Freud and Marx After Semiotics

What are the chief discoveries of Freud and Marx in the light of semiotics? In this question, let us state from the outset, that we do not intend to read Saussure or Peirce as a ‘key’ or ‘master’ text. That approach has already (for Freud and Saussure at least) been taken by Lacan. Rather, one must read all three sets of cultural productions—Freudian, Marxist, and semiotic—in a relation of equality to each other. These are the most important texts of our late modern era—and by ‘text’ we mean the body of writings and their followers and -isms as well—which constantly reinterpret each other.

The semiotization of Freud was the signal accomplishment of the sixties and we are beginning to comprehend Marx’s semiotic as well. Saussure and his linguistic/literary ancestors and descendants (Plato/ Rousseau/Roland Barthes et al.) have, conversely, undergone a materialist critique.⁴ Working this triadic configuration out in all its significant ramifications—from biology to theology—is probably the chief task of the coming decade.

The state of the synthesis at the present moment is utter confusion: the reader is constantly besieged with such a variety of strange bedfellows that the bed, semiology, must be suspected of Procrusteanism. Mao and Chomsky, Althusser and Heidegger, Marx and Saussure all cohabit in this contiguous stream of partial similarities, local parallels. This is a very model of association, each of the thinkers making his or her modest (metonymie) contribution to the corpus. One wonders at first what can indeed be the purpose of such an assemblage, which has neither diachronic and historical nor synchronic and paradigmatic value.

A deep reading of this confusion suggests a marshalling of allies for an assault upon the enemy: ideas of ‘fixed and uniform subjectivity’, bourgeois illusions of subjective identity, autonomy, and freedom. It is these illusions that act as a barrier to social renewal.

In their recent study, Language and Materialism, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis (1977:68-75 and 114ff.) refer to Barthes’s (1974) reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine. Sarrasine is the story of a man who obtains a night with a beautiful woman on the condition that he tell the tale of another man who fell in love with a “woman” who was really a eunuch, a castrato. Coward and Ellis make the story into an analytical model designed to attack the foundation, the bedrock, of bourgeois society: sexual identity. Whether in Balzac, Lacan, Barthes, or Lévi-Strauss, in Sarrasine, in the theory of the castration complex, or in the arbitrary nature of symbolic classification, the central task of the Freudian-Marxist convergence has been the démystification of sexual (and therefore subjective) identification. It is the breakdown of this classificatory system that Coward and Ellis and others believe will lead to the semiotic revolution.⁵

We are suggesting that there is a still more basic issue at stake in the current attack on the subject. If we follow Derrida and Foucault through and beyond the disturbance of sexual identity, we find the death of the subject occurring at the level of the ego, imagination, rhetoric, the self, and forms (figures). The Freudian-Marxist thinkers of the sixties (and after) do not have a philosophical or a theoretical-conceptual goal. Their goal is religious and redemptive. “The subject has to be destroyed,” we read, but this is immediately followed by the subtle reassurance, “and remade in the signifier” (Coward and Ellis 1977:130). Other examples of this effort to displace the subject by means of its death and resurrection proliferate in the writings of the Freudian Marxists, structuralists, and post-structuralists. We would not be disturbed if we could classify these lapses as classical instances of the millennial mentality common to participants in a social movement behind a new paradigm.⁶

But what would happen if the paradigm itself become contaminated by this redemptive theology?

