4 discourses – Page 3

discourse of university

Thanks to Sean Sturm’s blog for this illustration of Lacan’s 4 Discourses.

On page 46 from Vighi’s book On Žižek’s Dialectic: … the advent of capitalism coincides with the passage from the discourse of the master to the discourse of the university, whereby the hegemonic place comes to be occupied by knowledge (S1). … At this historical turning point something crucial takes place: the entropy which in the discourse of the master was hidden below knowledge suddenly starts to move, to speak, it becomes visible, turning into the motor of a new discourse where all knowledge passes into value. In Lacan’s words, ‘it is a matter of the transference, plundering, spoliation of what, at the beginning of knowledge, was inscribed, hidden, int eh slave’s world’ … the genie, as it were, escapes form the bottle and enters every little object around us. The formula of fantasy that belonged to the lower level of the master’s discourse ($ <>a) is thereby dealt a moral blow. We go from a social link where the entropic libido-object remained hidden (and yet available to the master thanks to the mediation fo the slave who produced it), to another link where this very object acquires centre-stage and full visibility, inasmuch as it occupies the place of the slave, the other qua mediator. Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

* Lacan’s four 4 discourses *

Bracher, Mark. “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses” Lacanian Theory of Discourse. New York UP: New York. 1994. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn et al. (eds) pp. 107-128.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psycho- analysis. Routledge: New York, 1996.

Fink, Bruce. “Master Signifier and the Four Discourses.” Key Concepts in Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Danny Nobus (ed), Rebus Press. 1998.

Lacan’s 4 discourses stress the nature of intersubjectivity, that speech always implies another subject. Lacan identifies four possible types of social bond, four possible articulations of the symbolic network which regulates intersubjective relations. These ‘four discourses’ are the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric, and the discourse of the analyst. Lacan represents each of the four discourses by an algorithm: each algorithm contains the following four algebraic symbols:

S1 (Master Signifier)

The force then —psychological and social— of the articulated systems of knowledge derives from the systems’ positioning the subject at certain points within them and thus establishing a certain “identity” for the subject.

These positionings entail a certain sense of identity (or ego), a certain jouissance, and a certain structuring of the unconscious. The most significant factor in these positionings is the imposition of the trait unaire, or singular characteristic. This singular characteristic is the earliest significance through which the child experiences itself —as a result of significations attributed to it by the Other (mother, father, and ultimately society as large).

This constitutes the subject’s primary identification, and this primary identification continues throughout the subject’s existence to exercise a decisive influence on the subject’s desire, thought, perception, and behaviour. But the trait unaire established by primary identification is supplemented and extended by various secondary identifications that serve as its avatars. It is, in fact, only through these secondary identifications that the primary identification manifests itself. And these secondary identifications, which are certain (usually collective) values or ideals, play a crucial role in discourse. They are what Lacan calls master signifiers, S1

A master signifier is any signifier that a subject has invested his or her identity in —any signifier that the subject has identified with (or against) and that thus constitutes a powerful positive or negative value. Master signifiers are thus the factors that give the articulated system of signifiers (S2) — that is, knowledge, belief, language —purchase on a subject: they are what make a message meaningful, what make it have an impact rather than being like a foreign language that one can’t understand.

Master signifiers would include words like “God”, “Satan”, “sin” “heaven”, and “hell” in religious discourse and “American”, “freedom”, “democracy” and “communism” in political discourse. [Mark Bracher, 1994. 111]

S2 (Knowledge)

a (The Plus-de-Jouir)

The Real, that which is simultaneously produced and excluded by the system of knowledge and its master signifiers

When the divided subject $, arises inthe intervention of S1 in S2, another factor isproduced as well: the object a.

(The barred subject)

The subject split between the identity to which it is interpellated (S₁) and the plus-de-jouir (a), the jouissance that it sacrifices in assuming that identity.

What distinguishes the four discourses from one another is the positions of these four symbols. There are four positions in the algorithms of the four discorses, each of which is designated by a different name. Each discourse is defined by writing the four algebraic symbols in a different position. The symbols always remain in the same order, so each discourse is simple the result of rotating the symbols a quarter turn.

Speaker Receiver

Agent —–> Other
Truth Production

Production: the enjoyment/jouissance produced by discourse

The left-hand positions designate the factors active in the subject who is speaking or sending a message, and the right-hand positions are occupied by the factors activated or elicited in the subject who receives the message.

The top position on each side represents the overt or manifest factor

The bottom position the covert, latent, implicit, or repressed factor — the factor that acts or occurs beneath the surface.

More specifically, the top left position is the place of agency or dominance; it is occupied by the factor in a discourse that is most active and obvious. The bottom left position is the place of (hidden) truth — that is, of the factor that supports, grounds, underwrites, and gives rise to the dominant factor, or constitutes the condition of its possibility, but is repressed by it.

On the right, the side of the receiver, the top position is designated as that of the other, which is occupied by the factor in the receiving subject that is called into action by the dominant factor in the message. The activation of this factor is a prerequisite for receiving and understanding a given message or discourse. For example, if systematic knowledge is the dominant element of a discourse (occupying the top left position), receivers, in order to understand this discourse, must (for a moment, at least) be receptive to a preconstituted knowledge, which means emptying themselves of any knowledge that might interfere with the knowledge in the discourse and becoming an amorphous, nonarticulated substance, a, to be articulated by the discourse. What is produced as a result of their allowing themselve to be thus interpellated by the dominant factor of a discourse is represented by the position of production, the bottom right. (Bracher, 1994, 109).

The Discourse of the Master

S1 —> S2
$ a

Žižek, Slavoj Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. London: Verso, 2004.

There is no reason to be dismissive of the discourse of the Master, to identify it too hastily with ‘authoritarian repression’: the Master’s gesture is the founding gesture of every social bond. Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology has lost its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master would be the one who invented a new signifier, the famous ‘quilting point’, which again stablized the situation and made it readable; the University discourse, which would then elaborate the network of Knowledge which sustained this readability, would by definition presuppose and rely on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content; he merely adds a signifier which suddenly turns disorder inot order — into ‘new harmony’ … Let us take as an example anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s: people felt disorientated, succumbing to an undeserved military defeat, an economic crisis which ate away at their life savings … and the Nazis provided a single agent which accounted for it all: the Jew, the Jewish plot. That is the magic of a Master: although there is nothing new at the level of positive content, ‘nothing is quite the same’ after he pronounces his Word (Ž 138).

