THE NEW TITANIC

Australia’s Clive Palmer is planning to build and commercially sail an exact duplicate of the Titanic.  This endeavor is obviously an extension of cinematic imagination, which is to say it is second order protheses of imagination—that weakened faculty which depends more and more on technical artifice to remain alive.

Technology began according to the dictates of imagination.  Its function was to operationalize a wish.  But now the actual process of operationalizing eclipses the wish.  Perhaps the catalog of wishes is exhausted, and now we confront an age in which anything that can be operationalized will be operationalized.

But perhaps in the case of the duplicate Titanic the wish has survived in an unspoken and proscribed form.  Perhaps the secret wish, the object petit a, is to go down with the ship once again, to drown the virtual order (which is from its beginning haunted by death and absence anyway), and then to finally encounter the real by drowning and finding oneself buried in North Atlantic debris field.

One interpretation of our current age is that it evidences the symptom of traumatic repetition—the obsessive, continuing, too near visitation of the Lacanian real, the dead spot, the unspeakable rupture, in our symbolic order.  At the same time that we seek to replace the symbolic order with the virtual order, which would allow no traumatic eruption of the real just as the Titanic would not sink, a shadow returns to us.  Would not the helmsman of the new Titanic be tempted when an iceberg appears?