[t]he Unconscious Is Structured Like A Language." (lacan). Discuss The Relationship Between Language

"It is not experience that organises expression[...] - expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction.`1 Valentin Volosinov in The Marxist Philosophy of Language posits that language fundamentally shapes understanding, formulating the subject as his or her primary means of expression. Building upon Marx`s central ethos that `mental intercourse [is the] direct efflux of material behaviour`,2 3 Volosinov suggests that since language represents our only reference to the semiotic and its valuation, and represents the only means of conceiving of the symbolic, that language constructs thought. This concept is not revolutionary. Friedrich Nietzsche recognised the inextricable link between language and the development of consciousness when he proclaimed `we have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language`.4 Thought itself, and consequently any conceived notion of the self or reality, is understood only within the parameters language has placed upon it: given this, how can one deny the role of language in formulating the subject? However, the ways in which it formulates the subject are intriguing, particularly when considering language as a socially constructed tool, devised for communication and devoid of individuality. Nietzsche went on to propose that on a personal level, `we could think [and] feel[...] and yet none of this would need to `enter into consciousness`: the whole of life would be possible without, as it were, regarding itself in a mirror`.5 Unfortunately the truth, as Lacan asserts, is that confrontation with the mirror is inevitable; the infant must recognise its autonomy during the mirror-stage to enter into dialogue with civilisation. `Word as sign is a borrowing on the speakers part from the social stock of available signs, [and] the very individual manipulation of this social sign in a concrete utterance is wholly determined by social relations`.6 Studying language as the creator of consciousness, with this is mind, unveils the underlying cause for the anxiety and alienation that plagues the human condition. Since individual need (the id) must be suppressed in order to function as part of a collective (as highlighted by Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents) then language, developed to enhance communication and collective advancement, forces the individual to lose part of his or herself in order to be understood. The result of this lack of possibility for total self expression is that `the relation of the subject to the other is entirely produced in a process of gap`.7 An even more drastic effect of this `gap` is the subjects alienation from itself. Since we may acknowledge that the language developed to suppress the id also formulates consciousness, then instinctive desires remain hidden not just from society, but from the subjects themselves. As Lacan writes, `it is precisely the result of the fact that the subject depends on the signifier [that causes] a certain impotence in your thinking`.8 Language, then, completely moulds the individual, not just in a social context but by fundamentally dictating the barriers for personal understanding. This does not mean, however, that the individual is not capable of remoulding the very thing, language, that moulds us. Julia Kristeva argues that avant-garde literature forces the writer to surpass the symbolic and trace their route back to the semiotic, thus unveiling the Lacanian gap between personal drives and the language that has arrested the semiotic in a socially constructed framework. Language is constantly evolving, and artists have a unique opportunity to analyse this structure and reshape it, bridging the gap between self-expression and socially regulated repression. Language fundamentally formulates the subject, but that does not mean that the subject cannot reformulate language even whilst being created by it.

