Larval Subjects .

My post on depression got me thinking once again about the difference between the psychoanalytic conception of the symptom and what might be called the psychotherapeutic conception of the symptom. In what I am here calling psychotherapeutic orientations the symptom is an impediment to enjoyment to be eradicated. Here my symptom is something from which I suffer, something alien that plagues me, something that prevents me from attaining satisfaction or that stands in the way of my satisfaction. While it is indeed true that we suffer from our symptoms, within a psychoanalytic framework my symptom is the source of my jouissance or enjoyment, and is constitutive of my being (in the case of neurosis and perversion; remember there is no “normal” for psychoanalysis) as a subject. In this regard, the eradication of my symptom would amount to my destruction, my disappearance, as a subject.

Here it’s necessary to qualify the term “jouissance“. The term “jouissance or enjoyment, in English, has connotations of pleasure. Yet within a psychoanalytic framework, jouissance is radically different than pleasure. Pleasure refers to a release of tension that occurs through some sort of act such as eating. With the attainment of pleasure I no longer repeat. After I have eaten my fill, I no longer wish to eat anymore. By contrast, we know we’re in the presence of jouissance when we encounter endless repetition. We know that eating has become a matter of jouissance not pleasure when we continue to compulsively eat even though we are no longer hungry. We know that sex has departed from the domain of pleasure and entered the domain of jouissance when we compulsively masturbate throughout the day, rather than getting it over in the morning and being done with it. Jouissance is the domain of repetition where we seem to encounter a rise and maintenance of a particular activity rather than its cessation.

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Every once in a while you come across a concept that puts in words something that’s been on the tip of your tongue for years but which you’ve never quite been able to articulate. Ian Hacking’s concept of interactive kinds is, for me, an example of such a concept. In his discussion of social construction talk in The Social Construction of What?, Hacking is careful to emphasize that such talk generally refers to the construction of our categories (kinds), not the individuals or entities that are grouped under these categories. It is not, for example, my cat Tabby that is constructed, but the kind or category “cat”.

What is interesting here is not the construction of categories or kinds themselves, but rather the relationship between the constructed kind and the entities that fall over them. Hacking distinguishes between two different kinds: indifferent kinds and interactive kinds. In the case of indifferent kinds, the entity or individual falling under the kind is indifferent to the categorization that, for lack of a better word, names the entity. Take the example of trees. In his Prolegomena to Linguistics, Hjelmslev teaches us, in good nominalist fashion, to discern how different languages classify trees and shrubs in different ways (cue Monty Python). What is classified as a tree in one language might be classified as a shrub in another language. The important point, however, is that the entities being so classified are indifferent to the classification. The classification makes no difference to them. This doesn’t mean the entities are passive. Plants are active in all sorts of ways. It only means that plants take up no stance with respect to how we classify them.

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Over at Pagan Metaphysics, Paul has posted a couple of great quotes from Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Hopefully he won’t mind if I reproduce his post here. Paul writes:

I was reading through Dennett’s Breaking the Spell again yesterday and came across an endnote that raised a laugh. Dennett is reflecting on the value and uses of incomprehensibility, mystification and paradox in religion, specifically as mechanisms for bedazzling the mind (effective marketing strategies or tools of transmission), when he notes in a side comment his first secular experience of this phenomenon.

My introduction to this somewhat depressing idea came in 1982, when I was told by the acquisitions editor of a major paperback publishing company that her company wasn’t going to bid for the paperback rights for The Mind’s I, the anthology of philosophy and science fiction that Douglas Hofstadter and I had edited, because it was “too clear to become a cult book.” I could see what she meant: we actually explained things as carefully as we could.

OK, not funny so far (although perhaps evoking a knowing smile). Dennett then proceeds to explain a related story.

John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: “Michel, you’re so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?” To which Foucault replied, “That’s because in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense.” I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault’s candor: eumerdification.

Brilliant.

