Rupturing Lacan: Maga Culture's Rut & "Get Out of Jail" Card, Part B

RUPTURING LACAN:

Maga Culture's Rut & "Get Out of Jail" Card

How post-Whiteheadian Metanoiaic Language Can Free

Stuck Church & Cultural Societies

ESSAY I, Part B

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

Processual Metanoian Language

- a turning, reorienting, or re-becoming from within lack or incompleteness

- an event of creativity arising from within relational fracture

- the unfolding of a caustic rupture that becomes generatively transformative

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Continued from Essay1, Part A

II. Why Lacan Became the Architect of Postmodern Humility

Lacan’s prohibition against metalanguage didn’t land in a vacuum. It arrived in a cultural moment that desperately needed its sharpness. Modernity had been swollen with confidence - the belief that Reason could master the whole, that science could explain the whole, that theology could justify the whole. Lacan’s suspicion cracked that confidence like a chisel driven into stone.

Postmodernism inherited that chisel and swung it wide.

It told us, with varying degrees of irony and exhaustion, that:

• Every narrative is partial.
• Every system collapses under its own weight.
• Every attempt at synthesis becomes another form of control.
• Every supposed “meta-position” is just another position wearing a clever disguise.

And for a time, this was necessary.

Postmodernism was the antidote to modernity’s epistemic arrogance.

It dismantled the fantasy of coherence.

It cleared away the monuments to certainty.

But once the clearing was complete, the result wasn’t renewal.

It was emptiness.

• Postmodernism could deconstruct, but it couldn’t build.
• It could expose fractures, but it had no grammar for living inside them.
• It could reveal contradictions, but it had no metaphysics of becoming that would allow contradiction to be transformative rather than terminal.

After the critique, there was only suspension.

After the wound, no healing.

After the fall of meta-systems, only the lonely relativism of the fragmented subject.

In this sense, Lacan became the architect of postmodern humility precisely because he forced us to relinquish the fantasy of epistemic transcendence - but offered no generative alternative.

A world without metalanguage, in Lacan, is not an open system; it is a permanent enclosure, a symbolic structure incapable of offering novelty, birth, or transformation.

Postmodernism inherited his suspicion, but also his stasis.

So, where do we go?

How do we proceed?

This is the point at which many metamodern thinkers secretly try to resurrect the metalanguage Lacan killed - a “new integration,” a “better meta,” a “bigger perspective.” But this desire often leads straight back into the very illusions Lacan dismantled.

What was needed wasn't a return to transcendence, but a metaphysical framework capable of showing how novelty emerges from within immanence itself.

Not a Lacanian immanence - there is no such thing; it is always closed. One that is:

• A looping structure.
• Where meaning arising only from lack - and lack and never resolves.
• Where there is no novelty.
• No emergence.
• Where desire perpetually is deferred.
• Where language is structure and never creative.
• Where language is a prison of immanent recursion disguised as truth.

No.

What was needed was Whiteheadian immanence - immanence as process, relation, and creative advance.

In Whitehead:

• Reality is always becoming, never structured.
• Never closed. Never looped.
• Creativity is always metaphysical.
• Novelty is always real filled with possibility.
• Relational experience always generates new possibilities.
• Process makes transformation continually possible.
• And, God, world, and language are dynamically, complexly, interwoven.

This is processual immanence - an immanence charged with novelty and becoming, not trapped, not closed, not static, not looped.

It RUPTURES LACAN when overlaid in Whitehead's "processual netanoiatic language."

Instead of remaining within Lacanian metalanguage, we transform the symbolic structures themselves into a new metanoetic process language that embodies:

A META-WORLD FILLED WITH PROCESSUAL META-NOIAIC LANGUAGE

One which continually provides:

• a turning, reorienting, or re-becoming from the lack or incompleteness held within
• infinite events of creativity arising from within relational fractures
• unfolding provisions from caustic ruptures which may transform generatively

Postmodernism could describe the wound -
but it could not imagine the wound as a site of birth.

This is precisely where Whitehead’s processual rupture becomes essential for a metamodern world requiring new language.

And it is precisely where we must move towards a post-Whiteheadian analysis and position filled with processual metamodern immanence....

but first, an application for section II...

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Application for Section II -
Psychological & Cultural Enclosure as Postmodern Paralysis

The logic of Lacan’s closed immanence did not stay inside psychoanalytic theory. It seeped into culture, identity, and the modern psyche. Postmodernism amplified it until it became the emotional weather of our age.

You can hear it in the way contemporary people describe:

• the exhaustion of identity performance,
• the fear of being “seen through,”
• the suspicion that meaning is always constructed, never encountered,
• the anxiety that any claim to truth is secretly a claim to power.

Psychologically, this produces a subject who is:

• hyper-aware but under-empowered,
• self-conscious to the point of paralysis,
• deconstructive but unable to re-assemble,
• attuned to fractures but unable to inhabit them generatively.

