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English Studies Forum
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Paula Murphy
1.1 Introduction
What makes psychoanalytic theory useful for the analysis of culture? How does the task of the cultural critic equate with that of the psychoanalyst? Many solutions have already been proposed to these questions. Early use of psychoanalysis with literature produced what has come to be known as psycho-biography, with the critic analyzing the author and the text functioning as the dream or the flow of free association through which the latent neuroses of the author could be uncovered. The theories of Jacques Lacan steered psychoanalytic criticism irreversibly onto the path of post-structuralism, yet while critics no longer analyzed authors, recognizing that this method ignored the literary aspects of the text, they did analyze literary characters.
Recent criticism has begun to question more thoroughly the exact nature of the relationship between the two discourses, and E. Ann Kaplan astutely analyzes these various perspectives in her introduction to Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Shoshana Felman argues that there is no longer a clear-cut definition between literature and psychoanalysis, and instead of positing the critic as analyst, which has traditionally been the case, she sees the author as analyst, recognizing that even the analyst’s interpretation is not free from the actions of the unconscious, a point which Lacan is at pains to emphasize. Peter Brooks finds an analogy between literature and psychoanalysis in the concept of transference, equating the reader/text with the analyst/analysand: "[i]n the transferential situation of reading as in the psychoanalytic transference, the reader must grasp not only what is said but always what the discourse intends, its implications, how it would work on him. He must, in Lacanian terms, refuse the texts demands in order to listen to its desire" (qtd. in Kaplan 6). Brooks moves closer to what I believe to be the fundamental link between the two discourses in his description of the concealed desire of the literary text as parallel to the analysand’s unspoken desire in the situation of analysis.
It is precisely this site of silence that is the focus of Barbara Johnson’s essay "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," which critiques Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s analysis of "The Purloined Letter." Derrida criticizes Lacan for his blindness to the functioning of the signifier in the narration, and for making the signifier itself into the narrative’s truth, thereby contradicting his own position on the endless play of the signifier by imposing a fixed meaning on the text. Johnson points out that deconstruction too has a transcendental signifier, which is its insistence on the openness and instability of meaning. Derrida thus performs exactly the same action for which he criticizes Lacan, reducing the text to a singular meaning, although that meaning is in fact the lack of any stable meaning in the free play of the signifier. Moreover, Derrida ignores the context of Lacan’s reading. He is not posturing as a literary critic, but admittedly uses the text for his own purpose, which is the illustration of his theories. The truth that Derrida refers to, contained according to Lacan in the letter, is "a truth which is not to be divulged" (Lacan 1988, 198). All of the characters in Poe’s story are linked through their shared silence when in possession of the letter: the Queen, the minister and the detective Dupin. If the letter is, as Lacan suggests, "synonymous with the original, radical subject" (196) then it is the subject’s truth which is hidden, trapped in an endless play of signifiers, as "[o]nly in the dimension of truth can something be hidden" (201-2).
Both the analyst and the critic seek to uncover the truth or truths of the analyst’s speech and the cultural text respectively, and both attempt to do so through the only medium available to them: language. As Lacan says, "we, who spend our time being the bearers of all the purloined letters of the patient, also get paid somewhat dearly" (Lacan 1988, 204). Lacan’s now famous summary of his analysis of Poe’s story, "a letter always reaches its destination" (205), is open to many interpretations, but one of the most important for the purposes of this article is the primacy of the symbolic order in the construction of subjectivity. Each character in Poe’s story is changed in some way through his/her contact with the letter, and in a similar way, the symbolic order shapes and manipulates subjectivity. If there is a truth that can be accessed therefore, it is a truth beyond the signifier. The last forty years of structuralist and post-structuralist theory have effectively dismantled the idea that any text contains a definable, indisputable truth that is possible to uncover: at least, any truth of authorial intention. The truth that I refer to is not to be found within language. Rather, it is a truth that is situated in an unsignifiable space outside of language. It is not to be found either in the speech of the analysand or on the written page, but is concealed in the interstices of language, in the blank spaces between the words: ‘inter-dit’ (Lacan 1998, 119). This article will attempt to outline Lacan’s theory of language as the cornerstone of subjectivity, in order to propose that the mechanisms of signification in both the speech of the analysand and the literary text link the functions of both analyst and critic in an unending and ultimately unfulfilling search for truth and/or meaning.
