Deleuze for the Desperate #13
Background – debates with Lacan on language
Dave Harris
I have said on the notes on my website that I am
certainly not claiming a very deep acquaintance
with the work of Lacan. I have read much more
Deleuze and Guattari and I have tried to pin down
what it is about Lacan that they want to oppose.
That is still my interest and it clearly means I
have been selective in my occasional reading of
Lacan. I can only offer a few points that might
start to clarify things a bit. Obviously, much
more reading, of the originals and the
commentaries will be required if you want to
really get to the bottom of the controversy. Let's
jump in.
It should be said from the start that the main
model of language we are going to be criticizing
is one that dominated French thinking, and to some
extent Anglo-Saxon thinking as well, the approach
normally known as structuralist linguistics and
associated with Saussure and, for social sciences,
with Lévi-Strauss (I have notes
on my website of Levi-Strauss’s persuasive
demonstration of the power of a structural
analysis of kinship systems). There is also
occasional discussion of Chomsky’s linguistics
too, where a universal logical structure lies at
the heart of all transformational grammar.
The main proponent of the French view for D&G
though is Jacques Lacan. I am only an occasional
and light browser of Lacan, and everyone says he
is really difficult to read, probably for the same
reasons that Deleuze, Guattari or Foucault
are. As I mentioned in the Introduction, they are
all exponents of a particular kind of French elite
academic discourse, full of allusions and implicit
references to other philosophers but also to
writers and musicians. Lacan’s work is strewn with
words in French, German, Latin and Greek. An
important essay on the phallus (in Lacan's Ecrits)
summarizes the argument by quoting two
untranslated Greek words in Greek script, for
example. The material is really only for those
with no pressure from university assessment, with
financially secure leisure and good access to
online dictionaries and commentaries, and even
then it is formidable. Although Lacan is rarely
mentioned explicitly in A Thousand Plateaus
(ATP), I suspect that a lot of the casual
discussions of actual examples, from stickleback
behaviours to paintings, are really part of an
argument with Lacan – no doubt there is a
commentary somewhere to flesh this out.
The structuralist model is criticized on two
grounds. We can divide them into political and
theoretical grounds, although the two are linked:
Let’s start with arguments about the political
effects of this model. Structural linguistics
offers a particularly abstract conception of
language, and again it is one that offers simple
rules and options for analyzing communication,
despite the highly varied contents of such
communications – the language of both psychiatric
patients and analysts can be grasped by the model,
for example. We can understand all forms of
communication in terms of universal components
like signifier and signified, and there are a few
operations on these components that describe most
acts of communication – the construction of
narratives, the use of metaphor or metonym. In
metaphors, the meaning of a term is creatively
extended or displaced by suggesting an identity
between two separate terms – saying, for
example, 'the moon was a ghostly galleon'.
With metonyms, the meaning of something is
condensed so that a part stands for a whole
– Marilyn Monroe is described as a blonde, so her
blonde hair stands for the real person and all her
supposed characteristics -- describing her as a
blonde recalls her bubbly personality, combination
of naivety and sexiness and so on. Lacan's
definitions tend to stress the diachronic
dimension of metonym -- the way its meaning
unfolds over a sequence. Freud uses words
like condensation and displacement to describe the
processes going on in in developing the imagery in
dreams. Lacan is arguing that these are directly
translatable into more conscious linguistic
operations of metaphor and metonym.
[While I am here, Lacan
also argues that the basic components of language
are binary oppositions --anathema to D&G and
their insistence on the complexity of objects or
words.Lacan bases this on the acquisition of
language by the infant through games like Freud's
fort! da! (gone! there! the English variant
is peek-a-boo). He insists that binary opposition
is the first principle to order and classify
signifiers, before they even get organized by
codes]
It is not surprising that for Deleuze and Guattari
this makes structural linguistics a perfect
conception of language for modern abstract
capitalism that also transforms reality into
simple and abstract terms, represents the value of
commodities by their prices for example, and then
suggests fixed rules of exchange for them,
regardless of what those commodities are, or what
they are used for in reality. Modern capitalism
also increasingly concerns itself with adding
meaning to the various goods and services it
provides, adding signifiers, doing semiotics,
extending metaphors, generating images, again
regardless of content.
