In an attempt to separate subjectivity from identity in the last article, one of the questions we were left with was whether the subject simply exchanges an imaginary alienation (in the rivalrous world of semblables and imagos) for a symbolic alienation (in the Other of the signifying network). We noted how the shift in Lacan’s interest from the imaginary to the symbolic registers had a parallel in Freud’s move from the Group Psychology essays of the early 1920s to the presentation of an ontological formulation in the New Introductory Lectures a decade later. This shift has led Lacanians to elaborate a more minimal, ‘formal’ conception of subjectivity in place of the ‘experiential’ or ‘phenomenal’ formulations that we referenced in the first article in this series.

 

It might seem odd for a Lacanian to privilege subjectivity when Lacan is clear that the subject is only an effect of the signifier. “The subject is born”, he tells his audience in Seminar XI, “insofar as the signifier emerges in the field of the Other. But, by this very fact, this subject… solidifies into a signifier.” (Seminar XI, p.199). Indeed, the reason that Lacan writes the subject with a barred S – $ – is to show that “it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier” (Seminar XI, p.141), that “the subject that speaks is determined through an effect of the signifier” (Introduction to The Names-of-the-Father Seminar, November 20th 1963, published in Television, p.82).

 

Is there even room for a substantive concept of the subject in Lacan’s work, and even if so, would this subject have simply traded an alienation in the imaginary register for an alienation in the symbolic, given that a signifier refers not to oneself but to other signifiers?

 

We can respond to this question by looking at how Lacan takes a seemingly small and insignificant remark Freud makes in one of his papers and elevates it to the status of a concept. In chapter VII on identification in his paper ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ from 1921, Freud gives the example of his patient Dora who imitated the cough of her father. “Identification”, Freud writes, “has appeared instead of object choice… object-choice has regressed to identification” (SE XVIII, p.106-107). Dora’s identification is not to a person as such but to a particular trait of that person which borrows what Freud, in German, calls ein einziger Zug, a single trait:

 

“It is noticeable that in these identifications the ego sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one who is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from the person who is its object.” (SE XVIII, p.107).

 

Lacan refers to this einziger Zug many times in his work, using both Freud’s German term and the French equivalent he chooses, trait unaire, which in turn is translated into English as ‘unary trait’ . The word ’unary’ is often mistaken for a neologism of Lacan’s, or for ’unitary’. It is neither. Unary (unaire) is a term he borrows from set theory, and it is opposed to singular (unique). There are two points that we can make about how Lacan uses it in reference to subjectivity.

 

Firstly, Lacan shows that if the subject is an effect of the signifier this does not necessarily mean that the subject is in some way insubstantial, a pure lack.

 

Half way through Seminar XI Lacan refers to how prehistoric cavemen would signify the killing of an animal by marking it off with a single stroke, perhaps on a cave wall or on the weapon they used. The killing of the animal is represented by a ‘one’, and the subject counts his first kill as ‘one one’. Lacan explains,

 

“The subject himself is marked off by the single stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers. When this signifier, this one, is established – the reckoning [or perhaps ‘counting’] is one one. It is at the level, not of the one, but of the one one, at the level of the reckoning [or ‘counting’], that the subject has to situate himself as such. In this respect, the two ones are already distinguished. Thus is marked the first split that makes the subject as such distinguish himself from the sign in relation to which, at first, he has been able to constitute himself as subject.” (Seminar XI, p.141).

 

The difference between the two ‘ones’ is that the first is in isolation and the second is linked to a chain. The subject has to find a place for himself, “has to situate himself”, Lacan says, in the chain. In other words, we can say that the subject comes into being as a substantive, countable entity, through this single stroke. The single stroke is a way in which the subject can represent himself to himself, and as such gives the subject a sort of consistency, fixity, or singularity within the signifying structure. The important point is that whilst the strokes do not refer to him, the strokes nevertheless enable him to situate himself in a signifying structure.

 

As Lacanian scholar Calum Neill points out, there are two subjects that Lacan is bringing out with this apologue. Ostensibly the caveman is just representing a kill as ‘a one’, and then successive kills with ‘two ones’, ‘three ones’, ‘four ones’, etc. But rather than just signifying the count of kills, the caveman is signifying his own act of killing to himself. The caveman is not just signifying the kill of the animal but signifying to himself. The subject is both the one who puts the notch on the cave wall and the one to whom it signifies something. In other words, he is both the sender and receiver of the same message. The notch is a representation to himself and of himself. (Calum Neill, Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, p.18). This entails a division by the signifier for sure, but it also points to the way that the subject can constitute himself as subject in the Other. The subject is barred but not entirely swallowed by the Other, and Lacan says as much in Seminar XI when he tells his audience that this single stroke, this ein einziger Zug, constitutes the subject “at the level in which there is a relation of the subject to the Other.” (Seminar XI, p.256).

