Language is
central to Lacan's work from about 1950 on, before the
Seminars and all but the earliest of the Écrits.
The precise formulation that "the unconscious is
structured like a language" first occurs (I think) in
Seminar III from 1955-56 (The Psychoses), as a development
of the argument from the 1953 "Function and Field of
Psychoanalysis", that "the unconscious is the discourse of
the Other". This will be the heart of what Lacan does
until about 1970. Seminars XVIII (1970-71: D'un discours
qui ne serait pas du semblant, On a discourse that would
not be one of semblance) and XIX (1971-2: ...ou pire;
...or worse) will introduce the idea of lalangue.
Lalangue is language not as communication,
representation or even meaning, but as embodied jouissance, enjoyment. The dimension of
lalangue
is profoundly senseless, an obdurate core which resists
meaning. As a limit to meaning, and thus to any analysis
based on interpretation, lalangue takes up that
problem of the potential interminability of analysis which
troubled Freud late in his career - and which we catch a
glimpse of at they very beginning of psychoanalysis, when
Freud declares in The Interpretation of Dreams
that every dream has its navel, the point beyond which
interpretation cannot go.
From the early 1970s on, then
lalangue will lead
us though to the famous 1973 seminar on sexuality, Encore (where Fink translates
lalangue as
llalangue) and then the 1975 seminar on the sinthome, where Lacan's reading of James Joyce serves
to crystallise those ideas of the limits of meaning. The
sinthome is an element which, though it makes no
sense itself and is thus unanalysable, is what allows
there to be sense (and analysis), though at the same time
it marks the limit of these, beyond which they cannot go.
All of this is why the Lacan of those last few years moves
away from language-based models (an unconscious which
would be structured like a language) and towards
topological models (in particular, knot theory).
From the outset, that dictum of the unconscious structured
like a language was not at all the endorsement of
Saussurean linguistics it's easily read as, but a
thoroughgoing critique. We can see what Lacan does from
about 1950 on as a three-decade-long investigation of just
how those classical Saussurean ideas are not an adequate
description of the state of things.
We could point out to begin with how Lacan's reading of
Saussure provides a description of what Lacan will call
the Symbolic. Saussure (at least in one of his modes)
describes the sign as differential. That is, the
sign is what it is, not because it contains a positive
kernel of signified meaning, or because it represents the
world, but simply because it exists within a system of
elements from which it can be differentied. (Signs can
represent, of course - they do that all the time. The
point is that this representing is an effect to be
explained rather than the basic mechanism of signs.) From
this bare property of difference alone, Saussure
claims, one may deduce all the properties of language.
Nevertheless. as Krauss points out, there's a very strong
residual nominalism in Saussure (the famous diagram of the
tree in the Course in General Linguistics, where
the signifier "tree" in effect represents a signified idea
of "treeness"). There's also a very strong reliance on
naive comunications theory (which sees language as thought
coded into language, thrown across space to a hearer who
then decodes it into thought again - which, if you think
about it, describes at best the experience of a speaker
and hearer who don't know the language very well: it
implicitly the experience of the incompetent user as its
model).
If for Saussure all of that is bound up with the concept
of the sign, then - as Krauss says - Lacan will argue against the very concept of the sign. For Saussure,
the sign is made up of two parts, signified and signifier.
The function of the signifier, as the name suggests, is to
signify the signified meaning. That is, the sign is a
unity, held together by that relationship between
signifier and signified. Saussure will, of course,
famously argue that the relationship between the two is "arbitrary":
this is a recognition of the fact that different languages
obviously give different names to similar concepts, that
some concepts can be signified in a number of ways, and so
on. But Lacan's position is more radical: he talks in the
1957 "Agency of the Letter" (Écrits) about "the
illusion that the signifer answers to the function of
representing the signified, or better, that the signifier
has to answer for its existence in the name of any
signification whatsoever".
Krauss's opening suggests the "antinarrative, nonobjective"
nature of much painting, as if there is a battle between
the image and the word, and goes on to make a series of
disciplinary claims and counterclaims. Richard Boothby
suggests, in his Freud as Philosopher: Metaphysical
after Lacan, that the image and the symbolic are the
flipside of each other, so that the symbolic [is] the un-imageable
background to the image. If that's so - and we'll come
back to that - then even the "most austerely
antinarrative, nonobjective paintings" Krauss invokes can
be so only on the basis of, if not language, then at least
a background which is not itself visible, as the image is,
but which, in that invisibility, is the very condition of
possibility of the visible. After all, the mark set
against a background is the very basis for the very
activity of the painterly. But this setting-against-a-background
is not itself an image; it is what must occur for there to
be an image. As such, it is necessarily withdrawn from
even the "most austerely antinarrative, nonobjective
paintings".
