The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship

24 Pages·2005·0.33 MB·English

Volume 12(2): 223–246
ISSN 1350–5084
Copyright © 2005 SAGE
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
The Sublime Object of
Entrepreneurship
articles
Campbell Jones
University of Leicester, UK
Andre´ Spicer
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK
Abstract. This paper engages with debates on enterprise culture and one
of its key subjects—the entrepreneur. Enlisting the work of Jacques Lacan
and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, we attempt to explain the continuing failure of entre-
preneurship discourse to assign the character of the entrepreneur a
positive identity. Shifting away from stable categories such as ‘the entre-
preneur’, we describe entrepreneurship in terms of Lacan’s concept of
the Real and Zˇizˇek’s concept of the sublime object. This allows us to
critically scrutinize the operation of the phantasmic category of the
entrepreneur. In addition to indicating some prospects for the future of
psychoanalytic cultural criticism in organization studies, we make a case
for a continual questioning of the subject, a questioning that is today
being foreclosed by those critics who were first to call the subject into
question. Key words. entrepreneurship, du Gay, Foucault, Lacan, the
Other, the Real, the Subject, Zˇizˇek
Introduction: ‘Hey, You There!’
In a handful of notes and drafts that pre-date Foucault’s explicit accounts
of subjectification by several years, Louis Althusser indicated a rough
sketch of subject formation in terms of what he called ‘interpellation’
(Althusser, 1971, 1995; see also, for example, Foucault, 1982). Concerned
with the function of ideology in reproducing capitalist social formations,
DOI: 10.1177/1350508405051189 http://org.sagepub.com
Organization 12(2)
Articles
Althusser identified the way that ideology operates through the category
of the subject, by ‘“constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’ (1971:
171). This constitution of subjects takes place through a dynamic of
ideological recognition, a process of ‘identifying’ with or ‘recognizing’
oneself in a particular ideology: hence the hypothesis that ideology
works by interpellating subjects, by calling them up and in doing so
constituting individuals as subjects. As Althusser puts it:
I shall suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it
‘recruits’ subjects (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ subjects among the
individuals (it transforms them all) by the very precise operation which I
have called interpellationor hailing, and which can be imagined along the
lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey,
you there!’. (Althusser, 1971: 174)
On Althusser’s account, the subject responds to the call by turning
around, and in the act of turning around becomes a subject. Although
such a conception of the constitution of subjects outlines an intuitively
plausible parable of the relation between the subject and the constituting
call, questions immediately arise as to the efficacy of the interpellative
act. Althusser suggests that ‘the practical telecommunication of hailings
is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the
one hailed always recognises that it is really him who is hailed’ (1971:
174). Such an account suggests a particularly forceful authority on the
part of the caller, which may be the case in certain situations, but also
might overemphasize the authority of the interpellative power and invite
charges of ‘determinism’. Recognizing that Althusser introduces the
image of the police hailing as a self-conscious simplification, we also face
the question of why it is that, hearing a call, a subject would turn around.
The obverse of this, of course, is the question of why and how the subject
might reject a particular call, refusing to identify with the interpellative
apparatus.
If these are pressing problems for those working with an Althusserian
conception of interpellation, it is equally an issue for those working with
variants of this conception, probably the most common of which in
organization studies is a Foucauldian account of subjectification. This
Foucauldian image, which clearly draws on and extends Althusser’s
concerns (see Jones, 2002), sees subjects as formed or constructed in
‘discourse’ but still inherits similar problems. The questions remain: why
is it that subjects accept, indeed actively desire to construct themselves
in relation to discourse? If we reject a humanist vision of an isolated
subject who is immune to or only ever repressed by discourse, and also
want to be able to explain the constitution of the subject in discourse,
then we need to pose the question of why it is that subjects recognize
themselves in discourse, that is, why they turn around when they are
called.
