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Dashtipour, P. (2009) ‘Contested Identities: Using Lacanian Psychoanalysis to Explore and Develop Social Identity Theory’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 320-337 http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm

CONTESTED IDENTITIES: USING LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS TO EXPLORE AND DEVELOP SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY

Parisa Dashtipour

‘Social creativity’ in social identity theory

Social identity theory is broadly used as an explanatory tool across the discipline of social psychology (Brown, 2000) and it is probably the only model in the field which provides a rather meticulous illustration of ‘inferior’/devalued identities1. Rather than discussing recent developments of SIT or dwelling upon critiques against it, the aim of this paper is limited to provide a short review of the ‘social creativity’ notion and point to how Lacanian psychoanalysis might help to elaborate on some of its assumptions.

The idea in SIT is that people’s knowledge of their in-group and out-group and the way these are evaluated has an effect on self-image and action and that people have a motivation to “seek a positive social identity” (Turner et al. 1987: 30). A negative or threatened social identity will induce the adoption of various resistance strategies by the group (Turner and Brown, 1978; Tajfel and Turner, 1986). One of these strategies is ‘social creativity’2. This strategy is assumed to be adopted when group boundaries are not perceived to be permeable, and when the social power structure is believed to be legitimate. It involves an attempt to change the content of the negative social identity. For example, the group can introduce new dimensions through which they can compare themselves against other groups in more positive terms. They can also change the value of those aspects which are previously considered to be inferior and re-evaluate/reverse them. For example the ‘black is beautiful’ movement has attempted to do just that. In other words, this strategy is about re-assessing the content of the negative social category.

Reicher (2004) points out that contextual constraints determine whether the subordinate group will be able to engage in these strategies. These constraints are for example the actions of dominant group members and the existence of ‘cognitive alternatives’ to the existing

1 It has to be noted that authors from other perspectives in social psychology have tackled the issue of contested identities, such as Clark and Clarks’ (1939) famous study on black children’s self-image, Breakwell’s (1986) intra-psychic, interpersonal and social analysis of coping strategies for people with ‘threatened identities’, Timotijevic and Breakwells’ (2000) paper on immigration and threat to identity, and Howarth (2002) within the social representations approach who researched the identities of youth in Brixton. 2 Other strategies suggested are ‘social mobility’ and ‘social competition’. Due to limitations of space, this paper will not discuss these.

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power structure. Perhaps implicitly referring to the postmodern critiques of SIT (e.g. Billig, 1985, 2002; Wetherell, 1996), Reicher (2004) in his defence of the theory, claims that the social identity tradition is in essence one of social change and resistance. He claims that “flexibility is a function of varying social categories and is achieved through differing category constructions” (p. 936). Nevertheless, it has been acknowledged that those groups which are subordinated or negatively evaluated do not always demonstrate in-group favouritism and can in fact show preference for the out-group and discriminate against their own group, which often leads to devaluation and denigration of self and one’s group (e.g. Moscovici and Paicheler, 1978; Tajfel, 1981). Despite this acknowledgement, Reicher (2004) claims that minority members’ group actions are “aimed at challenging and dismantling current structures of inequality rather than creating and defending them” (p. 932).

There is well known evidence that shows how members of subordinated groups can in fact contribute to the inequality of their own treatment and status (see Clark and Clark, 1939; Bulhan, 1985; Marriott, 1998). This paper will argue that traditionally negative or stigmatized identities are sometimes identified with or desired, rather than done away with by members of devalued groups. Further, it is important to point out that re-evaluation of identity and the introduction of new and positive dimensions do not occur isolated from the society at large. Tajfel (1981) recognised that getting the characteristics of the group accepted by the wider society is indeed a problem and a struggle:

The battle for legitimacy […] is a battle for the acceptance by others of new forms of intergroup comparison. As long as these are not consensually accepted, the new characteristics (or the re-evaluation of the old ones) cannot be fully adequate in their function of building a new social identity (ibid: 297).

It will be argued here that there needs to be a dialogical understanding of inter-group relations and the ‘social creativity’ idea should be understood in relation to wider cultural ideologies and values which limit the contents used in the re-appraisal of the social identity in question.