Conventional language constrains our creative
thinking including our thinking about new more
liberating forms of politics. Right from the
beginning, when children learn a language they
also acquire what D&G call 'order words', that
is information about their place in social
relationships and about appropriate social
behaviour. The next audio file explores that
concept a bit more. Children develop as individual
enunciators and thus come to think of
themselves simply as individuals in social terms.
They come to acquire an understanding of social
authority, and they also form an understanding of
the world based on the conventional words that are
used to describe it. Conventional language
implies that things can easily be given a simple
name and understood in simple sentences – this is
'the objective illusion' that events and objects
are neat and simple, with dominant meanings
expressed in a single word. Events and objects for
D&G have both virtual and actual components as
we saw with the haeceeity. The whole process
linking language to social order is understood as
an openly political process, arising in definite
social conditions, whereas in Lacan and other
structuralists, it is a part of some universal
form of human development. Far more pessimistic
political implications follow as we shall see.
We can see this operating more locally too. In the
criticism of conventional Freudian psychoanalysis,
a major field for Guattari, we see clear examples
of using forms of language which imply dominance.
The utterances of neurotics or psychotics are to
be reduced to the classic terminology of expert
analysts. To cite a common criticism, developed
extensively in Anti Oedipus, Freudian
analysis insists that ultimately many neurotic
symptoms can be understood as arising from some
infantile struggles over identity in the
family, often summarized as the Oedipal
complex. That is seen as a universal form, central
to developing the human personality in socially
acceptable ways. The approach in Deleuze and
Guattari is to see the struggles of neurotics and
psychotics quite differently as attempts to raise
and explore philosophical issues about bodies and
social constraints and to seek alternative
understandings of themselves as
‘singularities’.
We saw something of this in the Plateau on the BwO with
the thoughts of Antonin Artaud or the insistence
that sexual experiments like masochism are not
just perversions but explorations of bodily
potentials and pleasures. In the second Plateau,
one of Freud’s famous patients, the Wolf-Man,
tries to convey something about the importance of
multiplicities in explaining animal and human
behaviour. He does this by referring to a group of
wolves in his dream, alluding to the wolf as a
pack animal, one showing emergent characteristics
arising from collective behaviour. Freud seems
unable to understand this point and treats his
patient as a self-contained individual. In other
discussions, including some in Anti-Oedipus,
a case discussed by Freud, Little Hans, is seen as
a child trying to explore his own rhizomatic
connections between his immediate family and the
activity involving horses working at a busy depot
that he can see through his window. This can be
described as Hans ‘becoming horse’. The poor chap
is crushed back into the oedipal triangle, seen as
a made anxious and agoraphobic by his
uncertainties about sex and reproduction. (There
is a good account of early criticisms of Freud on
Little Hans and Klein on Little Richard in Deleuze
(2006). As with all critiques, though, it is quite
assertive, very lightly referenced back to the
actual studies.)
In Guattari’s own work (in Genosko's reader) ,
there is a more general application too in that
all sorts of minorities, including sexual
minorities are labelled as perverted or neurotic
by conventional psychoanalysis: they have to be
encouraged instead to see their identities as
singularities, particular options within the
general forces that construct subjectivity.
Turning to more theoretical issues, the problem
with structural linguistics is that it does not
refer much to the reality that is captured by
language. It is too formal and abstract, and
misses out important aspects of actual language
use. Let's take Lacan as an example
again.
The sections in ATP follow from more
extensive criticisms of Lacan in Anti-Oedipus.
