Article

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 4(2): 173199 DOI: 10.1177/1473095205054604 www.sagepublications.com

THE PRODUCTION OF DESIROUS S PA C E : M E R E FA N TA S I E S O F T H E UTOPIAN CITY?

Michael Gunder
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract The Lacanian perspective argues that planning, in its discourses and practices, is inherently ideological and the visions and ideals shaping the fantasies of the future city are often reective of the homogenic desires of conicting, but dominant, privileged minorities. Here the democratic process fails because the issues of contention are pre-shaped and technically determined and the rationality deployed only allows a limited range of sensible, i.e. preframed, dreams of what constitutes the good city. This article draws on both Lacan and Lefebvre to explore the dichotomy between seeking a common harmony of social vision while at the same time avoiding any exclusion of cultural and related difference in lived space. Keywords agonism, ethics, ideology, Lacan, Lefebvre

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Introduction
We need a constructive imagination to help us create the ctive world of our dreams, of dreams worth struggling for. (Friedmann, 2002: 103)

Recent articles and monographs in the theory and case study literature have explored planning from a Lacanian perspective (Allmendinger and Gunder, 2005; Gunder, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Gunder and Hillier, 2004; Hillier, 2002, 2003; Hillier and Gunder, 2005). They posit that urban policy formulation and related planning processes are valued by society because they provide a mechanism for constructing and propagating shared public visions, or dreams, as to what constitutes a harmonious and secure future, at least for the built and related socio-economic environment (Gunder, 2003b). To express this perspective in a more conventional manner, planning might be said to be the use of reason and understanding to reduce collective uncertainty about the future (Hoch, 1994: 15). Regardless of articulation, planning aids the illusion that these dreams are being achieved through the supplement of development assessment and related implementation processes (Hillier and Gunder, 2005). Yet, this policy process has a cost that this article wishes to explore. It does so in the hope that its arguments may inuence the reader to consider the value of a Lacanian perspective. Specically, the article will explore the implications of Lacans (1988a, 2002) thinking as to what resides outside of symbolic language and image, what he called the Real. With some help from Lefebvres (1991, 1996, 2003) later works on the urban problematic, the article will consider the implication that this Lacanian concept may have for reconsidering plannings roles of social coordination and guidance in creating our future cities and regions. Both Lefebvres and the Lacanian perspective, as well as those of others, argue that planning is inherently ideological in its discourses and practices, so that the visions and ideals shaping the fantasies of the future city are often reective of the homogenic desires of conicting, but dominant, privileged minorities (Flyvbjerg, 1998a, 1998b; Gunder, 2003a, 2003b; Gunder and Mouat, 2002; Yiftachel, 1998, 2002). These are minorities with not just necessarily access to economic, but also social and cultural, capital (Howe and Langdon, 2002: 21618). They may include networks of business, intellectual and cultural elites, as well as government functionaries, including policy planners, who jointly seek and shape a common vision as to what the general interest should be (Jessop, 1998, 2000: 335). Fundamentally, in a Lacanian sense, all actors strive to achieve a vision that provides them with an illusion of security and harmony (Stavrakakis, 1999). This is accomplished for the dominant hegemonic bloc, or group(s), by rst articulating that something is missing in the achievement of the good city. The dominant bloc then imposes its particular desired solution as the resolution of this lack as if their dreams are universal throughout

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society, i.e. their views are the public interest (Laclau, 1996; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Yet, these desires are often at odds with those of other diverse, perhaps less articulate or empowered, societal groups, who may actually constitute, in aggregate, the majority of urban populations (Gunder, 2003b). Often this process is depoliticized because the identied lack is technically dened, as is its resolution. Rhetorical tropes claiming legitimacy of rationality, value neutrality, expertise and science are often deployed to advance these hegemonic desires (Gunder, 2003b, 2004; Lefebvre, 2003; Sandercock, 2004: 134). Here the democratic process fails because the privileged issues of contention are pre-shaped by unquestioned cultural imperatives and technically determined. The rationality deployed in this societal guidance only allows a limited range of sensible, i.e. preframed, dreams, or options, of what constitutes the sustainable, healthy, competitive, or perhaps creative city as good within the context of an increasingly globally competitive capitalist world (Hansen et al., 2001; McGuirk, 2004; Stahre, 2004).
The space of political universality is one of ideological struggle. For a hegemonic group to establish itself at the expense of others, it needs to colonize this space in its own interests. The political universal is thus usually the exact opposite of what one might take it to be: not an abstraction from a set of particulars, but the manifestation of the express interests of a particular group. (Kay, 2003: 151)

In the contemporary situation, planning policy formulation facilitated by the social constructs called democratic civil society and private/public partnerships of governance, functions as a blunt Orwellian instrument in this process of hegemonic colonization that shapes the acceptable parameters of what should constitute the future good city (Goonewardena and Rankin, 2004: 131; Jessop, 1998, 2000; McGuirk, 2004; Miraftab, 2004). Planning discourses and documentation legitimate prevailing tropes, academic or popular, as to what should constitute and how we should create the good space as dened by the values of the prevailing bloc or hegemonic group (Gunder, 2003b). Take, for example, Aucklands (New Zealand) Regional Growth Forum. The Forum comprises one elected representative from each of the Regions seven local councils and three from the Auckland Regional Council, is given technical support by their staffs, and is in partnership with central government agencies, the Chamber of Commerce and other business and development interests (Auckland Regional Growth Forum [ARGF], 1999: 54). The role of the Forum was rst to develop and now implement a growth strategy for Auckland through to 2050. In formulating the Strategy issues of transport congestion, a lack of sustainability and perceived urban sprawl were addressed so as to ensure that growth is accommodated in a way that meets the best interests of the inhabitants of the Auckland region (ARGF,

