Working Paper No. 06-16

Space and topos within Foucault and Lacan: the Ground for a Genealogy of Antipodean Identity

James Juniper

December 2006

Centre of Full Employment and Equity The University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australia

Home Page: http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee Email:

coffee@newcastle.edu.au

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1. Introduction This is a companion paper to one addressing the way that representations of space have been understood by the Post-Structuralist philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault. This paper will draw on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, with a view to establishing the basis for transdisciplinary research into Antipodean conceptions of space1

. In particular, it will identify the theoretical resonances between Lacan and Foucault. To this end it will engage in a critical review of Post-Colonial debates that seem to have pitted Foucauldean and Lacanian theorists against one another. The insights of the Lacanian framework will be elucidated through an examination of Rutherford’s application of Lacanian theory to conceptions of Antipodean space, as reflected in Australian literature.

The first of the two papers was grounded in an interpretation that Gilles Deleuze has made of Foucault’s works. The elements of this interpretation are summarized below. With some degree of provocation this interpretation, will be compared with its Lacanian counterpart (a provocative reading, given Foucault’s occasional hostility towards psychoanalysis, which can be seen most obviously in the preface Foucault wrote for Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and his critical comments about the relationship between the confessional, psychoanalysis and the ‘juridico-discursive’ model of power in The History of Sexuality).

For Deleuze the Diagram is conceived as something that relates Abstract Machines and Concrete Machines together via its spatial characteristics as immanent cause (where immanence for Foucault and Deleuze is that which undermines the hierarchical dominance of Soul over Man, God over Nature, and Sovereign over State). Thus power-knowledge relations operate as both battle and strategy, interlacing the otherwise irreducibility strata of visibilities and statements. Power-knowledge relations are diagrammatic insofar as power incites, provokes, and produces forms of knowledge (hence, effectively subsuming traditional Marxism within a broader frame); and insofar

1 These two papers have been motivated by issues set out on the first day of a three-day Workshop held at the University of Newcastle under the auspices of the ARCRNSISS in June 2005. The initial focus of this workshop was on developing an Inter-disciplinary and Epistemological Self-Consciousness. To this end, facilitators of the Paradigm Working Group on “Directions for the Socio-Spatial Paradigm”, suggested four aims that might guide the project:

1. Exploring space as an idea: providing a genealogy of spatial concepts and their representation across the social sciences

2. Exposing the material realisations of space as an idea in Antipodean space: initiating critical inter-disciplinary discussions about the ways representations of space have been understood and utilized to varying ends in Australia.

3. Investigating policy outcomes: identifying and evaluating the way spatial policies ensue from thinking about space in particular ways.

4. Developing and assessing the process of the “intensive workshop” as a collective research device in the social sciences.

This paper is focused on the second of these aims.

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as knowledge is stratified, constructing the formal categories and spaces of educating, caring, punishing, training, disciplining, and creating docility (both in terms of an anatamo-politics of individuals and a bio-politics of populations). As such, the visible (governed by conditions of emergence) and the articulable (governed by conditions of enunciation) are conceived as strategically woven together in a manner that exposes each of the two strata to the contingencies of the historical a-priori.

Although Foucault takes pains to emphasise that statements should never be reduced to signifiers, in certain respects his dichotomy between the visible and the articulable parallels Lacan’s distinction between the ‘positional adumbrations’ of the Imaginary and the ‘dispositional articulations’ of the Symbolic (Boothby, 2001, Chapter 2). This argument will be set out in more detail in the following section of the paper. In Lacanian terms, perhaps—the Diagram can be thought of as the material locus within which the “Four Discourses of Psychoanalysis”—the Discourse of the University, the Discourse of the Master, the Discourse of the Hysteric and the Discourse of the Analyst—unfold. For Lacan, the permutations of these Discourses represent both the dialectical evolution of social relations and progress with in the therapeutic process as resistance is overcome through working on the transference relationship.

1.2 Technologies of Self and the fold within the Outside As Deleuze demonstrates, resistance, in Foucault’s thinking, does not arise within the diagrams that actuate power but rather is generated within the non-space that is the outside of thought as set out in Deluze’s book on Foucault: a view that reveals itself most clearly in Foucault’s essay on Blanchot (Foucault, 1966).

In this appreciative essay Foucault concentrates on Blanchot’s notion of the thought of the outside, which appears in two forms. First, there is thought standing outside the subject (articulated with respect to its ends, limits, dispersion, absence) at the very threshold of positivity. In this form, the Outside appears not as a foundation or justification of the subject and its truths, but rather as an unfolding or void at the very site where the subject is constituted, in the distance within which there occurs a slippage of the subject’s certainty (Foucault, 1966: 16). Second, there is thought from the outside, which operates as the silence beyond all language, the nothingness beyond Being, as the topos Foucault describes in terms of the “lost rift where language loses its bearings”.

In this context, Foucault cautions that any attempt at a subsumption of the outside through reflexive discourse would merely lead back to that interiority from where the outside can only be conceived as body or space, or perhaps as the limit of will, or even the mute presence of the other. Fiction, on the other hand, while it has the potential to escape the traps of the interior, is perilous for other reasons, including those due to the thickness of the images it wields, complemented by the spurious transparency of its

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figures, and the ever-present temptation to slip into the familiar territory of the ready-made meaning. In contrast, for Blanchot:

[f]iction is no longer a power that tirelessly produces images and makes them shine, but rather a power that undoes them, that lessens their overload, that infuses them with an inner transparency that illuminates them little by little until they burst and scatter in the light of the unimaginable. Blanchot’s fictions are, rather than the images themselves, their transformation, displacement, and neutral interstices (Foucault, 1966: 23).

