materiality – objet (a)

eyers signifier in isolation signifier in relation

Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

it is my contention that Lacan’s work, early and late, and following Freud’s example, maintains the immanence of the Real in the Symbolic, against the arguments of those who see a gradual displacement of questions of language in the later seminars in favour of accounts of the Real, jouissance, etc. Underlying this chapter, indeed the totality of this book, is the contention that Lacan always considers language as fundamental to the Real, to sexuality and so on, and vice versa. (note 34, pg. 179)

Lacanian reinvention of the notion of the signifier tout court, predicated as it is on a displacement of any Saussurian certainty as to the signifier’s connection to the signified. 37
:)Yes, I agree that Lacan broke this tight relationship between signifier and signified. Scary?

:)constitutive interpenetration of Symbolic and Real,

Lacan, far from being a thinker of a hypostatized linguistic lack or void, insists on the singularityand substan-tial persistenceof those elements in the Symbolic that immanently escape any negative constitution of reference and that point to the ultimate overdetermination of the Symbolic by the Real,… Overdetermination, to be clear, signifies in this instance the absolute reliance of the production of meaning on those Real elements of the Symbolic that, while inherently meaningless, nonetheless provide the ground for meaning’s emergence. 37

🙂talks about Real elements of the Symbolic that although meaningless provide the ground for “meaning’s emergence.” Booya

Lacan’s philosophy of language will accordingly be distinguished from both the structuralist emphasis on complex totalities and the post- structuralist logic of a potentially limitless semiotic freeplay; Lacan, I will argue, manages, in part through his codevelopment of the relationality of the signifier and the material underside of the same, to avoid theorizing language either as an internally complex but exhaustive totality or as an endlessly creative, pliable resource.

The rich paradox at the heart of Lacan’s Symbolic is precisely the simultaneous insistence, then, on the irrecuperability of the rift between signifier and signified, and the equal insistence that a limited, contingent and material ‘stopping up’ of significatory freeplay is inevitable, with the notable caveat that such points of consistency are guaranteed not through the ruse of a transcendental signifier or an external guarantor of meaning, but by the repetitive, contingent iteration of the signifier’s materiality, its tendency to slip loose of or withdraw from networks of relation.

Terms including ‘letter’, ‘unary trait’, ‘phallic signifier’, ‘empty signifier’ and others are used, if not interchangeably, then to designate different aspects of the same phenomenon, namely the material insist-ence of the signifier beyond any significatory function. As a result, in this chapter I begin to develop what will be a central typology to be used throughout the rest of the book, namely the distinction between what I call the ‘signifier- in-relation’ and the ‘signifier- in-isolation’.

These concepts are intended to condense Lacan’s multifarious terms relating to language into their most pertinent, opposing characteristics: the ‘signifier- in-relation’ designates the signifier as it exists negatively, defined purely by relation to other signifiers and producing meaning as the result of its perpetual displacement along the axes of metaphor and metonymy, while the ‘signifier- in-isolation’ designates the signifier as Real, isolated in its material element away from the networks of relation that render it conducive to meaning.

🙂Eyers is now using the above distinction to claim that psychotics are not entirely outside the Symbolic.

Must psychosis be explained as entirely outside the ambit of Symbolic logic, or is it rather just an unmediated dyadically organized Symbolic logic that prevails in psychotic subjectivity? 39-40

Here, we come to recognize that, far from the Symbolic being radically foreclosed or revoked by the phenomena of psychosis, the rejection of the paternal signifier makes operative and primary those Real, aspects of signification – which is to say, signifiers torn away from the negative constitution of meaningful communication and tied to the aggressive movements of primary identification – that, as we shall see, must be presupposed, if kept at bay, for ANY signification to be operative for the subject. 41

For the common variety of neurotic, which by the end of Lacan’s teaching must be considered to be anyone who has acceded fully to the Symbolic, the dyadic logic of demand that accompanies primary narcissism has been nuanced with the metonymy of desire in the signifier; desire, properly speaking, is absent for the psychotic precisely by virtue of the lack of a full installation of the paternal law. 42

🙂The materiality of the signifier is Eyers’ Signifier in Isolation.

It is worth asking about the ‘nature’ of these isolated elements of the Symbolic, for it is partly in Lacan’s elaboration of this most material, which is to say most insistent and non- relational, aspect of signification that he most fully departs from, and subverts, Saussure’s insistence on the inevitability of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. 42

stephen white interpellation

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler would have us reconstrue this familiar speech act as the beginning of a lifelong chain of “girling” utterances that enact certain scripts as normal and others as abnormal. With this expansion of the temporal horizon and application of the notion of performativity, the relatively sovereign subjectivity of the passerby begins to dissolve. It is replaced by the image of a subjectiviy produced or constituted by the insistent, interpellating “demand” of “discursive power”. (82)

The policeman who hails the person in the street is enabled to make that call through the force of reiterated convention. This is one of the speech acts that police perform, and the temporality of the act exceeds the time of the utterance in question. In a sense, the police cite the convention of hailing, participate in an utterance that is indifferent to the one who speaks it. The act “works” in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation. (Butler Excite 33 cited in White 82)

Thus it is the reiterating function of language that is primarily carrying and reproducing dominant norms and crating the effect of sovereign, disengaged subjects by the continual process of calling them into social existence. We are, in short,“interpellated kinds of beings” continually being called into linguistic life, being “given over to social terms that are never fully [our] own.”

