Tamise Van Pelt

Department of English and Philosophy
Idaho State University
vantamis@isu.edu

 

As half of a signifying binary, the “Other” is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.¹ In the twentieth century, this Platonic mix of ontology with alterity informs the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who is countered by Simone de Beauvoir, who influences feminist philosophers, who influence theorists of political, racial, and sexual identity–forming a great chain of inquiry into being.²Additional philosophical perspectives on Otherness abound, and Hegel (via Kojève), Heidegger, and Sartre all present important statements on alterity. In this century, Jacques Lacan’s place in the history of alterity is unique, however, because Lacan insists on a decentering of Otherness that parallels his much-discussed decentering of the Subject. Specifically, Lacan explores an intrapsychic Otherness different from the Other of interpersonal theories of identity and distinct from the philosophical problem of Other Minds–a problem grounded in solipsism rather than narcissism.

 

Unlike his contemporaries, Lacan postulates a gap between an Other and an other that echoes a gap between the Subject and the ego. These twin decenterings imply Lacan’s symbolic and imaginary registers, since the “decentering of the Subject” is another way of saying that the Subject and the ego inhabit disjunct registers. Likewise, the disjunction between the symbolic linguistic Other and the imaginary mirroring other signifies a decentering of the former from the latter. Taken together, these two decenterings articulate a post-humanist subjectivity at odds with contemporary constructions of the “Other” as a person, particularly a person who is marginal or subversive in some way. This conceptual disjunction between theories of a humanized Other and Lacan’s radically alterior Otherness suggests a gap between the two approaches. Ironically, though, discussions that humanize the Other frequently cite Lacan, so it seems valuable to ask why.

 

Lacan’s rhetoric in and of itself invites his readers to overlook his decentering of the Other. Sometimes Lacan refers to the symbolic Other as the big Other and the imaginary other as the little other, but for the most part Lacan simply uses capitalization to distinguish the Other from the other. Though no reader would misread “Subject” for “ego,” the much subtler rhetorical distinction between “Other” and “other” can easily be missed–especially if readers don’t supplement the explicit discourse of alterity with the implicit discourse of the registers. Since Lacan discusses the Other topically without any explicit reference to the registers, his readers are often called upon to supply the implicit theoretical context. Envision the fate of the casual reader of Lacan who, interested in British literature, picks up Seminar VII on ethics to read “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis.” This reader sees: “In many cases, it seems that a function like that of a blessing or salutation is for the courtly lover the supreme gift, the sign of the Other as such, and nothing more” (152). Lacking the implied but unspecified discursive context of the registers, this reader can easily take Lacan’s “sign of the Other” to be a token received from an “Other” person. Only familiarity with Lacan’s theory of the registers allows his reader to grasp the intrapsychic “sign of the Other” as a decentering connection with the signifier in the unconscious that the courtly lover mis/takes for transcendence. Similarly, when Lacan writes in Seminar II that “the obsessional is always an other” he is talking about the obsessional’s ego-involvement, not the obsessional’s loss of identity. Again, Lacan’s point assumes the registers, allying the obsessional with the rhetorically explicit “other” and alienating the obsessional from the discursively implicit “Other.” Lacking the framework of the theory of the registers, a reader would be hard pressed to unravel either of these Lacanian invocations of alterity.

 

The currency of the idea of the Other in theory generally makes the reading of the decentered Other in Lacan even more difficult. The contemporary idea of the Other rooted in area studies inscribes itself in theories of race, class, and gender and reinscribes itself in post-colonial theories of national identities, both placed and displaced. Consequently, a plethora of critical discourses use the term “Other” to signify quite differently than Lacan. In identity politics, the decentering of the Subject can lead to an equal and opposite reaction: a centering–an entification–of the Other as object, an “it” denied the status of a “Thou.” Thus, readers familiar with theoretical discourses defining Otherness as race or class or gender or nationality see Otherness as attribute rather than alterity.

 

Since alterity is crucial to an understanding of Lacanian Otherness, and since the Other of contemporary theory means many things to many discourses, it will be useful first to distinguish the Other of identity theories from the decentered Other of Lacanian analysis. With this Lacanian decentering of the Other in mind, I then want to explore the way two theorists of identity deploy Lacanian Otherness: Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the registers that distinguish otherness from Otherness in his reading of colonialist novels; Judith Butler disputes the validity of the distinction between the registers on which Lacan’s decentering of the Other is based. In dialogue with theories of identity, Lacanian theory insists on the radicality of Otherness, an alterity that has frequently been obscured by the residual humanism implicit in the construction of the Subject as a political entity. Finally, this overview of Otherness will examine the relationship between the decentering of the Other and phallic discourse to argue the value of a politics that listens for the Other rather than speaking on its behalf.

 

The Other in Theories of Identity

 

Many contemporary theories of identity use the Other as half of a Self/Other dichotomy distinguishing one person from another. For instance, pointing out an oppositional racial distinction, Terry Goldie’s “The Representation of the Indigene” states: “At least since Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘not-self’ for the white view of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves” (233).³ Racial selves rather than subjects are at issue here in Goldie’s distinction between white people and black people. The same interpersonal dichotomy of race appears in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory”:

 

Troubled by the nagging contradiction between the theoretical justification of exploitation and the barbarity of its actual practice, [colonialist fiction] also attempts to mask the contradiction by obsessively portraying the supposed inferiority and barbarity of the racial Other, thereby insisting on the profound moral difference between self and Other. (23)

 

Here, an implicit humanism enters the anti-humanist discourse on race, imported by the idea of the racial “self.” Similarly, Goldie discusses the racial distinctions between the Self and the Other in terms of specific attributes, saying that “[p]resumably the first instance in which one human perceived another as Other in racial terms came when the first recognized the second as different in colour, facial features, language” (235). Now Goldie makes the previously implicit humanism explicit, but not without reason. In critiques that explore inhumanity, humanizing the Other makes a political statement. This statement, in turn, reminds us that the discourse of political rights and the discourse of humanism are twin intellectual legacies, two branches of the tree of Enlightenment knowledge.

 

Discourses of gendered selves parallel discourses of racial identity in the tendency to humanize the Other. Thus, a parallel distinction appears in feminist discourses discussing woman as Other, particularly those discourses opposing patriarchy. Where political rights are at issue, discourses refer both to woman as an Other human being and to the Subject as a political entity, a theoretical move that unifies the “Subject” as a person subjected to the law of the land. For instance, adopting the language of oppositional feminism, Raman Selden⁴ generalizes about feminist theory: “In many different societies, women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of ‘other’, ‘colonised’ by various forms of patriarchal domination” (249). Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex emphasizes the humanism that is at stake in the Self/Other dichotomy, writing of the Biblical Genesis: “… humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him… He is the Subject, he is the Absolute–she is the Other” (xxii); this “expression of a duality… of the Self and the Other” is socially and historically pervasive, de Beauvoir points out (xxii). Of de Beauvoir’s and Virginia Woolf’s feminisms, Selden continues: “Being dispersed among men, women have no separate history, no natural solidarity; nor have they combined as other oppressed groups have. Woman is riveted into a lop-sided relationship with man: he is the ‘One’, she the ‘Other’… and, à la Virginia Woolf’s ‘looking glass’, the assumption of woman as ‘Other’ is further internalised by women themselves” (210). Here, Selden’s analysis of the woman’s internalization of her attributes parallels Goldie’s analysis of black identification above, and both invoke a discourse on Otherness that has Platonic rather than psychoanalytic roots.

