The Dislocations of the Real
1.1 Lacan the psychoanalyst
It is important to always bear in mind that Lacan’s theoretical edifice was developed against the background of his work as a psychoanalyst.
Psychoanalysis is a praxis of speech wherein the person seeking help is charged with the task of saying whatever comes to mind during the session. This technique of free association quite rapidly reveals that what arises in the field of consciousness is affected by ‘another scene’, which Freud (1900, p. 535) designated as the unconscious. What the person on the sofa intends to say is continuously disrupted by elements that
appear to be out of place, nonsensical, foreign. The wager of psychoa- nalysis is that these seemingly senseless elements do not appear out of the blue: laws and principles that can be uncovered and systematized strictly determine their emergence. Through the practice of psychoanal- ysis, Freud (1917a, p. 143) discovered that the human being, this strange animal that speaks, is not ‘master in its own house’: he is not even free to say what he wants, as his conscious discourse is constantly affected by an unconscious to which he ordinarily has no access whatsoever. The conscious ego, then, is not all that we are, as speaking beings. Even in the intimacy of our ‘own’ minds, we do not coincide with ourselves. As subjects of language, we are essentially barred or split.
The material on which the analyst operates is language, or, more precisely, speech (language in action). Lacan uses the term signifier to denote the material substrate that carries the meanings we wish to communicate. Referring to the work of structuralist linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, Lacan (for example, 1957b) insists that a signifier, by itself, does not mean anything. The link between the particular sound pattern of a word (the material signifier) and a specific concept or idea (the signified) is strictly arbi- trary and contingent on the specificities of its enunciation. It is only when placed in a network of differential relations with other elements that any signifier acquires a temporarily fixed signification. Speech, for Lacan, can be taken as a chain of signifiers, and it is the chain itself that interprets each of its elements. For instance: an element that surfaces in a dream (a signifier or representation, Vorstellung in Freud’s terminology) does not simply refer to an object in waking reality, nor does it point to some sort of predetermined, universal referent or meaning. Its significance is strictly dependent on the always shifting relations with other elements in the dreamer’s discourse, as produced during the analysis. This is elaborated in Lacan’s (1957–58, 1960) ‘logic of signification’: it is the unraveling chain of associations that, in a retroactive movement, produces the meaning of what went before (Figure 3.1).
The retroactive meaning-effect emerges only at the point where the chain (S-S’) is punctuated. Moreover, through this generation of meaning, subjectivity ($) is produced. The subject is thus an effect of the chain: the subject does not produce speech, but speech produces the subject. In this way, Lacan’s subject is correlative to the symbolic order (the chain of signifiers), whereas the ego, as we will see, is tied to the imaginary order (given its function of misrecognition and its reliance upon the image). It bears repeating that this ‘subject of the signifier’
cannot be inborn or natural, as its appearance is strictly dependent on the functioning of language. As Vanheule (2011a) remarks, subjec- tivity according to Lacan is therefore ‘not a constancy or permanency.
It needs to be created time and time again by using the signifier’ (p. 47).
Subjectivity has an event-like status.
Lacan thus breaks with referential theories of language that focus on the relationship between words and the things in the world that they designate. In line with structuralist linguistics, he claims that meaning is not generated by the things in themselves: language does not simply name things that are already there in the world. Instead, language divides the world up in particular ways to produce for every social group what it calls reality . Each particular language, or broader, each particular symbolic or social order, has its own way of accomplishing this (Edkins, 2003).
What is crucial, however, is that none of these symbolic systems are ever complete. Reality itself is always ‘lacking’; something is always necessarily excluded from its scope. This limitation is structural: it is not a contingent failure that could be remediated. Lacan stresses that the symbolic system of language cannot close in upon itself: the Other is ‘barred’ just like the subject. An element is always missing from its structure, and it is precisely this feature that allows the system to function (Miller, 2012a). What cannot be represented, what falls between the cracks of the symbolic system, is what Lacan designated as the real. It concerns something ‘impossible’
that disrupts every attempt to construct both reality and a stable identity through representation (Stavrakakis, 1999).
