Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. New York: SUNY Press, 2007.
Signifiers are not a medium the subject uses to communicate
Rather, just as meaning rigorously speaking, never occurs as a hard and fast relation between a signifier and signified, although there is a meaning effect or signified effect, there is also a subject effect that occurs due to the interaction of signifiers (40).
“You ask me who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother”
The “not” is an attempt to efface the signifier “mother” and to lead the analyst to believe that the analysand’s true thoughts are elsewhere, that the dream had nothing to do with his or her mother. This battle against a signifier in signifiers allows us to see how the conscious subject, the ego, is at odds with another tendency, a tendency that the signifier “mother” manages to represent (42).
Signifiers, despite our conscious use of them, despite our illusory control over their emergence and our illusory belief in our control over how they are to be taken and read, reveal that there is a subject in a place other than the conscious speaking subject’s place. This is the kind of subject Lacan theorizes.
Signifiers … are indifferent to the conscious subject’s (the ego’s) intentions. Where the analysand wishes to deceive the analyst is where there is truth: this is the very structure of the “false false” and is in fact the strucuture of the basic functions of the unconscious — puns, parapraxes, dreams, and slips of the tongue. The unconscious produces signifiers that can be embellished by negations, but which are in fact true (42).
The truth appears despite our attempts to falsify it, or rather, the truth appears because of our attempts to falsify it. One always says more than one intends. So the signifier is in excess of the intention of the conscious subject. It is in this signifying excess, in saying more than we meant to, that the subject effect is to be situated, and not in consciousness, where we struggle to use signifiers to get a meaning across (42).