In this paper we outline a specific way of approaching these questions,
which cut to the core of contemporary debates about subjectivity and
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resistance. We suggest that a particularly powerful approach to these
questions might be found in the work of Jacques Lacan, work that has (we
think unfortunately) been underutilized in organization studies. We
suggest that a broadly Lacanian conception of the relation between the
subject and language might offer a way out of some of the impasses that
currently puzzle those concerned with issues of subjectivity and resist-
ance. We work through these general claims by focusing on the specific
case of the operation of discourses of enterprise, their effects in the
constitution of enterprising subjects, and problems around the category
of ‘the entrepreneur’. We begin with a discussion of one exemplary
account of both subjectification and enterprise, which can be found in
Paul du Gay’s examination of enterprise culture. Du Gay’s work and
subsequent responses can be read as a significant moment in a debate
around how a discourse (here enterprise discourse) hails subjects who
then further the cause of post-industrial capital through their own
volition. Revisiting these debates will help us to pose the question of the
subject in a Lacanian register or, better, show that Lacanian answers are
sometimes already there, in the most unexpected places.
Why du Gay Is Not (Always) a Foucauldian
In a series of papers (du Gay, 1991, 1994; du Gay and Salaman, 1992)
culminating in his books Consumption and Identity at Work (du Gay,
1996) and In Praise of Bureaucracy (du Gay, 2000b, see also 2003, 2004),
du Gay offers a critical analysis of enterprise culture and of its con-
sequences for ‘the construction of new work identities and the produc-
tion of different work-based subjects’ (1996: 3). At first glance the
theoretical frame is broadly Foucauldian: enterprise appears in the form
of a discourse that enacts relations of power through the construction of
subject positions, in a process that involves ‘making up’ enterprising
subjects. In a recent intervention, Fournier and Grey (1999) criticize du
Gay’s work on enterprise on a number of counts (see also Fournier, 1998;
Armstrong, 2001a,b).1 Although their criticisms are wide-ranging, of
interest here are their comments about subjectivity and their charge that
du Gay offers ‘too little’ of an account of resistance and of alternative
discourses to enterprise. They charge, in short, that in du Gay’s work
‘enterprise is treated deterministically’ (Fournier and Grey, 1999: 117). In
doing so, Fournier and Grey evoke the now widespread criticism of
Foucauldian organization studies on the basis that it denies, or at least
displays a tendency to neglect, the possibility of resistance (see, for
example, Gabriel, 1999; Newton, 1998; Reed, 1998, 2000; Thompson and
Ackroyd, 1995; see also Fleming, 2001; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994;
O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001a,b).
Fournier and Grey’s case is more sophisticated, and indeed more
paradoxical, than a simple dismissal of du Gay’s analysis of enterprise on
the grounds that his Foucauldianism leads him to ignore resistance. They
insist that a Foucauldian approach is not necessarily inimical to accounts
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of resistance, and hence they try to avoid the simplifying and ultimately
disappointing rejection of Foucault that we find in critics such as
Thompson and Ackroyd, who suggest that ‘neglect of resistance ...
reflects the limitation of Foucault’s analysis where, in the desire to avoid
explanations at the level of the subject, human agency gets lost in the
constitution of the subject solely through discourse’ (1995: 625). Indeed,
what we find interesting in Fournier and Grey’s criticism is the para-
doxical and equivocal nature of their charges against du Gay, which offer
themselves for closer scrutiny.
Although Fournier and Grey argue that du Gay fails to account for
resistance, they are faced with the problem, which they admit, that du
Gay does in fact attempt to offer an account of resistance to enterprise
discourse. In his response to Fournier and Grey, du Gay insists: ‘I have
gone out of my way to indicate on a number of occasions, both theoreti-
cally and empirically, the impossibility of eradicating difference, diver-
sity and antagonism from organizational relations’ (du Gay, 2000a: 178).
Fournier and Grey concede that du Gay does ‘attempt’ to account for
resistance, citing du Gay when he writes that:
While the official discourse of enterprise tries to produce particular mean-
ings for and forms of conduct among employees that will in turn produce
quality service for customers and a sale for the company, it cannot
completely close off the processes of the production of meaning nor totally
determine how particular norms will be enacted. (du Gay, 1996: 160, cited
by Fournier and Grey, 1999: 119)
Fournier and Grey suggest that du Gay ‘escapes complete determinism
and makes space for resistance’ (1999: 120) by turning to the sphere of
consumption, but conclude that du Gay’s analysis of consumption ulti-
mately fails to reintroduce resistance. The problem with such an argu-
ment is that it fails to recognize that it is not through a turn to relations of
consumption that du Gay seeks to ‘escape determinism’ and that du Gay
introduces motifs of resistance by turning, at crucial points, to a quite
different theoretical source. To put it bluntly, Fournier and Grey too
easily assume that du Gay simply adopts a Foucauldian view of the
subject, and in doing so they fail to notice when du Gay draws on quite
different sources. Fournier and Grey argue that, compared with his
earlier articles:
In Consumption and Identity at Work, du Gay presents a less deterministic
view of enterprise; he draws on Foucault to suggest that no discourse or
mode of rationality is complete or has complete power over its subjects. He
admits the impossibility of one form of government to capture the real, so
that ‘government is a congenitally failing operation’. (Fournier and Grey,
1999: 119)
Let us follow the twists and turns of du Gay’s text more closely.