 

National identity, too, presents itself in terms of Selves and Others, adopting the plural construction characteristic of discourses about identity. Here, Homi Bhabha discusses the post-colonial condition: “[The Derridean entre] makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist, histories of the ‘people’. It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others” (“Cultural Diversity” 209). Similarly, Xiaomei Chen concludes a discussion of “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse” with the following analysis that treats East and West as implicit human agents:

 

… it seems imperative that we at least attempt to find a reasonable balance between Self and Other, between East and West, so that no culture is fundamentally privileged over its Others. Perhaps the realities of history cannot allow such a balance to be fully realized. Indeed, it is even necessary to affirm that these master tropes are necessarily veiled by the fictional. What must be stressed here is then even imagining such a balance–surely one of the first requirements of a new order of things–can never be possible without each Self being confronted by an Other, or by the Other being approached from the point of view of the Self in its own specific historical and cultural conditions. (89)

 

The idea here, that Otherness is both agentic and a matter of point of view, is taken up by Judith Butler in a discussion of sexual identity when she writes in Bodies that Matter that “gay and lesbian identity positions… constitute themselves through the production and repudiation of a heterosexual Other” (112). As Butler’s analysis shows, Otherness can be relative, making the interpersonal dichotomy of Self and Other endlessly reversible.

 

Judith Butler’s critique of the “exclusionary logic” of the Other as it signifies in the Self/Other binary of identity points toward the limited usefulness of oppositional constructions. Lacanian logic, moreover, demonstrates the intrapsychic resistance that manifests when just such signifying binaries as white/black, West/East, or heterosexual/homosexual merge with a fixed, imaginary ego identity. Like intrapsychic resistance, political resistance has a use, particularly where brute survival is at issue. However, resistance denies the epistemological fact that in order to replicate the Self/Other signifying difference–in order to shape a foundational symbolic distinction–both terms necessarily implicate each other. In many of the discussions above, Chen’s “fundamental privilege” is less the issue than foundational, epistemological privilege. Civilized, superior Western white male heterosexual colonizers are foundationally privileged; we know in advance and without appeal to specific circumstance or historical context that this is so. Foundational difference makes a truth claim about the world; foundational difference prescribes positions, inscribes hierarchy, proscribes recombination. In and of themselves, such differences are descriptive at best, their insistent fixity rendering them insufficient for the analysis of dynamic problems, whether the problems are intrapsychic, social, or political. Discourses that align the Other with the marginal or with the subversive avoid a confrontation with complexity, just as JanMohamed’s exemplary redistribution of the attribute of “barbarity” from colonizer to colonized, above, stops short of an inquiry into ego identification as a transitive process. Allied binaries and binary realignments only build a thicker epistemological foundation.

 

Thick epistemology is vulnerable epistemology. As JanMohamed’s portable barbarity points out above, multiple binaries align and realign, attributes can be assigned and reassigned. Infelicitous combinatories undermine foundational privilege, whether the claim of privilege operates as an entitlement or an accusation. So long as there is an investment in the foundational signifying difference, the emergence of the combinatory’s undesirable elements will arouse resistance. For instance, Melville Chater’s paean to the new South African Union in a 1931 edition of The National Geographic sets up and reinforces a typical colonialist foundational distinction between hard-working, intelligent whites entitled to the prosperity they enjoy and lazy, superstitious blacks (who presumably have what they have “earned” as well). When Chater’s foray over the veldt discovers a “forlorn scene” of “dismal shacks, where some frowzy men and women and a plethora of dull-faced children [lounge] in the sunshine,” he rescues his foundations: “Yet they [are] whites, or, rather, ‘poor white,’ representing a South African aspect of that retrogressive type which is found in many lands” (441). When this relativizing of whiteness seems inadequate to explain “so formidable a number as 120,000 to 150,000” poor whites, Chater attributes the deterioration of the poor whites to “that too-easeful existence, based on slave help and game aplenty” (441). Having inadvertently tainted the white superiority he has constructed as the outcome of white hard work by the insertion of slavery into his discourse, Chater reasserts his foundation: in a stunning attempt to purify white superiority, he redistributes a poor white squatter to the black half of his equation by comparing the squatter’s language to that of “the American ‘black-face’ comedian”(441). Chater’s inadvertent denaturalizing of blackness has stumbled upon a blackness constructed by whites for white entertainment. He has entered the territory of the combinatory of combinatories, the Lacanian unconscious–the Lacanian Other.

 

A more contemporary and purposeful recuperation of race from the stasis of foundational difference is effected by Honduran comedian Carlos Mencia, who jokes that Los Angelinos meeting someone from Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala inevitably ask “Now, what part of Mexico is that?” Mencia exposes the exclusionary work of the foundational binary that identifies race in Black/White terms with a logic that reintroduces the combinatory: If you’re white, you’re white in L.A. Go to Miami and you’re still white. If you’re black in L.A., go to New York and you’re still black. Referring to himself, Mencia points out that in L.A. he’s a Mexican. “If I go to Miami, I’m a Cuban. And if I go to New York, I’m…” He gestures to the audience who respond “Puerto Rican.” “See,” he concludes, “You know what I’m talking about.” Shunted off to the racial unconscious by a foundational Black/White race-ism, Mencia’s own race must be articulated by indirection. Thus, the unary signifier “Hispanic” remains in the linguistic Otherness and only enters the joke obliquely, as a signifier for another signifier–[Hispanic]/Mexican, [Hispanic]/Cuban, [Hispanic]/Puerto Rican. Mencia’s comedic tactic parallels the strategy Benita Parry praises in Bhabha’s post-colonial theory: Bhabha “show[s] the wide range of stereotypes and the shifting subject positions assigned to the colonized in the colonialist text” in order to liberate “an autonomous native ‘difference'” from the binary European/Other (41).⁴ Similarly, Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter works with the exclusionary logics of both male/female and heterosexual/homosexual to open up the combinatory expressions of sexual orientation these foundational binaries preclude. Since these latter examples of linguistic identity have ventured into the territory of complex Otherness evocative of Lacan’s theory of the registers, this is a good point at which to distinguish clearly the doubling of alterity in the symbolic and the imaginary.

