Final Analysis Essay

Patrick Bateman's Morning Routine Scene 

Simply Not There :

 Jacques Lacan’s and Karl Marx’s philosophies on Society and Language elucidating Patrick Bateman’s sense of Alienation in Mary Harron’s American Psycho

         The 2000 movie American Psycho is one of the most misunderstood and debated movies in cinema history because of its social, linguistic, gender, existential, and metaphysical implications. A myriad of critics have examined the film under a postmodern lens, but there are more subtle forces at work within its protagonist’s existential journey. In the scene where Patrick Bateman, the film’s protagonist (played by actor Christian Bale) prepares his morning routine we get deeper insight into the source of his alienation, as he is alienated from sanity, mankind, and from his own true sense of identity and individuality. Just as Lacan concluded that we are defined and alienated by language, we find that Bateman is no exception. In his morning routine monologue, he introduces his home, age and name, and simultaneously reveals his social class in the Marxist sense. His signifiers’ signified ideas as a whole serve to define his social location; his extensive lists of beautification products reveal that he is obsessive with materials, as he is defined by the relationship his words have in naming them; his introspective conclusion—that he is merely an idea that is alienated from a name—relates to Lacan’s theory of linguistic alienation within the human psyche; when he peels off his mask in front of the mirror, Bateman demonstrates what happens to the human conception of self when one enters Lacan’s Symbolic Order during The Mirror Stage; his final introspection, where he reveals that he “simply is not there,” parallels Lacan’s theory that, with language, the signified dissolves into the signifier in the end. Altogether, Lacan and Marx help us understand what gives Patrick Bateman’s unconscious desires—to fuck and kill excessively—impetus.

            But before using Lacanian theory to elucidate Patrick Bateman’s alienation, it is critical to understand Lacan’s philosophy first. As a French philosopher, Jacques Lacan has had a seminal influence on literary theory primarily because he predates Marxist thought in terms of how we, as humans, are socially identified by the language which predates us. When we are born, Lacan would say, we are born into a world that teaches us language, defines us with language, and associates physical objects with words for us. Language, he would argue, is socially prescribed to the human child who enters a new world through maturation—an adult world of social classes and hierarchies; Lacan says specifically, “In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth” (The Symbolic Order). In his essays, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience and The Symbolic Order, Lacan plunges the idea of “self” into culture. He says that we are all shaped by the Symbolic Order into which we are born—this order is a realm of symbolization with which children must translate themselves with their words, or spoken language. Lacan denotes this order when he says, “Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man” (The Symbolic Order). The Symbolic, then, is how we are defined within, and by, the greater social conventions. When children learn to make symbols, they learn to detach from their childhood realm of objects and attain a sense of independence through a loss. This loss can never be a gain; this void can never be filled, as human desire is rooted in it, as we struggle to fulfill our sense of lost unity within. This craving, this desire for unattainable unity, is what Lacan calls the Imaginary Order; it is the part of the human mind that narcissistically establishes and defines the Ego’s activity. Lacan emphasizes that the ego thinks it has control of the id, but in actuality doesn't. He argues that the Ego, then, tries to reach this unattainable unity within, but in the end, is always unable to. This unattainable unity is part of what Lacan defines as the Real order, which embodies the human instincts, drives and unconsciousness that shapes our personalities. Altogether, Lacan’s essay denotes the self as a delusional and social construct afflicted by imaginary identifications with a false sense of wholeness and unity.

