Cesarotti’s essay on Macpherson, Ossian, and the construction of the folk compilation foregrounds the proleptic – i.e. historically retroactive – effects of the relation between a ‘cultural production’ and the identities produced. My review of Cesarotti’s narrative to this extent concluded with the observation that though Ossian was assembled according to problematic and by no means self-evident criteria the principal effect nevertheless was of having discovered (in the past) that which was in fact created (in the present). This effect was tentatively attributed to the institutional function of the ‘author’ and the adjustments required to accommodate the folk text to the proper format; but what was not stressed enough was that it was Macpherson’s project of compiling a true Ossian that necessitated, from the start, both the assembling of texts and the subsequent concealment of their sources beneath an author-ized proper name.
In this sense, then, the folk text was less hijacked by the ‘author function’ than summoned by it. After all, before accusations of inauthenticity could become possible, it was Macpherson’s self-devised project to track down, archive, select, and assemble texts under a configuration that was, for all intents and purposes, decidedly alien to them. The goal, from the very beginning, was to extract from their distribution an apparent unity and resolve the difference with the cohesion of a bound book. (Should the oddity of this project be now lost upon us – indeed, it had not been attempted before Macpherson, and when it was, it found sure resistance – it is only because it has proved so enduring.) The eventual review of the logic of the compilation furthermore revealed, and quickly naturalized, the political and racial conditions determining its configuration. Thus, as I noted before, neither the compilation of the text nor the construction of the bard as its representative can be considered an unmediated, organic expression of a people; on the contrary, both the project in its conception and the subsequent legitimizing of its criteria effected a concealment of the popular sources through the very process of their compiling.
Two seemingly paradoxical effects can accordingly be distilled from this archival operation: on the one hand, a proleptic image of the archetype as antedating its production; on the other hand, the concealment or exclusion of popular sources previously associated with the personage (and the folk works bound loosely through it). Together, these two, general effects exalted one people’s past at the direct expense of the other’s. –The compilation, in other words, applied to existent peoples, through the figure of the past, an imaginary segregation of genealogies; which is to also say, it applied to the past, through the figuring of the present, decidedly contemporary tensions and oppositions. With the same stroke that assembled Ossian, his history was made to unroll behind him.
This is not to suggest, however, that the pasts of the peoples in question were simply in a state of idyllic indisturbance before Macpherson’s intrusion; nor is it to suggest that the popular genealogies concealed by the compilation suffered an intractable obfuscation. On the contrary, Macpherson’s compilation served to expose history as the effect of extant transformations’ resistance to new ones. Indeed, the Hibernian Ossian, as the problematic case or insufferable exception, took on an impossible, and symptomatic, qualification: namely, ‘the counterfeit of an alteration’. –But even so, it received a name. And these names, with their determinate features (counterfeit, forgery, imitation) and resolute untimeliness (that is, coming always before or after the ‘proper’ era), compile (according to altogether different rules) a ‘counter-archive’ of sorts.
II.
The purpose of the following explication is thus to extend the configuration of the compilation to types other than the text or poetic personage; for, as will soon become clear, the archetype over which Macpherson labored for so long bears roots, as a method, in domains extraneous to his own. With respect to the literary archetype, Duns Scotus comes to mind; also, the pragmatist Charles Pierce, who, as a self-declared “Scotistic realist,” conceived of personages, and perhaps language in general, as a field of ‘assemblages’. But what holds these assembled elements together has always proved difficult to identify. For Scotus and Pierce, a final touch, of sorts, is all that’s needed – a ‘contraction’ or ‘concretion’, respectively. For Pierce, “The multiple formalities of an entity are contracted in a process of individuation, which seals the haecceitas [‘thisness’] of the individual. ‘The formality of man,’ then, ‘is not a whole being or res. It is a complex formality joined with a principle of individuation and a host of accidents, all of which are formalities. Socrates … is not a formality. He is a res, composed of many formalities, each distinct from the other with some higher formalities containing some lower ones in composed formalities’” (James I. Wimsatt, “John Duns Scotus, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Canterbury Pilgrims,” Speculum 71, No. 3 (July 1996), 633–645: 636, quoting Robert P. Godwin, “Charles Sanders Peirce: A Modern Scotist?” New Scholasticism 35 (1961), 48–509: 490-491). But what is the principle or force that gathers particular features into/as an entity? “Contraction,” after all, “leaves an unresolved entity” and “it is this that makes Charles Peirce complain that ‘even Scotus is too nominalistic’ [quoted in Jeffrey R. DiLeo, “Peirce’s Haecceitism,” Transactions 27 (1991), 79-109: 83] in his theory of contraction,” (Wimsatt 641) meaning that Scotus, though ostensibly a realist, in the end resorts to the nominalist creed of withholding from universals and abstract concepts an existence other than that imbued by a name.