 

There is no Other of the Other:
(but there is an other of the Other)

 

The journey that eventually leads Lacan to the aphoristic insistence that “there is no Other of the Other” (there is no meta-language beyond language) begins with a denaturalization of paranoid psychosis. The ideas Lacan forms during his medical training lead him to counter the prevailing psychiatric view of psychosis as a biologically-based personality trait by positing a developmental phenomenology he only later finds in Freud. Interested in folies à deux, and especially as such madness manifests in women’s “inspired” speech and writings, Lacan is very much a man attuned to the surrealist 1930s.⁵ What he writes for medical journals he revises for surrealist journals, but his interest is consistently in the otherness of the other–an interest that culminates in mirror stage theory. The interpersonal here seems undeniable. Lacan writes about the crime of the two Papin sisters. He writes his thesis on the psychotic Aimée’s attack on a famous French actress. Moreover, Lacan’s many references to Hegel’s struggle for recognition between the Master and the Slave certainly imply an agon between people rather than a contest within. Lacan’s mirror stage essay points out that a pigeon matures via an encounter with another of its own kind. Even the mirroring moment can be read as involving the infant and the mother. All in all, early on, Lacan seems deeply involved with the interpersonal, the social, even the cultural.

 

Read against the retrospect of his later interests, mirror stage theory appears to be Lacan’s failed attempt to explain the dynamics of an intrapsychic alterity in interpersonal terms. Not until his theory of the registers does Lacan achieve the post-humanist position he seeks. The dominance of a formative phenomenology in the earlier essay gives “The Mirror Stage” its interpersonal slant. In the theory of the registers, by contrast, the phenomenal is folded within the structure of language and intrapsychic structure is irremediably fissured with the gaps between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Since none of the registers is confluent with the others, Lacan avoids the problem of a seamless solipsism. He avoids a tabula rasa subjectivity passively constructed from without as well. So, it is not experience but experience’s imagistic residue that figures in the imaginary register. It is not the many instances of communication with other people but language as a whole that signifies in the symbolic. Nor is the model without constraint since the real is always there as an unimaginable, unsignifiable limit on what would otherwise constitute a psychic en abîme of mirroring or signification without end.

 

Models of the psyche necessarily inform analytic praxis, and Lacan’s theory of the registers is his attempt to come to grips with the theory/practice gap. While Schema L as the sketch on Lacan’s chalkboard is not the model on the analyst’s couch, there is an intriguing and ambiguous family relationship between the two. Though the terms may be the same, the contexts differ, and working across the contextual divide can make Lacan’s theory appear to contradict itself, rendering straightforward terminology paradoxical. The problem of discussing alterity is made all the more difficult for Lacan because he continually engages the divide between the interpersonal situation of analysis in practice and the intrapsychic dynamics that underwrite whatever interventions analytic practice makes. Practice motivates the transition from mirror stage theory to register theory as the latter is announced in Lacan’s manifesto on the function of speech and language in the Freudian field. His paper takes issue with non-Lacanian forms of analysis that he finds therapeutically inadequate precisely because of their emphases on the interpersonal. Increasingly, Lacan insists that analysis must be a process in which the analyst creates a therapeutic context where the analysand’s intrapsychic processes are the only processes in play. The cadaverous, “dead” position of the Lacanian analyst is meant to deconstruct analysis as humanistic interaction. Thus, Lacan’s discussion of Otherness must be read with special attention to context for three reasons: because Otherness is a term that Lacan himself doubles in his structural theory of the registers and in his dynamic theory of desire, because it is a term that defines an intrapsychic process and determines an interpersonal practice, and because it is a signifier shared by the discourse of analysis and by everyday language.

 

Since the idea of otherness is a term whose name–“the other”–remains the same but whose implications change, Lacan provides many interpretations of otherness. Some of the examples contrast the other with the Other and emphasize the distinction between the registers. In his second seminar, for instance, he compares the “radical Other” as one “pole of the subjective relation,” with the “other which isn’t an other at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a relation which is always reflexive, interchangeable” (321). Bearing in mind that Lacan is discussing a subjective rather than an intersubjective relation, and that the reflexive coupling of other with ego is an intrapsychic phenomenon for which another person is, at best, a prop or a pretext, consider this elaboration of the analyst’s alterity: the analyst “partakes of the radical nature of the Other, in so far as he is what is most inaccessible” to the extent that the analyst’s own ego is “effaced” and the analyst’s resistance is not aroused (324). The analyst’s refusal to play along with the game dictated by the ego of the analysand throws the analysand back into a confrontation with the intrapsychic gap between the other and the Other, since expecting to confirm the former the analysand encounters the latter. So, “what leaves the imaginary of the ego of the subject is in accordance not with this other to which he is accustomed, and who is just his partner, the person who is made so as to enter into his game, but precisely with this radical Other which is hidden from him” (324). Without another person to play along with the habitual imaginary game, the subject looks to the intrapsychic Other. If the analysis is successful, the Other will yield to the subject its Truth.

 

Appropriately, one of Lacan’s exemplary readings of radical alterity occurs in his Seminar III on psychosis, where he presents an analytic case study exploring the speech of a paranoid young woman. In this reworking of his analytic roots, Lacan presents a clear decentering of the imaginary other from the symbolic Other. The disjunction is evident in Lacan’s redefinition of psychotic projection–which might seem to be classically imaginary–as a mechanism that has been “placed outside the general symbolization structuring the subject” and returns “from without” (47). Lacan’s patient is a “girl” who tells him about her “run-in in the hallway with an ill-mannered sort of chap,” a married man who was also the illicit lover of her neighbor. While passing her in the hall, the man had devalued her by saying a dirty word to her. But she herself had spoken to him first, saying “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” [the charcutier, who specializes in pork]. He had responded: “Sow!” In his analysis, Lacan’s own response to the girl is a mistake, he admits. He interprets. He shows his analysand that he understands her comment “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” as a reference to pork, and by doing so he “enter[s] into the patient’s game… collaborat[ing] in [her] resistance” (48). Though he does not explicitly articulate his failure in terms of the registers, the distinction is clear. Lacan, through his display of “understanding,” has reinforced the patient’s imaginary at the expense of asking, symbolically, why there is something in the patient’s speech to be understood. The analytic question is: “Why did she say, I’ve just been to the butcher’s and not Pig?” (48-49).

 

Lacan goes on to insist that the interaction between the girl who might have said “Pig!” and the man who calls her “Sow!” is not an instance of his maxim that in speech the subject receives her message in an inverted form. In other words, here, the message should not be constructed as a symbolic exchange since the message at issue “is not identical with speech, far from it” (Sem III 49). The girl herself is enmeshed in the desire of her neighbor and the neighbor’s lover, a desire of which she is censorious to the point of wondering whether it is possible “through taking legal action, to get them into hospital” (49). She had been friends with the neighbor until the love affair interrupted the friendship; afterwards she intruded on the couple while they were dining or reading or “at their toilet” until they threw her out. So Lacan rereads the conversation’s intrapsychic implications: “Sow, what is that? It is effectively her message, but is it not rather her message to herself?” (49). The analysand’s ego has met her alter ego in the hallway; the moment is a mirror.

