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| − | Since the symbolic order is necessarily so central to any language
| + | [[Language]] occupies an important position in [[Lacanian psychoanalysis]], usually regarded as its most distinctive feature. |
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| − | its conceptual genealogy, the sources upon which Lacan drew for his basic formulations of the symbolic’s structure and functions.
| + | ==Language as a Structure== |
| | + | The word '[[language]]' used by [[Jacques Lacan]] refers to the general [[structure]] of [[language]], that is, the [[system]] of [[language]] in general, abstracting from all particular [[language]]s. |
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| | + | [[Jacques Lacan]] is concerned with the general [[structure]] of [[language]] (the [[system]] of [[language]] in general) (''langage''), (rather than the differences between particular languages (''langues'')). |
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| | + | ==Development in Lacan's Thought== |
| | + | Four broad phases can be discerned in the long process of [[development]] in [[Lacan]]'s thinking on the nature of [[language]]. |
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| − | the [[structural anthropology]] of [[Marcel Mauss]] and [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
| + | ===ONE=== |
| | + | [[Lacan]] argues that [[language]] is constitutive of the [[psychoanalytic experience]].<ref>{{Ec}} p.82</ref> |
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| − | whose conceptions of society and social functions as [[symbolic]] [[structure]]s and functions form the ground on which Lacan erected his conception of a symbolic order (Evans 201).
| + | [[Language]], understood in terms derived from [[Hegel]] rather than [[linguistic theory]], is a mediating element which permits the [[subject]] to attain recognition from the other. |
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| | + | [[Language]] is first and foremost an appeal to an interlocutor. |
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| | + | ===Language and Structure== |
| | + | Lacan's discussion of language contains references to Heideggerian phenomenology and to the anthropology of language (Mauss, Malinowski and Levi-Strauss). |
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| − | More than simply borrowing the concept of a symbolic function from Lévi-Strauss and Mauss, however, Lacan adapted wholesale the informing principles of their approach, "prais[ing] Marcel Mauss for having shown that ‘the structures of society are symbolic’" (Evans 201) in the body of his most famous collection of work, Écrits.
| + | [[Language]] is seen as [[structuring]] the [[social]] [[law]]s of [[exchange]], as a [[symbolic]] [[pact]], etc. |
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| − | This open acknowledgment of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss as influences both broadens our understanding of how Lacan conceived of the symbolic order and opens the way for considering other important points of reference in situating it.
| + | In his famous [[Rome Discourse]] [[Lacan]] posits a basic opposition between ''[[parole]]'' and ''[[langage]]''. (see [[speech]]) |
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| − | Indeed, it is precisely in Lacan’s adaptation of Lévi-Strauss that we find Ferdinand de Saussure, the next major influence on the conception of the symbolic:
| + | [[Lacan]] refers to [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] and [[Roman Jakobson]]. |
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| − | Lacan takes from Lévi-Strauss the idea that the social world is structured by certain laws which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts (see also Mauss, 1923). | + | Following [[Sassure]], [[Lacan]] argues that [[language]] is a structure composed of differential elements. |
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| − | The concept of the gift, and that of a circuit of exchange, are thus fundamental to Lacan’s concept of the symbolic (S4, 153-4, 182).
| + | [[Language]] becomes for [[Lacan]] the single paradigm of all [[structure]]. |
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| | + | ===Lacan and Language=== |
| | + | [[Lacan]] proceeds to critcize the [[Saussure]]an concept of [[language]]. |
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| | + | [[Lacan]] argues that the basic unit of [[language]] is not the [[sign]] but the [[signifier]]. |
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| − | Since the most basic form of exchange is communication itself (the exchange of words, the gift of speech; S4, 189), and since the concepts of law and of structure are unthinkable without language, the symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension.
| + | [[Lacan]] argues that the [[unconscious]] is, like [[language]], a [[structure]] of [[signifier]]s. |
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| − | (Evans 201)
| + | [[Lacan]] asserts that "the unconscious is structured like a language."<ref>{{S11}} p.20</ref> |
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| − | Lacan’s conception of the symbolic as "essentially a linguistic dimension" draws heavily on Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified such that the symbolic is the realm of the signifier while the imaginary is the realm of the signified.
