Signifiers and their Dialectical Pedagogical Dynamics

Abstract

Difference is fundamental to education. In fact, if we take education as a process of learning, learning which is necessarily learning about new things for the subject, only differences can produce the conditions whereby one can learn.

This paper utilises Jacques Lacan’s philosophy of language to present an epistemic theory of knowledge via the signifier. This theory involves a dialectics of difference where to know something which has not yet been known, something relevantly different to it must be experienced “together” with it and together signifierised (viz. pronounced as something). In exploring its application, this paper presents several real-life examples of unproductive and adverse pedagogical actions and explicates what makes them unproductive. However, it observes that such philosophies of pedagogy do not exist in a vacuum; they exist through and within the patriarchy.

This paper, thus, presents political and educational analyses of the consequences of a patriarchal ideological system; in particular, it carefully and thoroughly analyses the deliberately disingenuous political games and the consequent pedagogical manipulations therein through the signifier “transgender” and its essence “gender”. In extending how the signifier “transgender” is maliciously manipulated, it briefly explores the novel “1984” by George Orwell and provide parallels to our modern political discourse on how critical thinking is hampered and deliberately limited through the malicious use of language to negate difference and the possibility of new knowledge therefrom. This paper concludes on the positive significance of the true diversity of words and a non-patriarchal educational environment. 

Manuscript

We all live throughout our lives, in perpetuity, with a multiplicity and plurality of normals. Such normals constitute our prejudices in the technical sense of the word without their normative baggage. It is only new experiences in whatever form they may be in that allow us to realise that maybe, at least some of these normals are merely normal, rather than normal; that these just happen to be the particular cases of reality at their loci in space-time. Recognising as such allows us to dispense with their seeming “transcendental” baggage and consequently allows us to see that it is merely one normal among an infinite many possible options, each uniquely relationally situated with/in a plethora of infinite other normalities not yet linked (i.e. recognised) in the conscious mind. To put it in a colloquial register, the whole world suddenly seems different after a trip to a new “unforeseen” (to be purposefully tautological) land… the traveller monologues: “It is not clear what is different, I cannot quite articulate it, but I feel it… I have changed”.

This opening-up-of-horizons can only be done through a process of - what I call here - differencing. Experiencing the “same-old, same-old” kills and creates a burdensome somniferous life, it is that which suffocates and ossifies our very being. In contrast, being differenced gives us challenges (or constitute challenges themselves) and gives us life; it freshens up our lives and gives us meaning. 

In my MA dissertation, I introduced an idea I coined the Pink World. Let me recast it here. Imagine that there was inhabitant x in this very world where everything was, without any exception, pink, and of the very same colour and shade everywhere. x was living peacefully, but suddenly, a magic teleportation portal opens up and this brand new stranger y walks in - and let us assume that everything about and of y is coincidentally “pink”. y is from an advanced planet “Earth+”, our planet in the distant future where we developed teleportation technologies.

y starts looking around and suddenly looking utterly perplexed and says in astonishment: “Wow, this is incredible, everything is pink and of the exact same pink everywhere…” y in utter disbelief, veritably intensifyingly remarks to x “hey, everything is pink here, do you guys have any other colours here?” x with complete sincerity and curiosity responds, “what is this “pink” you are talking about? And what is this … ‘colour’?”.

It turns out that they speak the same exact language (practically speaking) but for x, the signifiers “pink” and “colour” are completely absent in x’s universe. y, in shock, perpetually points to objects surrounding them (as though themself is being suffocated) and desperately utters “Pink! Pink! Pink! This is a colour! Colour pink! Can’t you see!?” 

This is my estimation of the human subject’s ontologic-epistemic situation. No matter how many times the mere signifiers are pronounced, there is no way to make x come-to-know “pink” nor “colour”. There is only one solution here: x must be shown an object that is not pink.

y brings forth a purple cloth from his world, Earth+. At first, x does not quite recognise it … it does not register. Slowly, x recognises it and comes to realise that there is something different about their world. It is fundamentally different from that cloth. y with elated hope, slowly enunciates again and repeats the same process. x, this time, slowly, recalls the same and correctly identifies the signifiers. 

Now for x, what has always been is now no longer. This phrase is leaking out in its symbolism. Let us briefly explore, but before moving on further, I wish to note that the following interpretation appears rudimentary as it will only gain more meaning as the essay progresses, and is specifically thus, expansively remarked on page 44, incorporating the developments within this paper; only by then, can the phrase “what has always been is no longer” become holistically understood .

The phrase indicates that “what has always been” as an unarticulated thing (viz. “Been what?”... it cannot be articulated “specifically” from the subject’s position in the past) is that which “no longer” exists. The important question is, “exists” in what sense? Specifically, exists “no longer” in the sense that it is no longer that which “has always [simply, just] been…” It has now become something, just like how pink in the Pink World became, like how our normals became somethings after being differenced: a new normal has been established. However, by becoming something, that state of reality had to disappear as only difference can make it something, and thus, that which has disappeared ought to not be articulated under the mourning edict: “what has always been …” is necessarily unpronounced because it is too painful to be simply pronounced without any conscious hesitation or seeming unspeakability. 

This idea of the Pink World that I came up with finds its correlates in Jacques Lacan’s work. In chapter VIII, “Knowledge and truth” in the 20th Seminar, “Encore”, Lacan states: “Analysis came to announce to us that there is knowledge that is not known, knowledge that is based on the signifier as such” (1998, p.88). He is here referring to the knowledge of the “unconscious [as] the Other’s discourse” (Lacan 2006, p.6) and the knowledge existent therein through language as the Other. 

For the former quote, it is in the sense that “The subjects know, they know. But all the same, they don't know everything [when speaking]” (Lacan 1998, p.90). This is such that when one speaks, one can never speak “the whole truth” (ibid., p.85) but only speak the truth as the ego (viz. Conscious talk); the conscious signifier has “knowledge that is not known” (ibid., p.88). The unconscious is that which stricto sensu cannot, by definition, know itself; the moment it knows itself, it is simply, no longer (the) unconscious.

For the latter quote, he is referring to his famous dictum, “the unconscious is structured like a language”. The unconscious being “structured like a language” allows it to be a sort of cybernetic system which inescapably stores the signifiers one experienced, for Lacan. One can see people engage in Freudian slips where signifiers that sound similar or have close semantic contextual association appear and indicate an Other in the speech that is not the “I” who is currently speaking to the target audience. When one speaks (viz. engages in a pronunciation of signifiers), there is never solely the ego talking, as that which is the conscious subject of the statement, there is always the “unconscious [as] the Other’s discourse” (Lacan 2006, p.16).

The answer to how this “Other” got there into the unconscious is due to the fact that language is an Other; after all, language is not a private invention of infants but imposed from the outside, the Other. The reference “I speak my mother’s tongue” is perhaps a reference to the fact that it is of an “mOther” that the baby learns from that the mother (through the function of the “name-of-the-father”) is not part of “the world” (as a singular affair) and must live in recognition of that very ontological separation of “I” and “Other”. The unconscious is a storage system of signifiers of Others. 

For Lacan, the role of the signifier here is such that “knowledge is in the Other and owes nothing to being except that the latter has borne (véhiculé) the letter thereof.” (1998, p.89). Knowledge here is determined by the “use value” (ibid.) per the signifier as that which is the necessary condition for knowledge, being “shaped for use” (ibid.). 

Signifiers are essential for knowledge, mere experience (without signifiers and concomitant language) does not suffice; coming-to-know something is to signifierise it (i.e. make it a signifier) as it allows us to go beyond the mere Imagerial “experience” of it like a (perhaps, hypothetical) completely languageless animal. Nevermind the fact that, without language, there can be no Other as substantive collective inherited knowledge, but merely the playing out of the Imaginary field. Without signifiers, everything must substantively be done anew. 

The initial passing into subjectivisation requires that the “name-of-the-father” be dialecticised with other signifiers and that the subject born therefrom subjectivises itself at every turn with the flowing in of signifiers from Others. Let me briefly explain. 

For the human infant to realise that oneself is something (and not what just is) like how pink became something as opposed to being that which is part of the undifferentiated world-background, there must be the intrusion of an Other (viz. the “name-of-the-father”) which is not it, but this Other must help register to the infant that themself is an Other and not merely other (of the Imaginary order); simply put, the other is an Other insofar as there is something to be Othered to … an “I” which is not an Other, or else the Other will just be “another” thing that merely visually appears. 

