1. Introduction

We aim to revisit here a reflection started in past works (e.g.[1],[2],[3],[4]), through which we intend to relate both the concept of authorship with the one of drift, taking as theoretical basis Pêcheux’s Discourse Analysis (DA) and Lacan’s Psychoanalysis. It is with the attempt to establish a dialogue between these two approaches that we affirm ([1]: 80) as follows: “The work of authorship refers to what Pêcheux described as: “… a Discourse division into two spaces: one being the manipulation of established significations, normalized by a pedagogic hygiene of thought, and the other being the transformation of meaning, escaping to every norm previously set up, it is, a work of meaning about meaning, taken from the infinite recast of interpretations.” (e.g.,[5]: 51). Analytically, the subject takes up the author’s position when he retroacts on the process of meaning construction, seeking to “tie” the dispersion that is always virtually being installed, due to the equivocity of language. This way, the author produces what Lacan[6] named as “point de capiton”, anchoring point in the process of enunciation, where it is possible to realize that the subject has effectuated a backshift to the statement, and therefore, he can look at it from a different point of view, which I propose to be called the author’s place”.

In the same text, joining the notion of dispersion with the one of drift, we still comment: “...even succeeding in the constraint of dispersion, through the “shifters” and other resources (which belong to the system’s order), the author cannot control equivocity and, therefore, drift always comes up. The thing is that, if drift is an unconscious process for the subject-enunciator, a product of both his illusions or forgetfulness described by Pêcheux[7], it is a point of support for the subject-author, in order to create rhetoric maneuvers that should be avoided, such as in scientific pieces (which can be oral, as in a class, or written form, as in a thesis), or, to set it wide open as a resource of denial of language equivocity. (e.g.[7]: p.82)”.

According to Tfouni[2], the work of authorship is simultaneously done in conjunction with a deictic interpretation that occurs during enunciation. It is, as someone enunciates something, the subject-author builds imaginary constructions about the text he wants to build, which will give origin to mechanisms of anticipation, or, “expectation” in still virtual places of signification.

2. Methods

The subject, in this movement, is located at some point in the interdiscursive net that constitutes the memory of saying, which is where the statements are situated (the ones mentioned beforehand). Enunciating something is a historic-social act of appropriation and functioning of language, an anchored event in the determinations of the history of possible sayings, or, the interdiscourse. According to Pêcheux[7], looking at the linguistic phenomenon from the enunciation’s viewpoint, or from its functioning, implies the acceptance of its partly non-linguistic processing, and also that it can only be defined in relation to its conditions of production (including, here, the personal historic background of the subject). We are going to see how these are taken into account in the following analysis.

According to Pêcheux’s[7] own words: “(…) we propose to name interdiscourse this ‘whole complex with dominant’ constructions of discourse, clarifying that it is also subjected to the laws of inequity-contradiction-subordination which, as we said, features the complex set of ideological formations. (…) the oneness of all discursive formation is to dissimulate, within its transparency of meaning, the material objectiveness contradictory to the interdiscourse, which determines this discursive formation as it is; material objectiveness that resides in the fact that ‘something speaks’ (ça parle) always ‘before, somewhere else and independently’, it is, under the domination of the complex of ideological formations. (e.g.[7]: 162)”.

It is possible to say there are, then, mechanisms (ideological) of naturalization of meanings, that captures the subject, and that can update itself in the language through the choice of lexical items, for instance. Bakhtin[8], under the pseudonym of Voloshinov, already stated that the words of a specific language are filled with ideological content that reflects the history of class-conflict. This way, the metaphorical formations which accomplish drift (source of occurrence) are also part of the particular history, that is, in the memory, from where the language updating occurs as products of a social and specific history. Attributing a meaning is a task concerned to the imaginary, the ideology: to create bounds, establish relations, order, classify, compare, transform what is new, something disturbing into something always-already-there: to tame the instability of “lalangue” through “langue”, fixing, hence, through metaphors and metonyms, a new transitory unit that will soon again dissolve under the nonstop harassment of what is real, the return of the constrained, the impossible thing to define in itself.

