“The world must be made to mean”
—or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality
So what in the world does it mean to say that “the world must be made to mean”? How does this sentence help us begin the hard work of “coming to terms with materialist language” (Jameson 2004: 403), of getting a handle on materialist semiotics? And why is this morsel of semiotic material an appropriate starting point for “in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality”— for introducing the idea that this “subject” must always be induced, as other processes, like labor or vomiting, must occasionally be induced? Like all properly “materialist” questions, these cannot be simply, briefly, or tidily answered, but we can learn a great deal about the most basic assumptions of theoretical writing by “coming to terms” with their terms.
The sentence was written by the Birmingham School cultural theorist Stuart Hall.1 To say that Hall’s sentence concisely expresses the most basic assumption of “materialist semiotics” is to locate it within the tradition of Marxist or “historical materialist” cultural studies. The initial clause of the sentence—the world must be made—is pretty much the foundational premise of historical materialism, while the final infinitive—to mean—is our semiotic kicker. Taken together, premise and kicker basically boil down to labor with language, or work with words, or, if you’ll forgive me, Marx with marks.
What marks Marx as an “historical materialist” is his conviction that humans must always make or produce their “world,” their “history.” In other words, Marx concurs with what Edward Said calls Giambattista Vico’s “great observation that [people] make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made” (1978: 4–5). For Marx and other historical materialists, that is, “the world” is nothing but “the history of the world,” and that history is only ever “anthropogenetic,” only ever humanly fashioned, fabricated, or caused—humans only are responsible for it.2 In The German Ideology, Marx sets his materialist analysis of anthropogenesis against philosophically idealist or mistily theological accounts of “the origin of the world.” He writes that human beings
can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence . . . By producing their means of subsistence [people] are indirectly producing their actual material life. (1932b/1978: 150)
For Marx, then, specifically human history begins, antinaturally enough, when the earliest humans first distinguish themselves from immediately natural or merely animal life by actively producing the real material conditions of their existence, their human reality, their world. For Marx, only humans “think, act and fashion [this] reality” (1844/1978: 54); only humans produce, actively and materially create, this world—which is why some Marxists, such as Antonio Negri in Time for Revolution, speak of historical materialism as “creative materialism” (2005: 166).
Here of course the word “world” doesn’t mean the physical planet (crust, mantle, magma, molten core, etc.), which Marx doesn’t for a minute think that humans “created” (though he doesn’t believe that some almighty, otherworldly deity cooked it up either); rather, by “world” an atheist historical materialist like Marx means the untranscendable horizon of human social existence in its historical totality, from the most rudimentary tribal forms in the dark backward and abysm of time to the most developed and digitally fast-forwarded cyber-societies. Specifically human history or “the world” begins for Marx not when some deity says “let there be light” but when “the first humans” begin working on the raw materiality of their immediately natural environment in order to transform it into something starting to resemble specifically human or social existence—thereby becoming, anthropogenetically speaking, “the first humans.” In other words, probably because “living like animals” wasn’t working out all that well for them anyway, the proto-people who are our most distant ancestors gave up trying to live a “merely natural” life—they stopped seeking shelter in the nearest natural formation (the proverbial cave or some other hole in the ground) and starting building huts and hovels out of the available sticks and mud; they stopped being merely hunters and gatherers, as some animals merely hunt and gather, stopped grubbing on whatever happened to be growing or grunting nearby, and started raising flora for harvest and fauna for slaughter. As these quite basic examples might suggest, the materialist gist here is that human reality or human history even at its most “primitive” level never “just naturally” (much less supernaturally) happens, never just grows on trees, or falls from the sky; a certain amount of work or productive activity is required in order to get human history up and running—to begin wrangling a realm of specifically human freedom from the merely natural realm of necessity.
“Antiphysis,” then, isn’t a bad name for this anthropogenetic activity, this totally human and—potentially, at least—totally humanizing work on and “against nature.”3 For in an historical materialist account, there is no beneficently divine creator watching over us, and nature is completely indifferent to our survival, much less to our “cause” (freedom, autonomy, dignity, etc.). Nature, that is, doesn’t really give a damn whether or not we’re protected from its elements, doesn’t care if or, most importantly, how we live or die. If I live like a king or die like a dog, it’s all the same to nature. And the fact that nature is completely indifferent to Operation Human Freedom, the fact that raw and immediate physical nature must be transformed, worked on, worked against, if this project of antiphysis is ever to get off the ground, constitutes the basic or primordial reason why “the world” must always “be made”—and always only by us. Because we, the people, first distinguish ourselves as people by anthropogenetically differentiating ourselves from animals in the practical act of producing our means and conditions of existence, human reality must always be distinguished from natural reality, from merely animal life.
