“Think, pig!”: The University Discourse and the Ignorant Schoolmaster

I recently taught Waiting for Godot and was struck by Lucky’s speech in the first act, which is prompted by Pozzo’s imperious demand: “Think, pig!” The speech is of course a garbled series of academic throat-clearings. Previously I had found this merely amusing, but in the wake of reading Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster and Lacan’s Seminar XVII, it seemed different this time around. I joked on Twitter that we should exclaim, “Think, pig!” whenever there’s a lull in class discussion, but I started to wonder if that’s finally all we’re doing as educators.

Why Zizek doesn’t have a political program

From Less Than Nothing, pp. 1007-1009 (yes, I’ve finished the thing):

Faced with the demands of the protestors, intellectuals are definitely not in the position of the subjects supposed to know: they cannot operationalize these demands, or translate them into proposals for precise and realistic measures. With the fall of twentieth-century communism, they forever forfeited the role of the vanguard which knows the laws of history and can guide the innocents along its path. The people, however, also do not have access to the requisite knowledge–the “people” as a new figure of the subject supposed to know is a myth of the Party which claims to act on its behalf…

There is no Subject who knows, and neither intellectuals nor ordinary people are that subject. Is this a deadlock then: a blind man leading the blind, or, more precisely, each of them assuming that the other is not blind? No, because their respective ignoance is not symmetrical: it is the people who have the answers, they just do not know the questions to which they have (or, rather, are) the answer…. Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that the prohibition of incest is not a question, an enigma, but an answer to a question that we do not know. We should treat the demands of the Wall Street protests in a similar way: intellectuals should not primarily take them as demands, questions, for which they should produce clear answers, programs about what to do. They are answers, and intellectuals should propose the questions to which they are answers. The situation is like that in psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but does not know what they are the answers to, and the analyst has to formulate the questions. Only through such patient work will a program emerge.

I am reminded here of my post on Lacan’s pedagogy.

On Seminar XI

Seminar XI was the first of Lacan’s seminars to be published and also his first to be delivered to a broad educated audience beyond analysts in training. As such, it seems to be regarded as a kind of “go-to” self-introduction to Lacan. Rereading it for my tutorial with Stephen Keating, however, I was disappointed. It has some suggestive remarks, some helpful clarifications of concepts, some development of important notions (objet petit a, the Real, the element of sexuality), some intriguing discussions of the relationships among psychoanalysis, religion, and science — but I’m not sure what it really adds up to.

The problem, for me, is that the thing seems to go off the rails once he starts talking about Merleau-Ponty, and then it never recovers. He promises a coherent development of the four concepts (unconscious, repetition, drive, transference) in their interrelations — and then we spend like a quarter of the time randomly talking about vision? Transference in particular never seems to get the necessary development: I got the sense that he was continually saying, “And of course I’ll really explain transference next time!”

Am I missing something?

On being over halfway through Less Than Nothing

I’ve been reading Less Than Nothing on and off for at least six months at this point. When people ask me about it, I always say, “Whenever I’m reading it, I think it’s probably the best thing he’s ever written, but once I put it down, I have no motivation to pick it back up again.” The reason for this stems precisely from the book’s greatest merit — it really is a comprehensive synthesis of Zizek’s thought. The problem is that I’ve already done my own synthesis, so few of the big conclusions are “news” to me.

Thoughts on Seminar VII

Yesterday, Stephen Keating and I had a great discussion of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. There is much that is impressive about this seminar, which seems to me to operate at a higher level of ambition and reach than the first three, but there is also much that is puzzling — most notably the central question of the sense in which this is an ethics.

As Stephen suggested, perhaps Lacan was not so much putting forward a normative ethics as performing a kind of thought experiment, asking what ethics would look like in light of psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s pedagogy

Earlier this week, Stephen Keating and I discussed the second half of Seminar III as part of our ongoing study of Lacan. We both agreed that things were becoming much clearer as the seminar proceeded, but Stephen asked with some incredulity, “But would you ever teach like that?!”

