Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature

Dan Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032238418
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000732009
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Theoretically informed scholarship on early modern English utopian literature has largely focused on Marxist interpretation of these texts in an attempt to characterize them as proto- Marxist. The present volume instead focuses on subjectivity in early modern English utopian writing by using these texts as case studies to explore intersections of the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both Lacan and Foucault moved back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual trends and ultimately both defy strict categorization into either camp. Although numerous studies have appeared that compare Lacan's and Foucault's thought, there have been relatively few applications of their thought together onto literature. By applying the thought of both theorists, who were not literary critics, to readings of early modern English utopian literature, this study will, on the one hand, describe the formation of utopian subjectivity that is both psychoanalytically (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) and socially constructed, and, on the other hand, demonstrate new ways in which the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other when applied to literary texts. The utopian subject is a malleable subject, a subject whose linguistic, psychoanalytical subjectivity determines the extent to which environmental and social factors manifest in an identity that moves among Lacan's Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

Section 1
Introductory Matters

1 Introducing Utopia

This book explores the nature of subjectivity in early modern utopian literature by locating intersections between the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. By categorizing ten early modern utopian texts using Lacan’s tripartite model of subjectivity, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real aligned with the three phases of Foucault’s career, I will demonstrate the ways that the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other and that it is possible to define utopian subjectivity from both Lacan’s psychoanalytical point of view and Foucault’s biopolitical, social-constructivist point of view. I will demonstrate that subjectivity can come about from an individual’s impartial or nonexistent indoctrination into Lacan’s Symbolic order, the order of language, which can then result in a socially constructed subjectivity, which ultimately results in what I am going to call the malleable subject. Near the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Inner Party member O’Brien says to Winston before he begins torturing him, “Men are infinitely malleable.”¹ Using early modern utopian texts as case studies, I demonstrate that early modern utopian literature depicts such a malleable subjectivity.

Foucault’s writings receive consistent attention from theorists who seek to understand Foucault in the context of contemporary Western society. Although he died in 1984, Foucault foresaw the recent controversies surrounding surveillance, mental illness, and sexual marginalization. This book provides a model for application of Foucault’s theories to literature, a somewhat lacking aspect of Foucault studies, and, furthermore, it will integrate Foucault’s theories with those of Lacan to challenge and complicate Foucault’s status as one of the founding figures of the anti-psychiatry movement.² According to Thomson Reuters’ Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science, in 2007 Foucault was the most cited author in the humanities, while Lacan garnered approximately a fifth as many citations. Similarly, Joan Copjec has demonstrated that Foucault’s influence in the humanities has eclipsed Lacan’s. Foucault, according to Copjec, attained prominence because of his association with post-structuralism, while Lacan was doomed because of his association with structuralism. Lacanian psychoanalysis, according to Copjec, mandates the interpretation of the “exclusivity” of surface and appearance to mean that appearance always trumps being because being and appearance never meet, which she calls a “syncopated relation” that leads to desire; historicism seeks to situate “being in appearance” without consideration of desire.³ This study will merge the largely sociological theories of Foucault with the tripartite psychological paradigm of Lacan to analyze that societies depicted in early modern utopias.

Utopian Studies scholarship is out of scope for this book, but since its beginning with the Frankfurt School theorists there has been a constant redefinition and reevaluation of the very concept of utopia. Studies of early modern utopias have grappled with the same problems of definition as Utopian Studies theorists have. J. C. Davis argues that utopia must deal with “the totality of change envisaged, its closed-society nature, and the order of stability of the new establishment.”⁴ For Davis, order and stability suggest a utopian Big Other that will keep watch over and control the populace of literary utopias in order to keep them utopian. Timothy Kenyon argues that More’s Utopia conceives citizenship as opposed to the theological conceptions of freedom in which More believed in an attempt to retrieve the intent of More and Winstanley because, while they both use utopianism to promote political change, they use conventional concerns for this goal.⁵ Kenyon suggests, therefore, that in spite of their utopian impulses, More and Winstanley could not escape their historical situation and the limitations it imposed on them, their thought, and their writing. This has considerable implications for the statist nature of many of the utopian texts in the early modern period.

