the real – Page 17

pluth other’s desire mirror stage

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

In the mirror stage, I am presented with an image (or a signifier, a unary trait, in Lacan’s later revision of the mirror stage), and I get identified with it. Lacan’s article on the mirror stage does not offer a very satisfactory account of how this identification happens. It just seems to happen.

In Lacan’s later discussion of the mirror stage, we do get an account of why mirror-stage identification occurs. It occurs because the Other identifies me with the image. This is my motivation to identify with the image. It is as if my identity is already “out there,” affirmed by the Other as “me” before I have anything to do with it (72).

A subject is not consciousness

nor is it a “vital immanence.” We have already seen that Lacan rejects these ideas.

When the idea of the Other’s desire is added to this account of identity, the subject can finally be conceived as something that is neither consciousness nor an ineffable lived experience. In other words, the Other’s desire makes it possible to account for how a subject is something other than its identity or its ego. In the encounter with the Other’s desire I am given neither an image nor a signifier for what I am, and I am not encouraged by the other to identify with anything. The Other’s desire is in this way different from the Other’s affirmation of a place for me in identification. With respect to the Other’s desire, I am without a place. I am not even really addressed by the Other. … The Other’s desire is not at all directed toward me (73).

pluth genital stage subject

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

The genital stage allows for the creation of a space between the nascent subject and the Other, although again it does not at all resolve the fundamental discord between the two. What is different about this stage is that in it instead of being confronted with the Other’s demand the child is confronted with the Other’s desire — an enigma that appears between the lines of the Other’s demands.

Once the Other’s desire is introduced we can speak about the production of a subject. The earlier stages fail to bring about this production. It is only with the radical lack of a place for the child, a lack that the Other’s desire implies, that a subject can get produced. The oral and anal stages offer a place for the child in the Other, but the production of a subject occurs only when the Other offers no place at all (68).

Without this trigger, there would only be a strictly determined subject-as-meaning, a fate determined by a signifying chain. Without this interruption, the subject would be nothing but a series of signifers working like sheet music in a player piano, and attempts to separate from those signifiers would always be frustrated (69).

In the oral stage, the Other’s demand was a response to the child’s demand, and the child could see himself as the object of this demand, satisfying the Other to his own chagrin. In the anal stage, the Other’s demand to the child, which was first, was also readily answered, again to the child’s chagrin. The genital stage involves a demand from the Other that the child simply cannot answer. This “absolute” demand is in fact what Lacan calls the Other’s desire. This is not a desire for anything specific, and it is not necessarily a desire directed toward the child … It presents the child with an enigma, and as a result it puts the child’s relation to the Other, and the child’s very being, into question. Without this, there would be no possible space apart from the Other (69).

pluth subject and signifiers

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).

pluth first thesis chap 2 metonymy metaphor signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007.

What they don’t understand is that we’re bringing them the plague.

Metonymy creates an absent or a withdrawn signified effect.
Metaphor creates a verbal incarnation of a signified effect in a signifier by conflating a signifier with this effect, making the signifier act as a signified

Metaphor does not only create a signified effect that exceeds any particular signifier, it also achieves an incarnation of this effect in a particular signifier, which then acts as the “signified” of the metaphor. … The elusiveness that characterizes the kind of signified effect produced by metonymy is, in metaphor, incarnated in one signifier (36).

Even though metaphor, in contrast to metonymy, achieves a “verbal incarnation” of meaning, a signified is still not fully , or simply, present in it (38).

In metaphor, a particular signifier stands in for the more diffuse signified effect, marking the presence of that effect in the signifying chain. Metonymy marks rather the perpetual absence of the signified while at the same time succeeding in creating a signified effect (45).