 

The second point to be made about Lacan’s discussion of the unary trait is that he uses it to designate the precise point of intersection between the imaginary and the symbolic, a point which allows the subject to effect a movement that situates him in the latter rather than the former. The unary trait marks the point at which an imaginary identification with this einziger Zug that Freud wrote about can start to function instead as a signifying identification. Lacan’s innovation on Freud’s initial insight was to move us beyond thinking of these unary traits as merely imaginary traits, and instead conceive of them as purely formal marks, like those made by the prehistoric cavemen in the description given by Lacan above from Seminar XI.

 

The unary trait can thus be thought of as a sort of ‘frontier concept’ between the imaginary and the symbolic. As Lacanian writer Ian Parker notes, it is an object firstly that is then elevated to the status of a signifier:

 

“The unary trait does not simply appear randomly as a particular signifier that will represent the subject. The unary trait is intimately connected to the object; Lacan says ‘it is from the object that the trait emerges, [and] it is something of the object that the trait retains: precisely its unicity’ (10th January 1962, p. 5).” (Source)

 

It is not the unity of the object qua imaginary object – as one’s semblable, for instance – that is important, but something in the object that can be used to raise the subject out of a purely imaginary relationship. The einziger Zug is the mark or trait of the transition between the imaginary and the symbolic itself, the point which marks how the subject is to position himself in the latter rather than the former.

 

What is the common thread between these two points? We can say that for Lacan, an essential character of subjectivity that is inherited from this ‘single trait’ is its singularity.

 

Lacan highlights this singularity as a feature of the signifier itself. If language is a series of differential elements, pure differences, then this single, unary trait, this einziger Zug, is a signifier of pure difference, bringing into relief the minimal differential structure of language. This is what Lacan means when in Seminar IX Lacan he says that the einziger Zug functions as “a support for difference” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.) It designates “the power of radical otherness” (ibid). It is in this way that the alterity of the Other, of the signifying chain itself, lends singularity to the subject.

 

Returning to the prehistoric cavemen hunting animals that Lacan referenced in Seminar XI, we can see that the strokes or notches made every time an animal was killed is an example of this structure of difference. Rather than drawing a visual representation of the animal killed – a sketch of a bison or buffalo on a cave wall, for example – there is simply a notch. Whereas a picture of the animal would put us in the imaginary register, the inscription of a different notch to signify each kill puts us instead in the symbolic register. The succession of notches constitutes a counting, a minimal signifying chain based on difference. But this difference is not at the level of the image (a resemblance to the different animals killed) but at the symbolic level as a pure, formal difference, for which is notch or stroke is the best way to mark this difference. The image at the top of this post, of the engraved metatarsal of a reindeer depicting a horse’s head with notches engraved at the top and bottom, illustrates this.

 

In highlighting this aspect of singularity Lacan gives us a way to think of subjectivity not in terms of identification based on a dual imaginary bond, but in terms of how the subject can represent itself in a symbolic order of differential traits.

 

From Seminar VIII in 1961 through to Seminar XI in 1964 Lacan keeps returning to the subject of the einziger Zug and there is a plethora of references that we could examine about it. Let’s pick just one from Seminar IX on Identification in 1961 to illustrate the point above.

 

Lacan tells his audience a story about his visit to Salle Piette, a room of a museum located just outside Paris called the Musée d’archéologie nationale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Yvelines). On his visit he notices the bone of an animal, and as he bends over the glass cabinet, he sees that on it is scratched a series of little strokes or notches. He also notices that the primitive men of the same pre-historic era made little replicas out of bone, and that one of these is a replica of a horse’s skull. In other words, a replica of a horse’s skull made out of a horse’s skull. Why bother making such a replica, Lacan asks:

 

“But what is more, at the same epoch people made in bone on a very small scale, a reproduction of something that it might not seem one should have taken so much trouble over because it is a reproduction of something else in bone but which is much bigger: a horse’s skull.

Why redo in bone on a small scale, when really one imagines that at that epoch they had other things to be doing […]?” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.)

 

We can say as such that there was a drive on the part of pre-modern man towards creating representation, an artistic representation even, which we can situate at the simplest level in the imaginary register. But it is not because each one of these little strokes is different that they function as different, but “because the signifying difference is distinct from anything that refers to qualitative difference” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.). In other words, it is not because they are longer or shorter strokes that they are different, but in what they signify as strokes. The signifier “serves to connote difference in the pure state”, Lacan says (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.). It is not the image itself that marks difference (that the model horse made out of horse’s skull is a representation of a horse – this is a bit of a dupe) but in the formal qualities of the signifier as a notch or stroke.

 

So, it is the fact that the signifier can connote difference as such that makes it valuable in understanding subjectivity. As opposed to the imaginary where the only kind of subject conceivable is a mis-mash of one’s image and his counterpart’s, like a cubist painting, the singularity of subjectivity can come only from the register of the signifier.

