I’m finding Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun difficult to read but there are some remarkable insights in it about the precarity of signification. If I understand correctly her argument is that melancholia is constituted through a breakdown in reference. There is an experienced decline in the capacity of words to be strung together in ways which give form to affective inner experience. The words are still coherent. The person does not lose the ability to speak. But the sense in which they experience words as being about something means they might lose the desire to speak:
Persons in despair become hyperlucid by nullifying negation. A signifying sequence, necessarily an arbitrary one, will appear to them as heavily, violently arbitrary; they will think it absurd, it will have no meaning. No word, no object in reality will be likely to have a coherent concatenation that will also be suitable to a meaning or referent. The arbitrary sequence perceived by depressive persons as absurd is coextensive with a loss of reference. The depressed speak of nothing, they have nothing to speak of: glued to the Thing (Res), they are without objects
They are trapped by the overwhelming weight of their melancholy investments. But their losses cannot be constituted as psychic objects because the melancholic subject refuses the originating loss. If we use signifiers to cope with that loss, refusing the loss means refusing the signifier. We can’t use words to stand in for the Thing because we remain caught in its slipstream. The words feel empty because they cease to bind to internal psychic material. It’s only once we accept losses that we can begin to constitute them as internal objects through signification. In their absence the affective force of these psychic occurrences finds involuntary expression because the feeling literally has to go somewhere:
Depressed speech, built up with absurd signs, slackened, scattered, checked sequences, conveys the collapse of meaning into the unnameable where it founders, inaccessible and delightful, to the benefit of affective value riveted to the Thing. Denial of negation deprives the language signifiers of their role of making sense for the subject. While they have a signification in themselves, such signifiers are experienced by the subject as empty. That is because they are not bound to semiotic imprints (drive-related representatives and affect representations). It follows that such archaic psychic inscriptions, once they are set free, can be used in projective identification as quasi-objects. They give rise to acting out, which replaces language in depressive persons (see chapter 3). The surge of mood, up to the stupor that invades the body, is a return of acting out upon the very subject: such overwhelming mood is an action that is not taken on account of the denial that involves the signifier
What I take from this is a sense of how precarious signification ultimately is. It identifies the psychic economy underpinning signification as something which is, in a sense, achieved. Furthermore, this is done under certain conditions. Her structural analysis of melancholia suggests one mode of failure. What are the others? What role might media technology play in these other modes? My gut feeling increasingly is that language models might be breaking language in a subtle but profound way which only French psychoanalysis has the intellectual resources to begin to conceptualise.
What Kristeva talks about as ‘hyperlucidity’ feels important here. What happens to language when it is no longer enrolled in “making sense for the subject”. When the words can be strung together in situationally coherent but ultimately empty ways. For avoidance of doubt I’m not suggesting melancholics are like language models (or that language models are melancholic!) but that Kristeva’s structural analysis helps elucidate what might be at stake when the binding function of language breaks down.
If you leave
When I go
Find me
In the shallows, in the shallowsLying on my back
Lying on my back
Lying on my back
I’ll beWatching stars collide
Watching stars collide
Watching stars collide
Watching stars collide
Mark Carrigan 