5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Ferdinand de Saussure. It is not possible here to provide an adequate exegesis of
Lacan’s appropriation and reconstruction of Saussure’s ideas (see Elliott, 1999); in
what follows I shall only emphasize certain aspects of Lacan’s use of Saussure’s
structural linguistics, particularly those aspects most relevant to the concerns of
social theory. In Saussurian linguistics, language is explicated as a system of internal
differences. In this view, signs are made up of a signifier (a sound or image) and a
signified (the concept or meaning evoked). The meaning of a word arises through its
differences from other words: a pencil, for example, is not a pen. A book is not a
pamphlet, not a magazine, not a newspaper. Words as such do not ‘mean’ their
objects. Language creates meaning only through an internal play of differences.
Now Lacan accepts the key elements of Saussure’s structural linguistics, but he
radicalizes the relation between the signifier and the signified. Lacan will have
nothing of the Saussurian search for the signified, or concept, however ‘arbitrary’
the relation between signifiers that generates meaning may be. Instead, Lacan
inverts Saussure’s interpretation of the sign, asserting that the signifier has primacy
over the signified in the production of meaning. As he explicates this:
The first network, that of the signifier, is the synchronic structure of
the language material in so far as in that structure each element
assumes its precise function by being different from the others.
The second network, that of the signified, is the diachronic set of
the concretely pronounced discourses, which reacts historically on
the first, just as the structure of the first governs the pathways of
the second. The dominant fact here is the unity of signification,
which proves never to be resolved into a pure indication of the real,
but always refers back to another signification.(Lacan, 1977:126)In Lacan’s psychoanalytic reading, the two orders of discourse are always separated
by censorship, marked by a bar of repression. The signified, says Lacan, cannot be
elucidated once and for all since it is always ‘sinking’ or ‘fading’ into the unconscious;
the signified is, in effect, always just another signifier. And for Lacan the signifier is
itself coterminous with the unconscious. The unconscious, says Lacan, is ‘the sum of
the effects of the parole on a subject, at the level where the subject constitutes itself
from the effects of the signifier’ (Lacan quoted in Ragland-Sullivan, 1986:116).
Language, as a system of differences, constitutes the subject’s repressed desire
through and through. The subject, once severed from the narcissistic fullness of the