Lacan and Deconstruction
1. Introduction: Lacan speaks
This lecture is difficult: it is hard because
Lacan is hard, and because in order to understand him you have to open your
minds a little. The concepts in it are not in themselves complicated, but what
they do is, they deliberately defy common-sense. And so you reject them, and
the easiest way to reject them is not to understand them.
It's a strange feeling: you think you've got it,
it's clear, you understand it, you think of something else and then come back
to what you though you had clearly in your mind and--it's gone.
If you persevere, however, there is a reward.
Those who follow this way of reading literature, essentially the Lacanian way,
have a powerful and entirely novel way of looking at literary texts; and, as an
added bonus, they believe that what they are doing is very very important. You
will see.
In order to make it easier for you I am going do
two things. The first is, I'm going to spend much of this lecture not talking
about Lacan, but about some of the basic concepts that he uses in order to
build his theories. So this lecture is important, because it functions not just
as an introduction to Lacan but also to the whole of French literary theory.
But first, I want to give you a sense of Lacan, so you know what we're up
against.
Here is Lacan:
he is answering the question, What is Truth? With
characteristic arrogance, he answers as if he, himself, were truth. If you
can't follow this, don't feel bad.
Men, I am giving you the secret. I, truth, will
speak. Whether you flee me in fraud, or think to entrap me in error, I will
reach you in the misapprehension against which you have no refuge. In that
place where the most caustic speech reveals a slight hesitation, it is lacking
in perfidy--I am now publicly announcing the fact--and it would from then on be
rather trickier to pretend that nothing had happened, in good, or for that
matter, bad company...
In any case, is it not enough, to judge of your
defeat, to see me escape first from the keep of the fortress in which you are
so sure you have me secured by situating me, not in yourselves, but in being
itself? I wander about in what you regard as being the least true in essence:
in the dream, in the way the most Gongoresque conceit, the nonsense of the most
grotesque pun defies sense, in chance, and not in its law but in its
contingency, and I never do more to change the face of the world than when I
give it the profile of Cleopatra's nose.
What does this mean? It means,
the unconscious is found in dreams and slips of
the tongue.
The first question is: if that's what he's
saying, why doesn't he say so? If he's so perverse, so difficult, then what is
the point of studying Lacan? I can tell you the answer to that quite quickly.
For contemporary literary criticism, Lacan is more important than Freud, and
Jung; in fact, he is one of the two or three most important influences on
current literary criticism. I find him infuriating, incomprehensible,
incredibly perverse, but also, in glimpses, very very illuminating. He is a
trickster: a jester; a genius.
Lacan single-handedly placed psychoanalysis at
the exact centre of French intellectual life. His influence is everywhere: you
need to know about him.
2. Lacan's obscurity
The unbearable is hard to understand
So: why is it that Lacan is so difficult, so
obscure?
Well, think back to Freud. The entire point of
Freud's life work was that he was exposing to us the unbearable. What he had to
tell us about was the unconscious, and the reason why unconscious material is
unconscious is because we can't face it, and so repress it: the unconscious
contains the unbearable. If not that, then nothing.
So the question should be, in fact, why is Freud
so easy to understand? Why don't we reject it? Why don't we react to what he
says with horror and incomprehension? If Freud is true, then the unbearable
ought to be hard to understand.
What, in Lacan's case, is this unbearable topic?
For Freud, you remember, the unbearable is the sexual. In my experience,
students don't on the whole find that particularly convincing. On the whole,
students seem to find the sexual interesting, even quite possibly entertaining.
Well, Lacan deals with the sexual, yes, but that is not for him the deepest
level. What he does is this: he attacks the solidity of all that we can see,
and, worse than that, all that we think we are. For Lacan
Language is what we use to construct the world
Language is what we use to construct ourselves
Language is completely inadequate for both those
tasks
This is the bad news. Nothing is real. Nothing is
solid. You are not real. This, he would say, is unbearable: and therefore we
reject and repress it: we can't afford to understand it.
The discourse of the unconscious
Moreover in order to express the unconscious it
is necessary, Lacan would say, to be incomprehensible. In fact, it's
inevitable. When the unconscious speaks, it does not make sense, by definition:
its language is not that of the everyday world of common sense. The unconscious
speaks nonsense.
It must, if you think about it. It is
unconscious: it is utterly different. It is the voice of the other,
frightening, mysterious, awe-inspiring, shattering, strange: all of those
things. Not, repeat not, rational, commonsensical, easy to follow.
Dreams are nonsense. Psychotics talk nonsense.
The suffering of neurotics does not make sense. So in order to let the
unconscious speak Lacan felt he needed to speak with the voice of the
unconscious: to talk a kind of signifying nonsense. Lacan, you have to
understand, was a kind of standup comedian, an artist, a juggler, a showman;
because he was French he could unite those roles with being, at the same time,
an intellectual. He tried to make himself, at the same time, both clear and
unclear, so that at the edge of meaning, in puns, allusions, jokes, logical
contradictions, language games, glimpses of the truth can come through.
Lecturing on Lacan
This creates a problem for anyone whose job it is
to explain Lacan. How can I make Lacan speak to you without betraying
everything he stands for? How can I clarify and elucidate this stuff, try to
make it comprehensible, without by that very act destroying it? Well, the
answer is, I can't. All I can hope to do is give you a basis from which to
approach the man himself. To turn to Lacan, to leave this lecture behind.
Now: the influences of Lacan.
4. Dada
You can say that Lacan has three influences:
Freud, Saussure, and Dada. Freud, I have covered. Saussure was a Swiss linguist
who, in a series of lectures published in 1915, laid down the foundations of
modern linguistics. Dada was a movement, also Swiss in origin, founded, oddly
enough, at just the same time, in 1916; it consisted of some remarkably crazy
and irresponsible people, and it gave birth to the artistic movement known as
surrealism. Many of Lacan's friends were surrealists.
