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Lacan avec Peirce A Semeiotic Approach to Lacanian Thought
a Division III Examination in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies
Hampshire College, May 2005
by Andrew Younkins Committee: Dr. Mario D'Amato, Chair Dr. Annie Rogers, Member
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Table of Contents 3
Introductory Remarks
12 Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Lacanian Subject
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Chapter 2: An Introduction to Peircean Thought
57 Chapter 3: Lacan avec Peirce: Psychoanalysis with
Semeiotics
79 Chapter 4: The Riddle of the 'Guess': The Lacanian Name-of-the-Father within the Peircean Semeiotic
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Works Cited
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A Note to the Reader
The reader with a more general/exploratory interest will wish to begin with the
Introductory Remarks and move steadily through the work. The reader with some
acquaintance to the subject-matter will wish to read the Introductory Remarks, draw from
the first and second chapters whatever is appropriate, and read the third and fourth
chapters more closely.
A Note for the Published Edition
Since the debut and review of this work by my academic superiors, I have had the
opportunity to become more familiar with Gilles Deleuze, whose discorse I consider not
against but along side Lacans. Unfortunately for me, I have not had the opportunity to
incorporate the discussion of the material aspects of the signifier, as well as other
insights, in Deleuze's Logic of Sense (Columbia 1990, 196-216) into Chapter 4. I would
invite the careful reader to explore Deleuze's own account of subjective genesis before
coming to any final conclusions about Lacan's. Deleuze draws from Peirce and the
Scholastic and linguistic debates in subtle ways, which could stand to be compared to my
own in my future studies.
-A. L. Y., May 19, 2005
Hampshire College
List of Abbreviations Used in this Work
CP The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, the standard and most-cited source of Peirce
quotations, indexed by volume number and paragraph. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1-6. Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-5; and The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol 7-8. Arthur Burks, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
MS The Manuscripts of Charles Sanders Peirce. Catalogued by number in Robin, R. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Chalres Sanders Peirce. Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1967. Vol1 The Essential Peirce: Volume 1. A collection of Peirce's most vital and well-known essays, 1867-1893. Houser, Nathan, and Kloesel, Christian, eds. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Vol2 The Essential Peirce: Volume 2. A collection of Peirce's later essays, 1893-1913. Peirce Edition Project, The, eds. Bloomington, Indiana University Press: 1998. Ecrits Ecrits: A Selection. The newest translation of the papers of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Fink, Bruce. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Seminar Refers to the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, recorded ordinally (ex. Seminar XI). Please see Lacan, Jacques in the Works Cited section.
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Introductory Remarks
If psychoanalysis inhabits language, in its discourse it cannot misrecognize it with impunity. -Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses
This work represents an introductory and thoroughly pedantic effort.
Approximately half is devoted to acquainting the reader with the subject of my interest. It
is the fruit of almost exactly one year's pursuit, a voyage into areas in which I have no
formal training. This is ground trod by few undergraduate students, and for good reason.
My studies have been concentrated around law, religion, and Continental philosophy, and
until this academic year psychoanalysis and semeiotics (the branch of philosophy dealing
with signs and representations) were peripheral pursuits or topics for summer reading.
Both subjects are seen as particularly obscure and heavily theoretical. It is appropriate that
my interest in Jacques Lacan, one of the major figures in this work, was piqued by Slavoj
Zizek, perhaps the most effective author alive in relating Lacanian psychoanalysis to
more familiar fields, including politics, Western philosophy, and cultural studies. Judith
Butler, Bruce Fink, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan were also of seminal importance in
piecing together Lacan's edifice, most of which is still untranslated into English.
Psychoanalytic theory, and to some lesser degree semeiotics, are vague, guarded,
and, in large part, poorly understood fields, and I confess that I do not possess the
background to clarify or unlock either. My twin foci, Jacques Lacan and Charles Sanders
Peirce, each undertook to revolutionize the fields of their training. For Peirce this original
interest was in logic. He digested his first logical treatise at the tender age of 13, taking
mere hours to finish it. Peirce's convictions concerning the centrality of logic became the
basis or measuring-stick of all of his later work. Lacan's mission was formulated not
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through books or theory but in the clinic. His earliest work, including his doctoral thesis,
dealt with psychosis, an area in which most psychoanalytic techniques have met with
little success. Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis held only a theoretical understanding of
psychosis, and Lacan's early career, including his first three recorded seminars, was spent
expanding and clarifying Freud's most basic and earliest ideas. The result of such a
hermeneutical enterprise is a different-sounding Freud, Freud the explorer, Freud who
navigates the unconscious, not the Freud of totalizing topographies and metaphorical
cigars.
Lacan and Peirce both impacted fields broader than they could have expected;
they grab our attention, they challenge our ideologies, and they seem to offer an essay,
point, or comment to readers from diverse disciplines. Perhaps this is because both of
their vast bodies of work present nodal points, self-contained and enigmatic craters on the
map of Western thought. They built up theoretical edifices which develop by
complicating and re-complicating their own material, by a pulling evidence from
unpredictable sources and assembling it as might a bricoleur. This is not to disparage or
detract from either's importance to his chosen praxis, Lacan to his analytic technique and
Peirce to the scientific method and later to his pragmatism. Praxis was, in each case, the
extension of crucial insight or conviction. Lacan proceeds from a unique insight into the
human subjective topology, a word whose simplest definition might be "mathematical
structure", and which Lacan repeats again and again. Lofty terminology has been a
stumbling block for clinicians and has prevented bringing Lacan into the analyst/client
interaction. The most difficult parts of Lacan are surely his cryptic phrasings and
definitions, accompanied by the fact that his teachings themselves are often counter-
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intuitive. His discourse has been alternately described as 'prismatic' and 'dense', and by
Noam Chomsky as mere hucksterism ("An Interview" Radical Philosophy 53, Autumn
1989, p.32). Perhaps this is because Lacan's theory confronts previously unchallenged
assumptions about the link between the biological organism, speech, perception, and the
centrality of the subject of consciousness. According to Lacan, the conception of the
human subject we guard is the subject-supposed-to-know (le sujet supposé savoir), whose
integrity or wholeness in speech operates only on the condition of the integrity of our
knowledge, and whose anathema it is to admit a lack-in-knowledge of the self. Stop and
reflect upon the function of the 'self' in our language and what it presumes: it is nothing
other than a reflexive addressing, the formulation of a command or speech-act by an
egoic consciousness which results in a conscious action. We request information from it,
it replies, and only a lack in our own reasonableness or education could prevent a
satisfactory answer. This 'self' wrapped around a core of 'self'-hood is the Enlightenment
subject, a historically conditioned view, not of who we are, but of who we must be. This
implies an anxiety that we shall fall below such a baseline and descend into
unintelligibility. The Enlightenment was not a passion towards knowledge so much as a
demarcation of what is essential and important. Lacan himself said that of the human
passions, love, hatred, and ignorance, the latter was the strongest. The subject does not
want to know because it wants for knowledge and it knows it: knowing becomes a burden
and a danger. Who knows, after all, what we don't know?
What Lacan shows us is the archaic circuit that thought must travel if it is to be re-
composited into action and comprehension. Lacan's subject is not the robust individual
we would like to be because its governing factors are not rational pursuits: they are
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relentless drives and insatiable desires, ameliorated by tenuous negotiations and fragile
pacts. I speak metaphorically here when I say 'negotiation' or 'pact': there is no
'unconscious agency', no homunculus behind the veil akin to the one we suppose to be out
front. Instead we find the remnants of demands we made or were made on us, trace
memories and impressions which explain things we could not possibly have known
about, and all of this linked in organized, structurally defined ways. One of my goals is to
demonstrate via Lacan, and with Peirce, how extremely unstable the structure which
props up our reality-in-and-through-language is. 'Reality' takes on a pejorative sense in
Lacan: it is the result of all intra-subject negotiation, a host of commonplaces which serve
as reassurances. The three aspects of experience correspond to Lacan's 3 subjective
registers or modes of relation, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. The Symbolic is perhaps
the easiest to grasp, its meaning hitting closest to its normal signification: the creative
mind glides over a coherent world, things are taken for their value within a meaningful or
sense-making universe of terms. The Imaginary, on the other hand, is governed by
contours and outlines, the play of exclusions and inclusions, aggressive intrusions and
passive withdrawals. The Symbolic is systematic, while the Imaginary counts each
feature, each object, each other person, as recognized one by one. The Real is an entirely
different affair. It can be explained in two ways: on one hand, it is the stark materiality or
radical singularity, at once anterior and posterior to Symbolic and Imaginary association
or opposition. On the other hand, it is the obscene or disavowed underside of any 'real'
construction, the haunting and thing-like fact anchoring narrative. By way of example,
consider the American revolution towards independence from Great Britain. On the
Symbolic side, we have revolution as history, the publicly supported account of events,
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ideas, and transitions from one stability to the next. The Imaginary of the American
revolution is its delimiting and identifying function in creating an American polity,
achieved through icons (flag, monuments, the familiar portraits or battle scenes) and other
spectacular displays (fireworks, parades, etc.). The Real, however, is not exactly the
counter-narrative which says that the Founding Fathers were not heroes but greedy,
slavery-abiding usurpers, etc., but rather refers to the historical 'gap' in which an
accidental, cobbled-together Constitution was barely passed by the states, and then only
by violence and political subterfuge. This 'gap', of course, requires a deus ex machina or
divine providence magically guiding the process and insuring its outcome, the
achievement of 'secular' democracy. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, "it is only the trans-
ideological kernel which makes an ideology 'workable'" (Plague of Fantasies 21). God
constitutes the people as 'one Nation under God', but the people, in unison but silently,
constitute God's presence there.
This work is entitled Lacan avec Peirce ('avec' means 'with' in French) in homage
to Lacan's essay "Kant avec Sade", referring to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant
and the French author Marquis de Sade. Kant, the idealist philosopher who arose at 5 am
each morning, wrote for 12 hours, and was in bed by 9, could not have been more
different from de Sade, the epicurean expositor of perversions and author of Philosophy
in the Bedroom. Peirce's relationship to Lacan is not one of mirroring or reciprocity: they
don't concern themselves with the same subject-matter, and their fundamental insights
into the human subjective character are as skewed as possible. This is not a 'compare and
contrast' essay, because to do so would first result in a list of obvious and overt contrasts.
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Peirce sees the human as the subject of inquiry, as a member of the human community
composed of inquirers pointed towards a teleological truth. Lacan's subject is at cross-
purposes with him/herself and grounded in fantasy and desire. We can, however, use one
to educate the other, to reveal something about the other that was unexpected or
previously unelaborated. My overall thesis is this: Peirce's insight into the basic, logical
mental processes or elements as laid down in his theory of signs is correct insofar as it is
wholly useful and rigorously complete, and Lacan's topology, similarly, describes the
higher-level functions and processes that govern human purpose and action. One is not
'really saying the same thing' as the other, and yet when we apply one to the other, the
result is a host of useful insights. Peirce's theory of the overall human subject is vague
and does not correspond to the analytic experience or vocabulary, but he was without the
benefit of having read and considered Freud, certainly in his formative years or to the best
of my knowledge at any other point (although it is conceivable that he may have done so
later in his career). This work shall concentrate upon bringing Peirce to unlock
controversies, questions and concepts in the Lacanian discourse.
One cannot begin this process, however, without some overall starting-point or
insight which involves both authors. I have already used the term 'human subject': this
does not refer to the human qua biological being, but to the correspondence between one
individual and one human mind. Peirce was convinced, as Lacan was, of the
predominance of a signifying dimension in the human organism. Peirce says over and
over that man is a sign, a developing sign at that, which comes to hook itself to other
signs in a great signifying map. J.M. Balkin explains the relationship between the
biological brain and the immaterial mind as a relationship between 'biological hardware'
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and 'cultural software'. Cognitive approaches to mind emphasize or study our hardware or
the innate properties of mind, but experience with computer science and development
show that the 'tools' software provides are most efficient and produce the most adaptable
and therefore acceptable result when they do not come 'hardwired' in the brain at birth,
but are transmitted through cultural processes, most importantly language and writing:
"...the study of rhetoric or the study of semeiotics may be thought of as part of the study
of cultural software, or, more properly, the study of the traces or effects of this software"
(Balkin 19). Peirce and Lacan hold, however, that this 'software' is not just a tool for
achieving goals, but that the software and not the hardware forms and governs our goals
and purposes. This important comparison should be sufficient for hooking Peirce to
Lacan, not as continuing in some similar tradition, but as one piece in a jigsaw puzzle
latches into another to produce a more clear picture of the human situation.
What I am presenting in this work is this introduction, along with four distinct
chapters. The first is an introduction to Lacan's thought, the second an introduction to
Peirce's. They are meant primarily to acquaint the reader with the subject-matter and
terminology, and secondarily to demonstrate my own ability to synthesize portions of
their thought which may be unclear or disconnected elsewhere. The third chapter situates
both thinkers on a similar plane, understands some similar problems both faced, and deals
extensively with several secondary authors who have already broken ground in the
semeiotic approach to psychoanalysis, most notably John Muller in Beyond the
Psychoanalytic Dyad. The fourth chapter is an extensive attempt to mobilize the Peircean
semeiotic to clarify and augment Lacan's ideas about development in-and-through
language, specifically the idea of Master-Signifier. The work needs no conclusion, as it is
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not a unified whole. Comments to the author are appreciated: he can be contacted at
I would like to thank my parents, Frank and Ellen, for providing loving emotional
(and of course financial) support throughout my education, and for teaching me to read, a
great gift indeed. I thank my advisor and friend Dr. Mario D'Amato for helping me to be
rigorous, hardworking and exact in the midst of murky academic double-speak. Without
his tutelage I could not have begun to make sense of either Peirce or Lacan. I also thank
Dr. Annie Rogers, my Div III committee member, for her patience and confidence in my
ability to 'get' Lacan. I need to thank Dr. Jack Maranville, who taught me to read and
write clearly, and without whom I would have been lost in college. My friends are my
second family, they are important to my well-being and the development of my thought,
and above everything else they make me happy I came to Hampshire College. First
among them are Mollie Hurter, Michael Sherrard, David Bowen, Donald "DJ Bong"
Jackson, Manuel Castro, Seth Jensen, Katie Bryson, Prachee Sinha and Eric Anderson. I
would also like to thank Jennifer C. MacGregor for “creativism”. Without each of you,
my life would be humdrum and my world more boring. I can't thank everyone, friends,
saints and educators: the world has given me so much, and you all help me to see how I
can give some back.
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Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Lacanian Subject
The Other
What is an Other? In all of its many current usages, the Other (with a capital O)
stands for that which is unknown, quite possibly unknowable, and foreign to the human
subject. For Lacan, the question of the Other is intimately linked with the question of how
language itself affects the human organism. In his account, language is in no way an
innate or simple fact of the organism. It instead plays several roles: it designates our place
in the world from before our births, installs itself as another layer of knowledge and the
method by which knowledge is ultimately transmitted, and even marks our bodies,
inscribing our own flesh into the order of sounds and words. We experience language as a
medium that stands between our innermost selves and other people, serving alternately as
a tool, a barrier, and a pleasure. Any notion of an Other must not only describe its
character and relation to the individual, but also the emergence of an Other which is
irreducible to the sum of the appearances or characteristics of other people. The answer to
the question of how we relate to such an Other, and more generally to our language-
world, will come to dictate our individual psychic structures.
Lacan means by the Other a symbolic context, the locus of both language and
speech, and unconscious knowledge in which the subject originally situates him- or
herself. The subject is introduced bit-by-bit into his or her language-world, never in a
totalizing fashion, and is left to guess at the possible interrelationships between words
and images. Much of the child's early linguistic behavior comes about merely through
mimicking the behaviors and utterances of others. This mimicking is the subject of
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Lacan's first important developmental point, the stade du mirror or 'mirror phase'. At 6-18
months, the child experiences its own uncoordination and disunity, and is unable to
reconcile its own fragmentation: instead, that subject latches onto the unity, image-inary
unity, present in the specular image (Muller and Richardson 33). This unity is not ready-
made, but instead comes about through a series of spacial-temporal experiments with
body and contour that lead the child toward an anticipated mastery (Feldstein 134). The
subject perceives the outlines of those around him or her, and comes to recognize the
basic similarities and obvious differences of these figures with his or her own form. This
movement, however, is doubled: the stability or consistency of the other comes to rest
narcissistically upon our own growing experience of continuity. This confused yet clearly
reciprocal relation between the child-as-object of others or of self, or moi ('me' in
English), and the other-as-object, or autre (a) ('other' in English), is the misrecognition
(or meconnaissance) which comes to characterize every Imaginary relation. This archaic
Imaginary function is Lacan's approach to the Freudian ego. "The ego is a system of
imaginary lures or resistances", whose purpose is to protect one's existence, on the one
hand by suspending or delaying it, and on the other by constituting it (Ecrits 160).
According to Lacan, what must be avoided is an understanding of the ego as coterminous
or synonymous with consciousness. "The ego... is the seat of perceptions, but it reflects
the essences of the objects it perceives and not its own essence insofar as consciousness is
supposedly its privilege, since these perceptions are, for the most part, unconscious"
(Ecrits 127). I emphasize here two basic points. First, the Ich or ego is already split
between the ideal-Ich and the Ich-ideal (Freud's terms, usually translated ideal-ego and
ego-ideal), or functions of primary identification with the maternal imago (image) and
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secondary object-identification. The concept of identification is only roughly understood,
and here we will take identification as meaning any relationship based upon similarity or
physical contiguity which displays an alternating (dyadic) relation between extreme
distance and closeness. As Muller (140) points out, an identification with one's name
functions in much the same way, forming a very different sort of 'primary identification'.
Second, the view that while the moi may be considered the stratified remnant or ossified
residues of primordial identifications, for our purposes we should view the moi as the
product of an archaic and dialogical (dialectical) function which persists in the subject.
By noticing the peculiarities of this function with respect to the analysand's speech, we
can understand the unique role that the Lacanian Imaginary plays in language.
It seems natural to say that animals display the ability to mirror, to identify those
who bear resemblance to themselves as having a distinct and privileged relationship with
regard to their own bodies, and so to conclude that animals pass through a mirror-stage.
Animals are, however, different from humans in their relationships to their own
satisfactions and what for them constitutes wholeness: they can be fully gratified
following any instinctual feeling or urge. The struggles of the animal lie in balancing
instinctual or learned behaviors against the necessities of reality. The fact of language,
one might say, covers us over with something "extra", something alien which not only
surpasses and distorts need but introduces need and instinct into an economy which Freud
called the economy of the drive, or Trieb. Later in his career Freud came to realize that
the urge or compulsion (Drang) towards repetition is a manifestation of the Todestrieb, or
"death drive". The most basic idea asserted by this term is that language creates in the
subject a plane beyond his or her physical death, in which something else is at stake. This
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"extra" something is the word or signifier, the fact that we are born into a realm of
signifiers about which we know nothing but which refer to us. This is a traumatic
introduction into language which Lacan thinks affects us even in utero. Lacan's
explanation of the (death) drive borrows from de Sade the metaphor of 'first death' and
'second death'. The first death is the natural, physical death, part of an organized, cyclical
and natural flow. This death is one horizon, but it presupposes the independent
conception of our physical body as our 'natural' body. It is our understanding of ourselves
reduced to our biological being. De Sade's fantasy is to commit a "crime against nature,"
to mutilate not himself, not some image, part or idea of himself, but the fabric of the
'natural order' because, as he writes, "nature wants annihilation; it is beyond our capacity
to achieve the scale of destruction it desires" (Seminar VII 210-2). To de Sade, all of
reality has a desiring quality: it speaks to him, it is more than a mere set of disinterested
phenomena, it constitutes a system or intelligence characterized, like the Other, by a lack.
For Lacan this is the acknowledgment that language covers over every object, every facet
of reality, that "the word killeth the thing." The second death concerns the beyond of the
being to which we have conscious access, the obscure heart of desirousness in the Other
in which thought itself is annihilated. Lacan's point is that this place is only imaginable
for a being possessed of language. We must therefore give special attention to the role of
the signifier within both conscious (verbalized or pre-verbal) and unconscious (Other)
discourse, and the role it plays in their relation.
The Development of the Subject
Our first relationship to the Other is the movement that Lacan calls alienation.
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Fink (1) states: "Alienation is the instituting of the symbolic order and... the assigning of
the subject's place therein" (52). This assigns the subject primarily a role as the object of
language, the purely designated aspect, a place of lack which could alternately be filled.
The subject is subsumed within or covered over by language. This archaic relation to the
Other is one of being completely dominated within that Other, and of having no identity
without reference to it. Lacan noted on several occasions the resemblance between
alienation and the Hegelian dialectic of the Master and the Slave (Seminar XI 209-215).
In Hegel's account, the Master stands in the position of complete or full knowledge, while
the slave has to make demands upon the Master in order to survive, even though s/he is in
an absurd position from which to demand anything. The slave's choice is between being
and knowledge, which Lacan points out is no choice at all, since one must choose being,
and thereby accede knowledge to the Other. It is important here to grasp that no human
subject exists who is not alienated within language, and that no alienated subject can help
but use language.
