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196 LANGUAGE

this, claiming the whole of Lacanian theory as a valid materialist theory of
subjectivity and the internalization of ideology (see below).
It is during the ‘mirror’ stage that the child begins to acquire language. This
results from the child’s attempts to express and to come to terms with its
experience of the presence and absence of satisfaction. Absence of satisfaction
creates a sense of anxiety in the child, and both Freud and Lacan see the attempt
to master this anxiety (and ultimately to control desire) as the impetus behind the
acquisition and use of language. Lacan cites Freud’s example of a child playing
with a cotton reel. The child’s repeated action of throwing away and retrieving
the reel to the accompaniment of the words ‘fort’ (‘gone’) and ‘da’ (‘here’),
enabled the child to symbolize control over the presence and absence of objects,
the primary object being the child’s mother, and thus symbolically to control the
source of satisfaction. Throughout the ‘mirror’ stage all identifications are
imaginary. This is marked by the child’s use of language, by her/his inability to
distinguish between the positions of I, you and she/he. The child refers to itself
and others in the third person. Full mastery of language does not occur until the
child is able to assume a gendered position with the symbolic order of socio-
cultural relations after the resolution of the Oedipus Complex. Language is the
key to this positioning within the symbolic order, in the sense that it is through
language that consciousness and the unconscious are structured around Oedipal
relations and social relations more generally are laid down.
It is in language that the ‘I’ of the imaginary order is transformed into a fully
conscious, thinking, speaking subject, able to distinguish between itself and
others. The ‘I’ becomes a full speaking subject through its incorporation into the
cultural structures of linguistic communication, where it becomes the subject
who speaks and from whom knowledge apparently comes. Yet by virtue of being
in the position of speaking subject, the ‘I’ is subjected to the laws of language
and, by extension, society—laws which precede it and give it the power to
speak. Subjectivity is thus a function of language, not a pre-given, fixed human
characteristic, as rational philosophy presupposes. As such it is continually ‘in
process’, in the sense that it is reconstituted every time we use language, whether
to ourselves or to others.
Thus language forms the structure of both the unconscious and the symbolic
order. Lacan looks to Saussure and to Jakobsen for a way of theorizing the actual
mechanisms of language. From Saussure he derives the concepts of a linguistic
chain and the concepts of signifier and signified. From Jakobsen he takes the
concepts of metaphor and metonymy, which he sees as homologous with Freud’s
concepts of condensation and displacement (see below), In Lacan’s theory
language consists of interlinked chains of signifiers rooted in the unconscious.
Lacan insists on the term signifier because it is a principle of his theory that
meaning cannot be fixed, a priori, in a particular signified; that is, there can be
no such thing as denotative meaning. Meaning lies in the relation between
signifiers. These relations can be structured according to the principles of either
metonymy or metaphor. Language could be denotative (could contain a priori