Further, SIT mentions motivation for positive distinctiveness, a crucial dimension of identity, but it is also this dimension which has led to contradictory criticisms. Some social constructionist and postmodern approaches imply that this element of the theory is partly why it is an individualistic perspective (e.g. Wetherell, 1996). Others such as Billig (2002) suggest that the aspect of motivation is in fact not theorised enough in SIT. Motivation might be explained in individualistic or mechanistic terms, but it is problematic to assume that it is not important in processes of identification and categorisation. The inadequate theory of motivation in SIT might be due to the fact that the affective component of social identity is not pondered upon (Hogg and McGarty, 1990; Brown,

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2000) and due to the theory’s excessive focus on cognition. It appears that a proper focus on motivational aspects of identities would not fit into the SIT tradition – a tradition which has the aims to criticise the ‘blood and guts’ model of prejudice. It is also a tradition which has the goal to exclude psychoanalysis – a perspective which views human behaviour and mind as contradictory and chaotic - and construct a rational model of the individual-society relation (Brown and Lunt, 2002).

From the above short overview, we can pose some questions which would appear to be inadequately answered by SIT. What do people use or identify with when they re-evaluate their group characteristics? What puts limits to the contents available for use when re-assessing the social category? Why do some group characteristics hold more than others? Why is a stigmatized/’inferior’ identity sometimes actively desired, rather than contested? It will be argued below that these questions can to some extent be resolved with recourse to psychoanalysis.

Lacanian psychoanalysis

Although some writers have attempted to include psychoanalysis in social psychological research (see Hollway and Jefferson, 2001; Frosh et al., 2003; Gough; 2004), Lacanian psychoanalysis has largely been neglected. Only a small minority have fruitfully drawn upon Lacan to show how it can help to expand upon social psychological perspectives (see Hook, 2005, 2006, 2008; Parker 1997, 2005, see also Parker, 2000, 2001; Stavrakakis, 2008). It is the argument of this paper that Lacanian theory can add to social psychological theories of contested identities.

Lacanian psychoanalysis views motivation as a fundamental aspect of human life, but here the more expansive term desire is used. We may understand SIT’s claim that people have a basic motivation to enhance self-esteem, as being an implicit acknowledgement of one of the basic facets of what makes us human: our desire to be recognised by an Other. But what radically differentiates SIT from Lacanian psychoanalysis is that the latter perceives identity as largely produced in imaginary and symbolic processes, that is, as a result of mirror-stage dialectics whereby an ego is substantiated by the taking in of ‘outside’ images, and the symbolic devices of discourse and language that pre-exist the subject, rather than being a matter of cognition. Thus, it is not about straightforward self-categorisation, but about how one has been defined within the socio-symbolic field of the Other, and how one attempts to, consciously and unconsciously, make sense of the co-ordinates within which one has been placed. The subject is not defined once and for all, he or she will never be complete, and will always remain as a lacking subject - lack here connoting that incompletion, desire and the inadequacy of full identificatory meaning are all hallmarks of the modern subject. Thus, a ‘positive self-esteem’ will never be once and for all achieved. Moreover, in Lacan, identity processes are always viewed in relation to someone else, it

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is always about identification with something or someone else, with images, or like-others, located in particular socio-symbolic co-ordinates. One of the original contributions of Lacan is his three levels or orders of subjectivity (or inter-subjectivity): the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real. These can in fact be fruitfully used as three important dimensions of identification which, in very schematic terms we might link to the domains of a) cognition, meaning and (mis)recognition focused on substantiating an ego (imaginary), b) the operations of discourse, language and socially-codified laws and traditions (symbolic) and c) the extra-discursive realm which includes those intense libidinal affects (often understood in the terms of ‘jouissance’ or ‘enjoyment’) that escape the domestication of language (Real).

The imaginary, the symbolic and the big Other

The content of identities/social categories could not be re-evaluated without the use of images. The act of reversing or changing the content of social categories involves the work of visual schematisation - of representation. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the image which is sustained by the symbolic is the basis of identity in as much as it provides an external schematization of bodily/psychical self that affords the subject greater unity and cohesion.

