“The unconscious is structured like a language”
—or, invasions of the signifier
Not everyone buys into “the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan’s is the richest” (Jameson 2006: 365–6). But for those who are heavily invested in Lacan, the great wealth of his psychoanalytic writing flows from its active trading with semiotics and structural linguistics. Lacan, that is, first “struck it rich” by reading Freud as if Freud had read Saussure, by rethinking Freud’s discoveries through Saussure’s “linguistic turn,” and by cashing in on the claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1973/1981: 203).1
Our task in this lesson will be to understand what allows Lacan to stake his signature claim. We’ve of course already encountered the unconscious, the real kernel of Freudian discovery; we’ve also heard quite a bit about language, the central concern of semiotics and structuralism, the study of signs and of sign systems.
But what exactly is “a sign” for a semiotician? How, in a structuralist understanding, do sign systems work? How does the “structure” in structuralism differ from the “form” in formalism?
In the previous lesson, we witnessed that “form” for a formalist tends to resolve into an ostensibly “singular” thing (“organic unity” for Brooks) or technique (“defamiliarization” for Shklovsky). According to Robert Dale Parker, however, “we cannot say that structuralism is any one thing” (2008: 40). And the reason we can’t say any such thing about structuralism is that structuralism pretty much demolishes the idea of there ever being any one thing, any absolutely singular element that can meaningfully “stand alone,” independent of all other units of meaning. So when we read that “if we boil structuralism down to one idea, it is about understanding concepts through their relation to other concepts, rather than understanding them as intrinsic, in isolation from each other” (Parker 2008: 40), we can grasp what distinguishes a structuralist understanding of “textuality in general” from formalism’s intrinsically “literary” and socially isolated text. If we do “boil structuralism down to one idea,” it’s that there can never be any such thing as one idea, one single “positive term”—it’s about “coming to terms” with the realization that “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1959: 120); it’s about understanding that “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (Saussure 1959: 114).
Now, structuralism’s big idea isn’t that there’s “no such thing” as big ideas, or that meanings “simply don’t exist”; rather, the thrust of structuralism is that ideational meanings don’t exist simply—ideas exist, but they exist only in language, and “language being what it is, we shall find nothing simple in it” (Saussure 1959: 122). The structuralist idea is that ideas cannot exist except in differential relation to each other. Of course, the underlying ideal of Western metaphysics since Plato has involved the belief that meaningful ideas really do abide in their independently self-present “truth,” prior to any language that might be used to express, represent, or “stand for” them. But structuralism won’t stand for any of that. Structuralism posits that “there are no preexisting ideas” (Saussure 1959: 112), that “no ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct”—much less true—“before the introduction of linguistic structure” (Saussure 1972/1986: 110)—“Language,” writes Saussure, “has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system” (1959: 120).
Language for Saussure is thus necessarily, interdependently, systematic—“a form and not a substance” (1959: 122). There can’t be an “unstructured” language, any more than there could be an “unstructured” society or an “unstructured” psychic apparatus. And so the structuralist argument that “thought is linguistic” and that “concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression” (Jameson 2004: 403) entails the radical premise that linguistic structure constitutes the fundamental condition of possibility for all recognizably human reality, social, corporeal, and psychic. “The structuralist idea is that reality is linguistic and structured, not that there is no reality but that we construct it, so that there is no reality independent of language.” The structuralist idea is that “language not only describes our world [but] also produces the world it describes” (Parker 2008: 46).
This conception of language as world-forming is what sets theoretical writing after structuralism apart from preceding or competing literary criticisms. Regarding structuralism’s specific difference from formalism, then, we can say that if “for the new critics, the goal is to interpret the individual text,” the structuralist goal is “to describe or interpret the larger system” (Parker 2008: 47–8). And because the structuralist concern is with “the larger system,” formalism’s more limited focus on the specific “literariness of literature” seems pretty small potatoes. And yet, while structuralism would appear to neglect literature’s sublime (or starchy) literariness, structuralism’s emphasis on the larger system’s “linguistic foundation” arguably extends the strange condition of literature into every corner of human reality; “literature” thus gains considerably “larger” significance by losing the isolated and elevated status that formalism had bestowed upon it.
In the chapter of his Structuralist Poetics called “The Linguistic Foundation,” Jonathan Culler refers to the structuralist “notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena” (1975: 4). By “other cultural phenomena,” Culler means (1) cultural forms that don’t traditionally count as “creative writing” (that aren’t poems, novels, plays, etc.) and (2) cultural phenomena (such as fashion shows or football games) that hadn’t previously appeared to involve “language” to any pertinent extent and so hadn’t usually been considered suitable for linguistic analysis, much less “worthy” of close reading.
For structuralism, however, all cultural phenomena are wide open to linguistic analysis; moreover, all phenomena, even ostensibly “natural” phenomena, are “actually” always cultural objects that warrant being attentively read. In the key structuralist text Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes that structuralists “take language, discourse, speech, etc., to mean any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: . . . even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (1957/1972: 110–11). “Every object in the world,” says Barthes, “can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, natural or not, which forbids talking about things” (1957/1972: 109). Culler thus writes that
the notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena is based on two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events with meaning, and hence signs; and second, that they [signs] do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations. (1975: 4)
The first insight is basic to semiology, or semiotics, the “science of signs,” while the second is the foundation of structuralism, the analysis of the underlying systemic networks that make meaning, culture, human reality possible. For Culler, however, these twin insights are “inseparable,” for “in studying signs one must investigate the system of relations that enables meaning to be produced and, reciprocally, one can only determine what are the pertinent relations among items by considering them as signs” (1975: 4).
The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules: rules which do not regulate behaviour so much as create the possibility of particular forms of behaviour. The rules of English enable sequences of sound to have meaning; they make it possible to utter grammatical or ungrammatical sentences. And analogously, various social rules make it possible to marry, to score a goal, to write a poem, to be impolite. It is in this sense that a culture is composed of a set of symbolic systems. (1975: 5)
OK, so in human reality, everything and everyone is made of rules, composed of signs. But signs, we are told, “do not have essences”; they—and hence presumably we—“are defined by a network of relations.” What allows structuralism this disturbingly “anti-essentialist” claim? What makes the claim disturbing in the first place, and for whom? Of course, the claim that signs lack essences won’t fundamentally disturb anyone who doesn’t think much of signs anyway; it wouldn’t bother anyone who assumes that the “real truth” of ideas, experiences, or identities preexists any signs that might subsequently be used, like mere tools, to express or describe them. Such a “believer” wouldn’t feel spiritually infected by the essencelessness of signs; he would be no more disturbed by the claim that signs lack essences than he would be surprised to hear that his screwdriver or word-processor didn’t have a soul; he could readily admit that signs don’t have essences while still securely holding on to his own, so to speak. But the claim against significant essences could be unsettling for anyone who takes to heart the structuralist premise that signs systematically “create the possibility” for the very reality, the very ideas and very identities, that they are normally thought merely to describe. So given the “existential” stakes involved here, what, again, allows the structuralist to deprive us and our signs of any “essential” natures? What are these hungry ghosts called signs, anyway—particularly for the semiotician whose job is to study them?
The nineteenth-century American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished among iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. In Peirce’s schema, iconic signs are mimetic, basically pictographic representations—a crude drawing on a chalkboard could be “iconically” taken to signify, for example, a cat. Indexical signs, on the other hand, are effective indices or “indicators” of preexisting natural or physical causes—smoke indicates fire, stench indicates rot, etc. Note that an attempted iconic sign, like the drawing of the cat on the chalkboard, might be so miserably rendered that no one can possibly make out “what it’s supposed to be”; the failed iconic sign, however, can still function as an index of the merely physical fact that someone has been marking, however ineptly, on the board. But while iconic and indexical signs can be “grasped” or “sensed” by those who can’t read (a preschooler can recognize a well-drawn kitty, a real cat knows what to make of an emanating odor), a symbolic sign, like the word “cat,” can successfully signify only to a reader who knows the language in which it is written, in this case English. If a word for “cat” is chalked on the board in some language I can’t read, then the marks can signify indexically for me (I can take them as indicating that someone has been marking on the board), but not symbolically (I can’t really tell what the marks symbolize, what they’re supposed to mean).