Culturally, the same mood manifests as:

• irony masking sincerity,
• infinite critique without consequence,
• the cultural fragmentation of “takes,”
• oscillation between cynicism and naïve hope,
• the belief that authenticity is impossible because everything is mediated.

This is the psyche of the closed immanent frame:

• where the mind is trapped inside its own recursive language,
• endlessly decoding itself,
• while never allowing emergence;
• one that is always folding inward,
• but never outward towards generative transformation

A Lacanian world:

• produces psychological cleverness
• but not psychological transformation.
• It produces cultural critique
• but not cultural renewal.

Postmodernism exposed the fractures of modernity,

but it did not know how to live inside those fractures without despair.

It had no metaphysics of becoming - only a metaphysics of suspicion.

Which is why the shift to Whitehead is not merely philosophical.

It is psychological, cultural, existential.

Whitehead offers what Lacan and postmodernism could not: a way for the psyche to re-enter the world as a true participant in creativity, not merely a captive of Lacanian metaianguistic structure.

This sets the stage for Section III.

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III. The Limit of Lacan: Structure Without Becoming

Lacan sees language as a structure - a symbolic grid that precedes us, binds us, and loops back upon itself. The subject emerges inside this enclosure:

• Desire is lack.
• Meaning is deferral.
• The self is a wound that never closes.
• Language is a mirror hall with no exit.

And here is the hinge:

Lacan’s post-symbolic order is static.
Rigid.
Formal.
Closed.

It does not grow.
It does not evolve.
It does not generate.

This is where the rupture begins - not because Lacan is wrong, but because his metaphysics cannot imagine transformation.

His symbolic order is a form of closed immanence, a recursive system capable only of exposing fracture, not transfiguring it.

The problem is not his critique.
The problem is his ontology.

But in Whitehead, reality is never static.
Whitehead’s world is not structured like a grid.
It moves.
It becomes.
It unfolds.

Reality is process.
Reality is creativity.
Reality is continual metaphysical novelty.

Lacan’s system cannot account for emergence.
It cannot imagine the symbolic order itself evolving.
It cannot picture language as becoming rather than binding.

Whitehead can.

This is the first breach:
processual immanence ruptures closed immanence.

Where Lacan sees permanent enclosure, Whitehead sees:

• creativity as metaphysical
• novelty as real
• relational experience as generative
• becoming as universal
• God, world, and language as dynamically interwoven

But Whitehead is not the final stop.
He is the opening salvo.

Once the world shifts from structure to process, another movement becomes possible - one that neither Lacan nor Whitehead fully anticipated:

a reality / world which is inhabits generative immanence.

This is the metamodern expansion of Whitehead - or it's post-Whiteheadian Metanoeaic synthesis:

• rupture-as-birth from wound
• wound-as-origin of birth
• self-organizing novelty (autopoiesis)
• angiogenesis of meaning (new pathways forming)
• cruciform–resurrectional emergence (death → transformation → relational becoming)
• generativity beyond prior symbolic limits

This is immanence not merely as becoming,
but as becoming-beyond,
without ever leaving the relational field of life.

The question “Which immanence do we mean?” now matters:

• Lacan’s immanence is closed.

• Whitehead’s immanence is open.

• Metamodern immanence is generative.

Lacan collapses us inward.
Whitehead opens the field.
Metamodernism pushes through that field toward emergence.

This is the breach we needed:
not transcendence,
not escape,
not the resurrection of metalanguage,
but the metanoetic transformation of language itself into a new, living form:

Processual Metanoetic Language

- not spoken from above, but birthed from within.
- not a metalanguage, but a metamorphosing language.

- not the language of lack, but the language of becoming, of fulfilling, of fullness.

Lacan could describe the wound.
Postmodernism could analyze the wound.
Only process thought can imagine the wound as the site of birth.

This is where the true rupture takes hold.

And it is where we may introduce post-Whiteheadian Processual Metanoetic Language as the metamodern linguistic mode that emerges from within relational fracture.

Using metanoiaic as an adjective allows we may now talk about:

• metanoiaic immanence
• metanoiaic rupture
• metanoiaic creativity
• metanoiaic emergence
• metanoiaic process language

but before we do let's provide an application to this section...

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Application for Section III -
MAGA Culture as Closed Symbolic Immanence

The dynamics described in Section III are not abstract. They appear vividly in contemporary cultural formations, and one of the clearest examples is MAGA culture, not as a political position, but as a symbolic structure.

1. Lacanian Reading: The Closed Loop of Identity and Lack

In a Lacanian sense, MAGA culture often operates as a symbolic enclosure built around:

• perceived loss
• wounded identity
• nostalgia for a vanished wholeness
• desire shaped by lack rather than possibility

Its central messages frequently evoke:

• “we believe something precious has been taken”
• “we think the country used to be whole”
• “we believe we must recover what has been lost”

This creates an identity structure organized around lack, mirroring Lacan’s closed immanence:

• the wound cannot be resolved as it is
• identity is stabilized by grievance
• belonging is maintained through shared loss
• novelty feels threatening, not generative

The symbolic order becomes a self-reinforcing loop, where the wound functions as the anchor of meaning.

