Opening Theoretical Interlude for my paper on Transnational American Studies (draft!)

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.  


I've largely scrapped this text for my paper. There are comments about why and about my divergences from Lacan here. 

[ n.b. This is a 2nd draft (revised since yesterday) and by no means final. Citations are missing and at times where they are missing you will find something like this (XX).  This introductory interlude needs a snappy title (or subtitle) but I have yet to think of what it might be ("to keep on knowing more"?). Word count is 1,915 and in MLA format (minus the graphs) it overflows to page 6.]

Gratuitous Lacan image

Theoretical Interlude: Lacan’s Discourse of the University

The Positions common to each discourse

Lacan gives each of the discourses in a 2x2 four-cell graph, or quadripode, the positions of which are common to all four discourses. The Agent is in the upper left and the arrow points toward the Other that the discourse addresses. The discourses are not reducible to speech acts, as Lacan remarks that in certain situations our acts themselves are discursively structured (XX), but we will assume here that discourses are linguistic for this explanation. But we must understand that what is actually said is not all either. The Agent addresses a demand to the Other, so there is both the explicit conscious demand as well as the inexplicit or unconscious demand and the desire which both drives the expression of and distorts the relationship of these demands. If I, as Agent, command you, as Other, to “bring me a glass of water” or if I ask you a question, or if I tell you a story in monologue, there is in each case a demand involved. This demand is overt in the case of the glass of water. But when I ask you a question or indulge in a monologue the demand is that you attend to my words, and either answer or not, depending. But under every demand there also lies a desire which remains unconscious. The bottom cells of the quadripode are Truth (left) and Product (right). The position of Truth indicates that which the Agent’s discourse depends upon but which must be excluded from the manifest level of their discourse. We might think of it as the analogous to the latent content in the manifest/latent distinction from Freud’s Interpretation of dreams (XX Freud, also see Zizek). And, just as there, the latent content is not the secret of the manifest content, rather, desire is what mediates the link between the two - in the dream it is the dreamwork itself, in the discourses we might best understand it as that force which acts to preclude the emergence of the Truth of the discourse within the discourse itself. So, my demand for you (as Other) to provide me with water, may well rest upon an unconscious demand for your love (respect, regard, or some other libidinally salient affect in the place of Truth) but the force of desire is what accounts for why this specific demand should function for me as evidence of your love (respect, etc). We might then read the bar separating the Agent from its Truth as desire itself. Turning to the right side of the graph, when the Agent directs a demand at an Other, something is produced. Here, just as on the left side of the graph, it is not what the Agent’s demand is explicitly directed toward (the glass of water), but this Product can nonetheless be recuperated in a sense by the Agent of the discourse. As this may be unclear, let me ground it in our example. You, as Agent, have asked me to get you a glass of water. I, as Other, do so. This doing requires something of me, perhaps I must get up and visit the kitchen. Whatever action I engage in will be accompanied by some small effort on my part and just as we two people engaged in such an interaction are consciously aware of the demand made, we are also mutually perceptive unconsciously as well. If your demand for a glass of water, conceals a demand for my respect, then my comportment and the effort itself are all a part of the Product that results from but is not coterminus with the object of your explicit demand. If, through my affects and expressions, I evince concern for your thirst and your comfort generally, while I provide the glass of water, you could be said to have recuperated the product as evidence for the demand for respect which underpinned your explicit demand for water. Obviously, sighs of impatience produced in satisfying this demand might read differently in relation to your unspoken demand for respect. 

The Discourse of the University

Thus far we have spoken only about the relations between the positions. To understand the specifics of the four discourses, or indeed, any one of them, we must also fill the cells of the quadripode with four components of Lacanian algebraic notation; S1 (the master signifier), S2 (knowledge), $ (the barred, or split subject) and a (objet petit a, the object-cause of desire). Where each of these appears in the Discourse of the University is as you in the image here. Knowledge, S2 appears in the position of Agent, and it depends upon the exclusion of S1, the master signifier in the place of Truth. It addresses as Other, the object a, and the Other’s efforts entail the split subject, $, as Product. Lacan’s conception of this discourse cannot be divorced from a critique of the functioning of universities themselves, but it is crucial to recognize that they were not his primary examples of this discourse at all. Rather, he locates as exemplary instances of this discourse, both the Soviet bureaucracy and the American government (or empire) at the time of his seminar (1969-70). Involved in this is an historical and political observation which bears mention. The Discourse of the Master is exemplified best by the political reign of an absolute monarch, one who must be obeyed simply as he simply is the master (S1 as Agent). But as such political forms were largely displaced in the last centuries, and various other forms of socio-political organization emerged - whether of Soviet socialism, or American liberal democracy (to stick with Lacan’s examples). Concurrent with the rise in these new forms of governing there has been a shift toward the rule of knowledge itself and an enormous expansion of expert discourses, advisors on every topic, and a bureaucratic machine bent upon gathering ever more knowledge to shore up the authority of the Agent, as knowledge itself. In these political forms, the leader is no longer a master in the older sense, but the holder of the symbolic place of the leader whose authority is grounded in knowledge (of the needs of the party, or the needs of the people). 

