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=The Primacy of the Signifier=
Lacan accepted the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign but questioned two of the fundamental premises of Saussurean linguistics: the indivisibility of the sign and the prioritization of the signified over the signifier. In a famous example from 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud' (1977c [1957]) Lacan dismisses the usual Saussurean illustration of the functioning of the sign, that is, the picture of a tree, and replaces it with another:
Lacan then proceeds to tell this story:
A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. 'Look', says the brother, 'we're at Ladies!'; 'Idiot!' replies his sister, 'Can't you see we're at Gentlemen'. (1977c [1957]: 152)
What this example reveals, argues Lacan, is the way in which the signifier enters the signified. The doors are identical, so what distinguishes one toilet door from the other is nothing except the signifier above the doors. What Lacan is proposing, therefore, is to reverse the priority Saussure bestowed upon the signified in the signifier/signified relation.
The capitalized Signifier takes precedence over the signified and the 'bar' between the two elements symbolizes, for Lacan, not the inseparability of the sign but its fundamental division. The bar functions as a barrier to meaning. What a signifier refers to is not a signified, as there is always a barrier between them, but to another signifier. In short, a signifier refers us to another signifier, which in turn refers us to another signifier in an almost endless chain of signification. If we try to define the meaning of a specific word or concept, for example, we can only do so through other words; we are caught in a continual process of producing signs.
Signification is always a process - a chain. None of its elements actually 'consist' of the meaning or the signified but rather each signifier 'insists' on a meaning, as it presses forward to the next signifier. Meaning is not fixed, or as Lacan puts it, there is 'an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier' (1977c [1957]: 154). Lacan, however, is not suggesting that there is no 'fixed' meaning at all. There are what he called 'anchoring points' or 'points de caption', where this incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier stops and allows for moments of stable signification. The point de caption literally designates an upholstery button of the kind one finds on sofas and mattresses and which are used to hold the stuffing in place. Saussure's 'scientific', as opposed to historical, analysis of language provided Lacan with a model to study Freud's 'talking-cure'. Saussure revealed how there was a 'structure' within us that governed what we say; for Lacan that structure is the unconscious. The unconscious is at once produced through language and governed by the rules of language. The precise mechanism through which this takes place was provided by Roman Jakobson.
==Roman Jakobson==
Jakobson took up Saussure's distinction between the two axes of language - the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic - and proposed a correspondence between these axes and the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is the use of a word or expression to describe something else without stating a direct comparison. Metonymy, on the other hand, is the use of a term for one thing applied to something else with which it is usually associated, for example, when one says 'crown' for the position of the monarch, or 'sail' to imply a boat. Jakobson pointed out that metaphor is an act of substitution of one term for another and thus corresponded to the paradigmatic axis, or the axis of selection. Metonymy is a relation of contiguity, in that one term refers to another because it is associated or adjacent to it, and therefore it corresponds to the syntagmatic axis, or the axis of combination. Lacan saw in Jakobson's structural model of metaphor and metonymy a direct correspondence with Freud's processes of dream work: condensation and displacement. Condensation designates the process whereby two or more signs or images in a dream are combined to form a composite image that is then invested with the meaning of both its constitutive elements. In persecutory dreams, for example, the dreamer may dream that they are being punished by an unknown authority figure and try to identify that figure with someone in their life. This figure may well in fact not be a single person, however, but a composite, or condensation, of a number of different persons - parental figures, employer or partner. All of the ambivalent feelings that the dreamer has around these figures combine into a single persecutor in the dream. Displacement describes the process through which meaning is transferred from one sign to another. Let us take the example of anxiety dreams. In anxiety dreams the dreamer may become anxious about some very minor incident in their lives, but this functions as simply a way of avoiding, or displacing, a much more serious problem that they are facing. These two processes are what Freud called primary processes in contrast to the secondary processes of conscious thought. By mapping Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy on to Freud's primary processes Lacan was finally able to demonstrate how the unconscious was structured like a language. The unconscious, he argued, operates according to the rules of metaphor and metonymy.
=The Symbolic Order=