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2. Whiteheadian Reading: Blocked Process as Cultural Stasis

From a process-philosophical standpoint, a system organized around grievance becomes structurally static. It resists:

• relational becoming
• creative advance
• novelty
• transformation
• mutuality

Whitehead’s metaphysics sees identity, society, and culture as streams of becoming. When these streams harden into symbolic enclosures, the result is:

• reduced creative capacity
• inhibited or prevented transformation
• heightened fear of difference
• nostalgia replacing novelty
• reactive politics instead of generative politics (in the philosophical sense)

In Whitehead’s terms, this is the cultural equivalent of a closed actual occasion that cannot integrate new data.

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3. Metamodern/Metanoiaic Reading: The Missing Generative Immanence

Where Section III introduces generative immanence, MAGA culture illustrates its absence.

In generative immanence:

• wounds are sites of birth
• rupture leads to emergence (hopefully positive, not negative, as is often the case)
• identity transforms through relational experience
• novelty becomes a valuative path, rather than prohibitive a threat

In closed symbolic cultures (of which MAGA is one example), rupture becomes:

• something to fear
• something to resist
• something to defend against

There is NO metanoiaic movement in cultures like these;
rather they preserve the wound so that it cannot transform
and refuse to open the fracture so that it heals generatively.

MAGA culture becomes a LACANIAN METALANGUAGE CASE STUDY in:

• identity without becoming
• rupture without emergence
• wound without birth

This is not about ideology - It is about symbolic structure.

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Application Summary

MAGA culture exemplifies the dynamics Section III describes:

• Lacanian closed immanence: identity organized around lack
• Blocked Whiteheadian process: becoming replaced by stasis
• Absence of generative immanence: rupture does not lead to creation

This is not offered as a political critique, but as a structural illustration of how cultural formations can crystallize around wounds that remain NEGATIVELY untransformed.

It reinforces the core insight of Section III:

Only generative immanence - the metanoiaic turn - can move a wound from enclosure to emergence.

~ continue to Part C of Essay I ~

Rupturing Lacan: Maga Culture's Rut & "Get Out of Jail" Card, Part A

RUPTURING LACAN:

Maga Culture's Rut & "Get Out of Jail" Card

How post-Whiteheadian Metanoiaic Language Can Free

Stuck Church & Cultural Societies

ESSAY I, Part A

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

Processual Metanoian Language

- a turning, reorienting, or re-becoming from within lack or incompleteness

- an event of creativity arising from within relational fracture

- the unfolding of a caustic rupture that becomes generatively transformative

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Preface

This essay grows out of a tension many of us feel today: that we are living in a world where meaning is both desperately needed and perpetually slipping through our fingers.

• Modernism promised clarity.
• Postmodernism exposed fragmentation.

Metamodernism tries to hold both together - sincerity with irony, hope with doubt - but often slips into a quiet longing from some higher vantage point that might finally make sense of everything.

That longing carries a risk. It can tempt us into believing that we could rise above language, above contradiction, above our situated human condition, and speak from some pure and stable place.

This is exactly what Lacan warns against with his famous line:

“There is no metalanguage.”

His point is harsh: there is no language outside language, no final framework that explains all frameworks, no way to escape the fractures we’re born into.

And yet - those fractures are not linguistic prisons. They are openings:

• Where Lacan sees enclosure, Whitehead sees process.
• Where Lacan sees structure, Whitehead sees becoming.
• Where Lacan sees no escape, Whitehead sees continual creative advance.

This essay is written in the spirit of rupture - not as rebellion, but as a gentle breach, a creative opening within the very fracture Lacan describes. It’s an attempt to show that even if we cannot climb above language, we can still transform it from within. Novelty is real. Creativity is real. New forms of meaning are always possible.

This is not a claim to mastery. It is a fidelity to our incompleteness. A metamodern way of speaking from the wound instead of pretending we can heal it from outside.

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Introduction

Lacan’s famous claim - “There is no metalanguage” - is one of those deceptively simple lines that reshaped entire eras of thought. To understand why, we need a clear sense of what “metalanguage” even means.

A metalanguage is basically a language above language - the fantasy that we could climb above all our messy human meanings and speak from a pure, final vantage point. It’s the dream of a perfect map, a perfect theory, a perfect clarity that stands outside the world’s contradictions.

But the idea goes deeper.

