Contents
Lacan: the mirror stage and imaginary
Lacan’s reformulation of structuralism: language, symbolic order and the unconscious
After Lacan: Althusser and society as interpellation
Derrida: difference and deconstruction
Rereading psychoanalysis: Derrida’s critique of Lacan
Post-structuralism and post-colonial theory: Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
We left social theory at the end of Chapter 5 in the grip of the ‘linguistic turn,’ refashioning concepts taken from the study of language and extending these ideas to other aspects of social activity. In the perspective of structuralism, language is form not substance. Words, as the reader will remember, cannot mean their objects. A ‘tree’ is what it is because it is not ‘flee’ or ‘bee,’ and likewise ‘bee’ is what it is because it is not ‘she’ or ‘he,’ and on and on in an endless chain of signification. Suddenly, things look more complex. If a signifier only refers us to another signifier, and if we can never arrive at an ultimate signified, what are we to make of the structuralist insistence that language forms a stable system? How are we to understand the structuralist account of meaning in terms of systemic structures? Is there not a tension between the structuralist emphasis on the differential nature of meaning on the one hand, and the presumption that as speakers or writers we have no choice but to follow patterns of meaning already established in language as a closed system?
To put these questions is to raise doubts about structuralism as a social theory. Such questions go to the heart of the adequacy of the structuralist conceptualization of the sign as a tidy symmetrical unity of signifier and signified. What remains missing in structuralist linguistics is any detailed treatment of how concepts become firmly tied to signifiers, or indeed of what it is that prevents a signified (that is, a concept or idea) from transforming back into another signifier. Think about it for a moment, as the problem is less abstract than it might first appear. If you look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary, all you find are more words, more signifiers. These words too can, in turn, be looked up. But the same issue arises. For, again, the reader is referred to yet more words, more signifiers. All of this would seem to suggest that there is no neat or fixed distinction between signifiers and signifieds.
Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who has had a major impact upon the development of social theory and whose work I shall examine in this chapter, put the argument that meaning is always somehow suspended, divided and dispersed, a displaced outcrop of the endless productivity and play of signifiers. Lacan developed his exciting method of reading psychoanalysis through the lens of structuralist doctrines, his infamous ‘return to Freud,’ in the most philosophical and avant-garde of world cities, Paris. Although by training a psychiatrist, Lacan appropriated the ideas of various European thinkers – from Hegel and Husserl to Saussure and Lévi-Strauss – to develop a rigorous form of thought – often very abstract, sometimes seemingly unintelligible – on the psychoanalytical constitution of the human subject, specifically in terms of speech and language. In so doing, and long before his work came to the attention of a wider public, his project was to open knowledge to a world of social differences, to explore and affirm Otherness – particularly its effects upon all identities. In 1957, in a now-famous essay titled ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,’ Lacan reflected on the unstable terrain of language and pushed structuralist doctrines to their limit by advancing the view that meaning is never immediately present in the interlocking of signifier and signified. Lacan tells a most simple, yet powerful, story involving a girl and boy and their encounter with the established world of signs, particularly sexual meanings:
A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. ‘Look,’ says the brother, ‘we’re at Ladies!’; ‘Idiot’ replies his sister, ‘Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.’
Reading a sign, according to Lacan, cannot be reduced to an imagined unity between one signifier and one signified. For the doors are identical. What, then, distinguishes one toilet door from another? Nothing, says Lacan, but the signifier itself, which enters into, intrudes upon, displaces and derails the signified. The meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, and so in this instance ‘Ladies’ is somehow located in a chain of meaning which is traced through with terms that are absent from it, namely ‘Gentlemen.’ At the same time this play of signifiers enters fully into our sexual and personal lives, locking gender identity into a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence. The ‘constant flickering’ of signifiers is what most interests Lacan, and is what gives rise to the dispersal and division that marks our identities (sexual, private, public) for the rest of our lives.
Lacan’s quite abstract psychoanalytical and philosophical doctrines struck a chord, at first, with Parisian avant-garde intellectuals and artists, and later with a wider public. In underscoring the instabilities of language and the open-ended play of signification, his structuralist-influenced reinterpretation of psychoanalysis struck a chord because, in part, it reflected the growing experiences of dislocation and fracture of many people the world over. As the structuralist 1960s gave way to the poststructuralist 1970s in France, Lacan was to emerge as a celebrity of the cultural Left. Indeed, he became widely hailed as one of the most important European intellectuals of the postwar years, in large part because of his radical insistence on identity and sexuality as decentering, which he in turn linked to a culture that was decentering. In this connection, his intellectual influence was only to be matched by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, whose powerful blending of linguistics and post-structuralism in the form of deconstructionism will form the major thread of discussion in the second half of this chapter.
Derrida, like Lacan, is much indebted to Saussure and structuralist linguistics, but he gives a new impetus to social theory in his most exciting and brilliant method of understanding the multivocal and shifting textures of speech and language. The pure productivity of language is Derrida’s theme from beginning to end. He puts the argument, which I reproduce here from a 1966 lecture delivered in the United States, that the ‘absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.’ Not, perhaps, the easiest of philosophical statements to grasp for the beginning student. But certainly Derrida makes clear the consequences for social theory of the recognition that there is no harmonious one-to-one set of correspondences between words and objects, or as he puts it the ‘absence of the transcendental signified.’ The consequence Derrida specifies is, precisely, nothing less than the recognition that meaning is an outcrop of a potentially endless ‘play of signification.’ This tissue of social differences extends, says Derrida, ‘infinitely.’ Not only beyond the boundaries of the closed, structuralist system, but infinitely. Elsewhere in the lecture, Derrida implicitly links his argument that the process of difference in language can be traced along a chain of broader cultural and political differences. ‘In the absence of a center or origin,’ argues Derrida, ‘everything becomes discourse.’
What, exactly, is this ‘absence of a center? And how is this ‘absence of a center’ transformative of social relations into discourse or language? To understand the connections between Derrida’s early philosophical thinking and the changed social world to which it paid close attention, it is necessary to recall that the late 1960s was a period of mass political unrest throughout many Western capitals. In 1968, student protests in the United States against the Vietnam War generated considerable public support. These student protests subsequently swept across Europe, and in Paris the student movement forged various alliances with the trade unions and working class. Major social upheaval occurred in Paris in May 1968, when millions of workers went on strike and protestors took to the streets. For a brief period, the French Fifth Republic look gravely threatened, although the police and army in time gained the upper-hand and the French political establishment, under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle, reasserted social control.