Thus, how is the author’s job in the face of the possibility of drift? It is known all choices are a matter of exclusion. “The memory is memory of desire”, states Freud, and, therefore, the strategy used by the subject to restitute to the metonymic chain its lost sequence is not connected to a conscious process, notwithstanding at random. In order to go back to the author’s position, the subject takes refuge in the interdiscourse from inside out: he takes refuge in a ghost (e.g.,[9]).

With the attempt to refine such collocations, and following the DA procedures as well as the Psychoanalysis’ ones, we are going to keep on this thinking carrying out the analysis of a precious corpus that, we believe, will serve to illustrate how the metaphorical formations, which accomplish drift (source of occurrence), are also inserted in a specific history, that is, in the memory.

Moreover, we can claim that language updating is a product of social and particular history, which allows the subject to place himself in sites of meaning (materialized into chains of signifiers): specific places in the interdiscourse (e.g.,[7]) that will work as an anchor to the subject’s Discourse during the act of enunciation, allowing him to fiercely occupy a position of authorship, once this concerns his own truth.

The text below was orally produced by a group of patients in a psychiatric institution in Ribeirão Preto city, located in São Paulo state, Brazil, while they were taking part in a literacy class. It consisted of around twenty subjects, being the majority of them migrants from rural areas diagnosed as schizophrenics. Furthermore, they were believed to have a considerable deficit in their normal faculties, such as their motor coordination (including the control of sphincter), severely compromised by medication. As it was related to a work of writing, students gave their contributions orally (on the theme and title, for example), as a process of free-association, while the teachers in charge went writing:

THE FARM

The farm is a good place to live in. There, we work on the land.

There are many animals there: pig, cattle, chicken. There was a lot of fish. We used to drink a lot of coffee, milk and coconut water. It gets difficult when you become sick, because it is far away. But, the ones who have their own farm find a way to sort it out.¹

3. Results and Discussion

A first look at this text indicates there is a movement of meanings in which the verb tenses are altered (present/past/present), along with the discursive objects (farm, land, animals etc). These shifts, as the process of free-association is displayed in the collective production of the text, end up making a stereotype about the farm turn into a subjective view.

The gesture of authorship is, at the same time, into constraining the meanings’ drift and subverting the naturalized meaning of the signifier farm (note that, in respect to naturalization, from the very title, it is never used a deictic element before the word farm), relating it to another dimension of meaning, which is, other possible alternative meanings to the signifier. We will better discuss this process below. This way, the circulation of these signifiers turns out to configure a process of resignification in which the meanings are rescued and recast in an unconscious way, in a controlled openness of a nonstop drift (e.g.,[5]). Following Pêcheux ([7]), we propose that the process described above is an effect of ideological work that happens as a manner of naturalizing meanings through the attempt of deleting the social-historic memory of sayings and, accordingly, giving the possibility of statements turning into something else. The latest occurs, in the referred case, through a movement of discursive retroaction that leads to the singularity of the statements’ signification.

Such starting clues make us conjecture about the discursive memory and its role in the production of meanings. Pêcheux[10], referring to the role of memory notes that: “... this Discourse regularization that tends to form the law of the series of legible is always susceptible to collapse under the weight of the new discursive occurrence, which comes to disturb the memory: this tends to absorb events just as a series of mathematics happens conjecturing the next item in view of the beginning, however, the discursive occurrence, as it causes interruption, may fall apart such ‘regularization’ and, thus, produce retrospectively another series under the first one (…) ([10]:52)”.

The author refers, here, to the notion of drift of meanings, a process which would denounce the vicissitudes of memory under the shock of occurrence: the comes-and-goes of paraphrases (which can absorb drift and eventually dilute it by co-opting the occurrence), as well as polysemy (which acts deregulating, disturbing in a “(…) sort of vertical repetition, in which the memory bores itself, perforates itself before it unfolds into paraphrases)” ([10]: 53). Tfouni[3] explains how drift operates as a discursive fact postulating a dynamics of concurrence – which does not exclude contradiction – among paradigmatic axes (metaphoric) and syntagmatic (metonymic): “... when he builds the inter discursive chain, the subject faces – in each ‘void or gap’ after the selection of a word – a hole of signification, that theoretically can be filled in by any word that completes that arrangement. Obviously, there is not total freedom in the selection, considering that the symbolic has its own limitations, and also because the word that is going to come next is already committed by the context. However, the level of freedom is immense. It is in such moments that drift is installed as a possibility. Afterwards, the drift can effectively be installed – creating a nonsense effect or dispersion – as well as be avoided through the choice of the ‘precise’ word. ([3]:73)”