In metonymy, the signified slides away from signifiers and is always absent from signifiers, even though it is always suggested by them. Metaphor presupposes this arrangement but produces a “verbal incarnation” of the signified effect by making one signifier pose as the signified: the “plague” IS “psychoanalysis.” 39

What I wish to avoid with this reading is the idea that a signified effect can actually be reduced to a signifier, which Lacan’s formulas (particularly the one for metaphor) may lead some to believe. … the signified effect of a metaphor is not one of the signifiers involved in its production, be it “plague” or the “repressed” signfier “psychoanalysis.” So the repressed signifier is not equivalent to the signified effect, and what functions as a signified effect does not remain in the signifying chain as a signifier. “Psychoanalysis” is not the signified effect of the metaphor [see the above title heading] … The signified effect can perhaps be characterized as a new resonance that gets incarnated by the “signified” “psychoanalysis.” 39

The mobius strip could be taken as the signifying chain, and the void that the strip surrounds would be where the signified effect should be placed. … The maintenance of a bar between signifier and signified amounts to the creation of something beyond the signifying chain, which can be said to lack therein despite attempts to incarnate it (in metaphor). Thus unlike in the Saussurean model, where the signified is available on the other side of the sheet of paper, in Lacan’s theory what is on the other side is always another signifier just posing as the meaning or signified (a Mobius strip is, after all, a one-sided surface), and one keeps going around the signified effect without actually getting to it (40).

The main point is that the order of signifiers produces the effect that there is an order of final signifieds beyond signifiers. In imagining the space of this signified effect, we must not be misled into thinking the “beyond” of the Mobius strip os signifiers as something that exists prior to signifiers, or as something that the chain of signifiers is attached to as a sign is supposed to be attached to its referent. In fact, the signifying chain itself forges the signified effect’s space (40).

pluth signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly meanings can be quite clear at times. By saying “pass me the salt,” my intention is probably clear … But the idea of a meaning or signified effect recalls to us that there is always more evoked by words than what one wants them to mean, and it is not always possible to reduce evocation down to the kind of fixed meaning possessed by signs. The point here is that even when I say “pass me the salt,” there is still more said than what we might normally take the phrase to mean. … Maybe I am quoting someone … or maybe [it’s] an idiomatic expression from my part of the country meaning “how great!” or something entirely different. .. But I am simply trying to illustrate that what is being spoken of here as the signified — always really just a signified effect — is something other than what we might take the more or less easily determinable meaning of a signifier or phrase to be

This “easily determinable meaning” never completely does away with the aura of ambiguity surrounding every signifier and every signifying chain. This aura of ambiguity is just what Lacan’s idea of a signified effect is trying to account for (32).

Signified effect: the evocativeness produced by an interaction of signifiers
Signified: what one ends up with when on attempts to reduce this evocativeness. In this case we have an apparently stable meaning and the appearance of a one-to-one correspondence of a signifier and a meaning. … Of course, such an idea is mythical, but it does nevertheless play an important role in our lived experience of language. But this fixed meaning is in fact always just another signifier, evoking others, generating yet another signified effect. (33)

pluth signifiers signs signfieds chapter 2

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Traces … were self-sufficient. Signs implied the ruin of this self-sufficiency by subordinating traces to objects. Signifers go even farther: signifiers are not dependent upon merely one object but upon every other signifier. For this reason, it is not entirely appropriate to speak of a signifier “referring” to other signifiers: it does not refer to them as a sign refers to an object. Rather, all other signifiers absorb it, and its particularity is always vanishing because of this absorption.

What is being described in this movement from traces to signs to signifiers is a movement from the self-sufficiency of the trace to the referential structure of the sign to the radical difference constitutive of the signifier. Of course, this radical difference could just as well be called a “hyper referentiality” … A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and unlike the trace, it is not self-sufficient but hyper-referential (29).

Although there may never be a strict union of signifier and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be. In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning (30).

… signifiers are not signs. They originate in a destruction of the one-to-one reference that is constitutive of signs. Also signifiers are constituted by difference, and their uniqueness consists of their difference from other signifiers … A signifier is moreover, meaningless. … So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier. According to Lacan, signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signfiiers (30).

This unfixed meaning effect or signified effect is produced by an interaction of signifiers with each other in what Lacan calls … a signifying chain (30).

