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.