The Extra-Clinical Potential of Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst?

As Lacan’s ‘discourse theory’ has become more well known since the English publication of Seminar XVII in 2007, it has not been uncommon to see the analyst’s discourse touted as having great potential for deployment outside the clinic. It is easy enough to understand why such hopes would be expressed, though it seems to me that certain claims being made about it exceed the support that it can offer. Some say it is a revolutionary discourse, others that it is a discourse which “excludes domination” (that phrase is Jacques-Alain Miller’s). Here is Žižek glossing this perspective (note I do not say that he is espousing it), 

(...) the analyst's discourse stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria. In it, the revolutionary agent - a - addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the "symptomal torsion" of the subject's constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject's (ideologico-political) unconscious. 

The snag, or hang-up that emerges for anyone wanting to take this aspiration further (if it is recognized as a snag at all, and often it is not) concerns how to actualize the discourse of the analyst outside the clinic.

Inside the clinical relation, the analyst’s discourse makes possible many things, crucially it aids in establishing the transference, it makes of the analyst a cipher or void or sorts onto which the analysand’s various repetitive ways of responding to the Other might, over time, be made recognizable to them. And with that recognition of what is symptomatic and repetitive in the analysand’s stance vis-a-vis the Other, comes the potential to change (obviously much more could be said about this). I have no qualm with any of this because in that very special setting (that of a psychoanalysis) it seems to me that the analyst’s discourse does facilitate these very things. Note that I wrote facilitate, and no other verb which might imply that it offers any assurance of such an outcome. The analyst’s discourse makes possible, that is all. 

[Here too, and in spite of my conviction, I am moved to note that there may be something about the discourse of analyst which is specific to the clinical work with neurotic analysands, as I have seen suggesting that if working with a psychotic analysand, that the elusive and enigmatic approach is very much not what is clinically called for — if that is true, then does the analyst in the clinic of the psychotic, still operate in the analyst’s discourse? I leave that question aside here as it exceeds the bounds of my topic.]

But again the question of how one can speak from the place of object a (which is to speak from the place of jouissance), that is, how can one be the agent of the analyst’s discourse outside of the clinic in order to advocate for the (revolutionary, emancipatory) desires that others (those who hear) have, but have not or cannot avow as their own? (This being part and parcel of aiding the analysand in grasping their symptom qua symptom, through recognition of their stance toward the Other.) Then, if one can do this effectively outside the clinic in the broader social realm, then per the discourse, the hoped for product would be new S1s, new master signifiers that productively name the addressed subject’s desire— allowing them to own it, to act upon it. 

What those who either make these claims or hope for them seem to be eliding is the radical specificity of the clinical setting and it’s marked difference from nearly any other discursive context one might name. That setting insists upon the fundamental rule of free association. Already here, at the fundamental rule, we are faced with an injunction that is very unique. And while it is not as if we do not, in our many and varied discursive activities, engage with free association — only that nowhere else is it a rule, much less a fundamental one. In the clinic, the analysand (certainly to the extent that he or she has sought out a Lacanian analyst) is unlikely to be consciously expecting answers to their every question, advice or instruction relevant to their life’s problems, even as what they very probably do expect unconsciously might very well be these things. While this setting may be compared with other clinical settings or to what takes place in other sorts of psychotherapy, it is quite difficult to imagine any less formalized, less structured “social setting” being able to maintain even the fundamental rule of free association. 

Let us be comedic for a moment and suppose that you wish to operate only in the analyst’s discourse throughout the course of a day and through one’s various activities (making an appointment to take the cat to the vet, ordering lunch, talking with coworkers around the break room table, sitting in a conference call with other co-workers, unwinding with a friend or spouse after work, etc). How does one speak from the place of jouissance so as to help the other one is addressing to recognize and avow their own desire when ordering lunch? What happens on that conference call if, now and then when you hear an odd stress or slip of the tongue you echo it in the manner of the analyst? How much ‘unwinding’ is possible with friends if you only ever repeat their slips, or highlight the polyvalence and ambiguity of what they say? 

The trouble it seem in each of these scenarios is that they do not conform to the specific agency involved in the clinical use of the analyst’s discourse. Agency in everyday discourse situations requires offering statements, questions, information and much else a great portion of which is expected to be accurately self-referential in nature. The waitron’s question is not “what do I desire for lunch while being unable to avow it to myself” it pertains to you and your demands at the conscious level. We might then think of the analyst’s discourse as one in which the agent involved agency is directed toward enabling the unconscious of the other to be heard. And while, between good friends, where one has a trouble and wants to talk about it, the other may very well be trying to hear in their friend’s many thoughts about whatever they are suffering from, what it is that they desire but cannot put into words, I would argue that even here, where a very similar impulse might be seen, that enough significant differences persist that such a conversation between friends is still not a clear cut example of the analyst’s discourse. 

Having thought about this off and on for a couple of years at this point, I remain at a loss to find any other social setting where the specific constraints that structure the clinical relation are in effect. 

Here are three passages from Lacan which underscore some of the issues already raised;  

For a good analysis to be possible there needs to be an agreement, an understanding between the analyst and the subject analysing himself. 

The routes by which this act of speech proceeds demand a great deal of practice and infinite patience. Psychoanalysis’s tools are patience and moderation. The technique consists of moderating the degree of help that you give to the subject analysing himself.  

Psychoanalysis is a serious matter that concerns, I repeat, a strictly personal relation between two individuals, the subject and the analyst. There is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses. 

(Lacan in 1974” — emphases are mine) 

Now for more comedy, but not a thought experiment. During my analysis, I became, as I am sure many do, quite attuned to slips of the tongue, both my own and those of others. Once one begins to hear how amazingly frequent these are, it can be hard not to try doing some of what one’s analyst does — or at least this was the case for me. I did this to people all the time! The responses were quite striking. Here are a few in brief;

I’d asked where the men’s shoes were in a department store, the employee said something like “Shoe-shits are over there.” The first word “shoe-shits” was less clear and less distinct than it appears in writing. But that is what I heard, so I blurted out, in my best neither-question nor-assertion tone of analytic ambiguity “shoe shits” with a pause to bring out both words. The employee looked shocked for a split second then started cackling with laughter. This is the only pleasant anecdote about this I have.

The most unpleasant is somewhat complicated and even now I shy away from giving some of the details, but a very short version. I heard a poet reading. He had intended a particular word and said something else, something very neologistic but quite clear (and later I listened bakc to this on an audio recording and it again seemed clear to myself and other I asked that the neologism I heard is what other heard as well). After the reading I mentioned this slip of the tnogue to the poet and he first denied (quite vehemently) that this is what he had said. I didn’t dispute with him only saying that this is what it sounded like to me. The word in question (I am intentionally not giving it for reasons that will be made clear below) included the word “porn” as one of two syllables in the neologism. The poet in question became more angry and said “So you’re saying that I watch porn and there’s something wrong with that?!” I said I had nothing against pornography, and had no insight into the meaning of the slip, and that I thought the word I heard was poetically interesting. He seemed unable to hear any of this and continued in the same vein, getting progressively angrier. I tried to change the subject but he kept circling back. Finally, arriving at his hotel, I said, “What would be so bad about having said that. We all make slips of the tongue all the time.” He replied with “Fuck you” and slammed the car door. Had this been all there was too it, it would be less of a story but the action doesn’t end there. About a week later I was alerted by a friend that several lengthy posts at a blog were violently attacking me by criticizing a piece I had written about a poet (already long deceased at that time). My friend sent me the link and I notice only once I had click on it that the blog it took me to had a one word neologistic title — precisely the same neologism I had heard in this poet’s slip of the tongue. I read through three lengthy pieces of this guys writing which were all intent on demolishing every claim I has made in that piece about the dead poet, and along the way to impugning my poetics, my intelligence, my grasp of logic, my abilities as a reader of literature, and even my grammar! Over the next month or more, additional posts appeared with scathing reviews of my poems as found here and there online and even point by point attacks on posts I had made to a poetry-related listserv more than 5 years earlier. This blog still exists (I just checked), though its author has long since ceased to devote himself to telling the world how terrible everything I think say or write is (and from checking the archives, it seems that he deleted the posts about me at some point in the intervening years — this having happened in 2004). 