I don’t know if Foucault actually said this or not, but it’s the sort of thing I strangely want him to have said and to be true. Nor am I denouncing such style, as I think such “eumerdification” is a rhetorical technique that functions to produce an effect within the reader. All of this reminds me of an allegory that Lacan relates when discussing the nature of gaze as object a. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan writes,

In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Pharrhasios, Zeuxis has the advantaga of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye. (103)

The secret of the veil is that it causes us to wonder what is behind us. And, of course, Lacan’s example here is particularly delicious as it is a painted veil, and therefore veils nothing. There is nothing behind this veil, but rather the veil produces the effect of something hidden. The veil here functions as objet a, the object-cause of desire, becoming the engine of desire. Objet a is not the object of desire, but rather that which causes or occasions desire, that which evokes desire. In this connection, I remember a friend from graduate school who was obsessed with the Girls Gone Wild commercials. Finally, at a certain point, he broke down and decided to buy one of the videos. To his great surprise and disappointment, the videos evoked none of the desire the commercials elicited precisely because the black bars screening the women’s breasts were absent in the videos. It was precisely the censorship of the veil, of the black bar, that evoked or caused his desire, not the object of desire itself (the breasts). In the absence of the object-cause of desire, my friend could no longer desire the object of his desire.

This seems to be what Dennett’s editors were getting at with respect to the issue of whether or not to buy the rights to Dennett’s early book Minds Eye I. Because the book was written so clearly, the editor contended, it was unlikely to become a cult or classic book. Our initial reaction to this anecdote might be anger or outrage. “How dare they reject a book because it’s clear! Isn’t clarity a virtue to be admired?!?!” However, the editor has a point. Part of what allows a book to endure, part of what gives a book the power to last, is precisely a sort of opacity, a presence of the veil, that allows, over time, all sorts of heterogeneous meanings to be projected on to the book as we endlessly wonder what it is that is behind the veil. The veil here functions like an engine or productive device that ensures that the text continue to produce meaning for readers and that we return to it again and again.

I’ve always thought that Lacan’s parable of Zeuxis and Pharrhasios was the core of his analytic teaching, perfectly exemplifying the aim of psychoanalytic treatment. We’re all familiar with the Lacanian thesis that the end of analysis consists in traversing the fantasy and discovering that the big Other does not exist. But what does that really mean? With Lacan the point that should always be borne in mind is that the three different subject positions– neurosis (hysteria/obsession), psychosis, and perversion (there is no “normal”) –are structures of intersubjectivity or ways of relating to the Other. The neurotic relates to the Other’s demand, trying to repress the enigma of the Other’s desire, the pervert relates to the Other’s jouissance, and the psychotic has foreclosed the Other altogether. The neurotic suffers from desire. Here we should recall that, according to Lacan, “desire is the desire of the Other”. The ambiguity of the genitive in this little aphorism drawn from Kojeve allows us to interpret desire as the desire of the Other as simultaneously signifying that the subject desires the Other (that the Other is an object of the neurotic’s desire) and, more fundamentally, that the neurotic desires to be desired by the Other. The neurotic therefore suffers from a persistent and frustrating question: “what am I for the Other?” “what does the Other want from me?”

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Responding to one of Anxiousmodernman’s comments in my post on BP, Circling Squares writes:

Estimates vary but its been reported recently that 27 million Americans are on anti-depressant drugs. (1) That is a heck of a lot of people who are medically numbed; it is pretty difficult to be angry, righteous and politicised when you are taking drugs to stop you from feeling. (2) Besides the direct effect on those specific people, this indicates a far wider tendency, as you said, to individualise blame, to accept failure as one’s own fault and thus, because one is trapped into that circle (there’s no way out, nowhere else to go from there), self-harm and self-medication follow.

There’s more to Circling’s response, so please go read it. There are a few points worth making in response to Circling’s remarks. First, anti-depressants don’t prevent feeling, but rather depression prevents feeling. When, in the grips of depression, everything is bland or gray. Nothing interests, nothing motivates, nothing excites, nor is there much in the way of any affect whatsoever. The depressed person is more or less paralyzed or completely numb. It is thus a mistake, I believe, to suggest– if this is what Circling is implying –that if only we weren’t medicated, if only we embraced our depression, we would be capable of acting. The reverse rather seems to be the case. Moreover, when anti-depressants are at their best, far from turning one into a numb zombie, they actually liberate affect and the capacity to engage with the world. It becomes possible to care or be engaged with the world around us.

