David Bertolini
The financial crisis that took down the world’s economies and ruined countless lives in 2008 revealed a strange codependence between capitalism, architecture, and ethics. The crises exposed the unthinkable paradox of a modern global capitalist society, where one’s actions appear to be simultaneously guided by both the vital, creative, and harmonious drive of Eros and the self-destructive, delusional, pathological drive of Thanatos. This paradox surfaces from principles of both the American and French revolutions and free market ideology, whose primary maxim is the right of individuals to pursue happiness while in a state of perpetual liberty, on the condition that their actions do not adversely infringe on others. In psychoanalysis this paradox does not initially sound paradoxical because it first appears as the balance between the pleasure principle and the death drive. Where the pleasure principle regulates a balance between pleasure pursuit and pain avoidance, the death drive desires to return to a state of quintessence that is similar to life before human subjectivity, akin to death. However, the paradox appears to us, according to Jacques Lacan, from the fact that the pleasure derived from being human is unfulfilling because life is mediated through the Symbolic, a network of signifiers that stand in for actual things. Thus, there is always a terrifying feeling that we are missing out or lacking access to a real thing or experience. In capitalism this paradox appears as a normal state of affairs, where contradictions are experienced as non-paradoxical. The free market system strives for enjoyment that exceeds the limits of pleasure while it tries to access the real thing in the form of wealth and the freedom that equity (financial and ethical value) provides. Eros/Thanatos is a political-ethical dilemma manifested in our physical environment, specifically architecture.
The 2008 crisis involved the invention of financial derivatives sanctioned by Law as well as the American dream. These risky, complex instruments affected all building practices, including the development of housing, office buildings, and resorts. It is important to realize that the relationship between financial derivatives (as the essence of capitalism greed) and architecture is about more than just investment opportunities: rather, it is a symbiotic relationship validating an ethical determination between dangerous risk-taking behavior, masquerading as striving for pleasure, and the organization of environments that mask capitalism’s projects. Architecture has a sublimating power that makes its products and its activities appear to be strictly objective. The public perceives capitalism as an ethical system, largely because it appropriates what is good and beautiful in the world, such as food and housing, then maps such moral provisions over its own greedy actions. Because architecture creates the environments we occupy, it is a large part of this paramount good. It is perceived as an ethical practice that results in aesthetic and practical structures that enrich our lives. The problem with the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and architecture is that it allows us to overlook the cold and calculating “other side” of capitalism’s activities, where profits are maximized at any cost. We willfully imagine that no one is hurt from such practices, or that the benefits of risk versus reward outweigh any collateral damage. The myriad of signifiers emanating from architecture—from the green-friendly Starbucks to Enron’s futuristic corporate headquarters—make it appear that environmental concerns trump capitalist greed, to suggest that there is a kind of ethical ground justifying free-market risk-taking. This construct of “a capitalism personally concerned about the public good,” Slavoj Žižek argues, combines cultural woes and capitalists’ profits into commodities that serve as the “remedy against the consumerist excess: in the same way as you do your ecological or social duty by buying a product (the price of a Starbucks cappuccino includes money for organic agriculture, for helping the poor etc.).”1 The more capitalists profit, the more social guilt is alleviated. It reflects our perception of ourselves, which is that we are intrinsically good. Yet, possessing good will or being ethical does not have a direct object in the world; therefore, it seems fleeting or impermanent. To give it permanence we read such attributes through the signifiers linked to the aesthetic attributes of architecture and our social institutions, such as perceiving our courthouses as honorable structures, or our universities as imbued with truth.
Jacques Lacan’s reading of Immanuel Kant and Marquis de Sade together in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis reveals a problem modern ethics typically avoids. His observation is similar to the one raised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer years earlier: If we are the descendants of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, how do we reconcile reason’s march toward freedom and progress with its horrific outcomes, such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.2 According to Adorno and Horkheimer, modern ethics relies on Kant’s formalist idea of duty because it foregoes pathological motives in making ethical judgments, thus one privileges the sterile determinations of reason. Adorno and Horkheimer conclude that Sade reveals the intrinsically cruel and destructive principles of modernity that Kant’s ethics protects. Lacan claims that the unmitigated pursuit of pleasure in Sade’s writings reveals the dark underside of Kant’s ethics in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. According to Lacan, we should focus on the fictionality of Sade, where, ironically, human desire (subjective, pathological, and self-interested) is not grounded by pathological causes. Thus, desire in Sade fulfills Kant’s criteria for an ethical act, which means that “following one’s desire overlaps with ‘doing one’s duty.’”3 Problematically, for capitalists, this means that an unbounded desire for wealth is not understood as selfish and ruthless; rather, it is nothing more than doing one’s Kantian duty.
