The Wedding and Its Medialization from the Perspective of the Ljubljana Lacanian School

Abstract

The ritual of marriage serves as a nexus for various dimensions of social and personal life, including sexuality, gender, religiosity, family, and parenthood. This pivotal event is laden with a multitude of expectations, hopes, and fears for all involved parties. The psychological energies converge not only within the spouses or participants but extend to encompass the entire cultural community. Simultaneously, it represents a ritualistic identification, where individuals, through the ritual, become what they are, establishing an identity. This article aims to provide a Lacanian interpretation of the marriage ritual, informed by the interpretation popularized by the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s framework allows for the conceptualization of identification as a socially mediated process, revealing the psyche as extending beyond the individual into intersubjective structures. This approach might help to clarify the inner logic of the ritual, allowing for a better understanding of the role of medialization. It will be shown, that under these lenses wedding photography and other forms of medialization do not only preserve memories of the event afterward but are already playing an active and even constitutive role during the event.

1. Introduction

This paper will attempt to describe the ritual of the wedding as practiced in contemporary American and European Christianity in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, using the interpretation put forward by members of the Ljubljana Lacanian School. The findings might or might not apply to rituals practiced in other cultural contexts, which would certainly be an interesting topic in itself. However, this paper will not investigate beyond the cultural context described above, as this type of analysis necessitates an empathetic grasp of the inner workings of certain cultural formations.

In describing the wedding ritual based on Lacanian theory, the three registers of psychical subjectivity will be the primary points of reference. As the wedding is loaded with enormous amounts of psychic energy (as Freud would have put it), for the spouses as well as for the entire cultural community, it should be possible to very clearly examine mechanisms aimed at processing these energies. Lacan’s work seems suitable for this endeavor because his thought emphasizes intersubjective structures as constitutive for individual psychic life. In introducing Lacanian concepts, attention shall be placed on locating the respective ideas in their philosophical contexts. By building a bridge from abstract philosophical discussions to the concrete descriptions of weddings, it should be possible to do justice to the theoretical nature of Lacan’s work by applying it to the context of relatively concrete cultural studies, while at the same time remaining understandable for readers not familiar with Lacan’s work or that of his interpreters.

This article will look at the wedding primarily as a way of culturally codified identification. In Lacanian thought, identification takes place in symbolic and imaginary ways. The structure of this text will follow the three registers of psychic life, beginning with the symbolic. The symbolic is the most obvious dimension of identification taking place at the wedding. It could be regarded as the core of the ceremony (everything to do with the formal process of getting married) to which other aspects are (it seems) added, which are relevant when thinking about the wedding’s medialization.

1.1. The Wedding as Symbolic

In order to examine the wedding’s symbolic aspects, it is crucial to briefly characterize the concept of the symbolic, which functions as one of the three registers (imaginary, symbolic, or real), “the three fundamental dimensions of psychical subjectivity” (Johnston 2023) within Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. One must be careful when defining a certain phenomenon to belong to one of those registers since they primarily are dimensions of the inner life of individual subjects. However, this paper contends that certain phenomena represent, illustrate, or are paradigmatic of a symbolic or another aspect—as will be argued towards the end of this chapter with regard to the priest.

Before characterizing the symbolic register in order to elucidate what is meant by symbolic identification, it should briefly be mentioned what is meant when talking about identification. In everyday language, “to identify” usually means to denote another person, an object, or oneself with a specific term to assign an identity to someone or something, i.e., “This is a tree”. However, identity can also be understood in the sense of the relation of two identical things which in reality are one and the same, i.e., Frege’s famous example: “The evening star is the morning star” (Frege 1948, p. 215) or more commonly, “I am [name]”.1 In Lacanian theory, identifying something or oneself always also carries the meaning of setting two things as identical. This should be kept in mind when going forward, as the necessary failure of any identification conceived this way is a central tenet in Lacanian theory.