For Saussure, all linguistic signs, all words, are symbolic in Peirce’s sense, which means that their primary signifying function is neither iconic nor indexical, that words signify by being neither naturally mimetic images nor simple indices of physical cause – effect relations. But Saussure inveighs against our using the term “symbol” to “designate the linguistic sign” (1959: 68), because while “the linguistic sign is arbitrary”—and we’ll be discussing at length the huge implications of that little zinger—“one characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot” (1959: 67, 68).
For Saussure, “symbol” isn’t quite the right word for a word because symbols can still participate in iconic or indexical significations, both of which imply some “natural bond” or physical motivation. But words are completely “empty” of and by “nature.” The linguistic sign, Saussure insists, is not only “antiphysical,” in all the senses of that word that we’ve explored in previous lessons, but arbitrary, which means that words are based not on physical nature but on social convention, collective agreements. Saussure cautions that the term arbitrary “should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker,” for “the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community.” Rather, to say that the signifier is arbitrary means “that it is unmotivated, i.e., arbitrary in that it has no natural connection with the signified” (1959: 69).
Now, Saussure writes that “the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign . . . dominates all the linguistics of language” and that “its consequences are numberless” (1959: 68). Indeed, the implications of the principle “that there is no fixed bond” (1959: 69) between signifiers and signifieds or signs and referents are probably much more numerous and extensive than Saussure himself might have envisioned. But because the principle of the sign’s “arbitrary nature” has proven to be so consequential, we need to make sure we understand exactly what Saussure means by it.
In Saussurean terms, a linguistic sign couples a signifier with a signified in order to designate a referent. The signifier functions as an “acoustic image”; the signified is the “concept” that this acoustic image conventionally evokes; while the referent is the “real thing” in the world that the sign (signifier and signified combined) conventionally designates. In the case of the “cat” inscribed on the chalkboard, the signifier is the image, the perceptual imprint, of the grouped letters c/a/t, coupled with the phonetic sound—kat—that in English conventionally corresponds to those marks. Please note that on the side of the signifier the “image” is not your mental vision of some feline but merely your visual perception of this trio of marks, c/a/t, as they appear on the board or page. Note also the absence of any natural, fixed, or inevitable “bond” between the legible mark “c” and the hard “k” sound we are trained to make in English when we perceive that mark; obviously, other languages couple differently imaged marks with that particular sound. Note further that there is no “natural bond” between the signifier “cat” and the signified concept or mental image of a real cat. If there were some natural connection or physical cause – effect relation between them, then the marks “c/a/t” would inevitably provoke both the sound “kat” and the mental image of a cat for, say, a Chinese person who didn’t read English, just as fire inevitably causes smoke, or rot stench, everywhere in the natural world.
So here’s the crux of the matter: the condition of language is such that the linguistic sign has no natural connection, no motivated, iconic, or indexical relation, to anything in the physical world—and hence neither do we. This is not to say that neither language nor we, the animals at its mercy, have any connection with nature whatsoever; it is only to say that for us, as specifically human beings, there is no natural relation, no physically motivated connection, between signifiers and signifieds or words and things. What we have instead of merely natural relations is a shifting ensemble of arbitrary, contingent, socially conventional relations. In other words, and once again, what we have is only what we ourselves make—the ongoing history of a world that must be made to mean.
Now, as I hope you’ll recall from earlier lessons, Roland Barthes refers to myth as a “depoliticizing” type of speech that attempts to turn this “history” back into “nature,” into a static realm of naturalized significations in which “things appear to mean something by themselves” (1957/1972: 143). Myth in Barthes’ sense depends upon a sort of enforced ignorance about the arbitrary, conventional, unmotivated “nature” of the linguistic sign. Myth, in other words, is politically motivated to occult language’s lack of natural motivation, to actively depoliticize speech by ignoring or obscuring its purely fabricated social conventionality. Myth attempts to maintain the fiction that language isn’t fictional, to support the illusion that linguistic signs really do function iconically or indexically; myth, that is, attempts to permanently bond signifiers to signifieds, to make the connection between them seem as natural and inevitable as the indexical connection of smoke to fire or stench to rot.
In other words, myth presents words as if they were natural facts, not social forms, as if they were completely “positive” terms without any “inmixture of otherness.” But Saussure’s myth-shattering assertion is that “in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (1959: 120). We should understand that a “positive term”—if it existed—would involve a fixed or fundamentally grounded content; a “positive term” would simply and independently be what it is and mean what it means, all by itself, just naturally. But against this myth of terminological positivity, Saussure argues that any word’s “content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it” (1959: 115), that terms “are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not” (1959: 117).
Of course, Saussure is here discussing terms, not real things. He’s not suggesting that the “most precise characteristic” of a real cat is that it isn’t a hotdog; rest assured that, for all a structuralist cares, a real cat can simply be what it is, positively. But for a structuralist the signifier “cat” cannot be a positive term; the signifier “cat” is what it legibly is, means what it visibly/audibly means, only because of its difference from other signifiers, “outsiders” that are almost the same but not quite—rat, sat, mat, pat, lat, hat, etc. If linguistic structure is in fact “made” entirely of such micro-differences, if any signifier’s most precise characteristic is not its positive content but its situation in relation to some other term that it’s not, then Saussure is justified in claiming that “in language there are only differences without positive terms,” that “everything in language is negative” (1959: 120).
All these Saussurean claims are of course the “linguistic foundation” for Culler’s unsettling assertion that signs “do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations” (1975: 4). These claims are also the condition of possibility for the anti-essentialist or deconstructive principle of “constitutive otherness” that I mentioned in the previous lesson—that is, the idea that any meaningful entity “is what it is” only by virtue of its difference from, and dependence upon, other entities. But Saussure may well have sensed the threat his principles posed to traditional metaphysics, to “the underlying ideal of Western culture,” for, perhaps protecting his own unconscious investment in that very ideal, Saussure backs away from his own “new rule” pretty quickly after having laid it down. Having just said that everything he’s said “boils down” to the bold statement that “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (1959: 120), Saussure seems to back-paddle—“But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and signifier are considered separately; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class” (1959: 120). And as Saussure continues to recant, insisting that the sign in its totality somehow can be terminally positive, certain clichés—involving barn doors being shut after horses have bolted, cats being let out of bags, and oddly named eggs falling off their walls—may well pop into the close reader’s mind. For once, we very close readers have taken to heart Saussure’s central claims about language; nothing that he says thereafter can put our shattered faith in “positive terms” back together again; nothing can restore our previously held idealist belief that signs really do have essences; nothing can persuade us that the structuralist slogan “everything in language is negative” isn’t completely valid for “the sign considered in its totality”—and hence, for human reality considered in its totality as well.
Indeed, after Saussure’s totally linguistic turn of the screw, nothing—not even the “nothing” that Hamlet calls “a fair thing to lie between a maid’s legs”—has ever been exactly the self-same again.
II. Adventures in metaphor and metonymy
But speaking of legs, and of what lies or doesn’t lie between them, did you know that crossing one’s legs in a certain fashion—at the ankle, not at the knee—is the single best way “to give the world the assurance of a man” while sitting? I myself was told this once, in so many words. Sitting comfortably enough at my desk in an eighth-grade classroom, minding my own business—albeit crossing my legs the other way, not at the ankle but at the knee—I suddenly heard a cackle of cultural intervention, the voice of the gender police: a concerned classmate, who happened to be a boy, pointed out to the rest of the class that “Thomas” was “sitting like a girl.”
