Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Signifier, Non-Signifying but Despotic

In delineating the unconscious as the (no longer merely psychic, as in Freud, but Symbolic (social?)) repository, as it were, of repressed elements, Jacques Lacan stresses that the rules (the Law) these elements are subject to (that determine the shape, as it were, of the unconscious, what it looks like, what’s in there, what happens there . . .) are the structural rules of language (as laid out by Saussure). He asserts this, first of all, by saying that the elements of the unconscious–the things that can be found there–are nothing but signifiers, which (following the Saussurian line) are the most basic units of language.

What Lacan stresses, however, is not the relationship of the signifier to some signified (signification) or the relationship of those two to an external (to language) referent (meaning), but the differential relations among the signifiers themselves. By this he means that a signifier can be identified (as a particular signifier) not due to some intrinsic quality it has (some intrinsic identity, that then determines what it is, what it means . . .), but based purely on its position in a network (the network of all signifiers). This signifier is differentiated by virtue of it not being something else, by virtue of it being in a certain position in relation to other signifiers by which–by virtue of it occupying that position (beside this signifier and beside that, and not in the position of that other signifier)–it is delimited as that particular signifier. In other words, the system and its rules (and the position that an element comes to occupy in relation to other elements)–not some inherent characteristic–is what distinguishes an element, what gives it its “identity” as such. (This is of course but the classic structuralist argument that emphasizes the system, its rules, and the relations between its elements over an element’s “inherent” essence.)

From these purely differential relations, Lacan is able to construct a symbolic system in the unconscious (which, he claims, is what the unconscious is made of: a symbolic system of signifiers!). This symbolic system follows rules determined by the differential relations between the elements which have nothing whatsoever to do with pre-existing external reality (i.e. with whatever referents the signifiers refer to). Hence Lacan is able to claim that these signifiers, these elements of the unconscious, are non-signifying, are, in fact, nonsensical substance. They are not devoted to (in not being connected to some signified) making any sense and have (in not being linked to a referent) no meaning whatsoever. (Psychoanalytic appropriations of Saussure tend to disregard the difference between the signified and the referent.)

Bruce Fink, explicating Lacan in The Lacanian Subject, reinforces this claim by citing examples that show that the effects that unconscious elements have on the (consciously operating) person are motivated not by meaning, i.e. some basis in factual truth, i.e. an accurate correlation/link between a signifier and some material referent, in other words, the reference of the signifier to something material (not necessarily just physical, so long as delimited and meaningful). Instead, as interpreted by Fink, the said unconscious effects are triggered solely by the (differential) relations that the words–the signifiers–have with each other. According to Fink, signifiers simply happen to be heard by a person, signifiers which (for one reason or another) get stuck in this person’s head (i.e. repressed in the unconscious), which then mix differentially with the other elements there (without regard as to whether they are based on facts or not), ultimately affecting his/her desires and future actions (i.e. produce an unconscious effect).

The question to be asked in this delineation of the unconscious is: Is this Lacanian unconscious–by virtue of the (differential, purely signifier-related, i.e. linguistic) rules that Lacan subjects it to–truly non-signifying? Does this structural version of the unconscious really not have any connection with anything material, i.e. does it really have no meaning (especially those that trapped the Freudian psychic unconscious to giving merely (everywhere, in all cases, all the time!) Oedipal meaning (i.e. Aha! It was your father! It is your mother!))? Should the unconscious, in fact, have no connection with any material referent whatsoever? Provided that it does escape from giving purely Oedipal meanings, is the structure created (the extension of the psychic unconscious into a structural one) any different, i.e. does it change anything fundamental in the way that psychoanalysis thinks about desire (which, come to think of it, isn’t that what all the symbolic elements (the signifiers) in the unconscious point toward, what caused them, what they’re all about in the first place?)? Does it offer anything more liberating from the classic Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of desire and its relation to the social? Does it successfully detach psychoanalysis from capitalism, taking it off its list of State ideologies/sciences? In fact, is this even possible? Is there something in psychoanalysis to be salvaged? Is psychoanalysis–even given Lacan’s twist, the most liberating of them psychoanalysts–capable of being redeemed, which is to say, is it, can it be revolutionary?

