subjectivity – Page 29

pluth the act the other

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 13:30

The subject associated with Lacan’s theory of the act is a subject that is negative yet nevertheless consists in some way. It consists in a sustained signifying activity or process that is still not like the signifying practice that characterizes the subject-as-meaning. Žižek is right to see the Lacanian subject in negative terms, but the subject in an act is negative with respect to a particular configuration of the Other, to the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know. In this way it makes sense to speak of the subject in terms of a negative or destructive consistency or process (116).

An act does not make any demand on the Other, and is thus not about getting recognition from the Other.
Acts then, are ways of using signifiers in which identification is not at stake at all.

The problem with Žižek’s interpretation is that he does not allow for the subject of an act to consist of anything more than a “no!” — ultimately a “no” to signifiers as such. This makes the subject in Lacanian theory out to be more negative than it is (117).

The subject of an act is a product of a particular type of signifying process … a process that is not simply saying “no” to something, but a more nuanced “no … but.” (117)

The Other in Lacan’s later theory is not just the field of any signifying practice whatsoever but is a name for a particular organization within which some signifying practices are recognized as legitimate and others are not. This can be thought of as the Other who is a “subject-supposed-to-know.” An act’s use of signifiers, which is punlike insofar as the signifiers used are not immediately recognicable and able to be situated in the linguistic code, is not oriented toward obtaining recognition by the Other.

An act creates new signifiers and new significations, ones that do not involve getting recognized by the Other. But since acts, like puns, are not entirely nonsensical either, and since they are using signifiers and creating sense, something of the Other is used in them, without that Other being posited as a subject-supposed-to-know. This is the point that is overlooked in Badiou’s reading of Lacan. The very insistent or “ex-ceding” real that Badiou wishes to see taken into account in, and included in, a theory of the subject is present in Lacan’s theory of the act —precisely in the form of the creation of new signifiers, which is not simply a symbolic activity but includes the real in the symbolic (in the kind of exceeding Badiou is after, I believe) insofar as it brings about a signifying “tension.” (128)

pluth the act is not the result of a conscious decision

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

The act in Lacanian theory is not the result of a conscious decision, nor is it identical to a conscious deliberative process. (116)

Lacan’s theory of the act requires us to conceive of a freedom that is not a metaphysical attribute of a subject but rather a phenomenon that may sometime occur to people. In this respect, Lacan breaks with humanism: Freedom is not an essential or a definitive attribute of “man.”

While such a theory can hardly answer in precise terms questions such as “What should we do?” or “How can we effect change?” it does offer a way to describe the structures and processes at work in individual and social changes. In this respect, it is doing something rather unique on the contemporary theoretical scene (116).

Pluth the act part 2 subject as thing and not as agent

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

Lacan seems to have favored a certain kind of subject, one that is engaged in maintaining an inconsistency in the Other, one that signifies in such a way that the order of the Other itself gets scrambled. Instead of merely seeking a signification for an event in terms already available in the Other, an act puts a resistance to signification into words. … A pun creates a new signifier that resist 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).

While it is fairly easy to see how acts use signifiers in a way that is different from other signifying practices, the position of the subject in an act, and whether this subject differs, structurally, from the subject as meaning, remains to be explored.

One attractive aspect of the subject-as-meaning was that such a subject seemed more or less thinglike and substantial: a knot of signifiers, if you will. This can be thought of as a “subject as substance”: not the thinking substance that characterized the Cartesian cogito but substancelike nonetheless. The view of the subject as a thing, however, and not as an agent, although it does insist and repeat.

pluth on the act

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

Originally published on: May 12, 2009 @ 13:53

the act does not depend on gaining recognition from the Other

involves doing something with signifiers

not far from Austin’s performative speech act but Lacan is not interested on acts that change the situation of the world or the set of facts within it . Lacan focuses on acts that change the structure of the subject If Austinian speech acts change the state of affairs in the world —making meetings closed, bachelors married, and so on— then Lacanian speech acts change the subject (101).

The act means crossing a certain threshold

Pluth goes on, “Notice that Austinian speech acts, in contrast, are not at all transgressive but are in fact highly ritualized and codified. The conditions for the success of an Austinian speech act largely depend upon the existence of social guarantees and rituals. Marriages, for example, are only successfully accomplished when performed under very specfic circumstances, and by the proper authorities. According to Lacan’s conception, however, an act transforms a subject, and even though it occurs with signifiers, it does not happen by following a preestablished ritual or code. Also, of course, there is no authority that can ensure the legitimacy of such an act. 101

It is not the case that someone is simply changed by an act: he or she is reinaugurated as a subject. Where there was a certain structure or law operative for a subject prior to an act —imagine this to be an unconscious law, the kind of meaning and determination constructed by the fantasy— an act brings about a transformation in this structure and thereby inaugurates a new subject. In this way, an act situates one outside such a law, and for this reason it is appropriate to consider acts to be transgressive. 102

pluth puns and the act

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).

pluth fort-da

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

This blog entry was originally published on May 10, 2009 14:17

Fort-Da game is a repeated, attempt to exorcise a traumatic event. Yet instead of leading to a simple release of libidinal tension, and perhaps a dissolution of the traumatic event, the Fort-Da game sublates that tension into a signifying activity —canceling the event out as an affective tension, yet preserving it as a signifying tension in the form of a compulsive linguistic repetition.

… in the Fort-Da game, where the traumatic event is also simply being said, or named, by being taken up into signifiers. Yet there is no production of meaning by these signifiers, and the game does not use signifiers as part of an attempt to obtain a recognition of the trauma from the Other.

