University of Illinois Press Visual Arts Research

The Site/Sight/Cite of Jacques Lacan or Forget Slavoj iek?
Implications for Art and Its

Education
Author(s): Jan Jagodzinski
Source: Visual Arts Research, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 15-37
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Visual Arts Research Volume 36, Number 2 Winter 2010 15
The Site/Sight/Cite of Jacques Lacan jan jagodzinski

or Forget Slavoj iek? Implications University of Alberta
for Art and Its Education
This essay attempts to introduce Jacques Lacan in an accessible manner through the ex-
planation of a joke as formulated by Slavoj iek in order to develop what is the key to
grasping Lacanian psychoanalysisobjet a. It is hoped that difficulties that surround
other important terms within the Lacanian lexicon become more accessible through this
example. Also, a strong distinction is developed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and
post-structuralism, which has become hegemonic in visual cultural studies. I argue that
Lacan is not a post-structuralist. Lastly, the essay attempts to question the iekian ap-
propriation of Lacan by maintaining that there is another account of the psychic Real
as forwarded especially by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, as well as Julia Kristeva,
that may well have more import for the arts and their education. This remains as an
unresolved tension.
Anyone trying to tackle the difficult question of art and its education by attempt-
ing to incorporate psychoanalytic theoryespecially as presented by Jacques La-
can and its postdevelopments such as those by the prolific and entertaining prince
of fools, Slavoj iekshould be forewarned. The undertaking is frustrating,
some faith has to be invested in the worth of such a perusal, and the difficulty of
the conceptual language has to be struggled with. The refusal and evasion to deal
with Lacanian psychoanalysis by many academics often rests on the excuse that
such language is not edifying enough, not clear and hence obtuse,1 as if only ac-
cessible concepts are truthful, or to put this more crassly: Even the man on the
street should be able to get it, just as (s)he should get quantum physics or com-
2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
16 Visual Arts Research Winter 2010
plexity theory if it is only explained well enough by teachers whose job is to make
all knowledge accessible. Such an anti-intellectual attitude has become prevalent
with the advent of edutainmentscience should be popularized and reduced to
the level of what we see on the Discovery Channel, and cooking food should be
elevated to a science as on the Food Channel. Both television programs flow into
each other by giving us the hyperreality of dramatized experimentation. In a soci-
ety of the spectacle, the mind and body distinction has been reversedfood porn
supplants science porn. The fantasies aimed at the stomach stir the senses even
more than science stirs the fantasies aimed at the mind.
This essay tries to tread a path between the false dichotomy of obscurantism
and clarity so that the reader doesnt immediately dismiss the potential of psycho-
analysis in this contemporary period of art and its education because of the dif-
ficulty. At the same time, it stages some theatrics to keep the reader interested by
straying off the path to raise visual research questions that surround the need for a
psychoanalytic approach. In many respects, this is ieks tacticsome outrageous
joke enables him to open up the functioning of everyday life through the anamor-
phic screen of psychoanalysisnever a dead-on perception but askew or awry,
because the body has shifted its position from the common place set out for it by
the structuring social forces, which go by the name of hegemony and its paradoxes
of complicity in the ideology of the social order. For iek (1989), such complicity
takes the form of a cynical disavowal: I know very well what I am doing [that I
am ideologically complicit], but I am doing it anyway (p. 28).
Another task this essay undertakes is to address the ambiguous demand/ques-
tion Forget iek? as a graffiti tag to Jean Baudrillards Forget Foucault (1977/2007),
which in turn is tagged by Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turners Forget Baudrillard?
(1993). The reader should follow suit and close the circuit: Forget jagodzinski?
Objet a
Let me start with a typical iekian joke that I am fond of (perhaps because of its
ethnic reference) and try to appropriate it in my own way. It comes from a 2005
presentation at the Canadian Society of Art Education that I had forgotten about,
buried in the recesses of my computer. It illustrates a difficult concept, the jewel of
Lacanian thoughtobjet a (objet autre, object other), which has a long history
in his writing as an unconscious structuring element of conscious thought. Heres
the joke (iek, 1989, p. 159): A Moscow art exhibit displayed a picture of Nade-
zhda Krupskaya, Lenins wife, in bed with a young member of the Komsomol
the Russian Communist Union of Youth. Below the work was displayed its title:
Lenin in Warszawa (Figure 1).
A visitor, after closely examining the image and then reading the title, be-
jan jagodzinski Site/Sight/Cite of Lacan 17
came confused and politely

asked the docent-guide stand-
ing by, But where is Lenin?
The guide, quietly and with
dignity, turned and whispered
to the visitor, Lenin is in
Warszawa.
A Political Detour
Now, visual cultural educa-

tion (as least in some circles)
has become a lot smarter
since the time of this joke
(1911), embracing a semiology
that has taken a post-structur-
alist turn. The dominant field
of visual research maintains
that there is no metalan-
guage, attempting to escape
Figure 1. Lenin in Warsaw. the navet of presence (as
implied in the joke): the as-
sumption that vision has a direct access to the referent. Such a naive perspective is
still embraced by many in the visual field through claims that art speaks for itself:
All we need to do is feel the artwork as it magically penetrates us, and so on. The
post-structuralist position maintains, on the other hand, that there are only dif-
ferent systems of representations that are in competition with one another. Which
ones succeed in becoming true depends on persuasive visual rhetoric; or perhaps
because they have been formulated through power politics or (better still) have
tradition to back them up as authority. Others who embrace a phenomenologi-
cal perspective maintain that the thing-in-itselfthe referentcan be captured
through visual means alone, claiming a visual realm separate and distinct from all
forms of text, holding the specter of language at bay. Perhaps the paradigm case
is the work of Mark Rothko, whose color field paintings have been promoted as
offering a direct access to emotional meaning. Still other educators are satisfied
by updating various approaches to cognitivism,2 which trades on academic and
intellectual freedom by maintaining its adherence to empiricism and the processes
of careful self-conscious reflection. It retains the respectability of being scientific,
which carries the hegemony of legitimacy when it comes to financial support for
research grants and the like.
From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, I hope to show that these

