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SIX
LANGUAGE AND THE SUBSTANCE OF THE SELF: A LACANIAN
PERSPECTIVE
190
…Lacan…preeminent theorist of relationships between
discourse and the subject.
As a practicing analyst, Lacan sought to understand
the human subject. As a poststructuralist, he sought to understand the
subject’s constitution through and by discourse.
192
Structuralists and poststructuralists tend to ignore
the specific discourse functions (described by psychoanalysts) that, lying
within the subject-system, operate on language. Psychoanalysts tend to
ignore the discourse systems (described by structuralists) that, lying
outside the domain of the subject, compose and situate the subjects.
…Frederic Jameson … Lacan’s work, with its emphasis
on the “constitution of the subject,” displaces the problematic of orthodox
Freudianism from models of unconscious processes or blockages toward an
account of the formation of the subject and its constitutive illusions…
Lacanian theory, with its decentering of the ego, the conscious subject
of activity, the personality, or the “subject” of the Cartesian cogito…
and its repudiation of the various ideals of the unification of the personality
or the mythic conquest of personal identity… naïve, commons-sense
categories of “character,” Protagonist,” or “hero,” … identification, sympathy,
or empathy.
193
Lacan’s rejection and displacement of Freudian ideas
is, to a large extent, something Jameson imagines.
… Bannet… There is in Lacan no autonomous, self-conscious
subject in whom, as in a container, knowledge, experience and emotion inhere,
whose relationship to the social environment can be measured in terms of
reactivity and self-recognition. Lacan’s model for man is the computer.
Man is a machine whose predetermined linguistically programmed circuits
are governed by binary structures: closed-open, absent-present, 01.
If one reads Lacan hastily and uses quotations selectively,
it is easy to find support for such claims.
194
Lacan …That is where the power revealed by the
originality of the machines we have at our disposal falls short. There
is a third dimension of time which they undeniably are no party to which
I’m trying to get you to picture via this element which is neither belatedness,
nor being in advance, but haste, the relation to time peculiar to the human
being. That is where speech is to be found, and where language, which has
all the time in the world, is not. That is why, furthermore, one gets nowhere
with language.
Speech, something produced by humans, is very different
from language. “the question of meaning” Lacan points out in an earlier
context, “comes with speech.”
Meaning is produced as language is driven or operated
by subject-functions such as desire, temporality, repression, the Imaginary.
195
In effect, Lefebvre-Pontalis points out that you can
do “anything with language,” but only if there are speaking subjects. Lacan
agrees, but adds: “Of course, the question is to know what the function
of speaking subject is in all this.” For both Lacan and his commentators,
the key question is to know “the function of the speaking subject.”
197
… “identity” pattern in poststructuralist thought
that works to erase the human subject, to make “the subject of discourse”
an entity composed, contained, derived from, and imprisoned by language
(not speech). In The Pursuit of Signs, Jonathan Culler repeats claims
made earlier by Levi-Strauss and argues that as structuralism investigates
the self, it erases it: These disciplines find, as their work advances,
that the self is dissolved as its various functions are ascribed to impersonal
systems which operate through it as the self is broken down into component
systems, deprived of its status as source and master of meaning, it comes
to seem more and more like a construct”: a result of systems of convention.
The subject conceived by structuralism is an “effect” of discourse.
It is an illusion produced by linguistic effects.
198
In
Book II Lacan insists that the subject
is not an “entity,” and later that the “subject is no one.”
Lacan is not saying that there is no subject; he is
instead disputing the kinds of boundaries place on the subject by traditional
psychoanalytic theory.
Because the characteristic gesture of structuralism
is to see the subject in terms of language, the subject easily becomes
nothing but language.
For Lacan, relations between discourse and the
subject are two-sided. The subject operates on discourse, and discourse
operates the subjects. This dialogical interaction between subject-functions
shaping discourse, and social forces providing the matrix of discourse…
199
In many ways Lacan’s account of the subject is a very
precise account of meaning effects produced by the “impersonal” subject-functions
and subject-components alluded to by Culler..
