The Film Industry and the Barred Subject

Both are great. Helen has more of a political drive to her arguments and I think that's critical

Sorry for the late comment, but I’ll try my best to explain it. It’s a bit hard since subjectivity is a fairly complex idea in Lacan and I don’t know all that much, but to massively simplify, the subject is the agent of the mind and behaviour. Unlike most psychoanalysts, who connect this idea to the ego as the self, Lacan viewed the ego as a symptom (a privileged one at that).

For a quick detour, Lacan had three different orders — the Symbolic (the order of language, the Law, and absence), the Imaginary (the order of images, sense of self, and fraud), and the Real (the order of truth, trauma, and impossibility). The ego for Lacan is in the order of the Imaginary (fraud) and a symptom, and thus can’t be the locus of the subject. Likewise the Real is impossible. Instead, it is in the order of Language that Lacan looks — the unconscious, or Symbolic id (Es in Freud’s German, corresponding to S for subject, a pun Lacan makes with his L-Schema).

The first place where the split nature of this subject becomes apparent is in the ego. In Lacan, like Freud, the ego is constructed by the unconscious. But instead of it acting as a regulator between the id and the superego, for Lacan it is nothing more than a collection of images and identifications. The ego forms in the subject during the mirror stage of an infant’s life, where the child begins to discover itself in external objects, like mirrors (or, barring mirrors, other children/people).

What occurs is that an Imaginary identification is made between the subject and its reflection in one of these objects. The subject is necessarily attracted and captivated by its image. The subject has a moment of revelation as it realises that that in the mirror is it, producing a set of images and beliefs that construct its sense of self (the ego).

However, the subject fails to realise that the reflection is something external to itself; the pleasure it gains from observing itself is from a primal but alienated form of identification. The specular image of the mirror is illusionary and a misrepresentation — it’s petit a (not objet petit a, the object cause of idea, mind); it’s defined by Imaginary otherness.

This genesis of the ego explains why the subject is barred. The ego can be described as the subject of the statement. The I someone uses when they say something. This isn’t the true subject (the ego is only the symptom, “the mental illness of man,” as Lacan put it), but it is the subject as it appears to itself — the ego being the Imaginary self. Otherwise said, the subject of the statement is the conscious subject.

This all is opposed to the subject of the enunciation: the subject of the unconscious (id/Es). Unlike the subject of the sentence, the subject of the enunciation is hidden in a way. The subject doesn’t recognise itself as a consequence of the imaginary identification it made with the specular image. Additionally, the subject of the enunciation is alienated from it through another fashion: the Symbolic and the Other.

The Symbolic and thus language is the domain of the Other (or rather, the Symbolic is composed of the Other). Unlike the petit a other of the specular image, the Other is defined a radical otherness that transcends that of the the prior’s illusionary otherness. The reason why the Other is language and the Symbolic is because it comes from outside of the conscious. The child we first looked at earlier has no choice but to learn how language and the Symbolic order (also acting as the world of social customs) operates and functions in order to interact with others.

This knowledge however can’t come from within, it has to come from without: from an Other (in a way, all the people surrounding the child). The knowledge then necessarily shapes the child’s thoughts and desires — it slips in as something foreign (Other) and shapes its very being. As the unconscious is shaped by language and by the Symbolic, you can see why it is described by Lacan as the discourse of the Other. As a result of the unconscious being of the Other, the subject of the enunciation in turn is alien to the subject (of the statement), on a deeper level than just parapraxis alone (although that’s more like a symptom of this alienation).

Thus the subject is barred on multiple levels. The most apparent is between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation — between the conscious and the unconscious. On the second, it is barred through the creation of the ego and its Imaginary alienation from itself. On the third, it is barred because the Other (language as I originally stated in my first comment) acts as a wall, the unconscious being Symbolically alienated from the subject.

TL;DR:

Summarised, the barred subject has an excess of structure. It is torn between the otherness of the ego and the Otherness of the unconscious id/Es. The ego is put into words through the subject of the statement (the pronoun I), whilst the unconscious appears as the subject of the enunciation, appearing as parapraxis for example. There is always a split between these two.

“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” is Lacan’s famous play on Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum. I think it best sums up the split in the barred subject. The subject of the enunciation thinks where the ego and the subject of the statement are not, whereas the ego put into linguistic terms (the subject of the statement) resides where the subject of the enunciation does not think — consciousness.

Sorry again for how late this was and how long winded it is, hopefully it’s somewhat clear! If not, just say and I can try clear it up.