1.2 Language: The Real Thing? For Lacan, subjectivity is firmly rooted in language.[3] Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, and Lacan’s rereading of the unconscious as a system based on the relation of the subject to signification, has engendered such a radical displacement of twentieth century thought that Lacan compares it to the Copernican revolution (1989, 182). Lacan constantly emphasises the alienation between language and reality, which Ragland-Sullivan describes saying, "[l]anguage names things and thus murders them as full presences, creating an alienation between the word and the thing, an alienation that infers gaps or a ternarity into language itself" (Ragland-Sullivan and Brasher 4). Language can only stand in for the real thing. It creates reality: "[t]he concept…engenders the thing" (Lacan 1989, 72). In "Encore" Lacan denies that there is any knowledge beyond the signifier, saying "[t]here is no such thing as a prediscursive reality. Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse" (1998, 32). He draws on Saussurian linguistics which similarly highlights the gap between language and reality by seeking to prove that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. According to Saussure it is the combination of the two components of the sign that produces meaning: "[a]lthough both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact" (Rice and Waugh 40).
Lacan’s originality lies in his belief that the signifier acts independently of its signification, and moreover, that the subject him/herself is unaware of this. Lacan adopts the algorithm S/s, placing the signifer above the signified and positing language above reality[4]. The bar between represents the slippage, or glissement in meaning, between the two[5]: "the distance of what is written" (1998, 34). The signifier is assigned this place of prominence because "[w]ere it not for this bar above which there are signifiers that pass, you could not see that signifiers are injected into the signified" (34). In other words, were it not for the signifier, it would not be possible to understand that there is a signified. Because of this slippage in meaning between the signifier and the signified, it is impossible for language to accurately communicate thought concepts. The subject’s "surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack" (Zizek 175). The failure of representation of the signifier and the void that it opens is itself the subject of the signifier: it is a palimpsest[6], marked with its own failure. The void that opens up between signifier and signified is a microcosm of the subject’s relationship with and to language. The subject cannot control his/her representation in the signifying chain (S1) since this signifier is controlled by another signifier (S2). In this way that the subject is an entity "whose being is always elsewhere" (Lacan 1998, 142). It is within "llanguage" that S1, the master signifier, is to be found. Lacan uses this term to describe the language of the unconscious and to differentiate it from language that serves the purpose of communication: "[l]anguage is what we try to know concerning the function of llanguage" (1998, 138). It is an unconscious phenomenon, and as its affects are felt in the unconscious realm, they are as such incapable of being articulated by speech. The speaking subject, unable to reconcile being at once the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enounced, disappears in the gap that opens up between S1 and S2: a disappearance that Lacan names aphanasis. These relations between the unconscious and linguistics are form a crucial component of Lacan’s thought and are used in his formulations of the Oedipus complex, repression, condensation, the anal drive, identification, love, displacement, the symptom and desire to name but a few. For example, the symptom of the analysand is the end result of the substitution on the chain of signification from the original sexual trauma, and so can be successfully aligned with metaphor. Likewise, the endless chain of desire can be described as metonymic.
Lacan’s linguistic schema posits a signifying chain that floats above the signified, engendering "an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" (1989, 170), and opening a gap in meaning and a division in subjectivity, as has been discussed. However, there must be something which binds signifiers to signifieds, otherwise language would be totally meaningless. What stabilizes the incessant glissement of signifiers are certain anchoring points which Lacan calls points de capiton. The literal translation of this term means upholstery button, an appropriate image of their mooring function. The points de capiton stop the sliding, at least temporarily: they are the points at which "signifier and signified are knotted together" (1981, 268). A certain number of points de caption are necessary for the subject to be psychologically stable. If the subject has no anchoring points, then the result is psychosis. Although signification is anchored at particular sites within the system of language, this does not endow signification as a whole with any reliability. On the contrary, the subject only rarely comes close to complete, meaningful articulation, which Lacan calls full speech.
1.3 Full and Empty Speech
That Lacan places so much emphasis on the importance of language is hardly surprising, since the practice of psychoanalysis has only one medium: speech itself. Lacan differentiates between two types of speech which he names full speech and empty speech. The basic methodology of psychoanalysis requires the analyst to uncover what the analysand is not saying, in order to find the root of his/her psychological problem. Empty speech is the analysand’s speech to the analyst, where the subject "loses himself in the machinations of language" (Lacan 1987, 50). The void or empty speech of the analysand can only be probed by speech itself, so despite the inability of language to communicate what is contained within this void, it is nevertheless the only means by which the analyst can access it, albeit in a metonymic sense. Empty speech is nothing less than "the appeal of the void, in the ambiguous gap of an attempted seduction of the other" (Lacan 1989, 44). Full speech, then, is found in the symptom(s) of the analysand, signifying a signified that is repressed from the subject’s consciousness. This is full speech because it "includes the discourse of the other in the secret of its cipher" [7] (). Full speech aims at truth, "the truth such as it becomes established in the recognition of one person by another" (Lacan 1987, 107). Truth is therefore not pre-existing, but is formed within a dialectic.
