Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 46

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Popular Culture Review

and this understanding functions as the object of desire for the subject
(object a). It is in this position that we find fantasy approaching
symptom. We may say that the Other will not give the subject the
answer desired (the object a). This is fine; the object a. is, by
definition, missing from the Other. However, psychosis may occur
when the subject decides the Other cannot relinquish the object
because the Other doesn't exist as something distinct from her/him.
The viewer might decide that the set of all signifiers simply refers to
some giant Truth in which (s)he believes. The Truth is no longer
separate, but here around and in the subject. The Other is no longer
barred; it actively desires of the subject. A clear example is that of
schizophrenia, where the subject somehow receives messages from
the television (or from alien broadcast, God, or both).
The Prisoner and The X-Files describe a discourse of
psychosis, but this structure may preclude psychosis for some viewers.
Of course, state of mind cannot be determined simply by how we
watch television, but viewing habits may suggest structures inherent
in a given society. Television provides signifiers with which we may
align and ensures a distinct Other. The possibility of Ultimate
Truth, the virus which breeds psychosis, is foreclosed as there are so
many truths from which to choose.
Old Dominion University
Works Cited

Anthony Enns and Tim Richardson

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis. W. W.
Norton and Company: New York, 1978.
Metzger, David. The Lost Cause of Rhetoric. Southern Illinois University Press;
Carbondale, 1994.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.
University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1986.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, ed. Lacan and the Subject of L a n ^ g e . Routledge: New
York, 1991.