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1999: 2). The strategy is premised on urban containment and promoting compact urban environments through intensive nodal development along transit corridors, consistent with the smart growth planning paradigm. In compiling the Strategy a market perspective to this process was considered vital by the planners involved; consequently, interviews were conducted with representatives of 21 major development companies on issues of urban boundary expansion versus in-ll housing and urban intensication (Gunder, 2003a: 2756). Gunder (2003a: 276) continued that there was no record of consultation or similar meetings with representatives of the Regions other 1.1 million residents. That is, Aucklands housing consumers. For the Forum, the only housing market perspectives needing consideration appear to be those of its major commercial developers and land-bank property holders. The Strategy appears to seek only what is best for them. This author suggests that this process of hegemonic imposition is not unique to Auckland; rather it tends to represent the norm of what is perceived by many as good planning process. Nor is this type of critique only put forward from a Lacanian perspective (see Allmendinger and Gunder, 2005). Yet, this article hopes to demonstrate how Lacanian insight can provide new critical perspectives of understanding, as well as to begin to lay potential openings, or scope, to displace this hegemonic tendency for the imposition of one dominant set of transcendent ideals as to what constitutes the good city and region. This article seeks to illustrate how Lacan and his adherents can lend further insight into understanding how this and similar mechanisms of hegemonic social coordination occur in our complex and largely globally connected societies. It seeks to explore how planning and its related actors formulate their particular perspectives and then implement their resolution as urban policies. However, in contrast to the arguments of multiculturalism put forward by postmodernist proponents, such as Leonie Sandercock (2003, 2004), this article will suggest that societal fantasies for a safe and secure inclusive city premised on addressing the diverse desires of an entire population, not just those of the hegemonic minority, are a utopian impossibility. The article will argue that this is a consequence of what Lacan (1988a, 2002) terms the Real. This registry of negative noumena resides beyond our abilities for symbolic articulation or even that of our conscious imagination and, at best, resides in our unconscious realms of affect and drive. Yet, this author suggests the Real is why our plans and dreams so often fail and, further, that an understanding of this Lacanian concept will make us better informed and effective planners. To help in the understanding of the Lacanian Real and its related implications for urban ideology and planning, the article will draw on the later writings of Henri Lefebvre (1991, 1996, 2003).1 The article will suggest that Lacans registries of the symbolic, imagination and the Real were a signicant inuence on Lefebvres thinking and his conceptualization of space and the urban problematic (Blum and Nast, 1996, 2000; Hillier and Gunder, 2003:

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229).2 The article will draw on aspects of their perspectives to provide an understanding of urban ideology and the role of planning in addressing and resolving issues of the urban problematic. After illustrating the similarities between some of Lacan and Lefebvres conceptual insights, the subsequent section will then explore the dichotomy between that of seeking a common harmony of social vision while at the same time avoiding any constraint of cultural and related difference. It will consider the role that enjoyment and fantasy play in addressing this contradiction under the prevalent cultural imperative of global capitalism. The article will draw on the work of Lacan and his contemporary followers to illustrate the mechanisms at work in the shaping of our dominant ideological belief sets; the role planning plays in this societal guidance; and, how critical Lacanian insight can be an aid to transgressing, exposing, and deating adverse ideological power. The latter part of this article will argue the impossibility of planning to consolidate the range of multiple different desires and conicting ideological fantasies necessary to create what for this author would be the good utopian city of vibrancy and diverse inclusion. In response to this impossibility, the article will suggest that there is a requirement for a mode of planning that does not seek one dominant consensus, but rather actively promotes a planning related politics beyond that of liberal civil society. This is a proposed planning ethos predicated on affable but agonistic dis-sensus (Ziarek, 2001). This is a call for agonistic pluralism initially brought by Mouffe (1999, 2000) in the political studies literature and recently proposed in the planning theory literature by Gunder (2003a), Hillier (2003) and Plger (2004). This is an agonistic planning ethos we are yet to develop (Plger, 2004: 88), which might constitute an approach to planning that is capable of accommodating conict and emotion. This author suggests that Lacanian insight may provide understanding for such an approach as it provides an ethos for facilitating an agonistic planning process that has the potential to make possible not a good city of allinclusive difference, but a mechanism to encourage the affable and productive confrontation of diverse difference within urban debate. This is a proposed ethos that acknowledges power and desire so that we may develop city changing methods that begin to open the possibilities for a practice utopia, a city politics of possibility and hope (Sandercock, 2003: 2). This ethos attempts to transcend modernist conceptualizations of good and evil while going beyond postmodern nihilism to allow an opening for new potentials.

The similarities in Lacans and Lefebvres thought

Lacan (1988a, 1988b, 2002) and Lefebvre (1991: 407, 1996, 2003), drawing on Freud, both argued that western Cartesian thought had negated and denied the biological body residing in space as a valid repertory of non-formal knowledge outside of discourse. Lacans (1989, 2002) Freudian

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perspective of the unconscious was at odds with the Cartesian worldview of the rational cognitive actor. Lacanian subjects are split between a conscious sense of self, drawing on symbolic and imaginary knowledges of the world as to how they are expected to act, and their unconscious desires and drives generated by affect and trauma that fundamentally seek a repetition of the impossibility of the subjects primordial state of maternal bliss. Similarly, Lefebvres (1996: 108) Marxist perspective of everyday life, inuenced by Freud, was at odds with the ideological consequences produced and reinforced by this instrumentalist Cartesian worldview that negated daily life, immediate relations, the unconscious of the urban, what is little said and even less written. For Lefebvre (2003), the Cartesian rationalist worldview is exemplied by modernist planning and related urban policy and design specialists. Plannings instrumental rationalism negated all that was not readily capable of broad-brush quantication in social life, particularly the everyday materialized practices that constitute social reality in the built environment. As Lefebvre (2003: 1823) observed even before the implementation of GIS and three-dimensional cyber-space representations of urban environments:
the urbanist who composes a block plan lookdown on their objects, building and neighborhoods, from above and afar. These designers and draftsmen move within a space of paper and ink. Only after this nearly complete reduction of the everyday do they return to the scale of lived experience. They are convinced they have captured it even though they carry out their plans and projects within a second-order abstraction. Theyve shifted from lived experience to the abstract, projecting this abstraction back into lived experience . . . The technicians and specialists who act are unaware that their so-called objective space is in fact ideologic and repressive. (Lefebvre, 2003: 1823)

Or as Lacan (1994: 108) phrases it in regard to the drafting of pictures and diagrams that illustrate what is desired, wanted, or ought to be: reality appears only as marginal and peripheral to the lines and points of focus to that which is desired and wanted of the Other. For the planner, the planning map, or computer representation, simplies and illustrates what is wanted of the planned public. Yet, it abstracts, misrepresents and overtly simplies the complexity of social reality in built space and consequently fails, particularly without signicant textual elaboration (Gunder and Hillier, 2004: 222). Lacan (1988a, 2002) purports that the human subject conceives of the world and subjects within it via three inter-related registries. These are the imaginary, symbolic and the Real, with the latter residing outside of image or signication. The Real precedes language, and it is best understood as that which has not been symbolized, remains to be symbolized, or even resists symbolization; and it may perfectly well exist alongside and in spite of a speakers considerable linguistic capabilities (Fink, 1995: 25). The Real will forever exist despite the comprehensiveness of the symbolic. The Real