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Over at An Un-Canny Ontology Nate weighs in on our recent discussion of Life After People. Nate writes:

In his response to Tim and to my problem with the TV show Life After People, Levi over at Larval Subjects remarked:

I think narrative is a way in which these things take place, but is not the way. This is what I referred to in a prior post (over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, I think) as an occupational hazard. The rhetorician spends his or her time analyzing narratives and thus naturally sees narratives and signifiers in everything.

And then a little later:

The whole thing that set off my original post was Nate’s rather snide remark that all the object-oriented ontologist can say is “objects act”. Hell no. We’re interested in how objects act and celebrate those modes of analysis that show how objects act and what differences they contribute.

I’ve made bold this last sentence because it draws out a larger question. What, if we are not creating narratives, does Levi mean when he makes this last statement? A narrative is story set up in an sometimes enlightening but often constructive format. It can take shape in variety of forms (novels, short stories, poems, TV shows, movies, anecdotes, even grocery lists, etc, etc.). The first order observation that Levi fails to see when watching Life After People is that he is watching a narrative – I am in no way adding this narrative, as Levi claimed, since as a TV show Life After People is automatically a structured way of relaying a story – and if the title and the obvious fact that it is a TV show want to be ignored, one can always point out the second glaring reason – Life After People has a NARRATOR. The show, the story of a world without people still needs to be narrated, significance needs to be given to the objects of this specific (and post-human) world. BUT, this significance is not placed onto the show by an outside viewer as a first-order observation. No. It is inherent in the show itself, which brings me back to the original problem I had with it. When stripped of all of its narrative aspects, what are we left with? I would argue, that what we are left with is something far more boring than the job of a rhetorician.

There’s more there so check out his post. A couple of points are in order. First, nowhere have I denied that narrative is at work in the show. I just argued that I don’t think this is what is crucial or interesting in the show (I provide a narrative analysis I would find interesting later in this post). This is the point, in my recent post, of the garlic example. Just as I wouldn’t deny that the garlic plays a role in the pasta, I would not deny that narrative plays a role. What I am thus objecting to is the manner in which Nate and Tim are treating narrative as a God-term that is the only important difference at work in the show, or the only element that plays a role.

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One of the more compelling themes that punctuates Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is the linkage between the rise of certain mental illnesses and post-Fordist capitalist modes of production, identifying it as a key site of the political (at least virtually). Now, for readers familiar with French inflected social theory, this thesis will not, in and of itself, appear new. In An Introduction to Marcel Mauss Levi-Strauss had argued something similar with respect to schizophrenia and psychosis, going so far as to suggest that in certain “primitive societies” this phenomena doesn’t exist. Canguilhem suggested something similar, as did Foucault. But in each of these instances the emphasis was put on the social and discursive production of mental illness. If one adopted these accounts of mental illness, then it became necessary to reject materialist or neurological accounts of mental illness. The story goes that either one adopts the neurological account and is thus subject to an ideological illusion that de-politicizes something that is in fact social (mental illness), or you adopt the social account of mental illness and reject anything having to do with the neurological or psychotropics as ideological mystifications. Fisher’s analysis, by contrast, is far more subtle. As Fisher writes,

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low seratonin. This requires social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism. (37)

In many respects, Fisher’s analysis of affectivity here mirrors Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism. Just as commodity fetishism treats relations that are truly between person’s as if they were relations between or to things (when I buy a diamond I think I’m just relating to that commodity and not enmeshed in a set of social relationships), “affectivity fetishism” could be construed as treating relations that are, in fact, social and political, as relations to mere neurons. The instantiation of certain neuronal structures and relations is here confused with the cause of these instantiations. Here I would express what I take to be Fisher’s point a bit differently by referring to Aristotle’s four causes. The problem with neurological accounts of mental illness is that they confuse what Aristotle referred to as the material and formal cause of a thing with its efficient cause. Depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia are all certain structures of mentality (formal cause) that are embodied in a certain stuff (material cause), but this in and of itself does not account for why these particular embodied structures come to exist as they do (efficient cause).

