The Dislocations of the Real
2.6 The impasse of the real-in-itself
The link between the presymbolic real and the infant’s experience before the intervention of the Other poses a few problems for Lacanian theory. To be brief, Lacan argues that both the subject and the ego, and, more generally speaking, organized consciousness as such, only come into being as effects of the signifier. The implications of this claim are vast: in order to become a person, to become an individual, to reach the level of human existence properly speaking, one must necessarily be constituted in and through language. In fact, this ultimately boils down to the idea that a person not only has to die two times, as Lacan (1963) worked out in his writings on the Marquis de Sade, but also has to be ‘born’ at least twice. First, the human being is obviously born in the biological sense, as an organism (what we called zoe in Chapter 2).
Yet besides that, we are born a second time, when we are drawn into the symbolic order and the flame of an organized consciousness is lit ( bios ).
For Lacan (1961a), reflexivity and consciousness are strictly dependent on the second type of birth, on the constitution of the ego and the unconscious subject during ontogenesis. Naturally, this begs the ques- tion as to ‘who’ is performing the acts of identification that purportedly lead to the precipitation of the ego and the subject (Frank, 1989). In this way, Lacan’s theory is in danger of reintroducing through the backdoor precisely the type of ‘inborn subject’ that it tried so hard to circumvent in its emphasis on the primacy of the Other.
Given that the world we consciously inhabit is the signified world of meaning, there is no possibility of knowing or saying anything about
what preceded the advent of language, since ‘we’ were simply never there. Whenever we reflect, think or speak, we always do so from within our current position in the symbolic order. As such, when we concep- tualize the preverbal real as a time before the word, we cannot but fall back on ‘the categories and filters’ provided by the symbolic (Fink, 1995, p. 24). When trying to imagine a state before the word, we inevi- tably take our current selves with us: ‘Once the signifier emerges, what came before begins to exist in the terms that the signifier introduces’
(Eisenstein & McGowan, 2012, p. 11). Thus, the thesis of a presymbolic real can never be more than an afterward construction, derived from our experience as beings of language. It is our existence in language, which is necessarily marked by lack, that produces the mirage of a presymbolic real unaffected by lack.
If we agree that our experience is always-already dependent on language, then the only way in which we are ever confronted with the real is through its reverberations in the systems of representations that are already in place and that support our existence. Like I argued in the previous section, it is against the background of a unified system that the real ‘returns’ as a disruptive, traumatic element. As such, the real ceases to be equated with a simple notion of prelinguistic reality. If the real is defined as the impossible to represent and therefore traumatic, then its status is not simply inde- pendent of the symbolic-imaginary order. The real cannot be thought in independence of the symbolic and the imaginary: the Lacanian trio must be conceived as mutually constitutive. This is what the term ‘postsymbolic’
refers to: the real only exists as a result of symbolization, as the detritus that this operation leaves behind in the form of an excess, a remainder or a surplus-effect. At the same time, however, it can only be encountered as a lack, from the standpoint of socio-symbolic reality.
The difference between the two versions of the real, in their rela- tion to trauma, can be illuminated by Slavoj Žižek’s (2006) reference to Einstein’s transition from the special to the general theory of rela- tivity. In the former, the curvature of space is explained as the effect of matter: the presence of matter ‘curves’ space (in the sense that only an empty space would be ‘non-curved’). In the general theory of rela- tivity, however, the causality is reversed: matter is no longer the cause but rather the effect of the curvature of space. When applied to trauma this means that the symbolical system is not incoherent because of the disruptions of a foreign, outside element, as a reading of the presymbolic real (cf. the special theory of relativity) might suggest. The turn towards the postsymbolic real (cf. the general theory of relativity) implies that the traumatic impact of a scene is rather the effect of an already existent
curvature of the singular subjective space, that is, an effect of the struc- ture of the symbolic order itself.
I am well aware of the difficulty of this turn-around. Whereas the account of the presymbolic real has a degree of familiarity to it, the idea of a postsymbolic real is rather counterintuitive. I will introduce it by returning for a moment to the context of psychoanalysis and the tech- nique of free association. This will allow me to indicate how the real is located vis-à-vis the symbolic chain; how the determination inherent to the symbolic chain circumscribes an impossibility to be identified with the (postsymbolic) real. To conclude, I will describe the view of trauma that derives from this articulation.
3 The postsymbolic real
Someone who enters psychoanalysis often does so because he or she suffers from a symptom that is barely understood. The symptom presents itself as a ‘hole in meaning’, a piece of nonsense that one cannot get rid of. Likewise, other productions of the unconscious such as parapraxes, bungled actions or dreams equally constitute ‘units outside meaning’
(Soler, 2014, p. 36). They pop up of their own accord in an anomalous fashion, seemingly out of nowhere. The analytic work of free association consists in connecting this unit with others that confer meaning upon it (Lacan, 1953–54). Soler (2014) convincingly argues that ‘every time a parasitic element surfaces in intentionality, it will summon the associa- tive work that produces meaning by revealing the phantasy’ (pp. 69–70).
Prior to the analytical work, a senseless unit appears as a One in isolation, an opaque monolith. Only by recuperating it into a chain of associations does the analysand recover (a morsel of) its unknown meaning.
When the analysand is confronted with something unthinkable or unmasterable (for instance, a symptom), the transference implies a supposition of knowledge and the expectation that this knowledge can remediate the ‘hole in what he thinks he knows about himself’ (Soler, 2014, p. 41). This knowledge concerning the analysand’s intimacy is transferred onto the person of the psychoanalyst. Conversely, the analyst supposes this knowledge to free association: it is the unraveling chain of the analysand’s discourse itself that somehow ‘knows’, that somehow produces this knowledge (Lacan, 1964). The latter supposition refers back to the fact that so-called ‘free’ association is not free at all. In the chain unfolding during free association, particular jouissance -laden signifiers systematically and automatically return. This resurfacing of the same elements suggests that their emergence is not coincidental, but driven
by an unconscious knowledge and wanting-to-say ( vouloir-dire ) (Lacan, 1953–54, p. 242). According to Lacan, the determination in free associa- tion is orchestrated by the signifier, and the seemingly senseless elements traversing conscious discourse in fact express unconscious desire. The signifiers that return time and again owe this promotion to the specifici- ties of the life of the particular subject in question. They are the signi- fiers of the Other in which the subject is alienated, the signifiers that structured the drives of the subject (Declercq, 2000). In his later work, Lacan (1972–73) arrived at the idea that signifiers are laden with the drive ( jouissance ), apart from the meaning they entail. Each signifier thus
‘carries both structure and drive’ (Vanheule, 2011a, p. 152). However, jouissance is not distributed equitably across the signifying chain: some signifiers are charged with jouissance more than others, and this quality is what drives their incessant recurrence throughout the productions of the unconscious. The surprising elements that surface during free association are thus not without a logic: in the symbolic process of concatenating signifiers, what can and cannot appear is bound to certain laws or rules.
There is some sort of determination at work in the unconscious, some kind of ‘action of the structure’ as Miller (2012b) calls it. Nevertheless, the real driving force behind these movements is something ‘beyond’ the chain itself. In this way, determination is distinguished from causality.