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When, a couple of years ago, the disclosure of Michael Jackson's alleged “immoral” private behavior (his sexual games with boys under age) dealt a blow to his innocent Peter Pan image elevated above sexual and race differences (or concerns), some perspicacious commentators asked the obvious question: what's all the fuss about? Wasn't this so-called “dark side of Michael Jackson” all the time here for all of us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases and that were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexual gestures (exemplarily in the case of Thriller and Bad)? This paradox illustrates perfectly Lacan's thesis according to which “the unconscious is outside,” not hidden in any unfathomable depths—or, to quote The X Files motto: “The truth is out there.”
Such a focusing on material externality proves very fruitful in the analysis of the inherent antagonisms of an ideological edifice. Do not the two opposed architectural designs of Casa del Fascio (the local headquarters of the Fascist party), Adolfo Coppede's neo-Imperial pastiche from 1928 and Giuseppe Teragni's highly modernist transparent glass-house from 1934-36, in their simple juxtaposition, reveal the inherent contradiction of the Fascist ideological project, which simultaneously advocates a return to pre-modern organicist corporatism and the unheard-of mobilization of all social forces in the service of rapid modernization? An even better example is provided by the great projects of public buildings in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, which put on the top of a flat multi-story office building a gigantic statue of the idealized New Man or couple. Within a couple of years, the tendency became clearly discernible to flatten even more the office building—the actual working place for the living people—so that it changed more and more into a mere pedestal for the larger-than-life statue—does this external, material feature of architectural design not render visible the “truth” of the