Directly following the comment ‘government is a congenitally failing
operation’, which appears on page 73 of Consumption and Identity at
Work, du Gay explains: ‘The “Real” always escapes attempts to govern it
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because there is always a “surplus” separating the “Real” from its
symbolization’ (du Gay, 1996: 73). Now, the problem is that this is not
Foucauldian language. Indeed, du Gay’s capitalization and insertion in
quotation marks of ‘the Real’ (which strangely disappear when Fournier
and Grey mention it) are far from accidental but make explicit reference
to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s quite specific conception of ‘the
Real’. Indeed, the Real is a central concept for Lacan—we might even say
that it is the Lacanian concept par excellence.2
This reference to Lacan is quite explicit, and we find an outline of a
range of Lacanian concepts in the pages running up to the section cited
by Fournier and Grey (du Gay, 1996: 70–3). In these pages du Gay
outlines some of the basic formulae of a Lacanian conception of the
social, and hence argues that ‘all attempts to capture the “Real” symboli-
cally ultimately fail. There is always a “left-over”, a “surplus” separating
the “Real” from its symbolization’ (du Gay, 1996: 70). Let us be clear, the
source of this jargon comes via Lacan, not Foucault. Here du Gay draws
on Zˇizˇek as well as Laclau and Mouffe, writers who are all significantly
influenced by Lacan. This ‘ineradicable surplus’ is described by du Gay,
following Zˇizˇek (1989), as a ‘traumatic real kernel’ and, following Laclau
and Mouffe (1985), as an ineradicable ‘antagonism’ (du Gay, 1996: 71).
Paraphrasing Laclau and Mouffe, du Gay finds that contradiction and
resistance are inherent in any social system because ‘“the social” is
“always an inconsistent field structured around a constitutive impossi-
bility”, a fundamental antagonism’ (du Gay, 1996: 71, see also Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985: 125–7).3
Even with these brief indications from the text, it should be clear that
du Gay has a ‘theoretical safeguard’ from determinism, which appears
not in a turn to consumption but in the category of the Real which he
borrows from Lacan. His references in these crucial sections are not
to Foucault (as is suggested by Fournier and Grey) but to Lacan and to
‘Lacanians’, specifically Zˇizˇek and Laclau and Mouffe. When Fournier
and Grey argue that du Gay ‘draws on Foucault to suggest that no
discourse or mode of rationality is complete or has complete power over
its subjects’ (Fournier and Grey, 1999: 119, emphasis added), they fail to
acknowledge the preceding section of du Gay’s work and in doing so fail
to be clear about the moments in which du Gay turns, not to Foucault,
but to Lacan and the Lacanian tradition.
Having located the impact of a certain reading of Lacan on du Gay, we
should not revert to a simplistic notion of inheritance that would see du
Gay’s work as simply or singularly determined (see Jones, 2002). We
should be alerted to the dangers of positioning du Gay’s work, as
Fournier and Grey seem to do, as simply ‘in a Foucauldian tradition’
(Fournier and Grey, 1999: 108). Rather, we should insist that any work,
and du Gay’s work is no exception, is multiply determined, or ‘over-
determined’ as Freud (1974) would say. We could suggest that du Gay’s
work on enterprise is caught between (at least) two determinations, one
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that is a Foucauldian conception (borrowing from Rose, Miller, Gordon,
etc.) of the construction of subjects through discourse, and another that is
a Lacanian conception (borrowing from Zˇizˇek, Laclau and Mouffe, etc.),
which sees the construction of subjects and the full or final constitution
of subjects or society as impossible.4
Outing Lacan
When we say that in du Gay there is a tension between a Foucauldian
and a Lacanian conception of the subject, this is not to say that du Gay is
a ‘closet Lacanian’, which might imply that there is a genuine Lacanian-
ism that could be found behind his Foucauldian veneer. Rather, it is to
say that his text is drawn in two directions, caught between two determi-
nations and unable to decide conclusively on one direction or the other.