As argued by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, the formation of language owes its construction to the necessity of social interaction, thus creating a mental intercourse that is fundamentally incapable of understanding individual needs that function outside the remit of social acceptability. The severance of the conscious and unconscious self via society`s constraints was first highlighted by Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents, when he suggested that `sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development` because `it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression) of powerful instincts`.9 The alienation of the civilised individual is unavoidable, given the paradox that `he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him` yet equally must recognise `there is a long list [of] benefits which we owe to the much despised era of scientific and technical advances`.10 Freud realises that `the decisive step of civilisation`, comes when `the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction`.11 However, it is not a question of how much the individual can tolerate; they have been formulated by this very system of alienation and thus remain societal constructs even when they believe in their own autonomy. Lacan believed Freud was aware of this relationship, since `the thrust of Freud`s work is centered around man`s relationships with language`, but he was `forced to analyze human relationships with language without the benefit of detailed knowledge of the science of language`.12 Nevertheless, it was Lacan who first recognised the absolute alienation of language. He asserted that this initial split, in which the subject must give up part of themselves in order to function in society, begins earlier than Freud suggests, with the `spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage, [...] before the social dialectic takes effect in man of an organic inefficiency in his natural reality`.13 The infant recognises its separation from the mother and its surroundings, producing a `lack` from initial totality that the individual is never able to repossess. Once this split has taken place, the subject only begins to recover by accepting their particular social position and beginning to interact with it: `language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject`.14 Volosinov`s concept that the individual is a social construct re-emerges here, as Lacan submits that `everything emerges from the structure of the signifier. [.] The relation of the subject to the other is entirely produced in a process of gap`.15 If we accept that language is a socially created tool that necessarily inhibits expression of individual desire, as made concrete by Freud`s notion of the alienated individual, then this `gap` exists not only in relation to the other, but in relation to the self. Conversation exists somewhere between two individuals, answering to the desires of neither: `the dialectic of the objects of desire[...] creates the link between the desire of the subject and the desire of the Other[...] this dialectic now passes through the fact that the desire is not replied to directly`.16 Joseph Smith summarises Lacan`s concept of this indirectness by describing the human as `diverted from the real of bodily needs and satisfactions into the imaginary and the symbolic`.17 The dialectical gap in the process of conversation also functions in the dialogue between the conscious and unconscious self. Since language is the fundamental tool of conversation and of thought, there is an estrangement in both cases, as expression of the id is denied. In this parallel between the process of thought and the process of conversation can the unconscious be seen to be `structured like a language`. Our instinctive desires must remain completely veiled from ourselves, if we must communicate within a gap that does not correlate with either individual, creating the alienation that Lacan and Freud saw as an inherent aspect of the human condition. Since thought itself depends upon language, the id is repressed by the subject, whose concept of reality has been moulded to disregard individual desires in favour of the requirements of the community. The subject is formulated by language to such an extent that one remains irreversibly severed from instinctual desires or even from confronting real bodily needs; `for lacan[...] alienation is the fundamental condition of man`.18

The validity of this argument, however, depends upon accepting that the structure of language is rigid and irreversible; the concept that humanity is `diverted from the real of bodily needs` implicitly assumes the individual and their system of communication are confined within an immovable dialogue with each other. In reality, the evolutionary potential of language creates the possibility for the individual to perpetually remould their relationship with language, beginning the process of uniting experience with expression; language remains severed from true meaning only if we accept that it cannot be defied or rewritten by the subject. Julia Kristeva hypothesises that avant-garde literature may transcend the symbolic and return to the semiotic (and thus correct the alienation of language) by questioning and confronting the link between the unconscious and the conscious; the artist can reshape the very structure of language, even whilst being created by it.

The instability of language can be understood by the acknowledgement that we must consider all meanings that have been, and all meanings to come, if we are to assume any understanding of a given word. Jacques Derrida highlights the importance of `différance`, by proposing that the wavering meaning of any word undermines the possibility of truth: `the friends of truth are without the truth, even if friends cannot function without truth. The truth - that of the thinkers to come - it is impossible to be it, to be there, to have it; one must only be its friend`.19 Grasping the truth in the conceptual framework it will hold for `thinkers to come` remains an impossibility, and as such one must resign oneself to incomplete truth and `must only be its friend`. Derrida`s ideas of différance were hugely influential on Julia Kristeva; her work is grounded in the positive belief that our relationship with language evolves, and can be consciously evolved in order to transcend alienation. In an interview with Kristeva in 1981, Derrida states: `meaning is not only a question of synchrony with all the other terms inside a structure, but also of diachrony, with everything that was said and will be said`.20 Observing that meaning is temporary within isolated words opens up the possibility of redefining concepts, and redefining our relationship to them. Kristeva asserts that art functions beyond the symbolic, beyond language: `the very practice of art necessitates reinvesting the maternal chora so that it transgresses the symbolic order[...] the text signifies the unsignifying: it assumes within a signifying practice this functioning, which ignores meaning and operates before meaning or despite it.`21 The foundations of her argument in Revolution in Poetic Language is that the avant-garde movement operates beyond the symbolic, returning the human to their original, pre-thetic drives. This is not a `restorer of pre-symbolic immediacy`, but a window into how the symbolic was constructed out of the mass of conflicting drives that characterises the pre-social infant: a `reversed reactivation`.22 Unveiling this connection offers an invaluable insight into the construction of the individual, providing an opportunity to remould this connection and alter their relationship with language. In this sense, by exploring the unstructured vacillations of the pre-symbolic chora, `textual experience represents one of the most daring explorations the subject can allow himself, one that delves into the constitutive process`.23 Kristeva believes this process is achieved by the writer `when instinctual rhythm passes through ephemeral but specific theses, [so that] meaning is constituted but is then immediately exceeded by what seems outside meaning: materiality, the discontinuity of real objects`.24 Avant-garde literature prioritizes the patterns and rhythm in the structure of language, using them to represent the oscillations and meanderings of the semiotic drives. What this kind of writing realises, is that the human body `is not a unity but a plural totality with separate members that have no identity but constitute the place where drives are applied.25 The process of interpreting such texts makes the reader aware of the constructive process that has taken place, i.e. how the chaotic semiotic mass was moulded and oppressed into its post-thetic socialised format. In other words, it offers us a glimpse of how language formulated the subject: `we can read a Joyce only by starting from a signifier and moving towards the instinctual [and] material`.26 The techniques used to strip the subject of their socialized self may utilise language, but the feeling, the rhythm, the abstract patterns it weaves are what is truly important, thus transcending the `prison house of language`:`the productive process of the text thus belongs not to this established society, but to the social change that is inseparable from instinctual and linguistic change`.27

