Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
The Symbolic cuts up the Real into separate parts. If it were possible to get beyond the
Symbolic, we would see the Real as everything merged into one mass. What we think
of as a natural disaster is an irruption of the Real. However, how we categorize it is
always from within the Symbolic; even when we call it a natural disaster, we have symbolized
the Real. To put it another way, nature as Nature is always an articulation of
culture: the Real exists, but always as a reality constituted (that is, brought into being)
by culture – the Symbolic. As Lacan explains it, ‘the kingdom of culture’ is superimposed
‘on that of nature’ (73): ‘the world of words . . . creates the world of things’ (72).
In the realm of the Real, our union with the mother (or who is playing this symbolic
role) is experienced as perfect and complete. We have no sense of a separate selfhood.
Our sense of being a unique individual only begins to emerge in what Lacan (2009)
calls ‘the mirror stage’. As Lacan points out, we are all born prematurely. It takes time
to be able to control and coordinate our movements. This has not been fully accomplished
when the infant first sees itself in a mirror (between the ages of 6 and 18
months). 20 The infant, ‘still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence’
(256), forms an identification with the image in the mirror. The mirror suggests control
and coordination that as yet does not exist. Therefore, when the infant first sees itself
in a mirror, it sees not only an image of its current self but also the promise of a more
complete self; it is in this promise that the ego begins to emerge. According to Lacan,
‘The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency
to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of
spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented
body-image to a form of its totality’ (257). On the basis of this recognition or, more
properly, misrecognition (not the self, but an image of the self), we begin to see
ourselves as separate individuals: that is, as both subject (self that looks) and object
(self that is looked at). The ‘mirror phase’ heralds the moment of entry into an order
of subjectivity Lacan calls the Imaginary:
The imaginary for Lacan is precisely this realm of images in which we make
identifications, but in the very act of doing so we are led to misperceive and misrecognize
ourselves. As a child grows up, it will continue to make such imaginary
identifications with objects, and this is how the ego will be built up. For Lacan, the
ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary
selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify (Eagleton,
1983: 165).
With each new image we will attempt to return to a time before ‘lack’, to find ourselves
in what is not ourselves; and each time we will fail. ‘The subject . . . is the place of lack,
an empty place that various attempts at identification try to fill’ (Laclau, 1993: 436).
In other words, desire is the desire to find that which we lack, our selves whole again,
as we were before we encountered the Imaginary and the Symbolic. All our acts of
identification are always acts of misidentification; it is never our selves that we recognize
but only ever another potential image of our selves. ‘[D]esire is a metonymy’
(Lacan, 1989: 193): it allows us to discover another part, but never ever the whole.