Lacan's Lack: Language and Power

Outside the hall of minors, Lacan's arguments look "other" to me. Ironically, their resonance with something "real"—a real other than his "all" (the universal logic of language)—allows them more persuasive force than they would otherwise have. This real is bound up with the fact that culture is masculine, not as the effect of language but as the consequence of actual power relations to which men have far more access than women. Here the founder (Freud) is much more honest about "reality" than is Lacan. He does not ask us to believe the sons are castrated in the same way or to the same extent as the daughters or that the oedipal struggle and induction into culture have the same consequences for boys and girls. In Freud's theory anatomy is destiny; real fathers want their sons and not their daughters to inherit

and administer their law and the power(s) behind it. Sons are promised access to and power over women (wives) when they grow up. Freud masks power behind biology; Lacan claims we are all prisoners of language. But the founder's thinking is more transparent and points toward more useful dynamics for feminist theorizing than Lacan's.

Lacan's theory of language itself is also inaccurate. Language is as much signified as it is a signifier. It depends for its actual effects as much on the forms of life it reflects as on those it constitutes. For example, the coherence and compelling power of Lacan's notion of the phallus as universal signifier draw upon preexisting social relations (e.g., a gender system) that operate to create binary opposites with unbridgeable "gaps" between the two terms. Lacan's concept of universal "binary logic" supposedly governing language itself may reflect the preexisting importance of the number "two" in our culture. We are accustomed to dividing things in two from the moment of birth. Often the first question asked about a newborn is whether it is a girl or a boy. Within this gender system two opposite but not equal types of being are constituted. Dividing things in two and the gender system as a whole appear to rest on "natural" differences or "external" logics. However such differences or ways of counting attain their special salience and capacity to convey meaning as an effect of the gender system, not because of a logic independent of social relations.

Nominalistic approaches to language (including Lacan's) are inherently flawed. No signifier (not even the phallus) exists outside a "language game" in which its meaning and functions depend on historical practices and past usages of the word. For example, the term phallus depends for its rhetorical or truth-claiming effects in part on its uses within preexisting language games and forms of social life that are unacknowledged within but necessary conditions for the plausibility of Lacan's theory. The notion of a phallus as universal signifier calls upon and depends for its rhetorical effect upon the ineluctable equivalence of phallus and penis in ordinary language. Lacan's claims that the phallus exists purely upon a symbolic plane, that it does not signify penis, and that any relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary are disingenuous. Would we be persuaded by Lacan if he claimed that the mother lacks, say, "a mouse" or that her desire for the child is to be the "waxpaper"?

At least Freud is more transparent and accurate in his rhetoric.

Contrary to Lacan's claims, Freud is quite clear that he uses penis and phallus interchangeably and that he believes the boy's narcissistic investment in his penis as a "superior" organ is warranted in fact as well as in fantasy. What Freud (like Lacan) does not do, however, is locate his claim within a particular social context. Within a male-dominated society possession of a penis or access to a phallus is particularly valuable, and anyone interested in certain sorts of power or privilege would worry about its loss or lack. In societies free of male domination, possession of a penis/phallus would lose such incredibly charged salience.

The whole notion of a universal signifier depends on and reflects our experience that someone or something and not others has the power to order our world. The phallus signifies not culture itself, but rather a culture in which "what is called" civilization has been primarily the work of men (qua embodied penis-possessing beings). However, if like Lacan, we treat culture/language/Law of the Father as universal structures and equivalents, there is no way to reverse the play of signifier and signified. The phallus is never signified. We cannot ask what determines the place of the phallus as "universal signifier" within Lacan's theory or in culture. Lacan leaves us with the alternatives of phallic culture or no culture at all. He thus repeats rather than analyzes the "normal" oedipal boy's development, his "narcissistic investment" in the penis/phallus, and his choice to accede to and reify the father's law rather than to question or defy it.

Lacan's theory also reflects rather than analyzes the father's desire: that women see themselves and experience their sexuality as the "object" of man's desire. Women are not to question men's right to have access to, to "exchange," or to define them. Although Freud's notions of female penis envy and castration are deeply flawed, Lacan consigns woman qua female, embodied being to an absolute nonexistence in culture rather than to an imperfect, inferior one. By shifting the ground of psychoanalysis from the psychosexual development of concrete persons to a supposedly "neutral" and universalistic theory of language and symbolic systems, Lacan further obscures the social origins of gender and gender-based asymmetries of power. Once again the father's authority is asserted and concealed; his desire is privileged and protected.

Woman is not only identified with but relegated to the realm of the Other, the bearer of difference, the body, instinct, lacking a phallus,

castrated. If we are in or enjoying our bodies, we are perpetually outside of this and all possible cultures. Woman in Lacan's theory is placed in a familiar double bind. She is charged with introducing "difference" into human experience. Yet as woman we literally cannot speak, we do not know what we experience, and we can say nothing to the men (signifiers?) who constitute culture.

Lacan's theory also reveals a further capitulation to the law of the father (in this case Freud himself). Freud's emphasis on the centrality of the oedipus complex can be partially understood as a denial and defense against the return of the earlier relatedness to and identification with the mother. In Lacan's texts a similar repression is at work. Inasmuch as women are associated with the presymbolic, they appear as the repressed within Lacan's theory. Yet like all repressed material they continue to affect the dynamics of the whole self, for to be repressed is not to be absent. The repressed is omnipresent as an unconscious force within the psyche and therefore in culture itself. This repressed material cannot be made conscious by Lacan's theory because he relegates it to the presymbolic and therefore to the unspeakable and unknowable. The presymbolic nevertheless haunts both symbolic systems and the subject.

The antimony within Lacan's theory between the symbolic and the presymbolic and his denial of the meaningfulness or possibility of the reciprocal social relations in the presymbolic are rooted partially in the repression of the infant's experience of the loved and feared mother. The infant's (and the infant within the adult's) longing for fusion is defensively turned into Lacan's notion of the lack. Even more than in Freud's work, the powerful mother of infancy is reconceived as the "castrated," unknowable, and unreachable Other. Once the possibility that the infant self was in a relationship with another is denied, the forming of the self can occur only through acts of alienation. The self is necessarily always a false self in Winnicott's sense, but unlike Winnicott, Lacan believes that no other "true" self is possible.

However, as I have argued, it is better to read Lacan's work as a description of the child who is stuck in its separation phase or the narcissistic position and is unable to see himself in the other. His notion of the lack can then be understood as a denial of prior relatedness rather than as an inherent and unresolvable dilemma within the human condition or as intrinsic to the nature of desire. The social history of the subject is transformed into a universal, abstract, existential di-

lemma. Certain aspects of the subject's existence are concealed rather than radically deconstructed as Lacan claims. The subject is turned into a linguistic cipher partially to obscure its own prehistory.

In the end Lacan recreates the myth of a solipsistic disembodied self. Despite his heroic self-image as a brave Nietzschean negator of bourgeois culture, elucidating our primal alienation and fractured selves, Lacan replicates rather than dismantles a dominant strain of modern Western thought extending from Descartes through Sartre. The subject is not "decentered." An incomplete and stereotypically masculine form of self is posited as the unalterable linchpin in the chain of signifiers said to constitute culture. It is not surprising that the phallus assumes the role of "universal signifier" within Lacan's theory or that he wishes to consign women to presymbolic silence.