dominant positions, currently embraced by visual culture in art education, are
half-truths. Each is only part of a broader, more embracing grasp of the complexi-
ties that surround the perceiving subject in an age of simulacra where it appears
that ideology has vanishedas first heralded by Daniel Bell in 1960 and then by
Francis Fukuyama, who completed the claim in 1992. We live in a postideologi-
cal society according to both centralist Left and Right political pundits. The more
radical Left was at a loss as to what to do. All this seemed plausible as the United
States headed into a time of prosperity, ending with a 4-year (19982001) dot-
com bubble when capitalism expanded into the electronic markets and prosperity
flourished during the Bill Clinton years in the United States. This was why, as a
response to ideologys claimed disappearance, a post-Marxist, yet critical, question-
ing, led by Michel Foucault, Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Franois Lyo-
tard, embraced by the academy in the 1990s, emerged as a reply to psychoanalytic
theory as developed by Freud-Lacan. Similarly, iek, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ran-
cire, and Deleuze and Guattaris influence emerged around the mid-1990s, when
cultural studies had already established itself as the academic conservative solution
to the question of ideology, to proffer a response to Freudian-Lacanian psychoana-
lytic theory. An emphasis was placed on the pluralism of interpretations, mined
by an endless stream of subjective qualitative ethnographic studies and the savvy
spectator that embraced a multiculturalism coming from the decentering of Man
(as heralded by Foucault), varieties of feminism, diasporic intellectuals, First Na-
tions, disability studies, folk culture, animal rights activists, and queer studies. In
short, the politics of identity fueled (and continues to fuel) the dispersal of what
was targeted to be the seat of power, an idealized construction of the hegemonic
enemy as white, male, heterosexual, young, active, nationalistic, trusting in God,
xenophobic, and so on. However, the morphing forms of designer capitalism have
simply absorbed any attempt at reforms raised by a weakened radical Left: Femi-
nism remains embroiled with postfeminist developments (McRobbie, 2009); there
are disagreements as to whether the signifier queer embraces the various identities
that this master signifier wishes to embracegay, lesbian, bi, transgendered (Ed-
wards, 1998; Green, 2002); multiculturalism has become a new form of postmod-
ern racism (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991), managed through the Colors of Benetton
mentality as separate cultural spheres; postcolonial studies is under question as
issues of who represents who are raised, who is politically correct, and so on (Hall-
ward, 2001). First Nations are also not a unified front where all differences are
collapsed under its master signifier but are dispersed into various identities; hybrid
identities do not find any one culture that anchors them, and many have been
excluded from treaty status for having married inappropriately. Psychoanalysis is
equally not some monolith of agreement.
If there have been gains, they have come to a halt and require renewed tac-
tics. However, with the massive bailout of capitalism that is now in process, one
is not hopeful. But this is the global condition, in my view, that art and its educa-
tion toil under. This is why a psychoanalytic perspective becomes necessary for a
renewed critical position that goes beyond the stalemate of identity politics in its
various post-structuralist guises.
The Post-structuralist Failure
Before returning to explore the dangling joke that I left with you, a distinction
needs to be made between a psychoanalytic approach and post-structuralist ap-
proaches. For the post-structuralist position of those visual art researchers who
have embraced a cultural studies approach where hybrid forms of the visual and
textual have become standard fare, it has become impossible to ignore the play of
the signifier, since it is so pervasive in advertising. In post-structuralism, the idea
of a metalanguage, some anchoring transcendental signifier, has been rejected and
replaced with the ground zero of ordinary language and the banality of everyday
images. From this post-structuralist standpoint, ordinary language and the banal
image are their own metalanguage, which leads us into the quagmires of multiple
interpretationsthe game of endless semiosis that hermeneuticans are so fond
of playing. Most of us are experts at such interpretations. At work here is a self-
referential textual language and visual imaginary based on difference that is savvy
in its claim that the referent can never be known. This is typically the failure of
the symbolic via the Derridean position of diffrance. All we have is a distancing
from reality that is constructed and reconstructed, the endless slipping signifiers
that de(sign)er capitalism requires to sell more products. This is the ground of
Baudrillards (1994) third order of the simulacrum where all we have are appear-
ances. Baudrillards (1979/1990) critical solution to this dilemma was to hitch a
ride on the feminine bandwagon (like Derridas claim that truth is woman) and
offer seduction as the only way out: [S]eduction represents mastery over the symbolic
universe while power represents only mastery of the real universe (p. 8, original em-
phasis). What Baudrillard meant by only and real universe remains vague, stand-
ing perhaps for the pragmatic everyday events that manifest themselves from the
policies that are in place. These policies, evidently, can be changed only through
seduction, a position that many feminists rejected at the time, especially because
Baudrillards attack was specifically directed at Luce Irigarays insistence on an ir-
reducible feminine difference.
Visual art research, in its more critical post-structuralist side, is engaged in
sign wars, a game of trying to hijack the signifier back from designer capitalism,
to decenter it, resignify its meaning. The works of Barbara Kruger, for instance,
which try to turn the advertised message against itself, exemplify such a process.
Most of this is done in the name of critical thinking and emancipationforms of
romantic resistance that go back to the Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s. As ro-
mantic resistance (jagodzinski, 2003), I would maintain that no artist can outsign
the capitalist enterpriseunless one goes outside the law in such forms as graffiti
and social action performances that are able to deterritorialize urban spaces. But
even the streets have become policed, and graffiti has in turn become more like
decoration for spectators rather than the civil disobedience and transgression it
once was. There are now graffiti art contests that are staged within the confines
of a gallery or a library to identify upcoming young artists.3
This infinite self-referential and self-interpretive play of language in its visual
translationswhat in Arts and Activities magazine appear as school projects that
quote art history or represent parodies of self-reflexivity, evoking an ironic subject
position exemplified by the long-running television series The Simpsons, where
self-referentiality abounds in laughterpresents an impasse of the cynical sub-
ject that seems to confirm ieks assessment that disavowal seems to be the only
response that appears to be critical. We can only laugh at the absurdity of it all,
seemingly incapable of doing anything to change structures as one administration
replaces another. There appears to be no escape from the capitalist designer imagi-
nary. So the post-structuralist ironic self-reflexive subject that is shaped through
such visual research, criticism, artistic projects, and so forth, sometimes in the
name of critical and emancipatory thought, has done away with metalanguage.
There is no pure object-language and no pure visual imagery, no textual language,
and no visual imagery that could ever produce a purely transparent medium that
captures pure experience.
And yet there is an insistence in the field of visual studies that something
of this referent (the object as unmediated reality) comes through and affects us.
Proponents of materialist culture also support this stance. So, on the one hand, we
have a naive notion of representation that continues to mask itself as reality, as in
the absurd obscenity euphemistically called reality television, while, on the other
hand, we have this savvy ironic self-reflexive subject that knows that its a repre-
sentation constructed through elaborate rhetorical structuring devices, and either
plays with or tries to do representation one better by exposing its very construct-
edness or artificiality. The result is a desperate search for authenticitywitness the
myriad of reality shows spying into boyfriends or girlfriends bedrooms (MTVs
Room Raiders), checking the truth of what potential dates are saying through
lie-detection devices (MTVs Exposed), or the countersurveillance shows like
Temptation Islandso as to identify something to believe in. Pedagogically this
is the same pursuit where students examine their own expressive autobiographies
as being narratological constructions, the constructions of race, class, gender, and
so forth. I would maintain that neither of these positions, which form the binary
of de(sign)er capitalism, can come to terms with a way images might be read
that disrupts the navet of the neoliberalist subject of presence and the so-called
decentered multiple subject of post-structuralism. The first position (presence)
attempts to sustain the narratological trance while the second (artifice) does the
same by exposing the magical trick that everything is staged. Either way, its like a
magicians force,4 and the spectator remains consciously hypnotized.
Back to the Joke
At this point, I will argue that the Lacanian subject is able to disrupt this binary
that enables de(sign)er capitalism to sustain itself. The argument is presented
through the joke as it continues. From a Lacanian standpoint, the idea that there
is no metalanguage and no metavisual imagery has to be taken quite literally. All
visual and textual language is an object-language; there is no visual and textual
language without object; a referent always appears. Even when it looks as though
the subject is caught up in a web of self-referential movement, in the endless re-
cesses of intertextualities of mis-en-abyme effects, apparently only speaking about
itself, not truly being able to say what is meant or even mean what is said, there is
an objective nonsignifying reference to this movement. This nonsignifying refer-
ence raises the question of the unconscious.
Lenin in Warsaw is the absent third, the bearer of the prohibition for such a
sexual relationship. In the Lacanian sense, this is the object of the picture. But we
have to make an important distinction here. There is a vast difference between an
object of desire (some material thing or idea) and the object a as cause of desire.
The title names the object that is lacking in the field of vision, what is depicted.
The lack gives rise to desire that is not situated at the level of signifiers or present
in the Symbolic order. The trap of metalanguage catches the visitor. The spectator
establishes the same distance between the picture and the title as between the sign
and its denoted object, as if the title speaks about the picture from a kind of ob-
jective distance, and then looks for its positive correspondence in the picture: a bit
like the anecdote told about Picasso:
Picasso once found himself discussing art with an American GI who professed
to dislike abstract paintings because they were excessively unrealistic. The artist
said nothing and the conversation moved on to such other subjects as the GIs
girlfrienda snapshot of whom he proudly showed Picasso. My, Picasso ex-
claimed, examining the picture, is she really that small?5
Again the work of art has no direct correspondence to reality; its form being non-
representational opens up a cascade of potentialities.
So exactly where is the object indicated by its title? As in Magrittes This Is

