One Big Tangled Wall of Words

15 Feb, 2026

I don’t really have much of a post today; I’ve been trying to think my way through Jacques Lacan’s concept of the wall of language. But like pretty much everything related to the French psychoanalyst, that thinking had better be very careful, since all of his twists and turns and linguistic playfulness present his own variety of wall, and I’m not sure I’ve correctly made out how it’s constructed.

Here, though, is the source of my contemplation: Philippe Julien’s discussion of how “Lacan was struck by three paradoxes concerning the relationship of speech and language within the subject.” I won’t go into all three; it’s the third that captured my attention, namely

The paradox of modern man, alienated in scientific civilization, his speech objectified in a universal language, his sense of existence lost in a common work. With this point, Lacan launched a thesis that was dear to him: the wall of language is its opposition to speech....“as language becomes more functional, it becomes improper for speech, and as it becomes too particular to us, it loses its function as language.”¹

This entire discussion is centered on analysis, and how the unconscious and the subject make use of and are formed by the realms of the imaginary and symbolic (and later, the real). And none of these terms—imaginary, real, etc.—is used as it might be in everyday or pop psychological understandings.

I don’t think I’m totally incorrect in assuming that when Lacan says that “language is made… to create a wall”: that a term or symbol (“signifier”) we use to designate an object (including people), is meant to be a comprehensive encapsulation of everything that can be said about that object, with nothing left to add, nothing left behind.² And that’s even though it’s just not possible to consolidate once and for all, say, the person who was William Shakespeare by using those two words that serve as his name. Life, the world, people, even simple objects, are more than the words used to designate them; something of or about that object will always be hovering outside the word that’s intended to confine the entirety of its meaning within it.

We’re born into a language-infused and -guided world, and the images with which we’re confronted are labeled, using words or symbols, as certain things and not others. Language—the system of signs, what allows us to communicate through those signs—contains the words we use, and gives those words a structure that enables them to convey an idea, an impression, a command. Language structures our use of words, so that they can’t be employed in just any way, at least if we’re to be understood by others within our language world. Thus there’s more to language than just the words themselves—and even so (or maybe because of that fact), the words are in some sense limited in what we can make them do or express. Language often won’t let us get at what we’re really trying to convey; won’t let us name what we really (think we) desire; it starts to lose its function as a means of communication or sense-making. In analysis, in particular through the dialogue that occurs there, some of the language system’s grip on words—what they are and aren’t allowed in the usual world to designate or mean—is eased up. The analyst’s representation of what he hears the analysand really saying, what’s really behind the words, is what Lacan calls full speech, which “allows the unconscious subject to be fully expressed, by bypassing the wall of language."³

That’s a lot, and I’m sure Lacan experts will poo-pooh my poor simplification. But given last week’s thoughts on dry science writing, as well as my continual bafflement by and fear over the corporate and tech-speak Anna Wiener calls “garbage language,” I’m wondering whether it’s legitimate to see that wall of language taking on different shapes within the overarching language structure.⁴ There’s the wall that won’t let you in, or your ideas out, unless shorn of all (evidence of) desire, made to fit within a supposedly pure objectivity. There’s Wiener’s sort that, blaring loudly and fancifully about what it thinks it’s doing, erects the wall of bloated language to hide the fact that it’s really not doing much of anything at all. There’s a great deal of poetry that seems to want to break through that wall by the (probably) impossible task of restructuring language itself. You could point to any in-group’s use of jargon as the wall meant to keep others out and the cool kids in (so, a wall within the generalized wall?), all of which could in turn cover over or redirect the speakers’ desires away from what it is they’re really feeling or hoping to achieve. (For instance, I suspect that behind Gen Alpha’s maddening, all-occasion use of “six seven” is much that the tween community hasn’t yet learned to articulate, or is too embarrassed to do in straightforward fashion.)

All a bunch of pondering, then, about one part of a legendary thinker’s approach to who we are and how we function. As I continue, I hope I’ll get more meaty, mysteriously fascinating poetry like this assertion, apparently meant to help us understand the larger discussion:

Lacan began his second seminar by describing [Isaac] Newton’s achievement: with three little letters, he inscribed the law of gravitation in a field unified by language and rendered the planets silent. Thanks to language, the planets no longer speak…. having lost their value as natural symbols, they no longer have the power to lie to us. This is what language is made for: to create a wall.⁵

I don’t know. I realize and am grateful for the fact that the work of Newton et al has resulted in quacks not being able to declare that our destinies are ruled by planetary positions. But if I’m lucky enough to look up and see Venus when it’s her time to shine, I sure feel spoken to, and somehow in a way where truth and lie aren’t meaningful concepts. That might be because neither one of us is really using language; we’re “speaking” through the simple image of a bright body in the sky. And maybe that’s also evidence of a larger problem, alienated here in scientific civilization as I am: the wall of language over in my immediate neck of the woods might be a little crumblier than the norm. I may never figure out, though, what that means for the ways I’m still unconsciously butting my head up against it.

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