* New update:

Part II -

Lacan In The New Market Place Of Knowledge

By Scully Maywood/June 2010/

Part I- The Loss of Innocence: Lacan, Topology, and Psychoanalysis – 

By Scully Maywood/ Jan. 2009/edited by C.M. and H.H.

At this late date, it has become difficult to accept the attempt to focus a psychoanalytic investigation through discussions of Knowledge, Consciousness,  Politics, the World and Man without getting suspicious that you have heard it all before. Something like a repetitive drone: someone somewhere will present one more graduate thesis on Lacan, Proust, and the Post-Colonial Subject or The Speculative Ontology Of Your Sadian Neighborhood, etc..Without denying the positive effects of Lacan’s delirious language – a Lacanian inspired delirium can not be put to a pragmatic use outside a university ghetto – there is no reason to remain there.  Yet, who and what is being held hostage?

*Witness the recent "Debate" at U.C.L.A. between Badiou and Zizek: Is Lacan an Anti-Philosopher? Noting the decline of the American university into a marketplace of knowledge, one may very well ask if the familiar opposition of philosopher/anti-philosopher is just the alibi for a more important difference: that between the European discourse of the University (personified by Badiou and Zizek) and the discourse of the North American Anti-University (fittingly personified by nobody on the American side). What is it that opposes the Philosophy of the European University to the Anti-philosophy of America's New Market Place of Knowledge? What occurs when the American university, in the democratic replacement of the Master by the Professional, is assimilated into the market place of knowledge? Is the practice and theory of Lacanian analysis condemned to straddling the divide between the University of Europe and the College, Inc. of North America?

We propose that these are the real and urgent questions that were predictably avoided at the UCLA conference.

The significance of such questions becomes clear once one views the absolutely useless characteristics of Lacanian studies in the United States as something positive; for the curious emergence of a field of studies where one can waste one's time in the market place of knowledge should not be taken for granted. Indeed, that a student should be invited not only to waste his or her time in Lacan studies, but to spend no small amount of time and money working and paying for it, reverses those economic principles most commonly agreed upon as forming the basis of a capitalist system. Beyond the acts of revolution invisaged by Marx, Zizek, and Badiou, those acts foreseen by Freud and Lacan are truly involutionary: that one can pay to work – not work to get paid – for things that are a waste of time and breakdown is evidence that we are no longer in the naive times of capitalism, but have entered into a consumer society. One need only turn an eye towards the current situation in Wall Street, Housing Morgages, Health care, and the recent B.P. oil spill to recognize the money to be made off lost time and things that do not work.

The beauty of a Lacanian discourse is that one is confronted by the problem of crisis and catastrophe from the beginning; thus, lending a new interpretation to Marcel's Proust's Le Récherche du Temps Perdu. The question is not whether such a research of lost time is good or bad, but how a consequence can be constructed so that the student of analysis does not remain at the level of a pure loss. That the student of Lacanian analysis, unlike an ambitious technocrat or a Cognitive-Behavioral Therapist, can neither support a practice nor get a job on the basis of their academic 'Lacanian' theory is in principle the best place to begin as they are confronted with the difficulty of a Cause forming the basis of their didactic formation. The questions remains, however, if this useless place is hardly tolerable, how not to remain there by subliminating the theory and practice of Lacanian analysis as a pre-text for an aesthetic or cultural position. Indeed, it must be asked: what is being bypassed the moment one claims success byachieving a career in the literary Lacan, the anti-philosophy Lacan, the philosophic Lacan, the therapeutic Lacan, etc.?

To investigate the place of lost time and waste what an analyst requires more than brains is a good set of kidneys to endure the pollution.  Yet, after twenty five years of working through this field, I continue to do so, as a duty, as they say, that “comes with the job” for I still have the convictions that, not in spite of, but because of such a loss, an ‘event’ may occur; that is to say, something can happen that would never have had the chance if one were "in the program". That this ‘event’, if it ever occurs, would become an ‘act’, is doubtful, for the conditions are not set up in College, Inc. for either a debate or an assumption of the consequences of lost time.

