> The logical sum: there is no politics without a good fantasy.
> That makes sense: in revolution, reform and reaction, one
> wants to bring the unreal forth from the real; in conservatism,
> one wants to preserve the unreal one has from the real one
> fears (whose fundamental principle is change and decay).
I'm not sure I can make sense of this but I'll try.
Fantasy is what constitutes our daily reality. What we perceive, the meaning we draw from the symbolic systems around us (from architecture to advertising) is all part of our fantasy life. Obviously, we can't (or at least don't) just fantasize about anything (our fantasies teach us what and how to desire something - which may or may not be 'good'). Fantasy 'leans on' objective reality - even in cases of psychosis.
To say that fantasy is 'unreal' in thissense is rather awkward. I suspect it might be more appropriate to say, "There is no politics without a good utopia" - utopia is 'no where' - in this sense it is unreal. Politics can certainly exist without a *good* fantasy... but politics can't exist without fantasy (Kant postulates the immortality of the soul, Sade postulates the immortality of the body, Habermas postulates the unlimited communicative community and so on). The question of good or bad is what defines politics, and is what fantasy strives to ecplise (the last thing you want in your fantasy life is 'reality'). "Goodness" then doesn't arrive prior to politics here (in a parallel way to Kant's idea that the good cannot be placed prior to the moral law). In a way, science - which is itself constitutive of certain dreaming - also works to debunk existing fantasies (disenchantment?)... as does ideology critique...
To follow this, I'm tempted to reverse the claim that we want to bring the unreal into the real by saying we want to bring the real into the unreal - to politicize our fantasies by revealing their imaginary qualities. This doesn't liquidate fantasy, which would end up being a crater for subjectivity... rather, collapses them, adjust them... reason 'reflects on' the imaginary in our relations. The critique of fantasy is probably one of the most rational things we can do (since fantasy is precisely that which resists any kind of critique - it is the 'rock' of our 'reality'). For the most part, our fantasy are radically apolitical - they operate on the level of demand. When we encounter someone who is in pursuit of their fantasy... it tends to be difficult to politik with them since fantasy is also constitutive of a certain blindness. One sees the object of desire which appears in fantasy at the expense of all other objects. This illusionary object is the cause of the fantasy itself... but because it occurs within the fantasy field is disorted and equated with a real object. This is not exactly a good thing. Monopoly capitalism is a prime example of a fantasy-machine in pursuit of a single goal, operating on the level of demand(ing the exploitation of labour / nature) sacrifice and conformity. The 'object cause' of capitalism, to but it in my own simpleton terms, is capital. But capital does not exist, it is itself a fantasy. To express this awkwardly, there is a hard kernel of a fantasy within a fantasy frame, but the content is not to be separated from the form of the dreaming... it is all, really, a piece of shit. A radical politics goes after this: to provide a critique of the imaginary in our symbolic relations without 'going all the way' into a dissolution of what makes symbolic relations possible (fantasy). So we have a fine line here... we want to traverse the fantasy without bringing about the end of subjectivity in the process.
I guess this is a long way of providing an explanation with a question tagged on at the end. If fantasy is 'unreal' and yet constitutive of our 'reality' - then how do we distinguish 'good' and 'bad' fantasies? The materialist might say that this is obvious: we know what the primary conditions for any possible good life are, and now we need a politics to follow through from this. But this neglects an important point, which is not as simple as 'we cannot survive on bread alone.' If politics is brought about because 'needs' and 'demands' (fantasies) have not been met, then how can we say that any given set of material conditions will satisfy these demands? Worse, if a demand is met, the demand itself disappears. So operating on materialist premises alone is insufficient, since the fulfillment of these requirements would itself be the end of politics (the satisfaction of a drive). I would surmise that only a critique of desire is appropriate here. It isn't our fantasy that needs fueling, but our desire - more precisely - the desire of desire. Fantasies seek to but an end to desire, by filling up the gap between desire and its object (as enjoyment). In this sense, fantasies in politics are dangerous because they work against ongoing deliberation, debate, struggle, recognition. But we don't really have much of an alternative, since liquidating fantasy is precisely what brings about a 'postmodern' state of affairs....
between Ljublijana and Frankfurt, ken