The art of fiction, therefore, consists not in showing the invisible, “but in showing how the invisibility of the visible is invisible”. Thus, Foucault contends that in Blanchot’s writing fiction “bears a profound relation to space; understood in this way, space is to fiction what the negation is to reflection (whereas dialectical negation is tied to the fable of time)” (Foucault, 1966: 24). The allure of the outside does not betoken a positive presence or a possible communication. Instead, it gestures towards the emptiness or destitution2

. Moreover, Foucault warns that the presence of the outside does not denote a proximity between two interiorities but only “an absence that pulls as far from itself as possible, receding into the sign it makes to draw one toward it (as though it were possible to reach it)” (Foucault, 1966: 28).

In his discussion of the role played by the concepts of attraction and negligence in Blanchot’s work, Foucault comments that negligence is manifest as the total disregard for consequence, or for one’s other life. As such, it is the flip-side of zealousness: a solicitude in surrendering oneself to error or distraction, a willingness to take things too far in regard to what has withdrawn. Foucault observes that, for Blanchot, uncertainty implies that negligence and zeal appear as reversible figures; zeal is the simple neglect of negligence and, paradoxically, being attracted or negligent at the same time—as with the Freudian Fetish in relation to the threat of castration—both manifests the withdrawal of the law and conceals the manifestation of the law (Foucault, 1966: 30-31). In this context, the law is not a principle or an inner rule of conduct, rather it is the outside enveloping conduct, it is the void which converting its singularity into the universal necessitating transgression as both a provocation and a revelation of invisibility. If in response to this provocation, punishment is meted out, this merely betrays the law’s irritability and weakness rather than its power (Foucault, 1966: 34-35).

Blanchot’s notion of the Outside, and the lawless law has some obvious resonances with Lacanian psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s topological interpretation of subjectivation, the Moebius strip separating the Real register (which it contains), from the Imaginary and

2 An obvious antecedent for this conception of the Outside would be Hegel’s dark night of the soul, a notion that Lacan draws upon.

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Symbolic registers, becomes the site for the constitution of the Kantian or Freudian Thing. Lacan extracts this notion of the Thing from Freud’s discussion of the nebenmensch; the appearance of our fellow human being conceived both as our first helping power or satisfying object, and also as our first hostile object. Lacan observes that for Freud this division mirrors the crucial distinction which supports our capacity to engage in ‘reality testing’, to separate perception from hallucination. Following Freud, Lacan argues that this is predicated on the successful accomplishment of a separation between a constant, non-understood or uncanny part whose attributes fail to correspond to mnemic traces, and another part understood by the activity of memory. The Kantian Thing is thus the impossible, inaccessible void that, paradoxically, is what enables the cognitive processes of memory and reality testing to operate. As Boothby contends, the Thing provides an internal but empty locus of unity and constancy, a virtual outline or a provisional matrix holding memory and perception together until identity-in-perception can be established. Lacan emphasises the fact that the Thing is only approachable in and through language, and thus through the subject’s relation to the Law.

For language, the Thing provides the primordial directionality, a verbal ostension towards the signified, it is the ‘non-representative representative’ of what escapes representation, in the sense that ‘X marks the spot’ of something that is essentially missing (Boothby, 2001: 216, citing Freud, S.VII: 54, 83; and Lacan, 1979: 218). This void at the heart of what we encounter is necessarily concealed beneath the phantasmatic veil of the objet petit a: the latter conceived as the ‘always, already’ lost object of desire. Seen in this light, the Imaginary order is most gainfully conceived as what provides the illusion of fullness by filling out the unfillable: the ‘skin’ of appearance is stretched out over the ‘skull’ of the real (Boothby, 2001: 210-12).

One of the other key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the objet petit a, then comes to designate what remains of the Thing after it has undergone symbolization: a role that can be played by a variety of substitute objects—the mamilla, faeces, phallus (as imaginary object), urinary flow, the gaze, and even the the voice (Boothby, 2001: 242-3, citing Lacan, 1977: 315]. Belonging neither to subject nor to object, the objet petit a is liminal, it operates as what is lacking in the image, it is the extimate—both inner and outer—it is the impossible object or residue constituted by signification as what is essentially lost to it (Lacan, 1979: 62). The subject, however, gains consistency through the objet petit a, which marks the impossibility of the subject’s coincidence with itself insofar as this object of fantasy—motivating desire—stands in as a substitute for the subject (Boothby, 2001: 244-5, citing Lacan, 1989: 103; 248). In weaning itself, detaching itself from the breast, the subject overcomes the anxiety obtaining prior to the threat of loss, which becomes assuaged through a sacrificial ceding of the object. This ceding of the part paradoxically and negatively allows the infant to experience itself as a whole body. It is lost so that it can be found for the first time. Desire is founded through its inhibition. In determining the Other as a desiring being, by giving form to the desire of the Other, it does not effect an exchange so much as establish the possibility of exchange by anchoring the symbolic order. This ceding of the object also complements Lacan’s notion of not ceding to one’s desire in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, insofar as it establishes the

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possibility of ceding or not ceding (Boothby, 2001: 246-8, citing an unpublished translation of Lacan’s Seminar, Book 10 and Lacan, 1992: 319).

