What is a Master-signifier?

S1 → S2

To accept a given nodal point is to retroactively confer meaning and significance on a cross-section of previously existing ‘free-floating’

signifiers’.

Being ‘framed’

In the US television show ‘Boston Legal’, an older, seasoned attorney gives advice to a younger lawyer he has just defeated at trial: ‘Never let your opponent frame your argument’.

This means that I can make a perfectly coherent and compelling argument, but still be defeated by someone able to frame the articulation between the component parts of my discourse.

Because I do

If one is to interrogate one’s own deepest values, and to press on with question after question as to ‘why?’, as to what lies behind, what justifies the single most important belief we claim to have – whether it is a spiritual, an emotional, a political commitment – this chain of values will ultimately lead to an empty ‘because I do’, ‘because it is’.

Because I say so

The potentially endless succession of words seemingly stops here, with a master-signifier, an “idiotic” signifier which can never be fully explained.

This is a signifier which must not be relativized, and – as in the mother’s response to the disobedient & questioning child: ‘because I say so’ – must obeyed.

Descending from above

In the 3rd movement of Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 a beautiful introductory melody, played by the winds, is joined by another, played by oboe and clarinet.

At first this 2nd melody seems to be an accompaniment to the 1st, but after a while we realize that this first is in fact the accompaniment to the 2nd which ‘descends from above’ (Zizek).

Descending from above

What we have here is a seemingly dominant element – a ‘what comes before’ - that becomes articulated within a broader, as of yet unseen frame, which retrospectively determines its meaning.

It is not simply that the 2nd motif retrospectively converts the 1st into a variant of it, but that both are ultimately variants of another, as of yet ungiven theme.

A 2nd reframing motiff

In Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ we have a similar procedure: a ‘bird’s eye’ view of a the burning town. Initially this appears as an unclaimed point of view, but gradually one then another bird enters the scene.

The birds which originally appeared to be the subject of the shot now provide its point of view.

The making of the ‘off-screen’

We have something analogous here to the Mozart example: the fact of a second motif that re-marks, reframes anew, an initial motif.

We have, more importantly, an imposition of a frame from outside.

Crucially, in ‘The Birds’, the ultimate point of view is not that of the birds, but that of an off-screen space itself.

The effect of the not-present

This “off-screen space”, this implied frame of reference that is not itself explicitly present - or given any concrete presence - gives a heightened aesthetic effect.

The ‘divine’ aspect of Mozart’s music: to imply that any given musical motif only stands in for another, as yet unheard one that is greater than anything we could imagine.

Absence of substance

The Hitchcockian ‘suspense’ lies in what is left out of the scene, what does not happen; this other place or possibility for which what we do see stands in.

Part of the key to what we are trying to grasp here lies with the idea that it is precisely the lack of a fixable, substantive content that makes a certain element operate as a master signifier.

Why meaning is possible

We have thus something tantamount to an ‘empty space’, a ‘ground’, which enables the inscription of all other marks, without itself being a meaning, a signified. Without such an operation, meaning cannot emerge.

The master signifier (S1) is just such a ‘ground’, a signifier-without-a-signified which always supplements the chain of ‘knowledge’ (S2) and makes it possible.

The logic of the re-mark

In ‘the universe of the signifier’, we need at least one element that represents the place of inscription for all other elements.

Without the inscription, within the series of elements, of an element which re-marks their very place of inscription, the distance between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ cannot be established (Zizek).

This element holds meaning together, articulates the component parts.

Sliding of signifieds

We know about the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified.

For psychoanalysis this means that the signifier often determines meaning, that there is often a sliding of signifieds under the signifier (jokes, slips of the tongue) where the pun or ambiguity of a word leads us away from expected meaning to a different destination.

From one signifier to another

If I want to work out the meaning of a new signifier, I cannot access its signified automatically, but I need rather relate it to other signifiers (look in a dictionary, etc).

The signified is thus always potentially slipping out of reach, escaping any attempt to keep it fixed.

Lacan however is not advocating the impossibility of any fixity of meaning, an unending fluidity of unconnected differences.

Point de capiton There is something like a point de caption, a

quilting-point which fixes, retrospectively, the meaning of whole chains of signifiers.

Such a point of fixity arrests the sliding of the signifieds under the signifiers, although, like an upholstery button, some degree of movement is still possible.

The existence of points de caption never produce an eternally stable meaning, only a relative and temporary – albeit necessary – fixation.

The identity of an ideological field

“What creates and sustains the identity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its positive content?”

“the multitude of floating signifiers, proto-ideological elements is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain nodal point which quilts them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning” (Zizek).

Different ecologisms

The meaning of ‘ecologism’ is not the same in every ideological system but shifts btw several possible meanings: feminist ecology (the exploitation of nature is masculine); socialist ecology (capitalism is to blame for exploitation of nature); conservative ecology (urging us to go back to the cycles of nature). (Zizek)

Different ecologisms Ideology is the struggle over which of these

elements not only is defined by its relationship with the others but also allows this relationship, is that medium through which they are organized.

It is the struggle not only to be one of those free-floating ideological signifiers whose meaning is ‘quilted’ or determined by another but also that signifier which gives those others their meaning, to which they must ultimately be understood to be referring.

Totalizing the field

The idea of a signifier that that totalizes an ideological field, which constructs an identity by connecting free-floating ideological elements can lead to a misunderstanding that this signifier is itself an ‘essential’ fixed point of reference, a point of supreme plenitude of meaning.

The status of the nodal point is truly paradoxical.

The tautological element This nodal point is not a point of excessive

density of meaning, a perfect guarantee of meaning. On the contrary, its role is purely structural, its nature is purely performative.