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A central aim of Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science is to diagnose what he refers to as the “epistemic fallacy”. In a nutshell, the epistemic fallacy consists in the thesis, often implicit, that ontological questions can be reduced to epistemological questions. The idea here is that ontology can be entirely resolved or evaporated into an inquiry into our access to beings, such that there are no independent questions of ontology. As an example of such a maneuver, take Humean empiricism. As good Humean empiricists, we “bracket” all questions of the world independent of our mind and simply attend to our atomistic impressions (what we would today call “sensations”), and how the mind links or associates these punctiform impression in the course of its experience to generate lawlike statements about cause and effect relations.

Note the nature of Hume’s gesture: Here we restrict ourselves entirely to our atomistic sensations and what can be derived from our sensations. Questions about whether or not our sensations are produced by entities independent of our mind are entirely abandoned as “dogmatic” because we do not have access to the entities that might cause or produce these sensations, but only the sensations themselves. Consequently, the order of knowledge must be restricted to what is given in sensation. Hume’s epistemology is thus based on a thesis about immanence or immediacy. Insofar as our minds possess and immediate relation to our sensations, we are epistemically warranted in appealing to sensations as grounds for our claims to knowledge. We are not however, warranted in appealing to objects, powers, selves, or causes because we do not have sensations of these things. Consequently, all of these ontological claims must be reformulated in epistemological terms premised on our access to being. If we wish to talk of objects, then we must show how the mind “builds up” objects out of atomistic impressions and associations. If we wish to speak of powers, then we must show how the mind builds up powers out of atomistic impressions and associations. If we wish to speak of causality we must show how the mind builds up an idea of cause and effect relations through impressions and associations. If we wish to speak of selves and other minds we have to show how mind builds up our sense of self and other minds out of impressions and cause and effect associations.

At the level of the form of the argument, not the content, nearly every philosophical orientation since the 18th century has made the Humean move. While the content of these positions differ, the form of the argument remains roughly the same. That is, we perpetually see a strategy of attempting to dissolve ontological questions through epistemological questions. This move always proceeds in two steps: First, one aspect of our experience is claimed to be immanent or immediate. Second, the furniture of our ontology is then dissolved through an analysis of those entities with reference to this plane of immanence or immediacy. The immediate can be impressions as in the case of Hume, the transcendental structure of mind as in the case of Kant, the intentions of pure consciousness as in the case of Husserl, or language as in the case of late Wittgenstein or the thought of Derrida. Other examples could be evoked. In each case, the gesture consists in showing how the being of beings can be thoroughly accounted for in terms of our access through this immanence or immediacy. The point is that we no longer treat the entities in our ontology as existing independently of this field of immanence or immediacy, but now see them as products of these modes of access. Whether the world is really like this independent of our chosen regime of construction is a question that is abandoned as dogmatic.

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Somewhere or other Lacan speaks of a fundamental choice of subjective-structure that precedes any actualized form that subjective-structure might take. Thus you get the choice of hysteria that protests the legitimacy of any particular master, figure of authority, or father, leader, or expert, the choice of obsessional neurosis that constantly licks the heels of every master while secretly stealing pathetic bits of enjoyment behind his back by pissing in his lemonade, the pervert that shows the neurotic what his desire is really about, and finally the psychotic that bucks the whole damned system, refusing it altogether. Zizek, in his writings on Schelling, speaks of this as a choice that precedes choice or a sort of transcendental choice to choose. In other words, you get your average obsessional sort of neurosis that chooses not to choose, saying that the game is set, that this is the way things are, and that our only option is to steal little bits of jouissance while maintaining the system.

