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=The Symbolic Order=
Throughout the 1950s Lacan was concerned with elaborating a system according to which everything in the human world is structured 'in accordance with the symbols which have emerged' (Lacan 1988b [1978]: 29). Lacan is not saying here that everything is reducible to the symbolic, but that, once symbols have appeared, everything will be ordered, or structured, in accordance with those symbols and the laws of the symbolic, including the unconscious and human subjectivity. For Freud, the unconscious is that part of our existence that escapes us and over which we have no control, but at the same time which governs our thoughts and wishes. For Lacan, on the other hand, the unconscious consists of signifying material. The unconscious is a process of signification that is beyond our control; it is the language that speaks through us rather than the language we speak. In this sense, Lacan defines the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. The big Other is language, the symbolic order; this Other can never be fully assimilated to the subject; it is a radical otherness which, nevertheless, forms the core of our unconscious. We will see how this works in the following chapter, but first let us look at Lacan's conception of the subject and how it is determined by the signifier.
Lacan conceived of the symbolic order as a totalizing concept in the sense that it marks the limit of the human universe. We are born into language - the language through which the desires of others are articulated and through which we are forced to articulate our own desire. We are locked within what Lacan calls a circuit of discourse:
It is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. It is the discourse of my father, for instance, in so far as my father made mistakes which I am condemned to reproduce…. I am condemned to reproduce them because I am obliged to pick up again the discourse he bequeathed to me, not simply because I am his son, but because one can't stop the chain of discourse, and it is precisely my duty to transmit it in its aberrant form to someone else. (Lacan 1988b [1978]: 89)
We are born into this circuit of discourse; it marks us before our birth and will continue after our death. To be fully human we are subjected to this symbolic order - the order of language, of discourse; we cannot escape it, although as a structure it escapes us. As individual subjects, we can never fully grasp the social or symbolic totality that constitutes the sum of our universe, but that totality has a structuring force upon us as subjects.
In the previous chapter we saw how Lacan distinguished between the ego and the subject. The ego is an 'imaginary function' formed primarily through the subject's relationship to their own body. The subject, on the other hand, is constituted in the symbolic order and is determined by language. There is always a disjunction, according to Lacan, between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance; in other words, the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken. Following the linguist Emile Benveniste's (1902-76) conception of 'I' as a shifter - as having no specific referent but in the act of speech designating the person who says 'I' - Lacan argued that the 'I' in speech does not refer to anything stable in language at all. The 'I' can be occupied by a number of different phenomena: the subject, the ego or the unconscious. For example, in what Lacan called 'empty speech', the 'I' would correspond to the ego; in 'full speech' it corresponds to the subject; while at other times it corresponds to neither subject nor ego. This is what Lacan means when he says I is an other, that is to say, 'I' is not 'me'; these two terms do not refer to the same entity; the subject is not the same as the individual person - it is decentred in relation to the individual. In short, Lacan de-essentializes the 'I' and prioritizes the symbolic, the signifier, over the subject. It is the structure of language that speaks the subject and not the other way around. Lacan summarizes this in his famous statement, the subject is that which is represented by one signifier to another. The seminar on The Purloined Letter is nothing less than an exposition of this, whereby the subject is caught up in the chain of signification and it is the signifier that marks the subject, that defines the subject's position within the symbolic order.
=''The Purloined Letter''=
Lacan's seminar on The Purloined Letter was first delivered in 1954. It was written up the following year and formed the introductory essay to the original French publication of the Écrits, although it was removed from later editions. As Benvenuto and Kennedy point out, placing the seminar on Poe at the beginning of the Écrits served a dual function: it both represented what was to follow and, more importantly, it established a particular mode of reading. In 'order to read Lacan, the story seems to be saying, one must follow the path of the signifier, and the remainder of Écrits is fundamentally concerned with the laws of the signifier' (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986:23-4). The 1954-5 seminar series was given the overall title The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis and concerned Freud's late metapsychological text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1984b [1920]). Lacan was primarily concerned with Freud's idea of repetition compulsion, that is, the compulsive urge to repeat unpleasant experiences in apparent disregard of the pleasure principle. Lacan called this process 'repetition automatism' and associated it with his idea of the insistence of the signifying chain. Lacan's seminar on The Purloined Letter is an illustration of this thesis, that is, the insistence of the signifying chain and the determination of the subject by the signifier.
Edgar Allan Poe's (1809-49) short story The Purloined Letter was the final tale in a trilogy about the detective, M. Dupin. The story concerns the theft of a letter from the Queen by one of the King's Ministers and the search for this letter first, unsuccessfully, by the police and then, successfully, by Dupin. The twist in Poe's story is that the letter is in fact never hidden but always in full disclosure. According to Lacan, the tale can be divided into two scenes. In the first, a letter is delivered to the Queen in the presence of the King and the Minister and the Queen leaves the unopened letter on the table in front of everyone. The Minister immediately realizes the incriminating nature of the letter and picks it up off the table, leaving the Queen unable to ask for its return without alerting the King to its importance. The police secretly search for the letter but are unable to find it because they assume that the Minister has hidden it, whereas he has also left the letter on open display in a letter rack hanging from his mantelpiece. In the second scene, we have a repetition of the first, but now the Minister possesses the letter, the police are in the position of not being able to see what is directly under their noses and Dupin is able to see the significance of the now disguised letter openly hanging from the mantelpiece.
