The living, breathing body; though “we” might take issue with any such attribute, even one as abstract and difficult to territorialize as our “thereness,” the attention given to corporeality here is instructive. It reminds us that theory has a role in embodiment (and vice versa), that theoretical commitment to the condition of being a physical presence can work in tandem with somatic practice to produce what Alain Robbe-Grillet refers to as a “new [wo]man” (133) who emerges, in his estimation, from engagement with the Nouveau Roman, the French literary movement whose radical eschewal of convention has inspired numerous contemporary writers. For the purposes of this study, the “new [wo]man” may be understood as one who recognizes cultural strictures in the form of codifications (literary or otherwise) and institutionalization, learns from their limitations, and undertakes to reverse their effects in her life—her decisions, her relationality, her physicality, consciousness, and so on. I will focus specifically on embodiment later in terms of Shusterman’s category of “somaesthetics,” but for now I would like to consider some of the assumptions around (self) perception that Hans identifies as symptomatic of a milieu in need of rejuvenation, assumptions that provide minimalist texts both a notional framework and, in some cases, a desire to exceed the limits of theoretical conjecture.

Emile Benveniste’s grand statement that “language provides the very definition of man” (“Subjectivity” 729), when paired with Jacques Lacan’s notion that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Four 149), gives a sense of the feedback loop that is generally understood to underpin subjectivity according to postmodern theory. Such a view obviously stands in contrast to a Cartesian understanding of the individual as an intelligent creature who creates and uses language as a tool, a rational individual employing an object. Rather, in these models, language is construed as an inherent “constituent” of the human animal and his or her process of subjective formation. Thus, “it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality, which is that of the being” (Benveniste 729). The interplay, then, between the self, language, and the concept of “I” (thought, spoken, or written) that follows is the essence of the subject; or, to be more specific, the speech act (along with the first person writing act) is the subject-defining act. Indeed, the two inform one another. “Language is possible,” Benveniste claims, “only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse” (729).² The equation is expanded by the inclusion of another subject who participates in the discourse (as interlocutor or reader) and is denoted by the pronoun “you,” providing the initial subject with further means by which he or she may define himself or herself, that is, as not “you.”

Whether it is Benveniste’s notion of language as dictating the field of the subject, or, further, Louis Althusser’s discussion of “hailing,” whereby the hearer comes to occupy a space (both psychic and linguistic) that is ultimately driven by ideology, or Michel Foucault’s interrogation of power relations and the interpellating effects these have on bodies throughout history, the subject does not tend to fare very well among its late twentieth-century theorists. In order to grasp the impact of such models in their reduction of the self to a subject (to one who is subjected rather than agentic) I would argue, it is necessary to look deeper into the question of how the relation between subject and object is constructed—the constitutions of the “I” and the “you” and the forces of desire that meld them. Standing in stark contrast to the Cartesian “I,” postmodern theory figures a self that exists insofar as it responds to various stimuli—an interplay in which the actions of both the self and the other (via identification and interpellation) are equally significant.³ What follows is an explication of this self in its psychoanalytic incarnation, as a subject forever in the process of negotiating its constitution via the discursive and particularly the cinematic language of the unconscious. Such a process involves a number of key stages where the various “sites” of the subject unfold or collapse depending on the particular (historical) circumstances of the subject, a process that obviously extends from infancy and into adulthood.