Not a Pipe (19281929), we have a paradoxical relation between text and image
in the joke. The title (signifier) and the picture (signified) are not connected by
representation, yet they appear to rest on the same surface as continuous with the
picture. In representation, the title and the picture are meant to occupy the same
plane to make sense, to communicate. But here the title (signifier) embodies what
is missing from the picture inside the same signifying plane as the picture itself oc-
cupies. The distance of the object missing from the picture is strictly internal. In-
ternal here is a paradoxical concept for it does away with the inside/outside border.
Lacan called it extimit, which is often translated as excluded interior or an in-
timate exterior (see Miller, 1994). It makes an incision or carves into the image,
making the frame possible, whose structure is desperately attempting to contain
reality as such. This something must fall (out) from the picture for the picture to
exist: not its title, but the object the title replaces. Extimit describes the exterior
or disguised nature of that which is most intimate to the self; this is an unknown
or exterior intimacy cloaked by an imaginary substitute, something that stands
in the place of what cant be known. The picture becomes the materialization
of Lenins absence, the joke, which is what frames the viewers vision and causes
amusement. Conversely, Lenins very (ab)sense is what makes the picture positive-
ly possibleto exist at all. If he was around, Krupskaya may not have dared the
adventure with a young lover. In the joke, our complicit laugher simply affirms
the truth of the image that sustains a fantasy of illicit transgression. Perhaps Lenin
himself would not have laughed, but then again, hes in Moscow! (Note that the
image of the joke [Figure 2] is simply a collage that I threw together.)
There are time gaps between the visitor perceiving the painting, reading
the title, and then asking the docent for clarification. We dont know the visitors
reaction to the docents reply. It is us, as receiver of the joke, who substitute for
the visitor. There is a difference, however, between imagination and the psychic
Imaginary, which can now be explained. The time of primary perception (in this
case, the time it takes to look at the picture, or the time it takes to listen to or
read the joke) is distinct from the time that the imagination takes to entertain it.
There is a gap between the twothe primary retention (short-term memory, not
a memory recall) is followed by a secondary memory or recollection. The visitor
thought about the relation of the title and the picture. This moment of thinking is
imbued with memory of past experiences. These two moments (absent and pres-
ent) reverberate against each other in a passing now as complicated by reading
the title. The flow between these two moments is not entirely predictable. If the
visitor immediately got the joke, there would be no need to ask the docent. The
Imaginary psychic register should be understood as the egoic reaction of the visi-
tor, the way the memory and the context of the situation impacted the originary
perception. Memory belongs