The speaker’s own subjectivity is also constituted within this dialectic. Because of the gap between language and reality, language and the unconscious, and the constructive power of language itself, Lacan radically denies the informative function of language. Rather, Lacan believes that the function of language is to seek a response from the other, thereby confirming the speaker’s own subjectivity:
Like the signifier that can only be defined in relation to another signifier in Lacan’s version of Saussurian linguistics, so too the subject (S1), can only be defined in relation to another subject (S2), and so cannot exist outside of the chain of signification. Here, as in so many cases, Lacan traces a correlation between language and subjectivity, and he defines this process by his own neologism, "linguistricks" meaning, "everything that, given the definition of language, follows regarding the foundation of the subject" (1998, 15). The impossibility of communication is not necessarily felt by the subject as a frustration, and this is precisely because of the ability of language to mould the discourse of the unconscious into an articulation that can fit into the system of the symbolic order. Since the real is beyond symbolization in any case, real thoughts and desires become metamorphosized when translated into language, and more importantly that metamorphosis becomes what the subject believes to be a real thought. In this way, language constructs and manipulates our unconscious thoughts, until "the fact that one says remains forgotten behind what is heard" (15): when a thought is articulated, the actual thought is then forgotten as it takes on a different meaning through its translation into language. In his formulations of metaphor and metonymy he once again practices linguistricks.
1.4 Metaphor and Metonymy
Lacan looks to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams for the roots of his theory that the unconscious is structured like a language. Freud believes that the dream is a rebus, and he identifies entstellung, meaning distortion or transposition, as the precondition for the functioning of the dream. Lacan equates entstellung with "the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse" (1989, 177). The action of this sliding is of course, unconscious. As usual, Lacan uses this reading of Freud as a starting point for a much larger theory, beginning by stating that the very topography of the unconscious can be defined by the algorithm S/s (181). Lacan follows Jakobson in the latter’s major article of 1956, in positing two directly opposed axes of language, the metaphoric axis, which involves the substitution of one term for another, and the metonymic axis, which involves the combination of linguistic terms. Lacan expresses the signification that occurs in both metaphor and metonymy with two mathematical equations. The equation that describes metonymy is written: f(S…S’)S = S(-)s with f S referring to the signifying function, and the two s’s in brackets referring to the connection between signifier and signifier, present in metonymy. On the right hand side of the equation, there is the signifier, represented by "S" and the signified, represented by "s." The bar in brackets represents the "resistance of signification that is constituted" (181). The formula as a whole articulates the fact that the signifying function of the connection of one signifier with another is congruent with the maintenance of the bar. According to Lacan, in metonymy, the bar is not crossed so no new signified is produced. In metaphor however, the bar is crossed and Lacan expresses this with the formula: f(S/S)S = S (+)s Here, S/S represents the substitution of one signifier for another that is evident in metaphor. This equation expresses the fact that the signifying function of the substitution of one signifier with another (metaphor) is congruent with the crossing of the bar between the signifier and signified. Thus, it is only through metaphor that Lacan believes that a new signified can be created. The purpose of these formulations are to underscore the inherent resistance to signification in language, and point out that this resistance can only be overcome through metaphor, where one signified is injected into another, producing a new signified. Metaphor and metonymy are used by Lacan in a number of different contexts. For example, the most important metaphor in human development is the paternal metaphor, where the desire for the mother is replaced by the Name-of-the-Father in the Oedipus complex. He also links metonymy to displacement and metaphor to condensation in the dream process, and the mechanisms of identification and love can also be conceptualized in this way, since both involve processes of substitution. Although Lacan’s theorizations concerning language have now been filtered throughout post-structuralist criticism, this should not dilute their radical nature. Language, so long considered the supreme system of communication; a system which in its complexity proves the superiority of humans over other animals, disguises and resists articulation. The signifying chain allows the subject "to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says . . . . it is no less than the function of indicating the place of this subject in the search for the true" (172).
