Page 205 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

194 LANGUAGE

heterosexual love objects. In the psychosexual development of the child the
resolution of the Oedipus Complex is achieved in a gender-specific way through
the differential male and female effects of the fear of castration. In the male
mode this is a real fear of castration by the real father, who is identified with the
symbolic position of power and control. In the female mode it involves
acceptance of having already been castrated and of standing in a negative
relation to the symbolic position of control of the laws of human culture with
which the father is misidentified. This position of power and control, which
Lacan calls control of the phallus (the phallus being the signifier of desire) from
the position of the ‘Other’, is not actually occupied by anyone but is the
structuring principle of the positions which individuals can occupy within the
symbolic order of human culture. It is culturally identifiable, for example, in the
power of the ‘Name of the Father’ in Judaic and Christian cultures. Desire to
control the laws of human culture (to occupy the position of control of the
phallus by the ‘Other’) is the structuring principle of language.
The moment of the acquisition of language as a total structure is the point in
psychosexual development when the resolution of the Oedipus Complex is
achieved and the individual is able to assume a gendered position within the
symbolic order. The symbolic order is the realm of conscious human thought,
laws and culture, and its structures are embodied in the very structures of
language itself, which designate positions from which one may speak. Language
exists prior to any individual speaking subject, and it is through language
acquisition—that is, by taking up the position of speaking subject within
language—that the human individual acquires gendered, conscious subjectivity.
The basis of language is desire, and signification is a continual attempt by the
subject to control desire by striving to occupy the position from which meaning
and the socio-cultural laws controlling the satisfaction of desire come. This is
what Lacan calls occupying the position of ‘Otherness’ (identifying, in an
imaginary way, with the ‘Other’)—the position of control which structures one’s
own ability to speak and to obtain satisfaction.
Thus desire is the structuring principle of the psyche, of langauge and of
subjectivity. It is the manifestation of the lack experienced by the individual
because she or he is not the source of the laws of human culture and does not
control them but is subjected to them and to the subject positions they make
available. The lack of control is manifested in the individual through the gap
between need, demand and satisfaction. Desire, which marks this gap, can, in
principle, never be satisfied, since this would involve occupying the position of
the ‘Other’ and becoming the structuring principle of human culture. Language,
which involves the symbolization of this lack, is a never-ending attempt to
control it. However, desire as a structuring principle, like ‘differance’ in
Derrida’s theory, has the effect of constantly deferring meaning through chains
of signifiers, which are never fixed once and for all, as this fixing could only
come from the source of meaning and control, the position of the ‘Other’.