Those two anecdotes mark the poles, but the most common response to experiment in listening for the unconscious along these lines was “that’s not what I said” but I’ll still note that often it was prefaced by a “fuck you” and that, it often resulted in a fair amount of negative affect being directed at me. Sometimes people simply looked confused momentarily and ignored what I’d repeated from their discourse. Other times someone would turn what I had said into a question for me. Still, overall, the most common affective response to my many experiments with this seemed to be anger, annoyance, confusion or a demand for clarification. These seem to be what emerges when you try to use the analyst’s discourse in social settings which are not structured in such a way as to allow it to do the work that it does in the clinic.

Toward the end of the time when I was doing this I also tried telling people that I was practicing hearing slips of the tongue and that they should feel free to free associate to anything I repeated. This never went anywhere. Either demands were issued for me to explain why I would do this, arguments were made that slips of the tongue mean nothing, or my repetitions were met with a raised eyebrow and ignored. Often people would ask that I stop doing as soon as I said anything.

I conclude form these admittedly anecdotal and personal/subjective experiences that, Freud was right — It speaks!  But (he was right about this too) very few people want to hear what it says or think about what it says and mostly they’re just gonna be pissed off. 

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan says above, “is a strictly personal relation between two individuals” and if, as he also claims, there “is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses” might the reason for this be that no speaker, no agent of any discourse in the extra-clinical social world, where there are more listeners and speakers involved than we see in an analysis, is able to impose and thereby rely upon the rules which psychoanalysis requires in order for the analyst’s discourse to work as it is does in the clinic.  And while I do assert that it does work in its radically particular setting, saying so is not meant to imply that it always works, or that it works astonishingly well, or anything of the sort. Most of the time it doesn’t work, right? Doesn’t that have to be the case, as even in the clinic the analysand often enough squirms away from many interpretations because they touch upon what is most anxiety-producing about the unconscious, what we in effect do not want to know that we know about ourselves. This is why Lacan stresses above that psychoanalysis requires “infinite patience” and “moderation.” If the analyst’s discourse always worked, little patience would be required. The analyst’s discourse works, but only now and then… hopefully more often as an analysis proceeds within that very specific setting or “social bound” that we call a psychoanalysis. 

Having said all of this, I do not mean to suggest that one cannot operate as Agent of something structurally equivalent to the analyst’s discourse in a social space not founded upon free association and all the rest. I claim that it can and does get used in the day to day world. But that outside of the rules which found the clinical relation it operates somewhat differently, is harder to sustain for long periods (by contrast with the other three discourses in each of which one can blather on for hours at a time seemingly). Also, in non-clinical social space, the fact that the upper level of the graph of the analyst’s discourse is very similar to the matheme of the perverse phantasy [a <> $] is not without significance, because in its extra-clinical functioning it may well be that the best name for it is the discourse of the pervert.  

Faulkner

So, how does this discourse, whether we call it the analyst’s or the pervert’s work? The position of the agent, as discussed above, is one which speaks on behalf of jouissance from the position of the object and it addresses an other in their very character as split, addressing itself to this split that all of their defenses and ego and self-understanding is premised upon denying. It does this with S2 (knowledge) in the position of truth, as such this agent has knowledge of jouissance and it is this which it seeks to locate in the split in the other. And, the product of this discourse is an S1, a new master signifier. To provide an illustration of this pervert’s discourse, I’ll now turn to one of the novels in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy, The Hamlet. 

Some stage setting will be required here. The Hamlet referred to in this novel is the teensy tiny Frenchman’s Bend, part of Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha county where the majority of his famous works take place. A new family or clan has taken up residence there, these are the Snopes and they are generally thought of as pretty bad news for a variety of reasons. The important Snopes for this discussion are the patriarch Ab and his son Flem. But Frenchman’s Bend, small though it is, is perhaps not a terrible place when they arrive and rent a nearby farm. The town is run by Will Varner who is the richest man in town, owns the town’s one store, and is the landlord for the majority of the farmland surrounding it. Ab Snopes rented the farm he’s working from Varner’s son Jody who, as head clerk, runs the store for his father. Ab and Flem Snopes, and Jody Varner are the principle characters discussed here, but there is one other who is somewhat important, Ratliff. Ratliff is a travel salesman who passes through Frenchman’s Bend and many other small towns throughout his territory, not only selling his wares, but also acting as new service of sorts. Ratliff knows everyone and seemingly remembers everything as well. So, let’s dive in to the specifics now. 

Ab Snopes, father of Flem, comes into Varner’s store and encounters Jody. Ab, like his son Flem, evinces certain traits which might be read via the discourse of the pervert (analyst), namely his vague and somewhat ambiguous answers and his refusal of the normative flow of conversation and reinforcing eye contact (Faulkner 8). But overall this exchange unfolds as two Masters facing off with one another in the full Hegelian-Kojèvean resonance of that as a “fight to the death for pure prestige” (Kojève 7). But outside of this founding Hegelian myth, in a social world wherein such dominance is not usually obtained through direct violence, determining who 'wins' in such a face off is less clear. Jody does not evince any fear for the security of his own dominant position, he is, after all, the son of Will Varner, the richest and most powerful man in Frenchman's Bend as well as the proprietor of the store which everyone thereabouts depends upon — he has power and knows it, is used to exercising it and to be deferred to on its account. But he does recognize the strangeness of the interaction and the obdurant mastery that Ab presents (Faulkner 9). Moments after Ab Snopes leaves the store, a hanger-on at the Varner store named Tull, tells Jody that Ab is thought to be responsible for burning a barn on a property he’d rented previously (Faulkner 9).  

The narrative shifts next to a discussion between Jody and his father Will that evening in the Varner home. Here Jody tells his father of a plan he has conceived to increase the Varner profits from the Snopes rental. He suggest that they let Ab work the farm until the season is almost over, and only when the crop is ready to harvest, to reveal that they know about the barn burning incident, using this as a means to intimidate and run the Ab and the family off the property. This scheme would net additional profit, from both the rent paid by Ab until that time and then from the entire value of the abandoned crop (Faulkner 13-8) which the Varners could then have harvested and sell. 