The Lacanian synthesis of a Kantian-Sadean ethics is the ethics of architecture in a capitalist world. Architecture, with all of its clarity and homeostatic balance, represents society (die Sache), but it also forecasts a radical ambiguity, what Lacan called the Thing (das Ding). On one hand the positive attributes of culture emerge from the building’s surfaces and the public spaces delimited by them. The message is that we are doing the right thing in the right place, where our interactions and desires are socially appropriate, measured, and fulfilled. On the other hand, the mysterious and frightening aspects of culture and society are also surreptitiously present. Uninhibited desires—power, control, and perversion—operate within the nooks and crannies of architecture. The message is that the people who are visible and exposed are at the mercy of those operating within the shadows. At this point the fantasy of architecture as a universal good gives way to a sudden, obscene substitute: architecture becomes a foreign force that imposes demands we cannot satisfy. The issue is difficult to see in everyday life because of the nature of ideology that prevents one from standing outside of its influence. However, the issue is clear in films. In what follows I will demonstrate how films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Children of Men (2006), and Inception (2010) expose the dangerous relationship between architecture’s ambiguity and capitalism’s incessant growth as a pursuit of pleasure/wealth—a relationship where capitalism conceals its illicit nature through the intrinsic enigma of architecture’s aesthetic and practical attributes, concealed within the general goals of prosperity, order, and harmony.
The primary role architecture plays within society vacillates between its three principal capacities: the practical, the beautiful and the good. In this sense architecture is always-already ethical because it exists for the single purpose of meeting demands made by society through the provision of security, aesthetics, and timelessness. K. Michael Hays describes two categories of architecture that delineate how ethics operates in architecture. One category is architecture as an “instrument of culture,” where architecture is an “epiphenomenon, dependent on socioeconomic, political, and technological processes for its states and transformations.”4 Here architecture expresses the culture that produces it. The other mode, Hays writes, is “architecture as autonomous form,” where there is a notable absence of “historical concerns in favor of attention to the autonomous architectural object and its formal operations.” Here, architecture is seen as a pure idea freed from the demands of culture. But, actually, all architecture is an “instrument of culture.” So, Hays’ categories seem to be forced—which he tacitly admits when he writes that the purely formal architectural position denies architecture’s “special status as a cultural object with a causation, presence, and duration of its own.”5 Further, Hays argues that architects and their architecture must actively occupy a dynamic “cultural place—as an architectural intention with ascertainable political and intellectual consequences.”6 His categories work as long as we accept his premise that architecture is ethical. We need to re-contextualize Hays’ categories to see, through architecture, how his “instrument of culture” takes the Kantian ethical stance, while his “architecture as autonomous form” adopts the Sadean ethical attitude. The fundamental paradox of architecture is that we are never quite sure when it is Sade or Kant.
Kant’s and Sade’s works advocate two radically opposed positions that coalesce around the activities and environments of our capitalist society. Kant’s “sublime disinterested ethical attitude” and Sade’s “unrestrained indulgence in pleasurable violence” (Žižek) summarize the two sides of the major question regarding the economic collapse: i.e., how people can undertake dangerous strategies knowing that they are very likely cutting down the tree in which they perch.7 The paradoxical aspect of the crisis is that the perpetrators embody both the freedom of Eros (life/pleasure) and the hierarchical oppression of Thanatos (death). Žižek notes that our response to the financial collapse unfortunately avoided condemning the capitalist system itself. Instead of asking what alternatives we have to this corrupt system, we clamor to “return to the basics,” the “real economy.”8 The true danger lingering after the crash is that “instead of awaking us from a dream,” our response to the crisis “will enable us to keep dreaming.”9 This dream-state is evident in many cultural narratives, such as the American Dream, which stipulates that hard work will bring wealth and success. But, the reality concealed by these myths is the exact opposite—upward mobility is rare; hard work begets harder work; and opportunities are often available only to the upper class. Žižek asks, “Is moral hazard inscribed in the nature of capitalism itself?” The crucial question to add is: how is the moral hazard within capitalism inscribed in architecture? The difficulty of answering either question revolves around the observation made by Karl Marx, which is that the bourgeoisie (capitalists) have been able to naturalize their actions, while other actions are labeled as artificial.10 Further, architecture’s reliance on wealth for its existence has made it the paradigmatic expression of society’s “natural” order. Manfredo Tafuri explained that “modern architecture, as a whole, was able to create, even before the mechanisms and theories of Political Economy had created the instruments for it, an ideological climate for fully integrating design, at all levels, into a comprehensive Project aimed at the reorganization of production, distribution and consumption within a capitalist city.”11
Architecture was an ideological tool of capitalism before architects knew it was, in much the same way that everyone in society, as Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek have shown, are products of capitalism’s ideological principles even without knowing it. Ideology, according to Louis Althusser, is a type of fantasy that exerts control by distancing its mandates from how things appear to us. He writes that ideology is the “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”12 The exploitive, unstable, and unfair practices of capitalism are masked by the appearance of prosperity, order, and freedom in our daily lives. Buildings provide the infrastructure for economic activities, such as research and development of commodities, leisure activities, and, most importantly, retail. Symbolically, buildings are the loci where we project the ideological narratives that constitute our society, such as the American dream, democracy (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), and conspicuous consumption (buying commodities to project a way of life).
