Lacan 2: Agency of the Letter: Brief preliminary Notes
Saussure: Established for linguistics a delineated (in theory anyway) object of study, the sign, thus guaranteeing that linguistics be a true “science” (where science is defined as the study of a definitive object). What is the sign? As in any science, the basic unit or basic object is the most difficult to define. The concept of the sign (which Lacan will attempt to reinvent yet again in the “Agency” essay) has a long and difficult history. Most classical definitions think of a relation between two relata. But signification is not relation. “Mother” necessarily relates to “child”. But if I use the word mother I mean you to understand a mother and not a child. St. Augustine defined a sign as that which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the sing itself makes on the senses. But this presupposes that a meaning exists outside a sign and is simply summoned up when the sign appears. It supposes that sign and meaning are replaceable by each other. But a siren sound can signify the beginning of an air raid and at the same time evoke anguish, war, etc. Words are not simply about that of which we wish to speak and “stand in” for the things themselves. Swift mocked this view in the land in Gulliver’s Travels where the people carried around sacks of the things they wanted their words to refer to. With Saussure the sign is refined to refer to a sensible appearance that for a specific group of users marks a lack in itself. The signifier (the perceptible part) is present; the signified is absent. The relation between them is signification. To accept this model one is committed to a radical difference between signifier and signified: between presence and absence.
A community of users institutes a sign. (Smoke may become a “natural” sign for fire in one culture but not in another since smoke is only one consequence of fire.) But the community may be as small as one person as when he ties a string around his finger. A signified is not simply an object. An object simply is; it does not signify. A signified does not exist outside its relation to a signifier—it does not exist before it, after it, or outside it. A signified without a signifier is unimaginable. So the definitions of the concept of the sign remain tautological.
A sign is therefore contrary to identity—it is not identical to itself. A sign (signifier and signified) is both a mark and a lack, a perceptible and a gap, a presence and an absence. The signifier marks the place of the signified but does not purely and simply identify it. The signified is that which the signifier lacks. The relation is negative—even the word relation is not quite right to describe this. Now, at the same time, every signifier exists alongside others and there relation is also negative. This or that sound is perceived as a legitimate mark only insofar as it is different from all other marks. This led Saussure to say that the relation is arbitrary. Later linguists dispute this and make the more modest but still important assertion that we must not attempt to reduce the sign to a relation that is either one of subjective intention or objective essence. A significant object is both an existent (it is) and an absence (it must mean something). This is the best way I can put it.
Jakobson. For Roman Jakobson, based on his study of aphasia, the apprehension and comprehension of a linguistic entity entail two distinct and independent intellectual functions: comparison with similars (that could be substituted for it: metaphor) and relation among coextensive entities (syntagma). Language acquisition is dual. I apprehend a word because of 1. others that surround it in a given discourse (syntagma)(this will become the “signifying chain” in Lacan) and 2. the memory of other words institutionally similar to it in meaning (metaphor)(this will become “repression” in Lacan).
This essay was given very broad application. It seemed to confirm the dream of Romanticism that language is fundamentally literary. Literature or poetry or rhetoric are not secondary employments of language. On the contrary, language is poetic in its essence. Or at least, language is structured around two axes that are essential to literary production.
Consequences: On the one hand, the study of literature takes on a new and now fundamental importance. The study of literature is the study of language. On the other hand, if language is indeed fundamentally poetic/literary/rhetorical then what we mean by literature need not be narrowly defined. The possibility that language is a priori poetic in structure means that any use of language comes under literary study and analysis. Indeed the general movement in language departments since the 1960s has been from a restricted study of classically defined literary works to a general study of any linguistic practice. No use of language can escape the two axes of metaphor and metonymy. As a practical consequence one can look at course offerings, especially at the graduate level, at any university in the US and find fewer than half the courses deal with literature narrowly defined. Ironically, having become marginalized anyway since the triumph of science and technology, classic literary texts—even if fundamental exemplars of language in general—have been re-marginalized in the now general study of linguistic productions.
