02.25.08
This thought-half-thought came to me while I was in the shower, so now I am typing in my living room dripping all over the keyboard with soap in my eyes.
But before I showered, I was working on my Kierkegaard paper, and I was about to write something like, "And so, for the man of faith, faith is that foundational concept that justifies the use and determines the meaning of all subsequent words, concepts, and actions." (Let's leave aside for now my problem about whether or not that sentence even is coherent.) I have been working for a while with the conscious thought that what faith is for Johannes de Silentio (and, I believe, Kierkegaard) logic is for the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and language or language-games are for the author of Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty.
But then I got in the shower and I said to myself, "But faith is inarticulable." And I realized that that is what the Lacanian Master Signifier is. (I do what the Big Penis tells me to do.) (Wittgenstein greatly admired Freud, and saw what Freud was doing in psychoanalysis as the parallel for what he was doing in philosophy, namely, therapy.) There is a particular concept that is fundamental in determining my identity and my life-view, and all of my other words get their meaning from my relationship with that particular concept.
But now I feel myself beginning to float, because this is still all dealing in the currency of metaphor.
Later that day: There are several different metaphors that are used in order to describe this concept. In the Tractatus, logic is the outer boundaries of our thought - it provides the scaffolding or the architecture or the form for our thinking, which is the content that fills the form and provides Sinn. Contrastingly, Zizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology talks about the "traumatic kernel" that simultaneously resists/rejects signification and provides the system of signification as a whole with sense. In On Certainty, the metaphors used are those of bedrock, foundation, or the river banks that are more solid than the fluid concepts to which they give shape (meaning) but are in turn slowly eroded by that liquid. All of these meaning-giving concepts have the privilege of not being subject to the same 'rules' of meaning because they provide those rules, those justifications. [The normative sense.]
So in what sense could there possible be any kind of disagreement among these different pictures of meaning?
Later, later that day: What I was trying - and failing - to express was the thought that even though all of these philosophies claim that there is something that gives my life and my language meaning, it is not necessary to posit that something outside of life or language. (And I'm not sure that any of them do or claim to do.... except for the author of the Tractatus. He definitely does.) However, they all resort to metaphors to describe that Big Something. Scaffolding, phallus, kernel, bedrock. It would be wrong to claim that these are all different names for the same concept, and it would be wrong to say that there is something that is ineffable that they are trying to grasp at, and they cannot do it directly so they use metaphor instead.
So if I want to define the Master Signifier (I don't know if I am abusing Lacan here - I'm not meaning to) as "that concept that justifies the use and determines the meaning of all subsequent words, concepts, and actions," then I would have to admit that that Master Signifier is social in nature, and that it is possible (and true) that different cultures and different languages have different meaning-giving concepts, and then I would have to admit that it is possible (and true) for a single culture to have its Master Signifier shift over time as the use of words shift, or for a single culture to have more than one Master Signifier at a time. And if all these things are true, if you have replaced your deity with a pantheon, then doesn't the meaning - by which I mean the use and the purpose - of the word-concept "Master Signifier" kind of evaporate? (That is the aim of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and what he shares with Nietzsche and Derrida.) (Of course, if all this is right, if even these super-concepts are social and contingent, then Abraham is lost.)
I feel like there is a big logical gap here on paper that is all filled up in my head.
But before I showered, I was working on my Kierkegaard paper, and I was about to write something like, "And so, for the man of faith, faith is that foundational concept that justifies the use and determines the meaning of all subsequent words, concepts, and actions." (Let's leave aside for now my problem about whether or not that sentence even is coherent.) I have been working for a while with the conscious thought that what faith is for Johannes de Silentio (and, I believe, Kierkegaard) logic is for the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and language or language-games are for the author of Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty.
But then I got in the shower and I said to myself, "But faith is inarticulable." And I realized that that is what the Lacanian Master Signifier is. (I do what the Big Penis tells me to do.) (Wittgenstein greatly admired Freud, and saw what Freud was doing in psychoanalysis as the parallel for what he was doing in philosophy, namely, therapy.) There is a particular concept that is fundamental in determining my identity and my life-view, and all of my other words get their meaning from my relationship with that particular concept.
But now I feel myself beginning to float, because this is still all dealing in the currency of metaphor.
Later that day: There are several different metaphors that are used in order to describe this concept. In the Tractatus, logic is the outer boundaries of our thought - it provides the scaffolding or the architecture or the form for our thinking, which is the content that fills the form and provides Sinn. Contrastingly, Zizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology talks about the "traumatic kernel" that simultaneously resists/rejects signification and provides the system of signification as a whole with sense. In On Certainty, the metaphors used are those of bedrock, foundation, or the river banks that are more solid than the fluid concepts to which they give shape (meaning) but are in turn slowly eroded by that liquid. All of these meaning-giving concepts have the privilege of not being subject to the same 'rules' of meaning because they provide those rules, those justifications. [The normative sense.]
So in what sense could there possible be any kind of disagreement among these different pictures of meaning?
Later, later that day: What I was trying - and failing - to express was the thought that even though all of these philosophies claim that there is something that gives my life and my language meaning, it is not necessary to posit that something outside of life or language. (And I'm not sure that any of them do or claim to do.... except for the author of the Tractatus. He definitely does.) However, they all resort to metaphors to describe that Big Something. Scaffolding, phallus, kernel, bedrock. It would be wrong to claim that these are all different names for the same concept, and it would be wrong to say that there is something that is ineffable that they are trying to grasp at, and they cannot do it directly so they use metaphor instead.
So if I want to define the Master Signifier (I don't know if I am abusing Lacan here - I'm not meaning to) as "that concept that justifies the use and determines the meaning of all subsequent words, concepts, and actions," then I would have to admit that that Master Signifier is social in nature, and that it is possible (and true) that different cultures and different languages have different meaning-giving concepts, and then I would have to admit that it is possible (and true) for a single culture to have its Master Signifier shift over time as the use of words shift, or for a single culture to have more than one Master Signifier at a time. And if all these things are true, if you have replaced your deity with a pantheon, then doesn't the meaning - by which I mean the use and the purpose - of the word-concept "Master Signifier" kind of evaporate? (That is the aim of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and what he shares with Nietzsche and Derrida.) (Of course, if all this is right, if even these super-concepts are social and contingent, then Abraham is lost.)
I feel like there is a big logical gap here on paper that is all filled up in my head.
posted by Joel | 9:52 PM
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