Alienation is preceded only in an inferred sense, by the original relationship that
Lacan calls the jouissance of the Other. Jouissance is best translated into English as
"enjoyment", in the double sense of the word that Zizek points out: it is both to enjoy and
to be enjoyed, as in enjoying one's property, in the sense of deriving the use value from it
(61). Jouissance of the Other is a relation involving some imagined original unity (which
Lacan calls le Un in Seminar XX) or totality in which complete satisfaction seemed to
have actually occurred. As Willy Appolon states, "this hypothetical, primordial
experience becomes the model of satisfaction for the subject, while its absence, if not its
lack, becomes the unconscious cause of the desire to recover it" (51). Thus, jouissance
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can take the form of pain itself, provided it 'points to' or gives the subject some small
reminder of the jouissance of the Other.
The fact of alienation leads the subject toward the production of the first
signifiers. This first pair of signifiers appears in the form of a primal dyadic utterance,
which Freud first dubbed Fort-Da (in German, "gone" and "there"). The account Freud
gives involves a child with a small bobbin who, when his mother leaves the room, casts
the bobbin, exclaiming "Fort!", and then pulls it back, saying "Da!". Lacan originally cites
the Fort-Da dyad in Ecrits (64/276) as denoting a presence-in-absence, but says nothing
more. In Seminar XI, Lacan becomes more specific: in this dyad, each signifier represents
the other signifier to the subject, and in this way the subject is able to 'slip' under the
signifiers (236). In understanding this relationship it is important that we not view the
subject as having full agency or consciousness of this process. The desiring subject is
caused by the pair of signifiers just as much as s/he causes them. The question is, what
function is served by the adoption of such a relationship with language? Zizek's (Puppet
59-60) poignant answer is that the act of throwing away the spool and retrieving it opens
up a "space where I can gain a distance towards [the maternal Other], and so become able
to sustain my desire," the "desire to have a desire" (Ecrits 246). Such a desire opens up
the possibilities of substitute-desires coming to fill its place.
This introduces two new terms: desire and objet petit a. The signifier now comes
to surround not me, but some external object which acts as the stand-in for my position in
the Other's desire as well as the object-cause of my desire, objet petit a. Oscillating
around it are the differential phonemes based on oppositional vowel pairings (such as
'fort' and 'da',the German 'o' and 'a'), whose organization will eventually serve as the
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grounding logic behind the child's language (Muller and Richardson 79). The repetition in
the child's action does not involve a mastery over language or the mother primarily, but
the ambiguity of the subject with respect to his or her own jouissance: pull the object too
close, and an inherently excessive jouissance overwhelms you; throw it away, and desire's
lack finds you (Fink (1) 96, 100). As Lacan so plainly states, "desire is a defense, a
defense against jouissance" (Ecrits 309). Objet petit a is not an object in the Real*,
although it appears in the guise of actual objects. Rather, it is the support of the neurotic
subject's fantasy, inscribed in the Lacanian matheme $<>a (see below). While one can
say that there is nothing "really contested" in objet petit a, it does serve as the imaginary
link between ourselves and the Other. To clarify this, Harari uses the example of the
placenta: to whom does the placenta belong? How can such an object belong to one being
or another? Lacan calls the objet petit a a biceptor, a reflexive point or hinge point
between the barred subject and the Other (Harari 113-4). Viewed another way, the Other's
desire (and more broadly the dynamic that exists in the field of the Other) is the mediator
between the split subject of the unconscious and objet petit a (Zizek, Plague 9-10). Desire
is tied to what Lacan in French calls a beance, translated by Wilden as "originary lack", a
lack around which a speaking subject can crystallize (132). Lacan's dictum is that, "Your
desire is the desire of/for the Other."
The pulling apart of the subject between desire and jouissance is the basis of the
conscious/unconscious system. The subject is now "barred": Lacan writes this as ($), the
barred subject of language. This corresponds to the movement of separation from the
*Joel Doer (23-4) says this of the Real: “The Real is reality in its unmediated form. It is what disrupts the
subject's received notions about himself and the world around him. Thus it characteristically appears to the subject as a shattering enigma, because in order to make sense of it he or she will have to symbolize it, that is, to find signifiers that can ensure its control.”
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Other, which is paired with alienation in the double movement of fantasy (indicated by
the losange, <>). Separation is initiated by the realization that the (m)Other is herself
desirous and therefore lacking, and that what is lacking is the signifier, a signifier which
stands in the place of lack. The father of the mother-father-child triad is not the phallus:
this is a common misinterpretation of Lacanian concepts. The presence of the father calls
into question the child's status as being the phallus for his/her mother, and makes the
phallus into something contested by mother, father and child, a signifier rather than a
penis. There is a crucial distinction between the phallus as Imaginary object and signifier
of Symbolic castration. Even though the intervention of the Imaginary father may be the
event which brings about Symbolic castration, this father is never adequate to the
symbolic phallus, whose existence is supposed to have preceded him (Doer 17-27).
The signifier has several basic subjective functions: the first two inhere in the
Lacanian homophonic Nom-du-Pere, which means "Name of the Father" but also
suggests the homophonic "No of the Father" in French. The phallic signifier has a
paternal and Symbolic function, which is the role of name-giving. While the
real/Imaginary father is the father of generation, the dead/Symbolic father is the father of
the unconscious imperative. The reverse of this is the Symbolic father as the father of
prohibition, originally prohibition of the (m)Other, but eventually acting as a gateway to
jouissance. The phallic signifier is also the signifier of sexual difference: the child's
identification with either the phallic signifier or with lack is identification with 'male' and
'female'. Remarkably, it is the Smaginary phallus that marks boys as castrated subjects.
The Imaginary phallus is experienced as filling a gap or loss, suggests the possibility of
loss, and involves the boy in a dialectic of Oedipal rivalry with the father, experienced as
20
an other. Taken together, these functions structure the subject and fix his/her place within
the order of language. The status of the phallic signifier with respect to the desire of the
Other is, for Lacan, completely determinative of whether one will turn out psychotic,
perverse, or neurotic. A position with respect to this signifier characterizes each of
Lacan's three fundamental orientations: psychosis is the utter foreclosure of the phallic
signifier, perversion is disavowal of Imaginary castration, and neurosis is a refusal to
sacrifice one's Symbolic castration to the Other's jouissance. The function of this
signifying 'one' will be the subject of my final chapter.
Lacan and Language
The preceding is all by way of exposition or introduction to Lacan's most
important ideas and terms. It would be impossible to give a clear picture of Lacan's entire
conception of the 'Freudian discovery' in this or any other chapter, given the amount of
his attention over the course of more than twenty years that he gave to Freud's writing.
Lacanian authors stress again and again, as Lacan did, the importance of the "return to
Freud", not the conceptions of Freudians, or even necessarily to every bit of Freud's
corpus. Certain texts come up again and again in Lacan's discussion- the Traumdeutung,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and
Their Relation to the Unconscious, to name some of the most important. What these
works have in common seems to be a concern with the role language and behavior play in
our conscious life, our unconscious life, and the connection between them. This is not
primarily a concern with models of the psyche, complexes, or pathologies. Rather, these
texts are each investigations into the nature and possible connections of observable
21
phenomena, the patient's speech and affect. Lacan's aim seems almost fundamentalist: a
return to the text, a filial devotion to the words and connections he finds, but a
commitment supplemented by an ability to bring literary and scientific testimony to bear
upon Freud. These insights Lacan saw as the basis for the Freudian analytic technique;
and, if psychoanalysis is to maintain any advantage over against cognitive science or
behavioral approaches, it must be this technique. That said, let us do Lacan the same
courtesy he did Freud and read him attentively. Our approach shall be to draw heavily
from his Ecrits and portions of Seminars XI and XX, in an attempt to partially account for
language, the signifier, and their role in psychoanalysis.
Language (langage) is simply the scientific/linguistic attempt to account for
llanguage (lalangue). Llanguage is the "babble" (Television) or "mother tongue" (Seminar
XX 138) of the subject which throws into question the dialogical, referential nature of
human language. Language refers to a common, accessible and verbalizable subset of
llanguage, the portion accessible to study. Knowledge locked within the form of language
is the unconscious, and it is from here that the nature of the signifier and the hypothesis of
any subject whatsoever must be deduced. The signifier is not originally a sign of anything
except the subject, who however is vanishing as the signifier vanishes, always into
another signifier. In other words, the passage of the signifier is the passage of the subject.
The total effect of language Lacan calls "le Un", the One. This signifier does not actually
exist for Lacan: it presents itself as pure possibility. It would present itself as an end to
the constant re-inscription of the master signifier, S(sub)1, which is the continual re-entry
into unconscious discourse, demanding a loss of jouissance. Thus, le Un is the correlate
of jouissance of the Other. (Fink (1) 137) (Seminar XX 137-145)
22
Lacan identifies the beginning of his linguistics with the Saussurean sign: S/s,
standing for signifier/signified, and the fact that the signifier above the bar and the
signified below the bar represent "distinct orders". In order for something to be a
signifier, there are two requirements: that it refer to another signifier for a subject, and
that it must not "represent". Instead, it must justify itself in terms of some signification:
the possibility of calling something a language is, for Lacan, based upon the contiguity of
the system, the ability of its parts to signify its other parts. Lacan uses the example of two
doors, one reading 'ladies' and the other reading 'gentlemen', seen by two different
subjects at the same time, to demonstrate that signifiers do not simply re-present on a
vocal level, and that signifiers do not have hard-and-fast connections to single signifieds.
The bar in the relationship S/s makes the signified an effect of the signifier, which creates
meaning based upon a connection of signifiers. The signifier begins to "enter into the
signified", and what seemed to be two distinct orders are shown not to be mutually
exclusive. Lacan uses the French term signifiance, which can be rendered as either
"significance" or "signifierness", to insist that what makes a signifier meaningful is its
relation to other signifiers which are not brought to consciousness (Ecrits 139-145).
In order to make these points clear, Lacan's assessment of the unconscious
borrows two important concepts from Saussure: synchrony and diachrony. Saussure
introduces these terms in his discussion of points-of-view from which we can study
languages. Either we can study the entire language in its synchronicity, or totality at any
given moment, or we can study it over time in its diachronous, ever-changing state. Lacan
modifies these terms somewhat and connects them to his idea of the unconscious: the
synchrony of the signifier and the diachrony of the signified. The signifier, he writes,
23
originally exists in a connection based on audible or visible difference, simply as
phonemic elements or traces of perception. The synchrony of the unconscious is
organized on the basis of this sheer difference between elements. A second, and this time
temporal, organization is done on the level of the diachrony of the signified. The
elementary form of diachrony in language is the sentence, a bringing-together of signifiers
that purports to have specific meaning. Meaning for Lacan is a "reading-back", from end
to beginning, an after-effect of signification. (Seminar XI 46, Ecrits 118, Muller and
Richardson 364)
The point of a Lacanian classification of the signifier is that the subject of
language exists within a closed order, closed first on account of a fixed number of
elements corresponding to the finite number of sounds that exist in any given language,
and second on account of a fixed procedure by which those elements may be combined.
The combination of elements takes place due to two laws of combination: metonymy and
metaphor. Metonymy refers to the effect of the chaining together of signifiers in "word-
for-word" connections, which is most clearly associated with diachrony. Metaphor refers
to the replacement of one signifier with another, in the form of "one word [or word-
sound, phoneme] for another". This relation is based not on some natural connection
between the juxtaposed signifiers, but rather on the disparity in either image or denotative
meaning between the two. Replacement, however, is not complete substitution: the
signifier replaced is "occulted", remaining in its original place due to its metonymical
connections to the rest of the signifying chain.
Lacan (155) gives his mathematical formulas, or mathemes, for metaphor and
metonymy, which draw from S/s, signifier over signified. The first, f(S...S`)S=S(-)s,
24
might read, "The function of the chaining together of S to S' with respect to S equals S
(signifier) 'over' s (signified)." It designates the effect of a chain of signifiers on a single
signifier within that chain, where the signifier is then put in a relation of at least minimal
distance to some signification (s). Freud called this Verdichtung, or condensation of
meaning around a signifier. The second, f(S`/S)S=S(+)s, read much in the same manner
as the first, designates the effect of one signifier being substituted for another in the form
of a metaphor, and uses the (+) instead of a (-) to show that the (s) is an effect not just of
the replacement signifier, but of the movement from an assumed S` into an S: something
of this movement is retained, and a signification apart from the denotative or "ordinary"
meaning of S is created, in an operation Freud referred to as Verschiebung, or
"displacement". (Interpreting such gnomic, quasi-mathematical descriptions is part and
parcel of reading Lacan. Lacan's aim in the course of his Seminar, and his writing, was to
confound attempts to simplify or appropriate his concepts, always with the further goal of
deepening the students' comprehension through constant re-evaluation.)
Lacan saw desire and symptom as determined by these operations, and therefore
as intimately connected with the signifying chain. Desire is "caught in the rails of a
metonymy"; just as desire is always "the desire for something else" or desire for a desire,
metonymy always signifies something which cannot actually be expressed (158). The
typical example of such a metonymy is the pairing of Fort-Da: desire always slips under
the bar, into the signified, never actually reached by either of the signifiers. Lacan also
speaks of symptoms as bearing a metaphorical relation to the signifying chain. He writes:
"Between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a
current signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom- a metaphor in which flesh
25
or function is taken as a signifying element- the signification, that is inaccessible to the
conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved". This is not to say that the
symptom is only a signifier: instilled in the body, it takes on the character of a letter, or
"the essentially localized structure of the signifier" (144). If the comparison to a metaphor
holds good, then we should not view the psychoanalytic symptom as completely arbitrary.
Rather, it is a signifier cut loose from the signifying chain, and as such has come to stand
only for itself (Soler in Rabate 92).
Analytic Technique and the Signifier
Willy Appolon states that analysis must manifest two things: a signifier and a
transference. The transferrence comes in taking the analyst as an avatar of objet petit a,
the cause of the analysand's desire and the object in fantasy. Bruce Fink (Feldstein 93)
states: "the analyst, serving as a 'make-believe' objet petit a, as a stand-in or semblance of
objet a, introduces a further gap between S and a', disrupting the fantasized relation, <>.
The analyst makes that relationship untenable, inducing a change therein," through a
constant withdrawal of him/herself in speech, an 'absent presence in present absence'. In
clinical terms, the analysand might report that the analyst is beginning to show up in his
or her dreams, for example. The term "transference love", on a Lacanian account, refers to
a demand for love completely absent of need and therefore pregnant with desire. Demand
itself is something that the child originally had to do in order to survive his/her birth
within the order of the Other, and tracing the history of the analysand's demands is the
analyst's first step in tracing the paths of the analysand's desire “through the defiles of the
signifier”, which is equivalent to the Other with a capital O as the locus of speech's
26
deployment (Ecrits 243-52).
The Freudian analytic technique is often to be construed as one of mirroring, of
manifesting a healthy ego which becomes the model for the analysand's weak ego, and
then analyzing the ego's resistances or defenses (Muller and Richardson 266-7). Lacan
saw this theoretical framework as skewed, as describing a relationship which gives rise to
a purely Imaginary success, and which remains ignorant of the fact of the signifier. Lacan
explains his analytic strategy with an allegory: the analyst is involved in a game of bridge
with the analysand. The analyst occupies two seats: the object causing desire, and the
Other of speech or "dummy". This corresponds to understanding the dual role of the
analyst as object in fantasy and the "subject supposed to know" or "supposed subject of
knowledge", to whom the analysand directs his/her speech. The analyst, more by his/her
silence than by what s/he says becomes the target of the analysand's speech, in the same
way that the child makes a primordial demand upon the Other. The analysand also has a
partner, one whose nature the analysand is willingly ignorant of, but whose secret is the
truth of the analysand's being and sex (Ecrits 184). As in bridge it is the partner's hand
that is the key to any player's success: the analyst's role is to situate him/herself
strategically on one side or another of the analysand in the game. The analyst's speech is
not facile: it serves two primary goals. While it is clearly an interpretation, a version of
the analysand's speech fed back to him or her through the intervention or cipher of the
Other, such speech also takes on the character of a punctuation with the effect of being a
hint or clue to the analysand. The point is not for the analyst to treat upon the multiple
meanings of the analysand's discourse, or to remain the monolithic figure of knowledge,
but to open up a space where desire can manifest by vacating the position of full knower
27
(Ecrits 129-132, 217-18, 257-8) (Fink (1) 88-90).
A signifier, however, is more elusive: which signifier? There is some selection
involved on the part of the analyst as to which signifier he or she will give attention.
Lacan makes a distinction between full and empty speech: empty speech simply refers to
the analysand's ordinary, egoic, and imaginary discourse: "intuitive illumination,
recollective command, and the retorting aggressiveness of the verbal echo" (Ecrits 131).
Full speech is speech which emanates from the locus of the unconscious. The signifier the
analyst listens for is one which begins the signifying chain; Lacan abbreviates it with
S(sub)1, and the rest of the chain that it refers to as S(sub)2. In order to give us an idea of
what this signifier does, Lacan uses the phrase pointe du capiton, or "button point" to
demonstrate that this signifier, simply a word or phoneme, acts as an anchoring point in
the analysand's Symbolic order, and presents that subject with a "jumping-off point".
Lacan's definition of a signifier is "that which represents a subject for another signifier"
(Miller in Lacan and Language 31, Seminar XI 236). The original S(sub)1 is the original
phallic signifier which ties the desire of the barred subject to the signifying chain. It acts
as a metaphor, covering over a desire which cannot be expressed and standing for the
barred subject, $. Lacan brings together his several glosses on S(sub)1 in Seminar XX
with the following diagram: S(sub)1(S(sub)1(S(sub)1...(S(sub)2)))). The phallic signifier
"never stops being written" as a constant re-inscription of the symbol of the signifying
chain.
The symptom is one among several reasons that an analysand may enter analysis.
In the early Lacan, symptom was treated simply as an address to the Other, whose place
the analyst occupies. This was supposed to allow the analyst, in the course of the
28
treatment, to interpret and thereby destroy the symptom. However, Lacan's theoretical
orientation changed significantly with the introduction of the notion of jouissance into his
thought. Symptoms bother us because the symptom is stranded jouissance, a letter
instilled in the body which accounts for a lack in our demand to account fully for our
desire. The appearance of the signifier in speech is no longer enough to contain the
jouissance. However, the symptom, as the Real return of that signifier, does not lead to
perfect enjoyment. It is still a substitute for a more perfect enjoyment associated with the
possibility of "full speech" (Appollon 12).
The symptom has the dual character of being a repeatable source of enjoyment, in
our repeated attempts to ground it in meaning, and of depriving us of jouissance, of
keeping jouissance at arm's length at all times. The symptom is a support of being as well,
in the sense that it grounds our being in something which is non-subjective and non-
contingent; hence the unconscious, imperative demand of the Other to "Enjoy your
symptom!" and identify with it. This is not easily done: with the symptom comes all of
the ambivalence that comes with jouissance. The first and fundamental example is
woman as man's symptom: men 'can't live with woman, and can't live without her', as the
adage goes.What the saying reveals is that existence without the signifier 'woman' is the
only truly impossible task for such a subject: his enjoyment and therefore his being are
'hooked' on the existence of 'woman'. Symptoms never mean anything at the time of their
occurrence: they stand for the radical disjunction of being, or "dissident jouissance"
(Soler in Rabate 92). Zizek (Lacan and Language 188-9) states: "Symptoms are
meaningless traces; their meaning is not discovered from the hidden depth of the past, but
constructed retroactively. The analysis produces the truth, i.e., the signifying frame which
29
gives to the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning." Notice that this truth process
concerns not the meaning given to the symptom by the subject at any one moment, but the
history of the premature meanings associated with it. Zizek draws the comparison
between the truth event of the symptom and the subject of the revolution-event: the
revolutionary subject is always attempting to bring about the event too early, but it is only
against the backdrop of these failed attempts that the event comes about. For Lacan, this
backdrop is made up of the analysand's confrontation with their desire.
Lacan's approach to symptom relies on his overall conception of the roles of time
and interpretation in analysis. The analyst's imperative is to separate the subject from
his/her speech, the speaker from his/her jouissance (Miller in Lacan and Language 87).
Meaning must be delayed in analysis in order to delay jouissance, and to this end the
analyst must remain free in his or her "timing and frequency" (Ecrits 217). The idea of the
variable length session, one in which the analyst decides when the session is ended, has
been one of the major Lacanian innovations and points of criticism by most other schools
of psychoanalysis. The Lacanian rationale is that to imply that the analyst is controlled by
some arbitrary limitation is to suggest that the analyst-as-Other is controlled by (and
therefore desirous of) some external, arbitrary Law, or that the analysand can simply
withhold speech from the analyst. The analyst "annuls the times for understanding in
favor of the moments of concluding" (Ecrits 48/256). This means that the analyst does not
allow the passive or even conscious consideration of past events and their possible
meanings, but instead uses his/her speech to radically change the direction of the
analysand's discourse, to frustrate, to hit upon unexpected details or minor faux pauxs,
etc. Lacan says that the analyst uses the session as an opportunity for the "scansion" of the
30
patient's speech. Scansion ordinarily refers to an analysis of meter, as in verse. Lacan
modifies this usage, suggesting that the analyst works to hit upon the Imaginary dialectic
of presence and absence that underlies speech in a way that punctuates the analysand's
full speech and elides empty discourse.