Hence, in Lacan’s earliest theorization of the constitution of subjectivity, the subject takes on an external image, be it a reflected image of their own body, or the images/gestalts of like others in their immediate environment, the imaginary other. He is therefore alienated by the taking on of an image which comes from the outside. As Lacan states: the subject “perceives the unity of this specific image from the outside, and in an anticipated manner” (Lacan, 1988: 166). Hence, he is not at the centre of thinking and action, although the effect is the illusion that he is. Continuous identifications with certain representations or images is an attempt to cover over a constitutive lack in the subject (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008) although this is never achieved: “The very image of man brings in here a mediation which is always imaginary, always problematic, and which is therefore never completely fulfilled” (Lacan, 1988: 166). Imaginary identification is identification with the lovable image (the ideal-ego), and it hence entails a narcissistic component. It is the image which appears likeable to us and signifies who we want to be. But importantly, this narcissistically-affirming image can function as a rival in those moments when it ceases to affirm and instead appears to challenge the subject’s ego. A subordinated group when engaging in ‘social creativity’ strategies is in part identifying with an imaginary image, which provides esteem and cohesion for the group and a fantasy of fullness and eminence. The dependence on the symbolic is here concealed (Žižek, 1989).

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Symbolic identification is with the position from which we are being seen, and from which we appear lovable or desired (the ego-ideal). This is “the subject’s identification with the Other’s ideal” (Fink, 2004: 117). We might approach the Other as Lacan’s means of insisting on the omnipresence of social mediation, as the ever-varying network of trans-subjective social structures and values underlying a given society. The Other can hence be viewed as the Other of language, of certain ideals, norms and ideology of a particular society or community and as a position, a presumed or posited point (or perspective) of authority, knowledge, validation. Therefore, it is this Other which constrains the option of images available in the process of re-evaluation of social categories. Not any set of attributes/images can function as the basis of an idealizing image (ideal-ego). We can say that it is the big Other which judges if a social identity or image is positive or negative, that it is the big Other which puts limits to who one can be (see Glynos, 2001; Daly, 1999, for a discussion of how ideology always comes with a dimension of fantasy which disavows alternative ways of seeing the world and a jouissance which ‘fixes’ subjects). In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the ego-ideal is what he or she would need to be in order to be seen as lovable in the gaze of the Other, it is the standard, the bench-mark, derived from what the Other is thought to favour, against which the subject judges themselves and their image (ideal ego). Ideal-ego images are thus circumscribed by the degree to which they fall within the range of our parental or societal ego-ideals, which, in turn are put in play by the supposition of an Other.

Imaginary and symbolic identifications are thus importantly related. “Imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other [....] which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image?” (Žižek, 1989: 103). In symbolic identification it is not a matter of how we see ourselves in images, but “how we are seen by them” (Butler, 2005:53). We see ourselves through the way in which we fantasise that an Other is seeing us. When one speaks one imagines that one is being listened to by some Other.

The libidinal element of images

The symbolic and the imaginary are permeated by the Real, that is, the domain of the extra-discursive, which Lacan variously understands as the brute materiality of bodily or traumatic experience beyond the symbolic. Lacan (1988) states that the Real is

something which always lies on the edge of our conceptual elaboration, which we are always thinking about, which we sometimes speak of, and which, strictly speaking, we can’t grasp, and which is nonetheless there (p. 96).