Similarly, many critics have produced scholarship on early modern English utopias that primarily has focused on sociological and political issues. The utopian impulse by its very nature suggests a challenge to an established and accepted status quo, which by extension places utopianism in an Imaginary relationship to the Symbolic order’s traditional norms. Marina Leslie argues that early modern utopia reacts to historical crisis, not merely as a contextual marker but rather as a type of representation that had to illuminate historical development to achieve success as a fictional model or narrative.⁶ From a Foucauldian perspective, Amy Boesky argues that utopianism emerged from the inception of the early modern statist institutions that became foci of power and authority in the context of England’s shift away from court and church and amid the rift between the aristocracy and the growing bourgeoisie.⁷ Boesky believes that English early modern utopias represent “founding fictions, narratives that delineate the origins and charters of emergent nationalism.”⁸ Robert Appelbaum also sees historical narrative as an important context and subtext for utopian writing, arguing that the seventeenth century displays a prevalent history of idealized politics and utopianism that registered a change in the political subject and what it meant to be an autonomous subject able to think about politics.⁹ The utopian subject, in other words, undergoes a change in subjectivity that allows a newfound capacity to question the established social and economic order. Appelbaum contends that utopian literature in the seventeenth century serves a nation-building purpose that reflects a considerable change in the nature of political subjectivity.¹⁰ The creation of nationalism and political subjectivity as demonstrated by Boesky and Appelbaum highlights the larger trend of early modern literary scholarship that has focused more on how fictional characters interact with and relate to each other as opposed to the ways in which characters attain interior subjectivity. Like Boesky and Appelbaum, Christopher Kendrick detects in early modern utopia an immersion in social and historical context, characterizing early modern utopia as architectural and urban because it marks a unique historical moment in which architecture became known as “political discipline” that educated and guided architects to rebuild the city with an aristocratic urbanity unconcerned with the masses.¹¹ For Kendrick, the desire of early modern utopia was one of class, and that the image of freedom came with uneven development and contradiction that he labels as “anarchic.”¹² Contradiction and anarchy suggest placing utopia in the Real, the impossible and unimaginable space to which discourse is unavailable.

Although there have appeared no attempts to assess the extent to which sociological factors affect psychological states in utopian literature, some critics have begun to lay the foundation for doing so. Building on what Michael C. Schoenfeldt has called “materialist psychology,” Lucy Sargisson argues that “binary oppositional thought” constructs “hierarchies” that influence how we experience the world.¹³ Sargisson’s focus, however, does not address psychological implications of characters in utopian texts as she focuses more on Self/Other subjectivity, which concerns individuation as it relates to other people.

More recently, studies of early modern utopia have focused on generic and formal qualities. Nina Chordas demonstrates that early modern utopia is largely a generic aggregate with a unique historical context that places utopian discourse in a quotidian context.¹⁴ Chloë Houston notes that utopias often engage with questions concerning form by creating and imagining the very social forms that address.¹⁵ In other words, for both Chordas and Houston, early modern utopia subjects its own form to a meta-discursive interrogation of its own genre, in essence, questioning its own established set of tropes and manifestations. Following Louis Marin spatial construct “utopics,” Sara Hogan argues that the spatial irony of early modern English utopias reflects formal and ideological aspects of an indeterminate and transitional present that would soon transform into worldwide capitalism, as these texts privilege a systematic institutional reform of individuals and communities by engaging with abstract historical change in addition to tangible epistemological reality.¹⁶

The preceding, albeit very cursory, survey of scholarship on early modern utopia demonstrates the wide range of perspectives that utopia has attracted. The insularity of both political and psychological criticism of seventeenth-century English utopian literature has resulted in a largely, and incorrectly, essentialist body of scholarship that has misread many themes and motifs in these texts. Philosophers, social scientists, literary critics, and even psychoanalysts recognize the crucial role that the concept of utopia plays in human subjectivity, whether through an understanding of fictive depictions of utopian societies or psychological interpretation of these utopian societies, and in the following chapters I seek to demonstrate the interdependent nature of these approaches to understanding hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Section 1 Introductory Matters
• Section 2 The Utopian Symbolic
• Section 3 The Utopian Imaginary
• Section 4 The Utopian Real
• Bibliography
• Index