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Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Linguistics and Tropology in "The Agency of the Letter"
Author(s): James M. Mellard
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 499-530
Published by: Duke University Press
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PoeticsToday19:4 (Winter 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
1. Introduction
1.1 Freud'sArchaeology
Even if, as Freud joked, he brought the "plague" into the world with his
psychoanalytic theory, he certainly brought a method of interpretation
that has powerful implications for all hermeneutic activity, all decipher-
ing or making of meaning from any sort of text. In literary study, however,
the Lacanian reading threatens these days to supplant the Freudian as the
most frequently practiced mode of psychoanalytic literary hermeneusis.
While Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a Freudian and there-
fore worked within "the Freudian Field"-indeed he called his teaching
forum, begun in 1964, "l'ecolefreudienne"-his approach to analysis differs
from Freud's, sometimes in subtle, sometimes in radical, ways. I contend
that a primary difference relates to questions of poetics. Lacan differs from
Freud because he constitutes his field of discourse in a different way. It
is well known that Freud constructed his discursive field through a meta-
phor of archaeology (see Moller 1991; Gay 1988: 170-73). As early as "The
Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896), we find Freud drawing an analogy between
the ways archaeologists and psychoanalysts work to uncover buried histo-
ries. Imagine, Freud (ibid.: 192) says, "that an explorer in a little-known
region ... may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he
may set the inhabitants to work with these implements." He goes on to
speak of a buried site and archaeological activities. "Together with them
he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from
the visible remains, uncover what is buried." He ends with the triumphs
of the discipline. "If his work is crowned with success," he says, "the dis-
coveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of
a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out
into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bi-
lingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been de-
ciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of-information about the events
1.2. Lacan'sLinguistics
Equally well known is that in a historically apt "structuralistturn" Lacan
adverted in his rereading of Freudian discourse not to archaeology, but to
a discipline -linguistics - already faintly visible in Freud's imagery above
of inscriptions, alphabet, and language. Lacan is known to be particularly
indebted for his "linguistics"to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakob-
son. But having referred to Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Effectiveness of
Symbols" (1949) in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis" (1977b [1953]), Lacan also seems, in the words of Dylan
Evans, to have been "inspired by" the anthropologist, "who in the 1940s,
had begun to apply the methods of structural linguistics to nonlinguistic
cultural data (myth, kinship relations, etc.), thus giving birth to 'structural
anthropology"' (1996: lo1). Though linguistic terms are everywhere visible
in Lacan (much more, indeed, than archaeological references are visible in
Freud) and though many Lacanians address language and linguistic issues
in Lacan, Lacan's use of linguistics itself is somewhat misconstrued. A
voluminous body of commentaries -of which the most fruitful recent one
is Moller's (1991)-envelops Freud's troping as he speaks of psychoanaly-
sis. For that reason, one might as readily examine the commentary on
Freud as Freud'sprimary documents themselves. That is not the case with
Lacan. While an enormous volume of commentary also surrounds Lacan
and his focus on language and linguistics, not much of it actually focuses
on his rhetoric or his troping or even admits that he usestropes, rather than
merely discussing them, when talking about psychoanalysis.
The work of David Macey (1988) notwithstanding, Lacanian studies
seem, for the most part, still at the level of the literal. At this stage, scholars
take the metaphors and other tropological moves as natural or ordinary
or merely factual in some unproblematic, referential way. Then they tend
either to support or to debunk Lacan's linguistics. Although Macey comes
closer than others to my tropological orientation (and, indeed, I return to
him in my conclusion), it is Macey (ibid.: 123)who reminds us how the "lin-
2. Linguistics-as-Trope
how Lacan uses linguistics to invent his particular version of the Freudian
discursive field.
2.3. A TropologicalMethod
Examining Lacan's rhetoric and poetics, I shall analyze the constitution
of Lacanian discourse in "The Agency of the Letter" through a rhetorical
method called "tropology."For illustrations of this approach see Mellard
(1987), Rice and Schofer (1983), and White (1973, 1978, 1987). Because of
his interest in tropes, tropology meshes very well with-even reflects-
Lacan's poetics. Indeed, Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986: 120), without re-
course to my tropological method, say that "Lacan's whole teaching is
metaphorical." Like any other discursive field, Lacanian discourse is in-
vented or constituted precisely in ways accessible through tropological
analysis. Perhaps today's leading international tropological theorist, Hay-
den V. White, demonstrates that as a discourse moves back and forth from
the unknown to the known, it functions through predictable phases and
operations open to analysis. "A discourse," says White in his introduction
to Tropicsof Discourse(1978: 4), "moves 'to and fro' between received en-
codations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuses incor-
poration into conventionalized notions of 'reality,''truth,' or'possibility.'"