The most salient feature: dominance of the master signifier S1. Upon reading or hearing such a discourse, one is forced, in order to understand the message, to accord full explanatory power and/or moral authority to the proffered master signifiers and to refer all other signifiers (objects, concepts, or issues) back to these master signifiers. In doing this, the receiver of the message enacts the function of knowledge (S2). As a result of enacting this function, the receiver produces a plus-de-jouir that is, the suppressed (i.e., beneath the bar) excess of enjoyment, no longer to be enjoyed, for which there is no place in the system of knowledge or belief (S2) enacted by the receiver in response to the master’s S1. It is this a, this plus-de-jouir, that carries the power of revolution, of subverting and disrupting the system of knowledge (S2) and its master signifiers (S1). (Bracher 1993, 121)

[All attempts at totalization are doomed to failure. The discourse of the master ‘masks the division of the subject’ The master (S1) is the agent who puts the slave (S2) to work; the result of this work is a surplus (a) that the master attempts to appropriate. Dylan Evans 45]

The discourse of the Master restricts this a, the unsymbolized cause of desire, to the receiver (the slave, the one in the position of powerlessness), who has no voice (no legitimation of his or her own subjectivity).; The speaker, or master, is oblivious to the cause of his own desire (a)and has even repressed his own self-division ($) The essence of the position of the master is to be castrated: a certain jouissance is forbidden to him. The speaker is totally oblivious, unaware of the reason for promulgating its master signifiers.

Discourses that promote mastery, discourses that valorize and attempt to enact an autonomous, self-identical ego by instituting dominance of master signifiers (S1), which order knowledge (S2) according to their own values and keep fantasy ($♦a) in a subordinate and repressed position.

It is only by confronting this lack in its relation to the cause of desire (a) that the impetus behind S1 can be understood and, perhaps redirected, displaced. By interrogating the something of the subject that is left out by the master signifier, it becomes possible to reclaim that which has been suppressed and repressed and thus institute a new economy of both the psychological and the social structure. If one wants to be subversive, Lacan suggests, one might do worse that to approach “the hole from which the master signifier gushes”. (Bracher 121)

All teaching begins as a discourse of mastery with the imposition of basic concepts of a discipline i.e., master signifiers that serve to ground and explain the procedure of a body of knowledge that constitutes the discipline. Medical teaching for example, consists of acts of reverence to terms considered sacred, that is master signifiers. Philosophy is a clear instance of the discourse of the Master. Philosophical works are ultimately nothing other than attempts to promote a certain way of speaking, to promote certain master signifiers.

No discourse can operate without master signifiers, rather the question is what use we put the master signifiers to. My aim is to use these (Lacanian) master signifiers as means to promote change rather than as holy words with which we might baptize or consecrate certain phenomena and thereby ascend to some state of blessedness.

Lacanian master signifiers and knowledge S1 and S2 like any others, as soon as they become the dominant factor in a discourse, constellate a discourse of the Master and a discourse of the University, respectively, unless subordinated to an alternative aim, which the discourse of the Analyst provides.

From Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? 1997, 1999 rev. ed.

He (the master) is blind to his own truth, he cannot recognise this truth, because if he did he would fall from his position and cease to be master. 108

The Discourse of the University

For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth. Jacques Lacan

S2 —> a
S1 $

[The dominant position is occupied by knowledge. This illustrates the fact that behind all attempts to impart an apparently ‘neutral’ knowledge to the other can always be located an attempt at mastery (master of knowledge, and domination of the other to whom this knowledge is imparted). The discourse of the university represents the hegemony of knowledge, particularly visible in modernity in the form of hegemony of science. Evans 46]

We begin our academic careers as students in the position of a receivers of the system of knowledge S2. Subjected in this position to a dominating totalized system of knowledge/belief (S2), we are made to produce ourselves as (alienated) subjects ($) of this system.

Our position as the a simply continues the position we are born into. Before we learn to speak — and even before we are born — we occupy the position of the receiver of speech, and we do so in the form of the a as the as yet unassimilated piece of the Real that is the object of the desires of those around us, particularly our parents, for whom children often function as the object a that promises to compensate for the Other’s lack and thus fill the subject’s lack as well. As we have seen, our preverbal experience of ourselves and the world, mediated as it is by the actions and demeanor of our primary caretakers, is partially determined by the system of knowledge/belief, or language, inhabited by them, and by the position they attribute to us within that system, speaking and thinking of us, as son or daughter, delicate or hearty, future beauty queen or athlete, etc. In the second instance it means that when we begin to understand language and to speak it, we must fashion our sense of ourselves (our identity) out of the subject positions made available by the signifiers (i.e., categories) of the System S2. (Bracher 115)

This discursive structure and hence the totalizing and tyrannical effect of the S2 are not limited however to our infancy or to education. Bureaucracy is perhaps the purest form of the discourse of the University; it is nothing but knowledge — i.e., pure impersonal system: The System, and nothing else. No provision is made for individual subjects and their desires and idiosyncrasies. Individuals are to act, think and desire onlytin ways that function to enact reproduce, or extend The System. Bureaucracy thus functions to educate, in the root sense of that term: it forms particular types of subjects. (Bracher 1993, 55) (1994, 115)

The kind of knowledge involved in the university discourse amounts to mere rationalization, in the most pejorative Freudian sense of the the term. We can imagine it, not as the kind of thought that tries to come to grips with the Real, to maintain the difficulties posed by apparent logical and/or physical contradictions, but rather as a kind of encyclopaedic endeavour to exhaust a field. Working in the service of the master signifier, more or less any kind of argument will do, as long as it takes on the guise of reason and rationality (Fink 34).

The Discourse of the Hysteric (from Bruce Fink)

$ —> S1
a S2

In the hysteric’s discourse the split subject occupies the dominant position and addresses S1 calling it into question. Whereas the university discourse takes its cue from the master signifier, glossing over it with some sort of trumped-up system, the hysteric goes at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge.

The hysteric’s discourse is the exact opposite of the university discourse, all the positions reversed. The hysteric maintains the primacy of subjective division, the contradiction between conscious and unconscious, and thus the conflictual, or self-contradictory nature of desire itself.

In the lower right-hand corner, we find knowledge S2. This position is also the one where Lacan situates jouissance, the enjoyment produced by a discourse, and he thus suggests here that an hysteric gets off on knowledge. Knowledge is perhaps eroticized to a greater extent in the hysteric’s discourse than elsewhere. In the master’s discourse, knowledge is prized only insofar as it can produce something else, only so long as it can be put to work for the master; yet knowledge itself remains inaccessible to the master. In the university discourse, knowledge is not so much an end in itself as that which justifies the academic’s very existence and activity. Hysteria thus provides a unique configuration with respect to knowledge, and I believe this is why Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria (Fink 37).

The hysteric pushes the master ”incarnated in a partner, teacher, or whomever” to the point where he or she can find the master’s knowledge lacking. Either the master does not have an explanation for everything, or his or her reasoning does not hold water. In addressing the master, the hysteric demands that he or she produce knowledge and then goes on to disprove his or her theories. Historically speaking, hysterics have been a true motor force behind the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic elaboration of theories concerning hysteria. Hysterics led Freud to develop psychoanalytic theory and practice, all the while proving to him in his consulting room the inadequacy of his knowledge and know-how.