As with most of Lacan’s core concepts, his notions of the imaginary and symbolic draw on Freud’s distinction between thing-presentations and word-presentations. For Freud, repression obtains when the more elemental, primordial form of representation that is rooted in perception is separated from the word-representation. The same distinction comes to the fore in Lacan’s discussion of the Schema-L (see the diagram below), where the unconscious passage of ‘current’ from the big Other (A) to the Subject (S) is seen to be disrupted by resistance of the imaginary function envisaged as second current passing from a to a’: this disruption being associated with a shift of valence from the symbolic to the imaginary axis [83-4, S.II:120]. In the Schema-L, the S (Es) represents the analytic (incomplete) subject who sees himself in the objet petit a, and that, Lacan argues, is why he has an ego. Moreover, the ego always perceives its fellow being in the form of the specular other (a′). This imaginary relation, Lacan posits, is the plane of the mirror, which ultimately gains its false (ie. verified) reality from language: when the subject talks, ordinary language “holds the imaginary egos to be things which are not simply ex-sisting, but real” (Lacan, 1988a: 244). Insofar as the subject brings the specular others “into relation with his own image, those with whom he speaks are also those with whom he identifies”. However, the basic assumption that there are subjects other than us, that authentically intersubjective relations exist, will not be held, Lacan warns, unless “the subject can lie to us”. In fact, we attempt to address those we do not know, the true Others (A1, A2…), but they are always, already on the other side of the wall of language. We aim at them but attain the specular others (a′, a′′…), which are not true subjects but rather mere shadows. At the same time, the subject sees himself from the other side of the wall of language, but doesn’t know himself—as such, the ego is perverse, fundamentally incomplete, imperfect, and unknown.

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It is this essentially incomplete ego, Lacan scornfully observes, which the object-relations theorists choose to be their favoured vehicle for integrating all of our partial objects, all our fixated stages of development, while supported by the image of the Other (the Analyst) who supposedly speaks ‘objectively’ and can act as the basis both for identification and for our objective dealings with the real (Lacan, 1988a: 245). Understandably, Lacan foreshadows an alternative conception of analysis,

One trains analysts so there are subjects in whom the ego is absent. That is the ideal of analysis, which, of course, remains virtual (Lacan, 1988a: 246).

The imaginary and specular relation interferes with the wall of language whereby what pertains to the ego is always perceived via the intermediary of an other. Accordingly, true speech, Lacan advises, must join the subject to another subject across the wall of language. Under this conception, the analyst is not a ‘living mirror’ but an ‘empty mirror’: analysis must therefore operate through a progressive displacement that works through the transference, while positioned beyond the wall of language in which the subject doesn’t recognize himself, such that it can eventually be said that “Where the subject was, there the Ich shall be”.

Freud’s quest, Lacan cautions, is therefore not one for a better ‘economy of mirages’, but for a ‘spoken clarification’ of the history of the subject (Lacan, 1988a: 255). Here, the subject’s relations to the object are seen to acquire meaning (as valuable) because a subject other than him or herself has relations with this object and they can both name it: thus nomination functions as an invocation of presence.

(ego) (a)

(Es) S

(A) (Other)

(a′) (other)

Imag

inary

Relatio

n

Unconscious

Lacan’s Schema

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Another more-extended interpretation of the Schema-L is provided in Lacan’s paper On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis, taken from his 1955-6 Seminar at the École Normale Supérieure. In this paper Lacan describes how the subject is “stretched over the four corners of the schema”, from his “ineffable, stupid existence”, to his objects, to his ego, and finally to the Other, conceived as “the locus from which the question of his existence may be presented to him” concerning “his sex and his contingency in being” (Lacan, 1977: 194). Lacan situates the veil of the narcissistic image along the span between object and ego, which he associates with capture and seduction.

Lacan elaborates on this model by introducing the Schema-R. The base for this model is provided by the imaginary triangle of the Mother/Child symbolic relation linked to the third term, that in which the subject identifies himself (Lacan, 1977: 196). Backing on to this base is the symbolic triangle of the I as ego-ideal, M as signifier of the primordial object, and F as the Name-of-the-Father located in the Other (Lacan, 1977: 197). However, the quadrangle of the real is located between the subject and the Other, with the M and I of the symbolic triangle situated on the upper two corners, and the ego e, and specular image i—the imaginary terms of the narcissistic relation—situated on the lower two corners.

As shown below, Boothby interprets this diagram by deploying a Griemasian cross characterised by the Figure, the Ground and their respective negations. While the small (o)ther takes on the role of Figure, alongside the ego as its counterpart, the big (O)ther is constituted as its negation. However, this leaves to the Subject the role of Ground, while the ego-ideal becomes its negation, alongside the maternal object as its counterpart. In Lacan’s Schema-L, depicted below, Boothby notes that the a corresponds to both the Symbolic and the Imaginary registers, while the barred subject of desire supports the field of Reality which is given its frame (in the form of the Moebius strip) by the very extraction of the a (Boothby, 2001: 272; citing Lacan, 1977:223).

