Personal identity depends on language’s temporal unification of past, present, and future

Evidence

Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning. … Meaning on the new view is generated by the movement from signifier to signifier. What we generally call the signified — the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance — is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves. When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. … The connection between this kind of linguistic malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic may then be grasped by way of a twofold proposition: first, that personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present; and, second, that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 98

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Lacan’s schizophrenia as a breakdown of the signifying chain and unpacks how meaning arises from signifier-to-signifier movement rather than signifier-signified matches.
• QUESTION: Jameson will build the ‘waning of affect’ on this linguistic model of temporal identity — worth tracking how he moves from sentence-level time to psychic experience.
• XREF: connects to: Metaphysics privileges the present tense by defining past and future as modifications of presence — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 195; Interiorization of natural time transforms mere sequence into subjective synthetic unity — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 392; Consumption history serves as shorthand for personal identity and biography — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 864 (+4 more)