A signifiying chain is nothing other than a succession of signifiers.

pluth ego ideal

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 on May 15, 2009 at 9:56

The ego ideal is the symbolic or linguistic foundation of identification. It plays, in the symbolic order, roughly the same role that the mirror image plays in the imaginary order —it is something the ego strives to be but is not. 52

Driving around in a sports car to “piss daddy off.” What is at stake here is the signifier “father.” That is, even though they set themselves up in a defiant relation to the ego ideal, the ego ideal is still for them the point of view from which they have a place and are “seen” by the Other, and this is still, whether they are seen by the Other as good or bad, narcissistically satisfying. Defiant or not, the common factor here is that in these examples they remain seen by the Other, and their actions occur entirely within the Other’s scope. Indeed, their actions are for the Other, even when they appear to be against the Other (53).

What is important here is the notion that the ego ideal is a signifier in the Other from whose “point of view” the individual is given meaning and a place. … In Lacan’s revision of the mirror stage, the child is compelled or encourged to identify its mirror image (ideal ego) as itself by a parent (or someone else) saying something like “That’s you Jimmy! Yes it is!”

The child finds that it has a place ein this symbolic Other by means of the Other’s affirmation of a place for the child. The child is told by the Other what he or she is (54).

pluth signifiers generate a signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly, unlike a sign, a signifier is not fixed to a particular object, but in its inclusion withn a system of other signifiers there is still an extreme form of reference at work. A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

According to Lacan’s view, there are nothing but signifiers and signified effects in language (29).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and … not self-sufficient but hyper-referential. As such, it is also distinguished from the sign, whose reference is more or less fixed.

Although Lacan rejects the Saussurean notion of the sign — a union of signifier and signified — this does not prevent him from granting that some sort of signified effect is an important aspect of language. Although there may never be a strict union of signifer and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be. In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning. (30)

A signifier is, moreover, meaningless. Since Lacan rejects the notion that a signifier and signified (meaning) are united in a single unit, meaning is never ultimately pinned to a signifier. So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier (30).

According to Lacan, signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signifiers.

pluth the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Does the real always mean the presymbolic?

2 versions of the real in Lacan’s work:

real1, prior to the acquisition of language, which is “progressively symbolized” in the course of the child’s life
second order real (real2) which is an effect of the symbolic order itself

Real2 is not outside the symbolic, as real1 seems to be. This second-order real is characterized by impasses and impossibilities that occur in the symbolic order itself.

The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization (Seminar XX)

Instead of being a field of referents that language aims at, this version of the real is a stumbling block in the field of signification itself (17).

pluth on signifiers and subject of lacan the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject, New York: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

🙂 Lacan who not only subverts the subject but then he RETHOUGHT the subject but his critics are out there: Borch-Jacobson is saying that although Lacan’s subject is not EXTERNAL to language (that would be too Cartesian), so he says that Lacan’s subject is the same as language.

A persistent theme in Lacan’s discussions of the subject is the view that the subject is an effect of signifiers, and so B-J is right to wonder whether the subject is anything other than language. B-J does not consider, however, that thinking of the subject as an effect does not have to mean that the subject is somehow immanent in, rather than external to, language . I will be arguing that Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language. This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something nonlinguistic: sexuality (12).

The subject is in part “in” the Other but is also not in the Other: in other words, the subject has an important relation to language, but it is also external to language in some way. … the subject is not identitcal to language (14).

[T]he subject is portrayed [by Lacan] as something articulated between two poles. One of the poles is language, while the other pole remains a bit vague (15).

It will turn out that the subject is produced not only by an interaction of signifiers but by an interaction of signfiers with something nonlinguistic. Although the subject is not identical to either of the poles Lacan considers here, each pole designates something that is involved in the production of a subject — and language alone does not suffice (15-16).

[T]he production of the subject by signifiers needs to be complemented with an appreciation of a particular type of obstacle to signification. … it would be not erroneous to understand this second pole in terms of sexuality … (16).

One way to get at this second pole, nevertheless, is to consider the idea that there is something of the body that does not fit with the “socialized” body, the body that is overwritten with signifiers.

Saying that a body is overwritten with signifiers suggests that ther is something prior to signifiers on which the writing occurs, something that gets besieged by signfiers at some moment of its existence. This could be thought of as a body prior to the body that is linguistically and socially carved up, thus a body that is presymbolic and perhaps to be thought of in terms of what Lacan called the real (16-17).

