D Madhava Prasad synchronicity or the permanence of the features of a social formation since the interaction of the elements of the combination is always open to change. This point finds support in the Althusserian argument against the empiricist notion of the synchronicity of the present and in favour of a structure where time is itself divided up into a combination of temporalities with a distinct and changeable character of its (the combination's) own. What would be the object of study in such a horizon? In the previous horizon, not any particular class but class contradiction itself was the object. Here, similarly, we cannot take any particular mode of production as the object. Jameson then proposes 'cultural revolution' as the object and defines it as 'that moment in which the co-existence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the center of political, social, and historical life' (Jameson, p. 95). Having identified the horizon thus as consisting 6f the cultural revolution, the next step involves specification of the 'textual object', the equivalent, in this horizon, of the 'symbolic act' in the first and the 'ideologeme' in the second. The text here is conceived as 'a field of force in which the dynamics of sign systems of several distinct modes of production can be registered and apprehended' and this dynamics is termed 'the ideology of form' (Jameson, p. 98). In this horizon, form itself undergoes a reconceptu-alization, appearing not as the bearer of content but as itself content. The formal processes, when found in combination, can be understood as 'scdimented content'. The primacy of form has also been asserted by Slavoj Zizek in his study of the discovery of the symptom by Marx and Freud. Parallel to the triple division of interpretive labour proposed by Jameson, we find in Freud the distinction between three elements of the dream: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought, and unconscious desire. Of these the third is the most difficult to discover because it is 'on the surface' rather than hidden from view, serving as the mode of articulation of the latent dream-content into the manifest text: the work of the unconscious lies in 'the form of the "dream"' (Zizek, p. 13). Similarly, Marx goes beyond the classical political economists when he focuses not on some 'secret' hidden behind the commodity form but on 'the secret of this form itself (Zizek, p. 15). However, Zizek's understanding of the relation between social reality and what he calls the 'ideological fantasy' differs from Jameson's in one important respect. On his reading, it is the fantasy that supports and organizes social reality and gives it coherence. Structured in this way by ideological fantasy, reality itself is a shield against any direct encounter with the real — the antagonism that resists symbolization. The different social formations, the modes of production, etc., are on this reading, so many ways of organizing reality against the threat of the real — the fundamental, irresolvable antagonism. It is on the ground of this third horizon that I propose to situate the following analysis of two recent films, Rajkumar Santoshi's Domini and Mani Ratnam's Roja. It stands to reason that these texts can also be reconstituted as objects within the other two Number 29