The real, then, must be distinguished from what is commonly called reality. Reality is considered the effect of symbolical action upon the real, which is said to cut into the latter’s smooth surface, gener- ating divisions, separate zones, distinguishable entities and distinct
$
S S1
Figure 3.1 The logic of signification
features (Fink, 1995, p. 24). Reality must come into being, it must be created by language. What cannot be said, in other words, is not part of reality. Given that the real is per definition antonymic to the symbolic, it cannot be part of this linguistically constructed reality.
Strictly speaking, the real for Lacan doesn’t exist , since he defines existence as a function of language (Fink, 1995). By contrast, Lacan (1975–76, pp. 26, 34) will say that the real ‘ ex-sists ’, which means that it is outside of or apart from our reality. 3 Whereas the symbolic order and the concomitant reality are structured, as language introduces differences and creates order, Lacan’s real is ‘without zones, subdivi- sions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere’ (Fink, 1995, p. 24).
When starting to speak in psychoanalysis, the new analysand is faced with his own submission to a symbolic system that exceeds him or her.
Where we believe ourselves to be free, autonomous beings, the speech in analysis reveals that what we say is determined by a series of influences from the past, which are no longer in our control at times of delibera- tion. In addition, the experience of psychoanalysis learns that as human beings, we are irresistibly and repeatedly drawn to certain activities that are against our own interests and that make us suffer (this is what Freud (1920) called the death drive , elaborated by Lacan (for example, 1970) as jouissance and related to both the real and to trauma). It is by grace of the transference to the analyst, which Lacan (1964, p. 232) redefined as the analysand’s supposition that the analyst knows the opaque meaning and source of the former’s symptoms and difficulties (a supposition that elicits the analysand’s love for the analyst), that the analysand continues to produce speech in order to form a belated understanding of these estranging phenomena. As such, the analytic process reconstructs the paradoxical logic behind the unconscious formations.
Lacan re-examined Freud’s original texts and suggested that primary unconscious processes such as displacement and condensation are equivalent with linguistic operations such as metonymy and meta- phor. It compelled him to famously conclude that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, and to systematize the laws that govern this symbolic mode of thinking. The structuralist thesis that orients this endeavor holds that the individual, as it is usually understood (that is, the conscious subject of psychology), is merely ‘a derivative effect of structuring forces operating on a level beyond its grasp’ (Hallward, 2012, p. 13). The signifier and the symbolic order, according to Lacan, cannot be conceived of as constituted by man. It is rather the other way around: man is constituted by the symbolic. In this way, the conscious
ego is considered a merely ‘structured’ and not a ‘structuring’ configura- tion. The same applies to the realm of meaning in which we consciously dwell: for Lacan (1957b), the symbolic level of the signifier has primacy over the signified, which only arises as an effect of the former’s action.
Lacan’s project necessitated him to make explicit his ideas regarding what it is that drives the human being; how desire is constituted and oriented during human development; how fantasy organizes a person’s mode of enjoyment; how reality must necessarily be constituted for every individual, and so on. The conceptualization of how psychoanal- ysis works requires the elaboration of a theory of what it is that makes the speaking being suffer; what it is that he or she asks when he comes to see a psychoanalyst; what it is that occurs in a psychoanalysis and how the analyst operates; what a psychoanalysis potentially has to offer in the end, and so on. I only briefly mention these many questions – and there are a great deal more – to show how an attempt to rigorously think through the psychoanalytical experience leads to a panoply of issues regarding human nature, reality and so on, issues with relevance exceeding the framework of psychoanalysis per se.