            In the morning routine scene from Mary Harron’s film, American Psycho, we meet Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Wall-Street businessman by day and a bloodthirsty serial killer by night. He introduces himself, first, with where he lives, his name, and then his age: “I live in the American Gardens building on West Eighty-First Street, on the eleventh floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I am twenty-seven years old” (Harron). Right off the bat, we place Bateman in the upper class, Marx’s Bourgeoisie, of society; he is in his prime in age and in material wealth. Following a brief introduction, Bateman expresses what he values—“I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine” (Harron), and reveals that, “In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now” (Harron). Immediately, the audience is presented with a character who is wealthy, youthful, and deeply concerned with his physical appearance. Although he is unaware of how he is defining himself, as he simply states facts about himself and his lifestyle in the beginning of the clip, Patrick Bateman is actually revealing which social strata he belongs to and associates with based on his language—the Marxist Bourgeoisie. When Karl Marx says “They do not know it, but they are doing it” (Capital 669), he means that people operate within an ideology, within a social class, entirely, whether they are aware of it or not—that social classes, and their respective ideologies are inescapable in the long run. Ideology and language can be interchanged here, as a certain language belongs to a certain ideology. Bateman, here, exemplifies how one’s seemingly harmless and unassuming introduction can carry socio-economic implications. In fact, the entire scene can be said to display the language of an ideology—the upper class ideology. Within his first couple of introductory sentences, we immediately discover that his voice has the sound of a refined, upper class individual; his voice is collected and overly-confident, his words dispassionate and itemized.

            After he introduces himself within an upper-class discourse—as a health and appearance conscious individual—Patrick Bateman reveals his obsession with the countless hygienic products he uses, as he utilizes the material world to establish his “self”. In listing these objects, he uncloaks his attachment to them, as he uses them to define his refined image and his social identity:

In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser, then a honey-almond body scrub, and on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb mint facial mask which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after-shave lotion with little or no alcohol because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm, followed by a final, moisturizing ‘protective’ lotion. (Harron)

Patrick Bateman’s character illustrates Lacan’s theory on language. Lacan says that language gives us an identity, that “it is the world of words that creates the world of things” (The Symbolic Order); thus, Patrick creates his world of things within the world of words. The products he uses for self-beautification are merely products of socially prescribed signified ideas behind a learned chain of signifiers within his socialized language. For Lacan, there is no unified self in this world of words; Bateman doesn't have a unified self either. This ties into what Karl Marx says about commodities, things with a socio-economic value: “There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Capital 667). Bateman, thus, defines himself with objects and simultaneously defines himself with words; his entire monologue is an illustration of his relationship to his things, to his “ice mask,” to his “water activated gel cleanser,” to his “honey-almond body scrub.” Furthermore, Bateman’s routine is painted as both extensive, but also ridiculous. The repetitious and multifarious application of skin conditioners and appearance-enhancing products strikes an ironic chord for the audience—this irony is grounded in the fact that Bateman’s excess—in his obsession over maintaining a pristine and exceptionally refined appearance through the usage of a laundry list of material objects—in the limitless lifestyle his socio-economic status provides for him.

            But the scene takes Bateman’s character one step further than just socio-economic status, it reveals what a life of excess—a life based solely on materialism and commodity fetishism—does to the human spirit; it adds to his feeling of linguistic and Psychological alienation from the world’s objective meaning. In the last portion of Patrick Bateman’s morning routine scene, his monologue takes an introspective and noticeably bleak turn. He says, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory” (Harron). Essentially, Bateman’s concluding introspection in the clip serves as his attempt to come to terms with the separation of the signifiers, and their respective signified ideas, in the Lacanian sense. The insatiable desire for Bateman to become as clean, healthy, polished, and refined as possible, can, then, be said to result from his separation from the meaning in words themselves—he is coming to terms with his lack of being and substance. Thus, Bateman’s extensive morning routine is, in itself, his attempt to replace the void he feels, the fissure between his subjective personality and the objective, outside, social world; he is trying to fill this void with the materials in attempting to identify himself with what he owns, with hygienic products. As Lacan puts it, we, and Patrick Bateman here, “cannot ever find an object to embody what we ultimately” (the Symbolic Order), and ideally want—Bateman slides along a chain of signifiers, whereas each signifier represents a part of a whole, not a whole in itself—he is forever incomplete this way. Lacan says, “For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence” (The Symbolic Order). Therefore, Patrick Bateman realizes that what he defines himself by—his name “Patrick Bateman” quite literally here, with words absolves any true understanding of himself. Just as the countless skin-care and beautification products and itemized style in which Bateman’s introduces them with lose their signified meaning in their ridiculously endless context, Bateman, himself, like language, loses any realization of himself, any idea of himself. He essentially conveys his alienation from language, his alienation from assigning meaning to the countless signifiers he uses to introduce himself with, and his alienation from any true sense of individuality (he is just like his upper class friends).

