LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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principles of language use, well-known to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with linguistic theory: metaphor and metonymy. Equally famous is his outline of the six constitutive factors of language. Concisely said, through a point of CONTACT the ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE within a CONTEXT using a CODE. The six basic functions of language which correspond to these factors are the PHATIC, the EMOTIVE, the POETIC, the CONATIVE, the REFERENTIAL and the METALINGUAL, respectively. Even without detailing these factors and functions, it might readily be surmised the effort needed to properly set them to task on a text. A moment’s reflection should also confirm that while a text is being investigated in such a technical fashion, the experience of meaning which comes from simply reading the text is lost. No doubt this occasions the structuralist to interrupt his interpretive activity with an inquiry into textual meaning. Such hermeneutical questioning is, in fact, an employment of the metalingual function. This is also the function with which Jakobson expresses the least interest.
Instead, Jakobson privileges the poetic function. Given the historical tendency to assign deep significance to poetry, this function is ironically titled. For it is intended to capture the process by which poetic or linguistic sequences are actually generated. The generation of meaningful equivalences to already existing sequences falls instead to the function of meta-language. These two functions are in diametrical opposition to one another. By way of a general assessment, since it is never the poetic word but rather the poetic function that is at stake, we might say that if linguistics is to structuralism as poetics is to meaning, what Jakobson accomplishes is the annexation of poetics to linguistics. As with Saussure, his primary concern is not for signification. Rather, it is for the meaningless mechanisms of language which form its structured support. This concern does not change with later theoretical developments.
Post-structuralism is often identified with deconstruction, a term coined by Derrida. However, strictly speaking deconstruction is not a theory but an interpretive technique. It presupposes a text to be fundamentally incompatible with itself, as simultaneously striving toward and deferring convergence between what it says and how it says it. But far from facilitating convergence, deconstruction antagonizes the gap between textual meaning and textual structure. More specifically, a text’s binary oppositions are sought out and shown to be structured hierarchically; this hierarchy is then overturned to make the text say the opposite of what it initially appeared to say; finally, the opposition itself is re-inserted into a nonhierarchical relation of difference, thereby exposing the text as incapable of maintaining a univocal center of meaning. Said to haunt every unity, Derrida’s notion of difference has its theoretical roots in Saussure.
Recall how Saussure values the signified and signifier negatively, as each is constituted on its own differential plane. But when combined into the linguistic sign, the result is a positive unity embodying the substance of meaning. What
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