Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 41

The Prisoner and TheX-FUes

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m . The unconscious as we use it— master signif iers and master pians
Lacan defines the unconscious as the discourse of the Other as
eariy as the "Agency of the Letter" essay, and teaches it at greater
length in Seminar )6. This unconscious, far from being submerged
somewhere in the subject, is the surface through which we experience
the imaginary and Symbolic orders as enjoyment (jouissance). The
subject's mental state depends on her/his relationship with the
Other (as the set of ali signifiers), and the overall structure of this
relation is something like language. In the case of television, we can
consider the medium itself as Other, in the sense that it embodies a
rather vast set of signifiers in which we may (not) identify some
master signifier for ourselves. But as Other, it must also be viewed as
barred, insofar as we do not find ourselves in the position as objects of
the jouissance of television (shows), that is, television does not desire
something from us, but we desire something from the Other as
evidence of our connection with that which is more than us (the object
a). Simply, the commonplace of identification works in the sense
that the protagonist of a certain (or any) program may function as the
subject's representative in the construct of signifiers.
With regards to the Other, we find two possible positions
with which the subject may be aligned—alienation and separation.
In the former, the self is alienated from itself as a signifier. The
alienated subject chooses a signifier with which to identify (Si of
Figure 1). Usually, the subject is drawn barred, and the identifying
signifier (S i) functions as the master signifier, as a means with
which to align her/himself with regards to the field of the Other.
Since we have discussed the Other as barred, the subject remains free
to desire, but here chooses a representative from within the barred
field to do the desiring. This representative (the Si of Figure 1),
however, may assume the position of a barred subject, in that the
protagonist is a creature of the script. We may not know what will
happen next, but we are reasonably certain that our representative
will not die. The subject in separation is in a less clearly drawn
position, in that (s)he realizes a lack in the Other (see Figure 2) with
which to identify. The lack is written as object a.. This object
functions as a place-holder for that for which there is no signifier, for
what does not exist in the Real. We find the separated subject where
(s)he realizes that something Is missing, whether it is the elusive