1.5 The Search for the True
Lacan offers few solutions to the problems that he poses however. What is this "true" that the subject is in search of? And how can he/she access this truth? If there can be no real communication in language, he declares that neither is there a metalanguage through which speaking beings can communicate. "No formalization of language is transmissible without the use of language itself" (Lacan 1998, 119). Even the Greek symbols that Lacan himself uses can only be explained and conceptualized through language. "[N]o signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification" (Lacan 1989, 165): the structuralist belief that there is no inherent meaning in the sign but only differential meaning, forming an endless web of signifiers that are almost completely separate from the signifieds they represent. Heideggerian philosophy is very much in evidence in Lacan’s work, and nowhere more so than in Lacan’s theorizations of language. Heidegger too admits that as humans, we are to some extent trapped within language, and however much we try to analyse it, it is paradoxically language which constructs us:
Although much of Lacan’s theories about the influence of language on the subject are heavily influenced by both structuralist linguistics and existentialist philosophy, his originality lies in the application of these concepts to a broader analysis of the subject. Lacan’s thesis on the fundamental role of language in subjectivity has quite radical consequences when taken to its logical limit, which he openly acknowledges, calling into question the very notion of being or existing. He cites Plato, saying, "[f]orm is the knowledge of being. The discourse of being presumes that being is, and that’s what holds it" (1998, 119). Likewise, in Lacanian linguistics, it is language itself that creates and forms our reality. As Heidegger articulates, even as we look at language, it is language that is looking at us, constructing our identity and defining our subjectivity.
Truth is one of the most central notions in Lacan’s theory, but it is also one of the most ambiguous. It always refers to the truth about unconscious desire, and the aim of analysis is to reveal this truth in the analysand. Lacan does appear to believe that we can have some access to this censored knowledge of truth. This knowledge is to be found "inter-dit" (Lacan 1998, 119), between the words and between the lines: "[i]t is with the appearance of language that the truth emerges" (Lacan 1989, 190), according to Lacan, although he is not referring to the language of everyday speech utterances here, but to the clues contained within and between those utterances which lead us back to the unconscious, the discourse of the Other. The truth of unconscious desire does not exist in a pre-formed verbal state, waiting to be uncovered. On the contrary, Lacan insists that the truth is "gradually constructed in the dialectical movement of the treatment itself" (Evans 215). That the subject comes to remember the formative moments of his life is not in itself particularly important: "it is less a matter of remembering than of rewriting history" (Lacan 1987, 14), and this remembering must be "re-experienced with the help of empty spaces" (Lacan 66). This aligns with Lacan’s notion that language creates reality: not just in the sense that language structures thoughts as they are being verbalized or written, but also in the sense that the act of remembering which must be done through language, actively constructs history. In articulating past experiences, we are forced to narrate our own histories, and these constructions are never fully accurate. As Lacan states, "[i]ntegration into history evidently brings with it the forgetting of an entire world of shadows which are not transposed into symbolic existence" (Lacan 192). Remembering inevitably entails an element of forgetting.
1.6 Reading Between the Lines
In his essay "The Third Meaning," Roland Barthes articulates a similar ambiguity of signification. In this essay, he describes an image from Ivan the Terrible. The details of the image matter little, as his enquiry could as easily be directed at any piece of literary or visual art. The image operates on two ascertainable levels. The first level is informative, which includes the visual information that is imparted from the image, in this case "the setting, the costumes, the characters, their relations" (qtd. in Sontag 317). The image also operates on a symbolic level. In the image, gold is pouring down on a young czar’s head, symbolizing "the imperial ritual of baptism by gold" (317). In addition to this straight-forward symbolism, Barthes also lists the symbolism of the image in relation to the overall theme of gold in Ivan the Terrible, as well as Eisenteinian symbolism and historical symbolism. Yet there is something missing from this analysis. The image speaks to him in a way that seems to defy signification:
He calls this the third meaning or the obtuse meaning. Like full speech and truth in the analyst and critic diagram, the obtuse meaning "is not in the language system" (25). Likewise, it is "not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence" (326). Barthes deems obtuse an appropriate adjective for this meaning since the definition of an obtuse angle is on that is more than 100 degrees. Likewise he states that "the third meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative" (320). Here, Barthes attempts to articulate the indefinable impact that an image had on him, but he could just as easily be talking about a scene from a film, a poem, or a work of art. The "third meaning" is the concept of "inter-dit," but Barthes’ theory lacks an analysis of the mechanisms of its signification, which it is possible to find in Lacan’s work.
