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

1
 Table of Contents

3
Introductory Remarks

12
Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Lacanian Subject

35
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

115
Works Cited

2
 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

4
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-

5
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

6
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,

7
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.

8
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'

9
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

10
not a unified whole. Comments to the author are appreciated: he can be contacted at

aly01@hampsire.edu.

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

12
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

13
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

14
"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.

15
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

16
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

17
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.”

18
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

19
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

20
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)

21
 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,

22
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,

23
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

24
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

25
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

26
(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

27
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

28
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

29
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

30
 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.

31
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

32
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

33
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.

34
 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

35
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

36
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

37
"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

38
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

39
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

40
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

41
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

42
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

43
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

44
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

45
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).

46
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

47
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

48
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

49
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

50
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

51
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

52
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

53
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

54
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

55
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

57
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

60
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

81
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

1
Unless 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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