The parents best do this Othering by introducing the infant who is “jubilant” (Lacan 2006, p.94) at first seeing their own reflection in the mirror, and oratorically and physically pointing out (through the mirror) “I”, “father”, “mother”, “you”, “us”, “we” etc., The infant ends up identifying with the singularising mirror image of themself as an illusory, singular and unified “I” (e.g. “I am that!”) and the Others of their parents. The infant with this event enters into the (Lacanian) Symbolic where language as signifiers effectively determine the contents of the “I” (e.g. “I am x, y, z etc., and therefore, I should a, b, c,); in happening so, the infant gradually becomes evermore a subject. This is the principle feat of abstraction where signifiers get switched and shifted around in new sentences and can gain meaning where mere Imagerial experiences would not allow as concrete things. 

This abstraction is what allows the something to be more than the initial something and thereby deconcretises it: language allows us to transcend the concreticity of the world. This thing (experienced object) being “shaped for use” (Lacan 1998, p. 89) (as signifier) and being made into something specific (a signifier) allows us to be able to introduce and manipulate it with Other “things” (within sentences). It is this “use value”  (ibid.) that language has as signifierising experience. 

Here we come across the difference between mere identification - as that which is at the level of the Imaginary - and knowledge which is located at the level of the Symbolic. Let us return back to the Pink World. 

x comes to recognise pink as something; however we now know that this recognition is not empty. For it to be something, it must be contentful or else it is just an-other thing out there which does not register (as a “wow!”, for example). Mere othering does not work as this just makes an-other thing out there in the Imaginary landscape. What needs to be changed is for there to be an Other thing which makes pink something rather than just something as nothing.

As I mentioned on the first page, the world suddenly seeming different after a trip to a brand new different place provides the experience that “It is not clear what is different, I cannot quite articulate it, but I feel it… I have changed”. This experience is an experience at the level of the Real (prior to articulation); however, it does not consist in a vacuum; just like the infant who in “jubilant assumption of his specular image” (Lacan 2006, p.94) “manifest[s] in [that] exemplary situation the symbolic matrix” (ibid.), the newly-travelled person recognises something true (e.g. inchoate “knowledge” like lalanguage as trying to articulate the soon-to-be Other) in the experience. The subject as split between the Symbolic and the Real recognises the experience differently from the merely Imaginary psychotic. 

In the Pink World, the normal-as-pink becomes for x, pink as a possible normal state-of-things of which there could be at least two (as of now), “pink” and “purple”. This transformation is not a mere shifting phantasmagoria where there is just change as is. It is the coming-to-know of normal as merely normal through signifierisation where y telling (viz. pronouncing) x the signifiers “pink” and “colour” introduce their possibility (of knowledge) into the “jubilant” (ibid.) recognition of x like the parents pointing to the mirror and pronouncing the signifiers “I”, “you”, “father” and “mother” to their “[ever-]jubilant” (ibid.) child. It is at this stage, without the appropriate signifier-accommodation from the Other that lalanguage as an introductory step becomes even-more crucial as that which creates the steps necessary to connect the Real of experience to that of the Symbolic: it is the attempt of the subject to establish and the journey itself towards the establishment of knowledge as “I know this something”.

To Know or Not to Know the Signifier, that is the Question. 

Excuse me for my pun, signifiers are significant, in our anthropomorphic context of language, it is quite something! Signifierisation through the Other cannot occur in the merely Imaginary insofar as it is something that the subject comes to know as a new normal which sets up a new normal, yet unrecognised. It is insofar as a subject emerges through using signifiers where, a la contra Descartes, “I am where I do not think I am, therefore I am where I do not think I am” of the Real that there is a conscious (false being) element of “I know” where the ego “knows”. For if there is no subject, there can be no (subject) that can know, something just is structurally; of course, referencing here the idea that the subject is that which allows Lacan to go beyond structure (viz. Structuralism).

The key idea here is that there is a fundamental educative difference between mere difference and Others. Difference as difference simpliciter serves as just another thing in the panoplied world. An Other, in turn, serves the dialectical pedagogical process of what I call somethingisation: the Other makes that which just ... into something that was always there but never was. 

Education at the level of the Real is without a doubt, effective, but ineffective in the grand scheme of what could potentially be: slipping back into the prejudices of and within the Symbolic is quite often too easy and the uncomfortableness getting displaced onto mere unrecognised (by the ego) behaviour is just too common. What is crucial at this level of the experience of the Real is the clear articulation of what was different about the differencing experience, so as to form a new Symbolic that breaks down the old. To put it in another way, it is to break down the old worldview and provide a new one, to dismantle the fixed paradigm and open it up to new possibilities. 

At this level of articulation, I borrow Bruce Fink’s elaboration upon Lacan’s distinction between understanding and knowing. 

For many, understanding is a desirable goal of education. For reasons which do not need mention, such a belief notwithstanding myself prior to Lacan, is quite “understandable”. Lacan differs. The act of understanding, for him, belongs to the Imaginary, rather than the Symbolic. The problem can be understood from the point that “understanding [(illusorily)] satisfies” (Fink 2013, p.x). The question is: what is this satisfaction coming from understanding, “the” satisfaction of? 

In the analytic setting, the analysand speaks to the presumed “subject supposed to know”, referred in French to as “sujet suppose savoir”, who does not “know” at the outset (e.g. therapies last for years in many cases where the analyst endlessly learns new interpretative meanings). Some analysts or teachers who are put into this role accept (as internalisation) it and performatively try to “fill it up” as though there is no (Lacanian) lack or the Other in speech like a cybernetic robot. Such is, needless to say, an impossible task, and leads to the ever-anxious game of unhealthy authoritarian performative power. In such cases, the analyst or teacher unhealthily and falsely tries to “understand” everything and explain away everything on the basis of a (necessarily) fixed set of hermeneutic tools and limited knowledge. Instead of assuming that perhaps they cannot exactly understand everything relevant prima facie and acting in light of this fact, so to speak (and correctly assume that they can, in fact, only know so little if substantively at all prima facie), they illusorily act as though they relevantly understand everything. To understand, it seems, gives a sense of vanquishment. It is the ego implicitly saying “I know it all! And there is nothing greater than (beyond) me … I am perfect!”

Understanding (e.g. “trying to understand”) appears to be the assimilation of the “unfamiliar to the familiar” (ibid, p.I) where the Imaginary dimension assumes that the experienced objects matches (is of) what is known, that it is fully explainable (viz. understandable for the subject). For example, at the Imaginary level, if one is feeling upset, angry, hungry, etc., the people in the world also appear to be likewise; if one is embarrassed, it appears as though everyone around you is judging you in some sense. Instead of articulating to oneself that one cannot exactly quite know the internal state of others and that this prima facie unknowability is also substantiated by the fact that our internal subjective state illusorily influences our perception, things that are unknown appear to be as known things, as examples of themselves, as being such and such (e.g. “You look hungry!” … “No, I am not hungry”. 

This happens occasionally throughout all our lives where you might explain an experience or a feeling that you have had, for them to respond “I understand what you mean”, to have only in fact, substantially missed the specific idea that you intended to convey: “no, in fact, that is not what I meant …”. Trying to understand by assuming that there is a perfect/convenient match between one’s knowledge and the Other’s speech, is to, in one sense, conveniently “explain it away” and thereby illusorily solve the hermeneutic problem of discourse. 

The particular paradigms that we all live in, as a certain way of understanding and categorising experience (e.g. “that driver must have been driving like that because x, [(therefore)] he must be having a difficult day” when in fact, we really, substantially speaking, have no clue why the driver drove like that) prevents us from experiencing Others. 

This case is best illustrated when somebody might have “said” something offensive, for example, but not have meant it to be anything remotely as such and may have meant it even in a genuinely authentically positive way; we are often keen to instinctively “understand” such things as that speaker = Bad to satisfy ourselves (as “good” or the “knowing”), and thereby play the semi-convenient game of prejudicial power and exploit the opportunity to publicly show one’s supposed moral correctness instead of sincerely asking first “what did you mean by that?”; perhaps “this person is [not] x because they said y”. 

It is better for the analyst or teacher in many cases to not try to understand everything prima facie that the student or analysand says, but accept the humbling fact that one cannot and hold their intention to understand in suspense, in order to come-to-know. The dispensing of the ego’s intent and stressing conscious thoughts to “understand” and secure the objects of experience in the same-old paradigm and thereby (illusorily) “solve” the unfamiliar which challenges the familiar, is necessary. In contrast, accepting the modus operandi of allowing yourself to be barraged by the Other is most oftentimes the pedagogically preferable alternative. 