So first I will tell you a little about Dada and
the surrealists, so that you can see how Lacan gets away with being as
difficult and irresponsible as he is; then I will spend a quite a lot of time
explaining Saussure, who is crucial not just to Lacan but to all of the French
exponents of the new critical theory. Then I will take you in the direction
beyond Saussure that Lacan himself took: towards the deconstruction of everyday
reality, and of the ego itself. To do that I will look at the work of a
colleague and on and off friend of Lacan's, Louis Althusser, whose theories,
because he was not a surrealist, are easier to understand, and usefully
parallel to Lacan's. All of this is essential preparation. Next week we will
face the man himself: Lacan, and I will show you some ways of applying his
theories to literature. But now, Dada.
Dada was a literary and artistic movement that
began in Switzerland in 1916. It speedily moved to Paris, where it gave birth
to Surrealism in the early 1920's and then died.
Dada believed that art told lies; it believed
that the truth was in what art did not say. Surrealism believed that only in
pure spontaneity would the truth arise, because the only truth was in the
subconscious mind; therefore only by a process very like free association could
the truth be found. If this sounds familiar, it should do: the father of Dada
was Freud.
Realism, in art, is a lie. It does not show what
is there, it creates it: realism is an illusion. The camera always lies. Here
is one of the most famous surrealist pictures: the caption says 'This is not an
apple'. But it looks like an apple: so why isn't it? First, obviously, because
it's a painting; second, less obviously, because it wants to disturb your trust
in apples. It asks the question: what is real? And so did Lacan, using the same
kind of jokey, skilful, perverse method. As we shall see.
After Dada, Saussure.
5 Saussure
Saussure's radicalism
It is quite possible that Tristan Tzara, one of
the founders of Dada, who was a fairly barbaric individual, and Saussure, the
founder of modern linguistics, and by all accounts a rather civilised and
scholarly person, could have run into each other in the street in Zurich. They
would have had very little to say to each other, I imagine; nor could they have
imagined that a union between the two of them could have given birth to Lacan.
But it did. And it is probable that the more radical contribution came from
Saussure.
What Saussure did was to deconstruct the sign.
What is a sign?
What is a sign?
This is a sign.
When I say the word 'fish', immediately there
comes into your mind a concept. What I am doing is making a noise, 'fish', and
that's all, but there is an immediate, instant, intrinsic link in your mind and
in my mind between the noise and the concept: we experience them to be the same
thing. That marriage, that union, noise+concept, is the sign. A sign is a
linguistic noise that evokes a concept. 'Fish'. Sign = noise + concept.
This is very simple, but also very important: it
is basic to the way language works. What Saussure did was simple too: he took
the sign apart. But this, though simple, had very very powerful consequences:
from this deconstruction of the sign he arrived at the following famous
proposition: 'language is a system of differences with no fixed terms'. What
does that mean? Well, let us split the noise from the concept, and see.
The signifier
So, first the noise.
'Fish'. This he called the 'signifier': the
sign-maker, the thing that initiates the sign-process. The signifier. Now, let
us take that apart.
Phonemes
What is this signifier, 'fish'? Considered purely
as a signifying noise, it consists of three elements: a 'f' noise, an 'i'
noise, and a 'sh' noise. Those elements are called 'phonemes'. Now, if I change
one of those elements, a different sign is initiated: wish, dish, fit, and so
on. English has a little more than 60 phonemes. That's it. That's all you need
to create all the words, or rather all the signifiers, 4 million or so
signifying noises, that make up the English language.
A system of differences
What we can do with these phonemes is to put them
together into a chart: wish, dish, fish, and so on. Obviously, what we've got
here is a system. And the most important thing about the elements of the system
is that they differ, said Saussure. When I say 'fish', in order for you to
understand me all I have to get across is what I'm not saying. That I'm not
saying 'dish', or 'wish', or 'fit'. The system, on the level of the signifier,
on the noise level, is a system of differences.
The signified
Now, look at the other half of the sign: the
concept half.
This is called the 'signified'.
Here are two interesting things about the
signified. One is, in order to talk about it, I have to use signifiers. In
order to discuss language, you must use language. Obviously. But this means
that you can't get outside the sign: language is a closed system.
The sliding of the signifiers
To talk about a signified, I use a signifier,
which has a signified, and to talk about that I have to use another signifier,
words to explain words to explain words ... and so on, until I run out of
language or loop back and start again. This is what Lacan calls 'the sliding of
the signifiers'.
No fixed terms
The other interesting thing about the signified
is that although the marriage between signifier and signified is so tight in
our minds, the actual relationship has no basis. It is baseless.
There is no essential reason why the cold-blooded
thing that swims should be evoked by that noise, 'fish', and no other. It's
just an arbitrary arrangement we have because we are all members of the group
known as English-speakers.
It needn't be like that. Look: supposing I said
that from now on, I will refer to the cold-blooded thing that swims as a 'bok'.
This might take a little getting used to, but it
wouldn't be hard, and soon we would all be using and understanding the word
'bok' without any trouble. And that would be a purely arbitrary arrangement we
have because we are all members of the group known as
people-who-went-to-the-Lacan-lecture. And if we were really proud, or
defensive, about being in this group we might develop a whole arbitrary set of
signifiers we could use together to announce and emphasise our membership of
that group, and everyone else would feel mysteriously deprived. You can all
think of sub-cultures that have their own private languages. Los Angeles street
gangs. Rastafarians. Bibliographers. Lacanians.
But the point is that the relationship between
the two halves of the signs of these languages is arbitrary. There is no essential
relationship between the noise 'bok', or the noise 'fish', and the concept they
express.
And look at the arbitrary bunch of creatures that
we class under the term fish. A goldfish is a fish. A great white shark is a
fish. The white meat in batter that you buy ready-cooked with chips is a fish.
It goes on being a fish while you eat it, and then it stops being a fish. We
class all these items as fish. And a whale is not a fish. A whale stopped being
a fish in the eighteenth century.
Obviously, what puts things into the class 'fish'
is convention, common agreement amongst users of the same language, whether the
language group is as enormous as all users of English, or as small as
those-who-went-to-the-Lacan-lecture; it's a cultural convention. There might be
another culture that thinks that the dead thing with the chips on your plate
has stopped being a fish, and become something else, just as we think that the
dead sheep on your plate that you are about to eat is not a sheep at all, it's
stopped being that entirely, it's become mutton. Arbitrarily, at least as far
as language is concerned.