Let us turn away from this disquieting possibility and go back to Lacan for a new beginning. Lacan’s existentialism and semiotization of Freud contains both possibilities: a semiotic redemption of the individual and a radical disconnection of the ego, self, subject, and imagination, etc., from their overdetermination by sociohistorical process. Friend to and intellectual affiliate of the existentialists, Heideggerian in his outlook, Lacan could see in structuralism a logical development beyond existentialism but in need of the subjective theses he could bring to it. Structuralism had become an idealism, the sign too much inscribed in hypostasized sets of oppositions (signifier/signified) that had quickly become hierarchies of privileged meaning over mere signifiants. Lacan’s ‘materialist critique of the sign’ (actually quite distinct from Derrida’s) was to bring to an arid and static structuralism the central and clearly existential question of the “subject” (as material presence, speaker) in spirit and in the flesh. Language, the taking up of a position which is already pre-formed by linguistic categories,⁷ offers the means of linking symbolic (fixed) structures to their source and vice versa. Continuity out of the discontinuity of experience is the goal. Structural order becomes pliable under the force of the drives. But they also liberate the subject from the oppressive weighty Symbolic Order into which it is thrown. (We are referring to the Symbolic Order as discovered by Heidegger as Gerede and Lévi-Strauss as ‘myth,’ or network. [See Wilden 1968:130]). Lacan (168:42) writes in his Discours de Rome:

As Merleau-Ponty might have put it, corporeal desire, desire incarnate, material desire, reveals the pretensions of the Universe to be only that of a world when seen from the point of view of subjective experience or the present moment. The Heideggerian vocabulary is unmistakable, and although it was in vogue at the time (recall that the Discours took place in 1953), the schema does permeate Lacan’s work. The subject is thrown into everyday life’s network of symbols that are apparently fixed; but these are meaningless in themselves, lack Being, and are really only signifiers dependent upon other such signifiers for any meaning at all. Weak and fallen, Heidegger’s subject can yet have some moments in which the particular mode of Being of Dasein (time) can be experienced with intensity; similarly, in Lacan, within the finite dictionary-totality of signifiers certain signifiers achieve a kind of fleeting superiority of status, as “points de capiton,” (privileged signifier, or symbols), nodal points⁸ that have the prestige of generating chains of signification (Coward and Ellis 1977:97).

It is difficult to sort out Lacan from his commentators, not because of problems of translation, but because he has arbitrarily excluded his own readings of Freud from his (belated) published Ecrits.⁹ It is often unclear whether Lacan is basically being interpreted in the hermeneutic way (the hermeneutics we just learned, only to have it attacked by post-structural rhetoric) or whether he is in fact ironizing hermeneutics. But there is little doubt that his version of the subject is both that of a personal experience of fragmentation and that of a Symbolic Order, the appearance of a meaningful totality that is in fact ungrounded—an ‘it’, a “they say” (Discourse of the Other), an unconscious, or an “id”—a dictionary whose meanings only exist by dint of the existence of the totality of signifiers.¹⁰ The subject-as-Universal-Symbolic-Order both oppresses and sustains the personal subject.

The intricacies of this system are produced by its link with existentialism, which link is the greatest difficulty in the Freud-Marx-Saussure triad. Can Marx be articulated to the redemptive notion of the subject in post-structural thought? Not unless he is disfigured. We must try to push these ideas beyond the idea of redemption, which is based on a myth of innocent origins of the subject, of consciousness. It is on precisely this point that Marx cannot be dragged into a premature Marxist “synthesis.” All oppositions and contradictions within Marx’s project are essentially and originally repressive. And consciousness that emerges from opposition cannot have an innocent beginning. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty crashed on the same rocks, Sartre when he attempted a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism (especially in the Critique de ia Raison dialectique);¹¹ Merleau-Ponty when he took a stand of purely personal commitment for which he did not adequately account intellectually. The two -isms cohabit but with discomfort in the postwar period, in what is technically a pre-semiotic comprehension of Husserl and possibly Heidegger.¹²

Marx resists incorporation in a redemptive post-structural paradigm. But there seems some room for movement in a radical reconfiguration of the question of the subject that has not been designed in the first place to keep the old subject alive in the new paradigm. We have already suggested the potential for a Marxist semiotic (chapter 1) and the work of applying key Freudian concepts to Marx’s analysis has been begun by Louis Althusser. Let us move on to the more interesting matters.

