FAQ U: What's the Phallus?
The phallus is masculine in the same way a penis is masculine.
I wrote a primer on Lacan’s concept of phallic desire a month ago, and I realize—although my blog is mine and my target audience is one at least superficially familiar with concepts from Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, so I don’t feel particularly motivated to write introductions for people totally new to those fields of discourse—I kind of did that XKCD bit about how familiar the average person is with niche obscure bullshit. Again, it’s not my problem necessarily, but then people talk about how literal or abstract the phallus notion is supposed to be from Lacan’s mouth or my own. Is the phallus masculine (to quote WFS) “the way a horse [think equus in Latin] is masculine”? Is classic D&D more “literally phallic” (by way of being masculinely horny) than I had “intended” in my critique of it? Is usage of the word “phallus” a mere birthmark of a discourse originally grounded in bioessentialism from which it eventually outgrew? My answer to all these questions is no.
I’m going to preface this explanation by saying I fucking hate philosophy. Yes, I did have the opportunity to translate my interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis into an undergraduate honors thesis and, by virtue of that or by virtue of my character, I may practice what some consider to be academic rigor. But—and it’s a big but, thank you very much—I think most people who throw their hands up in the air about understanding Lacan or Freud or Marx, saying it’s all hoity toity philosophical bullshit, are capping. Especially for psychoanalysis, people who are likely to come across this blog are also more likely to suffer from what I’d call phallic blindness: by being on top or outside of the heterosexual pyramid, they don’t really grasp what’s being described or criticized. In contrast, most of my friends tend to be on the bottom of the heterosexual pyramid, and I can talk very candidly about the phallus with them because they understand intuitively from their position how and why it works, without deliberating about how literal or abstract it is. Hell, I demo’d some presentations based on my thesis to a bunch of sorority girl friends at the time, and what questions they asked were less about the “theoretical” concepts than about the literature I was criticizing (Greco-Roman didactic poetry). I’m not being bioessentialist except insofar as our society is bioessentialist and, even still, this blindness much less to do with one’s sex or sexuality than with their social position (like vulgar economists reading Marx). What I am saying is: if these things are unfamiliar to you on a social or personal level, lock the fuck in.
Let’s start from first principles. I would describe myself as an orthodox Freudian, not in the sense of taking Freud 100% uncritically (that’s a strawman), but in the specific sense that I consider his approach and framework to be indispensable to understand how the heterosexual matrix (as Butler refers to it) functions on the individual, interpersonal, and social levels. That is how Butler and Irigaray and Lacan, despite criticizing and improving on Freud’s original analyses in various ways, orient themselves, and they are each perhaps shockingly “literal” compared to those who’ve appropriated their work. So, please read me literally when I say this (summarizing an earlier post): the basis of psychoanalysis is in that patriarchal society sexually grooms children to acclimate them to a complementary social role relative to the parent who grooms them.1 This acclimation occurs at various degrees on personal and social levels, and “success” varies from individual to individual based on other (individual, interpersonal, or social) factors. But anyone who claims otherwise about psychoanalysis or our culture is capping either to others or themselves.
The penis is the patriarchal symbol par excellance. Yes, the penis: the male-sexed organ for pissing and fucking. We start at the penis because patriarchy seems as if—from above and below—it starts from the penis. I mean, that’s the image patriarchy maintains for itself and the myth according to which it makes itself seem natural (and, on the other side, the penis seem intrinsically powerful and creative). Psychoanalysis isn’t interested in preserving the myth of the penis. Freud himself was certainly a sexist and biological essentialist, and he has been criticized for that by most other psychoanalysts of note, but one has to ask why even despite that his work was considered threatening enough for the fascists to burn it alongside Marx and Hirschfeld. Do you wonder where my blog’s name comes from? It’s a reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis: in order to analyze a fantasy we need to traverse it by retracing its composite symbols until we arrive at its fundamental significance. That is what it means to do psychoanalysis, and that’s why it threatens patriarchy: it reveals that the penis has no significance except for what patriarchy attributes to it as its own symbol. That doesn’t mean that the significance isn’t real, because it is real and it has ramifications for how we understand and criticize patriarchy, but it is just socially determined.
But now—and this is where we finally move past Freud—we need to distinguish between the penis qua organ and the penis qua symbol (or, more accurately, the social significance attributed to that symbol). Lacan introduces us here to the phallus: not the penis, but the masculine power which it is supposed to embody. Yes, the phallus is an abstraction and it is not equal to the penis organ. This is the basic relationship between a signifier and what it signifies: it’s arbitrary and overdetermined, especially in the context of other signifiers—but you’re a lazy shit if you don’t figure out how its significance emerged. So let’s subtract the biological organ from the symbol of the penis. What’s left? Lacan identifies in fact not one but three phalluses corresponding to his three registers: the imaginary phallus, which (in the most literal reading of the Oedipus complex) is what Baby imagines Mama wants; the real phallus, which is the realization that Baby doesn’t and can’t fulfull Mama’s wants; and the symbolic phallus, which is Baby LARPing as Daddy for another Baby LARPing as Mommy. This is where we get into the more jargony aspect of Lacan, but the terminology is useful because it lets us delineate how the penis myth functions and propagates within patriarchy as a semiotic system. Let’s go through it again, this time without reference to the classical Oedipus: the penis is idealized, but no one can live up to the ideal penis, so everyone who wields a penis in order to perform their masculinity has to LARP as if they wielded the ideal one. Now substitute penis for phallus, because the phallus is really the actual thing at play.
Lacan takes it a step further, because what’s true of the phallus is true generally of most identity formation centered on what he calls a master signifier: the signifier around which all other signifiers are defined and oriented, itself having basically no significance except for its assumed centrality.2 The phallus is the master signifier of patriarchy, just as the US dollar is the master signifier of the liberal world order. This is a very useful concept since it illuminates a lot about semiotic systems outside of sexual contexts, besides revealing that sex is just another (albeit very significant) semiotic system. You can see how useful this is if you search maybe “discourse lacan” on my blog to read about the discourse algorithms, which Lacan uses to illustrate how master signifiers interact with subjects and dependent signifiers in such semiotic systems—including, yes, those fucking elf games. But I hope it’s clear why I disagree with statements about the phallus being gender-neutral or gendered merely as linguistic convention. The phallus is masculinity. The phallus is both patriarchal power and the signifier of those who wield it. The phallus is the spirit which possesses the penis and makes men think they’re all that. Lacan even considers the (symbolic) phallus to be the first master signifier with which the subject comes into contact, thus serving as the model for all other master signifiers and symbolic identities. To degender the phallus is to miss the point of it as an object of critique.
One more thing, so I don’t piss people off too much: a penis which ceases to function as a vessel of male power also ceases to function from patriarchy’s standpoint as a phallus (or even as a penis) since the possessor is considered basically castrated; instead, in contexts we might consider “trans-exclusionary”, the lack of a penis (or even more abstractedly, of the phallus!) takes on a phallic function for identity formation and group cohesion. Just going to gesture vaguely towards Julia Serano and leave it there.
There’s some discourse about whether late Freud in conceptualizing the Oedipus complex is attempting to cover up his early case work in exposing the prevalence of childhood sexual assault. However, even if that is true for Freud, we’ve since arrived at a critical synthetic consensus that Oedipus is grounded in that grooming. Freud is simply in his later years an obsessive-neurotic who wields truth in the service of lies. Many such cases! ↩︎
Remember how the semiotic analysis of that one LLM found “a man’s penis” at the center of all the tokens, which it differentiated from (inter alia) “a woman’s penis”? Fascinating shit! ↩︎
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