Category: the real

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.

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.

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 4

Sinthome

an identification with the symptom, a recognition in the real of our symptom of the only support of our being (Stav citing Žižek 1989) 133

Wo es war soll Ich werden: the subject must identify with the place where the syumptom already was: ‘In its pathological particularity [it] … must recognise the element which gives consistency to [its] being’ (Žižek 1989) 133

By saying ‘We are all Jews’, ‘We all live in Chernobyl!’ or ‘We are all boat people!’ — … we elevate the symptom, the excluded truth of the social field (which has been stigmatised as an alien particularity) to the place of the universal — to the point of our common identification which was up to now, sustained by its exclusion or elimination. The same happens when we say ‘We are all gypsies!’ — … What is promoted here is an attitude consistent with identifying with the symptom of the social and traversing social fantasy.

It is only by accepting such an impossible representation, by  making this declaration of impossibility, that it is possible to ‘represent’ the impossible or rather to identify with the impossibility of its representation. Identification with the symptom is thus related to the traversing of the fantasy. Going through fantasy entails the realisation of the lack or inconsistency in the Other which is masked by fantasy, the separation between objet petit a and the Other, a separation which is not only ethically sound but also ‘liberating’ for our political imagination.  134

What is clearly at stake here is the possibility of enacting symbolic gestures that institutionalise social lack, that is to say incorporate the ethical recognition of the impossibility of social closure.

Critique of Judith Butler, Will Connolly, Simon Critchley

Critchley’s Levinaisan ethics of the Other [and probably Butler’ s too]. ‘The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other’ (citing Critchley 1992).

The problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unifed totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way.  What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relation — the identification with the Other — that attempts to bring closure to the social.

In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relate — identify — with the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics.  And this is what democracy needs today. 139

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 3

It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new socio-political order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. 74

Trapped as we are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction.  The only moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature, nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but “a mode of concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being” (Stav quoting Evnden 1992) 86

Recognising the constitutivity of the real does not entail that we stop symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs — or, if one accepts that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and transient character of every symbolic constuct. 89

Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’ it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.  Yet any promise of absolute positivity — the construction of an imaginarised false real — is founded on a violent/negative origin; it is sustained by the exclusion of a real — a non-domesticated real — which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. 108

The fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still with us

Can we have passion in politics without holocausts?  Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia?  … Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope.  But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society.  It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequence of such a dream.

Radical Democracy

What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order.  Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen as something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be “valued and celebrated.  … To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk.” (Stav quoting Mouffe 1996)  111

Democratic politics — and politics in general — can never eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division.  the aim is rather to establish unity within an environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Stav quotes Beck 1997) … accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the politcal qua encounter with the real. 112

Lacanian political theory aims at bring to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, [therefore] it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. 116

Democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle.  On the contrary, democracy is based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured. 120

Democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. 120

Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured.

Thus the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other but on the recognition of its own irreducibility.  … But this is not possible as long as the ethics of harmony are still hegemonic.  What we need is a new ethical framework. This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction.

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 2

difference between Lacan and the postmodernists: Although Lacan accepts the priority of the signifier in the formation of meaning he also focuses on the ways this signifier mythologically attempts to embody the real, the ways in which it constructs the imaginary illusion of anchoring our symbolic being to a pre-symbolic level of immediate fulfilment of need.  In other words, prioritising the signifier is coupled with exploring the complex ways in which this signifier produces the effect of the signified.  The point de capiton is one of these ways. 60

If the role of the point de capiton is necessary (or universal) in structural terms, its particular content (the signified produced by its signifying predominance) is not a matter of mirroring a pre-existing objective reality but of hegemonic struggle. 61

if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions?  What stimulates the desire to articulate new constructions of reality?

Dislocation can be conceived as a confrontation with the real.

The real is what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking.