Hysterics, like good scientists, do not set out to desperately explain everything with the knowledge they already have ”that is the job of the systematizer or even the encyclopedaedist” nor do they take for granted that all the solutions will be someday forthcoming. … In the hysteric’s discourse, object (a) the Real appears in the position of truth. That means that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse, its hidden motor force, is the Real. Physics too, when carried out in a truly scientific spirit, is ordained and commanded by the real, that is to say by that which does not work, by that which does not fit. It does not set out to carefully cover over paradoxes and contradictions, in an attempt to prove that the theory is nowhere lacking” that it works in every instance” but rather to take such paradoxes and contradictions as far as they can go (Fink 37).

The Discourse of the Analyst

a —> $
S2 S1

The discourse of the analyst is produced by a quarter turn of the discourse of the hysteric (in the same way as Freud developed psychoanalysis by giving an interpretive turn to the discourse of his hysterical patients.) The position of the agent, which is the position occupied by the analyst in the treatment, is occupied by objet petite a this illustrates the fact that the analyst must, in the course of treatment, become the cause of the analysand’s desire. The fact that this discourse is the inverse of the discourse of the master emphasises that, for Lacan, psychoanalysis is an essentially subversive practice which undermines all attempts at domination and mastery.

The analyst plays the part of pure desirousness (pure desiring subject), and interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between conscious and unconscious shows through: slips of the tongue, bungled and unintended acts, slurred speech, dreams, etc. In this way, the analyst sets the patient to work, to associate, and the product of that laborious association is a new master signifier. The patient in a sense ‘coughs up’ a master signifier that has not yet been brought into relation with any other signifier.

As it appears concretely in the analytic situation, a master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient’s discourse to a halt. It could be a proper name (the patient’s or the analyst’s), a reference to the death of a loved one, the name of a disease (AIDS, cancer, psoriasis, blindness), or a variety of other things. The task of analysis is to bring such master signifiers into relation with other signifiers, that is, to dialecticize the master signifiers it produces. That involves reliance upon the master’s discourse … recourse to the fundamental structure of signification: a link must be established between each master signifier and a binary signifier such that subjectification takes place. The symptom itself may present itself a s a master signifier; in fact, as anlysis proceeds and as more and more aspects of a person’s are taken as symptoms, each symptomatic activity or pain may present itself in the analytic work as a word or phrase that simply is, that seems to signify nothing to the subject. Lacan refers to S1 in the analyst’s discourse as la betise (stupidity or ‘funny business’), a reference back to the case of Little Hans who refers to his whole horse phobia as la betise. It is a piece of nonsense produced by the analytic process itself.

S2 appears in analytic discourse in the place of truth (lower left-hand position). S2 represents knowledge here, but obviously not the kind of knowledge that occupies the dominant position in the university discourse. The knowledge in question here is unconscious knowledge, that knowledge that is caught up in the signifying chain and has yet to be subjectified. Where that knowledge was, the subject must come to be.

Now according to Lacan, while the analyst adopts the analytic discourse, the analysand is inevitably, in the course of analysis, hystericized. The analysand, regardless of his or her clinical structure — whether phobic, perverse, or obsessive compulsive — is backed into the hysteric’s discourse. Why is that? Because the analyst puts the subject as divided, as self-contradictory, on the firing line, so to speak. The analyst does not question the obsessive neurotic’s theories about Dostoevsky’s poetics, for example, attempting to show the neurotic where his or her intellectual views are inconsistent. Such an obsessive may attempt to speak during his or her analytic sessions from the position of S2, in the university (academic) discourse, but to engage the analysand at that level allows the analysand to maintain that particular stance. Instead, the analyst, ignoring, we can imagine, the whole of a half-hour long critique of Bakhtin’s veiws on Dostoevsky’s dialogic style, may focus on the slightest slip of the tongue or ambiguity in the analysand’s speech — the analysand’s use, for example, of the graphic metaphor ‘near misses’ to describe her bad timing in the publishing of her article on Bakhtin, when the analyst knows that this analysand had fled her country of origin shortly after rejecting an unexpected an unwanted marriage proposal (‘near Mrs.’).

Thus the analyst, by pointing to the fact that the analysand is not master of his or her own discourse, instates the analysand as divided between conscious speaking subject and some other (subject) speaking at the same time through the same mouthpiece, as agent of a discourse wherein the S1s produced in the course of analysis are interrogated and made to yield their links with S2 (as in the hysteric’s discourse). Clearly the motor force of the process is object (a)— the analyst operating as pure desirousness.

What does it mean concretely for the analyst to occupy the position of object (a) for an analysand, the position of cause of the analysand’s desire? Many analysands tend, at an early stage of analysis, to thrust responsibility for slips and slurs onto the analyst. As one patient said to her therapist, ‘You’re the one who always sees dark and dirty things in everything I say!’ At the outset, analysands often see no more in a slip than a simple problem regarding the control of the tongue muscles or a slight inattention. The analyst is the one who attributes some Other meaning to it.

As time goes on, however, analysands themselves begin to attribute meaning to such slips, and the analyst, rather than standing in for the unconscious, for that strange Other discourse, is viewed by the analysand as its cause: ‘I had a dream last night because I knew I was coming in to see you this morning.’ In such a statement, very often heard in analysis, the analyst is case in the role of the cause of the analysand’s dream: ‘I wouldn’t have had such a dream were it not for you.’ ‘The dream was for you.’ You were in my dream last night.’ Unconscious formations, such as dreams, fantasies, and slips, are produced for the analyst, to be recounted to the analyst, to tell the analyst something. The analyst, in that sense, is behind, is the reason for their production, is, in a word, their cause.

When the analyst is viewed as an other like the analysand, the analyst can be considered an imaginary object or other for the analysand. When the analyst is viewed as a judge or parent, the analyst can be considered a sort of symbolic object or Other for the analysand. When the analyst is viewed as the cause of the analysand’s unconscious formations, the analyst can be considered a ‘real’ object, object (a) for the analysand.

Once the analyst has manoeuvred in such a way that he or she is placed in the position of cause by the analysand (cause of the analysand’s dreams and of the wishes they fulfil — in short, cause of the analysand’s desire), certain manifestation of the analysand’s transference love or ‘positive transference,’ typically associated with the early stages of analysis, may well subside, giving way to something far less ‘positive’ in coloration. The analysand may begin to express his or her sense that the analyst is ‘under my skin,’ like an irritant. Analysands who seemed to be comfortable or at ease during their sessions at the outset (by no means the majority however) may well display or express discomfort, tension, and even signs that they are rebelling against the new configuration, the new role the analyst is taking on in their lives and fantasies. The analyst is becoming too important, is showing up in their daydreams, in their masturbation fantasies, in their relationships with the significant other and so on.

Lacan considers this to be the ARCHIMEDEAN POINT OF ANALYSIS, that is the very point at which the analyst can apply the lever that can move the symptom.

The analyst in the position of cause of desire for the analysand is, according to Lacan, THE MOTOR FORCE OF ANALYSIS; in other words, it is the position the analyst must occupy in order for tranference to lead to something other than identification with the analyst as the endpoint of an analysis (identification with the analyst being considered the goal of analysis by certain psychoanalysts).

