"Lacan then defines what is referred to in the title of this session, ‘A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness’. He says that consciousness occurs whenever “there’s a surface such that it can produce what is called an image. That is a materialist definition” (p.49). But what does he mean by this? Is consciousness nothing more than the capability of a surface to produce an image? By ‘materialist’ does Lacan mean ‘physical’, and by ‘phenomenon’ is he referring to ‘what it feels like’, subjectively, to be conscious of something?
Lacan clarifies – any image reflected onto a surface behaves like a mirror,
“All that’s needed is that the conditions be such that to one point of a reality there should correspond an effect at another point, that a bi-univocal correspondence occurs between two points in real space…. In this way you can realise that everything which is imaginary, everything which is properly speaking illusory, isn’t for all that subjective” (p.49).
If consciousness is like the camera capturing the image of the mountain reflected in the lake, this is precisely not a subjective phenomenon, in the sense of it being consciously experienced; it is enough that it is simply registered by a device like a camera. “There are illusions that are perfectly objective, objectifiable, and it isn’t necessary to make the whole of our distinguished company disappear for you to understand that”, he says (p.49). One such illusion could be the image in the lake, which is objectifiable via the camera and which will capture the image even without men (an ego) being there to apprehend it. A similar phenomenon might be taking a picture of a rainbow – it is an illusion, it is an image produced on a surface, but it is not subjective. So these examples show us that by a ‘materialist’ definition of consciousness Lacan means one that does not rely on an ego being the seat of consciousness, or the ego being interchangeable with consciousness, or with consciousness being a purely subjective phenomenon.
Lacan’s innovation here is in detaching the phenomenon of conscious from the realm of what is mental. It is in radical contrast to a position of someone like Bishop Berkeley, for whom there is simply only consciousness, there is no material world. For Berkeley, ‘Esse est percipi’ – ‘to be is to be perceived’. This is Berkeley’s way of getting round the problem of thinking of the mental as on one side, and reality on the other. But Lacan’s proposition is to detach what we usually think of as constituting subjectivity (an ego) from consciousness altogether, or better, to detach consciousness from the realm of what is mental.
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