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Chapter 3 The Signifier DANIELLE BERGERON The Signifier: A Structure Behind the Scenes In thinking of the question of the signifier, a question not unlike a hidden door leading to the subject of the unconscious, my own thoughts were stirred by two memories, one of the wings of the Paris Opera House, the other of the sewers of the City of Lights. Several years ago, a musician friend, then a consultant for the Paris Opera, invited me to visit the wings and the backstages of that historic cultural site. For two hours we meandered through one hallway after another, taking backstairs and riding in ancient elevators and dumbwaiters, covering the equivalent of some ten stories. I discovered there a complex and infinitely precise mechanical organization of pulleys and ropes used to raise the curtains and magnificent backdrops of the season’s musical program. An immense gap seemed to separate my increasing interest in the preparations and necessary technical means used to stage the operas from my overwhelming awe in the performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute. As a member of the audience, I was struck first by the pure majesty of the old building, the refinement of the ancient friezes, then by the glistening of the imposing crystal chandelier suspended in the main opera hall and the ceiling frescoes of Chagall, and above all by the sumptuous music of Mozart. However, there was nothing fundamentally incongruous between the dazzle of the stage and the convoluted, awkward and dusty character of the wings: the “Opéra,” not only a palace of culture 59 This material was first presented, in different form, as a lecture given at the “Symposium on Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” organized by the Center for Psychoanalytic Study and by the Chicago Open Chapter for the Study of Psychoanalysis, February 1993, Chicago. but also an artistic concept of musical production, was possible only thanks to the existence of the other scene, silent and hidden, but nonetheless absolutely determinative in the staging of the opera. Simply, the signifier opera, is a condensation of multiple elements: some, apparent , support the official definition of an opera as “a dramatic work or poem set to music composed of airs, recitatives, choir and dance.” Other elements, necessarily secret and concealed in technically sophisticated wings, preserve the mute memory of the artists, their stage fright, their emotions, and the anguish that had marked their bodies.The only vestiges of these hidden dramas are the names of the performers, marked by music, historically enshrined, but seemingly far removed from the backstage production that shadowed each famous performance. For its adepts, the opera is both the magnificence of the place and the musical work. But for me, ever since that day, the word opera has also taken me into the entrails, behind the scene, where a maze of all sorts of unaesthetic material structures and organizes the theatrical production. My second memory may seem more amusing. I had just arrived in Paris to complete my specialization in psychiatry when a fellow physician asked if I would be interested in going with him on a visit of the Paris sewers. At first I thought he was jesting with me—after all, wouldn’t a stroll to the EiffelTower or the splendid vista from Notre Dame de Paris be more appropriate? But finding he was dead serious, and intrigued by the idea of such an unusual tour, I accepted his invitation. I arrived at our prearranged meeting place to find some thirty other people, each clutching a guidebook, standing in line to see the sewers.The stairway led down to an underground area that had been transformed into a museum.There a guide explained the major events in the city’s history since the French Revolution.We then walked along the dark sidewalks of a humid and gloomy underground Paris, along canals of wastewater upon which sewer workers were floating in their pneumatic canoes. Despite the guide’s reassurances, a feeling of uneasiness prevailed in the group as we imagined the possibility of being overcome by nauseous odor or by the shock of a rat darting out suddenly from the shadows. At intersections we could read the names of the streets five or six meters overhead, streets that charmed their pedestrians: Champs-Elysées, avenue Montaigne, Place de la Concorde. Immensely odd and unusual, this internal Venice had nothing in common with the City of Lights but the parallel tracing of the streets whose sewers, carrying away the trash and remains...

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