LACAN’S SCHEMA - R

$ (the divided subject)

O (the Other)

M (the primordialobject)

I (the Ego-Ideal)

φ i (the specular image)

e (the ego)

o (the objet petit a)

o’ (the objects ofidentification)

I

R

S

The MoebiusStrip

The MoebiusStrip

F (the Name-of-the Father)

(the phallus)

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Each incarnation of the objet a, Boothby argues, allows the subject to preserve and pass the question of the Other’s desire (as the unthinkable dimension of the imaginary other) on into the symbolic process, thus opening the space between symbolic and imaginary axes. The final terms of this process are given by the Phallus and Name-of-the-Father at the outer points of the respective triangles.

The phallus is the last in that series of figurations assumed by the objet a, which display an imaginary character (unlike the gaze and the voice that belong to the symbolic order) and yet, unlike the breast and faeces, it also points beyond the mother to the third position of the father. Prior to symbolic castration both the imaginary m, i and symbolic M and I

S (subject)Ground

o (other)Figure

O (Other)[Thing]

Not Figure

As relation-to-berealized

S1 prescribedGround

-S1 not prescribedNot Ground

S2 forbiddenFigure

-S2 not forbiddenNot Figure

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are collapsed onto one another. The cut permits both the emergence of the ego-ideal and the mobilization of desire around aims that extend beyond the image into the defile of the signifier (Boothby, 2001: 272-274; citing Lacan, 1977).

Boothby argues that this understanding explains Lacan’s mature position which holds that the phantasy must be traversed at the end of analysis, with the analyst occupying the position of the objet a, and with the analysand approaching the transcendent real core of the phantasy, the non-objective object. As such, it is not some external constraint that prevents us from fulfilling our desire, but its ultimate unknowability. Our relation to reality only becomes possible through the destabilizing influence of the signifier, which opens onto the empty space in the field, the blind spot; which in turn explains why absolute certainty is the domain of the paranoiac, for psychosis, as Boothby points out, is ultimately characterized by the lack of the lack itself (Boothby, 2001: 275-6, 279).

Boothby emphasizes the fact that the spatial captation of the ego arises before its social determination through an internal process of alienation whereby the subject becomes a rival to itself. In this conception of internal rivalry, the ego appears as bottleneck, an inhibitory agency of filtration, misrecognition, and stereotypical organization that constrains the vital energies of the organism. As such, psychical identity is established at the expense of a splitting of the subject between an organized, virtual unity and an anarchic remainder, divorcing the subject from its own future (Boothby, 2001: 142-146; citing Lacan, 1977: 2, 21, 128). With the accession of the Symbolic, the Real of the drive assumes the mythical status of the ‘lamella’—an amoebic blob; foreign, inarticulate, uncanny, but still somewhow tethered to the subject—and conceived as a pure force unknowable in itself. Aggressivity is a sign of this split in the Subject. However, for Lacan the disintegrating force of the Freudian death drive in desire is aimed not at the biological organism as Freud thought, but at the alienating character of the ego. As such, the death drive is paradoxically linked to the realization of a fuller vitality and, unlike Eros and its lures, it escapes representation other than in a purely negative form (Boothby, 2001: 150-153; citing Lacan, 1977:11-2,22, 277;1988a:149). The transitive, reversible character of the imaginary gestalt, for which murder and suicide are indistinguishable, also explains how this aggressivity can be directed outward as sadism against the other.

In post-colonial theory, the very void of the Real is the locus in which Bhabha’s concepts of fetish, mimicry, and hybridity are situated, as well as the fantasies of nationhood. In their own way, each of these fantasies give consistency to what cannot be symbolized, thus materializing a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle. The inverse of this jouissance is a fierce resentment for the enjoyment of the other, for the one who threatens to steal or contaminate my own enjoyment.

In the Deleuzean interpretation of Foucault’s ‘metapsychology’, however, the fold in the Outside is presented in more political rather therapeutic terms as the topos of

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subjectivation. This is the space in which the immanence of the non-self obtains—the folded topology of the relation of force to other forces—the space which enables the folding back or relation of force to itself and, likewise, the self-imposition of moral codes by the subject (e.g. the enkrateia of the Greeks). Here, Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father and the Freudian Ego Ideal come to mind. Deleuze contends that the fold is that which—by problematizing the past, freeing oneself from the present and establishing the possibility of thinking otherwise—enables us to seek answers to the Kantian questions: What can I do? What can I know? What can I be? In this manner it: (a) leads to transformations of the Diagram; b) explains how we can relate to and transform ourselves via technologies of power; (c) opens up the possibility of a non-reactive mode of resistance that is more primordial and autonomous than power-knowledges, which in themselves are forever condemned to operate within the topological confines of the Diagram. From a Lacanian perspective, perhaps, we can relate the fold to the empty mirror of the transference relation, which enables the analysand to subvert the Master signifiers that would otherwise govern him or her as an expression of the remorseless demands emanating from the super ego and consolidated through the unattainable standards that are embodied in the ego ideal.

2. The Gaze, the Outside, and the Law: In the social sciences, much of the debate on identity and conceptions of space has taken place within the debates on post-colonial discourse. To find some purchase on these debates, and their relationship to Foucaldean and Lacanian thought, this section briefly examines the work of Edward Said and the Lacanian critiques directed at Said by Homhi Bhabha.

2.1 Orientalism’s notion of the Other Said’s analysis is one based on a distinction between manifest form (reflecting the diachronic narrative of colonial discourse which is constituted by the instability of knowledge) and the unconscious scene (reflecting a synchronic essentialism which is constituted by the latent content of stable signifiers and fantasies).