To begin with, the Other⁴ may be understood as synonymous with a symbolic component of subjectivity to the degree that it is “the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of truth” (Lacan, Four 129). It is a “realm” that is constituted, first and foremost, by the signifying faculty of language. Again, language as a system of signs and signification is capable of constructing the subject insofar as the he or she identifies with a given designation. However, by emphasizing the presence of a self to perceive and, quite possibly, to produce “truth,” Lacan expands the category of the Other to include signification issuing from a variety of sources. It proliferates, in his scheme, from the mother, the father, the person on the street whose gaze “reads” like a poem, or a newspaper article, from the perceived “endowed” male, the “castrated” female, from the object of fetishistic delight, and so on. The Other is an “entity” grounded in language (the structure of language) but nevertheless becomes manifested in the flesh, as a (primarily) visual object. The “field” of the subject, on the other hand, as mentioned above, is less tangible. Like the phantasm of ideology as conceived by Althusser, here the subject is presented as what “was previously nothing if not a subject coming into being” (199), into the domain or unconscious experience of signification. While “nothing” remains rather vague, we still get a sense of the productive capacity of the symbolic and the subject’s inevitable accumulation of self-knowledge via the Other. Of course, Lacan must still reckon with the corporeal, the actual person who “feels” as much as she perceives selfhood and over whom, nevertheless, the subject casts its shadow. For this task, he discusses a number of “moments” undergone by the infant that are reinforced throughout the process of maturation. In so doing, he shows the subject to be less a metaphor than a manifestation of existence as qualified by the vulnerability of the impressionable child, or the adult whose longstanding core is absence and lack.

The first “moment” involves a specific need (hunger, change of position, etc.) that is incommunicable, insofar as the subject lacks language ability, and is thereby expressed in the form of a general “request.” From the discrepancy between the need and the inability to communicate that need, as well as from the deprivation of a signifying relation with the maternal presence, there arises desire that will determine, in large part, the complexity (and complications) of sexual life. Signification, then, is at once a governing force in subject development by virtue of an essential lack (of communicative ability) and a point (both material and symbolic) located within the maternal other that substantiates this lack to the extent that it represents a remote, though “infinitely appeasing” love. Thus, the infantile subject is beholden to a sense of meaning or completion the remoteness and transience of which (meaning shifts with age; mothers and lovers eventually die) must invariably provoke crisis. Though his or her capacity to communicate the quality of this crisis evolves, signification (despite the central “talking” methodology of clinical psychoanalysis) may never be entirely ameliorative.

The second “moment” in the infant’s life that is responsible for its subject-development works in cooperation with the symbolic to reinforce a dialectic of desire. Lacan’s well-known “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” considers the role of the subject’s mirrored reflection to be determinative of an initial alienation between self and Other. Schematically, the scenario unfolds in the following manner: The infant perceives his or her image at a point in life (six to eighteen months of age) when he or she is unaware of an autonomous self and has succumbed to a sensation of the (uncontrollable) body’s fragmentation. What appears before the infant in the mirror, however, is a fully constituted “individual” whose exploits (moving, expressing, etc.) he or she sees as at once heroic and enviable. The infant, then, in an effort to escape physical fragmentation (preceded, of course, by the psychic fragmentation of the previous, perpetual “moment”), assumes the identity of the figure in the mirror whom Lacan, in reference to Freud, paradoxically calls the “Ideal-I”; paradoxical, because this “I” is a mere projection, a fabrication, a “form [that] situates the agency of the ego . . . in a fictional direction” (Lacan, Ecrits 2). Consequently, the stage that is so crucial to the subject’s formation is founded on a fundamental misrecognition, or méconnaissance. The object of misrecognition, the “Ideal-I,” becomes imbedded in the unconscious and thus in the play of signification that “speaks,” however inefficiently or erroneously, the subject into existence.⁵

It is precisely the identification of this real and its hazardous correlation to the inquiring subject, I would argue, that yields the function of a text such as “The Mirror Stage” essay. In other words, what the text does is to provoke the discomfort of the real. Certainly such “danger” is apparent in other postmodern texts, their “action in the world”—the opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish that depicts, in graphic detail, a scene of relentless torture whereby a person is literally, physically fragmented; or even in a relatively “safe” passage from Judith Butler: “Subjection is a kind of power that not only unilaterally acts on a given individual as a form of domination, but also activates or forms the subject” (Psychic 84). What such postmodern (and specifically Lacanian) texts do, then, is foreground both lack and the degree to which artificial “dreams,” cultural as well as nocturnal, construct something (a subject) out of nothing (ephemeral but codified images, discourse), leaving cherished aspects of self-identity, theoretically at least, in shards. Some examples of how the real is obfuscated in various cultural operations, according to a Lacanian model, as well as how a self might begin to subvert such operations, will be appropriate here.