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is a rift, or void, where nothing can be said or dened and it resides as a logic of constitutive lack a traumatic kernel or surplus which escapes signication (Newman, 2001: 147). It is an un-denable unthought outside of language, imagination and signication, an unattainable and un-denable void that we desire to ll but cannot (Gunder, 2003a: 296). The ultimate experience of the Real is not that of reality which shatters illusions, but that of an illusion which irrationally persists against the pressure of reality, which does not give way to reality (Zizek, 2001: 166). For Lacan the Real remains the same in all possible universes (of observa tion) (Zizek, 1999a: 78, 1999b). It just resides outside of the language and conscious fantasies that the symbolic and imaginary are capable of constituting. The Real is why we cannot clearly articulate and dene our ideals or specic qualitative states, such as those signied by the label aesthetics, and above all what constitutes the good (Gunder, 2003a). The Real is why something is always lacking in our articulations. We can never say exactly what is or what we desire comprehensively ought to be. Here, what emerges via distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the Real that is, the trauma around which social reality is structured (Zizek, 1999a: 79). Yet the Real is not the Beyond of reality, but its own blind spot or disfunction that is to say, the real is the stumbling block on account of which reality does not fully coincide with itself (Zupancic, 2003: 80). Similarly, for Lefebvre (1991: 389, 489) the world and space itself are composed of a similar triple schema of the perceived, conceived and lived that can be historicized via dialectical terminology into three evolutional spatialities he calls natural, absolute and abstract (Blum and Nast, 1996). The rst is the space that is seen, generated and used the registry of Lacans image(nary). The second is a space of symbolic knowledge and rationality, the instrumental space of social engineers and urban planners the registry of Lacans symbolic. The third space is the evolving qualitative space of less formal and local knowledges of daily existence, which resist clear articulation (Elden, 2004: 190). The scientic, or symbolic, response of urban planners to this third abstract space of being is to negate it. For Lefebvre, lived space is an elusive space, so elusive in fact that thought and conception usually seek to appropriate it and dominate it, but they cannot, for theres more there there (Merrield, 2000: 174):
The qualitative is worn down. Anything that cannot be quantied is eliminated. The generalized terrorism of the quantiable accentuates the efciency of repressive space, amplies it without fear and without reproach, all the more so because of its self-justifying nature (ideo-logic), its apparent scienticity. In this situation, since the quantitative is never seriously questioned, [there is] no scope for political action . . . urbanism reects this overall situation and plays an active role in applying ideo-logic and political pressure. (Lefebvre, 2003: 1856)

Lefebvres lived space that lacks quantication should not be argued to

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be Lacans (1998, 2002) Real that resides in the human subject and the material spatial world, yet is incapable of symbolization. Although this author follows Blum and Nast (1996, 2000) in suggesting that Lacans conceptualization of the Real may well have inuenced Lefebvres notion of lived space.3 Rather it perhaps comes close to what Lacan refers to as knowledge in the real (Zizek, 2002b: 185). These are unsymbolic bodily knowledges of how to unconsciously do lifes many daily activities such as walking, driving a car, or passing time with a neighbour. These are habits and techniques of the self that we just do in our daily habitus of lived space (Burkitt, 2002; Howe and Langdon, 2002). While it can never fully contain the Lacanian Real, natural science seeks to suppress this boundary, this lack, by unsuccessfully attempting to cover over the Real with knowledge of the material world for this open boundary, mobile and real, between knowledge and the real, is what Lacan calls the subject of science (Morel, 2000: 68). Yet natural science is never complete knowledge, it fails in its striving for complete articulation of the material world. Something always remains unsaid. There always remains a lack or void in knowledge. To totally ll this void and create a complete body of knowledge is modern sciences holy grail; yet, natural science can never achieve this absolute task (Verhaeghe, 2002: 125). Applying social science to human subjects fails even more so than natural science in the attainment of complete knowledge. Unlike that of the material world, the Real of the human subject is untouchable. It is just not knowable as it resides in our unconscious. It is ltered, framed by fantasy, as though by a window that at best, through psychoanalysis, can be traversed to give a few degrees more freedom (Morel, 2000: 74). The Real of the unconscious the real of the human subject which causes symptoms and discontent in civilization is an entirely different unknowable Real to the noumenon of the material world (Loose, 2002: 2812). The human subjects Real is the intrinsic division of reality itself (Zupancic, 2003: 80). This is where each subjects desire for often ideal and unobtainable objects drawn to them by what Lacan calls petit object a and then consequently shocked by exposure to the Real (Zizek, 1989: 183) drives and sustains this gap or division between the subject and reality. Consequently, to cover over this void induced by the Real, the subject is lured and deluded into ideological illusion within the imagined and symbolic realms of daily life in social reality (Zupancic, 2003: 80). This is a position not inconsistent with that of Lefebvre. Consider the following in relations to Lacans Real and the products it produces in space. Yet the unknowable Thing constituting the Real can only be articulated in the symbolic language and text which always fails to conceptualize this unexplainable void, or lack.
This world of images and signs, this tombstone of the world (Mundus est immundus) is situated at the edges of what exists, between the shadows and the

Gunder Production of desirous space light, between the conceived (abstraction) and the perceived (the readable/visible). Between the real and unreal. Always in the interstices, in the cracks. Between directly lived experience and thought . . . The world of signs passes itself off as a true world . . . [yet] this is a fraudulent world, indeed the most deceptive of all worlds . . . The world of images and signs exercises a fascination, skirts or submerges problems, and diverts attention from the real i.e. from the possible. While occupying space, it also signies space, submitting a mental and therefore abstract space for spatial practice . . . Differences are replaced by differential signs, so that produced differences are supplanted in advance by differences which are induced and reduced to signs. (Lefebvre, 1991: 389)