The best way to introduce the symbolic is via the theory of language, as the symbolic is essentially the realm of language, simultaneously encompassing law and tradition, as those are phenomena tied up with language and meaning. Lacanian psychoanalysis is indebted to Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist theory in this regard. Saussure analyzed language as a system of signifiers defining each other by differentiating each other in a semi-stable network. The rules of language are largely arbitrary and change over time, but the speaking subject is nevertheless bound by them (de Saussure 1959, pp. 65–74).

How, then, can any speaker ever know what word to use? How is it even possible to perceive language as stable while speaking (as one must necessarily do, lest one cannot speak at all)? The Lacanian formula is a reference to the Other. Signifiers are able to express a certain meaning insofar as the speaking subject is able to assume that a listener other than them will understand a certain meaning. This was essentially the point in Wittgenstein’s well-known argument about the impossibility of private language (Wittgenstein 1984, §§ 243–61). The existence of a listener who knows the spoken language is a condition of the possibility of the use of language in general because otherwise, it would be impossible to know if one is using the words correctly.

Lacan however goes one step further. For him, language is not only in question when a subject is speaking but also when they are thinking, and even in unconscious processes. Lacan’s aphorism that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (e.g., Lacan 1966, p. 800) implies that there has to be an Other present even on the level of the unconscious. Lacan develops this insight into one of his best-known terms: “the big Other” or just “the Other” [capitalized].

The big Other is the other of the social order, as mediated by language. It exists purely as a role necessarily implied through our use of language. It is witness to every use of language and functionally guarantees its meaning. One must be careful to not simply equate this role with any existing position or person within one’s lived experience, as it is impossible to ever fully assume this position due to the (post-)structuralist conviction of the impossibility of ever fully grounding the social order. The position of the big Other is, therefore, one that cannot ever be truly occupied, or as Lacan puts it more poetically, “And when the Legislator (he who claims to lay down the Law) comes forward to make up for this, he does so as an impostor”.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the impossible position of the big Other is temporarily assumed (as an impostor nevertheless) by the priest in the wedding ceremony. The priest functions as a representative of the church, which in turn functions as the representative of God, perhaps the ultimate model of the big Other. This is signaled by the importance of the priest’s language. He needs to say certain words and (perhaps even more importantly) hear certain words in order for the ceremony to be successful. By speaking, a couple is able to change reality, not only what they are for each other but also in the eyes of God (which implies, in reality). But this transubstantiation through speech act (Searle 1968) in the form of a rite of passage (van Gennep 2019) by the couple is only possible if the priest is there to listen and witness the speech. As Catholic Cannon law, for example, clearly states in c. 1108 §1, “Only those marriages are valid which are contracted before the local ordinary, pastor, or a priest or deacon delegated by either of them, who assist […]”2. We can understand this as a constitutive rule (Searle 1969, p. 33) of a speech act and, therefore, as a necessary condition of it. The representative functions here as a kind of medium, allowing speech to become causally real. In Lacanian terms, “He is supposed to guarantee the meaning of words and therefore to function as the big Other of the symbolic order”.

The wedding, being an instance of symbolic identification in which a symbolic identity is granted through a speech act, is quite an obvious observation. More interestingly, we can now investigate its imaginary aspects in order to hopefully make sense of them and explain why they might appear.

1.2. The Imaginary and the Photographer

In order to approach the topic of imaginary identification, one can look to the mirror stage. The mirror stage is the phase of human development in which the infant recognizes itself in the mirror for the first time. For Lacan, this moment opens up a profound problem that a person will not be able to solve for the rest of their lives. What the infant learns at this moment is that it has a body that can be perceived. Lacan writes the following:

“For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a Gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it”.

(Lacan 1949, pp. 94–95)

The German term, Gestalt, indicates here that the mirror image (the only image the infant has of itself) has a fullness to it, which the infant cannot redeem due to a lack of control over its own motor functions. The contour of their stature makes the image in the mirror appear like an organized body, which the infant does not perceive internally. This is a misrecognition, an identification with something that the infant is not. It is not their mirror image, but they cannot but identify themself with it.

