The Primordiality of The Signifier: Two Types of Understanding
Lacan separates experience into imaginary, symbolic and real. The imaginary is equal to itself, it is the order of signifieds. The symbolic is the realm of difference and contradiction because a signifier is by definition pointing to something other than itself, it includes within itself its own otherness, it’s like a pointer in C++. This is why Lacan says that lack only exists in the symbolic order, because a signifier can invoke a concept in its absence: the word ‘tree’ invokes the image (signified) of a tree even when I am not standing next to one.
This raises quite intriguing questions regarding the nature of understanding. Colloquially, we conceive understanding as a movement from the symbolic to the imaginary. The symbolic order is the order of both structure and contradiction. The symbolic is defined by negativity. It is the order of structure and organization because negativity and differentiation characterize it, but it is also the order of contradiction because meaning is constantly deferred in the symbolic. The imaginary, on the other hand, is the order of identity, where everything equals itself. Understanding, then, is commonly understood as a process of unification. The bifurcation of the symbolic is unified and a multiplicity is turned into oneness. For example, the symbolic operations inside mathematics are said to be understood intuitively when one imagines the signified concepts. “2+2=4” is a symbolic abstraction, but imagining two apples next to two apples and counting them as four apples unifies the multiplicity of deferred meaning into one single image.
However, there is a different kind of understanding, which disposes of the imaginary altogether. Here, meaning is fluid and ever-changing because it is constantly deferred through signifiers without being ‘grounded’ in a signified. The former type of understanding is the understanding of the Lacanian neurotic, while the latter one that I’m introducing now is the one of the pervert. This latter type of understanding is an understanding of pure differentiation. It is most easily exemplified when doing complex mathematics. When I am solving abstract algebra or real analysis problems, I can understand how to solve them and pass an exam on them without being able to ‘intuitively understand’ what those numbers and letters actually mean. This type of understanding is purely symbolic with no imagery and preserves multiplicity and becoming, rejecting the identity and oneness of the imaginary order.
What are the implications of this type of understanding in philosophical issues? Wittgenstein (in)famously argued that all philosophical problems boil down to language games. Is it possible that philosophical problems are often caught in an endless cycle of deferred symbolic meaning, without being grounded in an image or idea? For example, consider this question: “what causes causality?”. Is it even possible to understand such a question in the former, but not the latter sense (in regards to the two types of understanding)? Can one imagine what it means for causality to be caused? Or is this a mere language game? Lacan famously argued for the primordiality of the signifier.
The common (neurotic) view of language views signifiers as a tool for communication, a medium between images: I have an idea in my head, then I try to find a word so that I can implant the same idea in your head. The formula is ‘signified -> signifier -> signified’, or ‘idea -> word -> idea’. For Lacan, the opposite holds true: a signifier may produce an idea as an after effect. The signifier comes first. For example, it’s not that I first had the idea of what causes causality through an image of some sort, which I only found the words to describe later. Instead, the idea was contained in the words themselves. Without language, I couldn’t have even been able to think such an idea. We have to remember here that language is just as much of a tool to communicate with others as is a tool to communicate with oneself, since we think not only in images but also in words. Lacan stated in his third seminar (The Psychoses) that when one speaks, one is both the sender and the receiver of a message, since one hears one’s own uttering. Words and language do not merely reflect pre-existing ideas but actively generate them. So, the question “What causes causality?” doesn’t stem from a pre-existing idea waiting to be named but from the symbolic play of language itself. Here, the question becomes a symbolic construct, a concept that only exists within language.
