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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?

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, 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":

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.

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