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| − | The key aspect of Saussure’s conception of this relationship is that the link between any given signifier and signified is arbitrary.
| + | Lacan can formulate the category of the symbolic with greater precision. |
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| − | Signifiers only gain value (i.
| + | In 1969 Lacan develops a concept of discourse as a kind of social bond. |
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| − | e.
| + | ===''Lalangue''=== |
| | + | [[Lacan]] coins the term ''[[lalangue]]'' to refer to non-communicative aspects of [[language]] which, by playing on ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a kind of''[[jouissance]]''.<ref>{{S20}} p.126</ref> |
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| − | content or a claim to a particular signified) in the process of opposition and relation to other signifiers.
| + | All [[human]] [[communication]] is inscribed in a [[linguistic]] [[structure]]. |
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| − | Since the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, the only way any kind of stability can be obtained is if the signifier habitually associated with a particular signified retains its claim through a process of differentiation not from other signifieds, but from other signifiers – it asserts its claim to meaning not by declaring a positive connection to the signified, but by declaring a negative relationship to all other signifiers.
| + | The whole [[aim]] of [[psychoanalytic]] [[treatment]] is to articulate the [[truth]] of one's [[desire]] in [[speech]] rather than in any other medium. |
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| − | 16 And since direct access to the signified (the imaginary) of any given signifier is either impossible or incommunicable, we are restricted to the endless play of signifiers as we try to use language to manage our world, an approach which is suprisingly effective given the arbitrariness of the signifier/signified connection in any given instance.
| + | The [[fundamental rule]] of [[psychoanalysis]] is based on the principle that [[speech]] is the only way to this [[truth]]. |
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| − | 17 Lacan’s conception of the symbolic, though it is informed by this concept in its totality, focuses on the realm of the signifier, locating the signified in the imaginary and that which is excluded from this binary in the real.
| + | [[Speech]] is the only tool which the [[analyst]] has. |
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| − | [[Jacques Lacan]] is most famous for his attempt to formalize [[psychoanalysis]]. | |
| − | [[Jacques Lacan]] laid an emphasis on [[language]] in his attempt to formalize [[psychoanalysis]].
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| − | [[Jacques Lacan]] describes the [[unconscious]] as a kind of [[discourse]]: the [[discourse of the Other]].
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| − | [[Jacques Lacan]] argued that [[castration]] is a decisive moment in the [[development]] of the [[speaking]] [[subject]].
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| − | Freud repeatedly described symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic phenomena capable of interpretation.
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| − | The third is Lacan's desire to try to understand the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative procedure that relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay Analysis the 'magical' power of the word.
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| − | Lacan allocated language such importance was touched upon.
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| − | For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social collective.
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| − | By contrast, individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan stresses (in line with a vast wealth of psychological research), are prone to characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and inabilities.
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| − | Already from this, then, we can outline a first crucial feature of Lacan's 'philosophy of language'.
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| − | Like the later Wittgenstein, Lacan’s position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of rules or laws for the use and combination of words.
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| − | Accordingly, for him too, 'learning is based on believing' [Wittgenstein].
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| − | Particularly, Lacan asserts a lasting link between the capacity of a subject to perceive the world as a set of discrete identifiable objects, and his/her acceptance of the unconditional authority of a body of convention.
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| − | I will return to this below.
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| − | Back to Table of Contents
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| − | b.
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| − | Psychoanalysis as Interpretation: the Unconscious Structured Like a Language
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| − | Lacan's contention concerning human-being as a parle-etre, put most broadly, is that when the subject learns its mother tongue, everything from its sense of how the world is, to the way it experiences its biological body, are over-determined by its accession to this order of language.
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| − | This is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan owes to phenomenology.
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| − | From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a subject is to experience the world as a meaningful totality, and that language is crucial to this capability.
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| − | Aligning Freud with the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that 'lives' through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities.
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| − | For Lacan, that is, 'the unconscious' does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness.
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| − | It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and 'external' objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.
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| − | Freud had already commented in the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be compared to a language without a grammar.
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| − | Lacan, using structuralist linguistics, attempted to systematise this contention, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that 'it speaks'/ ca parle.
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| − | A symptom, Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of embodied corporeal metaphor.
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| − | As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the consciously accepted self-conception and values of the subject.
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| − | This desire, if it is to gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be expressed indirectly.
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| − | For example, a residual infantile desire to masturbate may find satisfaction indirectly in a compulsive ritual the subject feels compelled to repeat.