In the text The Farm, it is possible to see these notions at work mainly in the occurrence of horizontal series, which can be converted into vertical lists (e.g.,[11]), the ones that make visible to the analyst’s eyes the contention of drift produced by metaphorical effects. There, we may find in association with what seems to work as the “master signifier”, or, signal of the whole text’s signification (Farm) the following associations:

-good place to live in

-work on the land

-farmed animals (inserting here a sub-list): pig, cattle, chicken

-fish

-coffee

-milk

- coconut water

-sickness

-it is far away

Each of these entries in the horizontal axis is preceded by a hole of signification, a possible moment of drift, which antecede the next word’s choice. These associations constitute the metaphorical effect of the text. In fact, this effect only succeeds when drift is refrained and an element fills in the necessary meaning installed by that. The outcome of this series of metaphors is a shift of meaning, starting from The Farm, till ‘it is far away’, that is placed in a different semantic area from those that have been happening so far.

But, this last syntagma has been already connected syntactically to something new: sickness. This new association, which introduces the text to another zone of interdiscourse, breaks the unity of meaning that has been instituted until that point. Moreover, this rupture is indicated by the signifier “difficulty” (in the sense that it gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away), which is implicitly (not-said) opposed to “facility”, like a label that could be used to feature the associated series before mentioned (naming, on the other hand, the facilities of living in a farm). Or, perhaps, it could be said, building an anagram for “facility” – one which would also reflect a metaphorical effect – that these associations go round the idea of “facility” that the subjects believe there is (was) in living in a farm. We could probably paraphrase Pêcheux ([5]:20) by saying that we have, in this case, two fields of opposite meanings, once the statements linked to one or another “…are not evidently in relation interparaphrastic; these statements relate to the same fact (Bedeutung), although they do not build the same signification (Sinn)”. Furthermore, it is necessary to observe that It gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away installs a possible drift, since its interpretation can be either: 1-When you become sick, you have to stay away from the farm (interned in a mental institution, maybe?), and that is difficult; or, 2- If you get sick, living in a farm offers a problem because it is far away (from the place where you can receive assistance).

It is relevant to point out that, here, it is not a matter of “choosing” one interpretation out of both as if one was more suitable than the other (in the way that the Gerativistic-semantic approach do when dealing with ambiguous statements), notwithstanding, considering that both co-occur, not being possible to distinguish whether one would be predominant over the other.

The insertion of It gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away breaks the expectation over the signification’s course through the introduction of another discursive object: as it was abovementioned, instead of continuing talking about the farm itself, they start talking about sickness. This substitution movement makes possible to question the transparency of language and the naturalization of meaning, which happens due to the fact that there was a reference to the signifier farm up to that point as a collective space marked by stereotyped signifiers belonging to that area of meaning, such as coffee, pig, and cattle. The insertion of becoming sick brings, to the metonymic axis, an unexpected aspect, which comes to break the tack of naturalized associations made until that moment by the subjects. Thus, the occurrence of a possible drift should not be accredited by chance; however, it should be related to the subject’s truth: his/her symptom. Associating farm with sickness, considering the conditions of this Discourse’s production, points out that the farm’s meaning, already firmed in the language’s own code, through the effect of ideological evidence, is subverted by the flow of signification. This cutting shows that, to make it possible to talk about conflicts, traumas and uncomfortable experiences, it is often necessary for the subject to shift to another discursive position. Tfouni & Carreira[12] comment on this respect that the narrative allows the subject to talk about himself/herself in a disguised way. What happens in the related short extract is that, to refer to here and now, so to the adverse conditions of internment, the subject backshifts the verb tense, and sets the scene in a different place – in the farm. As we can observe in this case, which took place along the collective oral production of the sanatorium’s internee group; it was possible to talk about a parallel phantasmagoric scene, and that because of the particular way drift was restrained and domesticated by their Discourse. The retroaction by the already-said and its summary through lexical choices configure points in which the author intervenes.

