This libidinal
wasteland to where our emotions have been jettisoned lies beyond the borders,
beyond answerability, and beyond the mirror.
Here, there is only freedom and risk. The android-human pursuit
outside the margins is therefore more than a ruined vacation, even more
than a high moral, important as it is, that a liberatory technology tied
to consumerism is not only never liberatory, it is dangerous; the chasing/fleeing
that begins in the Symbolic—-in Westworld, Medieval World, and Roman World—-transgresses
the Imaginary, and ultimately approaches the Real, is foremost an antagonism
between voices, a negotiation between ego and ego-ideal, or, in Lacanian
terms, the mediation of a split subject and master signifier (Bracher
112). It is the latter in which I am especially interested, that
is, the master signifier that the “subject has
invested his or her identity in [. . .] identified
with (or against) and that thus constitutes a powerful positive or negative
value” (111). |