Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
Resistance
In consequence, culturalism allows only a very reduced place for resistance. A common critique of twentieth-century new historicism, for example, has emphasized its propensity to see all events as contributions to the survival of the existing social order. The homogeneous culture it defines allows no space for dissent (Belsey 1999: 15– 18). Instead, minor revolts simply offer occasions for extending social control; crime legitimates an extension of the police.
This view is often attributed, erroneously, to Michel Foucault, whose own declared position was more complex. Resistance for Foucault is a necessary corollary of power: not its excuse and ally, but its defining alternative. If meaning depends on difference, power is imperceptible, unintelligible as power, where resistance is ruled out. That all social relations are also relations of power implies the possibility of struggle, not automatic submission (Foucault 1979: 95– 6).
But how, if our social performance is culturally scripted, is resistance possible? In two ways. For one, social values contradict one another: a commitment to human rights, for instance, conflicts with homophobia. As the contest between them is played out in society, one side or the other comes to prevail. And for another, unconscious desire, formed in the place of the lost real, contradicts the instructions of the cultural script itself, pulls against it on behalf of other imperatives. These imperatives trace in the speaking being the contours of loss, and make themselves evident as dissatisfaction or restlessness. 29
Beyond Demand
What reappears beyond demand is not the lost needs, but unconscious desire. Obliteration of real, organic existence leaves its mark. Human beings are now to be seen as ‘woven’ (284), composites of the speaking beings they become and the real organisms they remain but can no longer reach. 31
Desire is not in the end desire for something or someone, however much it names itself as love (and its corollary, hate). The succession of objects of desire that present themselves as able to satisfy it are no more, Lacan says, than stand-ins, substitutes at the level of demand, for an ‘object’ that is altogether less palpable. The task of the analyst is to make evident the unconscious desire that the analysand does not consciously intend or acknowledge.
Lacan’s rejection of mind– body dualism is not a cheery ‘wholism’, therefore, in which mind and body are reconciled or reintegrated; nor is it a relaxed version, where they subsist alongside each other in perfect harmony. And it is emphatically not a return to nature and biologism, relocating the human essence in the body. Instead, the relationship between an organism and the driven human being it becomes, at the mercy of compulsions that seem to have no origin or explanation in rational consciousness, is precisely the enigma that psychoanalysis addresses. His view is not, Lacan hastens to insist, a form of cultural constructivism: 31
psychoanalysis concerns the inevitable loss that is the effect of a structural relationship between language and subjectivity, whatever the content of the language in question, and not simply a specific cultural or historical version of it. The unconscious desire that appears in the structural place of that loss is not, in this sense, culturally relative, even though the succession of objects of desire we can name as able to make us happy are culturally defined. 32
Charles Shepherdson has perfectly encapsulated the self-indulgence of contemporary constructivism:
sexual difference is not a human institution, and if in our theories we pretend that it is simply one more social construction, invented by a particular society (like democracy or Christianity), do we not unwittingly sustain the humanistic (narcissistic) notion that ‘man is the maker of all things?