A “home without walls” in the symbolic order



“May you have always been at home.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, written above his signature for me in a copy of The Refugees (1)

If language functions to exclude marginalized communities, how can the Vietnamese refugee author Viet Thanh Nguyen, in the foreword to an anthology of Asian diasporic poetry, claim that language can be a “home”? This paper theorizes “home” as a Lacanian object of desire, fantasies about the attainment of which are intertwined with structures of racial exclusion embedded in the American and global American hegemonic symbolic order. It further theorizes that Nguyen’s fantasy of finding home in language functions by exposing the “impossible real” (2) of the unattainability of home, deconstructing the exclusionary fantasies embedded in the very signifier “home” in a subversive “aesthetic dimension.” (3)

In the foreword to Go Home! Nguyen writes about his own upbringing in San Jose: there was food, warmth, and love — “and yet, despite not needing anything, I wanted more, although exactly what, I did not know.” (4) Nguyen’s experience illustrates how, by negotiating needs through the symbolic order, inarticulable and unattainable desires emerge even when those needs are satisfied — with the desire for “home” emerging through this negotiation. Ryan LaMothe theorizes that, from the moment of our birth, we must satisfy our need to “dwell” in a space by negotiating with the needs of others — and that the experience of “home” can thus be described as “embodied dwelling-with-others.” (5) In the Lacanian framework, satisfying our needs through others requires the existence of a “symbolic order,” the written and unwritten rules that provide a necessary “common background for us to interact with each other.” (6) LaMothe’s experience of home can thus be described as being able to successfully navigate the symbolic order to fulfill one’s needs. But the need to find home — to successfully dwell-with-others — is unattainable by the very nature of the symbolic order. The symbolic order doesn’t allow one to communicate their needs transparently with others: it forces one to use the order’s signifiers to make “demands.” In the process, the order’s signifiers gain power over the very things they signify, and one cannot even communicate to themselves their needs transparently, resulting in the emergence of unattainable and unconscious “desires.” (7) The state of being able to fulfill one’s needs by navigating the symbolic order is thus unattainable because the very act of navigating the symbolic order distorts and obfuscates those needs: thus the meta-need for home becomes a desire in and of itself. The notions that “home” can be found in family, familiarity, etc. are ultimately fantasies created to prevent confrontation with the non-existence of home.

Racial exclusion is part of the dominant American fantasy of “home,” reflecting McGowan’s observation that the symbolic order functions “ideologically to keep certain subjects out.” (8) LaMothe recalls Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing about experiences of being socially “unhoused” as a Black man: confronting a white woman who pushed his teenage son, Coates was threatened by other white people in the vicinity to have police called on him (9). The anecdote is a reminder of the many persistent elements of the symbolic order that include white people in American public spaces while excluding Black people (10). This racial exclusion does not grant white people “home,” but it can be a compelling fantasy for it — an imagined “solution to the Others’ desire” that lends the racialized sense of home a “consistent and substantial existence…that it doesn’t actually have.” (11) The racialization of Asians as perpetual foreigners who cannot be home in America, as expressed in the titular jeer of Go Home!, is one and the same as the fantasy that white people are home in America. Importantly, the fact that this symbolic exclusion is reproduced by material power relations — American capitalism was and continues to be built off of the exploitation of Black and other racialized labor (12) — explains why the fantasy of finding home through racial exclusion became and remains a hegemonic element of the American symbolic order. This exclusion also functions internally: highlighting the advocacy of some Vietnamese refugees against the U.S. taking in more refugees from the Middle East, Nguyen demonstrates that these exclusionary fantasies are also perpetuated by those on the outside seeking their way in, looking for a way to use the symbolic order to come to terms with their own desire for home (13).

Yet McGowan writes that fantasy can also “expose the failure of symbolic authority rather than shoring up that authority” by emphasizing the “loss of the object” of desire rather than “the act of obtaining the object.” (14) Nguyen performs such an exposé by articulating a desire for “a home without walls and boundaries” — in contrast to the dominant manifestation of being home in America as being predicated on racial exclusion — and a corresponding fantasy that such a home can be reached by reclaiming the English language. Nguyen’s and the dominant fantasies do not interact on a level playing field: the hegemonic nature of the exclusionary fantasy means that, for an inclusive fantasy to have any sway, it must subvert “all ideology in question,” (15) lest it simply lapse into disguised support for the hegemony. It’s easy to imagine how the call for a “home without walls,” taken at face value, can be co-opted into liberal anti-bias rather than systemic anti-racist politics, strengthening rather than challenging racial oppression. But Nguyen’s fantasy performs ideological subversion, as McGowan describes, by centering the loss of and pursuit of home through language rather than its attainment in a fixed form. The “homes” Nguyen describe in the foreword of Go Home! include those that are “not always idyllic and are often conflicted,” or that “no longer exists or is not a place one wishes to return to.” The relationship of language to these homes is not that they can manifest untarnished replacement homes, but that Asian diasporic creative writing makes space for diaspora members to negotiate with and find stable relationships with their desires for and experiences of loss of home, without lapsing into harmful fantasies of obtaining it. Nguyen’s fantasy is in line with McGowan’s description of the goal of psychoanalysis: not to “cure people of their lack,” but to “allow them to get over the idea that one can cure it and to embrace lack as constitutive rather than as an obstacle to overcome.” (16)