Fink provides his quasi-technical term for this particular modus operandi, for him, what is required is “free-floating attention, not me-floating or me-centered attention” (2013, p.11). This “free-floating attention” for Fink is directed towards signifiers spoken by Others, in particular, the analysand. This is trying to understand the meaning of the words at the level of the Symbolic (e.g. thinking through the signifiers) rather than forcibly assimilating them into the preconceived frame of the Symbolic (e.g. “He said this word x so he must have done, think, believe, or want to y, when in fact he did not y”). 

On a short tangential note, Fink applying and clinically instantiating this Lacanian conception of understanding notes that “There is no need for the analysand to know in order to get better” (ibid., p.9). This is true. In Lacanian clinical work, the therapeutic emphasis on change means that signifiers that are spoken do not need to be “known” but instead hit at the level of the Real, instigating change (e.g. “I don’t know why but that painful x has disappeared after our last session” or “I do not have the y (for example, urge) to z”). To borrow Socrates, one might have akrasia where one understands that eating a cookie or a sugary treat is not something one should do in their (perhaps diabetic) context but still continually engage in the mistake of eating them. What matters here is change, not knowing per se. 

This operative maxim, is no doubt, clinically (and in real life) useful; however, for education and pedagogy, we might reverse this, nevertheless insightful, maxim: There is a need for the learner to know in order to get better. In saying this, I want to add the caveat that the objectual relations are tremendously complex and I in no way recommend the reversed maxim simpliciter quo prima facie.

Let us briefly apply this to the Pink World. 

The inhabitant of the Pink World x experiences the colour pink to the fullest visual degree possible, no one can experience pink anymore than x themself. x despite this, has no clue what pink is, and it is not merely that x does not know what the signifier signifies: x has no clue what pink is as it just forms an inarticulable precondition (unlike Kant’s intuition of time, for example, which has elements of past, present and future) of the fabric of the world. 

Introducing a different colour in the fabric of the Pink World is insufficient; there is merely a (seeming) quasi-“ah” at the level of the Real but no knowledge of pink as something but just a thing which is identification-wise merely an-other different thing. At the moment of signifierisation, whether it be a neologism or “purple” (which does not “technically” matter), there is the sudden coming-to-know of pink as something; one has gained knowledge of it instead of merely operating on that basis of normal. In the case of x in the Pink World, “There is no [substantive way] for the analysand to [not] know [and] get better” (ibid.)

In this very case, the very Imaginary act of understanding is as evidenced, completely useless (i.e. impossible) because it constitutes the fabric of the world (viz. of thought itself): one cannot understand that which is not-pink solely through a singular (necessarily omnipresent) pink. The barrage of the Other (as signifierised after experiencing it) must be accepted under the necessary suspense of the ego to come-to-know what the other means. 

Mere talking does not suffice at all. In discussions where y merely imposes (rather than explains by using the dialectical method of coming-to-know) signifiers on x, like the “banking educator” (1970) of Paulo Freire, there only remains afloat empty signifiers which mistakenly have mere concrete representation: the student responds “I think I understand what you are saying” to, in fact, have no knowledge what the teacher meant.

The Signifier’s Dialectical Impositions

We have explored the case up till now of the dialectical process of coming-to-know, here as somethingisation. In this process per the Pink World, we have come to know that Othering is essential to which is but which is not known in order to know that as which is … ! (as something). The principle idea here is that things which always were but were and are still not known cannot be known until that which it is not has Othered it. Pink is just one example per the fantastical Pink World but pink’s relevance does not end there simplicissime; at the level of the Real, there are (literally) countless unsignifierised iss.

Let us elevate the level of the exposition.  

When one enunciates a signifier (viz. word) there are a countless number of meanings therein at the moment of enunciation. These can never be exhaustively articulated nor known. And each signifier introduced by the Other, as Lacan notes “being can kill where the letter reproduces, but never reproduces the same, never the same being of knowledge” (1998, p.89), has an “accidental” different meaning. For example, the signifier “wealthy”, to take a popular example, will have an infinite number of different meanings (and more) for a million different interlocutors. 

Perhaps consequentially unsettlingly, language is not a private invention. It cannot be, at least on any practical level, if at all. The words that we have come to learn from Others originally were new terms grafted upon the experience of lalanguage, recognised as something new as somethings: “(what is this thing?) … let’s call it x!”

Ideally, or more accurately, utopically, this should not be a source of concern per se. In a “perfect world”, we perhaps could allow, starting from infancy, the introduction of signifiers in a thoroughly dialectical way. Such a change would help us better understand the meaning of the words we use. This would not be remotely easy but it would help edify and enhance our understanding of signifiers: “what is a chair?” or “what is happiness?” have no easy answers (and most accurately, no answers, but recognizing that is a journey in understanding the significations themselves) but it is worth thoroughly dialecticising at least the latter. Of course, the world that we live in does not allow that for the general mass of people. 

Our world is overwhelmingly one of brutal “practicality”. One does not need to see far but to just look at one’s own public education system (e.g. the South Korean public education system). It tries to impose and thereby reproduce, according to the patriarchal order of the phallus, a “necessity” of neuroticising competitive survival where there for some reason is “no time to think” but only performance within pre-ordained structurality. There is a reason why in Korea, especially, why students have a substantially difficult time writing essays but have a significantly easier time answering multiple choice questions and seemingly infinitely more difficult and complex pre-structured exam questions. 

Rather than mount a critique of this particular system, which is not the purpose of this paper, I propose a fundamental epistemic problem per signifiers of this authoritarian impository “banking system”. A fundamental problem with this impositional top-down pedagogy is that knowledge through signifiers cannot be simply transferred via mere imposition: no matter how many times y says to x, “Pink! Pink! Pink! Colour! Colour! Colour!” can the meaning of these signifiers be simply known and x’s response, “I think I understand” as a mistaken concretisation is the most dangerous of all. In top-down impositional education, rather than dialectical presentation of ideas (viz. signifiers) the method of delivering knowledge is primarily identificatory like y initially to x. Here is how it is. 

The focus on pre-ordained knowledge that must be delivered in a contextual vacuum is the free-floating of signifiers as “misknown” vague concrete representations. In a non-situative top-down pedagogy, teachers are determined on pre-fixed performative criteria, rather than criteria of knowing or “understanding” (how it works and why it is, for example). Instead of teaching the reasons (as we colloquially put it) behind why things (viz. signifiers) are the way they are or what they are, we are just simply told “this (signifier) is that (experienced object)!” 

If students are “disturbing” fellow students in the classroom by being slightly rambunctious, that is simply labelled (pointed to) as “bad behaviour” and dealt with as “bad behaviour” is “dealt with” (e.g. performatively fixed merely through ADHD medication). By just pointing to a behaviour without specifying what about the behaviour is bad and thus why the behaviour is bad, there is no knowledge there of what the behaviour that qualifies as “bad” is. If we analogise it to the Pink World, it is like the potential case of x who “understands” the pronounced signifier “pink” to mean (be) a particular congregation of objects or another signifier for “space”. A signifier can only be known through differentiations by the Other as that which it is not. 

In cases like these, there is the phallus’ imposing of itself through the actuality (i.e. concreteness) of performative control and punitive punishment rather than situational understanding (i.e. knowing) and communication that tries to come-to-know the context and the perspective of the students in order to fruitfully teach the message (and “solve” the “problem”). This phallus of the bureaucracy that imposes itself without opening itself (which the phallus cannot) to difference (perhaps the world does not fit the order of the pre-judicial concreticity of the phallus), tries to merely impose and by doing so ignores the “contextual” and merely imposes its “abstract criteria” (Ferguson 1984, p.25) as a vague concrete object of quasi-experience. It has no space for Others and thus does not consider the Other’s perspective and Other contexts besides the universal order of the phallus per the phallus. Such an approach, as feminist ethics of care observes,  lacks “the ability to communicate among persons involved or affected.” (Walker 1989, p.19) and thus does not teach but merely causes the student to performatively vaguely do or not do that. 

The well-acquainted proverb, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime” comes to mind. If you teach someone properly, this person can extend the meaning of that experience to many other contexts, in turn, forming an articulable worldview that is capable of critical review, rather than remain in that one vague concrete context of utterance: concreteness can only take you so far until language breaks down with the experience of reality. 

Here are some more relevant examples:

• A teacher might publicly point to a well-performing student and say to those who are not, “she is good (personally attributing a normative term for her academic achievements)! You guys will become happy with good grades!”. In doing so, the teacher equates the signifier “happy” with the object of “good grades” and being “good” as having the objects, “good grades”. 