Or, as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might put it—in terms no less laboriously “materialist” than those of Marx—human reality must be distinguished from nature because each and every subject of this reality must be set apart from the real, must separate or free itself from the real’s oppressively immediate hic et nunc or “here and now.” Lacan describes “human reality” as a “montage” of the imaginary (the register of images) and the symbolic (the register of language). He distinguishes this imaginary and symbolic montage from another register, which he calls the real. In Lacan’s account, the real both precedes and exceeds human or “socio-symbolic reality,” precedes and exceeds any individual subject of this reality, any particular human being. The real precedes reality insofar as it relates to “the very young child’s experience of itself,” which, Lacan says, “develops on the basis of a situation that is experienced as undifferentiated” (1966c/2006: 91); Lacan characterizes this “precedent” real as a perceptual state or experiential stew in which “things . . . at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (1966d/2006: 229). Because the inarticulate infant mired in this undifferentiated real literally can’t “tell the difference” between its “experience of itself” and everything else, it in effect experiences itself as “everything.” Thus the real as “the hic et nunc of the all” relates to what Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents calls the infant’s “oceanic” feeling, “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (1930/1989: 723)—a “feeling” that we all of course must one day lose. For, eventually and inevitably, each and every “very young child” must be pulled out of the “oceanic” real and installed in properly human reality, framed in the imaginary/symbolic montage, must become an individual human subject, an “I,” a parlêtre or “speaking being,” as Lacan puts it, “an animal at the mercy of language” (1966f/2006: 525). Thereafter, the real is what exceeds human reality and “resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1991: 66).
We’ll be returning to Lacan, to “infantile” experience, and to the real’s resistance to language’s tender mercies, later in these lessons. Here, let’s say that for Lacan, human reality must be distinguished from the real because, in the real, there is nothing to distinguish the human from the merely natural/animal “here and now.”4 While for Marx, labor pries humans loose from nature, for Lacan, language separates reality from the real. Taking Marx and Lacan together, materialist semiotics asserts the “labor of language” as the specifically and exclusively human mode of antiphysis that produces human reality as such. The world must be made, to be sure, but it must also be made to mean. Human reality is only ever the product of human work with words.
But how do these laboriously linguistic matters relate to the idea that “the subject of human reality”—the individual human being—must be “induced”? Here, we begin to approach a materialist assumption that many self-respecting human beings find unpalatable—the assumption that, like “the world,” each and every one of us must also be “made to mean.” To paraphrase Lacan—humans make meaning, but only because meaning makes us human.5 Antinaturally enough, this quip means that none of us is ever actually born human; rather, universally and transhistorically, we must all be turned into human beings through the antinatural labor of language. What does this mean? How does this work? How could this possibly be?
Well, consider all the abilities or activities by which we tend to “distinguish” ourselves from animals. Make a list of everything we can do that a non-human animal, a monkey or a lobster, cannot.
Now consider whether you could perform any of these constitutively human tricks immediately upon the moment of your birth, or even for several years thereafter. Sure, you may have first popped out with the innate potential to learn these operations eventually, to acquire these characteristics one fine day. But a moment’s reflection will inform you that you, in fact, had to be taught each and every single one of them because in the inert facticity of your neonativity, you basically couldn’t do squat.
In fact, from this rather unflattering perspective, our most “species-specific” characteristic as newborns is our utter inadequacy not only as humans but even as little animals. This lack of sufficient animality stems from what Lacan calls our species’ “specific prematurity at birth” (1966b/2006: 78), a matter we’ll consider more carefully in the next few lessons. For now, however, let’s see if we can cut through all the “ideological labor of cuteness” (Edelman 2004: 137) that is normally and normatively performed upon “the baby” and behold the human neonate as a “small animal conceived by a man and a woman,” a little creature that will not just naturally become but must actually be made into “a small human child” (Althusser 1971: 205). If we can swallow this queerly materialist description, then we might begin to digest the radical proposition that humanness itself, while a conceivably innate or hard-wired potential, is actually only ever a hard-scrabble acquisition, that we are each born as inadequate little animals, rough beasts that must be turned into human children through laborious linguistic processes of socialization. Like the world that must always be made to mean, we ourselves must always be made to mean and must always continue to make meaning.
But while being “made” here denotes being manufactured or fabricated, the word also suggests being compelled or forced, just as the word “must” implies an inexorable, and hence, vaguely sinister imperative. What are we to make of this more ominous meaning of the phrase “must be made”? Here, it might help to know that Lacan refers to human reality as the symbolic order. In Lacanese, the symbolic order is the underlying set of grammatical and syntactical structures that regulate the material production of meaning that is social reality itself. For Lacan, the symbolic order pervades and supports any actually existing social order. The symbolic order is the “grammatically correct” organization of signs and symbols that gives us our “politically correct” position within the polis, within the prevailing social order (our properly gendered position within a legitimated exogamous marriage or kinship system, for example). To become a social subject, one must first assume the symbolic position of the grammatical subject. One must first agree to designate oneself in terms of the first-person pronoun—to say “I” and really mean it.6 But this seemingly casual agreement to “be oneself” in words is actually “made” under a bit of psychic duress. For the symbolic order isn’t merely an ordered row of symbols, an organized concatenation of words. It’s also an order to symbolize, an officially issued directive to mean—or else. To enter “the symbolic order,” to participate in human reality as one’s own personal “I,” one must first follow “the symbolic order,” the order to symbolize, the relentless imperative to mean. Non-participation in “meaning,” exclusion from the privileges of the “I,” would be the aforementioned “else”—and you really don’t want to end up there.