Consider the difference between the ‘subject’ of the Heideggerian Lacan and the ‘subject’ of psychoanalysis, i.e., the experiential one. Imagine for a moment that entire Symbolic Order as absent or as bearing no evident signs of relationships, no support networks, nor even interconnected lines or channels through which communication with their subjective grounding could ever be possible. Imagine an Unconscious that is not full of the archaeologic ruins, that is not composed of fragments and marks of an earlier subjectivity and desire that have been temporarily alienated from its prior intentions.¹³ Imagine an Unconscious that is not structured like a grammar fixing the symbolic order and identifying the personal subject but is instead structured as a rhetoric (Derrida 1967b: 310 and Charles 1977:116), in which order fails at every step and at every stage and requires one to take a position. Imagine a non-Hegelian subject.

Think of Emma Bovary—all the Emmas (or Flauberts) like her suffering from Yonneville to San Jose (in all the yawn villes)—precisely because the “Symbolic Order” has yet to be invented. Getting the symbolic order together is not the most ‘revolutionary’ act of the modern subject, as Coward and Ellis suggest: it is in fact the sole source of continuity, this ongoing manufacture of ‘tradition’. Emma, expectant at every upcoming ‘stage’ of life, finds quite simply that no fixed institutions await her. A minimal investment of libido, informing and forming her relationships with love, interest, or merely attention, is precisely the gesture she will not make: she fails, literally, to take a position and thereby to participate actively in the ‘social construction of reality’. And she, not the ‘revolutionary’, becomes the disruptive, asocial force, albeit not in the mode of a willed gesture. She does not know why “everything I touch turns rotten,” as she says on finding her garden loveseat in decay. Her failure to invest disfigures all social roles, institutions, and rites: a more spiritless wife, mother, and mistress it would be hard to find.¹⁴

The “Symbolic Order” is a vast network that has been produced by rhetorical positions that have forgotten their origin in desire or are, rather, a perversion of these desires. Lacan (1970:189) once said the manifestation of the unconscious as a Symbolic Order is like “Baltimore in the morning.” The anonymous structures seem to stand as testimony to the impossibility of desire’s being named as such or ever manifesting itself except in a completely ruined form.¹⁵ This has been how many of Lacan’s interpreters understand the unconscious. We shall follow these later developments now to show a current impasse in their thinking.

How does one rescue desire, which, as Lacan wrote in the Discours de Rome, is the only human force to counter the elaboration of the network and revitalize it? Two directions have been proposed within post-Lacanian semiotics, one by Julia Kristeva, the other by Deleuze and Guattari. Neither is necessarily satisfactory because each finally avoids confronting the question of the subject.

We shall see in chapter 7 Kristeva’s equation of “the semiotic” with desires that escape symbolic repression, in the pre-linguistic form of partial articulations or signifiers without signifieds. In her version the semiotic acts as a force because it is in contradiction to the order of men and things; it becomes a productive force by virtue of being a disruptive force.

Kristeva’s almost Hegelian vision is quite distinct from that of another branch of neo-Lacanians, the group around Deleuze and Guattari. Here the ultimate absence of repression seems to be possible—desire, the final signified, can be manifested in its essence. The Unconscious-as-a Symbolic-Network is a labyrinth that has been created by dammings or repressions.¹⁶ Liberation is tantamount to facilitating freeflow of libido, to “transversing” (Guattari’s term) the line separating conscious and unconscious. The aim would be to allow desire to circulate freely, to allow it to display itself openly. Guattari’s impatience (like Emma’s) is clear: “The real question is whether the production of desire, a dream, a passion, a concrete Utopia, will finally acquire the same existential dignity in social life as the manufacturing of cars or fads” (Guattari 1977:79). There is an ultimate homology between the individual body and the socio-symbolic order, a homology between individual desire and Kapital,¹⁷ and it is this homology that makes all of the socioeconomic system open to liberation. The alternative to liberation—in the case of terminal disorder—is the decision like Emma’s not to invest, to divert desire and (libidinal) capital to alternative areas. The final revolution is dropping out.