The subversive power of Nguyen’s fantasy is realized when he attaches it through his writing to the signifier “home” itself. “Against the racist demand that we go back to where we came from, we say that we are already at home, not just in the United States, but in English,” he writes in the foreword. Taken at face value, the response that “we are already at home” doesn’t make sense — obviously, suffering racial harassment, one is not “already at home” in the same way that the harasser is. But it is precisely this lack of “sense” that unsettles the symbolic order, exposing the “impossible real” (17) of the inherent unattainability of home and the fantasy of exclusionary homes embedded in the signifier “home” itself. Thus, Nguyen’s seemingly contradictory articulation of finding a home in language subverts ideological exclusion and makes space for a new kind of home centered on ongoing negotiation rather than attainment — a home without walls and boundaries. It would have been impossible for Nguyen to have articulated his fantasy in “clearer” terms: to recall Barthes, the rupture from oppressive elements of the symbolic order that Nguyen sought in his vision of home could only be communicated through another rupture in the signifiers used to explain it (18).

Robin James points out that similar fantasies have been exercised by marginalized community members for centuries. As artwork, such fantasies transcend the “zero-sum approach to racism and sexism,” James writes (19). When Nguyen and the anthology’s authors write about racist unhousing, they do more than rehash racist fantasies: they create new “aesthetic dimensions” in which such fantasies can be opposed in ways impossible in the “everyday reality in which that work and its artists exist.” (20) Beyond radical art, James — invoking Audre Lorde — argues that “everyday pleasures,” like listening to music with others, fulfill a similar function, allowing oppressed peoples to “carve out smaller, habitable worlds in a universe whose current structure requires their physical, social, and/or civil death.” (21) Referencing Barthes, these everyday pleasures can be seen as continuous, small moments of blissful rupture: acts that are revolutionary precisely because they are “atopic” and “asocial,” (22) centering negotiations with the desire for home that are not dependent on the dominant fantasies within the symbolic order.

Nguyen’s discussions of home offer a demonstration of the meaning of this course’s introductory Fiske quote: the pleasure of symbolic fantasies may be a tool to enforce the hegemonic order and even “bait” would-be dissenters into doing the same, but marginalized community members also readily subvert signifiers and create everyday ruptures to expose “impossible reals” and create spaces that “[escape] the system of power.” (23)

Citations

1. Signed when I attended a talk he gave at Scripps College on Nov. 15, 2022, just one week after I chose the topic for this paper. I don’t analyze the quote directly in the body of the paper, but by the end I hope the connection is clear. McGowan wrote that “the turn from accumulation to satisfaction portends the abolition of capitalism,” (Todd McGowan, "Conclusion: Enjoy, Don’t Accumulate." In Capitalism and Desire (Columbia University Press, 2017) pp. 239-244, 242) and Nguyen’s words empower readers to make this turn by confronting them with an impossible temporality, exposing the “impossible real” the unattainability of home masked by exclusionary fantasies and opening up the possibility for more inclusive ways of negotiating the desire for home and “dwelling with others.”
2. Todd McGowan, Psychoanalytic film theory and the rules of the game (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015), 38
3. “Aesthetic dimension” from Robin James, "Must Be Love On The Brain? Feminist responses to the “can we separate artwork from artist” question in the era of# MeToo popular feminisms." Journal of Popular Music Studies 32, no. 4, 2020: 75-94, 83
4. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Foreword” in Go Home! (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2018)
5. Ryan LaMothe. "On being at home in the world: A psychoanalytic-political perspective on dwelling in the Anthropocene era." The Psychoanalytic Review 107, no. 2 (2020): 123-151, 142
6. McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 31
7. McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 24-25
8. McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 33
9. LaMothe, “On being at home,” 139
10. In this case, racialized notions of violence and criminality
11. McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 50
12. Manning Marable, “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America” (1983); W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (orr. 1935); Edna Bonacich et. al, “The racialization of global labor” in American Behavioral Scientist 52, no. 3 (2008): 342-355
13. Nguyen, “Foreword”
14. McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 52
15. Roland Barthes, The pleasure of the text (Macmillan, 1975), 33
16. McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 41
17. “Impossible real” from McGowan, “Psychoanalytic film theory”, 41
18. Barthes, The pleasure of the text, 22
19. James, “Must love be on the brain?”, 83
20. James, “Must love be on the brain?”, 83
21. James, “Must love be on the brain?”, 84
22. Barthes, The pleasure of the text, 23
23. John Fiske, Television Culture (Routledge, 2010), 280