LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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workings of the symbolic order and thus to unconscious processes. This autonomy stems from the various degrees of ciphering involved in these workings, a ciphering which dictates in many respects the general direction a signifying system can proceed. Their overlapping or overdetermined symbols are designed to mimic how natural language assigns more than a single meaning to any word or phrase such that a surplus of words is most often required to adequately represent one’s intention. Lacan has effectively laid out a series of exercises for his reader. But in what is perhaps the Lacanian version of Freud’s admonishment to actually practice dream analysis, he warns against taking up these exercises solely for their ‘recreational character.’22 The painstaking process of slowly working through these pages with paper and pencil in hand may or may not appeal to one’s sensibilities. But Lacan wagers that only through such analytic work – properly speaking, a deciphering – can one truly be convinced that if the unconscious does exist and its processes are so ciphered, then these processes indeed have nothing to do with meaning. The realm of meaning is under the sole purview of conscious thought and can be safely set aside when discussing (the truth of) unconscious formations and productions. More strongly said, meaning must be set aside as it covers over the unconscious causal forces of the subject. Lacanian interpretation does not so much aim to uncover meaning as rather seek to reduce the matter at hand to the meaningless movement of overdetermined signifiers.
But it is a year later that Lacan first works out a full theory of signifiers, as demonstrated in his écrit “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” (1957). It is here that Lacan famously inverts the order of Saussure’s linguistic sign, placing instead the signifier on top and the signified on bottom with an intervening bar which quite literally bars any intimate relation between the two. In his algebraic shorthand,23 it is represented as 
Generally speaking, the signified is another term for (the smallest unit of) meaning. So what Lacan now calls an algorithm seems to concur with the Saussurean notion that to every signifier stands a meaning. Yet Lacan breaks from Saussure by claiming that these algorithms are ‘devoid of meaning.’24 Indeed this entire paper
22 Ibid., 39.
23 Lacan begins to use algebraic symbols in the mid 1950s in an attempt to formalize psychoanalysis, a basic requirement for any discipline with designs on achieving scientific status. Although his rationale for their use should be seen more in line with his repeated insistence that such formalization is necessary for the successful transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge in the training of psychoanalysts. This generally accords with structuralist thought which likewise adheres to linguistic form to frustrate the imaginary lures of intuitive thinking. His use of such symbols only increases from this point on, and in the early 1970s he coins the term matheme [mathème] to designate his own particular psychoanalytic algebra.
24 Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 416.
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