A metalanguage is the fantasy that we could somehow step outside our own messy human perspectives and speak from a place of perfect external clarity - as if we could climb a ladder and look down at meaning from above. A true metalanguage would promise:

• a final map of meaning
• a perfect, untainted vantage point
• a place where contradictions vanish
• a language that explains all languages
• a view of the system from outside the system

In everyday life, this shows up as the quiet hope for “objective truth without bias,” or “the final theory that makes it all make sense.” A God’s-eye dictionary. A cosmic commentator’s booth. A place beyond the mess.

Lacan’s point is cold and uncompromising:

We can never get there.

• We can never stand outside language.
• We can never step into pure perspective.
• We can never escape our own histories, wounds, or desires.

There is no final narrator.

There is no master framework.

There is no pure clarity waiting beyond the horizon.

We are always inside our own frame. We are always speaking from inside the wound.

This insight dismantles the illusion of mastery that modernism coveted and certain strands of metamodernism still desire - the hope that a final synthesis might one day pull the fragments together.

But Lacan stops at the fracture. He reveals the impossibility of transcendence, yet he leaves the wound untouched, inert, unhealed - a static condition of lack, a metaphysical cage.

Lacan stops at the deconstruction when exposing the impossibility of metalanguage by not following the fracture into its creative depths.

This is where Whitehead becomes indispensable. Where Whitehead ruptures Lacan from within that very wound.

Whitehead accepts the impossibility of metalanguage, yet refuses the stasis of Lacan’s symbolic order. Reality, for Whitehead, is not structural imprisonment but processual becoming. Creativity is metaphysical. Novelty is real. Transformation is woven into the bones of the universe.

Whitehead agrees that we never find a place outside the system - but he refuses to treat the system as static, closed, or final. For Whitehead, reality itself is becoming. Language is alive. Meaning evolves. Novelty is metaphysically real. The symbolic order is not a cage; it is a living, breathing, organism.

Metalanguage is impossible -

but metanoia is not.

From this angle, Lacan’s prohibition — “there is no metalanguage” — is not a dead end. It is the beginning of a creative rupture from his metaphysical cage to Whitehead’s metaphysical promise.

Not transcendence.

Not synthesis.

Not meta-mastery.

But the possibility of new language emerging from inside the very fractures Lacan describes.

• Metanoetic Process Language (Whitehead):
  language that turns, reorients, and becomes.

• Generative Language (post-Whitehead):
  language that births new meaning from within fracture.

• Autopoietic Language:
  language that self-organizes and evolves.

• Angiogenic Language:
  language that grows new pathways, new lifelines of meaning.

• Cruciform–Resurrectional Language:
  language that dies to old forms and rises in creative transformation.

This constellation forms a metamodern counter-movement to Lacan - not by offering a vantage point above language, but by showing language itself as alive, emergent, and capable of becoming beyond its prior limits.

We do not need a metalanguage.

We need the courage to create a new language, a new attitude, a new ending, from within the wound.

This essay then is about that rupture. To explore the metamodern, processual breach created by static language and static concepts.

To explore what it means to inhabit incompleteness rather than escape it.

To explore how rupture becomes generative when we follow Whitehead instead of stopping with Lacan.

Essentially, we do not need a metalanguage. We need the courage to create a new language, a new attitude, a new ending, from within the wound.

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Summary of Post-Whiteheadian Metanoetic Process Concepts / Language

Below are suggested hyperbolic terms to extend Whitehead's processually organic ideas into today's metamodern universe. It needs to be:

Generative
 - Birthing from within to reach beyond.
 - Language as natality, as creative explosion.

Autopoietic
 - Self-making, self-organizing, recursively evolving.
 - Language as a living system.

Angiogenic

 - Language as new blood-vessels forming,

 - As new pathways of meaning growing towards life.

Cruciform + Resurrectional

 - Theological language which dies to old forms,

 - That rises in new relational becomings,

 - That progressively unveils  in apocalyptic overtones.

 
Wound-Breakage + Fracture Healing

 - Language that forms through rupture - not after rupture.

 - Of wounds, personal failures, blown-up lives which resurrect

 
Inside-Out "Predator" Birthing (mythic-radical version)
 - A “hyperobject” version of radical re-creation
 - Of forced emergence under pressure
 - A radical birth from within or under existential intensity

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I. What Lacan’s “No Metalanguage” Really Means and Why It Matters

Lacan’s prohibition - “there is no metalanguage” - is not merely a linguistic observation; it is a metaphysical critique. It dismantles a very old dream: that we could step outside our own symbolic  reference frame and finally speak truth (as we think we known and understand it) from some utopian plane of perfection, with objectively, and as whole people.

For Lacan, (high-conceptual) language is not a neutral tool but the very structure in which subjectivity may form. The symbolic order precedes us. It shapes our desire, our concepts, our thought, our sense of self. And because it precedes us, we can never get outside of it to speak from a purer or more stable ground.

This is why metalanguage, in Lacan’s view, is a fantasy - a famously alluring and seductive one:

• the fantasy of personal or societal mastery
• the fantasy of integrative coherence
• the fantasy of complete understanding
• the fantasy of a “view from nowhere but everywhere”

Lacan doesn’t deny meaning; he denies final meaning.