•  A math teacher might say “This symbol is an imaginary number and when you square it,  -1 is the result”, and thereby explaining mathematical ideas and concepts that follow in use of it in such similar merely identificatory manners, rather than explaining what it is that is so “imaginary” about it by dialecticising it within the larger framework of mathematical theories or more accurately, meta-theories. It is not a surprise then, students cannot relate to such discourses, and find it disconnecting from their lives.

• A political science teacher might be explaining the political history of Italy, and thereby say “The Socialists (PSI) in the 1920’s were betrayed by Benito Mussolini and thereby fascism took over with him at the helm of the fascist party, PNF” without having explained the signifiers within that phrase before and neither will afterwards. 

At the end of these classes, students have a plethora of (seemingly disparate) signifiers floating in their minds but they do not quite know what they learnt and conclude the lesson with a yawn where everything felt boring and disconnected. In such cases, the signifiers that were imposed by the Other remain as quasi-empty signifiers, only gaining their non-emptiness from prior social-webbings (e.g. “I heard my mother use this term!”).

In contrast to this, we have the polar opposite teachers who absorb the audience of students into the material. Students here seem to be able to remember the various minutia of discourse. One familiar reference that many have probably come across is David Attenborough, the legendary British broadcaster, presenter and narrator who attractingly and absorbingly narrated an endless series of wildlife documentaries. 

If we look at several of his most famous narrative episodes, there is a pedagogical commonality running through them: he provides the technical name of the animal on screen and then proceeds to synchronistically narrate in a thoroughly dialectical manner the signifiers that are associated with that animal. 

Let us observe a case of his productive pedagogy. First, the “Twelve-wired bird” in the “Birds of Paradise” episode in the “Our Planet” series, also available on Youtube. Please watch the clip prior to reading the following analysis of it. 

In this short episodic clip, he introduces the discourse by narrating “New Guinea’s animals have become truly bizarre” as a tropical waterfall background shifts and this “truly bizarre” looking bird that seemingly has whiskers on its bottom appears, he again narrates, this is “the only bird that has tail ornaments like this, that is used to tickle the face of a prospective mate” while the bird does exactly that.

There is a lot that is happening even in this small introduction here, but one thing is clear, it is memorable and we will likely come off of it knowing substantially about it (the signifier of the bird). Let us dive into it and the whole clip beyond it.

The introduction of the theme “animals have become truly bizarre” is not answered unproductively by a mere identification of “this is [pointing at it] bizarre”. On the contrary, Attenborough specifies, “[this] is the only bird that has tail ornaments like this, that is used to tickle the face of a prospective mate”. The implication here is that what is bizarre about the animal is not an image per simpliciter (as a somewhat vague concrete thing which was generically pointed at), but it is “bizarre” as bizarre because it is “the only bird” that has this unusual feature of having “tail ornaments like this, that is used to tickle the face of a prospective mate”. Just prior to narrating this line above, the scene shows that whiskered bird alone and narrates “the male Twelve-wired bird of paradise is the only bird that has tail ornaments like this, that is … ” and as the forthcoming phrase after “that is” is pronounced, the bird that is being tickled as the “prospective mate” is that which looks “normal” (in other words, not special at all). There are a lot of brilliant pedagogical dialectical events happening here. 

First, before moving further on, the differencing at play at the visual level chiefly transcends the Imaginary dimension (most pedagogically relevantly) due to Attenborough’s signifierisation of the experience; it becomes not mere differencing, but differencing as being Othered. From this point forward, I will use the italicised term differencing over Othered due to the aspect of signifierising the Imaginary and as the thing that Others is not truly an (absolute) Other to that which is being Othered but is rather different within its same categorical paradigm (e.g. purple and pink are not fundamentally Other but only Other within the same categorical paradigm of colour; they are different but become different within the journey of the Pink World). 

The peculiar male Twelve-wired bird is visually stunning, and looks bizarre (in a certain sense) as its seeming bottom-end whiskers, which is something “used to tickle the face of a prospective mate”, is highlighted by being dialecticised by a bird which it is not: the female Twelve-wired bird. It is still the same species as the male and thereby signifies in some sense “potential” similarities in virtue of species-membership but by saying specifically the “male” of the species (is “bizarre”), it - through the culturally produced false oppositional binary of gender (as man or woman) and cisgenderism, and speciesism (where the “prospective mate” of a male bird must be a female bird of the same species) - differences and thereby makes us expect the female bird to not be “bizarre” and thereby dialecticises us. 

Equally crucially, the phrase being and only being, “used to tickle the face of a prospective mate” in the context of the “male [bird]” as that (which) is “bizarre” (because it “can” tickle), appears to imply that its face is not being tickled and thereby makes us expect the “bizarre” characteristic of the “male” bird is that which does the “tick[ling]” but is not tickled itself. Afterall, Attenborough said the “male” bird is “the only bird that has tail ornaments like this” but did not specify that it is the only bird that “tickle[s] the face of [another bird, that which is “prospective”]”. Such language within the phallocentric order also implies that the male is active and the female vice versa, and in doing so, makes us expect the female bird to be the subordinate passive one as it is shown on the film: the male bird climbs upwards to actively move (viz. compel) the location of the female bird beneath “himself” and the female bird having become less active (beneath him), the male bird actively dances on top, he dominates the scene. 

In accordance with this expectation that is (currently) ineluctably imposed, there emerges on the scene, the female bird as that which it is not. The female bird begins where the male bird ends at the Imaginary level, clearly and cardinally insofar as what is unique (as that which makes the male bird “bizarre”) and serves as the sine qua non identification of the male bird, the bottom-end whiskers, absolutely ends (viz. Never reappears) and is Imaginarily obstructed (i.e. “ended”) by that which it is not (i.e. not “bizarre”). The male bird here is properly known as “bizarre” (viz. The knowledge has been transferred) insofar at the Imagerial level here, it is met initially by that which is not “bizarre”. It has been properly differenced and with the signifiers at play together, the Imaginary properly differences the male bird.

This short clip is brief but memorable. It seems like we have truly come to know about the bird and its sine qua non “bizarre” as that which is its primary identification. There is nothing fundamentally empty about these signifiers in any significant sense, neither are the signifiers at play, blurry or concretely misidentifiable simplicissime. This is all in great contrast to authoritarian impository teachers. An expression, this time, that people in general would use en masse would be “the teacher explains well” or “is a good storyteller”, the key signifiers here being “explains” and “story” and its association with being not disconnecting.  

I would like to present analysis of other clips, such as the “Black Sicklebill” bird which is in the same Youtube clip and likewise the “World’s Grumpiest Cat” in “Frozen Planet II”, but there is no space here to do so so I implore others to try likewise if it be of such interest. 

Many teachers or pedagogues would have thought of various objections while reading this. The most pertinent one, in my opinion, would be the simple but substantive one: “it might be easier to engage in such dialectical pedagogy for such topics where there is easily accessible film material that corresponds with the signifiers of them. In contrast, teaching abstract topics (whatever they may be) which are of our interest and are our tasks, cannot be done like that to any sufficient degree”. I am inclined to agree to a great extent. But, there are two responses I provide here. 

First, some of the most attracting teachers have been good storytellers. It is necessary and possible to teach abstract topics which incorporate and utilise more relatable experientially grounded signifiers. Many (so-regarded) high-level concepts are not merely high as being separated from the groundedness of the world. In fact, many of them fundamentally relate to it as being constitutive landscapes or paradigms of these “mundane” objects, such that the best way to make students come-to-know these signifiers is to relate to their experiences. In doing so, I am not advocating an analogisation of education, as analogies work primarily through the understanding and leave out the dissimilarities between signifiers and does not help the students come to know but primarily strengthen their prejudices if not done properly. I am advocating for the technical usage of such experiential signifiers. 

Secondly, I am responding here to a situation of brutal “practicality”. There is much more that can be changed and done for the betterment of education, especially given the general landscape of public education across the world. There is substantial ground for change.   

The key idea that has been explored hitherto is the dialectical point that to know something (as something) we need the dialectical process of somethingisation where differencing as signifying upon (and more accurately, of) mere Imaginary difference is had; mere imposition of signifiers as mere Imaginary (non-dialectical) identifications is pedagogically insufficient. 

In understanding this, we can explore the objection above a little more carefully. Let us reobserve our example of the teacher that “publicly point[s] to a well-performing student”.

