The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious--Jacques Lacan

The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious

Summary of the essay—Lecture notes by S. Sreekumar

                       PART II

“The Insistence of the letter in the Unconscious” was originally delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1957.

David Lodge writes about the apparent difficulty of understanding Lacan thus:

“Lacan was a notoriously, wilfully difficult writer, and the present editor (Lodge himself) certainly does not claim fully to understand everything in this essay. The algebraic formulae for metaphor and metonymy, for instance, seem designed to mystify and intimidate rather than to shed light.”

Summary of the essay

Psychoanalysis aims to understand and, if possible, cure the disturbances caused by the pressure of the unconscious upon conscious existence as manifested by neurotic symptoms, dreams etc. Orthodox Freudian doctrine views the unconscious as chaotic, primordial, instinctual, preverbal. Lacan’s most celebrated dictum is: “the unconscious is structured like a language”.

This means that psychoanalysis as a discipline must borrow the methods and concepts of modern linguistics. He also aims at a critique of modern linguistics from a psychoanalytic vantage point.

At the outset of the essay Lacan questions Saussure’s assumption that there is nothing problematic about the bond between the signifier and the signified in a verbal sign. He provides us an example—the two signifiers ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ may refer to the same signified, or be interpreted as apparently contradictory place names.

Language, the signifying chain has a life of its own which cannot be easily anchored to a world of things.

Language system can be represented thus:

Signifier   Signifier   Signifier   Signifier

signified       signified       signified       signified

Signification is always a process——a chain. None of the elements actually ‘consist’ of the meaning. Each signifier ‘insists’ on a meaning, as it presses forward to the next signifier. Meaning is not fixed. “There is a perpetual sliding of the ‘signified’ under the ‘signifier’ [this is an idea borrowed from deconstruction]

“No meaning is sustained by anything other than reference to another meaning”

Lacan’s other principal borrowing from modern linguistics was Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Lacan identifies these with Freud’s categories of condensation and displacement.

Metaphor = condensation

Metonymy = displacement

He identifies neurotic symptoms with metaphor and desire with metonymy.

Lacan’s points: “The other points that emerge from this dazzling, wayward, teasing discourse” are:

♣   There is no getting outside language,

♣   Language is innately figurative,

♣   It is not transparently referential,

♣   Human subject is constituted precisely by the entry into language,

♣   The Christian – humanist idea of an autonomous individual self or soul that transcends the limits of language is a fallacy and an illusion

DETAILED SUMMARY

The essay has 3 parts.

1. The meaning of the letter,

2. The letter in the Unconscious, and

3. Being, the letter and the other.

1

. The meaning of the letter.

The psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language. The unconscious is not merely the seat of instincts.

‘Letter’ is the material support which concrete subject borrows from the language.

Language must not be confused with the different psychic and somatic functions “which serve it in the individual speaker”. [somatic= relating to the body of an organism]

Language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each individual at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it.

The speaking subject is a slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal moment of which he finds himself at birth , even if only by dint of his proper name.

‘Substance of the discourse’ is not ‘the experience of the community’. This experience is founded in the tradition created by the discourse itself. The drama of history is written into this tradition. But before that it creates the elementary structure of culture.

The ethnographic duality of nature and culture [refer to Claude Levi Strauss’s ‘nature-culture binary’ (on incest prohibition) which he calls a ‘scandal’] is giving way to a ternary conception of the human condition: nature, society and culture. The last term could well be equated to language, or that which essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies.

The science of Linguistics, as in the case of all the other sciences is based on a formula which is its foundation. The formula is   S/s which means the 

signifier over the signified. Lacan gives the credit of discovering this formula to Saussure although it is not found in that form in any of Saussure’s lectures.

The beginning of modern linguistics can be recognized in this formula. The signifier and the signified are seen as different orders. The arbitrariness of the sign was known even to the ancients.  

                                               

“…no meaning is sustained by anything other than reference to another meaning”.

All languages that exist can cover the whole field of the signified. It being an effect of its existence as a language that it necessarily covers all the needs.

Lacan illustrates the classical use of S/s thus:

                 TREE                                                           

         

          

Lacan replaces this with another:

L

Lacan explains this as “the solitary confinement offered” to “Western Man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative he shares with the great majority of primitive communities which submits his public life to the laws of urinary segregation”.

A little boy and a little girl seated in a train pulling to a stop mistake the signs for the name of the station. 

Lacan’s views on the signifier:

►   The structure of the signifier — reduced to ultimate distinctive features and combining according to the laws of a closed system.

►   The signifying chain – rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings.

