Lacan is not an oracle whose pronouncements are descriptions of
reality, or even, must one say, of being with or without a capital. His
work has been thoroughly discredited on three grounds, though the
theorheoea has such a strong outflow in literary criticism it will
continue a while longer till the impetus dies to a little drip. Lacan
fails in his theory of linguistics, psycholinguistics and child
development.
1. Like a number of other postmodernist pseudophilosophers,
Lacan used Saussure yoked with Jakobson to construct a neat but
totally fallacious model: from the former came signifier and signified
to account for language, from the latter metaphor and metonymy to
account for sentence production and from Freud the myth of
consciousness and unconsciousness as a bifurcated model of the
mind. We have dozens of detailed studies showing the flaws in
Saussure and the manipulation of his thought--mendaciously by
Derrida as Raymond Tallis has documented--for a variety of
unsuitable purposes. Lacan went wrong quite early by relying on
thoroughly discredited turn-of-the-century linguistics. Literary
critics keep citing the warmed-over phlogiston of Lacan's
Saussurian thought as if the whole linguistics revolution instituted by
Chomsky never happened. No linguist of repute holds Saussure's
views, perhaps no linguist at all; only literary critics and Lacanians
dancing the Lacan-can do. The whole business is wrong on a
grand scale. Some Lacanians may argue that Lacan only used
outmoded linguistics as a metaphor for his own psychological
purposes. That is as stupid as it looks. Maybe poets can do that,
but not anyone who claims the mantle of science and objectivity.
That would make as much sense as using a metaphor to understand
particle physics. Quarks came from Joyce, not the things in
themselves or their behavior.
2. Lacan has made an even greater error by trying to psychologize
Saussurian linguistic entities. Turning linguistic entities into
psychological ones compounds the problem by joining Saussure's
worthless linguistics to a bifurcated model of the mind that has not
been empirically proven. If anything, modern neuroscience has
begun to show that the mind has many strata interacting
simultaneously in highly complex ways. As of now, we do not have
the slightest idea what consciousness is or how it's produced.
(Those who think otherwise should read MIT's journal "Psyche" as a
start.) In absence of that knowledge--and I'm inclined to follow
Roger Penrose here by looking for a solution in quantum
mechanics--any talk of un-consciousness is meaningless. I might
add that the work of critics like Adolf Gruenbaum has left
Freudianism without the slightest pretence to scientific validity. It's
pure myth, and can only be judged for utility that way. Chomsky
has noted that both structural linguistics and behavioral psychology
deny the existence of an active, autonomous individual in favor of a
subject ruled by linguistic laws or stimulus response laws. The
structural linguistics derived from Saussure is, as Chomsky noted,
"radical behaviorist reductionism." Whatever the ultimate standing
of deep structure theories, Chomsky has demonstrated that it is
logically and empirically impossible to account for language
proficiency, for the ability to generate an infinite series of
meaningful sentences and understand them, by stimulus response
chains. There is probably not one serious psycholinguist who would
accept Saussure's and Lacan's account of how we understand
language. The whole of modern cognitive science shows that words
do not simply imprint themselves on the mind. Very complex
processing loops and feedback systems are necessary to
understand meaning. As Ellis and Tallis among many other have
observed, the only reason to maintain such a crude and false
stimulus response theory is the need many literary intellectuals have
to deny the individual any autonomy. For critics to keep on citing
and employing this philosophical dross as if it were gold bespeaks
some serious intellectual blindness or aberration.
3. The theory of "a mirror stage" in child development from six to
eighteen months rests, as usual with Lacan, on nothing but a few
outdated books and on chimpanzees. Anyone who reads the books
that Lacan cites will find nothing there about the mirror stage. As in
so much of postmodernist theory, the sources are nonexistent,
contrived or distorted beyond recognition. No modern scientific
studies of child development support the mirror stage, which is a
kind of selfobject differentiation process that for Lacan leads not to
selfidentification but loss of being--whatever being may mean.
4. By psychologizing Saussure's model of language, Lacan has
constructed his theoretical shanty-town on a kind of selfrunning
language that is ultimately antipsychological. He has done the
opposite of his stated intention.
5. Those who think that Lacan has some heuristic utility in literary
criticism are obliged, therefore, to shed any aura of scientific or
objective validity to his thought. He does not automatically confer
authority on an analysis of poetry. But since his linguistics and
psycholinguistics are erroneous, it much more likely that they will
confer error, misunderstanding and opacity. The recent posts that
assume Lacanian categories as givens read more like the effusions
of true believers in a cult than the rational analysis of scholars who
respect logic and evidence. John Ellis has of course argued that as
the salient feature of most postmodern critical theory.
6. If we must be inundated with Lacanian analysis, one would like to
see it conveyed in clear, precise English. The recent posts by the
passionate rhetorician are larded with the worst excesses of jargon.
Martha Nussbaum, a Classicist I'm happy to say, has recently
shown that the jargon-laden prose of Judith Butler can be completely
recast in lucid English without the slightest loss in subtlety. Indeed,
what Butler mostly loses in the exercise is the mystique of intellectual
depth.
7. When I read such quotes as "The unconscious does not lend
itself to ontology" or "the unconscious is a temporal structure"
thrown out as obiter dicta from truth, I realize that many of us have
only slimmest hold on the distinction between empirically-validated
evidence and hogwash. Both these sentences, stripped of Lacanian
cant, are meaningless. Whatever the unconsiousness may or may
not be, whatever time may or may not be, the answers will only be
found by scientific inquiry. One of the great intellectual errors of
this century has been the tendency to construe scientific problems
as philosophical or psychological ones that can be solved by an
almost childish reliance metaphysical reasoning and outdated
thinkers from Nietzsche through Heidegger. The collapse of
Freudianism now that we know far more about brain chemistry is a
good example. A heavy does of Wittgenstein and John Searle might
help, though I doubt it.
8. I am personally tired of reading daily posts from the passionate
rhetorician in which she indulges the most shameless PR for her
particular critical favorite. Enough is enough. The name and the
literary slant have been trumpeted, though the trumpet is hardly an
appropriate musical instrument for a nymph dancing about the land
of Renaissance pastoral.
9. "This is not the first time that Theory has been reported dead.
This is the not first time that Theory has been reported dead.
This is not the first time that reporting the death of Theory has
been reported dead.
This is not the first time that reporting the death of Theory has
been reported dead.
However, we believe that we are the first to call for an end to
reporting the death of reporting the death of Theory."
--Martin McQuillan et al., Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism,
1999)
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Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus
2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan 432-8012
Voice and Fax: (053) 457-4514
Japan email: [log in to unmask]
US email: [log in to unmask]
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