“But Peirce does subscribe to a version of haecceitas. For Scotus, haecceity ‘is the final or ultimate reality of the being …[It] restricts the specific form, matter, or composite thing and completes it by sealing the being as “this” being.’ [DiLeo, “Peirce’s Haecceitism,” p. 91] Peirce comments approvingly that according to Scotus haecceitas ‘is a peculiar element, a blind insistency, by which the nature crowds itself into a place in the world’ [quoted in DiLeo, 92]. However, Peirce presents this haecceity not as a formality but as experience, reactive event, with ‘hereness and nowness its essence’ [quoted in DiLeo, 93]. Peirce states variously that ‘existence (not reality) and individuality are essentially the same thing,’ that ‘[e]verything whose identity consists in a continuity of reaction is an individual,’ and that haecceity is the ‘element of existence which … by an inward force of identity, manifesting itself in the continuity of its reactions through time and space, is distinct from everything else’ [quoted in DiLeo, 95, 96]. Rejecting static formalities, he sees in bare event the essence of existence (to be distinguished from reality) and therefore of individuality” (Wimsatt 641).
Leaving aside the question of whether Pierce has simply “replaced the mysterious notion of contraction by an equally mysterious process of concretion” (John Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce’s Relation to John Duns Scotus (Seattle, Wash., 1963), p. 142, quoted in Wimsatt, 643), for Peirce, the concretion (a “complex formality joined with a principle of individuation and a host of accidents, all of which are formalities”) is ultimately in the service of “an inward force of identity.” However, insofar as identity is given as identical to its persistence, the inward ‘vitalist’ force – which replaces the (nominalist) name or (Scotist) seal as the concreting principle – renders moot the possibility of an identity persisting across changing features. Indeed, once ‘continuity of reaction’ defines ‘individuality’ (‘distinction from everything else’), the ‘formalities’ previously comprising the ‘formality’ now appear more as features attached to an inexplicable essence – a force – that admits little determination of its own. Likewise, if it is inward force that determines individuality, then the features that ostensibly differentiate one individuality from another must become, in effect, either interchangeable or, paradoxically, immaterial.
In other words, we must look elsewhere for a solution to the nominalist/concretion dilemma. This solution, moreover, must take into account the kinds of effects identified in the Ossian compilation: that is, it must be able to theorize identity – though not necessarily the subject – as a ‘process’ or malleable configuration. Žižek, as it were, treats a similar question, in relation to the more contemporary doctrine of descriptivism (which in many ways extends or rethinks the nominalist position). Indeed, for Žižek, “The basic problem of antidescriptivism is to determine what constitutes the identity of the designated object beyond the ever-changing cluster of descriptive features – what makes an object identical-to-itself even if all its properties have changed” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1999), 94).
His approach to this question, though informed by a combination of Hegelian and Lacanian theories concerning the ‘universal’ and the ‘signifier’, respectively, is nonetheless unique in its attempt to incorporate a theory of power. What constitutes identity, if only in the domain of ideology, he claims, is the point de capiton, “the ‘rigid designator’, which totalizes an ideology by bringing to a halt the metonymic sliding of its signified” (Žižek 99). This point or rigid designator, however, is “not a point of supreme density of Meaning, a kind of Guarantee which, by being itself excepted from the differential interplay of elements, would serve as a stable and fixed point of reference. On the contrary, it is the element which represents the agency of the signifier within the field of the signified” (Žižek 99). What he means by this, presumably, is that the rigid designator is not external to the set of features it represents, nor is it excepted from the metonymic play to which all designators are subject. Therefore, it is an element to the same extent as those it binds together: it is, thus, “to put it in Hegelian terms, the species which is its own universal kind” (Žižek 89). Žižek, moreover, attributes this ‘fold’ in the set to an act of sheer force, a (Schmittian-Agambenian) sovereign decision: “The crucial step in the analysis of an ideological edifice is thus to detect, behind the dazzling splendour of the element which holds it together (‘God’, ‘Country’, ‘Party’, ‘Class’ …) this self-referential, tautological, performative operation” (Žižek 99).
The element holding the edifice together does not, of course, consider itself a mere element; rather, it conceives of itself as having produced the set of which it is a part. In this sense, then, a temporal or historical dimension is integral to its claim to exception. As we saw with respect to the Ossian compilation, features appear as symptoms of a past that preexist its construction. Indeed, working off of Lacan’s well known claim that “The symptom initially appears to us a trace, which will only ever be a trace” (Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Cambridge, 1988, p. 159, quoted in Žižek 55), Žižek writes:
“Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively – the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way” (Žižek 55–56).
