Today, as we wait for the Spring Marsh Frogs to sing, our little group intends to poke a finger or two at the Triadic Structure. Or, if you prefer to be a folksy political type desperate for the authenticity of the roots you never had, a three legged stool.
The off putting thing about Hegel's Triadic Structure was that one of the asymmetries was prepared to die rather than be wrong. The asymmetry that would have preferred to die than submit was referred to as the master and the more magnanimous asymmetry was referred to as the slave or in more enlightened times referred to as the servant.
The third leg of this triadic structure, which eventually became called the Synthesis, was like a melding of the two asymmetries into some sort of compromise which in time would become yet another asymmetry. Not an easy compromise to make and it would have been impossible had it not been for a flaw within the asymmetry that had a death wish, he wanted his wonderfulness to be recognized, and over the generations the master and servant were able, for mutual advantage, to recognize each other as self-conscious beings, and this produced a mutual recognition out of which, often through conflict, a synthesis, a new direction, emerged.
For Hegel, his Triadic Structure had nailed it, everyone else could go home, and in the same way that Kant's version of the Enlightenment had predicted the End of History, Hegel was confident his own Phenomenology of Spirit was actually how the End of History would happen.
Hegel probably had a point he wanted to drum home when he assigned master/servant to the two asymmetries in his triad. He wanted to have one asymmetry dominant, raw in tooth and claw, otherwise nothing would get done, no one would obey anyone else, the harvests wouldn't be harvested and so on. A closer appreciation of Hegel's meanings include the idea of union between asymmetries that included recognition and the desire to be recognized.
When Lacan attended lectures on Hegel's phenomenology in Paris, he grasped this area of desire and recognition and saw a much subtler complexity. He concluded that master and servant misidentified the forces at play. The desire for a Pork Chop on a stick might be a need for sustenance, but a desire for a chunky soled Kleman Pador Tyrolean walking shoe was a desire for recognition. It was an adornment, part of the wardrobe. And if indeed the servant had a master, his master was the wardrobe that presented his self image to the world. And here Lacan introduced his own Triadic Structure.
In Lacan's Triad, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are three interlocked rings, and all is well as long as the symbolic remains a master worth following. Then, should the imagery no longer supply the symbolic with a path through the real, bam, you got neurosis and pharmaceutical makers have 20 percent of their manufacturing capacity. There's also a chance that your whole Tyrolean wardrobe thing might be showing signs of disintegrating, your neurosis becomes a compunction which turns psychotic the next thing you got a problem with too many skeletons in the basement.
Lacan, being French, referred to these symptoms as sinthomes and while struggling through James Joyce who he judged to be a very difficult writer he concluded that Joyce wasn't writing for other people, he had no desire to impress them with a new take on the literary equivalent of Tyrolean Brocade, he was writing for his own sanity, no one else. He was scouring the floor of his dressing room, gathering bits and pieces, including his shames and his soiled underpants and through his writing he was using them to symbolically complete himself by desperately trying to keep his three rings in some sort of working order.
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