Derrida’s post-structuralist recasting of social theory – widely referred to as ‘deconstruction’ – was at once prefigurative of and reaction to the widespread public discontent which was 1968. Social theory, he argued, should break from the search to identify a center or origin of meanings. For the Center – the West, its belief-systems and its philosophy – was under severe political strain, seeking to respond to, cope with and shore up widespread social protest. His method of deconstruction, as we shall see, was a means of decentering the oppressive search for a political Center, and opened social theory to the ambiguous, conflicting meanings of social differences. Derrida’s deconstruction was both a philosophical and political method for continuing the disruptive revolts of 1968 to the cultural and institutional powers of the West. In devoting his philosophical energies to deconstruction, Derrida’s social theory proceeded from an unspoken alliance with those individuals and groups – students, workers, women, blacks, marginalized outsiders, former colonial subjects – questioning the political structures of Western power and the ongoing relevance of a principle of the Center. This was politics carried on under a different name, that of deconstruction or post-structuralism. Let us now turn to consider in more detail the detailed theoretical arguments which produced this shift from structuralist to post-structuralist social theory.
Lacan: the mirror stage and imaginary
Like Saussure, Lacan was no social theorist. Yet his influence over contemporary social theory has been profound. That this should be so is, at first sight, hard to figure – not only because of the dense and very difficult conceptual terminology of his work, but because Lacan’s central reference point was the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. This was not the first time that Freud was to loom large over social theory. In Chapter 3, I described how for the Frankfurt School the insights of Freud and psychoanalysis are of fundamental relevance for social theory, particularly for grasping how individuals come to submit to unequal social relations based upon political power and domination. It is the writings of Freud himself, rather than those of his followers, which Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno and Marcuse turned to in refashioning social theory. A similar orientation is to be found in Lacan, who returns to some of Freud’s earliest theoretical speculations – particularly his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) – in formulating a post-structuralist account of how the individual becomes ‘other’ to itself. By this reference to ‘Othering,’ Lacan was to draw attention to the split and fractured nature of identity as operationalized through the repressed unconscious.
Like Adorno and Marcuse, Lacan held a negative view of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly the American model of ego-psychology. He argued that ego-psychology represented a flattening of the Freudian revolution. By contrast, Lacan sought to develop a radical language for psychoanalysis, a language adequate to the strange workings of the unconscious. One might better appreciate the metaphors, puns and elliptical nature of his writings if this is borne in mind: Lacan believed that theoretical discourse must reflect the distortions of the unconscious in order to engage with both the practical and poetic textures of who we are as human beings.
When Lacan, early in his career, formulated the outlines of his new social theory based upon a rigorous ‘return to Freud,’ he focused on the precariousness of the ego and its imaginary lines of engagement with the world. Why? Why imagination as the basis upon which to question how individuals come to see themselves, and how individuals understand how other people look at them as actors in the world? Lacan’s line of analysis was, in essence, premised on one basic idea: that identity involves a fundamental division, one which secures and sets the unconscious life of the subject in the direction of imaginary lures, snares, misrecognitions and misadventures. In perhaps his most influential paper, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’ (1949), he describes a small infant contemplating its image in a mirror. Noting that from the beginnings of life the infant is physically uncoordinated, psychologically fragmented and without any defined sense of center, he asks how it is that the small child becomes centered on the world and on itself. Elaborating upon Freud’s argument that the ego is built upon self-love or narcissism, Lacan speaks of an ‘imaginary’ state in which a degree of unity, wholeness and centered-ness occurs. The infant’s drafting of a distinction between itself and the outside between the age of six and eighteen months, says Lacan, takes place within the paradoxes and illusions of the visual field, or what he calls the ‘mirror stage.’ As a metaphorical and structural concept, the mirror provides the subject with relief from the experience of fragmentation by granting an illusory sense of bodily unity through its reflecting surface. Note that Lacan stresses that the image is cast within the field of optics: it is in and through a reflecting suface that the subject narcissistically invests its self-image. This contrasts radically with other conceptions of mirroring, such as the work of Cooley (1902) who speaks of a ‘looking glass self’ that exists in relation to the gaze of others and also the work of D. W. Winnicott (1960) who views the early interchange between self and others as crucial to the founding of a ‘true’ self.
We only have to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image – whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.
This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infant stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.
This form would have to be called the Ideal-1, if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications, which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical synthesis by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.
J. Lacan (1949) ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’ In Ecrits: A Selection, transi. A. Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977, page 2.
The mirror, for Lacan, is therefore not what it seems; it appears to provide a sense of psychological unity and cohesion, but what it in fact does is distort and deform the self. As Lacan proclaims, the mirror situates the self in a line of fiction. The self or ego is created as defensive armor to support the psyche against its otherwise terrifying experience of fragmentation and dread. The capture of the self, or what Lacan terms the ‘I,’ by the subject’s reflection in the mirror is inseparable from a fundamental misrecognition of its own truth. In a word, the mirror lies. The reflecting image, because it is outside and other, leads the infant to misrecognize itself: the image yielded up by the mirror looks pleasingly unified and gratifyingly alluring, but the reality is that the mirror is just image. The image is not in reality the subject. Still more, Lacan believes that the ‘mirror stage’ is not something we ever fully pass through or get over in our personal and social lives; it is rather a ‘drama’ that defines a core aspect of our ongoing experience of ourselves and others in the social world. Television soaps, media advertising, pop music, Hollywood blockbusters: all the signs that circulate in contemporary society are shot through with imaginary investments and distortions. This is not a point that Lacan himself developed in any detail, but it is a line of argument taken up by some of his followers in media studies and social theory. We will turn to consider these developments in Lacanian-inspired post-structuralist theory later in the chapter.
Lacan’s reformulation of structuralism: language, symbolic order and the unconscious
Having argued that the ego is a paranoid structure, an agent of misconstruction and misrecognition, Lacan’s subsequent work aimed to demonstrate that the subject is also divided through insertion into a symbolic order of speech and language. Through extensive engagement with Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) and Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969), Lacan derived a structuralist-influenced account of the subject in which the concepts of signifier, system, otherness and difference figure prominently. The central essays in which he elaborates this antihumanist or structural-scientific conception of psychoanalysis are ‘The field and function of speech and language in psychoanalysis’ (1953) and ‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud’ (1957), to which we will now briefly turn.
In setting out his idea that life, both private and public, is dominated by the primacy of language, Lacan drew from and refashioned Saussure’s theory of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. The importance that Saussure placed upon the status of oppositions – upon not things themselves but on the relationship between words – appealed to Lacan’s psychoanalytic and structuralist sensibilities. Saussure provided Lacan with the means to bridge his theoretical concerns with both symbolic production and the formal organization of desire. He argued in his seminar, following Saussure, that the linguistic sign comprises two parts: the signifier (the acoustic component or linguistic mark) and the signified (the conceptual element). In line with structuralist thought, Lacan argued that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is arbitrary. However, where Saussure placed the signified over the signifier, Lacan inverts the formula, putting the signified under the signifier, to which he ascribed primacy in the life of the psyche, subject and society. All is determined for Lacan by the movement of signifiers. In fact, the position of each of us as individual subjects is determined by our place in a system of signifiers.
