Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Blog post originally published May 13, 2009 at 13:10
- A bicycle can’t stand alone because it is two-tired.
- What’s the definition of a will? (It’s a dead giveaway).
- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
- A backward poet writes inverse.
- In democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism it’s your count that votes.
- She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but broke it off.
- A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
- If you don’t pay your exorcist you get repossessed.
- With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
- Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I’ll show you A-flat minor.
While inventing a new signifier is hard, “It is not that one doesn’t try. This is just what a witticism is. It consists of making use of a word for another use than that for which it is made. One crumples it up a bit, and it is in this crumpling that its operative effect lies” (Lacan)
Puns distort words, crumpling them up and making them take on another function, thereby shaking up the linguistic meanings and values already present in the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know.
Should acts be seen in the same light? Perhaps they fail to invent totally new signifiers, signifiers that would not have any meaning at all (“like the real”), but they may at least distort a conventional use of signifiers, thereby marking the presence of the real in the symbolic. In this distortion acts would manifest a tendency toward non-meaning, and, because of the effect this has on the Other, acts might thus also go beyond fantasmatic attempts to get oneself recognized by the Other. Such a signifying distortion seems to be just what is found in the social movements Lacan mentions: Christianity and the Russian Revolution.
Christianity did not seek recogntion by what could be considered the Other of its time (Roman law), and the Russian Revolution of 1917 was not about seeking recognition for the Communist Party in the existing Russion state. Yet such social movements seem very unlike puns and witticisms. What do acts have to do with puns anyway? In what way, if at all, can puns be models for acts? Or are puns just to be seen as primitive acts, formally resembling them, without the resemblance going much farther? 107
- It is as if a pun is saying to the Other, alright, what do you make of this? In this way puns emphasize a lack in the Other.
A pun creates a new signifier that resists signification without being completely nonsensical. It is a signifier that is not simply “the Other’s” but forces a new place for itself in the Other (115).