Re:TheAshLad - Sandbooks

peripheral and debased. These 'feelings'. (bodilydrivesrhythms
pulsions pleasures bliss) are never lost and their. memory is
heldprecariously in check by the patriarchal symbolic. They can be.
seen to rise tothe surface through cultural forms in different ways. For.
instance they havebeen retrieved in readings of artistic work where
their. resisting quality maybe'accidental' e.g. in readings of the th
century. photographs of JuliaMargaret Cameron (see Mavor ) or the
abstract works of. HelenFrankenthaler(Pollock ). Feminist cultural
theorists have exposed the. way in whichthesememories remain to
'trouble' patriarchy revealing how. cultural practices andstories (films
rituals fairy tales myths) replay the. moment of patriarchalculture's
formation in which the possibilities of. 'difference' are
continuallyabjected and repressed (Kristeva Creed. Warner ).Kristeva
believes that the subject can gain access more. readily to
thesemioticchora through creative musical poetic practices or even. just
through vibrantuse of colour (Kristeva ). She sees these possibilities. as
already havingtheir origins in the semiotic chora recalling a more fluid.
plural and lessfixed perception of meaning and self which reactivates
feelings. lost in thepatriarchal 'rational'. However Kristeva also makes
it clear that. the'feminine' semiotic chora is not something outside or
beyond language.. Shestates 'if the feminine exists it only exists in the
order of. significanceorsignifying process and it is only in relation to
meaning and. significationpositioned as their excess or transgressive
other that it exists. speaksthinks(itself) and writes (itself) for both
sexes'. Thus it is 'different. or otherinrelation to language and meaning
but nevertheless only thinkable. within thesymbolic' ().presymbolic
within symbolic. frameworkHowever as Kaplan notes 'the childadult
never forgets the world. of theImaginary and heshe continues to desire
unconsciously the. illusionaryoneness with the mother heshe
experienced' (). It is this. propositionthat the child clings to those heady
pleasures of the 'bliss' of. preOedipalfusion with the mother that has
been central to the development of. a theoryofvisual culture. Lacan
believed that the child never forgets its. illusionaryoneness with the
mother or the 'jouissance' that this moment. entailed amomentbefore
the intervention of paternal law which requires both. the control of'self'
and the denigrationabjection of the feminine (mother) and.
thepleasuresassociated with her emotions feelings love.Briefly Lacan's.
reworking of the CastrationOedipal complex proposed adistinction
between the. penis as an organ (Freudian) and the phallus as a
sign(Lacan ). He also. theorised a more fluid path to the formation of
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