The poles of the thesis of the “Symbolic Order” as the blockages of unconscious desire produced by the mechanism of repression, the mechanism that also authors the self and the consciousness, seen in Kristeva on the left and Guattari on the right (or is it the reverse?), are of course part of the larger movement that has difficulty with the question of the restrictions posed by form, which we have begun to sketch. It is still form, in the psychoanalytic case, the ego, that seems to us to require a Marxist rethinking before it can be so easily bypassed. Freud stresses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in his writing on crowd behavior how central repression is to his theory (Freud 1929:91 and 1948:84-97). We can take this concept seriously not as another word for oppression or subjugation as many of the neo-Freudian/neo-Marxists of the sixties did, and we can also make more explicit a Freudian link to Marx’s analytic through their common semiotic of form/and/matter.

THE SEMIOTIC OF THE SELF

The self or ego is that form (figure) which is itself a secondary interpretation of subjective existence. In Freud’s own terms it is an institution or a composition that is totally dependent upon an investment of desire and love (Freud 1936:24-25). We do have some current readings of Freud that confine themselves to the level of the self, or figurative aspect of the subject. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s (1977) brilliant analyses of mimesis and his recent attack on the problem of representation (1978:19) in Freud is an example of this analytic, which relegates the unconscious to Sartrean nothingness. This theoretical move allows one to interpret the manifestations of consciousness, its figures, as the totality of its subject matter. By denying the reality of deep structures or of backs behind fronts, we can study the self as a kind of reverse sign: it is a presentation that masquerades as a representation. Saying “I” is a theatrical pretense that there is a subject to one’s enunciation, a subject that is actually a mere hypothesis (see J. MacCannell 1974 and 1975).

Restricting one’s semiotic to the level of sign as manifestation allows one to deal with the self or with the ego as that which, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “performs I,” yet it does not really do justice to the contribution and honest complexity of Freud’s semiotic. It seems to us that it is the very notion of subject that Freud meant to revise, by situating the ego and id as constant rivals, each capable of pyrrhic “victories” over the other, and persisting always by a fiction of having reduced or bested the other. Like signifier and signified in Saussure’s terms, ego and id, consciousness and the unconscious, are mutually determinant, and defined by their difference. This difference is repression, and it is this difference, like a semi-permeable membrane, that allows for the intense involvements of each in the other. Reinscribing this structure in the language of subjectivity before taking account of the drama, the agon, that is the essence of psychic life in Freud, is premature and leads to distortions. Freud’s basically conflictual model would include all the other meanings the term ‘subject’ can have, primarily its implication in being defeated, in subjection, thrown under. There are ‘loyal subjects’ and ‘subjects of experiments’, and the surplus meanings of ‘subject’ reveal the desire for dominance that resides in subjective life, and which it was Freud’s special talent to be able to demystify. Lacan’s playful attempt to restrict analysis to the level of the signifier (the real subject is the barred subject, $, or that which does not cross the barrier of repression) is consistent with discourse analysis and yet not fully semiotic, as is Freud. Let us detour by way of Jacques Derrida’s (1972:10) double science to read a Freud who fits into a post-structural version of the sign: Signs that always have “other meanings” that erode the “first” meaning from within and attack it as the id attacks the ego.

The French Freud of Jacques Derrida (1967a and b) and Jean Laplanche (1976) exposed the latency or “unthought” of Lacan’s rereading of Freud and provided the occasional cause for their rewriting. Although De la Grammatologie for example refers overtly to these categories as they appear in Heidegger, there can be little doubt that Lacan’s vocabulary is also in view: the concepts Derrida analyzes, such as subject, speech, voice, presence, and symbol, are fully as privileged in Lacan as in Heidegger. Using Freud’s theory of Nachträglichkeit (which feeds into Derrida’s différance), secondarity or retardation, Derrida revises Lacan’s semiotization of Freud by criticizing the implicit value of the key concepts of material presence and the primacy of the signifier, corporeality, and sound. Laplanche, whose book is conceptually very close to Derrida’s (1967b) essay, provides us with extremely lucid expositions of Freud that read Freud semiotically and without the subjective vocabulary often dominant in Lacan. (Laplanche and his colleague J. B. Pontalis have collaborated to offer a useful dictionary of psychoanalytic terms.) Let us now turn to this version of Freud, which does not view the fall from desire into semiosis as a subjective crisis, for ill or for good.