This brings us to the relation between language and the unconscious, a central preoccupation of Lacan. The idea that language might be a product of the unconscious was widespread among many psychoanalysts, and indeed Lacan continually affirmed in his writings and seminars that the importance he placed upon language was in keeping with the spirit of Freud’s corpus. However, Lacan’s structuralist elaboration of Saussure is, in fact, a radical conceptual departure from the Freudian conception of the unconscious. Whereas Freud sees connections between the psychic systems of unconscious representation (fantasy) and conscious thought (language), Lacan views subjectivity itself as constituted to its roots in language. This linguistification of the unconscious has important ramifications, making of this psychic strata not something which is internal to the subject (as with, say, a bodily heart or kidney), but rather an intersubjective space of communication, with language constantly sinking or fading into the gaps which separate signifier from signifier. The unconscious, writes Lacan, represents ‘the sum of the effects of the parole on a subject, at the level where the subject constitutes itself from the effects of the signifier.’ (Lacan quoted in Ragland-Sullivan 1986:106) Or, in Lacan’s infamous slogan: ‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’ (1998b: 48)
If the unconscious is structured like a language, as a chain of signifiers, the apparent stability of the individual’s ‘mirror image’ is alienated twice over. Firstly, the individual is alienated through the mirrored deceptions of the imaginary order, in which the ego is organized into a paranoid structure; secondly, the person is constituted as an I in the symbolic order, an order or law indifferent to the desires and emotions of individual subjects. Language is thus the vehicle of speech for the person, but this is an order in which the individual is subjected to received social meanings, logic and differentiation. It is this conception of the function of the symbol which paves the way for Lacan’s incorporation of Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology. Drawing upon Lévi-Strauss’s conception of the unconscious as a symbolic system of underlying relations which order social life, Lacan argues that the rules of matrimonial exchange are founded by a preferential order of kinship which is constitutive of the social system:
The marriage tie is governed by an order of preference whose law concerning the kinship names is, like language, imperative for the group in its forms, but unconscious in its structure … The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating … This law, then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language. For without kinship nominations, no power is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that bind and weave the yarn of lineage through succeeding generations.
(1953: 66)
This primordial Lawto which Lacan refers is the Freudian Oedipus complex, now rewritten in linguistic terms. What Lacan terms nom-du-père (name-of-the-father) is the cornerstone of his structural revision of the Oedipus complex. For Lacan, as for Freud, the father intrudes into the imaginary, blissful union of the child/mother dyad in a symbolic capacity, as the representative of the wider cultural network and the social taboo on incest. It is, above all, the exteriority of this process which Lacan underlines. Broadly speaking, Lacan is not arguing that each individual father forbids the mother-infant unity. Rather he suggests the ‘paternal metaphor’ intrudes into the child’s narcissistically structured ego to refer her or him to what is outside, to what has the force of the law – namely, language.
After Lacan: Althusser and society as interpellation
Throughout his career Lacan was primarily concerned with clinical issues arising from psychoanalysis, though he did often speculate on broader philosophical and aesthetic matters. He was not much concerned, however, with the social and political applications of psychoanalysis. In order to consider the import of Lacanian psychoanalysis for social theory, we need therefore to briefly look at the writings of one of Lacan’s followers, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In several essays published during the 1960s, Althusser argued for the importance of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for understanding how social relations are sustained through ideology. Ideology for Althusser was a concept of major importance for grasping how societal arrangements are sustained and reproduced in the daily lives of people, and especially for addressing the many forms of political domination. In order for production to be possible in any society, according to Althusser, it is necessary to reproduce the conditions of production. That is to say, reproduction depends not only on the forces of production, such as raw materials, buildings and machines, but crucially also on labor-power, which in turn requires individuals with the requisite know-how and training to carry out particular roles and tasks. The central issue in social theory which Althusser seeks to illuminate thus concerns how it is that individuals come to submit to the rules of established society.
There are two major theses on ideology put forward in Althusser’s writings. The first thesis asserts that ideology both confers a sense of coherent identity and subjects individuals to a particular social position in class society. Althusser’s exploration of the ways in which ideology leads individuals to feel ‘centered’ in relation to society is perhaps best captured by his oft-quoted slogan, ‘ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.’ This notion of ‘interpellation,’ whilst the topic of considerable debate in social theory throughout the 1970s, provides a theoretical underpinning for understanding the social processes through which an individual comes to experience a sense of unitary identity. As a structuralist Marxist, Althusser was particularly insistent that individuals have no essential unity, and derive whatever sense of meaning and value they have in their lives from the signs and social practices which go on around them. Ideology in this sense is less a set of well-articulated political ideas or doctrines than deeply resonant unconscious images and associations generated in everyday interaction which lead individuals to feel centered on others and the wider world. Just like the unconscious which structures it, ‘ideology is eternal.’ To capture this lived tissue of ideological structures, Althusser uses the term ‘ideological states apparatuses,’ which includes schools, family, the Church, legal systems, political parties, trade unions and the mass media. It is through our day-to-day involvement with such wider social structures, according to Althusser, that ideology does its work, ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellating’ the individual as a subject of society. Moreover, the consequences of such interpellations are material, as ideology itself is deeply inscribed in social practices. A terrorist, for example, is not just someone who believes in various fundamentalist doctrines, but rather situates their beliefs in relation to specific extremist practices centered on violence and acts of destruction.
The second thesis proposed by Althusser explores the ideological nature of the individual subject’s lived relationship to the world and to itself, and it is here that Lacan’s ideas on the imaginary are employed by Althusser to dramatic effect. Seeking to break from the dominant tendency in Marxist thought – derived from various comments in Marx’s The German Ideology – which casts ideology as a mere ‘reflection’ of the institutional structures of society, Althusser argues that ideology is not a representation of reality but rather comprises the individual subject’s lived relation to their conditions of existence. Borrowing from Lacan, Althusser writes of the ‘duplicate mirror-structure of ideology’ in which the individual’s relation to society parallels the narcissistically encircled space of the imaginary. Like the small infant before a reflecting mirror, jubilantly imagining itself to possess a unitary identity that in reality it lacks, the ‘subject of ideology’ similarly misrecognizes itself. This misrecognition is, above all, a self-misrecognition. As in the case of the luring mirror image, the ideological sphere entraps the individual as a subject, although the individual does not comprehend that its subjectivity is thereby produced. From routine social interaction through mass media to party politics, ideology confers an identity upon individuals that in actuality serves as a form of subjection.