Further, taking into account the marginal position of Lacan in organiza-
tion studies, it is not totally surprising that the Lacanian influence went
unremarked by Fournier and Grey. Whereas Lacan has had a significant
impact on cultural and social theory, his work remains largely unex-
plored in organization studies. Even when addressing issues that are of
central concern to Lacan such as the subject and language, there has been
a tendency in organization studies to privilege Foucauldian frames of
reference. We can see this here in an extreme form when the Lacanian
influence on du Gay’s work passes without comment under the critical
gaze of Fournier and Grey.
This is perhaps explicable with reference to the repression of psycho-
analysis and Lacan in organization studies. Lacan is typically given only
passing mention in works that survey organization studies (Clegg et al.,
1996: 235–6; Jackson and Carter, 2000; Warwick Organizational Behav-
iour Staff, 2001: 621) and fails to attract the attention of those outlining
‘critical’ approaches to management and organization (see, for example,
Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Thompson and
McHugh, 2002; Wilson, 1999). Lacan has been almost totally side-
stepped in debates over postmodernism and organization, not being
mentioned in the contributions to this debate by Burrell (1988, 1994),
Cooper (1989), Cooper and Burrell (1988), Hancock and Tyler (2001b),
Hassard and Parker (1993) or Parker (1992).
Nevertheless, there is an established tradition of using psychoanalytic
concepts to ask questions about organizational life. This is famously
associated with the classical tradition of the Tavistock Institute, and the
early works of writers such as Jacques (1951), although psychoanalytic
and psychodynamic explorations of work and organization now con-
stitute a veritable cottage industry (see, for example, Baum, 1987; Dia-
mond, 1993; Gabriel et al., 1999; Hirschhorn, 1988; Kets de Vries, 1984,
1993; Kets de Vries and associates, 1991; Maccoby, 1976; Schwartz,
1990). This work has clearly established the significance of the uncon-
scious and ostensibly ‘irrational’ aspects of organizational processes and
shown how there is much more to organizational life than meets the eye.
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In relation to the entrepreneur, the work of Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries
(1977, 1985, 1996) is exemplary of this tradition in the way that it opens
the door to the ‘dark side’ of entrepreneurship, even if we might want to
argue that the theoretical and political complexities of this dark side are
foreclosed in his analytic practice.
Some who are working in, or at the edges of, this psychoanalytic
tradition have found it productive to draw on Lacan. The journal Human
Relations, which has been broadly sympathetic to psychoanalytic studies
of organization for some years, has occasionally allowed Lacan into the
fray (see, for example, Leather, 1983; Long, 1991; Frosh, 1997) and has
recently published work that engages both Lacan and questions of
organization (Arnaud, 2002; Vanheule et al., 2003). Gilles Arnaud (2002)
has indicated a vast array of ways in which understandings of concepts
such as leadership and organizational symbolism might be transformed
by a Lacanian approach, and Vanheule et al. (2003) take up concepts of
the imaginary and the symbolic in order to interpret executive burnout.
In addition to this recent work, we should be aware of other Lacanian
work on organization, which ranges from those who mention concepts
such as ‘the Other’ in passing or introduce basic concepts (for example,
Carr and Zanetti, 1999; Cooper, 1983), to those who have used Lacan to
engage questions such as consultancy (Arnaud, 1998), information pro-
cessing (Fa¨y, 2000), public administration (McSwite, 1997a, 1997b) and
corporate responsibility (Roberts, 2001).
In terms of our own approach (to the extent that we are able to know
what ‘our approach’ is), we might suggest that we are making an effort to
extend, and in doing so to problematize, this tradition of the psycho-
analytic critique of organization. We draw selectively on the writings
of Lacan, although we are drawing particularly on the consequences of
Lacan for cultural critique. Importantly, whereas Arnaud (2002) and
Vanheule et al. (2003) elect to conduct organizational analysis using the
concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, we will here emphasize
the Real, which is the third and possibly most disruptive element of
Lacan’s theoretical triangle. The Real is also the element to which du Gay
explicitly refers, and we will use it in the course of this paper in our
attempt to disclose the phantasmic character of the entrepreneur.