Lacan developed answers to these and other questions in opposition with the psychoanalytic establishment of his time, which he suspected to be moving in a direction at odds with the crucial insights garnered by Freud. He vehemently argued that Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis had adapted itself to the ideals of bourgeois capitalism, promoting the development of a strong and mature Ego able to deal with reality in an ‘adequate’ or normalized fashion (Van Haute, 2002). A first period of Lacan’s work, if we follow Miller’s (2007) historical division, was arguably dedicated to describing the opposition between those supposedly imaginary forms of intervention whereby a person is alien- ated to some sort of outside norm, and the symbolic process by which the relation between the (unconscious) subject and the order deter- mining it (the Other) comes to the fore. For Lacan (1957b), the set-up of psychoanalysis is designed to produce the conditions of possibility for the latter to occur. An emphasis on meaning (which is considered only a derivative effect that belongs to the imaginary register) and so-called objective reality during the analysis can easily obstruct the exposition of the symbolic matrix in which the subject is entangled, and therefore should be rejected. Lacan’s advice is to pay attention to the specific signifiers that are used and to observe the manners in which they regularly resurface in the analysand’s discourse, without jumping to conclusions as to the underlying meaning (hence his tech- nical guideline ‘ Gardez-vous de comprendre! ’, ‘don’t try to understand!’
(Lacan, 1956b, p. 394).
Nevertheless, Lacan soon learned that this focus on symbolic struc- ture, notwithstanding its merits, cannot be the entire story of psycho- analysis. In order to avoid the pitfall of ‘interminable analysis’, which refers to Freud’s (1937) observation that the analysand’s speech has the propensity to go on forever without reaching a satisfactory resolution, every analysis should lead to a confrontation with the limit of symbolic determination, a point where an encounter with the real of jouissance is orchestrated. The subject of psychoanalysis, then, is not simply ‘struc- tural man’; it is an embodied being marked by language and suffering from a truth that involves the object of fantasy and the paradoxical, corporeal enjoyment ( jouissance ) tied up with it (Soler, 2014, p. 5). It was only by acknowledging the dimension of the real that Lacan was able, au delà de Freud, to define a possible endpoint for the psychoanalytic cure, one that differed from any form of adaptation or alienation to an outside norm. Importantly, the manner in which Lacan conceived the end of the analytic experience is linked to trauma: he surmised that the cure should be oriented towards a confrontation with both the lack in the Other and the subject’s estranging jouissance. Both are instances of the real, which means that this confrontation verges on the unbearable and the trau- matic. Strange as it may sound, Lacanian psychoanalysis pushes toward this confrontation, which entails the so-called destitution of the subject (Lacan, 1967–68), because it is only at this point that a break with the subject’s prior modes of functioning becomes possible. These ideas will be picked up and worked out in the final chapter of this book.
Without further ado, I will now turn to a discussion of the presym- bolic real in its relation to the mirror stage theory of the subject. This will allow for a first understanding of how Lacan thinks trauma as the resurfacing of something which is ordinarily hidden from sight. The reading of the real as some sort of prediscursive or presymbolic field is quite widely spread in secondary literature on Lacan. Here, the real is conceived as something with an independent existence, which can be gradually drawn into socio-symbolical reality. However, parts of it always ‘stay behind’ and ‘remain real’ as they cannot make the transi- tion to the symbolic. The contingent confrontation with these unproc- essable elements is considered to be potentially traumatic.
2 The presymbolic real
The presymbolic real is construed as a domain of immediate experi- ence, ‘a level of brute reality that never reaches consciousness without being filtered through representation – by memory, by the ego, or by
various internal neurological pathways that mediate and organize our sensory experience’ (Shepherdson, 2008, p. 29). For the human being, this primordial real is said to be organized and structured through the symbolic and imaginary registers that represent and distort it. As such, we never simply have unmediated access to the world. The prism of language and our past experiences always fracture the manner in which we apprehend both external and internal cues. This means that how things are in themselves, without this form of mediation, can only be construed and projected back from within the confines of our current symbolic-imaginary framework. In this reading, the real comes very close to Kant’s notion of das Ding : it is what lies beyond our representations, the thing-in-itself before it is transformed by our faculties for under- standing. In fact, Lacan himself, in a reference to Freud’s Project (1895a), designated the real with the term das Ding in his Seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (1959–60). It is important to keep in mind, however, that he appropriates das Ding not as something essential that provides a solid ontological ground for our representations, but to denote an excess produced by the action of the signifier.