Now, like everything else involving the production of human reality, the symbolic order doesn’t grow on a tree or fall from the sky. So, where does it come from? How is it maintained? Suppose I don’t really want to enter or follow it. Can I take or leave the symbolic order, as I please? Is it possible to refuse? Or, does the symbolic order “make me” (as) an offer that I can’t refuse without somehow refusing myself and participation in human reality in the bargain? These questions take us into our next lesson, which explores the socializing mechanisms by which we are initially “made to mean,” first inducted into the “politics” of meaning.
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson One:
Birmingham School, real/imaginary/symbolic, the symbolic order
Notes
1 What Hall actually writes, in “The Rediscovery of Ideology,” is “The world has to be made to mean” (1998: 1050), but for a number of reasons, including the hard time I have resisting alliteration, I’ve changed “has to” to “must.” Birmingham School is short for the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded in 1964 at Birmingham University, UK. Hall was director of the Center from 1968 to 1979 (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 28–9).
2 Commenting on the link between Vico and Marx, Fredric Jameson notes that Marxism “stakes out what may be called a Viconian position, in the spirit of the verum factum of the Scienza Nuova [1725]; we can only understand what we have made, and therefore we are only in a position to claim knowledge of history [which is our work] but not of Nature itself, which is the work of God” (2009: 7); thus “Vico’s verum factum in effect sunders history from nature as an object of possible human knowledge” (2009: 217n21). But where Marx’s materialism surpasses Vico’s is less in the act of sundering history from nature as an object of human understanding and more in understanding human history itself as our permanent sundering of ourselves from nature, understanding history as the ongoing and productively human or “anthropogenetic” process of “antiphysis.” Marx further surpasses Vico in rejecting the idea that nature is “the work of God” and positing instead that “God” is the creative or imaginative work of “man”—for the militantly atheist Marx, that is, “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” and “the basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man” (1844/1978: 53–4).
3 I write here that human history as our ongoing work on and against nature is only potentially “totally humanizing” because, so far, history hasn’t exactly worked out this way for everybody—in other words, we haven’t yet reached what Jameson calls “the human age itself,” the utopian age of our totally mutual recognition of ourselves in a “fully human and humanly produced world” (2010: 107). The “world,” to be sure, is still only ever “humanly produced,” but for many, the work itself is anything but “fully” humanizing. For many producers, that is, labor is still “alienated” in the four-fold sense Marx describes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. We will discuss Marx’s theory of alienated labor more fully in Lesson Seven. For now, let’s just say that from a Marxist perspective, “the human age itself” can’t and won’t come about until the age of global capitalism is superseded.
4 Let’s also say a little more about Lacan’s triptych—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. It’s true that Lacan distinguishes human reality, as imaginary/symbolic montage, from the real. It’s also true that Lacan gives us a sort of developmental narrative in which the infant starts off in the undifferentiated real, leaves that mess behind, and enters “the imaginary order” via the so-called mirror stage (which we’ll be discussing quite thoroughly in a later lesson), and then supersedes the imaginary by entering “the symbolic order” of language. But Lacan doesn’t want to suggest that any distinction drawn between the real and reality is absolute; nor does he want us to put all our psychoanalytically interpretive eggs in the developmentally narrative basket; rather, Lacan stresses the structural permanence of real, imaginary, and symbolic interconnections within human reality as such. In fact, he famously represents the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic with the diagram of the so-called Borromean knot, “a group of three rings that are linked together in such a way that if any one of them is severed, all three become separated” (Evans 1996: 18) and the whole “subject of human reality” falls apart. So, while it’s accurate to say, as I have above, that “the real” in Lacan’s sense precedes and exceeds human reality, it’s probably more accurate to say that the real precedes, exceeds, and yet never ceases to invade human reality. This sense of invasion can produce a feeling of “extimacy” for the subject of human reality. As explained in the Preface, the word extimacy “neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between the inside and the outside, between container and contained” (Evans 1996: 58); the word opens us up to the unsettling suspicion “that the innermost, intimate core of a person’s psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign ‘thing’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86).
5 Or, to quote him directly: “Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229).
6 With this phrase—“to say ‘I’ and really mean it”—I am playing on the literal meanings of Freud’s German das Ich and das Es—“the I” and “the it”—which appear in Strachey’s English translation of Freud’s work as “the ego” and “the id.” Thus, Freud’s famous motto Wo Es war, soll Ich werden—“where id was, there ego must be” (1933/2001: 80)—can be read more literally as “where it (das Es) was there I (das Ich) must come into being.” Thus, “to say ‘I’ and really mean it” can mean: (1) to say “I” and sincerely intend to represent oneself as a subject, a self-identical person, but it can also mean (2) to say “I” but unconsciously refer to something else, something “other,” an “it,” an object, “an alien, foreign ‘thing’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86). This second and much stranger meaning points us to what Lacan calls “the truth of ‘I is an other,’ less dazzling to the poet’s intuition than it is obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint” (1966c/2006: 96). We’ll have more to say about this dazzling truth in Lesson Five.