This process begins with an "initial surrender to the Other", the analyst as
guarantor of truth, but culminates in the traversing of the fundamental fantasy, to inhabit
that Other locus which is the cause of the subject. An analysis must build towards a
moment that Zizek calls the troppo fissio, one "moment which comes to stand for all",
and radically re-determines their signification (Plague 90-1). Such a dramatic resolution
can only be reached after the lengthy process of helping the analysand to build up a
context from which s/he can draw a conclusion, a process whose length is indefinite
(Muller 88). The role of time in analysis refers to two separate kinds of time: the
"reversible" time of the signifier, and the a-temporal or unchanging time of objet petit a.
The analysand's passage through his/her own network of signifiers is always a question of
before and after, of anticipated or retroactively ascribed meaning. Desire, however,
presents the analysand with a limit that s/he continually bumps up against, the
limit/impossibility of interpretation present in fantasy. The subjectification of the cause
calls for the reconstitution of the subject around the object, made possible by the fact that
meaning ultimately comes to rest upon a central lack, "signifierized" by S(sub)1, which is
an empty signifier and represents a symbolic position that the analysand can come to
occupy (Plague 90-1).
Seminar VII- Beyond the Signifier, Towards Desire
31
The early Lacan invites us to consider the human psyche, often referred to as "the
entire system", as organized primarily around language and signifier. Lacan's seventh
seminar is invaluable because it traces the signifying system of the subject with respect to
an extra-signifying factor, das Ding (the Thing), an instance of objet petit a. The seminar
begins with Freud and his opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality
principle, primary and secondary process. This is not an opposition between conscious
and unconscious, or between pleasure and pain, but between that which seeks a unity of
perception and a unity of thought. The pleasure principle is the creative process
associated not just with pleasure, but with the function Freud termed wish-fulfillment.
Lacan describes primary process as "appetitive" and "fictional", and states that on the
level of its object, the pleasure principle concerns unconscious material, while the reality
principle, although unconscious as well, concerns the level of words, the known level of
meanings (Seminar VII 33-4). On the level of substantive goal, the pleasure principle
works towards the 'good' of the subject, a good unconditioned by external necessities and
purely determined by unconscious material. The correlate of the 'good' under the reality
principle, we are told, is the goal of regulation according to seemingly split processes, one
of retaining a certain quantity of libidinal energy, and one of discharging that energy, but
never completely.
Lacan sees the Bahnungen, roughly translated as "facilitations", as the
intermediary between the unconscious, organized synchronically, and the preconscious of
language. These Bahnungen are imprinted associations between siginifers. They are the
"creation of a continuous way" which allows for the organization of the matter of the
unconscious, and which Lacan supposes may be underpinnings of the signifying chain.
32
He brings up two of Freud's terms, Sachevorstellung or thing-representation, and
Wortstellung or word-representation, and then goes on to associate the
Vorstellungrepraesentanzen, or idea-representations, with the signifier or signifiers-in-
general, a concept to which Freud did not have access. Conscious thought is simply the
perception of discourse at the level of the Wortvorstellung, subject to the function of
system omicron. Beyond the Sache and the Wort, however, lies das Ding, the Thing. Das
Ding is the alien or estranged kernel of our "neighbor", or Nebenmensch (literally, "near-
person": it stands for unconscious being always just beyond our grasp). On the level of
the object das Ding is not primarily known or unknown, but lost, only to be "found as
missed", found only in "pleasurable associations", and is the same as that which lies at the
heart of the absolute Other of the subject. How does the appearance of das Ding relate to
the pleasure/reality system?
"The complex of the object is in two parts; there is a division, a difference in the approach to judgment. Everything in the object that is quality can be formulated as an attribute; it belongs to the investment of system omicron and constitutes the earliest Vorstellungen around which the destiny of all that is controlled according to the laws of Lust and Unlust, of pleasure and unpleasure, will be played out in what might be called the primary emergences of the subject. Das Ding is something entirely different." (52)(italics added)
Such qualities are the limits of what can be sought. However these appearances
are not really it, the Thing, but only the first representations of it. What we seek is its
reappearance, the finding of the Thing which is lost. "In the name of the pleasure
principle" das Ding is sought. What constitutes effectively the beyond of the pleasure
principle, which is also the "beyond of the signified", is shown to seek "optimum tension"
up until a limit, the limit imposed by the reality principle, intervenes (52, 54). Das Ding,
as the provoker of the limit, spreads its effects over the entire system, and is
fundamentally responsible for the tendencies and organizations of the Vorstellungen, for
33
organizing it into a signifying chain with a purpose. Yet, das Ding is absent from it in the
form of a withdrawing, "it is at the center of it only in the sense that it is excluded" (71).
The point here is that desire remains a-signified, that it maintains itself as a moment of
the Real beyond the merely symbolic. This suggests that analysis must transcend the
signifier and bring the subject into relation with the history of his/her desire. This is to
some extent the logic of the symptom and the analysand's confrontation with it. The
ethics of psychoanalysis is based on this logic: it is not the goods and bads of the patient
with which the analyst concerns him- or herself, but with the inarticulable Good
represented by das Ding, the kernel of our being and beyond the limit of the "first death".
The signifier emerges as important to this process insofar as it constitutes the medium
through which speech gives rise to desire. Lacan says, "It is in the signifier and insofar as
the subject articulates a signifying chain that he comes up against the fact that he may
disappear from the chain of what he is" (Seminar VII 295).
The most important concepts to grasp about Lacan's approach to the kernel or
central aspect of our being is that it is permeated through and through by language.
Language is what makes the idea of an unconscious even possible, it both invades the
human subject and gives him or her a tool, and our experiments with and socialization
through language. The biological part of being is not thereby denigrated, but put in
perspective as another aspect of the constructed and contingent subject. As Lacan said in
his seminar on anxiety, “anatomy is destiny”: the subject born with a vagina inhabits
certain potentials with respect to the signifiers she chooses and those attributed to her and
the Imaginary relationships she forges early on. More generally, however, the body comes
to be gerrymandered by the regime of the word- arms, toes, blinks of the eye, glides of the
34
jaw, all take on poetic function, building into a cadence and a vocabulary. One's desire
cannot come to be formed ignorant of biology, and yet such biology is never strictly
determinate of sexuality, gender assignment, or what toys the subject chooses to play
with; within an order of words, every agreement is ultimately negotiable. Such choices
and assignments are traceable to signifying experiences, and an intervention at the level
of unconscious formations like these are the eventual goal of the analytic technique.
35
Chapter 2: An Introduction to Peircean Thought
Phaneroscopy: Philosophy between Metaphysics and Science
What is phaneroscopy? Before any positive definition can be given, we must
understand that this term is founded upon another, phenomenology. Peirce takes the term
phenomenology in the Hegelian sense, stating that it is the study "whose task it is to make
out what are the elements of appearance that present themselves to us... whether we are
pursuing earnest investigations, or are undergoing the strangest vicissitudes of
experience, or are dreamily listening to the tales of Scheherazade" (Vol2 147). Later in
his career, Peirce seldom passed up an opportunity to admit Hegel's influence upon his
thought (MS 301, MSs 305-6). In opposition to Kantian philosophy, which makes a
strong distinction between the character of experience and the character of pure mind or
reason, Hegelian phenomenology considers the character of that which is experienced,
whether actually experienced or possibly experienced; that is, it deals in hypotheticals,
that which might be, as well as certainties, that which is or must be. The Kantian object is
absolutely in-itself, while the Hegelian object is always nothing other than the
development of consciousness through a process of self-reflection. Similarly, Peirce
maintained vigorously that unknowable or "absolutely incognizable" objects could not be
counted amongst the set of objects with the quality of being (Vol1 25). He decided that
any object that could be said to not-be must have a correlate with some real object, for we
could cognize any object through its opposite or fictional correlate.
The modification, however, is a crucial one: phaneroscopy "reckon[s]
phenomenology with pure mathematics," or logic. The phenomenon or character of an
36
appearance is considered as a phaneron, or logical part of the world that the experienced
occurrence represents. If the phenomenon is, in Peircean terms, the putting into language
of an object-fact (Almeder 112-3), then the phaneron is equally broad, and anterior to the
question of simple 'truth' or 'falsity', which is a specific application of certain types of
reasoning. The phaneron has an object-structure (Ransdell 54-5): it can be taken both as
a singular and as a plural, and denotes both the total character of an appearance or
sensation as well as the possible or thinkable divisions which compose such an
appearance (Fitzgerald 24-8, Deledalle 9; CP 1.284-7). Phaneroscopy draws from aspects
of three distinct fields: logic, of which Peirce considered mathematics to be a branch,
near-idealism or idealistic realism, both of which consider everything experienced to be
mind-mediated, and scientific method, or inquiry-based research which relies upon
experience and testing. Phaneroscopy could be seen as the confluence or meeting-point of
these approaches. In this brief sketch of Peirce's thought, the reader's intention should be
to consider Peirce's phaneroscopy, the categorical system it suggests, and how it brings
about the Peircean semeiotic. We will conclude by describing his view of human
subjectivity, especially as presented by Vincent Colapietro.
Peirce wrote extensively on logic, including several critiques and writings on his
own developments and solutions. He argued that the character of thought is wholly
logical, and that the rules of deduction (reasoning from a higher principle), induction
(reasoning from lower principles or multiple instances), and hypothesis (alternately
referred to as syllogism and abduction) governed thought in the same way that they
governed a mathematical system. Peirce proceeds from the facts that a) ideas come into
the mind in some definite succession or temporal unfolding, and b) that we have some
37
powers of reasoning. He writes in his "Logic of 1873": "These three things must be found
in every logical mind: First, ideas; second, determinations of ideas by previous ideas;
third, determinations of ideas by previous processes. And nothing will be found which
does not come up under one of these three heads" (CP 7.346-50). Peirce denies Kant's
transcendental a priori method, which asks the question, "How are synthetic judgments a
priori possible?" and attempts to discern the conditions for the possibility of the synthesis
of true propositions before experience. Prior to this question, Peirce poses another: how is
any sort of synthetic reasoning possible at all? (Vol1 78). Such an approach reflects the
logical nature of our experience of our own thought, evident in every act of cognition.
Idealism is usually defined as the belief that 'matter is effete mind', or more
precisely that all perceptual or conscious events are simply events of the mind, and may
bear no relation to the physical world, if such an external world can even be said to exist.
H.B. Acton defines it in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) as „the view that mind
and spiritual values are fundamental in the world as a whole‟; David Savan defines it
more usefully as the view that, “whatever there is depends for its existence upon
cognition” (“Refutation” 1). Two well-known variations on this belief are the 'brain in a
vat' hypothesis, which argues that our mind is actually embodied by a thinking entity
whose actual physical situation is unknowable, and the belief that we might simply be
'ideas in the mind of God' or some other more complex being. The term mind is crucial
for Peirce's idealism: it implies something entirely different than brain. 'Mind' is Peirce's
medium, the mediator between consciousness and the externally or physically real. Peirce
hereby rejected the view that consciousness and matter are absolute and polar opposites
or that either exists prior to mind. He writes against the 'Common Sense approach', which
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"makes the real things in this world blind unconscious objects working by mechanical
laws together with consciousness as an idle spectator," and which would thus lead to
concluding that consciousness is impossible, a form of materialism (CP 7.559).
Peirce thinks that general statements, or generals, of which laws of every sort are
a subgroup, do exist. Peirce's metaphysics reflect the nominalist/realist debate of the
Scholastics, especially the writings of Duns Scotus in which he was interested early in his
career. According to nominalism, real generalities or generals do not exist, only mere
occurrences or existences, and the names that we give to them, hence the title
nominalism. Occurrences stripped of the general terms which we assign them have no
essential character or commonality, and one cannot be said to be the cause of or caused by
another. Nominalists use the term haeccaety to refer to any unique body only definable by
its qualities and opposites (Boler). Nominalism poses the question: if you can only know
qualities mediated by mind, how can you assume any essential character or prove any
existential connection at all? Peirce skirts an absolute idealism here by tempering it with
realism, or the view that the ultimate object of knowledge is outside of mind, and that all
valid references or truth-claims make reference to such a real, external object. Almeder
refers to this as an epistemological realism, where truths and other higher-order relations
are not so much invented as discovered by the mind (Colapietro 21). Were our minds
completely free from the constraints of the possible, logical forms, or the actual, physical
possibilities, there would be no real regularity or predictability in the activities of mind or
what it observes. Such freedom is the correlate of an unrestrained idealism, whereas
Peirce's idealism is simply, "[the] method [which] promises to render the totality of things
thinkable; there is no other way of explaining anything than to show how it traces its
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lineage to the womb of thought" (CP 7.559-64). I would characterize this position as
idealistic realism or mind-mediated realism, a view which emphasizes the extensive role
of thought in constructing the world as it emerges into consciousness and the separate but
important role of the externally real, the object of scientific investigation.
Science is an unusually general term in Peirce's writing, encompassing almost
every form of investigation, even including metaphysics. If knowledge does not begin
with a priori statements about consciousness, and certainly admits no dogmas about
reality-in-general, it must begin somewhere, even upon principles which may later be
proved faulty (Vol2 25). The scientific method therefore rests upon the usefulness of
inductive reasoning, or the result of a rule or premise considered with a specific case or
occurrence related to that premise, to produce a new premise formally similar to the
original. Peirce's rule is thus: "a number of facts obtained in a general way will in general
more or less resemble other facts obtained in the same way; or, experiences whose
conditions are the same will have the same general characters" (Vol1 169). Induction is
not mere chance, as some logicians would assert. Peirce holds inductive claims to be
useful in the sense that they will tend to be true "in the long run," under ideal conditions
and amongst an ideal community of investigators. The ideal community of investigators
will tend towards a true proposition concerning the external and material real, that
"which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is
therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me" (quoted in Fisch 187).
Peirce extended the notion of an ideal human community past science, and used it
as the basis of an ethical system appropriate to his logic. Peirce begins his explanation of
ethics with an interesting claim: both logical and moral action depend upon aesthetic
40
judgments. This is in some ways the opposite of a rejection of ethics in favor of
decadence, because it integrates judgments about what is 'fine', 'beautiful' or 'good' into a
deliberative process involving moral and logical judgments. Aesthetics is defined as the
primacy of pure feeling or sensation, apart from terms like 'pleasure' or 'happiness' which
involve numerous coexisting conditions, and often references to oneself and another (i.e.
'giving' or 'receiving' pleasure). Comparisons of such conditions, however, are beyond the
purview of aesthetics. Feelings reveal themselves over the course of experience, to be
ideals or aims, and, “it is the business of ethics to ask: What end is possible? What can be
an ultimate aim capable of being pursued in an indefinitely prolonged course of action?”
(Sheriff 76). Peirce's name for such an ideal is Reason. Peirce, however, denies that we
simply leave aesthetic sentiments behind, or that Reason relegates other concerns to
secondary or tertiary positions within a hierarchy of values. Rather, aesthetic judgment
'checks' the results of all judgment and cannot be ignored. The predominance of one
register of experience over any other Peirce would find perverse; he favors an approach
whereby, “If conduct is to be thoroughly deliberate, the ideal must be a habit of feeling
which has grown up under the influence of a course of self-criticism” (CP 1.574). Feeling
or aesthetic capacity is still free to develop, albeit within certain bounds, those ultimately
of logic. Self-directed or selfish action, whether it be applied to a social system or one's
own life, is illogical because it fails to achieve its result over the long run of cases.
Reason only succeeds in guiding action if we adjust our guiding principles towards social
values, because doing so extends the probability of ultimate success to the greatest length
possible (CP 2.653-4). An ethical system based upon reason as guiding principle does not
require a theistic conception of the universe, but accords with the positive and general
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tendencies of religion, the principle Peirce ultimately called 'evolutionary love' (Sherriff
80-2).
Of course, all such valuable judgments presuppose a theory of inquiry and truth.
As previously stated, Peirce denies Kant's a priori method for ascertaining what is the
truth of our cognitions, which is not simply analytic or definitional truth, whereby the
predicate judgment may be contained in the subject of the judgment. He writes that, "...if
the propositions of arithmetic for example, are true cognitions, or even the forms of
cognition, this circumstance is quite aside from their mathematical truth" (CP 4.232).
Mathematical truth is, for Peirce, a species of possibility, the truth of a hypothetical state,
which could be completely arbitrary if not connected to an actual state of things: Peirce's
example is an imagined universe which coheres in theory (4.232-233). Conversely,
however, no positive knowledge could result from simply knowing the state of the
actuality of things, which could be mere chance. It is only from the inmixing here of the
possible and the actual that we ever arise into the third state of things, the necessary. This
critique of Kant led Peirce to the establishment of his own categories of "Quality,
Relation, and Representation", which are clearly the result of an early division between
possible, actual, and necessary (Fisch 264).
One, Two, Three: Peirce's Categories
The transcendental or triad (also and herein referred to as trichotomy) is the
categorical breakdown according to Peirce's phaneroscopical approach. The three general
categories are Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Each category applies to all phanera
(sing. phaneron), although one may be more prominent in the phaneron than another. The
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category of the First is the category of pure quality or possibility. The First "is itself as it
is regardless of anything else. That is to say, it is a Quality of Feeling" (CP 5.66).
Firstness is non-contingent and exists in the mind as feeling unconnected to any other
thought or feeling. In temporal terms Peirce describes Firstness as the category
corresponding to the immediate and always fleeting present.
The category of the Second is the category of singularity and differentiation.
Singular occurrence or instance is equivalent for Peirce to actuality over against
possibility. Secondness always occurs "Second to some First", that is, it is always the
relation of one thing to some other thing. It accounts for "such facts as Another, Relation,
Compulsion, Effect, Dependence, Independence, Negation, Occurrence, Reality, [and]
Result," all of which are impossible without thinking something in terms of pure dyadic
relation. If a First corresponds to a physical or temporal beginning, a Second then
corresponds to an absolute end. Peirce claims that without an element or relation of
Secondness we cannot think concepts such as force, extension, or vector (Vol1 248).
The category of the Third is the category of mediation, that which stands between
a First and a Second and brings them into relation with one another. The essence of
mediation, for Peirce, inheres in two terms: law and generality. Laws are not the physical
laws of natural science, which admit to some possibility of error or chance. Peirce calls
his doctrine of absolute scientific chance tychism, from the Greek word for 'chance'. Laws
are instead analogous to the laws of cognition, encompassed by Peirce's all-important law
of mind: "ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to
them in a peculiar relation of affectability. In this spreading they lose intensity, and
especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with
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others" (Vol1 313) This is because the intensity of any feeling, feeling being a quality of
any relation, occurs over what Peirce calls an infinitesimal duration of time.
Viewing a straight line, say, one which represents a time-line, we can see that
between any two points there lie innumerable mediate points. This is not simply infinite
divisibility, for dividing something infinitely many times by any other rational number
simply yields a set of fractional divisions whose number cannot exceed a certain
numerable series of rational fractions (320). All points on the line, then, have at least an
infinitesimal distance between them, and the point at which something occurs and the
point at which we feel or notice it occurring are separated by such a distance. Thus, the
feeling we actually experience cannot be said to be the product of any instant, but of an
infinitesimal duration, arranged ordinally (first period of duration, second, third, etc.).
Such durations are not wholly exclusive from one another, i.e. they may contain the same
instances of time and be said to be an ordered grouping of such instances, but of course,
no duration could be said to be identical to any other, or it would make no sense to speak
of separate durations at all. Thus, "a finite interval of time generally contains an
innumerable series of feelings," or infinitesimal durations, "and when these become
welded together in association, the result is a general idea" (325). By 'general idea' Peirce
means not simply an idea we might label general, because the importance of his analysis
is to show that even the most specific and intense of sensations is already the product of a
generalizing process before it results in an immediate consciousness. Peirce's idea is that
as new instances insist upon the mind, the vividness of a particular sensation becomes
more and more removed. The sensation deduces in intensity, but out of this comes a more
abstract and general perspective, as this sensation becomes additionally integrated with
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more immediate durations. Thus, a continuous series of durations gives rise to an
unbroken sense of consciousness. The law of mind is therefore a law of absolute
continuity between singular feelings, which Peirce dubs synechism. Peirce calls this
appearance of everything general to immediate consciousness the 'firstness of thirdness'.
The power of a particular general idea to affect others rely upon their being posited as
subjects or Firsts, and the affected ideas to be posited as predicates following from the
First in question (326-7). If an idea is not posited subjectively at some point, it will have
no possibility of affecting other ideas. The longer the duration a certain sensation
occupies, the more power it will have to affect others, and the farther it is from being
posited by consciousness, the less power it will have.
But why a triad? Why are there only three indecomposable categories or modes,
and not four or five? What we have discussed so far is a more general and descriptive
theory of the categories, but Peirce was also after clear arguments which deduced the
reality of trichotomy from mathematical or grammatical examples (for example, CP
3.63). Peirce's claim is that whatever is necessarily and logically involved in any portion
of the phaneron is involved in the phaneron itself, and therefore one must analyze the
phaneron into the largest possible unit which is not decomposable into smaller units. The
argument runs thus: one can imagine a point, or monad, as existing, and then imagine this
point as existing as part of a dyad with another point. One can also imagine a triad not
decomposable into dyads, because the idea of mediation necessarily involved in the triad
excludes it from being described or counted in any way that involves fewer than three
terms. However, Peirce exclaims, we cannot consider a tetrad to be similarly
indecomposable, because it can be resolved into several triads in combination. Peirce
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reasons (Vol2 364) that combination itself is essentially a species of Thirdness, since it is
what allows us to imagine wholeness over and above an opposition or duality (MS 908).