to the unconscious, whereas
the context belongs to the
Symbolic order (museum/
gallery context, historical set-
ting, postrevolutionary times,
and so on). The imagination
is the realm of perception
(the image) while the psychic
Imaginary is subject to decep-
tion and lure. The visitor was
fooled.
The field of representa-
tion (in German, Vorstellung)
is the field of what can be
represented, but the problem
is that not everything can
be depicted (represented).
Something has to fall out or is
in excess: Thus, the implica-
Figure 2. Collage of Lenin in Warsaw. tion that Lenin must be in
Warsaw and the title take the
place of this missing void, of the originally repressed representation. Its exclusion
functions as a positive condition for the emergence of what is being depicted. If
Lenin were not in Warsaw, Nadezhda Krupskaya could not be in bed with her
lover. The content of the picture as subject (as when we ask what is the subject of
the picture) takes on a wry appearance. It becomes skewed and anamorphic. The
subject is not Nadezhda Krupskaya in bed with a young Komsomol member but
Lenins absence with all the surrounding complications and implications of that
situation.
For Lacan, a master signifier has the status of a Vorstellungsreprsentanz: It
is subject to a double representation. A master signifier is no longer a simple Sau-
ssurean material representative of the signified but acts as a substitute filling out
and thereby covering a void of some originally missing representation. It does not
bring to mind yet more representation; rather, it summons the lack in representa-
tion: that is, Lenin in Warsaw. The Vorstellungsreprsentanz is the pure, reflexive
signifier incarnating the lack itself, which then fills out the void of this lost object.
As soon as the Vorstellungsreprsentanz is no longer connected to this hole in the
Other (the field of representation), to the falling out of the object, it begins to
function as a title. It becomes merely an incision that limits the possibilities of
interpretation and becomes entwined in the hermeneutic process of figuring out