Clearly there is no time or space to pursue these
very far here, but one main focus there is on
Lacan's view of how desire works. To be very
brief, desire for Lacan is rooted in both basic
needs and more complex social demands, with the
links between them inevitably involving
interaction with others (and the Other) via
the signifying chain (see Ecrits,
especially the complex section on The Subversion
of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in
the Freudian Unconscious ). Needs,
demands and desires all have to be symbolized,
expressed in language and acted out in relations
to others. Sexual and family relations are
excellent case-studies where we can see see this
happening. In infancy, for example, desire becomes
attached to a powerful signifier, the phallus, a
symbolic penis (see below) and so the whole
mystery of desire and its connection with other
people, become symbolized as a puzzle about who
possesses the phallus, who can initiate desires.
The phallus is so central it becomes a master
signifier. It can come to symbolize relation with
a wide range of signifieds.
In Anti-Oedipus, this whole structure is
challenged. Instead of direct connections between
signifiers and signified, we have a whole number
of connections or conjunctions between desires and
their objects, not all of which operate through
conventional language. Desire itself is not a
simple matter of sexuality, but more a matter of
flows of more general energy. It is machinic,
offering many potential combinations of these
flows. It will only be channelled through
conventional language or the Oedipal triangle in
specific circumstances. Desiring machines also
contain many more possibilities, both realized and
applied, because they connect together quite
separate or heterogeneous elements: we are
on familiar ground if we remember that the term
desiring machine was to be replaced with the
notion of the assemblage in ATP.
By breaking with the Lacanian system, we also
break with Lacan's insistence that there must
always be an alienation or lack accompanying
desire. That lack arose because subjects are never
able to fully grasp with signifiers their objects
of desire, both their own and those of others The
notion of the desiring machine with its complex
conjunctions seems to imply that there is no one
simple perfect connection in human desire to be
sought, and so no permanent feeling of lack or
alienation if it is not achieved. Instead, there
is pleasure and recognition of one’s own
singularity in exploring the available
connections. Any alienation arises from the
connection of desiring machines to social
machines. Capitalism requires the regulation or
repression of desire and Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis can be seen as spelling out the
apparently independent internal dimensions of this
repression in the mental activity of the
individuals who have to live in that system.
Even a brief reading shows that Lacan sees human
language as simply dominating all other available
meanings. There are other realms of meaning such
as the Imaginary, but they are all totally
dominated by the realm of the Symbolic, of
language. Note that Lacan uses capital letters for
his terms to indicate that he is using them in a
special technical sense. So human beings
might experience affects from real-life processes.
They might be able to deal with a range of images,
impressions, or general models of material and
social reality. But as soon as they want to
elaborate and develop any of these meanings, they
are forced to use symbolic language. As soon as
they do, they have to obey the rules and
conventions of language use, which are external to
them. Language use is the basis for relations with
other people as speakers and listeners. The
linguistic reactions of others, including those
apparently located in the unconscious, are
crucial in developing our sense of
ourselves. At the level of individual
psychoanalysis, patients can only describe their
symptoms in conventional language, and analysts
can only enquire about them using conventional
language. It is only a short step to see
psychoanalysis itself as nothing but a matter of
deciphering the language of psychiatric patients.
To grasp that language we need to understand
structural linguistics, especially what it tells
us about the relations between signifiers and
signifieds in the sign. Human language offers many
sophisticated literary forms of combining signs in
actual speech or writing. Metaphor and metonymy
are the most often discussed forms, but there are
all the other literary manipulations as well.
Using English rather than Greek words, we can talk
about attempts to persuade, to project meanings on
to others, to use irony, exaggeration, inversion,
compression and so on. We have to remember that
the signified is not a real object or event but an
expression in speech of a concept about the real,
so 'reality itself ', outside of languauge, does
not exist and cannot constrain us. Expressing or
establishing meaning then becomes a matter of
developing acceptable relations of various kinds
between signifiers both with themselves and with
signifieds. These expressions can be very complex
ones, as we see particularly well with the
accounts of delusions in psychiatric patients.