Now this setting-off-against-a-background is differential.
The logic it relies on is purely differential: this
is not that, and indeed this stands out
as being this only because it is not that,
the background. Only because the image is not the
background can we see it as image. This is very like
Gestaltist logic (Lacan invokes Gestalt psychology fairly
often in the Seminars, especially in II).
Krauss focuses her argument on "The Agency of the Letter
in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud". This piece is
from 1957, when that linguistic turn is well under way; it
is contemporary with Seminars IV on Object Relations and V
on The Formations of the Unconscious. She draws a lot on
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's The Title of the Letter:
in particular on their argument that in adapting
Saussure's diagram of the sign, Lacan turns it
into an algorithm, which it patently is not in
Saussure.
Saussure's diagram:
Lacan's version:
where S (upper-case)
is the signifier, and s (lower-case, italic) is
the signified.
This is more than just an inversion. Saussure is indeed
drawing a diagram, to show how the sign is structured
internally in order to be a sign: it has two parts, which
Saussure names, and a relationship between them. Lacan
turns this into an algorithm, which is to say a systematic
mathematical procedure for calculating a result. A = π r2
is the algorithm for calculating the area of a circle. If
you know the radius, plug it into the algorithm, and what
emerges is the area. For Lacan, the figure he offers is
the algorithm for the Symbolic, the system of signifiers:
this is how the Symbolic is generated.
Thus the Saussurean
picture of the sign becomes a
sort of formula - that's crucial in Lacan's
preference throughout most of his career for expressing
things in this quasi-mathematical way. Instead of the two
interrelated parts of the sign we see in Saussure's
diagram, Lacan now inverts the whole thing to give the signifier pride of place, cuts the signified off from
it with a bar, and insists that the sign has no unity at
all. Instead a unity (the ellipse around the two parts of
the sign in Saussure's picture), we have an endless
differentiation: the signifier is capable of generating
meaning not because it has recourse to any signified
whatsoever, but because it is now in relation with an
indefinite and potentially endless set of other signifiers
within the system.
In "Agency", Lacan takes Saussure's model of the tree to
task as misleading. Words don't take on meaning because we
can attach some extralinguistic signified to them; they
work because we can connect them with other words. Think
of the word "of": commonplace, we all use it, it causes no
problems (to native speakers: it's a lot trickier if
English is a second language). Dictionary definitions
don't give you a signified meaning outside of language,
some sort of unlanguaged thought for which "of" stands (This
is an "of"); they describe relationships "of" sets up
among words around it. "Of" is a word whose function is to
set up certain relationships between words before it and
the words after it.
This is why Lacan puts the signified under a bar. We never
reach a signified meaning which would be just pure
concept, without reference to signifiers or to language.
On the contrary, it's the horizontal motion along the
chain of signifiers, the relationships among signifiers,
which give us meaning. (What do we do when we come across
a word we don't understand? We talk about it, use other
words. Sooner or later, we find that we do know quite well
what that word means.)
Möbius band
This is also why the signifying chain has the shape of a
Möbius band for Lacan. An ordinary sheet of paper, like
the Saussurean sign, has two sides, and you can only get
from one to the other by crossing over an edge. A Möbius
band, though, is what you get when you take a strip of
paper and give it a 180o twist before joining
it to the other. The odd property of a Möbius band is that
it has only one side and one edge. Go far enough along the
band and you end up back where you started, on the other "side".
Go far enough along the chain of signifiers (translation:
talk about it), and you find that this is quite enough to
produce, as an effect, a signified meaning.
As simple as it might seem, the S/s algorithm is
enormously ambitious, as it's from this that Lacan will
develop all the properties of the unconscious. The
radicality of Lacan's approach is to show how so many
things which are apparently properties of the psyche are
actually properties of the signifier. A few years later,
in the 1960 piece from Écrits, "The subversion of
the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian
unconscious", he will develop an extraordinary series of 4
diagrams which begins with nothing more than the chain of
signifiers, and then show in a series of successive
layerings how, from nothing more than the properties of
this chain, one can derive things as different as
imaginary and symbolic identifications, desire, the
structure of the superego, castration and jouissance,
fantasy, drive, demand and desire, and a theory of why
desire must always in its very nature remain unsatisfiable.