Thus, with respect to the Ossian compilation, not only were its features given as preexistent to it, but also the text itself was presented as the compilation of all true Ossians. To be sure, Macpherson’s compilation was not presented as just another folk transformation, but as the authoritative archive of those transformations. Indeed, though Žižek applies the following observation to the subject (which is for him homologous to a master-signifier anyway), for our purposes it may just as well describe the archive in its relation to the elements it commands: namely, that its “initial ‘illusion’ […] consists in simply forgetting to include in the scene […its] own act – that is, to overlook how ‘it counts, it is counted, and the one who counts is already included in the account’” (Žižek 58, quoting Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 26). In short, “we overlook the way our act is already part of the state of things we are looking at” (Žižek 59).
Žižek’s theory of the retention of identity across a complete, if gradual, transformation of the referent’s descriptive features may also be inspired by Lacan’s theory of “metamorphism in which the formulation of their [instincts’] organ, direction, and object is a Jeannot knife with infinitely exchangeable parts” (Jacques Lacan, “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology,” in Écrits, tr. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, 102-122 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 121). Lacan’s Couteau de Jeannot refers, in turn, to the well-known fable of the French peasant who alternately replaced the handle and the blade enough times such that it was no longer the same material knife though it retained its identity all the same. Lacan, however, applied this identity persistence model to the drives to indicate their general apparatus as one formed of ‘relations’ rather than constitutive ‘elements’.
“The Triebe (drives) that are identified in this theory simply constitute a system of energetic equivalences to which we relate psychical exchanges, not insofar as they become subordinate to some entirely set behavior, whether natural or learned, but insofar as they symbolize, nay dialectically incorporate [intègrent], the functions of the organs in which these natural exchanges appear – that is, the oral, anal, and genito-urinary orifices.
These drives appear to us only through highly complex links; we cannot prejudge their original intensity on the basis of sheer deflection. It is meaningless to speak of an excess of libido” (Lacan 121).
Leaving aside, for now, the relative validity of this statement, for our purposes it will suffice to observe the unique deployment of the model of ‘interchangeable parts’ and the particular attention to the ‘links’ between them. Indeed, for Lacan, the drives are relations, ‘energetic equivalences’, not forces preexisting law or restriction: in fact, to the same extent that the drives are ‘subordinated’ to a posterior law or restriction, they ‘dialectically incorporate’ the ‘functions of the organs’ – i.e. the body ‘itself’ – in which these ‘natural exchanges appear’. Thus, the drives, as such, only appear through ‘links’, in a complex configuration – on the body, and so in no way preexist their conditioning. They are always already conditioned. If we ‘cannot prejudge their original intensity’ it is because they don’t have any: intensity is not any more revealed in the moment of ‘deflection’ than in the moment of ‘subordination’, and for this reason, presumably, the drives are said to ‘dialectically’ incorporate changes in the forms of subordination themselves. Thus, since both the deflection and subordination of the drives constitute the drives themselves, one cannot speak of an ‘excess of libido’.
The specific formulation of the drives’ organ, direction, and object is for this reason a “Jeannot knife with infinitely exchangeable parts”: that is, the components of the apparatus are able to change while the general relational configuration does not. Bracketing the question of whether this view of the subject admits an essential formalism – namely, an organizing principle that exists nowhere and which cannot be reduced to the configurations that manifest it – our interest, you will recall, is confined to Žižek’s use of this model in explaining descriptive features and the master-signifiers that bind them together. To be sure, in Žižek, this model obtains, at least with respect to Lacan, a much more historical province. While ‘the subject’, in a sense, brings with it, for better or for worse, a readymade contour – the individual – a comparable point of departure would seem to be for the most part unavailable to ‘the name’. Indeed, the question we are dealing with is precisely ‘what’ grounds or binds features together in nominal entities.
To begin to answer this question, we will have to circle back to the kinds of historical problems – e.g. the ‘author function’ and the political conditions at work in the Ossian compilation – that provoked this inquiry to begin with. Our cue may thus be taken from Bruce Fink, who, in a note to the Lacan passage cited above, observes that “Freud refers to something similar with the term ‘Lichtenberg knife’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud VIII, 60, fn1, and SE XIV, 66” (Fink, in Lacan 779n147). The phrase indeed appears at the end of his “On the history of the psychoanalytic movement” (1914), in searing reference to Jung’s perceived threat to his psychoanalytic empire. –But first, a retelling of the context of Freud’s formulation is in order.