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| − | Just as one might metaphorically describe one's love as a rose, Lacan argues, here we have a repressed desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently dissimilar bodily activity.
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| − | Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's papers "On the Psychology of Love", Lacan argues that desire is structured as a metonymy.
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| − | In metonymy, one designates a whole object (eg: a car) by naming one part of it (eg: 'a set of wheels').
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| − | Lacan’s argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have the same hair, or look at him/her the same way the mother did …).
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| − | According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language into which the subject has been inducted (what he calls 'the battery of the signifier') to give indirect vent to the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow.
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| − | Lacan's Freudian argument is that a directly comparable process occurs in formations of the unconscious as in jokes.
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| − | As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the 'punch line’ of jokes pack their punch by condensing in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning.
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| − | The first of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our shared norms for interpretation, lead us to expect.
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| − | The second is a wholly different chain of associations, whose clash with what we had expected produces our sense of amusement.
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| − | In the same way, Lacan observed that, for example, when an analysand makes a 'slip of the tongue', what has taken place is that the unconscious has employed such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense, etc.
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| − | , to intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did not intend, but through which his unconscious desire is given indirect expression.
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| − | Lacan argues that what the consideration of jokes, symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is that human beings form sense in language.
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| − | The first thing is that the sentence is the absolutely basal unit of meaning.
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| − | Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain.
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| − | It is only when the sentence is completed that their sense is fixed, or- as Lacan variously put it- 'quilted'.
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| − | Before this time, they are what he calls floating signifiers, like to the leading premises of a joke.
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| − | The sense of this position can be easily demonstrated.
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| − | One need only begin a sentence by proferring a subject, but then cease speaking before a verb and/or predicate is assigned to this in accordance with linguistic convention.
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| − | For example, if I say: 'when I was young I…' or ‘it’s not like …’, my interlocutor will be understandably want to know what it is that I mean.
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| − | At the end of the sentence, by contrast, the sense of the beginning words becomes clear, as when I finish the first of the above utterances by saying 'when I was young I ran a lot', or whatever.
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| − | This understanding of sentences as the basic unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers 'float' until any given sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan's emphasis on the future anterior tense.
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| − | Sense, he argues, is always something that 'will have been'.
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| − | It is anticipated but not confirmed, when we hear uttered the beginning of a sentence (see transference below).
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| − | Or else, at sentence's end, it is something that we now see with the benefit of ’twenty twenty hindsight’ to have been intended all along.
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| − | This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan even quips that the meaning of symptoms do not come from the past, but from the future.
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| − | Before the work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier, whose meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst.
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| − | As the analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some later time that casts the whole behaviour into relief in a wholly different light, and makes its sense clear.
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| − | Back to Table of Contents
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| − | c.
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| − | The Curative Efficacy of the 'Talking Cure'
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| − | Lacan's emphasis on language is also over-determined by an elementary recollection that, if Freud’s intervention promised anything, it is that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental illness.
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| − | The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations of these behaviours that retrospectively make their meaning clear.
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| − | And this is not simply an intellectual exercise.
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| − | As Freud stressed, there is knowledge of the unconscious, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon it.
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| − | A successful psychoanalytic interpretation is one that has effects even upon the biological reality of the body, changing the subject's bearing towards the world, and dissolving his/her symptoms.
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| − | The need to explain this power of words and language is a clear and lasting motive behind Lacan's understanding of language.
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| − | His central and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the following way.
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| − | In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make itself manifest.
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| − | The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else repeated in the way the subject responds to the analyst in the sessions.
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| − | Then an interpretation is offered by the analyst, which recognises or symbolises the force of the desire at work in the symptom, and the symptom disappears.
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| − | So here the recognition of a desire at the same time satisfies the desire.
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| − | What this can accordingly only mean is that the unconscious desire given voice in the symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part a desire for recognition.
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| − | This is an absolutely central Lacanian insight, wherein he again shows the influence of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit upon his most central concepts.
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| − | It synchronises exactly with the philosophical anthropology recounted above, and Lacan's stricture concerning how human desire is always caught up in the dialectics of individuals’ exchanges with others.
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| − | But, for Lacan, it also shows something vital about the language in or as which the subjects' repressed desires are trying to find a vent.
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| − | This is that language is above all a social pact.