Krauss cites Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe here, to say that
what this does is destroy the classical view of the sign,
as Saussure presents it. Quite right: but rather than see
that as an unfaithfulness to Saussure or sloppy reading,
it's important to see that as precisely Lacan's intention.
Lacan dismantles the sign, if we take sign in its
classical sense as something that represents something
else (i.e. for a subject). He is not interested in the
sign, but in the signifier, as algorithm, the thing from
which everything else follows. The signified is redundant:
it's something a system of signifiers will produce, as an
effect. (We should repeat that this is not a matter of
Lacan's arguing that language doesn't represent things. Of
course it does. No one has any problems with that. It's a
matter of saying that that function of representation is
an effect, not a cause. Language doesn't work because it represents ideas or the real. On the
contrary, it is able to represent only because it works as
a system of signifiers. Representation might be an
important effect of language, but it's not the basic
mechanism behind it. What Lacan is offering is an attempt
at a rigorously anti-nominalist theory of meaning.)
So, Lacan does indeed abandon and dismantle the very idea
of a sign, as something which represents something else (sor
a subject), and instead offers the more cryptic definition
of a signifier as that which represents a subject for
another signifer. This is precisely where he breaks with
Saussure, where the Saussurean image of the sign becomes
an algorithm, something whose working is itself a part of
the symbolic. It is not, as Krauss suggests, the point
where Lacan loses the way. It's the deliberate and quite
radical point from which he departs, the thing which sets
him on his way.
We need also keep in mind something else that follows from
this, as it will do a lot to dismantle Krauss's argument
in turn. If the Symbolic has no unity, but is produced
entirely in and as an effect of difference, then the
Symbolic, the Logos, can never be simply "impervious", as
Krauss characterises it. The Symbolic must necessarily be
furrowed, at every instant, with the lack which both makes
it possible and at the same time guarantees that its
empire will always remain incomplete. Logos is a sort of
project: it never ends, never finally closes in on itself
as completion. To see it as complete is, quite
precisely, to see it in terms not of the Symbolic, but of
an image, a presence to be grasped in a single
gestalt. A much more complex and interesting question than
that of escaping the supposed imperiousness of the Logos
is how we are to conceive of Logos as this necessarily
ever-incomplete background, as forever divided against
itself. This is where what Lacan calls sexuation
comes into the picture. Sexuation is not just sexual
difference either as a biological fact or as a cultural
production, but is also that very division of the Symbolic,
the Logos, against itself. There is no single position
from which one can totalise the Symbolic; there are always
at least two radically incompatible and irreducible
positions available within it. Far from being opposed to
each other, as Krauss suggests, narrative and the image
alike may function as ways of forestalling the anxiety
which is a consequence of that radical division within the
Symbolic.
Earlier, I invoked Gestaltist distinction between image
and background, and suggested that for the image to work
as an image it must necessarily partake of the
logic of the symbolic. For us even to be able to perceive
it as image rather than as all but unimaginable
blooming buzzing confusion, we must be able to perceive it
against what it is not. That is, the very
thing that allows there to be an image in the first place
is the basic relation which characterises the Symbolic:
two terms, X and not-X, each of them taking on its meaning
only through its juxtaposition with the other. The
Symbolic is an irreducible condition of the image. As soon
as we have an image, we also have the Symbolic.
The relation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic is thus far
more complex than Krauss makes out. Rather than see the
image as the nostalgic and liberatory outside of an
imperious Logos, for Lacan the Imaginary and the Symbolic
arelimits to each other.
Schema L
For Lacan, psychonanalysis must address the subject
rather than the ego. That is, it has to take into
account the unconscious and the symbolic, not only the
imaginary and fantasised aspects which make up the ego.
The ego is, surprising as it may seem, an object: the
fantasy of the self objectified, frozen, no longer
subjected to the vicissitudes of an unconscious. It is a
fantasy a greal deal of positivist psychology buys into -
hence Lacan's famous insistence that psychoanalysis is not
a psychology.
