Category: lacan

objet a

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud recounts the story of his grandson, who was greatly attached to his mother. At the age of one and a half, the child invented a game which he played again and again. This involved throwing away a wooden reel attached to a piece of string with a sound his grandfather, perhaps optimistically, interpreted as ‘fort’ (‘gone’), and then recovering it with a joyful ‘da’ (‘there’). Freud reads this game as a way for Ernst to allow his mother to go away without protesting: 47  for the child the reel compensated for her absences, took her place (Freud 1984: 283– 6). It was the first action, throwing away the reel, that the child repeated tirelessly.

This construction of a symbolic opposition between two terms, ‘fort/da’, with the emphasis on the first, marks, Lacan affirms, the advent of language, of the signifying subject, and the splitting off of the real that that entails.

What Ernst translates into representation, as he throws the symbolic reel, is not a need that might require his mother’s return. On the contrary, he does not even look at the door in expectation of her return. Nor in Lacan’s reading does the reel symbolize the child’s mother as such. Instead, the object attached to the string represents a part of himself, stands in for the child’s loss of continuity with the world around him, replaces and supplants the lost real of the connection that meets his needs, the particularity of his organic relationship with his mother. The reel takes the place of the real in the symbolic. And Lacan adds his own story to Freud’s. He too, he says, has seen a child traumatized by the fact that he was going away, and has returned to find the same child ready to fall asleep on the shoulder of ‘the living signifier that I had become’ (1979: 62– 3).

The wooden reel, this ‘privileged object’, that has emerged from the primal separation between the subject and the organism, from the ‘self-mutilation’ that cuts off the possibility of encountering the real, is the objet a (1979: 83), and it is in itself nothing much. Indeed, by way of compensation, it is nothing at all. Ernst will go on to abandon the plaything, but not the lack it symbolizes. And in later life he will no doubt seek a succession of stand-ins to fill this lack. None of them, however, will fully do so. Like the wooden reel, the object of love can never replace what is lost. Instead, ‘that’s not it’.

‘“That’s not it” means that, in the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a, for the object that would satisfy jouissance’ (1998: 126). No such object exists. As ‘the void presupposed by a demand’, the objet a represents non-being more explicitly than the Thing (1998: 126). It constitutes the nothing that is to be found behind the veil, the object-cause, both object and cause, of desire. In love, ‘I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a’ (1979: 263). 48

Like the Thing, it has no existence in the real, since no actual object can satisfy the unconscious desire that pure loss serves to perpetuate. 49

The real, then, surrounds us. It also inhabits us as the condition of our ex-sistence. Human beings remain uneasy composites, the conjunction of an unreachable real organism and the subjects they become.

The unconscious is not the real, nor the repository of the real, but the consequence of its loss.

Driven though it is, and constituted by culturally constructed images of reality, the subject remains ultimately empty. A drive is not an instinct, but its representative in the psyche, like a delegate sent to take its place. Lacan insists that the drive is not to be understood as the pressure of a need, such as hunger or thirst. Nor is it the incursion into the mind of the real, living organism (1979: 164). But the real of the organism as lost to the subject remains the condition of the existence of the drive. ‘The real . . . is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious’ (1998: 131). 50-51

antigone

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

Zeuxis wanted to look behind the veil of the paint that constituted his rival’s picture. The psychoanalytic subject longs to look behind the veil of the signifier, but what it seeks there is not so much the forgotten, repressed real, not that part of itself, or its continuity with the world, cut off by the symbolic and lost. Instead, it looks for the object and cause of its own desire, an identifiable something that would fill the gap created by the loss of the real. This object that motivates and perpetuates desire took on increasing importance for Lacan. In Seminar 7 in 1959– 60, he named it the Thing (das Ding); later, the Thing disappeared, to be remodelled as the objet a. 45