The next day, on the road to the Snopes farm to meet Ab and see how things are progressing with the crop, Jody encounters Ratliff and their conversation initiates a shift in Jody’s thinking which is crucial to understanding what follows with Ab to a degree and with Flem most of all. Ratliff tells Jody the story of the bad blood which led up to the barn burning that Ab (with the likely aid of his son Flem) is said to have perpetrated as an act of revenge the landlord whose barn it was. In this scene we see how this barn burning narrative suddenly takes on another function relative to Jody’s plan. No longer a handy and obvious ace-in-the-hole, Jody begins to see the barn burning as far more threatening than he had previously imagined, as his repeated Hell fires, blurted out during the Ratliff’s tale, comically portray (Faulkner 16, 18). Jody's assumption had been that the mere rumor of wrong-doing would undermine Ab's pretensions mastery and insure Jody's dominance of the relationship. In the terms of the graph of the Master’s discourse, Jody’s initial plan to abscond with the literal product (the crops) that Ab as other (as S2, knowledge, in this case specifically knowledge of how to farm and the knowledge of the barn burning incident) conforms nicely to the graph’s dynamics. This aim is precisely mirrored in Lacan's discussion of the how it is that, in his account, the philosopher managed to interest a Master in something more than merely setting slaves to work; reaping the benefits of the knowledge they have, yet cannot or do not articulate (2007, 30). But the effect of Ratliff's narrative is to portray an Ab Snopes who is not in the least troubled by social censure or opinion, an Ab Snopes who is a master that doesn’t limit his strategies are to the socially acceptable. There are more examples of this in Ratliff’s gossip about the Snopes than simply the barn burning and which paint Ab as someone with a prickly refusal of being dominated by others (Faulkner 18). 

Having set out on this road in a complacent sense of his own Mastery, by the time Jody reaches the farm and notices that the gate has not been repaired, something he would normally have used against the tenant, his Mastery has been undermined decisively and he remarks “I don’t even dare to mention it” (Faulkner 18-9). Nothing that he had hoped to accomplish in visiting Ab comes to pass at all, and in his mounting anxiety he finds himself instead offering favors quite out of character (Faulkner, 20-1).

In the discourse of the Analyst as practiced in the clinical setting, one of the expected and indeed necessary effects is that the analysand is hystericized. They generally begin by speaking of their problems as Master’s would, or perhaps from a distance characteristic of the University discourse. But analysis begins to bear fruit only when the analysand’s presumption that the analyst knows the meaning of their symptom or their suffering results in their beginning to shift to an hysterical response, trying with all their might to force the analyst out of the Analyst’s discourse and into that of the Master so as to pronounce the truth of their symptom as an S1. For analysis to proceed the analyst must refuse this, must instead remain ambiguous, noncommittal, must not obey conversational conventions such as offering reinforcing gestures or eye contact – analytic behavior proceeds in this fashion so as to embody the elusive object a for the analysand – that object which they wish to contain, naturalize, and delimit so that the frightful and overwhelming jouisance it manifests can be tamed. 

Jody Varner already had installed this idea of barn burning in the chain of his own desire to manipulate and swindle Ab, but after talking to Ratliff and seeing exactly how much he had underestimated the potential consequences of fire as a means of expressing antagonism, it, the signifier "burning" or "fire," has behaved as signifiers generally do, sliding into other relations with other signifiers and signifieds. In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" Lacan characterizes the signifying chain as composed of "links by which a necklace firmly hooks onto a link of another necklace made of links" (2006, 41). Both Jody's initial plan and the change in his attitude after talking to Ratliff can be illustrated by this suspended links example. Jody begins by assuming that by revealing his knowledge of the barn burning and threatening Ab with it, that Ab will immediately grasp the many associative vertical substitutions that this allows, marking Ab as criminal, untrustworthy, social outcast, etc. Jody is himself criminal as his plot to run Ab off the farm clearly shows, but Jody's social power and prestige is a consequence of his father, and thus, for he himself to be revealed as untrustworthy, a criminal, etc would be disastrous for what mastery and prestige he has. His mistake is assuming that his own mastery, second order as it is and dependent upon social prestige, is the equal of Ab’s mastery, which is not dependent on the social consensus. After talking to Ratliff, whose story undermines the assumption Jody was depending on, we see how it is that other substitutions equally available to the signifying chain manifest that threat. Having burned on barn, Ab might well burn another. Or, a store, a home or many other piece of property might be into the position of the object to be burned and thus collectively embody a substitutive chain of signifiers hanging suspended from the signifier "barn." The threat is that should such things go up in smoke, Jody’s own needs, demands and desires would be curtailed in a fundamental way as the store above all is the emblem of Jody’s own power. 

On his way home from his dispiriting encounter with Ab, Jody runs into Ab’s son Flem on the road and, perhaps imagining that Flem will be easier to deal with engages him in conversation. If we consider the pages on which this interaction takes place we can see that Jody, like a good analysand, talks a lot. He seeks to extract reassurance, to tame and domesticate his anxiety. But Flem does not provide any assurance, even when asked if his name is Flem he replies with the ever-so analyst-like question “[t]hat so?” instead of with simple agreement (Faulkner 22). 

Unnerved by both Ab's and Flem's persistently perverse ambiguity, Jody tries initially in his conversation with Flem to speak from the discourse of the University, positioning Flem as his object a (what he wishes to control, to domesticate) and attempting to institute a split in him. How does this happen? Jody attempts to sketch a narrative which will make the unspoken signifier “barn burning” its occluded subject and to warn of the dangers facing those who resort to such things, namely that they will run out of places to run away from their own ill repute. This information is delivered not as the commanding nomination of a master who by saying asserts it as truth but as something commonly and socially known, dependent upon obvious knowledge (S2) on whose behalf Jody, as agent, speaks so as to educate Flem. Clearly Jody is hoping to get an assent of some kind from Flem, a recognition that there really are only so many places that a person can run if they do things again and again to make themselves unwelcome and unable to stay where they are. Such an admission on Flem's part would, firstly, link the coordinates of Jody's and Flem's utterances to a common S1 in the position of truth (perhaps nameable as 'social approval' or even 'common sense'). Had Flem agreed to this, and if we assume he did have something to do with the barn burning incident, such an assent to Jody’s claim would have effectively split him between his past criminal actions and his present recognition of the dangers of such actions. 

Flem's response avoids this discursive trap entirely. He replies instead that “[t]here’s a right smart of country” (Faulkner 22). Flem’s manifest meaning here is that there is a lot of country and thus that he doesn’t worry about running out of places to go, and Faulkner chooses this particular idiomatic expression for that thought. The obvious, if submerged threat is clearly there for Jody as we know he is already afraid and now his cautionary narrative has just blown up in his face (i.e., the “truth” or S1 that he was depending upon — ‘social approval’ was not so much refused as simply ignored). And Flem response, in analytic fashion, makes use of signifiers provided by Jody, but in order to produce a signification at odds with the meaning that Jody wanted to be taken.  

And the utterance is ambiguous, is Flem's response directed at the whole of Jody's narrative or only its final comment? What does Flem know? What are Flem’s desires? Jody cannot tell from what is said. He cannot be sure that Flem is even paying very much attention as his “face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough” and during Jody’s speech he “chewed steadily” (Faulkner 22). 

