The Pain and Pleasure of Subjectivity

What has helped me to try and make sense of this week’s readings is to take as a starting point the Cartesian/humanist model “I think therefore I am” which implies a human being as a unified center, with agency, from which meaning emanates. (73).
Each reading that follows shows how far we have come from this human-centered Enlightenment view.

Freud introduces the individual whose identity is split between the conscious and the unconscious. Unacceptable drives and impulses are repressed and relegated to the unconscious. From infancy we move from “being” into “meaning” and take our place as functioning members within society. This constitutes a loss that we try to recover through substitution and games of mastery such as the fort/da (there/gone) game described in the reading. Of course, a return to wholeness is never completely possible so we end up with a divided self, built around a lack, an emptiness, a loss.

Lacan reiterates this. As I understand it, he defines the individual in negative terms. He says we should start with the misrecognition that characterizes the ego in all its stages (85). He describes this process of the formation of the subject in stages:
1. An infant sees no boundaries between the self and others, (a blissful state).
2. Between 6-18 months the “trotte bebe” discovers his image in the mirror and misrecognizes this image as himself. There is a split between the “I” as experienced, an out of control and fragmented baby’s body, and the illusion of the “I” as reflected in the mirror, one of wholeness and competency.
3. In the final stage of entry into the world of language and regulation which is identified with the father, the child becomes a subject with a place in a symbolic order. According to Saussure, language doesn’t just name things in the world but creates reality through a system based on differences. The child begins to recognize who “I” am through a discourse of difference between “I” and “not I.” What can be seen as objectionable about Lacan, which perhaps is not obvious from this excerpt, is his phallocentrism, and his emphasis on separation from the mother as the absence around which the self is constituted.

I found Fanon’s description of the annihilation of the self under bombardment from colonial constructs of the black “other” to be totally heartbreaking and true to life. But he rejects the objectification and fragmentation of self that the colonial system demands. I see this as an affirmation, a demand for and identification with something positive, and a denial of the lack at the core of being that stands at the center of both Freudian and Lacanian models of self.

Kristeva takes the Freudian concept of the split self and applies it to semiotics coming up with semianalysis. Within language which is an ongoing process, there exist simultaneously the laws which govern its operation and the elements that threaten to disrupt it. If I understand this correctly, the phenotext is language that obeys the rules of communication, a system we can understand through our experience as both a speaker addressing a subject and as the subject being addressed. The genotext is made up of those drives that are not reducible to language and that threaten to disrupt the system (similar to Freud’s unconscious). The two exist in opposition and the interaction between them makes meaning possible. So Kristeva is looking at how things come to have meaning through language, what resists or undermines this process, and the places within the system where transformation can occur. In her theory as I understand it, both language and the human subject constituted within it are split, unstable and are open to change.

Foucault gives us historical accounts of the formation of the ideal government created to counteract the plague, and the architectural model of the panopticon that ensures the success of a system based on surveillance. He also describes how a discourse of sexuality was constructed combining the religious act of confession and scientific inquiry resulting in the augmentation of ars erotica with scientia sexualis. Although he shows how institutional power structures create situations in which people subject (subjugate?) themselves without physical confrontation, I think these pieces could also have been included in the previous chapter on Ideology.

Barthes’ wonderful riff on the pleasures of the text seems a fitting way to end. It provides an alternative and certainly more upbeat theme for our chapter. From Freud’s attempt to reconcile traumatic neuroses with his concept of the pleasure principle, Lacan’s quote that “psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of ‘Thou art that’ “(86), Kristeva’s implied pleasure in identifying those elements that disrupt a governing system and make transformation possible, Fanon’s possibility of a positive alternative to a colonially imposed identity as “other,” and Foucault’s description of a different kind of pleasure relating to sex: ”the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure” (106), plaisir/jouissance is a (sometimes thin) thread that weaves its way through the readings.

P.S. thank you for your help in getting this on the blog!