Serendipity alaways seems to play a part in academic research. I finished my previous post having decided that I needed to do a more thorough exploration of what Lacan had to say about ideology. I turned to  Krutzen, who is not infallible, but normally delivers the main references, at least according to key words. The head word produced five references in four seminars: 14, 16 (2), 18, and 19. I will explore these texts in more detail later, but I want to finish the serendipity thread first.

The first piece of luck came through Academia.edu, in the form of an essay by Peter Caws, Goerge Washington University: "The Unconscious is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences", whose unpromising title led me to consider a new-to-me concept of the ex-conscious, a category to add to Freud's Conscious-Pre-conscious-Unconscious, which Caws created following a passage in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents:

    . . . Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical             entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once         come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist         alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium      of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S.         Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by      the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once         more stand—without the palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this         not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still     showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands     we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we           should find not only the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site,     the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the            church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer        would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one     view of the other . . . [Freud, 17-19]

Caws goes on to observe: 

    So there is a lot in cities that we don’t see, or can’t see, or don’t want to see. But it is there just the same,.... All of it, not just the early morning activity, is in Lacan’s words "the result of thoughts, actively thinking thoughts," even if not always consciously thinking thoughts.

Although Lacan in his Baltimore text (more on this later) does not state the parallel between those material expressions of "thoughts", his statement at least creates a metaphor between the ever-present but past-created thoughts and ideology, or at least one kind of ideology.

The second piece of serendipity, although coming out of a conscious search for "ideology in MUN's library catalogue, was an essay, "Ideology and the Question of the Subject" by Goldberg and Sekoff, published in a collection of essays, published 1978 by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology, London : Hutchinson & Co., 1978, pp.265. Further discussion of this essay will have to wait for my next blog.

 My best laid plans to make this blog a weekly event were set aside by the visit of a former student, now a dear friend, who was in town to see his ageing father. Time was not lost, however, since we had several lively discussions centred on the questions I posed in the previous blog. 

Tom's doctoral dissertation dealt in part with the ways in which First Nations have been dealing with the impact of North American culture on their traditional way of living in the land. We tried to thrash out the interactions between native culture -- all the various aspects of family relationships, role models, entertainment, rhythms of seasonal activities-- and the importation of mechanical devices such as guns, snowmobiles, radio, and planes. We differed in our approach: Tom preferred to think of the First Nations' world view as "culture"; I am leaning towards the cluster of ideas grouped under "ideology".

Lacan rarely used the term "ideology".  Instead, focussing on the preeminence of language, he developed his thinking according to the three orders: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. The Symbolic deals with language. Beyond that simple statement lies: the language that the child learns in the context first of the family -- the "mother tongue" in common parlance, harking back to a time when children were raised in the early years by a mother (or mother substitute in wealthy families) -- then the extended family, early schooling, and so on up to the general level of the nation. Signifiers are grouped by sense into sentences, then into more complex conscious constructions. However, at some stage, links beyond sense are formed as the unconscious comes into play. Firstly, one signifier becomes "lost" -- it simply disappears from conscious recall. It will however play a role in organizing, beyond conscious control, other signifiers. Among these other signifiers, some will act as "quilting points", drawing some signifiers into chains or webs. When in early sessions the analysand is asked to freely associate, avoiding where possible conscious choice of words, the analyst is listening for those signifying chains, in order to determine the "quilting points", and eventually the "lost" signifier. This is a rather crude description of the Symbolic order.

The Imaginary is more difficult to describe. It includes all the visual images that surround the child and then the adult, which are absorbed without conscious effort. They include the obvious: buildings, advertisements both large and small, photographs (especially family photos that place the subject in the nexus of family relations), statues, monuments, and so on. And then the tricky notion of ideology. Most of ideology rarely receives conscious expression until it is analysed from a radically different point of view. Class consciousness, which may be dimly perceived by the subject through an awareness of the quality of clothing, accent, topics of conversation, cultural references, manners, and so on; religion or general world view, including race; political views. In a separate but related category I am placing work relations, and especially the relationship between worker and the means of production. My reasons for separating this aspect is because as the means for production remained stable over a fairly long period of time, there was a direct and sustained impact somatically. (I will deal with this in more detail later.)

The third order, the Real, is not to be confused with reality. Lacan came to identify the real with the "lost" object mentioned above, giving it the "title" (not the name) objet a. No signifier can be attached to it, but it has an enormous impact on the subject. If a metaphor might help, it is like a black hole -- nothing escapes from it, because its magnetic force is so great. The subject experiences it as the object cause of their desire, something they constantly strive to reach, but from which their drive is diverted.

Next time I want to focus more on the Imaginary, since I think that it is there that I will find some answers to my initial questions.

Robbe-Grillet in the light of Lacan

 This is a general title that I am going to use for what I hope will be a series of posts concerning my recent thinking about Robbe-Grillet. Why now? you may ask. Well in September 2022 I attended a conference on R-G to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in Brest, Brittany. The event had attracted scholars from various countries, some of them like me, old-stagers from previous conferences, and some new faces, an encouraging aspect for future scholarly work on this important novelist, cineast and essayist.We had the added attraction of R-G's wife, Catherine who attended every session, sitting in the front row and paying close attention to the proceedings. So much for the context that has prompted this series. The Actes of the conference will be published shortly, an event which may result in some attention being given to R-G's work; since his death in 2008, most publications have been edited versions of interviews he gave to various people in the last decade of his life., notably Roger-Michel Allemand's Entretiens complices and Benoît Peeters' Alain Robbe-Grillet: Réinventer le roman. Entretiens inédits.

In my presentation, I focussed on Lacan`s concept of jouissance as displayed/hidden by R-G in his repeated use of a gap or a hole which he attempted to cover over. A similar structure can be find in incidents involving doppelganger; and in his last major novel, La Reprise, repetition in various forms operates to provide jouissance for the author/narrator. I indicated, during the presentation, that some questions had to be left for a future work. I have not formed a complete plan, but I will be guided by the following questions:

The first major question, which I think R-G answers in part as early as Pour un nouveau roman, is answered by R-G's focus on the creation of the work itself, shifting away from a Balzacian depiction of reality. My question focuses more tightly on trying to explain what is going on when so many other artists in all disciplines are pursuing the same line. I think that the usual recourse to "influence" is weak and insufficient. Flaubert, Verlaine and Rimbaud, the "Art for Art's sake" movement, impressionism, cubism, Schonberg, Stravinsky: each in his own way was responding to aspects of their world that could not be approached through earlier means.

The three numbered questions represent my attempt to bring some kind of cohesion to my research. More broadly, I am looking to spell out the dominant ideology that individuals are reacting against, whether consciously or unconsciously.

This is the prologue.