Reality doesn't immediately manifest itself to us as objects, but as things. The object is already a constructed entity, circumscribed and integrated into a set of categories. The object can later be named, domesticated by language. But from the outset, it brings into play the human mechanisms of representation. Before the object, there is the thing: the thing reaches us brutally, without mediation, not even yet as an image, but as a shock.

The child manipulates his cube or spoon, turning it in his hand or bringing it to his mouth to incorporate it, then rejecting them violently without sometimes immediately succeeding in disengaging himself from them, because his hand grasps more easily than it disengages: the child is then not only experiencing distance, separation from himself to the cube, to the spoon, the object relation. He repeats the coming to him of the thing, appropriating the first aggressions (the air forcing the lungs, the milk making its way, were sufferings before becoming pleasures), and turning these aggressions towards the outside. Turning the thing into an object means transforming the shock (something from the real reaches the subject) into repetition (this thing, now an object, becomes part of a category, a series, an ordinary). For the moment, it's not a question of desire, but of the shock that precedes it, of the intimate impact that must be reversed. To desire the thing, to desire the return of the first pleasures, is already to enter into a process of transforming the thing into an object, it is already to switch from the undergone attainment to the returned attainment, it is already to enter into the second logic of repetition.

The thing proceeds from the real; the object proceeds from representation. To constitute a thing as an object, even before there is any question of language, is first to think of it as an image, as a scene, as a picture that repeats itself, and to reduce it through this repetition: the child chooses an object, he prefers such and such a cube, such and such a figurine, such and such a little car to the other things presented to him; he therefore recognizes and selects a familiar image. This selection is only apparently a preference; in reality, it protects the child against the threatening heterogeneity of things, by opposing them with the regularity of the object. Of course, there is a loss here, and the subject can only observe the poverty of the reassuring world of objects compared to the infinite world of things. This is why the relationship with the object is always disappointing: the thing always remains behind, in the vagueness of the real, in excess, as it were, even when the object is caught, clutched, possessed, even destroyed. The domination of the thing by the construction of the object is thus always to be remade, and never conjures up the damage the thing has inflicted on the subject. The eternal recommencement of the process of transforming the thing into an object constitutes the mechanism of repetition and defines desire.

The object thus comes to stand between the real and the subject, as a kind of counter-fire, like a screen built by the subject against the damage inflicted by the real. What is formed between object and subject is not the simple articulatory feature of the object relation, but a whole space protected and sheltered from the real, the very space of representation¹. Representation, then, is not an external transposition of the real: we must never forget that the real transits through the subject, who then protects and defends himself against it by means of representation. There is thus a double contradictory movement, first a brutal rapprochement of the subject and the real, an appropriation, then a distancing from this real, representation constituting a dispossession.

Image and language

Language, which names objects and states of the soul, i.e. relations from self to self, then from self to objects, then from one object to another object, is therefore no more than a secondary elaboration of thought, whose first activity was iconic: providing for, or rather against things, images in order to constitute them as objects. There can be no language if there are no objects, if thought has not first constituted things as objects. To constitute things as objects is not yet to name them, it is first to integrate them into a system of repetition: what is repeated is the trace that things have left in memory; this trace can only be iconic. Of course, we can't rule out the possibility that these traces may be mingled with sensations other than the visual, such as touch, smell or taste. But in addition to the fact that memory tends to privilege the visual dimension of things, the distance that the gaze establishes vis-à-vis what is being looked at plays an essential role in the constitution of objects: as long as things are apprehended in the touch-odour-taste continuum (air and bath, breast and mother's milk, doudou), they remain things, without distance or firewall.

The image one recognizes introduces, from oneself to reality, a time of latency, a suspension that is not sensitive, but intellectual: it's no longer a question of letting oneself be invaded by the sensation of the thing, but of marking, from a distance, a recognition that one appropriates, of identifying an image that one dominates: vision then becomes gaze, the luminous shock of the thing is reduced by the gazing subject to the status of the repetition of an image².

From thing to object, images are at work. Once these images have been posited, language is put in place, not only to say the relations between objects, but also, in its most elaborate, properly artistic form, to mark what, in objects, has been lost from things, and to attempt, as it were, an impossible return from the object to the thing, that is, to something that would be at once full, uncircumscribed, and dominated. To achieve this return, language - or, more precisely, thought insofar as it is now dominated by the structures and means of language - appeals to its primary, iconic resources, to that which primitively manipulated things in order to constitute them as objects, as if there had been a primitive mastery of things that it would be necessary to recover, and forgetting, as it were, that the aggression of things was first and foremost a horrible catastrophe from which the subject had sought to escape as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary. Forgetting the catastrophe is essential, even when art seems to be striving to express it, to represent it: in its very horror, it idealizes it; by the very fact of returning to it, it deposits the structure, the formal envelope of the objects. This is why, whatever form it takes, beautiful or ugly, abomination or celebration, the return of objects to things, through this artistic language in which the image is put back to work, constitutes the process of sublimation.