Lacan’s theory makes it possible to explain why works of art are capable of exacting an emotional response in the subject. It cannot be explained by the actual combination of words on the page or paint on the canvas, rather it is a message received from behind the canvas, from between the lines: "inter-dit," that addresses the Other. An elaboration of this analogy between critic and text/analyst and analysand reveals the relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalysis that makes Lacanian theory an indispensable theoretical model. What links the discourses of psychoanalytic theory and cultural criticism at the most fundamental level is the interpretation of language in a search for truth. Both discourses are also confined to interpret language through language, since there is no metadiscourse. The similar mechanisms of cultural criticism and psychoanalysis can be expressed in the following diagram.
Starting from the top, both the analyst and the critic act as interpretants of a particular discourse: in the analyst’s case, it is the utterances of the analysand, and in the critic’s case it is the text. According to Lacanian theory, the utterances of the analysand constitute empty speech, as does the literary text. In the case of the analysand, the discourse creates an increasing level of resistance on the approach to the pathogenic nucleus, becoming stronger the closer the discourse comes to the centre of the nucleus where the source of the original trauma lies.[8] At the moment the speech of revelation is not said, resistance is produced, and this resistance is inversely proportional to the distance from the repressed nucleus (Lacan 1987, 22). The source of resistance lies in the ego, strictly located in the imaginary order,[9] which constructs an obstacle to the "speech which insists" (Lacan 1988, 321), the speech of the Other. It is useful here to note that the ego always has a relationship with the other, and the ‘other’ in this case is both a reflection and a projection of the ego (Evans 133). It represents both the counterpart of the subject and also the specular image, so both ego and other reside in the imaginary order. As the ego is the source of resistance, and as it is so intimately connected to the specular image, méconnaissance is its fundamental function (Lacan 1987, 53). The source of speech is the big Other, which is situated within the symbolic order.[10] The radical alterity of the Other allows Lacan to emphasise that language is beyond one’s conscious control, it literally comes from an "Other" place, which is why "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other" (Lacan 1989, 16).
There is a certain residual layer of resistance, even after the reduction of the resistances that may be essential, according to Lacan. Both resistance in psychoanalysis focused on the pathogenic nucleus, and Lacan’s theory of inter-dit in language constitute a space of silence where there is an absence of signification. In the written or visual text, the overall meaning cannot be ascribed to a particular word or image, or even a combination of words or images. The "truth" or meaning of a visual or literary text would seem to emerge from a space beyond the page or the canvas. For Lacan, it is precisely in what is incapable of being articulated that the truth resides. For example, the most significant dream for analysis would be the dream that the subject has totally forgotten, or about which they could not speak (Lacan 1987, 45). Likewise, because of the inability of language to communicate meaning, it is in the silences between the words of the text that the truth lies. "Speech never has a single meaning," he states, "[a]ll speech possesses a beyond" (242), and this beyond is silence.
Lacan’s theorizations are not without their problems and contradictions however. He problematically maintains that full speech can be found in the symptom(s) of the subject, which include the discourse of the Other in their code; on the other hand, he claims that a residual layer of resistance is always present, suggesting that there can never be "full" speech in the true sense. In any case, it is apparent that from the silences of resistance and inter-dit emerge full (or almost full) speech in the analysand and truth/meaning from the literary text or visual artwork. Of course, the ultimate paradox of language and linguistics in Lacan is that the only medium to articulate truth is through language itself, and so it can never be articulated fully, but always at a certain remove.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques.Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The JohnS Hopkins UP, 1997.
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996.
Georg, Stefan. "The Word" On the Way to Language, by Martin Heidegger. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Heidegger, Martin.. Unterwegs die Sprache. 1959. Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske. [ The Way to Language. Trans. Peter Hertz. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.].
Kaplan, E. Ann. Psychoanalysis and Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 1989.
---. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-4. Trans John Forrester, with notes by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
---. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, notes by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
---. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956. Ed. Jacques-Allain Miller. New York: Norton, 1981.
---. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore, 1972-1973. Ed. Jacques-Allain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Ed. A. J. E. Collins and B. J. Hayes. London: University Tutorial Press.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, and Mark Bracher, eds. Lacan and the Subject of Language. London: Routledge, 1991.
Rice, Philip and Patricia Waugh, eds., 2001. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP.
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