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This is the terrain of those extreme affects of pleasure-pain (or jouissance) that simultaneously thrill and pain the subject. Identities would not be so ‘passionately attached’ to subjects if they did not entail jouissance, that subliminal, libidinal residue of symbolic activity which attaches the subject to certain social identities. Jouissance exists in fantasy, in the “by-product of symbolisation” (Fink, 2003: 254). So there is a paradox here. Jouissance is in the domain of the Real, but it also penetrates and disrupts the symbolic. We may understand jouissance – transgressive libidinal enjoyment - as Lacan’s theorization of affect, his means of understanding those ‘subterranean’ passionate ties or bonds that underwrite more overtly symbolic and rational discursive fidelities of group membership. Moreover, it is “a kind of fixity- something that holds the subject together and that provides it with a place” (Dean, 2006a: 17). Indeed, viewed this way, jouissance puts limits on movement and change. Subjects identify with social groups and ideologies because of promises of jouissance. Members of a social group obtain a ‘taste’ of jouissance in bonding with one another, in bonding with the image of ‘us’. It is the reach for jouissance which makes us identify with political projects, social roles or consumer choices (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008) and which makes some group-images more desirable or fixed and resistant to change than others. For example, Stavrakakis (2007) claims that the reason why there is a failure to create a European hegemonic identity is because the project has failed to evoke the necessary passion or jouissance- the kind of libidinal bond that exists in other forms of national identity. One might point to the ardour present in certain national practices (celebrated sporting victories) or the jouissance involved in the problematisation of the food, the habits, the traditions of others (the way they speak, the oddity of their food, their strange work habits). The conclusions we can draw from this is that change in identities is less about re-evaluation of social categories/groups at a cognitive level than about a change in the jouissance attached to those categories. Change means a change in relation to our jouissance. It means a change in or the removal of the libidinal investments in images/representations. The problem which needs to be tackled is how to overcome the fantasies which promise jouissance (Dean, 2006b).

I will now suggest how we may implement the above arguments in research, by presenting a portion of a case study about a Swedish anti-racist magazine called Gringo. Gringo3

As a response to the stigmatised image of ‘immigrants’ in the media, Gringo magazine was established as a supplement in the Swedish Metro, and published between 2004 and 2007. As the creator and chief editor, 3 The word Gringo is a disparaging term used by Latin Americans when referring to foreigners, i.e. those from British or North American descent. According to its website, the magazine is called Gringo because it wants “Sweden to not give a shit about how one looks like” (Gringo.se accessed February 2007).

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Zanyar Adami, writes in the first edition of the magazine, the aim of Gringo is to resist the biased and distorted image in the media of the residents in the ‘suburbs’- the areas in which inhabit a large number of people with immigration background in Sweden. The content of the magazine is usually around problems of integration, racism, multiculture, ethnicity and identity. However, it is not clear whether the aim of Gringo is social change or making a business product or both, and the magazine should be analysed in the context of “global commodification of urban and street culture” (Christensen, 2008: 238).

During its first few years, Gringo was both highly popular and unpopular and sparked an intense debate in the public sphere in Sweden because, among other things, of it’s sarcastic humour and its vulgar use of ‘suburb- language’- the dialects which are spoken by young people in these areas. According to the magazine’s own estimates, because it was a supplement in Metro, its number of readers was very high4 and said to consist of young urban people, half of whom had an immigration background and the other half a ‘Swedish’ background. Moreover, Zanyar Adami was given a journalism prize in 2005 for creating Gringo. In 2007 Gringo’s publishing company, Latifeh AB, went bankrupt because of liquidity problems5. In 2008, the magazine was re-launched outside the Metro as a free magazine with a new chief editor.

The first version of Gringo which was published between 2004 and 2007 is used in the present research as a case study. The analysis has been multilayered, including coding and thematic analysis of the text as a whole which produced specific themes and from those themes, specific articles were picked out for an in-depth discourse analysis. This study is following the kind of research which has recognised the value of psychoanalytic tools in the understanding of media representations. In contrast to social psychology, psychoanalytic tools have been widely used within film studies (e.g. Cowie, 1997) and cultural studies (e.g. Hall, 1997). These have investigated identifications, fantasies, and desires in cinema representations or other media images and text. Further, Gilroy’s (2004) analysis of comedy in the British media draws on psychoanalytic notions to investigate how humour reveals psychic anxieties against cultural others. Moreover, Williamsson (1978) drawing from Freudian dream theory, studied the work of advertisements and showed the importance of the analysis of the form of ads and how the latter rely heavily on signifiers to evoke certain affects. The idea in the current research is to combine notions in discourse analysis and psychoanalysis in order to ‘diagnose’ the libidinal effects of discourse particularly in relation to identification. Gilroy (2004) for example is implicitly carrying out this kind of diagnosis when he

4 According to the chief editor, Gringo had over a one million readership and was the country’s biggest newspaper supplement (Gringo, number 2). Sweden’s population is roughly 9 million. 5 http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/nyheter/artikel_252557.svd, accessed December 2007.