Tfouni ([13]:2) states that:

“... each and every saying has an inescapable historic character, that is, it is impossible to think about language, the subject and a meaning away from such relation, which we are going to characterize as visceral: necessary condition of constitution and functioning of all discourse. That is what provides the language occurrence with a repeatable character, mainly for its relation with one (or more) discursive formation: the possible sayings in a certain socio-historic moment. The occurrence of repeatable order, when it gets into contact with what is new, specific of a certain time, re-upsate enunciation, and that can lead to the emergence of a new meaning of a statement, or, even, a new statement itself”.

Additional evidence to what has just been posed is found in the use of the verb tense in the referred text, according to the topics discussed in further details in Tfouni ([14]: 107), in which, among other questions, we claim the following, as to comment the fact that the text The Farm presents a narrative structure of personal experience: “It is known that the prevalent verb tense of this narrative is set in the past. Nevertheless, the beginning of such text is in the present, as if the related facts were still happening for the narrator-subject. As the free association goes on, however, the past comes to replace the present. After that, almost as if it was an acceptance, the statements come up as follows: “It gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away. But, the ones who have their own farm find a way to sort it out.” Note that there is, here, a therapeutic effect in writing practices, which is manifested by a detachment from the past and a reform in the present (through Discourse and writing organization) of the memories and recollections that cause suffering. It is observed then how the writing discourse (the one organized with beginning, middle and end) propitiates the emergence of subjectivity, as well as allows minor gestures of authorship to be accomplished, as the production of this text shows, which is collective, but regards (the truth of) each one in particular”.

Such reoccurrence of the personal experience touches two important points: firstly, it indicates a relation with the individual myth of neurotic people, whose structural character may be compared with the effect of forgetfulness number one proposed by Pêcheux[7]²; secondly, we have a form of resistance to “the hygienization of thinking”, that, to be punctuated by the analyst under the form of master-signifiers, supports the therapeutic effect in question, as it allows the analyst to work on in between the contingences of signifiers and propose in this space a possible solution, a final point that would destroy the contradiction expressed in the formula ‘or…or’, which is typical of drift.

This movement of interpretation, which points out the therapeutic work and its effect, is likely to happen, in the work presently reported, because the action strategy of educators does not follow a pre-defined direction in the viewpoint of procedures to be fulfilled step-by-step. The possibility of causing a therapeutic effect comes, exactly, from marking a posteriori in specific places of the signifier chain, places which revert to the particular history attached to the isolated context of internment.

The retroaction to what is already-said (already-written), caused by the literacy process, supposes a correlation between writing and body language, apart from taking into consideration the opaque manner with which the letter focuses on the unconscious and sustains the “sending” of messages quoted by the subject’s corporeity, which goes, slowly, turning into “body-writing” (e.g.,[15]).

We have, there, one of the ways to strengthen the supporting point of drift containment; which is, through a sort of supplement exerted from the position occupied by educators in the cooptation of transitory unities of meaning; unities that either make reference to the relevance of master-signifiers in control of drift, and in the marking of the interpreter’s position that is fulfilled in the act of enunciation affected by enigmas of particular memory to be deciphered.

Moreover, it is behold, in such process, how the containment of drift can act through a kind of supplement, inserted by the punctuation of another person (educators), whose commitment is to make readable (in the sense of linearity required in the standard form of “written body”) the gapped marks decisive for the deciphering of particular memory.

Hence, there were neither worries in raising or tabling the sociometric or sociologic characteristics, nor any other empiric component concerning the interned subjects, all of which normally serve as a basis for pedagogic planning. It is not the empiric subject that matters here. As in[3] we presented how the possibility of reconstruction of specific truths, from the therapeutic work on writing, reaches a dimension not directly accessible for the subject to imply himself a posteriori in the effects of how he/she may find his/her position (through the oral word and/or written one) within the language structure.

This was only possible because the act of creating space for these subjects to name and articulate, through language, the dimensions indirectly reachable of question formulation about their own desire allowed their hypothesis concerning the functioning of language, and its location in the sense of language structure, placed in relation and held in check the “truth” based on uniform diagnostic criteria (nosology), the description of symptoms emerged from medical Discourse. Such “truth”, established elsewhere and connected to a therapeutic medicine and medication, was nullified on account of the process of body writing’s inscription, to give room for the truths emerged from the relational aspects and the form through which the provisory unities of meaning allowed them to spin in the dialogical construction implied in the regular history.

