Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
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disposal’ (1973b: 36). This raises some very interesting theoretical issues with regard to<br />
the meaning of texts. It suggests that the meaning of a text is not merely in the text<br />
itself; rather, that we need to know the associations a reader brings to bear upon the<br />
text. In other words, he is clearly pointing to the claim that the reader does not passively<br />
accept the meaning of a text: he or she actively produces its meaning, using the<br />
discourses he or she brings to the encounter with the text. My particular reading of<br />
Little Redcape is only possible because of my knowledge of Freudian discourse.<br />
Without this knowledge, my interpretation would be very different.<br />
Freud’s translation of psychoanalysis to textual analysis begins with a somewhat<br />
crude version of psychobiography <strong>and</strong> ends with a rather sophisticated account of how<br />
meanings are made. However, his suggestions about the real pleasures of reading may<br />
have a certain disabling effect on psychoanalytic criticism. That is, if meaning depends<br />
on the associations a reader brings to a text, what value can there be in psychoanalytic<br />
textual analysis? When a psychoanalytic critic tells us that the text really means X, the<br />
logic of Freudian psychoanalysis is to say that this is only what it means to you.<br />
Lacanian psychoanalysis<br />
Lacanian psychoanalysis 101<br />
Jacques Lacan rereads Freud using the theoretical methodology developed by structuralism.<br />
He seeks to anchor psychoanalysis firmly in culture rather than biology. As<br />
he explains, his aim is to turn ‘the meaning of Freud’s work away from the biological<br />
basis he would have wished for it towards the cultural references with which it is shot<br />
through’ (1989: 116). He takes Freud’s developmental structure <strong>and</strong> rearticulates it<br />
through a critical reading of structuralism to produce a post-structuralist psychoanalysis.<br />
Lacan’s account of the development of the human ‘subject’ has had an enormous<br />
influence on cultural studies, especially the study of film.<br />
According to Lacan, we are born into a condition of ‘lack’, <strong>and</strong> subsequently spend<br />
the rest of our lives trying to overcome this condition. ‘Lack’ is experienced in different<br />
ways <strong>and</strong> as different things, but it is always a non-representable expression of the<br />
fundamental condition of being human. The result is an endless quest in search of<br />
an imagined moment of plenitude. Lacan figures this as a search for what he terms<br />
l’objet petit a (the object small other); that which is desired but forever out of reach;<br />
a lost object, signifying an imaginary moment in time. Unable to ever take hold of this<br />
object, we console ourselves with displacement strategies <strong>and</strong> substitute objects.<br />
Lacan argues that we make a journey through three determining stages of development.<br />
The first is the ‘mirror stage’, the second is the ‘fort-da’ game, <strong>and</strong> the third is the<br />
‘Oedipus complex’. Our lives begin in the realm Lacan calls the Real. Here we simply<br />
are. In the Real we do not know where we end <strong>and</strong> where everything else begins. The<br />
Real is like Nature before symbolization (i.e. before cultural classification). It is both<br />
outside in what we might call ‘objective reality’ <strong>and</strong> inside in what Freud calls our<br />
instinctual drives. The Real is everything before it became mediated by the Symbolic.