We trust that the ethical space architecture creates—whether the space is either a mirror of the status quo or as an antagonism critical of social traditions—is known through three indelible attributes: (1) stability, in the sense that the limits are knowable and marked; (2) communality, in a way that reveals common experiences; and (3) sovereignty, because domestic and social order are structured as part of a community. Architecture secures these aspects because it is aesthetic and diuturnal. Aesthetic properties require agreement, even if they are meaningless or antagonistic. For example, classical styles are linked to spaces of power—palaces, banks, and courthouses—because we have come to accept that classical traditions represent a certain social echelon. The diuturnal permanence of architectural structures is made apparent by exposure to brutal and mutable environments, so we gauge the permanence of our culture by the durability of our buildings. Further, Žižek argues, architecture is paradoxically schizophrenic because it affiliates with, and expresses, two wildly different social-political ethical positions at any given moment. He writes,
[I]t is not only that the fantasy embodied in the mute language of buildings can articulate the utopia of justice, freedom and equality betrayed by actual social relations; this fantasy can also articulate a LONGING FOR INEQUALITY, for clear hierarchy and class distinctions. Does the Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture not enact the “return of the repressed” of the official egalitarian-emancipatory Socialist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinctions? The utopia enacted in architecture can also be a conservative utopia of regained hierarchical order. And does the same not hold for the monumental public buildings from the Roosevelt era, like the central post office in New York? No wonder the NYU central building in downtown Manhattan looks like Lomonosov University in Moscow….13
Žižek’s point is not the easy gloss, that architecture can be used for different political positions, which the average citizen perceives as being, variously, good or bad for society. Rather, Žižek’s point is much subtler; it centers on the idea of the “return of the repressed”—that the very nature of architecture is to make ethical determinations related to power, such as who is allowed to enter or who is marginalized.7
Arguably, the bedrock of modern ethical thought is that humans have the power to have a good will. Kant believed a good will was the only attribute that is good without conditions, primarily because other attributes of the mind—courage, resolution, and perseverance or temperaments such as pity, empathy, and helpfulness—are initially desirable and good but can be converted to evil ends intentionally or unintentionally.14 Kant defines good will as the manifestation of a rational being’s free will to obey the moral law. A good will is not good because of its ability to produce effects or any means to an end it, rather it is good because “of its volition, that is, it is good in itself.”15 Building upon the notion of good will, Kant’s ethics is a deontology, a moral theory derived from one’s obedience to duty, a moral theory derived from one’s obedience to duty itself, not to a Supreme Being or any inner sense of satisfaction.” Kant refutes the notion that moral judgments are made because they “accomplish good things” or because the actions are “inherently good.” Accomplishing good things or being inherently good, Kant argues, focuses on the “means to an end,” which involves an external agency for accomplishing any intended good. Because of this externality, the means are too easily influenced by pathological interests. Kant removes the traditional notion of a Supreme Good from his ethics and replaces it with a “pure Form bestowing on our acts the character of universality.”16 Kant defines moral duty with his famous idea of the “Categorical Imperative.” The Categorical Imperative is a command, grounded in our free will and human reason, which transforms a moral issue from a pathological dilemma immersed in the particulars of an issue into a universal form that rises above the fray. Kant explains the principle thus: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”17 On the one hand, Kant’s ethics identified with reason and free will as humanity’s pinnacle achievements. At the same time, it removed idiosyncrasy and emotion from the moral equation. Morality was made not just to be rational but also to appear so.
Kant’s ethics descended from Enlightenment ideals. Adorno and Horkheimer write, in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment agenda was to eliminate myth, animism, and all belief-based institutions (such as religion) from society, because in doing so this would liberate “human beings from fear and install them as masters.”18 The Enlightenment saw reason as the abstract form freeing humanity from false beliefs and thus ushering in a liberating and egalitarian order. By liberating reason from the contingencies of belief and, at the same time, unleashing the secular market economy, the Enlightenment exposed this terrifying paradox, that capitalism is “at once the prevailing form of reason and the power which ruined reason.”19 According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the freedom unleashed by universal reason allowed unethical acts to be justified simply because they were based on rational assertions interpreted as moral declarations. This led them to see how the Marquis de Sade’s libertine ethics were the logical support for Kant’s ethics. Lacan on the other hand sees Sade as the truth of Kant, where the categorical imperative is nothing more than a “superego demand.” Žižek writes that the “moral law is obscene in so far as it is form itself which functions as a motivating force driving us to obey its command.”20 Thus, we can see the actions of speculators and architects are “doing the right thing” in terms of capitalism’s directives. Here, Kant’s ethics produces by-products that are universal ethical mandates disguised as moral postulates, by-products that enable those in power, the bourgeoisie, to lead trouble-free lives.21 Or, as Žižek explains, the “‘cold’ objective market relations and the utilitarian logic of instrumental manipulation are supplemented by pathetic morality and sentimental philanthropism.”22
Marc de Kesel points out that that Sade’s imperative is not a “supersensible goodness, but a universe of absolute cruelty,” and that Kant’s formal ethics, albeit grounded on one’s good will, is “capable of generating a sadistic universe.”23 Lacan explains that if one removes every vestige of emotion or feeling from the ability they possess to help guide one’s actions, then in the “final analysis the Sadean world is conceivable.”24 The point is that Sade’s excessive enjoyment is identical, in form, to Kant’s ethical duty. There is no adequate way to tell them apart, philosophically or ideologically.
Sade’s ideas reveal the unconscious demands lurking in modern ethics. Kant claimed that ethical reasoning must purge all subjective feelings, such as pleasure, pity, euphoria, or happiness. To do so requires one to obey the categorical imperative. Lacan claims Kant’s universal notion of law as duty-followed-by-necessity exposes its jouissance, or obscene surplus enjoyment, which is sadistic and cruel. People do not experience moral or ethical satisfaction from their actions; rather, they gain satisfaction from the fantasy that they are the instruments of the “law itself,” what Lacan calls the big Other, the agency of the power of Symbolic. The paradox is that the more one submits to the universal demands of the moral law, the more sadistic it becomes. Why? The universal ethical domain is continually slipping away because there is always something that escapes its definition; something that does not fit or cannot be symbolized. Hence, architecture takes up the role of a physical marker that smooth things over by creating a coherent narrative.
Architecture allows us to imagine that we are immune to the grind of everyday life. It provides us with a sanctuary in which we can realize the achievement of our desires through access to unmitigated enjoyment. It provides the very substance upon which we build our ethical fantasies. This is evident in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), where Dorothy is driven to the Land of Oz because she feels that her boring farm life withholds access to true enjoyment that must exist elsewhere, somewhere exotic. Here the feudal-agrarian lifestyle cannot meet Dorothy’s desire, where its utilitarian barn and house only express her basics needs such as food and shelter. However, the Land of Oz and its capitol, the Emerald City, are more than mere projections of Dorothy’s dreams, they are in actuality the ethical manifestation of her drive for individual happiness without feeling self-conscious or guilty. The Emerald City stands for the singular drive for order and happiness that promises to give Dorothy access to what she desires most, pure enjoyment. Here architecture’s function is to transmit the endless signifiers showcasing the allure of unlimited commodities while masking the totalitarian power structure overseeing this magical environment. The crisis is that once Dorothy arrives in Oz she is unable to fit in—or, rather, unable to pay the price. She is forced to recognize that she had been truly happy in Kansas.
Outside of the Emerald City is the terrifying and contingent world subject to inclement weather, wild beasts, hunger, and evil witches. But, within the Emerald City one’s dreams are fulfilled, from exorbitant beauty to an abundance of pleasure for all—it is the manifestation of the Kantian Good. Ethically, actions such as singing while buffing the Tin Man or pruning flowers for the next spectacle are done out of a sense of duty to the greater good that orders Oz. Work hard, work happy, work singing—just work! The truth of Oz, however, is its obverse, Sadean side, where the Wizard orders Dorothy to complete dangerous missions, tasks that put her and her companions at risk of losing their lives. The Wizard’s demands are pointless distractions designed to keep Dorothy from recalling her true desire to go home, in hopes that she would simply accept the universal demand of Oz—to enjoy.
The architecture of the Wizard’s inner sanctum is devoid of human scale; it is a large room with indeterminate boundaries that focus attention on a terrifying stage, where floats the specter-like head of the Wizard. The architecture projects the salient aspects of the Kant/Sade ethical deadlock, in which happiness is regulated by a universal objective “voice of reason” coming from inside the terrifying apparition of the all-knowing Wizard. Like Dorothy, we accept dangerous demands, because we want to materialize our desire through a more authentic and exciting experience. In other words, the “Kantian [ethical] Law is a superego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, in this case Dorothy’s inability to meet its inexorable demands.”25 The problem is that, if we question the Law and peak behind the curtain, as Dorothy does, the enchantment disintegrates; the Emerald City and becomes just another corrupt state run by an egomaniac! This disintegration reveals the fragile nature of the good, which Lacan correctly identified: “The domain of the good is the birth of power.”26 The point is that architecture promises access to our desires while continually postponing their realization, as inexorable demands are made upon us by capitalism, in the case of Oz represented by the (defective) Wizard. Architecture is the enchanted object—from home ownership to the Apple Store—that commands us to “Enjoy!” because by having such enjoyment we are “doing the right thing.” Sadly, we always feel there is something more we cannot yet access. This is the Lacanian Thing, and our Sadean side keeps pushing us to more extreme activities in an effort to get to this Thing.
Lacan marks the moment of ethical judgment based on Freud’s theory of the terms das Ding and die Sache in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The basic principle organizing the human world is the fact that to be human means that we mediate the world through language. We postpone satiating our needs—for example, having children, eating lunch, or even going to the bathroom—until we have enough money, reach the right moment, or are given permission “under the law.” In doing so we have sublimated our bodily instincts (or, more accurately, drives) by postponing their satisfaction for the sake of larger (super-ego) goals that are now articulated through the structure of language. We have a constant feeling that we are always missing out on access to “authentic” (or immediate) enjoyment. Because enjoyment seems to be only what is achieved by other people—who have more money, fewer responsibilities, more freedom, etc.—our “delay” in satisfaction is confronted by a contradiction in the construction of the Other: there are “others” who do enjoy, who do not delay. We fantasize about a world before language, in order to avoid confronting the Real of the mandates of the (obscene) Other. Whether in the guise of capitalism or the Wizard, we need to neutralize the threat, to see the Wizard as “just another Kansas man” who wants to help; to see capitalism as “just a way of doing business to feed our families.” Where the Symbolic leads to confrontation with the dark side of the structure enclosing us, the Imaginary allows us to transpose the trauma into a “pre-Symbolic”—i.e. a “pre-linguistic”—paradise.
For Lacan, die Sache is the thing (contrasted with the Thing, das Ding) accessible by language, or what Lacan called the Symbolic. It is the “product of industry and of human action […] always on the surface, always within the range of an explanation.”27 Das Ding, on the other hand, is the thing as it really is, located within the domain Lacan called the Real. The Real resists our attempts of domestication: “the Thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine.”28 Žižek explains that the “symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, at its very core, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, [or] integrated into the symbolic order”29 The traumatic element is the “Thing” or das Ding, anything that cannot be subsumed directly by language or even imagination.
At the heart of the ethical experience, as well, is the feeling that there exists something that is more real than reality; something that is independent of the human representation, culture, and society but nonetheless gives our anxiety-ridden contingent life consistency and meaning. This Thing provides the means for securing moral grounding and justice as a source of unmediated enjoyment. The irony is that this “thing in itself” does exist; it does structure our world. But, because we never have access to it and we only experience its presence indirectly through its impact on signifiers and images, it appears to us only as a void. We experience this Thing as being (1) alien, because it stands against the symbolic order; and (2) necessary, because it serves as the object of our desire. Our relationship to the Thing, Lacan claimed, is paradoxical because it is predicated on establishing a topographical distance from it.
In Alfonso Cuaròn’s film Children of Men (2006), das Ding emerges as the Nemesis of society’s capitalist activities. Pollution, toxic products, engineered food, and political imbalance have led to a dystopia where humans are infertile and are living out the end of their life—in effect, the self-imposed end of humanity. With the exception of Great Britain, which clings to a fragile social order, civilization has collapsed. An ethical crisis develops when a group of political subversives, including anarchists, radicals, eco-terrorists, and generic illegal immigrant militants coalesce around a project to protect the only pregnant woman on earth.
The story demonstrates how the notion of supreme good, represented in the film by Great Britain, turns into the supreme evil, where the State’s ethical decisions lead to many horrible events, such as placing anyone suspected of not being British into internment camps where they are treated like animals. The hero in the story is Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a former activist turned bureaucrat, who tries to follow the law and its extreme demands until he is bribed by a revolutionary group to provide travel papers for a young woman named Kee. By accepting the bribe, Faron assumes the Sadean ethical stance. Taking the money allows him to “enjoy” the last bit of his life, but in so doing he forgoes his privileged access to society and it protective orders. This ethical shift is the heart of the story. Although Kee is miraculously pregnant, even her protectors seem to look past her frail subjective human reality. They convert her into an ideological commodity, a scientific specimen and political pawn at the mercy of ongoing power struggles. The architectural significance is the topological metaphor—one’s relationship to the Thing—where the mass of cells “inside” Kee’s womb are separated from the radical global-political role “they” are about to play. People are terrified of Kee’s unborn child. Their fear raises it to the status of the Thing (das Ding) capable, they imagine, of restoring social order, power, and eternity for those who possess it.
In this post-ethical world, architecture never loses its ethical mandate to both mark the void of das Ding or to provide a link, albeit imaginary/fantastic, to the Thing. Architecture dissolves into the topological demarcation between the inside and outside. The “inside” is the safe Kantian social order relying on science and technology that is good, thus a women becomes pregnant and the “outside,” which is the Sadean self-serving hedonistic drive of self-preservation, caught in the act of trying to steal the Thing—in this case pregnancy. Additionally, the inside is divided into hidden and present spaces. In the essay “The Architectural Parallax,” Slavoj Žižek observes that buildings have “an intermediate space which is disavowed: we all know it exists, but we do not really accept its existence.”30 This space is primarily used for whatever we prefer not to see—electrical conduits, plumbing, refuse, etc. Žižek focuses on excrement because this how we judge these spaces (they are literally the “throwaway”). He writes that, “we, of course, know that the excrements which disappear are somewhere in the sewage network—what is here ‘real’—is the topological hole or torsion which ‘curves’ the space of our reality so that we perceive/imagine excrements as disappearing into an alternative dimension which is not part of our everyday reality.”31
Žižek’s point is that for us to have consistency and continuity in reality requires a fundamental disavowal that a certain unpleasant yet essential Thing (das Ding) is non-existent. However, I think the hidden spaces are more than the “horrifyingly-sublime beyond of the primordial, pre-ontological Chaos into which things disappear.”32 These hidden spaces actually contain the hidden voice of the Sade/Kant tormentor, in our case, the ruling Other who controls the activities of visible subjects. In the film, architecture is correlated to this Other because it is no longer being designed. Nonetheless, its former mission, of projecting social signifiers from its surfaces and hidden spaces, has been transformed into the vocabulary of defensible positions, basic shelters, and nostalgic relics—an architecture of “imperial ruins.”
The ethical demand created by obtaining das Ding, as the collective fantasy of a privileged social hegemonic order over foreigners seen as parasites, is evident in a remarkable scene that contrasts the chaotic “outside” of the remnants of London’s streetscape to the “inside” of fortified compounds. In a series of long takes comprised of tightly framed and densely packed shots, the camera follows Theo on his visit to his cousin Nigel, a high-ranking government official in charge of “saving” the world’s artistic masterpieces. His limousine drives slowly through the once prestigious streets of London, now crowded and chaotic. In addition to people struggling to conduct business, we see foreigners held in cages, screaming. At street level, the remnants of English society desperately haggle over now-precious essentials. Some burst into emotional appeals to a God who is nowhere visible. The demarcation is clearly drawn from Theo’s claustrophobic and uncomfortable vantage point safe inside the limo, where the terrifying events outside appear as projections of his fears. Theo’s limo passes through a heavily guarded gate. The scene opens up to views of a beautiful garden, where well-heeled patrons are enjoying a leisurely day. Soldiers parade in dress uniforms, orchestras play familiar park serenades. In a surreal moment, a zebra strolls by.
Outside, the powerful have withdrawn from the public spaces. Inside, the elite maintain their Kantian ethics: they use the categorical imperative to keep up the fantasy of “business as usual.” “Yes, the world is ending,” they seem to be saying, “but we hold the secrets of social order, we are saving the artworks, preserving the traditions, and upholding the Law. This makes sense only in the remote hope of a return of fertility. But, we quickly realize that all this jouissance this is nothing more than Kant’s Sadean inverse. The principle of delayed gratification key to Kant’s paradigm is spatially and socially segregated: those outside must wait in pain while those responsible for cultural order may enjoy full Sadean gratification. This logic extends to the uneven distribution of discipline. Outside the gates it must be ruthless and exacting; inside, tolerant and forgiving. All architecture is obverted (Lacan: extimated). The interior spaces of power now appear externally in militarized zones. The externality of the public domain must now be internalized behind heavily defended perimeters.
The Thing, in social terms, simultaneously requires distancing and immediacy. Architecture puts this directly, in the contrast of interior and exterior. The Battersea plant where Nigel works and lives is a building with an interior retrofitted to appear like the Tate Museum. It is, in the film as in real life, an art museum. But, in this fictional Tate, the exterior is militarized, to keep people at a distance. Inside, the horde of artworks protected from the chaos outside creates an uncanny intimacy. Theo walks down a long hallway, where Michelangelo’s “David” stands against a window framing the chaotic city below. Theo ponders. “You kill me. A hundred years, there won’t be one sad fuck left to see any of this. What keeps you going?” Nigel responds, “You know what it is? I just don’t think about it.”33 Nigel recognizes that art is meaningless in light of the coming extinction. His unwavering allegiance reveals its object: the implacable and inaccessible Other of the Law, whose enigmatic desire can be satisfied only through excess imaginary enjoyment, not to be had by any who serve it, but by those who must endure the dissatisfactions not only of duty but irrationality.
From time to time everyone has the feeling that the current situation and surroundings are as mysterious and alien as if they were really projections imposed by some external force. In Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), this unreality is tested by architecture and the specific spaces it fashions and the events it fosters.
The primary reason one feels cheated by reality, according to Lacan, is because the process by which humans are constituted as subjects forever separates humanity (reality as we know it) from non-human reality; this also establishes us as desiring beings. The non-human part is what Lacan called the Real, one-third of his tripartite model of human subjectivity: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The Symbolic is the most easily understood part of his schema; it is the power to structure the world through signs. The Imaginary is the configuration of the ego (what one imagines him or herself to be, such as, I am a lawyer, a father, or an international corporate thief). The Imaginary is the realm of appearances. Together, the Symbolic and the Imaginary seem unified and cohesive but are plagued by the nagging feeling that something intangible is missing. The Real is the cause of this incompleteness, through which it creates anxiety. Lacan conceptualized the Real by following Freud, because to be human means to be forever separated from one’s instinctual, unmediated, “natural being.” The Real is impossible to imagine, represent, or to attain, but is always “over-present.” It constantly returns to the Symbolic and Imaginary as a traumatic entity. These three Lacanian elements structure Inception and the moral dilemmas it represents.
Inception is a story of the love between a gifted former architect turned industrial spy, Dominick Cobb, and his wife Mal.34 The love story revolves around their experimental shared dreaming, Mal’s suicide (caused by Cobb), and Cobb’s global/corporate espionage. Cobb has learned to invade the innermost thoughts of others by dreaming. In these invasions, he is able to plant ideas that the dreamers later take to be their own. But, Cobb is uneasy about his illegal and certainly unethical profession: so the film’s story focuses on three sites defined by Cobb’s attempts to escape in pursuit of pure enjoyment (jouissance): (1) “reality,” the least important of the three sites, where Cobb exists as a corporate raider with contractual (i.e. Symbolic) obligations to a Japanese magnate known only as Saito; (2) Imaginary partial architectural environments that simulate reality and where criminal activates operate through dreaming; and (3) architectural ruins, an imaginary city dreamed by Cobb, where Cobb and Mal are happy as long as they are able to co-inhabit the dream. In all three zones Cobb has broken with any traditional sense of Law; he seeks to emulate Sade’s heroes, who “give free rein to the orgy of excess and crime that represents in their eyes the free reign of nature.”35 This free reign, for Cobb, is the happiness he imagines he will derive from breaking through the confines of the Symbolic world and its contractual obligations into the realm of the Real, idealized by his dream city. The danger of course, as Lacan warned, is that access to the Real actually means dissolving into an undifferentiated, indifferent mass of nothingness. Cobb mistakenly substitutes his utopian city for this Real; his desire to break away from the Symbolic will only lead to destruction.