To speak in a Marxist language, if it is true that the representation of the real conditions of existence of the individuals occupying the posts of agents of production, exploitation, repression, ideologization and scientific practice, does in the last analysis arise from the relations of production, and from relations deriving from the relations of productions, we can say the following: all ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.
L. Althusser (1971) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.’ In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, transi B. Brewster, London: NLB, page 1553.
Althusser’s writings on ideology received widespread attention throughout the 1970s, but most critics now agree that there are serious flaws in his social theory. For one thing, his account assumes that individuals are serenely subjugated through ideology and just passively adapt to processes of socialization. But what is lost by Althusser, and no less by his many followers, is any sense of the politics of ideological struggle. What is lost is an understanding of the complex, contradictory ways in which people inculcate dominant forms of ideology and established ways of doing things as well as how people come to dis-identify with, and in turn contest, existing societal arrangements. This difficulty with Althusser’s social theory arises in part from his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, an interpretation which focuses almost exclusively on the imaginary and the ego. But to view ideology solely in terms of the narcissistic lures of the imaginary is to ignore Lacan’s emphasis on both the symbolic and real orders of psychic life, and particularly their unconscious contradictions and fissures. These are problems to which we will return when reviewing problems with Lacanian theory in the next section of this chapter. For the moment, I simply note that the tendency to present the human subject as a ‘cultural dope’ in Althusserian social theory was a key reason for the fading of influence of this perspective on ideology in the social sciences.
Althusser’s social theory, deeply influenced as it was by the thinking of Lacan, was a powerful attempt to demonstrate that social change is never the simple unfolding of economic or institutional contradictions in society. Since Althusser’s appropriation of Lacan’s ideas, social upheaval must necessarily be seen in terms of an imaginary crisis of human relationships. This may seem a self-evident truth in today’s world, in which ideologies of extreme nationalism, racism, ethnic hatred and xenophobia proliferate, and yet one might easily underestimate the extent to which mainstream social theory in the English-speaking world for many years by-passed or ignored the volatility and vulnerability of cultural relations and societal arrangements. One influential figure in social theory who has emphasized the deeply unconscious dimension of social antagonisms and cultural traumas, with the implicit aid of Althusser’s social theory of ideology, is the Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek, as for Althusser, ideology implies an imaginary relationship to socio-symbolic forms of class, race and gender. In contrast to Althusser, however, Žižek contends that ideology always outstrips its own social and political forms; it is a realm beyond interpellation or internalization. Ideology, he says, is not something which just magically goes to work on individuals, assigning identities and roles in the act of producing itself. Rather, ideology should be conceived as an over-determined field of passionate attachments. ‘The function of ideology,’ writes Žižek, ‘is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.’ (1989: 45)
According to Žižek, politics is that public field of activity that vainly tries to build upon a melancholy loss at the core of desire – those deeply entrenched, threatening passions that people find too painful to acknowledge. In this sense, ideology provides a ‘lining’ or ‘support’ to the lack or antagonism which lies at the core of the self. Ideologies of nationalism, racism, or sexism are the very stuff of cultural fantasy-with the result that displaced, unconscious forms of libidinal enjoyment periodically erupt in violent waves of killing and ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Žižek sees the various eruptions of neo-nationalism and ethnic xenophobia across Europe during the 1990s in precisely these terms. Racism in his sense is an outer displacement of that which people cannot accept within. The projection of what he calls a ‘surplus of enjoyment’ onto denigrated others, the dumping of distressing and painful affect on socially dehumanized objects of antagonism, lies at the heart of the psychic dimension of political exclusion. This eruption of excess enjoyment, directed at the Other, represents an unbearable kernel of desire. Such excess is alleviated solely through its translation into an ideological symptom. Thus the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in Eastern Europe unleashed a surplus of fantasy. It involved the projection of pain onto something perceived as strange and Other.
It is possible to criticize Žižek’s radicalization of Althusser in various respects. It can be argued, for example, that if loss, lack and absence are ideological anchors for desire, their many forms and changing circumstances would seem more politically differentiated than Žižek recognizes. Žižek sees ideology in terms of a fantasy scenario, the sole purpose of which is to fill-in or cover over painful elements of lack. Yet there is a problem with this view insofar as it tends to flatten out the complex, variable reception of ideological forms by individuals and groups. Žižek sees no significant difference between whether one is in the grip of identity-politics, reading philosophy or classical literature, or watching a TV talk-show host such as Oprah Winfrey. These are all equally to be seen as pieces of ideological fantasy, aimed at effacing the sour taste of lack, gap and antagonism. In this respect, what is lost is the connection between self-identity, ideology and politics. For Žižek tends to pass over the complex ways in which people come to challenge political ideologies, and to treat the very worst and most sinister ideological formations on the same level as other relatively progressive formations. These problems in Žižek can to some degree be traced back to his engagement with Althusser, and in particular the project of using Lacan’s ideas to develop a resolutely negative critique of culture. For the Althusserian and Lacanian linkage of the ‘subject of the unconscious’to the idea of the arbitrary nature of the sign tends to give an inadequate account of how some political meanings and established ideologies predominate over others in personal and social life. This brings us back to Lacan’s essential contribution to social theory, as well as a consideration of problems associated with Lacan’s Freud.
Lacan’s ‘return to Freud,’ as we have seen, has powerfully influenced the direction and development of social theory. Any theory as complex and difficult as Lacan’s post-structuralist rewriting of Freud is, however, inevitably the source of fierce debate. Lacanianism has been enthusiastically applauded and critically attacked on a great number of grounds, and in what follows here I want to briefly consider some of the more important of these points. To begin with, Lacan’s account of the imaginary constitution of the ego has served as a corrective balance against other social theories and particularly versions of orthodox social science which place the self at the center of rational action, agency and autonomy. By contrast, Lacan emphasizes that the subject is necessarily alienated from its own history, formed in and through an interpersonal field haunted by otherness, and inserted into a symbolic network which decenters. Equally significant is that in emphasizing that the ‘I’ is an alienating screen or fiction, a medium of misrecognition which masks the split and fractured nature of unconscious desire, Lacan debunks certain traditional theories of meaning. For such theories, there is a presumption that mind and reality automatically fit together. But not so says Lacan, who not only powerfully questions the view that signs can be explicated in terms of corresponding features of the social world, but raises the issue of whether meaning can ever be immediately present in speech and language. This issue applies not only to meaning but equally importantly to identity itself. For on Lacan’s theory of the ego and imaginary, the subject can never be fully present to itself. The self is an illusion, a narcissistic mirage, and every attempt to represent identity is always somehow dispersed, displaced and decentered.