Yes, the Lacanian signifier is non-signifying. It has–needs–no signifier/referent to do its job, i.e. to have potent (unconscious) effects on–affect–the subject. Citing the Einstein (where, after overhearing his parents’ conversation, a kid starts to think that his father did not believe in him, thus he ends up not doing well in school–when, in fact, he was not the kid talked about, i.e. he was not the referent that the father’s signifier referred to) and appendix (where a man, after being told by his wife that the appendix is on his left side, starts to feel pain precisely there, leading him to think that he was suffering from appendicitis–only to find out later on that the appendix is on the right, after which the pain suddenly disappears) examples, Fink is right to claim as much (10-2). The Lacanian signifier–even when not directly linked to an accurate–to the right–signified and referent–nonetheless produces (after being repressed in the unconscious) very real effects (in the return of the repressed?).

In other words, the signified and the referent do not matter in the unconscious. All that matters are the signifiers and their differential dynamics, the differential play they go through, the differential (purely signifier-related) mechanisms that get activated in a person’s head (and in his unconscious), which then (after being repressed) produce effects on his/her conscious functioning (in the return of the repressed). What is involved, in other words, is merely a play of signifiers–with no regard whatsoever to meaning and signification. Thus, the Lacanian signifier is, indeed, non-signifying.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, credit Lacan with as much. Describing Lacan’s portrayal of the unconscious as a symbolic domain of codes, they say:

The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions of a type that differs from the previous connections. We owe to Jacques Lacan the discovery of this fertile domain of a code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain–or several chains–of meaning. [. . .] But how very strange this domain seems, simply because of its multiplicity–a multiplicity so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even of one code of desire. The chains are called ‘signifying chains’ because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a jargon, an open-ended, polyvocal formation. (38)

They do, however, add an important concept not to be found in Lacan, equiping them with something with which to critique him later on and to extend the non-signifying nature of the signifier (and make it asignifying):

The nature of the signs within it is insignificant, as these signs have little or nothing to do with what supports them. Or rather, isn’t the support completely immaterial to these signs? The support is the body without organs. These indifferent signs follow no plan, they function at all levels and enter into any and every sort of connection; each one speaks its own language, and establishes syntheses with others that are quite direct along transverse vectors, whereas the vectors between the basic elements that constitute them are quite indirect. (38)

Lacan’s psychoanalytic signifier, then, is indeed non-signifying. However, it can be asked: How is it that it is only the signifier that gets to trigger unconscious effects? Why does the signifier have exclusive rights to this? Why is this (non-signifying) signifier privileged to do all that it supposedly does? Is it–the signifier, linguistic, Symbolic (the Symbolic!)–indeed the only (type of) material–the only thing–capable of engraving/inciting unconscious effects?

To claim that only–exclusively–the signifier has this power–to mark something in a person’s unconscious, shape his/her desires, motivate his/her actions, create the driving force (insert the Other’s desire?) that then determines his/her life, puts him/her in a certain position in relation to his/her desires, in relation to body parts, to other people, to structures (of language, but not only) (as in Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”)–to claim that the material capable of doing this is exclusively Symbolic, linguistic–why, Doc, isn’t that enthroning a despot and legitimating his, well, despotism?

Moreover, while the Lacanian signifier–in not needing to be linked to a signified and a referent–is indeed non-signifying, is it not true that it still creates some kind of meaning? Does it not, after all, determine the position to be occupied by a subject, what s/he does, what s/he’s motivated by . . .? Is that not (in the existentialist sense?) endowing the subject with (in fact, imposing on him/her) meaning? Perhaps we can indeed say that the Lacanian signifier is non-signifying, but it certainly is not, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, asignifying. In the Lacanian unconscious, there is still meaning! In fact, a meaning determined–proclaimed, imposed, assigned–by Despot Signifier (and its Symbolic Laws)! In other words, the Symbolic gets to determine the (meaning (which there still is!) of the) subject. (In contrast, an asignifying signifier would not produce meaning (which, if it did–as with Lacan–it would need to be read, to be interpreted, what kind of meaning it gives the subject (this is the sense in which there is still meaning in the non-signifying signifier)), but rather, like the other material elements in the heterogeneous unconscious, would simply cause–affect–other elements, to effect something, do something, produce . . .)