The function of free-association and its favoring in the work with clues and in the construction of temporary unities has promoted the interaction and the mirroring among ones and others, through various signifiers of those that were alienated along the medical hospital routine, fact which, for its part, caused a rupture with perverse ideological mechanisms that delineated stuck positioning to be occupied by those related subjects in the hospital institution.

In the process here described, the educator, marked by the position of analyst, point out in between the production conditions of these discourses, possibilities of deciphering, whose determiners show the impossibility to make “one” with discourse; before that, it is used the effect of imaginary unity of writing to open “other possible places” in the symbolic structure; regarding that these other possibilities produce therapeutic effects, once they put into movement a certain amount of marks of which the interns appropriate , according to the way such marks define particular territories of reinsertion (between alienation and separation).

It was of capital importance, in this process, the acceptance that unconsciousness played its role, and also the place attributed to free association, whose maximum value, in Psychoanalysis, is to deal with aspects of regression, repetition and resistance, besides strengthening the fantasy plan, fundamental factors for the articulation of temporary unities commented beforehand. In the analyzed text above, the unity is reached through the control of dispersion of signifiers; a task bore by the master- signifier farm. Such control allows the text to have a closure, which is materialized into the ones who have their own farm find a way to sort it out.

In this last discursive sequence, the signifier who, as an indefinite relative pronoun, opens the possibility for each intern patient to elaborate fanciful aspects linked to their own idea of farm. Thus, who supports axes of articulation of particular truths.

From this point something else elapses: the farm, therefore, stands as an enigma to be deciphered by each one, a turning point, where building relations are condensed in the course of their lifetime as well as in the hospital; an event that installs aspects of history until now shut in memory, and, even so, active and provoking points of unconscious repression turned towards necessary regression to their elaboration. Such aspect can be seen, in the text, from the construction of the statement: It gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away. It is important to observe that the division previously marked between two possible statements (to know: 1- the facility/happiness of living in a farm and 2- the difficulty in living in a farm (in case of getting sick)), creates points of drift that are installed by equivocity of /in language, which shows the subject that the real element as contingence is present from the very chosen title. With effect, the signifier “farm” can be linked to more than one signified, owed to homonym, which creates a point of drift, to know: “farm” can be interpreted, according to an indiciary and psychoanalytic view, as a gerund (in Latin languages meaning “things to do”, what points out the present and future), or, as a noun: a good place to live in; where you work on the land etc., (and these convene the past).

The turnover caused by such occurrence is huge, the same as for its therapeutic effect: mark of one beforehand and another afterwards. Now, it is neither the hospital organization nor its discourse that defines to which enigma the subject is alienated (and to which of them it is ciphered in the mechanic routine of medical therapy), but the subject him/herself, as he/she deals with the master-signifiers that are for them costly and that were punctuated to them by the educators, rescue enigmas of their particular history, previously repressed, what allows them to find out ways of encoding and cope with the value, also particular, of fantasy. This, on its course, promotes a regression to the already-said/already-occurred, in a rupture with resistance, axe of the therapeutic effect of treatment using words/letters. According to Chemamma[16], such movement in the signifier’s chain permits the subject to “…break the boundary of the self’s imaginary relation, which prevented unconsciousness from manifesting. For that happen, it is necessary to go beyond the self, and also the other being “you”: it is necessary to break the dual relation.” ([16]:39). Following the Same line of thought, we bring[17], who establishes an articulation among enigma, word/letter and unconsciousness, pointing out that, when the subject becomes aware of the typical demarking movement of the interpreter’s activity (by which an analytical posture must be guided as an ethical duty) he/she learns to cope with transliteration, through which the word/letter rules him/her and also allows his/her facing of the “not knowing”. Without this “not knowing” aspect, as Lacan[18] states, there are no possibilities of discursive turnovers committed with a particular truth. We can affirm that such articulation needs rupture with the imaginary barrier to happen, which Chemamma[16] addresses, so that the oedipal triad can be installed, in the imaginary as a structural possibility.

