Greetings, all! I thought it might be useful to start a thread on our reading & discussion from last week's class, especially since we didn't manage to get to the psychoanalytical material. On Thursday, in the interests of time and in advance of our discussion of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," I'll likely plan to summarize/consolidate some of the ideas and implications from the Freud piece and then open things up for 30-40 minutes discussion of Lacan.
When Marx and Engels write that "the fundamental form of this activity is, of course, material, from which depend all other forms -- mental, political, religious, etc." (19), they're proposing that culture is not an independent reality -- that, in fact, it's inseparable from the historical conditions in which human beings create material lives. Additionally, these historical conditions are permeated by relations of exploitation or domination, and any sense that you have that you may be a "free" individual is a kind of misrecognition (here you can perhaps see how Marxist theory could be linked with Lacan: our identities are relational, but in this case those relations derive from the social relations of production -- division of labor, distinct social classes, etc.), a result of ideologies working on us and putting blinders on us. This is why the piece you read spends all that time on "fetters": we look back on "accidental fetters" and are not aware of the fetter that is currently circumscribing our own lives and age. Marx, of course, would want us to realize that the capitalist economy is first and foremost a power structure, marked by class oppression.
As you think about applying this to literature, you might begin with a very broad but sill useful question: do characters make their fates or suffer them? Does the "I" freely choose (this question might be useful for Coleridge's Ancient Mariner), or is it determined/circumscribed in its choices? You also might be prone to focus more on group identities -- e.g., oppressed or marginalized groups (such as when Simpson refers to the alienated labor of the crew in "Rime") -- with an eye towards identifying and deploying an emancipatory politics.
The basic question-at-issue that motivates Lacan (a kind of renegade French psychoanalyst who lived from 1901-1981) is to wonder how the organic body is related to the abstractions of representation. He pursues this problem/question by drawing on/adding to Freud as well as to the linguistic insights of de Saussure; additionally, when he sees the mirror stage yielding to "the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations" (193), we also sense a link to what Derrida will eventually articulate as "a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences" (197). If you can see the overlap between Saussure, Lacan, and Derrida here, you'll be well on your way to a profitable coalescence!
Lacan sees the Cartesian cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") occurring later in the formation of the ego, but prior to this there occurs a companion kind of moment when the child recognizes its image in the mirror. This is the moment when the child is first able to recognize a reflection of itself, with the fictional image -- the specular, or mirror image -- now identifying the self ("this jubilant assumption of his specular image" results in the I being "precipitated in a primordial form" (190)). The question for you/us then becomes, though, in what sense (according to Lacan and according to what you now know about poststructuralism) is this in fact a misrecognition? Why does Lacan quickly qualify this by proposing that "this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction" (190, emphasis mine), and that the mirror image of wholeness "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures the alienation destination" (191)? What is this "alienating destination" to which he refers and where is it elaborated on in the essay? Answering this will involve understanding Lacan's belief in a "deflection of the specular I into the social I" (193).
Well, I hope this helpful in at least modest ways, and certainly feel free to share an observation and/or a passage, or to raise a question. How do you feel about Lacan's formulations at this point -- forbidding and impenetrable? Intriguing and persuasive? Are you able yet to situate it against the backdrop of what we've already discussed in the past couple of weeks? I'll try to filter some of the Lacan material through that handout of the opening pages of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and then, of course, we'll have that interesting Lacanian reading of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to discuss. This will likely help us to see the relevance/usefulness of this kind of theorizing when it comes to literary interpretation.