Too bad we weren’t studying semiotics in this disciplinary setting. If we had been, I might have been able to respond to my classmate’s panoptical observation in some other way than desperately repositioning my signifying limbs, assuming too late the appropriately gendered posture. I might have been able to turn to my interpellating tormentor and ask why he assumed that any particular way of arranging one’s legs constituted an indexical sign of some preexisting chromosomal cause, why he assumed any natural bond, motivated connection, or inevitable relation between the gestural and the genital. I might have pointed out that signs of “sitting like” boys or girls are not “positive terms” with fixed, biologically determined contents but are socially conventional signifiers that “mean” only in differential relation to each other. I might have suggested that crossing one’s legs one way signifies sitting “like a boy” not because of any single thing that lies between a boy’s legs but only because crossing them the other way signifies sitting “like a girl.”
And if these choice words hadn’t been enough to earn me an after-school ass-kicking, I might even have announced that since “everything in language is negative” anyway, nothing positively causal lies between the legs of any human subject, boy or girl. With a precocious nod to Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus,” I might have mentioned that nothing “truly” lies between any of our legs but lies—contingent fictions of sex—regardless of whether any one of us really “has what it takes” down there or not. Or I might have lighted on the word “like” in my classmate’s accusation that I was sitting “like a girl” to launch into a discussion of similarity and contiguity as these physical conditions correspond to the tropes of metaphor and metonymy in structural linguistics; I might have continued along Lacanian lines and “articulated what links metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack” (1966e/2006: 439).
But setting aside all thoughts of what I might have cleverly said back then, I will now get back on track by launching into—guess what?—a discussion of similarity and contiguity as they correspond to metaphor and metonymy in structural linguistics, not only because it is now relatively safe for me to do so, sitting however I like, but because this discussion will take us closer to understanding how the basic elements of Saussurean linguistics allow Lacan to reboot Freud and claim that the unconscious is structured like a language.
We will continue our approach to Lacan’s analogy by considering Saussure’s distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language. Saussure insists that “in a language-state everything is based on relations” (1959: 122), but he proposes that linguistic elements “acquire” their relations in two distinct ways. On the one hand, words can “acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together.” Since language’s linearity “rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously,” words must be “arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking. Combinations supported by linearity are syntagms. The syntagm is always composed of two or more consecutive units” (1959: 123), and syntagmatic combinations are typically arranged sequentially across the horizontal axis of language.
Paradigmatic elements, on the other hand, “are not supported by linearity” (1959: 123)—or at least not by a sequentially horizontal linearity. But these elements can be “associatively” aligned or imaginatively “stacked up” on language’s vertical axis. Paradigmatic or “associative” relations, as Saussure calls them, involve words “that have something in common,” that can be “associated in the memory” (1959: 123). While the real “scene” of syntagmatic relations is their actual occurrence on the sequential chain of discourse, the imaginary “seat” of paradigmatic relations is “in the brain; they are a part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker.” Thus, syntagmatic relations are conspicuously evident, can be readily discerned and reported, while paradigmatic relations are rather more obscure, seem to require stronger powers of memory and imaginative selection. “The syntagmatic relation,” writes Saussure, “is in praesentia. It is based on two or more terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the [paradigmatic] relation unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series” (1959: 123).
To clarify Saussure’s distinction, let’s say that a simple declarative sentence such as “This fish is dead” so effectively presents its syntagmatic relations, its horizontally linear sequence of grammatically and syntactically combined words, that basically, all we have to do to receive this report on piscine morbidity is to grasp conventional grammar and to recognize what the words “fish” and “dead” denote. We don’t have to “remember” very much or “imagine” anything at all; we have only to see/hear the words in their “real time” seriality in order to “get the message.” But if I were to pick these syntagmatic bones clean and offer up the skeletal sequence ridden with absences—as in “This______is______”—then, in order to fill in the blanks, one might imagine a potentially towering series of similar words other than “fish” and “dead,” words that have “something in common,” nouns or adjectives that could be selected from one’s mnemonic “inner storehouse” and inserted into the positions opened by the absences of “fish” and “dead,” that could be substituted for “fish” and “dead” (this bread is stale, this coffee is cold, this lesson is tedious, this tapestry is gorgeous, etc.). And one could imagine those series arranged in vertical “stacks” above the blank spaces vacated by the dead fish (bread, coffee, lesson, tapestry in one stack; stale, cold, tedious, gorgeous, in another).
In fact, we pretty much have to imagine those vertical, paradigmatic “stacks” of signifiers because—unlike the actual and evident contiguities and adjacencies of the horizontal chain of syntagms, which we don’t have to imagine but can merely register—the paradigmatic “word-towers” are not really there: they must be imagined, conjured, thought up. While syntagmatic relations depend upon actual combinations and contiguities that are physically arranged horizontally, in praesentia, paradigmatic relations involve imaginary substitutions and unifications, psychically aligned vertically, in absentia. And this distinction between the physical and the psychical, between the actual and the imaginary, allows the structuralist to align, on the one hand, the syntagmatic—sequential—contiguous—combinative— horizontal axis of language with metonymy and, on the other hand, the paradigmatic| analogous|selective|substitutive|vertical axis of language with metaphor.
These alignments are among the most important in structuralist analysis. But Saussure himself doesn’t mention metaphor or metonymy by name in his discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. And in a sense it was not Saussure but our old formalist friend Viktor Shklovsky who laid the foundations for these structuralist alignments when he first distinguished prosaic metonymy from poetical metaphor. Using structuralist terms to rework Shklovsky’s “butterfingers” illustration in the previous lesson, we could say that when the described child has actually gotten butter on her fingers, the employed metonym “butterfingers” is a prosaically realistic syntagm, a horizontal verbal sequence combining the word “butter” with the word “fingers” in a way that mimetically reflects/reports the real physical contiguity of substance to flesh in the present. But when the clean-fingered child has merely dropped an object—she doesn’t really have butter on her fingers, it’s only as if she did—the employed metaphor “butterfingers” is a relatively poetic imaginative analogy that substitutes itself for the absence of real substance. But if the “present employment” of metaphor really depends upon “the absence of real substance,” on the negation of positive content, then Saussure, without explicitly naming metaphor as such, implies the utter metaphoricity of language simply by telling us that “everything in language is negative” and that “language is a form and not a substance” (1959: 120, 122). Moreover, when he writes that in considering “the relation that ties together the different parts of syntagms . . . one must also bear in mind the relation that links the whole to its parts” (1959: 124), Saussure implicitly describes the function of synecdoche, the type of metonym that works by linking parts to wholes, and he thus nails the syntagmatic to the metonymic without explicitly naming the latter.
Saussure thus allows us to see the antirealistic “poetry” of antiphysis even in the “prosaic” metonym “butterfingers,” for in that two-term, syntagmatic composition the word “butter” isn’t really a dairy product any more than the word “finger” is really a fleshy digit. In other words, the signifier isn’t really the signified any more than the sign is really the referent. Because in language there are only differences without really positive terms, even metonymical terms can be said to function metaphorically. But because linguistic differences must be strung out along the horizontal or syntagmatic chain of meaning, metaphors themselves are typically sustained or supported metonymically, in sequential combinations. Finally, since language itself works thanks only to the interplay between the paradigmatically metaphorical “poetic” function and the syntagmatically metonymical “prosaic” function, “any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry [alone] or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification.”
