Glossing Jacqueline Rose and 'Feminine Sexuality' PART 1.

When we looked at Kaja Silverman and Hitchcock we came across Structuralism, Saussure, linguistics and Lacan.

Here we encounter this again but in a more intense fashion.

Mainly I think what Rose is doing here is defending the sophistications of Lacan from certain hostile feminist mis-interpretations of his theorisation of the way feminine sexuality operates within a structuralist paradigm.

We know that for structuralism the world and its relations operate as a language and that language operates only by differences without any positive terms.

i.e. it is through the DIFFERENCES between words that we produce meaning, NOT by any real or intrinsic relationship between the words and what they refer to (signifiers to signifieds).

The whole is a convention, a code, one that works (and we work within it) but which is ultimately arbitrary.

This 'arbitrariness' and lack of positivity is the first of the uncertain, shifting, and in a way mysterious aspects of Lacan's view.

Rose starts out by reminding us of Lacan's theory of 'The Mirror Stage'. This is a turning point in child development when the child sees its image reflected in the world as something whole and fixed, but in the same moment notes the difference between that image and the shifting and unknowable reality of the internal subject.

It is a moment which produces the Subject as a split and as a difference akin to the difference that rules language. Just as the image promises to complete and contain me it makes me aware that I am not there where the image is.

Similarly, to Name something is to acknowledge that it is not owned or present, the name itself necessarily sets it apart from us and makes it absent, if only at the distance of its name.

A famous example from Freud - 'The Fort-Da Game' (in which a toy is repeatedly thrown from a playpen or cot and pulled back again or called for by the child) is used by Lacan as an example of how the child comes to understand the world, the self, and language, through ideas of absence and lack, of 'here' and of 'gone'.

Lacan thus builds on Freud, rescuing him from a certain American appropriation of his ideas, and reinstating Freud's contribution of the divided consciousness as something which increases uncertainty (making us proceed more carefully, thoughtfully and imaginatively perhaps) rather than as a call to build-up the ego (as in the American model).

Lacan's system can therefore be seen as an imaginative sophistication of a basic but relatively crude Freudian apparatus.

The Real -which is perhaps what the child acknowledges as un-representable at the mirror stage- is compensated for by both The Symbolic Order (authority of linguistic system) and The Imaginary (the everyday, pragmatic denial of the complexities and uncerainties of our 'Real existence).

Here we see an underlining of our lacks and uncertainties as a subject, but also a map of how we manage this.

The terms Phallus and Castration are crucial. They again build on parts of Freud's system, referring to Incest Taboo and Oedipal conflict as formative of the subject, but Lacan takes them away from the literal and specific into his preferred realm of the Symbolic i.e. they operate less as personal traumas and more as formative but unwritten laws.

The Phallus ot present but a wish, and symbolic of that missing positive term that we sense we are deprived of in language or are deprived of at the Mirror stage. We compensate for such an absence in our Imaginary pragmatism but this is constantly unnerved by the fear of Castration -the underl;ying sense that the Phallus or positive term is an unattainable fantasy. (Here Lacan builds on Freud's essay 'Fetishism' which can be found in the accessible Penguin collection 'On Sexuality').

Nevertheless, the Phallus operates as a primary or superior term. yet symbolic of the male, and central to the system, even as its existence is intrinsically fantasmatic. It provides the 'Order' in the Symbolic Order and remains the Law of the Father despite its mythic or purely Symbolic value.

TO BE CONTINUED ...