One way to begin to get into the wind, is to ask on what conditions may problems of time and loss be presented; and what is the loss of innocence implied when Lacan introduces his topological project as forming its didactic basis. Part I below was an initial essay written in Jan. 2009 on what I perceive to be some of the outstanding problems currently facing the teaching of Lacanian analysis within the market place of knowledge and how they can be rectified.

Part I- The Loss of Innocence: Lacan, Topology, and Psychoanalysis – 

As the result of a survey that I at one time performed, it is interesting to look back at a more ‘naive’ time – a pastoral time of pre-Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Badiou. Or, indeed, one may well examine certain current English Literature departments as opposed to their Comparative and Critical Theory cousins, to get a glimpse of a form of pedantry that passes for education to the degree that literally nothing can happen. If we defined the mathemata with Plato, as ‘what transmits itself with excellence’ and ‘what one knows already’, then the mathematical advantage of the traditional English literature departments over their more racy cousins comes from a purely formal and static use of the Dewey decimal system in the ritualistic attempt to bring back to life the work of a bunch of dead fathers. No doubt, if this ever happened it would truly be an ‘event’, but the likelihood of any little master or university professor ever assuming the event in the manner of a Joyce, Picasso, or Schreber, is doubtful. Needless, to say, the place for the assumption of an event – in act – is anywhere but a university department, whether it be in English or Comparative and Critical Studies.

While leaving it open to the future to judge as to whether Critical and Lacanian Studies amounts to anything more than a delirium, there is one positive thing that must not be taken for granted: something may potentially happen there that never would have if such students had remained at the level of a traditional cursus in the liberal arts. There would be no place for a Zizek, for example. And for every Zizek, there are hundreds, if not thousands of college students in the United States that have either identified with his admittedly delirious monologue (at least, Z admits it) or rejected it in the name of a positive or negative transference onto analysis[1]. Which does not bother me one way or another, as long as one does not confuse being in a transfer, with analysis. Indeed, an enormous resistance is coming from those who recognize the importance of the concepts of Lacanian analysis, but then make a fetish of them – thus, making it possible to formulate important questions in politics, science, and philosophy, that have absolutely no hope of reasonably being answered.

To be fair, I believe such disorientations are not limited to the field of Lacanian studies in America, but that these are only the symptoms of a more structural problem of what happens when language literally has no place to go; or similarly, when the subject after being distinguished from the ego, has absolutely no way of being isolated except in a series of metaphors and ‘case presentations’ that ultimately trivialize the subject as something or someone else, the moment they claim a descriptive cogency.

One may as well resign oneself to a certain loss of innocence that comes with the realization that no matter how much debate, discussion, and refashioning of clinical and philosophical concepts the subject of the signifier is either trivialized or assimilated to something it is not.  The question becomes, therefore, if inevitably we must give a place to this subject, if we must inevitably acquiesce to something somewhere, how can this forcing be made supple and not just assimilated to egotistical charm?. Said otherwise, is there a way to effectively construct a style, and not simply attempt to pass it off in the symptoms of metaphor and the masquerades of the person?  What difference distinguishes the analytic act from acting out and passing to the act in the name of psychoanalysis?

In order to respond to these questions and clarify further what is at stake, it is perhaps worth briefly recognizing how other fields have sought to avoid a loss of innocence through copying and charm. At the same time that M. Duchamps and other contemporary artists began to raise serious doubts about the academies and canons of the beaux-arts, we find groups of academic painters attempting to resurrect art in the appeal to authority and doing art in the ‘manner’ and ‘style’ of traditions: neo-impressionism, neo-realism, neo-classicism, etc. However, such paintings, rarely deficient at the level of the mastery of a technique or copying,  leave out any indication as to the act of painting or the style of the painter him or herself.