►   Only the correlations between signifier and signifier supply the standard for all research into meaning, as is indicated by the very notion of ‘usage’.

►   The signifier always anticipates on meaning by unfolding its dimension before it. e.g. “I shall never…”, “All the same it is…”, “And yet there may be…” Such sentences are not without meaning, a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.

►   It is in the chain of signifiers that the meaning ‘insists’ but none of its elements ‘consists’ in the meaning of which is at the moment possible.

►   There is an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.

Saussure holds linearity to be constitutive of the chain of discourse—emission of a single voice, horizontal position of our writing. Lacan says that linearity is not sufficient—apply to the chain of discourse in the direction in which it is oriented—‘Peter hits Paul” reverses its time when the terms are inverted.

One has to listen to poetry to hear a true polyphony emerge. All discourse aligns itself along the several staves of a score. [See notes 1]. Signifying chains are suspended vertically.

Tree—see how it crosses the Saussurian formula: the meaning its takes on in the context of our flora (strength and majesty), it erects on the barren hill the shadow of the cross ², tree of life, tree of knowledge etc.

The structure of the signifying chain makes evident the possibility that is insofar as it exists as a language, to use it in order to say something quite other than what it says.

Lacan says that the signifier makes meaning in 2 ways.

Metonymy and Metaphor.

Metonymy  [See notes³] ‘Thirty sails’—the word ‘boat’ is lurking behind—the part taken for the whole—if we take it seriously we are left with very little idea about the importance of this fleet—each boat to have one sail is the least likely possibility. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN BOAT AND SAIL IS NOWHERE BUT IN THE SIGNIFIER—this is the word to word connection that metonymy is based. Metonymy is one slope of the effective field of the signifier in the constitution of meaning.

The other slope is the metaphor^3a.  “His sheaves were not miserly or spiteful”. In modern poetry the conjunction of any two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor—additional requirement of the greatest disparity of the images signified, needed for the production of the poetic spark. The creative spark of the metaphor does not spring form the conjunction of two images, that is of two signifiers equally actualized. It springs from two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the hidden signifier then remaining present through its metonymic relation to the rest of the chain. ONE WORD FOR ANOTHER :THAT IS THE FORMULA FOR THE METAPHOR. [sheaves have replaced Booz,  the hero of the French poem quoted above. They have replaced him at the very spot where he has to be exalted—but now Booz himself has been swept away by the sheaves—sheaves have usurped his place—Booz can no longer return—the slender thread of the word ‘his’ which binds him to it is only one more obstacle to his return—it links him to the notion of possession which retains him to the very zone of greed and spite—his generosity is reduced to less than nothing by the munificence of the sheaves which, coming from nature, know not our caution or our casting out and in their accumulation remain prodigal by our standards—the giver has disappeared along with his gift—to rise again in the context of the burgeoning fecundity—this is what announces the surprise the poem sings, the promise the old man will receive in a sacred context of his accession to paternity]

So it is between the signifier in the form of the proper name of the man, and the signifier which metabolically abolishes him that the poetic spark is produced.

Metaphor occurs at the same moment at which sense comes out of nonsense.  nonsenseà sense. If crossed the other way [senseà nonsense] it becomes ‘wit’. At this frontier we can glimpse at the fact that man tempts his very destiny when he derides the signifier.

The spirit could not live without the letter. The letter can produce all the effects of truth in man without involving the spirit at all. Freud had this revelation—he called this discovery ‘the Unconscious’.

2.

 THE LETTER IN THE UNCONSCIOUS.

Freud depends too much on philological references—the proportion of linguistic analysis increasing just insofar as the unconscious is directly concerned. In The Interpretation of Dreams   every page deals with the letter of the discourse. It is with this work that Freud begins to open the royal road to the unconscious.

►   The first chapter announces that the dream is a rebus⁴. [notes]. Freud stipulates that it must be understood literally. The same literal structure persists in the dream through which the signifier in ordinary discourse is articulated and analyzed.

►   So the unnatural images of the boat on the roof, or with the man with a comma for the head which are specifically mentioned by Freud are examples of dream- images which have significance only as signifiers, insofar as they allow us to spell out the ‘proverb’ presented by the rebus of the dream.

Distortion is the general precondition for the functioning of dreams. It is the sliding of the signifier under the signified as Saussure said.

The two slopes of the signified are also found here:

Condensation is the structure of the superimposition of the signifiers. This is the field of the metaphor.

Displacement is seen in metonymy. [see notes⁵]

Lacan says that dreams are useful to the analysis because they reveal the same laws whether in the normal person or in the neurotic. Psychoanalysis demonstrates that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its scope.