 

Lacan connects this case study to his schema of subjectivity:

 

… Is it the reality of objects that is at issue? Who normally speaks in reality, for us? Is it reality, exactly, when someone speaks to us? The point of the remarks I made to you last time on the other and the Other, the other with a small o and the Other with a big O, was to get you to notice that when the Other with a big O speaks it is not purely and simply the reality in front of you, namely the individual who is holding forth. The Other is beyond that reality.

 

In true speech the Other is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognized by it only because it is recognized first. (50-51)

 

Having thus clarified the impersonal nature of the big Other, Lacan notes that in the paranoid insult, the Other is not in question since the patient doesn’t recognize the Other “behind him who is speaking. She receives her own speech from him, but not inverted, her own speech is in the other who is herself, the little other, her reflection in the mirror, her counterpart” (51). Though she seems to look at another person, the girl sees only herself.

 

The distinction Lacan makes here between the Other and the other, between the symbolic and the imaginary, involves the pact of language. Part of the process of recognition for the Subject as a subject involves the risky business of addressing the absolute Other beyond all that is known. Addressed to another person, the very Otherness of speech puts that person in a position to be recognized by the speaker and to recognize the speaker in return because both speakers share a symbolic commitment of which neither speaker is the origin. Committed speech is discourse, which for Lacan “includes acts, steps, the contortions of puppets, yourselves included, caught up in the game… An utterance commits you to maintaining it through your discourse, or to repudiating it, or to objecting to it, or to conforming to it, to refuting it, but, even more, to complying with many things that are within the rules of the game” (51). With these relationships between the registers, alterity, discourse, and the pact in mind, I want to return to two discourses on identity and Otherness that address Lacan’s register theory directly–one by invoking it, another by repudiating it–in order to explore the link between discourse and symptom.

 

Discourse, Symptom, and Otherness:
“The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”

 

The following two examples of the discourse of identity theory–Abdul R. JanMohamed’s “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” and Judith Butler’s “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”–offer critiques engaging Lacanian Otherness. As critiques, these essays are discourses about discourses, meta-discourses in which Otherness signifies. Because meta-discourses offer levels of complexity, symptoms appear in such discourses as deflections of the discursive flow as such. Briefly, the Lacanian symptom, like the letter in the “Purloined Letter,” is “a fourth element, which can serve… as signum” (Sem I 280). The symptom operates to link the imaginary and the symbolic into signs which figure against the real of “the organism as ground” (280). Slavoj Zizek points to the element of repetition involved in the Lacanian symptom, identifying the symptom as “a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency… if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates” (155). This element of consistency conferred by the symptom is characteristic of what Lacan calls the “narcissistic Bildung” of the ego and relates to the repetitious character of empty speech. Since theoretical terms easily empty themselves of meaning (as theory’s opponents tirelessly point out), the “Other” may mark a symptom in a discourse of identity.

 

In this first encounter between identity theory and Lacanian analysis, Abdul R. JanMohamed uses the Lacanian registers to make a distinction between forms of colonial discourse. A useful error–possibly a symptom–occurs in JanMohamed’s essay at the point where the discourse of post-colonialism disrupts the discourse on the registers forcing an either/or choice between irreconcilable constructions of Otherness. This error provides a helpful comparison to a similar error in Butler’s chapter, an error productive of a symptom at every level of Butler’s discourse, from the literal, to the paradigmatic, to the interpretive. Since from the analytic point of view both the error and the symptom locate discursive truth, both JanMohamed and Butler tell the truth about the encounter between theories of identity and the Lacanian registers.

 

The registers appear as unified and unifying descriptive categories when Abdul R. JanMohamed writes “I would argue that colonialist literature is divisible into two broad categories: the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic'” (19). Next, JanMohamed goes on to transcend the categorical in a sophisticated contrast between the work that aggressivity does in the ‘imaginary’ text and the work that mediation and problematization do in the ‘symbolic’ text. Having employed a Lacanian discourse to frame his discussion of the colonialist novel, however, JanMohamed writes that some “symbolic” novels are “conceived in the ‘symbolic’ realm of intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, and particularity but are seduced by the specularity of ‘imaginary’ Otherness” (19-20). This sudden collapsing of the distinction between the registers in the error “‘imaginary’ Otherness” is jarring to any reader familiar with Lacan. Abdul R. JanMohamed has broken the law!

 

Since JanMohamed’s essay provides exemplary instances both of discursive creativity and of discursive failure as they impact the relation between the writer and his reader, I want to review the sequence above in two ways. First, I will look at the interpersonal symbolic law of discourse that, once invoked, binds writer to reader in an intrasubjective and impersonal pact. The writer’s thesis invokes Lacan’s discourse of the registers and asks the reader to be bound by the pact that this discourse constitutes. This is a symbolic pact par excellence since neither the writer nor the reader originate the discourse but both agree to be bound by its rules in order to allow the possibility of a meaningful exchange, in order to agree on the terms by which they will produce meanings together. Since the writer has selected a Lacanian discourse, ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ cease to be overdetermined signifiers in the linguistic unconscious. ‘Imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ now invoke a set of relations defined by Lacan’s discourse, a discourse in which these terms signify in quite specific ways. Because and only because he has involved his reader in this pact of the registers, JanMohamed is free to explore the implications of the encounter between Lacanian theory and the colonialist novel. As the writer elaborates the particulars of the work of the imaginary in the colonialist novel, the reader can appreciate JanMohamed’s insight because the reader sees the colonialist novel in fresh and interesting ways and because the fruitful encounter between the Lacanian imaginary and colonialist fiction reveals new and unforeseen implications of the imaginary register itself. Creativity thus requires the law; creativity is paradoxically both bound to the law and unbound by it.