He denies the dream of purity.

This denial has a specific gravity:

 - It collapses the Enlightenment project of total knowledge.

 - It destabilizes the modern hope for comprehensive systems.

 - It cautions metamodern integrationists who long for a “higher-level” synthesis.

To Lacan, every attempt at a metalanguage (or metaknowing) - every attempt to describe the whole from the outside - is simply another expression of the same symbolic limits we are trying to escape. We can never speak from above language. As captive language-bearers, we only ever speak from inside conceptual language’s fractures.

This is the heart of Lacan’s critique.

And in many ways, it is correct.

But Lacan’s insight is bound to a particular kind of metaphysics - a structural world where language forms a superjective grid: a looping, self-reinforcing matrix in which subjective and objective experience collapse into a single symbolic enclosure. Within this framework, the subject is defined by lack or incompleteness, and desire is perpetually deferred into the endless chain of signifiers. His “no metalanguage” becomes a sealed ontological chamber.

This is the moment where Whitehead enters - not as a contradiction, but as a rupture.

Superjective (clarification): In this context, a superjective framework is one that loops back upon itself, containing both subjective and objective experience within a single, self-generating symbolic order — a fractal of consciousness or meaning. By contrast, an abjective frame would be neither subjective nor objective, an expelled or exterior remainder with no position inside the symbolic circuit.

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Application for Section I -

The Theological Parallel - When Churches Become Symbolic Enclosures

This same structural closure shows up vividly in many evangelical and orthodox theologies. Their doctrinal systems function like Lacanian symbolic grids: tightly looped, internally self-reinforcing, and unable to imagine meanings beyond their own inherited forms.

Within these enclosures, God becomes trapped in the very frameworks paradoxically designed to reveal God. The doctrines become the cage:

• God is boxed into punitive schemas.
• Salvation becomes a juridical transaction.
• Violence, wrath, and terror are attributed to divine necessity.
• Eschatology becomes cosmic retribution rather than relational healing.
• Human diversity becomes a threat to theological purity.

In these systems, theology is not a living process but a closed circuit of signifiers. The “attributes of God” become fixed points in a rigid grid - omnipotence as coercion, sovereignty as domination, holiness as exclusion.

This produces a superjective theology - a looping, self-validating symbolic frame where every question collapses into the system’s own predetermined answers. The Bible becomes an epistemic fortress. God becomes indistinguishable from the doctrinal machinery meant to point to God.

Nothing new can enter.

Nothing relational can breathe.

Nothing living can grow.

This is what happens when theology mirrors Lacan’s metaphysics:

meaning is static, desire is lack, the symbolic is a cage.

Whitehead’s metaphysics ruptures this enclosure by revealing that reality - and therefore God - is fundamentally processual, relational, creative, and open-ended.

This theological example illustrates what this essay will show in every other domain:

static metaphysics produces closed systems;

process metaphysics produces generative possibilities...

It is no accident that such frameworks produce fear-based religions, punitive cosmologies, and existential terror disguised as orthodoxy. When language is static, God becomes static - and static gods always collapse into violence.

This is exactly the moment where Whitehead’s process metaphysics becomes not only a philosophical alternative, but a theological liberation.

~ continue to Part B of Essay I ~

Rupturing Lacan: Introduction

Psychoanalyst and  Theorist Jacques Lacan

Rupturing Lacan: Introduction

ESSAY I

by R.E. Slater

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist known as the "French Freud" for his influential rereading of Sigmund Freud's work. His major contribution was the theory that the unconscious is structured like a language, and he developed this idea into a theory of "structural psychoanalysis". Lacan's work, which influenced many other fields like philosophy, literary criticism, and film studies, emphasizes the role of language, symbols, and the "Other" in shaping human desire and identity.

Core Theory:

• Lacan's central idea is that the unconscious is not just a repository of repressed desires but is structured like language, which means it can be systematically analyzed.

Key Concepts:

• "The Other": In Lacanian theory, human desire is the "desire of the Other," meaning it is a desire for recognition and is shaped by what others desire.

• The Mirror Stage: A concept describing the moment a child recognizes its own reflection, which is crucial for forming the ego and a sense of a unified self.

• The Three Registers: Lacan used the concepts of the imaginary (images and relationships), the symbolic (language and law), and the real (what is unsymbolized) to describe human experience.

Psychoanalytic Practice:

• Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis uses techniques such as free association and dream analysis to explore a patient's linguistic patterns and symbols. The goal is to bring unconscious processes into conscious awareness and challenge societal norms to understand one's own authentic desires.

Influence:

• His work has been highly influential, particularly within Continental philosophy and various humanities disciplines. He was also a key figure in 20th-century French intellectual life and had a complex relationship with the psychoanalytic community, famously leading to his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).