And that's what the second half of Saussure's
saying means: language is a system of differences without fixed terms.
Literature is a beautiful trick
You might say, so what? So what is important
about that? Well, let's try another signifier. Think of a cat. Any cat, but a
particular cat. A cat you know, or have known.
Now, think of the word "cat". That
noise. "Cat". Now try and imagine the distance, the incredible gulf, between
that noise "cat" and the cat you know. It's immense, isn't it? The
one hardly captures a particle of the actuality of the other. If you can hold
that distinction, between the actual cat and the empty word, in your minds, you
are prising the sign apart, and are getting a glimpse of how completely
language is in fact alienated from the actuality of the world. The fact is that
language cannot adequately describe the world. Not even a small fraction of it.
There is a gulf between the world and language, between the animal and the
word, and we are not aware of this gulf until we prise the sign apart.
But if words can't capture the world, what about
literature? Because that is literature's main claim for our attention, that it
delivers to us the world seen anew, that it is the prime agent for us of the
actuality of the world.
This claim is false. When we read a description,
however brilliant, say in a poem, say about a cat, the brilliance that makes us
catch our breath and wonder is a brilliance in language: a pattern of words.
The actuality it points us towards is always already outside language, beyond
language, not to be captured. It is a trick of words, an illusion. Literature
is a beautiful trick. Like a surrealist painting.
So that's quite an uncomfortable realisation. But
what makes it worse is that we rely on language, this imperfect instrument, to
construct the world for us: we can't do without it, we do almost everything
with it.
7. We see the world through language
When the two halves of the sign have been sprung
apart, we enter a strange world. Or rather, we stay in exactly the same world,
we inhabit the same reality, but it becomes strange, unfixed, sliding. In order
to see that, to really see it, we have to travel, so that we can come back and see
where we live as if we didn't live there.
Love
A good way of seeing something of how words
dominate and deceive us is to look at the word love. You could put up a good
case for the idea that this word, 'love', these three phonemes, is the most
important word in the English language. So let us look at how another culture,
another language, deals with it.
The Tibetans have a language that is extremely
well adapted for the description of psychological states. Since much of the
adult population in traditional Tibet lived in monasteries and spent most of
their time examining the nature of mind, it was necessary for them to develop
this language; and it allowed them to perceive and recognise things that are
obscure or not meaningful to us.
Tibetans are very interested in the concept of
Love. They have 14 words for it. I am just going to deal with 2 of those. Thugs
rTse Ba, and 'Tsal Ba. The first of these is classically defined as follows:
To love: to entirely wish for the happiness of
another being or beings.
The second, 'Tsal Ba', means:
To love: to wish to possess, to desire, to be
attached to.
What's interesting about these is that they are
opposites: the two words have meanings that are precisely 180 degrees apart.
Now, from that Tibetan perspective, if we look
back at our own word, love, it can be seen in a new way. Those two words for
love, roughly altruistic love and selfish love, are collapsed together in the
English word. In English you can say 'I love you' meaning 'I wish for your
happiness', or you can say 'I love you' meaning 'I want something from you'.
The latter is a very common use of the word, in my experience.
In fact what usually happens is that the word
carries both meanings. The two quite distinct senses of the word are collapsed
together, the self-seeking sense gains authority from the unselfish sense: you
must give me what I want, because I love you, and love is good, isn't it? Hence
the immediate feeling of guilt, surely known to us all, when someone says
"I love you", and you don't say "I love you" back.
This ambiguity runs through the whole of the
culture: did Othello, for instance, love Desdemona? Yes, he must have done,
that's why he murdered her. And so on. I expect you can think up examples for
yourselves. And none of this is a problem for the Tibetans, simply because they
have some extra words in the language.
Words fail me
Let me give you another, very simple, example of
how words describe, and dominate, and fail us. I will just read you a short
poem. It's called 'Words fail me'.
Dear Sirs · man to man · manpower · craftsman
working men · the thinking man · the man in the street · fellow countrymen ·
the history of mankind · one-man show · man in his wisdom statesman ·
forefathers · masterful · masterpiece old masters · the brotherhood of man ·
Liberty Equality · Fraternity · sons of free men · faith of our fathers · god
the father · god the son · yours fraternally · amen · words fail me
8. Language creates us
The ego is no longer master in its own house
I hope I have shown you how the language that we
use constructs the reality that we see, and how in doing so it can deceive,
dominate, oppress us. There remains one final Lacanian scandal: that the we who
do the perceiving are also constructed by language: there is no self; it is a
linguistic construct.
It was Freud who said this first: he was
conscious of being, in fact he felt honoured to be, in a line of iconoclasts,
whose work was to dethrone us, the human beings, from our feeling of being at
the centre of the universe: the paragon of animals, the centre of creation. So
Copernicus and Galileo showed that the earth went round the sun, and not the
other way around. Darwin showed that we are not the lords of creation, but
simply a rather specialised form of ape. And Freud showed, he said, that the
ego is no longer the master of his own house: that there is another mind,
inside our own, that we are unaware of, and which dictates a great deal of what
we do and think. The ego is no longer the master of his own house.
Lacan goes further than this: goes as far as it
is possible to go. He dethrones the subject entirely. In order to follow him
into this inner sanctum, it seems to me that the easiest thing to go to Paris:
to work with the theory of a colleague and (on and off) friend of Lacan's named
Althusser.
9. Althusser: ideology and language
the State apparatuses
Althusser (in 1968) asked this question: what is
it that maintains the stability of a given society? What is it that keeps
people under control? He gave two answers. In some societies, repressive
societies, people are kept under control by the obvious force of the state: he
called this the Repressive State Apparatus. This has to be obvious so that
people can be afraid of it, and so stay in line. The army. The Police. The
Secret Police.