We need to go back a bit. For much of his life Freud insisted that the unconscious motor force of all human life was sexual. But during and after the First World War, his work begins to demonstrate a mounting conviction that there must be another drive that presses towards death. How else to account for the sustained carnage of that extraordinary and unheralded episode of history? Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, begins by proposing an antithesis between the life-affirming sexual drive towards pleasure and, in contrast, the death drive that seeks inertia for the organism, but may equally be projected outwards by the subject as aggression against others. As Freud’s argument here unfolds, however, the two principles refuse to stay apart. On the one hand, there often seems to be an element of aggression in the sexual act; on the other, the pleasure principle too seeks release from tension, and so shares the aim of the death drive. Do they, then, support rather than oppose each other? Jacques Derrida has brilliantly deconstructed the opposition between the two (1987a), in this instance ably supported by Freud himself, who concluded his book with disarming honesty by admitting that he was not satisfied with a theory that remained purely speculative. 45

Beginning where Freud had left off, but going back to take account of a passage from ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, published five years earlier (Freud 1984: 136– 8), Lacan condensed the two drives into one. His rereading of Freud acknowledges only one drive, and it is both life-giving and deadly. Seminar 7 attends primarily to the quest for pleasure, which Lacan locates on the side of the signifier. Love is allied with pleasure, a form of sublimation, separable from desire itself. But Lacan also brings pleasure together with death here in his account of tragedy. Where Freud roots his theory in the story of Oedipus, Lacan (as a child of Freud?), defies his phallocentric reputation and takes as his heroic protagonist Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and offspring, therefore, of an incestuous marriage. On the basis of the organic bond with her brother, Antigone is impelled to bury him against Creon’s law, and to confront death as the inevitable punishment for her deed. Lacan sees Antigone as heroic because, like Marvell’s lovers, she assumes her fate, her Até, ‘atrocious’ though it is. For Lacan, she represents human sovereignty in the face of death: 46

“Antigone appears as autonomos, as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him.” (1992: 282)

Rather than languish as the victims of incompleteness that the signifier makes us, we are enabled by the same signifier to desire not to remain at its mercy. We can, in other words, want not to be. …  Antigone, in Lacan’s account, just as defiantly precipitates her own death. It is because she loves her brother that she ‘pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire’ (1992: 282).

Lacan’s death drive bears very little resemblance to Freud’s, which depends on the thesis that the organism prefers stasis, or inertia. 46 We do not seek annihilation, Lacan says, for the sake of restoring equilibrium. But he does draw on Freud’s proposal that the organism is driven to die at its own time and in its own way (Freud 1984: 311– 12). In Lacan the death drive operates in the speaking being, at the level of the signifier, and seeks what he calls ‘the second death’.

This is not just physical extinction (the first death), which might take place at any time, by accident. Instead, the second death entails the full recognition of what we are, which is to say, of course, what we are not: not complete, not knowing, not immortal. The tragic hero acts on this understanding, assumes the destiny of a being-for-death and, when the time comes, willingly accedes to the state of non-being that is the outcome of the human condition.

At this stage of Lacan’s work the object of the drive is identified as the Thing. An archaic, maternal, forbidden and impossible object of desire, the Thing is ‘both living and dead’ (1992: 300), at once life-giving and deadly. Lacan’s name for it is partly ironic, since no such object exists in the real; at the same time, there is the suggestion of a pun in French on la Chose and the cause of desire that we attribute to the Thing. The Thing is ‘that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier’ and ‘presents itself’ to the analyst in the gap produced by the signifying cut (1992: 118). Constructed retroactively to occupy the space of pure loss that is left by the erasure of the real, the Thing marks the place where the real was, constitutes itself as filling the emptiness that resides there for the speaking being. Subsequently the object of the drive is renamed by the even more evasive term, objet a, and located more firmly at the level of demand. Lacan also calls it the petit a, to differentiate the little ‘a’ from the Autre, the big Other, which is language itself. Little Ernst’s wooden reel offers an example of the objet a.

death real

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

The subject is what speaks. Language makes us subjects, but in the process permits us to know that we shall rejoin the real in the end. We shall die. … But the relation between language and death goes deeper. The subject’s own constitution in language brings about the ‘death’ of the real for the subject. In that sense, the possibility of absence from the signifying chain is there at the inaugural moment of the speaking being. The absent real anticipates a future absence for the subject itself, marks subjectivity as finite, temporary. 40.