Thus spake Roman Jakobson—“a key figure in Russian formalism and a major influence on French structuralism” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 210)—a theoretical writer who indeed seems to meld Shklovsky’s “formalist” concerns with Saussure’s “structuralist” investigations. For when Jakobson describes “the poetic function of language” in terms of a “focus on the message for its own sake”—that is, excluding any other “factors involved in verbal communication” (1960/2007: 857)—his description resonates with both Shklovsky’s “formalist” argument that the prolonged process of perceiving a defamiliarizing message “is an aesthetic end in itself” (1917/2007: 778) and Saussure’s “structuralist” insistence that “the true and unique object of linguistics is language studied in and for itself” (1959: 232). This double resonance continues when Jakobson writes that the poetic function “cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other hand, [that] the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function” (1960/2007: 857). What Jakobson calls “the poetic function” would seem to unite Shklovsky’s aesthetically “word-roughening” techniques with Saussure’s metaphorically “substance-negating” activities, for “by promoting the palpability of signs” (as per Shklovsky’s rough-stuff), the poetic function always “deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (1960/2007: 857)—that is, the sign as sign must negate or jettison the object.
Note that in the preceding sentence I’ve employed what Jakobson calls “the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selection and combination” (1960/2007: 857). That is, I have selected certain words based on their paradigmatic similarity and sequentially combined those words according to an effectively syntagmatic contiguity, imposing Shklovsky’s “word-roughening” onto Jakobson’s “palpability of signs” and projecting Saussurean “insubstantiality” onto Jakobson’s “fundamental dichotomy.” On the one hand, my “verbal behavior” here instantiates what Jakobson calls metalanguage—roughly, language about language rather than language about objects. On the other hand, my verbosity would seem to relate to Jakobson’s most emphatic description of the poetic function—“The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (1960/2007: 858). Of course, my sentence is “not really” an axial line of poetry at all. And yet, Jakobson’s description allows me to speak of my sentence as if it were not unrelated to the poetic function, as if it somehow involved the interplay of metaphor (the axis of selection) and metonymy (the axis of combination)—even though, strictly speaking, the sentence contains neither metaphor nor metonymy. The fact that Jakobson’s description of the poetic function allows me to write about my writing as if it were poetry when it’s really no such thing underscores his argument that “when dealing with the poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry” (1960/2007: 857).
But neither, writes Jakobson—in a key passage that effectively pre-lubricates Lacan’s insertion of Saussure into Freud—can linguistics limit itself to the “formalist” focus on “the literariness of literature” when dealing with the interplay of metaphor and metonymy, for
a competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric, is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social. Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s “identification and symbolism”). (1956/2001: 1268)
Linking metaphor and metonymy to all “intrapersonal” and “social” symbolic processes, as well as to linguistic “inquiry into the structure of dreams,” Jakobson here effectively paves the way for Lacan’s reading of “the ‘signifierness of dreams’ ” (1966e/2006: 424) and thus for his claim that the unconscious is structured like a language. As we learned in our lesson on taking desire literally, Lacan is keenly concerned with what Jakobson calls “the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects”—he incisively explores antiphysis, the rupture between signification and “the real” that makes all human reality possible. While he would agree with Roland Barthes that “even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (1957/1972: 110–11), Lacan insists that some ecstatically or traumatically “real thing” remains missing whenever objects or subjects are ordered to “become” meaningful “speech.” And though he would concur with Barthes’ statement that “every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law . . . which forbids talking about things” (1957/1972: 109), Lacan would interject that every object and every subject in the world not only can but must pass from its closed, silent, inarticulate existence to an oral state, open to cultural intervention and social appropriation. Lacan’s message is not that there’s no law forbidding our “talking about things” but that there is a law that forbids our not talking about things, not symbolizing them, that outlaws our not saying “no” to the real; this law, the symbolic order, prohibits our merely being (with or in) certain “real things” rather than differentially meaning them, articulately distancing ourselves from them.
Exploiting, moreover, the etymology of the word sex (from the Latin secare, “to cut,” as you’ll recall), Lacan “sexualizes” this articulate distance, this radical cut away from the real; he posits an “Oedipal” dimension to Saussure’s claim that language is the clear-cut “domain of articulations” (1972/1986: 111); he insists that what Jakobson calls “verbal behavior” is always already “sexual behavior” and vice versa. As we’ve seen, for Lacan, both the symbolic order’s law against inarticulate, undifferentiated “silence” and Saussure’s linguistic law of linearity that “rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously” (Saussure 1959: 123) are structurally analogous to the paternal law of lineage, that “prohibition against incest” which founds all exogamous social orders and which “reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order” (1966d/2006: 229).
In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan pays homage to Jakobson, whom he duly credits as “one of the leaders of modern linguistics” (1966e/2006: 439). But when it comes to connecting the terms of linguistics to basic Freudian keywords, Lacan corrects and expands upon Jakobson to a large degree. As we’ll see, Lacan indeed connects metonymy to Freudian displacement, as Jakobson does above, but he also associates metonymy with desire or lack; moreover, unlike Jakobson, Lacan compares not synecdoche but metaphor to Freud’s condensation and to the psychoanalytic symptom.2 Before examining Lacan’s corrections, however, we must come to terms with condensation and displacement as these terms function in Freud’s lexicon, specifically in the Traumdeutung, the Interpretation of Dreams.
Simply put, Freud’s premise is that a dream represents the fulfillment of a wish. But dreams being what they are, we shall find nothing simple in them, so Freud’s more complicated premise is that a dream represents a compromise formation, the symptomatic work of attempting to satisfy two mutually incompatible desires at once. On the one hand, there’s the dreamer’s unconscious desire, unconscious because repressed, repressed because incompatible with the dreamer’s socially installed ego-coherence or conscious sense of self-esteem; on the other hand, there’s the dreamer’s desire to stay asleep, to remain psychically undisturbed by the emergence of any potentially ego-damaging imagery. In Freud’s view, human sleep involves the relaxation—but not the complete abnegation—of the censorship mechanism that holds repressed desire in place. Thus, when we’re soundly asleep, unconscious desire “takes advantage” of our inner censor’s vulnerability and surreptitiously attempts to “have its say.” The unconscious, rather like Cleanth Brooks’ “poet,” very much “wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t [it] say it directly and forthrightly?” (1951/2007: 799) Well, because if the unconscious did directly “speak itself,” its dark matters would most likely set off the censorship mechanism’s alarms and wake the sleeping dreamer up. The unconscious therefore “understands” that to allow any dormant das Ich to continue dreaming (with ego-coherence altered but still basically intact), and thus to keep its own scandalous message from being abruptly “cut off” in mid-stream, it, the unconscious, must “have its say” only in disguised and distorted forms. The unconscious “knows,” in other words, that “it”—das Es—can have the substance of “its say” only formally. For the unconscious, like language, “is a form and not a substance.” Only as a signifying structure, a strangely organized sort of poetry slam, and not as some formlessly bubbling cauldron of biologically instinctual nature, can unconscious desire ever get away with having something like its say.
Let’s say that I unconsciously harbor the standard Oedipal desires to “have a father kill’d, a mother stained,” as Hamlet ambiguously puts it. If I were to have a dream that “directly and forthrightly” represented the fulfillment of those desires—a dream in which I ecstatically decapitated my father and/or seminally stained my own mother—the image of either atrocity would (let’s hope) be disturbing enough to rupture my slumber, because I really don’t think I’m the kind of person who would enjoy doing or spewing such horrible things. But if I were to dream of sawing off the top of a bottle of pop, or of masturbating onto the petals of a chrysanthemum, I would probably be able to sleep right through my own witness of these weird but comparatively placid hieroglyphics—my ego-coherence would be protected and, at the same time, “my” unconscious desire would have had something like “its” say. In my dreams, in other words, I(t) enjoy(s) otherwise.