The image is thus placed at the two extremes of the process of representation, at its archaic foundation, when it engages the transformation of things into objects, and at its artistic summit, when it is summoned to effect a return of objects to things. Between these two extremes, language constitutes the ordinary of representation, in the protected space of objects, the subject maintaining with what he speaks a middle, regulated distance.

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The making of meaning

Once again, the terms image and language are not taken here to define media of representation, but logics of meaning production. Speech can show, articulate images or unroll, string together discourse; similarly, a drawing or photograph can be read as a narrative or even a demonstration, or, on the contrary, seek to produce the global, immediate effect of an iconic shock. What constitutes this speech, this drawing, this photograph as artistic is precisely the interweaving of different logics productive of meaning.

The constitution of things into objects through the establishment of a protective network of images designed to represent things and, progressively, to stand in for them constituted the first meaning-producing logic. The expression of relations between objects³, and of the subject's relations with them, constituted a secondary elaboration and thus a second logic of meaning production. These two successive, then concurrent, processes both constitute symbolization processes, which implies a different symbolization code for each of them, for there is no reason to posit the arbitrariness of the signifier on the one hand, without positing a certain arbitrariness of the signified on the other.

In fact, we mustn't forget why meaning is produced. Intellectual activity responds to an intimate attack, the production of meaning is a defensive reaction of the subject threatened first by things, then by the risk of dislocation of objects. The subject builds and then maintains his or her screens of representation. To respond to the intimate attack, the subject resorts to a system, a code of symbolization. A mysterious alchemy then takes place, whereby this code constitutes both a personal, singular production of the subject and a reference, if not universal, then at least collective: it is because the code is recognized by others, and therefore to some extent respected by them, that it protects the subject. However mysterious it may be, this alchemy is a human and social production: what's at stake is not only how things are to be represented (signifiers), but also what is to be represented and, above all, how the figures are to be arranged in relation to one another. There is therefore a social, cultural arbitrariness to the code, just as there is an arbitrariness to the signifier. If the code contains an element of arbitrariness, it is not necessarily unique, not only from one society or era to another, but even within the same era, the same society.

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A symbolic code is an interface: it pre-exists the subject and at the same time is reinvented and arranged by him. In the code, then, there is always a play between the pre-existing meaning and the intimate meaning: this play is none other than that between the thing and the object, i.e. from what is given from the outside to what is conceived from the inside to figure this outside. This interface must not be considered exclusively from a technical point of view, as a logical construction to implement the signified: the technical approach tends to build a universalizing model and to deny the existence, the very possibility of a plurality of codes, which nonetheless constitutes an essential human given. The existence of the code is part of the human adventure; the fact that it is constituted as an interface feeds it with the singular history of each subject. The code does not simply signify things; it also expresses the history of the subject: such are the two faces, external and internal, that constitute it.

The iconic code thus refers to the archaic history of the constitution of the pre-oedipal subject, before the acquisition of language; the linguistic code, on the other hand, refers to the later oedipal scenarios through which the ego tends to take on a more definitive form. This is why we have deliberately spoken of primary and secondary elaboration, taking up Freudian terminology: the technical difference between the two semiological systems covers and translates the difference in the nature of the subject during their first implementations.

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We can therefore formulate the hypothesis that the signifying juxtaposition of images to form a screen in front of things reacts to the pre-object horror progressively identified and thought of by the subject as horror in front of the primitive scene. In other words, the setting up of images represents, in the form of a screen scene, the intimate attack as spectacle of the primitive scene. Mise en place and spectacle are the means of this primary production of meaning.

As for the articulation, the linking of objects in a continuous discourse, it essentially consists in integrating the speaking subject into the space of objects previously constituted: the spectacle set up in front of oneself, the objective disposition installed between oneself and the world are then transformed into scenarios, stories, narratives in which the subject occupies a place, a function. Just as Oedipus consists in the subject choosing a place in the primitive scene (the subject takes the place of the father, for example, in order to unite with the mother), so the implementation of language consists in introducing a differential "I" in the midst of objects, or in other words, in establishing an essential difference, among objects, between the subject and all others. As the subject becomes a special object, the arrangement of objects becomes polarized around him. Objective iconic arrangement and subjective discursive arrangement are then superimposed, constituting the space of representation in device.