what the picture means. Why was Lenin away in Moscow? Why is his wife be-
ing promiscuous? Is this really her lover? And so on, endlessly. All these questions
of meaning emerge because of the non-sense of an enigmatic signifier, as Jean
Laplanche (1992) might say; that is, a signifier that resists interpretation, that is
antihermeneutical in its character, not a signifier as we know it. The act of point-
ing to this failure of meaning is a way to punctuate the frame. For Laplanche, this
action of pointing is related to the German deuten as Freud meant it, which did
not refer to interpretation but to a pointing with the finger or the eyes to open up
space in a closed discourse.
The missing object that finds itself outside the frame is object a. The objet
a, by embodying the lack in the Symbolic order, functions both as a hole and that
which fills it. The portmanteau word, w(hole), conveys this double representa-
tion. It is not necessarily a concrete object but a voided belief that cannot be
tolerated in the representational order that sustains the Imaginary, thus sustain-
ing the fantasy of reality as it seems to be. Such a reality is also maintained by
the memories and histories that shape it, which is why a revisionist history that
uncovers a repressed object can be so disturbing; for example, why have there
been no famous women artists? began a cascade of rewriting a previously closed,
one-sided history.
Diagram
A number of diagrams can make this more accessible and help fulfill the expecta-
tion that should explain Lacans theory! Diagram 1 (Figure 3) is simply a frame
Figure 3. Diagram 1.
with a black square within it (see also iek, 1992, pp. 9495). The parenthesis is
there to indicate that something is bracketed that is internal to the frame: some-
thing is being suspended.
Diagram 2 (Figure 4) shows that the objet a, which is removed from the
space of the frame, exists in another psychic dimension; however, it is part of the
very system itself. It frames the system, as indicated by the white space that sur-
rounds the black square.
Diagram 3 (Figure 5) shows that what is framing the fantasy of the image
is Lenin as object cause of desire, as objet a. Its place is in the unconscious Real,
which I say more about in the Other Terms section. Suffice it to note that the
Real is always beyond the frame of things, always beyond representation as such.
It is the fantasy of the framed work of art that provides us with the half-
truth of those who maintain that the work stands alone, that it requires no analy-
sis. But this fantasy, structured by the frame, is precisely where the lure of the
object as object-cause of this fantasy resides. It is this unknowable object, which
is either repressed or is not counted, that is recognized by the Symbolic order that
holds the various imaginary discourses together to create reality with its hegemon-
ic imaginings. Psychoanalytic ideology critique is to identify the commonsense
master signifier that holds the frame together; only in this way can the fantasy be
exposed for what it is, what sustains itwhy Lenin must be away for Krupskaya
to have her fun.
Through visual research one produces what one is looking for, an object
cause of desire (objet a). The paradox is that the process of searching itself pro-
duces the object that causes (frames) the search, but this happens retroactively, in
an exact parallel to Lacans understanding of desire, which produces its own object
cause. An artwork is produced through an unknown desire that only appears after
many productive attempts. This is the paradox of creation, seemingly ex nihilo.
It is the structure of the finished artwork that arises around the void of what the
artist is attempting to represent, but which is unknown to him or her in the first
place. Only intuitive sense is at work. The artwork therefore can be regarded as a
Cause of itself. Origins disappear since the artwork appears always already in place
from the beginning, from the moment when the artwork is finished. Thus an
artistic retrospective can reveal just where the breaks in the artistic processes took
place, where a new event took place, where the law had failed and required explo-
rations beyond it. It is precisely the failures of the law that mark out the creative
artistic process as the contingent explorative events that are then pursued. Criti-
cism from a Lacanian psychoanalytic initiative becomes to deduce what is the objet
a that frames vision. What holds up the fantasy that sustains the image and what
desire by an audience, a nation or an individual viewer, sustains that desire in the
psyche? The task then becomes to interrogate objet a, cause of desire, the seat of
ideologyto see whether the fantasy should be ruined because of its ethical and
political implications.
Other Terms
I have concentrated on the notion of the objet a, rather than a host of other prob-
lematic concepts that are part of the Lacanian lexicon, such as the phallus and the
enjoyment ( jouissance) that accompany the objet a of desire. A particular phallic
jouissance surrounds the joke as the castration effect on Lenin (he is not present),
and also libidinal desire is released so that the young student can be with Lenins
wife. This also demonstrates what is of interest to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the
limit of structuralism and the Law (represented by Lenin) that continually fails
in its enforcement. The phallus is a fraud. It is impotent but puts on appearances
that it is not. Think of any teaching situation whose order exists not because of
authority per se but because of the achieved respect in the class, which could col-
lapse at any given time when what binds the group together fails. The objet a of
Lenin in Moscow shows how it is the cause of desire when there is a failure of the
Law. There is always some deficiency in the relationship between the subject and
the big Other (Law). This is a lack that cannot be grasped by meaning and expla-
nation (the signifying chain of cognitivism). So art in this sense is concerned with
the unexplainable gaps, the problematic of desire. This is why the subject is split in
psychoanalysis, unlike in post-structuralism: A gap exists between Cause and Law
and between meaning and the signifier.
Lacans triadic psychic registers can be found in the joke. The title of the
picture Lenin in Moscow functions as the Freudian Vorstellungsreprsentanz, a
representation (Vorstellung), which substitutes for some other representation
(reprsentanz)a doubled representation. The title is the signifying element filling
out the vacant place of the missing representation, which is the depiction of Lenin
himself (Lenin in Warsaw). The Imaginary visual is juxtaposed with a missing
object that is recalled by the title. Here we have three psychic registers working
in a particular knot: the picture itself as the Imaginary, as sight; the Symbolic as
the linguistic signifiers indicated by the title, the cite; and the Real, the site, which
is the absent place of Lenin in Warsaw. The site is the place that reveals the truth
of the image-text. It is the site of the Real, which lies beyond the frame, framing
perception, yet within it. Site here has a very special meaning. It is not space, nor
does it take on the various notions of site-based art such as developed by Miwon
Kwon (2004). This site of the Real will be problematized next.
We can see why Lacan considers the Imaginary a mconnaisance (miscon-
strual or misrecognition). It is illusionary, a repetitive construction. Identity is
constructed here as an imaginary object, an ego-ideal (idal du moi), a me (moi)
shaped during secondary narcissism. The ego (the moi) sustains itself as a continu-
ous and unique self through ongoing misrecognition of the actual conditions of its
existence: dependence on others and the symbolic system of culture and language.
The coming to awareness of this outside happens through the acquisition of lan-
guage and the behavior patterns sanctioned by a culture through the caregivers;
thus a distinction is made between the moi and the Je. The I (the Je) is a linguistic
signifier, a shifter that has to find its identity in the Symbolic order; it is therefore
shaped by particular discourses, particular signifiers that are placed on the subject,
often referred to as the ideal-ego. This leaves another psychic register, the uncon-
scious Real and its peculiar contingent effects, which disturb the ego and set its
course for change and transformation in particular directions, including repressive
ones. This is where the Lacanian subject lies. It is not discursive as in post-struc-
turalist accounts or in ethnographic and emic accounts, or in autobiographical ac-
counts or self-reflective accounts or even self-reflexive accounts. The subjects site is
the Realit is self-refleXive, in my grapheme. The X marks that this unconscious
subject does not belong to the chain of signifiers. The X is the site of extimit. This
excluded aspect of being in the Real is bound up with objet a, as well as the affec-
tive bodily intensities, which form the libidinal attachments of fantasies that are