‘Negative transference’ is by no means the essential sign indicating that the analysand has come to situate the analyst as cause of desire; it is but one possible manifestation of the latter. Nevertheless, the attempt by therapists of many ilks to avoid or immediately neutralize any emergence of negative transference … means that aggression and anger are turned into feelings which are inappropriate for the analysand to project onto the therapist … Patients thereby learn not to express them in therapy … thereby defusing the intensity of the feeling and possible therapeutic uses of the projection. Anger and aggression are thus never worked out with the therapist, but rather examined ‘rationally.’ … It is only by making psychical conflicts — such as aggression against one’s parent or hatred of a family member — present in the relationship with the analyst that the patient can work them through. To work them through means not that they are intellectually viewed and processed,’ but rather that the internal libidinal conflict which is holding a symptomatic relationship to someone in place must be allowed to repeat itself in the relationship with the analyst and play itself out. If verbalization (putting things into words) is the only technique allowed the analysand, a true separation from the analyst and from analysis never occurs. Projection must be allowed to go so far as to bring out all the essential aspects of a conflict-ridden relationship, all the relevant recollections and dynamics, and the full strength of the positive/negative affect. It should be recalled that one of the earliest lessons of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria was that verbalizing traumatic events without reliving the accompanying affect left the symptom intact.

Transference, viewed as the transference of affect (evoked in the past by people and events) in the here and now of the analytic setting, means that the analysand must be able to project onto the analyst a whole series of emotions felt in relation to significant figures from his or her past and present. If the analyst is concerned with ‘being himself’ or being herself’ or with being the ‘good father’ or ‘good mother’ he or she is likely to try ot immediately distance him or herself from the role in which the analysand is casting him or her, by saying something like, ‘I am not your father’ or ‘You are projecting.’ The message conveyed by such a statement is, ‘Don’t confuse me with him’ or ‘It is not appropriate to project.’ But the analyst would do better to neither encourage or discourage the case of mistaken identity that arises through the transfer of feeling, and to let the projection of different personas occur as it will — unless, of course, it goes so far as to jeopardize the very continuation of the therapy.

Rather than interpreting the fact of transference, rather than pointing out to the analysand that he or she is projecting or transferring something onto the analyst, the analyst should direct attention to the content (the ideational and affective content) of the projection, attempting to get the analysand to put it into words. Not to dissipate it or prohibit it, not to make the analysand feel guilty about it, but to speak it. Here the analyst works — often more by asking questions than by interpreting — to re-establish the connections between the content (thought and feeling) and the persons, situation, and relationships that initially gave rise to it.

Just as one should interpret not the fact of transference but rather its content, one should avoid interpreting ‘resistance,’ transference being but one manifestation of resistance. Resistance, rather than being nothing more than an ego defense, is in Lacan’s view, structural, arising because the real resists symbolization; when the analysand’s experience resists being put into words, he or she grabs onto, digs into, or takes it out on the only other person present: the analyst. Transference is thus a direct product of resistance, of the resistance the real (e.g. trauma) erects against its symbolization, against being spoken. … Of course the analysand resists — that is a given, a structural necessity. Interpretation must aim at the traumatic event or experience that is resisting verbalization, not the mere fact of resistance (Fink 43-45).

Fink, Bruce. “Master Signifier and the Four Discourses.” Key Concepts in Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Danny Nobus (ed), Rebus Press. 1998.

Žižek Marx’s mistake

Žižek, Slavoj. “Object a in Social Links.” Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 107-128. Print.

However, precisely as Marxists … we should discern the mistake of Marx. On the one hand, he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity — see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air,” of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizing force in the entire history of humanity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamic is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism, so that the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is capital itself. the incessant development and revolutionizing of capitalism’s own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction (125).

Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle (“contradiction”), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.

In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive foreces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility”: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. If we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates. (Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus value and surplus enjoyment.) (126)

… what if his [Marx’s] mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus value)?

… For Lacan, however, desire has to be sustained by an object cause: not some primoridal incestuous lost object on which desire remains forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object that causes us to desire objects that we encounter in reality. As in the case with Marx, Deleuze’s failure to take into account this object cause sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire … (127)

Žižek four discourses desire drive

Žižek, Slavoj. “Object a in Social Links.” Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 107-128. Print.

Discourse of the Master

S1 —> S2
$ a

Discourse of the Analyst

a —> $
S2 S1

Today’s hegemonic symbolic matrix fits the forumula of the analyst’s discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.). Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions (110).

When, exactly does the objet a function as the superego injunction to enjoy? When it occupies the place of the master signifier … when the short circuit between S1 and a occurs. The key move to be accomplished in order to break the vicious cycle of the superego injuction is thus to enact the separation between S1 and a. Consequently, would it not be more productive to follow a different path, that is, to start with the different modus operandi of l’objet a, which in psychoanalysis no longer functions as the agent of the superego injunction — as it does in the discourse of perversion? (114)

The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet ain Lacan, which stands simultaneously for

the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and
for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.

Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.

one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological – because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews “really are” is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice. In this precise sense, the analyst’s discourse produces the master signifier, the swerve of the patient’s knowledge, the surplus element that situates the patient’s knowledge at the level of truth: after the master signifier is produced, even if nothing changes at the level of knowledge, the same knowledge as before starts to function in a different mode. The master signifier is the unconscious sinthome, the cipher of enjoyment, to which the subject was unknowingly subjected.

The crucial point not to be missed here is how the late Lacan’s identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism. Earlier, in the 1950’s, Lacan conceived the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject’s imaginary misrecognitions and to make them accept their proper symbolic place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place that effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity. Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other, that is, for the symbolic order’s inability to guarantee the subject’s symbolic identity. (116)

One should thus always bear in mind the thoroughly ambiguous status of objet a in Lacan. Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety”: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draws us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet a as constituted in its very loss. Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference that separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get the constituent fantasy only when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is. Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he defines objet a as the object that overlaps with its loss, that emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire – the true object cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different. Although in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of

objet a as the object cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,
while, in the case of objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself.

In the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object, but by a push to directly enact the “loss” — the gap, cut, distance — itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet a in its fantasmatic and posrfantasmatic status, but also, within this postfantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object cause of desire and the object loss of the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism. (117)

Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole.

– Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space,

– while the hole is more radical-it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).

Therein resides the difference between desire and drive:

– desire is grounded in its constitutive lack,

– while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.

In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object.

At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new object and modes of pleasure. However, even if it already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.

The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual — it is rather that those individuals who act as direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it.