Peirce was not imagining an arithmetic wholeness, or wholeness of homogeneous parts,
but rather a logical wholeness in which an inference (induction or abduction) results in a
conclusion which represents the unity of the constituent propositions.
Peirce was insistent in claiming that not only are Firstness and Secondness real,
but that Thirdness is as well. The phaneron, Peirce wrote, is wholly made up of qualities,
or Firsts, but is just as genuinely made up of forces, or Seconds (Vol2 364). He goes on
elsewhere to defend the reality and distinctness of Thirdness, especially in "The
Categories Defended" (MS 308). His claim is that mediation is not simply a property of
mind, as nominalists claimed, but instead that mediation really exists in nature, and that
the human mind has come to reflect it. Peirce gives us two articles of proof. Mediation
exists, he writes, first in the form of general principles: something which is apt to be
predicated of an aggregate of possible things that fall within the bounds of a given term
(Peirce uses the example of the word sun). Peirce mentions that representation is an
equivalent term to Thirdness. Much more convincing is the remark that mediation is
provable to any observer, since, "words can produce physical effects" (184). In other
words, signs have the possibility to produce action via some medium. The presence of
continuity between successive or related events, or synechism, is a natural conclusion of
the belief in real mediation. Synechism, however, required formalization if it was to
become demonstrable. Peirce concluded that if every individual cognition is logical,
relational, and to some degree points towards generality, he would need to invent a
rigorous system of thought classification unlike any previously conceived. Such a system
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would have to describe mediation in terms of the trichotomy, and would become "a
system conceived as semeiotic."
Peirce's Semeiotic*
According to Peirce, the development of the thought in the triad is equivalent to
the development of the sign: all thought occurs in signs. This is Peirce's axiom, and the
key to combining his synechistic and phaneroscopical approaches. Peirce gives several
definitions of the sign, but the most widely applicable is, "The sign stands for something
to the idea which it produces or modifies" (CP 1.339). Put another way, a sign represents
something for an interpreting mind to which the sign can be said to be meaningful. Signs
develop and produce one another, and therefore have both causational aspects and terms
of relation or position with respect to one another. Sign-action, or the development of
signs in this way, is referred to as semeiosis. The primary division of the sign proceeds
from the trichotomy, and further divisions occur as either degenerate or genuine
developments of the already developed parts of the sign. All Firsts for Peirce are genuine:
all Firsts are immediate, involving no other ideas but themselves. Some Seconds may be
considered degenerate, where the ideas related are simply posited as a relation, but others
are genuine, accounting for external relations, or "relations of Reaction" or of "Willing",
which are not simply the possibilities of actual relations, but the actual occurrence of such
a relation (Vol2 160-1). The use of these terms with respect to Thirdness will be
discussed below. No matter what its relation to its object or thinker, a sign is always a
*The term 'semeiotic' means any “art or science or doctrine or general theory of semioses,” and derives from
the Greek 'semeion', or 'sign'. The spelling 'semiotic' drops a vowel and confuses the root of the word with the Latin root 'semi-', or 'half'. The term 'semeiotics' is no more useful than 'logics' or 'rhetorics', and was never used by Peirce (Fisch 321-2).
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mediate or third term between the object being represented and the mind of the
representer (Vol1 281). All signs have an aspect of Thirdness, even though the usual or
observed connections of one sign with another may not bear out this generality most
clearly.
Peirce's trichotomy breaks down the sign into three parts, whose terms and
functions correspond roughly to the three categories: representamen (Firstness), object
(Secondness), and interpretant (Thirdness). The first is the representamen, or portion of
the sign which stands for the sign itself, the jumping-off point for semeiotic action. Peirce
often uses this term interchangeably with the term "sign", because in many contexts what
we would normally call a sign is what Peirce designates as representamen, the sign
considered in its sign-ness. For instance, if we see a billboard, the visual quality of the
billboard (size, shape, color) Peirce would say is the representamen. The sign with
respect to its representamen is either a Qualisign, which stands for the sensory quality of
the sign (the pure qualities perceived), a Sinsign, the appearance of the sign in its singular
or unified sense (qualities interpreted as a unity), or Legisign, which is the type of the sign
(the representamen interpreted as not being one actual instance, but the gestalt or general
image of the sign). A more helpful division, however, comes in Peirce's letter to Lady
Welbly: the potisign is the sign in its possible aspect, a sign which we infer to be the
purely possible, for instance, the thought of a cat we have never seen. The actisign is the
sign in its particularity, while the famisign refers to the entire type or class of the sign, say
the word 'cat' as a general category which refers us back to all other instances of the
occurrence of a cat (Vol2 483).
With reference to its object, a sign can be an icon, index, or symbol. Icons, or
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iconic signs, bear a relationship of resemblance or quality to their objects (color, tone,
brightness, etc.). An iconic relationship between representamen and object implies a
ground, referred to both as a 'real' potential of bringing into relation and alternately as
reference to a single quality. Indexes bear a relation of position or extension to their
objects, and make reference to a "correlate" (CP 1.557), or a "direct physical connection"
(CP 1.372). Symbols bear a conventional relationship to their objects, one created or
learned by the interpreter, not simply recognized and used by him or her. This is so
because the ground of the symbol involves something more than resemblance or position.
Therefore, the symbolic aspect of the sign is the aspect which in every case makes
reference to a logical interpretant. Symbols are general, or in every case represent their
specific object, and therefore involve a habitual association (for more on habit, see
below). In order to clarify the difference between icon, index and symbol, Peirce uses the
terms genuine and degenerate. A genuine symbol is truly a Third: it does not correspond
to its object due to any resemblance or position whatsoever. An index is a Third
degenerate in the first degree, because it refers to its object by virtue of position (aspect of
Secondness), and similarly an icon is a Third degenerate in the second degree, because it
relies on quality (Firstness). The language of degeneracy can also be applied to
Secondness, in the case of "weak" Secondness or sensation, which contains an element of
quality, and "strong" Secondness or pure Willing (CP 5.66-81).
Peirce uses the term "object" primarily to describe a portion or aspect of the sign.
This usage differs from our normal use of the term object: the subject or sign does not
simply correspond or indicate objects in the world, nor is an absolute division between
the "inner" and "outer" object native to Peirce's philosophy. Rather, in the mediative
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process of semeiosis, Peirce finds need to describe several types of objects. He uses three
distinct terms: immediate object, dynamic object, and real object, and comes to involve
them. Remembering to understand the sign primarily as a relation, the immediate object is
simply the object determined by some specific moment in a semeiosis. In the case of
vision, the immediate object is an image. The dynamical object is the object from which
the immediate object arises. The dynamical (often referred to as dynamoid) object is "not
anything out of mind, but the essence of the perception. It means something forced on the
mind by perception, but including more than perception reveals" (Vol2 478). Although
one cannot know exactly the content of the dynamic object, one can re-approach it
logically by means of an inference. The real or ultimate object refers to the object outside
of and not cognized by the mind, and Ransdell (55) points out that Peirce's phaneroscopy,
as opposed to his purely scientific writings, is not concerned with claims about objects or
realities that occur outside of thought.
The idea that a sign produces is the object of the sign, but there must be some
reason that this object is produced. The general term for the idea that the sign must stand
"for" is interpretant of the sign. The interpretant is the mediate term of the sign, which
Peirce describes as having two primary characteristics: it notes or accounts for the logical
relationship between the representamen and object (see below, 'Thought and Logic'), but
must also be thought of as a product of that relationship (Pharies 34). The sign with
respect to its interpretants can be broken down into its Rhema, Dicent, and Argument. To
classify a sign as such is to say that it has a certain type of interpretability, that it must be
interpreted as such. The Rhema is the sign's term, or verbalized distinction which
identifies it as a possible. A 'term' here is neither true nor false, such as the isolated
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appearance of a common noun or infinitive verb. To say that a sign is a Dicent is to say
that it is a proposition or fact (as, say, the proposition, "It is raining here" might be used
purely as demonstrative in a logic problem). It refers to an instance or singularity. The
Argument is "a sign whose rational necessity must be acknowledged," because it
represents a certain number of premises, the term 'premise' taken in the broad sense of
quality or relational term (called 'relates) (Oehler 5-6; Haas 67). The easiest way to
imagine it is as one sign which includes a number of propositions, all of which “urge”
interpretation by a genuine Third or law; therefore classifying the sign as an Argument
indicates that the sign should be interpreted as a generality (Vol II 204, 292, 220-1).
The interpretant term of the sign, then, breaks down in a similar way to that of the
object: there are immediate, dynamic, and final interpretants. An immediate interpretant is
the sign's interpretability, a term suggested by the very form of the sign, and allowing us
to cognize it. The dynamic interpretant is the actual response to a sign, say, a single action
such as a reply in the case of the verbal sign. The final interpretant is the eventual
response to the sign, also known as the significance of the sign (Vol2 498). This is the
interpretant which would be produced upon the mind in an eventual, full development of
thought (Pharies 26). There is also another method of classifying interpretants, according
to the triad emotional, energetic, and logical. Peirce asks, when presented with a sign, do
we respond with an emotion, an action, or by reasoning?
The origin of semeiotic action in the mind is not clearly ascribable to one portion
of the sign; semeiosis is an absolutely synechistic process. We must imagine, first, the
dynamic object, say, a flower, as in some sense determining a semeiosis. Objects,
however, are not considered in a vacuum; rather, they make an appearance as signs, and
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the term representamen stands for the coherence of the sign which has arisen from the
dynamic object recomposed in the mind. The representamen goes on to dictate an
immediate interpretant, which allows the determination of the immediate object, or image
of the flower. This then leads back to further representation of the flower, allowing more
possible interpretants to come into play. Note here that the process is not purely cyclical,
because the string of immediate objects produced in the semeiosis allows for an
inferential re-determination in thought of the dynamic object. This process of revision-in-
thought is what Peirce referred to as the "virtuous spiral," as it makes possible the
creation and modification of the set of interpretants. It is possible to define sign-action
this way: "Semiosis is thus the production of and attribution by a thought of the sign-
interpretant, or more simply interpretant, of a sign-representamen to the immediate
object, i.e., the sort of object that the thought takes for the object, given the action or
semiosis it has accomplished." (Deledalle 43-49).
Thought and Logic
The development of the sign is always linked, in Peirce's writings, to syllogism,
which he also termed abduction. If A--->C, then we must take A as representamen in the
sign-relation, and C as object, and the syllogism is only broken down and thus clarified by
A--->B and B--->C. B here is to be taken as an interpretant, a third or relational term. B
here represents another part of the sign, a response and development to A as related to C.
Peirce's true innovation, however, is to say the following: if A---->C, B is not the
necessary completion to that relation, but one of any possible number, corresponding to
any number of different possible interpretants. Peirce defines syllogism this way in his
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New List of Categories:
Q(sub)1, Q(sub)2, Q(sub)3 instantiate P S is also an instance of Q(sub)1, Q(sub)2, Q(sub)3 [therefore] S is a case of P with reference to Q(sub)1, Q(sub)2, Q(sub)3 (CP 7.580)
Q is a set of interpretant terms or conditions which, if satisfied, bring about P, an object.
S is a representamen which meets the set of conditions Q, and thus, because of an often
expansive set of logical criteria, S produces P. In reference to the virtuous spiral
described above, the representamen will first have to satisfy a number of mere qualitative
and positional criteria, most of which are usually automatic, leading to a dynamic
interpretant.
Peirce referred to interpretants qua logical thirds as laws, and more often than not
such logical thirds will be opaque, a term I care to use to indicate that while a definite
relation must exist between A and C, none can be clearly and logically demonstrated. The
difficulty of opacity exists for other types of interpretants as well (emotional and
energetic interpretants); Peirce called it doubt. Doubt is a state of discomfort or irritation
"from which we struggle to free ourselves"(CP 5.372). Doubt is satisfied only by the
passage into a state of belief. A belief, or "thought at rest," has three qualities: we are
aware of it, it appeases doubt, and it leads to the establishment of a habit of mind, a
corresponding indexical practice or action (CP 5.379). Note, however, that Peirce
discusses belief here in terms of our conscious consideration of it. Peirce postulates that
any belief results in the formation of a habit, whose role it is to determine our actions.
Habit, most importantly, is not "an affection of consciousness" (CP 2.148). We can
become aware of our habits only in a mediated or latent way. Altering our habits may take
place either unconsciously or after a judgment, a conscious consideration of a belief (Vol2
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1-98).
'Meaning,' on the Peircean account, is the sum of all possible interpretants (CP
5.9, quoted in Pharies 22), resulting from the "truth of the conception", or correspondence
between the dynamical object, the object as the optic nerve perceives it, and immediate
object, or the representation of the object arising into consciousness. Thus, a change in
the conception of the object results in a change in the set of fitting or even possible
interpretants. To go back to the example of a simple syllogism, if the dynamical object
that C refers to is differently represented in the mind, then it may appear as having the
character D, which falls into a certain relation to A, and so A---->D; this may not alter
any one of the possible interpretants, but at least some of them, giving rise to a change in
Peircean meaning, which is defined not just by one implication of the relation but by the
collection of interpretants.
Peirce's Semeiotic Subject
Peirce is noted for having different periods of intense creativity, from his earlier
and metaphysical work, to his later and more formalized semeiotic and pragmatic
writings. While several authors have tackled the problems with Peirce's theory of mind,
few have attempted to re-construct an account of Peircean subjectivity. In his landmark
and singular collection, winner of the first Charles Sanders Peirce Award from the Peirce
Society, Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity,
Vincent Colapietro attempts a reading of Peirce which adequates the idea of a semeiotic
subject to the perspectives of the educated, late twentieth-century reader. I shall begin
with a look at some of Peirce's basic writings on subjectivity, and move on to an
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explication of Colapietro's account. We begin where Peirce does, with a demonstration of
four different limitations or phaneroscopical observations about human thought in "Some
Consequence of Four Incapacities": "1. We have no power of Introspection, but all
knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge
of external facts.; 2. We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is determined
logically by previous cognitions.; 3. We have no power of thinking without signs," and,
"4. We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable." The third and fourth points
have already been discussed, and the second argument is proven by the fact that all
awareness of feeling, action, or our own thought processes occurs after and because of
that thought, action, etc. Even if we were capable of intuition, Peirce writes, we would
not be able to distinguish an intuition by any means from other cognitions. Every sort of
cognition has an object, whether that object be external or subjective. This is perhaps
Peirce's clearest demonstration of the truth of synechism with respect to mental life: we
can establish an unbroken logical relation between present and previous cognitions. The
first argument is predicated upon the second, and says that "inference from external facts"
is the only method by which we can determine the meaning and origin of feelings or
conclusions of any kind. In other words, perceived states of the external world and
mediative thought processes come to determine conscious thought, not immediate
knowledge of internal states. Rather than being an originary point for thought,
consciousness shows itself to be determined through a mediative process.
For Colapietro, the notion of interpretant allows us to see Peirce's semeiotic
subject, the utterer and interpreter of signs, as intersecting the "existentially situated
subject", that there is an overlap between individual psychic entities and semeiotic
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entities (35). Interpretant, as Colapietro uses it, most nearly means a mediative response,
corresponding to one of the types of possible interpretants. This entire notion rests upon
understanding the mind as a "community of interpretants" (43). As David Savan claims:
"A mind is a society or community of signs and interpretants engaged in a dialogue in
which each affects the others. Peirce's dramatic apothegms 'Man is a sign' (CP 5.324,
8.304) is short for: a human mind is a society of communicating signs and interpretants,
separated from other such societies only by error and ignorance" (Ketner 321). The "self",
described in Peirce as the core of one's being, is not withdrawn from discourse, but
articulates itself to others through the borrowed (and therefore internalized) discourses of
others (Colapietro 38). Mind is dialogical and not reciprocal: the interpretant is both a
response to the sign and the basis of a sign in its own right, subject to reconsideration.
Defining mind as we have, however, has another revealing side: it points out that any
conversation or concrete sign-exchange is also an instance of mind in a no less genuine
sense.
Colapietro also brings up the fascinating notion of matrix and focal selves. The
matrix self is deep, nearest to the most significant or essential part, and represents a
"complex of habits" (94). The focal or positional selves could be rendered as momentary
hubs or confluences on the surface of the matrix-self, representing different interests. The
ego, interestingly enough, is not described as one of these focal points, but rather as a
"mere wave of the soul" (CP 1.112), or a "phase of the inner dialogue" (Colapietro 95). It
operates not on one level of the self, but between multiple levels nearer to the surface of
consciousness. This is a stratified description of the self, but not one which precludes the
possibility of complex interaction between strata. The interpretant-critical process is only
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possible by inferential and controlled reasoning: language becomes a transformational
medium as well as a structuring or conformational medium. Peirce's three divisions of
consciousness correspond to the three divisions of the triad: Single, or consciousness of a
"pure indescribable quale which is gone in a twinkling of an eye", Dual, a sense of "action
and reciprocal reaction", and Plural or synthetic consciousness, "a bridge which unites the
present and the absent" (Vol1 280-4).
But what about the unconscious? Colapietro states that Peirce was specifically
disadvantaged in that he did not have a comprehensive theory of the unconscious to draw
upon, even though he conceded that the larger portion of the mind is obscure (“Sketch”
39). Do Peirce's comments about consciousness have anything more than purely
metaphorical value? Certainly not, unless we appropriate his goal and update it: to
provide an account of a human semeiotic, a mind corresponding to an individual subject
described in the terms of a single semeiotic system, which accounts for both the
unconscious and the conscious systems in terms not of a unity, but of a continuity:
synechistic terms which describe relations, processes and the resulting structures.
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Chapter 3: Lacan avec Peirce: Psychoanalysis with Semeiotics
It is crucial to begin with the fact that Jacques Lacan and C.S. Peirce, in the earlier
articulations of their respective theories, both began with a re-interpretation of Hegel.
Lacan was primarily influenced by Kojeve's seminars on the Phenomenology of Spirit,
while Peirce broke with a Kantian categorical approach between 1867 and 1870 to arrive
at a Hegelian conception (Fisch 190, 261-82; also see Wilden). In Hegel, both Peirce and
Lacan "found an emphasis on the self not as a substance but as a subject, not as isolated
subject but as subject in the intersubjective matrix of culture, not as fixed entity but as a
subject understood as process, and not as a process that gradually unfolds positively but,
rather, that operates through the dialectic of negation, suffering, division, and the shared
memorialization of loss" (Muller 64). Peirce and Lacan were phenomenologists in the
sense of a Hegelian phenomenology, which Lacan said, "represents an ideal
development... a permanent revisionism, in which truth is in a state of constant
reabsorption in its own disturbing element" (Seminar VII). This is essentially the Peircean
teleological account of the development of truth, which is process-based and involves the
development of an ultimate logical interpretant which sutures our epistemological
framework. Similarly, Lacan offers us an account of truth which is based not upon the
correctness of a certain narrative, but upon a process of re-integration of signifiers back
into a signifying chain. Lacan, however, via Freud, recognizes the disjointed relation
between the conscious subject and his/her desire, a relation of denial and repression
(Shepherdson in Rabate 128). Lacan writes that subjective structure is primarily molded
by desire as a negation or lack, a specifically Hegelian idea and one with which Peirce
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disagreed. This is an essential and perhaps irrevocable difference between the Lacanian
and Peircean topologies. Our task in general, therefore, shall not be to compare the
Peircean and Lacanian models of mind, but instead to understand how the Peircean
semeiotic might enlighten a Lacanian view of the subject.
However, Lacan and Peirce do critique Hegel on similar grounds. Lacan
recognizes the essential role of meconnaisance, the misrecognition of subjective position
due to the opacity of the unconscious Other, and Imaginary aggression in forming the
subject. These assertions make Hegel's project, which treds "the path... [of] conscious
inspection of the untruth of apparent knowledge," untenable (Phenomenology 16), and
preclude the pure Hegelian movement of sublation (Ger. Aufhebung), the logical
supercession of a principle where the principle is met with its negative, producing an
augmented or developed concept which captures the essence of the original. There is no
Aufhebung: "it is one of those pretty dreams of philosophy", Lacan declares (Seminar
XX). Peirce points out a similar error in Hegel: the mediative process of sublation
precludes an acknowledgment of the reality of Secondness. Genuine Secondness is more
or less absent from the Hegelian dialectic: all of Secondness is reduced to the idea of
Force, the 'inner difference' of already-unified phenomena. The play of Force constiutes
only Appearace, a stumbling-block to a mature and increasingly aware consciousness
(Butler 26-8). Within the dialectic, Peirce states, Hegel "usually overlooked external
(genuine) secondness, altogether... he has committed the trifling oversight of forgetting
that there is a real world with real actions and reactions... Hegel had the misfortune to be
unusually deficient in mathematics" (Hoopes 197). Compare these remarks to Lacan's
own: "...Hegelian dialectic is false and contradicted as much by the testimony of the
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natural sciences as by the historical progress of the fundamental science, mathematics"
(Television 84). Peirce and Lacan both criticize the ideal but ignorant series of mental
developments within consciousness alone.
For Peirce, mathematics combined with his triadic approach give birth to three
specific logical fields: formal logic, or critic, which governs the formal nature of
propositions; speculative grammar (a term borrowed from Duns Scotus), which attempts
a classification of sign relations; and speculative rhetoric (also called 'methodeutic')
which governs the relations of signs in the mind. If formal logic governs the possible
relations, and therefore the truth of any proposition, then speculative grammar describes
the actual relations of one sign to another, which Peirce called the meaning of
propositions. Speculative rhetoric, however, was a branch of Peirce's logic over which
mathematicians were said to have "boggled over comparatively simple problems of
unfamiliar kinds" (CP 2.105; see also 2.229). This governs what might be said to be
necessary for sign function to actually take place in mind, the "general conditions of the
reference of Symbols and other Signs to the Interpretants which they aim to determine..."