Said follows Foucault in rejecting the dichotomies between ideology and appearance on one hand, and science and essence, and the associated facile conception that political subversion could operate merely through an inversion of the symmetrical dialectic between self and other or master and slave. Said replaces these overused dichotomous terms with a new conceptual framework predicated on the notion of an ambivalence that is guaranteed by a multiplicity of overlapping and differential power relations. It is here where the diagram, ‘dispositif’ or apparatus plays a crucial role. Under the diffuse force of these power relations, the colonial subject is constructed as both a support and a target or adversary, as one who both frightens (as a phobic object) and one who entices (as the object of fetish); one whose counter-force can either be blocked or stabilized and deployed; one who can be incited to action, or constrained through interdiction’.

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Moreover, Said introduces a median category that would stand between the fear of the new or the original and a contempt for the familiar and the repetitive.

In contrast, Bhabha predicates his own conception of mimicry and the doubling of the colonial subject on the Freudian idea of fetishism as a paradoxical form of suture: stitching together both a metaphoric disavowal of castration (as the masking of the origin accomplished through an archaic affirmation and fixation of wholeness or identity), and a metonymic recognition of, and defense against castration (accompanied by the anxiety associated with difference or lack). Through the fetish—situated within the register of the Lacanian Symbolic, and governed by the surveillance of the scopic drive—both the coloniser and the colonised are denied access to negation as that which would otherwise permit recognition of difference.

Similarly, mimicry is camouflage: an elusive and effective strategy of colonial power, which operates through both the rhetorical instruments of irony and repetition, and the aesthetic resources of a trompe-l’oeil. In mimicry Bhabha discerns a kind of ironic compromise, governed by the imperial desire for a reformed, recognizable Other; that is, for a colonial subject who is ‘almost the same but not quite’. Colonial discourse is thus split between the post-Enlightenment language of liberty and a discourse, all the time highlighting the threat to ‘normalizing’ surveillance, which is embodied in the displacing gaze of the other. Mimicry does not operate through some kind of harmonization as a repression of difference, but rather through a terrifying resemblance, which engages in a strategic confusion of metaphoric identity and metonymic difference.

Bhabha replaces Foucault’s ‘unthought’, regarded as the counterpart to the 19th Century

sciences of life, labour and language in favor of the Lacanian notion of the ‘other scene’. And what amounts to a desire for an authentic historical consciousness is, here, turned into farce through an uncontrollable repetition of the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia. As such, the founding objects of the Western world become transformed into the accidental, eccentric found objects of colonial discourse.

Bhabha sees in The Order of Things Foucault’s misconception that the history of anthropology could effectively become a counter-discourse to modernity. Insofar as Man is constituted in his positivity as the subject of history by superimposing on himself the history of things, beings and words, Bhabha argues that the Western ratio is thereby provided with a locus, which can ground all of its dealings with other cultures. Nevertheless, to the extent that this fulcrum is established through the infinite and metonymic repetition of what is in reality an episodic and indeterminate sequence of cultural events, Bhabha ruefully observes that Man as universal subject is thus exposed to the incommensurability, ambivalence, and contingency of cultural difference.

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However, Bhabha ought to have acknowledged the fact that Foucault himself has never resiled from emphasizing on one hand the contingent, and historical nature of this ‘anthropological slumber’, (i.e. that in the social which gives rise to the universal subject) and on the other hand it temporary or episodic existence. The concept of Man, Foucault suggests, was soon to be erased by other contemporary developments within 19th Century thought; namely, Nietzsche’s genealogical approach and that of Freudian psychoanalysis. For Foucault, as we have seen, the historical a priori arises through the contingency of the interlacing of the two strata—statements and visibilities—accomplished through the strategic operations of power-knowledge. While Foucault first discusses the ‘unthought’ in this context, Deleuze brings out the centrality of the Outside of thought in Foucault’s later work. Needless to say, in staking his claim for the superiority of a Lacanian approach to post-colonial discourse, Bhabha would be reluctant to accept the possibility of a topological isomorphism between the Deluezian-Foucauldian concept of the fold in the Outside and Lacan’s arguments about the Kantian Thing, or his more seminal analysis of the Moebius strip appearing within his Schema-R.

Another Lacanian critic of Foucault is Joan Copjec, a longtime associate of Bhabha’s, who has conducted much of her research within the discipline of film theory. Her anti-Foucaldian arguments, which are based on Lacan’s notion of the gaze, are addressed below. In defending Foucault against his critics I want to highlight and bring out the underlying notion of space that can be discerned at play within the core of Foucault’s most profound and poetic thoughts.

2.2 Does the Lacanian Gaze Subvert Foucault? In regard to Foucault’s diagrammatic logic of the Panopticon, Joan Copjec has complained that it betokens the possibility of attaining total visibility and complete knowledge by virtue of excluding invisibility and non-knowledge. As such, the subject of the panoptic gaze is materially constructed by disciplinary power without the requirement for any mediation through the subject’s own representations. In contrast, she advocates a Lacanian reading predicated on the notion that a signifying system can never be determinate. It is not so much that the subject is constructed by a multitude of different discourses as the Foucaldeans would have it, for her non-knowledge is not inscribed at the point of overlap and contradiction between a multiplicity of meanings; rather, it is a force of resistance that renders every meaning incomplete and undermines every certainty (Copjec, 1995: 18). Where Foucault goes wrong, according to Copjec, is in assuming that the law, as an embodiment of the power that constitutes desire, is positive, nonrepressive, unconditional and unconditioned: for Foucault, she suggests, any notion of a negative, repressive law is purely the creation of psychoanalysis. Yet if this were the case, she reasons, any requirement for prohibition would be entirely superfluous and the very existence of moral conscience would go unexplained (Copjec, 1995: 25-26).