 

The moment JanMohamed writes “‘imaginary’ Otherness,” he breaks the law of Lacanian discourse and cancels his pact with the reader. Until the violation occurs, the reader is bound by the pact called “Lacanian discourse”; “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “Otherness” hold out the possibility of meaning-making (though they do not guarantee it). At the breaking of the pact, the terms cease to be terms within a discourse; released from the pact they are signifiers only. Lacking their discursive support, “imaginary” and “Otherness” thus signify randomly. Because he has broken his Lacanian pact with the reader, the reader has no possible way to grasp what JanMohamed might be trying to signify by “‘imaginary’ Otherness.” No context can stabilize what fractured discursive syntax has set free. Since signification outside the pact is idiosyncratic, the effect of the broken pact is to change “imaginary” and “Otherness” into random markers that preclude creativity in both the writing and the reading. The markers come and go–in and out of the linguistic unconscious–for reasons that may or may not be related to the colonialist novel, the stated project at hand. Once the pact has been broken by the writer, the reader can always declare the discursive failure an accident and continue as if the pact were still in place–but the reader is now on alert and any additional error will render the text indecipherable in terms of its stated project.⁶

 

Besides the rupture of interpersonal give and take between writer and reader, the collapse of this fruitful contact between the discourse of the colonial novel and Lacan’s discourse of the registers in JanMohamed’s essay signifies intrapsychically as the deformation of one discourse by another. If repeated, “‘imaginary’ Otherness” becomes a symptom rather than an error, and the essay manifests a subjective encounter with Otherness far beyond its post-colonial critique. Consequently, the discursive symptom provides a profitable alternative to the sterile fusion of Lacanian theory with the discourse of post-colonialism. Because Lacan’s distinction between the registers implies a decentering of Otherness that JanMohamed cannot maintain while simultaneously committed to a post-colonial construction of Self and Other, the reader is moved to ask why there is a symptom in the discourse at this point. It seems that the entified Other appears here as the symptom of a post-colonial commitment that runs deeper than the Lacanian discourse to which the writer is ostensibly committed. Since the Other of humanism cannot signify save by suturing the gap between the imaginary other and the symbolic Other, this is precisely what JanMohamed does. The repressed post-colonial humanism returns in the symptomatic fusion of “‘imaginary’ Otherness.”

 

The discursive symptom manifest in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s essay signifies psychoanalytically because he intends to use the Lacanian registers to frame his exploration of the colonial novel. A very different discursive symptom arises in Judith Butler’s influential critique of Lacanian analysis, Bodies that Matter, a critique in which she doubts that the registers signify at all. Here, a fusion of Lacanian registers pervades Butler’s discussion of “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” While both Butler and JanMohamed effect symptomatic erasures of the Lacanian other, the symptomatic erasure in Butler manifests distinctively–as an inability to accurately quote Lacan’s own text in spite of her extraordinary scholarly rigor.⁷ The misquotations enter her discussion from the moment Butler denies the distinction between the registers, but the symptom is prefigured by her insertion of Lacan’s structural theory of the registers into his essay on the mirror stage.

 

Butler’s chapter conflates psychoanalytic models that are theoretically and historically distinct–both Freudian models and Lacanian ones, and this conflation lays the theoretical groundwork from which the symptomatic misquotations arise. Thus, Butler reads “On Narcissism” against The Ego and the Id, though the former belongs to a mid-Freudian model that differs significantly from the last “entified” model of a psyche composed of Id-Ego-Superego. Similarly, Butler uses Lacan’s mirror stage essay to argue for the imaginary nature of the phallus in “The Signification of the Phallus”–even though the former essay provides a coda to Lacan’s early phenomenal and developmental model of the psyche while the latter condenses a portion of the seminar on desire, a seminar reflecting Lacan’s structural theorizing at its strongest. As we have earlier seen, though mirror stage theory and register theory do share signifiers, their variant theoretical models constellate variant signifieds; if the terms remain the same, their meanings have structurally altered. However, the alteration fails to make its way into Butler’s critical assimilation of the latter model to its predecessor.

 

Butler’s most overtly symptomatic collapsing of the Lacanian registers reveals itself in her persistent error in directly quoting the text of Lacan’s early seminars. Like JanMohamed, Butler substitutes the symbolic Other for the mirroring other. It is as if, having merged mirror stage theory with register theory, Butler is literally unable to see a significatory difference between the two. As a result, Butler continually fails to distinguish the imaginary other from the symbolic Other, a collapse of terminological distinction equivalent to suggesting there is no difference between the Subject and the ego. Since the distinction within alterity is so central to Lacanian theory generally and to his model of the Subject of the unconscious specifically, other and Other are definitional. Moreover, the other and the Other draw a precise and consistent distinction between the mirroring imaginary and the symbolic treasury of signifiers. By continually effacing the imaginary other with the symbolic Other, Butler indeed does what she explicitly states as her essay’s goal: she “rewrit[es] the morphological imaginary” (72) though the rewriting is far more literal than her subheading implies.

 

Where Lacan speaks of the body finding its unity “in the image of the other” with a small o (Sem II 54), Butler rewrites “in the image of the Other” with a capital (75), and where Lacan writes “the imaginary structuration of the ego forms around the specular image of the body itself, of the image of the other,” small o, imaginary other (Sem II 94), Butler again revises to “the image of the Other” with a capital O (76), collapsing Lacan’s straightforward structural distinction and begging the issue of structural difference. Butler perpetuates the error in her own discussion, commenting that “the specular image of the body itself is in some sense the image of the Other” (76) and that the “extrapolating function” of narcissism is the “principle by which any other object or Other is known” (77). There is no small irony in Butler’s symptomatic misquotation of Lacan given her rigorous inclusion of parallel phrases from both French and English texts, and carefully documented citations from both the French and English seminars.⁸ But as Lacan points out, the unconscious is always visible, right there, literally spelled out in the symptom in the text–and Butler’s text proves no exception to this Lacanian rule.

 

The symptomatic disappearance of the imaginary other in Butler’s thoroughgoing critique of the mirror stage essay parallels the conflation of the registers in JanMohamed’s essay. In JanMohamed’s criticism, the symptom arises at the moment of discursive incompatibility between the post-colonial paradigm of Self and Other and the Lacanian distinction between an other and the Other as the unconscious locus of language. Is there a similar discursive rupture in Butler’s argument? Looking more closely at Butler’s actual text may be helpful here. The substitutions begin in citations in which Lacan specifically mentions the body in connection with the registers–so Butler’s central concern in Bodies that Matter and her theory of performativity are both at stake when the misquotations begin. Her page-long explication of Lacan’s mirror stage theory in which five symptomatic substitutions of the symbolic Other for the imaginary other occur also addresses the body, specifically the “organs [that] are caught up in the narcissistic relation” (76-77). The following page of text, on which the symptomatic substitution occurs three more times, argues that the previously generic “organs” may be “the male genitals” (77), and if so, Lacan’s mirror stage theory grounds itself on a specifically masculine narcissism. Butler concludes that the narcissistically engaged masculine organs now condition and structure every object and Other, and as a result, the “extrapolating function” of narcissism raised to an epistemological principle becomes phallogocentric. In short, a phallic imaginary is masculine and any explanatory function such an imaginary might serve is inherently phallogocentric. Therefore, it is from Lacan’s phallogocentrism that Butler’s lesbian phallus liberates us, providing a subversive substitute for the hetero/sexist Phallic Signifier that she herself has taken great pains to introduce into the Lacanian imaginary register.