Lacan borrows from Heidegger the awareness of our own death as a perpetual condition of human beings which, whether we know it or not, shapes and influences everything we do. (If you doubt it, imagine a world that had conquered death, or in which death was impossible. How much would be different? Sex, partnerships, parenthood, work, adventures …. If our lives were not finite, would anything remain the same?)

Our own death is difficult to imagine. Freud pointed out that it is virtually impossible to do so, and when we try, we find that we ourselves are present in the imagined scene, hovering somewhere close by (1985a: 77). We cannot represent death to ourselves, even though we can name it, and see it staged in any number of genres from classical tragedy to Hollywood movies. As Roland Barthes might have said, ‘Every night on TV, someone dies’. But this is someone else’s death: our own remains oddly elusive, imaginatively hard to conceive. 41

Death thus constitutes a paradoxically absent presence in the symbolic order, and in that respect it not only exemplifies the real as unknowable, but typifies at the same time the lost object of immediate experience, subsumed, supplanted, and yet not finally abolished by the signifier.

Why is this? Because, Lacan would say, while there is nothing lacking in the real, there is always something missing in the symbolic, but this is an absence that makes its presence felt. As Saussure proposed, language is a system of differences ‘without positive terms’ (Saussure 1974: 120). In other words, nothing in the world anchors the meanings that language itself produces. Language, in consequence, is not to be trusted. The signifier seems to evoke the existence of something on the other side of it, but refuses to tell us what this is. Ordinary language, for example, locates an intention, a reason or a
truth ‘behind’ what is said. But there is no access to this place ‘behind’ the words; whatever inhabits it remains undefined, conjectural. The signifier, then, appears as a veil, but one that veils the unknown, perhaps nothing, a possible absence, the potential absence, even, of the subject itself.

drive

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

Freud insisted throughout his work on the organic life of his patients, but he also insisted that the symptoms which so commonly marked their bodies did not originate there. The drive, he affirmed, was the representative in the psyche of an instinct, and thus to be found ‘on the frontier between the mental and the physical’ (Freud 1977a: 83). 2

That instinct itself no longer exists as such in the speaking being, but its residue survives in the psyche to exert an influence on mind and body, or mind-and-body, since in this account the two interact in a way that renders them no longer so easily distinguishable. 37.

In consequence, the cultural script is never absolute. It plays a crucial role, of course: we cannot account for Anna O.’s behaviour without reference to the specificity of her cultural moment. At the same time, that cultural moment does not fully explain the ‘absences’ that made her unaware of her surroundings, the ‘bad self’ that threw cushions at her visitors and tore the buttons off her bedclothes, or the loss of her own culture in its inscription in her native language. For that we need to recognize what culture withholds, or the inability of the script to cover the lack that appears in culture itself. 37

The abolished particularity returns as resistance, marking the speaking being’s loss of the unnameable real, which is still there, but no longer there-for-a-subject. This resistance makes itself felt not only in individual experience, but also as incoherences in the apparent homogeneity of culture itself. A cultural criticism that takes this into account is able to acknowledge the silences that mark the inscriptions of culture, the complexity and the hesitations of the texts, as well as their noisier affirmations.

anna o

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.

The worst of her symptoms, he discovered, could be traced to a night in July. The father she loved was seriously ill, and while her mother was away, Anna was left alone to nurse him. Sitting by his bedside, she fell into a ‘waking dream’, and seemed to see a snake coming from the wall to bite her father. Apparently, there may have been snakes in the field behind the house in the country, where the family was staying, and this might have motivated the image. She tried to keep off the hallucinatory snake, but ‘it was as though she was paralysed’. At the same time, ‘language failed her: she could find no tongue in which to speak’, until eventually she remembered some nursery rhymes in English, and then she found herself able to communicate – and pray – in that language (92– 3). What was the meaning of Anna O.’s encounter with the uncanny snake, and the severe disorder, at once physiological and psychological, it brought about? Breuer does not say, though he insists (optimistically, as subsequent investigations have revealed (BorchJacobsen 1999)), that as soon as she had reproduced her waking dream for him under hypnosis, her condition improved dramatically. With hindsight, however, and in the light of more than a century of subsequent psychoanalytic theory, it is not hard to develop on the basis of Breuer’s text a (possible, partial) reading of Anna O.’s waking dream. 34.

