Category: language

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004. p 44.

The unconscious is a process of signification that is beyond our control; it is the language that speaks through us rather than the language we speak. In this sense, Lacan defines the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. The big Other is language, the symbolic order; this Other can never be fully assimilated to the subject; it is a radical otherness which, nevertheless, forms the core of our unconscious. We will see how this works in the following chapter, but first let us look at Lacan’s conception of the subject and how it is determined by the signifier. Lacan conceived of the symbolic order as a totalizing concept in the sense that it marks the limit of the human universe. We are born into language – the language through which the desires of others are articulated and through which we are forced to articulate our own desire. We are locked within what Lacan calls a circuit of discourse …

The ego is an ‘imaginary function’ formed primarily through the subject’s relationship to their own body. The subject, on the other hand, is constituted in the symbolic order and is determined by language. There is always a disjunction, according to Lacan, between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance; in other words, the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken. Following the linguist Emile Benveniste’s (1902– 76) conception of ‘I’ as a shifter – as having no specific referent but in the act of speech designating the person who says ‘I’ – Lacan argued that the ‘I’ in speech does not refer to anything stable in language at all.

To become a subject one must take a position in relation to the desire of the Other. The infant must differentiate itself from the desire of the Other. 74.

What is there beyond language and the symbolic that makes the subject more than the subject of the signifier?

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004.

Signifier

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signified

The capitalized Signifier takes precedence over the signified and the ‘bar’ between the two elements symbolizes, for Lacan, not the inseparability of the sign but its fundamental division. The bar functions as a barrier to meaning. What a signifier refers to is not a signified, as there is always a barrier between them, but to another signifier. In short, a signifier refers us to another signifier, which in turn refers us to another signifier in an almost endless chain of signification. If we try to define the meaning of a specific word or concept, for example, we can only do so through other words; we are caught in a continual process of producing signs.

Meaning is not fixed, or as Lacan puts it, there is ‘an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ (1977c [1957]: 154).

Lacan, however, is not suggesting that there is no ‘fixed’ meaning at all. There are what he called ‘anchoring points’ or ‘points de caption’, where this incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier stops and allows for moments of stable signification. The point de caption literally designates an upholstery button of the kind one finds on sofas and mattresses and which are used to hold the stuffing in place. Saussure’s ‘scientific’, as opposed to historical, analysis of language provided Lacan with a model to study Freud’s ‘talking-cure’. Saussure revealed how there was a ‘structure’ within us that governed what we say; for Lacan that structure is the unconscious. The unconscious is at once produced through language and governed by the rules of language. The precise mechanism through which this takes place was provided by Roman Jakobson.

ROMAN JAKOBSON (1896– 1982) Jakobson took up Saussure’s distinction between the two axes of language – the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic – and proposed a correspondence between these axes and the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy.

Metaphor is the use of a word or expression to describe something else without stating a direct comparison.

Metonymy, on the other hand, is the use of a term for one thing applied to something else with which it is usually associated, for example, when one says ‘crown’ for the position of the monarch, or ‘sail’ to imply a boat. Jakobson pointed out that metaphor is an act of substitution of one term for another and thus corresponded to the paradigmatic axis, or the axis of selection. Metonymy is a relation of contiguity, in that one term refers to another because it is associated or adjacent to it, and therefore it corresponds to the syntagmatic axis, or the axis of combination.

Lacan saw in Jakobson’s structural model of metaphor and metonymy a direct correspondence with Freud’s processes of dream work: condensation and displacement. Condensation designates the process whereby two or more signs or images in a dream are combined to form a composite image that is then invested with the meaning of both its constitutive elements.

In persecutory dreams, for example, the dreamer may dream that they are being punished by an unknown authority figure and try to identify that figure with someone in their life. This figure may well in fact not be a single person, however, but a composite, or condensation, of a number of different persons – parental figures, employer or partner. All of the ambivalent feelings that the dreamer has around these figures combine into a single persecutor in the dream.

Displacement describes the process through which meaning is transferred from one sign to another. Let us take the example of anxiety dreams. In anxiety dreams the dreamer may become anxious about some very minor incident in their lives, but this functions as simply a way of avoiding, or displacing, a much more serious problem that they are facing. These two processes are what Freud called primary processes in contrast to the secondary processes of conscious thought. By mapping Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy on to Freud’s primary processes Lacan was finally able to demonstrate how the unconscious was structured like a language. The unconscious, he argued, operates according to the rules of metaphor and metonymy.

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2004. p 40.

There are three essential lessons to be drawn from Saussure’s theory of language:

1. Language precedes consciousness; as speaking subjects we are born into language.
2. Language does not reflect reality but rather one produces one’s experience within the constraints of the given language system and that language system, to some extent, conditions the nature of one’s experience.
3. Language is not an absolute and fixed system within which a singular meaning can be located, but it is rather a set of differential relations.

Saussure’s conception of language as a total system provided the model for Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structure and in turn Lacan’s symbolic order. But there is an important difference between Lacan and Saussure. For Saussure, the two halves of the sign are always inextricably bound together – like two sides of a sheet of paper – and cannot be separated. Taking his cue from Lévi-Strauss’s reflection on the autonomy of the symbolic function, it was precisely the indivisibility of the sign that Lacan brought into question.

THE PRIMACY OF THE SIGNIFIER

Lacan accepted the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign but questioned two of the fundamental premises of Saussurean linguistics: the indivisibility of the sign and the prioritization of the signified over the signifier. (40)