In other words, the game is not making a demand on the mother to satisfy the child’s needs. It merely repeats a trauma or signifying impasse that causes the subject and is an act in which the subject is disjoined from an Other who can bestow and guarantee recognition. 104

The signifying activity involved in the act achieves something fundamentally different from what fantasy achieves.

In an act, a subject does not constitute itself as a satisfying object of the Other’s desire, and in it a subject is not demanding recognition of its own desire by the Other either. Rather, a subject is simply using signifiers autonomously, as it were, in a signifying repetition of a libidinal event. Perhaps this gives us a further hint as to why Lacan calls an act transgressive: an act uses the Other’s language against, despite, and without, the Other, in what could be called a profound indifference to the Other (104).

pluth subject as meaning junction disjunction

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

I described the subject as meaning. What I am saying here adds an important supplement to this notion of a subject represent in and for the Other.

First, there is meaning: I am something for the Other, an object that satisfies the Other’s demands, or a significant, desirable object of the Other (like Xenophon). Then, either because of bodily experiences that cannot be signified or an encounter with the Other’s desire, or both, this position as a meaning is called into question. In the wake of these encounters, there are two major possibilities.

1. My position as a satisfying object or meaning for the Other can be reaffirmed. Fantasy is Lacan’s account of how this happens. In fantasy I try to reassert my position as the object of the Other’s desire, and my own desire is to remain such an object.

2. Another way is possible, and Lacan’s theory of the act discusses this. An act involves a different reaction to both the Other’s desire and the meaning constructed for us in the Other (78).

On my reading, Lacan does not come up with a unique and rigorous theory of the subject until his fourteenth and fifteenth seminars (79).

This subject can still be thought of as an “organized system of symbols,” but it is not something that gives this order meaning. Rather, the subject is identified with a meaning. This corresponds to what I spoke of in chapter 3 as the “subject-as-meaning,” a subject represented in the Other, and part of the Other’s discourse. But I have been claiming that Lacan was not satisfied with this version of the subject either. Again, the subject is always something like a consistency of signifiers in Lacan’s opinion, but this is actually only one aspect of the subject.

Lacan’s ultimate vision of the subject is achieved when the subject is portrayed as something between an organized system of symbols and what motivates that organization in the first place — events such as sexuality, jouissance, and the Other’s desire, all of which can be correlated with the real (79-80).

The definition of the subject that I want ot focus on now comes from Lacan’s fourteenth seminar.

A SUBJECT IS SITUATED AT THE JUNCTION AND DISJUNCTION OF THE BODY AND JOUISSANCE

It is not so much of a stretch then, to suggest that when Lacan says “body” here, we could also just as well say language. So not only does this definition reaffirm that a subject is neither language nor jouissance, it also tells us more about the structure of the subject. … in his ninth seminar Lacan was content with saying that the subject is between the two poles of language and the real. In this definition, the subject’s position is given more elaboration. The subject is situated at a junction and disjunction of the two with each other (80).

pluth jouissance

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.
excessive unbearable tension, a tension that does not go away a tension that cannot be “relieved” by means of signifiers, because there is no signifier for it

for which the language of pleasure and displeasure is not adequate.

There is thus a radical tension between this jouissance beyond the pleasure principle and the order of signifiers (75).

For this reason, jouissance should be thought of in terms of real2 — something that is not prior to and outside of signifiers but that appears within signifiers as an impasse in signification (77).

Jouissance is an impasse in the fabric of meaning, but in neurosis it is at least put into a relation with that fabric. In psychosis, this relation is missing, and there is a radical gulf between the symbolic and the real. In neurosis, there is also a gulf, but here is also a project to build a bridge across the gulf, an attempt to elaborate on a relation between the two.

This study has at least given an indication now of how the body plays a role in Lacan’s theory of the subject. The body is the site and origin of a signifying impasse. Now this is not what Lacan usually calls the body in his theory. As we have seen the body is usually for Lacan something “overwritten” with signifiers. For this reason, Lacan was not inclined to say that the “stirring” in Little Han’s genitals was something that involved his body. Little Hans already had a body image prior to this stirring. The emergence of genital sexuality introduced something that did not fit into this image — and so, Han’s penis, when it started acting up, was not something he experience as “his.” Nevertheless, from another point of view, this jouissance was indeed coming from Han’s body. What needs to be explained now is how this impasse originating in the body — an impasse that can be abbreviated under the heading of sexuality — plays a role in the production of the subject (78).

pluth difference between lacan and levinas

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

Many commentators on Lévinas, as well as Lévinas himself, have tried to ground the subject in an address from the Other. This makes the subject fundamentally ethical, fundamentally indebted to the Other …

… what is called the subject in Lacan’s threory begins when the Other no longer addresses you. According to Lévinas, what is traumatic is the encroachment of the Other on my own psychic space. According to Lacan, what is traumatic is finding out that the Other’s desire concerns something that leaves you out of the picture. Being “touched” by the other is traumatic too, but not being touched at all is at least as bad, and in this absence of a touch can be found the core of Lacan’s theory of the subject (73).

This encounter with the Other’s desire motivates a quest for a signified and an eventual identification with that signified. The Other’s desire plays a role diferent from that played by the image in the mirror stage.

In the imaginary and symbolic identifications, a meaning or an identity is produced, and an individual is presented with a place that is already his or hers. In the encounter with the Other’s desire, I am not given any place at all, and my very being is put into question. The Other’s desire is a mirror that does not return my reflection. (74).

Because of this, the subject in Lacan’s work is not just something determined. It is also a position with respect to a determination, an affirmation or a rejection of it. The subject is some kind of negation of determination. But this negation actually originates from the resistance to signification that is found in the Other’s desire. The Other’s desire is opaque and abyssal. For this reason, it makes any determination appealing, because it is something I can always fall back on (74).

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 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).