In the Traumdeutung, Freud says that dreams work exactly through such distorting mechanisms, through such condensations of ideas and displacements of enjoyment. Freud uses the word Verdichtung or condensation to describe the psychic process by which two or more ideas or images are “paradigmatically” compressed into a single form (my patricidal dream condenses father and bottle; my matri-maculating dream condenses mother and flower). He employs the word Verschiebung or displacement to describe the psychic process by which the “discharge” of forbidden aggression or obscene longing is “syntagmatically” transferred from one element in the dream sequence to another (my daddy-killing dream displaces murderous rage away from my father and onto something else, a stupid bottle; my mother-soiling dream transfers seminal abjection away from my mum and onto something else, the lovely petals).
It’s all rather poetic, wouldn’t you say? And even if you wouldn’t, Lacan emphatically does, not only stressing the similarity between condensation and metaphor and associating displacement with metonymy—
Verdichtung, “condensation,” is the superimposed structure of signifiers in which metaphor finds its field; its name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows the mechanism’s connaturality with poetry, to the extent that it envelops poetry’s own properly traditional function.
Verschiebung or “displacement”—this transfer of signification that metonymy displays is . . . represented, right from its first appearance in Freud’s work, as the unconscious’ best means by which to foil censorship. (1966e/2006: 425)
—but also insisting on the traumatically sexual underpinnings of all enveloping tropes, metaphorical or metonymical, of all symbolic processes, intrapersonal or social, of all unconscious desire taken literally, à la lettre.
One way to understand Lacan’s “Oedipal” take on metaphorical condensation is to turn again to Saussure’s assertion that language’s law of linearity “rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously” (1959: 153). Ordinarily, “realistically” speaking, one could say that this rule against incest—oops, my bad, I mean, against simultaneity, against two “elements” being pronounced as/at on(c)e—generally holds; after all, this is the rule that compels all good writers to keep their letters separate rather than piling them on top of each other (as in the bad experimental “ink-stain” example back in the lesson on taking desire literally). In a “poetically” condensed metaphor, however, it’s as if the rule of linearity were broken by the superimposition of signifiers. In the Oedipal poetry of my dreams, either one of these dark inscriptions—“bottle of pop” or “chrysanthemum”—would seem to break the syntagmatic rule and would seem to allow unconscious desire to enunciate two elements simultaneously (“as one flesh,” so to speak). And this illicit enunciation transpires without das Ich quite catching on to what das Es is actually saying—that I(t) really do(es) want to have “a father kill’d, a mother stained.”
Another way to understand metaphorical condensation would be to reconsider the trope from Aristotle that we trotted out in the preceding chapter, which involved being “in the evening” of one’s life. Here, we see the pronounced compression of a lengthy, four-term analogy (as evening is to day, so old age is to life) into a shorter, two-term expression (evening of life). In this metaphorical condensation, the luxury sedan of “as A is to B so C is to D” becomes the compact two-seater “A of D”—linear sequentiality is abrogated in that we “jump” directly from A to D; moreover, by virtue of that “imaginative leap,” a certain number of substantially “real terms” are negated or occulted from the proposition (“day” and “old age” are absent or missing from “evening of life” in much the same way as real butter is nowhere to be found in Shklovsky’s metaphorical “butterfingers”).
Note that all these condensations involve the substitution of words for other words. Evening subs for old age; pop as bottle subs for pop as father; the final syllable of chrysanthemum stands in for a name bestowed upon my poor mother, etc. “One word for another: this is the formula for metaphor,” writes Lacan, “and if you are a poet you will make it into a game and produce a continuous stream, nay, a dazzling weave of metaphors” (1966e/2006: 422). And yet, the meaningful continuity of any verbal stream, however metaphorically dazzling, will always depend upon the horizontal drift of metonymy, for “metonymy is based on the word-to-word nature” of the syntagmatic thread of verbal behavior. Lacan thus “designate[s] as metonymy the first aspect of the actual field the signifier constitutes, so that meaning may assume a place there” (1966e/2006: 421). Because any “meaning” not only “may” but must assume its place in line, because the “word-to-word” basis of metonymy can be associated with the linear and sequential structure of the completely “woven” sentence, and because we read sentences not “all at once” but only by moving or transferring our attention, our perceptual cathexis or investment, from one word to the next along the chain of contiguous signifiers, Lacan associates the syntagmatic metonymy of structural linguistics with the somnambulant displacement of the Freudian dreamwork.
Lacan also links the substitutive, word-for-word condensations of metaphor with “the very mechanism by which symptoms, in the analytic sense, are determined.”
Between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom—a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element—the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved. (1966e/2006: 431)
Moreover, Lacan associates the “word-to-word nature” of metonymy with “literal” desire. He writes that “the enigmas that desire . . . poses for any sort of ‘natural philosophy’ are based on no other derangement of instinct that the fact that it [desire] is caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally extending toward the desire for something else” (1966e/2006: 431). Desire taken literally is always desire for something else because meaning always lacks being, because “no signification can be sustained except by reference to another signification” (1966e/2006: 415), because “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1959: 120), etc. “Whence we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning [emptily] insists, but that none of the chain’s elements [positively] consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 419). Mixing, then, the adventures of metaphor and metonymy with the insistence of the letter in the unconscious, Lacan insists that “there is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire” than to imagine that “it is the truth of what this desire has been in his history that the subject cries out through his symptom” (1966e/2006: 431).
And that, for crying out loud, is why Lacan imagines that the unconscious is structured like a language. But for Lacan the “crying game” of the “talking cure” involves a fundamental question—a question of the relation between the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language and the history of a subject who has conventionally been expected to posture like a boy or a girl, to signify as a boy or a girl, to take its place in one line or the other whenever two different lines form. Like linear language for Saussure, sex for Lacan is a form and not a substance; for him, linguistic structure always involves this “binary” question of sexual difference, the metaphorical/metonymical “question of being and . . . its lack” (1966e/2006: 439). As we’ll see in the next section (another word, come to think of it, like “sex,” derived from secare), the question of sexual difference is in Lacan’s view the question of being versus meaning, of being versus having something infamously called . . .
III. “the phallus”—for lack of a worser word
The first thing one wants to say about the phallus is that it isn’t the penis. It’s not an anatomical “object” of any kind, and “still less is it the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes.” Rather, as Lacan insists in “The Signification of the Phallus,” “the phallus is a signifier . . . the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier” (1966f/2006: 579). The phallus stands for what “meaning effects as a whole” are destined to stand for: namely, that
man cannot aim at being whole (at the “total personality” . . .) once the play of displacement and condensation to which he is destined in the exercise of his functions marks his relation, as a subject, to the signifier. The phallus is the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role of Logos is wedded to the advent of desire. (1966f/2006: 581)3
In other words, what “the phallus” means is that Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” can pretty much go hang. For the phallus designates the fact that anatomy isn’t “destiny” for any subject of human reality, whether possessed of penis or clitoris; it “means” that whatever any of us has or doesn’t, none of us can ever “aim at being whole,” at being all there, in the “exercise” of our “functions” within the domain of articulation. Because there is no “natural history” of human desire, because our destiny is forever subject to the play of metaphorical condensation and metonymical displacement, the only “wholes” we can ever “aim at” are grammatically completed sentences—even if no single, fully predicated sentence (and certainly not this one) can ever really satisfy its speaker’s desire for completion.