Butler’s ontology is one in which the basic “things” are persistent forces or processes. We must be careful not to imagine these as having qualities of subjectivy. Thus, power is not an anonymous subject that initiates discrete acts of constitution or construction. There is rather only “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence. (83)

But none of this … implies a notion that subjexts are dopes of discursive power. Reiterating is always potentially open to resignifying in ways that may contest the smooth reproduction of the dominant terms of discourse. Butler has described this subversive potential as “power’s own possibility of being reworked.”

What is not yet clear in Butler’s account is why or how this imperfection mightever be taken advantage of intentionally by an actor (83).

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche

Why does the passerby turn to answer the policeman? Power “hails,” but why does one submit to its call?

The violence of the prohibition, the frustrated desire, self-beratement, self-denial, desire turns back upon itself in the form of a will in the service of the regulating regime, that is of terms not one’s own. There is an investment of erotic libidinal energy in this turning back, in this prohibitive activity of the emergent entity of conscience. The conscience can never be an adequate site for thinking critical agency, since it is, in its very constitution, in complicity with the violent appropriation of desire by power.

thiem materiality

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

There is usually not merely one single framework that renders experiences intelligible; instead, there are various frameworks that compete with and among each other. Some are culturally prevalent and dominant; others are relegated to the margins. Yet such frameworks, as ways of making sense of the world, others, and oneself, are not unchangeably closed, fully consistent worldviews in themselves within which one is immersed and to which one is unalterably confined.

Consequently, experiences of pain or pleasure can bring the prevailing modes and frameworks of intelligibility into crisis and open them up for critical questioning and reworking. One runs in many ways up against and thus in a way experiences the limits of one’s hermeneutical framework which is one’s epistemological field. Since one operates from within that field, however, one is not in a position to look upon the field as a whole and so have reflective access to the field’s topography.

🙂 She loses me here: The limits are experienced, but they resist total sublation into reflective knowledge. This resistance depends on the fact that every paradigm works according to a certain foreclosure that occasions the preservation and return of that which cannot be signified within the given order of being. (25) 🙂 We experience the limits but these limits resist “sublation” into something she calls ‘reflective knowledge’

kirby bodies materiality

Kirby, Vicki. ‘When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (41-56).

The complication, however, is that to concede the existence of certain bodily facts is also to concede a certain interpretation of those facts. … If we situate this debate within feminism, then those who claim to represent real women without recourse to inverted commas will assume they have access to the truth of (the) matter, as if the compelling facts of women’s lives simply present themselves. According to this veiw, signifiying practices are the mere vehicles of such truths, having no formative input of their own (42).

Butler must rupture the bar that cuts presence from absence (lack), and language from what is considered prior to, or not language, in order to open the possibility of a revaluation of different subjects. In other words, she must engage the mode of production of these determinations, the hidden indebtedness to ‘the feminine’ whose disavowal has rendered it bankrupt. Butler explores the metaphysics of presence that opposes identity to difference as presence to absence, with the aim of refiguring difference as a generative force within whose transformational energies the sense of a fixed identity (as presence to self) is radically destabilized (47).

performativity

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 62.

Butler has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is no ‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural inscription. This seems to point towards the conclusion that gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’ (GT: 25).

Butler Manifesto

Bodies That Matter 1993 pages 15-16

As a result of this reformulation of performativity:

gender performativity cannot be theorized apart from the forcible and reiterative practice of regulatory sexual regimes,
the account of agency conditioned by those very regimes of discourse/power cannot be conflated with the voluntarism or individualism, much less with consumerism, and in no way presupposes a choosing subject;
the regime of heterosexuality operates to circumscribe and contour the “materiality” of sex, and that “materiality” is formed and sustained through and as a materialization of regulatory norms that are in part those of heterosexual hegemony;
the materialization of norms requires those identificatory processes by which norms are assumed or appropriated, and these identifications precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject; and
the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as “bodies.” If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and delegitimated “sex.” Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary “outside,” if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter.

How, then, can one think through the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body?

How does that materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms?

What challenge does the excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as “life,” lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?

The question

Thus the question is no longer, How is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the “matter” of sex untheorized), but rather, Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence (10).