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| − | As Lacan wrote in the Ecrits: "As a rule everyone knows that others will remain, like himself, inaccessible to the constraints of reason, outside an acceptance in principle of a rule of debate that does not come into force without an explicit or implicit agreement as to what is called its basis, which is almost always tantamount to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake.
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| − | I shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except the good faith of the Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think fit or if I am forced to, only to amuse bad faith.
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| − | " [Lacan, 2001: 154-155]
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| − | The [[true]] [[meaning]] of a [[statement]] will be registered in the [[big Other]].
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| − | The big Other is the place, tribunal, collective or single person which we presuppose will register the truth of what we say, whenever we speak.
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| − | [[Meaning]] is not formed prior to the communicative act.
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| − | [[Jacques Lacan]] defines [[speech]] as a process in which the [[subject]] receives its [[meaning]] back from the [[Other]] in an [[inverted form]].
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| − | In [[psychoanalytic]] [[interpretation]], the [[meaning]] of a [[symptom]] is rendered by the [[analyst]].
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| − | The symptom not only bears upon the subject's past relations to others.
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| − | If it can be dissolved by an Other’s interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start.
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| − | To quote Slavoj Zizek on this Lacanian notion of how the symptom is from the start addressed to an Other supposed to know its truth: "The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of 'prolongation of communication by other means': the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.
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| − | The implication of this is that the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, formed with an eye to its interpretation … in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always addressed to the analyst, it is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden message … This … is the basic point: in its very constitution, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning …" [Zizek, 1989: 73] Even the key meaning of transference, for Lacan, is this supposition that there is an Other supposed to know the truth of my communicative acts, even down to the most apparently meaningless 'slips' and symptomatic behaviours.
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| − | In terms of the previous section, transference is the condition of possibility for the quilting of the meaning of floating signifiers that occurs even in the most basic sentences, as we saw.
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| − | What occurs in a psychoanalytic interpretation is simply one more consequential version of this process.
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| − | The subject, by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to know her/his truth, and at the end of this process, the signifiers he offers to the Other are quilted, and return to him 'in an inverted form'.
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| − | What has occurred at this point, on Lacan's reckoning, is that the previously unquilted signifiers finding voice in the manifestations of his unconscious are integrated into the subject's symbolic universe: the way s/he understands the world, in the terms of his/her community's natural language.
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| − | They have been subjectivised; which means that now s/he can recognise them as not wholly alien intrusions into his/her identity, but an integral part of this identity.
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| − | Lacan's stress is thus always, when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretation, that this interpretation does not add new content to the subject's self-understanding, so much as affect the form of this understanding.
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| − | An interpretation, that is, realigns the way the s/he sees her past, reordering the signifiers in which his/her self-understanding has come to be ordered.
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| − | A crucial Lacanian category in theorising this process is that of the 'master signifier'.
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| − | Master signifiers are those signifiers to which a subject's identity are most intimately bound.
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| − | Standard examples are words like 'Australian’, 'democrat', ‘decency’, ‘genuineness’.
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| − | They are words which will typically be proffered by subjects as naming something like what Kant would have called ends in themselves.
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| − | They designate values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet.
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| − | Lacan's understanding of how these 'master signifiers’ function is a multi-layered one, as I shall expand in Part 3.
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| − | It is certainly true to say, though, that the importance of these signifiers comes from how a subject's identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the signifiers.
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| − | For example, if someone identifies himself as a 'communist', the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a 'liberal'.
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| − | ‘Freedom’ for him comes to mean ‘freedom from the exploitative practices enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath liberal ideological rhetoric'.
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| − | 'Democracy’ comes to mean ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat'.
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| − | 'Equality’ comes to mean something like ‘what ensues once the sham of the capitalist "equal right to trade" is unmasked'.
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| − | What Lacan argues is involved in the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new 'master signifiers’ which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and of their relations to others.
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| − | Previously, for example, a person may have identified with a conception of 'decency' that has led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup, which then return in neurotic symptoms.
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| − | What analysis will properly lead him to do is identify himself with a different set of 'master signifiers', which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.
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| | + | Any [[analyst]] who does not understand the way [[speech]] and [[language]] work does not understand [[psychoanalysis]]. |
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| | ==References== | | ==References== |
| | <references/> | | <references/> |
| | + | # Language: 12, 24-5, 33, 44-5, 71, 83, 118, 119, as system, 38, 40 (35, 37) |
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