The ego, then, is firmly on the side of the Imaginary. It
sees itself as formed in a series of mirror-relations with
others, small-o others, other egos. These mirror relations
are identifications with objective properties: I
see in this other certain qualities I like,
certain qualities I don't like; certain things remind me
of myself, or embody what I want to be, or don't want to
be, and so on. The subject, though, is on the
side of the Symbolic, and of the unconscious, because it
involves that entire dimension of the world which forms me
but of which I am never directly or fully aware. Here, my
identifications are not with small-o others, but with the
big Other, the Symbolic system within which, even though I
cannot see it as a totality, I am nevertheless positioned
and by which I always stand to be judged. Symbolic
identifications are always endless questions, unanswerable
in principle: what should I do to be loved, or a good
person? What's the right thing to do here? What's really wanted of me?
An adequate way of diagramming that would be like this:
It's inadequate because it simply juxtaposes the Symbolic
and Imaginary to each other - as if they were, as they
seem to be for Krauss - just a choice we could make,
depending on whether we're dealing with language or an
image.
I suggested that the real relationship between the two is
that they are each other's limit. To see how that
works, we once more apply a 180o twist. Imagine
that diagram drawn on a sheet of paper. Now keep the
bottom edge fixed, the ego and Other on
it, and give the top edge a full 180o twist, so
that other and subject change places.
What you get is this, which Lacan calls the Schema L:
The Symbolic and the Imaginary relations cross one another,
chiasmatic and occluding. On the top, we have the ego
relations, which tend towards a coherence (an imaginary
one). Beneath that, we have the symbolic relations that
subtend and support that very perception of coherence. As
the diagram suggests, those relations are largely
unconscious: they are not entirely visible, because they
are occluded by those apparent ego unities where one edge
of the twisted sheet dives under the other.
Again, what we have here is a very similar Gestaltist
logic: the ego, as object, as image, appears against a
ground of the unconscious. Because symbolic relations are
the support of the image, to focus on them is to make the
image itself vanish. That imaginary unit of the ego - or
in Freudian terms, its essential narcissism - is something
which is subtended by and left incomplete by the processes
of the symbolic. One name for that incompleteness would be
symbolic castration. (This is a term fraught with
misreadings. It isn't theft of a pleasure or a wholeness,
something which is rightly ours but of which we have been
robbed by our entry into the symbolic. Instead, it's the
cost of our access to pleasure, and to subjectivity itself:
without it, there would be no pleasures, no subjectivity
at all. The cost is that all desires and all pleasures
appear incomplete and thus endless. We find ourselves
measuring them up against a purely imaginary pleasure
which has no actual existence and which we never find in
the world. Castration is the name psychoanalysis
has for the realisation that desire is in fact this
endlessness: what desire desires is desire, more
desire; the object one actually attains is never quite
it. And what's more, rather than being a fate to
bemoan, that's actually how we all want it. Hell
would be what happens when all your desires do get
fulfilled, completely, once and for all...)
So, the Symbolic is a limit to the Imaginary: it's where
the apparent unity given us in the image reaches its limit.
The unity of the image is always illusory. The child sees
itself as a whole in the mirror but it does not
see a whole; what it sees is incomplete, parts of
a body, and what makes what it sees visible as an image is
that very incompleteness. There are many parts of the body
the child does not see in the mirror, including aspects
which are perfectly visible to others. The image is
an image only because it does not show all;
because what it does show takes on its intelligibility as
image only if it is understood that there is an unseen
aspect as well. The paradoxical lesson of Lacan's famous
article on the mirror phase (Écrits) is not
the obvious one of the primacy of the Imaginary; it's that
the Symbolic is necessarily there beforehand...
But we can also reverse things. A
Gestalt may
invert itself, so that the vase becomes two faces and vice
versa. There's a peculiar sort of projective geometry at
work here (in projective geometry, all theorems run in
pairs: wherever a statement is true, you can generate a
complementary true statement by exchanging the words point and
line). If the Symbolic is a limit
to the Imaginary, the Imaginary also functions as a limit
to the Symbolic - and as Lacan will develop in his later
work, both of them have another limit, one which will have
asymmetric effects on both: this is the Real, as shown in
the well-known schema of the Borromean rings.
Venn diagram
And just as the interruption of the Imaginary by the
Symbolic can be thought of as exactly what Freud calls
castration, so too we can find a clear Freudian name for
this Gestaltic inversion, whereby the Symbolic is
interrupted by the Imaginary. In the second Seminar
(1953-4), The Ego in Freud's Theory and the Technique
of Psychoanalysis, Lacan will say that this imaginary
function of the ego is nothing less than resistance.
(Why does the analysund resist? Because the ego does not
like where the symbolic chain of associations is leading.)
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from the
blog of
Christine Yeh
http://turn-the-page.blogspot.com/