This misrecognition is the first and paradigmatic case of imaginary identification (Žižek 2008, p. 116). The subject identifies themself with an image that (because it is an image) has a greater fullness than themself. The implications of this dynamic become clear when one realizes that Lacan assumes that this insight into the relationships humans have to themselves positions psychoanalysis against Descartes’ cogito (Lacan 1949, p. 93). Indeed, with Lacan, the kind of self-knowledge Descartes referred to in order to create a basis for all human knowledge is not actually attainable.

However, the immense philosophical and metapsychological implications of the idea of the mirror stage need not be of interest here in all their detail. What is important is that imaginary identification is a basic dynamic of subjectivity, which is repeated and has significance for the rest of one’s life. It functions through seeing and being seen, hence the term “imaginary”, which must be read here as image-like rather than in the colloquial sense of “made up”.

When trying to connect the imaginary to photography, one might be tempted to look to film theory. Unsurprisingly, Lacan’s concept of imaginary identification has found a particular resonance there. In her description of what she calls narcissistic scopophilia—in a paper which also termed the now commonly used concept of the “male gaze”—Laura Mulvey (1975) famously interpreted the camera and the image it produces as a means of imaginary identification, following Jean-Lois Baudry (1986, 1974). In broader media studies, Friedrich Kittler also made a similar point calling the camera the “perfect mirror” (Kittler 1986, p. 225) and connecting it to the Lacanian imaginary. One should, however, be suspicious here. As Joan Copjec (1994, p. 16) has pointed out, these theorists tend to misunderstand Lacan’s vocabulary, as their use of it is filtered through Althusser’s writing and influenced by Foucault’s work.

Lacan himself did not speak on photography directly. In Seminar Eleven, however, he used the word in a peculiar way, saying, “[…] the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which—if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am photo-graphed”(Lacan 1998, p. 106). Even though this quote does not refer to photography but only uses the term for wordplay, Ruth E. Iskin builds on this and other fragments in order to situate photography in the context of imaginary identification. She argues that photography can be analyzed as a way in which subjects map themselves, similar to what happens in the mirror stage (Iskin 1997). Having established this, we can take a look at wedding photography.

Wedding photography appears to be self-evident. We might call it an essential part of the “wedding industrial complex”, as described by Ingraham (1999). Michele Strano (2006) has conducted empirical research into this very phenomenon from the perspective of communication theory. She interrogates the specific role of wedding photography in the reinforcement and continuation of gender roles and social norms in general. What Lacanian psychoanalysis might be able to add to this description is the answer to the question of why photography seems needed at weddings. Of course, the intuitive answer has to do with conformity, but through this angle, it is possible to see behind this answer and locate the function of photography in the ritual. Conformity remains as an explanation untouched by this, as we are dealing with a completely different level of description here. One of Strano’s interviewees describes the decision to have a photographer present at their wedding as “unconscious” (Strano 2006, p. 39), thus pointing unknowingly towards a psychoanalytic answer.

The function of photographs here is precisely the function of imaginary identification, i.e., the need for a coherent image of oneself with which to identify. The wedding presents an opportunity to be identified with the thousands of images of weddings individuals might have seen throughout their lives, which Ingraham fittingly calls the “heterosexual imaginary” (Ingraham 1994). One especially interesting historical case is the wedding of Queen Victoria in 1840, after which many middle-class individuals adopted the white wedding dress (Ingraham 1999, p. 34) precisely as an attempt at imaginary identification with an image of royalty and a life many of them desired.

In order to make the point that the medialization of weddings falls into the imaginary register, the difference between it and the symbolic can be highlighted. Žižek describes this difference as follows:

“[…] imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing ‘what we would like to be’, and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love”.

