From Yannis Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political
Lacan starts his exploration of structural linguistics with the founding stone of modern
linguistics, the concept of the sign. For Saussure, language is a formal system which is
constructed on the basis of pure difference:
In the language itself there are only differences (Saussure, 1983:118).
The content of a word is not determined by what it contains but by what exists outside it. The value of a concept is purely differential: concepts are defined negatively by contrast with other items in the same linguistic system.
Accordingly, defining one unit demands taking into account the whole structure of language, a structure that classical structuralism accepts as a closed system — this closure will later on be disputed and deconstructed by poststructuralism.
But Saussure retains the concept of difference as applicable only to the levels of the signifier (the ‘sound pattern’) and the signified (the ‘concept’) when viewed independently from one another.
Viewed together they produce something positive: the sign.
Lacan is not keen in retaining this isomorphism characteristic of the Saussurean schema … there is no isomorphism between the two domains, that of the signifier and that of the signified.
Saussure, despite his efforts to avoid such a development, appears to be reintroducing a representationalist conception of signification.
In Saussure, the distinction between signifier and signified can be described as “a relic, within a theory allergic to it, of a representationalist problematic of the sign” (Borch-Jacobsen, 1991:175).
It is clear that Lacan’s reformulation of Saussurean linguistics moves beyond any such kind of representationalism. Lacan articulates a refined position which seems to take into account the critique of the Saussurean idea of the arbitrariness of the sign.
For Saussure, arbitrariness is a defining characteristic of the relation between signifier and signified, a relation which is conceived as alien to any kind of natural connection. It is this idea of the absence of any natural connection that puzzles Benveniste.
If by signified we mean the concept and not the referent (as Saussure was keen to point out from the beginning) then what is the meaning of Saussure’s statement that there is no natural connection between the two domains? Why would one think something like that?
It is clear that the argument is falsified by an unconscious and surreptitious recourse to a third term which was not included in the initial definition. This third term is the thing itself, reality.
Even though Saussure said that the idea of ‘sister’ is connected to the signifier s-ö-r, he was not thinking any the less of the reality of the notion. When he spoke of the difference between b-ö-f and o-k-s, he was referring in spite of himself to the fact that these two terms applied to the same reality. Here, then, is the thing, expressly excluded at first from the definition of the sign, now creeping into it by detour, and permanently installing a contradiction there.
This contradiction is never resolved in Saussure’s work, since the problem of external reality is never elaborated in length.
There is a certain realist representationalism still haunting Saussure’s work or some of its many applications: between the lines it seems to be presupposed that the signified precedes the emergence of the signifier which is there only in order to express and communicate it; meaning springs from the signified to the signifier; language is conceived as standing in for or as being identical with the real world.
As Derrida has put it, in such a schema, not only do signifier and signified seem to unite, but in this confusion, the signifier seems to be erased or to become transparent so as to let the concept [a concept linked to external reality] present itself, just as if it were referring to nothing but its own presence. (Derrida, 1981:32-3)
For Lacan, a theory of meaning founded on a recourse to some kind of referent, to a supposedly accessible order of objective reality, is clearly insufficient.
Lacanian theory offers a tentative solution to this problem by subverting the relation between the signifier and the signified.
Instead of the unity between the signifier and the signified, Lacan stresses their division; if unity prioritises the signified, division gives priority to the signifier over the production of the signified, a production which only now becomes fully elucidated.
Thus, although starting from a Saussurean angle, Lacan draws a very different distinction between signifier and signified from that of Saussure. What is most important here is that, although this second order interacts historically on the first, it is the structure of the first that governs the direction of the second
Tthis position will be further radicalised in the course of Lacan’s teaching. In “Agency of the Letter” (1957) Lacan makes a crucial move with reference to the Saussurean algorithm, which he presents as S/s.
Here, the signifier (S) is located over the signified (s), this ‘over’ corresponding to the bar separating them, a barrier resisting signification.
This barrier is exactly what makes possible “an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified” (E: 149).
If the dominant factor here is the bar which disrupts the unity of the Saussurean sign, then the unity of signification can only be an illusion.
What creates this illusion (the effect of the signified) is the play of the signifiers: “the signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole” (E: 126).
In Lacan’s schema then, the signifier is not something which functions as a representation of the signified; nor is the meaning of the algorithm S/s that there is a parallelism between the two levels, between that of the signifier and that of the signified.
Simply put, meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa (as argued by realist representationalism).
It is this idea that Lacan captures with his famous example of the toilet doors. In this case the signified — loosely defined as external reality — is the same — two identical doors presumably leading to two identical toilets.
What creates the different meaning in each case, what creates the difference between the ladies’ toilet and the gentlemen’s toilet is the different signifier, that is to say the fact that each door carries a different label (‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’).
The signifier manifests the presence of difference and nothing else, making impossible any connection between signs and things.
In other words, reference to signs implies a reference to things as guarantees of signification, something which Saussure himself was ultimately unable to avoid, while the notion of the primacy of the signifier breaks with such representationalist connotations.
If an intuitive theory of meaning is usually based on a ‘picturing’ or denotative schema, as exhibited in the Augustinian picture of language according to which words signify objects, Lacan clearly subverts this simplistic theory.
At this point, however, it is crucial to avoid a common misconception. This subversion is not effected through the elimination of the structural position of the signified.
What happens then to the signified in the Lacanian schema?
Lacan understands the signified as an effect of transference. If we speak about the signified it is only because we like to believe in its existence.
It is a belief crucial for our construction of reality as a coherent, ‘objective’ whole; a belief in something that guarantees the validity of our knowledge, sustaining the fantasy of an adaequatio between language and the world.
But for Lacan, as he argues in his seminar on The Psychoses (1955-6), even “the transference of the signified, so essential to human life, is possible only by virtue of the structure of the signifier” (III:226).
Put another way, “the supposed realism of describing the real by details is only conceivable in the register of an organized signifier the formal articulation of the signifier predominates with respect to transference of the signified” (III:229).
Lacan then is radicalising the semiological idea, implicit in Saussure and expressed by Barthes, that “it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language”.
The world of signifieds is none other than that of language (Barthes, 1973:10).
The signified is never a full presence constituted outside language. Lacan’s radicalisation, however, entails the definitive break with the isomorphism between signifier and signified and a refined resolution of the problem of external reality.
The archimedian point of his solution is the following: the symbolic is not the order of the sign, as in Saussurean linguistics, but the order of the signifier.
Meaning is produced by the signifier: It’s the signifier that creates the field of meanings. (III:292).