unique to each and every individual. This is further explored in the last section.
It is this register of the Real where the objet a, or rather the effects of objet
a, are felt in the way time is thrown out of joint; it no longer functions routinely.
Our laughing at the joke identifies this disturbance in time. So iek claims that
ideology is a relationship between the Real and the Symbolic, sustained by the
fantasy of the Imaginary. There is no encounter with the Real, as the hole, the
abyss of the Real, is continually plugged up by representation and meaning
seemingly the w(hole)and the portmanteau world presents us (again) with this
double representation (Vorstellungsreprsentanz). The Imaginary fantasy, the lure
of its frame, to be thought of in the pejorative sense, its aestheticization or its se-
duction, therefore, is maintained by what the Symbolic excludes and brackets as
Real. This particular framing structure reproduces the fantasy of the belief system,
which is anchored, so to speak, by master signifiers of language and the images
(signifieds) that accompany them in relation to an unknowable Real dimension.
If you say, I believe in God, and I ask, How do you know? there is no rational
explanation for this. One can believe in God only because the Other also believes.
The fantasy of this master or primal signifier, God, that holds theist belief together
in whatever forms (Christianity, Islam Judaism, and so on), does so by being in
the dimension of the psychic Real where it is sustained by the Imaginary and
Symbolic working together as representation, enabling an entire ontology to be
sustained through the institutions and accepted behaviors in particular cultures.
To dispel the belief in God, displace this master transcendental signifier or identify
it as an ideology along the lines of Feuerbach, Marx, or Nietzsche, appears to be a
frightening prospectand not a likely scenario when In God We Trust appears
on U.S. currency. And there are nontheistic positions that, having done away with
the master signifier God, yet maintain a creative universe. All this is to illustrate
the great difficulty, if not impossibility, of changing the ontology of a belief system
that is sustained in the psychic Real through the language and fantasies that circu-
late throughout popular culture, wherein the body is surveilled and disciplined in
ways that are basically unconscious.6
To question art and its education on the level of the ontological Real, then,
is to worry the fantasies and the linguistic signifiers, the order words that sustain
its production and reproduction of desire. But why bother? Why not simply teach
the hegemonic belief system? Why change if that sustains you? And, indeed, that
is the case within an accepted community of belief. Some disturbance, some anxi-
ety, must be made manifest before the Real of ones beliefs are challenged. Even
then, the ego is stubborn and resists, disavows what is being said. My mother was
told that if she didnt stop smoking, she would more than likely lose her leg. She
didnt stop. World-class athletes were anonymously asked whether they would take
an undetectable steroid if it meant a gold medal but death was sure to follow. The
majority was willing to risk it. Hence, I am under no illusions that introducing
a psychoanalytic dimension in art and its education will make any huge impact.
I doubt it. Teacher education would need to change drastically. My friend Mark
Bracher (1999, 2006) has offered all sorts of ways that a psychoanalytic view can
help change education. However, I now move to explore the subtitle of this essay.
Forget iek?
One of the huge problems with Lacan and iek for art and its education is their
iconoclasm. The forwarding of the signifier is meant to distance oneself from the
imageto tame it, so to speak. Jean-Joseph Goux (1991) does an admirable job
in exposing Lacans iconoclastic dogmatism. Lacans iconoclasm was even harsher
than Freuds, who also distrusted the image. Freud ignored the cinema that was
developing at the time and was ignorant of (or chose to ignore) modern art that
was forming in his own heimat of Vienna. Lacan, like Freud, chose his examples
from literature. For Lacan, the unconscious was structured like a languagethe
verbal, the phonetic, and the letter were the mechanism at the heart of the uncon-
scious.7 The Imaginary is to be distrusted (mconnaisance). The ego-ideal shaped
by the mirror stage meant that the unreachable image had power over the develop-
ing infant. It was deceptive, which was why (perhaps) Lacans discussion of the
evil eye that accompanied aphanisis, the fading of the subject and its alienation as
a castrating eye (of the Freudian Medusa), always took the form of a sublimation,
the need for art to protect (frame) the subject from the full effects of the Real,
which could lead to trauma. The power of the image is what is at issue. This is not
unlike Calvinists who took images to be alive, requiring violent destruction to kill
them.8 How serious is this charge?
Despite all those movies and popular culture discussed by iek, a dimen-
sion gets lost: the level of bodily affect, aistheticsand not aesthetics, which
in designer capitalism has been already colonized. This dimension contains the
half-truth that art speaks for itself. The aisthetics is presymbolic, or better still
asymbolic and asignifying, whereas aesthetics is symbolic caught by the signifier,
leading us to two understandings of the Real that are key to grasping the worth
of psychoanalysis for art and its education. It is not Lacan, nor his brilliant fol-
lower iek, who get at this level of the bodily aisthetic; rather it is Deleuze and
Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and Julia Kristeva
(1984), who have understood this lacuna in Lacans oeuvre. We should not entirely
dismiss iekian achievements for art and its education: there is a line of thought
where his work remains applicable. But I claim that Deleuze and Guattari develop
an aspect of the Real that is not iconoclastic and paranoid about the image
paranoid is the precise term here since paranoia accompanies the mirror stage for
Lacan. Objet a, discussed earlier, plays a paradoxical role in Lacans thought. As
Bruce Fink has argued in The Lacanian Subject (1995), two subject positions con-
tinually intertwine throughout his career, except perhaps towards the end with his
development of the sinthome. There is desire where lack becomes evident, a desire
that is caught by the Other, by the Symbolic order; and there is desire that simply
ignores or accepts ones symptom. The Other is found wanting or ignored. Drive
(Trieb) supplants desire, which is always risky since such passion is always beyond
the Law or big Other. This development of the sinthome came late in his career,
from approximately Seminar 19, entitled . . .Ou Pire ( ... Or Worse), taught from
19711972, just after the 1968 student revolts when Lacan began to face two chal-
lenges to his edifice. The first came from the Anti-Oedipus thesis by Deleuze and
Guattari in 1972 and Irigarays complaint of feminine difference from her work
with Parisian feminists such as Antoinette Fouque, in her doctorat dtat, Speculum
de lautre Femme (Speculum of the Other Woman), in 1974. Seminar 20, Encore, was
a response to that challenge. It ends with seminar 23, Joyce and Sinthome, where
Lacan, opposing a feminine positive notion of desire to the negative notion of
desire formed around lack, develops the notion of the sinthome (again literary
based) meant to answer Deleuze and Guattaris positive notion of desirethe
unconscious as a factory model. Lacan finally lets go of language as the overriding
factor, recognizing a beyond of language where art as the sight of the Imaginary
can prevent a fall into psychosis.9
From my standpoint, Lacan was not entirely successful in facing the two
challenges with his notion of the sinthome. iek draws on this late Lacan for his
own work but plays on the paradoxical positioning of objet a found throughout
Lacans oeuvre. The cause of desire, placed between the Real and the Symbolic,
which is where his psychoanalytic ideology critique merges, established ieks
reputation, but the cause of desire can also be placed between the Real and the
Imaginary, producing an entirely different dynamic, the one that Deleuze and
Guattari name as being schizoid.
The two Reals are supplementary to each other, and we might grasp them
as the limits of the body/mind dynamic: that is, the entwinement of matter and
spirit or materialism and idealism. In ieks scheme of things, he develops the
Hegelio-Lacanian monster to analyze this gap between nature and culture where
the dialectic is privileged as with the postsymbolic Real, as the excess beyond the
signifier. The presymbolic Real is often judged as an error (iek, 1993, pp. 1418,
150151). However, iek is slippery. He touts the merits of the presymbolic Real
as an act of subjective destitution that can change the Symbolic order as an earth-
shattering event (think the Copernican evolution or even the sinking of the Ti-
tanic) to ward off the theoretical developments of Judith Butler and Jacques Der-
