Hook, Derek. “Towards a Lacanian Group Psychology: The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Trans-subjective.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 2012.
Lacan (Sem I and Sem II) is constantly wary of subjective meaning as a questionable ego-construction designed to substantiate effects of knowledge and stability. He will approach a discourse not as a set of thematic or narrative contents, but rather in view of the set of relations, in terms of the particular social links, the structural positions between people that it holds together (Lacan, 2007).
His attention is not drawn by the “descriptive materials” of a discourse, i.e. its narratives, meanings, stories, etc., butby the relations established between participants, hence his (2007) model of four fundamental social bonds (the discourses of the master, university, analyst and hysteric) in which the thematic contents may vary widely despite that the structural positions remain intact (master and subject; doctor and patient; teacher and pupil, etc).
Lacan is thus interested in structural positions that are not simply “secured” by meaning or by the contents of discursive practices, but which remain in question, uncertain, reliant on others” views which are themselves contingent on the pre sumption of given social norms and values. His attempt is precisely to circumvent the psychological (or in his jargon “imaginary”) concerns of subjective sense-making and meaning by looking to an underlying grid of inter-linked symbolic positions. These positions are both more precarious and opaque than those afforded by subjective attempts at making-meaning. They are, furthermore, always linked, as in the prisoner’s dilemma, to other positions (indeed, to a chain of interlinked positions). Furthermore, each of these related positions remains uncertainly related to a key signifier—in the prisoner’s dilemma, the white disk—which remains both conventional (it embodies a certain consensus) and yet uncer-tain (in the pragmatic sense of what it may mean here and now). Lacan’s focus on the trans-subjective, certainly inasmuch as it prioritizes structural positions and the contingency of symbolic values, exists always at a step’s remove from the (inter)subjectivity of discursive positioning that focuses on subjective forms of meaning, narrative and sense-making. 9
[ To be continued]