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Both Lacan and Lefebvre would agree that science and scientic method fails in its ability to articulate the qualitative components of everyday human life. Further, the Lacanian position goes somewhat further than Lefebvre in suggesting that in attempting to address this unknowable Real we all construct ideological fantasies to paper over this lack of ability to articulate and know this noumenon (Stavrakakis, 1999; Zizek, 1999a). For, as even Lefebvre (2003: 67) asserts, sooner or later radical critique reveals the presence of an ideology in every model and possibly in scienticity itself. Lacanian theory argues that our very social reality, including space itself, and social interaction is constituted and composed of ideological fantasy constructs, misrecognitions and misunderstandings (Zizek, 1997). Something is always missing, lacking, not right. We attempt to overcome this void through acquiring and applying knowledge, but never quite succeed (Fink, 2004; Lacan, 1998). Hence, we constantly strive to construct new fantasies to cover over this lack. Fundamentally, Lacan (2002) points out that we cannot even fully know or articulate our own desires, let alone understand the desires of the Other. Yet it is the desire of an Other that we vitally seek and wish to please in our fundamental unconscious drive to return to our original desire for primordial maternal completeness (Dor, 1998; Lacan, 1998, 2002). This is a sense of safety and security that, if it ever existed, we lost as we gained our place in culture and the symbolic world (Hillier and Gunder, 2005). It is the aggregate of these Others that constitutes society and our social reality. This is in Lacanian jargon: the big Other. Yet this big Other is constituted on misrecognition, misunderstanding and ideological constructs of contradicting social logics. Further, planning, as a human discipline of governmentality, plays a signicant role in shaping the creation of this social reality of misrecognition and desire, particularly, as it relates to wants and needs and, especially, desire (Gunder, 2003a, 2003b). As Lefebvre (2003) acknowledges:
The logic of space subjected to the limitations of growth, the logic of urbanism, of political space, and housing clash and sometimes break apart when they come into contact . . . Social logics are located at different levels; there are cracks and

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The following section will suggest that this desire, expressed in the seeking of enjoyment via fullling our wants and needs against the constraint of nite resources, constitutes and underwrites the now dominant worldview, or fantasy, of the cornucopia of global capitalism. Lefebvre describes capitalist globalization as an intensely contradictory integration, fragmentation, polarisation and redifferentiation of super-imposed social spaces (Brenner, 2000: 361). Since Lefebvres (1991) consideration of the urban problematic in relationship to that of the world market, the seeking of urban and/or regional competitiveness under globalization has become a dominant cultural imperative (Jessop, 2000; McGuirk, 2004). It is the only game remaining in town (Zizek and Daly, 2004: 14652). This is a global fantasy that negates the role of democratic participation and regulation in its competitive worldwide eld of play. Globalization is perceived as not requiring democratic legitimization due to its universality and complexity (Zizek and Daly, 2004: 14652). In this discourse who needs democratic participation in the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) or other global economic steering organizations, impartial bodies exempt from democratic control, provided one can seek to achieve satisfaction and enjoyment (Zizek, 2004b: 59)! As a consequence, this imperative to enjoy and partake in the mistaken notion of a global cornucopia manifests itself in symptoms of pernicious planning processes and ideological outcomes at the national and local levels.

You will enjoy, not contest!

Desire as driven and experienced in the loss or gaining of enjoyment (jouis sance) is central to Lacanian theory (Blum and Nast, 2000: 199; Zizek, 1989, 1999a). Jouissance is what illustrates any object standing between the Real and ourselves so that that object can catch our interest and delude us with its seemingly compelling signicance and impose its ideological imperatives upon us (Kay, 2003: 54). Contrary to the classical denition of ideology where illusion is but distorted knowledge, for Lacan, ideology is not an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself so that our ideological beliefs are materialized in all our social actions within society (Zizek, 1989: 33). Something catches our interest as a signicant political or related master signier of ideological belief and identication when it approaches what Lacan (1992) calls the Thing that acts as a pressure point of the Real against the imaginary/symbolic registries. The pressure of the Real is sensed and expressed as an object or concept that has the effect of a transcendental illumination or incarnation of impossible jouissance that is utterly

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compelling, say, the desire for a particular solution, or even utopian ideal, that addresses a known problem, or lack, in the urban fabric (Zizek, 1989: 132). It is sublime, it overwhelms, yet cannot be fully envisaged due to its intensity, hence Zizeks (1989) title: The Sublime Object of Ideology. Jouissance is one of the four structuring elements of social discourse,4 or social interactions, links and relationships, where synchronic language meets diachronic speech to evoke an effect on the Other (Lacan, 2004: 3). Zupancic (2004) associates Lacans (2004) theory of the Four Discourses (see Gunder, 2003a, 2004; Hillier and Gunder, 2005) with the Marxian theory of commodication and surplus-value via Lacans concept of surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir). Lacan (2004: 111) contends that surplusvalue and surplus-enjoyment are historically equivalent, especially in the situation of the Masters injunction of No! in the emerging early phase of Calvinistic repressive capitalism. In contrast to the historical authority and rationality of the Masters repressive command, late capitalism is structured under a rationality of the university or bureaucracy. Now knowledge and technology, not the Masters injunction, become agency expressing a logic of governmentality and expertise (including that of planning) that does not prohibit enjoyment, but rather channels jouissance in ways that produces a bio-politics (after Foucault) of an alienated subject that has no option, but to enjoy and be satised (Hillier and Gunder, 2005; McGowan, 2004; Zizek, 2004b; Zupancic, 2004). In this regard, a nation exists only as long as its specic enjoyment continues to be materialised in a set of social practices and submitted through national myths [or fantasies] that structure these practices (Zizek, 1993: 202). This is taken further by the barely challenged international hegemonic discourse of global capitalization and the fantasies it induces in externally structuring the nation states very enjoyment (Stavrakakis, 2003a: 63; Zizek, 2004b: 61). Even the ruling British Labour government, with its Third Way, in contrast to its tradition of socialism, has placed economic globalisation as the most signicant factor in shaping Labour Party thinking since the early 1990s (Allmendinger, 2003: 326). As McGowan (2004) observes:
we trust fully in the staying power of global capitalism. The alternatives, which once seemed to be just around the corner, have become unimaginable today. The universe of global capitalism is, or so we think, here to stay, and we best not do anything to risk our status within it. Hence, we pledge our allegiance to it, and we put our trust in it. This is the fundamental mode of contemporary obedience to authority. Only by coming to understand this obedience to the dictates of global capitalism as obedience can we hope to break out of it. Global capitalism seems an unsurpassable horizon simply because we have not properly recognized our own investment in sustaining it. We see it as unsurpassable because we dont want to lose it and the imaginary satisfaction that it provides. (McGowan, 2004: 193)