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is interpreting the “pathological character” (p.98) of English identity and culture and its relation to its colonial history and the current multicultural atmosphere. Rather than focusing on a national identity as Gilroy did, the aim of this research is to focus on a single magazine, and draw from Freudian and Lacanian ideas in order to investigate the contradictions, ruptures, and the libidinal energy of the text.

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The discussion of two images in Gringo

In the following, we will see how Gringo engages with ‘social creativity’ strategies, which involves re-evaluating the stigmatized ‘immigrant’ social identity. In this paper, two images will be discussed: the ‘hero’ image and the ‘gangsta’ image.

The ‘hero’ image

There a number of articles in Gringo which depict immigrants as exceptional people, as rebels or agents of social change. These include reports on young music bands, singers, actors and actresses, sportsmen and women. The following is an excerpt6 from an article about ‘Nessim’ who helps to find jobs for the unemployed.

Love and loyalty for Sweden is what drives Nessim Becket to find 500 jobs every year for jobseekers all by himself.[...]During his time here Nessim has helped to find jobs for about 500 people every year. Nessim’s office is about 20 square metres. He would like to have a bigger one considering that around forty people come here a day. And he works all alone so there is a high tempo.

“It can of course be difficult to work alone with lack of resources. I am quite stingy, but never with my strength. The driving force behind my work is my loyalty to Sweden. I feel great love for this country and think that more people would feel like that if they had a job. [...]I don’t have much space for myself right now. My working day starts already at the underground train because I meet several of the unemployed there. The job then continues at the office, in the centre of town and on the way home. I don’t even have time for my family, but everybody is actually my family[...]The door is open for everyone.I look at the individual as a whole. There is often a background reason why a person has not been able to find a job. I try to find out what that is and work from there. I don’t want anybody to leave empty handed” (Gringo number 3).

This is a typical article in Gringo which aims to depict the ‘immigrant’ as successful and ambitious and in this text in particular, the immigrant is portrayed as a ‘hero’. Nessim is perhaps being implicitly compared to the ‘Swede’ and shown as being ‘competent’ and ‘morally good’. He is given an important part here: a representative of the socio-cultural institution of 6 The extracts from Gringo’s text have all been translated from Swedish to English by the author of this paper.

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Swedish community. Nessim is a hard working and benevolent man, who is helping people to find jobs. This is a stark contrast to the media representations and other stereotypes, which link ‘immigrant’ men with laziness, crime, patriarchal women abusers and exploiters of government funding. Other ‘hero’ articles have similar content as this one (success, ambition, immigrants as agents of change) and similar function (reversal of representations). Hence, we could say that two ‘social creativity’ strategies are being implemented simultaneously: By introducing new dimensions (here we can see that these dimensions would for example be ‘success, ambition, compassion for people’), the negative stereotypes which are usually attached to ‘immigrant’ men in Sweden (‘laziness, dishonesty, exploiters of government funding’) are being reversed. Now, one can ask whether these attempts are successful or not. But this is another issue. The question that concerns us here is: for whom are these images depicted? Why is there a repetitive and rather overstated reference to Nessim being a kind, loving, helpful man?