Let us look then at the functioning of the Discourse of the University in an example set in an explicitly university setting. In the position of Agent we will put a professor. What is a professor but someone who speaks on behalf of knowledge? The term itself being a symbolic designation precisely of those who are allows to speak as such. In the place of the Other, we will put a student as object a, a scenario which Lacan punningly called being the “a-studied” (XX SXVII). The professor assigns a paper whose topic, let us imagine, is a theoretical-critical analysis of the object of study for a field known as Transnational American Studies. Recall that this paper when produced, is not in itself the Product, as the Product is always something more, something in excess of the explicit demand. So what then is the Product? The Product will be a furthering, or deepening, of the split that constitutes the subject (and thus yet another resubjectification or interpellation if we understand this term somewhat at odds with Althusser). Whatever the response, the Other here, the student, is further alienated in the realm of a desire that is not their own. That is, their explicit answer to the demand, the paper they produce, cannot be an expression of a desire that is their own, and will always be a negotiation of desires that pre-exist this demand. Put another way (as desire is famously the desire of the Other in every instance), a student cannot, in this discourse situation, simply write whatever they think, they must read and study and respond and critique and summarize and synthesize and only then are they allowed, within any number of institutional and rhetorical limits still, to speak as “themselves”, as the authors of their thought (we can see this exemplified nicely in departments of philosophy whose students in the main do not produce any actual philosophy themselves, instead, to earn their credentials they generally make careers commenting upon philosophy deemed canonical)

. All of this effort for the student is the Product, and so too I would argue is whatever they write which exceeds the explicit demand. Professors, and indeed teachers generally, are often heard to value especially those papers which surprise them, which given them back not simply a professional and well organized synthesis of the materials assigned, but something more. In the best case, it is this something more which the Agent as professor can recuperate - perhaps a novel idea or perspective or a source with surprising pertinence to the topic. In the worst case, it is not the excess in the paper (and indeed there may be none, the paper may be a simple mechanical reiteration of themes and issues which adds nothing of substance) but the effort and struggle of the student to respond to the demand which produces enjoyment. In this scenario we are speaking specifically of perverse enjoyment (XX Zizek ed collection), and as perverse enjoyment is not limited to the Discourse of the University, it need not concern us further here. On the left side of the quadripode, in the position of Truth we find the master signifier (S1). It is perhaps instructive that in our contemporary academic world, few and far between are those who make any claim to the word Truth, indeed, what knowledge believes in these times, if it believes anything entirely, is that there is always more to know and that claims to Truth are suspect. And yet, via the symbolic designation as Professor, as one who not only can speak on behalf of knowledge, but can also judge on that basis (i.e., assign a grade), while their conscious belief may well be that Truth is unattainable, perspectival, nonexistent, etc, their actual doing, the evaluation of the work and giving of the grade, demonstrates that they depend upon a position of mastery which cannot be fully deployed in this discourse (rather they would have to shift into the Discourse of the Master to do so). Here we see a parallel to Zizek’s claim apropos contemporary cynicism, that in our contemporary world, the lure of money (as the exemplary commodity form) no longer ensnares us, as we know very well what it really is (mere coins or paper). What this misses is that we “are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (Zizek MI 314-5). That is, our actions with respect to money embody the fetishism at issue. In our example, the judging itself which results in the giving of the grade are the doing which embodies the repressed Truth of the discourse. This is so, even as the professor is enjoined to say why this claim is false, and how this argument falls short, and not simply “it’s wrong because I say so.” It is this submerged dynamic which causes Lacan to suggest that the ur-statement of the demand subtending the Discourse of the University is “to keep on knowing more” (XX). This demand though, is, strictly speaking, impossible - it demands that one must be all-knowing before daring to speak, something that the functioning of actual universities does not permit (even as it valorizes those who appear to have done so, to have mastered the field).