Knowledge of language and knowledge of images

The oldest meaning-making system in each of us was theorized by Freud as the grammar of the unconscious. It is governed by two fundamental mechanisms: condensation and displacement. This term of grammar led Freud's heirs to identify the functioning of the unconscious with linguistic functioning, at a time when the linguistic model was becoming generalized in all scientific disciplines, as a prelude to the general crisis it is undergoing today⁴. We're all familiar with Lacan's famous formula, according to which the unconscious is structured like a language, and the place he assigns to the play of the signifier in the manifestations of drives and the processes of repression. In our opinion, we can't be too wary of a linguistic model of what Freud unearthed as radically irreducible to the conscious processes of representation, within which language reigns. It is in the flaws, not the structures of language, that psychoanalysis tracks down the manifestations of the unconscious.

The dream, which is the space where the ancient code of symbolization continues to dominate, is both timeless and discourse-less, i.e., properly speaking illogical. When words and speech intervene in the dream, they are not integrated into a discourse and must be interpreted precisely not for the idea they express, but as images placed before the things they represent. In the dream, representing does not mean articulating objects to one another, but protecting oneself from things by means of images placed before them. The dream screens things; it opens up a space for the representation of objects between the subject and things. The dream does not distinguish decisively between "doing" and "undergoing". It provides the disposition of a spectacle, but remains uncertain as to the role the subject plays in it. If the dream is delivered to the psychoanalyst by means of a narrative from his patient, the first task will be to strip this narrative of its logical articulations, its sequences, in an attempt to restore its iconic layout: a system of images that overlap or oppose each other globally, with an assigned place, but without order or duration.

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The iconic grammar of the dream, an unconscious grammar for the speaking subject, was the child's first conscious grammar, before being repressed when language appeared. But the dream doesn't just say otherwise. It also says something else. The knowledge of the dream is not the knowledge of language. The knowledge of the dream refers to the mystery of the primitive scene, while the knowledge of language refers to the Oedipal enigma.

In fact, when we use language, it's not a neutral tool of communication: what we say certainly communicates the information we've chosen to transmit, but it communicates it within a common framework of symbolic references, with a whole system of connivances that mean that our speech, at the same time as expressing our singular ideas, says and repeats the collective values, the common ideas in which these singular ideas come to be inscribed. Without these connivances, without this constant reassurance of participation in the community, speech is ineffective and rapidly becomes incomprehensible. All discourse in this sense constitutes an interface between the singular ideas it differentially expresses and the common ideas it more or less explicitly restates.

The same is true of images, which constitute things as objects, in the first, iconic phase of the constitution of meaning, even if the iconic interface is of an entirely different nature to the linguistic interface. The object is a thing chosen, then represented by means of an image: the thing belongs to the real, i.e. not of course to a social or cultural community, but to a totality of the world, whereas the image belongs to subjective elaboration. The object is represented by the image, in the subject's inner world, but it designates the thing, in the vague exteriority of the real. Here too, then, there is an interface, an archaic interface where it is not a subject seeking to integrate itself into a collectivity, but where subject and totality of the world face each other in an even more unequal struggle.

The knowledge of images, the knowledge of dreams, is the knowledge of this face-to-face encounter with things, with the totality of the world, a face-to-face encounter whose distressing, horrifying character is imaged by the spectacle, real or fabricated, of the primitive scene. The content of this knowledge is necessarily quite poor and primitive at the outset: it revolves around the question of the origins of the subject, for which the spectacle of the primitive scene provides not exactly an answer, but rather first a brutal experience of horrification, gradually transformed into representation. Any inquiry into the exact nature of this knowledge of images seems a priori futile, since this knowledge, which pre-exists language, in a way refuses to accept it. Who hasn't had the experience of coming out of a dream charged with emotions, twists and sensations, only to find oneself unable to render this rich content in words, and end up producing a dull, uninteresting narrative? The essential thing is missing from this restitution: the total spectacle in which the subject is immersed, the bath of images produced by the dream escapes and resists linguistic translation.