rida, whose positions are closer to the postsymbolic Real, as the aforementioned
joke shows. Namely, a lack in the symbolic is covered over, as heteronormativity
covers over the Real of queer life and social justice is to recognize what is internal
to the symbolic but not counted or recognized. Ernesto Laclau (1994) likes to call
this the constituted outside of discourse. This becomes a familiar psychoanalytic
understanding of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the general hate of the Other as
the obverse of this position. It raises the ethicopolitical question of the extimacy
of hate. If we exterminate the Jews, the Tutsis, the Roma, or Rhodesian White
settlers (as the marked signifiers that should not be counted), our culture will be
purified, stable, and prosperous. The postsymbolic Real at the level of represen-
tation leads to such insights. So, this saves iek if, as I have argued elsewhere
(jagodzinski, 2009), the task of art and its education does not become embroiled
directly in the sign wars, in overtly political involvement, but points to the truth
of the enigmatic signifier.
Let me outline what I mean by the two Reals. The presymbolic Real might
be best understood as presence itself, that is, an immediate experience as the vari-
ous neurological pathways are experienced through the skin: a level of brute reality
that never reaches consciousness without being filtered through representation
(memory, the imaginary, and the signifier). It is the subject before it is split, before
it fades (aphanisis) into cultural understanding as a subject of the signifier. It is the
subject before the Imaginary and Symbolic psychic formations. There is no lack
here. The Real is full. Lacan recognizes this Real when he says that there is noth-
ing lacking in the Real, but he is rather weak in his theorizations of this realm, as
is iek. The latters film study of Krzysztof Kielowski (iek, 2001) is probably
as close as he gets, and this is because color is such a powerful dynamic in the
Kieslowski trilogy. It is not Lacan who explores this but Julia Kristeva (1984), with
her notion of the semiotic chora and the abject, where she evokes the pre-Oedipal
Imaginary Father. The objet a here is abject, governed by the drive (demand), and
not object cause of desire. The abject is what is immediately rejected by the body,
valued as either good or bad partial object in Melanie Kleins psychoanalytic ac-
count of infant development. It is the Imaginary that is pervasive; the Imaginary
translates the Real of these experiences by the skin-ego as Didier Anzieu (1989)
developed it. For this reason Henri Bergson (1911/1988) can claim that the world
is composed of images and have a nonpsychological vitalistic account of the
unconscious as the productive flows of intensities, which is precisely where the
Deleuze|Guattari account begins.
No one knows what is happening at this level of the presymbolic Real. It is
akin to the black holes of the cosmos and the string theory of quantum physics.
Deleuze and Guattari refer it as the molecular model shaped by chaos theory. They
use the term machinic assemblages as an attempt to get at the intrarelationships
between animate and inanimate matter. I take Karen Barads (2007) vitalistic ma-
terialism to be updating this account. Complexity theory is simply a way to come
to terms with out-of-equilibrium states of unconscious delirium that are irratio-
nal. This is where the unexplainable creative process lies. It is the site of religious
experience, the attempt to experience the No-Thing by various religions, especially
the kabbalah of Judaism and Zen Buddhism, where the koans are meant to tie up
and twist the usual signifiers of linguistic meaning (Moncayo, 1998, 2009). It is
the realm of the cosmic sound machine that Deleuze and Guattari raise in A Thou-
sand Plateaus. Many artists and educators (such as Peter London and Mel Alex-
enberg) claim the spiritual from within ontotheological positions. For my part, I
would rather support nontheistic attempts to reclaim the sacred, like that of Stuart
Kauffman (2008). We need the recognition that creativity is not law governed.
Here we turn to a semiotics that are not Saussurean based, as Deleuze and
Guattari do with their mixture of Charles Pierces firstness and Louis Hjelmslevs
semiotic developments. Guattari calls this an asemiotic system. The point here is
that this understanding of the Real is not phenomenological, not consciousness
of some thing; rather, the unconscious Real is conjoined with consciousness that
is itself formed by things. In this sense, those who claim that art is a direct experi-
ence are half-right. On the other hand, when it attempts to explain chaos through
its vocabulary of attractors, complexity theory is already caught by the signifier. A
dynamic positive unconscious flow has its own logic of sense as Deleuze (1990) ex-
plored itif logic is the right term for what appears as irrational, with an entirely
different topology than that of Lacan.
It is easy to see that the Real-Imaginary connection provides the experi-
ence of hallucinations and delirium (the vacuum is alive, as both children and
physicists would say). Certain bodily experiences shape the Imaginary system dur-
ing primary narcissism when the subject defends itself against the affects of the
Real through processes of abjection, especially when a signifier is not yet lodged
to contain and rationalize the experience. Uncanniness is open, as is mystery. The
(primary) Real/Imaginary gap has more to do with the Imaginary structure of
the body. Images are faster than the word. So forget iek!or some part of him.
iek does not have enough feel for this other realm, as was evident in his en-
gagement with Deleuzian thought. Organs Without Body (iek, 2004) dismisses
Deleuzes attempt to fill out the full potential of the psychic Real by addressing
bodily affect.10 Typical is ieks response to abject artistic bodily work by artists:
Freuds naive reflections on how the artist expresses embarrassing, even disgust-
ing [things]by sublimating it . . .acquire a new relevance in todays era of
permissiveness, when performance and other artists are under pressure to stage
the most intimate private fantasies in all their desublimated nakedness. Such
transgressive art confronts us directly with jouissance at its most phallic, with
masturbatory phallic jouissance. (2006, p. 311)
This is a solid rejection of the many performance artists who are addressing the
implicit rather than the explicit body.
It should be remembered that images are not representations, since they are
not yet anchored to a definitive signifier. They do not resemble something original
by referring to it or looking like it. They are relational to one another without any
reference to an external modelwhat Foucault (after Magritte) called similitude.
This is why many art teachers maintain children can be creative: They are not
caught by clichs. The closest we get to this level of pure sense in the postsymbolic
Real is poetry, elevated as the highest art by Hegel and by Alain Badiou by for-
warding the poetry of Stphane Mallarm.
There is really no way to reconcile these two views of the Real. I think they
should be seen as supplementary, rather like Barads (2007) understanding of Neil
Bohrs apparatus-influenced theory that explains how light can be understood as
being both wave and particle alike. Here it is the serve of the clinamen (as wave),
which eventually becomes instituted as the primordial signifier (as particle) of
meaning that makes the presymbolic Real begin to disappear. But I think there is
one major implication here for art and its education: The dividing line between
Lacan|iek on one side and Deleuze|Guattari on the other, as representations of
the postsymbolic and presymbolic. iek, as I claim, jumps back and forth using
both positions (analogous to light being both wave and particle) so as not to be
trapped by either one, but ieks reputation regarding ideology rests on the post-
symbolic Real.
A fork in the road within art itself separates capitalist from anticapitalist
developments: the nonretinal irony of Marcel Duchamp that leads to conceptu-
alism, Idea art and anti-aesthetics, versus a retinal fixation, a visual essentialism
of designer capitalism and the arts that supports that view.11 The former is thus
iconoclastic while the latter is imbued with spiritualized fetishism, leading to
questions of cosmic art and also the danger of post-Romanticism. If we stay with
the postsymbolic Real and its implications for art and art education, then as Lacan
(1977) rightly says, The visual field and the imaginary is structured by symbolic
laws (pp. 9192). The artist is not an individual whose self-expression somehow
escapes the Symbolic social world that surrounds him or her. Communal conflicts
find their way unconsciously in the work (overtly and covertly) by way of lan-
guage games alone (i.e., in some circles, only figurative art is accepted). The joke
discussed does not emerge in a vacuum but bears the tensions between Lenin and
a younger Komsomol generation. Here the artwork is understood as a function