…the ego, can no longer aspire to control self-components
and functions.
…human nature is not determined by a universal “inner
nature” but by historical, social, and linguistic forces.
Lacan’s subject is perhaps best defined as the one
who suffers.
200
Lacan’s subject is “de-centered,” but this de-centered
subject is the focus for his theoretical project.
201
Paul Smith… critiqued the poststructuralist account
of the subject in terms of its failure to explain resistance.
…subject…Althusser… simple effect of ideology,
a unified structure “called” into place by the interpellating force of
language…
202
…Lacan’s ideas in insisting that social discourse
does not affect the subject in an immediate way. Social discourse is
always mediated through unconscious structures.
Lacan’s subject…is characterized by conflict, has
no “inner” unity, and has a porous “boundary.” The Lacanian Other, in part
a discourse structure, is always at the conflictual core of the subject.
Lacan’s subject thus is always most “outside” when it is most “inside.”
…an alien discourse structure at the center…
…the subject (as a discourse system) is very loosely
“centered” around certain self-defining discourse patterns…
203
This absolute particularity of the subject’s language
is in part related to what rhetoricians call “style” or “voice.” Subjects
both appropriate and express discourse in their own unique way. More importantly
for Lacan, this stylistic particularity of speech is related to various
psychoanalytic phenomena—desire, repetition, resistance, trauma, and the
symptom—that uniquely define and situate each subject.
207
Lacan teaches that the subject is a unique, though
self-divided, system differing in important respects from other discourse
systems that situate, constitute, and intervene in it. In this respect
Lacan is not a poststructuralist.
…the Lacanian subject contains unique subject-driven
mechanisms that both produce and feed on social discourse in quite unique
and particular ways. Lacan describes the subject as a system whose discourse
inside is formed from taking in material from an outside field of discourse.
This system (the subject) has a porous boundary…
208
The particular organization of discourse within
the subject produces the subject’s uniqueness.
The discourse systems “contained” by Lacan’s subject
are “contained” by a biological body, thus contradictions between differing
contained discourse subsystems have especially significant effects.
209
Often, in fact, political resistance is hard to distinguish
from analytic resistance. But when subjects are successfully engaged in
political resistance, the “containment” of suffering maps out a course
of thought and action that provides a real solution to human suffering.
Harmful sources of power are contained by successful political action.
Psychoanalysis, like political action, can of course also provide an effective
containment of suffering (a real solution to human suffering). The resistance
to psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is a form of negative containment.
When subjects in analysis are unwilling to face the truth of their own
subjectivity, containment maps out a course of thought and action that
has negative effects. Containment becomes a strategy of repression and
thus less a satisfactory solution to a problem of suffering and
more a source of suffering resulting from the repression of conflictual
knowledge. This rather complex relationship between political resistance/containment
and psychoanalytic resistance/containment has implications for understanding
ideology.
210
If ideologies do not exclude certain packages of knowledge
and prescribe certain modes of suffering as desirable “containments” for
conflict, they fail to control the ruptures within self-structure and thus
fail to provide directives for social organization.
Discourse can be present in memory as a rather
free-floating and consequential thing. This discourse “package” does not
affect other discourse contents within the self-system; it is simply a
unit of memory. In this context, discourse plays no role in the constitution
of the self; discourse is simply heard speech that may suffer any number
of fates. It may be remembered longer, or it may be forgotten. In being
forgotten, however, it is not repressed; it is simply something no longer
available for conscious consideration and has no apparent effect on the
subject. When discourse has the most important effects on the subject,
it is not simply something remembered longer; it is something that works
to organize or structure subject-components.
211
Lacan describes the ego as a system that contains
“a whole organization of certainties, beliefs, of coordinates, of references.”
The ego thus contains, in various ways and in various “packages,” knowledge.
This object called knowledge, however, exists in many different states.
The particular content of these components is always already determined before the birth of the subject. The subject can do nothing other than largely internalize, and thus in some manner be, some particular manifestation of this discourse system.