as a hermeneutic problem rather than as a recurrent nightmare or an existential crisis, and its major affective charge tends to be frustration rather than desperation or panic. Because it is a problem that invites resolution, it is future oriented—with the future at an intentionally near but presently unreachable temporal distance. Although, as in the experience of going round in circles, this future is forestalled, unlike that experience, the past has little purchase here. Instead, temporal movement streams forward in a directed manner against an ambiguous landscape, seeking purposive release from a definite present and resolution in a determinate arrival at a specified future.
Here the comedy Quick Change is exemplary. Two men and a woman successfully rob a bank and, for most of the film, attempt to get to Kennedy Airport and out of the country before the police can identify and catch them. They, like Sherman McCoy, make a wrong turn in their car and end up in an unfamiliar part of the city; unlike Sherman, however, the narrative on which they embark is less one marked by panic and the dissolution of identity than it is by frustration. They are lost but not completely ungrounded; even though, at the beginning of their forestalled getaway, they don't know where they are, their problems are experienced as primarily practical ones. Indeed, looking for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, first they unsuccessfully ask for help from some workmen who are in the process of changing critical directional markers at an intersection; next, in a Spanish neighborhood, they ask for directions and are not understood. When they then spot a man standing near his car looking at a roadmap and stop to ask him for directions, he robs them—although he does leave the map (and their undiscovered heist money) behind. Later, and for various reasons now without a car, they hail a taxicab whose driver neither speaks English nor understands where they want to go. Finally, they end up on a public bus—where they are again forestalled by having to adhere to the inflexible rules and logic of an overly precise bus driver if they are to get anywhere; and, as Roger Ebert puts it, “when they do, it's not where they're going (‘I didn't say the bus went to the airport. I said the bus went to near the airport’).”29 This particular form of being lost, then, is intensely directed toward a specific endpoint, and it has an entirely possible if presently unrealized future. Until the film's very satisfying resolution, where narrative and destination converge on a plane bound for the tropics, being lost in Quick Change is an exercise not in existential desperation or dissolution but in comic frustration.
I've drawn out here a very quick sketch of the spatial and temporal morphology, the “imaginary geography,” of three primary forms of being lost in worldly space. There are surely other variants with their own phenomenology. What this brief elaboration demonstrates, however, is that the experience of being lost calls for something more than the only partial descriptions provided by recourse to the traditional coordinates of cartography or geography.30 Being lost in space has a phenomeno logic that exceeds such descriptions, even as it may normatively depend on them for both its generation and resolution.
BEING DIRECTED
After about twenty minutes and going around the same block a few times, it was clear to Mary that Tom was lost. She finally suggested that he call for help. Tom became very silent. They eventually arrived at the party, but the tension…persisted the whole evening. Mary had no idea of why he was so upset.—JOHN GRAY, PH.D., Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
“They're making a Lost in Space movie. The Robinson family is still lost. Even after thirty years, the dad still refuses to pull over and ask for directions”—ROSIE O'DONNELL, The Rosie O'DonnellShow
When Freud was lost in Italy, going round in circles in the street of painted women, did he eventually ask for directions? He makes a point in his account to tell us that, once he determined its unsavory character, he “hastened to leave the narrow street” and “wandered about for a while without being directed,” only to find himself returned to the same spot. He is less forthcoming about the denouement of his anxious adventure, and all he tells us is that he “was glad enough to abandon [his] exploratory walk and get straight back to the plaza [he] had left a short while before.” It is a truism among American women (and pop psychology books about relationships between the sexes) that men almost never ask for directions.31 Indeed, their whole identity seems to depend on the sense that they can get about the world on their own. Hansel takes charge of finding the way home from the forest, and Freud tells us (in passing) that he wandered “without being directed” but manages to say not a word about how he managed to find his way back to known territory. Women laugh among themselves about what seems to us a libidinal overinvestment in men's negotiation of worldly space. We think it childish that the very idea of being lost (let alone the act of asking for directions) so threatens men's identity that they tend to evidence what seems disproportionate defensiveness, anger, or even hysteria when they are—what must seem to them—“caught out” in a “shameful” instance of—what seems to us—minor spatial disorientation.32
Although it has real and critical consequences in people's actual relationships, this gender difference is so familiar as to seem comic or banal.33 It is apposite, then, that getting lost provides a key scenario of gender conflict in many best-selling pop psychology books, among them John Gray, Ph.D.'s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.'s slightly less condescending (and less sexist) You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.34 For Gray, if a woman acknowledges a man is lost by casually suggesting he ask for directions, she is heard by the man as saying, “I don't trust you to get us there. You are incompetent!” Better for her, he suggests, to indulge in benevolent tolerance—and silence: “Tom greatly appreciated her warm acceptance and trust.”35 For Tannen, the conflict engendered in this scenario can be attributed to the fact that women in our culture see the exchange of information as an acknowledgment of community, whereas men see it as an articulation of unequal power relations: “To the extent that giving information, directions, or help is of use to another, it reinforces bonds between people. But to the extent that it is asymmetrical, it creates hierarchy.”36 Although these analyses of the different psychic investments of men and women in getting—and appearing—lost don't seem untrue, they do seem somewhat superficial. They are, quite literally, not yet fleshed out, their truth not substantiated at the deeper, carnal levels of our existence.
Being a “master of the universe” presumes an existential relationship and reciprocity with space that is centered in, tethered to, and organized contiguously around one's embodied intentionality and its perceived possibility of realizing projects in the world. This is a relationship informed by the confidence that one is immanently and transcendently, as both a body and a consciousness, the constitutive source of meaningful space—that one is, indeed, the compass of the world. And space, thus constituted, is a space in which one should not be able to really get lost, a space in which one should never need guidance. This is the existential space of the young world-making child—and, in our culture, also the presumed (and assumed) existential space of the adult man. It is very rarely the space of the adult woman.
In a phenomenological description of the reciprocity between culturally informed, engendered bodies and the morphology of worldly space, philosopher Iris Marion Young has distinguished the general forms through which men and women differently perceive and live space in our culture.37 This difference is less a function of sexual difference than it is of situational difference. All human beings experience their existence as embodied and therefore immanent, that is, as materially situated in a specific “here” at a specific “now.” All human beings also experience their existence as conscious and therefore as transcendent, that is, as able to transcend their material immanence through intentional projection to a “where” and “when” they are not but might be. However, given this universal condition of human existence as both immanent and transcendent, the ratio—or rationality—of their relationship each to the other is often different for men and women in our culture. More often than men, women are the objects of gazes that locate and invite their bodies to live as merely material “things” immanently positioned in space rather than as conscious subjects with the capacity to transcend their immanence
