Changes

[[Lacan ]] summarizes his [[concept ]] of the function of [[metaphor ]] in [[Hugo]]'s line, "His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful." As you [[think ]] [[about ]] what Lacan has to say about the Hugo metaphor "sheaf" it may be helpful to think of "Manderley", the patriarchal estate which is the setting for [[Hitchcock]]'s <i>Rebecca</i> based on the Daphne Du Maurier story. Thus, Booz's sheaf is structurally analogous to Maxim's Manderley. In the story it is one of the "names-of-the-[[father]]", representing the [[symbolic]], yet Manderley is also eroticized for Maxim and, differently, for his nameless wife. To say that the sheaf is neither miserly nor spiteful is both a filling out of the metaphor and an ambiguous characterization of the [[object ]] of [[identification ]] which the sheaf stand's for. On the one hand, Lacan may be saying that the "gifts" of [[the symbolic ]] are indeed the [[terms ]] with which any fullness of [[life ]] must begin. Thus in one [[sense ]] the symbolic is neither miserly nor spiteful in what it makes possible as [[speech ]] opens up its signifying [[chain]]. On the [[other ]] hand, to say that Booz's sheaf is neither miserly nor spiteful is a feint, a mask of the repressive and punishing aspects of [[being ]] [[subject ]] to the [[signifier]], "the [[name]]-of-thefather." We can perhaps see the same ambiguity in Maxim's Manderley which "is all that anyone cares for down here." He saves Joan Fontaine's [[character ]] from Mrs. Van Hopper; smothers her with flowers; gives his servants extra pay in celebration of his new [[marriage]]; etc. etc. Yet all this "generosity" masks the repressive subjection which Manderley represents. Metaphor is Lacan's way of analyzing [[Freud]]'s [[notion ]] of the [[condensation ]] of the [[symbol]]. It provides the anchor for the [[agency ]] of the signifier's [[projection ]] of [[meaning]], while [[metonymy ]] which is not strictly a metaphor in that it does not [[work ]] on the basis of similarity, is the mode in which Lacan accounts for what Freud calls [[displacement]], the movement from one object to [[another ]] which is in some way closely associated with it. Yet live metonymy is also a figurative work in the [[signifying chain]]. For metonymy reshapes the teleological or purposive dynamics of the meaning which the metaphor anchors. Thus within the field of the agency of the [[letter]], "Manderley," FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF MAXIM'S DESIRE, a [[number ]] of different [[objects ]] may be said to take the relay of dominating the projection of meaning from one episode of the story to another. There are the portraits; there is the ball which he gives; Frank who manages the estate, and so on. Metaphor and metonymy may be read from both the side of his [[imaginary ]] as well as from the side of the [[real]]. In the Hitchcock setting, as in so many of course, the functions of metonymy and metaphor are embedded within patriarchal forms. It is important, though, to see the [[logical ]] [[structure ]] of these functions as much more [[universal]]. For Lacan, <i>whatever</i> the [[form ]] of the symbolic and [[the imaginary]]'s relation to it, the [[social ]] [[order ]] and the [[individual]]'s relation to it will have this conflictual, "[[dialectical]]," form.</p><p>We have been [[speaking ]] of a poetics of everyday life which [[psychoanalytical ]] [[discourse ]] helps us see. With metaphor and metonymy we are talking about what might be called the basic rhetorical dimensions of the signifying chain which enable something of that [[dimension ]] of "[[truth]]" to come to the fore. Metaphor and metonymy. Lacan introduces it as what he sometimes calls the [[paternal metaphor ]] for [[the agency of the letter]]. The father represents the [[symbolic order]], represents not in the sense of [[identity]], such that when L speaks of the father he is speaking of the symbolic. Rather, it is a matter of the one who stands in for, gives [[voice ]] to, enforces the symbolic order. As there will be many fathers with many names, the symbolic will be over [[time ]] given many names. But the [[mother ]] may also [[represent ]] the symbolic in [[particular ]] as we think about her dominant [[role ]] in intitiating the [[child ]] into [[language]]. The crucial [[thing ]] for us beyond Lacan's [[gender ]] stratification is that someone <i>must</i> [[speak ]] for the symbolic. In [[Saussurian ]] terms, the agency and originary [[claim ]] to [[authority ]] of <i>la [[langue]],</i> must be recognized. Otherwise there will be no speech at all; [[human ]] life as we [[know ]] it could not [[exist]]. But by the same token the human will not come to life except as each generation reenacts the [[mythical ]] [[murder ]] of the father, the one who (however [[good ]] a father) would make this law of the symbolic determinate and fixed. [On the other hand, if one must in some sense murder the father in order to truly live, one must live with having sacrificed the voice of the father in order to assert one's own.] And yet to speak of this father Lacan chooses Booz (Boas) of whom Hugo says, his sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful.</p><p><br>

What is the original and initiatory function, in human life, of the [[existence ]] of the symbol qua pure signifier? This question will be answered by asking another question. "What is a metaphor?" Notice that there is an interesting shift here. For on the one hand when we talk about the symbolic order we are talking about the function of speech as law. And yet to speak about the way in which this symbolic initiates us Lacan speaks not about rules, explict commands, etc. He speaks about metaphor.</p><p><br>

What defines a metaphor? It is not, as [[Aristotle ]] or Bossuet say, a [[latent ]] simile, comparison. Somehow this doesn't do justice to the creative aspect of a metaphor. For if metaphor were just a latent simile, it would always be something secondary, merely a tool, emotionally toned no [[doubt]], for exhibiting preexisting facts about the [[world]]. Still, a metaphor does appear to involve comparison in some way. If one says "the [[mind ]] is a computer," there is something stronger than comparison going on. There is an identification that one attempts to effect, the success of which, however, depends upon one's ability to bring features of computers to bear on what we think we know about the mind. The scary thing may be that a metaphor like this one may become so "successful," in reconstituting what we think of mind, that the metaphor becomes a kind of law. [[Nothing ]] will hereafter be recognized as legitimate [[theory]], research, about the mind unless it pursues the [[project ]] of [[identifying ]] it with a computer. Notice the masked way in which the [[representative ]] of the symbolic thus conceived does its work. It /he appears to provide a [[freedom ]] with one hand which it takes back with the other. You are free to deposit your own signifier in the field so long as it does not kill the father. So metaphor which we think of as such an [[agent ]] of [[creativity ]] may in the very spell which it seeks to cast come to effect a kind of [[repetition]], a [[death ]] [[instinct]], which may be escaped from only by killing the father. No, the earth is not the center of things, says [[Copernicus]], it is the sun. [Metonymy?] Other examples: [[nature ]] is an organism. The just [[state ]] is a contract. Let [[Russia ]] and its confederates become a union of soviets, a worker-state. Students are consumers. [[Psychoanalysis ]] is a poetics. The subject (Booz) is a sheaf. Maxim is Manderly. Rebecca is . . . We might say that in presenting itself as metaphor, the [[symbolic law ]] presents itself ripe for [[imaginary identification]], as that which is capable of [[satisfying ]] [[desire]], as [[phallus]]. </p><p>So the subject, Booz, <i>is</i> a sheaf (this "is" is the basic "is" of identification); and the sheaf is neither miserly not spiteful. Note that one of the [[meanings ]] of "sheaf" is phallus. So not only does the letter [[present ]] itself, its law, as phallus, in so presenting itself, it presents itself as neither miserly nor spiteful. The symbolic is generous and not vengeful. Rather like the father who gives Ovaltine to his daughter (the Clarice Lispector story, "Sunday After Breakfast"). Of course he does not often [[need ]] to be vengeful because she has already learned that there is a price to pay in not smiling at the father's gifts. His [[love ]] is conditional upon those gifts being accepted. (He is not the ideally good father in whom the ideally good mother participates.) In presenting itself in the person of the father as this generous and not vengeful phallus, the symbolic masks the [[violence ]] which it does when it institutes itself in a new metaphor. It represses the murder it took upon itself in order to establish itself as the new representative of the symbolic, the new [[name of the father]]. </p><p>Now