            Its crucial to note that Bateman looks in the mirror and peals off the mask—an amalgamation of the numerous hygienic, material products he has applied to his face—when he concludes his monologue. When he sees himself in the mirror, he attains a false sense of identification, of wholeness and autonomy, just as the child does in Lacan’s The Mirror Stage: “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification…the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes the image” (The Mirror Stage 442 ). When he peels his mask off in the mirror, Bateman learns his place in the Lacanian sense of the Symbolic Order and represses an original desire for wholeness and autonomy. Bateman’s repression of his id, of his desire to be whole, his desire to have complete in control of his actions, ties in nicely with how Lacan bridges a child’s repression of his original desire for his mother with language. Lacan says that as a child represses his original desire for autonomy and wholeness is synonymous with how the signifier makes the signified absent, “For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence” (The Symbolic Order). The theorist says that the acceptance of repression and entry into the Symbolic is itself comparable to language in that once one learns to name something, one accepts separation from it: Similarly, in American Psycho, when Patrick Bateman names the various objects associated with his morning routine, he sacrifices each object’s meaning; this is because, according to Lacan, the mere presence of an object’s signifier is the absence of the signified behind the signifier—that is, Bateman’s words, his extensive naming of the expensive and seemingly superfluous hygienic products he applies to his body, only have meaning for him in that he is alienated from their signified meaning. To extend this concept, Bateman is only the product of the objects he owns, or, in this case, of the self-beautification materials he applies to his body on a daily basis. In their application and verbal utterance, Bateman’s spoken commodities confirm the absence of any individuality and substance in character, he has—as his numerous beautification materials are present in his everyday life, albeit in excess, his sense of self is absent in their presence. At its heart Bateman’s story in American Psycho is one which deals primarily with surfaces; when he peels off the facial mask in front of the mirror, he is peeling off a layer of his identity—he is reinventing his sense of self, whether it is merely an abstraction. His mask, which he peels off then, not only symbolizes Bateman’s reinvention, but also his detachment from reality, from words and their meaning, from surface and substance—it serves to show the beginning of his character’s arch from psychopathic to psychotic.

            When Patrick says, “though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there” (Harron), Bateman is really saying that he is alienated from everybody, even those within his higher socio-economic class. As Lacan explains, we are split form ourselves and that “we can never possibly attain wholeness in a world of objects” (The Symbolic Order); the ego deludes us with ideals. Patrick Bateman is no different in this scene. Bateman’s lack of being is based on his initial lack of being, from the original instance of his alienation from an imaginary sense of fullness; his id overpowers his ego. Moreover, Bateman’s identity is prescribed by society and he is alienated in the process. As linguistic structures have preexisted Bateman’s character, we can infer that he is merely playing the role of the wealthy young man in the Bourgeoisie camp, in the Marxist sense. He is part of the genetic upper class, and is, thus, fortunate to live a lifestyle of luxury and excess, even if its to the point where even material objects and property lose their meaning for him. His usage of the word, “flesh,” here, denotes the physical human aspect that he attributes to human relations and communication, although he is ultimately alienated to everybody, even himself, by language, and by the material world.