And to think that it is only signifiers–Symbolic, linguistic elements–that can–exclusively (no other material elements: not forces of desire, not bodies . . . No, no!)–that–by rights handed down by the Despot (here, the structural laws of language)–are recognized to have this power (to endow meaning)–why, isn’t that the all-powerful, fully legitimated, almighty despotic signifier (the Symbolic, language, the Law) that Lacanian psychoanalysis enthrones–empowered as it is by the established order (its order, really (manifested in the division between the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary) to (still!) hand out meaning (one’s role in the social system, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, what can be desired, what should be desired, how to be a good and able subject perfectly assimilated (socialized!) in the established order, earning all that can be earned for oneself and–more importantly–of course, for the State . . .)?

In essence, then, Lacanian (post-)structural psychoanalysis does nothing but maintain the basic structure (and its mechanisms) of Freud’s psychic familial psychoanalysis. Lacan, in a sense, has a triangle with different characters (the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary), but, as revealed by its mechanism (Law, desire incited by Law . . .), it really is but the same Freudian triangle (mother, father, child)! This is upheld precisely by the structural positioning/determination of the subject by Despot Signifier (when, through it, the Real is (forcefully) made to enter the Symbolic)–legitimated, endowed as it is with despotic powers precisely in order to do this. In other words, in thus enthroning the signifier and allowing it its despotism, the mechanism in which the (Real) subject has to be socialized (by the Law of the Symbolic, by the father–through the signifier!) is preserved and produces but the same Freudian result: the reproduction of Oedipus. (Things get even worse–more misrepresented (more Imaginary?)–when this despotic signifier is detached from the chain and elevated into the position of the lost and unattainable phallus.)

This is reinforced by yet another mechanism effected by this enthronement (and the legitimation of the despotism) of the signifier. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, with the elevation of the signifier as a despot, “All the chains of the unconscious are biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier. The whole of desiring-production is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation, and to the dreary games of what is representative and represented in representation. [. . .] The reproduction of desire gives way to simple representation, in the process as well as theory of the cure. The productive unconscious makes way for an unconscious that knows only how to express itself” (54). In other words, as already explained elsewhere, the Real (and revolutionary!) production that the unconscious can (like a machine) do/make/produce is reduced to production of (impotent, even irrelevant?) mere imaginings, fantasies . . . When, in fact, as Deleuze and Guattari assert (again and again!), “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’ How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work–yours and mine? [. . .] What use is made of the syntheses? It represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works” (109). In other words, since (thanks to psychoanalysis) the unconscious can no longer produce but only represents, desire is disempowered to challenge the very structure that represses it (into this triangle) and represents it as, imposes on it an Oedipal shape.

This is why Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to say that Lacanian structural psychoanalysis is really–in essence, ultimately–familial. According to them, in structural psychoanalysis, “Parents have been put in their true places within the workings of the unconscious, as inductors of an indifferent nature, yet the role of organizer continues to be entrusted to symbolic of structural elements that are still part of the family and its Oedipal matrix. Once again one is caught, without a way out: it is simply that the means have been found to render the family transcendent” (92). This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, enclosing the unconscious within Oedipus, cutting off all vital flows, crushing desiring-production, conditioning the patient to respond daddy-mommy, and to always consume daddy-mommy” (92).

In agreement with Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari thus assert that

The psychoanalyst completed and perfected what the psychiatry of nineteenth-century asylums [. . .] had set out to do: to fuse madness with a parental complex, to link it to ‘the half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family’; to constitute for the madman a microcosm symbolizing ‘the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values,’ relations of Family-Child, Transgression-Punishment, Madness-Disorder; to arrange things so that disalienation goes the same route as alienation, with Oedipus at both ends; to establish the moral authority of the doctor as Father and Judge, Family and Law; and finally to culminate in the following paradox: ‘While the victim of mental illness is entirely alienated in the real person of his doctor, the doctor dissipates the reality of the mental illness in the critical concept of madness’ (92-3).