But in Western affluent societies this degree of
control is much less obvious. There is, of course, an element of direct
repression against those who get out of line, but those cases, where the police
or the army are seen in an obvious way to be repressive, are rare, and get into
the newspapers. On the whole. So what is it that keeps us in line?
He decided that there was another kind of state
apparatus for control and he called it the Ideological State Apparatus. This
has the effect of making us want to stay in line; we enjoy and willingly
co-operate with our conformity. Why? Because it is common sense to do so;
because it is the way things are; because we believe ideology to be true.
Ideology, said Althusser, is not true: ideology is a false set of ideas
operating in a given society in order to keep the people in line and serve the
interests of the ruling class in that society. This sounds like propaganda, but
there is a crucial difference. Propaganda is obvious; it is felt to be a lie;
ideology is felt, at a deep level to be true. To be common sense. To be the way
things are. It is invisible.
So how does ideology get to be propagated? Said
Althusser, through the Ideological State Apparatuses. What are they? They are
language devices: discourses. Such as? The Church. The schools. The Newspapers.
The TV. The Theatre. The novels. The bill-boards. The Department of English at
the University of Birmingham. Here we are, Althusser would say, in this lecture
room, in the very heart of the ideology industry.
So how does ideology work? He would say, ideology
is like the air we breathe. It is everywhere, so that we can't see it. It is
buried deep in language and felt, at the deepest level to be true. Ideology
tells us who we are: it names us into our very existence. How does this happen?
He expressed it by a pun in French.
Ideology names us
In French when you call yourself something,
appeler, je m'appelle Tom, you do two things: you name yourself, and you call
out to yourself: it's the same word, appeler. So when someone calls out to me
in the corridor, Tom, in French they are simultaneously calling me, appeler,
and naming me, appeler; and it has an electric effect. You're walking down the
corridor, you hear your name called out, you jump to attention. Althusser would
say, at that instant you become yourself: I become "Tom." Now
ideology works like but at a much deeper level: it names us invisibly,
internally, at a level so deep that we can't see it or feel it or hear it, but
nonetheless it is there, everywhere: it is our truth. It is the truth of us: it
names us into existence and tells us, not just who we are, but that we are. Not
appeler, but interpeller. Naming within. Outside that false interpellation, we
have no existence. There is no 'I'. Said Althusser. And said Lacan.
10 Ways round language
Religion
This is all very bleak; however, it is not the
end of the story. There are ways of dealing with this problem. One of them,
which I will not discuss here, is religion. Many religions have somewhere in
them the perception that language deceives us about the world, that the ego is
an inadequate construct. There is in these religions a rich repertoire of ways
of subverting the lies of commonsense experience, the oppressions of normality:
in Sufism, in Buddhism, in parts of Hinduism, in Taoism--just to name a few. I
mention this in order to make clear that this problem is not a new one: it was
not invented by fashionable Frenchmen in the late 60's, but is as old as the
oldest written records.
More directly relevant to us in the English
Department and to this lecture are three methods: psychoanalysis,
deconstruction, and, surprisingly, the study of literature.
Psychoanalysis
For Lacan, psychoanalysis was the way to deal
with this problem. He thought that neurosis was a result of a disruption, a
deception, in Language, and that language could be turned against itself, in
order to heal. I will say more about this in the next lecture.
Deconstruction
This use of language in psychoanalysis we would
call deconstructive. And deconstruction is not only a psychoanalytic tool.
Here is the good news: there is a peculiarity in
language which allows us to escape from its complete domination by it. The
peculiarity is this: although Language is almost all we have to think with, it
so happens that we can turn it upon itself: it is possible to catch it in the
act of deception. To interrogate it. It's not easy, because you have to find
some way of getting outside what you normally take for granted, of escaping
from common sense.
One way of getting outside language is to look at
the way different cultures operate in language. Sometimes we can use this
insight to look back on our own with new eyes: to see the tricks in action. And
having seen the trick operating, we can ask why? Where did this come from? As I
tried to show with the word "love."
You can take this further: if, for instance, we
ask why English has this ambiguity about the word love, the answer is very
interesting. It has a history. I think it probably derives from Plato, and came
into English via Christianity. There's a good book about it: Arthur Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being; a classic work of literary theory. That would be a good
place to start. And from this start you could go very deeply into the nature of
our culture, the way we are made, the way we see things: the history of our
preconceptions. Deconstruction is like opening a door into ourselves: behind
that door, another door, and another, leading us deeper into knowledge.
Deconstruction is a method of interpretation: it
looks beneath the surface, as does psychoanalysis; it refuses to be deceived.
It takes the symptom and looks for the truth behind it, the truth that may be unconscious.
It refuses to be tricked. It will not let language get away with fooling us. It
looks profoundly into the way the world works in language, to clear away
illusion, to come to a truth. It seeks to make us free.
Literature
But as well as looking into other languages and
cultures, there is a more convenient area where we can look, one much closer at
hand. We can look at literature. Literature, which is made up of language,
embodies the peculiarity that language has, that it can be turned against itself
in order to show it in action. We can use deconstruction to examine, you might
say, the unconscious of literature.
Literature is made up of language, and therefore
a trick; but it is also characteristic of literature that it pushes at the
barriers of language to free itself from them, restlessly, constantly, always
feeling and testing the constraints of words. You could say that Literature
tries to deconstruct itself.
So literature presents us with language and its
deceptions, captured and laid out for us to test and question, conveniently
packaged in book form; but also it leads us itself towards a way out. Yes,
literature is a trick; but the very trickiness of literature is what, you could
say, does the trick. We as critics can deconstruct language through literature
because that deconstruction is what literature itself does: by puns, jokes,
tricks and distortions of language: all those literary devices. Metaphor, for
instance, the essential device of literature, is exactly a way of tricking
language into saying that which cannot be said.
This view suddenly transforms the study of
literature. No longer a harmless activity, saying nice things about nice books:
but central, combative, subversive, fascinating, and, above all, important.
Very, very important.
Lacan
1. Overview
Briefly, what I'm going to do in this lecture is
this.
Lacan is known as the French Freud. This
summarises rather well what he did, which is to translate Freud into French.