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Illusion resides under this global fantasy of capital where the basic feature of this dominant cultural imperative no longer operates on the level of ideals and identications, but directly on the level of regulating jouissance (Zizek, 2004b: 113). Even in Lefebvres day, this was a capitalism where surplus-value was synonymous with surplus-enjoyment supporting the injunction: you must enjoy!. In this light, the role of planning is to facilitate enjoyment by sustainably providing the correct space healthy, competitive, t and attractive where enjoyment can be effectively materialized and maximized under the imperative of global capitalism. Consequently:
urbanism is nothing more than an ideology that claims to be either art or technology or science, depending on the context. This ideology pretends to be straightforward, yet it obfuscates, harbours things unsaid: which it covers, which it contains, as a form of will tending towards efciency. Urbanism is doubly fetishistic. First, it implies the fetishism of satisfaction. What about vested interests? They must be satised, and therefore their needs must be understood and catered to, unchanged . . . Second, it implies the fetishism of space. Space is creation. Whoever creates space creates whatever it is that lls space. The place engenders the thing and the good place engenders good things. (Lefebvre, 2003: 159)

This is exacerbated further in the current milieu of consumerist post-democracy personied by the master signier: global capitalism. Post-democracy is founded on an attempt to exclude the political awareness of lack and negativity from the political domain, leading to a political order which retains the token institutions of liberal democracy but neutralizes the centrality of political antagonism (Stavrakakis, 2003a: 59). In response to the dominant logic of global competitiveness, the technocrats and experts including planners, shape, contextualize and implement public policy in the interest of the dominant hegemonic bloc. This is constructed under the logics and knowledges of university discourses (see Gunder, 2004), with an objective to remove existing or potential urban blight, dis-ease and dysfunction detracting from local enjoyment and global competitiveness (Gunder, 2005; McGuirk, 2004). Of course, the hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debate as to what constitutes desired enjoyment and what is lacking in urban competitiveness. In turn, this denes what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of planning remedy. This is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular dened type of enjoyment, or competitiveness, is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body.
Planners, programmers, and users want solutions. For what? To make people happy. To order them to be happy. It is a strange way of interpreting happiness. The science of the urban phenomenon cannot respond to these demands without the risk of validating external restrictions imposed by ideology and power. (Lefebvre, 2003: 141)

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Yet this lack and its resolution are more often technical in nature, rather than political. As a consequence, the technocrats in partnership with their dominant stakeholders can ensure the impression of happiness for the many, while, not to mention, achieving the stakeholders specic interests.

Material happiness for all but that evil other

Lacanian theory suggests that a subjects jouissance is given freest rein when an act of desire contains a dimension of transgression. It is the little sin that gives the most pleasure; it is the prohibition as such which elevates a common everyday object into an object of desire (Zizek, 2004b: 177). The bio-politics of contemporary planning are predicated on enjoyment you will enjoy! not the prior duality of repression/freedom of the Weberian capitalist masters injunction: No you cannot do that!. The achievements of traditional utopian goals were ones of freedom to act against the repression of the negative injunction. Contemporary injunctions are to enjoy or at least to sustain our happiness regardless of what we actually desire. Happiness is not a class of truth, but one of an ontological class of being where:
happiness relies on the subjects inability or unreadiness fully to confront the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desires. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we ofcially desire. Happiness is thus hypocritical: it is the happiness dreaming about things we do not really want. (Zizek, 2002a: 5960)

Planning continues to succeed because it underpins the primal desire of most subjects in society for a conict-free, safe and assured happy future, even if it can only deliver this as a fantasy-scenario of material happiness, rather than as an impossible reality that actually sates all desires (Gunder, 2003a, 2003b). This is a fantasy predicated on an obedience to a shallow consumptive quantitative imperative to be materially happy, which often occurs at the expense of our actual qualitative psychic desires. In our contemporary global society the moral law is no longer the imperative that acts as a limitation, stopping us from enjoying too much. Instead, the cultural imperative, the now dominant moral Law itself, in its injunction for us to enjoy becomes the ultimate transgression should one wish to pursue a life of moderation (Zizek, 2004b: 174). Further, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social world can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder . . . a certain particularity which cannot be assimilated, but instead must be

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eliminated (Stavrakakis, 1999: 108). This is the stranger, the Other that is not us that can act as the scapegoat to be stigmatised as the one who is blamed for our lack, the Evil force that stole our precious jouissance and stopped the fantasy from achieving its utopian vision (Stavrakakis, 2003a: 58). Even our complex contemporary societies rely on the basic divide between included and excluded (Zizek, 2004b: 86). Zizek (2004b: 86) continues: in any society there is a multitude within the system and a multitude of those excluded, and simply to encompass them both within the scope of the same notion amounts to the same obscenity as equating starvation with dieting. It is continually this Other that permits the delusion of harmony in our identity dening groups and for this to transpire we require an Other, external to the group for the group to dene itself. We require a disparity, or gap, to allocate a degree of difference to an Other to conceptualize the group identication as who we are not and on this Other we can attribute all the signs of disharmony that jeopardize our shared fantasy (Zizek, 1997: 5). Difference is essential to complete our fantasy of harmony, but only by providing the sacricial Other on which we can blame the disappointment of the fantasy to deliver (Zizek, 2004a: 1589). In this light, planning,as part of the apparatus of the modern state, makes its own imprint, has its own powers for good and evil (Sandercock, 2004: 134). This is especially so as planning identies, or at least names and legitimizes, what constitutes an urban pathology that detracts from what is desirous of the globally competitive city. Planning then sets out to remedy this lack or deciency. Civil society, i.e. the public stage, and media of information dissemination are central to this process. Of course, our media are not ideologically neutral. As a consequence, media access for putting forth particular tropes of desire constitutes a central component of social, as well as economic, capital. This is well documented by Flyvbjerg (1998a) where the Aalborg Chamber of Commerce controlled the editorial content of the local newspaper. This argument is central to that of Chomskys (2003) multinational corporate steering of mass media content in the, so-called, free press. This is where the mass media are free to publish almost anything, provided, of course, they do not alienate their corporate clients who provide their majority of income and prots via their advertising payments. Gunder (2003b) documented how planning actors and their afliated partners gained public agreement via the rhetorical use of culturally shared master signiers and their related metonymies and metaphors. Here each signier was linked to associations in the publics unconscious that induced a conscious expression of desire for a particular set of values or specic consequential actions. Effective deployment of rhetorical tropes can seduce subjects to relinquish previous desires (including identications and embrace new ones) or alternatively, to invest all the more completely in old ones (Bracher, 1993: 512). For example, does anyone wish to live in a

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city that is losing enjoyment to other locations because it lacks the tness to compete?
In Lacan, the construction of reality is continuous with the eld of desire. Desire and reality are intimately connected . . . The nature of their link can only be revealed in fantasy . . . when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. (Stavrakakis, 1999: 623)