            Bateman is, moreover, split from himself because he can never attain wholeness is his world of objects and the material. Lacan defines the Real as the cause of our desires, which we can only access through signifiers. In American Psycho, the chain of signifiers Bateman operates within represents his desires that never arrive at the Real; the Signifiers he uses only distance him from his desires as he distances himself from objects in the very act of listing them off. Thus, according to Lacan, human desire—here, Patrick Bateman’s desire—is carried by signifiers which stand in for a lack that can never be filled in; Bateman’s unconscious resides in the signifiers of his language, which he uses to identify his socio-economic self. It is crucial to notice that Bateman ends with a tone that resembles a yearning for communication and clarity between men and objects; he illustrates his complete alienation from man, through language, here. His introspection starts with identifying himself as an “idea” and as an “abstraction,” but concludes with his realization that he is, in himself, the absence or void: “I simply am not there”—moreover, Bateman’s conception of himself starts as a Signified and evaporates into a sole Signifier. In a couple sentences, just as Bateman’s words have lost their signified meaning, so has Patrick Bateman lost his own meaning as an individual within a social class. This relates to what Lacan says of language and absence as presence, that, “Through the word—already a presence made of absence—absence itself gives itself a name” (The Symbolic Order); Patrick Bateman, in his character’s absence of substance, understanding, completeness, and unity, symbolizes Lacan’s “presence made of absence” because he is present in defining his own absence; he is the embodiment of “absence” and he gives himself the name, “Patrick Bateman,” although his identity becomes completely associated with his Signified name, completely devoid of the idea he mentioned before.

            Patrick Bateman’s psychological crisis, then, is that he has no real concept of self, except that there is a lack of self, that there is something missing. There is nothing innate within him that he can fall back on—he is basically a murderous vacuum, looking for meaning in the surface of things and people, in the signifiers of his words, in his material objects and their lack of signified ideas. Moreover, every single word in Bateman’s monologue describing his morning routine alienates Bateman himself, as in naming objects in the first place has alienated him from their meaning and importance to his life. He is constantly reinventing himself in every ridiculous situation he finds himself in, after every word in list, after every sentence in his monologue—just as his desires are carried by signifiers which supplant a bottomless hole within him—and he only operates in a world of signifiers, where meaning is just as illusory as his generosity and genuineness.

            

Works Cited

American Psycho. Dir. Mary Harron. Perf. Patrick Bateman. Polygram, 2000.

Lacan, Jacques. The Symbolic Order (from "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis). Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology.Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.

Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004. 441-446.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004. 665-672.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-yoMEZXnbQ

Analysis 4: Post-Colonialism

"The Noble and the Savage": Joseph Conrad's An Outpost of Progress and Edward Said's Orientalism

         In Edward Said's essay, Orientalism, he lays the groundwork for a methodical analysis of how England, and other dominant and Imperialist nations, have maintained their international socio-economic grip on the subservient peoples whom they exploit in their expansion. As his theory is grounded in Marxism--mainly that the more powerful class has the control to create and spawn discourses about an inferior "Other" figure. Yet Said's glimpse can be elucidated and enhanced aside Joseph Conrad's short story, An Outpost of Progress; Conrad's short story is a critique of the English Imperialism of the late 19th Century and can be understood in the context of Said's essay. In Conrad's story, we meet two white officers, Kayerts and Carlier, who are Britain's two chosen men assigned to maintain a station, an outpost of progress, if you will, in Africa, among the indigenous peoples--the "others" in the story. 

              

Living on their station's grounds, albeit in worser conditions than the two  British officers, is Makola, the resident domesticated African man. Conrad describes Makola as an African who is  "taciturn and impenetrable" and one who "despised the two white men” (Conrad 1073). Paired with Said's essay, specifically the line, "The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different;’ thus the European is rational virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” (Said), Conrad's text comments on how the inferior Africans--the colonized--are ideologically meaningful to the superior conquerers, Britain. Here, Conrad describes Makola the African as "taciturn" to reveal the alienation he encounters from his white, superior, invaders. He is described as "impenetrable" to show that he is socially distant from Cayerts and Carlier, the two white men who are different from him. Yet, Conrad is doing something more than merely explicating Colonialism in Africa here; he uses only Makola to represent the "different" and "normal" officers to uncloak the mentality the British had with their conquered peoples; the author is satirizing British Colonialism. Makola, then, is the "other," defined by the two Europeans but he is, too, the human who is unjustly exploited according to Conrad's depiction of him.

