Death and Desire (RLE: Lacan): Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud (Routledge Library Editions: Lacan) by Boothby Richard

Author:Boothby, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

The relation of signifier to signified is called “arbitrary” or “unmotivated” in so far as it is not based (1) on a relation of resemblance (as, for example, the image on a dollar bill stands for George Washington; or (2) on a relation of causality (as a footprint indicates that someone has passed).10 The arbitrariness of the signifier is demonstrated by the fact that the same signified may be indicated by completely different signifiers: “tree,” “arbre,” “Baum”; “I am going to school,” “Je vais au l’école,” “Ich gehe in die Schule.”

The arbitrariness of the link between signifier and signified, which marks language as a conventional rather than a natural organization of forms, is closely related to and is in fact interdependent with the character of language as a diacritical system. Because it constitutes a system defined in and through itself, the signifying network of language can theoretically be posed in its independence from the entirety of the signified. Saussure was thus led to speak of signifier and signified as “two floating kingdoms.” This analogy of floating kingdoms held together only by convention suggests the possibility of slippage between the two realms. “We are forced, then,” Lacan claims, “to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (E:S, 154).

Although the relation of signifier to signified may thus be taken to be arbitrary, the speaker is not free to use a signifier in a way that fully ignores its conventional meanings. Precisely because each signifying element is determined by its relation to all the other elements in the system, the meanings of particular signifiers are stabilized for a community of speakers. From this point of view, as Emile Benveniste has remarked, the relation of signifier to signified is not arbitrary but necessary.11

(5) Finally, Lacan conceives the most elemental components of language to be binary in structure. In this respect, he follows the proposal of Roman Jakobson that all language is analyzable in terms of twelve pairs of distinct, vocal-physiological oppositions—oppositions such as voiced-unvoiced, dental-labial, rounded-nonrounded, etc.—which Jakobson calls “differential features.” The building blocks of language, the phonemes, are composed of “bundles” of differential features.12

Along the lines described by these five aspects of language, it is possible to specify the differential relation of the symbolic and the imaginary.

In the first place, unlike the effects of the imaginary, the origin of which is circumscribed within the present experience of an individual perceiver and which remains coextensive with the ego-identity it forms and limits, the symbolic system always extends beyond the position of the perceiving subject both diachronically and synchronically—in the terms used a moment ago, language is both “transcendent” and “diacritical.” On the one hand, as a system of shared codes that exists prior to the individual’s entry into it, language offers an inexhaustible reservoir of forms from which psychic development beyond the infantile ego may draw its guiding clue. The symbolic order is adequate to provide a rule which “pre-exists the infantile subject and in accordance with which he will have to structure himself” (E:S, 234).

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