One criticism of Lacan sometimes heard in political circles is that his understanding of culture and social relations is too pessimistic. To say, with Lacan, that we are prisoners of lack, caught within the distortions of the imaginary, and trapped by laws of the symbolic is surely to undermine that sense of resistance and utopianism which is central to the radical political imagination. Whether this is true or not, the variety of contemporary approaches in social theory indebted to Lacan would seem to indicate that a sense of political resignation and cultural pessimism has been important to recent contestations of the established social order. From Althusser to Žižek, Lacan’s pessimistic doctrines have been marshaled to assault such notions as Truth, Freedom, Liberty and Meaning. In Lacanian terms, to believe that these terms might hold some absolute value necessarily involves accepting the world as it is. By contrast, Lacanian cultural criticism is out to probe the ‘naturalness’ of the signs by which women and men live, and in so doing attempts to subvert dominant structures of language. Here it is not too fanciful to detect similarities between Lacanian social theory and the psychoanalytic-influenced social theory of the Frankfurt School, as discussed in Chapter 3. For like Lacan, Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno and Marcuse drew from Freud to uncover the repressive forces at work in the construction of the self. In contrast to Lacan, however, the recovery of the repressed unconscious for these authors is also said to hold out a promise for autonomous social relations. In Lacanian and post-Lacanian social theory, however, a radically different tack is taken. Lacanian-inspired social theorists such as Althusser and Žižek do not so much evaluate society in terms of psychoanalysis itself, but rather explore the logic of desire (as revealed by the master, Lacan) as an index of society itself. That said, one of the less fortunate legacies of much social theory indebted to Lacan – especially those forms of social theory as represented by Althusser and Žižek – is an impoverished conception of the relation between the self, creativity and autonomy. Let us turn to consider three major limitations of Lacanian-inspired social theory.
Firstly, there are problems with the Lacanian proposition that the imaginary dimension of self-identity is a product or construct of illusions or misrecognitions. Lacan, as we have seen, viewed the imaginary as a distorting trap. The mirror constitutes a narcissistic self through consoling images of unity and thus screens out the dismal truth that subjectivity is, in fact, fractured. But the argument that the ‘mirror’ distorts fails to specify the psychic processes which make any such misrecognition possible. For example, what is it that leads the infant to (mis)recognize itself in its mirror image? How, exactly, does the individual cash in on this conferring of self, however deformed or brittle? Surely for an individual to begin to recognize herself in the ‘mirror’ she must already possess a more rudimentary sense of self-organization. Cornelius Castoriadis (1997b), an acclaimed European social theorist, has convincingly argued that Lacanianism fails to account for how the ‘mirror,’ or indeed the other person as a reflecting mirror, is perceived as real by the individual. By contrast with Lacanian-orientated social theory, Castoriadis argues that a radical psychoanalytic approach must engage with the capacity of the self to ‘gather meaning and to make of it something for him/herself.’
Secondly, and equally serious, is the complaint that Lacan actually suppresses the subversive implications of Freudianism by structuralizing the unconscious and reducing it to a chance play of signifiers. This criticism engages Lacan’s reading of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, specifically his claim that the unconscious is co-terminous with language. Many critics – including Paul Ricoeur, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche – have argued the Freudian point against Lacan that the unconscious is resistant to ordered syntax. These critics, in focusing on different threads of Lacan’s work, rightly argue, in my view, that the unconscious precedes language. According to this account, the unconscious – as Freud emphasized throughout his writings – twins meaning and energy, representation and affect. The unconscious may thus intrude upon language, as in slips of the tongue or pen, and yet cannot simply be equated with it. Malcolm Bowie has expressed this well:
It is our lot as speaking creatures to rediscover muteness from time to time – in rapture, in pain, in physical violence, in the terror of death – and then to feel a lost power of speech flowing back. One may be ready to grant that these seeming suspensions of signifying law are themselves entirely in the gift of the signifier, yet still wish to have them marked off in some way as events of a special kind. A long gaze at the Pacific may be taciturn at one moment and loquacious the next. Language offers us now a retreat from sensuality, now a way of enhancing and manipulating it. Yet to these differences Lacan’s theory maintains a principled indifference.
(1991)
The unconscious, for Freud, is completely unaware of contradiction, time, or closure. With Freud, we are the biographers of ourselves but not in the manner of our conscious choosing. Constructing self-identity is a project that emerges out of family, interpersonal and historical narratives, and is thus intricately interwoven with language. And yet our deeper sense of who we are is fashioned beyond the borders of language, as emotions, drives and memories are linked together in the specific ways that people develop as individuals.
To emphasize the pre-linguistic, unconscious character of the self is also to bring into view important social-theoretical considerations concerning Lacan’s assimilation of the unconscious with language as a fixed structure. These considerations pertain to the agency of the individual subject. One influential interpretation of Lacan holds that, in presenting a model of desire as disembodied and pre-structured linguistically, the individual subject is effectively stripped of any significant capacity for lasting identity, emotional change or personal autonomy. This complaint is, however, more appropriately leveled at those post-structuralist thinkers that champion the ‘death of the subject’ instead of Lacan. Rather than celebrating the disappearance of the human subject, Lacan posits a ‘subject of the unconscious,’ a subject located in the spacings of language. Another widespread reading of Lacan is that, in conceptualizing the ‘subject of the unconscious’ in terms of difference and specifically oppositions that are structured linguistically, no theoretical room is given to practical agency, emotional literacy and the capacity for personal resistance to external social forces. In my view Lacanianism does indeed face a problem in this respect, casting off the most vital questions of self and identity onto an abstract theory of language.
All of this carries particular implications for the account of culture developed in post-Lacanian social theory. For one thing, Lacan’s equation of language with cultural domination seriously downplays the importance of power, ideology and social inequalities in the reproduction of institutional life. For writers influenced by Lacan, individuals are transformed into subjects who act in accordance with the symbolic structure of society which is determined in advance. This is obviously a strongly deterministic interpretation of Lacan, but such a reading has powerfully shaped the contours of much contemporary social theory. Whether we turn to Lacan’s subsequent explorations of the dislocating force of imaginary, symbolic and real orders, or indeed whether we simply reject Lacanianism altogether and approach the issue of selfhood from an alternative theoretical approach, this deterministic reading of Lacan’s work is surely open to dispute. For whilst language certainly pre-exists us as individual subjects, it is surely implausible to suggest – as Lacanian-orientated social theory does – that the symbolic constitution of the human subject is singular, authoritarian and pre-structured in advance. It is crucial to emphasize here that identity is not constituted as ‘self-divided’ simply because of the insertion of the subject into language. The traumatic divisions and emotional fissures which people experience in today’s world are replete with the conditions and consequences of asymmetrical relations of social power. To understand this requires, I argue, a theoretical framework more sensitive to the articulation of identity in relation to social context. This requires attention to the multiple forms in which identity is constituted in deeply unconscious ways, specifically in relation to globalization and multinational capitalism but also to the mass media and new information technologies. It remains the case, of course, that such constructions of the self-at once conscious and unconscious – will be filtered through modes of discourse. And yet the specific criticism here is that Lacan’s work fails to consider what the cultural and political determinants of such codes might be.