With reference to this latest aspect, Zanello[19] makes a quite pertinent remark, aligning therapeutic work with both temporality and metaphor:“Therapeutic work must, this way, make possible to install the possibility of what is different, where the patient can only see what is similar: openness to mobility and new possibilities. It also concerns, according to Figueiredo (1994), of an openness to temporality: rupture and transition that refers to the passivity towards the unexpected, surprising, impossible, once repetition, as “the trauma does not pass, does not favor the future and does not constitute the present: the trauma a-temporalizes the existence” ([19]:165). ‘Healing’ would be the passage of disease’s time-without-time to a fluid, mobile and lively time.” In this sense, we can understand “sickness” as the impossibility of flowing in the come-to-be of metaphors of basis, crystallization in determined metaphors forever repeated (childlike prototypes), and disregarding in general, the context”.

We may suppose that the relation between enunciative temporality and metaphor concerns the fact that it opens a possibility of drift between the signifier It gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away and the master-signifier farm. In such gap, which signalizes the eruption of a contingence, the subject stands without a point of anchoring to continue the statement (according to[6]), the subject is the one who emerges fleetingly among signifiers). It runs from there that the metonymic chain is interrupted and the enunciation is held waiting for a connection (which is exactly the subject’s role in the author’s position).

4. Conclusions

In the case of the text under discussion, it is noted that what makes the literate-subject establish an anchoring point is the punctuation of the analyst-educator, who makes it possible the “connection” through an analytical act that leads back to the imaginary linearity of writing by drift’s containment.

It is this contingence that makes the drift get installed. Commenting this topic, F.E.V. Tfouni ([20]:97) claims that “…it is not possible to say both at the same time, and adds: However, it should not take out of the text its polyphony (equivocity?), fundamental question in the silent forms to understand words under words.” The author points that, in order to discuss such question, it is necessary to think of both dimensions of the real that touch the discourse: the impossible and the contingent (id.). We can better understand such atatement by relating it to the golden rule of Discourse Analysis (DA), that is: “Whenever one says x, he does not say y” (e.g.,[7]), rule that, for us, has to do with the theory of linguistic value proposed by Saussure. This way, once materialized a lexical “choice”, it makes it impossible for another signifier to be inserted there, in the same place, at the same time in which a residue is left behind related to something else that could be said in that place, but was not. In the Same direction, we can either interpret farm, or, It gets difficult when you become sick because it is far away, as an enunciative crossing of both possible meanings of the text. It is in such polyphonic ground that the subject is affected by these signifiers, which already announces the course the text’s meanings are going to take: at the same time, to talk about the past and assume “the things to do”³, it means to elaborate in the present, through writing, the traumatic situation of internment. In this discursive fact, it is possible to see how important it is the retroaction to the already-said for the authorship to be installed. (e.g.,[2]).

In other words, it is necessary to break the communicative flow, the linearity S-S’, and make the retroaction, the movement of interpretation that is going to establish a point of anchoring. It is at this point that the subject faces his own desire that is presented to him/her by the Discourse of the big Other one in the form of a question: Che vuoi, to which he gives the following answer: the ones who have their own farm find a way to sort it out.

It seems, then, that the drift’s eruption, and its consequent control, in the text above, was a result of the assumption of a new discursive position affected by authorship, as well as the writing discourse, what allowed the subjects to talk about suffering and social rupture, both of which are caused by their mental illness in conjunction with the internment conditions. The discussion and analysis presented here seem to confirm Laurent’s[21] statement, according to whom the author is the one who finds a place that was already there, waiting for him, while he just fills it in. (CNPq, FAPESP)

Notes

1. In Portuguese: Texto - A FAZENDA. A Fazenda é um lugar bom de morar. Nela, nós trabalhamos com a terra. Lá tem muita criação: porco, gado, galinha. Lá tinha muito peixe. Nós tomávamos muito café, leite e água de coco. Existe uma dificuldade quando você fica doente porque é longe. Mas, quem tem a sua fazenda que se vire por lá.

2. This forgetfulness, or illusion, refers to the fact that the subject imaginarily posts himself in the origin of ‘saying’.

3. Note that the signifier farm (fazenda, in Portuguese) has the same form of the Latin gerund (-nda), what allows the interpretation above. This does not happen in English language though, where farm consists of the noun, while farming is the gerund form.