In opposition to these claims, Copjec draws on Bachelard’s interpretation of the orthopsychic rather than the panoptic relation. It is the subject’s relation to itself that

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introduces the opportunity for concealment, the suspicion of dissimulation, and the ever-present possibility of self-deception: as such, the subject becomes a mere hypothesis of being. Copjec goes on to suggest that a similar, though not wholly identical, interpretation can be found in Lacan’s notion of the Gaze, as illustrated below:

In Lacan’s diagrammatic construction, the Gaze appears as one of the nodes of two interpenetrating triangles intersecting at the point of the image or screen. One of these triangles depicts the imaginary relation between the perceiving subject and the image, as if the image were both captured by, and marked out against, a perspectival grid such as those used by Renaissance artists. Moreover, the subject would be captured as well, but in this case, by the illusion of being the source of the world thus represented. However, in Lacan’s diagram the second triangle depicting the Gaze intervenes to disrupt the topology of representation. The imaginary relation cannot trap the subject completely. No vision can exist independently from language. Instead, the grapheme intervenes, lending meaning to the optical representation. Through the opacity of the signifier, and because each signifier is defined in relation to all other signifiers by virtue of the position it takes within the whole signifying network, the subject is able to conceive of a gaze outside the field of representation. Copjec contends that, for Lacan, this second triangle indicates the subject’s mistaken belief that there is something behind the space set out by the first (Copjec, 1995: 33).

As Boothby argues, unlike the Sartrean look, Lacan’s gaze not only acknowledges that the object for human beings is one that looks at me—especially when the eyes are blind, or evoked by rustling leaves—conveying sentiments of mastery and reciprocal guilt, in that it destabilizes the imaginary binary of the for-itself and in-itself, of the objectifying and objectified (Boothby, 2001: 252-3; citing Lacan, 1988b:215; and the unpublished Seminar, Book 10). Not only can both positions be assumed simultaneously (as with the

imageObject GeometralPointimageObject GeometralPoint

Point of

LightScreen Picture

The objet a in the field of the visibleis the Gaze: in nature

as = (- φ){The objet a in the field of the visibleis the Gaze: in nature

as = (- φ){

imagescreen

The subject of representationThe gaze

LACAN LACAN -- THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSISTHE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSISThe GazeThe Gaze

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contemptuous stare of a magazine cover girl), but Boothby points out the fact that a triadic structure is entailed between subject, the visual object, and the gaze as third locus: as the objet petit a to the extent that beauty is substituted for the monstrousness of the Thing (in the very same way that paintings mollify the gaze of the spectator). The all-seeing gaze is thus the ‘unapprehensible’ horizon within which the visible is established, it is the opaque screen: not the aim of the drive but the object-cause, the under-side of consciousness that produces both positional awareness and the depth of field through which the desire of the Other addresses itself to us (i.e. it is the Other in the other) (Boothby, 2001: 254-6; 258-60; citing Lacan, 1981: 82-3; 101). In mass psychology, the gaze brings subjects together in the position of being dominated by the desire of the Other, inciting aggression in the name of the leader against those outside the group.

Far from language constructing “the prison walls of the subject’s being” Copjec argues that the subject, through language, perceives these walls “as trompe l’oeil”, as an illusion constructed by something beyond them (Copjec, 1995: 34). For the subject of the gaze, Copjec reasons, this raises the quintessentially Lacanian question, “What is being concealed from me? What in this graphic space does not show, does not stop not writing itself? And this very point at which something appears to be missing or invisible, where some meaning remains un-sensed, this, is the point of the Lacanian gaze (Copjec, 1995: 34). Moreover, this very fact that “words fall short of the goal”, that the veil of representation seems to conceal something behind it, is conceived by Lacan as the very foundation and cause of the subject’s being. The subject “is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see (Copjec, 1995: 35). Thus, Copjec announces, the gaze “is the object cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible”. Far from coinciding with the gaze, far from being inscribed by all its supposed multiplicities of meaning, instead the subject is constituted by being cut off from a gaze that is intrinsically blind, self-absorbed, and non-confirming3

.

However, I would argue that Copjec errs in holding to the simplistic presumption that Foucault collapses appearance and being, on one hand, through his rejection of any conception of a metalanguage, thus reducing social space ‘to the relations that fill it’ and, on the other hand, through the replacement of the metaliguistic by a Spinozist notion of immanent causality, in opposition to which Copjec heralds Lacan’s alternative notion of anamorphic causality whereby the phenomenal field ‘obscures its cause’. Again, Copjec errs in arguing that Foucault wrongfully construes the subject as one constructed by a multitude of different discourses, such that non-knowledge is inscribed at the point of overlap and contradiction between an inassimilable multiplicity of meanings. In accordance with this misguided critique, Copjec insists that non-knowledge is a force of resistance undermining every certainty and rendering every meaning incomplete.