Wikipedia - link to Jacques Lacan

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEOP) - Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan in 10 Minutes

Žižek and Lacanian Psychoanalysis:

How to Read Lacan

Jacques Lacan Explained:

Psychoanalysis, Mirror Stage & Unconscious

Comparisons between Whitehead and Lacan

The philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Jacques Lacan are not directly related by influence, but rather represent distinct intellectual traditions (process philosophy and psychoanalysis, respectively) that have been brought into conversation by later scholars, particularly in critical theory and continental philosophy.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)

Whitehead, a mathematician and philosopher, is best known as the founder of process philosophy, which views reality as a dynamic, ongoing process rather than a collection of static substances.

• Key Concepts: His metaphysics centers on "actual occasions" or "actual entities" as the fundamental elements of reality, which are moments of experience that constantly "prehend" (incorporate) the past to create novel future events.

• Focus: Whitehead's work is an attempt to conceptualize existence at a cosmic level, emphasizing relationality, the role of feeling, and the emergence of value in the universe. His 1927 book, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, focuses on perception and language as acts of symbolization.

• Tradition: He is generally associated with the realist tradition and American pragmatism.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

Lacan was a highly influential and controversial French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who reinterpreted the works of Sigmund Freud using structural linguistics and philosophy.

• Key Concepts: His work revolves around the tripartite ontology of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary orders.

• The Imaginary is the realm of images, identity, and identification.

• The Symbolic is the order of language, law, and social structures that introduces "lack" into the subject.

• The Real is that which resists symbolization and imagination.

• Focus: Lacan is concerned with the subject of science and the construction of human subjectivity within language, rather than the objects of scientific study.

Points of Theoretical Comparison

Later theorists and philosophers have identified several areas of intersection and contrast, primarily regarding language, symbolism, and metaphysics:

• Symbolism and the Signifier/Signified: Scholars have compared Whitehead's and Lacan's approaches to symbolism. One analysis suggests that Whitehead's view of symbolism, which questions the fixed binary of signifier/signified, poses a fundamental challenge to Lacan's theory, where the signifier always "slips" and points elsewhere. Whitehead allows for images to signify words and vice versa, a flexibility that contrasts with Lacan's more rigid structuralist framework in which the signifier dominates.

• Metaphysics and Subjectivity: While Lacanian theory concerns knowledge and the unconscious subject, Whitehead's theory attempts to conceptualize the existence and feeling of all entities in the cosmos.

• Poststructuralism: Whitehead's process philosophy has been explored for its potential influence on contemporary poststructuralism (e.g., Deleuze), a school of thought that also engages heavily with Lacanian psychoanalysis.

* * * * * * * *

Symbolism for Whitehead in Comparison

to Lacan, Hegel and Deleuze

article link

by Lastrevio

Dec 3, 2024

Today I finished reading “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect” by Alfred North Whitehead. In this essay, I plan to present the main ideas from his book, their implications, as well as how I think they can relate to the work of other thinkers like Lacan, Hegel, Lacan or Deleuze.

Whitehead defines symbolism as the process through which certain components of a subject’s experience elicit “consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience”¹. The former are what Whitehead calls “symbols” while the latter are what Whitehead calls “meaning”. ‘Symbolic reference’ is thus defined as the way in which one aspect of our experience elicits or triggers another aspect of our experience.

What is to be first pointed out is the way in which Whitehead overturns the traditional signifier/signified relationship from traditional structural linguistics. For Whitehead, any aspect of our experience can symbolize another aspect. Thus, just like a word can symbolize an image, so can an image symbolize a word. Whitehead gives the example of a poet: “if you are a poet and wish to write a lyric on trees, you will walk into the forest in order that the trees may suggest the appropriate words. Thus for the poet, the trees are the symbols and the words are the meaning. He concentrates on the trees in order to get at the words.”²

In traditional semiotics, we accustomed to think of words as signifiers and images as signifieds. This is the basis upon which Lacan forms his theory of the imaginary and the symbolic order. For Lacan, the symbolic order is composed of signifiers and the imaginary order of signifieds. But Whitehead questions this binary: why can’t an image signify a word? For a poet, the image of a tree brings up lyrics about trees, so it is surely possible.

We need to rigorously analyze the profound implications this has upon Lacan’s theory. For Lacan, the imaginary order is the order of identity and identification, where every component (signified) is equal to itself. The symbolic order is what introduces lack into the subject by way of which each signifier is a contradiction, since it is not equal to itself. ‘A signifier is that which is the subject for another signifier’, as Lacan said. The signifier always “slips” for Lacan, it points to somewhere else. The signifier always means something else other than itself (with the exception of the master-signifier, which is self-referential).

Whitehead would be tempted to question the very division between imaginary and symbolic. For Whitehead, anything can be a symbol (“signifier”) and anything can be a meaning (“signified”). Whitehead says: “The nature of their [the symbol and the meaning] relationship does not in itself determine which is symbol and which is meaning. There are no components of experience which are only symbols or only meanings”³.