The ‘hero’ image depicts imaginary images- they are narcissistic ideal-egos of the ‘immigrant’ identity. These images are portrayed as coherent, unitary, valorised and likeable. In this sense, they disavow lack- the immigrant is represented as a perfect complement to society, as mitigating against social lack, as a positively socializing agent. Although they are about ‘the immigrant’, in the articles above - and in other similar ones in Gringo where a positive image is given - the Other as a benchmark of accepted and demanded social ideals in society, as an entrenched perspective, as the standard ideological position of the community in question is dominantly present. The process of reversing negative identities is fundamentally dependent on the desire of the big Other - on the ideals set in place by this compass of social and discursive values. It is the Other which determines what would be a ‘positive’ identity. The foreign immigrant can only be represented favourably if done so in the terms set by the ego-ideals of an existing Swedish Other. Hence, in the above text, it appears that there is no way to represent the cultural positives of this subject in their own terms, the only way they can seem likeable is by being subject to, filtered through the ideals of this Other, otherwise they do not even attain any positive representability.

But what is it that the Other wants? There are certain attributes which appears to be seen as valued, and we can detect these from the text. The formal, standard Swedish language in these articles - which differs from other articles in the magazine where informal slang language or ‘suburb-language’ is used- indicates that we are dealing here with an identification with the perspective of the Swedish symbolic Other. Moreover, we can also see that in order to be desired by the Other, one needs to enjoy life in Sweden and love and be loyal to this Country. A positively evaluated immigrant is one who is faithful to Sweden. But what seems to be the important point here is the ambition and ‘hero’ quality of this immigrant man. The text is telling the reader that helping people,

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being kind and loving is ‘morally good’ in the eyes of the Other. In most of the articles about ‘the immigrant’, the people who are reported on all have some kind of job, are studying to obtain a decently or highly regarded education, or are busy with some other commendable, socially acceptable activity. There is an absence of images of people who are unemployed or ‘socially failed’ in other ways. Hence, to wrap up our argument regarding the above text we can say that a) in order to be seen as positive, one has to be represented via the lens of the ego-ideals of the Swedish big Other, thus there is a need to attain these minimal standards to be seen as normal and b) the Other - the point from which ‘normal’ is judged - appears to be desiring excellence and prominence. This is what leads to an odd logic at work. One has to be exceptional to be normal. The immigrant can only be accepted as ‘normal’ if he is more than just ‘average’, if he is an outstanding human being.

These arguments make apparent a challenge for Gringo: the problem of representing the immigrant, creating a ‘positive’ identity of this social group, without identification with the lens of the ego-ideal values of the host culture. However, Gringo also employs another ‘social creativity’ strategy, but in analysing this strategy, SIT is not very useful, perhaps because of its neglect of language. There is no account in SIT which illustrates the resistance strategy of ridiculing or making fun of stereotypes.

The ‘gangsta’ image

The following extract is from a fictional guide which aims to inform the reader how to survive in the ‘suburbs’, the areas which the media helps to stigmatize and depict as unsafe. We will see how the image of the suburb as a dangerous place is here intentionally exaggerated.

[…]Gringo has created a survival guide for all of those who are courageous and want to go to the deadly suburb.

Before you go:- Go to the doctor in order to make sure that you’re completely healthy. It is tough out there. - Make sure you’ve had vaccination against polio, tuberculosis, malaria and yellow fever, among other things. - Take with you an ID card on which your blood type is shown. You’ll probably need blood. - Take a course in first aid where you learn how to stitch gunshot wounds and knife-stabs on yourself. - Find out what gang-colours you need where you’re going. - Write your will.

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How to behave:- Try not to go alone. Bring a sidekick. Or a bodyguard is even better. - […]Don’t show your bling-bling. Hide the mobile phone and everything else which is valuable.- […]Make sure you have a lot of people around you. You don’t want to stand alone in an alley surrounded by seventeen anabolic-Latinos. -[…]If a car has its windows winded down and slows down the speed, you can be sure that it is a drive-by. Lie on the ground and play dead. -Don’t ever say the words “yo mama” to anyone (Gringo number 2).

According to Gringo the intention of this kind of exaggerated depiction of stereotypes is to show the absurdities of prejudice. For example this is what the chief editor claims:

[We] take stereotypes and turn them around a few times more in order to make all their absurdities clear (Gringo number 13).