       

If Katerts and Carlier represent the Europeans dominating the inferior Africans, they do so with a certain ideology in mind--one in the sole interest of their conquering nation, Britain. Conrad describes the two officers in the context of this hierarchy when he says, “They had been in this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors” (Conrad 1074). In addition, Conrad puts his own spin on the hierarchy he has focused on--that which has dictated the actions of its subordinate European officers; the author describes the two Europeans as part of a crowd, who "believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion” (Conrad 1074). It is clear that Conrad is criticizing the British or European superstructure which drives its officers in a foreign land, as it forces its subordinates to its ends. Moreover, the two Europeans Conrad uses to critique such ideology also serve to show the inescapable nature and irrevocable influence of the ruling class, or the Conquerers, the British in this story. Said explains that  Orientalism’s rationale is primarily grounded in Western thought and rhetoric in defining Orientals as Others in discorse, that “these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient” (Said). Thus Conrad's story isn't only highlighting the differences between the Conquerers and the Conquered, it also focuses on Western dominance over Eastern ideology. After all the conquered will follow the conquerer's ideology as it is impressed on them by force in the end. 

        

Later in the story, the two European officers come across another African tribe and its respective leader; he is describes as follows: “Their leader, a powerful and determined-looking negro with bloodshot eyes, stood in front of the verandah and made a long speech […] and yet resembling the speech of civilized men. It sounded like one of those impossible languages which sometimes we hear in our dreams” (Conrad 1077). There is something subtextual at hand here; not only is the leader powerful and resembling a civilized decorum, Conrad is using him to make a statement on how Otherness works. Said says that, “the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar” (Said), and we can come to a new conclusion thereafter. Conrad is taking an African tribe, the Others in the story, and likens them to their conquerers, the two European officers. In one poignant sentence, Conrad has illustrated how the savage and incommunicable become civilized and powerful, even similar to their conquerers on an unconscious level in dreams. Subtly and vehemently, Conrad takes the Other and reveals his link to the Conquerers' humanity.

         

 Towards the end of his short story, Conrad has one of his British officers say,“We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean—except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions” (Conrad 1080). At heart, Conrad is making a statement on the discourse of a Conquering people, as he uses a white officer, or member of the conquering people, to ironically make his point for him.  Said denotes Orientalism as, “a discourse [that] exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral(as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do)” (Said). Essentially, Said says that the imperial nation conquers a people with their discourse--one which is political, intellectual, cultural, and moral. Said's argument is relevant to Conrad's here--Conrad's European duo acts as the instruments of Britain's Imperial discourse; he uses the British officers to shed unabashed and sober light on what this discourse really is. Conrad, thus, reveals what Said implies--that the discourse of the conquering class, what Said defines as Orientalism (defining an inferior, conquered people as the other), is an illusory tool that has one purpose: to benefit the Imperial nation and exploit the Conquered one.

Works Cited   

Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998. 

Conrad, Joseph. “An Outpost of Progress." Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Vol. B. Eds. Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, and Isobel Grundy. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2007. 1073-1084.

what i did for my presentation on Jacques Lacan

For our presentation on Jacques Lacan I sent out emails to the three other members of my group and met with them after class a couple times to delegate which sections of the Psychoanalytic pieces of theory each member was to present on. In addition to sending out numerous emails to bounce ideas off of team members--both suggesting and listening to others' suggestions--I also printed out each of my group members' handouts which the class received on the day we presented. For my portion--on Jacques Lacan's essay, The Mirror Stage, I put many hours into understanding its key concepts so that I could present them to the class in an informative and clear way; I talked for hours on the phone with an English Grad. Student, Cesar Soto, to get some more insight on Lacan, and on the essay's principles. My handout (below) is an amalgamation of the Rivkin text's Introduction on Psychoanalysis coupled with the Norton Anthology of Criticism's introduction on Lacan. 

