象征秩序(Symbolic Order)和阳刚之气危机(Masculinity Crisis)
oct 8, 2018, clit2069 reponse journal. 非常简短地聊了一下symbolic system 用lacan的model解释当今社会的masculinity crisis现象
It is interesting to see how the formation of masculinity in the modern days is approached from various perspectives. One of the most popular perspective of all, the Lacanian psychoanalysis, provides a sophisticated institution that is based on a symbolic system, namely the Symbolic Order. It foregrounds the prevailing importance of symbols in discourses of sexuality if not humanity. In Lacan’s accounts, the Symbolic Order is registered into every bit of the human race, from the language we speak which usually carries phallogocentric significations, to the phallus which is regarded much more than a reproductive organ it is but rather the symbolic lack vis-à-vis desire in a larger scope of sex studies. This journal will attempt to apply notions drawn from the Symbolic Order to a brief examination of a phenomenon of masculinity that widely exists in the modern-day society.
The phenomenon I am referring to is largely depicted in the contemporary pop culture sphere. It is though, something that much likely has existed a long time before people started to become aware of it such that it has been brought into social terms. For example, the very recent Hollywood production, Crazy Rich Asians(2018), portrays a man who marries a woman whose social status and background is far superior to his; despite having a considerate wife who tries so hard to avoid causing embarrassment in the household, he chooses to have an affair with someone socially inferior to him because his masculinity cannot be fulfilled. The wife eventually divorces the man, leaving a powerful note, “It’s not my job to make you feel like a man”. This portrayal gives rise to the question of whether masculinity can only be fulfilled being differentiated from or compared to femininity, of whether the society needs to necessitate a male-female binary of social attributes in order to prevent masculinity from crisis.
Setting aside a sexual essentialist point of view, the Symbolic Order provides a systematic explanation to such masculinity so sensitive that it limits itself within the conventional boundaries and is easily emasculated by elements foreign to its “comfort zone” every so often. As a matter of fact, Lacan emancipates the Freudian psychoanalysis from the essentialist realm where it is believed that men and women are inherently different in anatomical or religious terms. The Lacanian psychoanalysis mainly resides in the language of the Symbolic, although there is a pre-lingual stage where the infant identifies the Imaginary (m)other. Nevertheless, the Imaginary should be seen not as a definite stage prior to the infant’s subjectivity to the patriarchal order, although it precedes the entry into language, but as an Order parallel to the Symbolic and the Real that is only selectively repressed by one subject to the patriarchal regime. Submitting to the Symbolic Order is an unconscious and unnegotiable choice because once an infant learns to speak, the language which is a system of signifers and signified reigns over the infant’s thinking and behavioral patterns. The Symbolic is a system of difference, such that we are able to differentiate an apple from a banana because their linguistic signifers are different, and that we are also able to differentiate father from mother because the latter lacks the phallus. The symbolic system is so deeply rooted in the unconscious and in every aspect of the human race that truly escaping from it would mean to give up on the one thing that humanity is based on, language. Therefore, fundamentally, what makes men “feel like a man” is the awareness of having the phallus, something that signifies power, possession and control, as well as knowing the lack of phallus in women; what defines masculinity, in this sense, is the differentiation from women in phallic terms.
Although Lacan’s model is able to provide a solid analytic system of gender, sex and sexuality, it tends to neglect the Real. In other words, the Symbolic Order hardly touches upon the dimension of the Real but mostly engages with symbols, the signifers, the signified and such. To complement Lacan’s theory would require knowledge of social constructivism, where gender and sexuality are regarded in a way which takes social factors into consideration. To review the aforementioned phenomenon from a social constructivist perspective is to understand that sexuality and gender attributes are social constructs, and one’s own definition of masculinity varies accordingly to one’s own experience as well as the cultural and historical context.