I’ve actually been giving a lot of thought to what a “Lacanian pedagogy” might look like and the extent to which Lacan’s own approach in the seminars might match up with the pedagogical concepts one could draw from his work.

Insight and Change in Psychotherapy

In a recent comment on CBT and psychoanalytic therapy, a commenter, Dr. Jason Ramsay offered a familiar criticism levied against psychoanalysis:

I loosed the boundaries of CBT and found myself working from a psychodynamic perspective more and more, because that is what they wanted. What I found was that lots of insight was generated. Some could, some could not. But in the end, insight was rarely enough to help them change years and years of maladaptive behaviour. In the end, I think that what many of my patients in the study wanted was a combination of insight and technique oriented treatment, just for much much longer than the 12 weeks we were able to offer.

There is much to reflect on here, especially in the wake of a paper I recently presented on social adaptation and the goal(s) of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic clinicians are consistently critiqued by others in the profession that knowledge and truth are not sufficient to facilitate change. Some go so far to even discourage exploration and view it as a defense against making “real behavioral change.” While I am not absolutely against providing certain patients with skills (particularly in extreme situations such as psychosis) I always wonder a bit about this argument. I should note that I have yet to be trained to provide psychoanalysis just psychotherapy (although the dividing line is questionable as my old Lacanian teacher once told me). One is led to believe that unless certain folks are given skills they will never be able to make lasting changes. Let me try and break this idea down further.

Saving Freud from himself

I just got through a couple weeks of teaching Freud, which was a lot of fun. It was particularly interesting to do as I’ve been spending so much time with Lacan lately — it seems to me that the basic Lacanian interpretative strategies and emphases really “work” in the classroom setting, though by this I don’t mean much more than highlighting the “linguistic” element. We did a handful of his introductory lectures along with the case of Elizabeth von R. from Studies in Hysteria, and with regard to the latter, I feel like in discussion I stumbled across a really evocative way of putting the problem of hysteria: what kind of beings must we humans be if we can get sick from a pun?

That case study also includes the kind of thing that always disappoints me in Freud, namely, his desire to bring things back to some kind of biological origin. In his concluding reflections on the function of metaphor in hysteria, he brings in Darwin’s theory of the origin of the emotions (also quoted by James, by the way!), and things really fall flat for me at that point. There’s something similar skewing his theory of feminine sexuality, it seems to me — many of my students felt frankly betrayed after reading “Femininity” from the New Introductory Lectures, and I think it’s the gravitational pull of the idea of a “natural” biological outcome that produces all the well-known contradictions and slippages in his argumentation here. (And to their credit, my students engaged more in authentic critique than in extrinsic criticism, as Freud had built up enough good will in their minds in previous readings that they tried to stay with him for as long as they could.)

I know I’m not saying anything original, but it’s striking to see how this unfolds among students approaching Freud for the first time — and to juxtapose it with my current work with Lacan, so that I can see so clearly the ways in which Lacan might, from a certain perspective, be “saving Freud from himself,” bringing forward his most authentic and radical insights and freeing them of the gravitational pull of naturalistic reductionism.

More Jamesian Lacanianism!

From Psychology: The Briefer Course, ch. 17

“Will you or won’t you have it so?” is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it were the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world!

This notion that all we can “spontaneously” do (if anything) is give our yes or no seems very similar to Lacan’s deployment of cybernetics toward the end of Seminar 2, particularly the lecture that makes up the penultimate chapter. For Lacan, though, this sequence of “yes or no,” 1 or 0, seems to be conceived as a kind of unconscious code operating on us in a machine-like way, which it is the task of psychoanalysis somehow to bring to the surface or force the subject to confront or assume.

William James the Lacanian

From Psychology: The Briefer Course, chapter 2:

The first and foremost concrete fact which everyone will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. “States of mind” succeed each other in him. If we could say in English “it thinks” as we say “it rains” or “it blows,” we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption.