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Are the [[pessimistic ]] [[cultural ]] criticists (from Jean [[Baudrillard ]] to [[Paul ]] Virilio) justified in their [[claim ]] that [[cyberspace ]] ultimately generates a kind of proto-[[psychotic ]] immersion into an [[imaginary ]] [[universe ]] of [[hallucinations]], unconstrained by any [[symbolic ]] Law or by any [[impossibility ]] of some [[Real]]? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the [[other ]] two dimensions of the [[Lacanian ]] [[triad ]] ISR, [[the Symbolic ]] and [[the Real]]?

As to [[the symbolic ]] [[dimension]], the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the [[notion ]] of authorship that fits the emerging [[domain ]] of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship": the [[author ]] (say, of the interactive immersive [[environment ]] in which we actively participate by [[role]]-playing) no longer writes detailed story-line, s/he merely provides the basic set of rules (the coordinates of the fictional universe in which we immerse ourselves, the limited set of actions we are allowed to accomplish within this [[virtual ]] [[space]], etc.), which serves as the basis for the interactor's [[active ]] engagement ([[intervention]], improvisation). This notion of "procedural authorship" demonstrates the [[need ]] for a kind of equivalent to the Lacanian "[[big Other]]": in [[order ]] for the interactor to become engaged in cyberspace, s/he has to operate within a minimal set of externally imposed accepted symbolic rules/coordinates. Without these rules, the [[subject]]/interactor would effectively become immersed in a psychotic [[experience ]] of an universe in which "we do whatever we [[want]]" and are, paradoxically, for that very [[reason ]] deprived of our [[freedom]], caught in a demoniac [[compulsion]]. It is thus crucial to establish the rules that engage us, that led us in our immersion into the cyberspace, while allowing us to maintain the distance towards the enacted universe. The point is not simply to maintain "the [[right ]] measure" between the two extremes ([[total ]] psychotic immersion versus non-engaged [[external ]] distance towards the artificial universe of the cyber-[[fiction]]): distance is rather a positive condition of immersion. If we are to surrender to the enticements of the virtual environment, we have to "mark the border," to rely on a set of marks which clearly designate that we are dealing with a fiction, in the same way in which, in order to let ourselves go and [[enjoy ]] a violent war movie, we somehow have to [[know ]] that what we are [[seeing ]] is a staged fiction, not real-[[life ]] killing (imagine our horrible surprise if, while watching a war [[scene]], we would suddenly see that we are watching a snuff, that the actor engaged in face-to-face combat is effectively cutting the throat of his "[[enemy]]"…). Against the theorists who [[fear ]] that cyberspace involves the [[regression ]] to a kind of psychotic incestuous immersion, one should thus discern in today's often clumsy and ambiguous improvisations [[about ]] "cyberspace rules" precisely the effort to establish clearly the contours of a new space of symbolic fictions in which we fully participate in the mode [[disavowal]], i.e. [[being ]] aware that "this is not real life."

However, if this is the Symbolic, where is the Real? Is cyberspace, especially virtual [[reality]], not the realm of [[perversion ]] at its puresy? Reduced to its elementary skeleton, perversion can be seen as a [[defense ]] against the Real of [[death ]] and [[sexuality]], against the [[threat ]] of [[mortality ]] as well as the [[contingent ]] imposition of [[sexual ]] [[difference]]: what the [[perverse ]] scenario enacts is a "disavowal of [[castration]]" — a universe in which, as in cartoons, a [[human ]] being can survive any catastrophe; in which [[adult ]] sexuality is reduced to a childish [[game]]; in which one is not [[forced ]] to die or to choose one of the two [[sexes]]. As such, the [[pervert]]'s universe is the universe of pure [[symbolic order]], of the [[signifier]]'s game running its course, unencumbered by the Real of human [[finitude]]. So, again, does not our experience of cyberspace perfectly fit this perverse universe? Isn't cyberspace also a universe without closure, unencumbered by the inertia of the Real, constrained only by its [[self]]-imposed rules? In this comic universe, as in a perverse [[ritual]], same gestures and scenes are endlessly repeated, without any final closure, i.e. in this universe, the [[refusal ]] of a closure, far from signalling the undermining of [[ideology]], rather enacts a proto-[[ideological ]] [[denial]]:

"The refusal of closure is always, at some level, a refusal to face mortality. Our [[fixation ]] on electronic [[games ]] and stories is in part an enactment of this denial of death. They offer us the [[chance ]] to erase [[memory]], to startover, to replay an [[event ]] and try for a different [[resolution]]. In this respect, electronic [[media ]] have the advantage of enacting a deeply comic [[vision ]] of life, a vision of retrievable mistakes and open options."

The final alternative with which cyberspace confronts us is thus: are we necessarily immersed in cyberspace in the mode of the imbecilic [[superego ]] compulsion-to-[[repeat]], in the mode of the immersion into the "undead" perverse universe of cartoons in which there is no death, in which the game goes on indefinitely, or is it possible to [[practice ]] a different modality of relating to cyberspace in which this imbecilic immersion is perturbed by the "[[tragic]]" dimension of the real/impossible?

There are two standard uses of cyberspace [[narrative]]: the linear, single-path maze adventure and the "[[postmodern]]" hypertext undetermined [[form ]] of rhizome fiction. The single-path maze adventure moves the interactor towards a single solution within the [[structure ]] of a win-lose contest (overcoming the enemy, finding the way out…). So, with all possible complications and detours, the overall path is clearly predetermined: all roads lead to one final [[Goal]]. In contrast to it, the hypertext rhizome does not privilege any order of [[reading ]] or [[interpretation]]: there is no ultimate [[overview ]] or "cognitive [[mapping]]," no possibility to unify the dispersed fragments in acoherent encompassing narrative framework, one is irreducibly enticed in conflicting directions — we, the interactors, just have to accept that we are lost in the inconsistent complexity of multiple referrals and connections… The [[paradox ]] is that this ultimate [[helpless ]] confusion, this [[lack ]] of final orientation, far from causing an unbearable [[anxiety]], is oddly reassuring: the very lack of the final point of closure serves as a kind of denial which protects us from confronting the [[trauma ]] of our finitude, of the fact that there our story has to end at some point — there is no ultimate irreversible point, since, in this multiple universe, there are always other paths to explore, alternate realities into which one can take refuge when one seems to reach a deadlock. — So how are we to escape this [[false ]] alternative? Janet Murray refers to the story structure of the "[[violence]]-hub", similar to the famous [[Rashomon ]] predicament: an account of some violent or otherwise [[traumatic ]] incident (a Sunday trip fatality, a [[suicide]], a rape…) is placed at the center of a web of narratives-files that explore it from multiple points of view (perpetrator, [[victim]], [[witness]], survivor, investigator…):

"The proliferation of interconnected files is an attempt to answer the perennial and ultimately unanswerable question of why this incident happened. /…/ These violence-hub stories do not have a single solution like the adventure maze or a refusal of solution like the postmodern stories; instead, they combine a clear [[sense ]] of story structure with a [[multiplicity ]] of meaningful plots. The navigation of the labyrinth is like pacing the floor; a [[physical ]] manifestation of the effort to come to [[terms ]] with the trauma, it represents the [[mind]]'s repeated efforts to keep returning to a shocking event in an effort to absorb it and, finally, get [[past ]] it."

It is easy to perceive the crucial difference between this "retracing of the [[situation ]] from different perspectives" and the rhizomatic hypertext: the endlessly repeated reenactment is referred to the trauma of some [[impossible ]] Real which forever resists its [[symbolization ]] — all these different narrativizations are ultimately just so many failures to cope with this trauma, with the contingent abyssal occurrence of some catastrophic Real like suicide apropos of which no "why" can ever serve as its sufficient explanation. — In a later closer elaboration, Murray even proposes two different versions of presentifying a traumatic suicidal occurrence, apart from such a [[texture ]] of different perspectives. The first is to transpose us into the labyrinth of the subject's mind just prior to his suicide; the structure is here hypertextual and interactive, we are free to choose different options, to pursue the subject's ruminations in a [[multitude ]] of directions — but whichever direction or link we choose, we sooner or later end up with the blank [[screen ]] of the suicide. So, in a way, our very freedom to pursue different venues imitates the tragic self-closure of the subject's mind: no matter how desperately we look for a solution, we are compelled to acknowledge that there is no way out, that the final outcome will always be the same. The second version is the opposite one: we, the interactors, are put in the situation of a kind of "lesser god," having at our disposal a limited [[power ]] of intervention into the life-story of the subject doomed to kill himself — say, we can "rewrite" the subject's past so that his girlfriend would not have [[left ]] him, or that he would not have failed the crucial exam; yet whatever we do, the outcome is the same, so even God himself cannot [[change ]] Destiny… (We find a version of this same closure in a series of alternative [[history ]] sci-fi stories, in which the hero intervenes in the past in order to prevent some catastrophic event to occur, yet the unexpected result of his intervention is an even worse catastrrophy, like Stephen Fry's Making History, in which a [[scientist ]] intervenes in the past making [[Hitler]]'s [[father ]] impotent just prior to Hitler's conception, so that Hitler is not [[born ]] — as one can expect, the result of this intervention is that [[another ]] [[German ]] officer of aristocratic origins takes over the role of Hitler, develops the atomic bomb in [[time ]] and wins the [[World ]] War II.)

In a closer historical [[analysis]], it is crucial not to conceive this narrative procedure of the multiple-perspective encircling of an impossible Real as a direct result of the cyberspace [[technology]]: technology and ideology are inextricably intertwined, ideology is inscribed already in the very technological features of cyberspace. More precisely, what we are dealing with here is yet another example of the well-known phenomenon of the old artistic forms pushing against their own boundaries and using procedures which, at least from our [[retroactive ]] view, seem to point towards a new technology that will be able to serve as a more "[[natural]]" and appropriate "[[objective ]] correlative" to the life-experience the old forms endeavoured to render by means of their "excessive" experimentations. A [[whole ]] series of narrative procedures in the l9th century novels announce not only the standard narrative [[cinema ]] (the intricate use of "flashback" in Emily Bronte or of "cross-cutting" and "close-ups" in Dickens), but sometimes even the modernist cinema (the use of "off-space" in Madame Bovary) — as if a new [[perception ]] of life was already here, but was still struggling to find its proper means of articulation, until it finally found it in cinema. What we have here is thus the [[historicity ]] of a kind of futur anterieur: it is only when cinema was here and developed its standard procedures that we can really grasp the narrative [[logic ]] of Dickens's great novels or of Madame Bovary.

And is it not that today, we are approaching a homologous threshold: a new "life experience" is in the air, a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear centered narrative and renders life as a multiform flow — even and up to the domain of "hard" [[sciences ]] (quantum [[physics ]] and its Multiple Reality interpretation, or the utter [[contingency ]] that provided the spin to the actual evolution of the life on Earth — as Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated in his Wonderful Life, the fossils of Burgess Shale bear witness to how evolution may have taken a wholly different turn) we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and the alternate versions of reality. Either life is experienced as a series of multiple parallel destinies that interact and are crucially affected by meaningless contingent encounters, the points at which one series intersects with and intervenes into another (see Altman's Shortcuts), or different versions/outcomes of the same plot are repeatedly enacted (the "parallel universes" or "alternative possible worlds" scenarios — see [[Kieslowski]]'s Chance, Veronique and Red; even "serious" historians themselves recently produced a volume Virtual History, the reading of the crucial Modeern Age century events, from Cromwell's victory over Stuarts and American independence war to the disintegration of [[Communism]], as hinging on unpredictable and sometimes even improbable chances). This perception of our reality as one of the possible — often even not the most probable — outcomes of an "open" situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our "[[true]]" reality as a [[spectre ]] of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant "linear" narrative forms of our [[literature ]] and cinema — they seem to call for a new artistic medium in which they would not be an eccentric [[excess]], but its "proper" mode of functioning. One can argue that the cyberspace hypertext is this new medium in which this life experience will find its "natural," more appropriate objective correlative, so that, again, it is only with the advent of cyberspace hypertext that we can effectively grasp what Altman and Kieslowski were effectively aiming at.

Are not the ultimate example of this kind of futur anterieur [[Brecht]]'s (in)famous "learning plays," especially his The Measure Taken, often dismissed as the justification of Stalinist purges. Although "learning plays" are usually conceived as an intermediary phenomenon, the passage between Brecht's early carnavalesque plays critical of bourgeois [[society ]] and his late "mature" epic theatre, it is crucial to [[recall ]] that, just before his death, when asked about what part of his works effectively augurs the "drama of the [[future]]," Brecht instantly answered "The Measure Taken." As Brecht emphasized again and again, The Measure Taken is ideally to be performed without the observing [[public]], just with the actors repeatedly playing all the roles and thus "learning" the different subject-positions — do we not have here the [[anticipation ]] of the cyberspace "immersive [[participation]]," in which actors engage in the "educational" collective role-playing. What Brecht was aiming at is the immersive participation which, nonetheless, avoids the trap of emotional [[identification]]: we immerse ourselves at the level of "meaningless," "mechanical" level of what, in Foucauldian terms, one is tempted to call "revolutionary disciplinary micro-practices," while at the same time critically observing our [[behavior]]. Does this not point also to a possible "educational" use of participatory cyberspace role-playing games in which, by way of repeatedly enacting different versions/outcomes of a same basic predicament, one can become aware of the ideological presuppositions and surmises that unknowingly [[guide ]] our daily behavior? Do Brecht's [[three ]] versions of his first great "learning play," Der Jasager, effectively not [[present ]] us with such hypertext / alternate reality experience: in the first version, the boy "freely accept the necessary," subjecting himself to the old custom of being thrown into the valley; in the second version, the boy refuses to die, rationally demonstrating the futility of the old custom; in the [[third ]] version, the boy accepts his death, but on [[rational ]] grounds, not out of the respect for mere [[tradition]]. So when Brecht emphasizes that, by participating in the situation staged by his "learning plays," actors/agents themselves have to change, progressing towards a different [[subjective ]] stance, he effectively points towards what Murray adequately calls "enactment as a transformational experience." In other [[words]], apropos of Brecht's "learning plays," one should ask a naive straightforward question: what, effectively, are we, spectators, supposed to learn from [[them]]? Not some [[corps ]] of positive [[knowledge ]] (in this [[case]], instead of trying to discern the [[Marxist ]] [[idea ]] wrapped in the "dramatic" scenery, it would certainly be better to read directly the [[philosophical ]] [[work ]] itself…), but a certain subjective attitude, that of "saying YES to the inevitable," i.e. the readiness to self-obliteration — in a way, one learns precisely the virtue of accepting the Decision, the Rule, without [[knowing ]] why…

In his much underrated The Lost Highway, [[David Lynch ]] transposes the vertical into the horizontal: [[social ]] reality (the everyday aseptic/impotent modern couple) and its "[[repressed]]" [[fantasmatic ]] [[supplement ]] (the noir universe of [[forbidden ]] masochistic passions and [[Oedipal ]] triangles) are directly posited one next to the other, as two alternate universes. This co-[[existence ]] and mutual envelopment of different universes led some New Age tilted reviewers to claim that The Lost Highway moves at a more fundamental [[psychic ]] level than that of [[unconscious ]] fantasizing of one subject: at a level, closer to the mind of "[[primitive]]" civilizations, of reincarnation, of [[double ]] identities, of being reborn as a different person, etc. Against this "multiple reality" talk, one should insist on the fact that the fantasmatic support of reality is in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent. And this is what Lynch does in The Lost Highway: he "traverses" our late-[[capitalist ]] fantasmatic universe not by way of direct social criticism (depicting the grim [[social reality ]] which serves as its actual foundation), but by staging these [[fantasies ]] openly, without the "secondary perlaboration" which usually masks their inconsistencies. That is to say, the undecidability and ambiguity of what goes on in the [[film]]'s narrative (are the two [[women ]] played by Patricia Arquette the same women? Is the inserted story of Fred's younger reincarnation just Fred's [[hallucination]], imagined to provide a post-festum rationale for his [[murder ]] of his wife whose true [[cause ]] is Fred's hurted [[male ]] pride due to his [[impotence]], his inability to [[satisfy ]] the [[woman]]?) renders the very ambiguity and [[inconsistency ]] of the fantasmatic framework which underlies and sustains our experience of (social) reality. It was often claimed that Lynch throws us, the spectators, open in our face the underlying fantasies of the noir universe — yes, but he simultaneously also renders [[visible ]] the INCONSISTENCY of this fantasmatic support. The two main story-lines in The Lost Highway can thus be [[interpreted ]] as akin to the [[dream]]-logic in which you can both "have your cake and eat it", like in the "Tea or coffee? Yes, please!" [[joke]]: you first dream about eating it, then about having/possessing it, since [[dreams ]] does not know of [[contradiction]]. The dreamer resolves a contradiction by staging two exclusive situations one after the other; in the same way, in The Lost Highway, the woman (the dark Arquette) is destroyed/killed/punished, and the same woman (the blond Arquette) eludes the male grasp and triumphantly disappears…

Or, to put it in yet another way, Lynch confronts us with a universe in which different, mutually exclusive fantasies co-[[exist]]. Peter Hoeg's novel The Woman and the Ape [[stages ]] sex with an [[animal ]] as a [[fantasy ]] of [[full ]] sexual [[relationship]], and it is crucial that this animal is as a rule male: in contrast to the cyborg-sex fantasy, in which the cyborg is as a rule a woman, i.e. in which the fantasy is that of Woman-[[Machine ]] ([[Blade Runner]]), the animal is a male ape copulating with a human woman and fully [[satisfying ]] her. Does this not materialize two standard vulgar notions: that of a woman who wants a strong animal partner, a "beast," not a [[hysterical ]] impotent weakling, and that of a man who wants his [[feminine ]] partner to be a perfectly programmed doll meeting all his wishes, not an effective [[living ]] being. What Lynch does by staging inconsistent fantasies together, at the same level, is, in the terms of Hoag's novel, something akin to confronting us with the unbearable scene of the "[[ideal ]] couple" underlying this novel, the scene of a male ape copulating with a [[female ]] cyborg — the most efficient way to undermine the hold this fantasy exerts over us.

And, perhaps, along the same lines, cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to artistic practice a unique possiblity to [[stage]], to "act out," the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental "sado-masochistic" fantasy that can never be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the [[encounter ]] with the Other Scene that stages the [[foreclosed ]] hard core of the subject's Being. Far from enslaving us to these fantasies and thus turning us into desubjectivized blind puppets, it enables us to treat them in a playful way and thus to adopt towards them a minimum of distance — in short, to achieve what [[Lacan ]] calls la traversee du [[fantasme]], "going-through, [[traversing ]] the fantasy."

The strategy of "[[traversing the fantasy]]" in cyberspace can even be "operationalized" in a much more precise way. Let us for a [[moment ]] [[return ]] to Brecht's three versions of Der Jasager: these three versions seems to exhaust all possible variations of the [[matrix ]] provided by the basic situation (perhaps with the inclusion of the fourth version, in which a boy rejects his death not for rational reasons, as unnecessary, but out of pure egotistic fear — not to mention the [[uncanny ]] fifth version in which the boy "irrationally" endorses his death even when the "old custom" does NOT ask him to do it…). However, already at the level of a discerning "intuitive" reading, we can feel that the three versions are not at the same level: it is as if the first version renders the underlying traumatic core (the "death-[[drive]]" situation of willingly endorsing one's radical self-erasure), and the other two versions in a way react to this trauma, "domesticating" it, displacing/translating it into more acceptable terms, so that, if we were to see just one of these two latter versions, the proper [[psychoanalytic ]] reading of them would justify the claim that these two versions present a [[displaced]]/transformed variation of some more fundamental fantasmatic scenario. Along the same lines, one can easily imagine how, when we are haunted by some fantasmatic scenario, externalizing it in cyberspace enables us to acquire a minimum of distance towards it, i.e. to subject it to a manipulation which will generate other variations of the same matrix — and, once we exhaust all main narrative possibilities, once we are confronted with the closed matrix of all possible permutations of the basic matrix underlying the [[explicit ]] scenario we started with, we are bound to generate also the underlying "[[fundamental fantasy]]" in its undistorted, "non-sublimated," embarrassingly outright form, i.e. not yet displaced, obfuscated by "secondary perlaborations":

"The experience of the underlying fantasy coming to the surface is not merely an exhaustion of narrative possibilities; it is more like the solution to a constructivist puzzle. /…/ When every variation of the situation has been played out, as in the final season of a long-running series, the underlying fantasy comes to the surface. /…/ Robbed of the elaboration of [[sublimation]], the fantasy is too bald and unrealistic, like the [[child ]] carrying the [[mother ]] up to bed. The suppressed fantasy has a tremendous emotional charge, but once its [[energy ]] has saturated the story pattern, it loses its tension."

Is this "losing the tension" of the fundamental fantasy not another way to say that the subject traversed this fantasy? Of course, as [[Freud ]] emphasized apropos of the fundamental fantasy "My father is beating me," underlying the explicit scene "A child is being beaten" that haunts the subject, this fundamental fantasy is a pure retroactive [[construction]], since it was never present to the [[consciousness ]] and then repressed: although it plays a proto-[[transcendental ]] role, providing the ultimate coordinates of the subject's experience of reality, the subject is never able to fully assume/subjectivize in the first person [[singular ]] — precisely as such, it can be generated by the procedure of "mechanical" variation on the explicit fantasies that haunt and [[fascinate ]] the subject. To evoke Freud's other standard example, endeavouring to display how pathological male [[jealousy ]] involves an unacknowledged [[homosexual ]] [[desire ]] for the male partner with whom I [[think ]] my wife is cheating me: we arrive at the underlying [[statement ]] "I LOVE him" by manipulating/permutating the explicit statement of my [[obsession ]] "I HATE him (because I [[love ]] my wife whom he seduced)." — We can see, now, how the purely virtual, non-actual, universe of cyberspace can "touch the Real": the Real we are talking about is not the "raw" pre-symbolic real of "[[nature ]] in itself," but the [[spectral ]] hard core of "psychic reality" itself. When Lacan equates the Real with what Freud calls "psychic reality," this "psychic reality" is not simply the inner psychic life of dreams, wishes, etc., as opposed to the perceived [[external reality]], but the hard core of the primordial "passionate attachments," which are real in the precise sense of resisting the movement of symbolization and/or [[dialectical ]] mediation:

"/…/ the expression '[[psychical ]] reality' itself is not simply synonymous with '[[internal ]] world,' '[[psychological ]] domain,' etc. If taken in the most basic sense that it has for Freud, this expression denotes a nucleus within that domain which is heterogeneous and resistant and which is alone in being truly 'real' as compared with the majority of psychical phenomena."

The "real" upon which cyberspace encroaches is thus the disavowed fantasmatic "passionate attachment," the traumatic scene which not only never took [[place ]] in "real life," but was never even consciously fantasized — and is not the digital universe of cyberspace the ideal medium in which to [[construct ]] such pure semblances which, although they are [[nothing ]] "in themselves," pure presuppositions, provide the coordinates of our entire experience? It may appear that the impossible Real is to be opposed to the virtual domain of symbolic fictions: is the Real not the traumatic kernel of the Same against whose threat we seek refuge in the multitude of virtual symbolic universes? However, our ultimate lesson is that the Real is simultaneously the exact opposite of such a non-virtual hard core: a purely virtual entity, an entity which has no positive [[ontological ]] consistency — its contours can only be discerned as the [[absent ]] cause of the distortions/displacements of the symbolic space.

And it is only in this way, through [[touching ]] the kernel of the Real, that cyberspace can be used to counteract what one is tempted to call the ideological practice of disidentification. That is to say, one should turn around the standard notion of ideology as providing the firm identification to its [[subjects]], constraining them to their "social roles": what if, at a different — but no less irrevocable and structurally necessary — level, ideology is effective precisely by way of constructing a space of false disidentification, of false distance towards the actual coordinates of the subjects's social existence? Is this logic of disidentification not discernible from the most elementary case of "I am not only an American (husband, worker, democrat, gay…), but, beneath all these roles and masks, a human being, a [[complex ]] unique [[personality]]" (where the very distance towards the symbolic feature that determines my social place guarantees the efficiency of this determination), up to the more complex case of cyberspace playing with one's multiple identities? The mystification operative in the perverse "just gaming" of cyberspace is thus double: not only are the games we are playing in it more serious than we tend to assume (is it not that, in the guise of a fiction, of "it's just a game," a subject can articulate and stage — [[sadistic]], "perverse," etc. — features of his symbolic [[identity ]] that he would never be able to admit in his "real" [[intersubjective ]] contacts?), but the opposite also holds, i.e. the much celebrated playing with multiple, shifting personas (freely constructed identities) tends to obfuscate (and thus falsely liberate us from) the constraints of social space in which our existence is caught.

1. See Janet H.Murray, [[Hamlet ]] on the Holodeck, The MIT Press: Cambridge (Ma) 1997, p. 278.

2. As to the [[concept ]] of perversion, see Gilles [[Deleuze]], Coldness and [[Cruelty]], New York: Zone Books 1991.

6. See Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson, [[London]]: MacMillan 1997.

7. See [[Bertolt Brecht]], "The Measure Taken," in The [[Jewish ]] Wife and Other Short Plays, New York: Grove Press 1965. For a detailed reading of The Measure Taken, see Chapter 5 of Slavoj [[Zizek]], Enjoy Your [[Symptom]]!, New York: Routledge 1993.

9. See [[Sigmund Freud]], "A child is being beaten," in Sexuality and the [[Psychology ]] of Love, New York: Touchstone 1997, p. 97-122.

10. See Sigmund Freud, "[[Psychoanalytical ]] [[Notes ]] Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of [[Paranoia]]," in Three [[Case Histories]], New York: Touchstone 1996, p. 139-141.

11. As to this term, see [[Judith ]] [[Butler]], The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford [[University ]] Press 1997.

12. J.Laplanche / J.B.Pontalis, The [[Language ]] of [[Psychoanalysis]], London: Karnac Books 1988, p. 315.

13. I rely here on Peter Pfaller, "Der Ernst der Arbeit ist vom Spiel gelernt," in Work & [[Culture]], Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag 1998, p. 29-36.