Protochoice

Protochoice names the foundational, reality-instituting decision that precedes and conditions all subsequent choices made within an already-constituted social reality. It is not a choice among available options but the very act that establishes the field within which options become thinkable at all — the "choice" by which a subject enters a symbolic order, accepts its coordinates, and thereby becomes capable of choosing in the ordinary sense. The concept draws directly on the Lacanian logic of alienation: just as the "vel of alienation" is a forced choice that produces the subject at the cost of something irrecoverable (being or meaning, never both), the protochoice is similarly asymmetric and non-negotiable. It does not present itself as a choice to the subject who undergoes it; it is retroactively legible as a choice only once the symbolic coordinates it established are already in place.

In the ideological analysis developed in the source text, the protochoice becomes politically significant precisely because ideology works to render it invisible. By flooding the subject with a proliferation of decoy choices — apparent dilemmas, surface contradictions, scenes of critical self-awareness — the Hollywood "alternate reality" genre creates the impression that everything is open to question while leaving the protochoice itself untouched and unexamined. The subject mistakes the freedom to choose within the given frame for freedom from the frame itself. This is why Ideologiekritik that operates only at the level of surface contradictions cannot escape the ideological field it critiques: it belongs to the same stratum of manufactured choices, never reaching the deeper level where reality's coordinates were originally staked.

The concept appears in todd-mcgowan-sheila-kunkle-lacan-and-contemporary-film-other-press-2004 as part of an ideological critique of the Hollywood alternate reality genre. It functions as a specification of the Lacanian concept of Alienation: if alienation names the forced vel by which the subject constitutively loses something upon entering the symbolic order, protochoice names the moment of that entry as experienced (or rather, not experienced) from the subject's side — the primal act whose outcome is the very reality within which the subject will henceforth deliberate. It extends alienation by giving it a political-cinematic application: ideology conceals the protochoice by substituting for it a theater of lesser, decoy choices.

The concept also articulates with Fantasy, Fetishistic Disavowal, Ideology, and Interpellation. Fantasy provides the coordinates of desire within the already-instituted reality; the protochoice is what institutes that reality in the first place, making fantasy possible. Fetishistic disavowal ("I know very well, but nevertheless…") is the psychic mechanism by which subjects relate to the ordinary choices they make while not acknowledging the protochoice beneath them. Interpellation (the ideological hailing that positions subjects) operates at the level of the already-given social reality; the protochoice is what the interpellating apparatus must keep concealed in order to present that reality as natural. The Contradiction and Alternate Reality Genre cross-references suggest that the Hollywood films under analysis stage visible contradictions as a decoy — a move that fetishistically disavows the more fundamental contradiction embedded in the protochoice itself. Objet petit a is implicated insofar as the fantasy frame sustained by the protochoice is organized around the unattainable object-cause of desire.

Lacan and Contemporary FilmTodd McGowan & Sheila Kunkle (eds.) · 2004 (page unknown)

there is a choice more fundamental than the choices we make within our daily social reality, a protochoice that establishes the very coordinates within which we choose

The phrase "establishes the very coordinates" is theoretically loaded because it positions the protochoice not as one option among others but as the transcendental condition of optionality as such — echoing the Lacanian vel of alienation, in which the subject does not choose between two pre-given alternatives but is constituted through an act that retroactively generates the field of choice itself. The contrast between "choices we make within our daily social reality" and the protochoice maps directly onto the distinction between intra-systemic deliberation and the system-founding gesture that ideology must occlude.