This statement suggests that at one level the text above is representing the suburb in an exaggerated way in order to criticise and mock the idea that the suburb is ‘dangerous’. It also implies that Gringo ‘knows’ that these stereotypes are not in reality true. We can see how the exaggerations and the humour in the text can have an effect of critique, of showing the irrationalities or meaninglessness of these stereotypes, an ‘Ali G type’ critique, which going over the top elicits laughter. With the use of slang and sensational language, the stereotypes of the suburb are accentuated to the limit. This might be said to be similar to the strategy of resistance that Hall (1997) discusses, which involves working within the stereotype itself, with its form, rather than content, in order to challenge it and demonstrate its illogicality. It can also be argued that through humour, identities are made performative and contingent, which can be a challenge to essentialised stereotypes.

However, the fact that the above article is a fictional (imaginary) guide and the use of humour indicates that the aim is clearly not only to critique, but also to incite laughter/pleasure. The text is enticing, it involves and engages us imaginatively, it draws attention, it elicits a kind of voyeurism and one might go so far as to claim that it is to some degree prurient. Thus, ultimately the assertion that the absurdities of the stereotypes would be demonstrated by exaggerating them is very doubtful. The outcome of this ‘critique’ is ‘undecidable’ in that even as one pretends to be critiquing a certain portrayal, one might still elicit effects of jouissance, obscene thrills, which can allow the reader to enjoy at a distance from (and to cement a strong identification against) what is being objectified. This portrayal of the suburb can also be a prurient or

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vicarious access to the suburb. It gives answers to the question: ‘what is it like in such undesirable places’. In other words, despite there being a distancing-mechanism in place, by virtue of the use of parody, this mechanism allows us to enjoy at a remove; safe in the sense that this is joking discourse, we can nonetheless experience something of an imaginative ‘thrill of the ghetto’. This is to say that although this is fiction, some of what it evokes by way of guarded response in its audience is nonetheless true; sometimes, as Lacan (1986) states, “truth has the structure of fiction” (p. 12). Moreover, the use of jokes in the text of Gringo about stereotypes might suggest that anxieties about the immigrant are repressed in public formal language, but able to be expressed in humour. As Freud (1960) claimed, when we have a negative feeling towards something instead of discharging distressful affects, we use humour.

Nevertheless, the fictional image also allows the reader to identify with this image; one can perhaps detect a desire to be this image. The kind of language used in this piece of text is very common in Gringo, the slang and the use of North-American English words (for example the suburb is referred to as “the hood”) is imagined as the language of the ‘ghetto’. This might be an imaginary identification with the African-American vernacular style of speaking. Thus, contrary to articles above, the desirable image depicted here is one of a ‘dangerous gangsta’ image, different to the righteous and hard working one.

From the above, we can assume that there might be a disavowal occurring: we know that stereotypes are not true, but we still believe, or feel them as if they are true’. There is a contradiction between what I know and what I believe. It is as if the subject both believes and does not believe in something. For Freud (1957) the refusal of accepting a certain reality or knowledge includes disavowal of this knowledge which is instead replaced with a fetish object. He claims that the little boy, when seeing that the woman is lacking a penis, refuses to accept what he sees, “for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger” (p. 153). The little boy keeps two contradictory beliefs at the same time: he saw that the mother did not have a penis, he ‘knows’ that there is a lack of penis, but he refuses to acknowledge it. This refusal needs the help of an object to be effective, an object which is a substitute for the mother’s penis and can thus ensure he is protected against a loss of something precious which makes him what he is. This object becomes the fetish. Hence, the fetish proves that something is not so. In the case of the little boy, it proves that what he saw, that the mother does not have a penis, is not true. The fetish helps to forget a threatening knowledge or reality. The denial of a reality leaves a lack/gap and there is a need to fill that lack with a fetish object. This object becomes so important to the subject because it conceals the gap, and it helps us ‘forget’ about it. But it also signifies the gap. Thus, paradoxically this object represents both the disavowal of reality and its acknowledgement. It represents both anxiety

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and pleasure. It is the ambivalence of anxiety and pleasure which requires the fetish object to be repetitively evoked, it needs to provide a certain kind of fixity. The more I repeat it, the more I establish to myself that something is not the case, because I have the fetish object to prove it. If the fetish is in evidence, continually resorted to, then the sort of identity that would otherwise be threatened can be maintained, as in the case of the little boy’s threatened masculinity; that which is special about him, and ensures his own narcissistic jouissance, can be protected, assured.