It's a very very free translation.
At the centre of Freud are two things: eros,
sexuality, and the story of Oedipus. So first I will remind you of Freud's
story of eros and Oedipus, to set the scene; then I will show how Lacan
radically reread this Freudian story, all the time vehemently asserting his
complete fidelity to Freud. No wonder he got kicked out of the Pyschoanalytic
Association.
Next I will then explain two main ways of using
Lacan for reading literature, with recommended examples of the theory in
action. Then I will show you a Lacanian analysis of the Ode to a Nightingale. I
will then come back to the subject of deconstruction, and finally do a Lacanian
analysis of a poem about a blackbird.
2. Oedipus
In order to begin with Lacan, we must begin with
Freud. I will remind you of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, and this
time go into it a little more deeply. Then I will give you Lacan's version of
Freud's theory.
The Greek story of Oedipus is a tragedy: a man
without knowing it kills his father and marries his mother. He is punished
terribly for this double sin. Freud's theory is, you will remember, that what
Oedipus did to his father and to his mother is what we all secretly desire to
do.
Here is an image of Oedipus, who has just killed
his father but not yet fallen in love with his mother, facing a monster with
the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a lion. That, by the way, is a
drawing of that scene specially created for Freud. The monster asks him a
riddle, and will kill him if he gets the wrong answer. This is for Freud and
for Lacan the essential metaphor for psychoanalysis.
So. Here is Freud's view of Eros and Oedipus.
3. Freud
3.1 Freud and Eros
The child is borne into desire. For Freud, you
remember, sexual desire is primary: eros is the motivating factor that makes
the whole psychic machinery work. At the beginning of life, in the oral stage,
the child is in a state of sexual bliss: at the mother's breast, receiving
nourishment, in a sexual relationship not only with his mother but, he thinks,
with the whole world. There is a primary at-one-ness with the universe, it's
sometimes called the oceanic feeling, that is connected with nourishment and
connected with sex.
3.2 Freud and Oedipus
As he grows older, he is weaned away from that
bliss. Eventually he enters into what Freud calls the genital stage: he becomes
aware of his own penis. He becomes aware too, perhaps in the bath with his
sister, that little girls don't have penises. He concludes, unlikely as it may
seem, that she has been castrated. By Daddy. This is because, in his secret
heart, what he wants to do is to get back into that primal blissful state with
the mother, that sexual union. But he can't because by now he has noticed that
he has a father, who prevents him: who is already in a sexual relationship with
the mother, who stands in between him and his desire, threateningly. The
father, for Freud, is one who says 'no': this 'no' enters deeply into the mind
of the child and becomes his super-ego: roughly, his conscience.
The 'no' is like a knife, cutting him off from
his mother; and he fears that if ever his guilty desires become known, a real
knife will castrate him. So he wishes to sleep with his mother, but can't, and
because he can't he wishes to kill his father. This is his deepest, most guilty
wish, the wish that cannot be expressed. This guilty wish is repressed deep
inside us, and since it is repressed, it governs our actions, surfacing in
displaced or symbolic forms throughout our lives. This is the Oedipus complex.
'Complex', incidentally, simply means 'pattern'. A recurrent pattern of
behaviour.
Now, you'll notice that the child is male. There
is a very obvious gap in this story: the gap is female. Don't ask me what
female version of Oedipus little girls are supposed to go through: I don't
know. Freud (who was maybe the clearest, the most brilliantly lucid, of all the
great theorists) is not clear about this.
So many people find two problems with this story.
One is that it is sexist: male centred. The other is that it is sexual: as if
the secret centre of all we are is our sexuality, and only that. In rereading
Freud's Oedipus story, Lacan addresses, and, many would say, solves those two
problems.
4. Lacan and Desire
OK: now for Lacan. First, his version of Eros: desire.
In French, désir.
For Lacan as for Freud, the child is born into
desire. Desire, désir, is what makes the psychic machine work. But for Lacan
this desire is more than sexual, though it is also sexual. To explain that I
need to explain one of Lacan's key concepts: the real, la réelle.
4.1 We cannot experience the world directly.
The crucial point is this: we cannot experience
the world directly. All we can experience is a mental event. I touch the table,
or see a friend, and think I am experiencing the table or the friend directly.
This is not true. I see or feel some phenomena, and interpret them, and what I
experience is the interpretation: friend, table. That is the only way I can
know the world. I can't get behind the interpretation to experience the world
direct, raw, unmediated.
The interpretations, that are all I can know of
the world, are made up of two things: language, and images that I have
previously experienced: previous interpretations. They are not real. They are
mental events.
Here I am in a lecture room, and I am perceiving
a lecture room, but that's an interpretation. My cat would not perceive a
lecture room, if she were here now. Neither would a Martian or a tribal man
plucked from the Amazon rainforest. I know it's a lecture room because I
recognise it, and I do this by comparing it with a database of images inside my
head. The second step is to define it, and I can do this because I have a
collection of definitions, in fact a kind of dictionary, also inside my head.
This dictionary is called language. These two things, images and language, make
up all of my experience of everything. Experience = images + language.
4.2 Experience = images + language.
I experience language as being more or less
controlled and precise, and the images as being rather dreamy: undefined. I
experience language as somehow secondary, artificial, and the images as somehow
primary, or basic.
Both language and images, says Lacan, are false.
All these mental events that I perceive are approximations, makeshifts. Remember
how inadequate language is for describing the world? If you compare the words
'lecture room' -- hear them, just the words, 'lecture room' -- with what seems
to be going on here, the difference is pathetic. And the database of images
that I have with which I compare this image-experience with others feels very
shadowy and shifting. Both, says Lacan, are not real. They are false.
4.3 the real
We cannot perceive raw reality. Whatever raw
reality is like, and I cannot possibly imagine what it might be like, I know it
doesn't have lecture rooms in it. Lacan calls this raw reality 'la réelle': the
real.
4.4 desire
Now, Lacan says that though we cannot know the
real, la réelle, in any way whatsoever, we have an obscure sense of it, of its
plenitude, its incredible fullness and richness. We want it.
