Symbolicity, or the Immanent Melancholy of Symbols: Hegel, Santner, Lacan and Others..

In Hegel, the emergence of the symbol is also the disappearance of the Thing in its immediacy. Once light becomes a symbol of Divinity rather than divinity itself, it only points towards a divinity which is not itself present, or is only present through the proxy of the symbol. The symbol signifies the thing rather than directly being the thing. The Thing itself has slipped away and left the consolation of the symbol.

The distinction between the symbol and the thing, the symbol and its meaning, has exercised and vexed much modern literature and latterly psychoanalysis. In particular, the way that, after symbol and thing separate, the symbol or signifier becomes an enigmatic object of interest in its own right.

Eric Santner, scholar of German literature, whose work is deeply informed by a psychoanalytic set of references and assumptions, gives two examples of this separation, one ontogenetic and one historical.

Ontogenetically, what the Mother gives the child, eg food, is always a sign of love, but never the Thing itself. The food etc is always the symbolic proxy of an x which is never directly present, but whose enigmatic message is dimly sensed in the material signs consumed by the child.

Historically, we are always surrounded by the signs of now extinct forms of life, written or material, which confront us as so many ‘hieroglyphs in the desert’ (a phrase he borrows from Lacan). Again, these are enigmatic signifiers of that which is not fully present.

Santner explains that the foremost property of these signs is that ‘significity’ exceeds meaning. This neologism, “significity”, indicates that we are aware that something signifies without fully understanding what. Things often have the flavour of “being symbolic” without us having any access to what it is they symbolise or signify.

There are two relevant quotations here, both cited in William Tindall’s book The Literary Symbol. Firstly, from Auden: “A Symbol is felt to be such before any possible meaning is consciously recognised; i.e., an object or event which is felt to be more important than reason can immediately explain.”

Put another way, symbols often have the quality of ‘being symbolic’ prior to any symbolised content. It is this quality which can be called ‘symbolicity’. The second quotation is from D.H. Lawrence (on Moby Dick:) “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly”

So it is that the quality of ‘being symbolic’ and the quality symbolised do not simply fit together. Again, Slavoj Zizek gives the example of Jaws, which is clearly ‘symbolic’ but without clearly ‘meaning’ something in particular.

Tindall goes on to say that Lawrence is finally ‘unable to resist’ positing a meaning: ‘he [Moby Dick] is the deepest blood-being of the white race’. At this point it becomes clear that when you come to ‘name’ the symbol like this there’s always a sense of disappointment, because, ‘no, that’s not it’. We immediately feel that something has been lost in ‘naming’ the meaning, but not because it is the ‘wrong’ interpretation. Any naming would have been ‘wrong’.  The ‘being symbolic’ is still there, a silent, magnetic remainder even after the thing, the meaning has been (apparently) disclosed.

For Santner and others it is this – this magnetic remainder - that drew us to the symbol in the first place. There is a sense in which we respond to the ‘symbolicity’, more than we are seduced by the short-change of its ‘meaning’.

Before saying more on this ‘remainder’, let us return to Tindall:

“At the end of his Comedy Dante, guided now by Saint Bernard, contemplates an enormous rose, bathed in radiance and attended by angelic bees. This white flower with yellow centre seems a garden of concentric petals within which Beatrice, the Virgin, and all the redeemed occupy suitable chairs. Penultimate, that rose is the most impressive and the most efficacious of “shadowy prefaces,” as Dante calls them, to his ultimate vision of circles and light.”

The Symbol, it seems, frequently has this ‘prefatory’ character. The symbol is this shadowy preface. The presence of the symbolic, even prior to revealed content, holds open the possibility of something to come. Because it is the ‘shadowy preface’ and not the Thing itself, it opens an obscure expectancy which is disappointed by any concrete content. Symbols, perhaps, before they symbolise anything, embody this expectancy.

 At the same time, in this reading at least, symbols also embody loss, in that the eventual content never equals the initial (the promise of) ‘symbolicity’. The surplus of symbolicity over content means that an emptiness always adheres to the content, a sense of ‘that’s not it’. And the fascination with the Symbolic – i.e. ‘being symbolic’ as opposed to symbolised content – is an adherence to this loss and with the symbol’s immanent melancholy.

We might then speculate whether what draws us to symbols, irrespective of their content, is their ability to give body to these affects: loss, expectancy, desire, and the curious commingling of the three. We are very close to Walter Benjamin on allegory here, for whom it is the form of a certain figurative language which is expressive rather than the content.

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A final (for the time being) thought. I’m sceptical of the psychoanalytic example Santner provides. He - or Lacan – seems to assume that the child experiences things already as “signs”. That is, might the child experience the Mother’s milk – or whatever it may be – not as a sign of Love but as love itself, in the same way that Hegel says the Zoroastrians relate to light. There is not some inaccessible ‘Love’ for which the child only has a series of signs pointing backwards to the concealed Thing. Rather is there a Love immanent to its multiple manifestations, like Spinoza’s God.