3 Accordingly, Copjec reasons that narcissism cannot be reduced to the simple finding of satisfaction in the image. Rather, it consists in the belief “that one’s own being exceeds the imperfection of its image” (Copjec, 1995, p. 37).

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On the contrary I would argue that, for Foucault, it is not language which constructs “the prison walls of the subject’s being” but the immanently causal relations of power and knowledge. Moreover, as Deleuze demonstrates resistance, in Foucault’s thinking, does not arise within the diagrams that actuate power but rather is generated within the non-space that is the outside of thought: an outside that is seen to possess all the hallmarks of Lacan’s notion of the impossible and inaccessible Kantian Thing. As argued above, this interpretation of power and resistance appears most clearly in Foucault’s essay on Blanchot (Foucault, 1966: 30-1). Once again, Blanchot’s notions of zeal and negligence resonate with Lacan’s reading of the Freudian Fetish, which acts as a substitute for the castrated phallus and masks or conceals the reality of castration.

Similarly, Blanchot’s conception of the law holds that it does not operates as a principle or inner rule of conduct, but rather as the outside enveloping conduct, the void which converts its singularity into the universal necessitating transgression as both a provocation and a revelation of invisibility (Foucault, 1966: 34-5). As such, this conception of the law bears an unmistakable resemblance to Lacan notion of the the lawless law as something predicated on the unknowability of the Other’s desire. As we have seen, the Thing provides an internal though empty locus of unity and constancy, enabling us to hold both memory and perception together until identity in perception can be established. However, for Freud no less than for Lacan, the pre-given non-equivalence between object and Thing also opens up a space beyond the pleasure principle, wherein resides the capacity for both sovereign good and radical evil. These conceptions of the lawless law will come to the fore in our review of Rutherford’s application of Lacanian concepts to a series of iconic works of Australian literature.

3. Prelude to a Critique of Antipodean Representation of Space The above theoretical interrogation has revealed a remarkable association in Foucault’s work between fiction, space, and non-space. I have also highlighted the affinities between Foucault’s thinking about the Outside and Lacan’s notions of the Kantian Thing and the Gaze. It remains to be seen where this kind of thinking might lead when it comes to identifying the Antipodean representation of space. To this end, I am going to draw on Jennifer Rutherford’s Lacanian reading of Australian culture.

The elements of Rutherford’s reading are summarised below, in an excessively abbreviated form that, hopefully, manages to convey some of the flavour of Rutherford’s work.

1. In Lady Bridget in Never Never Land, Rosa Praed establishes a dichotomy between a primordial, elemental, unadulterated, lawless, violent, dominant masculinity and the contaminating world of feminine sensibility, regulation and pragmatism: one that can only be resolved through love and the subsequent recognition by the hero McKeith of the validity of Black law. This fantasy of a

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lawless (British) law abounds in colonial fiction, as what must be overthrown and displaced by a new code of equality and a new hierarchy of monetary gain.

2. The diasporic subject (Richard Mahony) in Henry Handel Richardson’s Australia Felix, guilty of failing the colonial ego-ideal, forever subtended by the opposition between English cultivation and petty minded snobbery or parochialism on one hand, and an anchorless, egalitarian, easy-going, affable space without stable identity: a subject exposed to the madness associated with the loss of the Other. This opposition mirrors the two contrasting modes of group identification between love for the same (the horizontal, narcissistic, imaginary identification) and love for the different (the vertical, symbolic, identification with the leader as a personification of the gaze of the Other). Australian xenophobia stands as a figure against the ground of an idealized (and tyrannous) neighbourliness (personified by Mary).

3. The forthright prose of Malouf’s Johnno, mirroring the ideal of plain speech and symbolic curtailment, deceptively seduces the reader to identify with the narrator, when the symbolic efficacy of the text is rather realized in its vertiginous poetic and figurative departures from plain speaking. Johnno, the quintessential Australian larrikin and maverick icon of lawlessness and masculine beauty, playing in the empty space left by the departed father, by European law, finally repudiates this lawlessness in attempting to move beyond the law. In this repudiation he moves towards the Kantian Thing as the paradoxical source of both desire and disgust, towards the Sublime as that which escapes signification, the dimension of courtly love situated in a region of excess beyond the conventional moral sphere of the narrator, beyond the empty constraints of Brisbane life. But Rutherford explains how Johnno’s very European efforts at ecstatic abasement degenerate into farce and buffoonery against the backdrop of Australian ‘suburb-inanity’ even as death itself overtakes him: “[u]nable to speak, Johnno situates himself in the place of the Gauche Intruder—of the Thing—and makes place speak its limits as the limits of speech [175].”

4. The castrating, excessive space of lost love in Winton’s The Rider, drawing Scully into a European light that illuminates and humiliates his unreflexive, naïve, open-handed, optimistic, generous, genuine and democratic status against a European ground of superciliousness, pretentiousness, sophistication, and subtlety. In the background, the beautiful and perverse Jennifer, she who desires the desire of the Other, ultimately becoming the shark-fanged woman, the women who initially opens the door to an alien, foreign contamination, only to tear her child into pieces: the uncanny embodiment of the other who steals my enjoyment, the impossible vanishing point of the law.