Desire, for Lacan, comes out of the imbalance
between what we perceive, language and images, and what actually is: la réelle.
This enormous discrepancy is the primary fact of our mental life, like a
constant imbalance or vertigo. This, not eros, not sexual desire, is the main
thing that motivates everything, for Lacan.
It is impossible to satisfy this desire, because
we cannot know what we want. The real is utterly unknowable. Everything gets in
the way: all the mental events that make up our false view of the world. We
can't even really long for what we long for; we are fundamentally confused.
So this longing is displaced: we long for
everything else instead. Sex and food and consumer objects, trying to fill the
void of desire. But we are not satisfied by any of these things, because as
soon as the desire is fulfilled it vanishes, becomes, strangely,
unsatisfactory: no, I think, that's not it, that's not what I wanted. Soon
another desire arises: maybe that's it, maybe, maybe, and so I long for that
instead. Until it too is satiated and falls away. And so on for ever.
Of course if we could somehow actually encounter
the real, without any conceptualisation coming in between, it might be
blissful, or it might be actually terrifying. It would be like meeting God,
face to face.
So this is how Lacan translates Freud into
French: the sexual eros becomes the more abstract désir.
How then does he translate Oedipus? In Freud,
it's a conflict, located in sexuality, between mother and father. In Lacan, it
is a conflict, located in désir, between the two things that we use to make up
the world: images (associated with the mother) and language (associated with
the father). And the cause of the conflict is the fact that we are born too
soon.
5. Lacan and Oedipus: the child.
5.1 we are born too soon
It is generally admitted that human beings come
into the world too early. Some say it's because of our big brains. Big brains
need big heads, and if we stayed in the womb any longer these big heads would,
like Alice, grow too big, and wouldn't be able to get down the birth canal. We
are all prematurely born: most animals emerge from the womb with considerable
functionality, able to feed, to walk, to be independent to some degree of their
mothers. Humans emerge helpless, completely dependent on their mothers: as if,
for months after birth, they are still in the womb, still part of the mother's
body.
5.2 the child has no categories
In the beginning, the child (of either sex: note
this) has no language, and no images, and so knows no concepts or distinctions.
There is no difference felt between child and environment, and in particular
between the child and the source of nourishment, the bottle or the breast. The
world has no categories for the young child: it is not divided. It is as if the
baby is still in the womb. The sense of self in the child is absolutely
synonymous with and completely identified with his or her universe.
We adults are not like that: we all have a very
clear and constantly maintained distinction between the sense of "I"
and the rest of the world. The world begins immediately at the outside of our
skin, and goes on for ever, containing millions upon millions of separate
things, that are none of them us. Cats and cows and chairs and cheese and all
those other myriad things the world is so full of. For the child, the world is
full of only one thing; there is no boundary at the skin. The self and the
others are one.
This experience, for the child, resembles the
richness of the real. It is not the same, but it is like it, and therefore
satisfying.
But simultaneously there are phenomena that keep
happening that contradict this, because the child isn't in fact in the womb: it
is aware of unpleasure, and pleasure: of pain and hunger and the food not being
there. Strange objects move independently, noises, faces, but we can't yet call
them faces, or objects, or noises, because we have no language, and we can't
identify them, because we have no images to compare them with: so none of this
can be felt as separate from the self. (Lacan was not aware of the work on
inherited images that I talked about in the Dreams lectures). To make this
separation, the first thing that we have to do is to make a distinction between
the self and the world: to aquire a self-image. Lacan summarises the process in
a symbolic event: the mirror phase, le stade du miroir.
6. Lacan and Oedipus: the mother
6.1 The mirror phase / le stade du miroir
If you show a baby a mirror--the baby has to be
about six months old--it will usually do two things, both strange. No other
animal does either of these things. One is, it will recognise that the image
presented is an image of itself. It will not, like a cat does, think there is
another animal there: it will know that the mirror shows the self. Secondly, it
will laugh. There is pleasure in this realisation, this revelation of the self.
Lacan says that when the child sees him or
herself in the mirror, that's me, the child thinks; that is this. So 'me' is at
once here, safely inside the skin, as always, and also there, outside the skin,
in the glass reflection. And there 'me' is seen as others see it: is
objectified. With this comes the realisation that there is an inside and
outside, that 'I' exist objectively to others; 'I' am now only another being,
and no longer everything.
6.2 je est un autre
With that comes another realisation: that is what
I'm like. I now have a way of imagining myself, an image to live by: an image
of me. This is the primary image, against which I can compare all other images
I see, that are either me nor not me. I am about to build up my image stock, my
kit for making sense of the world. I am entering into the world of images.
Lacan calls this the imaginary world: the imaginaire.
6.3 the imaginary / l'imaginaire
The most important images are those that I use to
make up my self-image. This self-image is false. It is made up of things that
are not me. An image, not a reality. This self-image builds in the child's
mind, seems more and more real, as the child sees more and more images: it sees
other children, pictures, adults, glimpses of parts of its own body (now
identified as 'mine', part of 'me'), and so it builds up a self-image out of
these broken fragments. These alien entities.
It makes a sort of 'me' out of that which is not
me. Frankenstein, who made a badly made monster out of the parts of corpses,
who in trying to create a human created precisely the opposite, did what the
child does. Lacan, always a sucker for puns, calls this new being, that the
child thinks is self, an hommelette: a little man, made out of broken eggs.
6.4 the hommelette
So the hommelette is made out of fragmentary
images, of bits and pieces. But there is another essential ingredient of the
hommelette: the motivating force, désir.
Remember, the world we are born into is full of
desire, of unsatisfiable desire. When we are born we are surrounded by this
desire, which was always already there. People expect things of us, want things
of us, try to make us what we are not. Surrounded by this desire, we make
ourselves out of the expectations of others. Out of what others want us to be.
Which others? Well, at this stage, the mother.
She, like all beings, is full of desire, but her desire is misplaced from its
real object, like all desire, and finds expression in longing for this and
that, and this and that. So a major component of the landscape into which we
are born is the mother's desire, le désir de la mere. But the child cannot
satisfy that desire, because nothing can satisfy it. And we desire from her: we
desire the oneness that the child had at the breast, in the womb; but this too
is not it, not the real, and so cannot be satisfied.