Schreber’s account of his illness, a rare example
of a written account, for example, is lengthy and
coherent, and although describing miracles and
inner voices, resembles academic work in its
well-worked out arguments. In particular, he has a
classic view that if he is surprised by or unable
to fully explain something, it cannot be a
delusion arising from his own subjective knowledge
but must be real.I was reminded immediately of a
classic claim for ethnographic method that it
generates surprise. If you are tempted to
read a bit of his account, Chapter 15 is a good
example of this style.
Lacan went on to describe all the conventional
understandings that divide self from other, the
conscious and the unconscious components, the
thinking ego and the acting ego as linguistic
relations. To cite his famous slogan for example,
the unconscious is structured like a language. In
another slogan, one that particularly annoys
Guattari, social interaction is entirely
linguistic: the [human] subject is [only] a
signifier for other signifiers (criticized rather
implicitly in Plateau 4,
p.138) . One example, in Lacan’s Seminars
Book XV, refers to the
work of Pavlov in conditioning a dog to respond to
a noise, a trumpet or bell, by salivating or
producing some other gastric juice. This is a
classic act of successful communication, says
Lacan, where the only significance the human
subject Pavlov has for the dog is as a source of
signifiers – noises in this case, and received as
images not human symbols – and the only
significance of the dog for Pavlov is as an
emitter of other signifiers – gastric juices
–which Pavlov then elaborates as symbols or
symptoms of something. Pavlov and the dog
are significant others for each other because they
do something that is unexpected unpredictable,and
this is how we recognise genuine others. We relate
to others only via the exchange of signifiers, and
satisfactory relations with others depends on them
receiving our signifiers and responding
accordingly in an appropriate form of
communication, and vice versa. Our own egos talk
to internalized others to maintain and reinforce
our sense of reality.
[While I am here, I recently found a section in Lacan (1968),
laying out the differences for Lacan between human
and animal communication Here are my notes:
With symbols, words transform
the subject by acting as a signifier. That's
why we need to understand language and not see
signs as simply the names for objects as in
simple notions of a signal in a code.
[However, note 144, page 144 notes that as
Lacan pursues the notion of the signifier 'the
less one hears about the signified']. This
partly explained the recent interest in
gestures or body language as supplements to
the word. Can we find evidence for this in the
behaviour of the honeybee and its dance? This
is an example of coding and signalling, but
not necessarily of a Language because there is
'the fixed correlation of its signs to the
reality which they signify' whereas in a
Language signs relate to each other and can
show 'lexical sharing out of semantemes' (61).
Nor is the message ever retransmitted, but
remains fixed, permitting no detachment of the
subject. Language by contrast 'defines
subjectivity' by necessarily referring to
social action or the discourse of the other.
It invests a person with new realities by
naming them. It is dialectic in this sense,
requiring a response from the other even if
inverted: in this sense, 'the Word always
subjectively includes its own reply' (62).
When Language is reduced to the functional, to
information, or to the particular, it loses
these characteristics. The value of Language
lies in the 'intersubjectivity of the "we"
which it takes on'. We see this in the
residual redundancies of language even that
which is intended just to be a matter of
communication — what is redundant indicates
[something surplus] the necessary
'resonance in the Word. For the function of
Language is not to inform but to revoke' (63).
]
We saw that the linguistic and symbolic world is
already structured by social and political
relations, though. Power over others depends on
being able to monopolize the ‘master signifiers’
mentioned above, one of which is the phallus,and
another the ‘name-of-the father’. This seems to
support the notion that patriarchy or
phallogocentrism is some kind of natural order for
Lacan, although there is much debate about whether
Lacan was endorsing actual systems – Zizek in particular says
he was not, but most people seem to agree there is
a lot of ambiguity, where the symbolic phallus and
the actual male penis, or the name of the father
and actual fathers, seem interchangeable. I must
say that when I read the article on the
signification of the phallus (Ecrits), I
was struck by how much of it seemed to be located
in the sexual morality of bourgeois French society
at the time, that conventional heterosexual
conduct is the norm, for example. Lacan goes on to
describe the differences were between men and
women, and what forms were taken by marital
infidelity in uncritical ways. Existing forms of
sexual relations seem to have been taken as
universal ones.