Precisely through this resistance, it exerts its appeal. It may be that the knowledge of images, when it still constitutes for the subject the only material from which to begin to think about things, is a poor, terribly crude knowledge: but its subsequent burial in the unconscious, its resistance to verbalization confer on it in a second stage a prestige that is properly supernatural. The knowledge of images is, for each subject, the means by which he or she has resisted the aggression of things and triumphed over the certain death to which the first moments of life seem to promise each of us. In later conscious life, any intimate attack, any aggression, any experience of failure, of inferiority, of being outnumbered, can lead the subject to summon that knowledge of images which was his first survival resource, the first manifestation of his spirit. This movement by which the subject returns from objects to things is not necessarily and exclusively to be identified with the process of sublimation. In fact, sublimation is an exceptional case in point. More generally, the phenomenon in question is that of the subject's resistance through recourse to the archaic knowledge of images, even if this means investing this knowledge with new, highly elaborate content. An example of resistance through images is the mot d'esprit, whose apparent absurdity allows us for a moment to break out of the logic of discourse and fleetingly conjure up an iconic effect in language: what is said makes a tableau or, to use the Lacanian formula, constitutes a "pas-de-sens", i.e. both a defection of verbal meaning and the visual manifestation, so to speak, of a "pas", a non-verbal signifying connection.

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The knowledge of language carries all the values displayed by the community, all that society claims in terms of traditions, culture, identity. When the subject does not find himself in this knowledge, that is, not only in major traumatic experiences (injustices, wars, persecutions, blows of fate) but on a daily basis in all the little experiences of incomprehension, friction, of a discrepancy between what we feel and what the community expresses⁵, the knowledge of images rises up in him as a point of support to refound himself alone as a subject facing the totality of the world, as he had to do in early childhood, before the Oedipal scenarios of social integration were put in place. The knowledge of images, when explicitly claimed, is put forward as the highest knowledge, as the law that takes precedence over all other laws, as the principle that precedes and conditions all other principles: in it lies the boundary between life and death, in it the subject rediscovers, with the mystery of origins, the agreement of self with self. The knowledge of images is thus summoned, consciously and rationally, as a symbolic principle in the face of the symbolic institution that language carries and expresses, as an ethical requirement in the face of the pressure, the moral constraints that the collectivity exerts on the subject.

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The scandal of the image

This is not the first time that the hypothesis of a second symbolic instance both prior to and superior to the code and ordinary symbolic references has been posited: the philosophy of law recognizes a natural law below positive law; we also differentiate between law and justice; Christian culture differentiates between letter and spirit; Jewish culture - the torah and the mishna, the Bible and Tradition; the Greeks distinguish between the written laws of men and the unwritten laws of the gods, on which Antigone relies to claim the burial of her brother; Kant bases his moral philosophy on the distinction between hypothetical imperatives and the categorical imperative. The enumeration is certainly heteroclite, each of the symbolic couples evoked being based on different articulations in different contexts; but each time is implicitly or explicitly posited the principle of symbolic duplication, as a game necessary to the dynamics of law. The institution of laws recognizes a foundation anterior to itself, a principle from which it derives its legitimacy, but also from which recourse can be exercised against it, so that, for the institution as for the subject, the symbolic principle is both a principle of life and a principle of death.

What we're putting forward again here, then, is not the idea of symbolic splitting, but indeed the identification of the symbolic principle with a knowledge of images: how can the biblical letter, how can natural law, the laws of the gods and the categorical imperative be identified with what we've designated as the knowledge of images, knowledge that is properly illogical, i.e. not proceeding from discourse and resisting verbalization? Thus posed in its abrupt radicality, the hypothesis seems quite simply delusional.

However, positive law recognizes a natural right well above itself, corresponding to an earlier state of humanity, the state of nature, which logically if not historically precedes the state of society. In the same way, Christianity recognizes a religious law corresponding to an earlier state of Revelation, and therefore to an earlier state of humanity; the laws written down by the Greek democracies are presented as a sign of the evolution of humanity, and are defined in relation to the unwritten laws of the pre-democratic era, which, although ideologically condemned, have returned to the collective imagination as divine laws shrouded in the prestige of archaic times. While we find no trace in these couples of a privileged relationship between the old law and the image, we are indeed dealing with the same mechanism of repressing the old knowledge beneath the new, and then recognizing the returning effects of this old knowledge, as nostalgia for a lost world, as recourse in injustice, as an instrument of subversion.

The reference to the image is or appears absent not from the reality of the interplay between the two instances of the law, but from the discourse accounting for this reality, particularly whenever this discourse is held in the name of the symbolic institution, in the name of linguistic knowledge. The reference to the image is thus systematically erased, downplayed, disguised, with the unavowed aim of reducing to their simplest expression the possibilities of resistance, of subversion in the name of a principle presented as sublime, but veiled, inaccessible⁶. Since the new world of language, the old world of the image becomes unthinkable, and can only be described negatively, as a world without contract (the state of nature), without writing (the unwritten laws), without grace and love (the Old Testament), without reality itself (the categorical imperative).

Notes