Finally, these issues involve broader dilemmas relating to knowledge. The Lacanian narrative which we have traced – that the self is narcissistic, the imaginary a specular trap, the law omnipotent, and the symbolic a mask for ‘lack’ – risks coming undone at the level of social theory. For surely any political project concerned with enhancing freedom must be caught in the same imaginary networks of illusion as the Lacanian account of the self/society nexus? But if this is so, then perhaps the whole Lacanian framework might be deconstructed. For example, how can Lacan’s discourse evade the distorting traps of the imaginary domain? Surely Lacan does not seriously believe that the only way of overcoming imaginary distortion is through comic word-play, puns, and irony? In failing to grasp that human subjects are capable of critical se If-reflection and self-actualization, the issue of individual and collective autonomy remains repressed in Lacan’s work.
Derrida: difference and deconstruction
Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ might well be seen as another instance of Grand Theory, revolving on such concepts as a universal mirror stage and the symbolic order of language, whereas Jacques Derrida is more concerned with the intricate productivity of chains of signification, as revealed in language in general and writing in particular. To do this, Derrida develops in an early trilogy of books – Of Grammatology (1976), Speech and Phenomena (1973) and Writing and Difference (1978) – first published in 1967 (the year just prior to the student and worker rebellions in France) the concept of différance, by which he means the spacing inherent in the system of differences governing discourse. This may at first sound like a continuation of Saussure’s theorem that meaning in language is a product of difference, but it is in fact a radicalization of structuralism. This radicalization is to do with a fundamental stress on the never-ending process of difference which unsettles signification, and it is this stress which in many ways lies at the heart of the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism. For Derrida, as for Lacan, meaning is always necessarily unstable as it is relayed through an endless chain of signifiers. Yet unlike Lacan, Derrida refuses the philosophical concept of subjectivity in general and rather proposes an ingenious critique of decentering, difference and discourse in exclusively linguistic terms. In various forms of social theory, particularly among feminist, queer, post-colonial, and Afro-American critics, Derrida’s application of linguistic models in the context of post-structuralism has powerfully influenced the explication of social and cultural phenomena. We will turn to consider these developments in social theory later in the chapter, but first we must briefly consider Derrida’s work to see how post-structuralism and linguistics are interrelated.
In discussing Derrida’s key ideas, we are considering a form of criticism that has become widely known as deconstruction. This is a term which has suffered from various abuses at the hands of sympathizers and critics alike, and indeed Derrida often sought to distance himself from the more purely gestural uses of the term – especially in American deconstructive criticism. According to many critics of Derrida, deconstruction is notable for its belief that meaning is random, truth a fiction, and the human subject a mere metaphor. As we will see, this widespread view of Derrida as a subversive nihilist is in various respects inaccurate. Deconstruction, the philosophical method Derrida promoted, means not destroying Western philosophical ideas, but pushing them to their limits, to the point where their latent contradictions are exposed and criticism can press beyond them. To ‘deconstruct’ ideas then is to reconstruct and resituate meaning within broader structures and processes. Nevertheless, as Derrida argued, the deconstruction of language must necessarily have recourse to terminological innovation if it is to adequately subvert established categories of meaning. This is one significant reason why Derrida’s work seems to many bafflingly opaque, as he deployed various stylistic ironies to question modernity and its distinctive language of a ‘metaphysics of presence.’ By placing ‘under erasure’ or drawing an erasing X through the pivotal ideals of Western culture – the primacy of speech over writing, the presumption that meaning is fully transparent or present in communication, the foundational belief in some alternate Center to social affairs – Derrida unearths the endless process of transformation which underlies all signification.
Derrida can be said to have fashioned a whole new style of philosophical writing, and this is nowhere more evident than in his deployment of the neologism ‘différance.’ In French, the words différence and différance sound the same when spoken, but the ‘a’ in Derrida’s idiosyncratic concept cannot be heard. In this distancing from established categories of language through deliberate misspelling, ‘différance’ – as Derrida uses the term at any rate – refers to ‘the act of deferring.’ This is quite a complicated point and I shall return to it in a moment, but here it is important to note that ‘différance’ indicates that you will never arrive at a final signified of social differences which is not in itself deferred. In emphasizing the ‘différance of difference,’ Derrida at once continues and transgresses the tradition of Saussurian linguistics. Meaning, for Derrida as for Saussure, is created by the play of difference in the process of signification. For Derrida as against Saussure, however, signification is always deferred through potentially endless tissues of difference; our communications with ourselves and others can never reach an ultimate destination point or scoop up the idea or object they represent.
Nothing – no present and in-different being – thus precedes différance and spacing. There is no subject who is agent, author, and master of différance, who eventually and empirically would be overtaken by différance. Subjectivity – like objectivity – is an effect of différance. This is why the a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation – in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being – are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of différance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance. It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of différance, that the subject is not present, nor above all present to itself before différance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral.
Jacques Derrida (1981a [1972]) Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pages 28–9.
In fashioning the term ‘différance,’ which he says is ‘literally neither a word nor a concept,’ Derrida underscores that thought itself necessarily turns slowly (Derrida 1982: 3, 7). Language is not a transparent medium, but an opaque domain of traces or inscriptions whose content and rhetoric must be questioned (to be put, as Derrida says, ‘under erasure’) and thus resituated in a new register. Here we return to the spatial and temporal dimensions of Derrida’s social theory. I say social theory because it is Derrida’s emphasis on the displaced, deferred aspects of signification which has prized open conventional understandings of the relation between society, culture and history. One of the ways, according to Derrida, that social differences are ignored or repressed is through the act of delay. To differ for Derrida is to defer. Think about it. The present moment, once grasped, has passed. When I hear someone speaking or when I read a sentence, the meaning of what is conveyed is always somehow suspended. Each marking or inscription is shaken up, as it were, by the trace of other signifiers – again and again without end. ‘Différance,’ writes Derrida, ‘is thus a structure and a movement which can only be grasped in relation to the opposition of present/absent. Différance is the systematic play of differences, or traces of differences, of the spacing whereby elements are connected to one another’ (Derrida 1972, cited in Giddens 1979: 31).