The phallus thus not only “isn’t the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes” but “stands for” nothing other than the fact that it isn’t. Signifying nothing but its own disappearance, the phallus isn’t anything and isn’t everything but “stands for” the fact that “everything in language is negative” (Saussure 1959: 120). Without actually being “a natural fact,” the phallus stands for the fact that language is by nature fictional; it really symbolizes nothing but the fact that the symbolic isn’t the real. In the most obviously “sexual” terms, the phallus not only isn’t the penis but signifies the fact that the signifier “penis” isn’t the signified “penis” any more than the word “clitoris” gets to be a real clitoris. If words like “penis” and “clitoris” were really penises and clitorises, then one could caress, kiss, lick and perchance excite and/or arouse them; one could erotically rub the words together, like sticks, and make a sort of fire. The phallus signifies the fact that one can’t. The phallus signifies the hard fact that the word “penis” lacks a real penis, that the word “clitoris” lacks the actual organ. But the phallus also signifies the ostensibly “non-sexual” fact that a phrase like, say, “stick of butter” isn’t really a stick of butter. In other words, for Lacan, the shadow of the phallus extends across the entire field of signification, designating “meaning effects as a whole” whether any real organs or buttered holes are involved in the signifying act or not—the ostentatiously “sexual” word “phallus” signifies the seemingly “non-sexual” fact that “the signifier” qua signifier lacks “the signified,” that the word qua word lacks “the real thing,” that the subject qua subject lacks the undifferentiated real. Lacan’s phallus is thus the specifically privileged “signifier of lack” in general.
The idea that the Lacanian phallus signifies these linguistic negations, these sad-assed “facts of life”—it isn’t, one can’t—means that the phallus is “not unrelated,” as Lacan puts it, to the bar that separates signifier from signified in the Saussurean algorithm—
—which “is to be read,” Lacan writes, “as follows: signifier over the signified, ‘over’ corresponding to the bar separating the two levels” (1966e/2006: 415). But while Saussure reads the algorithm’s horizontal line as uniting signifier with signified, comparing “the two levels” to the recto and verso of a single sheet of paper, Lacan likens the same line to a bar of prohibition, a significant barrier instantiating the aforementioned negations—it isn’t, one can’t. To show the difference between Saussure’s paper-thin “line” and his own thicker and longer “bar,” Lacan pulls out what he calls Saussure’s “faulty illustration” of the signifier/signified dispensation—the signifying word tree suspended over a horizontal line that joins the word to what’s below it—an arboreal icon representing the signified concept of a tree—and he “replace[s] this illustration with another, which can be considered more correct” (1966e/2006: 416)—the words gentlemen and ladies situated above a horizontal bar that separates them from “the image of two twin doors” below, the floating words indicating alternative entrances on the nether side of the bar, the twin doors themselves marking the physically identical but “sexually differentiated” places where “gentlemen” and “ladies” are supposed to go, whenever they really “have to go.” As Lacan announces:
the image of two twin doors . . . symbolize[s], with the private stall offered Western man for the satisfaction of his natural needs when away from home, the imperative he seems to share with the vast majority of primitive communities that subjects his public life to the laws of urinary segregation” (1966e/2006: 417).
Still shaking the Saussurean tree, Lacan goes on to play “scrabble” with the French word arbre, anagrammatically transforming it into a barre and thus laying bare human reality as the “meaning effect” of primal repression, the laboriously primordial sacrifice of the real (and the arboreal) to the socio-symbolic order—the domains of articulation, incest prohibition, urinary segregation, and so on. In Lacan’s view, the social imperatives of language universally bar our way to any simple and undifferentiated “satisfaction” of “natural needs,” so that we “castrated” subjects of the signifier, constitutively sawed off from merely animal nature, can’t, like lemurs, simply live in, swing from, or piss under trees. Lacan’s saw is that everything in language is negative, based on this primordially prohibitive bar, and so everyone who wants to be anyone in our world of words must be made to mean, must consent to “castration” as “sexual difference” from the real, must abide by the laws of urinary segregation separating ladies from gents, must take his or her place in one line or the other in front of the “really identical” twin doors—this is what the phallus, as the “privileged” signifier of lack, signifies for Lacan.
But hold on here—even if we accept linguistic anthropogenesis as radical antiphysis; even if we grant that language must be articulated and therefore necessarily involves an inaugural separation of the speaking subject from the undifferentiated real; even if we swallow the line that being a speaking subject necessarily involves a haunting sense of incompletion, of never really being fully here nor there, why in God’s name must we think of articulation, separation, incompletion, etc., in the specifically “sexuated” terms of “castration”? Moreover, if we must select a single signifier to signify the fact that the signifier isn’t the signified; if we must privilege one symbol to symbolize the fact that symbols aren’t real; if we must designate one unit of meaning to designate “meaning effects as a whole,” why the fuck does it have to be “the phallus”?
Lacan in fact addresses these questions with a winking nod toward “the fuck,” toward copulation, both “real” and “literal.” As he puts it:
One could say that this signifier [the phallus] is chosen as the most salient of what can be grasped in sexual intercourse [copulation] as real, as well as the most symbolic, in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent in [discursive] intercourse to the (logical) copula [the “linking” form of the verb “to be”—is—is of course called the copula]. One could also say that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation.
All of these remarks still merely veil the fact that [the phallus] can play its role only when veiled, that is, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, once it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of the signifier.
The phallus is the signifier of this very Aufhebung, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance. (1966f/2006: 581)
What we can take this strikingly Hegelian language to mean is that language itself never means anything except by virtue of the real’s being stricken with signification. When the symbolic order strikes, signification removes itself from and erects itself above “the real” which disappears from it, which is “primally repressed” or driven into “latency” by it. Once language cuts into the signifiable real, “everything” becomes no longer simply signifiable but irrevocably significant.
Once language cuts in, “everything” must split along one side or the other of the horizontal bar separating the signifier from the signified, and for Lacan this symbolic segregation is “not unrelated” to the conventional social imperative that “everybody” must flock to the left or the right of the vertical line separating urinating ladies from gents. Once language cuts in and we’re made to “stand in line” in the public domain of articulation/urination, every erstwhile “total whole” and every formerly “oceanic feeling” sexually divides into signifiers and signifieds—signifiers that are barred from being signifieds, signs that are separated from formlessly immediate experience, words that bar us from any simple satisfaction of any of our “natural needs when away from home.”
Granted, none of the preceding fully answers the question of why “the phallus” must be “the privileged signifier” of the real’s necessary disappearance from signification, but that’s because the phallus ensures that nothing can ever fully answer that question or fully satisfy anyone who asks. Lacan, however, does lay out some strategically unsatisfying answers in “The Signification of the Phallus,” using his “privileged signifier” to rewrite Freud’s basic Oedipal scenario.
To employ a couple of titles, let’s say that in Freud’s account “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” is brought about by “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” In Freud’s terms, “dissolving” one’s Oedipus complex involves letting go of one’s desire to possess the mother and dispatch the father. Initially, all of us polymorphously perverse little children—blithely oblivious to the aforementioned anatomical distinction and its possible psychical consequences—share this same desire, “boys” and “girls” alike (both, that is, want to “be” with the mother, which means that the little boy’s pleasure principle is from a certain perspective already conveniently “heterosexual,” the little girl’s not so much). Eventually, both of “the sexes” will be led to “dissolve” their complexes, albeit for distinctly different reasons, and these contrasting dissolutions pave the way for us to arrive at our “normal” heterosexual masculinity or femininity. On the one hand, dissolving the Oedipus complex “like a boy” involves castration anxiety—perceiving a body anatomically distinct from his own, misrecognizing absence as violent deprivation (the price paid for some infraction of the rules), fearing similar punishment for his own unruly impulses, the little boy gives up on his mother to safeguard his bodily totality and represses his aggression against the father in favor of a self-protective identification, anxiety thereby assuaged. On the other hand, in Freud’s narrative, dissolving the Oedipus complex “like a girl” involves penisneid or “penis envy”—perceiving a body anatomically distinct from her own, falling for an unfavorable comparison between her clitoris and the other’s more impressive appendage and thus feeling corporeally slighted, the little girl is supposed to disinvest libidinally in her own active (i.e., “masculine”) clitoral self-stimulation in favor of passive (i.e., “feminine”) vaginal receptivity to outside intervention; she is supposed to give up on her likewise “deficient” mama, who doesn’t seem to have what she lacks either, and turn instead to the fantasy father-figure who apparently is better equipped to give her what she really wants—which, as it happens, is less a penis per se than what that real organ’s “turgidity” and “vital flow” might one fine day spell out—the baby (albeit preferably with a penis attached) as the ultimate indexical sign of the big girl’s “womanly” fulfillment.