Anna ‘was markedly intelligent’, Breuer tells us, ‘with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect which would have been capable of digesting solid mental pabulum and which stood in need of it – though without receiving it after she had left school’ (Freud and Breuer 1974: 73). It was Anna O. who invented the phrase, the ‘talking cure’, to describe Breuer’s treatment of her symptoms (83). She was fluent in several European languages. However, according to the case history, ‘This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family’ (74). In July the father she adored fell ill, and for the first few months Anna devoted all her energy to nursing him, until in December her own health broke down, and she was no longer able to care for him. She developed a cough, which began at her father’s bedside when she heard dance music next door, felt a sudden longing to be there, and then was overcome with self-reproach. After the waking dream of the snake, the cough was compounded by the more severe symptoms. And she could no longer speak her own language. When she is well, we might construe, Anna reproduces the cultural script, and duly performs the proper meaning of the word ‘woman’ in Vienna in 1880.

She stays at home, where her intelligence has no outlet; but she puts others first and nurses her sick father, when she would rather go dancing. In her illness she rejects this meaning in its entirety, and the language in which it takes its place, refusing the obligations of ‘womanhood’. All she can remember are nursery rhymes in a foreign language, the culturally transmitted but alien inscription of childhood and its irresponsibility. The hallucination surely fulfils a desire that cannot be consciously acknowledged, in which she neglects her responsibilities as a nurse by day-dreaming. And in this state, she makes no effort to save her father’s endangered life. 35

Where does her resistance come from? Not from consciousness, evidently: Anna loves her father and doesn’t consciously want to be rid of him. But not from ‘nature’, either. And still less from the body. The unconscious represents the residue of the obliteration performed by language of the instinctual, organic self. In Lacan’s terms, Anna’s forbidden impulse to go dancing, and her even more inadmissible wish not to have to nurse her father day and night, demonstrate the reappearance beyond the symbolic order, beyond anything she can recognize or control, of a desire that stems from pure loss. Dancing and day-dreaming are not an end in themselves, not the final object of unconscious desire, but stand-ins for something that would take the place of the missing real. Unconscious desire marks its loss to the speaking subject. 35-36

When smokers contracted lung cancer without knowing what caused it, they encountered the real. If medieval sailors nudged at the edge of the world, but failed to fall off, they encountered the resistance of the real. This is the real that exists outside us as a limitation on our power to make the world in our own image of it. In the psychic life of speaking beings, meanwhile, the real of the organisms they also are is lost to consciousness. This particularity is cancelled by the Other of language.

But what is lost reappears as a residue, unconscious desire for something else, which may, as in this case, be deadly in its aim. Anna’s forgotten, repressed, waking dream is subsequently ‘written’ on her body as a symptom, in the form of the paralysis which follows. Release from her illness is possible only when she remembers the event under hypnosis and narrates it in words to Breuer, ‘rewrites’ it at the level of the signifier. Inscribed on Anna’s body, presented, however inadequately, in the talking cure, and re-presented, however partially, in Breuer’s case history,

the hallucination of the snake reveals another identity for Anna O., another subject position, or perhaps more than one, in excess of the identification her culture offers as the proper, self-sacrificing meaning of what it is to be a woman. What she resists is the specific cultural script available to respectable young women, especially in Orthodox Jewish families, in late nineteenth-century Vienna.

But the possibility of resistance is structural, a dissatisfaction characteristic of the uneasy conjunction between a human organism and the Otherness of language which erases the particularity of real needs. Anna went on resisting the destiny her culture prescribed for her, but in due course she found a culturally permissible outlet for it in feminism. The non-fictional Anna O., Bertha Pappenheim, went on to give much of her subsequent energy to the emerging cause of women’s emancipation ( Jones 1953: 248). She translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women into the German she had now recovered, and wrote a play about sexual exploitation called A Woman’s Right (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992: 78). She never married. 36.

desire

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?