But what about the specific choice of the word “smart”, a word that did not emerge in Jody’s discourse, but from Flem? The psychoanalyst is not, or so we hope, out to manipulate the analysand, and it is in the service of clinical goals when the analyst offers interpretations or comments to the analysand. I think one can read this word, “smart,” as an interpretation, that is, as a response to the unconscious, latent import of Jody’s prior discussion and not to its manifest content. Were Jody an analysand and asked to free associate on that word in the context of this narrative, might he come in time to consider that he had headed out to see Ab intending to outsmart him (and failed) and that he had just (by means of his little narrative to Flem) hoped to show him a smarter course of action, and thereby outsmart him otherwise, and could the fear that he is now himself being outsmarted already have arisen in his mind? Switching to Flem’s side of this exchange, the analyst is asked to be open to his own unconscious during the clinical encounter, and when sudden signifiers emerge in his own thoughts, to allow them into the discourse. How much of a stretch is it to think that Flem intuits that Jody thinks he is being very smart here and therefore attempting to manipulate him? Flem's use of "smart" accords with Lacan's comment about analytic interpretations, that they are "not designed to be understood [but] to make waves" (qtd. in Fink 81). 

Jody's first self-serving little narrative having failed, he tries another tack, again in conformity with the discourse of the University, stressing that open communication between them is important in order to stave off any untoward problems (i.e., the unspoken signifiers “burning” or "fire") and that to do so would yield a benefit. Flem’s minimal response, the question “[w]hat benefit?” (Faulkner 23), once again fails in to address or in any way acknowledge the occulted significations of the narrative in which Jody is trying to ensnare him. What Flem says can be read to signify a simple request for clarification, as tacit agreement to the implicit deal being offered, or as doubt that any benefit offered would be enough, among other possibilities.

Flem's responses throughout this dialogue mirror another comment by Lacan about analytic interpretation, that "[i]t is only through equivocation that an interpretation operates. There must be something in the signifier that resonates" (qtd. in Fink 92). Here "equivocation" and  "resonance" denote a polyvalence and ambiguity in what the analyst says that attempts to maximize the potential significations of any utterance. When Jody answers that the benefit is “a good farm to work” (Faulkner 23) Flem immediately shoots him down, thus undermining the second of Jody’s attempts to contain, control, split and outsmart him. Jody tries again to gain the advantage by suggesting that in some other line of work, Flem would need the “good will” of others to succeed (the structure of the University discourse is again evident). Flem ignores this, changing the focus, and tightening it upon Jody himself by asking “[y]ou run a store, don’t you?” (Faulkner 23). This question has many effects here. First of all, in light of the manifest content of the last few lines, it says in so many words I don’t want a farm, I want what you’ve got. Additionally, it links the occluded signifier that has been driving this discussion, “burning” to the social emblem of Varner wealth. And finally, somewhat speculatively, Flem asks about the store twice, each iteration includes the words "you" and "run" (the latter term introduced earlier, as we saw, by Jody) and while one might observe that Jody may well wish he could simply run away from this encounter, that the Varner store cannot run, and neither Ab nor Flem seems about to be run off. Flem has repositioned this signifier in the chain of desires contesting here and, as with “smart” above, it has reverberations and "makes waves." As one knows from reading the novel, Flem will indeed come run the store (and the town) in time. 

Two more of Flem’s few comments remain to be mentioned. Jody offers him a cigar, and Flem refuses it saying, “I aint never lit a match to one yet” (Faulkner 23). Here again the previously occluded “burning” is once more reactivated and more explicitly than at any previous moment in their conversation. Jody registers this instantly, saying, as the text specifies, “quietly,” and presumably outside of Flem’s hearing, “[a]nd I just hope to God you and nobody you know ever will" (Faulkner 23). In light of the anxiety that Jody feels about things which might be burned, the offer of a cigar reads as an almost comical attempt to link Flem to both "burning" and something which, if burned, would not be cause for alarm; an attempt to bring closure to the anxiety of "burning" by innocuously punctuating its open-ended threat. Flem's response features both a double negative “aint never” which logically, if not in the vernacular, suggests its inverse and the destablizing word "yet" at the end, making the possibility that he will at some future point "[light] a match to one" explicit. Also, Flem by deploying the shifter "one" in this statement potentially opens up that term's reference beyond one cigar to one barn or one store among other possible “ones.” Jody's sotto voce comment quoted above makes this explicit. 

While Flem makes no request for a job in the store, Jody nonetheless makes an offer of such work to begin “[n]ext fall” and when this results in no response from Flem, he says “[n]ext week then” and once again he tries to rein in this giving away of favors to and to tame the anxiety that the unspoken “burning” provokes by asking for a “guarantee” from Flem. The offers, of cigar and of job, show us Jody in the discourse of the hysteric. If a master is not really a master then this is demonstrated by showing that they need things outside of themselves to be complete in their mastery. Jody as split subject offers a cigar and gets a refusal and an increase in his anxiety, then he offers a job next fall, to no reply, and finally he offers a job next week again without any response, and finally he makes a demand for a guarantee. This demand is essentially that Flem be a master, who can lay down the law with his word, and who can thus be potentially challenged and undermined by further hysterical demands for failing to be equal to that word. Flem, acting as the proper pervert (analyst), addresses Jody not as object a, refusing to grant or even acknowledge what Jody (as analysand) will not make explicit at the level of his speech, the signifier “burning”, by asking Jody in return “[g]uarantee what?” (Faulkner 23).

It is unclear from this scene what S1 might have been produced in Jody, but we can speculate. Jody had begun his day in comfortable assumption of his own social dominance and convinced that he could use it to swindle the Snopes. Through a series of incidents that turn his trump card into the signifier of great threat to himself and everything that sustains his own prestige. Might the signifier “guarantee” itself be the new S1 produced? Heretofore, Jody had not felt any need for a guarantee, he’d grown up without any challenge to his power, and without any need to struggle to attain it— that labor had been accomplished by his father. Offering Flem the job in the store might also be seen as a “guarantee” from Jody’s perspective as it is a position of power, prestige and influence in Frenchman’s Bend — and surely from Jody’s perspective, no one would want to burn the source of their own power, or the supports of their own narcissistic ego. But now Jody appears to recognize that he himself desires a guarantee of his own continuing relevance while before he’d never needed it, and while such a guarantee is hard to imagine as positive outcome for an analysis, as here it’s merely a prop for the ego— Flem’s having subjected Jody to the workings of the discourse of the pervert has brought about a change in Jody’s relation to his own desire, and to his stance vis-a-vis the Other. 

The Discourse of the Pervert

To conclude, as is obvious from what has been said above, my contention is that there is nothing inherent to the discourse of the analyst/pervert which necessitates that it have revolutionary or emancipatory effects on its others. And further, that the positive effects that it has in the clinic are made possible by a carefully regulated setting, with stated rules and expectations which are much more formalized than the majority discursive situations we find ourselves in day to day. Now having said this, I am not ruling out the possibility that operating as the agent in the discourse of the pervert is of necessity manipulative or “bad.” I also believe that this needs to be understood with reference to the other discourse as well. Each discourse can have negative and positive effects, sometimes we need the sort of agency deployed by the master, or the university, the hysteric, or the pervert (analyst) and each of these can be directed at us in ways that intensely problematic. We have to see the discourses as structures without any necessary ethical stakes as those stakes can only be made explicit when we carefully consider what takes the places of S1, S2, the object, and the split subject in a particular case. It will be remembered that Lacan hopes that, in the wake of a successful analysis, and thus “perhaps it’s from the analyst’s discourse that there can emerge another style of master signifier” (2007, 176) and that while of another style than previously, this new S1 would once again circulate within four discourses, that of the master, the university, the hysteric, the pervert… and, conditions permitting, the analyst. 

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. The Hamlet. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.

Fink, Bruce. Fundamentals of PsychoanalyticTechnique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: Norton, 2007. 

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1969.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.