Since any component of our experience points towards other components, thus any component of our experience having the potential to be a symbol (signifier), Whitehead may be tempted to deny the existence of the imaginary order altogether. This is related to him being the main representant of the philosophical movement known as “process philosophy”, the view that reality is a flux in constant change and becoming. For Whitehead, our experience is constantly moving and changing, and each component of our experience will automatically trigger other components of our experience, thus acting as a symbol. The existence of such a thing as the imaginary order would be a fallacy in our reasoning based on our a priori false assumption that there can ever be anything that is static and fixed, that does not point to something else. The image of a tree is not just a signified, we showed how it can very well signify the word ‘tree’ just as the word can signify the image. The signifying chain thus never stops, it is a process in a continuous state of becoming: meaning is perpetually deferred, with each new ‘signified’ acting as a signifier for the next triggered component of our experience.

Another flawed assumption of what Deleuze may have called our ‘common sense’ is that symbolization is a mathematical function, where a certain input (symbol) always leads to a single output (meaning). In other words, our common sense is tempted to assume that something can only mean one thing, that a symbol can not refer to multiple things at the same time. But Whitehead refutes this assumption in his analysis of the relationship between speech and writing:

“Often the written word suggests both the spoken word and also the meaning, and the symbolic reference is made clearer and more definite by the additional reference of the spoken word to the same meaning. Analogously we can start from the spoken word which may elicit a visual perception of the written word.”⁴

Whitehead suggests that a spoken word can signify both its written version and its associated image, just like a written word can signify both its spoken version and its associated image. And why can’t the image signify both the written and the spoken word? Thus we see how one symbol can have two (or more) meanings attached to it.

This forces us to rethink the very way we can visualize signifying chains. We aren’t dealing with straight lines, as we would if we were dealing with a 1-to-1 mathematical function. Nor are we dealing with a sort of tree, as we would if we were dealing with a mathematical function that is not 1-to-1. Instead, we aren’t dealing with a function at all, but instead with what in math is known as a multi-function, where not only can the same output have multiple inputs, but one single input can have multiple outputs. Our computer science analogy is thus neither a linked list, nor a binary tree, but a directed graph:

Press enter or click to view image in full size

We can use the image above as a visual analogy for how symbolism works for Whitehead. In it, each letter is either a symbol, a meaning or both. It is a symbol if an arrow points out of it and a meaning if an arrow points into it. For example, A is a symbol for B and B is a meaning for A. But H and I are both symbols and meanings for each other. And H has two different meanings: G and I.

This view of language is rhizomatic, in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari. In “A Thousand Plateaus”, D&G critique Chomsky’s hierarchical model of language, instead providing as an alternative a non-hierarchical, rhizomatic model for how language and meaning in general operate.

But symbolism does not stop at language. For Whitehead, perception itself is a form of symbolic reference. This is in contrast to [the philosopher] Hegel, who viewed perception as a sublation of sense-certainty. The difference between sense-certainty and perception is that sense-certainty provides a flux of unmediated, ‘unprocessed’ and chaotic sense data, the unfiltered flux of sense information that is coming in through our five senses. Perception, on the other hand, implies the work of reason and memory as well in order to “make sense” of that sense data. For example, when I look next to me, I see a blob of colors in various shapes and sizes, this is sense-certainty. But I engage not in sense-certainty, but in perception, when I look at that undifferentiated chaos of colors and shapes and I say “this is a chair!”. The act of perceiving a chair implies classifying and labelling an input of sense-data into a certain category that I can recall through memory.

For Hegel, perception evolves out of the sublation of sense-certainty. For Whitehead, on the other hand, it is sense-certainty which is a symbol for perception. Thus, just as the word ‘tree’ can symbolize the image of the tree, or how the image of the tree can symbolize the word ‘tree’ for the poet, so does sense-certainty symbolize perception, since it is one component of our experience triggering another.

Whitehead divides experience into two types: presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. Presentational immediacy refers to the vivid, immediate sensory experience of the external world, as mediated through sense-data (such as colors, shapes, sounds, etc.). Causal efficacy refers to the perception of how past or present events influence the present experience, emphasizing the underlying forces or relations shaping reality. Presentational immediacy is static and fixed, it provides us an image of the present outside of temporal relations. Causal efficacy is at the basis of Whitehead’s process philosophy since it puts the present moment in relation to the past, as an effect resulting from a different event in the past.