One may well suspect that the contemporary development of neo-Lacanianism has developed along similar lines: as a rather bleak attempt at copying and commenting on an Old Master in order to ward off the insecurity that an inevitable reference to the place of the subject makes explicit. Rather than face the difficult questions of what a production of a psychoanalytic theory entails, rather than make such a presentation public in way that can give a collective a chance to sharpen the terms they are trying to transmit, rather than folding these aporias into the very possibility of the analytic session, the average analytic scholar turns theory  into communicating and copying a ‘style’ , ‘school’, a ‘culture’, or ‘technique’ – a way of repeating a tradition that is safe from the anxiety and responsibility of individual judgment.  No doubt, the analyst who is unequal to the task and unwilling to face the difficulty of a work of structure, can preserve a certain innocence in the appeal to the profession of the ‘psychoanalyst’, then continue from there by relying on jargon and a charm of speech to apply his or her ‘theory’ to others. Thus, relieving the analyst of any responsibility of a material presentation of a psychoanalytic act in theory.  At the limit, we arrive at the inspired analyst – or confused student – driven by his or her own remarkable resources, yet unable to cope with the simplicity of the discourse at hand. As the capacity to charm and copy is clearly compounded by saying things complexly, the emphasis on intuition and individuality grows unwieldy enough to make agreeing on any one thing improbable. Without denying something might happen in such contexts and that interesting and important questions may be raised, the problem remains in so far as there is no possibility of an effective response. Thus, an event is never assumed in act, but just represented in a series of approximations.

Today, it is in this ambiance that the analysts’ greatest responsibility, an intuitive listening and tact, has been reduced to nil by the complexity of the tasks in front of them. What is worse, is that at a time that is in want of psychoanalysts with a precise practice of its theory, such a practice is either avoided in public or assimilated to the work of technicians who claim ‘to apply’ their theory. In such a case, the analytic act is either assimilated to a field of patients, or is avoided altogether in the pretension to a ‘je ne sais pas quoi’ of intuition and literary flare.

Since Lacan, analysts have been offered the chance to assume an ‘event’ in act: as the construction of something like a style.  This analytic act, tact, and style, is far from from being a means of acting out and passing to the act. It is not a way to become more charming, a professional, a philosopher, or becoming ‘neo’ anything, but a way to construct the object and place of an analytic theory. The loss of innocence that Lacan’s topology implies is nothing other than the difficulty of assuming this place of the subject in the separation from an object that does not fall under the habitual transfers that guide the ego. It is always easy to critique and practice analysis on ‘others’, but what happens when one is asked to assume an act and construction aimed at the place of the subject? What if this Other corresponds to the place of the subject itself?

Topology, in the structural sense, allows the analyst to perform a task that would have previously seemed impossible: the increased precision gives one the chance to sharpen a method with regard to what a psychoanalytic practice involves: a separation from a style or symptom in a construction of the drives. If we define a symptom as what can be made to function of a trait, then a topology is nothing other than a theory of reading and writing of traits. Or again, topology, re-defined as a theory of the place of a language and its subject, is another word for structure.

Once what psychoanalysts do intuitively is constructed and explained in such non-intuitive and precise ways of doing the same things, it becomes impossible to go back to what was carried out in the name of psychoanalysis before or continue to accept a speech based so innocently on the mere comprehension of debate and discussion. It would be a bit like a chemist who would refuse to accept the invention of Mendeleiev’s periodic table, but continues to ask us to believe in his speech when he claims to have discovered a new element hidden in a cave – the deeper and more mysterious the cave appears, the more profound the argument. Indeed, left at this intuitive and spoken level, master analytic terms such as unconscious, phallus, castration, etc. appear as nothing less than a return to the alchemist’s phologstrum.

No doubt, when a psychoanalyst proposes that at the origin of society there was a Totemic Father, he is not putting-forward a scientific proposition that can be verified with instrumental hardware or calculated in a mathematical theory. But not all instruments and tests are hardware, just as not all of mathematics is calculable: on one hand, there are logical instruments and linguistic commutation tests, on the other, there is Cantor’s theory of the transfinite whose existence can be demonstrated, but is neither verifiable in the experimental sense or calculable in the sense of the working mathematician. Thus, just as the use of a machine, logic, or set theory by a researcher implies a loss of innocence to the working mathematician, so does the adoption of a topology imply a loss of innocence for the working analyst.

Though this loss may well signal for some technicians a sign of depression or the occasion for rejection, it has become for us a cause for attention. [3]