Page 206 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 195

Since desire is not merely an abstract theoretical principle, like ‘differance’,
but a theoretical principle in Lacan’s theorization of the acquisition and
structuring of subjectivity and language, which has a psychosexual basis in child
development, we need now to look at this process of psychosexual development.
The pyschosexual theory is also important to an understanding of the way parts of
Lacan’s theory, in particular the ‘mirror’ phase, have been taken up and
incorporated in materialist theories of ideology.
Lacan’s theory of the psychosexual development of the human infant follows
Freud’s closely, but with the important addition of the ‘mirror’ stage. The first
stage that the infant goes through after birth is the pre-Oedipal, when it is
concerned with the exploration of sensory perception; its main feature is auto-
eroticism. At this stage the infant is unable to distinguish between things
associated with its own body and the external world. It has no sense of its
physical separateness from the rest of the world, nor of its physical unity as an
organism. Its predominant sensation is one of fragmentation. The automatic
satisfaction of need which it experienced in the womb is no longer a constant
factor. Satisfaction in the form of the mother’s breast, warmth and physical
comfort is sometimes absent, and the child can neither control the satisfaction of
its needs nor attempt control through language.
The initial conscious recognition by the infant of the distinction between its
own body and the outside world comes at about six months, with the beginning of
the ‘mirror’ stage. The child, which experiences itself as a fragmented mass of
unco-ordinated limbs, identifies with a visual (mirror) image of a complete,
unified body. This identification, which is the child’s first intelligent act, is the
basis of what Lacan calls ‘imaginary relations’. Identification with the physical
form of another gives the child an imaginary experience of what it must be like
to be in control of its body and of its own needs—to be able to control their
satisfaction. However, the child is as yet unable to distinguish between the form
it identifies with and itself. This form, which is seen as unified and distinct from
the rest of the world, is seen by the child as itself. In this sense the identification
is based on misrecognition; is ‘imaginary’. Thus, for example, children at this
stage of development cannot distinguish between themselves and their object of
imaginary identification (their imago): ‘A child who strikes another says he has
been struck; the child who sees another fall cries.’ 20
The structure of misrecognition laid down in the imaginary relations of the
‘mirror’ stage remains important even after the child has entered the symbolic
order and has become a speaking subject on the resolution of the Oedipus and
castration complexes. Thus, when speaking, the subject identifies herself or
himself with the ‘Other’—that is, with the source of meaning—as if meaning
came from her/him, in an act of misrecognition. It is this structure of
misrecognition which has been taken up by Althusser, Laclau and others as one
of the mechanisms at work in ideology. It is seen as the basis of identification by
the subject with a particular ideological position, through what is termed the
‘interpellation’ of the subject in ideology. Other Marxists have gone further than