In this case, the fundamental difference between the Pink World’s dialectic pedagogy and this example is that pink is a merely “visible” entity, while “happiness” is abstract. It is more difficult to teach the concept of “emotions” than “colours”. Both require in common the dialectical work and the consequent knowledge therefrom of the various feelings and various colours; colours are merely identificatory while emotions are not: emotions are not the mere identification of experienced objects (e.g. achieving good grades). It appears that signifiers of emotions are taught through at least one way: identification of facial features of Other people. 

To note, there is no singular temporal order by which this is done. In the former, a signifier like “happy” would be enunciated while pointing to somebody who has a “happy” face (e.g. smiling). But in doing so, not only must the signifier “happy” be pronounced, something relevantly different must be pronounced to show where “happy” begins and ends and in such a case the term “happy” is best differenced by being sandwiched between two signifiers, such as “angry” and “sad” where the differences are more visible. At this preliminary level, Imaginary mirror-identification (“I have a happy face!”) or intuitive identification (e.g. “my eyes are continually closing, I think I am also … ‘tired’”) proves helpful. When doing so, needless to say, the Imaginary or intuitive identifications must be experienced dialectically with those which difference it. Like the dialectical method where two different objects are come-to-be-known at roughly identical times (and no pre-ordained order except as the order of the pronounced signifiers), so are the signifiers known. 

After this rudimentary and preliminary dialectical journey has been “completed” (it can never be), other value-inherited signifiers (e.g. a tasty children’s meal one might know by the duplicitously and ingeniously chosen signifiers/name “Happy Meal” at McDonalds) that are associated with the particular feelings of the emotions (e.g. happy meal) become escalated or not to the positive signifier, “happy”. Eventually, as more signifiers are experienced by the infant, the infant begins to form a value-laden (i.e. normative) landscape of objects and a symbolic normative worldview becomes established (e.g. “I want this”, “I like this”, etc.,). 

All of this is here a rather brief and rudimentary presentation and is not meant to be taken as any sort of general nor (obviously a) holistic picture. The point of this passage is to simply show the pedagogical mistake of the teacher that “publicly pointed to a well-performing student”: the landscape of happiness is complex (rather than complicated) and external impository claims require justification (as corresponding) especially because of its normative relations.

The teacher here makes the mistake of not-explaining and merely imposing. What this consists of here is his skipping of the experience of why good grades = Happy, and in doing so he vaguely concretises the signifier (which consequently becomes vague) rather than make it a form of “knowledge” where differentiation is necessary. Here is how. 

What makes someone happy is first of all different for everyone, this is not unique to the signifier “happy”. Language is from the Other and the Other of language continually changes. For example, old signifiers disappear and new signifiers come to exist and with these new words, so do the meaning (viz. signified) of (identical) signifiers change and get altered so as to fit together with the other signifiers with the current set of language. We are all familiar with the fact that the words that we use do not mean the same cross-generationally (e.g. digital technology or just “technology”). In addition, the inescapable practicality of language where what one refers to as signifier x can simply never be identical in space nor time (viz. identifying moment) to what your Others (e.g. parents) referred to, makes signifiers never signify the same. Lacan put it as follows: 

“There is no information that stands up unless it is shaped for use (formé à l'usage).

Thus is deduced the fact that knowledge is in the Other and owes nothing

to being except that the latter has borne (véhiculé) the letter thereof. From

whence it results that being can kill where the letter reproduces, but never

reproduces the same, never the same being of knowledge.” (1998, p.89)

In this sense, the usage of signifiers is de facto impositional. When one signifies through a signifier, ipso facto, one is effectuating the case that the particular uttered signifiers are something in reality, they are not empty. To prevent this, one can try to explicitly caveat it with a warning that one should accept their signifiers qua imposition with great caution but doing so ipso facto realises that very case of de facto imposition. At least something must always be paradoxically grounded outside the perspective of relativity (even to establish relativity itself).     

“Happy” is a signifier that is very different from many other signifiers. It is also different in that it is a comparatively abstract term which itself has a whole panoply of unique associative signifiers due to its normative nature. For example, the signifier “sock” does not substantially change at all in relation to the change of signifiers in one’s Symbolic; it more or less, always signifies the same. The signifiers associated with the signifier “happy” as “to become happy”, shifts, alters and changes substantially along with the change of one’s Symbolic. The phrase, expansively gesticulatingly uttered, “this is happiness!” referring to one’s wealth, social position, or achievements is quite rudimentarily helpful here. Most importantly, sometimes being “happy” makes you “unhappy” about being “happy” because there is another higher-level desired object, for example. One can understand this on the grounds that the signifier “happy” gets associated with “good” early on and thus utterly complexifies itself. 

The identification of an object as “happiness” implying that this will make you happy is signifier-imposition par excellence as it imposes, unlike the sock (which is likely to have similar signification due to its visible social agreements), that the Other is substantially like oneself through its plethoric linkage with other signifiers that are uniquely and differently schematised for everyone. To this degree, it is the phallacious (phallus + fallacious) act of power and violence, making the Other the same through de facto eliminating difference.

Given the sheer difference in what signifiers amount to “becoming ‘happy’” for everyone, there needs to be a reduction in the degree of imposition. Just like how the relativist would explain, the pedagogically desirable way to do this is by “explaining” one’s signifiers as Attenborough did brilliantly: he clearly explains some of the meanings of the significant signifiers he employs in that short clip (e.g. “bizarre”) we explored above. By doing so, one is not merely imposing but instead explaining their impositions as to why they were imposed: “this is why I used the word “bizarre” and it means this …” One is de facto justifying them. Nonetheless, the other words which explain the preceding signifiers, remain impository. It is impossible to escape all imposition itself, it is the inexorable sine qua non of the pronounced signifier, but its qualities as schematic signifier-links can be made more visible and transparent; such an act elucidates meaning/s and its qualities. Explaining the relation between signifiers and engaging in the dialectic of differencing while doing so is the act of boundary making itself which helps people come-to-know better what exactly is being imposed, and in doing so de facto justifies its imposition.  

The teacher by engaging in mere imposition par excellence concretises language and thereby reifies it. He skips the dialectical discussion of signifiers and thereby makes the signifier of vague things, which is not even one specific thing. By doing so, critical thinking which requires abstract manipulation becomes hampered as one does not think about the meaning of words but instead engages in non-questioning acquiescive performative acts of depositions. 

The (Non-signified) Signifier “(Trans)Gender”

Perhaps the greatest victim of this concretisation of language produced from a patriarchal impository pedagogical world is the signifier “transgender” and in light of it, the people who are associated with it, in one way or another. 

Most people who accept this signifier either blindly accept the advancement of the signifier “transgender” in light of (their own) well-meaning political correctness or do so out of political coercion despite their disagreeing prejudices.  

When you talk with the former bifurcated community of people, they often are not inclined to discuss the “meaning of the word”. They just repeat the mantra of “yes” and say “I understand” but they do not know, and their allegiance is generally only held to the ground artificially to the extent that somebody leads them. For the former (within the community), it is agreement on the level of the Real, they feel it is the right thing to do but do not know why. The latter there is mere “political” performative agreement. 

Both communities, speaking in generalities, show (at least) some Real dislike towards the discussion of the topic though they may feign positive interest. It irks their stability and peace like much of the “white moderates” (King Jr. 1963) of  MLK Jr's days. They are prepared to respond to such publicity via social expectations, but it ought to be more uncomfortable for them in reality if they were honest and not prepared. There is another signifier that helps illuminate this discourse, the signifier “gender”. 

When one asks the signifier “gender” in identical contexts, the response is quite often, quite different. It baffles and makes the interlocutors visibly more uncomfortable. Though there are discussions of “gender” in public discourse, it is not to the same degree, often the conversation is around the signifiers “woman”, “man” and LGBTQ+ signifiers. The signifier “transgender” has become a scripted concreticity where there is a ready-made response script (internal monologue: “I know what to say.”): In the uttering of the signifier “gender”, there is something that goes a lot more substantially to the core at the level of the subject than the signifier “transgender” which is not even thought of but is provided within a ready-made response script. 

Besides the reason above of a pre-scripted response, there is another crucial reason why there is this difference. These two signifiers are not too different, but the prefix “trans” makes a substantial difference and illuminates why the signifier “gender” discomforts and why “transgender” does not. Let us explore why.

So far, this paper’s main focus was in expounding the pedagogy of coming-to-know. It involved a dialectical practice where signifierising was necessary. Essential to this dialectical practice was its constituent event of differencing which required something relevantly different to that which had had yet to be known. To know something, you have to experience that which it is not and signifierise the experience, and from doing so, one comes to know the signifier x and not-x. 