Whatever term is settled upon, the category under which this organism or body is to be thought is the real, and not the symbolic (17).

pluth Other

Renata Salecl suggests that our historical moment is characterized both by the the collapse of … an Other, of a subject-supposed-to-know, and by a variety of attempts to reestablish some kind of full, “premodern” Other …is it possible to accept somehow that the Other does not know, while avoiding the temptation to “save” the Other from this fate.

Is it at all possible for us to act socially and individually in such a way that we do not either implicitly rely on a notion of an Other who knows, or implicitly expect the reestablishment of such an Other?

copjec butler sexuation

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56. Web. Oct 5, 2009.

For Lacan, as for Freud, the unconscious has no understanding of sexual difference. This is still a radical notion; it must count among the central insights of psychoanalysis most frequently in danger of disappearing when psychoanalytic theory discards Freud’s earliest discoveries. It is also a tremendously difficult idea, and there are different ways of grasping it. One way would be to hypothesize that the first sight of anatomical, genital difference is traumatic for a child in that this difference cannot be fully assimilated by the ego — assimilated, that is, to one’s sense of his or her own bodily self. Although we would not want to suggest that this moment is an empirically verifiable event in every subject’s history, nevertheless each person’s first encounter with the morphological difference of the other sex presents him or her with a failure of recognition. It is this inaugural collapse of sense with respect to sexual difference that makes gender traumatic and justifies aligning it with the Lacanian real (752).

This point raises an issue on which we part company with Copjec’s account. Attempting to specify the distinctness of sexual difference vis-à-vis other categories of difference, Copjec (1994) argued that “sexual difference is unlike racial, class, or ethnic differences. Whereas these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words, is a real and not a symbolic difference” (p. 207). Yet once sexual difference is understood as real in the sense that it is experienced originally as traumatic, then we can start to appreciate how racial difference also operates as a real, not merely a symbolic, difference. One’s first encounter with another human whose skin is colored very differently than his or her own also prompts a failure of recognition; to the extent that one cannot make sense of this difference, racial difference too remains in the real. The distinction between sexual difference and racial difference lies in the fact that every human encounters the trauma of sexual difference very early in life, whereas an encounter with racial difference may be deferred far longer, especially in racially homogeneous cultures. (note 4: 752)

There is a certain driven quality to these projects—to Freud’s essentialist stories as well as to the current dogma of gender’s plasticity. This may reflect the inevitable downfall of narrative, its failure to let itself fail in making sense. Perhaps the most obvious way in which Butler’s theory of gender attempts to make too much sense is in its concept of gender identification as loss resolved by melancholic identification (Butler, 1995a). Butler and Copjec agree that the symbolic order is founded on what exceeds its grasp. But Butler takes the additional step of theorizing this absence of meaning as a set of culturally foreclosed identifications. By presuming she knows what is already missing, Butler follows in Freud’s footsteps when he set about providing us with his infamous developmental narratives of gender. In this respect, the resolutely abstract quality of Copjec’s argument is particularly refreshing. She offers no account of why sexual difference should be traumatic for the individual, but only attempts to show us in logical terms how this is necessarily so. Culturally contingent explanations of gender will inevitably vary, but, as she puts it, “sex does not budge” (Copjec, 1994, p. 211) (753).

Gender is the prime example not only of the impossibility of meaning, but also of the structural impossibility of full relationality. This implies that our theory of gender must describe not only the limit conditions of signification, but also those of relationality. The essentialist, heterosexist alternative refuses to admit any such limitations. In this view, gender is something substantial that one acquires and that lends meaning to one’s relations. Men and women find their counterpart in each other. The social constructivist alternative also eschews limits; as discourse determines subjectivity, subjectivity can be manipulated via the rhetorical device of deconstruction. In other words, it’s all in our hands, and a potentially endless number of possibilities for full relationship may prevail. Yet no analysis of external limits, be they biological or social, ultimately accounts for the impossibility of completely knowing ourselves or one another. Psychoanalysis, when it attempts to theorize this internally imposed impossibility, positions itself to address how the connection between the individual subject and the social is continually mediated by factors outside our awareness. In so doing, it can help us fail better.