This is where, from a Lacanian outlook, by accepting rationalization as the means to full a desire for completeness via the utilization of falsifying words man does not adapt himself to reality; he adapts reality to himself (Roudinesco, 1997: 114). Ideological fantasies as to what constitutes an enjoyable and satisfying city are deployed to hide the dysfunctions and unpredictabilities that are ubiquitous throughout all social spheres, particularly for those lacking in sufcient capital to offset adversity. Social reality is sustained by the as if, the fantasy of what things are like (Dean, 2001: 627). Rationalization, or realrationalitt as Flyvbjerg (1998a) calls it, exists between the everyday activities of social life and the held universal ideals or values of what ought to be, even if it is not so, in social reality. The belief that planning is not political, but technical allows the myths of objectivity, value neutrality, and technical reason to persist, and thereby fosters a certain delusion about planning practice (Sandercock, 2004: 134). Sandercock (2004: 134) continues: planning helps to redene political debate, producing new sources of power and legitimacy, changing the force eld in which we operate. Lefebvre suggests that planning is based on a strategy of mixing scienticity and rationality with ideology. Here, as elsewhere, scienticity is an ideology, an excrescence grafted onto real, but fragmentary, knowledge (Lefebvre, 2003: 166). In particular, Lefebvre argues that quantitative expertise including the technology of urban planning is largely a myth. This is because planning administrators:
and bad administrators at that, rarely use much actual technology. However, they have the ability to persuade the people as a whole that because these are technological decisions they should be accepted. In other words, a large part of Lefebvres criticism [of planners] is not that technocrats are technocrats, but that they are precisely the opposite. Technology should be put to the service of everyday life, of social life rather than being precisely the condition of its suppression and control. Urbanism, for example, is an ideology that operates under the cover of this myth of technology. (Elden, 2004: 145)

Social reality can only exist in the symbolic and imaginary registries as it is composed, that is constructed, as a result of a certain historically specic set of discursive practices and power mechanisms (Zizek, 2001: 66). Flyvbjerg (1998a) illustrates this well in his expos of the Aalborg Chamber

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of Commerces intervention in that citys planning process. Here this grouping of dominant business people is given hegemonic voice to determine what constitutes acceptable transportation modes and spatial development in Aalborgs town centre. In this example the planners technical facts, by themselves, produced the weaker argument. This was perhaps because the dissemination of these facts and their implications for planning action were ineffectively articulated to the public, if at all, via the local information media controlled by the Chamber of Commerce. In contrast, in Sydney, McGuirk (2004) documented how planners actively participated in and facilitated the dominant network of actors successfully pushing for a series of local, regional and national policies supporting Sydneys global competitiveness. It appeared to be of little consequence that these policies induced adverse effects on the rest of the country, not to mention many of Sydneys residents. Not dissimilarly, the Auckland case cited in the introduction illustrates how the planners actively consulted the dominant commercial stakeholders in developing their growth strategy, yet failed to have direct consultation with the Regions actual residents (ARGF, 1999; Gunder, 2003a). Planners and their governance forum of dominant stakeholders appeared to inherently know what is in the best interests of their regions residents.

Planning as agonistic ethics

Notwithstanding the full rendering of the antagonisms which traverse our society, we indulge in the notion of society as an organic whole, kept together by forces of solidarity and co-operation (Zizek, 1997: 6). Planning is one such instrument that shapes and justies the governing ideals of utopian desire and in this sphere, the fantasmatic ideal of harmony is dominant (Stavrakakis, 1999: 110). The subtle and not so subtle application of power denes truth, reason and rationality and this particularly comprises the deployment of power in our planning and related practices (Flyvbjerg, 1998a). Moreover, a Lacanian line of reasoning about knowledge and truth indicates that the constituting components of these induced fantasies of truth and rationality are mediated on the wants and needs of actors with the capacity to inict their desires and wants on the Other and, as if, these desires belong to those who have been imposed on. This is via assertions of unquestionable truth, which are often supported and empowered by selected distorted knowledge, practices and language put forward by their ideological supporters, employed professional experts and controlled media. Further, in this light traditional Kantian and related enlightenment ethics is nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology that tries to pass off its own commandments as authentic, spontaneous, and honorable inclinations of the subject (Zupancic, 1998: 41).

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In contrast to traditional ethics, Lacans (1992) theorizing may provide an alternative way to develop new values beyond those already constituted by society as traditional morals of good or evil shaping acceptable behaviours. Traditional ethics is predicated on a reality principle as to what is possible without transgression in social reality. As Zupancic (2003: 77) observes, this reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical factor or (biological, economic . . .) necessity. This beyond good or evil does not have to lead to postmodern nihilism, rather Lacan lays a groundwork for an ethics of the Real, where through acknowledgement of this Real that we cannot know or articulate we can establish new truths in relationship to the good (Stavrakakis, 2003b; Zupancic, 2000, 2003). This is through a mechanism of ethical sublimation where we create a certain space, scene, or stage that enables us to value something that is situated beyond the reality principle, as well as beyond the principle of common good (Zupancic, 2003: 78). It is the space, or stage, created when the planner, or other actor, makes the ethical decision to recommend an action or permission that is contrary to existing regulations, precedence, professional expectations, or cultural imperatives. This is perhaps because somehow for the planner, perhaps simply driven by strong feelings, the correct and expected action is perceived as not being the right thing to do. From the Lacanian perspective of the ethics of the Real, to make the sensed wrong into a rightness is the ethically correct task, even if this requires the agent to act against what he/she thinks society expects of that actor. This act of transcending the reality principle, and being true to the actors desires,5 makes possible a new good, a new potential, it changes the rules as to what is possible (Gunder and Hillier, 2004: 230). The ethical, then, is the constellation of events in which the subject frees herself from the symbolic law (freedom), commits herself to an act (agency), and thereby makes it possible for the law to be rethought (Kay, 2003: 109). The ethical act is an excessive, trans-strategic intervention which redenes the rules and contours of the existing order (Zizek, 2004b: 81). Viewed from this perspective, Kants categorical imperative must be rethought itself as purely transgressive:
the ethical act proper is a transgression of the legal norm a transgression which, in contrast to a simple criminal violation, does not simply violate the legal norm, but redenes what is a legal norm. The moral law does not follow the Good it generates a new shape of what counts as Good. (Zizek, 2001: 170)