Lacan's interpretation of Poe's story focuses upon two main themes: first, the anonymous nature of the letter, which for Lacan serves as the 'true subject' of the story, and, second, the pattern of intersubjective relationships that are repeated in the tale. The reader knows nothing about the letter except that the original script was in a male hand and that it will compromise the Queen if the King knows of its contents. As the letter passes from hand to hand - from Queen to Minister, Minister to Dupin, Dupin to Prefect of Police, Prefect of Police back to Queen - it forms a 'symbolic pact', situating each person who possess it within a chain of symbolic relations. Furthermore, the tale duplicates the relationships between the Queen, King and Minister in the first half of the tale with the relationships between the Minister, Prefect of Police and Dupin in the second. These rotating positions, or intersubjective relationships, pivot around the shifting position of the letter itself. As the content remains unknown throughout this process of symbolic exchange, we can also say that the letter is a signifier without a signified.
According to Lacan, the various subject positions in the tale can be defined by three distinct forms of 'glance' or 'gaze'. The first glance is the glance that sees nothing, that is to say, the position of the King in the first scene and the police in the second. This, then, can also be seen as the position of the law - the law as blind. The second glance is the glance that 'sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides' (1988c [1956]: 32). This is the position of the Queen in the first scene and the Minister in the second. The third glance is the glance that 'sees that the first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it' (1988c [1956]: 32). This is the position occupied formerly by the Minister and latterly Dupin. We have then a duplicate triangular structure:
For Lacan, The Purloined Letter is a precise illustration of his idea that it is the signifier (the letter) that determines the subject. What he is proposing, in fact, is a correlation between the three subject positions he identifies in the story and his three orders or registers: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, which we can represent thus:
Lacan observes that the King and 'the detectives have so immutable a notion of the real' (1988c [1956]: 39) that they fail to notice what is beneath their very noses. This is what Lacan calls the 'realist's imbecility' or a naive empiricism that thinks that the world is given and we have a direct, unmediated, relationship to it. The second position is that of the seer. In this position the subject sees both that the first position is blind and unaware of what is happening and that the third position is fully aware of what is unfolding and therefore holds the power. But in this position the subject believes that what is hidden (the secrets of the letter) can remain hidden and therefore 'delude' him/herself that it is they who possess the signifier (the letter). In the second position, then, the subject occupies an essentially narcissistic relation to the letter and this corresponds to the imaginary phase we outlined in the previous chapter. The third position is symbolic and in this position the subject 'discerns the role of structure in the situation and acts accordingly' (Muller and Richardson 1988:63). This is the position of the Minister in the first scene and Dupin in the second. Both figures can see what is taking place in front of them, they understand the implications of the letter, and moreover they know how to act. This is the position of the subject in the symbolic order; a subject who understands their situation within a larger structure and the function of that structure in determining their actions.
First the Queen and then the Minister believe they can possess the letter and keep it hidden. Lacan, however, argues that it is the letter (the signifier) that possesses the subject; it is the signifier that inscribes the subject in the symbolic order. When the Minister takes and hides the letter he readdresses it to himself, but in doing so he changes the masculine script of the original to a feminine one. Thus, suggests Lacan, he is caught up 'in the dynamics of repetition that drag him into the second position' (Muller and Richardson 1988:63). Similarly, Dupin cannot resist leaving his signature on his own replacement letter and in doing so he is immediately dragged into the second narcissistic position. As Lacan puts it, 'Dupin, from the place he now occupies, cannot help feeling a rage of manifestly feminine nature' (1988c [1956]: 51). In leaving a cryptic message on his letter Dupin is taking revenge on the Minister for a past slight, but at the same time he is giving up his position as a detached analyst or observer. The subject is caught up by the signifier and situated in a chain of signification through a continual process of repetition. 'This is the very effect', writes Lacan, 'of the unconscious in the precise sense we teach that the unconscious means that man is inhabited by the signifier' (1988c [1956]: 48). The subject does not exist outside the signifying chain but rather in-sists within it. The letter is a floating signifier that passes along the signifying chain with each person unconscious of the full import of what is taking place.
=Summary=
The 1950s were a period of extraordinary innovation for Lacan. Through the influence of the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, Lacan developed his central notion of the symbolic order and the subject as subject of the signifier. This facilitated Lacan's break with traditional psychoanalysis and paved the way for his major innovation - the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. In the following chapter we will see what Lacan means by this as well as what distinguishes the Lacanian from the Freudian unconscious and how the emphasis of his work changes from the mid-1960s onwards.