what about metonymy? Let's try to speak of if apart from metaphor for a [[moment ]] and then we will see how the two may be blended, but also, conversely, separated. Metonymy is a figurative use of signfiers but it is not strictly a metaphor which, while it attempts to effect an identification, is successful only as certain similarities are said thereby to exist between the two terms. The [[metaphorical ]] identifcation, "The mind is a computer" works only if we can go on to sustain a similarity between the way the mind works and the operations of a computer. But metonymy is rearranging the purposive relationships, the teleological shape, of things. Take the ambiguous [[figure ]] of the duck-rabbit that Wittgenstein makes so much of in the <u>Investigations.</u> <br>

If one first sees this as a duck, to then see it as a rabbit takes something like an exercise of metonymy. What one sees as contiguous and as parts, the way in which they relate to the [[whole]], must be rearranged. This actually provides a good analogy for [[seeing ]] how metonymy and metaphor are related to each other for Lacan. It is in virtue of seeing parts and whole differently related that a figure/subject that is first [[identified ]] with a duck comes to be identifed with a rabbit. Take what comes closer perhaps to a pure [[case ]] of metonymy. If one takes a leather mitten that has been waterproofed to keep out the moisture and turns it [[inside ]] out to expose, to make salient, the soft cotton lining (a [[contingent ]] contiguity), one shifts the [[relationship ]] of container to contained and recasts the "meaning" of the object and its relationship to other objects. (One can imagine such a mitten within the context of a [[fetish]].) [[Children]], Lacan argues, are very good at this kind of play. (Artists too.) But we can imagine the play continuously [[displaced ]] without there being an identification with one particular shape of things, without the identification that says, finally, "It's a mitten" or "That [e.g. Manderley, a [[philosophy ]] professor, an advertising producer, a man, a [[woman]]] is me." </p><p>In metonymy one plays with articulation, the relationship between meaning and reference with a view to [[significance]], [[looking ]] at contiguities and making of [[them ]] something purposively different. A name for a part or contiguous object is made to <u>re-present</u> the whole, <i>not just stand for the whole but in some way to refigure the whole.</i> And if we go back to our duck-rabbit example, it looks as if metonymy might be the wedge that opens the door to the possibility of metaphorical reidentfication. One plays with the contiguities and suddenly what was duck may be seen as rabbit. The [[contingency ]] with which the world is given to us in life constantly forces us into such play. In <i>North-by-Northwest</i> Roger Thornhill first takes himself to be an advertising executive. He arranges the contiguities of his life with reference to this imaginary figure. Suddenly he is taken for George Kaplan, a ficticious [[government ]] agent. He spends most of the movie in the liminal [[space]], the terrifying space in which the accomplished and taken-for-granted meaningful articulations of his life are shaken up. Late in the movie, under the pressure of circumstances and his love for Rose he grudgingly becomes himself an American agent. One could hardly say that it is a role that he strongly [[identifies ]] with. Indeed the [[film ]] ends with him saving Rose from falling on the precipice of Mount Rushmore, which is transformed into him pulling her into bed with him, once more on a train, going where we don't know. One might say that in the end they finally escape from the determination of their desire by the various regions of the symbolic that [[capture ]] them throughout most of the film. The [[illusion ]] of pure metonymy? In a number of his books [[Baudrillard ]] makes the argument that we have lost the depth which comes from metaphorical identification, that we are [[left ]] to the play of metonymical displacement, endless [[substitution ]] of signifier for signifier. Under the mechanisms of an [[economy ]] of simulation, we lurch from one [[image ]] to another like the constant [[change ]] of manniquins in a store window. Indeed, [[capitalism ]] under an economy of simulation and [[simulacrum ]] grows at rates which are exponential with respect to earlier phases of capitalism. Superficiality is profitable. Metonymy without metaphor. </p><p>