The study of the families of schizophrenics has breathed new life into Oedipus by making it reign over the extensive order of an expanded family, where not only each person would combine to a greater or lesser extent his or her triangle with the triangle of others, but where the entirety of the extended family also would oscillate between the two poles of a ‘healthy’ triangulation, structuring and differentiating, and forms of perverted triangles, bringing about their fusion in the realm of the undifferentiated (93).

In structural varieties of psychoanalysis, then,

The problem of the cure [. . .] becomes rather similar to an operation of differential calculus, where one proceeds by way of depotentialization in order to rediscover the primary functions and reestablish the characteristic or nuclear triangle–always a holy trinity, the means of access to a three-sided situation. It is clear that this extended familialism, wherein the family receives the very forces of alienation and disalienation, carries with it a renunciation of the fundamental positions of psychoanalysis concerning sexuality, despite the formal conservation of an analytic vocabulary. A veritable regression in favor of a taxonomy of families (94).

But the same familialism–what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the holy trinity.

In fact, if anything, Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis may actually cause more damage than Freud’s. This is because the structural extension of psychoanalysis allows the basic mechanism of triangulation to be generalized such that it is no longer merely familial but is present once one encounters the extension of the father figure, namely, language–in other words, as soon as one speaks! The result is that everyone (and no longer only those in a family), so long as he speaks (Who doesn’t?), becomes susceptible to psychoanalyzing (and its triangulation). In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “The distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic permits the emergence of an Oedipal structure as a system of positions and functions that do not conform to the variable figure of those who come to occupy them in a given social or pathological formation: a structural Oedipus (3 + 1) that does not conform to a triangle, but performs all the possible triangulations by distributing in a given domain desire, its object, and the law” (52). “Structural interpretation [thus but] makes Oedipus into a kind of universal Catholic symbol, beyond all the imaginary modalities. It makes Oedipus into a referential axis not only for the pre-Oedipal phases, but also for the para-Oedipal varieties, and the exo-Oedipal phenomena” (52).

Against this forced Oedipalization, Deleuze and Guattari cry out, “Is there an equivalence between the productions of the unconscious and this invariant–between the desiring-machines and the Oedipal structure [because, even in Lacan, in the end, let's admit it, it is still a matter of Oedipalization]?” Rather than redeeming psychoanalysis, “wouldn’t it be better to schizophrenize–to schizophrenize the domain of the unconscious as well as the sociohistorical domain, so as to shatter the iron collar of Oedipus and rediscover everywhere the force of desiring-production; to renew, on the level of the Real, the tie between the analytic machine, desire, and production?” (53).

This is what leads Deleuze and Guattari, against the Lacanian privileging/despotism of the signifier, to delineate an unconscious composed of codes (or, more precisely, an unconscious (that is) coded)–but of heterogeneous ones, ones more fully material (inclusive of other types (not just linguistic) of materials) (which helps in the assertion that the unconscious does not merely express (hence is not only to be interpreted) but produces). In their description:

No chain is homogeneous; all of them resemble, rather, a succession of characters from different alphabets in which an ideogram, a pictogram, a tiny image of an elephant passing by, or a rising sun may suddenly make its appearance. In a chain that mixes together phonemes, morphemes, etc., without combining them, papa’s mustache, mama’s upraised arm, a ribbon, a little girl, a cop, a shoe suddenly turn up. Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it ‘extracts’ a surplus value [. . .]. It is an entire system of shuntings along certain tracks, and of selections by lot, that bring about partially dependent, aleatory phenomena bearing a close resemblance to a Markov chain. The recording and transmissions that have come from the internal codes, from the outside world, from one region to another of the organism, all intersect, following the endlessly ramified paths of the great disjunctive synthesis. If this constitutes a system of writing, it is a writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real: a strangely polyvocal kind of writing, never a biunivocalized, linearized one; a transcursive system of writing, never a discursive one; a writing that constitutes the entire domain of the ‘real inorganization’ of the passive syntheses, where we would search in vain for something that might be labeled the Signifier–writing that ceaselessly composes and decomposes the chains into signs that have nothing that impels them to become signifying. The one vocation of the sign [after all] is to produce desire, engineering it in every direction. (39)