Now, Freud’s accounts are obviously quite problematic and have been attacked from a number of fronts, not all of them feminist. But as some feminist theorists have come to recognize, Freud’s accounts do possess the great virtue of being accounts. In other words, despite that unfortunate “anatomy is destiny” slogan, Freud demonstrably views normative heterosexual masculinity and femininity not as biologically determined outcomes but rather as complicated and fragile “formations of fantasy” for which speculative accounts are precisely what need to be given, even if the accounts themselves are inevitably incomplete and unsatisfactory, no less “fantasmatic” than that which they purport to explain.
Lacan, in any case, rewrites and revises Freud’s Oedipal narratives, focusing less on the child’s longing for the mother and more on its efforts to ascertain and somehow to be what it imagines the mother desires. In the Lacanian scenario, the child—boy or girl—still wants its mother, wants her to be its everything, but the child also wants to position itself to be the mother’s one and only thing, to be the sole object of the mother’s desire, without any annoying competition. The child’s desire to be the mother’s desire, however, presupposes that the mother in fact desires, that she wants or lacks something, and the phallus is potentially “not unrelated” to the child’s pressing question regarding the mother’s “enigmatic” desire—what does she want (me to be)? Significantly, the phallus enters the picture if and when this “emotionally necessary” presupposition of maternal lack (she must want something if she is to want anything like me) gets mapped onto the “standard interpretation” of anatomical distinction that takes the mother to be “castrated” (she seems not to have a thing like that thing down there). Of course, the “standard interpretation” is not the only interpretation available even among perverse little children (or male psychoanalysts); this conjectural reading of maternal “castration” is neither inevitable nor universal—not even for Lacan, who stresses the fantasmatic dimension of the “presupposition of lack” and who fully understands that female bodies aren’t “non-fictionally” incomplete (they really lack lack, as he puts it). Nonetheless, Lacan suggests that if maternal lack is presupposed, and “if the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy her desire” (1966f/2006: 582).
Now, before we jump to any ludicrous suppositions about what being the mother’s “little thing” might entail—the child as some sort of supplemental “strap-on” joyously jutting out from maternal loins, for example—let’s examine the logic of this “phallic fantasy” more closely. The child in question, boy or girl, in wanting to be what the mother wants, supposedly wants to “complete” the mother by becoming what she seems (in fantasy) to lack. Again, this fantasy must presuppose a wanting mother in order to generate the corresponding fantasy of the wanted child. On the one hand, the opposing fantasy of the unwanting mother—the “phallic” mother as “total personality”—is basically unsupportable for the child, simply because there’s no comforting or desirable place for the child to be in that fantasy. On the other hand, the fantasy that “the mother’s desire is” for a single thing that the child can somehow be “in order to satisfy her desire” isn’t going to pan out very well either, at least not if the phallus ends up being her supposed desire, because another player’s putative possession of this desideratum must spoil the child’s fantasy of completion. In other words, if “the father” already seems to have it, “I” can’t possibly be it. My bitter recognition that “the father” seems to have what the mother seems to lack pretty much rules out the possibility of my ever being the sole object of her desire, rules out her being “my everything” and my being her only thing. And this exclusive rule, if I manage to accept it, ensures that “the phallus” will have functioned metaphorically as a veritable law of “the father.”
This is why Lacan thinks of the “phallic function” in terms of paternal metaphor and why I have placed the name of the paternal spoiler in ironic or “de-realizing” quotation marks above. For it isn’t the real father or anything involving that swell fellow’s actual “apparatus” that’s decisive here. Rather, “the name of the father” figures as a structural position, as the third term that seems to bar dyadic “completion” in the Oedipally “incestuous” sense, that seems to block any real sexual reunion of mother and child or any “oceanic” merger of the ego with the real. Strictly and metaphorically speaking, no “real father” or “real man” ever need occupy that structural position. Not the real father but the “name of the father” (nom du père) functions as if it were the “law of the father,” as if it were the “no of the father” (non du père), as if the primordial “no to the real” that makes naming necessary and hence human reality possible issued from the loins and the lips of “the father” at the same time, the paternal metaphor thus condensing what “the father” seems to have (the “right answer” to the question of the mother’s desire) with what “he” seems to say about the child’s bid to satisfy the mother’s desire (no fucking way!). It’s by virtue of this metaphorical condensation of “seeming to have” with “seeming to say” that the nom/non du père is “not unrelated” to the phallus that is “not unrelated” to the bar that separates signifier from signified in Saussure’s triadic algorithm.
So the phallus in its “poetical function” as paternal metaphor substitutes itself for the mother’s desire. This substitution leaves the child, boy or girl, with nothing to be (for the mother) and everything to mean (including the mother). For if she herself respects the law of the father, the mother will no longer want the child to be her little thing; she will no longer want the child (to want) to be with her in a comfortably closed circle of mellifluous sound and sense, homeostatically pleasurable to those two alone but meaningless to the “outside world.” Rather, she will want the child not to be but to mean, to make intelligible sounds that “he”—and the “larger system” that he “stands for”—will be able to understand, to recognize; she will not want the child to be her thing but to substitute words for things, even if the very first of those things was really her.
The phallus, then, is not a thing but seems to substitute itself for the deprivational fact that words must substitute for missing persons and lost objects. In other words, the phallus—for lack of a worser word—is nothing but the word that seems to stand for the fact that “we must accept castration” (Lacan 2008: 41). And what it means “to accept castration” in Lacan’s teaching is to accept the fact that we must be made to mean, that none us of can ever be (with or in) or have “the real thing” ever again.
All of which would seem to take us back to the question of “the sexes.” For apparently the symbolic order has never allowed all of us boys and girls ever to mean equally “as one.” Or at least no symbolic order on record has ever exactly encouraged us to understand our anthropogenetic difference from the real except in terms of some putatively “real difference” between “the sexes”—whether the difference be enforced by conventional laws compelling urinary segregation or by other myths that attempt to transform “the history of sexuality” into an essentialized nature. Compelling us to perform cultural contingencies as if they were absolute necessities, the regnant symbolic order orders each and every one of us to mean “as” ladies or gentlemen, “like” boys or girls, in the positive or negative terms of purely masculine or feminine “subject positions.”
Addressing the question about Lacan’s position on these matters involves determining whether his rethinking of Freud through structural linguistics supports or suspends the regnant symbolic order, whether his work critically describes or forcefully prescribes phallogocentrism and the workings of the patriarchal unconscious. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan writes that:
one can indicate the structures that govern the relations between the sexes by referring simply to the phallus’ function.
These relations revolve around a being and a having which, since they refer to a signifier, the phallus, have contradictory effects: they give the subject reality in this signifier, on the one hand, but render unreal the relations to be signified, on the other.