hegel language

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005

HEGEL

Confronted by these arguments, which seem to go round in circles, Immanuel Kant, possibly the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, concluded that there must be a distinction between what we know and what exists. In Kant’s view, we can know things only as they appear to us, within a framework of knowledge that we ourselves create. Beyond the appearances, there lies a realm of thingsin-themselves, which is forever inaccessible to our knowledge. In the next generation, however, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel refused to settle for this gloomy view of the limitations on human knowledge. With the boundless optimism of the early nineteenth century about what was possible, Hegel developed a system that would impose no limits on what we are able to know – on condition that the ultimate object of knowledge is consciousness itself. Hegel’s starting point is what he calls ‘sense-certainty’, our awareness at the level of the senses of the sheer existence of things in the world. 22

It is because he stopped at this point in the argument, Hegel insists, that Kant supposed the true being of things was unknowable. Hegel’s next move is therefore crucial. He turns consciousness into its own object of knowledge. Enlightened, rational, universal consciousness is consciousness of the world as it is; the world is thus synonymous with consciousness of itself. In these circumstances there can be no failure of correspondence between consciousness and things-inthemselves. ‘Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality. . . . The “I” which is an object for me is the sole object, is all reality and all that is present’ (Hegel 1977: 140). When rational consciousness fully knows itself, becomes its own other, uniting self and other without abolishing their difference, reason reaches the level of what Hegel calls Geist. The German word has no exact equivalent in English, but is variously translated as ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. ‘Reason is Spirit’, Hegel affirms, ‘when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself’ (1977: 263). 23

Hegel’s incorporation of the world into consciousness might alternatively be understood to erase the world as anything more than an idea, and so to abolish the real. And even if few philosophers would subscribe to Hegel’s system now, its influence is perceptible in the widespread idealism that links a number of influential cultural theorists, Judith Butler and Stanley Fish among them. 24
At the same time, the specificity of the individual self disappears too. In a move that goes way beyond Cartesian mind– body dualism, Hegel contains and erases personal consciousness within universal reason. Recognizing, like Descartes, that individual experience is prone to error, Hegel locates absolute knowledge in a universality that entails ‘the externalization and vanishing of this particular “I”’ (308). 26

It is the property of language to generalize. In an attempt to be as particular, as singular, as possible, Hegel says, I name ‘this bit of paper’, but language cannot reach the sensuous ‘this’, and since ‘each and every bit of paper is “this bit of paper” . . . I have only uttered the universal all the time’ (66).

Knowledge, then, deals in universals. It negates the particularity of sensation in favour of universality. What do we know about salt? That it is white, tart, granular . . . and these are general properties that differ from each other, while one or other of them may be shared with sugar or sand. Such knowledge is no longer single, personal, private, but shared, Hegel would say, universally. Sadly, however, there is a price to pay for the community of enlightened minds that thus becomes available. Because language constrains what it is possible to say, we can no longer say what we mean. We set out to name the particular experience, but language insists on universalizing it. “And since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.” (Hegel 1977: 60) Language allows no access to the uniqueness of things. Instead, it “has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all.” (66) 27

But there is worse to come. Language, which places things beyond reach, but which, as if in compensation, enables consciousness to know itself and to communicate with others, has the further effect of placing the self in its uniqueness equally beyond reach. Individuality has only ‘an imaginary existence’ (298). This unique self in its real existence is subsumed by a universal self that enters into a new kind of reality. Paradoxically, it is language that permits the self to exist in its difference from others. But that very difference immediately disappears again in the generality that characterizes language …

Aware of all the twentieth century taught us about the irreducibility of cultural difference, culturalism rejects Hegel’s Enlightenment conviction that absolute knowledge is possible as universal truth. It retains, however, his historicism, as well as his idealism, with the effect of erasing the real. Whatever resides outside culture is held to have no bearing on us: unnameable, it has no effects. 29

sexual difference

Both Fish and Butler make large claims for the sovereignty of human culture over the world of things. Reality is more or less what we make it; material objects are shaped by language; identity is cultural and performative. But cultural determinism cuts both ways. If what we are is culturally scripted, we cannot be the source of our own beliefs, actions, selves. On the contrary, we are the helpless products of determinations that exist in our communities. Fish affirms that we have no freedom of opinion, and that the only alternative views open to us are those of another interpretive community; Butler sees the sole way to influence change as repetition of the cultural script with a difference. Neither has grounds for confidence that things will change much, or that change will be for the better if they do. Stanley Fish argues that if you want to resist, you have to move out and find another more sympathetic community. Judith Butler remains committed to resistance, but can see no adequate way of theorizing the possibility. The radical credentials of cultural constructivism do less than justice, it seems, to the distinctly liberal views of its main proponents. 16