 

Here, more explicitly, is the problem. Lacan theorizes that there is a privileged signifier in the symbolic register and that this privileged symbolic signifier is the phallus. Butler wants to argue against the real of the body, wants to argue that the body is “a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms” (2). Thus, Butler’s theory of materialization stops short of the radical constructionist claim that the body is only a symbolic construct. She finds an appealing alternative to constructionism in Lacan’s early theory where the imagined, alienated body appears in the mirror. This Lacanian mirroring replication supports Butler’s theory of materialization. But Lacan did not stop with his mirror stage theory, and though he once situated the body helpfully in the imaginary, he later positioned the phallus in the symbolic register–where Butler very much needs it not to be if her argument for a projective materialization of a phantasmatic phallus is to succeed. Consequently, a collapsing of Lacanian paradigms and issues ensues.

 

After arguing for the imaginary nature of the penis, Butler goes on to suggest that Lacan has simply renamed the penis the phallus (80); further, that the penis is the “privileged referent” to be symbolized by the phallus (84); and finally, that the relationship between penis and phallus (and by implication between imaginary and symbolic) is the relationship of signified to signifier (90). But issues of significatory slippage are not issues of reference, nor are they issues of meaning, and this series of conflations simply reiterates the earlier fusion of psychoanalytic models, creating a theoretical pastiche against which Butler then argues with great sophistication and subtlety.⁹ Given the persistent insertion of the symbolic into the imaginary, and the assimilation of the symbolic construct phallus to the image of the penis, it is not surprising to hear Butler conclude that “if the phallus is an imaginary effect, a wishful transfiguration, then it is not merely the symbolic status of the phallus that is called into question, but the very distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary” (79). But just whose wishful transfiguration does Butler’s text demonstrate, we may want to ask, since the symptom, Freud tells us, marks the location of the wish and it has clearly been Butler’s wish to do away with the distinction between the registers all along. Since Butler’s critique merges Lacan’s phallic discourse of desire with his theory of the registers, I next distinguish betweeen these two in “The significantion of the phallus,” Lacan’s most controversial essay. Returning the phallic signifier to the symbolic register, in turn, shows how the signifying phallus generates a post-humanist Otherness.

 

“Man’s [sic] desire is the desire of the Other”

 

Lacan’s hypothesis of the phallic signifier offers a many-layered theory of unconscious Otherness at odds with any conscious marking of any human being as an “Other.” While the Lacanian unconscious locates power in Otherness, the phallic signifier, by contrast, locates power in subjectivity. Unlike the unity of the imaginary imago, which provides a simple referential image of an other, the symbolic phallic signifier constrains Otherness by buttoning a signifier, an identification, and a discourse together into one neat package. In the wildly overdetermined signifying multiplicity of the symbolic register, the phallus provides a determined and determining force. It is precisely the phallic propensity for self-replication that inseminates the reproduction–the reiteration as Butler calls it–of the Subject. What is at issue in Lacan’s polemic “The Signification of the Phallus” is the predominant role of this phallic signifier as the Aufhebung of signifying difference per se. Since this is a far more complex idea than either the decentering of the Subject or the gap within alterity, we will proceed slowly. Lacan insists that seven years of seminars have brought him to the conclusion that he must “promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to that of the signified” (284); he must insist on the priority of the marker over its meanings. Freud’s discovery, which predates Saussure’s retroactive linguistic explication of it, “gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications: namely that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark” (284). Thus, the active, agentic function of language resides in mark-making, and signifying is an active rather than a reflective process.

 

That a subject is the product of a linguistic unconscious should not be taken as evidence of this subject’s “cultural” construction (284), nor should a subject be seen as the product of an “ideological psycho-genesis” (285). Lacan sees Horney’s feminist social-psychological analysis as the latter and dismisses all such “question-begging appeal to the concrete” (285). Appeal to the concrete is beside the Freudian point. The only laws that interest Lacan are the laws that govern the other scene of the unconscious, the laws of combination and substitution–of metaphor and metonymy–by which signifiers generate the “determining effects for the institution of the subject” (285). Lacan goes on to define the Other as that by which he “designate[es]… the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes” (285). The logic of the signifier is thus anterior to the production of meaning, the “awakening of the signified” (285)–suggesting that meaning is discovered rather than made wherever the unconscious is in play.

 

Lacan next invokes his theory of the registers to reiterate his argument for the symbolic character of the phallus as a privileged signifier. The phallus of Freudian doctrine cannot be assigned to the imaginary register because it “is not a phantasy” (285). Nor is it constrained by the biological real of “the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes” (285). “For the phallus is a signifier,” Lacan concludes, having made his case for the location of the signifying phallus in the symbolic register. But it is a signifier with a difference from other signifiers. The phallus is a signifier that can “designate as a whole the effects of the signified” (285). We can tell that a phallic signifier is present by its effects. And what are these effects? The linguistic fate of the speaking being is to be unable to articulate need save as a demand that empowers the Other as a repository of love. The residue of inarticulable need returns from this Otherness as desire.

 

Need/demand/desire. Lacan reiterates the relationship between the three: “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second” (287). Thus, while real needs can be satisfied, imaginary demands may persist–opening a gap generative of desire. This intrapsychic formula for desire leads Lacan to think relationally, and so he goes on to rework the role of the Other in terms of the sexual relation. Now, the sexual relation is rendered enigmatic because it is “doubly ‘signifying'” and ambiguous because of “the Other in question.” The ambiguity arises here from the fact that the Other has a place in both the discourse of the registers and the discourse of desire. Here, moreover, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal seem utterly and ambiguously mixed. Thus, “for both partners in the relation, both the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be subjects of need, or objects of love, but… they must stand for the cause of desire” (287). Subject/object/Other meet Subject/object/Other Lacan seems to be saying–weaving a double discourse of the intrapsychic with the interactive.

 

Since the sexual relation seems to involve the signifying phallus irretrievably in the interpersonal beyond of signification, I want to review the intrapsychic dynamics of this crucial Lacanian concept. First, Lacan has repeatedly told us that the signifier is binary–and he has exemplified this binary signifier in paired relations such as day/night, and red cards/black cards. The sexed (reproductive) relation is binary as well, feminine/masculine. Next, however, Lacan tells us that the phallus is a “privileged signifier,” a signifier of the sexual relation that we are to take in the “literal (typographical) sense of the term” (287). And how is this literal phallic pictogram of “the sexual relation” written? F Thus, Lacan concludes, the phallus is “equivalent… to the (logical) copula” (287). In the larger context of Lacan’s discussion of the binary symbolic signifier, the phallus is the foundation signifying as such. The phallic signifier, the foundational difference in and of itself, is rendered latent by the emergence of the signifying binary terms. “The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance” (288); thus “reproduction” disappears leaving behind the signifying difference “female”/”male” or “race” disappears from the foundational distinction “black”/”white.” Where has the phallus gone now that the paired terms appear? It is retained as the bar separating the terms, a signifier rendered inarticulable by the terms it leaves behind, yet simultaneously a signifier imperative to their signifying difference.

