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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 123

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

analytic sense, is determined’ (p. 166). This is the ‘transference-
function’ of the signifier: to represent what the unconscious will
not allow to be presented in its raw truth—desire. Metonymy,
by contrast, refers to the continual displacement of desire along
the chain of signifiers as the ego drives the subject’s endless
search for unity.
Lacanian psychoanalysis has been employed widely in post-
structuralist literary and cultural criticism, perhaps most
influentially so in work on the ‘gaze’. Lacan derived this notion
from Freud’s account of ‘scopophilia’, or the pleasure of looking,
in On Metapsychology. The child’s displacement of its auto-erotic
drive onto others during the Oedipal phase involves a
scopophilic drive, in which the gaze directed towards the other
produces pleasure. Freud viewed the process as at the root of
narcissism, voyeurism and masochism. In Lacan, however,
scopophilia was extended into the very formation of subjectivity
itself, through the notion that we seek confirmation of self in the
gaze of others. It is this illusory confirmation that ‘sutures’ the
impossibility of uniting with the big Other. Lacan’s conception
of subjectivity is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s theory of the self as
formed in dialogue with others. But Lacan’s version of the psyche
is essentially negative, leaving little hope for any eventual reso-
lution of personal or civilisational discontents. As Roudinescou
describes it: ‘psychoanalysis can never be an agent in the adap-
tation of man to society...it is doomed to live in the world and
to see disorder in the world as a disorder of consciousness’
(Roudinescou, 1997, p. 216). Some of the more persuasive uses
of the theory of the gaze have been made by feminists inquiring
into the ‘male gaze’. The obvious problem remains that Lacan’s
notion of ‘desire as lack’ seems quite unable to explain conflict-
ual desires, arising from the specific contexts of real individuals,
especially non-normative sexuality. Even Elizabeth Grosz, a
theorist who found in Lacan an important source of inspiration
(Grosz, 1990), came to question the value of a theory unable to
‘account for, to explain, or to acknowledge the existence of an
active and explicitly female desire, and, more particularly, the
active and sexual female desire for other women that defines
lesbianism’ (Grosz, 1994, p. 275).

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