5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
language has come under fire (see Ricoeur, 1970; Castoriadis, 1984; Laplanche,
1987). Here it is asserted that the unconscious is the pre-condition for language
and not the reverse. As concerns social theory, the problems in this respect are
significant. For it is certainly arguable that, in presenting an account of desire as
disembodied and prestructured linguistically, Lacan effectively strips the subject of
any capacity for autonomy, reflection and transformation.
Equally serious are the criticisms that have been made of Lacan’s account of culture.
Lacan’s linkage of the ‘subject of the unconscious’ with the idea of the ‘arbitrary
nature of the sign’ raises the thorny problem of the replication of ideological power.
In this connection, Lacan fails to explain how some ideological and political meanings
predominate over others in the shaping of the personal sphere. Instead, cultural
domination is equated with language as such. It is the subjection of the individual to
the symbolic, to the force of the Law, which accounts for the fall of the subject.
However, as Dews (1987) argues, Lacan’s equation of language with domination
seriously downplays the importance of power, ideology and social institutions in the
reproduction of cultural life.
LACANIAN AND POST-LACANIAN CONTEXTS
Lacan’s return to Freud has powerfully influenced debates concerning the links
between self and society in the late modern age. The emphasis on problems of
language and communication in Lacanianism has made this current of thought
highly relevant to a variety of social-theoretical issues in the social sciences.
In his essay ‘ldeology and ideological state apparatuses’ (1971), the French Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser seeks to integrate structural Marxism and Lacanian
psychoanalysis in order to understand the working of ideology in modern societies.
Althusser traces ideology as a discourse which leads the individual subject to
understand itself and others in such a way as to support the reproduction of
ruling-class power. Like Lacan, Althusser argues that social forms are experienced,
not so much in the public world of institutions, as in the fantasy realm of the
imaginary. ‘All ideology’ represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion is not the
existing relations of production...but above all the (imaginary) relationship of
individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them’
(1971:38–9). From this angle, ideology provides an imaginary centring to everyday life,
it confers identity on the self and Others, and makes the individual feel valued within
the social, cultural network.