 

To those who feel this reading of “The Signification of the Phallus” constitutes a recuperation of an irreparably phallogocentric discourse, I can only say that Lacan’s logic of the phallus captures the foundation in foundational thinking vividly. As a result, this phallogicentrism provides an extraordinarily valuable analytic tool. For me, the phallogicentrism of the essay is a discourse separable from the essay’s 1950s-style cultural discourse on the role of the man and the role of the woman in the comedy of intercourse. When Lacan begins to read the cultural “relation between the sexes” (289) in the essay’s concluding polemic against Melanie Klein, he lapses into a heteronormative construction of sexed Love that ends with an apparent affirmation of Freud’s intuition that there is “only one libido” and it is masculine. On first reading, years ago now, this section of the essay struck me as irrecuperably sexist and heterosexist–though it is imperative here to point out that the Freudian libido has nothing (no thing?) in common with the Lacanian imaginary. I can only note with some amusement that I found penciled in my margin of this concluding section “time for a lesbian deconstruction.” On this account, Judith Butler has read my desire. Now, since Butler has returned, I want to bring back theories of identity for one last encounter with Lacanian Otherness.

 

“The unconscious is the discourse [emphasis mine] of the Other”

 

The widespread insistence that Lacan’s brief écrit on the phallus is about dominance (and only dominance) rather than difference exemplifies the kind of foundationalism Lacan indicates by the phrase “having the phallus.” Moreover, folding this foundation back into an imaginary identification–presuming that one is oneself the “Other” of a Self/Other binary–is an instance of “being the phallus.” Gayatri Spivak notes just such a phallic politics of identification in “the fierce turf battles in radical cultural studies in multiracial cultures as well as on the geo-graphed globe, where the only possible politics seems sometimes to be the politics of identity in the name of being the Other” (159). Preferring the symbolic to the imaginary (as Lacan himself does), Spivak applauds those who stand up for the rights of groups with whom they are not primarily identified. Playing the F card (whether the phallic investment is in sex, race, class, or nation) may well be the solution to putting one’s own identity concerns on the table–both for Lacan and for his critics–but in terms of the registers, this solution refuses the encounter with the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. Instead, the primarily identified analyst understands rather than listens; knows in advance rather than finds out. Consequently, phallic foundationalism is a tactic with which Lacan does not agree, though it is a tactic to which he is not himself perpetually immune, especially when he is caught up in polemics over the practice of psychoanalysis.

 

In matters of politics more generally, Lacan remains skeptical, feeling that those who oppose oppression today will, once empowered, commit the very oppression they accuse. He compares the idealistic reformer to Hegel’s belle âme. The beautiful soul lives “(in every sense, even the economic sense of making a living) precisely on the disorder that it denounces” (Écrits 126), enabling us to “understand how the constitution of the object is subordinated to the realization of the subject” (80). More briefly and cynically put, the entified “Other” may be no more than a pretext for the subject’s speech, or tenure. By contrast, analysis shows the way in which “identity is realized as disjunctive of the subject” (80). It is precisely because the subject is not the same as the ego identity that interpersonal misapprehension can trigger the anxiety of intrapsychic Otherness. Since the gesture of disowning Otherness is so very protective of identity, it seems counterintuitive to own alienation when it appears. At the moment of alienation the subject has not merely reached its boundaries, it has exceeded them. Grasping onto fixed identity as an anchor with which to master the impending decentering is only logical–yet mastery is ineffectual, and “analysts have to deal with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language whose mission is universal the support of their servitude, and the bonds of its ambiguity” (Écrits 81).

 

Since Lacanian analysis supports neither the discourse of categorical identity nor the rhetoric of blame that so frequently accompanies it, it might appear that Lacan has little to offer political analysis, especially where issues of identity are foremost. However, I believe that neither the otherness of hostile objectification nor the Otherness productive of alienation alone offers the resource for political critique that examining the disjunction between the two affords. Carlos Mencia’s joke points to the alternative, to the location of politicized difference in another scene that addresses the phallic investment itself rather than the terms by which that investment is veiled. Analysis can indeed locate the political in another scene that is both a decentering of the subject and an exposé of the epistemology of a fixed or fixable Otherness. If ego identity is the certainty from which the subject is decentered, then “the art of the analyst must be to suspend the subject’s certainties until their last mirages have been consumed” (Écrits 43). If “psychoanalysis… reveals both the one and the other [the individual and the collective] to be no more than mirages” (80), then analysis seems at odds with the Platonic emphasis on a Self/Other binary though not with identity politics as a whole. Where identity is at issue, Lacan insists that “it is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (165). Regarding alterity, Lacan’s register theory would have us withhold our demands and acknowledge our desires as our own so that we can better listen for the discourse of the Other–if the Other’s Truth is what we genuinely desire to hear. And what is Truth? “Truth is nothing other than that which knowledge can apprehend as knowledge only by setting ignorance to work a real crisis in which the imaginary is resolved, thus engendering a new symbolic form” (296).

 

Since the engendering of a new symbolic form was very much at issue in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, I draw one final example of the political use of decentered Otherness from N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of the Conference proceedings in her recent book How We Became Posthuman (50-83). The Other’s Truth emerges through Hayles’s analysis, even though her argument for the dangerous supplementarity of embodiment to information theory is, at least in part, a rejection of Lacan. The role of Otherness here is all the more compelling because the discussion illustrative of alterity is not an application of Lacanian terms to cultural texts. Rather, Hayles’s reading of the substitution of one signifier for another recovers a woman held under erasure by the same mark-effacing mechanism at work in Mencia’s comic replications of ethnicity.

 

The woman in question appears in a photograph taken at the 1952 Macy Conference, the meeting at which psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie made his last ditch attempt to insert subjectivity into the debates defining information as universally portable, disembodied data. Unlike Kubie, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and the other intellectual luminaries, the woman sits with her back to the photographer. The position of her hands and body suggest that she is typing. Though the picture’s notation identifies her as Janet Freud, Katherine Hayles points out that she is in all probability Janet Freed, who appears throughout the Macy transcripts as “assistant to the conference program” (81). In the substitution of a famous man for an anonymous woman Hayles has all she needs to propound a feminist reading of the photograph as evidence of woman as “Other,” marshalling the remaining conference materials in support of this gendered difference. But such a reading would betray a phallic investment in gender, and Hayles does not yield to the temptation to play phallic politics with Freud. Instead, she turns her attention to another error: a handwritten note dating the photo of the 1952 Conference as “1953.”