Lacan’s The Mirror Stage (Essentially describes the fundamental role of FORM for humans) 

·       Lacan as a Neo Freudian:

o   Developed a Structuralist theory of Psychoanalysis based on linguistic theory of Saussure; “the French Freud”

o   The Ego is not unified, as Object Relationists suggest; it is blind to the drives of the Id (the unconscious); it remains blind to its own placement and construction in and by LANGUAGE

o   Before pre-existing Language assigns us an “I,” we have no sense of self; language gives us identity

o   There is no unified self like the Object Relationists suggested before him

·       The Mirror Stage as a process of self-identifaction:

o   The child sees themselves in the mirror and attains a false sense of wholeness and autonomy

o   This Mirror Stage, though, must be abandoned as the child enters the Social World through The Symbolic Order

o   The child enters the Social World when the father says “no” with the incest taboo that declares the Mother as an inappropriate and different object for and from him

o   The Child learns his place is the Symbolic Order; with the initiation of the Symbolic, the child represses his original desire for the Mother

§  Lacan compares this to the fashion the signifier makes the signified absent; The acceptance of repression and entry into the Symbolic is itself comparable to langue in that  once one learns to name something, one accepts separation from it

§  By naming something a human sacrifices the object because the mere presence of the sign/word/signifier is the absence of the signified/idea behind it

o   The passage from Imaginary to Symbolic orders = there occurs an installation of a combined linguistic/psychological separation of the child both from its initial object—the Mother

o   We learn to be social, to have social identities, by learning to say no, to sacrifice or give up both the initial contact one has with the natural world and with one’s first human objects

o   Our whole life consists of attempts to come to terms with Signifier/Signified separation, a lack of being

o   Our insatiable desire is a product of us trying to substitute an object for the initially absent mother object

o   We cannot ever find an object to embody what we ultimately/ideally—we slide along a chain of signifiers, whereas each signifier represents a part of a whole, not a whole in itself—we are forever incomplete this way

o   Lacan says that we are split form ourselves and that we can never possibly attain wholeness in a world of objects; the ego deludes us with ideals

o   Lack defines our being (As I Lay Dying: Addie’s Chapter); The chain of Signifiers we live in/operate in represent our desires that never arrive at the Real (the cause of our desires which we can only access through Signifiers; but Signifiers only distance us from our desires as we “name” objects of desire)---human desire is carried by signifiers which stand in for a lack that can never be filled in; the unconscious resides in the signifiers of language; language is relative because the signified is dissolved into the unconscious

·       Facts to help your understanding of The Mirror Stage:

o   Our being, the child’s being, is founded on our initial lack of being—this occurs when we are ripped from an imaginary sense of fullness and separated from the object that provided us with it--our Mothers; the Id overpowers the Ego and

o   Our identity is given to us from society and we are alienated in the process

o   Linguistic structures preexist the subject (the child) and are not created by him

o   “The Other”: designates the Symbolic dimension itself insofar as the subject has to relate to it—the very fact of speaking routes everything through the Other

§  In The Mirror Stage, this “other” for the child is its Mother

§  The child’s symbiotic relationship with the mother creates a sense of false narcissistic sense of unity in him; the child assumes the mother is himself and he “wants her to want” him

§  The lost object/the other/the mother is one that the subject/child never had, the loss brought into being by symbolization itself

§  For the child, the mother is, in fact, not there for him, not a total body form, not entirely focused on the child without other relationships (with the father, etc.)

o   The child goes through a process of self-identification from the Real to the Symbolic

§  The function of the mother is as the “Other,” who is not ENTIRELY focused on the child

§  The child’s father functions as both the instatement of language and the prohibition of incest (this refers to the “no” of the father)—think Oedipus Complex