THE REAL OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

In The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998) Truman himself is the only person who does not know that he is the star of a television serial. Born on the set, Truman supposes that Seahaven, domed, climate-controlled, safe, socially predictable, is all there is. This leaves him at the mercy of a world he does not even know is scripted. But driven by dissatisfaction and desire, in front of a worldwide TV audience represented in the movie by characters whose consecutive responses to the show the camera makes familiar to us, Truman tries to leave town and travel. His efforts to escape are repeatedly frustrated, until he sails as far as the horizon and finds an exit button. The way out is a black rectangle against the plaster sky, the unknown, perhaps the void. The Truman Show juxtaposes the imaginary world of Seahaven with the reality of the audience watching the true man’s struggles to escape the fiction he believes in, and with a third term, a black hole, the real. The real provokes anxiety precisely to the degree that it is not ours to control. Fish brackets the real: it is not his concern. Butler denies its independence, but in doing so, in my view, she impoverishes the politics of gender.

Sexual difference belongs to the real, to the extent that it generates anxiety as difference, while resisting symbolization. Sexual difference cannot be reduced to a distinction between this and that, or to decisive criteria for assigning bodies to one side or another of a single binary axis. Babies are not always born unequivocally male or female. Olympic athletes have to be classified before they can be entered for either men’s or women’s events, but no infallible test has yet been produced to settle the question in marginal cases. Sometimes the evidence of anatomy conflicts with that of hormones or chromosomes. No single indicator seems to be final. Judith Butler’s preferred term is ‘sex’, which points to an essence, and her case is designed to contest the appeal to the biological ‘facts’ of a single binary opposition as the ground of identity. But sexual difference is not an essence, and can hardly constitute a ground.

Difference is a relationship, a space between things, not a thing in itself, not even a fact. And everything we know indicates that it is by no means binary. Lived in history, of course, sexual difference remains a condition for cultural politics to reckon with, though not necessarily as a determining one, and certainly not as natural, where nature is viewed as either prescriptive or inert.

What we make of sexual difference, whether as oppression or diversity, we make in culture. But it doesn’t follow that we make it up, or that we can by means of performatives make away with it. The relation between the subject and the real organism that we also – and inextricably – are renders feminist and queer politics no less imperative: just more difficult, and therefore more demanding.

The sense of an alterity beyond culture, pushing and pulling it out of shape, permits us to escape the cultural determinism and the cycle of repetition. Our relation to the world is capable of change: things can be other than they are. The gap between culture and the real is a cause of dissatisfaction which impels us to want more. If so, current cultural theory confronts the question of the status and the limits of culture itself. On that depends our conception of human beings and their relation not only to the sexual possibilities, but also to the political obligations, of the world we inhabit.

We might even want to say that the absence of the real is the motive for culture – and for the resistance to culture’s regulatory norms. This motive is recurrently figured in Western thought as the darkness of Plato’s cave, St Augustine’s restlessness, fear in Hobbes, Freud’s civilized discontent or Lacan’s unconscious desire, the causes of change.  In Judith Butler’s case, what looked at first like the dream of freedom turned out in practice to be a form of determinism. For Fish, culturalism presents a world that looks all too like Truman’s Seahaven: safe, but repetitive. Cultural constructivism reckons without the real, …The sense of an alterity beyond culture, pushing and pulling it out of shape, permits us to escape the cultural determinism and the cycle of repetition. Our relation to the world is capable of change: things can be other than they are.

