I have a piece of paper in my hands that is asking me to explain how my/any subjectivity is constructed through language, and what implications it has for my own scholarship. How paradoxical! If, following Lacan, we were to argue that subjectivity is constructed through language, through our encounter with the structures that language produces in the world then any form of subjectivity we achieve would be flawed, fragmented, conflicted.
As infants we move from the Imaginary to the Symbolic in a dance of false identifications, however forever longing for the fatal desire for the Real, for that place where we are neither alive nor dead, where our existence in this world is part of being part of our mothers. The only unity that could be reached after we leave our mothers is through death... No identifications exists because there is no outside, no other yet present, there isn't even an I. The only I that exists is the mother we are a part of.
When we enter this world as a separate identity, when we look at ourselves in the mirror and see an Other/I reflected our tenuous identity appears, with border, smudged out edges, us but them simultaneously. Our subjectivity unstable, not fully realised, not our own. What does that mean? all we are, we think we are, is nothing but someone else? The violence of that identification ruptures us but it also arouses us, that other we are we desire. It is the other that is our m/other. But Lacan argues that that identification must be abandoned for a more stable, structured one. One that at its centre we find the phallus.
How can this phallus be the pivot of this structure? how did it come to be the signifier of all language? and as a consequence, of all subjectivity? What gave the phallus that power? That discussion belongs to another rant...
As we begin to construct our subjectivity not from our misguided identification with ourselves/other in the mirror but from our entrance into language and by internalising the structures that surround us, a more stable self appears. However this self is still not as stable as it would be expected, because as Lacan has explained, language is inhabited those signifiers without signifieds, those slippages, those remnants of repressed desires that break through and betray our coherence, our wholeness. And that subjectivity we so carefully treasure, and struggle to maintain finds itself dissolved in the spaces between words, in the emptiness of the non-discursive, in the desire for ends, for death, for union.
If the act of becoming a subject makes me both a subject and object of both myself and the world I inhabit, how can I ever give meaning to it or me? Can I ever write/speak/think coherently, objectively? No.
Like Rosalind Minsky argues: "Our Desire can disrupt any of the meanings we build up in our discourse, at any moment". Our scholarship is a product--a split, incoherent product--of our own subjectivity. Of how we have entered the world of the symbolic, by doing violence to ourselves, to our reflection, to our mothers. And in the act of producing knowledge we will be driven by the desire to undo that violence. But the only way we can speak is through the structures that we had to embrace to be a part of the world, the structures that violented us.
Perhaps the only way we could do scholarship would be by acknowledging the desire for the real, to acknowledge its presence in all that we do, write, speak. By not trying to erase the silences, by recognising that we are the other we seek to destroy, that the shattered image in the mirror, the shattered symbols in language are nothing but empty signifiers. There are no meanings behind them, and if there are, they are contradicting, superfluous, transient.
As infants we move from the Imaginary to the Symbolic in a dance of false identifications, however forever longing for the fatal desire for the Real, for that place where we are neither alive nor dead, where our existence in this world is part of being part of our mothers. The only unity that could be reached after we leave our mothers is through death... No identifications exists because there is no outside, no other yet present, there isn't even an I. The only I that exists is the mother we are a part of.
When we enter this world as a separate identity, when we look at ourselves in the mirror and see an Other/I reflected our tenuous identity appears, with border, smudged out edges, us but them simultaneously. Our subjectivity unstable, not fully realised, not our own. What does that mean? all we are, we think we are, is nothing but someone else? The violence of that identification ruptures us but it also arouses us, that other we are we desire. It is the other that is our m/other. But Lacan argues that that identification must be abandoned for a more stable, structured one. One that at its centre we find the phallus.
How can this phallus be the pivot of this structure? how did it come to be the signifier of all language? and as a consequence, of all subjectivity? What gave the phallus that power? That discussion belongs to another rant...
As we begin to construct our subjectivity not from our misguided identification with ourselves/other in the mirror but from our entrance into language and by internalising the structures that surround us, a more stable self appears. However this self is still not as stable as it would be expected, because as Lacan has explained, language is inhabited those signifiers without signifieds, those slippages, those remnants of repressed desires that break through and betray our coherence, our wholeness. And that subjectivity we so carefully treasure, and struggle to maintain finds itself dissolved in the spaces between words, in the emptiness of the non-discursive, in the desire for ends, for death, for union.
If the act of becoming a subject makes me both a subject and object of both myself and the world I inhabit, how can I ever give meaning to it or me? Can I ever write/speak/think coherently, objectively? No.
Like Rosalind Minsky argues: "Our Desire can disrupt any of the meanings we build up in our discourse, at any moment". Our scholarship is a product--a split, incoherent product--of our own subjectivity. Of how we have entered the world of the symbolic, by doing violence to ourselves, to our reflection, to our mothers. And in the act of producing knowledge we will be driven by the desire to undo that violence. But the only way we can speak is through the structures that we had to embrace to be a part of the world, the structures that violented us.
Perhaps the only way we could do scholarship would be by acknowledging the desire for the real, to acknowledge its presence in all that we do, write, speak. By not trying to erase the silences, by recognising that we are the other we seek to destroy, that the shattered image in the mirror, the shattered symbols in language are nothing but empty signifiers. There are no meanings behind them, and if there are, they are contradicting, superfluous, transient.


I answered this question quite differently, especially the scholarship part. This might sound stupid but, for me, the university/institution is like the m/other; the guardian, the primal site of reference of right and wrong, true and false, trivial and profound. The university as m/other manufactures her children that bears her mark. But above all, her children will feel like they are 'complete' subjects and ready for the world once they leave m/other.
ReplyDeleteHowever, like a restless child, the subject does not entirely feel comfortable being simply a blank canvas for the imprints of m/other and often questions and rejects what is passed down from the m/other. The product of this tenuous relationship between university as m/other and the learning scholar in the process of 'becoming' is "creative" scholarship; Scholarship that is not entirely m/other's, not entirely the subject's either but one that is new, fresh, but needs to be defended, preserved, and re-affirmed by other m/others.
This is pure fantasy of course. But I couldn't think any other way to answering this question on Lacan :(