Freud could only view the achievement of rewriting nature, the capacity for the mind to affect the body, for semiology to (re)direct biology, as a two-edged accomplishment. As Laplanche has so ably shown us, this rewriting begins, according to Freud, in the very first situations of anaclisis: Here the “drives” (the idea of natural forces) are “propped” on the “instincts” (natural forces). Need, for example, would manifest itself earliest as a ‘natural’ need—physical hunger. Other needs would be analogized to be structurally similar to hunger and its manner of satisfaction, and ideational needs would be assumed to be physical needs.¹⁸ Sexuality is the chief example: Laplanche cites Freud’s repeated assertion that the psyche’s interpretation that sexuality is (like) a physical need acts as much the part of a force in affecting behavior as any ‘purely’ physical forces (if there are such.)¹⁹

The capacity for interpreting thus exhibited by the psyche is, at both the micro and macro levels, a process of semiosis: anticipating by foresight and interpreting by hindsight experiences as signs of other experiences. There is therefore a gap in experience, moments or periods when experience—in all senses of the term—simply fails. In the derivation of psychic entities from natural entities what is most important for us to understand is the absence of any direct, primary experience of the meaning of an event. Present meanings are precluded for the peculiar construction that the psyche is because for it, meaning is only after-the-fact. The retardation, first of maturity (the prolonged helplessness of the infant), then of sexuality (the retardation of puberty), opens the breach into which semiosis (sign production) and semiotic (sign interpretation) flow. These delays promote psychic life (Freud 1936:100).

It is the failure of meaning of an experience or event to be present or embodied or located in the event that has most intrigued Derrida with Freud’s theses. Meaning is always deferred, nachträglich, a part of the process of reading signs: they can be read only in relation to other signs that equally fail to capture or embody meaning. The process has been interpreted by Jameson (1972:172) as the relay of meaning from signifier to signifier: but we intend here to read meaning-for-the-psyche as occurring by signs, that is signs that call to mind (consciously or not) something other than themselves. What becomes most important in this case is to look at the particular kind of representation involved in the work of the psyche. For these are signs that while they cannot be said to have an accessible concept or signified, yet appear to have one, and their power lies in their seeming to be charged with meaning. The analyst will hesitate before s/he easily makes the neo-existential gesture demystifying the signified in the name of the signifier, or vice versa.

Observe the way Freud handles the hysterical symbol as the archetypal sign in the Saussurian sense (whose referent is arbitrary). The ordinary symbol such as a flag stands, we believe, for something present, or at least recalled in the mode of representation. On the other hand in the hysterical symbol, such as flag-waving, “what is symbolized ... is entirely forgotten and has evacuated its entire charge and the whole of its affect into what symbolizes it” (Laplanche 1976:36-37; from Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology) . The unconscious is the indication of the lack of motivation of the symbol, the arbitrariness of the sign.