(Žižek 2008, p. 116)

This difference becomes clearer when we recall the priest and the photographer. Identification involving photography involves a person identifying with an image of what they would like to be (“This is what I have always dreamt of!”). The identification that takes place via the priest involves the extra step of being a certain way for the Other. In this specific case, the priest guarantees the marriers a certain status in the eyes of God and the community. This operation does decidedly not follow the logic of “now I truly am where I always wanted to be”, but rather that of “I am doing what they want me to do, and therefore I appear as good in their eyes”.

We can, therefore, see that wedding photography, and by extension, the medialization of weddings in general, can be viewed as a means of imaginary identification. The question remains, however, what this mapping of elements of the wedding onto kinds of identification might explain about the inner logic of these cultural practices.

1.3. Why Mediatile the Wedding?—The Role of the Real

It has become clear that we could analyze the wedding ceremony as primarily a symbolic affair, with wedding photography and the like indicating a kind of imaginary appendage or supplement. There remains however the question of why this supplement seems to be necessary. In order to understand this, we must take into account the third register: the real.

The imaginary and the symbolic taken together constitute what Lacan calls reality. This reality is opposed to the third and most difficult register to grasp: the real. The best definition of the real is precisely the one mentioned above: that which resists integration into the symbolic and imaginary (see Johnston 2023). In a paradoxical way, which must nevertheless be perceived as true according to Lacan, the real is both a condition of the possibility of reality and is produced as a negative space, a lack in reality. As mentioned above, the social order can never be “closed” so to speak. As beings who articulate social relations through language, we remain conditioned by a structure which is never able to ground itself and is, therefore, in a perpetual crisis of legitimacy. The real emerges due to this failure as a traumatic force.

In earlier writing (e.g., his text on the mirror stage (1949)), Lacan suggests that imaginary identification might be a defense against a preexisting real (in the biological sense) lack in the subject. When, towards the middle of his work, the symbolic takes center stage, this becomes reformulated into imaginary identification covering up for the necessary failure of symbolic identification (e.g., in Subversion of the Subject (Lacan 1966, 809f); see also Van Haute 2002, p. 92). However, at this point, the real can also be seen as a product of this failure, indicating the continuity in Lacan’s thought. (In his later Seminar Twenty, Lacan (1999, p. 90) also presents the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary as a triangular formation, highlighting how they engage in a sort of circular motion.) Imaginary identification then is necessitated by the failure of the symbolic to completely guarantee identity on its own.

The precarious nature of the symbolic order, threatening to bring forth the real, can be read as the incentive to substitute it with imaginary means. If one wanted to locate the paradigmatic figure of the real at the wedding ceremony, akin to how it was done earlier with regards to the photographer and the priest, it might most successfully be done in the figure of the spouse.

In a foundational text of the Ljubljana Lacanian School, Mladen Dolar (1993) analyzes the Althusserian notion of interpellation, taking a detour via the topic of love and falling in love. It is once again preferable to skip some of the theoretical parts of this text in order to concentrate on the point which concerns the topic at hand.

Using the Lacanian notion of forced choice, Dolar explains how love is always reliant on contingency. One meets another person at a certain point in time and falls in love, but from a rational perspective, this can never be more than good (or even bad) luck. If things had gone slightly differently, the two individuals concerned might never have met at all; they might have found someone else and fallen in love with that other person just as easily. This, however, is not at all the subjective experience of a person in love. For them, more often than not, it seems like fate. The commonplace phrases of “being made for each other” or being “soulmates” highlight this peculiar conviction.3

Dolar, using Lacan’s theory, is able to show how radical contingency and the experience of fate or predestination do not contradict each other, but that the former rather necessitates the latter. Contingency here is the real (as a contingent event is meaningless and the absence of meaning [symbolic] is the real), which can only be given meaning by wholeheartedly accepting and assuming it. The enthusiastic presumption of necessity exists as a psychic defense against the utter senselessness of falling in love (Dolar 1993, pp. 80–83). The senseless real at the core of the affair, however, cannot fully be worked through and reconciled in this way (and in fact, it never can). There remains a real traumatic kernel at the very core of every relationship, troubling and animating it.