This is brought about by the intervention of a seeming [paraître] that replaces the having in order to protect it, in one case, and to mask the lack thereof, in the other, and whose effect is to completely project the ideal or typical manifestations of each of the sexes’ behavior, including the act of copulation itself, into the realm of comedy. (1966f/2006: 582)
Here, Lacan would seem to disabuse us of the notion that the projected ideals of masculinity or femininity should ever be taken seriously or that he himself reads any “typical manifestations” of sexuated behaviors as absolute necessities rather than as broadly comic contingencies. In stipulating the way those manifestations “revolve” around a being, a having, a seeming, etc., Lacan, as I take it, means that when the child “accepts castration,” accepts that it cannot “be” (the phallus) for the mother but must make meanings instead, the child is also made to understand that it must eventually make “a man” or “a woman” of itself, that it must “mean” or send itself through one “door” or the other, “like” a boy or a girl. The child accepts, however gradually or grudgingly, that it can’t want to end up being the phallus for the mother any longer, but the available and acceptable avenues of meaning are such that the child must either (a) want to want to be like the one who seems to have the phallus, like the one who always seems “to have what it takes” (“masculine” identification with the actively possessive social position of the husband/father) or (b) want to want to be like the one who seems to be the phallus for another, who always seems “to be there for the taking” (“feminine” identification with the passively possess-able social position of the “trophy” wife/mother).
Regarding “plan b,” Lacan writes, “Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I am saying that it is in order to be the phallus—that is, the signifier of the Other’s desire—that a woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the masquerade” (1966f/2006: 583). He also writes that “The fact that femininity finds refuge in this mask . . . has the curious consequence of making virile display in human beings seem feminine” (1966f/2006: 584)—a clear enough object lesson for anyone who wants to follow “plan a.”4 In Lacan’s view, however, the anatomically male child isn’t biologically destined to opt for “plan a” any more than the biologically female child is anatomically destined to go for “plan b.” There’s nothing (but fear) to stop a man from wanting “to be” (or) a woman (from) wanting “to have.” Lacan, that is, concurs with Freud’s great line from Civilization and its Discontents—“Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities for happiness for a portion of security” (1931/1989: 752). And given the way our civilization still tends to withhold its love, recognition, and protection from those who deviate from its identificatory rules, it is, for Lacan, “understandable” (albeit anything but “natural”) that most “boys” will desire to seem to securely have and most “girls” will desire to seem to securely be what he, Lacan, seems all too happy to call the phallus.
Whether or not this happy calling makes Lacan a friend of phallogocentrism is a question that we can address by briefly considering the difference, in Lacan’s writing, between necessities and contingencies. Clearly, Lacan views the primordial separation from the real as a necessary and transhistorical condition for any human reality whatsoever, and he sees “the signifier” as the necessary and transhistorical mark of that separation or deprivation. Just as clearly, Lacan states that “we must accept castration,” allowing “castration” to designate the mark of “primal repression” that always necessarily calls or cuts us away from the real. Somewhat less clearly, however, Lacan will suggest that while this “being called away” from the real is structurally necessary for all of human reality, the “fact” of our having to keep calling that casting call “castration” is historically contingent and could conceivably even be dispensed with. Such, at any rate, is what I take Lacan to mean in Seminar XX when he writes that for his money “the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency” (1975/1998: 94).
Not that it’s easy to understand what Lacan “really” means in any of his writings—of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan’s is perhaps the most difficult. But Lacan’s specific difficulty—so productive of his reader’s feelings of bafflement, malaise, and non-self-identity—could be what finally undermines the argument that Lacan not only diagnoses but endorses phallogocentrism or unambiguously wants to enforce the patriarchal law of the father. For if “phallogocentrism” can be taken as a fairly recent word for that “image of perfectly self-present meaning” which has long constituted “the underlying ideal of Western culture” (Johnson 1981: ix); if, as Donna Harraway puts it, the ideal of “perfect communication” and of “one code that translates all meaning perfectly” is in fact phallogocentrism’s “central dogma” (1985/2008: 345), then, however “cocksure” he may have been of himself as a man, it would seem hard to justify tagging Lacan’s writing as phallogocentric, given the ostentatious imperfection and incompletion that pervades his every écrit. Perhaps the “fact” that we find nothing but resolute indetermanence at the center of Lacan’s purportedly “modern” or “structuralist” thought can metonymically displace it (and us) into some sort of anti-phallogocentric postmodernism—perhaps even into “a queer poststructuralism of the psyche” (Butler 2004: 44).5 Maybe the fact that Lacan’s “center [is one we] cannot hold” is what makes his theoretical writing neither dogmatically rigid nor relativistically limp but rather excessively rich—if not, at the end of the day, “the richest.”
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Eight:
iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs, signifier/signified, syntagmatic/paradigmatic, horizontal/vertical axes, synecdoche, metalanguage, condensation/displacement, symptom, cathexis, the phallus, logos, logocentrism, phallogocentrism, castration anxiety, penisneid, paternal metaphor, indetermanence
Notes
1 Lacan writes that while “Freud could not have taken into account modern linguistics, which postdates him,” Freud’s discovery “stands out precisely because, in setting out from a domain in which one could not have expected to encounter linguistics’ reign, it had to anticipate its formulations” (1966f/2006: 578). Lacan asserts that when Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, “it was way ahead of the formalizations of linguistics for which . . . it paved the way” (1966e/2006: 426); moreover, Lacan notes that “in Freud’s complete works, one out of three pages presents us with philological references . . . linguistic analysis becoming still more prevalent the more directly the unconscious is involved” (1966e/2006: 424). In How to Read Lacan, Žižek writes that “Lacan started his ‘return to Freud’ with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best-known formula: ‘The unconscious is structured as a language.’ The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. For Lacan, this notion of the unconscious belongs to the Romantic Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and has nothing to do with Freud. The Freudian unconscious caused such a scandal not because of the claim that the rational self is subordinated to the much vaster domain of blind irrational instincts, but because it demonstrated how the unconscious itself obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks” (2006: 2–3).
2 While “in medicine, symptoms are the perceptible manifestations of an underlying illness” (as a runny nose is a symptom of the common cold), in psychoanalysis, symptoms are treated not as direct indices of organic maladies but as “unnatural” signs of repressed desires. As writes Dylan Evans, “Lacan follows Freud in affirming that neurotic symptoms are formations of the unconscious, and that they are always a compromise between two conflicting desires. Lacan’s originality lies in his understanding of neurotic symptoms in linguistic terms” (1996: 203).
3 “Logos is Greek for ‘word,’ as well as truth, reason, logic, law. Since Plato, logos has stood as the transcendent grounding principle of order and reason that confers meaning on discourse. It constitutes the origin of truth” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 172–3). Correspondingly, logocentrism is “a word coined by Jacques Derrida . . . to describe the form of metaphysics that understands writing as merely a representation of speech, which is privileged because the utterance is present simultaneously to both speaker and listener, a situation that seems to guarantee the transmission of meaning” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 172). Now, because Lacan couples “the phallus” as a “privileged signifier” with “the Logos” as “origin of truth,” he stands accused, by Derrida and others, of being phallogocentric, a term which Eagleton suggests that “we might roughly translate as ‘cocksure’ ” (1983/1996: 164). We will, to be sure, have more to say about phallogocentrism later on.
4 For more on the “feminization” of virile display, take a look, so to speak, at my Male Matters (1996).
5 The word indetermanence is used by Ihab Hassan “to designate two central tendencies in postmodernism, indeterminacy and immanence” (Woods 2009: 73). See Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (1987). As for Judith Butler’s phrase, I use it archly, since for Butler Lacanian psychoanalysis is the last place one should look for “a queer poststructuralism of the psyche.” My irony has at least one strong queer ally, however—namely, Tim Dean, who in Beyond Sexuality argues convincingly against Butler’s numerous misreadings of Lacan and persuasively for the thesis that “in its most fundamental formulations psychoanalysis is a queer theory” (2000: 268). We will be discussing poststructuralism and postmodernism in the next lesson and exploring queer theory in the last.