We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive:

– while the goal is the object around which desire circulates,

– its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such (117-118).

dean capitalism discourse of university

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the University


S2 —> a
S1      $

S2 (knowledge, the string of signifiers) is in the first position, that of the agent or speaker. This tells us that under capitalism, the facts speak. They are not grounded in the Master (S1), although they rely on a hidden or underlying supposition of power, of the authority that they command (S1 is in the position of truth). Because this authority is hidden, the facts claim that they speak for themselves. What do they mean? Well, that is a matter of opinion — and each is entitled to his own opinion. The facts, or the knowledge that speaks in the discourse of the university, are not integrated into a comprehensive symbolic arrangement; instead, they are the ever conflicting guidelines and opinions of myriad experts. Thus they can advise people to eat certain foods, use certain teeth-whiteners, wear certain clothes, and drive certain cars. The experts may evaluate and judge all these commodities, finding some safer or more reliable and others better values for the money. Experts may make economic and financial suggestions, using data to back up their predictions.

S2 addresses a and, hidden underneath a is the subject $. This tells us that knowledge, or the experts, address the subject as an object, an excess, or a kernal of enjoyment. The object addressed by the experts, then, might be the person as a body or set of needs, the person as a collection of quantifiable attributes, or the person as a member of a particular demographic,

but the person is not addressed as what we might typically understand as the reasonable subject of liberal democratic politics.The person is addressed as an object and thus is less a rational chooser than an impulse buyer, a bundle of needs and insecurities, desires and drives, an object that can be propelled and compelled by multiple forces. As a version of university discourse, capitalism does not provide the subject with a symbolic identity. (98)

The formula shows that $ does not identify with S1. The subject is merely the remainder of a process in which knowledge addresses enjoyment.

Recall that Žižek argues that late capitalist societies are marked by (1) an injunction to enjoy and (2) the decline of symbolic efficiency.

Late capitalist subjects are encouraged to find, develop, and express themselves. They are enjoined to have fulfilling sex lives and rewarding careers, to look their very best — no matter what the cost — and to cultivate their spirituality. That these injunctions conflict, that one cannot do them all at once, and that they are accompanied by ever present warnings against potential side effects, reminds us that we are dealing with the SUPEREGO. (99)

The decline of symbolic efficiency (or the collapse of the big Other) refers to the ultimate uncertainty in which late capitalist subjects find themselves.

dean discourse of analyst pervert on lenin

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the Analyst

The discourse of the analyst has the same structure as the perverse discourse. The difference between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse discourse rests in the ambiguity of objet petit a (occupying here the position of agent).

In the perverse discourse, objet petit a designates the subject’s ($ in the position of addressee) enjoyment. That is, the pervert is the one who knows what the subject desires and makes himself into an instrument of that desire. Accordingly we see how the formula places knowledge (S2) in the position of truth, supporting the object that speaks. (89)
In the discourse of the analyst, this knowledge (S2) is the “supposed knowledge of the analyst.” This means that in the analytic setting, the subject presumes that the analyst knows the secret of its desire. But, this presumption is false. The enigmatic analyst simply adopts this position, reducing himself to a void (objet petit a) in order that the subject will confront the truth of her desire. The analyst is not supported by objective or historical knowledge. rather, the position is supported only by the knowledge supposed by the subject through transference. Analysis is over when the subject comes to recognize the contingency and emptiness of this place. Žižek follows Lacan in understanding this process as “traversing the fantasy,” of giving up the fundamental fantasy that sustains desire. (89)

Thus, whereas the pervert knows the truth of desire, the analyst knows that there is no truth of desire to know.

The process of traversing the fantasy, of confronting objet petit a as a void, involves “subjective destitution” As the addressee of the speaking object, the subject gives up any sense of a deep special uniqueness, of certain qualities that make him who he is, and comes to see himself as an excremental remainder, to recognize himself as an object. Neither the symbolic order nor the imaginary realm of fantasy provides any ultimate guarantees. They cannot establish for the subject a clear, certain, and uncontested identity. they cannot provide him with fundamental, incontrovertible moral guidelines. What is left out, then, is the authority of the Master (S1, now in the position of production). (89)

Žižek views the discourse of the analyst as homologous to revolutionary emancipatory politics. What speaks in revolutionary politics is thus like objet petit a, a part that is no part, a part that cannot be recuperated into a larger symbolic or imaginary unity. Such a part, in other words, is in excess of the whole.

In emphasizing the structural identity between revolutionary politics and the discourse of the analyst, moreover, Žižek is arguing that the revolutionary act proper has no intrinsic meaning. It is a risk, a venture that may succeed or fail. Precisely what makes revolution revolutionary is that it leaves out (produces as remainder) the authority of a Master: there are no guarantees.(90)

For Žižek, what was remarkable about Lenin was his willingness to adopt this position. Žižek emphasizes two specific moments: 1914 and 1917. In 1914 Lenin was shocked and alone as all the European Social Democratic parties (excluding the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) turned to patriotism … falling ini with the prevailing nationalist fervor. Yet this very catastrophic shattering of a sense of international workders’ solidarity, … “cleared the ground for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and Lenin was the only one who realized this, the only one who articulated the Truth of the catastrophe” … Likewise in April 1917, most of Lenin’s colleagues scorned his call for revolution. Even his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, worried that Lenin had gone mad, but Lenin knew that there was no proper time for revolution, that there are no guarantees that it will succeed. More importantly he knew that waiting for such an imagined proper time was precisely the way to prevent revolution from occuring. … Lenin is remarkable in his willingness to take the risk and engage in an act for which there are no guarantees. We should recall that the odds were fully against Lenin — in peasant Russia he did not even have a working class that could take power. (90)

Against communist dogma regarding the laws of historical development and the proper maturity of the working class, Lenin urged pushing through with the revolution. He did not rely on objective laws of history. He also did not wait for permission or democratic support. He acted without grounds, inventing new solutions in a moment when it was completely unclear what would happen. He refused to wait for authorization or do what other thought he “ought” to do, doing instead what he had to do. Lenin, then, takes the position of objet petit a. The truth of his view does not rest in laws of history but in its own formal position in an uncertain situation, a position marked by the Leninist Party (91).

Unlike (Agamben), Žižek does not abandon law and sovereignty. Lenin’s greatness is not simply that of a risk taker but of a founder, one who takes responsibility for introducing a new order. … addressing the fundamental political problems of the day — antatgonism in an era post-property and the exclusions and violence of neoliberal capitalism — is a matter not of escaping or abandoning the law but of traversing the fantasies that support the law, confronting the perversity and enjoyment in our relations to law. … possibility of moving from law to love. (92-93)

dean university discourse as capitalism

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the University


S2 —> a
S1      $

S2 or knowledge is in the position of the speaking agent. S2 addresses objet petit a the little nugget or remainder of enjoyment.
S1 (the Master) is in the position of truth, and the subject ($) is in the position of production.
This is a discourse in which knowledge speaks, the rule of experts.
What is hidden under the facts however, what the facts want to deny, is the way they are supported by power and authority (S1 below the bar, in the lower left-hand corner; the Master in the position of truth).
As Žižek argues, the “constitutive lie” of university discourse is its disavowal of its own performative dimension. University discourse proceeds as if it were not supported by power, as if it were neutral, as if it were not, after all, dependent upon and invested in specific political decisions.
Capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, as a generation of critiques of technocracy and instrumental reason made clear, emphasize expertise. Capitalists ground the expertise in efficiency as understood by economic theory. Capitalism addresses the subject as a kind of object, providing no real ideological or symbolic locus of subjective meaning. We see this in the way capitalism undermines symbolic identities, how it undermines such forms of attachment through the revolutionary force of ever expanding and intensifying markets. Instead of a symbolic identity of the kind provided by a Master, capitalism offers its subjects enjoyment (objet petit a). (83-84)