That is, discourse mediates between what he calls the interpretive and
the preinterpretive. While this mediative process may be called dialecti-
cal, White prefers to call it diatactical in order to distinguish it from the
processes of logic. Discourse, White (ibid.) suggests, crosses all the rules
of comprehension, "throws all 'tactical' rules into doubt, including those
originally governing its own formation." But it nonetheless offers a struc-
ture of levels or phases that allow us to analyze it. White calls these phases
mimesis, diegesis, and diataxis. But, further, he suggests that these three
phases operate in close conjunction with a series of tropes-the four tropes
(metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) that form the center of the
tropology White extrapolates from GiambattistaVico and Kenneth Burke.
In typical practice, this mediative process is entirely unconscious at first
and is only later rationalized as a naturalized structure. It begins in the
figuring of an unknown in the terms of some known that seems like it.
A simple instance of the principle sometimes occurs in naming, as when
Spanish explorers in the American Southwest encountered vertical up-
croppings of rock with a flat top and named them mesas,a Spanish word
for tables.In this instance, the metaphor of tablegoes nowhere, for it does
not lead to a system of objects in the landscape named after pieces of fur-
niture. More typical of complex analytical or constructive thought is the
metaphor to name his reinvention; in the parts his linguistics gives him, he
finds the metonymical extensions by which he explores the newly defined
field; and in a further trope-the letter-cum-Other-he discovers a syn-
ecdoche within which he can reintegrate the many parts uncovered in the
exposition of his essay's middle. Taken together, the tropological moves fit
into the rhetorical phases and, as rhetoric tends to do, serve both offensive
and defensive purposes, that is, to invent and to protect one's invention.
I shall first examine the rhetoric of defense. Serving the same rhetorical
purpose found in Freud'suse of the trope of archaeology (see Moller 1991),
linguistics allows Lacan to protect his field from assaults on its veracity
or truth value. If for Freud archaeology is a field already legitimate as a
science, then psychoanalysis becomes legitimate by being likened to it. In
the same way, if linguistics is legitimate as a science, then a psychoanalysis
likened to or constructed upon linguistics automatically (or so one pre-
sumes) becomes legitimate as well. While rhetorically, for Lacan, this step
may be the most important of all, in Lacan as in others it is the one that
takes up the least space. Lacan handles it rather briefly in two ways, one
direct, the other indirect. On one hand, just ahead of his extended (met-
onymic) discussion of the interrelations of linguistics and psychoanalysis,
he indirectly implies a link between his project and truth, and, on the
other hand, he makes direct claims about the scientific credentials of lin-
guistics. As to the first, the indirect implications come in his ironic use of
the phrase "domain of veracity" and the statement (which we may take as
a veritable thesis for the entire essay) that concludes his introductory pas-
sage: "And how could a psychoanalyst of today not realize that speech is
the key to that truth, when his whole experience must find in speech alone
its instrument, its content, its material, and even the background noise
of its uncertainties" (Lacan 1977d [1957]: 147).This is to say that because,
in the relation of analyst to analysand, analysis is founded totally on lan-
guage, psychoanalysis must be in need of linguistics and its analytic tools.
As to the second, the direct claims for the scientific credentials of lin-
guistics occur a few pages further.While aware that nonscientific versions
of linguistics exist, Lacan (ibid.: 148) writes that he will "trust only those
assumptions that have already proven their value by virtue of the fact
that language through them has attained the status of an object of scien-
tific investigation." But these credentials alone do not explain why Lacan
turns to linguistics. "While Lacan was at first excited by the prospect of
life as a speech and perhaps was not as rigorously revised to fit the standards of written
discourse as one would expect from anyone but Lacan. In contrast, Freud certainly would
never have published anything so highly inflected by the marks of speech.