One way in which we might pursue Derrida’s ideas on the repressed logic of différance in the structuring of a center of meaning in more concrete terms is by reconsidering aspects of self-experience and identity. I might, for example, persuade myself that – as author of this book – I am fully in control of the arguments developed and meanings conveyed, that I am as it were at the center of arranging, explaining and explicating the social theories reviewed in these pages. In some obvious ways, much of this is of course the case; yet there are other powerful forces, at once intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic that function to decenter my authorship. For one thing, since meaning is an endless play of signifiers, it is an illusion for me to believe that I can ever completely get to the nub of Derrida’s thinking about deconstruction. Sure, I might use various modish deconstructive terms – différance, logocentrism, trace – and yet, on Derrida’s account at any rate, these words are themselves always somehow differentiated – dispersed, divided, displaced. The endless circularity of the process of différance is thus reproduced and destabilized by the constant transformations of signification itself. Still more, another thing that decenters my authorship of this book is that I am not at the center of my own subjectivity. For Derrida as for Lacan, the conscious self is always decentered in relation to the unconscious. In Derrida, this is less an appeal to some pre-linguistic substratum of the subject than a critical focus on the binary oppositions that situate identity, subjectivity, authorship. Thus the oppositions of self-other, conscious-unconscious and identity-difference are at the core of how discursive practices structure our whole system of thought and experience of ourselves.
Another concrete way of grasping Derrida’s argument that meaning is always dispersed, displaced and deferred is by considering the political oppositions of center and periphery in the history of Western colonialism. The West in various political incarnations – the British, the French, the Dutch, amongst others – has historically represented itself as the center of world order. Imperial designs have thus been fashioned through the construction of linguistic, social and political hierarchies – of a Center of civilization, culture and reason on the one hand, and a periphery of barbarism, philistinism and unreason on the other. Constructions of social and political identities have likewise occurred within the organizing linguistic frames of nation, state, race, ethnicity and gender, all of which has served to reinforce an ideology of the West versus the rest. Yet such political hierarchical oppositions are always far from fully secure, as the slow decline of the American imperium in our own times graphically indicates. Deconstruction in such a political context aims to displace political hierarchy, not only by examining how the West depends on its Others to constitute itself as Center, but by tracing the ongoing, deferred significations through which the West as center is decentered by political peripheries.
Rereading psychoanalysis: Derrida’s critique of Lacan
Derrida’s post-structuralist social theory uses language to call attention to meanings, and in particular sees the process of naming as central to what is named in any classificatory system. The theory or edifice of psychoanalysis in this sense is no different to any other classificatory system from the standpoint of deconstruction, and in fact Derrida engaged at various points throughout his career with the writings of Freud and Lacan – most notably in his book. Resistances to Psychoanalysis (1998).
Difference, says Derrida, is always a moment of deferral, a delay in which internal contradictions and conflicts impede the search for the identity of an individual or group, derail the full realization of a structure or center, and displace the final moment in which ideals and illusions might be confronted. Developing a series of close readings of psychoanalytic theory in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Derrida deconstructs Lacan’s texts and teachings within the broader frame of post-structural linguistics. He questions, in effect, what people think they might know about Lacanian psychoanalysis by pointing to the complex structures of this body of theory and practice – all of which is only available to us as seminars, tape-recorded archives, texts, transcripts, quotations and slogans. Against this backcloth, Derrida argues that it is impossible to speak of ‘Lacan in general – who does not exist’. In developing this viewpoint, Derrida insists on the power of resistance. There is an unavoidable ambiguity, he says, between Lacanian theory and that to which it lays claim – the thought of Lacan. But if resistance is understood as structural limit, not in the psychological but rather rhetorical sense, where exactly does this leave psychoanalysis?
Returning to classical psychoanalytical theory, Derrida finds ‘resistance’ at the heart of Freud’s ideas, including the unconscious, repression and the Oedipus complex. He understands resistance not in the psychoanalytic sense of repression of defense, but rather in terms of a linguistic distortion or failure, of something that resists the identity of author and meaning. In a kind of lifting of psychoanalysis to the second power, Derrida contends that resistance arises from the structure of psychoanalysis itself. In short, Freud’s dream machine is, for Derrida, continually on the brink of bringing itself undone.
Derrida contends that psychoanalysis is itself inscribed in an infinite tissue of differences. Freud’s legacy is best approached as a product of numerous texts, histories, institutions and processes of inscription. There is no such thing as psychoanalysis in general. Only various theorists, concepts, quotations, teachings, schools and factions, all of which exist as socially structured differences. This seems to me an interesting and useful angle on the place of psychoanalysis as a discourse and practice within our culture. The scope of psychoanalytic theory is extremely wide today, ranging from classical to postmodern approaches in therapeutic settings, and with an equally broad range of theory (object-relational, clinician post-Lacanian) that circulate within the social sciences and the humanities.
However, there are limitations to Derrida’s critique of Lacan as well as his deconstructionist recycling of Freud. To say of a particular school of psychoanalysis that its structure arises in and through ‘difference’ is interesting only up to a point. Why, for example, did Lacanian theory fail for so many years to establish its legitimacy in Anglo-American psychoanalysis? Why, for example, is Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Lacan so popular in the academy at the current time, and why is it preferred over Derrida’s Freud? Derrida is unable to satisfactorily address these issues, I believe, since they require an examination in depth of the political context in which psychoanalytic theory operates. Derrida himself has hardly been noted for his political and institutional as opposed to his linguistic and discursive critiques.
Derrida’s writings in particular and deconstruction in general, it is often suggested, have provided a vital stimulus to social theory. Given the experimental, enigmatic qualities of post-structuralist criticism, it is perhaps not surprising that some have viewed this stimulus in a negative light. Very often, though, assessments of Derrida in social theory have been positive. Derrida’s debunking of totality and transparency, of uniform linguistic patterns and absolute truth claims, and of grand organizing principles and final solutions have powerfully influenced many if not all post-structuralist sociologies and versions of postmodernist social science. The radical credentials of this deconstructive assault on official or mainstream thought is said by its advocates to stem from attention to the multifarious ways in which language invades meanings, values and all ‘naturalized,’ ideological forms of experience. The result of this philosophical appreciation of difference has been a new kind of social critique, one in which language is understood to exist on its own terms, self-generative and self-validating in equal measure. Derrida was one of the first French theorists in the aftermath of the political explosion of May 1968 to grasp the extent to which culture and politics revolve on the violent suppression of difference, on the paranoid insistence of exclusive linguistic oppositions: inside/outside, truth/falsity, reality/illusion and good/evil. His deconstructive style, which in a dramatic performative sense enacted the poststructuralist fascination with undecidability, was thus an attempt to give free rein to the ambiguous, open-ended play of signification.