 

By holding the 1952 meeting under erasure, attendees distanced themselves from the hostilities erupting in its wake. At that conference, the dueling paradigms of homeostasis and reflexivity met head to head over the issue of scientific objectivity. The dominant group of intellectuals, including the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch (credited as one of the fathers of the neural net), propounded an idea of information founded on assumptions of a detached observer safely distanced from the observed. Arguing against McCulloch was the hard-line Freudian analyst Lawrence Kubie, who insisted on the implication of the observer in the observation. The stand-off between the two paradigms and their champions exceeded the conference. A subsequent exchange of demands testified to the otherness of theory as a mirror of the ego identity of the theorist: McCulloch offered a fiery denunciation of psychoanalysis; in response, Kubie set fellow psychoanalysts the task of secretly observing McCulloch out of “concern” for the scientist’s emotional health. Though the vehemence of this exchange suggests an irreconcilable face off, both sides of the debate revolved around a single axis of argument informed by a series of signifying oppositions: objective/subjective, dispassionate/affective, empirical/reflexive, rational consciousness/ unconscious motivation–the thick epistemology of the 1950s.

 

These are the oppositions across whose boundary conference organizer Frank Fremont-Smith could not effect rapproachment, perhaps because Kubie had angered the other participants by seeing their positions as “resistance” to his own (Hayles 70-73). The aggressive emotional charge attached to psychoanalysis could account for the phonemic association that replaced the name of Fremont-Smith’s assistant Janet /Fr/eed by that of the trouble-making /Fr/eud. The double displacements of name and of conference date bequeath their textual challenge to Katherine Hayles in her search for the Truth of the Other of information articulated by Janet Freed’s return from the repressed. Here is Hayles’s analysis:

 

“Take a letter, Miss Freed,” he says… A woman comes in, marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferences are arranged, books are published. Taken out of context, his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burden of the labor that makes these things happen is for him only an abstraction, a resource diverted from other possible uses, because he is not the one performing the labor… Miss Freed has no such illusions. Embedded in context, she knows that words never make things happen by themselves… On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, in her body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back, Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied… (82-83)

 

Having refused the easy politics of labeling Freed the Other, Hayles discovers in Janet Freed the Truth of embodiment, at the same time evoking a powerful feminist statement from the paradox of Freed’s visible invisibility. In the rich multivocality of Otherness, Hayles hears Janet Freed speak for a class of labor as well as for her gender: Freed’s erasure by the proponents of abstracted information suggests that free-floating information feels intuitively true only to men of a certain class who are “in a position to command the labors of others” (82). Finally, in allowing Janet Freed’s Truth to call into question the very desire for decontextualized information itself, Hayles uncovers a paradigmatic politics informing the 1952 Macy Conference on Cybernetics.

 

In all, N. Katherine Hayles’s analysis demonstrates the multi-discursivity of the Other’s Truth; when asked to speak, the Other has a lot to say. As a result, Hayles practices a Lacanian politics of close listening. What she hears in the Truth of the decentered Other is the encounter between the discourse of desire and the discourse of the registers; thus, Janet Freed appears in disappearing beneath the waves of conferees’ affect, beneath the sediment of their theoretical language. Because Janet Freed speaks, because Hayles listens, we find in their analytic encounter one final Lacanian Other. Janet Freed returns as the authentic subject of interpersonal exchange, the Other of whom the analyst must be perpetually innocent. Lacan speaks of this “authentic Other” as another subject to be appreciated for its alterity, its capacity to surprise. This authentic Other is available to any subject who is willing, like the Lacanian analyst, to annul the resistance of her intrapsychic other and to accept the anxiety aroused within her intrapsychic Otherness. Then the vital encounter between two authentic subjects can aim “at the passage of true speech, joining the subject to an other subject, on the other side of the wall of language. That is the final relation of the subject to a genuine Other, to the Other who gives the answer one doesn’t expect, which defines the terminal point in analysis” (Sem II 246).

 

And the terminal point in this discussion…

 

Notes

 

1. For a discussion of otherness in Plato’s Sophist see “Non-Being” in Stanley Rosen’s Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image, 269-290.

 

2. See de Beauvoir’s note on Levinas in the introduction to The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1989) xxii. The note is interesting because de Beauvoir contains Levinas’s discussion of radical alterity as absolute contrariety by insisting it is written from a masculine point of view that disregards “the reciprocity of subject and object.” However, for Levinas, as for Lacan, subject and object are decidedly non-reciprocal–the point Lacan expresses by distinguishing the imaginary register of the image from the symbolic register of the radical Other. Levinas reconsiders the idea of alterity in Outside the Subject (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), trans. Michael B. Smith. See, particularly, the concluding essay by that name.

 

3. Fanon himself does not hypothesize the term Other in Black Skin, White Masks, but rather draws upon and critiques a number of analysts and philosophers who do including Jean Veneuse, Sartre, and Lacan.

 

4. See also Homi K. Bhabha’s detailed study of post-colonialism and alterity in “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism,” chapter three in his collection The Location of Culture.

 

5. An entertaining account of Lacan’s early interests and of his overwhelming reliance on case studies involving women can be found in Catherine Clément’s “The Ladies’ Way” in The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, 53-101.

 

6. It might seem that a reader innocent of Lacanian discourse might be a “better” reader of JanMohamed’s essay, since the naïve reader would not discern the discursive impossibility of the “‘imaginary’ Otherness.” But in discourse as elsewhere, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Since the naïve reader has no discursive pact with the writer, what passes for reading is an extra-symbolic exercise in idiosyncrasy. Lacking the pact, “reading” would be a species of parasitic narcissism held together–if it is held together at all–by the reader’s imaginary identification with the writer, a mirroring instance of “reading” as “writing.”

 

7. Butler is an astute critic of psychoanalysis and has, throughout her career, raised significant issues about psychoanalytic theory. Her article “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse” offers Butler’s characteristically precise analysis of psychoanalysis’ and feminist theory’s implications for each other. See Feminism/Postmodernism 324-40.

 

8. The irony of Butler’s reading and its notable omission of the imaginary other is emphasized by her apt focus on Lacan’s most emphatically structural of the early seminars, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.

 

9. Reducing Lacanian theory to a unified field as Judith Butler does supports binary notions of subject and symbolic Other, turning Lacan’s intrapsychic model into an interpersonal model and rewriting Lacan in the terms of theories of identity more discursively assimilable to a paradigm of performativity. This interpersonal model is clearly politicizable and compatible with the kinds of Foucauldian and deconstructive political impulses that characterize Butler’s own theory of “performance as citation and gender as iteration” (Whitford, cover). Politically, then, Butler needs to situate the point of infinite substitution within a dualistic imaginary to accomplish her own theoretical goals. Thus, the imaginary, in Butler’s analysis, is regarded as a field that functions in a structurally unproblematic way.

Works Cited

 

• Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
• Bhabha, Homi K. “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
• —. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 206-209.
• Brenkman, John. “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, The Symposium.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 396-456.
• Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
• —. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
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