(CP 2.93). Speculative grammar takes the purely formal possibilities afforded by any sign
system and asks how we can apply these to actual conditions of the sign we witness a
posteriori. Speculative rhetoric goes even further: it asks us to take the actual relations we
witness in the sign, and consider these in relation to the reason they refer to one another,
the interpretant or third term of the sign, implying a relation of necessity: what must be in
the mind?
Peirce's approach to the logic of the sign allows us an insight into Lacan's work.
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Lacan as clinician must offer us a coherent picture of the subject of a certain structure or
'apparatus', as Freud said. Toward this end he went so far as to apply topological shapes
and graphs to describe these systematic relations. The most basic of these is Lacan's
"schema L", which crosses an a(other)-a'(moi) Imaginary axis with an S(Es)-A(Other)
Symbolic axis. Here, none of the terms refer to specific content, but rather the schema
"signifies a condition of the subject" defined as structuring relations between terms whose
content is wholly variable (Ecrits 183). This is quite close to Peirce's definition of
speculative rhetoric, a study which he knew required a method he planned to determine
and systematize (this book was never written). Lacan's own deficiency, then, might be
said to have been his construction of a grammatica speculativa which while enlightening,
is still an often times haphazard piecing-together of Saussurean semiology, Roman
Jakobson's linguistics, and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleu-Ponty. All of Lacan is
devoted to clarifying, "the essence of the relation between appearance and being," and the
subject's own otherness and ambiguity with respect to any subject-object relation:
“There is a phenomenal domain- infinitely more extended than the privileged points to which it appears- that enables us to apprehend, in its true nature, the subject in absolute overview. Even if we cannot give it being, it is nonetheless necessary. There are facts that can be articulated only in the phenomenal dimension of the overview by which I situate myself in the picture as stain...” (Seminar XI 94-7)
Lacan is describing a method of observation which allows the observer to notice, between
what s/he experiences and the absolute conditions of phenomenal experience itself, that
which is inconsistent between the two. To accomplish this, Lacan needed a new
vocabulary beyond the analytic terminology: the many-tiered use of the term 'signifier' in
Lacan, his use of artistic terminology like 'anamorphosis' (the unexpected and revelatory
effect that often accompanies perspectival shift), and other vagaries signal that Lacan was
forced to be creative (but often haphazard) in his borrowing. The goal of such distinctions
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as speculative rhetoric/speculative grammar is to allow us differentiate where Peirce and
Lacan become good expositors of Peirce's overarching notion of "logic" (absolute
condition of experience) and the actual phenomenal experience of the subject
(conditioned by structure). The systematic Peircean semeiotic, in the light of a Lacanian
notion of the human subject, will allow us to do two overall things: first, to translate
wherever needed from the terminology that Lacan chose to classify sign relations into
Peirce's speculative grammar, which includes representamen, object, and interpretant,
icon, index, and symbol, etc.,; and second, to demonstrate how Peirce's speculative
grammar and critical logic expose something new or interesting about Lacan's subject.
The latter task shall be approached more closely in Chapter 4, while here we shall
consider the work already done to bring Peirce's thought to Lacan's theory of the subject
of psychoanalysis.
Muller's Comparison of Peirce and Lacan
A triadic comprehension of the psychoanalytic situation shifts the terms of the
debate over models of psychoanalytic treatment: linear, cause-and-effect understandings
give way to more complex understandings of the code of the broadly semeiotic, but quite
importantly linguistic system. This is an interpretation of Peirce's linguistic system in
which words and actions are classified in the familiar and relational terms of Peirce's
semeiotic, which replaces the Saussurean semiological boundary, the assertion of a rift
between the signifier and the absolutely signified. Muller correlates Firstness with the
Real, and Secondness with the Imaginary. The Real (the lower case real is a referred to as
a "social construction" or amalgam) is "beyond an epistemological frontier", the obscure,
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homogeneous and maddening state of being that follows the collapse of the social order,
or network of signifiers (75-97, Muller and Brent 51-2). Muller claims: "I propose that
the general conceptual scheme provided by the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce
suggests a hierarchal model that can usefully organize the emergent data of
psychoanalysis" (ibid 54). The purely dyadic conception of the psychoanalytic relation,
the "transference/counter-transference" model, is grossly inadequate (55). Muller equates
the Peircean Third with the Lacanian Symbolic, or mediative context that arises between
analyst and analysand.
The dyadic, Muller writes, is governed by the Lacanian Imaginary. The human
dyadic system is governed by "knowledge of context, cuing, and ostensive reference and
is organized by a narrative format with four major constituents": goal-directed action, a
segmented order, a sensitivity to what is normative and what is deviant in human
interaction, and a narrational perspective (Muller 14). To say that action is goal-directed
implies not only that behavior has a purpose and a cause, but that there is some objective
or desirable condition which motivates each participant. The phrase 'segmented order'
implies that the interaction can be broken down into smaller and still meaningful units. I
also will suggest that the form of narrativity evident in this early stage of development is
the repetitive narration of the interchange or encounter, not the 'historical' or 'subjectified'
narrative we would associate with personal history, which always involves an articulation
and re-arrangement of remembered facts. This mirror-stage encounter is a cyclical period
of engagement, culturally specific in its context, content, and frequency, and rules.
Muller's point is that these encounters are not instinctually controlled, and already make
reference to elements of the context: "the (mother-child) interaction seems to be regulated
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by reciprocal cuings. Such cues, however, may not convey information about "inner"
emotional states, but rather may signal the overt conditions of recognition..." (18-19). The
infant gains a role in the definition of the context: Muller refers to this as a
"metacommunication."
Muller introduces the idea of a semeiotic development that proceeds up from the
icons, indexes, and into symbols or logical interpretants (34). The role of the icon is
central to empathy and affective response in infants almost immediately after birth, and
most noticeably manifests as mutual gazing. Index serves to punctuate icon, the deictic
function of index. Indexical words (such as pronouns) or gestures creates the condition of
dialogue. Indexes are never grounded in objective reference, as they might be for a purely
instinctual being, but instead rely on the code of the encounter (71). For example, the wag
of a dog may have a certain fixed referent, say, the appearance of some definite danger,
while a pronoun may refer to different objects, even a 'he' who is not present or not
masculine in any sense. A sequence containing only icons is akin to any sequence of
symbols: meaningless, unless one has the correct interpretive framework. Indexes have
the quality of assigning referents to groups of iconic behaviors. "Such a sequence... is not
controlled by either intrinsic or extrinsic executives, but brought about through the self-
organizing dynamics of the infant interacting with small differences..."(58).
The Peircean semeiotic context proves fruitful in classifying communicative
behavior within a Lacanian developmental schema: "When the other's responses to the
signing process fall out of timing, the structure of intersubjective recognition collapses.
Such disrupted semiosis, furthermore, may provide some of the necessary conditions for
the projective identification to occur whereby the feeling and action interpretants of one's
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signs are disavowed and enacted by the other member of the dyad" (51). There is a
seemingly paradoxical movement at this juncture: Muller writes that this break in the
communicative link (a lack or deluge of responsiveness) will cause an increase in
identification with the mother qua other. The common sense question here is: why
shouldn't such an event result in disassociation or de-identification from the maternal
other? This exposes the core of the desiring infant subject: the possibility of closure in the
mother qua Other, implying the non-necessity and therefore non-existence of the subject.
A breakdown in the communicative cycle makes it necessary that the child make an
extraordinary demand in order to survive, and provokes the question, "What does she
want?", thereby exacerbating the desire of/for the Other. Demand is linked thereby to
need, and the difference between them becomes the space of desire. The passage from
rough iconic behavior into deixis and indexical behavior should therefore be read as a
strategy of coercion: the index, as compared to the icon, is non-falsifiable and allows
reality-testing, attention-directing behavior, and "...for causal relations to be
apprehended" (Muller 60). In Peircean terms, the child's demand is taken as indexical of
some interpretant, whether it be because the mother genuinely believes that it is, or
because the mother's thoughts and feelings are projected onto the infant. Consequently,
the (m)Other's demand is taken by the child as indexical of her desire, thus giving rise to
the conditions for mutual dialogue (147).
I would break with Muller here, and contend that Lacan's concept of desire is non-
dialogical, and that desire comes to govern semeiosis in a quite different way. Muller
asserts (36, 45) that the condition of "mutual recognition" is the first logical interpretant
of the mother-child dyad, that which sustains the dyadic situation. Assuming for a
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moment that such an interpretant does exist, and while it may be that this interpretant is
such that it fulfills the overt condition of binding the interaction, it could not be in the
form of a pact or literal agreement. Muller does not assert this, and from the above
description of pre-linguistic interactivity, it should be clear that at this stage the
interaction has no unifying rule which is clearly understood as a rule by both members of
the dyad. From the child's point of view, that which stands behind the demand, the only
'logic' assignable to it, is the desire that it implies in the form of a metonymy from the
signifying chain. Desire is not structured by the choice of object(s) that the child
perceives the Other/other as making. Quite the contrary, desire is structured by the
movement of the demand from one signifier to the next (Fink (1) 90-91). In Chapter 1 the
idea of a metonymy was introduced, as was the idea that desire is a metonymy of speech.
In order to give us a clearer idea of how a metonymy might be discovered, Lacan uses the
word scansion, which refers to an analysis of meter in verse, in reference to a chaining of
signifying elements. The chain is then separated into different groupings which function
in relation to one another as indexes, as if to make a graph of the sentence. Upon scrutiny,
the chain may be said to be 'missing' or 'wanting' something, to be referring to an element
outside of the chain, or to contain an element whose referent is unclear, and Lacan says
that desire is the product of such an (unconscious) procedure by the child. While at once
being the product of one demand (the mother's), desire at the same time becomes the
interpretant condition of the child's signifying behavior. Desire is always a borrowed
desire (the desire of the Other). We do not experience the revelation of the object of such
a desire, for it is never more than implicit and hinted at in every concrete interaction.
Desire is the most opaque, or in Colapietro's words "inherently general" or nonspecific of
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interpretants. It is the first logical interpretant (in Muller and Brent 142), but only in the
sense of being the absence of an identifiable or concrete term.
Vincent Colapietro also mobilizes the distinction between final and ultimate
logical interpretants in order to clarify Teresa de Laurentis' idea that the fantasy is a form
of Peirce's ultimate logical interpretant. T.L. Short explains the crucial difference between
two previously unseparated concepts, the final interpretant of the sign and the ultimate
interpretant of all signs (“Intentionality”). The final interpretant is the interpretant which
is the goal of the interpretation of a specific sign, and it applies to all kinds of
interpretants, emotional, energetic, or logical. “If each sign has a unique, final
interpretant, then each is the sign that it is in relation not only to a ground but also to a
goal of interpretation,” and Peirce affirms that this is so (214). The ultimate interpretant,
however, is not the goal of the sign, but instead a logical interpretant, which, unlike the
rest of the logical interpretants, is non-verbalizable except in terms of some maxim which
describes it. Peirce's idea here is that any verbal sign is always further interpretable by
another sign, and so on in perpetuity. A logical interpretant which is a habit of
interpretation, as in Peirce's pragmatism, could be modified in an unlimited fashion
through testing. Such an interpretant fulfills the hermeneutical goals of the subject. I
would therefore claim that the Lacanian fantasy is the Imaginary correlate to an
interpretant that answers to or brings about the finality of an infantile semeiotic process,
the functional counterpart to an early attempt at an ultimate logical interpretant.
The fantasy implies a removed perspective in which we are implicated, something
like an Imaginary scene or mythical explanation, but one which we do not 'possess': we
do not 'have' a fantasy, a fantasy 'has' us. Roberto Harari introduces the difference
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between objectivity, which is based upon the phantasmatic character of the idea of
'certain' explanations, and objectality, which is the object-as-cause of desire inherent in
objet petit a. Harari writes that the function of a fantasy ($<>a) is to sustain knowledge of
the precise point at which knowledge begins, to sustain an objective perspective: Lacan's
aphorism with regard to this is, "Something is omitted in the consideration of
knowledge", or rather, consideration of the knowledge of cause/cause of knowledge
(quoted in Harari 167). An ultimate logical interpretant "marks the provisional, yet
nonetheless real, closure of a process, albeit a closure which itself opens possibilities and
thereby exposes the newly established habit to unforeseeable vicissitudes and even fatal
challenges," but at the same time forms a limiting point upon further semeiosis by
occupying the position or formal requirement of such an interpretant, that it be final, but
not its function, the full relief of a tension (Colapietro, “Sketch” 145). This is not really
the final interpretant as Peirce meant it, only a temporary convergence of the final and
ultimate interpretants. As Peirce says, the power of an ultimate interpretant term such as
the fantasy, which is to direct the future satisfaction of desire, far outstrips its original
sphere of authority, even though we may “develop degrees of self-control unknown to
that man” (CP 5.511). It is relevant to point out that Peirce's model of semeiosis was one
of rational inquiry, and that the fantasy is the result of that which disturbs the
transparency which thwarts rational inquiry. The many-tiered subject, therefore, may be
operating under multiple forms or kinds of 'ultimate' logical interpretants, each with its
own archaic niche or function.
The Oedipal conflict or introduction of an Imaginary third figure produces the
fantasy which grounds the neurotic in objectivity. Lacan makes an important distinction,
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often ignored or misunderstood, between the unary trait (le trait unaire, what Freud called
"ein einziger Zug") and the Symbolic phallus. Muller seems to miss this point as well; he
writes, "This trace or [unary] mark is a signifier, specifically an index, and as such has its
status in the Other" (144). The unary trait is linked in both Lacan and Freud to notion of
'ego ideal', the secondary object identification. Freud himself had great difficulty in
relating the function of the ideal-ego, or primary mirror-stage identification, to the ego
ideal, which he linked to the appearance of the superego. Harari points out that the
totalization sough in the mirror-image (ideal-ego) is not found in the secondary object-
relation, and that Lacan "rejected very emphatically" this totalization of the object that
implies a complete hinging of the child's ego upon 'good' and 'bad' objects (190). Instead,
we have the doctrine of the objet petit a. Objet petit a is the object-cause of desire which
manifests in five forms which are linked to five surfaces of the drive: oral, anal, phallic,
scopic, and superego. The series of secondary object identifications, the most familiar of
which is Imaginary castration, is not equal to or the same as object petit a. Objet petit a
substitutes for the anxiety-causing castration, but "the cover is never full," or else
castration could be completely liquidated. The main point here is not that objet petit a
fails: rather, it is the sign of the failure of all objects to appear in the place of that which is
excessive and missing from the place of the Other. Objet petit a is a term nowhere
mentioned in Muller's book, although Lacan insisted that it was his most original
contribution to psychoanalysis. He is correct when he writes, "...symbolic identification
structures difference and opens desire onto the field of substitution and displacement,"
but he seems to be mixing up the two major effects or products of Oedipus, object petit a
and the Name-of-the-Father, both products of "the intervention of a Third as an ordering
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principle" (144-6). The specifics and semeiotic correlates of how the desire of the Other
and the products of the Oedipal complex are lacking in Muller's account, and we should
bear in mind the factors that need explaining as we proceed.
Lacanian Development and the Ground of Intelligence
In the epilogue of The Languages of Psychoanalysis, John Gedo argues that a
theory of human motivations (what Freud referred to as drives) needs to take account of
the changing circumstances in which the subject develops, which lead to diverse and
specific outlets for biological satisfactions. Applied to human development, this is a
model controlled by sign development and not physical development: development in and
through the sign does not follow from an epigenetic ground plan or strict biological
blueprint, but describes the interaction between the organism and its environment made
possible by specific developments in the subject's capacities (Gedo 166-7). This leads to a
model of development which is, “not continuous but rather marked by the kind of phase
transitions and discontinuities associated with complexity theory,” and allows for a notion
of regression to previous phases due to the instantiation of more or less unstable mental
structures (Muller and Brent 59).
Muller (Muller and Brent 60-61) appropriates Gedo's 5 stage hierarchal model in
order to explain semeiotic development, and attempt to tie it to a Lacanian account of
development. There is an initial stage (mode I) of qualitative experience in which
"overstimulation" leads to trauma which pacification counteracts. Then follows a second
stage (mode II) in which degenerate secondness, an awareness of external and locutable
particulars, leads to a differentiation of pleasurable and unpleasurable stimuli. This stage
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involves both iconic (mirroring or other behaviors which indicate resemblance) and
indexical function (gestural functions which primarily indicate bounding). Muller states
that the problem at this stage becomes one of "unification". This strongly corresponds to
the notion of the Lacanian mirror phase, in which a delayed functional maturation leads
from the infant basing its stability upon the external other, the first appearance of a
duality between presence and absence. This stage is also the first appearance of
“organismic motivations supplemented by the guidance of memory signals” (Gedo 172).
The third stage (mode III), which Gedo says requires the whole-body stability aimed for
in mode II, in Muller's paradigm is the formation of the primary process, and the
developmental appearance of a genuine Secondness or external opposition. This crucial
phase involves the Lacanian concept of agressivity: a reciprocal relation with the other,
whereby the other's continuity is based now on one's own stability, what Freud termed
"secondary narcissism". The fourth stage (Gedo's mode IV) Muller links to "degenerate
Thirdness", where, "the object of the symptom is a repressed sign, signifying intrapsychic
conflict and, more likely, fear of interpersonal conflict and punishment” (Muller and
Brent 62). On a purely Lacanian developmental account, this would be linked to the
relationship of the infant with the primary process at work in the sustaining and
subsuming Other, whose territory is an unconscious Symbolic order which the child
cannot access. The important aspect of this alienation is that while the subject makes use
of the iconic and indexical significances of the components of this order, there is a clear
aspect of meaning or logic behind them which continues to elude the child, for s/he too is
objectified within this order. This leads to the fifth stage (mode V), in which a genuine
Thirdness is involved, "insofar as [it is] based on triangulation and oedipal structures"
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(63). This mode provides the subject with the stability and ability to form one's own
judgments that allow him or her to adapt within the human social context (Gedo 176-8).
While triadicity, and therefore the nature of the interpretant in the sign, is the
backbone of Muller's argument, he fails to distinguish between different aspects of the
interpretant, when he says, "...the interpreter does not produce the sign's significance or
its interpretant. Rather, the sign, in a given context and according to a specific code,
produces an interpretant in a receiver who, thereby, and in no other way, may become an
interpreter in a working system of signs" (2000 53; emphasis added). Muller treats
semeiosis as relying, on one hand, on the context to determine the meaning of statements
or actions and the signification of our responses to them, and on the other hand treats
code as a network of personal correspondences, which organize and break down
statements or chainings of signifiers. T.L. Short writes in disagreement over this point as
made by Umberto Eco:
Significance also requires the possibility of an agent taking goal-directed interest in certain objects, and hence in that agent seizing upon whatever cues or clues may lead him (sic) or it to them... significance in any case requires both a relation between sign and and object and the possibility of an interpreter that can interpret the sign on the basis of that relation. There is no reason to insist that the grounding relation must be always a convention or code. (“Peirce's Semiotic Theory of the Self”, 115)
I shall make two points by way of returning to this comment, the first being that
Muller ignores here the distinction between the immediate interpretant and the dynamic
interpretant. The immediate interpretant, or "sign of interpretability", fulfills the function
of allowing me to comprehend the referents of the sign. If I see a word, say 'herring', I
must first have some ground on which to interpret it. I see it as a word, in English,
printed, which implies certain phonetic properties. This allows me to refer it to an object,
say, the image of a fish; however, semeiosis does not stop there, but continues in the
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"virtuous spiral" as described in Chapter 2, and continues to form a dynamic (situation-
specific) interpretant. The development of the dynamic interpretant, the actual response to
the sign, is left unexplained in Peirce. One might imagine that it is a complex process
involving layers of re-coding and interpretant-production, which Lacan referred to as
'ciphers'.
This brings me to my second point, which is that Lacan is very much concerned
with this gap between the de-ciphering of the sign and that what he calls parole (speech):
this is Lacan's major justification for introducing the idea of 'subject' into the individual.
It is just this sort of parole which is not reduceable to the perceived context or one layer
of coding, but is a complex effect generated by all of them. Lacan explains this in Ecrits,
using a series of ciphers applied to a chain of letters: he demonstrates that, when the
correct ciphers are applied, the resulting chain demonstrates a certain syntax, in other
words has structural possibilities and impossibilities. Fink writes: "to Lacan's mind, the
unconscious consists in chains of quasi-mathematical inscriptions, and- borrowing a
notion from Bertrand Russell, who in speaking of mathematicians said that the symbols
they work with don't mean anything- there is thus no point talking about the meaning of
unconscious formations or productions" (21, emphasis in the original). The Lacanian
unconscious is not an unconscious where conscious meanings are hidden, or coherent
sentences wait in abeyance to be discovered and interpreted. Eugen Baer, for instance,
divides up speech acts into consciously available and unconsciously available, some of
which float up into consciousness due to the allowance of the secondary process (Baer
35). Lacan specifically denies this view of the reality principle in Seminar VII, and at no
point referred to pre-formed 'speech acts' as residing in the unconscious. Rather, the
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appearance of parole is in the form of the caput mortuum, or "dead letters" which
function as the residues of the process of symbolization and gives us some clue about
unconscious processes. Fink (1995) makes this point apropos of the French 'ne' and the
English 'but', as elements of the spoken or enunciated chain, which seem to refer to
conflict between the conscious subject and another subject, the subject of unconscious
discourse (39-40).