For Žižek, the most interesting aspect of modern power captured by the formula of the discourse of the university stems from the distinction between the upper and lower levels of the diagram. The upper level S2 —> a expresses the fact of contemporary biopolitics (knoweldge addressing objects, treatinig subjects as objects) while the lower S1 —> $ marks the “crisis of investiture,” or the collapse of the big Other …

In contemporary capitalist society biopolitics appears in two forms: the life that has to be respected and the excess of the living other that one finds harassing, unbearable, and intolerable.

Thus, in one respect, the other is fragile and vulnerable. It must be fully respected.
In another, the fragility of the other is so great, the need for respect so strong, that anything can harm it; everything is dangerous

Žižek argues that the discourse of the university enables us to understand how these two attitudes are two sides of the same coin. They are both brought about by a crisis in meaning, by “the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself.” That is to say, the structure of university discourse reminds us that authority is presupposed yet denied by expert rule; the Master does not speak and does not occupy the position of agent; rather, he occupies the position of Truth (85).

Yet whereas capitalism is a self-revolutionizing economic form, one in whose very crises, inequities, and excesses drive its productivity, Stalinism was a self-revolutionizing political form. Stalinism tried to attain (and surpass!) capitalist productivity without the capitalist form, without, in other words, class struggle. Once class struggle officially ended with the 1935 constitution, the revolutionizing impulse of capitalism came under the control of the political domain in the form of terror. As a consequence, the inequities of capitalism shifted into social life as more direct forms of hierarchy and domination. Žižek writes, “In the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards, the key social division was defined not by property, but by direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). For this reason, Žižek can say that Stalinism was the “symptom” of capitalism. It was a symptom insofar as it revealed the truth about the social relations of domination that capitalist ideology presents as free and equal. (86)

real of woman

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-131

The production of the excluded ‘reality’ of women is evident in, for example, the case of sexual harassment.

Before feminist activism in this area, social discourses did not represent the ‘experience’ of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment existed as a social practice, but it was not possible to articulate that experience as such within the symbolic economy of existing social discourses. These experiences were literally ‘not spoken of’.

Yet at the same time, the sexual harassment of women is a social practice that is produced by gendered social relations. The social discourse produces both the practice and its disavowal. The exclusions of social fictions can be traced to the operation of a phallic Symbolic order that produces discourse as discourse and subject as subject.

In Lacanian terms, the production of the real of women as an excluded term of discourse is linked to the impossibility of symbolically rendering women in a phallocentric Symbolic order. The Lacanian position links the excluded real of women to the symbolically repudiated female body of the Mother in a phallic Symbolic order. In feminist terms, this symbolic economy renders ‘women’ as either the phantasy of The Woman or as an excluded term. In this formulation, feminist discourses articulate the founding symbolic repudiation of the excluded real of women.

Unlike social fictions, feminist discourses render the real of women not as lack but symbolize and reinscribe it into the signifying chain. This reinscription shifts the relation of symbolic elements within the chain, producing a new chain of signifiers. This reinscription produces a new discourse and thus a different representation of women.

Instead, the a should be understood as analogous to the Lacanian concept of the Real. This concept is one of Lacan’s most difficult and complex, as he uses it in many linked senses and its meaning changes over the course of his work. … Lacan posits the Real as excess, impossibility and lack. In Lacan’s earlier work, it is a material plenitude which exceeds the Symbolic order, and in which nothing is lacking … In Lacan’s later work, the real is impossible (‘le réel, c’est impossible’) (S17: 143). It is a logical obstacle that cannot be represented within the symbolic (S17: 143). For this reason, the Real is also lack in language, because it marks that which the Symbolic cannot symbolize. No signifying chain can represent it in its totality – hence its impossibility. Something must always fall out of discourse, which is its excluded a. 131

In this way, the Real can also be understood as the hole in the Symbolic order, the impossibility on which that order is predicated and the absence that it encircles. 131

It is not the matching of a signifier to its correlative signified, because there is no metalanguage able to tell the truth about truth and no transcendental signifier that can fix meaning as a correlate of reality (Lacan 1965: 16, Éc: 867– 868). Knowledge is a discourse of the Real, diffracting it through the prism of discursive structures. The production of a new signifying chain represents a different relation to the Real, and with it a new ‘real’.

My account of feminist knowledge does not understand the Real as a fixed entity that the act of knowing passively uncovers. Rather, it is the constitutive ‘outside’ of the existing limits of discourse. An effect of the excess plenitude of the Real is theoretical and political possibility.

If the Symbolic order does not represent the totality of being, then language can take a different form, can represent a different relationship to the Real, and can represent a different Real. It becomes possible to signify the Real differently. Such a conception grants a utopian dimension to knowledge, for if it is not immutable, then the world that it represents is not given, and it can describe a different Real.

Accordingly, knowledge exists in both a present and a future signifying relation to the Real. If the Real is an impossible plenitude, it becomes possible to accept that we can never fully know or represent it, while also accepting that it offers a multiplicity of possibilities.

There can be other symbolic exclusions from discourse, such that the operations of discourse are less costly to those excluded others of the Symbolic order.

We need not conflate the lack in the symbolic with a Symbolic that represents femininity as lack. To claim that it is possible to change a signifying relation to the Real (and with it the signifying relation to object, self and others) is not to claim that it is possible to obtain a mystical fusion with the plenitude of the Real, in which language is adequate to its all and the speaking being suffers no loss. My conception of feminist discourse assumes that there is no knowledge that can ever provide a full and adequate representation of the world. Rather, knowledge is necessarily incomplete, situated and partial, such that it cannot ever represent all, or be a transcendental Truth.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 132.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=145

Oedipal complex reformulated using mirror stage

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 120.

Discourses of the subject

How do discourses produce subjective identity? In his later work on the four discourses, Lacan suggests that symbolic identification with a master signifier produces the subject. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the master signifier is a symbolic element that represents the subject to itself and to other subjects. It is the ‘unifying’ trait which constitutes the subject and which functions as the signifiant-m’être, that signifier which masters the subject. This represents, in Lacan’s account, the signifier of my ‘being’ (S17: 178).

Identification with that master signifier which ‘names’ the subject produces it within discourse, and so produces its speaking position.

In this reformulation of the Oedipus complex, the imaginary I becomes the social I of identity in its identificatory attachment to those master signifiers which structure the signifying chains of discourse. This account of subject formation explains how the Freudian bodily ego becomes a social identity.

