Chang tries to look at the reality with different perspective, from which he sees what is present outside but easily (or usually) ignored. He discovers the contradictory situation that we take for granted. This is similar with Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fantasy. In Žižek’s words, Chang’s photographs traverse the social fantasy. In the following paragraphs, I will firstly discuss how Žižek interprets the notion of fantasy and then try to study Chang’s photographs with it to see how Chang does his symptomatic reading towards the society with his photographic images.
In popular understanding, fantasy is opposed to reality: it may be either the mental projection towards the reality, or the desire which is forbidden by the law but is satisfied or realized in fantasy. However, Žižek does not consider the relation between fantasy and reality as internal illusion versus external reality. He sees fantasy as “the materialization of ideology” (Žižek,
“Seven” 4). In order to understand his words, I will discuss two aspects: one is his reflection on the Marxian definition of ideology; the other is his adoption of the notion of fantasy by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.
Based on these two aspects, we will have a better understanding of Žižek’s notion of fantasy.
When Žižek mentions fantasy for the first time in The Sublime Object of Ideology, he tries to illustrate how Marx defines ideology. When ideology is considered as false consciousness, it is based on the Marxian formula that people do not know it but they are doing it. Žižek asks a question: where is the place of ideological illusion, in the “knowing” or in the “doing” in the reality itself? He takes an example: when people use money, they know very well that there is nothing magical about it; they understand that money is simply an expression of social relation in its materiality. In other words, people know that money is an illusion but they are still using it as if they do not know. Thus, what they do not know is not reality (the materiality of money) but the illusion that structures their reality (money represents the exchange value, which structures the social reality). They do not know that their social reality is guided by an illusion, which Žižek then calls “ideological fantasy” (Žižek, Sublime 28-33). Thus, fantasy is not a mental projection but the materialization of ideology, which structures the social reality.
Žižek clearly points out that “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Žižek, Sublime 45). Fantasy, as the materialization of ideology, is the primordial form of narrative, which
“emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by arranging its terms into a temporal succession” (Žižek, “Seven” 10-1). Here we see the parallel between Žižek’s notion of fantasy (as the primordial form of narrative) and Fredric Jameson’s arguments on literary and aesthetic texts. Jameson sees all literary and aesthetic texts as ideological texts, which are “resolutions of determinate contradictions” (Jameson 80). He illustrates with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ analysis on the facial decoration of Caduveo Indians and argues that Lévi-Strauss’ work suggests all cultural artifacts are to be read as symbolic act while its resolutions to the real problems remain imaginary ones that leave the real untouched. Thus, Jameson considers the aesthetic act ideological: “the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (Jameson 79).
Based on Jameson’s words, we can understand what Žižek means when he defines fantasy as the “primordial form of narrative” (Žižek, “Seven” 10).
We may suggest that fantasy is exactly the symbolic acts to face the unsolvable problems in reality; only through fantasy can we get close to the real situation. Then, it appears that Žižek tries to push the ideological acts further in two aspects. Firstly, fantasy, as the materialization of ideology,
not only appears in cultural artifacts as Jameson mentions but also supports and structures our social reality; that is to say, reality is itself a fantasy-construction and we can trace how fantasy works right in our social reality. Secondly, Žižek’s notion of fantasy follows the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan, which have the closest link with desire.
Although fantasy (phantasy) in Freudian theory does not have a clear and determined definition, in so far as desire is articulated through fantasy, fantasy is the locus of defensive operations (Laplanche and Pontalis 315).
Lacan accepts Freud’s formulations on the importance of fantasy and on its visual quality as a scenario which stages desire; he emphasizes the protective function of fantasy (Evans 60). Illustrated with the dream of “the burning child,”12 he sees the father’s awake as his escape into reality to avoid the Real of his desire and to be able to maintain his blindness.13 The death of his child implies the fundamental guilt of the father so that he awakes to escape into reality. In other words, he escapes into reality, which is sustained by fantasy, so that he maintains his existence in the symbolic order, or his symbolic universe would be de-constructed into nothing.
12 The dream is told by Freud’s patient. The detail of the dream is described by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Lacan reinterprets the dream in his seminar eleven.
Freud, “Chapter VII” 509-11; Lacan 53-78.
13 Žižek interprets Lacan’s words in his book. Žižek, Sublime 44-6.
Thus, when we come back to Žižek again, it is clear that he tries to point out two main aspects of the function of fantasy in The Plague of Fantasies: on the one hand, fantasy stages our desire; on the other hand, fantasy screens the unbearable situation. Firstly, what fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fully satisfied, but a scene that stages the desire. The realization of desire does not consist in its being fulfilled but coincides with the reproduction of the lack that constitutes desire (Žižek, Looking 6-8). Fantasy appears as an answer to “Che Vuoi?” (What does the Other want from me?):
it constructs the frame enabling us to desire something; this desire is not ours but the desire of the Other. In other words, the original question of desire is not “what do I want” but “what do others want from me?” (the Other’s desire).
On the other hand, fantasy is also a defense against “Che Vuoi?”: if the Other has desire, then the Other has lacks (so that it desires). This Other is the symbolic order with which the society is constructed, and the lack is some repressed antagonism, some unbearable trauma around which the symbolic order is structured. We consider that the symbolic order is complete but actually it has a lack, which cannot be faced directly, or the symbolic order would disintegrate. Fantasy bears witness to this lack: it is a screen that
protects us from getting too close to the lack, the object cause of our desire.
If we get too close to it and thus losing the lack itself, anxiety is brought on by the disappearance of desire (Žižek, Sublime 114-8, 126). Thus, fantasy maintains a distance towards the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it and at the same time functions as the inherent transgressions (Žižek, “Seven”
18-27). It is through fantasy that we can see how the lack functions in our social reality since fantasy can neither hide nor solve this lack.
Žižek emphasizes this lack much when he explains it as sinthome. The notion of sinthome14 has much to do with the meaning of “existence.”
Firstly, only what is symbolized fully “exists.” Secondly, it is the existence that is an ex-sistence, as the impossible-real kernel resisting symbolization, as a leftover of enjoyment beyond meaning. “Symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject” (Žižek, Sublime 75). Symptom is the way we avoid madness, the way we choose something (symptom-formation) instead of nothing (the deconstruction of the symbolic universe). Thus, to access to the lack of the symbolic order, the object cause of our desire, we shall examine how fantasy works in our social reality so as
14 Žižek explains it in different essays. Žižek, Looking 136-40; Žižek, Sublime 74-5.
to traverse the fantasy. As we understand how fantasy works, it is then possible for us to see the sinthome and know the lack of symbolic order.
From here shall I commence the study on Chang’s photographs in his photobooks.