In the text of Gringo, the exaggerated image of the suburb as ‘dangerous’, ‘violent’, or as the same as the African-American ‘hoods’, the ideas of ‘difference’ which come up again and again might indeed be a resistance strategy to make the stereotypes absurd. However, they can also be read as a repeated and fetishised representation. But if the fetish is a proof that something is not so, what is it that is threatening and is being disavowed or denied? It might be the idea of sameness, homogeneity, or lack of difference which is threatening, because it means that I am just like anybody else, that I am not special. After all, being seen in the gaze of the Other as different to everyone else provides me a sense of distinctiveness, a kind of affirmation of specialness; the feeling of difference provides jouissance. ‘No difference’ might itself be a threatening idea; it is a threat to the jouissance which comes with difference. The fetish object is the representation/stereotype of the ghetto suburb. This is the object/monument which keeps difference alive and denies complete non-difference.

Here it helps to refer back to an earlier analytical observation: that there is no room for the immigrant to be positively visible except by taking up a place within the ambit of the home culture’s ego-ideals, as governed by the Other. One would expect then that some representations would play into these ego-ideals, but also that there would be some attempt to resist them, to deny this homogenization, and assert an identity able to evince a degree of difference. In other words, this example of a fetishistic resort to ensure a threatened identity should be seen as dynamically related to the foregoing ego-ideal-harmonizing identities. It provides a crucial way of ensuring a different mode of identity against the threatening homogenization of the Swedish Other; it keeps a threatened identity alive and secure, and enables its own particular type of jouissance in the bargain. Hence, this depiction of the suburb, rather than being seen as a resistance to stereotypes or an attempt to ridicule them - can rather be viewed as resistance to the ego-ideals of the big Other; a resistance to be what the Other wants me to be.

All this contradicts Reicher’s (1994) claim that people in a subordinated group will work against in-equalities rather than creating or defending them, because reproducing stigmatized images hardly works against in-equalities. Psychoanalysis can help us understand why those with ‘stigmatized’ identities might indeed contribute towards their own inequality. In the example, above, the fetishised stereotype of the

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‘gangsta’ may not only work to ‘otherise’ those with immigration background, but members of the ‘immigrant’ social category (as producers or readers of Gringo’s text) can themselves be involved in the fetishisation of this stereotype.

Conclusion

The ‘social creativity’ strategy suggested by SIT is a useful tool to use when analysing the process involved when groups aim to change identities. It shows that in such situations the group aims to re-evaluate the content of a negative social category. However, I have argued above that the theory leaves some questions inadequately answered. Firstly, the fact that the process of re-evaluation is carried out in relation to the wider culture needs to be emphasised. Ideologies, cultural standards and ideals about a ‘positive’ identity is what puts limits to how identities are re-evaluated. Secondly, the question of why some group characteristics or representations hold more than others is disregarded. Finally, SIT neglects the fact that sometimes a stigmatized identity is desired, rather than contested.

From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, re-evaluating a social category involves imaginary identifications with certain representations in which group members appear complete and non-lacking. These images come from the ‘outside’, from the Other, the particular ideological standards which limit the choices made when groups re-evaluate the content of their identities. These ideologies deny lack and promise fullness and jouissance. It is the promise of jouissance which sustains some group images more than others, it is jouissance which attaches group members to certain social identities. And it is also this libidinal component which puts limits to ‘flexibility’ and change and which fetishises certain stereotypes, rather than doing away with them.

Acknowledgement

I would like to greatly thank Dr Derek Hook at the Institute of Social Psychology, London School of Economics, for his constructive comments and help in the preparation of this paper.

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Biographic Details:

PARISA DASHTIPOUR recently completed her PhD in the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics. She is primarily interested in the application of Lacanian theory in the study of social issues.

Address for Correspondence:

Institute of Social Psychology, London School of Economics, St Clements Building, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

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