Zizek’s tells a marvelous vulgar joke that perfectly exemplifies this logic. A peasant couple encounters a nobleman on a dirt road. Evoking the ancient law of prima nocta, the nobleman demands the right to sleep with the peasant’s wife. However, to add insult to injury he demands that the husband hold the nobleman’s testicles while he does the deed so they don’t get dirty from the road. After the dirty deed has taken place and the nobleman has trotted off, the husband laughs hysterically. Distraught by her husband’s response after this terrible encounter, his wife asks how he can possibly laugh. The husband responds, full of mirth, that he didn’t hold the master’s balls. Such is always the logic of those who want to be recognized by their master’s. Here the husband thinks he’s scored a major victory, but he’s kept everything important in place just as it was before. He steals his little bit of jouissance, but it only functions to sustain the unjust system within which this event took place. This, for example, is the universe of the Larry Craig’s, Sanford’s, etc., that keep the system in place while stealing bits of enjoyment behind the scene, but also the logic of all of those who identify with their oppressors, believing that they will get their eye and recognition. They strive to get recognition from their masters even as they despise them. On the other hand, there are those that prior to any choice they make recognize that the frame of decision is itself arbitrary and can be changed. The philosophical difference here might be characterized in terms of the difference between Badiou and Deleuze on the one hand, and Habermas and Rawls on the other. In the latter case we are constrained by a lifeworld and can only act and decide within the framework of those constraints. The constraints themselves cannot be questioned or interrogated. In the former case, by contrast, it is the frames themselves that are contested and the entire issue revolves around how those frames might be abolished or transformed. Of course, the latter position always wins out because you cannot show an alternative possibility, but only enact it. As a result, the latter position is always the “sensible” or “common sense” position.

Prior to where anyone stands on any particular issue, there seems to be a fundamental existential decision that precedes any “ontic” decision one might make regarding social and political issues. There are, basically, two types of people in the world, though this point can only be made through ontic examples. There are those who side with the insurance companies, holding that the reason prices are so high is that there are spurious lawsuits against doctors for malpractice. And then there are those that side with the people, seeing insurance companies as profit driven entities designed to inflate cost for their own benefit. There are those who side with corporations, believing that policy should be designed for their benefit because, after all, they’re the ones that give us jobs, and then there are those that side with the workers seeing little or no connection between the interests of corporations and the interest of workers. There are those that side with the protesters on May of ’68 against an oppressive academic and work regime, and then there are those who see May of ’68 as a youthful burst of naivete that had no meaning whatsoever. There are those that side with the raped woman and then those who said she shouldn’t have dressed so provocatively. Most recently there are those who side with Gates and those who think he was an uppity black man who should have been more respectful to the officer. And then there are those that claim that all intellectual work should be constrained by the tradition and strictly defined by that framework. Where one falls is always a fundamental existential decision that precedes any specific decision one might make. What is interesting is how those who have chosen not to choose somehow nonetheless end up talking endlessly about the pie in the sky naive ones who have chosen to choose, almost as if the former are aware of their own ephemeral and irrelevant place in the order of things.

In my last post I localized a paradox at the heart of Lacan’s teaching. On the one hand, Lacan puts forward a “true formula of atheism” that states that God is unconscious. There the line of reasoning seems to run that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other and that the Other does not exist. This would be a clever, indirect way of saying “God does not exist”. On the other hand, Lacan says that the gods belong to the order of the Real. How is it possible to reconcile these two claims. With respect to God and religion, I think Lacan can be seen as proposing what I call an “A-Theology”. A-Theology is not atheism, though it is related to some standard claims of atheism. Most generally, atheism is the denial of any sort of supernatural causation in the world and the existence of anything supernatural. In debates with religious belief, it generally points to the lack of evidence for miracles, the supernatural, souls, etc., and therefore the absence of reasons to believe in such things.