–––. “‘This so-called crisis. It does not exist.’ — Jacques Lacan on psychoanalysis 1974.” 

–––. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII; The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses”

Is that a real theory, or did you make that up?

I like reading Lacan.

Not always mind you.

Not with some desperate impulse barking at my neck, some super-Ego stand-in demanding that I finish a paper or rebut a critique or otherwise pronounce authoritatively upon (& cite of course!) to demonstrate my worth for the big(bloated)Other in some fashion.

But I find just how freakily bizarre Lacan can be, rather… awe-inspiring.

That so much of his work is spoken opens a particular door to it that I often stand in, looking, and wondering (through the haze of multiple English renderings with my non-French eyes) from the improvising poets' room (my room) into Lacan's (as I imagine it) and feeling as if I know something about how things must just have just started to come out - like a tap being turned on, the pipes creak, then you're talking - and it is not as if one is not thinking all the while (in fact it is challenging to think on one's feet, in one's mouth), but to say that one is magisterially directing with knowledge aforethought each utterance in accordance with some grander argument is perhaps even more absurd (noodle in a pincushion) than to suggest that no thought is being exercised in this process. 

O'Hara

Much more like Frank O'Hara than anyone will probably credit, Jacques is going on his nerve.

Or so it seems to me.

But Lacanians, or such has been my experience, are not comfortable focusing overmuch on his seminars or writings as embodying a poetics - as if to find in the language something not importantly content-relevant and connectable to one's real or imagined internal map of Lacanian thought consigns whatever it is to frivolity. 

I see no necessary contradiction with desiring to both make use of the generative charge of Lacan's poetics - a position which would start with him but go wherever, and another which thinks that attempting to tune him in as best as one is able (an endless and recursive process) is important regardless of whether one ultimately 'agrees' and this attempt is an aid to the very generativity of the poetics.

In correspondence recently with my sis, where I was thinking through some of this same stuff somewhat otherwise, I wrote this;

[Lacan's] poetics i do not talk about but simply use, a poetics that is generative (for me at least) and about which i do not have much of anything to say, though there is endlessly something more one can do with it - "doings" which could never have been predicted entirely from knowledge of Lacan, hence the 'generative'

were the generative poetics not present, then the "specific rigor" [of my approach to Lacan's work, her description] would never have taken hold, nor would giving 2 shits about Lacan in all likelihood

in a very similar way (abstracted from the specific contents); 

i hold you to a higher standard - because i love you

None of which should suggest that my reading and thinking and experience of Lacan is not conflicted and ambivalent in many ways. 

That is, in spite of having found ways to enjoy, I am not immune to the suggestion that something crucial is being said, that he is on the verge of giving us the key to grasping it all - and thus of the need (it could strike at any moment!) to be able to bring the lights up, stand, face the group and say "What Lacan means is…"

And this is surely required if one is to accord with the general demands of the University discourse,.. that flash of mastery "What Lacan means…" - as fleeting as a grimace - is quickly diffused with more and more knowledge, tied to the master's words with citation and exegesis, propped up further by pointing at other names who read him in a similar way.

But saying "What Lacan means…" is a rather secondary if not tertiary posture of mastery already, one that any 'Agent S2' in an actual university setting sneaks up on rather than blurting out in most cases, laying all the bricks of justification and citation before daring to pronounce. 

Obviously - in the tone if not the substance - there is something about this which is displeasing to me, constraining.

There is a poetics in that too I guess, but it isn't one that presses my buttons and - as JL himself argues in Seminar XVII apropos the University discourse. 

"…the difficulty endemic to translating me into academic language will also blight anyone who, for whatever reason, tries their hand at it…" 

"Blight" is an interesting choice - and of course that is Grigg, the translator's choice and I do not have the French original to ponder.

Rather we are to be agents of the S2, knowledge purveying a unique packaging (dare I say brand) of some concatenation of 'a stupid' of signifiers, made to appear to have a meaning and should the they be truly classic, the might simply seem to be their meaning (two echoes there might be worth thinking about sometime, not now).

This unique packaging should be reflected on the c.v.,.. naturally.

Brand Lowther (includes the award-wishing Lowther Method ®™)

Google > Image "brand lowther" gave me this pic and this caption;
"As you might expect, Lowther-based loudspeakers were much in evidence at the show. A pair of vintage Lowthers was spotted in the Lowther America room." Now I want a vintage Lowther loudspeaker!

Superego says: [sigh]

So, I like the idea of having a specific rigor, it sounds so butch but maybe we could spin it nicely if the license that the poetic provides is available as a consequence.

There is an ethics there and one not totally unlike that involved in staging a Return to… the text of someone or other.

Which is not to even pretend that the poetics that I find generative would have found favor with Lacan or that he'd even agree that it is there in his work, just that I feel pieces of it there.

"Poetics" here having less to do with words-language-discourse as such as with the ways of working with them, actual practices but also the stances towards the materials would seem to be important.

Since I am already risking an opposition between the poetic and the academic 'Lacans' let me also not forget the clinical one - arguably the one most crucial for Lacan himself from the beginning to the end of his career. 

My hope to tune Jacques in as best as I can as well as to find the points where more thinking is needed, extensions proposed, modification seems necessary, etc - This is where it shades over into the poetics (theory is then improvised and maybe not scrapped after) (this is very like poetry for me, a poem is written or spoken and later one decides… Not all of them can work. Plus if you aren't failing often then you can't be trying very hard. Sometimes they come in bunches, interrelated but distinct and they keep coming for as long as they keep coming and no longer.) to do perhaps with the way the concepts interact, how they fit together and don't, how they unsettle one another or create tensions, the sorts of narratives that emerge from them, a sense (ultimately my own, and not exactly anything I could argue for) of the propulsion or internal dynamics of this as poetics that makes it available for use.

But, just to make matters more impossible(?), it seems to me that whether some modification to the theory is to be justified as "psychoanalytic" in a meaningful sense of that term, then it would also need, at the bare minimum, to not be armful or contraindicated or somesuch thing in the clinic.

No analysands were harmed in the making of this post (so far).

But yes, that is a tough one as I am not an analyst and never even completed my own analysis - though I do admit that I often wonder about becoming an analyst, being an analyst, ( I hear your slips of the tongue, I do, but have learned mostly to pretend I didn't) etc. 

So those are the three styles or modes that I try to keep in mind, the poetic, the 'specific rigor' (scholarship) & the clinic - the first I feel but have some difficulties explaining and do not really desire to try to explain very much - the second I am always trying to adapt to the specifics of university protocols and whatnot but which my allegiance to scholarly pursuits is not framed by those things (MLA format, disciplinary boundaries, peer review) but by the specific texts that I am excited by - and thirdly by my hallucination of the subject as analysand or analyst, my memories of my analysis and others I read about, my never-ending snooping around in my own associations, slips, dreams.

The weak link is the third one.

Which is not to say that the others are über-robust or anything.

Creeley, natch.

My subject line is a riff on the line that poet Robert Creeley so often repeated.

Creeley was reading somewhere - the midwest I think - and after his reading a man came up and asked him, in all seriousness "Is that a real poem or did you make that up?"

If we put theory in for "poem"…?

The whole problematic of the university discourse as discussed above is evoked once more.

Other jokes are possible.

But speaking as a poet I just want to say, 

That's a real theory

because

I made it up.

You talkin' to me?

Foreword by Stephen Whittle, from The Transgender Studies Reader (quotes interspersed with my babble)

The Transgender Studies Reader

Edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

Routledge, 2006.