Thus, we can distinguish between four types of symbolic reference:

1. From presentational immediacy to another presentational immediacy (association)

2. From causal efficacy to another causal efficacy (reason)

3. From presentational immediacy to causal efficacy (perception)

4. From causal efficacy to presentational immediacy (imagination, memory, etc.)

Thus perception (the third one) is only one type of symbolic reference, where our presentational immediacy (sense data, or what Hegel called “sense-certainty”) refers to, or symbolizes, the causal relationship between that sense data and the object in our experience that triggered it. But we are just as justified in thinking that causal efficacy itself can trigger a form of presentational immediacy: for example, in the acts of imagination and memory. In these cases, an image in the mode of causal efficacy (for example, the way the rain touches your skin) triggers an image in the mode of presentational immediacy (for example, a memory of how you liked rain as a child): only the latter here is a ‘thing’, the former that triggered it is a relationship between things. Thus, Whitehead implicitly challenges Hegel’s teleological and linear development in The Phenomenology of Spirit (although without mentioning his name). Just as Hegel goes from presentational immediacy to causal efficacy in the creation of the concept of perception, we are just as justified in going backwards: from perception back to sense-data.

While Whitehead does not mention Hegel in his book, he does mention Hume and Kant with the purpose of critiquing them. Whitehead mentions how Hume and Kant were anti-realists in regards to causal efficacy, assuming that causal efficacy is either an effect of habituation (Hume) or a product of our mind’s categories (Kant). But Whitehead insists that causal efficacy is in fact the default mode of experience, and that presentational immediacy requires an active effort of our mind, not the other way around. Whitehead gives the example of the perception of a chair: “We look up and see a coloured shape in front of us, and we say, — there is a chair. But what we have seen is the mere coloured shape”⁵. Whitehead mentions how a trained painter may not have immediately jumped to the perception of a chair, and may have instead remained in the mode of presentational immediacy to observe the colors: “He might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful colour and a beautiful shape”⁶. Whitehead explains that “my friend the artist, who kept himself to the contemplation of colour, shape and position, was a very highly trained man, and had acquired this facility of ignoring the chair at the cost of great labour”⁷. For Whitehead, remaining at the level of presentational immediacy without triggering the mode of causal efficacy through the act of perception requires an active effort from the part of the subject. It is in the subject’s instinct to engage in perception and thus move to the mode of causal efficacy. Whitehead gives the example of a dog as well: “if we had been accompanied by a puppy dog, in addition to the artist, the dog would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such. Again, if the dog had refrained from such action, it would have been because it was a welltrained dog”⁸.

In the spirit of process philosophy, Whitehead views everything as relational: the present can only be analyzed in relation to its history. Whitehead thus demonstrates how presentational immediacy is not in our ‘natural instinct’ when it comes to not only humans, but to animals and plants as well. When a sunflower moves itself to face the sun, it does not engage in the mode of presentational immediacy to form a static and fixed image of how reality is in the present, instead it reacts to the environment, engaging in an act of perception, instinctively moving from presentational immediacy to causal efficacy. The opposite act, when we move from causal efficacy to presentational immediacy (as we do in the acts of imagination or memory) require a more conscious effort, the repression of our instincts, and thus exist only in more advanced organisms such as humans, being more limited in plants and animals.

Whitehead uses this insight to critique Hume’s anti-realism towards causality. Hume treats sense-data (impressions) as the sole foundation of perception, dismissing any intrinsic connection to external causality. Hume denies that impressions can demonstrate the “real existence” or causal relations of objects, seeing causality as a habit of thought rather than an immediate perception. Whitehead argues that this dismissal rests on a faulty assumption that sense-data exist in isolation. He posits that causal efficacy — our perception of the influence and conformity of the present to the past — is an integral and direct component of experience, not a secondary habit or category, present even in animals and plants.

The final thing I want to point out that stuck in my mind after reading his book is Whitehead’s insistence on immanence. In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze, Whitehead also rejects looking for sense in the ‘depths’ or in the ‘heights’, as Deleuze would have put it. For Deleuze, sense is a surface effect. Whitehead, in a similar fashion, defines symbolism as the act of purely going from one content of our experience to another, rejecting the symbolization of transcendental concepts that we can not experience such as “God”. For Whitehead, an image can symbolize a word, a word can symbolize an image, an image can symbolize another image, a word can symbolize another word, a written word a spoken word, etc.; but all these examples are examples in which one aspect of our phenomenological, conscious experience refers back to another aspect of it. There is no unreachable “noumenon”, as in Kant’s transcendental idealism; nor a Kantian division between ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’, where only the latter symbolizes concepts outside of our immediate experience. Instead, Whitehead’s symbolism is grounded in the immediacy of lived experience, where meaning arises through relational processes within the flow of reality itself. By refusing to posit a hidden depth or transcendent beyond, Whitehead invites us to view sense-making as an emergent, immanent activity that remains fully embedded in the world of experience.

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REFERENCES:

1: Alfred North Whitehead, “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect”, pg. 8

2: ibid., pg. 12

3: ibid., pg. 10

4: ibid., pg. 11

5: ibid., pg. 2

6: ibid., pg. 3

7: ibid.

8: ibid., pg. 4