Lacan claims that we desire access to the Real, which is in the form of das Ding—the Thing. The danger is that if we ever obtain the Thing or access to the Real we would disengage from the Symbolic, the suicide of psychosis. Cobb does not realize that the price to be paid for access to unfettered creativity, or rather, enjoyment (the Lacanian Real) is death. Just as the forced choice of the bandit’s demand, “Your money or your life!” is not really a choice (if you want to keep your money you will not have any life to enjoy it with), the desire for the Real removes any basis for enjoyment, which requires the support of the Symbolic. The pleasure principle is a “braking” mechanism that keeps us from getting too close to the Real. Experiencing the city in distress, destruction, or ruins filters the Real by constructing fantasies so that architecture can be used as a means of ethical fulfillment. Although architecture is the medium by which the Other projects its own fetishes—in the form of the Law, the symbolic order, the duty to “love thy neighbor”—the fetish, in the form of fantasy, does not just conceal horrible truths; rather, “at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference.”36 Architecture in its mode as obscene thus plays a double game between fantasy-fetish and the Real. No wonder, then, that Cobb does not see that his utopia is in fact an Apocalypse.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the film Inception architects are portrayed as megalomaniacs obsessing over access to pure creative freedom unencumbered by laws or the vagaries of human life. We discover the nature of this megalomania when Cobb visits his old architecture professor and father-in-law, Stephen Miles, in order to find another architecture student willing to work for him. His criminal assignment would require the apprentice to design a maze-like world that simulates reality within unconscious mind-space. The appeal, we discover, is not about money; instead, it concerns unbridled pure happiness. Resisting this request, Miles pleads with Cobb to return to the United States to face charges for his wife’s murder. Miles does not approve of Cobb’s criminal lifestyle as a corporate spy. “I never taught you to be a thief,” he complains. Cobb responds, “No, you taught me to navigate other people’s minds. But after what happened to Mal there weren’t a whole lot of legitimate ways for me to use that skill.” Mel displaces responsibility for his actions to the “Symbolic” demands of family and society. Cobb argues that if only the system would change—i.e. if reality could become Real—truth would become self-evident. Žižek explains Cobb’s point in terms of Sade’s hero: that he is not a lustful crazed maniac, but rather an uncaring intellectual alienated from sensual pleasure, who substitutes pleasure derived from the logical “activity of outstripping rational civilization by its own means.”37
Cobb persuades Mal to enter into the deep reaches of “unconstructed dream,” a “limbo” space located in his unconscious, because here, he promises, one’s actions will be rewarded with pure happiness. This is the pure ethical space of jouissance. The price of visiting this space is insanity (psychosis), where we are left only with what has resisted the Symbolic, what is in effect the irreducible remainder of the Real. Even if this residuum could be said to mean anything, it would not mean anything for any human subject, however constituted. It would have no language to speak, no space to inhabit, no time to endure.
Cobb is aware of the insanity of enjoyment that result from shared dreaming, but he also knows that, according to the rules of espionage dreaming, the only way out is to die while in limbo: the shock will cause the dreamer to wake up in reality; but the world he created for Mal and himself to co-inhabit is believed by her “to be” reality. Thus, Cobb decides that he must plant an idea in Mal’s unconscious that she will mistake for her own; this is the idea is “the current world” is not real and the only way to return to reality is the “standard dreamer technique”: i.e. to commit suicide. The two are awakened into the real world, but Mal continues to thinks it to be imaginary. She is resolved to her “idea” that she and Cobb must die (again) so that they can “wake” up in reality.
Cobb has created a situation identical to that of the Sade’s tormentor inflicted on the beautiful young girl who, magically, woke up the next day as if nothing ever happened. Nonetheless, she submitted to the same abuse again because the “moral Law is the Real of unconditional imperative which takes no consideration of the limitations imposed on us by reality—it is an impossible command.”38 In other words, Mal chooses, at her own expense, to gratify herself in the “love of the law, and thus of the inherent immorality of our superegos.”39 Though she will never reach the paradise promised by Cobb, she will relish the pure pleasure of submitting to its obscene demands!
Lacan’s theory of human subjectivity locates our true concerns and intentions in the dream because only there are we able to access the Real of our desire. Inception unconsciously plays out this “truth of the Freudian-Lacanian clinic.” The ability to use dreams to navigate between Symbolic (reality), Imaginary (constructed fantasy), and Real (destruction) is the basic premise by which Cobb is capable of committing his criminal acts. Further, it is the place for him to attain his innermost sadistic drives: influencing others’ innermost and personal thoughts, holding Mal hostage, double-crossing his employers, etc. During conscious life we are limited by the ego’s desire to keep us within the strictures of the Symbolic. It forces us to repress our a-social inclinations and postpone pleasurable activates. The desires articulated in the unconscious but repressed by the ego would disrupt the fragile issue of inconsistencies and contradictions that it is the duty of the Symbolic world to anesthetize. The dreamer waking from the “dream” of the Symbolic awakes into the trauma of the Real.