This began as quote poaching, then I started rearranging the quotes and seeing interesting things in the new juxtapositions, and that led to some dictation and some thinking and wandering and much else. 

Also note - and cut & paste that nifty trans symbol, ⚧

"Increasingly we presume that language, as another predeterminant of humanity, overrides the determinant of biological sex: that is, a person is the gender they claim to be, regardless of sex status. But the language of sex and gender is inherently limited. As trans people challenge their exclusion from language, and therefore from basic human rights, sex itself is increasingly becoming an unsafe foundation for the legal foundation of the order of human life."(xiii)

"Having a sex is apparently a prior determinant of being human, but as such it begs the meaning of what 'human' is."(xiii)

Does sex need laws?

I'm not sure what that question is about. I heard it. So I wrote it. (dictation)

One can object to the question in so many ways and sidestep imagining any answer. 

One can tarry over the terms and the options of relating them. So many inflections, contexts, would have beens… 

The safest course is to understand it as you like and/or walk away.  

To say what sex "means" so as to consider the question as such ties one back into laws of various orders, yet we know it is not a free-for-all - as much as that fantasy is available in the culture - that is to say, whether one is born into a body that accords with their desire, or not, does not seem an issue of choice in the usual sense of that term.

At a tangent from that - but again (dictation) - I just heard it, 

…Neither is who you want to fuck.

Perhaps we need more space simply for not knowing?

Is it just the largely contingent emergence of law-like behaviors that have outgrown their utility but which sprang from out of greater potentialities at some point in the past and those potentials are now needed once again? 

Too utopian? all that foggy ancient wisdom potential once the b-movies move on it?

Sorry, I am not terribly in control of the throughput just now. After the above, I slept reading this sleeping this and now this, here. 

Kinda the beginning of Swann's Way, but less dreamy perhaps - doesn't everyone have that? that thing where you are so deep into the text that your sleep is an extension, your thought perhaps clopping along at the characteristic pace of what you'd been reading? 

Where could I stand to pronounce on what is or is not legitimately of the human?  I laugh at me for thinking it.

As to the limitations to our language for sex and gender, and he could have added orientation and expression etc etc (both terms seem to provoke endless internal descriptions and exponential external ramifications)… yes, of course. 

But how to be alert to and differently responsive to the places where it breaks down so frequently with negative consequences for bodies, lives, etc.? That is the question that needs answering. 

⚧ 

"For the trans person’s understanding of the self, the question becomes whether gender, at the heart of self-understanding, can be theoretically recuperated. It is all very well having no theoretical place within the current gendered world, but that is not the daily lived experience. Real life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression based on the apparently unreal concept of gender." (xii)

"This new politicization forged a determination to change the world, by every means possible, for the next generation of trans youth. Significant changes have indeed taken place. At the very least, where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination, which is more easily addressed through the courts and legislature."(xii)

One is placed regardless of how they would place themselves. If that accords, so easy not to even recognize it happening. Indeed, would it not simply seem to be how things are if what you thought was what everyone else asserted? Ought I to have said 'how things were'? it is what I first typed (is that dictation?) (yes, it's dictation)

The first of these quotes seems to argue that, viable or not, recuperable or not, unreal of not, gender remains a social mandate.

Gender (and sex) would then be one of the things that those subjects supposed to believe, believe in. & as difficult as it is to combat the beliefs which are supposed by subjects, themselves merely suppositional - I'd argue that this is a better situation than one where we had compelling evidence that all but a few of 'us' do in fact believe. It's better as what supposes subjects are supposed to believe is largely a fantasmatic construction based upon the this or that person's grasp of the cultural dialogue about whatever (sex & gender, in my example)… & thus a construct that is only as strong as the individual who supposes such other believing subjects own need for this belief. 

Is that clear?

Probably not.

Ok, the idea is an development of Lacan's concept of the subject supposed to know, i.e., the analyst. Analysands, of necessity impute knowledge to their analysts (at least neurotics do, not sure this applies to every structure). The end of analysis, if it goes well, requires the fall of the analyst, the moment when the analysand recognizes that it is they, the analysand who has done all the work, all the analysis, and is the only one who can declare that things are over, that the symptom has been interpreted, etc. None of that supposed knowledge was the analyst's at all, it all belongs to the analysand. So far so lacanian…

Žižek is the one who develops this into the subject supposed to believe. My example will be yard mowing, I think I took this specific example from Levi R. Bryant who used it  years ago on the Lacan listserv, but I like it so much because of certain personal experiences with 'yard nazis' in the Chamblee part of the greater ATL. Anyway, let's say you live in a housing development sort of neighborhood and you really do not like mowing the yard, in fact you find it a waste of time, after all the grass hurts no one when allowed to grow, so what's the big deal? But you nonetheless believe that the neighbors are all deeply invested in lawn lengths as falling between certain parameters which your own grass has woefully exceeded. You note that your grass is the longest of any yard's on the block and you conclude that all those other subjects (everyone else in your hood) believe there is a length for grass which is simply too long. Grumbling you mow your yard under the imagined pressure of the neighborhood, though in theory every single local resident might feel exactly as you do. 

Great theory. Likewise, it can be very useful in explaining why people do certain things - say with regard to the stock market. 

But… when I lived in Chamblee, though my ex supposed the subject of the hood to have certain feelings about the yard, I didn't give it much thought at all and in time the landlord was given a letter of complaint by one of our neighbors about the height of our grass.

That fact is maybe funny at this point though, right?

But that, as that quote I keep tossing around goes: "Over the last decade, more than one person per month has died due to transgender-based hate or prejudice, regardless of any other factors in their lives. This trend shows no sign of abating" (Gwendolyn Ann Smith, p90 - in Beemyn & Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People) …or as Whittle puts it above "life affords trans people constant stigma and oppression" - the only strategy that makes any immediate sense against this is education, or dare I say consciousness raising. 

Yes, I too am squirming at that.

So, while I am in no way suggest that an strategy of educating people should be in any way diminished, just as I don't think that symptoms of unconscious desire can be explained away as irrational or counterproductive or whatever (as this addresses only the conscious ego), so too, educating - perhaps especially when it's motivations are to 'raise consciousness' seem very likely to produce in some of the 'astudied' formations of desire that are reactive, built upon the Imaginary and expressed through aggressivity. 

The Discourse of the University 

Calling those who are to be 'educated' the "astudied" is also a Lacan quote, or pun, neologism… which emerges in Seminar XVII when he is discussing the Discourse of the University. Across the top line of the discourse we see S2, knowledge in the position of the agent, the operator of the discourse. The agent as knowledge addresses an other who is the object cause of desire. In one scenario, consider the teacher (filled with "positive" intentions) speaking on behalf of all that they know (that people are just people no matter where you go, that being gay or straight of bisexual or asexual, intersexed or transgendered or transsexual or genderqueer or of any height or weight or race or ethnicity or by approximation to ideals of beauty - that none of this should matter) and aiming to convince the student, or students, thus the (objet petit a)-students, those who the teacher wishes to usher into hir own libidinal attachment to this set of beliefs. The lower level of the graph shows us something else… 

Below the agent is S1, the master signifier - that thing you reach when you keep asking yourself why you believe ____ to every given answer… You reach that which you believe because you just do (damn it!). (& I suspect that when it comes to things like transphobia or homophobia, misogyny, racism, etc… that while some of these have visible 'superstructures' of Imaginary and Symbolic contents - that what makes them so often expressed through violence is the very same thing that makes them difficult to change simply by presenting arguments - these would of course be unconscious investments). But here, in the University Discourse, though the agent will stage, launch and purport to defend the content of their speech with logic and stats and reasoning and examples, the motive will ultimately be otherwise. There will be a belief that is believed simply because it is believed, a belief which can't be uttered and owned as the agent's own without it invalidating the working of the discourse itself. & then, on the right hand side, regardless of how the other responds to the discourse, to the extent that they do respond, the excess, the waste product of having been interpellated by the discourse here produces a deepening of the split within the subject ($). 