Deleuze and Guattari relate the linguistic to the material, putting all sorts of heterogeneous elements in a univocal ontological field where it matters less what they mean than what they do to each other (i.e. their affects). As they explain:

Selections are made from signifying chains no less than from material flows. The exegetical meaning (what is said about the thing) is only one element among others, and is less important than the operative use (what is done with the thing) or the positional functioning (the relationship with other things in one and the same complex), according to which the symbol is never in a one-to-one relationship with what it means, but always has a multiplicity of referents, being ‘always multivocal and polysemous.’ (181)

The unconscious is then related to the body-without-organs, that new concept Deleuze and Guattari gave birth to, composed as it is of becomings, where “everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations–all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appelations, divine appelations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous items” (84-5). “If everything commingles in this fashion it does so in intensity, with no confusion of spaces and forms, since these have indeed been undone on behalf of the new order: the intense and intensive order” (85).

Now, Deleuze and Guattari do reserve a place for some of the things that Freudian psychoanalysis overvalues, but, as they explain, “The father and the mother exist [in the unconscious] only as fragments, and are never organized into a figure or a structure able both to represent the unconscious, and to represent in it the various agents of the collectivity; rather, they always shatter into fragments that come into contact with these agents, meet them face to face, square off with them, or settle the differences with them as in hand-to-hand combat” (97). They do the same to the characters of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as when they say, “If in fact there are structures, they do not exist in the mind, in the shadow of a fantastic phallus distributing the lacunae, the passages, and the articulations. Structures exist in the immediate impossible real” (97).

Thus, the picture of the unconscious that Deleuze and Guattari create is a heterogeneous assemblage of material elements, with some of the things (signifiers, familial characters . . .) that psychoanalysis claims are there–but (inevitably, Really!) with more. They prioritize above all (above Despot Signifier), as they ought to be, desiring-machines, the energy they discharge (libido), and the (material) things that they (Really!) produce–which then determine (and not the other way around) (and without sacrificing (by way of the Symbolic) desire’s materiality, its Reality) what the unconscious looks like. As they say:

It is the function of the libido to invest the social field in unconscious forms, thereby hallucinating all history, reproducing in delirium entire civilizations, races, and continents, and intensely ‘feeling’ the becoming of the world. There is no signifying chain without a Chinaman, an Arab, and a black who drop in to trouble the night of a white paranoiac. Schizoanalysis sets out to undo the expressive Oedipal unconscious, always artificial, repressive and repressed, mediated by the family, in order to attain the immediate productive unconscious. Yes, the family is a stimulus–but a stimulus that is qualitatively indifferent, an inductor that is neither an organizer or disorganizer. As for the response, it always comes from another direction. If there is indeed language, it is on the side of the response, not the stimulus. (98)

Putting it in terms of the molar and the molecular, Deleuze and Guattari explain:

Desiring-machines [are] molecular elements, [where] use, functioning, production, and formation are one and the same process. And it is this synthesis of desire that, under certain determinate conditions, explains the molar aggregates with their specific use in a biological, social, or linguistic field, [and not the other way around]. This is because the large molar machines presuppose pre-established connections that are not explained by their functioning, sine the latter results from them. [. . .] A molar functionalism [such as what is employed in Lacanianism, in enthroning the signifier as despot,] is therefore a functionalism that did not go far enough, that did not reach those regions where desire engineers, independently of the macroscopic nature of what it is engineering: organic, social, linguistic, etc., elements, all tossed into the same pot to stew. The only unities-multiplicities that functionalism must know are the desiring-machines themselves and the configurations they form in all the sectors of a field of production (the ‘total fact’). A magical chain brings together plant life, pieces of organs, a shred of clothing, an image of daddy, formulas and words: we shall not ask what it means, but what kind of machine is assembled in this manner–what kind of flows and breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows. (181)