Of course, in relation to the findings of contemporary ethnology, it has become possible to charge the atheist with missing the point with respect to myth. Here the argument would run that myth is a particular way of understanding the world that was never intended to be taken literally. As I heard Caputo once put it at a conference when defending religion, “Of course the figures and miraculous events we see depicted in sacred texts and myths did not take place. Rather, the myths and stories of religion are closer to comic book stories, representing struggles between good and evil, the nature of the world, the meaning of life, etc.” Caputo’s thesis, of course, begs the question of why, if this is all myths are, we don’t choose better literature such as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, etc. But whether we go with a somewhat unsophisticated thesis like Caputo’s or a more well developed thesis like Levi-Strauss’ approach to myth, the point remains the same: When we criticize these stories on the grounds that they violate the natural order and that there is no evidence in support of their truth, we have made a category mistake. We have failed to understand that myth is relating to truth and meaning in a different way. While there is certainly a great deal of truth to this thesis, it’s obvious shortcoming is that many followers of particular religious beliefs do take these stories literally rather than figuratively. Nonetheless, were this way of relating to myth to become the dominant paradigm in actual religious practices, it would be a substantial advance allowing for a much different dialogue between atheists and believers.

A-Theology, by contrast, differs from atheism in that its aim is not to refute or debunk claims about the supernatural. Where atheism focuses obsessively on religion as an explanatory hypothesis about the nature of the world, A-Theology, by contrast, is directed at a particular structure of thought and a particular form of social organization that it refers to, for lack of a better word, as “theological”. In this connection, it is crucial to emphasize that from the standpoint of A-Theology the conditions under which a particular structure of thought or social organization contains elements of the supernatural matters not a whit. In other words, a structure of thought or a form of social organization could be entirely secular in character, it could be an ultra-materialism, and nonetheless remain theological from the standpoint of A-Theology. Likewise, a form of social organization or thought could be pervaded by appeals to all sorts of supernatural phenomena and nonetheless be characterized as “a-theological” from the standpoint of A-Theology. The arch-materialist and determinist Pierre-Simon Laplace is an excellent example of a materialistic account of the universe that is nonetheless thoroughly theological. This is not because Laplace attributed the workings of matter to God– when Napoleon asked him about the place of God in his system, he famously replied “Je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse. –but rather because of the curious role that Laplace’s Demon plays in his understanding of nature. Similarly, perhaps Greece, prior to Platonic thought can be understood as A-Theological, despite being pervaded by all sorts of deities and supernatural phenomena. Given these two examples, it is clear that the distinguishing mark between the A-Theological and the Theological has nothing to do with the supernatural or the sorts of causality that function in the world.

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In an interesting response to my post on A-Theology, Nikki over at Prosthetics writes:

levi, hello…
I am interested in what you wrote here:

In this connection, we are reminded of another gloss on the father where Lacan remarks that the only father is a dead father. Clearly fathers are not always dead, so we must understand Lacan as referring to the father not as a living body, but in his function as a signifier, as a symbolic function, in the Oedipus, naming the enigmatic desire of the mother and enacting the prohibition against incest. In this respect, to say that God is unconscious would be to say that God is the dead signifier that establishes prohibition.

First i would like to propose that, in light of what you and Lacan are working in this vicinity ‘dead signifier’ is a redundant phrase – but at the same time, perhaps redundancy is where living takes place, or more precisely, where living shows up on the radar? This is the case for Badiou, and also for Jean-Luc Marion… Yet as Derrida points out in limited. inc signification, signing, the desire to underwrite what cannot be insured, is always a hollow(ing) enterprise. I am thinking redundancy, repetition and ritual.

Nikki makes an interesting point about the nature of the signifier, death, and life that had not occurred to me in quite these terms. For the sake of those not very familiar with Lacan’s work, early Lacan– the Lacan of the first two seminars and of Function and Field of Speech –often emphasized that the signifier “kills the thing”. I read this in somewhat Derridean terms. With the advent of the signifier in our subjective economy absence is introduced into the world. It becomes possible to refer to the thing in its absence, but every relation between word and thing necessarily requires the institution of this sort of a priori absence. Moreover, where the thing is perpetually changing and becoming over the adventure of its existence, there is a way in which the signifier freezes the thing, turning it into a fixed statue.

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