A
Signified
Signifier
Figure1
Concept
Sound-
image V
Figure2
side of which is an arrow pointing either up (the one on the left) or down
(the one on the right); the ellipse is divided by a line above which is the
word Conceptand below which is the word Sound-image.
Immediately after the diagram (ibid.: 67), Saussure translates Concept
into Signifiedand Sound-image into Signifierand later (ibid.: 114)redraws his
diagram accordingly (see Figure 2).
Third, when Lacan creates his algorithm (S/s; read as "Signifier over
signified")by modifying Saussure'sdiagram from page 114,he reverses the
terms so that one-Signifier-gains dominance both by appearing above
the bar and by beginning with an uppercase letter. Fourth, whereas Saus-
sure gave no priority to either Concept/Signified and
or Sound-image/Signifier
conceived of them as two sides of a sheet of paper (ibid.: 113),Lacan en-
figures the two elements of the sign not only as having different levels of
importance, but also as being entirely separate from each other.
Thus, it seems from the outset that while Lacan has a defective under-
standing of Saussure, his misunderstanding-of the sort, perhaps, that he
himself might have called meconnaissance-makesno difference to the con-
stitutive value of linguistics as his trope. Within the rhetoric of diegesis
through which Lacan expands upon the concept of the sign, his argument
makes the algorithm he constructs the most important figure. "To pinpoint
the emergence of linguistic science we may say that, as in the case of all
sciences in the modern sense, it is contained in the constitutive moment of
an algorithm that is its foundation" (Lacan 1977d [1957]: 149). Whereas I
identify the constitutive moment of Lacan's invention of his psychoanaly-
sis in linguistics as such, Lacan locates the emergence of linguistics itself
4. On these axes, Jakobson differs from Saussure. The differences have caused some confu-
sion among those who study Lacan. Saussure 1959 [1916]: 80 provides a diagram in which
"the axis of simultaneities" is the horizontal and "the axis of successions" is the vertical.
Jakobson and structural linguists after him have typically reversed these: in schematic dia-
grams, they make the vertical the axis of the differing concepts of the simultaneous and
the paradigmatic, and they make the horizontal the axis of concepts of succession and the
syntagmatic. The vertical in Jakobson is the axis of selection; the horizontal, the axis of
combination. In conceptualizing these axes diagrammatically, Lacan follows Jakobson in
assigning metaphor to the vertical axis; metonymy, to the horizontal.
cant term." That is, in popular sports parlance, Lacan believes not that
"it's over when it's over," but that it's never over. In this principle echo-
ing Saussure's notion of the limitlessness of semiosis, Lacan believes that
some meaning always lies before or beyond (anticipated by) the signifier.
Thus while Lacan (ibid.) concludes that "meaning 'insists"' in the chain
of the signifier, he emphasizes that "none of its elements 'consists' in the
signification of which it is at the moment capable." A philosopher might
say, then, though Lacan does not, that while meaning always subsistsin the
chain of signifiers, it is never present at any one point in the chain except
as a moment pinned down by what Lacan calls pointsde capiton,anchoring
points that only momentarily hold meaning within a system of relations, a
phenomenon Derrida (1967)names differance to suggest the constant defer-
ral of meaning and its difference from itself in time.
In a second move in the rhetoric of diegesis, Lacan turns to a new figure
in explanation of Saussureanprinciples and a linguistic unit larger than the
phoneme. In the diegetic expansion of his originating linguistic metaphor,
Lacan moves beyond the point, or smallest unit of language represented
by the phoneme, to a field, represented by multiple chains of significations
contained in a larger discourse. For Lacan, the analogical figure for such
a field of discourse is the musical score. For him the musical score not
only illustrates the perpetual sliding of meaning, but also its polyphony or,
we must say, polysemy.All discourse, says Lacan (1977d[1957]: 154), oper-
ates as if through alignment "along the several staves of a score."Whereas
in the previous move he had talked of science, he talks of poetry when
he illustrates the sliding of meaning or signification. In one of the most
poetic passages in his work, he meditates lyrically on tree(or arbre,which
for him evokes anagramatically the concept of the barre,the gap he--not
Saussure-envisions between signifier and signified). Here, Lacan (ibid.)
suggests concretely how on a two-dimensional diagram the horizontal sig-
nifying chain contains, "as if attached to the punctuation of each of its
units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended 'vertically."'
