Shame and Lacan's 4+1 Discourses

By Moonis Azad

I want to use the theory of the four discourses, from the seminar Lacan held in 1969-70, to talk about the significance of the master signifier or S1, especially after the S1 is exposed as semblance, or after the end of analysis. I also want to discuss why Lacan emphasizes the significance of shame in this same seminar. At one point in the seminar, which is titled "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis," Lacan says:

You will say to me, 'What's the use of shame? If that is the other side of psychoanalysis, we don't want any.' My reply to you is, 'you've got enough to open a shop.' If you're not aware of this, then do a bit of analysis, as they say. You will see this vapid air of yours runs up against an outlandish shame of living.

Why, we should ask, was it so important for Lacan, particularly in the aftermath of the May 68 riots, to mention a rise of shamelessness? Why was this collective lack of shame an important symptom for him, and what was it a symptom of?

Discourse is a social bond. Every act of speaking to someone is an act of placement. As Louis Althusser showed, addressing someone subjectivizes them. And subjects tend to act accordingly. But in Lacan there are problems that come with subjectivity. There are cracks, glitches.

There is also a fifth discourse, Lacan later formulated. The capitalist discourse. I would like to share a few thoughts though on why Lacan mentions shame many times in this seminar. There is no shame without a gaze. The gaze, as Foucault theorized it, is a social mechanism meant to keep us disciplined. It is when the subject perceives he is seen by a gaze that isn't really there. So, Foucault explains not only how the panoptic gaze is effective, but he also exposes its truth as being illusory. There is no one really watching, except that discourse makes it appear so. What is the logical outcome of this exposure? When the panoptic gaze is exposed as merely an effect of discourse, the fact that no one is really watching, what is the subject left to do after this knowledge? When I had been keeping myself from enjoying because I kept holding myself back, now that I know there is no reason to hold myself back, what is left to do but enjoy? The possibilities of my enjoyment were being limited by showing me a false panoptic reality. Now that I know this reality was contingent, and not necessary, then I no longer limit myself. Thus, the slogan, "Enjoy without limits," or "it is forbidden to forbid."

Lacan's concept of the gaze is a different one. For Lacan, as he discovered in Freud, it is the subject itself that limits its own possibilities. All subjects are dissatisfied subjects, split subjects, because that is their nature through the signifier. The signifier splits. It limits my possibilities. It makes impossible the ultimate satisfaction that I desire. But it never stops desiring. It is not contingent that the subject feels gazed upon. it is not contingent that the subject hold back from enjoyment. For psychoanalysis is structural. The gaze is not part of a discourse that the contingently creates self self-discipline in me. It is a necessary feature of every structure from where I feel gazed upon. Even when I am not gazed upon by any particular person, institution or any other being. I still have this feeling of being seen. This feeling is the gaze, and it does not tell me to be disciplined. It does not speak. It is simply my own separation from myself, my split as experienced outside of myself. It is an anxiety of not fully existing, of partially existing outside myself as an Other who gazes, an Other who doesn't exist, but the experience persists of necessity. This is my own nature giving me a partial enjoyment of the real, rather than an enjoyment of S2. It is one manifestation of the object a that disturbs. This also happens with the experience of hearing a strange silence. Lacan called it the voice.

The difference Lacan explains between this new capitalist civilization and the others before it was the acknowledgement of the feeling of this being seen, of being anxious, of being ashamed. For eg., Levi Strauss discovered that almost every culture has a version of what we call the "evil eye." Lacan says in the seminar:

Today I have brought you the dimension of shame. It is not a comfortable thing to put forward. It is not one of the easiest things to speak about. This is perhaps what it really is, the hole from which the master signifier arises. If it were, it might perhaps not be useless for measuring how close one has to get to it if one wants to have anything to do with the subversion, or even just the rotation, of the master's discourse (pg. 189).

What is this shame of? It is the shame of my own enjoyment. The structure, with the S1 at its center, doesn't deprive us of our enjoyment. It protects us from too much of it. It enables us to keep desiring. From societies that shamed us for enjoyment we have now ended up in a global village that makes us guilty for not enjoying enough. And as Jacques-Alain Miller has noted, with the fall of paternal authority today we are a more anxious, a more desperate and depressed civilization than ever before. I quote Miller: "We are at a point where the dominant discourse enjoins one not to be ashamed of one's jouissance anymore. Ashamed of all the rest, yes, of one's desire, but not of one's jouissance" (pg. 27).

I would like to conclude with a question: in the context of more traditional societies like Pakistan there is a double threat. Not only are we threatened with the new global capitalist super-ego compulsion to "enjoy without limits," not only do we increasingly become intolerant of the place of the S1, we also face the neo-traditional enjoyment of right-wing populism, whether it is in the form of glorifying tradition, culture or religion. We are shown the decadence of the West in order to be seduced into the decadence of the East. Just because there used to be societies of shame before capitalism does not mean they did not find ways to act shamelessly. See for example Mikhail Bakhtin's study of cultural carnivals: emancipatory moments where the distinction between the public and the private disappears. Bakhtin celebrates carnivalesque moments in culture and literature, but would he feel the same if he saw global politics today, which is increasingly becoming a kind of carnival? The question to be asked is what is to be done in the face of this double threat of a western capitalist, as well as a non-western traditional shamelessness?