The concept that the body is `not a unity but a plural totality` of contradictory drives is a vision shared by a large majority of Modernist writers, and transcending language in order to reformulate our relationship with these eclectic drives is fundamental to the works of one of the most prominent writers of the time, Virginia Woolf. Her primary artistic vision was motivated by the Kristeva-like knowledge that `the `shower of innumerable atoms` - which bombard the nervous system from the inception of awareness to the end, are really all that one can ever know`.28 The real experience of reality is a chaotic flux of conflicting emotions, scattered and incoherent, and literature should `record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall; [to] trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance`.29 Accurately conveying this understanding of reality using the English language is inevitably difficult to achieve directly and Woolf, as Kristeva suggests, resorts to the rhythm and patterns of language to awaken the reader to the chaos of the semiotic that lurks beneath the symbolic. In reference to her novel The Waves, which aims to represent the fluidity of the wave-like fluctuations of human emotion, Woolf stated: `I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot`.30 Rhoda`s thoughts, whilst surveying the Spanish sea, abstractly interweave multiple concepts of death, suicide and the vibrant chaos of her mind. `Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me`.31 Despite utilising language to achieve this myriad of images, individual phrases are not coherent or logically understandable; only by feeling the assorted impulses can the reader recognise the melancholy that saturates ambiguous lines such as `the white petals will be darkened with sea water`. In the opening section, Woolf`s characters are young children, and her writing, despite functioning within the socialized human language, portrays the experience of the child still within the metamorphosis of the thetic stage: `The flowers swim like fish made from light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing`.32 The immediacy of feeling - abstract, unformed and beyond the coherent structure of language - is somehow presented to the reader in the process of reading. Virginia Woolf is able to achieve the `instinctual rhythm` Kristeva champions, as `meaning is constituted but is then immediately exceeded by what seems outside meaning: materiality, the discontinuity of real objects`. It is this style of literature that reopens our relationship with the semiotic, revealing the constructive process of the subject. Virginia Woolf` revolutionary style of literature challenges our relationship with language; it is no longer alienating, but is used as the scaffold to bring the individual closer to his or her instinctive drives. Language may formulate the subject, but that does not mean the subject, particularly through artistic endeavour, cannot reshape our understanding of language and thus control how language formulates the individual.

Language is fundamentally a socially constructed tool, designed and perpetrated for the benefit of civilisation as a whole. Unfortunately for the individual, this presents a catalogue of impediments and alienating emotions, considering language`s undeniable role in the creation of personality, and in the creation of the subject`s understanding of themselves. As Freud suggests, civilized humans must repress their instinctive desires for the advancement of civilisation; the individual must sacrifice a crucial element of themselves to reap the benefits of community life. As Lacan shows, this sacrifice is particularly alienating, when considering it is an entirely unconscious process: the very language we use to recognise our own desires and understand our position in the universe is moulded to the restraints of civilised society. The natural repression of the id, however, does not mean that the discontinuity between social order and the `plural totality` of human drives necessitates permanent estrangement. As shown by the novels of Virginia Woolf, the perfect embodiment of Kristeva`s concept of the redemptive possibilities of avant-garde art, the individual can come to understand the relationship between the socialised subject and their original chaotic drives, and thus reconfigure language to more accurately reflect the true individual need. By seeing beyond the symbolic and confronting the semiotic drives lurking beneath, the artist may re-formulate language, changing the way language will subsequently formulate them. As Kristeva remarks, `it is only in the performance [of art] that the dynamic of drives charges, bursts, pierces, deforms, reforms and transforms the boundaries the subject and society set for themselves`.33