The gap between culture and the real is a cause of dissatisfaction which impels us to want more.  If so, current cultural theory confronts the question of the status and the limits of culture itself. On that depends our conception of human beings and their relation not only to the sexual possibilities, but also to the political obligations, of the world we inhabit. 19

real

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.  2005

According to Lacan’s version of Freud, social reality offers gratifications, including sexual gratifications. But because language is irreducibly Other than the organism that we also are, the satisfactions available to the speaking being never quite match the wants they are intended to meet. When the little human animal becomes a symbolizing subject, something is left out of what language permits it to say. Its demands, in other words, belong to the alien language, not to the organism, and the gap between the two constitutes the location of unconscious desire. Desire, then, subsists in ways that are not culturally scripted, not the result of habit or the repetition of speech acts. Desire, unfortunately for us, is never quite ‘performed’ in our speech acts, but continues to make its disruptive presence felt in them for that very reason.13

Psychoanalysis sees human beings as driven by determinations that bear a more complex relation to culture.The drives are psychic representatives of instincts. They thus participate in both culture and the real. The ‘person’ in psychoanalysis does not consist of ideas that materialize a body, and still less a mind and a body. Instead, we are speaking beings, divided between a real organism that inhabits an organic world and a subject that makes demands in symbols so irreducibly Other that they leave in place a memory of loss, which continues to insist as unconscious desire. From this perspective, the real, culture’s difference, without which the term has no meaning, is that silent or silenced exteriority which is also inside us, and which we cannot symbolize, delimit, specify or know, even when we can name it ‘the real’. That term invests it with a substantial but remarkably indeterminate character. We shall, however, revert to the real in the end, in death. Death doesn’t do fiction, but eliminates the body and the speaking subject, with all it thinks it knows. Death puts an end to the cultural game for each of us. The real is not nature, the terrain that Western science has set out since the seventeenth century to map and master, … Nor is the real a fact – of the kind bluff common sense might invoke to crush speculation. Still less is it the truth, a foundation on which to base new laws or dogmas, or an alternative reality with which to contrast appearances. On the contrary, the real is a question, not an answer. 14

Nor is the real a fact – of the kind bluff common sense might invoke to crush speculation. Still less is it the truth, a foundation on which to base new laws or dogmas, or an alternative reality with which to contrast appearances. On the contrary, the real is a question, not an answer.

Though it exists as a difference, there is no meaning in the real. Indifferent to description, it exceeds representation and brings language to an impasse. If we experience it, we do so as a gap, or alternatively as a limit, the point at which culture fails us. The real is what our knowledge, individually or collectively, both must and cannot accommodate. 14

culture and the real

Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism. N ew York: Routledge, 2005.

Lacan’s real is not to be confused with reality, which is what we do know, because culture defines it for us. The real is what is there, but undefined, unaccountable, perhaps, within the frameworks of our knowledge. It is there as such, but not there-for-a-subject. In Lacan’s account, the meanings that give us our sense of reality are always acquired from outside. We learn to mean from other people, from a language that exists before we are born into it or, in Lacan’s terms, from the irreducible Otherness of the symbolic order. As the subjects we become by means of our subjection to the symbolic order, we gain access to social reality, but we leave behind the real of the human organism in its continuity with its surroundings. From now on language will always come between us and direct contact with the real. But the loss will be made good in the end: we shall rejoin the real in death, which we can name, but not know. Death separates us decisively from subjectivity and its experience, including the experience of reality.

Because it cannot normally be brought within the symbolic order of language and culture, the real is there, but precisely not there-for-a-subject, not accessible to human beings who are subject to the intervention of language. Psychoanalysis, however, can bring to light the missed encounter with a real so unbearable that it cannot be named. Freud recounts the case of a father who, in Lacan’s interpretation, woke up rather than continue to dream the appeal of his dead son, ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ (Lacan 1979: 58– 60). The dead child in this appalling (‘atrocious’) vision ‘designates’ a realm beyond reality, which is one of cruel loss (Lacan 1973a: 58). This loss is real, organic, but language cannot do it justice. Lacan comments that no one can say what it is to lose a child, unless the father as father, in the bond with his child that he cannot name as a conscious being in the symbolic order, in culture, in the reality we (think we) know. The dream comes close, but even there the real is evaded.