(It is worth noting that Freud once said that he wished one day to replace the terms of the science of psychoanalysis with terms borrowed from chemistry. But he added that terms used in chemistry are also figurative. (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”))
Lacan. The imaginary. The infant is in reality “organs without a body,” not unified, not having any control over itself—indeed not having a unitary self at all. An infant is born without a body and without a self. But the infant can identify with others who can control themselves, stand up right, etc. and hence the infant can, in imagination, see itself as it one day will be. The ego (the who that I am) is always imaginary. Indeed, was it not for this function—which is libidinal, the infant enjoys it—the infant would not mature at all. Importantly, this infantile identification is imaginary; the cruel reality of the infant is its pre-maturity, its selflessness, is lack of skill and coordination, etc. (The infant’s reality is strictly unimaginable since there is no self there to imagine.) This imaginary ability to identify is the root of sympathy and also aesthetic enjoyment that is retained throughout life. (This is why film theorists are so fond of Lacan. The cinematic experience is the imaginary/visual experience par excellence.) The early Lacan is concerned with identification-mimesis-imagination. But what orders this dimension? The later, the “middle” Lacan focuses on the Symbolic, the Symbolic order. The Law of desire. The basics are already prepared however in the imaginary.
The Agency of the Letter
I. What he’s going to do in this essay is move away from the ego to the subject and to the idea that the unconscious is language. The essay was delivered to an audience at the Sorbonne. It was probably Lacan’s intention to show this group of philosophers and literary scholars and other specialists in the humanities that he (that is to say, Freudian psychoanalysis) knows a thing or two.
The “letter” is the “material support that concrete discourse borrows from language”. L is trying to articulate that point where the Saussurean “system” of language meets the speaking of words. It is an odd materiality however. It is not somatic material—ink marks on a page, e.g. L, whatever he means, is aiming at neither an ideality of meaning nor a substantiality of materiality. The “letter” is matter but not substance. This would be the precise point where the speaking-subject enters language for the first time and every time again afterwards. Now, at the same time, Lacan always stresses that language and speech (a sign is always a sign for someone, it is always an address) are fundamentally social; so when the human being enters language it is the human-social animal. OK. There is no human being prior to language; at the same time language is not language unless it is social (above) and hence requires humans. When the subject enters into language it will be instantly installed in a social and linguistic order and will be come an institutionalized convention, an effect of language. (This is the Symbolic order and this is also castration.) The human being is doubly enslaved: once to the system of language that pre-exists and “recruits” him (“if only by virtue of his proper name”) and also to the demand that language be concretized in speech (which entails a social order as well on the basis that a sign is always for some other, presupposes some other. To speak is to enter a rigorously binding social contract.) Anterior to the individual is community and language. (Likewise, anterior to human being in general is community and language. But, community and language are unimaginable unless they are actually existing and in practice in bodies. So, I think, L is trying to define a kind of radical anteriority: radical because each requires the other as an anterior condition in order to properly exist. That more general paradox is left to Levi-Strauss.) So I’m going to put it this way: one enters into language without knowing what it means. (Because, when you stop to think about it, language as a whole has no meaning. There is only meaning in language.) That is, there is a structural surplus of signifiers over signifieds just as there is a structural surplus of forgetting over memory (there would be no memory at all were there not an always prior forgetting.) Not actual signifiers, mind you, but potential ones. Like this: I see something—or read something—and just sense that it is significant. But I don’t know how or why yet. Later, the signifiers will come, but in the meantime I am “in” a kind of ‘language plasma’ that has yet to crystallize into actual signs. (Perhaps, not unlike the theorized “energy plasma” that existed (or “existed”) prior to the big bang and which certain physicists wish to re-create in order to study “radically primitive matter” prior to its existence in what we call the universe.) [Whether or not we want to call this “material” is open to debate. Derrida was critical of L’s use of the word ‘material’ (The Post Card, 464) L may be caught up in the temper of the times to avoid ideality at all costs: see Yu S.Y. and R. Levin on this. But hasty or not, correct word or not, it is important to understand this in order to make any sense of L.] It is most important to understand that material or not, plasma or not, language is anterior to the individual speaker and language is social.