This is a transgression that introduces new spaces for what can be considered good and hence a wider space for jouissance, beyond that of mere technically produced materialist satisfaction. Of course, a key question becomes: how can a credible planner, or other

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actor, transcend the accepted norms and expectations of a society to create a new space for a new concept of good? Further, how can one effectively and reasonably mobilize such an ethics of the Real in everyday life when it is so contrary to the consensual instrumental rationality of the modern project and its ready-made solutions, that are, arguably plannings purpose and foundations? Planning theorists (e.g. Gunder and Hillier, 2004; Plger, 2004) and researchers in other disciplines (e.g. Mouffe, 1999, 2000; Stavrakakis, 2003a; Thrift, 2004a, 2004b) are currently attempting to address these complex issues that essentially require new insight and perhaps even profound change in our very relationships towards social reality, itself. Further, they are attempting to do so in a manner that does not simply impose a new intransigent set of ideals to replace our late-modern cultural imperatives, but rather to encourage diverse opportunities for multiple opening in which imminence may continually occur (after Deleuze). Coherent and implementable means to achieve this desired state are yet to emerge as new knowledges and practices, if they can ever do so. Yet, this author suggests that mere awareness and articulation of the impossible implications that the Lacanian Real has on traditional rationality are perhaps one of many points of commencement. Of course, this discourse also may fall into the trap leading to transcendental idealism, i.e. a process of identifying a lack, or void, in our knowledge and practices and then presenting a hegemonic solution that must be implemented, regardless of effect and affect! This author suggests that to change social reality, to begin to question and where necessary traverse our norms and laws, while avoiding the imperative of idealism, calls for a return to agonism that reawakens the political awareness of lack and negativity in place of the technical injunction: you will enjoy! This permits a space for an inclusive acceptance of strife or agonism that does not exclude the Others voice attempting to articulate their desires and wants in response to the irreducibility of the Real (Stavrakakis, 2003b: 331). Rather this re-politicization of the planning problematic from that of the technical, quantied, solution is one that values Lacans Real and Lefebvres lived space by making the key jump from quantity to quality, from antagonisms subordinated to differences to the predominant role of antagonism as pure agonism (Zizek, 2004b: 92). In Lefebvres city unconscious desires and passions lay dormant, dormant beneath the surface of the real, within the surreal . . . waiting for . . . the day they can be realized in actual conscious life (Merrield, 2000: 178). In this regard, rather than continuing to ll the lack generating the urban problematic and produce a largely phallic enjoyment, Stavrakakis (2003b: 332) reminds us that in Lacans later teachings he spoke of another form of jouissance female or feminine jouissance which values this lack per se as something that entails a different kind of enjoyment. Perhaps this feminine jouissance may be more appropriate to politicize the needs and wants of lived space. Yet, to do so would require a politics

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that acknowledges the impossibility of the Lacanian Real. In contrast to the notion that what is meant by an utopia is an imagined ideal society; what characterizes utopia is literally the construction of a u-topic space, a social space outside the existing parameters, the parameters of what appears to be possible in the existing social universe (Zizek, 2004b: 123). This proposed utopia is one that may permit, at least aspects of Lefebvres lived space of the qualitative to be both visible and articulated in conscious life. Rather than contestant cities and regions competing globally under one cultural imperative to attract and retain nite capital and resources via one logic and vision, this article calls for a planning ethos that encourages diverse groups within cities and regions to actively contest their perspectives and desires without threat of exclusion. To achieve such a state requires planning to nd ways of working with agonism without automatically recurring to procedures, voting, representativity, forced consensus or compromises that inherently exclude (Plger, 2004: 87). This requires a planning ethos predicated on a central awareness of the irreducible Real. This is an understanding that any forced resolution always excludes a remainder, what cannot be articulated or perceived. Further, this remainder will continue to have unconscious effect in terms of what drives our materialized actions. This suggests an overt democratic planning process, representative of a society that is explicitly and overtly hegemonic for all participants, not tacitly hegemonic in its privileging of specic groups with access to power and technocratic justication that is constituted under a logic implicitly desiring social order (Critchley, cited in Zizek, 2004b: 95). This is in contrast to the existing social reality, where political processes, such as planning, appear to strive for public participation culminating in an harmonious public consensus, when of course this is but an ideological foil that excludes in the name of a general interest dened by a privileged few and legitimized by technocratic reason. In contrast, a strong society places conict and power at its centre by guaranteeing the very existence of conict (Flyvbjerg, 1998b: 229). Our current dominating fantasy of harmony is sustained by the illusion of continued consumer abundance produced and brought by the cornucopia of global capitalism, at least for the rst world. This enjoyment of global capitalism constitutes a (partial) reality with hegemonic appeal, a horizon sustained by the hegemony of an administration of desire with seemingly unlimited resources (Stavrakakis, 2003a: 61). Of course, resources and global carrying capacities are axiomatically nite. So perhaps must be our desires, for they can never be sated.

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Traversing our fundamental fantasy for harmony: a start, not a conclusion!

Lacan and his followers, such as Stavrakakis, Zizek or Zupancic, produce valid arguments for a psychoanalytically derived philosophy of reality and ideology capable of theorizing the ways our deepest commitments bind us to practices of domination (Dean, 2001: 627). Revealing and transversing the ideological constructs that shape and structure our social reality is inadequate in itself as a mere academic critical exercise of knowledge production. This author argues that we must radically challenge our underlying beliefs for ourselves, and, in particular, not externalize them to larger cultural practices and technologies so that hegemonic networks, or partnerships, of dominant actors, including intellectuals and bureaucratic professionals, can do our believing and desiring for us through planning and related diverse agencies of social guidance (Dean, 2001: 628). To do so we must traverse our fundamental fantasies that seek harmony and security. This articles application of Lacan, augmented with some of Lefebvres urban insights, gives us a combination of Freudian and Marxist thought that is considerably at odds to that conjured up by the Frankfurt Schools vision of society as a liberated collective culture with little space for the individual histories of unique subjects (Jameson, 2003: 8). The latter is the School, or project, drawing on Marx and Freud, which eventually created the Habermasian product of communicative rationality. This is a rationality that sought as its seldom if ever achieved ideal, to produce undistorted (ideologically free) speech acts based on recognition of the corresponding validity claims of comprehensiveness, truth, truthfulness, and rightness constituting a basis for consensually agreement as to how we should act (Habermas, 1979: 3). Yet, as Hillier (2003) illustrates, this is an ideal of undistorted speech that is an impossibility because of the Lacanian Real and the incompleteness it always induces in language, not to mention the impossibility of absolute truth. Yet, this author would agree with Habermas call for the supremacy of discourse over mere technical reason. Habermas last two validity claims of truthfulness to our desires and the need to act in regard of what our unconscious feeling says is rightness, even if this sense is perhaps not readily justiable with symbolic knowledge and reasoned argument, should be given due regard through our discourses. In contrast to Habermas validity claims of truth and comprehensiveness, Lacans theorizing suggests a much more fundamental contextualization of urban ideology based on the fantasies we construct to paper over the lack induced by the Real. This is a perspective that situates our very social reality, including space and social interaction, as principally constituted and composed of ideological fantasy constructs, misrecognitions and misunderstandings (see Hillier, 2003). As Jameson (2003: 378) observes, we owe to