This aesthetics of language, however, is also for many enthusiasts of Derrida’s work a politics of discourse – and it is here that deconstruction is of most direct relevance to social theory. In so far as Derrida demonstrates that meaning is indeterminate and that language is unstable and ambiguous, he can be seen as speaking up for the dispossessed, the marginal and the voiceless. To the extent that deconstruction is a critical technique opposed to linguistic, social and political closure, it is an attempt to recover – to put back into words – excluded narratives and alternative histories which have been repressed. In more sociological terms, Derrida has provided social theorists with a richly textured battery of terms (différance, trace, inscription) for rethinking action in a dynamically open field of social differences. The application of deconstructive techniques to social theory in this way has been successfully deployed to reconstruct and resituate the narratives of people – oppressed women, blacks, gays and subalterns of various kinds – excluded by mainstream political hierarchies and institutional frameworks.
Post-structuralism and post-colonial theory: Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
Post-structuralism, especially the deconstructive theory advanced by Derrida, has exerted considerable influence over the development of post-colonial analyses of identity, culture, race, gender and the broader struggles of the Third World against the oppressions of our modern age. Harvard University’s Homi Bhabha is one of the most influential postcolonial theoreticians of diasporic culture and multiculturalism, and has sought to deconstruct various narratives of nationality that serve to naturalize Third World countries as subordinate to the West.
To do this, Bhabha draws extensively from psychoanalysis – in particular Lacan, but also the post-Lacanian theories of Julia Kristeva (examined in Chapter 12). But it is Jacques Derrida who perhaps most influences his thinking. In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha argues that racism is never fixed or frozen; race is a ‘liminal’ category, always in process, shifting, transformational. For Bhabha, colonial identities (for example, the British in India or Africa) are always defined in relation to a marginalized, excluded Other – the colonized or colonial territories. Colonial identity thus both draws upon and represses the black Other; indeed, denigration and denial of the Other is fundamental to the imagined survival of the colonizer. Repression may well be essential to the West’s existence, but Bhabha contends that psychic exclusion of the excluded Other never fully succeeds. The repressed unconscious returns to derail Western orderings of power, and this for Bhabha is nowhere more evident than in colonial strategies of ‘hybridization’ and ‘mimicry.’ The attempt to imitate, copy or blend racialized identities must necessarily come unstuck according to Bhabha, because colonized subjects are in fact different to those that advance the strategies of colonial power. Against this backdrop, Bhabha situates racial stereotyping in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of repetition. The repetition of racial insults, for example, indicates that the relation between colonizer and colonized is radically ambivalent. The racial slur or denigration is always for Bhabha in danger of coming unstuck, and this is one reason why social actors must work overtime in the making and remaking of relations of domination and submission. This ‘ambivalence of colonial rule’ enables a capacity for resistance throughout colonized cultures; through performative ‘mimicry’ of the colonizer, the colonized are able to preserve some hidden or pure aspect of themselves under the sign of an authorized identity. Discussing writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Toni Morrison, Bhabha hunts the ‘location of culture’ in the marginal. displaced, haunting spaces between Western Enlightenment values and its excluded others.
Bhabha, a product of Elphinstone College, Bombay and Oxford University, has sometimes been rebuked by his critics for preaching the rights of native peoples, migrational groups and marginal cultures from the lofty heights of European post-structuralism. Whatever one makes of this charge of elitism and elitist language, there can be little doubt, in my view, that Bhabha has powerfully engaged psychoanalysis with the rapidly changing social and demographic movements unleashed by the forces of globalization. Moreover, following in the footsteps of Fanon, Bhabha has fashioned a very particular politically informed psychoanalytic critique of post-colonialism, one that deploys concepts of hybridity, liminality and mimicry to challenge neo-colonial forms of political power over the colonized Third World and to deconstruct imaginary constructions of national and cultural identity. He forcefully argues against the colonial tendency to essentialize Third World cultures as homogeneous, the bearers of historically continuous traditions; rather, he suggests relations between First World metropolitan and Third World cultures are constantly changing and evolving, involving creative hybrid interactions of various cultural identities. The theme of equal respect for cultures has emerged in his more recent writings, drawn in part from Derrida’s speculations on the centrality of hospitality to justice and freedom.
Notwithstanding the significant impact of deconstruction upon social theory in particular and the social sciences in general, however, there are a number of critical objections that have been made against Derrida’s work. Derrida’s account of différance and the deconstructive technique of close reading this entails, according to some critics, leads social theory to ignore the social and cultural context in which dialogue and debate takes place. The criticism is that deconstruction produces a retreat into linguistic codes. In this sense, a major limitation is that Derrida’s approach inherits and compounds Saussure’s failure to explicate the social dimensions of language and of the arbitrary sign. This is an issue of considerable importance to sociological post-structuralism, as compared with, say, post-structuralist literary criticism, because it concerns those hidden or underlying political variables that shape and structure the ways in which speakers deploy language in specific social situations. Critics have argued, for example, that while deconstruction supposedly excavates processes of signification as productivity, Derrida’s work tends to dismiss the issue of reference altogether and instead concentrates on the play of pure differences, of codes themselves. But does not the internal identity of codes, separated by Derrida from any connotation of reference, actually derive from the social and political context in which it is embedded? What shapes the ‘identity’ of codes if not the social context or the semantic aspects of forms of life in which such codes are expressed?
Related to the foregoing complaint is the charge that Derrida rewrites everything social as linguistic or discursive. This is problematic, some argue, because it reveals deconstruction as elitist. The strong version of this criticism is that deconstruction is little more than a trivial play with words, a kind of embroidered academicism. For such critics, the playful self-irony of deconstruction is itself apolitical. A disengagement with the world of structured social differences is not in my view necessarily implied by Derrida’s social theory, although it is the case that deconstruction has been interpreted too crudely at times, especially in the United States. The more moderate version of this critique questions the fruitfulness of approaching social practices as exclusively linguistic. This critique draws attention to the pre-discursive, the non-linguistic, of what cannot be said in language – and powerfully questions whether such fundamental aspects of social life are really best captured through an exclusively linguistic notion of social differences.
1 What is problematic for identity about the image a mirror reflects back?
2 Is Lacan’s mirror stage helpful for a critique of contemporary popular culture – pop music, television soaps, the Internet?
3 Can words ever adequately represent your desires?
4 Fundamentalist ideologies – racism, nationalism, xenophobia – are all-embracing and all-consuming. For people in the grip of such ideologies, what are they seeking to escape?
5 According to Derrida, the deferral and spacing of language is essential to the generation of meaning. But beyond language, what role might social context play?
6 Thinking of current examples, how do you see the politics of difference at play in the recovery of excluded narratives and histories of individuals and groups?
Jacques Lacan
Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock Press, 1977)
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Vol. v Freud’s Paper on Technique 1953–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Vol. 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998a)
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 1992)
Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)
Writings and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978)
Dissemination (London: Athlone Press, 1981b)
Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1982)
Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988)