The locus of the unconscious

It is very close to the locus defined by the formula S/s. The incidence (occurrence) of the signifier on the signified suggests its transformation into:

F (S) 1/s

    

The horizontal signifying line—metonymy—can be symbolised thus:

f.(S…S’) S  S      (-) s    This means that the connection between the signifier and signifier which permits elision (omission). The signifier inserts the lack of being into the object relation using the reverberating character of meaning to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports. The line – between ( ) represents the retention of the line in the original formula marked the irreducibility in which, in the relations between the signifier and the signified, the resistance of meaning is constituted.

Metaphoric structure—vertical signifying line—metaphor—can be symbolised thus:

               

            f.   ( S’/S)   S    S (+)s

   

This indicates that it is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that an effect of signification is produced which is creative or poetic, which is the advent of the signification in question. The sign + between ( ) represents the leap over the line.

►   ‘I think therefore I am’^{6 [see notes]}

Cogito ergo sum

This is the link between the transcendental subject and his existential affirmation. Perhaps I am only object and mechanism and so nothing more than phenomenon, but assuredly insofar as I think so, I am absolutely. No doubt philosophers have made important corrections on this formulation, notably that in that which thinks, I can never pose myself as anything but object. None the less it remains true that by way of this extreme purification of the transcendental subject, my existential link to its project seems irrefutable at least in its present form, and that:

►   ‘I think, therefore I am’ where I think, there I am’—

Cogito ergo sum ubi cogito, ibi sum

overcomes this objection. This confirms me to being there in my being only insofar as I think that I am in my thought; just how far I actually think this concerns only myself and if I say it, interests no one.

I think where I am not; therefore I am where I think not.

A man only deludes himself when he believes his true place is at the axis of S and S, which is no where. Was no where, that is, until Freud discovered it.

Symptom (in the analytic sense) and metaphor

] Between the enigmatic signifier of a sexual trauma and its substitute term in a signifying chain there passes the spark which fixes in a symptom the meaning inaccessible to the conscious subject.

] This symptom is in effect a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as signifying elements.

►   Desire and metonymy.

] Eternally stretching forth for the desire of something else—metonymy.

] It is the truth of what this desire was in its history which the patient cries out through this symptom.

è To interpret the unconscious as Freud did, one would have to be as he was an encyclopedia of the arts and muses.

è The task is not made easier by the fact that we are at the mercy of a thread woven with allusions, quotations, puns, and equivocations.

è The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier.

3.

Being, the letter and the other.

Is what thinks in my place another I? Does Freud’s discovery represent the confirmation on the psychological level of Manicheism? ^{7[see notes]}

] The end which Freud’s theory proposes for man was defined by him at the summit of his thought thus: “I must come to the place where that (id) was.” The goal is one of reintegration and harmony, even of reconciliation.

►   We cannot ignore the self’s radical ex – centricity to itself. Man has to face this reality. This is the truth discovered by Freud. Within man there is a radical heteronomy [het·er·o·nym either of two or more words that are spelled the same, but differ in meaning and often in pronunciation, for example, “bow” (a ribbon) and “bow” (of a ship) –two meanings, two personalities] gaping within man can never again be covered.

►   “Then who is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the heart of my assent to may own identity it is still he who wags me?”

The presence of the other is a second degree of otherness. It is the position of mediating between me and the double of my self, as it were my neighbor.  The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

Freudianism has founded a radical revolution. No need to collect witness to the fact. [Francois Mauriac—history of our body—to write the history of oneself is to write the confession of the deepest part of our neighbor’s souls as well.]

Everything involving not just human sciences, but the destiny of the man, politics, metaphysics, literature, art, advertising, propaganda—everything has been affected.

 “If I speak of being and the letter, if I distinguish the other and the Other, it is only because of Freud”. 

For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy for all that men mock the idea.

Notes:

1. Score, musical notation for a multipart composition, in which the music to be performed by each voice or instrument is written on a separate staff, all the staves being aligned one above another.

2. tree = a gallows (archaic ),  in Christianity, the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified (archaic )

3. Metonymy, use of a word or phrase for another to which it bears an important relation, as the effect for the cause, the abstract for the concrete, and similar constructions. Examples of metonymy are “He was an avid reader of Chaucer,” when the poems of the English writer Geoffrey Chaucer are meant, and “The hostess kept a good table,” when good food is implied.

Synecdoche, figurative locution whereby the part is made to stand for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, and vice versa. Thus, in the phrase “50 head of cattle, ””head” is used to mean whole animals, and in the sentence “The president's administration contained the best brains in the country,””brains” is used for intellectually brilliant persons.