Žižek explains that fantasy is an alternative to this kind of awakening. We can, through fantasy’s access to the Imaginary, stitch together the disparate parts so that the world appears to us as complete, unified, and meaningful. But, this does not mean that “life is a dream.”40 Lacan’s notion that fantasy structures reality is based on the fact that there is a “leftover” that “persists and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring” during our waking consciousness. This kernel remaining, untouched by the Symbolic, is the Real—the Real of our desire. Žižek explains the ethical dilemma we face when, in a dream, we experience our most pathological self (many times they are illegal and immoral thoughts). Upon waking we claim that it was “just a dream”; “I am not really that way.” However, this conclusion not so much incorrect as inverted. “It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy-framework which determines our [waking] activity, our mode of acting in reality itself.”41
Thus, it is accurate to say that “our truth lies in our dreams,” and that reality is actually our attempt to escape this truth by pretending that “it was only a dream.” Architecture is the paradigmatic element in both reality and dreams because it serves as the only entity capable of establishing the boundary between the Real and the Symbolic in the physical realm; it serves as both the guarantor of the Thing and its (necessary) separation in space. This is primarily why architecture appears to us as always-already ethical, despite the fact that it has a dark and a light side. In the film architecture serves in both dreams and reality as the only entity able to protect our deepest secrets and ideas, for example Mal’s implanted idea that “reality is false.” The dark side of architecture exploits the notion of buildings being preeminently ethical in the sense that they appear as they truly are. Buildings seem to be either sheltering and strong or impassive and threatening. Behind this seeming, however, is the Truth of the either/or: architecture as the boundary between the Real and Symbolic must maintain this hinge function. Architecture cannot appear to us as unethical because if the boundary between the Real and the Symbolic dissolves then our entire world disappears.
The architect’s job is to create architecture that manages the “kernel of the real” that serves as the basis for fantasy. The seeming “epiphany” for architects today, occurs in the film Inception in the scene when Cobb declares that his actions were not done for money but for the “chance to build cathedrals, entire cities—things that have never existed, things that couldn’t exist in the real world.” Cobb’s desire is to go beyond the “pleasure principle,” the vehicle, Freud argued, that keeps us from accessing enjoyment (the Real) and, by so doing, maintains our subjectivity. The dilemma contains both the danger articulated in this paper and a possible solution for architects.
Cobb: That’s not what you used to say. You told me that in the real world I’d be building attic conversions and gas stations. You said that if I mastered the dream–share I’d have a whole new way of creating and showing people my creations. You told me I would be free.
Miles: And I am sorry I was wrong.
Cobb: No you weren’t. Your vision was a vision of pure creativity. It’s where we took it that was wrong.42
Cobb is right; the error was in where we took it. The ethical dimension, Lacan suggests, should be found in the person perceiving architecture as a purely “aesthetic moment of catharsis.”43 The way to interpret this for architects and the role of architecture as an ethical attitude society is to separate the two. First, we would make a distinction that architecture in physical reality manifests the Sade/Kant dialectic and its instrumental use by capitalism; thus we will call this function by the name of “building.” Second, we would reserve the term architecture to represent the exception—a purely aesthetic dimension—a signifier acknowledging its dependency on articulating our ability to see our desire. By doing this we would create what John Rajchman has described as a “constant cultural resistance to the tyranny of the very idea of an objectively good human arrangement.”44
Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973).
Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
Cuarón, Alfonso, Children of Men (Film: Universal Studios Entertainment, 2006).
Hays, K. Michael, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
———, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 14–29.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
———, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Grego (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
de Kesel, Marc, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. Sigi Jottkandt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009).
Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981).
———, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986).
———, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
Marx, Karl, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963).
Nolan, Christopher, Inception (Film: Warner Brothers Pictures, 2010).
Rajchman, John, “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity,” Representations 15 (1986): 42–56.
Sade, Marquis de, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1991).
Tafuri, Manfredo, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Architecture Theory since 1968. ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 6–35.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989).
———, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
———, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997).
———, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London and New York: Verso, 2009).
———, Living in the End Times (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
———, “The Architectural Parallax,” The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011).
———, The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond L. Wright (Oxford, UK and Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
1 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London and New York, 2010), 236.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973), 361.
3 Slavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Leo Wright, (Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA, 1999), 288.
4 K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 16.
5 Ibid., 17.
6 Ibid., 27.
7 Žižek, Žižek Reader, 285.
8 Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London, 2009), 14.
9 Ibid., 20.
10 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, 1963).
11 Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. M. Hays (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 15.
12 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, 1971), 109.
13 Slavoj Žižek,“The Architectural Parallax,” The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Farnham Surrey, UK, England and Burlington, VT, 2011), 255–297.
14 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary J. Gregor, (Cambridge U.K and New York, 1998), 7.
15 Ibid., 8.
16 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York, 1991), 261.
17 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 15.
18 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 2002), 1.
19 Ibid., 70.
20 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York, 1989), 81.
21 Žižek, Žižek Reader, 286.
22 Ibid., 286.
23 Marc de Kesel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. Sigi Jottkandt (Albany, NY, 2009), 133.
24 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (New York, 1986), 79.
25 Žižek, The Žižek Reader, 288.
26 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 229.
27 Ibid., 45.
28 Ibid., 125.
29 Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 132.
30 Slavoj Žižek, “The Architectural Parallax,” 272.
31 Ibid., 274.
32 Ibid., 274.
33 Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (DVD: Universal City, CA, 2006).
34 Christopher Nolan, Inception (DVD: Burbank, CA, 2010).
35 de Kesel and Jottkandt, Eros and Ethics, 136.
36 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York, 1997), 6.
37 Žižek, Žižek Reader, 287.
38 Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 81.
39 John Rajchman, “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity,” Representations, 15 (1986): 52.
40 Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 47.
41 Ibid., 47.
42 Nolan, Inception.
43 de Kesel and Jottkandt, Eros and Ethics, 247.
44 Rajchman, “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity,” 55.