To illustrate, Freud uses the case of a young hysteric who could never enter a shop. In analysis she remembered an incident at age twelve when she had entered a shop and had fled in fright when she thought she saw a clerk laughing at her clothes. The shop, the clothes had obviously symbolized something for her, but the referent was lost. The symptom, intense, clearly charged with affect, carried the entire weight of a meaning without having one. Further probing revealed a couple of prior incidents in a shop wherein the child had possibly been the victim of a sexual assault. Yet the first incident lay fallow for it had no meaning at the time it occurred. It was only at adolescence, when the girl had acquired sexual ideas, that she could interpret or give a construction to the earlier scene. In the ‘normal’ psyche this naming of the prior experience accommodates and attenuates it; literally gives it to the ‘Symbolic Order’, or langue. But for the hysteric the ‘normal’ process of symbolic naming—the (repressive) construction of language—becomes a positive, unconscious misnaming (“laughing at the clothes”): one is left with a lie, the protonpseudos. It is the misrepresentation that intensifies the affective power, that indeed (and this is the radical point) gives the sole power to affect: without the misnaming, or metaphorization, we would have only ‘memory traces without affect’ (Laplanche 1976:57).²⁰ This deferred affect in fact mimics an original, i.e., pre-ego, emotional subjective response: as Freud writes, “the retardation of puberty makes possible the occurrence of posthumous primary experiences.” The ‘event’ is not an ‘event’ until after it has already passed: Freud writes, “We never manage to fix the traumatic event historically” (cited in Laplanche 1976:43, 41).

This is enough to illustrate how different the emphasis is when Freud’s analytic is to be seen as a classical semiotic, (re)discovering in the lack of motivation of the symbol (in hysteria) the arbitrary relation between symptom and disease, and the necessity for interpretation. But interpretation, reading signs, is the work of the psyche, not just of intellectuals. The psyche never finds its meanings ready-made in a dictionary or symbolic order, but tracks them through pathways already unconsciously traced by an experience which, while remembered at some level, has never had a proper name given it. The psychic process of misrepresentation is both idiomatic and also generic to humanity. It is the movement between the idiosyncratic process of ‘creating’ meaning and the collective accretion of these (mis)represented meanings that constitutes Freud’s version of the subject and condemns it to exist forever between blindness and insight.

To use these two terms recalls Heidegger, and it is vis-à-vis a Heideggerian reading of Freud that Derrida’s and Laplanche’s can be measured. In Derrida’s version there can be no ‘forgetting’ of the symbolic order since by definition the symbol is a remembering of something forgotten only we cannot quite remember what. Institutions are not caught in the dilemma of being either oppressive or tolerant; they are simply the meanings (conscious or unconscious) a nonmeaningful existence acquires for us. In this version the gesture of “uncovering” foundational binary oppositions that institute or fix a social hierarchy, or chain of significations—such as male/female in the castration complex fixation—can never be innocent or neutral if it indulgently accepts the particular sort of opposition it uncovers as being the way of all flesh—and of all meaning. This acceptance is itself an interpretation in the mode of agreement with the structured opposition and could never be revolutionary.

The primacy of the signifier, the prime signifier, the phallus, institutes our culture of domination and subjection: and so we find Derrida chiding Lacan for his ‘phallogocentrism’ (1975:96-98), for his complicity in the primacy of the phallus as signifier of the first domination of nature:

Lacan, whose perspective is ultimately that of social reintegration in a living present of the speech act (speech being the first social institution, as the eighteenth century taught us) is an operative force in continuing this institution. Note that we must abandon Lacan and look elsewhere for a theory of a “female sexuality not organized to reproductive ends” (Coward and Ellis 1977: 156). Derrida writes:

The phallus, the symbol not of the male organ, but of the sociocultural counterpart to natural power (the primacy over nature) would be, in the Lacanian interpretation, an illusion of autonomy (desire is always dependent on its object), but a (socially) necessary mystification. In the Derridean version the mystification is an “enormous old root which must be accounted for” as perhaps above all a misrepresentation. Lacan’s version of the signifier-as-phallus ultimately equates desire with the consciousness of a lack. Derrida’s version of the signifier-as-hymen (in his essay “Spurs” [1979]) links desire with the border that differentiates consciousness and the unconscious. Consider the possibility that the phallus is not a sign of power, but a sign of failure of desire (love) and a loss of its object (anxiety). In this alternative version, phallic primacy can be retraced to the primacy of a (feminine?) gap, a gap not in being but in existence,²¹ a gap between signifier and signified.