Things start getting relatively hairy at this point. That is, in my use and my understanding (undoubtedly both open to critique) none of these discourse models is transparent within a given sample of speech or text. Lacan is careful to distinguish discourse from speech at the beginning of the seminar. But just a statement can mean differently in differing contexts, so too the same utterance could function within multiple discourses. And just as, for Freud - unlike the grocery store line 'dream handbook'  with its many X means Y claims about 'symbols' and so forth - an element of the dream text has no determinate meaning in advance of its interpretation in the context of the dreamer's own associations… what precise S1 is repressed in this or that Teacher's discourse when they are speaking as the agents of knowledge is going to have to vary from person to person. Just the same, the product of the Uni Discourse, the deepening or furthering of the split within the subject ($) might be experienced as alienating and painful - furthering one's sense of being unable to put one's suffering into words - or it might come as a relief, as when - after countless doctors and no answer to what ails you, a diagnosis is finally given. A 'diagnosis' of one sort could serve to anchor a claim that your suffering is absolutely and utterly not your fault, thus freeing you from guilt or stigma, but how many of us notice that this also denies us any agency? That these new signifiers which are the meaning of our suffering are not open to our agency, they require our submission. 

All of this makes me wonder again at the "new style" of Master signifier that Lacan speaks of in Seminar XVII. 

&, at the same time, whether there might be a way to saturate the culture with images and narratives and concepts which would not be prone to being experienced as a University Discourse at all. & looking at Whittle's thoughts above, where he writes "where once there was pure ignorance and prejudice of trans issues, we now see informed prejudice and discrimination" I find myself asking whether - given the understanding that is afforded by the subject supposed to believe, whether there might be a way to target that? 

Bear with me, I am struggling to make this make sense for myself as well. 

That is, rather than a Uni Discourse scenario, where I would be trying to make you invest in the beliefs and positions which underpin the many things I am concerned about (already a rather suspect aim, no? even if I am promoting peace and love…) that instead, I ask myself what is it that contributes to certain beliefs (the people phobias and isms mentioned above) being believed - supposed (imputed to) - some them ('everyone', 'most people' 'right wingers' 'vegans' etc) and how that impression might be altered. Essentially - to stick with the trans context (but it could be applied to any I suppose) How to make it appear that regardless of what phobia or fear or rage or whatever you may feel in your black little heart, that everybody knows that is totally wrong because everybody knows that trans people are people just like every other kind of people are people. 

Or who knows, maybe that's just a shoddy containment strategy, after all, what white person doesn't know to not use the N-word and does that in itself prove that there is less racism? 

Nope.

But, perhaps it does equate to "informed prejudice and discrimination" and thus to not sucking quite so thoroughly? 

⚧ 

"I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium."(xiv)

"It is now possible, simply by 'telling' or theorizing my own life and the lives of other trans people, for me to build an academic career based on the fascination of the 'Other' with people like me. It is their obsession that has given us the opportunity to use the power of the media to tell our stories, to theorize our lives, and to seek equality and justice."(xii)

Irony here too in lots of ways, too many to compass. But the central one being that the academic activism against Othering is to some degree facilitated by that very Othering. 

Does that mean they might be able to cancel out eventually? 

That was probably a dumb question.

On the grumpy side, if - as seems so amazing obvious - one's sex/gender/whatever - is so tightly wrapped up in one's subjectivity that relatively minor infractions of the ordering principles assumed to depend upon it leads all too often to explosions of dangerous affects - rage, violence, etc.. in light of this, it seems unlikely that it will be, in any sense of the word, easy, to make large scale alterations to.

But then it is also pretty easy to point to significant changes and developments and so forth as well. 

& this seems to lend itself to various narratives which, at the extreme, are utopic in character. & that troubles me as I'm just too much of a curmudgeon to invest in a time share in Utopia without a lot of skepticism being work through first. Though I suppose that I needn't take that narrative seriously in order to recognize that positive social changes have occurred. 

I may be doing Whittle a small disservice here in that he sets up the one line above, "I am part of the cultural crisis of the new millennium" with some care, and does not deliver this line with the sort of I am trans hear me roar, vibe that it has when floating alone and out of that context.

But, I wanted it to resonate like that.

I wanted, dear (largely hypothetical) reader, for you to feel some crisis. If, that is, you were not already.

⚧ 

"Frequently, many non-trans theorists have used trans identities to support constructivist arguments. But increasingly, trans people are questioning whether the deeply held self-understandings they have can be entirely due to nurture and environment." (xiii)

"...the formal psycho-medical theories are falling rapidly by the wayside, and nothing has appeared in their place except some very limited evidence of biological differentiation that is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." (xiii)

Not sure where to step. There is a tension between these two quotes that I can sketch in big dumb strokes but it feels like it needs a definitive question to cut through it somehow. Both concern the body, or almost the bodies of the body - the empirical body of science, the imaginary body of ego identification, the erotic body of drives and merger, the raced, sexed, aged, coded bodies that are all ours, each of us, specifically, particularly, to the culture, etc.

I've aired my concerns about biological explanations for transgender phenomenon, how they might have some benefits and aid in some efforts for recognition but that they also open the door to scary places - places where something would be fixed or prevented or 'hygienically' cleaned-up and corrected. 

But, to spend much time concerned over such things now is also foolish. The "limited evidence" at the moment "is so problematic that it cannot yet be said to have any proof value." If such evidence were to arise… then one can start asking how much the trans persons' agency has been taken away by the scientific account of cause.

More interesting to me, though still not the intervention between these two quotes I was hoping for, if one has a "deeply held self-understanding" going back to the moment when one was operating in language but hardly only just… does this in itself argue for a nature, rather than nuture argument? I'm not trying to adjudicate the answer based on whether this is or is not a valid supporting claim, just wondering about the somewhat catch-all character of "deeply-held understandings."

I guess as so many of my deeply-held understandings have been proven limited, if not wrong, through the years.

Also here is the recognition that the default assumption of mental illness of one kind or another is on the outs - though it seems to me that many trans people still have to reckon with it's lingering effects.

Then there is the business about the 'non-trans theorists' which, if I deserve the mantle theorist, I'll surely also rate non-trans or cis-gendered. Though whether I'll be caught making a constructivist arguments (not usually my thing) is less obvious. I get that trans people can quite legitimately feel like objects of convenience for theorists of all sorts, but I'm holding out for the possibility that I, as a non-trans person, might eventually have something meaningful to say (this issue deserves a post of its own, and to refer to a number of other writers about this question). But I will note that I am somewhat nervous about that issue - given that Patricia Elliot writes of the many criticisms she has be treated to - and I read her book thinking about what a great job she did of not being potentially offensive.

