Screen - Dark Matter Archives

66----­35 Laplanch~ andLeclaire. op cit.pp 162-163.36 ) Laplanche and)-8 PODtatiS, TheLanguage 0/Psycho-Analysis,Hogartb, 1973 ,p 316.37 The image here isLacan's. but itsextension to unconscious,as we1las conscious.thought islaplanche's.Lacan himself hasre jected such animplication ofpassage betweenes o Pes and Ucssystems. preferringthe 'recto-verso'image of 'double-,inscription' ­corresponden cewithout joining.See AnikaLemai re. Jacqueslacan, Routledge.1977, pp 249-251.coa lesce into specific themes. LapJanche:As to the oncological status 0/ the u"cOHscious the 'Wlords '{hat compose it are elements drau'n from the realm of the imagin ­ary - notably from l1isual imaginatiOI1 - but promoted to theaignity of signifiers. The term imago. somewhat lallen into disuse .corresponds fairly well, if laken in a broad sense, to these elemelltaryterms of uncmrscious discourse .. The 'se1Hences' that arefound in this discourse are short sequences, most often fragmen ­tary, circular and repetitive. It is these tlrat we discover as unconsciousphantasies. 35Laplanche and Pontalis observe that when Freud speaks of 'unconsciousphantasy' :H e seems at times to be relering to a subliminal, preconsciousreverie imo which the subject falls and of wllich he mayor may notbecome reflexively aware,and they contin ue,It is possible to distinguish between several layers at which phantasyis dealt with in Freud's work: conscious, subliminal and un ­conscious. Freud was principally concerned however less withestablishing such a differentiation than with emphaSising the linksbetween these different aspects.:\u (my emphasis)The actual 'substance' of the contents of the unconscious mustby defin ition remain unknown. Freud speaks inconsistently on thematter; Lacan commits himself only to the observation that,although they may share identical formal properties, the consciousand unconscious signifiers are otherwise very djfferent. It doesseem to be the case however that (speaking now as if from theimaginary terrain of the first topography) the 'closer' we approachthe unconscious the less differentiated become the modaHties ofthought: gesture, image, and word become compacted into densemulti-layered and faceted units; and it is as if these, in their turn,were en route to destinations of ultimate compression: 'knots' inthe tangled associative skeins of the unconscious : point s-decaption3 ; in the incessant sliding of sense. It is these which arethe ultimate, if mythical. destinations of the bifurcating chains ofassociations which spread OUt from the manifest elements of aphotograph into the 'intricate network of our world of thought';consciollsness. subliminal reverie, pre-conscious thought. the unconscious- the way of phantasy : and it is by these same routesthat, subject to the transforming vicissiwdes of repression. contentsmay pass 'in the other direction', to invest the image. providingthe purport of its cathexis.To return, then. to tbis particuJar image. Ambition. erotidsm.contemporaneity - the tbeme of ambition is obviously central toadvertising, as is the erotic, which is anyhow latent in all acts ofjookin~ In this particular advenisement, the expression, 'Theloneliness of the long-distance runner' offers a phantasy identificadonwithin a syndrome of success, and with a successful figure- as a certain familiar style of promotional language otight haveput it: 'Tom Courtney is the long-distance runner', ahead of hiscompetitors, the ' leading man' both in the diagesis and in reality.This particular expression at that particular historical conjuncturebrings the phantasy satisfaction of the ambitious wish 'up-to-date',The conjunc tion of ambition and eroticism here is achieved, literaUy,through 'the agency of the letter' - the substitution of a'v' for an 'n', and a 't' for an 'c' , which tacks the manifest verbaltext to its pre-text in the pre-conscious. By this device, the verbalfragment faces on to both unconscious contents (i n the 'descriptive'sense; ie, Ucs-Pcs) and upon tbe manifest visual contents ofthe image.The text says that the tuner is lovely. what it simultaneouslymea". (through the anchorage by which it is related to tbe constellationof conventional associations around the figure of thewoman) is that the woman is lovely; th us the word 'loveliness'acts as a relay in an associative chain linking the radio to thewoman - a metonymic movement which facilitates a displacementof libidinal cathexis from the one to th e other. The woman is'lovely', she is also 'lonely' : the suppressed term in the pretexthere serving as the material absence which neverthelessanchors the meaning of the woman's posture and, beyond, theentire 'mood' of the picture. Apart from the configuration of thewoman's pose, the mood is given most predominantly by the waythe scene has been lit; it is the sort of lighting popularly referredto as 'intimate' - a word which also takes a sexual sense. Theterm 'intimate' here is not reached by totally 'free' association,the association is conventionally determined to the point that wemay consider this Iigbting eflect to belong to the complex of'considerations of representabiJi ty' in respect of this term. Thesuppressed term 'lonely', then, in conjunction with the connotationsof the lighting. anchors the particular sort of narrati\re implicationsof the momeD[ depicted in the image, implicationsreadily Hnked to the phantasy of seduction, widely encounteredacross ad vertising. This scenario is on the side of signification,there is however another h istory inscribed here on the side ofsign ificance. saAlong the axis \\loman/ radio we encounter a double oscilJationbetween revelation and concea lment. First, the visible marks whichdictate the reading 'woman' also suggesl the reading 'naked' ­there is not a single signifier of clothing. Howe\'er. from the point­38 There is noradical discontinuitybetweenthe primary andthe secondaryprocesses. both3re ever presentaspects oflanguage. Kristevahas coined ther~rm 5ignifjanceto indicate th~simultaneouspresence of thesetwo registers (ioher terminology.the 'semiotic' andthe 'symbolic') ­signifiance exceedsthe Significationwhich unitessignifier andsignified along thesy ntacticallyordered route ofconsciousdiscourse.67