·       The 3 orders (The Real, The Imaginary, The Symbolic)

o   The Real can only be studied in its effects on the other two dimensions/orders for Lacan—the Imaginary, the Symbolic

§  An impossible wholeness of self, plentitude of desire satisfaction (joissance), and continuity of signifier and signified or word and object—this the child associates with the Mother—the Mother represents wholeness for the child; this false sense of wholeness and agency is a result of a concealing of an initial separation that is instilled permanently in the child

o    The Imaginary: originates in the human’s fascination with FORM—think Plato’s forms

§  Lacan’s essay (The Mirror Stage) denotes the founding moment of the Imaginary; the infant’s recognition of its image in the mirror

§  The baby forgets how weak it is and identifies with the wholeness of a/its reflected form—this suggests that the human “self” comes into being through a fundamentally aesthetic recognition; the self-image of the baby causes a fictitious identification/recognition for its image, which is “over there”

§  The baby is essentially dictating the efforts of the subject, itself, “I”, toward a totality and autonomy it can never attain

§  The Imaginary =the relation between the self and its image

o   The Symbolic: the dimension of symbolization into which the human’s body, to the extent that he or she begins to SPEAK, must translate itself:

§  The dimension of articulation that is actually a structure of relations rather than things

§  Socio-culturally prescribed; the social languages that identify us and lend us identites, al of which exceed consciousness and never assume the form of knowable or conscious identities

§  Symbolic language which assigns social roles and dictates proper behavior in society; it is like language and assigns identity according to the binary opposition of presence or absence

o   Helpful Insights on Lacan’s philosophy:

§  For Lacan, the unconscious= a form of rhetorical energy designed both to disguise and to express those desires, which exist in Psychoanalysis in their effects

·       Lacan: “The unconscious is structured like a language”

·       The unconscious is not a language in and of itself but is structured like a foreign one

·       The unconscious speaks rhetorically through dreams, symptoms of somebody; the body—through its senses—provides the unconscious with the raw material it uses to express itself

§  Signs: systematically and unconsciously constitute all social codes, conventions, and prohibitions; we are acculturated by signs—even before we begin to speak, we are already being spoken

§  Language + Desire:  as soon as man begins to speak, he must launder everything important or even routine about his bodily life through linguistic structures that don’t exactly correspond to biological requirements; this is to say that DESIRE is what by definition remains un-satisfiable

o   Applying Lacanian theory to Texts

§  Apply the Mirror Stage (the Real and the Imaginary) to a certain point in a character’s life; explain when/how/why that character develops a false sense of wholeness when looking in the mirror/looking glass

·       You can also color another character’s interaction with the main character; how does the main character get a false sense of wholeness/agency from the way the other character treats them?

·       Lacan talks of the “gap” between the infant and the mirror, a gap which defines us throughout our self-actualization/identification process—what constitutes the “gap” in a text?

§  Apply the shattering of the Imaginary by the Symbolic (the father figure)

·       You can denote a point of self-realization within a greater context in a main character’s lifespan; who symbolizes the father in a text? How so?

§  Apply Lacan’s theory of Signifiers and Signified:

·       How is a character alienated by his desire to define something or someone? How does he lose the sense of its essence/signified idea in naming/defining it?

·       How is a character’s unconscious desire carried by Signifiers?

o   Lets try it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCQqC9xgbfk

§  American Psycho—protagonist is Patrick Bateman, a psychotic serial killer who is also a member of the upper crest, up-and-coming Wall Street Capitalist in 1980’s America

§  What does he reveal about his sense of self, of the “I,” in his monologue? What does he value most?

§  What kind of Language does he use in describing his routine, his identity? How does his use of Language play into Lacan’s theory that Signifiers overshadow the Signified?

§  When he says, “…and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there,” how does he summarize, or put a spin on, Lacan’s theory on Language and the unconscious as related to personality and identity? What does this say about Language and Signifiers, about how language defines and alienates us in the fissure between the word and its meaning?

                           

Works Cited

Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004.

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.