In Lacanian theory, a symbolic representation of the imaginary morphology of the ego of the mirror stage produces the subject as a ‘self’. This symbolic representation is articulated through the master signifiers of the Symbolic order that enable the subject to experience itself as a self – as an I of identity. Identification with the master signifiers of social fictions produces that experience of self.

Social fictions are both imaginary and symbolic. In social fictions, the Symbolic order is given content by the imaginary: ‘at the level of the Imaginary, the subject believes in the transparency of the Symbolic; it does not recognize the lack of reality in the Symbolic . . . in effect, the Imaginary is where the subject mis-recognises (méconnait) the nature of the Symbolic’ (Lechte 1994: 68– 69).

Social fictions reproduce the Symbolic order because the production of the subject in identification with its master signifiers gives the fictional Symbolic order ‘flesh’ and so ‘life’. The discourses of social fictions produce subjects through a process of introjection of their master signifiers. If discourse produces the subject, it cannot be separate from the subject but must be integral to subjective formation.

Through that formation, the subject comes to have imaginary relations of phantasy and identification to its symbolic master signifiers and hence to discourse. Psychic mechanisms operate to produce the subject in relation to discursive master signifiers and, in particular, to the social fictions of identity that they represent. Identification with the master signifiers of discourse constitutes subjects, since that is how the subject becomes a subject.

While the Lacanian model addresses the sexuation of the subject, this conception of the social fiction includes other master signifiers of identity, such as sexuality, ethnicity or class. Butler points out that it is necessary to recognize that ‘the order of sexual difference is not prior to that of race or class in the constitution of the subjects; indeed that the symbolic is also at and at once a racializing set of norms, and that norms of realness by which the subject is produced are racially informed conceptions of “sex”’ (1993b: 130).

Social fictions represent discourses of social identity that intersect in overdetermined master signifiers. The theory of social fictions enables us to understand how discourses reproduce the racialized and sexualized subject and intersubjective relations of the Symbolic order. As a discourse, social fictions rest on a foundational and excluded term a. This excluded term is a discursive construct, since it is produced by the operations of social fictions. Social fictions of identity rest on the positing of difference – ‘I am a man (because I am not a woman).’

The assertion of difference is itself filled with imaginary content: ‘If I am a man (because I am not a woman), then I must possess this set of associated masculine qualities.’ In this way, the positing of identity in social discourses is productive because those discourses describe practices which signify how ‘to be’ a subject. At the same time, that ‘being’ rests on the production of a repudiated other – ‘I am not a woman’ – for social fictions rest on symbolic relations of identity and non-identity. The repudiated other functions as the foundational and excluded term a.

Social fictions themselves produce the repudiated term – for that repudiation founds their signifying structure. For example, the social fictions of masculinity rest on the excluded and foundational term of the feminine – a masculine subject defines itself in terms of another which is castrated. The ‘castrated’ ‘feminine’ functions as the excluded a. We can see other examples of the operation of social fictions in Drucilla Cornell’s description of the production of ‘white’ identity that is founded on its repudiated other of ‘black’ identity (1992: 67), and Butler’s description of a ‘heterosexual’ identity that rests on a repudiated ‘homosexual identification’ (1993b: 111).

social fictions symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 119.

Social fictions are culturally dominant representations of how to be a subject and how to exist as a subject in relation to other subjects.

… Lacan links what he describes as the dominant discourse of our age – the Discourse of the Master – to the rise of capitalism and the modern ego (S17: 207), indicating that discourses are historically and culturally specific. Accordingly, social fictions can be understood as historically and culturally specific forms of the Symbolic order, which articulate particular historical and cultural discourses.

Judith Butler offers a useful reading of the Symbolic order as ‘a register of regulatory ideality’, which includes not only sexualized but racialized interpellations (1993b: 18). For Butler, the Symbolic produces ‘regulatory norms’ which demarcate and delimit forms of family, identity and love (1997b: 66). It represents ‘reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility’ (1997b: 24), suggesting that it is a set of cultural rules which constitute social norms.

However, in this formulation, the Symbolic remains a closed and monolithic structure that produces a single normative subject. Such a conception of the Symbolic does not explain the many discourses of identity, or their historical specificity – which are precisely the grounds of Butler’s critique of the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic.

‘Social fictions’ help us to understand the ‘register of regulatory ideality’ as a discursive register of social fictions, as discourses of identity that produce it through the identification with master signifiers of sexualized and racialized subjectivity. The Symbolic order also produces racialized and sexualized relations between subjects, operating as a register of regulatory relations. While the Symbolic order structures discourses in terms of the production of sexualized and racialized subjects and intersubjective relations, the ‘content’ of those identities and social relations will be historically and culturally articulated as social fictions. Social fictions are therefore specific to a historical moment of that social order. In this way, social fictions are contingent in the sense that they represent particular cultural and historical forms of the discursive production of identity. If social fictions are contingent and mobile, then they are open to political contestation and change.

social fictions

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 118.

Nancy Fraser claims that in the Lacanian model of discourse, ‘one cannot even pose the question of cultural hegemony’ (1992: 184). However, by using the concept of the social fiction it is possible not only to pose the question of cultural hegemony using Lacan’s model of discourse, but also to see the productivity of its answer.

Social fictions

‘Social fiction’ emphasizes the formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in social discourses. This concept stresses the social and ultimately fictive nature of social discourses, which are fictional in the sense that they are contingent upon a symbolic field that gives them meaning. The concept focuses upon the discursive production of forms of subjectivity and the relations between subjects, developing the Lacanian theory of discourse as a description of the structure and operation of social discourses.

This concept of ‘social fictions’ describes the dominant social discourses that constitute a subject, such that the term names the multiplicity of socially produced and sanctioned ideas about how one ‘is’ a subject. A social fiction is a socio-symbolic representation of subjective identity. Social fictions work to produce a subject as subject, with a gendered and racialized identity. With that identity, a subject (mis)recognizes itself in particular dominant signifiers of social discourses. Dominant social fictions include discourses of ethnicity, sexuality, class and gender. As discursive formations, social fictions produce the speaking position of subjects. They represent an enunciative position, for example, ‘I am Scottish’, or ‘I am a woman’, and so on. This I of the speaking subject is an imaginary position of consciousness or ‘self’. These social fictions produce a subject’s relation to itself and its others, and so enable the subject to think of itself as a self and as distinct from, or the same as, its others. As an I, the subject experiences itself as a unified self that possesses identity. However, the production of the identity of the subject in social fictions generates not only its relation to itself, but also its relations to other subjects. For example, in the Lacanian schema, the Discourse of the Master describes a relation of mastery of ‘self’ and others. In this way, social fictions can be understood as a symbolic relation of subject to other subjects. Social fictions represent the discursive relation of the subject to itself and to other subjects, because their discourses are socio-symbolic representations of subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
In the Lacanian model, master signifiers ‘dominate’ discourses, holding a discourse together and giving it a distinctive shape by ordering its structure of signifiers. The subject takes up a speaking position according to the master signifier of its discourse (in the Lacanian model, that of Master, Hysteric, Analyst and Academic).