 

But if the signifying network has a differential structure and can thus be distinguished from the imaginary through the singularity of purely formal differences, is it legitimate to extend this to the subject itself? Many writers on Lacan have interpreted his famous maxim that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier as meaning that the subject has no ontological consistency, that subjectivity is just an effect of the animation of the signifying chain. But in his work at this point, Lacan offers us some clues that enable us to show that the subject is not just an epiphenomenon of the signifying chain but that it itself has a singularity.

 

Lacan takes the example of the Marquis de Sade in Seminar IX. He notes the way that Sade inscribed notches on his bedpost for every sexual conquest he made. Why would he do this? Intriguingly, Lacan says it is so that one can “locate oneself in the sequence of one’s sexual accomplishments” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.). In other words, he is representing himself to himself – he is both the sender and receiver of the message, in the same way that Calum Neil pointed to in the reference from Seminar XI above. Lacan says that the notch on the bedpost stops the “immanence” of the subject to his action (the sexual act), “to discern what exists as difference in the real” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.).

 

Lacan’s implication is that a minimal symbolic inscription is necessary to fix subjectivity, to give it a permanence – as opposed to the immanence of the imaginary.

 

Signifiers help us to introduce difference into the imaginary (and into the real), to annul qualitative differences, like the differences in hair colour or eye colour that Lacan points out to his audience between himself and Laplanche:

 

“You will say: “Laplanche is Laplanche and Lacan is Lacan”. But it is precisely there that the whole question lies, since precisely in analysis the question is posed whether Laplanche is not the thought of Lacan and if Lacan is not the being of Laplanche or inversely. The question is not sufficiently resolved in the real. It is the signifier which settles it, it is it that introduces difference as such into the real, and precisely in the measure in that what is involved are not at all qualitative differences”. (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.)

 

The unary trait, he then says, is what allows for a distinction to be made between two elements beyond “an identity of resemblance” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.)

 

In this session of Seminar IX Lacan also talks about the importance of differentiating the unary trait as a signifier from the sign. What is the difference between the two?

 

“A sign, we are told, is to represent something for someone: the someone is there as a support for the sign. The first definition that one can give of a someone is: someone who is accessible to a sign. It is the most elementary form, if one can express oneself in that way of subjectivity; there is no object at all here yet, there is something different: the sign, which represents this something for someone. A signifier is distinguished from a sign first of all in this which is what I tried to get you to sense: the fact is that signifiers only manifest at first the presence of difference as such and nothing else.” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.).

 

In other words, a sign may signify something, perhaps to someone, even if that someone doesn’t know what it is. But a signifier doesn’t have to signify anything except pure difference. Signifiers do not relate to signifieds – they only relate to each other. The difference a signifier signifies is a difference from other signifiers, and as such they can only function as signifiers when they are part of a network, even if that network is just a minimal binary – day/night, in/out, right/left, 1/0, etc.

 

The reason Lacan says that “the someone is there as a support for the sign” in the passage above and not vice versa is that a sign only makes sense if there is someone there to see it. We can think of being in a foreign country and seeing a signpost, knowing that it is meant to represent something to someone, but because you do not speak the language it means nothing to you. Nonetheless, we know it’s a sign even if we don’t know what it it means. Signifiers, on the other hand, according to Lacan, represent first and foremost difference itself before anything else. And this means that there needs to be more than one of them – one signifier can only exist as a signifier if it is different from another. The sign and the signifier can be the same thing (e.g., a notch or stroke) but can function differently according to whether it is alone (a sign) or part of a series that establishes its difference (a signifier). In other words, we can see things as signifiers even if we can’t tell what they are supposed to signify. Later in Seminar IX Lacan affirms this point when he says that signs can be taken as signifiers “insofar as they operate properly in virtue of their associativeness in the chain, of their commutativity, of the function of permutation taken as such” (Seminar IX, 13.12.1961).

 

In another session in Seminar IX Lacan describes the unary trait or einziger Zug as “that through which every being is said to be a One” (Seminar IX, 13.12.1961).

 

Ein einziger Zug is a signifier that can give to the subject a place in the symbolic order. It provides both a substantive presence and a singularity, a uniqueness, that is the opposite of the pathological coincidence of self and other that is a feature of the imaginary register.

 

In this article we have focused a lot on the function of the unary trait in providing a bridge from the imaginary to the symbolic. But we have said very little about the third Lacanian register – that of the real. Although the subject can achieve some degree of stability by representing himself in the symbolic order through a notch or stroke – like that Lacan believed Sade achieved by scratching the notches representing his sexual conquests onto his bedpost – the question of the real is one that involves the body. What helps the subject tie the corporeal unity of the body (given through the mirror stage) with what is most real (‘real’ in the Lacanian sense) about subjectivity – the experience of jouissance?

 

It is this latter question – about the subject of the body, and how it can ‘treat’ jouissance to maintain a corporeal integrity – that we will address in the final article in this series.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

 

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