Lacan is not philosophical enough nor radical enough to get us beyond this moment. Lacan’s discovery of the phallogocentric roots of our subjectivity (like Balzac’s) has the effect of perpetuating it, and not, as Coward and Ellis so ardently hope (1978:116-20), of overthrowing it to renew it in a more perfect condition. Until the political implications of the subject’s (phallic) involvement in power and domination are fully explored we cannot hope to see a fundamental revision of social, culturally derived inequities. At the same time that the castration-complex and Oedipal anxiety over the phallus is assumed to be the masterpattern for organizing subjective life and culture as a whole it is being challenged by questions about the (sexual) source of the subject’s existence. Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal stance is not necessarily endorsed by us, nor is Laplanche’s attack on the primacy of Oedipus (Laplanche takes account of siblings, not just of parents); but these challenges to Oedipus are signs of rebellion within psychoanalysis, and they are correlated with criticism of basic cultural institutions.

Indeed the fundamental questioning of the phallic roots of our institutions may be far-reaching in its effects: one might recall Diderot’s remark that there is “a little bit of testicle at the foundation of all our sentiments” to remind oneself of the powers of change that resided in some earlier questions. It is indeed ironic that literary criticism will be (even has been) both the source of and the object of the critical examination of its phallic roots. Literary history defends its established tradition of (male-created) literature, sometimes in quite harsh terms, against revisions (of which works may be ‘canonized’). But already Harold Bloom’s (ironic) exaggeration of the prevalence of father-killing as the basis of literary and cultural tradition shows both that the explanatory power of the Oedipal paradigm is diminishing and that tradition has origins that are not innocent. The subjective ‘origin’ or ‘beginning’ of culture is now at least again an open question. This opening of the question is due not only to the theoretical narrowness of Oedipal explanation, but also to the growing (though still disproportionately small) presence of women and minorities in academic disciplines concerned with cultural studies.

The Oedipus myth is the story of continuity through change.²² It is a charter for traditionalism. But a traditionalism untempered by the desire for new departures is not really a part of the literary spirit (see de Man 1971:142-65). Nor is it, despite Lacan and the importation of semiotics into literature through Lacan, semiotic in spirit either. Although the underlying conservatism of Lacan’s emphasis on the phallus-as-signifier appeals to Americans and has led to many critiques of Derrida (see Jameson 1978a:374-75) we will eventually have to rethink this particular enthusiastic reception, or we may find ourselves foreclosing ‘modernity’ (as opposed to ‘history’) as a literary option. Derrida’s reading, which does not tolerate the indulgence (‘boys will be boys’) toward social mystification that he detects in Lacan, clearly threatens the male primacy (including its homosexual variants) that in theory (phallogocentrism) and in practice (the composition of “quality” French departments in the American university) leaves the woman out of the system.

Conclusion

There is another story, like Sarrasine, of a false love, a story in which the drama of the blockage of desire relates not only to social structure but to the structure of the self. It is the story of Narcissus cheated of his object by the dissolution of form into matter, self into subject. It is the story that locates the founding binary opposition not in the interpersonal realm, but in the heart of the relationship between self and subject, ego and id: what is the reflection which represents nothing? The comparison here is Rousseau’s play Narcisse versus Balzac’s Sarrasine.

The subtleties of self as an imaginary construct have apparently been overemphasized in the last two decades. But in our weariness with images we are beginning to overstate the psychoanalytic preference for the “Symbolic Order” as opposed to the “Imaginary.” In conclusion, it is worthwhile to recall that Lacan, like Freud, has both foundation myths (Oedipus and Narcissus) in his system (castration and mirror-fixation), and it may be that they cancel each other out to produce the Real. Perhaps—this is the most radical construction one can put on it—the Real has its own founding myth, or rather, story. It is the story of the lapse of binary oppositions; the story of love’s becoming desire and desire love; it is a story with a feminine hero: that of Psyche and Eros. Recall that it is this story that intrigued late antiquity (Apuleius) and European Romanticism from Rousseau’s Julie and Hölderlin’s Diotima to Stendhal’s Clélia in La Chartreuse de Parme. Stendhal’s great work is a post-Greek and also a post-Christian rewriting of the story of Psyche and Eros, a realist novel.

