Page 131 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

that, as it were, ‘speaks’ it: ‘It is the world of words that creates
the world of things’ (p. 65). But entry into the ‘Symbolic’ and the
acquisition of subjectivity are achieved only at the price of a loss
of this imaginary identity with the mother. The symbolic order
is thus masculine: it is, in short, the Law of the Father. Though
a child might have no empirical father present, it is nonetheless
socialised into pre-existent symbolic social structures under the
agency of paternity. The Law of the Father is symbolised by
the ‘phallus’, which is not the actual penis, but rather the ‘trans-
cendental signifier’, as Lacan terms it, that grounds the social
order.
Lacan’s third term, the Real, stands in opposition both to the
Symbolic (language, the social, culture, other people) and to
the Imaginary (the subject’s sense of its relationship to the Sym-
bolic). The Real is not ‘reality’, however; it is all that lies outside
and inside the subject, but which is never directly accessible.
For Lacan, the original lack is not the lost unity with the mother,
but the lack of self. Driven to fill this originary lack, which can
never be wholly sutured over, the individual is traversed by
insatiable desires, which are displaced from object to object in
search of recognition and acceptance. Here, Lacan distinguished
between the ‘big Other’ the ‘little other’. The former is all that
the subject desires to know and bond with in its plenitude and
full presence, but which forever remains at a remove. In conse-
quence, the subject ‘transfers’ this desire to substitute versions
represented by the ‘little other’. In his later theorisations, Lacan
would redefine the big Other as the Real.
Lacan was particularly interested in Lévi-Strauss’ emphasis
on the function of the signifier, as distinct from the signified, an
idea that led him to the notion of ‘an incessant sliding of the
signified under the signifier’ (p. 154). In short, meaning can never
be definitively fixed on a signifier, but is constantly displaced
from signifier to signifier, much as Derrida imagined, in a chain
of perpetual signification. Lacan saw Freud’s concepts of ‘dis-
placement’ and ‘condensation’ as corresponding to metonymy
and metaphor, the primary figures of language in Jakobson.
Metaphor points to the substitution for one signifier of another
and is thus the ‘very mechanism by which the symptom, in the

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