⚧ 

"In recent years, embracing the trans community and its culture has led us to an exciting position at the cusp of one of the most significant social and political changes in the postmodern world. The struggles of trans people could have significant impact on all of our freedoms, depending upon who wins the war of ideologies surrounding the meaning of gender and sex."(xiv)

"But the questioning that trans people present to others’ identities is a growing challenge to all who place their confidence in the binary rules of sexed lives: man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/gay."(xiii)

Doesn't the mere existence of trans people suggest that there is so much about being human that most humans do not have even any ideas about? 

Likewise, in other areas of thought, when an idea (the ether wind) for example finds it's experimental invalidation (the Michaelson-Morely experiment - though it was intended to measure the ether wind's direction and speed, not to find that it was not there at all) there might be some squawks about it, but it tends to get dropped (witness: the theory of the humors,  phrenology, neuroscience… ok, joking about that last one, sort of…) and yet copious counter evidence to the conceptual adequacy of our conceptions of sex and gender, male and female, masculine and feminine are all over the place and yet… The terms are no sensed by most as discredited and untrustworthy. 

Why not?

⚧ 

"The work of trans academics and theorists is increasingly moving trans people away from the discredited status of being mentally disordered, towards having expert knowledge of those who struggle to maintain the current strict gender regime, referred to by Kate Bornstein (1997) as 'gender defenders'."(xiii)

"The empirical and sociological analyses undertaken have shown that it is only by understanding and accepting that linguistic barriers still exclude the vast diversities of trans and non-trans identities, that we can possibly begin to accept that gender, like race, simply does not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power within the economies of social discourse."(xiv)

. . . so like money? that is, Whittle mentions "the economies of social discourse" and characterizes gender as something that does "not exist other than as an idea that has gained immeasurable power"… How different is that to the money form itself? 

Here is much of a paragraph from a piece I wrote on Žižek's "How did Marx invent the Symptom" which is the last chapter of Mapping Ideology (Žižek ed. - and to which my page references refer) and also included in The Sublime Object of Ideology. & here is that entire text from back in July 2011 (while I was basking in the lovely heat of New Orleans), it's gonna be rather thick with missing context (sorry):

Users of money understand that currency is simply paper (and coins, metal), that it gets old, wears down, etc. Yet “in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist of an immutable substance” (303). Žižek evokes the notion of disavowal and stages it for this case as “I know that money is a material object like others, but still... [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time had no power]” (303). Žižek opines that Marx never solved this problem, that of the “sublime material” or the “immutable body” of money (303). “This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object” though Žižek insists that we must recognize how the “postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order” that its very immutable nature is “sustained by the guarantee” of the symbolic (303). 

(…) 

But the same blindness is present in every act of exchange in which we “misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market” (304). Given this “the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic” (305). Žižek dubs this “the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’” (305). As such “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” is what we must see as ideological (305). This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. “'Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (305). At last the symptom enters the discussion here as Žižek offers a “possible definition” of it as “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” as when, by virtue of analysis and interpretation the subject brings this knowledge to consciousness, the symptom dissolves (305). 

…OK, I know that might have come from out of left field, but let's play substitution games for a bit and see what happens.

Users of the ideas sex and gender understand that these things are not simple binary terms, that there are intersexed bodies, that gender attributes are culturally specific and mutable, they understand that these concepts are increasingly out of sync with the bodies and subjects around us and that they're wearing out. Yet, in the social effectivity of symbolic exchange we none the less treat assigned sex or gender as if they were the unmediated and inescapable evidence of those concepts as bodily substance. So then yes, this is a disavowal, "I know very well that feminine is a culturally specific set of beliefs about what characterizes the female, and that this concatenation of ideas is largely contingent, but still… [it is as if, when I read a body as female, I know it through and through, I know it as "feminine".] This would make of "sex" or "gender" something quite like a "sublime material" or an "immutable body" beyond the anatomical. This immaterial corporeality "Gender" (or is it "Sex"?) of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object (read: objet petit a) though the postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order, such that its very immutable nature is sustained by the guarantee of the symbolic. (…)

[To be clear, the Symbolic is not immutable at all - and Žižek knows this very well - he is referring to the way in which subjects treat the Symbolic, how it works within a discursive situation for example, or in fantasy - as the big Other. It is this Imaginarization of the Symbolic which leads us to credit it so thoroughly, as an Other without lack, a Symbolic where every answer could in principle be found, a fantasy world where "the truth (really is) is out there". Object a's place as sublime within fantasy or social discourse is sustained by that, but they (the object and the Symbolic) are not of the same stuff, the object is not Symbolic but Real.]

(…)

But the same blindness [that philosophy has to the unconscious] is present in every act of gendering in which we systematically misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of gendering: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of bodies through the medium of the categories language has as yet allowed for. Given this the social effectivity of the gendering process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic. Gender then, pace Žižek, would display the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’. As a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence. None of truly know what the hell sexual or gendered 'identity' is truly all about, but we can master the linguistic terms well enough to use them and navigate social discourses and even to find lovers, so to the extent it continues to "work" (at all) we treat it as a guide to essence as, all to often, we believe there is one and thus wish to speak of it. It is this that we must see as ideological. This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. A gender identity (of any sort) is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a social being but this being itself in so far as it is supported and socially-constituted by the ‘false consciousness’ that the historical moment and current state of the Symbolic and Imaginary allow when attempting to think Sex or Gender. Gender then appears as symptom,  a possible definition of which might be, a formation whose very consistency ("I am a man") implies a certain non-knowledge (of what being a "man" or "woman" or whatever would truly entail) on the part of the subject, as when, by virtue of an analysis yet-to-come and its interpretation the subject might bring this knowledge to consciousness and dissolve gender as symptom so as to assert it (or something like 'it') as sinthome, as the support needed for subject in order to be able to live, love, work, play without unnecessary suffering. 

⚧ 

Stephen Whittle

I'll let Stephen Whittle's text have the last word as I have been rambling so much above. There are a few things in the passage below that catch my eye. The 1st of these is the injunction to claim "the transsexualism of the self"… and my curiosity is as to whether this might be something that the non-trans person might also have a share in. I rather hope so. Of course there is also a bit of the manifesto here as well, and I do love manifestos when they're well done… even as I shy away from many utopian futures foretold. 

Anyway, this Foreward is a great read and raising many interesting questions that I didn't even allude to. Also, if you are curious about who this Stephen Whittle is, here are two links to find out [one and two]

"The public articulation of a trans voice and trans consciousness has not only influenced sex and gender studies, but it also impacted on trans people themselves, and has provided a collection of materials that coherently explain their own experiences as genuine. Amongst other things, it has created new ways in which to be an activist, as well as new ways of being trans. It is now possible:

• to acknowledge and fight the injustice of transphobia, and to be trans publicly in order to truly represent transphobia’s victims;

• to be in charge of what we do to our own trans bodies, and to take risks in the art of our bodies;

• to become queer, by refusing gender ascription and by claiming the transsexualism of the self;

• to turn away, ultimately, from the relative safety of queerness and go beyond that to claim a unique position of suffering; and finally,

• to welcome the rage afforded by that experience of suffering, a suffering that is part and parcel of being trans.

Teaching transgender theory is itself an activist process as well as an explorative process. The field is expanding exponentially along with the cultural changes that accompany it. It also poses a daunting problem—in order to hear the voices of trans people, as justice demands, one has to acknowledge the limits of sex and gender and move into a new world in which any identity can be imagined, performed, and named."(xv)