5. Rutherford compares the critical reception of Patrick White’s work in Australia with the feting of artistic works by the Heidelberg School who were viewed as the first authentically Australian painters to portray the bush in an intense and transparent light of verisimilitude: works that were all too easily contrasted with the apparently tainted, more European productions of their colonial predecessors such as Von Guerard and Glover, as though the bohemian world of Impressionism arose from a purely indigenous movement. She identifies a homology between the Bulletin’s progressivism (with obvious sources in Irish nationalism, English

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radicalism and American republicanism) and the modern critical attacks on White’s style, which paradoxically was seen to evoke a European imprecision, a patrician and sophisticated dissembling, a metaphoricity, and semantic playfulness, alongside a formless, murky, savage aboriginality. In destabilizing the narcissistic fantasy of Australian homogeneity—of a plenitude without lack—through the Other of language White articulates the inarticulable character of the “Great Australian Emptiness”. Each of the four riders represents one facet of this emptiness: Mrs. Godbold the fecund mother bespeaking the lie of masculine wholeness; Miss Hare the mad spinster personifying the ungovernable and threatening reality of the bush; Himmelfarb the Jew-Christ figure, who was ‘crucified’ by Blue as an inadequate form of compensation for the pain of his motherless isolation; and Dubbo the aboriginal protector of an artistic beauty occluded by the white Australian culture.

Conclusion In a provocative manner, this paper has attempted to trace the resonances between Foucault’s meditations on the ‘thought from the outside’ and Lacan’s analysis of the Kantian Thing. The interpretation it offers is no doubt controversial, not least because Foucault has explicitly distanced himself from psychoanalysis, most notably in the forward he wrote for Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Yet this distancing stands in marked contrast to Foucault’s respectful attitude towards psychoanalysis in The Order of Things, where he regards it as a complement to ethnology in the constitution of his ‘Third Science’ of the historical a-priori.

Moreover, in the articulation of what is often glibly described as the politics of identity psychoanalysis, in its Lacanian garb, has played an important and enduring role. Notions of fractured identity, hybridity, mimicry, and liminality are commonplace in the cultural geographies of post-colonial theory. Yet theorists such as Bhabha, have exhibited a hostility towards the Foucaldian analysis of authors such as Edward Said. Unravelling the misunderstandings responsible for such hostility has provided this paper with one of its most obvious motivations.

In a sister paper to this one, I have focused on the valuable contribution that Foucault’s analysis of assemblages, dispositifs and diagrams can make to the critique of neoliberalism. As Foucault was once willing to openly acknowledge, psychoanalysis has provided an important resource for critical thinking across the human sciences. Another motive for this paper has therefore been the desire to construct a bridge between psychoanalysis and Foucault’s later work on power-knowledge relations and technologies of power. In this context, there is no doubt that psychoanalysis has often served conservative political masters, and may continue to do so, especially within the American school of ego-psychology and some of the object-relations schools. However, for Lacanian analysis, such forms of political conservatism are neither inevitable nor desirable.

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Bibliography Althusser, L. and Balibar, É., (1970), Reading Capital, (trans.) Ben Brewster, London: Verso.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The location of culture, London; New York: Routledge.

Boothby, , R. (2001) Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan, New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, (1994), What is Philosophy, Trans. H. Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York, Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, (1999), Foucault, trans Sean Hand, London, Athlone Press.

Foucault, Michel (2001) Interview with Michel Foucault (conducted by D. Trombadori in 1978 and first published in the Italian journal Il Contributo, in 1980) appearing in Faubion, James D. ed., (translated by Robert Hurley and others) Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Volume 3, Power, Penguin Books, London.

- (1998) "A preface to transgression" in Faubion, James D. ed., (translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, slightly modified) Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Volume 2, Aesthetics, method and epistemology, Penguin Books, London, pp. 69-87.

- (1988) The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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- (1984) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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- (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books.

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- (1987) Foucault/Blanchot : Maurice Blanchot : the thought from outside, trans. Brian Massumi. Michel Foucault as I imagine him / by Maurice Blanchot; trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, New York : Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fourtounis, G. (2005), ‘On Althusser's Immanentist Structuralism: Reading Montag Reading Althusser Reading Spinoza’, Rethinking Marxism, January, 17( 1), 101-118.

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Haas, L., 1998, ‘Beheading the King: Foucault on the Limits of Juridical Thought’ in Reinterpreting the Political: Continental Philosophy and Political Theory, ed by L. Langsdorf , S. H. Watson, & K. Smith, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998, 233-48.

Jessop, B. (2002) “Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Urban Governance: A State-theoretical Perspective”, Chapter 5 in Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (eds.) (2002) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, London, Blackwell Publishers.

Lacan, J. (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller): Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60, English translation with notes by Dennis Porter, Routledge, New York. Originally

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published in French as Le Séminaire, Livre VII, L’ethique de la psychoanalyse, 1959-1960 by Les Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1986.

- (1988a) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller): Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester, New York: W.W.Norton & Co.

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Said, Edward, W. (1995) Orientalism, London: Penguin.

Line of the Outside

Strategic zone

Fold: zone of subjectivization

Strata Strata

Deleuze (1986): 120

The Outside [non-stratified] Internal to Thought

STATEMENTS

Non-formalizable functions

VISIBILITIES

Non stratified

Conditions of Enunciation

Conditions of Emergence

Power [diagrammatic] • Incite/ing • Provoke/ing • Produce/ing F f K l d

Knowledge [stratified]

Actualizing affective t i f

STRATEGY THE DIAGRAM