In the introduction of this paper, I presented the difference between normal as an unrecognised normal and normal as recognising it as only one normal among an unknowable infinite variety. This is not a neutral process by any sorts. The normal is comforting; it is a soporific calm that takes no intruders in any form, it ignores presence of differences (i.e. they do not register to the mind though they are present as though they are invisible), it exerts and pervades itself as the precondition of perception. The intrusion of difference as an Other like the infant whose tranquill normal of unison with the mother is disturbed by his “Father” is the rocking of all-that-was. The ego thinks it understands or at least it tries to exert itself as such (e.g. “I already knew this!”), but the Other of language as difference rejects it and forces upon the subject, its utter inadequacy in the possible landscape of the unknown as what-could-be. Education does violence to the ego and challenges the soporific dream of life where everything is smooth-sailing and “perfect”. 

This process is an initially uncomfortable moment like the Socratic prisoner in the cave who becomes discombobulated after witnessing the truth of what he merely saw per the wall. The prisoner who has newly learnt after entering the world of illuminating truth (as the form of the Good), decides to go down to help the prisoners know the truth of the world, but instead of them being open to the “enlightened” prisoner, Socrates suggests:

“if they had the opportunity, do you supposed that they might raise their hands against him and kill this person who is trying to liberate them to a higher plane?” (Plato 2016, p.517a)

Thus is John Stuart Mill’s adoption of this Socratic message as a justification for the necessity of “freedom of the expression of opinion” (2001, p.50), where without it, knowledge can exist “without ever lighting up the general affairs” (p.32) but merely remain ineffectually in the mind of single individuals. 

The prejudice of the masses who prefer to not have their normal altered or disturbed is the very threat to education. This seemingly innocuous desire for comfort and stability which cannot be maintained absolutely ad infinitum is the violence of the ego that does violence to the objects of difference (e.g. cultural differences) through the ego’s narcissistic understanding. It insists on its prejudice at the cost of all that is different (e.g. eradicating or marginalising minorities that are different). All of us are culpable of this in some sense to varying degrees, some more acceptable or tolerable than others. Everybody has had moments during their quietest and most peaceful moments, fascistic thoughts or moments. It is in all of us and it can only be so. 

Now, we get to see the signifier “gender” in a more productive light. But before exploring further, let us propose one principle that we can glean from all our preceding discussion:

Bringing (the normal) to consciousness is an act that is sine qua non stressful and most 

people would prefer to not do it if they did not have to.

To not know the meaning of the signifier “gender” is to recognise that all that “gender” is, is just merely what is as nothing rather than something. It is unrecognised naturality that does not disturb as it forms the background of our anthropomorphic conditions. In this light, we get see that the antithesis, so to speak, to “gender” is the biological presumption of the “natural state of affairs”, where such behaviour, whether it be the way one dresses, speaks, walks, etc., is just the way things are per the biological signifiers of “male “and “female”. It is an unquestioned normality.

To come-to-know “gender” is to recognise that it is something. Something which is not that which once was but different. That it is alterable and beyond the naturality of biology as “male” or “female”. It is to recognise that it is not fundamentally fixed per the background of other signifiers like “pink” in the Pink World: “pink is changeable (as colour)!”

The pronunciation of the signifier itself, not dialecticised in the mind of those who do not know, irks the Real of the subject. They react defensively as though they do not want to hear the word “gender”; it awakens something in them (perhaps what they always have been need not have been … ). To the degree that one feels that they could have been something else (someone else), the signifier pains and guilts the subject, making the subject react evermore defensively until it has been properly thoroughly dialectised and brought to consciousness. 

For them, the signifier is merely identificatory and corresponds solely as Image of this or that. The pair of blue jeans, the cowboy hat, or the roaring motorcycle, the nurse costume or the high-heels (famously worn and popularised by King Louis XIV of France), etc., is “gender”: there is no abstraction which requires somethingisation. By this, we can understand the curious (yet insightful) insistence by conservative speakers who speak out against transgender individuals, that “gender” is not a thing. They intend to conserve the normal and thereby make it not a thing but a natural state of affairs that ineluctably has to be (e.g. “there can only be this … [liberal capitalist order]” where in saying so, the signifiers are not pronounced (and spoken in response to an objector) as they have not been differenced and if they are, they are irkful merely vague concrete identifications). Knowing and learning is discouraged in such an environment but mere performance is realised/mandated as the phallus of actuality imposes itself.

Once one signifierises the thing which has not yet been signifierised, one is no longer a hostage to it. It has become something, and thereby capable of being manipulated in one way or another (e.g. abstractly); one becomes capable of becoming independent from it as it no longer constitutes the necessary presupposed background of a particular existence or aspect of the world (or the world itself). Such an act creates the condition enabling the subject’s isolation from what always was as the normal.

The signifier “gender” is a victim of an infinite variety of different things which can never be captured, even in a “single” compendium; however, given the patriarchal culture we live in, where education is as such, the signifier “gender” as “this is how [pointing to an Image] you should behave!” leads to its vague concretisation and thereby negation. This is why imposing gender norms on children is a bad idea as it substantially limits their very own understanding of themselves and their relation to the world. 

The signifier “gender” itself irks the subject as it slowly brings to consciousness the current state of affairs as that which it is veritably not; it brings forth epistemic inconsistency which troubles the subject through its split ontology of the Symbolic and Real. The signifier “transgender” here is a little different.

The prefix “trans” in “transgender” means to go beyond gender, it trans-cends. In reality, the phenomenon of transgender identity is the very manifestation of gender itself as it can play out on the human subject. There is nothing inherently revolutionary about it and it appears revolutionary only insofar as our society is fundamentally unhealthy.

The signifier “transgender” becomes understandable insofar as we take it to be a deliberate pedagogical coinage. The point is to bring to the conscious fore the “truth” of gender per the signifier. It is the dialectical act of somethingisation presented in the signifier itself that must go beyond (i.e. trans-cend) the signifier “gender” for it to be something rather than nothing. In doing so, it makes it a blatantly conscientising event: it forces the truth of the signifier “gender” upon the subject. In consequence, the reactive attack on the signifier “gender” - as that which intends to restore the disturbed pre-judicial normal through the attack on the signifier “transgender” - must be renewed. The term itself must be concretised like “gender” and thereby not thought of, nor discussed. Now, we run into the most blatant case of this level of discourse: character assassinations. 

If one has observed anti-trans medias, the discussions are generally (or at least predominantly when they first became popular) never about “gender” nor about what the signifier “transgender” signifies philosophically or ontologically. Maybe this is an unreasonable expectation. Nonetheless, what matters here is that they were deliberately disingenuous discussions. They engage in perpetual slander and defamatory remarks about transgender individuals.

They show images of visually non-normal (as in not stereotypically cis-gender masculine or feminine appearing) drag queens, and propagandistically identify them by uttering signifiers such as “the decay of Western civilisation”, “groomers”, “perverts”, “sexual deviants” and the rest. I once had a benign and kind transgender friend who was so afraid to walk out in public in Toronto, because of their possible encounter with such people who have thoroughly internalised these propagandas. By doing so, they impose par excellence and vaguely concretise the signifier “transgender” in various images which are associated with those signifiers. Just like how “gender” becomes nothing by being identified as natural “blue jeans”, “cowboy hats”, “gun holsters”, so does the signifier “transgender” become so with the signifiers of character assassinations. 

These Images that are maliciously (i.e. with malicious intent) chosen and shown irk the subject as difference irks the normal. At this level, signifierisation is crucial, but instead of coming-to-know it there is the understanding at play as subsumption of that which is different as the same old “bad” (e.g. internal monologue: “this person is broken and mentally sick. We should help …”). It is the intended preservation of the normal by subsuming the different into the same. Such people often claim that they know what “transgender” means but in reality they have no clue and have merely subsumed the different into the already known and thereby have blocked themselves from knowing it. They are like the student who misunderstood the teacher’s “speech” but claims to have illusorily “understood!” 

In fact, if new things (different things) are suddenly shown or experienced in great rapid succession and quantity, but are not slowly and gradually dialectically signifierised, it can be traumatic and cause the subject to, even in a stronger manner, revert back to their normal. 