The real and the not-all

If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality … the real is not an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral representation of external (symbolic) reality … it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity. … it is exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be ‘NOT-ALL’, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. 68

… in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction.  This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within. The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69

The real dislocates social objectivity 70

WE MUST PRECIPITATE A CRISIS, AN EVENT, THAT CONFRONTS THE LIMITATIONS OF OUR MEANING STRUCTURES

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 1

(1-12)  How can we talk about Lacan and not fall prey to psychologistic analyses that reduce social to individual?  Freud wrote a good deal using that combined a psychoanalytic framework with a social analysis Civilization and Its Discontents, Jokes etc. and Lacan even more so, develops a socio-political conception of subjectivity that is “not reduced to individuality, a subjectivity opening a new road to understanding of the ‘objective’. 4

The million dollar question is what the hell does Stavrakakis mean here?  He quotes Laclau here to buttress the point about the impossibility of the construction of any identity.

Mirror Stage

Captivated by its image in the mirror. “But this captivation, the anticipation of synthesis, can never eliminate the real uncoordination of the body of the infant, it can never erase the external and alienating character of its own foundation. This ambiguity is never resolved” (18).

🙂 Stavrakakis here argues that the mirror image of the child is alienating, even though it is this image the infant recognizes, reaches out to as a basis of her identity, but it nevertheless remains fundamentally alienating, meaning, that there exists a gap, the infant is still uncoordinated yet his image gives him the appearance of a totality, of a wholeness that is complete and unified. Remember the imaginary is already caught up within the symbolic.  “If the ego emerges in the imaginary the subject emerges in the symbolic (19).

If the imaginary, the field of specular images, of spatial unities and totalised representations, is always built on an illusion which is ultimately alienating for the child, his or her only recourse is to turn to the symbolic level, seeking in language a means to acquire a stable identity.  By submitting to the laws of language, the child becomes a subject in language, it inhabits language, and hopes to gain an adequate representation through the world of words … ‘the subject is the subject of the signifier — determined by it” (Citing Lacan) (20).

Lack

But instead of transgressing alienation in the direction of acquiring a solid identity, the subject of the signifier, the subject constituted on the basis of the acceptance of the laws of language, is uncovered as the subject of lack par excellence. (20)

This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable ACT OF POWER at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones (20). …

Already this is indicative of the political relevance of the Lacanian category of the lacking subject. This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable act of power at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones.

The subject can only exist on the condition that it accepts the laws of the symbolic.

It becomes an effect of the signifier. In that sense it is a certain subordination, an exercise of POWER, that constitutes the condition of possibility for the constitution of subjectivity.

Judith Butler is right when, in her recent book The Psychic Life of Power, she argues that there is no formation of subjectivity without subordination, the passionate attachment to those by whom she or he (the subject in question) is subordinated (Butler, 1997:7).

[However Butler] remains within the limits of a somewhat traditional conceptualisation of power when she is personalising her account (those to whom we are subordinated are presumably our parents, especially during our early formative years).

In Lacan, it is the signifier that is revealed as the locus of this power forming the subject: ‘‘power is coterminous with the logic of the signifier’’ (Dyrberg, 1997:130).

This POWER of the signifier cannot be reduced to the physical presence or the behaviour of the biological parents.  It is the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, the symbolic and not the real father, who is the agent of this POWER, the agent of symbolic Law (20).

Signifier and Signified

Meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa … 25

What happens then to the signified in the Lacanian schema? Lacan understands the signified as an effect of transference. If we speak about the signified it is only because we like to believe in its existence.

[T]he signified disappears because it is no longer associated with the concept, as in Saussure, but is conceived as belonging to the order of the real; that’s why the bar dividing signifier and signified, … is understood as a barrier resisting signification, as a limit marking the intersection of the symbolic with the real (citing Boothby 1991). 26

Loss of the Signified

In Lacan, … the signified disappears as such, that is to say as the epicentre of signification, exactly because in its real dimension it is situated beyond the level of the symbolic.

