, one can imagine an adulterous affair freely without ever disturbing the stability of one’s symbolic identity as a loyal spouse. The imaginary enjoyment is perfectly consonant with the functioning of the symbolic order.

Because Real enjoyment poses such a threat to the social order, the contemporary command to enjoy cannot find an outlet in this kind of enjoyment. Only imaginary enjoyment—enjoyment of the television, the computer screen, the ego—offers an acceptable path through which to obey this command. In this sense, the predominance of the image today indicates most emphatically the presence of the command to enjoy. The image provides a way—the only way—for us to respond. All of the images that surround us offer the allure of a complete enjoyment—a jouissance unperturbed by any lack. And yet, this avoidance of lack is purely imaginary: because the image has its foundation in the symbolic order, because it is projected from the symbolic order, the image does not escape lack and provide the completeness (and the complete jouissance) that it promises. The image is beset by an incompleteness that its form denies. Imaginary enjoyment represents a failure to enjoy, which is why the images that predominate the society of enjoyment provide an outlet for a kind of enjoyment that stabilizes rather than threatens the social order. When someone decides to “enjoy Coca-Cola”—embracing the image from the advertisement, she/he provides support for the system of exchange. This imaginary enjoyment doesn’t interfere with the functioning of the social order but rather keeps it going and furthers it. Whereas enjoyment in the Real provides a fundamental threat to the social order and has the potential to transform that order, imaginary enjoyment keeps things going as they are.

Today, the symbolic Law no longer demands that subjects sacrifice their imaginary enjoyment in order to enter into the social order because imaginary enjoyment does not threaten the structure of that order. In this sense, the Law today is more tolerant: it allows the imaginary transgressions that it once circumscribed and punished. But this increased tolerance for imaginary transgressions merely serves to disguise an increased intolerance for Real transgressions. Accommodating itself to the prevalence of imaginary enjoyment allows the Law to become ever more vigilant in policing Real enjoyment. This dramatically changes the way the subject experiences the symbolic Law. Rather than experiencing the Law as a cut that disrupts an imaginary plenitude, subjects experience only minor impositions on their sense of imaginary plenitude: no Law, but a series of rules designed to circumscribe the imaginary experience. Thus, the image offers subjects a zone where they are seemingly free to enjoy, a zone where the Law doesn’t interfere. It is this semblance of the freedom to enjoy that makes the experience of the imaginary so attractive to contemporary subjects. But the more we embrace imaginary enjoyment, the more we miss a Real alternative.

NOT SO IMAGINARY AFTER ALL

In contrast with symbolic order, the imaginary is based on a relationship of duality: in it, I relate directly to the image of an other—my counterpart or alter-ego—without the mediation of a third party (provided by the symbol). Because it lacks the mediation of a third party, the imaginary relationship lacks any evident connection to what exists beyond it. In Seminar I, Lacan calls the imaginary sphere a “closed world of two.”²⁷ Closed off in this way, without the absence or lack that the symbolic order would introduce, the imaginary provides a kind of enjoyment—or, more correctly, an image of enjoyment—that the symbolic order cannot. In the imaginary, I relate to myself and to the other in the same way—and in a way that seems entirely undisturbed by a third party (the big Other).

The predominance of the imaginary and the experience of it is what allows contemporary subjects to imagine themselves as isolated monads. The image hides the experience of castration—the requisite sacrifice of enjoyment—from subjects who nonetheless exist within the confines of the symbolic order. Whereas a strong symbolic authority creates dissatisfied subjects because it forces them to come face to face with the sacrifice of enjoyment required for entrance into the symbolic order, the imaginary keeps the subject satisfied, not with the Real of her or his desire, but with its image. Enjoyment in the imaginary is an enjoyment that is imagined or fantasized. Though it seems—especially to the subject her/himself—as if this fantasized enjoyment transgresses the norms imposed by symbolic authority, it actually poses no real threat to symbolic authority. As theorist Walter Davis points out:

Rather than an “otherness” to dominant ideologies, the image is by and large the realm of ideologies’ triumphant circulation and consumption. Proximally and for the most part one finds in most images the conventional, the commodified, that which reinforces and reifies the dominant culture, not that which alienates or estranges us from it. This is especially true today of most of those images that claim to do the opposite: the primitive, the vital, the liberatory, the erotic—these are now thoroughly colonized matters.²⁸

Imaginary enjoyment seems to occur in open disdain of symbolic authority, thumbing its nose at that authority. But symbolic authority depends on this imaginary enjoyment that would “subvert” it because this enjoyment renders subjects docile. For symbolic authority, the danger of the imaginary is only an imaginary danger.

Though the society of prohibition views imaginary enjoyment as an actual threat, the society of enjoyment no longer does. Today, imaginary enjoyment is so far from being a threat that it is our fundamental duty. And it results in a society of increasingly docile subjects. Imaginary experience has the effect of rendering subjects more willing to accede to the dictates of the social order precisely because it provides for them an imagined enjoyment. If I feel as if I’m enjoying myself, whether I really am or not, I’m not likely to revolt, or even to concern myself with the social as a whole or its governance. As the power of the imaginary increases, the hold that symbolic authority has over subjects increases as well. Ironically, imaginary satisfaction inevitably leads to greater productivity: the number of hours contemporary subjects spend working continues to increase because we see work as a way of securing the money to purchase our imaginary enjoyment. We will work innumerably more hours when we are working not just out of duty but in order to pay for a new DVD player. The more imaginary enjoyment increases, the more productive we become, thereby indicating the extent of our investment in the ruling late capitalist symbolic structure. In this way, the command to enjoy eviscerates our possibilities for enjoyment and for freedom. It becomes nearly impossible for us to gain any distance from—or have an experience that transcends—the power of the prevailing structure. As Alice Kuzniar puts it in her discussion of the cinema of Wim Wenders, “we are completely immersed in the image, emptied out before it. There is no moment of detachment.”²⁹ Entrapped by the image, contemporary subjects come to inhabit a world without distance.