In its concreteness, the passage helps to elucidate how polysemous lan-
guage can be when significations multiply from within a single word or
point in a syntagmatic string. He needs to emphasize language's polysemy
in order, diegetically, to construct the next level of his linguistic invention
of psychoanalysis. Playing off Saussure's use of tree(arbre)to illustrate the
terms Conceptand Signified(Signifie),Lacan offers, as it were, a jazz riff on
trees that works as much through metonymy as through metaphor. "Let
us take our word 'tree' again," Lacan begins, "this time not as an isolated
noun, but at the point of one of these punctuations, and see how it crosses
the bar of the [nonexistent] Saussurian algorithm." Moving associatively,
the symptom, then, through a flash of insight, the analyst may discover
the object of the patient's desire, for that desire lies beneath the symp-
tom as the signified lies beneath the signifier: the symptom is to desire as
the signifier is to the signified. But because desire, as a signifier, stands for
something missing and, ultimately, unrecoverable to it, it also participates
in metonymic strings, in which one object of desire is always replaced by
another, prompting Lacan (ibid.: 175)to say, "Desire is a metonymy."
The Unconscious. Talk of symptoms and subjects leads Lacan to an-
other synecdochic construct. The second integrative concept Lacan must
somehow explain in terms of his linguistic trope--of linguistics as his
trope-is the unconscious. Lacan addresses the unconscious at the end of
both the first and the second sections of "The Agency of the Letter" and
makes it the dominant focus of the final section, "The Letter, Being, and
the Other." In his way, Lacan invokes the new concept within the context
of the algorithm S/s and the two tropes that function within signification.
Both metaphor and metonymy provide access to the unconscious. Meta-
phor, Lacan argues, occurs at the point where sense emerges from non-
sense, "at that frontier which, as Freud discovered, . . . produces"wit or, in
Lacan's word, produces esprit, a word that signals both witticism and spirit
and, in the latter, connotes a domain that may be thought to underpin
the letter. Likewise, metonymy is also a means of creating wit or humor,
because it has "the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censure"
and therefore to evoke a truth the subject ordinarily represses. These two
ways of the letter-metaphor and metonymy-begin finally, says Lacan,
to bring us to the verge of the "Freudian truth" of the unconscious itself.
"Haven't we felt," he asks, "for some time now that, having followed the
ways of the letter in search of Freudian truth, we are getting very warm
indeed, that it is burning all about us?"(ibid.: 158).That truth, however, is
not to be mistaken for the spirit that in Western thought so often accom-
panies the letter. As language operates without a subject, independent of
human consciousness, and thus is an object in its own right, so the letter
connoting the unconscious likewise operates independently of the spirit.
Lacan (ibid.) adverts to the saying, "The letter killeth while the spirit giveth
life." Though he feels he must agree to some extent with its claim, he also
asks "how the spirit could live without the letter." But because of Freud's
discovery of the unconscious, the letter has punctured the pretenses of the
spirit, for, Lacan (ibid.) argues, Freud has "shown us that [the letter] pro-
duces all the effects of truth in man without involving the spirit at all."Just
as the letter operates independently of the spirit, the unconscious operates
independently of the subject. The unconscious is a subject itself.
Of Freud'sdiscoveries, the unconscious is the one, Lacan says, that most
4. Conclusion
At the end of "The Agency," Lacan remains positive and unironic about
langue, about the access of psychoanalysis to it, and about linguistics as the
means by which analyst and analysand might reach it. While Lacan can be
very ironic about the divisions of the subject epitomized in the algorithm
schematizing the sign and symbolizing both subject and language, in the
concluding peroration of "The Agency" Lacan betrays no irony toward
linguistics or language or the project of psychoanalysis itself. Indeed, quite
the contrary: in his language, Lacan sounds like the missionary to the hea-
then preaching a sermon of conversion in which the integrating tropes--
the synecdoches of letter, unconscious, Other, Language, Word, and Logos
-beckon with promises of incorporation into a force or being far greater
than themselves. At this moment in his career, Lacan surely preaches
in "The Agency of the Letter" as if his conversion-the conversion of
Freudian into Lacanian psychoanalysis through the agency of linguistics-
has given him the redemptive, sacramental word he now gives his converts.
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