What is retained is the locus of the signified which is now designated by a constitutive lack. What is also retained is the promise or the aspiration of attaining the lost/impossible signified, to fill in the vacuum in the locus of the absent signified.

Signification is articulated around the illusion of attaining the signified; but this illusion itself is a result of the signifying play. The signified, as we have pointed out, is an effect created by the signifier in the process of signification. 26-27

… if there is a signified it can only be a signifier to which we attribute a transferential signified function.

The signified, what is supposed to be, through its links to external reality, the source of signification, indeed belongs to the real. But this is a real that resists symbolisation — this is the definition of the real in Lacan; the real is what cannot be symbolised, the impossible.  Surely, if this real is always absent from the level of signification it cannot be in itself and by itself the source of this same signification. Its absence however, the constitutive lack of the signified as real can. This lack constitutes something absolutely crucial for signification.

This absence has to be compensated if signification is to acquire any coherence. It is the absence of the signified in its real dimension which causes the emergence of the transference of the signified. What emerges is the signified in its imaginary dimension.

There is, however, one more dimension to this signifying play.  This transference of the signfiied, the emergence of the imaginary signified can only be the result of the play between signifiers. This is how the third dimension, the dimension of the symbolic, determines signification. It is the predominance of the signifier that produces the imaginary signified in order to cover over the absence of the real signified or rather of the signified as real. 27

Here we need to introduce lack.

[I]rreducible lack is inscribed within the symbolic structure, a lack due to the priority of the signifier and the nature of the symbolic order; the subject becomes identical to this lack … by being born with the signifier, the subject is born divided. 28

The fact that we speak itself divides the subject: the gap between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement can never be bridged.

From Identity to Identification

The fullness of identity that the subject is seeking is impossible both in the imaginary and in the symbolic level.  The subject is doomed to symbolise in order to constitute her- or himself as such, but this symbolisation cannot capture the totality and singularity of the real body, the close-circuit of the drives.

Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity itself, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible. For even the idea of identity to become possible its ultimate impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desireable exactly because it is essentially impossible. It is this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification possible, if not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. 29

What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image or the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then, if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play. 29

The concept of identification becomes crucial then for any understanding of the Lacanian conception of subjectivity, … The ontic horizon of identification is that of ultimate failure; its ontological horizon that of impossibility.  Yet this is not, strictly speaking, a failure of identification, but a failure of identity, that is to say a failure to achieve identity through identification.

It is, however, this same impossibility to achieve identity (substance) that that makes identification (process) constitutive. This is not only true for the life of the child but for the life of the adult as well, something which reveals the relevance of the concept of identification for social and political analysis.

Since the objects of identification in adult life include political ideologies and other socially constructed objects, the process of identification is revealed as constitutive of socio-political life. It is not identity which is constitutive but identification as such; instead of identity politics we should speak of identification politics.

Name-of-the-Father introduces a certain lack, the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier that disrupts the imaginary relation between mother and child by erecting the prohibition of incest, the Paternal Function isntitutes a new order, an order structurally different from the natural order, an order instituting human society, a certain community of meaning (32).

… in order to gain the signifer we have to sacrifice the signified

Symbolic identification is an identification structured around the acceptance of this constitutive lack.

But the objective sphere is also lacking, how?

40 In a section entitled The objective is also lacking. Stav insists that even though Lacan made innovative theoretical strides on subjective side, the importance of Lacan for political theory comes through with his work on the ‘objective’ side.  Roughly the social.

These two levels are not, of course identical but in any case they are not antithetical; there is something linking the individual to the collective, … it is the subject, symbolic lack itself, which splits the essentialist conceptions of individuality; it is the same subject as lack that introduces division into human collectivity. 40
How does the subject ‘introduce division into human collectivity”?

