Žižek – Page 45

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 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 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).