This botched concept of self, this monster, the
hommelette, made of illusion and desire, surrounds the child like a hard skin:
it is me, the child feels: it protects me, it keeps me safe. But actually it is
not me at all, but a constriction of me, a hard awkward clumsy approximation,
made up of what my mother wants of me, of tangled half-understood images and
suppositions. It prevents me from being free and happy.
So for Lacan the primary environment of the
child, as it enters into the imaginaire, the world of images, is the mother's
desire: le désir de la mère.
6.5 the desire of/for the mother / le désir de la
mère
This seems a long way from Freud. But what Lacan
does, remember, is to translate Freud into French. In French le désir de la
mère is ambiguous: it means both the mother's desire, and the desire for the
mother. And, as in English, desire can mean sexual desire, or a more general
want.
So Freud's sexual desire by the child for the
mother, a desire to return to the bliss at the breast, which for Freud is a
sexual act as literal as the incestuous love of Oedipus for his mother/wife, is
located by Lacan in a more general landscape of loss and desire. The mother's
unfulfillable desire for the child, and the child's unfulfillable desire for
the mother. All loosely located in the dreamy unreliable landscape of the
imaginaire. There they are, the child and the mother, in union, joined at the
breast, negotiating desire, dreaming together.
7. Lacan and Oedipus: the father
7.1 the symbolic
This mutual desire is disrupted, as in Freud, by
the father. As in Freud, there is a castration. But in French. Le désir de la
mère is suppressed by what Lacan calls le nom du père, the name of the father,
and the new landscape is not the imaginary, but the symbolic: la symbolique.
The child enters into language. I will explain.
It is language, remember, that names the world
into existence, that creates all the categories by which we separate the world
into manageable chunks: cats and cows and chairs and cheese and so on and on.
When we enter this hard masculine world of language the dreamy world of the
mother, l'imaginaire, is suppressed. So you can say there are three layers: at
the bottom, deeply and unutterably suppressed, is desire itself: desire for the
real. On top of that is l'imaginaire, and le désir de la mère. And on top of
that, suppressing it, is language, the voice of the father: la symbolique.
Once the child has acquired language and realised
the multiplicity of things then the original sense of oneness with the mother,
and the even deeper desire for the real, is lost. No, not exactly lost: they
become unconscious, because they are outside language. Once we begin to think
in language, it's hard to imagine what it is not to have it: it is unspeakable.
It is unconscious. So we have not only lost something wonderful, something
important, but also we don't know, we can't possibly know, what it is that we
have lost, because we can't express it in language, because it is not in
language: it is, exactly that which language is not. L'imaginaire can surface in
dreams and fictions, but desire itself, desire for the real, is deeply deeply
hidden.
7.2 le nom du père
So this is how Oedipus gets translated into
French. Lacan imagines that language comes with the child's increasing
awareness of the father, which cuts him or her off from dreamy bliss.
Specifically it is the voice of the father, who becomes the conscience: who
says 'no'. For Lacan the entry into language, the entry into separateness, that
splits up the world and deprives us forever, is a castration, a cut that
separates, and it is associated with the father. He says this in a pun: it is
le nom du père.
This is twice a pun. Once, blasphemously, on the
end of the Lord's prayer (in the name of the father); twice, in that the word
'nom' in French, meaning name, is identical in sound with the word 'non',
meaning 'no'. So in le nom du père you have all those meanings: the god-like
father names the world by saying no. it is the non du père that suppresses the
désir de la mere, puts it into the unconscious: we are cut off from it, for
ever.
With language we enter into a new world: the left
brain, organised, articulated world of language: the symbolique. We as it were
turn towards the father. This says Lacan, is a perversion, a père-version.
And here, for Lacan, is the root of suffering. In
each of us there is an absence that we cannot, by definition, think about,
because we cannot name it. At the moment of the creation of the ego, the self,
an absence is created. It is an absence as big as everything, because it is
caused by the removal of a sense of unity with everything. But that removal
created 'me', gave birth to my sense of self, so 'I' can't get back to it,
because to do so 'I' would cease to exist. And so what I want, I can't have. What
I do is to try and fill this gap up with things, with all of the things that I
might think I am hungry for, like food and toys and books and cars and houses
and computers, and all the other goods, that seem so good, in anticipation,
but, when attained, seem to do no good at all, because the absence is not
filled.
8. Truth and consequences
So let me now point out some consequences of this
Lacanian map of the world, so oddly similar to Freud, and yet so competely
different.
First, sex is decentered from the centre of all
things. It is a deeper desire, which includes all desire, that drives us on.
Second, the hero of the Oedipus story is no
longer a little boy. It is not a gendered story.
Thirdly, more than this, one of the ways you can
read Lacan's reading of Oedipus is to say that it is a critique of patriarchy.
Lacan was deeply suspicious of repressive masculine authority, of any way of
using language to tie down knowledge, to repress freedom. He called it
père-version, remember. He also called it le discours de l'université.
Men traditionally in this culture see women as
illogical, dreamy; women see men as excessively rational, oppressive. Lacan
says that both these ways of being, the symbolique and the imaginaire, are
there in all of us; and he appears to value the imaginaire over the symbolique.
So you could say that Lacan's translation of
Freud into French has the effect of answering the two main criticisms of Freud:
his sexualism, and his sexism.
9 Two ways to use Lacan
So: having negotiated all that, how on earth can
we apply it to literary criticism?
As I see it, there are two ways. You can try to
imitate Lacan, or you can try to use Lacan. The first of these, I will call the
method of free association; the second, I will call the method of hidden history.
9.1 Free association
"Take a leaf out of my book: don't imitate
me"
If you want to take the first course, you should
read this article, by Maud Ellmann, on Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess,
entitled "Blanche". This completely subverts the discourse of the
University, which is relegated to ironic footnotes: it is a poem, an elegant,
somewhat imaginary, mediation on woman. The main point of her essay, as I read
it, is the beauty of its own writing: it is literary criticism, not as
interpretation, but as another work of art: it is playful, artful, beautiful.