Like the case of Rumspringa, where amish teenagers are “​​set free, allowed, even encouraged, to go out and learn and experience the ways” (Zizek 2009, p.331) of their urban counterparts in the metropolitan cities (e.g. New York City) for a year or two, the vast majority of Amish teenagers with their sudden liberation into the (or more accurately, thrown in the unfamiliar and different) urban landscapes turn back quite strongly to the traditional Amish ways of normality and have a reverse effect. It appears, as Zizek claims, “such a solution is biased in a most brutal way, a fake choice if ever there was one.” (p.331); it is simply a deliberately engineered, educationally adverse event. We should see, thus, the conservative anti-trans media’s (“false”) flashy showcasing of drastically different drag queens (e.g. “these are these people!”) as a malicious attempt to shock inexperienced subjects and thereby cause them to revert back to their normal even stronger: nothing makes them feel safer than being in the non-thinking soporific home of pre-judice. The normal should be carefully and gradually dialectically signifierised.

Trauma as experience of the Real that breaks down the Symbolic (as Lacan articulates), where one did not know and could not put into words (i.e. transcending the current Symbolic) the   occurred event, makes the subject drastically reverse back to the normal of the past and engage in familiar repetitive actions: they appear to have lost language and are unable to formulate sentences like they used to. Of course, this is not the case with anti-trans medias, but the principle applies in graduation. Observing a documentary on shell-shocked veterans or veterans with PTSD veritably elucidates such dynamics. The ability to think breaks down and the normal of behaviour is merely performed and not known. Hence why, therapy for trauma revolves predominantly involves the slow reintegration of the traumatic events into the Symbolic per language (as an articulated event). Education all has this potential to be traumatic and within a gradationary barometer, pedagogical guidance is crucial. Being barraged by the Other, as mentioned before, must be done gradually and in moderation.

Anti-trans media personnel are often seen exploiting this moment of vulnerability (where current language and knowledge ends) that people have when they experience difference; by imposing par excellence they implicitly claim “I know the way … follow me!” rather than fostering the dialectical process of coming-to-know for the interlocutors, they tell them, “what you already know is correct and enough!” These moments of vulnerability require the most special pedagogical attention and care (in the technical sense of the word) to prevent exploitation and regress. 

The edict is clear from all this, those media personnel claim: “do not think(!), for I can “think” for you!”

The anti-trans media does not only affect those who actively consume it, it affects all of us as existing in the discourse of society. At the preceding starting point of this section, we pondered why the signifier “gender” irks the “average joe” more than the signifier “transgender” when asked. Now we have come to know why. 

The signifier “transgender” as the explicit representation of the dialectical “truth” of “gender” is consciously dealt with by the reactive but deliberate character assassinations and the claim “gender is not a thing”. In so doing the “trans-ability” of the signifier “transgender” is eradicated as there is nothing to be “trans-ed” at all: “gender is not a thing”. It propagandistically becomes vague concretised things that register as forms of mental illness where naturalness is broken and in need of repair. These vague concretised images appear as abnormal and in appearing so, the general public does not resonate with the signifier and when heard of, assume it is unrelated to who they are (as they are normal) in any relevant sense. The signifier became alien. Political discourse takes place at this level in the general public. So when a person says “I want to help transgender people”, it can have multiple meanings antithetical or not to what the listeners presume and desire.The result is that the signifier “transgender” does not irk very much. There is another important reason.

 The signifier “transgender” operates at the level of “trans-ing” where “gender” itself must be dialectically trans-cended. However, the signifier “transgender” here is too distant from “gender” in the sense that the signifier “gender” is allowed to be understood (i.e. subsumed) through its distance due to the first part of the pronounced signifier being “trans”: (“I am curious what is being transed here??? I want to understand!”). In contrast, when the signifier “gender” is pronounced (relevantly) alone, it is felt because the signifier itself impacts by itself differencing, in turn, providing epistemic inconsistency to the subject by making it (the naturality of biological sex) something: there is no other processing that allows a prepared subsumption of understanding to take place so as to egoically subsume it. The signifier hits immediately. 

Those who are not engaging in this anti-trans medias maliciously while knowing the “truth” (which is required to be effective at propagandising and hence, truly malicious) appear oftentimes to be (naive) individuals who are most at the point of realising the truth of the signifier “gender” (as they appear to be so “disturbed” by it) and appear to be “fighting against themselves”. Despite this, when these people sink back into their normal of silence (viz. non-articulation), they never again completely return back. They have been ineluctably irked; the Real of the subject will simply not allow it, it has been hit by the signifier and permanently changed. 

The focus on the Image of transgender women participating in female sports is the par excellence of such attempts. It is the attempt to character assassinate “transgender” people and by doing so, disingenuously makes the conversation a non-conversation and a mere repetition of the same-old, same-old. The proper way to respond to such discourse which permeates our social discourse and affects us all, is to not even accept it as a premise of the discourse and recognise it as what it is, a disingenuous attempt at unjustifiably conserving pre-existing discourse. Instead, the correct approach is to immediately switch to the discourse about the signifier “transgender” and its dialectical philosophical contents (viz. to talk about what the word really means in a helpful and accurate manner). 

The goal of my exposition here in this section is to merely take one signifier among an infinite many others, and to explore the educational and social dynamics and their consequences that take place within our phallocentric impository order of our world. Now, this is not to blame all problems with the supposed misknowing of signifiers upon these dynamics. Most words either are vague (Sorites paradox), indeterminate, ambiguous, or thoroughly underdetermined; there are contronyms, homonyms, polysemies and more; but these lead to the case why situationally dialectising words are evermore crucial and necessary, and not to alleviate blame from those who deliberately do not. 

 Reification and Inherited Impositions

In the famous novel “1984” by George Orwell (1949), we have a truly dystopian picture of language manipulation. Therein present is the malicious manufactured language “Newspeak”, in opposition to “Oldspeak” which (more or less) resembles our British English language, created by the “Big Brother” (i.e. “INGSOC”) to maintain absolute control of the people: He is “interested solely in power” 263 for the sake of itself, He wants “only power, pure power” (p.263) as O-Brien, the representative of Big Brother, says himself. 

Through Newspeak, everything eventually belongs (as O’Brien claims) to the singular order of the Big Brother where “Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right” (p.155) and concomitantly where “thoughtcrime [becomes] literally impossible” (p.52). Supposedly, “Men are infinitely malleable” (p.269), and the key to the malleability lies simply in manipulating language, such that “because there will be no words in which to express it [viz. the thoughtcrimes]” (p.52) as Syme, an editor of the newest edition of the Newspeak dictionary says, it will be impossible to lie or engage in criminal thought; no contrary thoughts will be even possible to have. 

 Here are the famous “three slogan of the Party” (p.6) INGSOC:

“WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”  (p.4) 

In this world, Syme again says:

“what justification is there for a word which is simply the

opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite

in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like

‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’

will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite,

which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger ver-

sion of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string

of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all

the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘double-

plusgood’ if you want something stronger still.” (p.51)

Oldspeak “with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.” (p.52) must be eliminated by “destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day” (p.51): “Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?” (p.53). This conviction that “Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word” (p.52) is the very dystopian fantastical character of the novel. Such a dystopian world is impossible: the significations of signifiers can only be made insofar as they differ from some other signifier/s. 

The singular order of Big Brother cannot even be true, as there can be neither falsehoods nor lies. The world just is. There is no escaping it. There is no order of the Big Brother, as there is no contrary of the Other, the order is just reality per its representations. It is reality itself. There is nothing beyond it where its justifications rest. 

In this world, there can be no thinking as to think (viz. to articulate signifiers) one must be able to think of an-Other signifier, “Pink”, for example, can be signified insofar as there is something that is not-pink. There must be a point at which the signifier x ends and something different, not a mere “un-x”, for that is a different category, one that requires differencing in the first place to be established. The structure of a sentence is constituted by many different words. It is not possible, as Syme suggests, for words to simply be self-referential. 

When one utters a signifier x, it can only be done from the position of not-x, or perhaps more accurately, not-merely-x. For example, if one articulates a repressed truth “I am angry so I should stop projecting, displacing, etc., on my innocent coworker”, one is not merely the same subject who pronounces those signifiers. One speaks necessarily from a different locus, the position of not-merely-those-signifiers. The signifiers are only recognisable (they are something which has a beginning and an end from where difference emerges as differentiations) insofar as they are seen from the Other’s position as that which is not it: you cannot signifierise the colour pink if you have only ever been in it.

When I say, “not-merely-x”, I must here briefly caution what I understand to mean by that before moving on further. When one pronounces “this is x”, the x is seeable only insofar it is properly differentiated and therefore, a something. In being so, one must be able to mutually entertain x and not-x. I will just state here simply that, one must locate oneself outside of the signifier x in order for it to be seeable (from), and in being so, when one pronounces a signifier x, one must be in the locus of the Other (which is different) which can perceive x. At the same time, x must be present in the subject in a certain way.  It is not obvious how the nature of cognition precisely works so as to be able to mutually entertain differences as, for example, presented in the spoken or the written signifier above. One here is reminded of the Kantian thesis of the intuition of (the inescapability of) space. I will not address this philosophy of mind issue in this paper and leave it up to others. 