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Lacan the rst new and as yet insufciently developed concept of the nature of ideology since Marx. Drawing on Althusser, Jameson (2003: 378) continues that ideology is the representation of the Imaginary relationships of individuals to their Real conditions of existence, so that the individual subject invents a lived relationship with collective systems. This is a symbolic, materialized, relationship of practices and rituals (Krips, 2003: 149). Here, it is the desire of this Other that we fundamentally seek and wish to please as we constantly strive to return to our idealized primordial desire for infant maternal security and contentment (Hillier and Gunder, 2005). So we construct and share illusions and fantasies ideologies that we are somehow achieving this impossible task. It is the aggregate of these Others, and the illusions we generate about them and ourselves, that constitutes the social reality that is our lived space. This critique considered the role that enjoyment and fantasy play in the dominant discourse of global capitalism. The text illustrated the mechanisms at work in shaping our dominant ideological beliefs and how critical Lacanian insight can be an aid to transgressing, exposing, and deating their ideological power. In particular, it allows us to confront negativity and difference by allowing us to adopt an ethical position beyond the fantasy of harmony (Stavrakakis, 2003a: 62). Further, Lacans psychoanalytical derived ethics of the Real allows us a perspective to develop a radical agonistic planning process predicated not on symbolic knowledge that quanties and totalizes, but rather on an understanding that there is an outside to knowledge that we can never know or express. This work demonstrates the impossibility of planning to consolidate the range of multiple different desires and conicting ideological fantasies necessary to create what for this author would be the good utopian city of vibrancy and diverse inclusion. The text concludes that an acceptance of the Lacanian Real requires a much different mode of planning that does not seek one dominant technical consensus, but rather actively promotes a planning related politics beyond that of traditional liberal civil pluralism. This article proposes a planning ethos predicated on affable but agonistic dis-sensus that can confront and even transgress dominant norms and traditions to present new potentials for social reality and our cities and regions. This author does not encourage physical conict, anarchy and disharmony. Rather he asks the reader to stop privileging the avoidance, mitigation or elimination of agonism and strife as an unquestioned objective of good and hence effective planning practice. Accepting and even privileging conicting positions and the contesting of multiple voices without forcing agreement or false consensus may allow the enhanced potential for the valuing, or creation, of the Others diverse liveable spaces. This is an Other that may constitute the majority of populations within our cities and regions. Indeed, a passionate planning that cares about the Other and values and encourages constructive agonism may facilitate totally new

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unforeseen or even impossible potentials and possibilities for all Others, including ourselves. Of course, it will also open up a whole new range of issues to do with power, morality and ethical justice. To achieve this planning for the Real, which values the qualitative and conicting, may well require us to not privilege the hegemonic articulation of dominant blocs or networks even when these may appear to us as the best rational, or most efcient and competitive, argument. A positive engagement with strife and agonism predicted on an ethics, politics, or even planning, of the Real may be one potential step eventually leading towards the impossible utopia of a truly inclusive society that values the Other. For just continuing to strive for modernist consensus inherently will persist in failing to produce the good city of inclusive desired space for all.

Acknowledgement
As always, my thanks go to Jean Hillier, and to the very constructive and well reasoned comments of the anonymous referees. The remaining errors in thought and omissions in this article are fully the fault of the author.

Notes
1. Lefebvres representations of space have been deployed extensively in the geographical and related planning literature to dene alternative conceptualizations of conceived, imagined and (often overlooked) everyday space (Benko and Strohmayer, 1997; Dear, 1997; McCann, 2000; Soja, 1989). 2. Even if Lefebvre might disagree and disavow Lacans inuence, for he was profoundly hostile to structural analyses, including those of Doctor Lacan whom he accused of performing with stunning virtuosity the formalization of language and of detaching this form from any support in the movement of the real (Lefebvre, 1996: 17). Lefebvre (1991: 356) disavowed Lacans privileging of language over that of space. In addition, Lefebvre (1991) is critical of Lacans two-dimensional delusional representation of the body (in the mirror) and landscape vistas of the world (as a picture) where in fact space and its objects are three-dimensional (Blum and Nast, 2000: 1935). While Lacans structuralist inspired psychoanalysis was largely at odds with Lefebvres Marxist phenomenology, both thinkers occupied the same space-time of mid-20th-century Paris, the period and space of what Eagleton (2003) called the golden age of high theory. Both thinkers were concerned with the fundamental questions of human existence with particular foci on what escapes articulation and representation within modernity. Lefebvres (1991, 1996, 2003) particular value to this article was his exposure of urban ideology drawing partially on what this author suggests are some of Lacans conceptual insights, as well as his call for revolutionary change as to how we perceive and value our social reality. This is in contrast to Lacans (2004) largely dismissive and cynical attitude to profound societal change, because, for Lacan, all revolution does is replace one master with another.

Gunder Production of desirous space 3. See in particular the footnote and surrounding text in Lefebvres (1991: 136) The Production of Space. 4. With the other three elements being: knowledge, desiring subjects who do not know their unconscious desires, and master signiers that constitute each subjects identications. 5. When this point rst is raised with students or colleagues, almost immediately someone raises the observation that then anything goes. Of course, this Lacanian injunction to be true to your desires does not apply to our shallow and base impulses, rather it applies to our deep strong feelings of unease that something is wrong, or needs to be done, be it for yourself or others.

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Michael Gunder is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Planning, University of Auckland. He was in professional planning practice before returning to the academy in 1994 where he took up his current position and completed his mid-life PhD. He served as Head of Department from 1999 to 2001. Michael has research interests in post-structuralism, particularly as it is applied to understanding human practices and the development of urban policy. Address: Department of Planning, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industry, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. [email: m.gunder@auckland.ac.nz]