We are more than aware of certain limitations in Lacan’s work, the
most obvious of which is his sometimes excessive writing style, some-
thing to which we should be alert even if we do not feel inclined to
disparage this as an ‘art of evasion’ (Derrida, 1981: 110). More problem-
atic perhaps is his troubled relationship with questions of gender, which
results in part from Lacan’s often over-enthusiastic identification with
Freud and the patriarchal stain this leaves on Lacan’s work. Anyone
hoping to engage with Lacan must face up to this stain, although we do
not think that a stained carpet is necessarily a useless one (see also Grosz,
1990). In the light of such problems, and drawing critically on the work
of Lacanian critics such as Brennan (1993), Copjec (1994), Salecl (1998)
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and in particular Zˇizˇek (1989, 1997, 2001), we propose to engage Lacan in
order to address specific questions of subjectivity and enterprise, while
remaining cautious of this endeavour and of previous discussions of
Lacan. This is not a marketing exercise on Lacan’s behalf. But first,
because Lacanian jargon is not generally taken as legal tender in organiza-
tion studies, perhaps we should explain some basic principles and clarify
some basic misunderstandings.
Beyond the Mirror Stage . . . and Back
When Lacan has been taken up in organization studies, it has been almost
exclusively through discussion of the concept of ‘the mirror stage’, which
appears in his early paper ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function
of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (Lacan, 1977a/1937).
In this paper, Lacan tells the parable of the act of a young child who, from
about the age of six months, becomes able to recognize its own image
reflected back to it. The child ‘unable as yet to walk, even to stand up
[and] still sunk in his motor and nursling dependence’ is able to fixate on
its image, in an act of what we know as identification(Lacan, 1977a: 1–2).
This early experience is, for Lacan, central to the formation of self and is
a central metaphor in his early work, which focuses on what he calls
‘Imaginary’ relations—the relations of identification of a subject with an
image.
If we were to go no further we would find here the Hegelian motif of
the development of self-consciousness, the story of the subject coming to
know itself by being recognized in the eyes of others, which is one of the
guiding strands of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1977; see also
Carr and Zanetti, 1999; Hancock and Tyler, 2001a). The mirror stage, in
this reduced form, is often taken to be Lacan’s contribution, offering a
conception of the subject who finds itself mirrored in its relations to
others. In an example that is particularly telling, such an image of Lacan
appears in the conclusion to McKinlay and Starkey’s edited book on
Foucault, Management and Organization Theory (1998; see also Starkey
and Hatchuel, 2002). Discussing shifts in Foucault’s work and possible
changes in the way that Foucault could be used in organization studies,
Starkey and McKinlay outline a possible move ‘from discipline to desire’.
Noting that the predominant use of Foucault in organization studies has
been to deal with questions of power and discipline, they bring to the
fore the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality(1985, 1986)
in which Foucault began more explicitly to theorize the subject as an
active desiring agent. In this context, Starkey and McKinlay (1998:
237–8) offer the work of Lacan as a way forward from Foucault, but once
again, although we find such a proposal potentially attractive, we should
admit our disappointment at what is actually achieved. In their outline of
what might be gained from Lacan, Starkey and McKinlay fail to get
beyond the most simplistic commonplaces about the mirror stage.
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This is significant because Lacan offers far more than a model in which
the subject recognizes itself in the mirror of the social. Indeed, such a
model could be easily found in Hegel, in Mead, or in a variety of social
psychologies in which the self is socially constructed in its daily inter-
actions with others. Such a model of the subject is a beginning, but it
might too easily reduce Lacan to some form of ‘social constructivist’ in
which the relation between the subject and the Other is easy and
satisfying, and in which the subject ‘takes up’ a whole and coherent
‘identity’ in relation to the Other. This reduction of the mirror stage to
the social construction of self and the failure to engage with the radi-
cal challenge of Lacan’s short paper on the mirror stage are our first
obstacle. And this is an obstacle that Lacan himself faced in his teaching.
Already in 1955 he noted the ways in which the term was being abused,
and hence the quip ‘The mirror stage is not a magic word’ (Lacan,
1988: 102).
