Theoretical Interlude: Lacan’s Discourse of the University (draft 2.0)

I suggest that you download the complete paper with this link. In it you will find the best edited version of what this post contains, and my complete bibliography of more than 50 items all in a single  PDF of about 53 pages and a bit more than 15,000 words.  

Ok, here is the draft of the 2.0 version of my theory-interlude. This is not the absolute beginning of the paper (which I write last I guess). Instead this just tries to clarify how the discourse of the university works and provides two examples, the first without immediate relevance to transnational american studies and the 2nd with relevance (if possibly oblique relevance, at least for now). 

I didn't want to use Lacan's face again, and the F.U. Logo amused me

Theoretical Interlude: 
Lacan’s Discourse of the University

In Seminar XVII of 1969-70, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan introduces the theory of the four discourses; master, university, hysteric and analyst. For Lacan, each of these discourses presents one configuration of the “social bond” (XX). I will make some use of the university discourse as a heuristic below. It is the discourse of the scientific and medical establishments, education and government, military and business, technology, NGOs and more. The university discourse is that discourse which breeds bureaucracy and establishes and rationalizes the values of any possible knowledge economy. That Lacan called it the university discourse implies a critique of the functioning of universities, it can suggest discursive homologies between things otherwise thought to be profoundly dissimilar. The university discourse provides us with, in Lacan’s words, the form of the “modern master” (s17 31).

The Positions of the Graphs (L) - The Discourse of the University (R)

Each discourse is given in graph, or quadripode as show here, the positions of which (Agent, Other, Product and Truth) are invariant. The positions are filled by one of four elements of the Lacan’s algebraic notation: S1 (the master signifier), S2 (knowledge), $ (the split subject) and a (objet petit a, the object-cause of desire). In the university discourse, knowledge, S2 appears in the position of Agent, and its agency depends upon the exclusion of S1, the master signifier in the place of Truth. It addresses as Other (indicated by the arrow), the object a. If the Other (a) is successfully marked by this and thereby resubjectified or interpellated (we will return to this later) then the Other’s efforts in response to the Agent’s demand entails a Product, the split subject ($). Each discourse can work within a single psyche, or in relation to large masses of people. But to exemplify its functioning in a restricted, if not wholly internal, scenario is perhaps the easiest introduction. I will give two such scenarios.

Let us assume a psychiatrist that relies on the ‘industry standards’ of psychopharmacological treatment as corollated with current edition ofThe Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. When, as Agent, the psychiatrist pronounces a diagnosis, he does so on behalf of knowledge, the encoded systematized knowledge given by the DSM (S2). The patient, as Other (objet a) is in effect commanded to accede to the signifier of the Agent (the specific diagnosis) and further to enjoy this, which amount to accepting its “meaning” as self-defining (compare a professor giving a grade, a judge pronouncing a sentence, etc). By enjoy we must understand not unambiguous ‘pleasure’ but specifically the pain-in-pleasure and pleasure-in-pain that jouissance designates in Lacan’s use, the “beyond” of pleasure that Freud had postulated. But the patient experiences this as a deepening of the split in their own subjectivity, a further alienating in the discourse of the psychiatric big Other. Some experience this as a relief, as they now have a meaning, or at least a name to attach to their suffering and they can eschew personal responsibility for their suffering on its basis; it’s not my fault, I have a disease. But relief is not assured. What of the patient who believes herself understandably unhappy after the loss of a loved one, yet having sought help for her misery, now is said to have a “disorder”? Here the meaning that she had ascribed to her suffering is invalidated or downgraded in favor of the judgement of the psychiatrist-Agent. In either case the patient, is marked by knowledge and receives jouissance at the same time (whether enjoyed or suffered, both are jouissance). The deepening of the split of the subject ($) is in the place of the Product, it is what this discourse produces in excess of what it explicitly aims at (diagnosis, treatment, etc). What then is the repressed master signifier that resides in the place of Truth? It is not what an old-style critic of ideology might immediately assume; that behind this mask of instrumental knowledge functioning “impartially” there lurks the historical and economic reality of the DSM - that it is a manual imposed upon this field by insurance companies who demanded that they know precisely how little they must pay for any specific diagnosis. Rather, the Truth that the discourse represses here is something which it both embodies and yet cannot allow to emerge within the discourse itself if it is to continue functioning. Psychiatric discourse, much like academic and military discourses are nearly phobic when it comes to ‘hard’ truth claims. The results of our research suggest that... The consensus of the field at present is... The available intelligence implies that... These are prototypical instances the university discourse. The master discourse provides an instructive contrast. The Agent as master simply commands, It is, because I say it is. Such a statement, however particularized, is atypical to the point of nonexistence in the university discourse and appears there only as disavowed through irony or humor, etc. And yet, this very mastery is the repressed Truth that the discourse must aver. The psychiatrist (professor, etc) may know very well at the level of their conscious reflective selves that their diagnosis (grade) has no absolute guarantee, but in marking the Other with it, what they actually do embodies the mastery which the discourse represses at the level of articulation. Zizek’s analysis of the fetishism of money as commodity can help to clarify this point. We all know that currency is simply printed paper on no great value in itself. Yet what we do with it, how we use it, how we treat it illustrates quite the opposite. We treat it as the unambiguous material instantiation of wealth. Zizek observes apropos of this that we “are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (Zizek MI 314-5). We might rephrase this as saying that Agents of the university discourse are masters in practice, not in theory. They know they are not masters, but they act as masters because of their position within a field of knowledge and on its behalf.

The university discourse is at work in Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 presidential address to the ASA. She discusses the exclusion of a poem by Gloria Anzaldúa from an Oxford anthology on the grounds that it was “not appropriate” for their “target audience” (FF18). This prompts her to say, “[i]t’s just a fantasy, but imagine this: if those young soldiers (...) in Abu Ghraib had had the chance back in high school to read and discuss and really confront Anzaldúa’s shocking poem about wanton brutalization, might one of them have thought twice before perpetrating analogous violence?” (FF18). We might remark that at the manifest level (its content) this thought experiment seems entirely unlike the psychiatrist pronouncing a diagnosis, but the discourse that underpins it, its latent structure as it were, is the same. Fisher Fishkin, as Agent begins with a disavowal “It’s just a fantasy, but...” which in this instance allows us to see that this “fantasy” is likely to have a closer relation to the repressed Truth of the discourse than otherwise, even if, as consciously articulated, it will still pertain more to the knowing than the doing in which the Truth is most resolutely embodied. Lest this realm of embodied action seem questionably linked to discourse, Lacan remarks our actions too can be inscribed therein (s17).