It is a game.
It's very difficult to do that game in this
lecture, because I am very much speaking with the discourse of rationalism (the
discourse of the university) here. If you want to see what it's like, read the
article.
The other method, the method of hidden history,
is more amenable to the tone of voice I'm using now. It is a way of using
literature to find out about ourselves.
9.2 hidden history
When the patient comes to see the analyst, in order
to help his or her suffering the analyst takes nothing said for granted.
Everything is read against the grain, in opposition to the voice of the
conscious mind. That is because the conscious mind is concealing the truth that
causes the suffering.
Similarly no historian or economist or political
scientist will take the word of the ruling class in any society, the official
propaganda that disguises the truth: they will attempt to read beneath that, to
get at the concealed truth. In its most general form, this method of hidden
history is like that: you read the text to get at the secret behind it, its
unconscious contents, revealed in gaps or absences or slips or, as it were, the
dreams of the text. To find out what the text doesn't want you to know. This method,
which I began to describe to you in the last lecture, is called deconstruction.
Now, you can do this in more specifically
psychoanalytic terms: you can look in the text for a history of the way we see
the world. One of the main exponents of this method is Catherine Belsey, and if
you wish to learn it, a good place to start, in my view, is in her article,
"The romantic construction of the unconscious".
In it she says this: that what Lacan tells us is
that the self is a construct: it is, you might say, part of ideology. It is not
natural or outside history or culture.
She says that since this 'self' is cultural, it
can be studied, and the best place to study it is in literature: if it has a
history, then that history is textual, because literary texts are, as Freud
knew, in a powerful way like the dreams of the culture: they can be read, and
interpreted. So in this article she offers a reading of some of the most
dreamlike works of literature, the poems of the romantic poets. Her reading of
these is Lacanian, in that she sees them as a dialogue between the imaginaire
and the symbolique. How? Well, it is better that you should read the article
and find out; but what I will do is to attempt a reading of The Ode to a
Nightingale using the same kind of analysis that Kate Belsey uses, to show you
how it can be done.
10 The nightingale: desire and dissolution
Let us look at Keats's poem.
10. 1 the poem
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot
But being too happy in thy happiness
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless
Singest of summer with full-throated ease.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-
To thy high requiem become a sod
.10.2 the interpretation
This poem, as FR Leavis was the first to point out
in a famous essay, has two movements. One is towards a fantastic world, of
mythology, sensory pleasure, music, sensation, ecstasy. The geography of this
world is hard to catch, because it is not of this world; the nightingale has no
physical location and doesn't behave much like a bird because the whole of this
part of the poem has exactly that categorylessness, that feeling of outside
language, that we now know to associate with the Lacanian imaginaire; longed
for, not describable, inexact, infinitely seductive, with the enormous power of
something remembered and yet not remembered: something repressed. It is the
unconscious.
Beneath this longing there is a deeper longing, a
climactic desire, but one that loses itself instantly in paradox. Now more than
ever seems it rich to ... die. This deeper longing has a catch: the 'I' that
wants it, remember, cannot possibly get back to it, because it can only exist
when 'I' do not, since it is beyond categories, and 'I' is a category. This
would be a death, but so seductive, to cease, no more longing, no pain, a
pouring forth of self into plenitude just like the nightingale's pouring forth
of self into song. But at the end of the last stanza quoted the paradox hits,
and so does realism: it is impossible, death is death.
That is a Lacanian reading of the Ode to a
Nightingale.
This method of reading, as I said, is most
commonly known as deconstruction.
11 deconstruction again
What I have just shown you is Lacanian
deconstruction; there are others, and there is no time to go into all of that
here. I hope you have got from this a beginning, so that if you see the word
deconstruction in some literary criticism you will know what it means and have
some idea how to do it.
It means to look behind the text, and against the
grain of the text. You can use Althusser, or Lacan, as in the above examples;
if you look at my Lacan reading list you will find many more ways of doing it.
If you follow this path, there is a benefit. One
of the things that it does, is that it gives great meaning to being in an
English Department. I will explain.
Most students choose to study literature because
they like it, and this is very nice. I like it too. But they find that they are
asked to read long difficult books that they may not like. George Eliot, for
instance. If their only motivation is in liking literature, and they are asked
to read something they don't like, then that feeling of vertigo, of
contradiction, sets in. It saps their motivation, and they waste this precious
three years, and regret it, very very much, after the three years is over.
Whereas this way of reading has this to say for it is this: it makes the
reading of English in the English Department a very important activity; it
restores to it some of the centrality that it had in the golden days of the
founding fathers of literary studies: TS Eliot, FR Leavis, IA Richards, William
Empson.
What it does is to put the full meaning of the
word 'criticism' back into literary criticism. If those founding fathers knew
that the main method of teaching of literary studies in schools and often in
Universities is to teach students to appreciate texts selected as good by their
elders and betters, they would rotate in their honoured graves: they did not
name the subject literary appreciation, they called it literary criticism, and
they meant what they said.
Of course, deconstruction isn't easy. It is often
very difficult. A saying from George Eliot comes to mind: love does not make
things easy: it makes you choose that which is difficult.
Finally, I will return to the quotation that I
gave you at the beginning of this lecture series.
12 The blackbird again
A man and a woman
Are one
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
How do we interpret it? I would suggest that it
is beyond interpretation, because the two people in it are free. They are in
control of language, rather than being controlled by it. For them language is
renegotiated, and therefore, for a moment, reality is renegotiated too. They
are free. This moment is expressed not in words but by a blackbird's song, that
cuts through categories and creates oneness: inexpressible. The delicate,
utterly precious, moment of unity that they have together, a recapturing of bliss,
is constructed in privacy, because they have privatised language and made it
their own. The meaning is locked in the poem, in the moment, between the
lovers, and what we readers are given, from our exclusion from their private
meaning, is a jewel, a method, a way of being, that we can use in our own lives
exactly however we like.
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