LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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a structuralist reading of Freud would point out that by remaining at this level of imaginary meaning, the meaningless structural mechanism which generates the dream’s phenomenal meaning-effect is neglected. A concern for meaning and structure do not stand on the same level. While the meaning-effect is easily invoked by a simple pause in the analysis of the chain of signifiers, it takes considerable effort to move to that analysis from the level of meaning. Indeed ‘[i]t cannot be denied that to interpret and report one’s dreams demands a high degree of self-discipline.’18 Freud often laments how his discoveries are not widely accepted because so few actually attempt to analyze dreams as he advises. Not only advises, but actually practices: upon waking from a dream Freud would write it down on paper, usually immediately but never longer than a day later. Its analysis would then proceed from the written text itself. It is this rigorous attention to the structural level of signification that accounts for Freud’s conviction that ‘dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.’19 Writing in an intellectual climate that witnessed the modeling of the human sciences on the natural sciences, as well as the rise of phenomenology and structuralism, it is little wonder that Freud aspired to put his new discipline on firm scientific footing.
Lacan’s own turn toward scientificity also parallels his structuralist concerns. But his move away from hermeneutical phenomenology should not imply that he now explains meaning through the determining forces of signifiers. At least not in the sense of naïvely conceiving meaning as a finished product which emerges from an assembly line of signifying chains. Readers of Lacan’s work from his relatively brief second period might be tempted to conclude otherwise. They rightly identify his desire to delimit causal forces in the field of meaning. In his defense it must be stressed that while similarly investigating the formal aspects of this field as other structuralists, he uniquely does so by insisting that first, there is a cause of meaning; second, the cause of meaning is decentered; and third, this decentered cause is the signifying structure itself. Such an understanding better accounts for why meaning-effects are experienced only when strict structural work is set aside. For Lacan, at the formal level of language stands sense, and performing structural analysis accesses this sense but not meaning. The potential for meaning is actualized only in a future moment when signifiers are released from their analysis, thereby allowing their free and incessant sliding to produce the imaginary meaning-effect. At this point in Lacan’s career sense and meaning are related roughly as cause and effect, articulated with respect to the symbolic qua formal mechanism of the signifying structure. In Lacan’s third period meaning is still seen as an effect of sense, but the status of this cause is conceived as real and not symbolic. While the following three écrits from his structuralist period are best understood by taking
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