This is a picture of a speaking subject who is anything but univocal in his/her
responses, and T.L. Short's criticism of Muller's code/context view of the subject goes
toward this point. The appearance of a sign which is not interpretable, which does not
mean in terms of either social code or context, disrupts the link between interpretability
and interpretation, between the sign and its object. And yet, it is this very kind of dynamic
interpretant which defines us as unique sign interpreters, for it is only such inexplicable
appearances which necessitate "new types of action- e.g., those that sustain thinking or
test thought" (Short 120). The subject is impelled to respond not only to external
situations, but also to respond to one's own sign-production, which while apparently
anomalous was exposed as grounded in mental processes and the subject's history by
Freud. Lacanian symptom is just this sort of signifier come back to us in the material
Real. It is the symptom which lends us subjective consistency, which differentiates us
from the accident of a particular set of conventions (see Chapter 1). In Peircean terms, the
symptom or caput mortuum is an object of doubt, and in Lacanian terms, it is an object of
enjoyment, the enjoyment of interpretation that a doubt demands. "One can now think just
for the pleasure of it, or to discover a useless truth," and interpretation seems to succeed
where it fails. We do not easily give up our interpretations of our symptoms when we
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"come to the point where you enjoy words instead of enjoying things", in which the word
kills the thing (Short 120; Miller in Lacan and Language 30). This enjoyment, however, is
always the failure to more fully enjoy, which would be to satisfy the doubt by creating a
belief that effectively quells doubt. Also recall that, in Peirce, any verbalizable belief will
ultimately develop into a habit of action which acts as the ultimate interpretant of all
subsequent semeiosis. I would suggest that doubt so produced leads the subject towards a
second-order or second-intentional form of discourse whose object is language, an
internal dialogue whose genesis confronts the idea that conscious discourse is the result
of a 'natural' cognitive or biological development. More will be said of the idea of the
'letter' in Lacan, the material of language and its significance to the Peircean semeiotic in
Chapter 4.
Muller (Muller and Brent 59) writes, "Development is not an unfolding from pre-
given structures, but rather self-organizing processes that result from interactions with the
environment". Such an epigenetic view of structure involves a complex synergy of
growing capacities and broadening experiences. This should be contrasted with more
dominant psychological paradigms which attempt to explain the growth of human
capacities, including language, according to biological developmental models which
reduce behavior to instinct. Peirce, however, assigned a relatively small role to instinct, as
did Lacan. Colapietro (1995) cites CP 7.381, in which Peirce writes that instinctual
behaviors are usually rationally controlled and consciously managed; in short, the
instincts are not the undercurrents which manage and direct unconscious activity at all,
but are instead "infinitely plastic." More interesting, however, Peirce assigned rationality,
what we usually think of as the most developed of human capacities, to the realm of
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"Unmatured (sic) Instinctive Mind" (CP 7.381)! Peirce thought of rationality as an ability
which, if left unfettered, would tend towards a state of perfect refinement. Colapietro
adds an even more surprising aside:
To push the matter beyond where Peirce appears to have felt it, allow me to suggest that instinctive mind is at once a prematurely matured and invincibly immature set of complex tendencies. Thus, the cultural encoding of our instinctive tendencies is simultaneously the fissuring of prematurely determined tendencies and the directing of wildly immature impulses. (1995 486)
I would submit that this fits nicely with a Lacanian view of intelligence. In the
Names-of-the-Father seminar, Lacan discusses the "correspondence between intelligence
and the intelligible" and the progress of what he calls a "positivist" science. What is the
difference between intelligence and intelligibility? Intelligibility relies upon the ability to
see or to know, the hypothesis that "facts are intelligible". If this is so, Lacan admits, then
intelligence is rightly to be listed, as positivists have done, under the heading of the
affects. I mean to correlate the Peircean notion of immature rationality with just this sort
of affective intelligence. Lacan thinks that a purely psychological notion of intelligence is
directly opposed to "Freud's discovery": what confounds this form of intelligence is
specifically, in Lacan's terms, the fact that the subject is barred from Other-knowledge
(Ssub2), or stated differently, that we are born within a realm of signs and desires about
which we know nothing. This corresponds again in Lacan to alienation within an Other-
framework. Muller uses Peirce's semeiotic terms to describe how the mother's semeiotic
matrix moves to encompass the child's purely instinctual matrix, causing the child to
quickly respond by adopting the mother's perspective (30). Lacan refers to this initial
Imaginary capture in Seminar III as the process "distinct from everything we can assume
about an instinctual, natural relation" (87). This leads us to the points that while an
Imaginary relation is instantiated almost immediately after birth, a Symbolic relation
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could be said to precede birth.
Peirce's Triad versus Lacan's Registers
John Muller's major claim in Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad is that Peirce's
Triad or architectonic is a hierarchical theory, and that the Peircean Triad is correlative
with the three Lacanian registers, Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. There are solid
arguments in favor of Muller's presumption. First, considering the category of Third as
pure mediation, and then connecting it to the fact that all semeiotic developments are
mediated and explicable in synechistic terms suggests that Thirdness does indeed stand in
a hierarchical relation to the other categories. Peirce's bias was towards a teleological
explanation in which concepts proceeded to produce more and more abstract Thirds
(laws, etc.), and it strikes us that Peirce was intent upon proving the necessity of
Thirdness in the complete explanation of any thought process. David Savan, however,
cites "A Guess at the Riddle" (CP 1.362), in which the triad is presented descriptively,
without reference to any absolute nature amongst the categories: "It is the relative place
which a term occupies in a triadic relation which determines its categorical character"
(“Questions” 190). Savan refers here to the triadic construction of the sign, in addition to
whatever else it is, as an ordered relation amongst terms. While all three relata of the sign
are Thirds by virtue of being considered qua sign, they may also be Firsts, Seconds or
Thirds in other relations (187).
If the major comparison were well made, however, it would also imply that the
Lacanian registers functioned in hierarchical terms. While this may seem to be true
primae faciae, especially given the de-emphasis given to the register of the Real in the
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earlier Lacanian Seminars and Ecrits, I assert that it does not hold with Lacan's
understanding of the registers in Seminar XX and elsewhere. In one of the few places
where Lacan compares the roles of the three Registers, he depicts them in a triangular
"graphicization", the translator's term, with the terms of the Registers occupying the
vertices, each boundary mediated by three related terms: the phallic signifier, the signifier
of the barred Other, and objet petit a (90-95). In the middle lies jouissance, shown to be
emptying into the Real. What the depiction clearly shows is a non-hierarchical relation
between the terms. Similarly, in La Topologie du Jacques Lacan, Lacan depicts this
relation using overlapping circles which form a knot, in which each strand in the knot
binds the other two to one another. Relevant to the notion of a continual or non-
hierarchical relation between the Registers are Fink's comments on the two Reals: the
Real that is pre-Symbolic, the Real of mythic and unlimited jouissance which is slowly
drained away and stabilized by the Symbolic, and the post-Symbolic Real, "after the
letter", which is the product of that symbolization. In his "Seminar on the Purloined
Letter", Lacan writes of the "supremacy of the signifier in the subject" and the subject's
"capture in the symbolic dimension" (The Purloined Poe 28-54). Neither of these
comments admit the supremacy of the Symbolic per se. Quite the contrary, it is precisely
these symbolic elements which in Poe's story allow the subject to be duped. One should
understand that in general the signifier refers to the portion of a spoken language which
carries meaning. Lacan points out that such meaning is always referential and displaced,
that it is the aspect of that signifier which always leads you towards other signifiers ad
infinitum. Meaning, however, only exhausts one side of the signifier, its Symbolic aspect.
The term "letter" refers to the connection of the signifier in the Real and Imaginary
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registers, aspects of production and re-production inseperable from signification. It is this
knot that the signifier represents between the different registers which we shall attempt to
elucidate in the fourth chapter.
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Chapter 4: The Riddle of the 'Guess': The Lacanian Name-of-the-Father within the
Peircean Semeiotic
"Exceptio probat regulam de rebus non exceptis." (An exception establishes the rule as to things not excepted.)
Jacques-Alain Miller states that while the Peircean sign accounts for one, for one
intersection between sign, object, and interpretant, the Lacanian signifier always requires
a minimum of two (31). Miller refers here directly to Lacan's own definition of the
signifier: "The sign is something that represents something for somebody, but the
signifier is something that represents a subject for another signifier" (see "Of Structure as
the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject Whatever"). The dimension of
the signification of the signifier, the Lacanian Symbolic, is circular and enclosed. A
signifier 'means' by referring you to further signifiers, and further signifiers, in perpetuity.
A 'pure' language is a perfect system of signifiers that would at no point admit anything
which is non-referential. The heart of Lacan's thesis concerning language, however, is that
no such complete language exists: in order for a language to be meaningful, it must in
some way refer back to the subject who causes/is caused by the signifiers, the barred
subject of language. This is what Lacan means by his dictum, "There is no meta-
language": despite the best efforts, there can be no completion to our language which
would patch up its holes and allow us to speak our intentions perfectly. This is the
paradox of Lacanian 'llanguage': linguistic meaning is hinged upon a non-meaning at the
core of the subject, a non-meaning whose reverberations cause words to be minimally
separated from the objects they describe. What can a signifier be when it is non-
meaningful? My answer is that it can be functional, and that this function depends upon
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the positional and material aspects of the signifier.
If the conventional definition of the sign is inadequate to define what Lacan means
by 'signifier', then there are two major questions to be answered:
1) How might we situate the signifier within the Peircean speculative grammar?
2) How can we account for the appearance or genesis of a sign called a 'signifier'?
The answers to both questions require a more full exploration of the Lacanian signifier
than was present in Chapter 1. The first question challenges us to pick apart the term
'signifier' and come to a reconstructed understanding thereof, then use Peirce to classify
the result. The answer to the second will bring us back to the idea of the Symbolic phallus
or Master Signifier, understood in Chapter 1 as the signifier which stands in the place of
the Other's lack and whose inauguration brings about the Symbolic order (as opposed to a
pre-ontological Symbolic relation). If the Symbolic is an inconsistent order, how can we
understand the founding of such an order? Muller's book applies Peirce's semeiotic to the
Lacanian developmental schema, reliably bringing us to the point of desire-formation. We
wish to go further, just as an analyst would, and understand the subject's strategy with
respect to his or her own desire.
Part I- The Signifier Explained
The Properties of the Signifier
In Seminar III, Lacan gives his first and fullest treatment of the concept of the
signifier. The subject's first relation to the signifier, even before an unconscious and
temporalized relation, is one of simple perception, the origin of memory characterized by
associations of signifiers within a simultaneity (181). Within this absolute and original
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synchrony of signifiers, the only real or material differences are within a "covariant
ensemble" of opposed elements (Seminar III 187). The opposition of such elements, "isn't
the result of the law of experience but of an a priori law that we have an equal chance of
selecting a plus or a minus," one differential element or another (131). But to what
precisely does this "covariant ensemble" refer? Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (202) opines that it
might refer to "the inmixing of the three orders", the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, but
this is too vague, and suggests some previous separation or hierarchy between the
registers. It also seems to contradict the obvious fact that the law of oppositions, which is
the law of the signifier, is the specific property of the Symbolic. Lacan was especially
influenced by the linguistic researches of Roman Jakobson, whose exploration of
languages yields a picture of the "markedly discrete, oppositional character of distinctive
features" (29). These features are phonemic oppositions, such as the vowel pairing a/o
present in the German Fort-Da (see Chapter 1).
While paradigmatic for Lacan, such oppositions are not absolute and do not
account for or apply to every sound within a language. Jakobson (1979 21) points out, for
example, that there is no oppositional partner for the English 'm'. As productive as the
idea of opposition is for linguistics, any one phoneme may account for a bundling of
distinctive sound-features, leading to a rough, non-absolute oppositionality. Nor does
Jakobson wholeheartedly agree that there is any 'original synchrony' of signifiers which
predates usage, which is always diachronic. "Discrete articulated sounds did not exist
before language, and it is pointless and perverse to consider such 'phonic stuff' without
reference to its linguistic utilization" (29). What we can conclude is that when Lacan
speaks of 'original synchrony' he is not referring to a real totality that actually existed or
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predated symbolization, but to an inference of a totality which explains and largely
corresponds to the actual oppositions and correspondences the young subject does find
within concrete discourse and which become the bases of structure. Moreover, Lacan
thinks that the pattern of oppositions is based upon more than the sonic qualities of one's
language: it is also based upon learned oppositions such as night/day and man/woman
which form 'complete' pairs. Jakobson confirms this point: "The opposition between day
and night is a signifying opposition, which goes infinitely beyond all the meanings it may
ultimately cover, indeed beyond every kind of meaning" (198). It is not that such pairs are
'whole' or strictly autonomous, per se, but that the presence of one suggests the absence of
the other, provoking the thought of its partner, in an infinitely repeatable dual movement.
These oppositions come to structure the further diachronic (temporalized) acquisition of
the completed network, which is always filtered through the unconscious
(Unbewusstsein, an order of conceptual memories), Lacan's second stage of signifier-
organization. In Lacanese, covariance is the rule of the primordial signifiers on the side of
the Other, constituting the ultimate basis for our constructed 'reality' insofar as it is
governed by the Symbolic function.
When studying the relation of the traumatic experience and the "break" in
language which characterizes psychosis, there are two important synchronies, systems or
sets of signifiers corresponding to two conflicts, one old and one new. Mobilizing the
distinction between 'set' and 'totality', Lacan asserts that it is the existence of a signifier
present in the original conflict which is the linchpin between the two sets of signifiers,
forming a coherent totality (sets linked diachronicly) (183). This signifier is a symptom,
an archaic signifier which acts as a "potential signifier, a virtual signifier, and then
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captured in the signified of the current conflict and used by it as a language, that is, as a
symptom" (Seminar III 119-20). Lacan relates this important, linking signifier to the idea
of pun, which Freud discusses in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. His most
illuminating example is the pun, 'I drove with him tete-a-bete': the pun here is substituting
'bete', French for 'beast', for 'tete', where the expression 'tete-a-tete' means 'tit-for-tat'.
Freud writes that the expression, "can only mean: 'I drove with X tete-a-tete, and X is a
stupid ass'"(25). Such puns are 'condensations accompanied by modifications as
substitutes', a combination of a metonymy, the effect of the operation of the sentence
around a single expression (tete-a-tete) and metaphor, the unexpected replacement of a
single phoneme with another (b- for t-). The effect of such puns or pun-like speech is to
refer to a split subject, a subject of enunciation whose position with respect to his
enunciated statement becomes uncertain. If such punning is unintentional it becomes an
intrusion which allows the speaker to say something that perhaps he or she could not
consciously speak.. What we are driving toward is the point at which the Symbolic is
anchored to something which is non-meaning, at which signification spills over into the
Real. Lacan relates the linchpin signifier to a pun to point out that its function is linked to
its material aspect, or in Lacan's vocabulary, to the "letter". In Ecrits, the letter is defined
positively as the "material support of the signifier", but much more valuable is Willy
Appollon's gloss of the term :
...we call the "letter", any segment, mark or unit of that capture as an indefinable parcel of the body: a border, an opening, the outline of a hole, a stroke, or even a gesture or a glance as a referential mark and the like... As an inscription of a lost jouissance, the letter doesn't take precedence over the language which caused the trauma and which gives the letter its consistency. (108)
The most basic idea of letter is that signifiers have a dual aspect: they become
linked in an unconscious way to both sound-material, or phonemes, and to physical
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locations on the body, and in the psychoanalytic pathology we call these symptoms.
Lacan recognizes a similar physio-lingual link to the one Jakobson sees between the
sound-shape of the word, the physical mouthing of the word and the actions linked to the
spoken material, a set of associations which begins in childhood but extends long into
adulthood (Jakobson 77-8). Letters on the body have the function with respect to the
signifying chain of filling in the gaps or holes in meaning, either personal or social. This
place in which letters serve as substitutes and the analysand cannot 'speak well' their
meanings is the unbearable emptiness of desire where the signifier fails to contain
jouissance. To go further, we will have to investigate the function of the signifier as the
Law of enjoyment.
The Name-of-the-Father: The Crux of the Symbolic
In his 1963 seminar, the "Introduction to the Names of the Father" (see
Television), Lacan confronts a topic seemingly untouched in the secondary literature: the
idea of the desire of the Father, and does so by way of the biblical account of Abraham's
sacrifice of Isaac. As the story goes, Abraham is called on by God to make sacrifice of his
only son Isaac, whose birth to his aged wife Sarah was miraculous to begin with. At the
last moment, God sends an angel to stay Abraham's hand, and a ram is sacrificed instead.
Lacan envisions the relationship here between three factors: God's desire, God's name,
and God's power. The angel is the bearer of God's name, the all-powerful and
unspeakable name which intervenes unexpectedly, which solidifies binding covenants,
portents, etc. The name, however, is not God's power in the world: God demands in the
first place that Isaac should die, but Abraham is God's agent in this. The Almighty's name
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reveals God's desire to test Abraham in the first place. God's power is expressed through
a substitute or equivalent sacrifice, the sacrifice of the ram. The demand for sacrifice is
thus alternately fulfilled. God's power is possible only in and through God's desire, and
but this desire is only realizable in hindsight, by way of God's name, the symbolic
mediator which introduces the idea of equivalence, one sacrifice for another.
Equivalence, however, does not come without the loss of enjoyment in the form of a mark
on the body, symbolized by Abraham's circumcision.
It is surely impossible that a just God could have desired Isaac's death... or was it?
Slavoj Zizek asks, "If something is in itself impossible, why is it necessary further to
forbid it?" (Enjoyment 8-9). Lacan's parable is an introduction to the prohibitive function
of the signifier-qua-Law of the Father. In Lacan's discourse this singular signifier goes by
many names: the Master-Signifier, Name/No-of-the-Father, Symbolic phallus, etc. There
seems to be a general equivalence between these terms, and the plurality of names for a
signifying 'one' seems to come from the various roles it plays, perhaps most technically
the signifier of the Other's desire. The desire of/for the Other in Lacan is an impossible
desire, a lack or void in the subject/Other ('your desire is the desire for/of the Other'). The
metonymy which sustains desire is the Imaginary effect of the signifiers which participate
in an endless chaining: each successive element of our inner discourse promises relief
from desire, but ends up contributing to its effects.
The Name-of-the-Father is the symbolic mediator, a mediating third term which
cancels out or stands for the entire signifying set. Lacan links this signifier to the
appearance of the first metaphor, a metaphor which stands for the subject itself (the
barred subject of language, $). This 'quilting point' (pointe du capiton), by virtue of its
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position with respect to the rest of the signifiers, buttons together the Symbolic and
Imaginary aspects of the subject. Lacan defines the Master Signifier in two important
ways: as a signifier which comes to stand for every other signifier to the subject, and as a
signifier for which all other signifiers represent a subject. The first definition points to the
original mediating aspect of the signifier, while the second points to the idea that the
signifier creates a "general equivalence" amongst signifiers, over-writing their dyadic or
oppositional aspects in favor of a relationship in and for the 'one'.
The Name-of-the-Father could be said to be the first signifying 'one', the first
quilting point, but others follow. Recall the formula for Master Signifier from Chapter 1:
S(sub)1(S(sub)1(S(sub)1...(S(sub)2)))). Other quilting points are formed as responses to
the continuance of discourse; these signifiers (written S(sub)1) are re-inscriptions which
come to stand for the subject at the level that s/he is simply a collection of unconscious
material. In neurosis, there may be many of these signifiers, which mark what Freud
called the "rock of castration" (Lacan speaks of the neurotic subject as the result of
Symbolic castration) (Fink 1 78-9). They mark end-points in any signifying chain or set
of meanings: they are nonsensical and seemingly random, signifiers signifying nothing,
quite indestructible because they do not glide into other signifiers (Seminar III 185). For
this reason they mark the endpoints or limits of interpretation, and consequently the limits
of the Law in providing an answer or representation of the Other's desire. The Law
ultimately proves inadequate to its task insofar as there is still an excess of jouissance
which it fails to hold back, the haunting remainder of "Father-Enjoyment" (Zizek 135).
To grasp this notion, think back to the example of Abraham from the book of Genesis.
God's first demand, that Isaac should die, implies a desire which is impossible to
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countenance. Lacan, however, points to Mishnaic commentaries in which Abraham is
said to have been not just compliant but completely lustful for the killing. It is only the
intercession of the name of God which staves the Other's desire, the subject's 'true' or
'original' desire, and replaces it with the Father's desire. The substitution of the ram for
Isaac in the sacrifice, however, implies a giving over of enjoyment ever-afterwards to the
Father: every sacrifice will not really be 'it', but instead a replacement or repetition which
prevents a confrontation with the impossible demand.
