Page 107 - Decoding Culture

100 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

observed his grandson throwing away and recovering a cotton­
reel, accompanied by the repeated cries of 'f o rf (off it goes) and
'da' (here it is) , a game he interpreted primarily as an attempt by
the infant to deal with the absence of the mother but also as a
beginning process in the construction of a symbolic universe.
Lacan extends this such that/ort and da become signifiers of pres­
ence/ absence, foundations, as it were, of the difference system of
language. Then, later still, in the Oedipal phase, the infant encoun­
ters the full force of the Symbolic, subjected through language to
the 'Name-of-the-Father', to the Law, made into a nascent social
subject via the mechanism of the castration complex.
Of course, the apparent phasing of this description should not
be taken literally. What is captured here, rather, is the sense of
subject formation being intimately connected with the acquisition
and character of language. The castration complex is seen to com­
plete, in its establishment of differences, the process inaugurated
by the mirror phase and the FortiDa game in which subjectivity is
organised by the same structures as language' (Coward and Ellis,
1977: 1 1 5). The slogan with which Lacan's work is so often char­
acterized is 'the unconscious is structured like a language', a
phrase which, as always with Lacan, may be open to many readings
but which certainly suggests the centrality of difference relations
in the constitution of subjectivity as much as in the constitution of
language. To become a subject is to find a place in a system of rep­
resentations, to be constituted through the Symbolic as a
seemingly unified self.
Now this is more or less the claim that Althusser borrows in
constructing his view of interpellation. But even on this deliber­
ately thin account of Lacanian theory it is not clear that subject
formation and interpellation are ideal bedfellows. Interpellation
has a certain mechanistic quality, a sense of constraint and fixity.
Indeed, that was its attraction to those eager to explore the

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