The mirror stage, for us, is not a comforting discovery. If we go back to
the opening of this, his ‘first’ work, we find Lacan insisting that the
conception of the mirror stage ‘leads us to oppose any philosophy
directly issuing from the Cogito’ (1977a: 1). The challenge of the mirror
stage is not in seeing the subject as being constructed in relation to the
Other, a notion that is anyway almost a commonplace today. The chal-
lenge is that the act of recognition simultaneously involves a dynamic of
misrecognition (see also Peˆcheux, 1994). The subject perceives itself as
whole, as a bounded and effectively ‘good’ entity surrounded by the evils
of the world. This is the self-satisfying image of a coherent subject in
which, as Lacan puts it, ‘the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams
by a fortress, or a stadium—its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by
marshes and rubbish-tips’ (1977a: 5). Here we are approaching an under-
standing of Lacan’s conception of the subject. Through the mirror stage
the subject deceives itself into coherence through a phantasmic relation
to the Other. The subject misrecognizes a coherence that represses its
fragmented character. Hence, for Lacan, ‘[t]he subject is no one. It is
decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the
deceiving and realised image, of the other, or equally by its own specular
image. That is where it finds its unity’ (1988: 54).
As Lacan’s teaching continued, we find this notion of the ‘decentre-
ment’ of the subject elaborated and extended. A decisive shift is sig-
nalled by the introduction of the category of ‘the Real’, a concept that
becomes increasingly important for Lacan (and that, as we saw earlier, is
central to Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of society, which is variously
taken up and then forgotten by du Gay and by Fournier and Grey).
Refusing to see psychoanalysis as an idealism (Lacan, 1979: 53), or
seeing symbolization as total, Lacan identifies the Real as that which
escapes symbolization. The Real is, in Miller’s eloquent definition, ‘that
which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all
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articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but
never grasped’ (Miller, 1977: x).
In order to clarify what is meant by the Lacanian Real and its role in
signification and subjectification, consider the famous, but puzzling,
painting by Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (see also Lacan, 1979:
88–9). In this painting we find two subjects who appear before us
constructed and hailed by the signs around them. Their fine clothes
indicate their wealth, the Oriental rug indicates that these are men of
travel and experience, and the instruments of the arts and sciences of the
time indicate that these are learned Renaissance men. It appears that we
have a relatively successful interpellation: the figures are hailed by the
signifiers that exist around them, and they answer with a definite identity
of being ambassadors, the painting’s simplistic title. However, there
appears to be an obstacle in interpreting this pattern of signification, in
the form of a strange blotch at the feet of the ambassadors. Is this a silly
mistake by one of Holbein’s scoundrel apprentices? The pelt of an animal
worn by ‘howling savages’ from a far-off land? If we inspect this blotch
from the correct angle, we are struck by a skull staring us right in the face.
All the fineries of life-affirming wealth suddenly pale into insignificance
as this horrific reminder of death opens a hole in the signifying chain. It
is this hole that then comes to frame, shape and indeed ‘motivate’ the
pattern of signification and interpellation in this picture. The two men
are not only interpellated as ambassadors (men of learning, experience
and wealth), but also simultaneously ‘pulled apart’ by the ghost of
mortality indicated by the skull. This skull points us towards the Lacan-
ian Real—the traumatic, unspeakable of death in this case. Moreover, it is
this ‘silent’ Real of death (whose place is held by the traumatic signifier
of the skull) that throws the rest of the signification in the painting into
being as signifiers. The Real, this rupture in the symbolic fabric, is ‘the
stroke of the opening that makes absence emerge—just as the cry does not
stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes
the silence emerge as silence’ (Lacan, 1979: 26).
Lack Is in the Other
The Real appears, then, as an obstacle to the effective constitution of the
subject in discourse, and, for us, is one of the markers that distinguishes
Lacan from Foucault. Having identified a lack in the subject, which the
subject attempts to stitch up or ‘suture’ through its Imaginary relation to
the Other (see Miller, 1978), the Real produces a limit or lack in the
symbolic order or, to put it simply, a lack in the Other. Hence, we have
moved some distance from the simplistic ‘mirror stage’ image of the
subject recognizing itself in the Other, to finding the subject lacking or
‘barred’ in relation to the Other. As a corollary, when a subject recognizes
itself in the ‘mirror’ of discourse (subsequently constructing its sub-
jectivity), it never achieves full recognition. The subject never closes on
the centre of the subjectivity that is imputed in discourse because it is
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