Stalking the Cause: The (Non)Meeting of the Imaginary and Symbolic
Lacan commented, "I speak for analysts" (Miller in Feldstein et al, 214). This
seemingly straightforward comment, however, hides a double meaning: Lacan's discourse
speaks to analysts, but also on their behalf. In the first part of his career he is defending
the 'Freudian kernel' against object relations theory and 'Freudianism', but in the latter part
his task is to defend or make adequate the analytic discourse in light of social, political
and intellectual critiques centered in France, including feminists like Luce Irigaray and
historians like Michel Foucault. The question Lacan confronts, recorded in interviews and
letters (see, for example, Television), is: is Lacan's psychoanalysis revolutionary, or is it,
like Lacan himself, bourgeois? Lacan asserted that the 'revolution' against the French
political authority would only depose one master in favor of another, thus implying that
the revolutionaries were behaving like children, but more importantly that in
misrecognizing both cause ('repression') and cure (unbounded sexual freedom,
situationalist anarchy), revolutionaries were making the same mistake he had earlier in his
career: regression to a totalizing Symbolic/narrative structure. Lacan's movement from
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strict structuralism into post-structuralism is his movement from a subject governed by an
overarching Symbolic organization, a field of coherent meanings or 'signifieds' into a
subject defined by the non-Symbolic cause of signification. This is the major
hermeneutical shift in Lacan from the 1950s until the 1970s. It is a rejection of the idea of
intelligible correspondence between the signifiers at work in our everyday language or
dream-fields and the signfieds representing repressed memories, situations or
experiences. Instead, Lacan moves towards the organization of the set of signifiers around
a central lack or hole which butts up against the Real, the "extimate, inherent decentering
of the field of signification, that is, the cause at work in the midst of this field" (Zizek in
Feldstein et al, 398). Symbolic narrative is supported doubly, on the level of recourse to
myths and fables supported by an Imaginary identification, but also on the more original
level of causation which touches the Real. In stalking the cause of the signifying order,
Lacan stresses that we must not give in to linear conceptions of signifying causation or
subjective development, which always lead back to the staging of a fantasized 'cause' in
the form of myth or absolute origin. The cause or completion of the smooth order of
signification is always outside of and yet 'ex-timate' (a play on the idea of 'intimacy') to
itself. This idea is summed up by Lacan's idea of the 'inner eight', a figure which appears
circular but is actually completed by looping back upon and inside of itself. This figure
represents Lacan's idea of synchrony: Lacanian synchrony is different from Saussurean
synchrony in that Lacan's synchrony is not an absolute snapshot or simple simultaneity of
the signifying order at any one point in time, but the looping of the order back in upon
itself that occurs when the chain of signifiers is derailed in the movement from one
simultaneous set of meanings to another.
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Lacan says in Seminar III that there is no 'magic' moment where signifier comes to
meet signified, although it is clear that the arrangement of the Unbewusstsein is linked to
such a meeting. The idea of this 'original', historical trauma-as-cause is still on the level
of mythic explanation. The traumatic cause, coming from the outside, is cause only after
the fact: trauma is the moment that brings the field of meanings to the point of
inadequacy, the point at which lack is satisfied by recourse to an often perverse,
monolithic Law. The original signifier, or Name-of-the-Father, is supported by a Real
kernel, a portion of the signifying material or 'letters'. Subjective positing or "positing
reflection" is hooked onto the Real: something is supplied by the subject in his or her
radical freedom. Zizek links this to Hegel via, of all things, a grammatical form: "freedom
is, strictly speaking, the contingency of necessity, that is, it is contained in the initial 'if...,'
in the (contingent) choice of the modality by means of which we symbolize the
contingent real or impose some narrative necessity onto it" (Zizek in Feldstein et al, 402).
According to narrative accounts, a set of seemingly necessary situations culminates in
something we ordinarily consider an overarching historical necessity, like the existence of
a political or economic system. The element of absolute necessity within the actual
signifying framework, however, occurs in the form of a radically contingent choice which
undergirds the necessity of every concrete action. What we experience here is a radical
disconnect between normal historical necessity and radical choice, which is mirrored in
Lacan by the disconnect between the Other's desire and the Father's desire. After all of
this, the question of origins still remains for us: why and how does the Name-of-the-
Father come to be the first button-point? My hope is that an otherwise vague and
paradoxical temporal process can be clarified by an exact semeiotic analysis of the terms
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in play.
Part II- The Semeio-Temporal Origin of the Master-Signifier
The following portion of this chapter consists of a brief evaluation of Lacan's
ideas concerning linguistic structure, then turns to two concept which clarify the idea of
Master Signifier in the synechistic terms of Peirce's semeiotic: hypoicon and abductive
reasoning. Afterwards follows a brief section which attempts to tie these two concepts
together.
Language as Semeiotic
We begin by evaluating Lacan‟s claim that the basis of the signifying order is a
„covariant ensemble‟ of signifiers. For Peirce, the idea of dyadic opposition constitutes
the minimal paradigm of a semeiotic („A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not
exist‟, CP 1.457). Roman Jakobson, a reader of Peirce, applied and expanded the
linguistic concept of markedness, originally used to designate purely phonological
oppositions, to cover grammatical and lexical oppositions, i.e. oppositions at each level of
a language. Markedness consists of a pairing of terms or elements whereby and according
to some rule the two terms are mutually exclusive: one is present while the other is
absent. The marked form in the opposition is the one 'entity opposed to its absence', the
predominant or 'strong' and usually longer form. Shapiro does not hesitate to compare the
notion of markedness to Peirce‟s idea of logical interpretant: “Markedness and
interpretant are synonymous where the structure of the linguistic sign is concerned”
(Shapiro 74-81). This view of the basic organization of language is both binary and
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illative; that is, one element always opposes another, and the opposition is governed by a
rule in the form of a proposition, such as „if A, then B‟. „A‟ stands for the condition or
situation in which the rule applies (in Peircean terms, the ground of the sign), and „B‟
stands for one member of the marked/non-marked oppositional pair. This fulfills Peirce‟s
criteria that the interpretant be the mediative or Third factor in the sign, that is, it
negotiates an opposition. While the primacy of markedness may seem obvious or
intuitive, it is closely paralleled by another potentially universal constitutive principle of
language, that of ranking. Ranking, as well as markedness, is present at each level of
language in the form of subordination and coordination of elements. Shapiro argues,
however, that ranking is the much more conceptual, complex and situation-specific of the
two principles, while markedness has its basis in the phonemic material of language but
extends beyond such basic oppositions to all features of a language, according to a
principle called „markedness assimilation‟ (80-5). Markedness assimilation is the idea,
simply put, that values occur in similar contexts: if the context is marked, the value will
be marked, and if the context is unmarked, the value will be unmarked as well. This
extends the idea of markedness past the diacritic (phonemic) level to the non-diacritic,
and accounts for how the neutralization of oppositions occurs. The neutralization of an
opposition is the basis for contiguity or complementary relations between elements, and
occurs vis-à-vis one opposition supplementing another, the work of two separate
interpretant terms (84). The set of binary interpretants governing oppositions between
value-signs, or phonemes, forms the “structured core” of a language (88).
The other basic system or „adstructure‟ of a language involves a system of
content-signs or morphemes, elements comprised of value-signs which are considered
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meaningful, whole units. All of a language could be said, on one hand, to be constituted
by morphemes, and on the other by phonemes, depending on which paradigm we were
interested in. Language, for Peirce, was a system of symbolic legisigns, but also of
symbols modified either in the direction of indexicality and iconicity, the latter being by
far the more operative and important of the two (Shapiro 89). Iconicity is a property of all
signs, and proves to be the major linkage between sign/expression, or signata, and the
intelligible meaning of the sign, or signantia. The content- and value-levels of language
are thus connected but still asymmetrical, as discussed above: one does not transition
smoothly into another, and the content-system is still governed by a hierarchical relation
of sign-variants, or allomorphs. Iconicity is broken down into 3 different kinds of icons:
images, diagrams, and metaphors. Peirce's subsuming term for icons-in-general is
hypoicon. This term suggests that there is a common or abstract idea of iconicity or
similarity which exists in aspects of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.
For the moment we will concern ourselves with the former two categories, images
and diagrams. Imaginal or phonemic correspondences and oppositions pervade the set of
morphemes, but could quite possibly be accidental or arbitrary, not rule-governed. We
might, for example, say that because plural forms are often associated with desinence
(ending) length, that there is some sort of “universal rule” about this association; this
correspondence, however, fails to account for many counter-examples, such as verb
length in Russian (90-1). Diagrammatic correspondences, on the other hand, are those
which, “represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing
by analogous relations in their own parts” (2.277) (italics added). With regard to
phonemic or value-signs, the material sounds themselves are not simply images, but
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diagrams of paradigmatic and interpretant-governed relations. “There is no direct way of
comparing form and meaning, and the only access to their congruence is via the
interpretants” (Shapiro 90).
We are now in a position to reconsider Lacan‟s notion of the basis of the Symbolic
order. What Lacan seems to be claiming is that the set of morphemes is reduced, on the
level of perception, to a paradigmatic and thus explanatory system of pairs forming the
basis of the signantia. In other words, the allomorphs or variance between morphemes
reduce to alternational pairs (night/day, man/woman). We might regard these pairs as
relations of wholeness, but inseparable from the core or value-system of language.
Shapiro writes:
What appears in greater clarity in the light of (image/diagram) distinctions is the status of imaginal iconic correspondences vis-à-vis the diagrammatic ones. Here, as everywhere in semeiosis, it is a matter of emphasis or relative prominence of one or another aspect of the sign, rather than a matter of all-or-none. (91) (emphasis added)
Morphemic or learned oppositions are subtended by phonemic and oppositions in
a dramatic extension of the notion of markedness assimilation. This is not the sole reason
or adequate causal explanation for why they become oppositions in terms of the subject‟s
private language universe, or llanguage. All oppositions are created on the basis of an
abduction on the part of the subject, which involves an element of hypothesis-testing and
therefore fallibility (Shapiro 92-3). Such oppositions may or may not be part of the
official language the child is immersed in. There is, however, adequate phonemic ground
on which morphemic oppositions of the kind Lacan describes cohere, whether they be
purely lexical (the above examples suffice) or grammatical (relations of contiguity, like
„fort-da‟). In the latter example, the phonological paradigm is especially clear, with the
longer, marked „o‟ of „fort‟ being complemented by the abridged „a‟ in „da‟ (Shapiro 91).
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The fallibility of these oppositions is productive: it adjusts the subject‟s meaningful
morphemic paradigms to both the social realm of meaning and also to the constantly
reinforced system of phonemic values, or as Shapiro puts it, “the overarching teleological
thrust of language development tends to direct the coocurrence (sic) of linguistic
phenomena into patterns which are iconic…” (92). This corresponds to Peirce‟s notion of
the development of symbols over time: symbols have an historical aspect and a teleology,
or as Jakobson puts it, “when time enters into such a system of symbolic values as
language, it becomes a symbol itself” (Shapiro 195; Jakobson 1971 562). Peirce
suggested this as applicable in a number of semeiotic contexts, and the point here is that
the principle is applicable both in terms of the individual subject and the history of a
particular language.
The linguistic sign is the product of a hierarchical set of interpretants who rely on
abductive inference for their instantiation. Each interpretant can only be explained by
recourse to another interpretant, another, etc. Diachronic change, the introduction of the
element of time as a dynamic symbol, is an “ontological component of linguistic meaning
or the nature of meaning,” an absolute condition of the system (Shapiro 94). The question
of the ultimate interpretant, the ultimate arbiter of meaning, searches for the ultimate
condition of language which totalizes content and expression, vis-a-vis a signifier which
stands for this totalization. This idea of a „totalizing one‟ is the heart of the Lacanian
Master-Signifier.
Master Signifier as the First Metaphor
The above has been written primarily to demonstrate how the Lacanian Symbolic
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is convened in terms of a system of aparallel binary organization whose teleological goal
is towards iconicity. This must be reckoned with the idea of a signifying chain that it
ultimately comes to interpret or stand in relation to. Lacan teaches that it is a metaphor
that breaks the infinite movement of metonymy, and the Peircean definition of the
metaphor allows us to see exactly how this is so. Peirce's idea of metaphor is as the most
developed form of iconic representamen (or hypoicon). The metaphor is the most fully
developed type of icon, which “represents the representative character of a representamen
by representing a parallelism in something else” (CP 2.277). Metaphor is the trope which
reverses or neutralizes a hierarchy of signata: “Metonymy goes no further than the
establishment or instantiation of a hierarchy. Metaphor, on the other hand, reverses or
neutralizes a hierarchy, even if the hierarchy is one established during a metaphoric
process only to be reversed” (Shapiro 197). In a metonymy, the oppositional and
referential aspect of the signifiers predominate. “Simultaneously,” however, “each
semantic syntagm (syntactic string of words that form part of a larger syntactic unit) has
an internal organization- a focus on the relations contracted by the signata amongst each
other- which corresponds to and is interdependent with the denotata that constitute the
universe of referents we call reality” (www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn, Shapiro
198). We have already seen how this is completely plausible via Lacan's scheme of
perceptual signifier pairing, such signifiers comprising the smallest such syntagms. The
predominance of correspondences internal to the syntagyms over referential meanings
inverts the usual dominance of the message over the code: the code comes to dominate
over the message. The Lacanian idea of signifying chain should also be taken as a species
of syntagym, or syntactic stringing-together of signifiers. This corresponds to Muller's
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surmise (see Chapter 3) that the child's original signifying relation to the (m)Other is one
of repetition of finite patterns in an infinite, metonymical way.
Shapiro alludes to a difference between poetic and linguistic types of both
metaphor and metonymy. A linguistic hierarchy (metonymy) is not the establishment, but
only the instantiation of an already present hierarchy; that is, the hierarchy is an effect of
the diagram of the linguistic relationships already present (Shapiro 202). Poetic
metonymy, on the other hand, does instantiate a new hierarchy, but only by way of a
metaphor. Lacan's example of such a poetic metonymy in Seminar VII is “to eat a book”,
which already requires a figural or non-denotational understanding of 'to eat'. Metaphor,
as well, can be of the strictly linguistic type, a neutralization of hierarchies via some
phonetic equivalence, or it can be poetic metaphor, which reverses rather than neutralizes
a hierarchy, on the basis of some equivalence of both tropes with a third, denotational
trope (Shapiro's example is 'heavenly body' and 'luminary' for star) (203). Puns like 'tete-
a-bete', which refer to two possible denotations, are metaphors of this type.
The introduction of these two categories of metaphor and metonymy allow us two
new ways to talk about the function of the signifier with respect to desire. On one hand,
the parental demand constitutes an original metonymy of the type Shapiro dubs
'linguistic'. It is simply an instantiation of the same set of interpretants as were evident in
the participatory signifying chain, the rules of language and of the interaction. At this
point the demand of the Other threatens to stifle the subject's desire, linked to that which
lies beyond the Other but conditions the subject's desire: objet petit a. Remember from
Chapter 1 that the objet petit a is both the Imaginary link between the subject and Other,
but also the object which lies on the opposite side of the field of the Other. The parental
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demand stands as an appearance of objet petit a, and is equated with the Other's lack,
posed as a question about the Other, ('What does she want?'). The very posing of the
question directs the Other's desire away from the subject, and the Master Signifier qua
quilting point provides an answer to that question. It is a Third governing a system of
dyads as an ultimate interpretant, the Law of the chain whose term governs all access to
final meaning (“a third is thought in its role of governing secondness” (CP 1.538)). It
metaphorizes the entirety of the demand by referring to the internal, phonetic logic that
interprets the signifying chain, by negating that metonymical demand, as does Shapiro's
'linguistic' metaphor. To use Peirce's terminology, it is an iconic legisign (a form of the
interpretant) which embodies, “a certain form or quality persistently maintain[ing] itself
in the serial process, such that each successive iconic interpretant either leaves off or
acquires something extraneous to the icon proper embodied in each member of the series”
(Ransdell, “Iconic Sign” 64). In addition to its dyadic referent/opposite term, all
diagrammatic signs now refer to a Third. This is exactly what Lacan says in Ecrits about
the structure of the neurotic, that the Symbolic phallus is somehow equivalent to the
demand and fixes the place of the lack in the Other (308), and that all of a neurotic
subject's speech refers back to the Master-Signifier qua mark of the “split” (one might say
castrated) subject. Lucie Cantin describes the effect of this process succinctly: “The Law
makes possible and frees the subject's desire from the demand of the Other by offering
other means of expression for the energy of the drive: dreams, fantasy, artistic creation”
(Appolon 145).
Peirce's definition of 'metaphor' is perfect here: the Name-of-the-Father
symbolizes desire by paralleling it with the concrete aspects of the signifying chain. It has
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no discernible oppositional term in light of which it can be negotiated or interpreted.
These phonemic traces are the archaic 'letters' or representatives of the Law appearing in
the Real. The signifying chain does not end, however, and metaphors tend toward a
fading or 'lexicalization', a gradual reification or loss of practical meaning that
accompanies the loss of the practical context in which they occur (Shapiro 205). Puns
function as remetaphorization of these lexicalized meanings because they make recourse
to the vital, original meaning and history of tropes, and only such a “specialized
acquaintance with the word's etymology permits the connection to be revivified” (206).
An etymology refers to a history or cause, to a specific development, here tied to
the subject's desire. However, the law of the chain is not to be confused with the
irreducible cause of our desire, objet petit a. Lacan associates the entire category of
'cause' with the idea of a gap-in-thought beyond which we cannot regress within a strictly
linear conception of causation: “...there is cause only in something that doesn't work”
(Seminar XI 22). The cause of causation, so to speak, is isolated from the rest of the
chain of causation, as an endpoint, a radical event of beginning. In grammatical terms it is
strictly a member of the preterite tense, associated with the most genuine kind of Peircean
Secondness, whereas the Law is an encompassing Third.
Peircean Inference and Temporal Tension: The Origin of the Master-Signifier
In this section, we shall see how the ideas of cause and law, an apparent logical
disconnect, can take place via a Peircean category of reasoning applied to a Lacanian
theoretical example. As discussed in Chapter 2, Peirce was an exponent of the practicality
of hypothetical reasoning, defined as “an argument which proceeds upon the assumption
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that a character which is known necessarily to involve a certain number of others, may be
probably predicated of any object which has all the characters which this character is
known to involve” (CP 5.276). Hypothesis, along with induction, is one of two kinds of
'ampliative inference', also called synthetic reasoning, or reasoning that can bring a
previously unknown principle to light. Both types of reasoning bring a “reduction of a
manifold to unity”, induction by assuming a random sampling of the manifold of
instances one is testing (ibid). Hypothesis refers to reasoning about facts unobserved,
however, and about facts quite possibly untestable, “those which in the present state of
knowledge are unobserved and quite possibly unobservable” (Fann 21). In Peirce's later
work, hypothesis means “the process of postulation”, an initial positing, and “induction”
means the confirmation of a postulate (22). The two types of reasoning thus work
together towards the introduction of new information: one hypothesizes about an
unknown fact from a limited number of observations, then tests this via a genuine and
scientific induction. Peirce writes, “...Abduction seeks a theory. Induction seeks for facts”
(CP 7.217-8). This seeking after facts is exactly what Peirce says makes an induction a
good and a fruitful one, and under an ideal situation hypothesis and induction work in
perfect tandem. “[Abduction] is the provisional adoption of an hypothesis, because every
possible consequence of it is capable of experimental verification, so that the persevering
application of the same method may be expected to reveal its disagreement with the facts,
if it does so disagree” (CP 1.68). It is clear, however, that the large extent to which we
rely on hypothetical inference precludes the scientific proof of the principles we assume
thereby: the truth of our perceptions, for example, relies upon inference from a small and
never random sample size. Peirce describes this first part of any inference, the abductive
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portion, as essentially a guess: “The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an
act of insight, though extremely fallible insight” (CP 5.181; italics in the original), and
“abduction is... nothing but guessing” (CP 7.219). It is not a mere guess, but one which
relies upon some evidence, and Peirce again and again insisted on the validity of
abductive processes. Peirce's certitude results from his belief that the human mind is
somehow attuned to the form or structure of truth (CP 7.220, 1.121).
Peircean abduction is a reasoning whose results are far from 'objectively' true, and
their value instead lies in their utility or productivity, a quality Peirce calls the 'uberty' of a
reasoning. Peirce strays from the traditional categories of logic by suggesting that
practical value has anything to do with truth or certainty, but as a scientist concerned with
the economy of time and resources used in research, he had to be concerned with the
efficiency and benefit of every sort of human reasoning. In a limited, real-life situation in
which hesitation could be damaging or even fatal, hypothesis is often necessary, and the
degree to which we rely on hypothesis alone might be said to correspond to the degree of
urgency of the situation. Imagine that you are a prisoner in a room with three others. He
tells you that there are five disks in his bag, three white and two black, and that he will
pin one disk at random on each of your backs in such a way that you can see the other
prisoners' colors but not your own. There are no mirrors, and most importantly, one
cannot speak or cue. The warden offers to pardon the first of you who can walk to the
door, correctly identify the color of disk you wear, and explain in a purely logical way
how you concluded that you wore that color. How would you do it?
This is the problem Lacan confronts in his essay, “Logical Time and the
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Anticipation of Certainty: A New Sophism.”1 Each of the prisoners, as it turns out, bears
a white disk, but of course, none of them know this. Lacan's elegant solution to the
problem is thus:
After having contemplated one another for a certain time, the three subjects take a few steps together and pass side by side through the doorway. Each of them then separately furnishes a similar response which can be expressed thus: “I am black, and here is how I know it: as my companions were whites, I thought that, had I been a black, each of them would have been able to infer the following: 'If I too am black, the other would have necessarily realized straight away that he was a white and would have left immediately; therefore I am not a black'. And both would have left together, convinced they were whites. As they did nothing of the kind, I must be a white like them. At that, I made for the door to make my conclusion known.”