We owe Lacan an immense debt for his discovery of Freud’s semiotic insight that the unconscious is structured like a language. But we have not yet decided whether this language is matter or form. Coward and Ellis and others suggest that the unconscious (langue) and the conscious (parole) are continuous with each other and together they position the subject. Derrida, Laplanche, and others read Freud and Saussure as saying that the unconscious, like language, having no reasonable basis, is sheer discontinuity.

Derrida’s Freud is not intent upon humbling the subject in the name of the wider order, in the service of perpetuating the structure of domination in society. It is precisely this subject that Derrida’s Freud “decenters” in a much less reassuring mode than we have seen it decentered in Lacan (or in Lévi-Strauss’s “engineer” or in Merleau-Ponty’s [1964:147ff] “classical reason”). The impulse in this radical reading of Freud is toward an understanding of how consciousness comes to be: in the face of Hegel and all his heirs, we still find Freud asking about that which is never yet incorporated by consciousness, assimilated, interpreted, and affected—the unconscious. Clearly, this is not the reassuring schema of an all-too-facile opposition between a desiring subject and an inhibiting ego (we could call it content versus form or primary versus secondary process). Clearly we have gotten to the point, and beyond, of questioning the male primacy instituted by the interpretation that, once the sexual binary opposition is established, it structures our symbolic order, our hierarchies, our faith, our reason, our redemption, and even our attempts (via homosexuality) to escape it. Instead in the post-structural version of Freud we have a drama of (mis)representations that views the unconscious as an empty set of only potentially meaningful markings, not as a “pool of signifiers” (a dictionary) through which social communication is assured (Brenkman 1978:438).

The unconscious is a fiction of a material heterogeneous to the ego, just as the ego is the fiction of a form heterogeneous to the subject (matter): Freud’s analytic method shows how each of these is constantly rewritten as the other. It is not easy to assimilate these theses on the endless supplementarity of psychic life nor to describe in practice the manner in which subject becomes self and self again a subject. Freud is our current master in this description; Rousseau was also adept at it. So although we feel the necessity to restore perspective by bringing the “subject” back “in”²³ we must be aware that this can never be done by fiat or by preaching its necessity: it can only be by the concrete analysis of the process of semiosis—the metaphorization of experience (condensation) and its companionate process of the experience of metaphor (displacement). The process can be analyzed in all cultural forms, individual or collective.

The Marxist and Freudian economies move towards a confusion of tongues. And it is the disappearance of the subject that is responsible: who (collective or individual) and what (form or content) is the subject of analysis, of revolutionary praxis? “Who is speaking and to whom” in our cultural practices, our social institutions: urgent questions demanding answers. This urgency has given impetus to the rhetorical, social turn in cultural analysis. (The most advanced equation of Marx and Saussure—that of Voloshinov [Bakhtin]—proceeds as rhetorical analysis.)

As the once seemingly stable categories of self, person, class, state, race, interest, etc., destabilize to reveal themselves capable of being twisted into other shapes, of being both the means of and the matter of knowledge—of being, that is, merely signs—we are less and less able to justify invoking either of these powerful theorists, Marx or Freud, in the absence of the other. Yet what is needed is not so much a synthesis of the two (such as appeared in the sixties) as it is a willingness

(1) to admit that in the face of culture we must remain open both to Marxist and Freudian analytic tools for any specific applications, and

(2) to apply pressure to both analytics in the form of a continually open semiotic questioning. As subjects transform themselves before our very eyes into signs of themselves we cannot do otherwise without risking losing even this much of a grasp of our “subject matter.”