Another way of approaching the spouse as real is via the notion of object petit in Lacan’s thought. The points made here stem from Lacan’s text, The Subversion of the Subject (Lacan 1966), especially the explanations regarding graph 3, even though those have to be simplified again here. Bruce Fink (2004) and Phillipe Van Haute (2002) offer useful resources to engage deeper with this text.

For Lacan, desire is not something that stems from external stimuli that animate it; rather, it results from the subject’s own internal inability to reconcile oneself with oneself, brought about by language. Necessary failings of symbolic and imaginary identification—as seen in the mirror stage as a misrecognition and the fact that the big Other never actually grounds the social order—mean that something is left over (Fink 2004, p. 118). This leftover, which has not and cannot be expressed, is the subject’s desire and has to be thought of as a lack within subjectivity itself. Therefore, it does not have any positive content of its own. However, through fantasy, the subject is able to project its lack into a given external object (Van Haute 2002, p. 137). Then, the formula of fantasy is expressed as “I am not whole, I lack something and this external thing is what I am lacking. If I can get it, I will truly be complete”. We can already recognize some similarities to Dolar’s explanation of love, in that negative space is filled up by getting committed fully to something contingent and external.

The object then becomes loaded with the subject’s lack and therefore bound up with the real at the core of subjectivity. In this way, the real is present in the wedding as the object of desire, which is most often the spouse. We can therefore interpret the wedding ceremony as a defense mechanism against the real, which might manifest itself in the beginning of marriage. It involves coming close to what you believe is your desire. This reaching what one wants is always bound up with the risk of suddenly revealing its radical contingency. The ceremony then offers opportunities for identification in order to stabilize subjectivity through this very risky endeavor. The interesting twist, of course, is that the very real that the wedding can be read as a defense against also emerges as a consequence of such institutions (as it involves the breakdown of the symbolic). Such is the dialectic of the registers.

It should be stressed, however, that it is precisely because the real is an absence, or a lack, that anything can theoretically take on this role in the minds of individual subjects. Individual history must be of primary concern when approaching individual stories of weddings through a psychoanalytic lens. What has been done here is only identifying a structure of psychic functions, scattered into the world as concrete individuals in the basic setup of the wedding.

2. Explanatory Power and Limitations

The arguments laid out so far have tried to apply psychoanalytic thinking, which always affirms the importance of the history of individuals, to a cultural artifact, excluding precisely the individual histories and networks of meaning involved. This operation is legitimate, as it has been carried out many times in cultural studies (i.e., Kittler 1986 or Mulvey 1975). Still, it should be noted that Lacan’s ideas were removed here from their psychological context and placed into an investigation allowing for a more liberal application of his theories.

In identifying a psychic structure of functions in the wedding, it was possible to offer an idea of how the wedding relates to its (imaginary) medialization. This text can therefore be read as relating to the same questions approached by researchers like Strano (2006) and others (i.e., Mäder 2023) in an empirical way. In this analysis of the wedding’s medialization, we might see that it is not only a question of preserving memories, but that this preservation already plays a role in the event itself. It is not a contingent copy of the wedding for later use, but, in its role as preserving, it is already constitutive of the thing it is supposed to preserve. Wedding photographers and priests are, then, not part of totally different operations but work together, so to speak, in upholding a nexus of meaning.

It might also be possible to build further on this framework by taking a closer look at the history of weddings and trying to explain their change over time in the terms proposed by this paper. For example, one might try to relate the changes to wedding ceremonies to the thoughts on secularization proposed by Eric Santner (2011). According to this, weddings would be driven to change (and perhaps intensify its imaginary side) by a general crisis of legitimacy that intensified in modernity.