of the unconscious desire of the Other. Most of schooling falls in this direction.
What does the art teacher want of me? What kind of work do I have to do to
solve this design problem for my client? What does the client want? and so
on. The pathos (jouissance) that surrounds such artistic creativity has precisely to
deal with this unknowability. The artwork is functioning as an index of the void
(as lack) within the subject (the student) and within the social-Symbolic order,
represented by the teacher/clients. All such artwork is simply innovationa class
responds to a visual problematic the teacher sets, from which emerge many varia-
tions and possibilities. There is no creativity proper. Creativity happens only when
the law fails. You might eventually find an artwork that breaks with the problem
to find another solution, but then that person has not done his or her assignment.
How can you grade that? As I have argued elsewhere (jagodzinski, 2010a), such art
cant be taught. The failure of the Law emerges once more in more ways than one.
We have here two limits of perception: one at the level of Imaginary and
the other at the level of the signifier. Retinal art addresses the presymbolic Real,
the level of the bodily sense that wrenches the nerve endings, like the paintings
of Francis Bacon, whereas nonretinal art, as begun by Duchamp and the Dada-
ist movement, addresses the postsymbolic Real at the level of the signifier body/
brain. We also have two supplementary views of the sublime, as already developed
within the modernism of Kant. The dynamic sublime rests with affects on the
body through images and sounds, whereas the mathematical sublime rests with
the signifier. There is a distinction between la langue as the grain and intensity of
the voice in the presymbolic Real and the language of the postsymbolic, although
both are intertwined. The mother tongue is always embodied, hardwired through-
out the brain with many synaptic associations with memory. This means an ir-
resolvable tension within art and its education. On one side of the equation we
have artists working with the aisthetics of the body (affect), whereas on the other
side are conceptualizations of the mind. Each uses a different set of technologies to
explore its realms.
I will end by noting that this fundamental contradiction within art has im-
plications for the direction that arts education can take, which I have developed
elsewhere (jagodzinski, 2010c) by introducing a series of neologismsself-refleX-
ivity, Xpression and an avant-garde without authoritythat hopefully provides
an interesting way to conceptualize creativity that recognizes the necessity of the
Laws failure.
Notes
1. For a defense on the difficulty of Lacans language, see Douglas Aoki (2000).
2. Throughout his long and illustrious career, Arthur Efland (2003) has always updated this
position.
3. This seems to be an international phenomenon. Google results for graffiti art contest
range from Saudi Arabia to all over Europe. Forty artists competed in the 2009 Graffiti
Contest in Ann Arbor; the winner was a BFA major at Eastern Michigan University
4. A magicians force is a preliminary setup whereby the participant appears to be coop-
erating to help perform the magical act (stunt, card trick, stage performance, mind read-
ing, etc.) freely with no coercion or manipulation, but actually has already been set up
in terms of the outcome that is known prior to the actual execution of the magical act.
5. Available at http://www.anecdotage.com/browse.php?term=Modern%20Art.
6. Think of gold, which seems to magically enable the equalization of currency exchang-
esat least it did so before the gold standard was dropped and money became xeno-
money. It appears as though this was always the case, as though this substance existed
between nature and culture, or belonged to neither. The Phallus is the same; its tran-
scendental hiding place would need to be ruined, exposed, if masculine hegemony were
to fade. To a very limited extent, some of this has taken place.
7. It should be made clear that Lacan never said that the unconscious is structured as a
language, nor through language, but like a language. As Malcolm Bowie (1991) put it, The
structure of the unconscious can be understood only in terms of its temporality, and that
language, which is the sole vehicle of this temporality, cannot itself complete the task
[p. 193, emphasis added]. In seminar 20 (1998), Lacan clarifies this: You see that by still
preserving this like (comme), I am staying within the bounds of what I put forward when
I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like so as not to sayand
I come back to this all the timethat the unconscious is structured by a language (p.
48). While this doesnt say exactly what he meant by like, it does indicate the uncon-
scious as a continuous temporal formation.
8. Although I disagree with her critique, Ann Kibbey (2005) discusses the iconoclasm that
runs through Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, and Lacan.
9. I have tried to demonstrate this through the art of Henry Darger ( jagodzinski, 2005).
10. I have explored at length why I take iek to be a disguised Deleuzian when he reverts
to the presymbolic Real, especially through his conceptualization of the act (see jag-
odzinski, 2010b).
11. I have tried to elaborate this claim in Art and Education in Designer Capitalism: Decon-
structing the Oral Eye.
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The Site/Sight/Cite of Jacques Lacan or Forget Slavoj iek?

Implications for Art and Its

The Site/Sight/Cite of Jacques Lacan jan jagodzinski

for Art and Its Education

2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

came confused and politely

Now, visual cultural educa-

From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, I hope to show that these

The Post-structuralist Failure

Back to the Joke

So exactly where is the object indicated by its title? As in Magrittes This Is

perception. Memory belongs

interpretation and becomes entwined in the hermeneutic process of figuring out

a younger Komsomol generation. Here the artwork is understood as a function

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