Zizek: “The crucial step in the analysis of an ideological edifice is to detect behind the dazzling splendour of the element that holds it together (God, country, Class) this self-referential, tautological, performative operation”.

Privileged signifiers

In a critique of Derrida, Žižek (1994b) warns that one cannot reduce the Lacanian symbolic “to the balanced economy of exchange” (p. 195).

The reason for this is that such a system inevitably yields one or more privileged signifiers; not all signifiers, we might say, are equal in such an economy.

Disproportionate values

We need move beyond the classic Structuralist conception of a differential system of components to an appreciation that certain key ideas – the motifs of a given ideology for instance - attain a disproportionate hold upon us.

How are we able to account for the fact that certain signifiers appear to maintain a massively amplified ‘value’?

Hollow markers

Any symbolic or social system will yield certain prioritized values and notions.

These are the anchoring-points, the apparent fixities – the exceptional signifiers - around which a great many other signifiers coalesce and come to gain meaning, a semblance of fixity.

The irony is that these signifiers are ‘undecidable’, they can’t be totalized.

A ‘navigational principle’

Ultimately there is no natural primacy to these markers – they remain forever hollow, insubstantial, empty.

This is less important than the fact that the social or symbolic system in question needs an unquestioned assumption as a centring point, their navigational principle - their ‘magnetic north’- in terms of which all surrounding signifiers gain a sense, a location, an identity.

Positivization of a void

Any notion of structure, far from being simply differential, a balanced matrix of permutations, necessarily gives rise to a ‘Master Signifier’, a structural function that power gets hold of, but which is in itself empty, devoid of meaning, a pure positivization of a void (Dolar, p. 87).

Undecidability

Such Master Signifiers are not easily contested, refuted, or denied because they play a crucial role in fixing meanings, in providing co-ordinates for surrounding signifiers.

These Master Signifiers emerge precisely at those points where meaning can never be fully determined.

Undecidability

Such Master Signifiers are not easily contested, refuted, or denied because they play a crucial role in fixing meanings, in providing co-ordinates for surrounding signifiers.

They emerge precisely at those points where meaning can never be fully determined. It is no coincidence that undecidability and primary signification occur at the same place.

Mediation of empty signifiers

Society lacks an ultimate signifier with which to make it complete:

[N]othing positive can be said about the ‘truth’ of society except that it is incomplete – in Lacanian terms, that there is a ‘lack in the symbolic Other’. Thus, society exists as a totality only insofar as the social subject posits its existence as such through the mediation of empty signifiers (Glynos, p. 197).

Exceeding its reasons

Being in love provides an example of the totalizing effect of that element which itself cannot be totalized.

The reason why I love this person is never fully rationalized by the string of signifiers which follow on from this fact; being in love is itself a self-justifying fact which always exceeds the ‘reasons why I love them’.

Exceeding its reasons

Lacanian theory is attentive to the moment in which such a lack - the inability to articulate a final justification, a definitive substance - switches over into something quite different, into that which (potentially) lies behind the meaning of everything, that which grounds me, providing a coherent social role and significance for my existence.

Incapacity to full meaning

A failure, in short – an inability to explain – is thus translated into the positive condition of our existence as types of meaningful social subjects.

As Glynos (2001) puts it: epistemological incapacity is hence transformed into the positive ontological condition of society and of our social subjectivity.

Incapacity to full meaning

This is the conversion of undecidability of the signified into an exceptional signifier:

‘Nation’, ‘Democracy’ and other causes stand for ‘something’ about which we are never sure what exactly, it is – the point is, rather, that by identifying with Nation we signal our acceptance of what others accept, with a Master signifier which serves as the rallying point for others (Žižek, 1996, p. 142).

Constitutive lack

A master-signifier resembles a Janus head: it is presented as a consideration of supreme meaning, yet it is also an empty name lacking substantive content.

The nodal point quilts all the ideological moments of a signifying chain together – it hegemonizes a field of potential meanings – and yet it can be shown to be an impossibility, a lack covered by a mere word, a signifier.

Constitutive lack

It functions as a point of supreme meaning, fullness, objectivity (natural objectivity) and moral value (nature’s intrinsic value).

“The nodal point is presented as a point of supreme density of meaning (instrinsic value, ethical priority, etc.) while, in reality, it only masks an ‘underlying’ constitutive lack, thus masking the split and unstable character of [the ideological formation]” Stavrakakis.

Meaning to come

We are hence dealing with a “meaning to come” which although it is never fully actualized, functions as if it is already effective.

So, by the time ‘God’ or ‘Nation’ or any other master-signifier works as a rallying-point for a group, it already effectively co-ordinates their activity, consolidates them as a society even though each of them might indeed have differing notions as to what ‘God’ or ‘Nation’ might in fact be.

What others identify with

What is being identified with is not some concrete image, some delimited object of knowledge, but – indeed, a meaning-to-come - that which others accept and identify with.

Identification with a Master Signifier is an odd sort of identification, it is neither direct nor with anything substantial. It is not an identification with any concrete thing; it is rather identifying with something that others identify with.

Precipitate identification

We are plugged into a similar social network by virtue of the fact of identifications with the indefinite, always open Master Signifier that others are also identified with.

Hence the notion of a precipitate identification that involves not a direct relation with an object, but a relation with an inconclusive (Master) signifier that others have also taken on and have done so as a means of avoiding the uncertainty of their (our) social being.

S1 & big Other

So, how do we pass from the dispersed, inconsistent collection of signifiers to the big Other qua consistent order?

By supplementing the inconsistent series of signifiers with a Master-Signifier, S1, a signifier of pure potentiality of meaning-to-come.

By this precipitation (the intervention of an ‘empty’ signifier which stands for meaning-to-come) the symbolic field is completed, changed into a closed order.