All three thus exited simultaneously, armed with the same reason for concluding.
This is not a sophism in the way it is normally understood, as an exact but fallacious
argument (from the Oxford English Dictionary). Lacan says that he is concerned here
with the logical value of the solution and nothing but its logical value, “on the condition
that one integrates the value of the two suspensive scansions” (italics in the original). In
Lacan's presentation of the objections to his solution, he discusses the reasoning process
each of the prisoners must have gone through in observing one another and deciding,
hesitating, and deciding again what color each of them is, and what color s/he must then
be. The objections Lacan cites, he says, all fail to account for the prisoners' “crucially
important inaction, that is, their suspended motion” (Fink in Feldstein 359).
What is the value of these suspended times? According to the conceptions of a more
classical logic, which Lacan accuses of infirmity on the basis of a purely spacialized
conception of the prisoners' reasoning, they have none. The suspensions themselves,
Lacan argues, constitute logical evidence of what the thought process of each of the
1Unless otherwise cited, all quotations in this section are from Lacan, Jacques. "Logical Time and the
Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism." from Écrits, transl. by B. Fink and M. Silver in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (ed.), Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol.2, 1988.
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prisoners has been, and thus a temporal conception of the process is needed. Lacan
parses each prisoners' thinking as occurring in 3 distinct stages: the instant of the glance,
the time for comprehending, and the moment for concluding. The instance of the glance
is a single look from the other prisoners, one at each of the others, revealing that each
wears a white disc. Prisoner A, from his perspective, can therefore rule out that any of
them is the lone white, but cannot exclude the other possibilities, that all are white, or that
he is a black and only the others are white. The exclusion of one possible option occurs in
zero-time, completely by the logical operation of deduction. Since none of the prisoners
can see the answer to the solution, Lacan claims that what becomes important now, “is
not what the subjects see, but rather what they have found out positively about what they
do not see” (emphasis in the original). The instant of the glance being accomplished, the
prisoners move to a secondary mode where each subject, “objectifies something more
than the factual givens offered him by the sight of two whites.” This objectification
occurs in something Lacan calls an “intuition”, and which we will not hesitate to call a
guess or hypothesis: “Were I a black, the two whites I see would waste no time realizing
they are whites.” The prisoners make such a hypothesis on the bases, a) that they cannot
do nothing, that they must develop some principle of action or be doomed to passivity,
and b) that the Imaginary relation that the subject falls back on in this situation (looking
as s/he does towards the glance or gaze between the two other prisoners for information)
is marked by an assumption of his/her own minority status, an expectation of spatial
difference in the face of seeing two others who are alike. What the subject assumes, as
Fink (366-7) points out, is that the error on the part of one prisoner (we shall call him or
her prisoner A) is in equating the time it takes him or her to formulate his or her
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hypothesis with the time it takes for prisoners B and C to invent their own hypotheses,
what Fink calls the “imaginary error.” Both the disequation of him/herself with the other
subjects, and the second error, only possible on the basis of the disequation qua
hypothesis, the equation of times within A's hypothetical universe, operate on the
opposition same/different (as Lacan says, B and C are considered “undefined except by
their reciprocity”). On the basis of an erroneous Imaginary situation, the subject begins to
construct a Symbolic situation about which signifier, white or black, stands for him. This
corresponds with Lacan's idea about what makes a signifier different from a sign: the
signifier of the subject is the mediator of all signs that A infers, the object towards which
they point.
Subject A, however, is wrong: he has made the crucial error of forgetting the original
situation that got him or her to where s/he is, the observation that the other two subjects
are white. It is as if this sole piece of evidence is lost during the time of the hypothetical
reasoning, perhaps to reappear. His “imaginary error” is confirmed as an error when the
other prisoners, whom he had inferred as thinking him a black, do not move, and A
concludes that he must be a step behind. This is the second of the “suspensive scansions”
or pauses. S/he then rushes to the moment of conclusion: “I hasten to declare myself
white, so that these whites, whom I consider in this way, do not proceed me in
recognizing themselves for who they are.” A has made a mistake, and hastens to correct it
by skipping over the second hesitation in favor of the moment of concluding, which
Lacan says is necessary, else “this time [of comprehension] would lose its meaning,” that
meaning consisting in nothing other than the linking of the subject's subjective status to
his or her thought process. The burden or urgency of the subject who has been thrown
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into radical disequilibrium is now forced to act, and marches towards the door, armed
with his/her answer. This too is an error based on the equation of thought-processes: what
A takes as a hesitation is taken to be the meaning of the time for concluding. The
necessity to act retroactively produces the second suspension as a hesitation; that is, it is
not counted as a hesitation until the moment of concluding marks it as having been one,
and symbolizes the “lagging behind” that the subject thinks he is experiencing. A, the
subject of the conclusion we are describing, then stands and readies him/herself to march
towards the door.
Lacan submits that the entire problem, resulting as it does from the formation of a
hypothetical, is less subject to a principle of reasonable doubt than to a value he calls
“anticipated certainty”: the truth of the sophism is not an 'objective' or desubjectified
truth, but the revealing of, “a tendency which aims toward truth- a notion that would be a
logical paradox were it not reduceable to the temporal tension which determines the
moment for concluding.” Lacan seems to be making a distinction between 'subjective
certainty', of which we only require a modicum to act, and a logical certainty which can
only be attained afterwards. Consider what would happen if a purely logical subject, one
who only accepts absolute logical certainty, realizes the error of his hypothesis, that his
supposition about the first suspended time is false: he would never be able to 'dis-equate'
the two times he had originally equated, the first suspension (Fink 368-70), and is thus
doomed to passivity or mere guessing. The time for comprehension thus loses meaning
for this subject, because it fails to allow him to cognize the all-important second
hesitation, a crucial moment of evidence. The important point here is: the truth can only
be reached by the subject who presumes truth as both a starting point and an endpoint,
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who adopts the belief that “the truth is out there.”
The value of the subject's hypothesis in this case is that it aims towards a certainty which
can only be confirmed as the truth afterwards. “What is, however, unusual about truth
here is that, in order to arrive at it, at least two of the three prisoners must presume it. Not
that is a rather original claim concerning the nature of truth: if it is not presumed, it will
never be confirmed. Truth only comes to be verified through its presumption. Truth
depends upon a tendency which aims toward the truth” (Fink 380) (italics in the
original).This is the essence of Peircean abduction, the ability to form hypothetical
situations or presumptions using the best premises available and act upon them. The
integration of radical doubt at any step (“How can I be sure?”) turns a theoretical lagging
behind the others into an actual lagging behind, a decidedly negative result. Lacan
accounts well for the principle of 'uberty' in his solution. The Imaginary determination of
the subjective situation leading to the “imaginary error” is the only factor which allows
the subject an insight into his Symbolic situation, and the hypothesis leads to a necessary
error: the proposition 'I am black' (erroneous) in the first instance leads to 'I am white', the
correct conclusion. Fink (386) suggests that error, perceived as 'purely' Imaginary, is
lopped off, forgotten, and covered over instead by finally produced signifier, 'white', and
further that this is the basis for the advent of the “signifying one,” the Master-Signifier.
“Competition [between the prisoners] here... generates the temporal tension necessary to
create a spark which will fly counter to the imaginary axis, instantiating a symbolic
relation” (Fink 376).
Lacan's allegory provides a definite signifying basis for the difference between law and
cause: the law of the causation is attained as the result or conclusion of a strictly temporal
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process, 'white', but this serves to cover over the two mediate temporal steps of the cause,
the assumption of 'black' (imaginary error) and the notion of the second hesitation. Fink
(378) remarks that, “the 'first' castration came about in the very same way: a path forged
between the signifier of the barred other- that which has been primally repressed- and
'another' signifier.” I submit that such temporal retroaction is deeply analogous to the idea
of the desire of the Father, which covers over an aporia or lack which it causes to be only
insofar as it is considered by the subject as a lack. Fink indicates much the same notion:
he sees an opposition here between the 'signifying one' and another signifier referred to in
Lacanian discourse as the signifier of the barred Other (symbolized by S(barredA)). This
term means the signifier of the lack in the Other, the mark of the inconsistency of the
“inherent inconsistency of the symbolic order, the fact that there is something
(jouissance) which resists symbolization and causes gaps and ruptures in the symbolic
order” (Zizek, Plague 175). In Seminar XX, objet petit a, S(barredA) and the Symbolic
phallus qua dead letter or name are linked or related terms, and in the sophism they are
linked to the two scansions and the conclusion (objet petit a to the first scansion,
S(barredA) to the second). 'Black' plays the role of objet petit a well, as an “objective
factor of subjectivization”, a Real and traumatic kernel which initiates the movement of
the subject's desire; S(barredA) is loss in the Other associated with the excess-ive
enjoyment that the Name-of-the-Father engenders as we pass from the Imaginary to the
Symbolic (so-called 'father-enjoyment'). Elsewhere Bruce Fink refers to S(barredA) as
“unpronounceable”; clinically, this concept is linked to the silence or enjoyed meaning
which occurs at the conclusion of analysis, where the two signifiers (S(barredA) and
Name-of-the-Father) are themselves 'dis-equated', the Master Signifier brought into a
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dialogic relation and the Other's desire is lain bare.
The temporal process just described is one in which the subject is literally split by the
hunt for the signifier, only to be sutured again with respect to another signifier, which
becomes the basis for the subject's further history, a metaphorizing mark with its own
particular etymology. The subjectification of the signifier allows the subject to objectify
an otherwise subjective experience, the temporal scansions. In the case of the 3 prisoner
dilemma the scansions which stand for the Other's desire are the hesitations, and in the
concrete speech situation the demand of the Other implies this desire. Thus, the Master
Signifier qua ultimate interpretant allows the subject to maintain a consistent relation
with respect to the rest of the signifying phenomena, because the signifier now has a
consistent relationship with time: it represents its passage.
Peirce, in his writings on time, differentiates between a continuous or conscious relation
to time (see chapter 1), and the regularity of time as governed by a Third or law.
Regularity includes the idea of continuity, but imbues mere continuity with an aspect of
generality, which it would not necessarily contain. Continuity is best described as the
Firstness or immediacy of temporalized, continuous cognition, and memory is the
Secondness of the same cognition (the then/now opposition). Regularity, therefore, could
be viewed as the Thirdness of continuity, the subjectification of a law which allows one
to objectify a certain time as continuous. The paradox of this, essentially the paradox we
have been dealing with all along, is that such a cognizance requires something which is
radically discontinuous or exists outside of the order of continuity, an exception. The
exception in question, described as a metaphor in the Peircean sense, establishes what is
general about the continuities (scansions or times of comprehensions) in question. Peirce
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expresses the relation between time and the subject describing time as, “that diversity of
existence whereby that which is existentially a subject is enabled to receive contrary
determinations in existence,” an existential analogue of the logical flow (CP 1.494).
Lacan's sophism demonstrates how and why the subject equates his/her own logical time-
flow with a signifier: first on the basis of an (imaginary) error, second on the basis of an
imagined necessity. The error is correlated with objet petit a qua cause, the necessity with
the appearance of the Master Signifier. Recall Zizek's description of the Hegelian positing
reflection (above), in which the subject in his or her radical freedom asserts that
contingency which s/he takes as necessary (the apodosis within a simple syllogism). In
conclusion, I do not think that it is a stretch to say that an urgent situation, one forcing a
guess about the Other's desire via hypothetical reasoning, brings about the sign in its
Triadic aspect, a signifier whose inconsistency stems from the vicissitudes of its
extraordinary genesis. This process forges the barred or split subject of language, the
subject of a signifying synchrony which is something more than the sum of its component
simultaneities or dyadic oppositions. As O.P. Haas puts it, “Thirdness operates as a sign
in as much as it is a law whose generality extends beyond the limitations of fact to an
indefinite future” (47).
Conclusion- The First Subjectified Signifier
We have so far seen that the instillation of a Master-Signifier involves two
processes: that of hypothesis formation, and that of the metaphorizing of the subject. In
the next section we shall go further and try to tie these ideas back together using three key
Peircean concepts: Argument, dynamic object, and finally, hypostatic abstraction. The
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objective is to describe in a semeiotically consistent fashion the process of Master-
Signifier formation, and it is my hope that the following explanation will demonstrate
even more clearly, in a way that C.S. Peirce never could, how the concepts that he
formulated really do play a governing role in human sign-use. This is not an idle task, for
as T.L. Short writes:
Peirce's genuine extension of the concept of sign is his application of it to human languages and their use... Since Peirce's theory of signs is intented to be a science, it must be judged by the illumination it casts on diverse phenomena and by the fruitfulness of its application in research. It is not enough to judge it by the internal coherence of its basic principles. One must, in addition, give Peirce's detailed classification of signs more attention than it has yet received, and one must refine and extend this classification wherever possible. Only in that way can we reveal the explanatory power and, therefore, the truth of Peirce's basic semeiotic principles. (“Semeiosis and Intentionality”, 199)
I believe that this is in keeping with the basic mission of this work, which is to use one
author to expose something about the other.
The dynamic object is “the really efficient but not immediately present Object” of
the sign (CP 8.343). Any sign has a number of immediate objects, but no one of these
indicates what we would normally consider the object of the sign. The idea of dynamic
object makes clear that at some point witin the sign-action, the sign must be interpreted or
expressed positively via a dynamic interpretant, some response to the sign which leads to
a here-and-now affirmation of what the sign-user thinks to be the real nature of the object
of the sign. The dynamic object of a sign can only be filled out by collateral observation
or experience with the object in question; that is, a set of conditions present in the sign in
isolation is not enough for the sign to indicate its dynamic object (CP 8.179). However,
“though a sign cannot express its (dynamic) Object, it may describe, or otherwise
indicate, the kind of collateral experience by which the Object is to be found” (Short
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215). The sign that indicates the dynamic object fits exactly within Peirce's definition of
Argument (see Chapter 2), a sign-representamen which by logical necessity indicates its
object. To understand what Peirce means by Argument, we must be careful not to equate
the idea of 'sign' with that of signifier or icon: not all signs are such compact or isolatable
units, and a sign whose only existence is in-and-through language can be of indeterminate
length.
Arguments in the more general (small 'a') sense, to which Peirce's classification is
related, can be broken down into two constituents, major and minor premisses. Major
premisses constitute some evidence or observation, and minor premisses are the
conditions which, when applied to the evidence, produce some result. Each element of the
major premise is a part of the Argument's composition, what Peirce would call a monadic
predicate referring to some subject objectified within the context of inquiry. Monadic
predicates take the form 'x is red', 'x is a boy', etc. Arguments are signs that indicate
dynamic objects, but can do so only because there are existing interpretants which
constitute the principles by which Arguments are interpreted (minor premisses).
To apply these categories to the Lacanian idea of sytagmatic demand, we might
view each recurrence of the repeated phonemic trait as a collection of monadic terms
within that compose the Argument, the set of these terms constituting the major premise.
With reference to the dynamic object, these terms would be the set of immediate objects,
and therefore the Other's desire, the really efficient cause of the demand, is the dynamic
object of the subject's question, “What does she want?” The minor principles, therefore,
could be said to be twofold: the idea of iconicity/similarity in general, operative in both
markedness assimilation and Lacan's “imaginary error”, and the principle of
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necessity/urgency, appropriate to any instance of hypothetical reasoning. Based upon
what we have said (above) about the idea of Master Signifier with respect to
demand/desire, we can see that the desire of the Other is the dynamic object of the
demand qua Argument. Implicit in the demand is that its necessity or urgency must be
acknowledged. The young subject, unable to interpret the Argument's conventional or
rational value, relies upon the salient iconic feature in the demand, a provisional answer
to the ever-growing signifying chain.
We must be careful however, to maintain the important distinction between law
and cause by not mischaracterizing or simplifying the abduction that gives rise to the
Master Signifier. The phonemic trait which serves as the Real material upon which is
founded the subjective Law/metaphor is in a very important sense the result of an
induction about the signifying chain, but an induction within the frame of a hypothetical
and temporalized process. Thinking back to the 3 prisoner dilemma, 'the imaginary error'
that gives rise to an original hypothesis frames the subsequent induction by defining the
parameters of its answer, and by subtending it with the same assumption of
similarity/difference. The subject cannot work forward through the problem unless s/he
can work backwards from an expectation of the character of the solution, present in the
character of the guess. As Peirce says, “...a real connection cannot be the conclusion of an
inductive process alone,” because it establishes no connection between what was thought
(subjective history, cause of desire) and what we now think (our final, explanatory theory
about desire) (Boler 86). Urgency, however, brings about a cessation of hypothetical
postulation. This cessation, from a logical/explanatory perspective, is inexcusable and
something which the nascent subject, under duress and without the developed signifying
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capacity, cannot explain.
The recourse to induction could be framed as the quasi-logical flight to a purely
abstract consideration of the demand qua iconic. Boler helps to clarify how this switch
takes place: “The quality spectrum that corresponds to monadic predicates is a simple
form of the more complex continuity of the process. The events in the reasoning process
are related not by being similar to one another, but by being ordered to, or successfully
realizing the end of, the process” (78). The signifier at the end of the process, the Name-
of-the-Father, memorializes but at the same time conceals and contracts the temporal
process that allowed it to become in the first place. It reifies, in a retroactive fashion, the
assumption that the demand was an Argument in the first place. If in the sophism the
signifier 'white' plays the part of the Master Signifier, the realization of this answer would
go something like, “How foolish! I assumed myself black, but I see now not only that I
am white, but further that this is so because 'white' presented itself at every stage in my
reasoning.” This assumption leads from a collection defined by tendencies (because this
is all that monadic predicates or phonemic features of the signifying chain are) in which
iconicity is the operative tendency, towards a system in which iconicity is enacted in the
form of rule or law.
I wish to close this work by going back to the Hegelian idea of the “contingency of
necessity” (above). It should be clear that, by a process of hypothesis, the subject chooses
to produce his or her own guesses about the desire of the Other in order to free
him/herself from this desire, and rationalizes that choice later (“it could not have been
otherwise”). The signifier of the Law is the first signifier that the subject 'subjectifies', the
first signifier to represent him or her to the rest of the set of signifiers. The idea of
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subjectification (Peirce actually uses this term) is subsumed under the logical movement
he calls hypostatic abstraction, a complex Third. The idea of hypostatic abstraction is
thus (CP 4.235): “it consists in taking a feature of a percept or percepts... so as to take
propositional form in a judgment, and in conceiving this fact to consist in the relation
between the subject of that judgment and another subject, which has a mode of being that
merely consists in the truth of propositions of which the corresponding concrete term is a
predicate.” Simply put, it is the conversion of that which would ordinarily be a logical
predicate into a logical subject: instead of saying, “The sparrow is red”, we now say, “The
sparrow has redness.” The full process of abstraction contains two steps: first, the feature
in question is considered in itself, without regard to the other features of the object(s), and
second, the nature is given a numerical unity so that it can be predicated as one things of
many things (Boler 60-1).
We use hypostatic constructions all the time (redness, velocity, etc.), because they allow
us to discuss real commonalities as really existing, singular things. The cart is placed
firmly in front of the horse when we take our own subjective determinations as if they
accounted for objective facts (and were themselves objective), and yet the perdurance of
any trope relies upon just such a reification. Think about the paradox in saying, “If not for
redness, nothing would be red”: this acceptance of the 'Firstness of Thirdness' is the
logical shortcut which allows the subject to hinge his or her being upon something more
concrete which will allow the subject not to disappear from the signifying chain. The
reader of Lacan will notice here the change associated with the appearance of the Phallic
signifier, the difference between the ideas of 'being' the Imaginary phallus for the mother
(monadic predication, singular referent) and 'having' the phallus (Symbolic abstraction).
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The subject who can 'have' can also 'lose': what was a physical possibility is transposed
over into language as the threat of castration-in-language. The fantasy (the idealized
Imaginary scenario which in Chapter 3 we defined as a correlate of the ultimate logical
interpretant) responds to this possibility by re-asserting the Name-of-the-Father's
determination of the subject's position, but in a revisionist way that is inconsistent with
the cause of desire, objet petit a. At the heart of every such gap/shortcut lies a Real
antagonism which cannot simply be dispelled or explained away, only repeated over and
over again as symptom. It would be fair to say that a bit of that antagonism is inherent in
every figure of speech or hypostatic abstraction.
The static, immobile, yet stabilizing term of the Master Signifier is the basis of neurotic
structure. What have we said about the subject of this structure, however? What I want
the reader to take away from this chapter is that the subject who can wield metaphor and
create numerable abstractions is endowed with a “poetic competence”, a rhetorical ability
that allows him or her to conceal a thing by speaking its 'name' (The Purloined Poe 150-
3). The analyst seeks to disrupt this stasis at the subject's kernel by re-provoking the
antagonism which the subjectified signifiers cover up. The analyst must play the role of
detective/poet: the path of the Real 'dead letter' is ciphered through a Symbolic/Imaginary
scenario akin to Lacan's sophistic example. This gives us a new way to envision the
'changed' or 'cured' analysand: s/he must re-engage with his or her own poetic capacity,
his or her own responsibility that comes with the realization that s/he really is the author
of his or her life. Lacan's is a model of the revolutionary poet, who eschews Imaginary
forced choice in favor of his or her own desire.
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