I want to introduce our discussion of culture and critique by looking briefly at the concept of "culture" ("one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language" [1] ) vis-à-vis a rough sketch of Jacques Lacan's three orders of human experience: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.
Lacan attempts to explain human subjectivity, development, and experience with respect to these three orders. In Lacanian theory, the imaginary is characterized, as the name suggests, by images and imagination -- the order of appearances. By means of the imagination, one can identify with other people and images (see oneself as the other, or the other as oneself) and incorporate these images -- this "misrecognition" -- in the constitution and reconstitution of the self or ego. To that extent, Lacan characterizes the imaginary as the realm of misrepresentation. While Lacan diminishes the positive role of imagination in the acquisition of knowledge, others (such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray) attribute much greater value and significance to the (female) imaginary as that which resists certain constraints of the (patriarchal) symbolic order.
The symbolic is principally the order of language, differentiation, communication, and the regulation of desire (Law). Lacan characterizes the symbolic order as completely autonomous, contingent, and independent of genetics and biological determination. "Once the symbolic order has arisen, it creates the sense that it has always been there..."[2] In Freudian terms, it rechannels the aims of the pleasure principle according to the dictates of the reality principle. The symbolic order is "the realm of culture as opposed to the imaginary order of nature". [3]
In contrast to the imaginary and the symbolic orders, the real is a "smooth, undifferentiated space" prior to language and the imposition of symbolic order and laws. [4] It is "everything that has yet to be symbolized". [5] "Reality" (not to be confused with "the real") is created in the symbolic order by "canceling out" the real, i.e. cutting it up and, thus, annihilating portions of it with names and propositions.
What cannot be said in...[a given] language is not part of its reality; it does not exist, strictly speaking. In Lacan's terminology, existence is a product of language; language brings things into existence (makes them part of human reality), things which had no existence prior to being ciphered, symbolized, or put into words....[Thus] the real is perhaps best understood as that which has not yet been symbolized, remains to be symbolized, or even resists symbolization; and it may perfectly well exist 'alongside' and in spite of a speaker's considerable linguistic capabilities. [6]
The central assumption of psychoanalysis, of course, is that the symbolic has the capacity to transform the real by bringing it into language and, to that extent, "erasing" it. For example, a blockage or fixation is an aspect of the real that has become a stumbling block for the subject, which is to say, the subject is unable to symbolize some problematic aspect of the real that lies outside signification. The result is a traumatic experience. "By getting an analysand to dream, daydream, and talk, however incoherently, about a traumatic "event," we make him or her connect it up with words, bring it into relation with ever more signifiers." [7] The obstacle is removed; the stumbling block is "dialecticized".
Now, given these rough distinctions, let's consider Lacan's claim that culture (in contrast to nature) can be identified with the symbolic order.
The contrast between culture and nature in the western tradition goes back
at least to the ancient Greeks. As Surber points out [8],
the Greeks divided reality into
phusis ("nature" or, as Aristotle would say,
that which arises spontaneously and has its principle of movement
and growth within it), and
nomos (custom or control; that which is governed from
the outside by rules and laws).
So, for example, Aristotle used this notion of spontaneous growth or movement to distinguish the natural from the artificial components of a wooden bed by means of the following thought experiment. If the bed were buried in the ground and something were to grow from it, it would be a tree and not another bed. His point is that we would not expect a new bed to grow from the existing bed because the form that makes the bed a bed rather than a table, a chair, a bench, etc. is imposed on the matter (wood) from outside, i.e. by art not by nature. [9] Thus, we might say that the practice of making beds as well as all the arts belong to culture, i.e. a realm in which things are governed by rules imposed from the outside (relative to a practice or custom) rather than from within.
But what would it mean to say that culture as "external law" is the symbolic order? And what is the "nature" (matter) on which it is imposed? Is it the real?
Rather than ruminating on possible answers to these questions, it may be more productive to introduce some additional concepts.
Consider the following argument: Forms, material objects, movements, marks on a page or a wall, sounds, etc. have no meaning or value in themselves. These things acquire whatever meanings they have only through interpretation within a discourse. If this is true, then nothing has meaning or value "in itself" outside of a discourse. Thus, to have knowledge of a thing is to recognize the role it plays within the set of relations that constitute a discourse. It's always within a discourse that knowledge is produced.
If this argument holds, then it is crucial to understand what constitutes a "discourse". What's the nature of this concept of a discourse? What is its object? What does it bring into focus? What we need are some concrete examples.
Many concepts found in recent social and cultural analyses -- madness, sexuality, justice, to name just a few -- have meaning only in the discourses to which they belong. The same is true for knowledge about these things. Foucault claims that a discourse is determined by four components:
Given these variables, it follows that any particular discourse or assemblage of discourses ("discursive formation") is historical and contingent.
For example, it has been claimed (by Foucault and others) that homosexuality and the primary subject of the discourse -- "the homosexual" -- did not exist prior to the late-nineteenth century.
While this may seem to be an extravagant and preposterous claim, it becomes more plausible if we distinguish
With these factors in mind, it becomes more plausible to claim that while certain material acts (kissing, anal intercourse, etc.) have always occurred among humans (and other primates) of the same sex, it was not until the last century in Europe that a particular way of life (a "cultural identity") emerged, brought into focus and made salient by the concept homosexual.
Finally, since discourse and knowledge play an instrumental role in the regulation, discipline, and control of various social practices within which some individuals exercise control over others, they are intimately linked to power relations, assume authority, and have real (material) effects. For example, it may or may not be true that single parenting leads to higher rates of juvenile delinquency and crime. But if the dominant culture believes that it does and imposes painful sanctions on single parents, there are real consequences for both the parents and their children.
Now perhaps we can see a little better what Lacan's claim might mean. Human beings are self-defining and self-generating organisms. We constitute and re-constitute ourselves as subjects through discourse. We "come to ourselves" or "come-to-be" in language and the symbolic order. This is where we create a world or reality to inhabit; where we "cultivate" what it means to be human. In that sense, the symbolic order is culture.
1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, 76.
[return]
2. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of
Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996, 202. [return]
3. Evans, 202. "Like Claude Levi-Strauss and
other anthropologists, Lacan points to the prohibition of incest as the kernel
of the legal structure which differentiates culture from nature; 'The primordial
Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage superimposes the kingdom
of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating'." (120)
[return]
4. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between
Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 24.
The real is "prior to language" not simply or solely in a temporal
sense but in a logical sense as well. [return]
5. Fink, 26. [return]
6. Fink, 25. This characterization of Lacan's is
derived from Heidegger. [return]
7. Fink, 26. [return]
8. Jere Paul Surber, Culture and Critique: An
Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies, Boulder: Westview
Press, 1998, 2f. [return]
9. "Every craft [art; techne] is concerned
with coming to be; and the exercise of the craft is the study of how something
that admits of being and not being comes to be, something whose origin is in
the producer and not in the product. For a craft is not concerned with things
that are or come to be by necessity; or with things that are by nature, since
these have their origin in themselves." [1140a11-15] Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics, Terence Irwin (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985, 153. [return]
© T. R. Quigley, 1999