Let us apply what we have expounded so far to the signifier “happy”. To be continually “happy” and have “always” been solely as such is to not recognise the signifier “happy”. In South Korea, we see the signifier “행복” (translated as “happiness”) everywhere, perhaps, because we are a chronically unhappy society. By this specific point, I am not intending to make any psychoanalytic or political point. I intend here, specifically, that the proliferation of the signifier is enabled by the fact that Korean society in general is quite unhappy. I suggest here that perhaps “enjoyment” is found in the non-thinking of the supposed unhappiness (as a non-signifierised thing that does not bother). 

To return back to the aforementioned saying on page 3, “it is no longer that which was”, we can now see better why this is especially true. It is that when one utters that “which was …”, it locates them in the new and different and concomitantly discomforting world of that which is not that “which was …”. In doing so, it violates the fundamental principle of mourning: stay with the subject (who passed away), be in their presence, and recognise the contributions the person made and in their beauty of them, show gratitude and by doing so, slowly and gradually recognise the value of them (as lost objects) by dialectically contrasting them with the new different world. The process of doing so, allows the subjects to move away slowly from the mourned subject in an acceptable way: without a recognition of what has been lost, there is nothing to be mourned, it becomes a mere vacuous performance. To suddenly move away without recognising the loss (as that …) by pronouncing the signifier is contextually inappropriate and cringes everyone, such an act is simply to not mourn but merely to simply recognise the death of someone as though it is neither a relevant nor a significant deal of any sorts. 

 From these preceding expositions, we can understand that just like how if we are merely in the written signifier (its complete shapeless centre) or merely in the centre of the spoken signifier without any seeable or determinable differentiations we have no clue what it means, the subject’s pronunciation of the signifiers can never be done from the same locus as the signifiers themselves if it is to be the communication of known things. It is simply that:

For the object-to-be-communicated to be communicable, it must itself be represented in the

form of that which is communicable, that which is something itself. 

It is simply not the case that “A word contains its opposite in itself.” (p.51) as Syme intends it. To perpetuate the traditional state of normality for oneself is to have never approached the boundary of what is (per tradition) and have never known but merely performed it like the Pink World where the boundary of pink was never met until it was dialecticised with purple (and signifierised). It is to merely perform it with the omnipresent non-/signifier at play. This is where the difference between mere performance and knowing emerges: to know it is to have gone (dialectically) beyond it. What implications this has for A.I learning and its epistemology qua language will be quite interesting. 

For Big Brother, true “Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Thinking is unconsciousness.” (p.53). It is normality, maximised in a utopia of their kind. This system is unsustainable in reality. This state of thinking is not perpetuatable ad infinitum because it perpetually requires a new, more conservative low of non-thinking (normal), like the white nationalist, for example, who tries to find ultimate justification in pure nature and attain a state of non-thinking normality, where no reason can intrude. This statement about “Orthodoxy” (ibid.) is represented in “1984” by the ever-decreasing quantity of words where eventually there will be only “exactly one word” (p.52) to express “Every concept that can ever be needed” (ibid.). One realises here that there needs to be at least some (a singular) framework that provides justification for being. It can never be eliminated. Such an idea in the real world, can only lead to a practically non-entertainable regress of living death itself. The normal itself is not neutral and neither is it neutrally located; it compels the subject to perpetuate itself. 

In line with this, in “1984”, the belief is essentially: the same anthropomorphic system of society can continue functioning along with the ever-decreasing language of that society. At the individual level, there is no possible way for the human subject to continually perform the normal of tradition, for example, without coming-to-know (i.e. think through difference) it at some level (one necessarily inadvertently brushes up against the limits of it): consciousness ends up adjusting itself to this new normal of tradition like how the drug addict’s dose no longer suffices and reality painfully shows itself. This coming-to-know cannot be prevented by eliminating signifiers, as lalanguage and the neologisms grafted on them will proliferate in order to satisfy the inherent cravings in the experiences of differences. It can only be kept down through pure violence or a system of violence (e.g. where one is deliberately not given the time to think). Likewise, mere punishment does not teach when one wrongs, it instead teaches something else. Such a system will necessarily require a brutal division of the managerial (viz. those who know) and the performers; without going any further, such a patriarchally unequal social world is fundamentally not healthy for everyone in it: no one can breathe in it. 

In the realist version of “1984”, thinking cannot be had. In fact, the limited signifiers that are used, merely appear, to suffice like Oldspeak. This is an illusion caused by the Imaginary quality of understanding from the perspective of those who know: only the dictionary writers and the elites who coordinate the production and orchestration of Newspeak, can think through these remaining few words as they do not merely think through these remaining Newspeak words. In contrast, these remaining signifiers register for the populous merely on the behavioural level of the concrete. 

This can happen because the signifiers represent vague concrete things and at the level of impository social organisation (of the managerial over the performers), what fundamentally orders their world is behavioural guidance through fear. There is no signifier as knowledge because there are no sufficient differentiations. Signifiers here represent forms of crude and rudimentary fearful “yes”s or “no”s and thereby become concrete action-directives and become vaguely associated with their experientially-corresponding actions. In this world, the performers become mere “automatons” - to humorously use Cartesian language in light of Lacan - where their normal pervades for themselves (insofar as the managerial class is able to appropriately interfere).   

Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan “There is no alternative”  is one of the best real life political examples of such actions. The alternative is deliberately not even named, for if it is known, so must that which has “no alternative” must also be known together with it and the possibility of change recognised.

Most importantly, what this does is it mandates performance: if there is no alternative economic order, then one can only and must merely perform that which is. There is no coming-to-the-boundary of which is where an Other appears, thus there is no knowledge of what one does (at the relevant level of economic organisation and order), there is mere performance and its mere identifications. 

This was Big Brother’s way of doing things; however, there is another way besides “destroying words” (p.51). It is to assimilate differencing signifiers that stressfully make the calm soporific normal, a something, into the same old Symbolic through the understanding, thereby destroying words without “destroying words” (ibid.). It is to prevent the subject from being disturbed, no matter the cost to Others, in its all-pervading soporific normal. As I said before on page 33, this desire for comfort is not an innocuous desire, and it only appears so to those who are (relevantly) the same and thus, not affected. Most crucially, this regression in pursuit of the state of soporific non-thinking normal is unsustainable. This deliberate “blindness to difference” (Fink 2013, p.10), however, can only be perpetuated in a society of action over thinking and knowledge that is fundamentally unhealthy (e.g. mistrust) and full of fear and anxiety where a minority of unknown managers (from the sky) impose all the rules from above; but this is not all, as Erich Fromm and others (e.g. Wilheim Reich, Paulo Freire, etc.,) have observed through their versions of the phenomenon referred to as “the fear of freedom”, many people would voluntarily accept such a state as it allows them to perpetuate their somniferising normal of non-thinking through mere actions that are mandated through fear (and where thus non-thinking becomes justified to themselves).

It is not the creation of new words and a concomitant new way of speaking and thinking that is Orwellian, as many conservatives claim, rather, it is the subsumption of the new words into the dictionary of the Old(speak) to prevent thinking that is Orwellian. Just like how the “Communist International” became “Comintern”, the “Ministry of Truth” became “Minitrue”, and “English Socialists” became INGSOC, we see that terms like “liberals” became “libs”,“transgender” individuals became “trannies”, and “social justice warriors” became SJWs. This desire becomes an unsustainable infinite regress if no resistance is met: if they could, they would go further on to reduce the diversity of words and perhaps eliminate all but “exactly one word” (p.52). 

Critical thinking can only occur through the “vagueness and useless shades of meaning” (Orwell 1949, p.52) that signifiers have. It is to not take the meaning of pronounced signifiers as prima facie true but to investigate them in light of other possible meanings, something which is not possible in “1984”. It is to look behind their curtains and dialectise them in different contexts to figure out that there is more to those words than they were in those previous sentences. This freedom to think Otherwise, is what is fundamentally required for a healthy society where critical thinking is ubiquitous. Most importantly, in order to have the ability to think Otherwise, one needs to be able to think through Other words which are truly different; new words are required to be evermore learnt and evermore created. This diversity of words is truly indispensable and fundamental for any healthy society.

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