Emotions as Signifiers
Emotions and rationality both arise from the same place, i.e., the mind. This nearness can make emotions harder to see or check, since we are almost always swimming in them. But it's worth considering taking up the habit of disambiguating and checking our mental activity so as to not let it take us off the rails.
We tend to myopically assume that our emotions are always real or an obvious guide. But upon closer examination, we find that sometimes our emotions are really signifiers without referents—floating, disconnected ideas, perhaps springing from doxa (δόξα) or unexamined beliefs, rather than episteme (ἐπιστήμη), or knowledge gained through reason and evidence.
These empty or floating signifiers—which are ambiguous, open to interpretation, or seem to resist being defined—are analogous to dangling pointers in software. They can pull us around, lock us into situations we’d otherwise avoid, or lead us in circles as if we were without a compass.
This observation is partly why Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, staked the claim that desire tends to be structured like metonymy—or floating signifiers that elude us by the fact that they're contiguous but dissimilar—where one thing represents another not by similarity, but by proximity or association—pursuing the next adjacent object.
Lacan wants us to consider that desire is not a metaphorical process of meaning-making—that it does not tend to function in a manner where we simply transfer knowledge from one scenario to another by virtue of similarity between our desires.
This is to say that desire is not quite a vertical meaning-making process. But why not?
Lacan hypothesizes desire operates in precisely the opposite way: that desire is a drive which pivots us from one object to another in a chain of objects that are contiguous but not similar—this is to say, the relation is horizontal.
Have you ever gotten a thing you wanted, quickly became bored with it, and then immediately desired a new, different thing? That’s metonymic desire.
Desire, then, tends to function approximately the same way a floating signifier does. It is defined by its undefinability; that our attempts to define, describe, or name it seem futile.
It slips away as we try to grasp it. What desire really signifies is negation—a perceived lack or absence.
In other words, we ourselves may not even know what it is we really want in the first place. And worse, sometimes we wish for things without first remembering to be careful about what it is we wish for.
Desire is always a desire for something else.
While I've used desire as an example of a potential empty signifier, we should also consider that many other thoughts or ideas could be empty or floating signifiers, too.
One might naively assume the problem here is emotion itself. But it isn't. The problem is how we point at anything at all and how we understand in the first place.
Facing that, two failure modes stand out: being numb to your emotions and being numb to your preferences—that is, being at all unable to decipher your own processes within the context that you exist in.
In practical terms, maybe one solution is undertaking the labor of clearly defining and understanding one’s thoughts within the context of both the local world and the greater, global world.
If something seems fuzzy, try to formalize it. If a solution seems too darn obvious and you catch yourself feeling overconfident about it, cast some skepticism on it. If something seems indescribable, try to describe it. If an event's cause and effect aren't making sense, consult the literature regarding that thing.