Culture is the element we inhabit as speaking beings; it is what makes us subjects. Culture consists of a society’s entire range of signifying practices – rituals, stories, forms of entertainment, lifestyles, sports, norms, beliefs, prohibitions and values. In our own globalized society it includes art and opera, fashion, film, television, travel and computer games. Culture resides in the meanings of those practices, the meanings we learn. The subject is what speaks, or, more precisely, what signifies, and subjects learn in culture to reproduce or to challenge the meanings inscribed in the signifying practices of the society that shapes them. If subjectivity is an effect of culture, of the inscription of culture in signifying practice, there is no place for human beings outside culture. Culture, therefore, is all we know. In that sense, we are always in culture – always in the game. And if so, there is nothing we can be sure of, even when it’s vital. Culture is what we know – or think we do. In practice, we can never be certain of it, because it is known in language  9

Knowledge exists at the level of the symbol, and there is no way of showing that any specific set of symbols maps the world accurately. Our mastery of the world depends on our ability to map it, to recognize the difference between fact and fiction, but we cannot do so with absolute confidence. 10

If anything resists the sovereignty of the symbolic order, we always risk the uncanny possibility of an encounter that exceeds what culture permits us to define.

Ror Malone Kareen real

Fomulas create a way of writing that does not represent reality but rather operate as a writing that structures the real.  Math can build bombs; physics can conceptualize a non-existent electron marked only by its effects.

We approach the real through the inter-dit —the between words. To gain access to this “between” one must work through the materiality of the signifier to the point of its failure.  … Rather than telling the analysand what is really happening according to some sense of meaning, one presses where language fails and language will always fail at the level of its material enunciation.  Interpretation is about different strategies with the inter-dit or how one operates at the interstice between language and what is other to it.

subject in lacan and butler

Ror Malone, Kareen. “Reading Desire and Tracing the Subject in Lacan and Butler: The Problem of Ethics Without Meta-Language. Theoretical Psychology Critical Contributions. Selected Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of The International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. June 3 – 8, 2001. Eds. Stephenson, Niamh. and H. Lorraine Radtke, René Jorna, Henderikus J. Stam. Concord: Captus Press Inc, 2003. 233-241.

From the abstract: The “end” of meta-language refers to the necessity of crafting a more precise notion of the interactions that define the “extra-discursive,” authority, and the “reality” secured by language (e.g., norms).  It is at the intersection of these dimensions that one may ascertain a form of agency that is both embedded within culture yet able to subvert or take an ethical position in relation to its norms.  Language and loss the “inter-dit” in Lacanian interpretation, and Butler’s concept of rhetoricity are implicated as avenues through which one can understand the emergence of this sort of agency and ethics.

Any recourse to a meta-language would render clinical work an ideological game of identification with the so-called reality of the analyst.

To claim that the subject is at the same level as the law is not equivalent to claiming that she is the law, since any conflation of subject with law only reduces her, subjects her absolutely, to the law. At the same level as and yet not the law, the subject can only be conceived at the failure of the law, of language.  In language and yet more than language, the subject is a cause for which no signifier can account.  Malone, 234 citing Copjec in Read My Desire 1994, 209.

In Seminar XX (1974/1999), Lacan asserted that there is no meta-language, no language about language.  In other words, within the Lacanian paradigm, there is no super-ordinate position of exemption from the limits of language.  For Lacan, the absence of a meta-language thus implies a limit in two ways. First, language and no position in language can say it all; there is a remainder that is known only by its effects.  Secondly, you cannot escape lanugage. The above impasses of language create ethical dilemmas that are often solved by notions of the good, which try to locate some trans-linguistic position that organizes the ends of speech. Regarding the impasses found in the limit of language, Lacan says that:

There is some relationship to being that cannot be known. It is that relationship whose structure I investigate … insofar as that knowledge — which as I just said is impossible — is prohibited (interdicted) thereby. this is where I play on the equivocation — that impossible knowledge is censored or forbidden, but it isn’t if you write (inter-dit” appropriately — it is said between the words, between the lines. We have to expose this kind of real to which it grants us access. Lacan 1974/1999 119.

The inherent lack of foundation in our relation to the Other takes its social bearings in relationship to prohibition.  You can only know so much about the Other (your parent’s unconscious fantasy, the arbitrary rule of law etc.)

So there is a question of a non-relation to the Other that cannot be eased by discourse, a limit within discourse encountered only through discourse. This limit has social implications [for example psychotics are only too certain that they know what the Other wants and this is what Rothenberg finds problematic with Butler’s work].