I understand social fictions as discourses, which a dominant signifier structures and gives its distinctive shape. Social fictions operate as a sequence of master signifiers that, as Mark Bracher describes, have other signifiers attaching to them in metonymic and metaphorical movement of signification (1993: 49). Every social fiction has a discursive structure, and a dominant master signifier that produces the subject. The master signifier functions as the interpellative ‘hook’ of subjective identity, since it represents that moment at which the subject (mis)recognizes itself in social fictions. The master signifier enables the subject to perceive itself reflected (or otherwise) in social discourse. This identificatory and phantasmic ‘interpellation’ gives social fictions their power – for subjects literally recognize themselves or, in Althusserian terms, are ‘hailed’ by social discourses of identity. The master signifier serves as a mechanism of identification with social fictions, and so as a mechanism of psychic and social identification. Master signifiers enable the subject to represent its self to itself and also to other subjects. As social subjects, we recognize the master signifiers of other subjects, whether similar or different to our own, because the master signifier represents the subject for another subject. In this way, master signifiers serve to anchor social fictions as discourses, both in the production of the subject and in the production of its relation to other subjects.

In this way, this notion of the ‘social fiction’ reworks the Lacanian conception of discourse as a social bond in terms of socio-symbolic relations between subjects. As discourses, social fictions produce meaning, as well as relations between subjects. 118

campbell symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 116.

In Lacanian theory, contestatory knowledge is psychoanalytic and subversion emerges from each individual’s psychoanalysis. If we follow Lacan to the letter, then it seems a critical or collective politics outside psychoanalysis will fail. In contrast, feminism is a collective politics that contends that it is possible to create knowledges that do not reproduce the Discourse of the Master.

Lacan does not intend his psychoanalytic theory to be a social theory. Nevertheless, his work presents a series of explicit and implicit claims as to the nature of the social in its account of the Symbolic order. .. While Lacanian knowledge is by definition a social practice, his work presents an unelaborated concept of sociality. For this reason, Lacan does not develop the radical implications of his epistemological theory. Rather, this theory of knowledge removes the knowing subject and knowledge from their social frame and so fails to address their social and political production, a central contemporary epistemological concern (Doyle McCarthy 1996). Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter argue that ‘to be adequate, an epistemology must attend to the complex ways in which social values influence knowledge’ (1993a: 13) … A theory of feminist knowledge requires a more complex account of the social than Lacan’s unelaborated notion of the Symbolic order. … In the next section, I address these problems in the theory of the Symbolic order, using two strategies. The first elaborates the theory of the Symbolic order through Lacan’s later concept of discursive intersubjectivity. The second develops this Lacanian theory of the social relation through a feminist theory of social relations. These two strategies represent the first part of a rereading of the Symbolic order as a social order. 114

The Lacanian account of subjectivity contains within it a theory of intersubjectivity because it provides an account of the production of relation between subjects. However, in his later work Lacan characterizes ‘intersubjectivity’ as an imaginary relation between subjects. By the 1960s, the concept of intersubjectivity acquires negative connotations, as Lacan associates it with the imaginary and dual relation of two selves trapped in the méconnaissance of their egos (Evans 1996: 90).

Lacan develops his critique of this imaginary intersubjectivity from the Hegelian account of the battle for recognition between the master and the slave. Žižek points out that ‘[w]hat the late Lacan does with intersubjectivity is to be opposed to the early Lacan’s Hegelo-Kojèvian motifs of the struggle for recognition’ (1998 Seven Veils of Fantasy in Nobus Key Concepts: 194).

Žižek counterposes the intersubjective character of fantasy – the imaginary relation to the other as object – and the field of intersubjectivity of the symbolic Other (1998b: 195– 196). This later account of the symbolic field of intersubjectivity differs from the Hegelian model of imaginary recognition. An example of Lacan’s concept of symbolic intersubjectivity is found in his description of the transference between analyst and analysand. In the relation between analyst and analysand, there is always a third party – that of language as the order of culture which intervenes in the imaginary relation. This third party is the Symbolic order, a symbolic relation between subjects. 115

Symbolic Order

The Symbolic order represents a symbolic rather than an imaginary relation between subjects. The Symbolic is ‘a point beyond the specular oscillation of intersubjective rivalry – a purely symbolic point’ (Lechte 1996: 12). The Symbolic order forms the subject and its relations to others. In this formulation, Lacan presents a model of intersubjectivity in which language constructs the relation between subjects. In this sense, intersubjectivity implies a symbolic relation between subjects that makes possible their social relation. The theory of the four discourses is an example of such a model of intersubjectivity, as the four discourses describe the foundational discursive bonds between subjects. This formulation reflects a classical concept of intersubjectivity in critical theory, drawing upon its most minimal formulation as a relation between subjects. 116

The concept of symbolic intersubjectivity offers a means of rereading the Symbolic order through the later theory of discourse. The later theory shifts its emphasis from the Symbolic as a monolithic and closed structure to the open and incomplete nature of both discourse and the Symbolic order.

For Lacan, discourse always produces a remainder, which represents its foundational and excluded term, as ‘[n]o matter how many signifiers one adds to the signifying chain, the chain is always incomplete; it lacks the signifier which could complete it’ (Evans 1996: 96).

An excluded term structures discourse because there is a lack in its foundation, the Symbolic order. With this poststructuralist inflection, we can use Lacan’s later work on discourse to reformulate a concept of the Symbolic order that does not imply that it is a singular or total structure of language, and so to develop from it a feminist and psychoanalytic social theory.

The theory of the four discourses reconceives the Symbolic order as producing different discursive structures, giving more complexity to the account of the symbolic relations between subjects. It permits us to reformulate the concept of the Symbolic order as a mobile system of signifying chains – or discourses – which produce social relations and subjects.

This model of the Symbolic order accepts Lacan’s proposition that it founds the stable structures of discourse. However, it also proposes that these stable structures take different discursive forms, which in turn produce different symbolic forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In this way, I develop the concept of the Symbolic order to describe the structure and operation of social discourses; and their production of subjects and social relations.

My reformulation of the notion of the Symbolic order retains the later Lacanian conception of discourse as constructing possible subjective positions and discursive acts. However, it emphasizes the productivity of discourses, in the sense that it emphasizes their production and reproduction in subjective and intersubjective discursive practices, rather than being fixed or frozen structures that are imposed upon the subject. In this way, it understands discourse as constitutive of, and articulated in, subjectivity and intersubjectivity; as producing and being reproduced by subjects and the relations between them.

S1 (Master Signifier)

Speaker Receiver

Agent —–> Other Truth Production

S2 —> a S1 $

S2 —> a S1 $

Agent —–> Other
Truth Production