However, Lacan’s arguments present a real problem
for anyone interested in liberating people from
the social order. It is introduced to us in
infancy, and preserved at a very deep level of our
personality. We structure ourselves and our
relations to others through this dominant language
We can't rely on altruism, philanthropy, idealism,
reform or pedagogy because they are all
underpinned by ‘aggressivity’. (Ecrits) The
best thing we can do is understand this process to
come to terms with it.
A prominent feminist psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger,
have looked for a less hierarchical form of
relationship with others, in forms of language and
meaning construction that were in place before
infants make a full entry into dominant language,
for example. She says this was suggested by
reading Guattari. These infantile relations were
more maternal, more reciprocal, more shared. I
think Lacanians would have few problems in saying
that no access to these forms of communication are
possible unless we go through adult language to
describe them, in this case the specialist
language of the feminist analyst.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the project to get
beyond Lacan is more extensive:
(1) To revive forms of language and meaning that
coexist alongside the symbolic, denying the
symbolic its monopoly. We have looked at animal
communication in Plateau 11 on the refrain. We are
going to examine what might be called natural
forms of communication, in Plateau 3. There are
also artificial languages which consists of
special signs in internally coherent systems –
like maths or computer coding – which do not
symbolise or signify conventional social meanings
– they are ‘a-signifying’. There is also interest
in experimental forms of writing or other arts as
shown in Deleuze’s other books on Proust, Francis Bacon,
or experimental cinema,
and in the jointly-written book on Kafka. Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense
explores non-sense like Lewis Carroll’s work and
the radically experimental languages of
schizophrenics like Artaud or Woolfson.
(2) To restore the proper social dimensions of
language in collective assemblages of enunciation,
rather than focusing on the dialogues or
‘dialectic’ between self and other.
(3) To work at the virtual or machinic level to
show that particular languages are never just
logical or self-sufficient universal structures.
These structures themselves are the product of
deeper sense-making processes acting as abstract
machines, producing current models of language or
artistic conventions as one concrete option amidst
a whole range of possibilities.
Later audio files take up some of these points.
References
Deleuze,
G. (2008) Proust and Signs.
Translated by Richard Howard, London: Continuum. (my notes)
Deleuze, G. (2006) Two
Regimes of Madness: texts and interviews
1975--95. Ed D Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges
& Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e)
Foreign Agents Series (my
notes)
Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense,
trans Mark Lester, edited by Constantin Boundas,
New York: Columbia University Press. (my notes)
Deleuze, G
(1989) Cinema
2
-- the time-image, London The Athlone
Press. (my
notes)
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2012) Kafka.
Toward a Minor Literature.
Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
(my notes)
Deleuze G & Guattari F (1984) Anti-Oedipus.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
London: The Athlone Press.
(my unreliable notes)
Ettinger, B. (2012) ‘Maternal
Subjectivity and the Matrixial Subject’ EGS
video (my
notes)
Genosko
G (Ed) (1996) The Guattari Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell. (my
notes)
Lacan J (1968) The Language
of the Self: The Function of
Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans and
with notes[and an essay] by Anthony
Wilden. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press.
(my notes)
Levi-Strauss, C (1977) 'Structural
Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology', in Structural
Anthropology, Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. (my notes)
Schreber, D. (2000) Memoirs
of My Nervous Illness. Trans and ed Ida
Macalpine and Richard Hunter. New York: New York
Review of Books.
Zizek S (2004) Organs Without Bodies, London:
Routledge. (my notes)
|
|
|