power dynamics that establishes its meaning, or its territory: ever since G. W. Hegel, the master has been understood as a master only if there is a slave too (or a subject), while there is no subject without a master (even an abstract one) to be subjected to.
If meaning itself (as master) is destabilized, the system it supports and its subjects also lose the stability they draw from meaning. There is no territory if there is nobody who has lost it. Usually, the members of a community reinforce the concept of territory, in order for it to sustain their meaning, or their desired identity. For instance, an oppressed social group like that of African Americans has to forge a meaning, a communal territory, which, abstractly, is “race,” but can also acquire a “territory” that can be defended. This issue is complicated by the fact that black Americans have to define themselves within a territory that has already been defined by those who bereaved them of their initial territory, so that territory has to remain a stake in resisting the forces that strip them of identity. In the contemporary world, we can look at the example of “the hood” as the territory in which, for instance, rap communities forge an identity, a territory defended against contamination by inauthentic rappers.
For the social structure to function and to allow the individual to function inside of it, any destabilized factor is turned into a stake. The need for the social structure to be (re)affirmed is predicated upon a challenge, an unknown, anything destabilizing. The territory is continuously redefined. It is not possible to determine an ultimate starting point where any constitutive factors can be identified as origin, in the sense of prior to any other (whether larger factors like society, the individual, or meaning, or related ones such as the sign, the family, or any other social unit, power relations, and so forth). In the terms advanced by Lacan, anything pertaining to the imaginary or to the symbolic cannot be given priority since, when individuality joins the social space, all the elements are already there, in the mirror stage (the initial stage of self-perception). He also goes on to claim that, as far as the subject is concerned, there is no other stage besides the mirror stage, while the real is always lost because of alienation into the social self. The subject speaks by abolishing itself as real, by already having lost the territory.
This real will never be retrieved since language and the social systems that function within language can only retrieve it by defining it. The real, as the outside/prior to language, escapes definition since there is no such thing as not-language, once language is the means to retrieving non-meaning. All the signs, or signifiers, which the territory has become, even the “land” sign, are not the “real” territory that has been lost by the community. All objects defining territory have become language and, for us, they signify, rather than simply exist. That is why territory is never not an abstraction, and always a “real” to be retrieved. Unfortunately, then, the real also contains its subjects, who will always try to define this real and derive their identity from it. This is why, from the perspective of language, everything is always a fall and a loss.
Now, as I have mentioned, Lacan and other poststructuralists have been stamped with the stigma of irrelevance to the “real world” due to the abstractness of their theories, and it is true that language cannot be discussed without abstraction. But let’s consider that Lacan’s understanding of the connections between the real, signifiers, and desire is relevant due to the enormous, very real consequences of the fact that territory has become abstract, which means it can be infinitely defended. This renewable and flexible abstract territory points to the perspective of the fall that I am suggesting: anything can be lost, which means anything can be fought for in an attempt to retrieve it or save it from impurities.
The three modes of understanding the loss of territory, or the fall, are by no means separate historically. Identities, or territories, and their loss always coexist. It is true that different moments in time bring changes to the perception of identity and the fall, but the changes are never final. People’s lives do change, and many times revolutions bring monumental improvements in the way people live. Otherwise we would not be speaking of the end of feudalism, the end of slavery, or the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. However, there are essentialist ways of perceiving social identity and self-identity that have not changed. For instance, violence against racial others continued even after the bondage of slavery was abolished.
Historic changes only shift the emphasis on how identity is constructed, due to variations in the stakes that language raises. If we accept the definition of the individual as a subject of language, we should also accept that this subjection is what drives the subject to believe that language has robbed it of something essential, which is the real. In the real, the subject imagines the ideal, or whole selfhood exists (i.e., one that is not lacking). This is why the real, overtaken by the imaginary and the symbolic, is precisely this lost territory I began to explain. It is this abstract territory and its signifiers that individuals and communities become attached to, and to which they turn when they become convinced they can retrieve their lost identity.
Lacan also emphasizes the perspective of the past in the formation of the subject: “the subject is there to rediscover where it was—I anticipate—the real .... Where it was, the Ich—the subject, not psychology—the subject, must come into existence. And there is only one method of knowing that one is there, namely, to map the network .... One goes back and forth over one’s ground, one crosses one’s path.”2 Obviously, Lacan also associates a notion of territoriality to the formation of the subject, and he is not the only one to do so (see Michel Foucault3 or Spanos4). Lacan’s notion of the subject formed within the lack of the real can explain the notion of the fall itself, as what is unnecessarily but stubbornly insisted on in relation to identity.
The reason why I find Lacan more useful than others (though I draw ideas from Derrida as well, and to some extent Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others), is that Lacan unequivocally claims that the subject is founded on a misrecognition. This is to say, what the subject desires as an identity is what the subject assumes to have lost (hence recognizes). In actuality, this recognition leads to an illusion of self-identity (hence misrecognized) that drives human beings to identify with an image/symbol all throughout their lives. Critics of Lacan claim that he dooms and restricts subjects to being deluded.5 The point is, however, that Lacan offers an explanation that is tremendously useful in trying to disengage human thought from the idealism of linguistic identity. If we agree with Lacan’s logic, our efforts should be directed toward how we can change (even to an infinitesimal extent) this perception of ourselves, rather than hide behind a judgment that reinforces our misconception that we are in need of retrieving something lost. Is it even possible, one would ask, to conceive of a way in which we can function and see ourselves as other than such fallen subjects? Although that is close to impossible, we can certainly acknowledge that “recognizing” ourselves is what drives us toward violence, because we will never stop on our way to reaching that elusive object of desire, which is the self. This is what places us in an irreconcilable position toward others; the more we define ourselves, the more tension we create with others.
Lacan best explains this conflict by placing truth, speech, and self in the Other, against which the subject is defined. He arrives at this now overly-used and re-used concept of the “capital Other”6 from a basic critique of Rene Descartes,7 and further exploration of ideas developed by Hegel7 and Alexandre Kojeve.9 Lacan’s contribution is to claim that the Other organizes the unconscious, which becomes “the discourse of the Other”:10 “You will then see that it is in the Other that the subject is constituted as ideal, that he has to regulate the completion of what comes as ego, or ideal ego … that is to say, to constitute himself in his imaginary reality …. This is also the point from which he speaks, since in so far as he speaks, it is in the locus of the