II. L now wants to rigorously define a science of the letter. Not a linguistics as in Saussure, but L depends heavily upon S’s theories. Beginning with the sign:
Lacan sign [algorithm]: Signifier/signified Saussure sign: Signified/signifier
Lacan changes things. For S there is a strange but indubitable relation, association, inseparability between the Signified and Signifier. (At one point he compares the sign to the recto and verso of a single piece of paper remember.) In L there is a 1. “barred” relation, a prohibition, and non-communication between the S and the s; 2. The S is signifier, the s is signified: which establishes a priority of signifier over signified. (How many times have you read about “sliding of signifiers” or “slippage of meaning”?) In L the signifier achieves autonomy with regard to the signified. The key issue, often overlooked by the subsequent celebrators of this autonomy is that L’s chief concern is with the bar. The bar is the key, the bar is the cut—castration—of the sign. This is a new theory of the sign. L is trying to move well beyond the Saussurean issue of arbitrariness. For L a signifier does not “represent” an absent signified: this is too enslaving, too metaphysical. An algorithm is a sign that does not signify.
L’s famous example is that of the separate bathrooms. Under the signifiers “Men” and “Women” there is no signified but instead the symbolization of the Law (of urinary, that is, of sexual segregation). Here the signifier divides space: hence its subtle or odd materiality. Or, it does not so much divide preexisting space as it institutes a culturally imperative prohibition that man and woman share the same urinary place. The signifier Men/Women does not refer to the two places, it institutes them and the signifier itself Men/Women is not a positivity but rather a binary differential: Men=Women, that is to say, the law of sexual difference. Signifiers institute the place to which one belongs by virtue of being male or female. In that place I am not man as signified but man as not-woman. The signifying set Men/Women does not have the Law as its signified but rather the sexual difference symbolized by the imperative of segregation. The two doors lead into solitary spaces both real and symbolic. This space, the Man’s, is only this space because it is not that space, the Woman’s. That’s what the signifier “refers” to—but there is nothing to refer to. Sexual difference itself is not presentable—it is symbolic. The signifying set indicates a structural hole. Now, when I see a Man/Woman signifying set I know what to do, but, on L’s analysis, I know this only through the structural hole. Meaning does not derive from the signifier but from the materiality of the letter: the bar.
III. However, if there is a bar and no correspondence between signifier and signified (“Play of signifiers” how often have you read this is criticism over the past 20 years?) how do we explain the effect of signification, of meaning? Signifiers are always sliding outside of their alleged proper meanings, the also flowing signifieds. What anchors the two “floating kingdoms” (Saussure)? The poetic, the unconscious, the evocative power of the Word. This is what makes meaning possible. (Really, this is surrealism, isn’t it?) Meaning is produced, to be sure, but not out of any sort of classical correspondence or relation. But as meaning is produced from out of an evocative power, an unconscious, then what of the speaker, the subject? Actually, the subject is an effect of this power, which is why the subject always signifies something other than what the subject says. What the subject says signifies other signifiers or, in other words, other words. There is no stopping this displacement of meaning. (And this takes us back, I think, to Descartes and to my preliminary notes on Lacan: the equation of truth and speech. Speech is Truth. It does not represent truth nor correspond to truth nor to any true thing. Lacan’s theory of the subject is the Cartesian certainty I think/I am but now I speak/I am.
IV By way of this, meaning is exhausted. Exhausted in metonymy first: the reference of signification to signification to signification… This is a kind of death sentence for meaning: it cannot come to be present but at the same time its absolute extinction is “preserved” in its relay along the metonymic signification chain. This perpetual exhaustion is the letter of discourse. (This too somewhat explains Lacan’s style which borrows heavily from poetry and rhetoric and which is also designed to exhaust the reader who wants to know what the hell all this means. It is legitimate, however, insofar as L is trying, with Descartes on the one hand and Jakobson on the other, to show that poetics is the possibility of significance.) In metaphor I substitute one word for another: that is I say what I do not say or I say an absence, but you know what I mean. Thus “Metaphor occurs at the precise point where meaning occurs in non-meaning.” (158) In L all discourse occurs as one word for another (metaphor) and one word to another (metonymy): the two Jakobsonian axes of language.
Along these axes the subject is carried away. The subject suffers from language. 1. Metaphor is the production of a term that only represses another term that could be used in its place: why did I choose this word and not that one? Every time I speak I “produce” an unconscious. It is absolutely unavoidable. 2. Metonymy is the perpetual desire for something else. Every time I speak my words is “carried” away, distracted by, the words the preceded it and that follow it. The subject is radically excentric.
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