3a. Jacobson formulates one of the basic principles of Saussurian linguistics, that language, like all system of signs has a two-fold character, involving two distinct operations, selection and combination. To produce a sentence like ‘Ships crossed the seas’, we select words we need from the appropriate sets or paradigms of the English language and combine them according to the rules of the language. If we substitute ‘ploughed’ for ‘crossed’, we create a metaphor based on a similarity between things otherwise different—the movement of a ship through water and the movement of a plough through the earth. If we substitute ‘keels’ for ‘ships’, we use the figure of synecdoche —part for whole or whole for part. If I substitute ‘deep’ for ‘sea’ I have used the figure for metonymy (an attribute or cause or effect of a thing signifies the thing). According to Jacobson, synecdoche is a subspecies of metonymy: both depend on contiguity in space/time (the keel is part of the ship, depth is a property of the sea), and thus correspond to the combination axis of the language. Metaphor, in contrast, corresponds to the selection axis of the language, and depends on similarity between things not normally contiguous. Those who suffer from aphasia (language disorder) tend to be more affected in one or other of the selection and combination functions. Those who suffer from ‘selection deficiency’ or ‘similarity disorder’ are heavily dependent on context or contiguity to speak, and make ‘metonymic mistakes’, substituting ‘fork for ‘knife’, ‘table’ for ‘lamp’ etc. Conversely, persons suffering from ‘contexture deficiency’ are unable to combine words into a grammatical sentence, and make ‘metaphorical mistakes’ – ‘spyglass’ for ‘microscope’, or ‘fire’ for ‘gaslight’.

4. A rebus is a puzzle in which pictures represent words or syllables [.e.g. veena]

5. Condensation is the process through which one element in the dream may represent more than one dream-thought and refer to more than one event; anxiety etc. in the dreamer’s waking life. The multiple sources of a given dream image usually turns out to be contiguous in the dreamer’s life.

Displacement refers to the way a dream is often differently centred from the preoccupations which give rise to it, a trivial event in reality being of prime importance in the dream. Freud links this phenomenon very closely to condensation and uses the same examples to illustrate it.

6. the famous axiom of the famous French rationalist philosopher, Descartes (1596- 1650).

In Meditations Descartes asked how we might know the truth of our beliefs and our perceptions of reality. He suggested that we could only do this scientifically if we rejected everything that we had cause to doubt and then saw what remained with certainty as true. Te difficulty with this approach, Descartes observed, is that it could lead one onto more difficulties and uncertainty that the position from which one originally started. One would have to accept, as Descartes put it, that ‘there was nothing at all in the world: no sky, no earth, no minds or bodies. Descartes concluded that all we could be certain of was the existence of God and ourselves.

“There is therefore no doubt that I exist, if he (God) deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as likes, he can never cause me to be nothing, so long as I think I am something. So that after having though carefully about it, and having scrupulously examined everything, one must then, in conclusion, take as assured that the proposition: I am , I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind”.

7. Mani was born into an aristocratic Persian family in southern Babylonia (now in Iraq). At the ages of 12 and 24, Mani experienced visions in which an angel designated him the prophet of a new and ultimate revelation. On his first missionary journey, Mani reached India, where he was influenced by Buddhism. With the protection of the new Persian emperor, Shapur I (reigned 241-72), Mani preached throughout the empire and sent missionaries to the Roman Empire. The rapid expansion of Manichaeism provoked the hostility of the leaders of orthodox Zoroastrianism, and when Bahram I (reigned 274-77) succeeded to the throne, they persuaded him to have Mani arrested as a heretic, after which he either died in confinement or was executed.

Mani proclaimed himself the last prophet in a succession that included Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus, whose partial revelations were, he taught, contained and consummated in his own doctrines. Besides Zoroastrianism and Christianity, Manichaeism reflects the strong influence of Gnosticism.

The fundamental doctrine of Manichaeism is its dualistic division of the universe into contending realms of good and evil: the realm of Light (spirit), ruled by God, and the realm of Darkness (matter), ruled by Satan. Originally, the two realms were entirely separate, but in a primal catastrophe the realm of Darkness invaded the realm of Light, and the two became mixed and engaged in a perpetual struggle. The human race is a result and a microcosm of this struggle. The human body is material, therefore evil; the human soul is spiritual, a fragment of the divine Light, and must be redeemed from its imprisonment in the body and the world. The path of redemption is through knowledge of the realm of Light imparted by the succession of divine messengers that includes Buddha and Jesus and ends in Mani. With this knowledge the human soul can conquer the carnal desires that perpetuate its imprisonment and so ascend to the divine realm.

 Dr. S. Sreekumar