Laclau is quoted by Stav, “‘Objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism’ are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible.” HSS 13

Lack in the Other

It is the Lacanian subject of the signifier, the lacking subject, that provides the first link between psychoanalysis, society and politics, and this precisely because it highlights its dependence on the socio-symbolic order: …

By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche, a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the individual level and opens the way to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis, since this lack can only be filled by socio-political objects of identification. 37

If I need to identify with something it is not only because I don’t have a full identity in the first place, but also because all my attempts to acquire it by identifying with a supposedly full Other are failing.

Identification only becomes thinkable as a result of the lack within the structure, the structure of the social Other.  The objective as a closed totality is a semblance; the objective Other is lacking. 41

This then takes Stav into a discussion of the nature of this lack, and hence the introduction of jouissance and desire. Lack is a lack of jouissance, “lack of a pre-symbolic real enjoyment which is always posited as something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed/castrated when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations” 42

As soon as we enter the symbolic, the pre-symbolic – that which is impossible to integrate in the symbolic – is posited as an external prohibited object. “The universality of language cannot capture the singular real of the pre-symbolic mythical subject. The most intimate part of our being is experienced as something lost.” 42

The emergence of desire cannot be conceived independently of the family drama of the subject. The Name-of-the-Father demands the sacrifice of jouissance. … This loss … the prohibition of jouissance, is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire that is structured around the unending quest for the lost/impossible jouissance. The paradox here is that what is prohibited is by definition impossible. 42

The trick of the Law is that it creates desire as a result of the lack imposed by the prohibition of incest. … it is the prohibition itself, the performative institution of symbolic Law, that makes possible the desire to ‘recapture’ this impossible jouissance. 43

This is the nodal point of the Oedipus complex … The Law makes us believe that what is impossible really exists and it is possible for us to encounter it again …  What is revealed here is a dialectic between desire and the Law.  The prohibition of an impossible jouissance creates the desire for its attainment …

It means that it is lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa. It means that it is an act of power, an act of exclusion, that retroactively produces the fullness we attribute to what was excluded, to that unknown impossibility. 43

“It is … lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa” 43

The individual’s entry into symbolic means a loss of jouissance (pre-symbolic real).  Is thus always seeking identification, and thus this is what is behind the emergence of the subject and yet “if full identity is proven ultimately impossible, what makes us identify again and again? … What stimulates our desire for new identification acts? ” 45

It is this repetition of failure that sustains desire as a promise to attain the mythical jouissance; if the realisation, the full satisfaction of desire is impossible, then the promise of this realisation becomes necessary; without it no desire can be sustained.  But what is the exact nature of this promise? … the name for this promise is fantasy. 45

Fantasy veils the lack in the Other

Fantasy is a scenario that veils the lack in the Other effected by castration. If the human condition is marked by a quest for a lost/impossible enjoyment, fantasy offers the promise of an encounter with this precious jouissance, an encounter that is fantasised as covering over the lack in the Other and, consequently, as filling the lack in the subject. 46

… fantasy emerges as a support exactly in the place where the lack in the Other becomes evident; it functions as a support for the lacking Other of the symbolic.  … In short, it attempts to take the place of the lacking Other of the Other, of the missing signification that would, this is our mythology, represent our sacrificed enjoyment.  It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. 46

What has to be stressed … is that the domain of fantasy does not belong to the individual level; fantasy is a construction that attempts, first of all, to cover over the lack in the Other. As such it belongs initially to the social world; it is located on the objective side, the side of the Other, the lacking Other. 51

Fantasy sustains our sense of reality.  Our social construction of reality acquires its ontological consistency due to its dependence on a certain fantasy frame. When this frame disintegrates, the illusion – the promise – of capturing the real that sustains reality, the illusion that closes the gap between the real and our symbolisations of it, between signifier and signified, is dislocated 51-52

How can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure? 93

The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits. 93

The elimination of lack through a definite symbolisation of the real is impossible. Yet this is the condition of possibility of our freedom because it means that no order, no matter how repressive it might be, can acquire a stable character … 95