The+Third+Week

An excerpt from the RPI TA training quiz: An effective teacher makes difficult topics to understand:
 * 1) Difficult
 * 2) More difficult
 * 3) Impossible
 * 4) Ludicrous
 * 5) Easy

Glynos and Stavrakakis: //Postures and Impostures: On Lacan’s Style and Use of Mathematical Science//

Lacan took an extremely critical view of pedagogically styled discourse, always cautioning his audiences to resist understanding too quickly.

“You are not obliged to understand my writings. If you don’t understand them, so much the better – that will give you the opportunity to explain them” (Lacan 1975, 35).

Lacan is concerned first and foremost with what happens in the clinic.

Why should he go out of his way to caution his audience to resist understanding too quickly? Precisely because he is concerned that analysts are tempted to understand their patients too quickly.

This means, for Lacan, that in understanding the patient’s discourse analysts understand only what they are already familiar with. Instead of accessing the patient in his or her uniqueness, analysts effectively reinforce their own //self//-understanding.

Taking responsibility for one’s understanding, rather than relying on a consensus of understanding.

The scholar or trainee, in other words, develops a critical understanding and opinion of the text after a difficult and protracted period of study.

__Science Wars Burns – Mostly because sometimes I just enjoy being petty__

Scientific discourse is, by and large, opaque and filled with impenetrable jargon that takes considerable time and will to master.

If it appears that Lacan is taking a deliberate stand on the issue, then S&B would at the very least be expected to provide reasons why pedagogy should be an ideal worth aspiring to in a given case rather than taking these reasons for granted.

Though severely under researched and deeply unself-reflexive, S&B’s objections to Lacan’s style do give voice to an apparently legitimate fear.

It by no means guarantees an understanding that will satisfy or convince – indeed, one may “drop” psychoanalysis altogether after several years of an apparently fruitless struggle. But then again, many may also drop mathematical physics after an equally arduous several year struggle with that subject.

S&B suggest that it is possible to judge the scientific status of psychoanalysis without being familiar with issues and knowledge generated by the psychoanalytic experience.

From the perspective of the “pure” mathematician, the physicist’s use of mathematics is often considered “sloppy,” to the point of risking its condemnation as outright error.

Our verdict is that S&B are guilty of gross intellectual negligence insofar as they systematically misunderstand and distort the research program of Jacques Lacan and its relation to mathematical science. No serious effort is made to give Lacan the benefit of doubt or to engage in scholarly fashion with the literature on this topic, openly admitting that they know next to nothing about psychoanalysis. Had it not been for S&B’s link to the scientific establishment – an institution whose authority one tends to accept without question – //Intellectual Impostures// would not have seen the light of day. Should one dignify this debate by issuing a response?

By pathology we mean only what you get when dismissive opinions about a person’s work are taken seriously even if expressed by those //who admit to their ignorance// regarding that person’s discipline, substituting sensationalized irony for intellectual rigor and relying – through mere association – on the crutch of the scientific establishment’s institutional authority.

Felman: //Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight//

Issues such as dialogue and the performative psychoanalytic character of understanding and of knowledge as itself an act, a process of narration.

I was merely interested in seeing for myself if this text had anything to offer me. I simply read through it, without fighting with it, without trying to appropriate it as a piece of academic information
 * Is this what we should be doing in this class maybe? Would that cause us less pain?

I realized that Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and not as is mistakenly believed as the myth would have it - a pure theoretician.

To explore Lacan in his own terms: to reach as deep as one can reach into Lacan's own frame of reference.

My subject is necessarily larger than Lacan: it is the cultural fecundity of psychoanalysis, the general significance of psychoanalysis for contemporary culture.

How does psychoanalytic insight modify both the interpretive stance and the very conception of the basic cultural act of reading (and of writing)?

Each pragmatic reading always has a //triple// reference: a reference to a literary text, which it is specifically interpreting; a reference to a text by Freud, with which it is specifically interpreting; and a reference to clinical practice, for which Freud's text is trying to account, and of which the literary text always in some way a telling paradigm, a metaphorical dramatization.

One can use theories only as enabling metaphorical devices, not as extrapolated, preconceived items of knowledge.
 * "The practice of psychoanalysis is a process, not a set of doctrines."
 * Tacit knowledge, trained judgment

The analyst’s effectiveness proceeds not from the superiority of his/her knowledge, gifts, perception of reality, or moral ideology, but from the analyst's position in a symbolic structure that repeats itself: the structure of the clinical situation, insofar as it repeats and picks up on the symbolic structure of the unconscious of the patient.

There is no psychoanalytic understanding that can dispense with narrative or truly go beyond it.

But the significance of the discovery appears only in retrospect, because insight is never purely cognitive; it is to some extent always performative (incorporated in an act, a doing) and to that extent precisely it is not transparent to itself.

Lacan psychoanalysis is an invention that, in its practice, //teaches people how to think beyond their means//

It is not in words that the lesson can be learned, but in the body, in one's life.

Language for Lacan (even his own) is something altogether other than a list of terms to be mastered. It is rather something like a list of terms we should be transformed by, a list of terms into which to write, or to translate, ourselves.

The analytic reading is thus essentially the reading of a difference that inhabits language, a kind of mapping in the subject's discourse of its points of disagreement with, or difference from, itself.

The activity of reading is not just the analyst's, it is also the analysand's: interpreting is what takes place //on both sides// of the analytic situation.

What this implies most radically is that whoever reads, interprets out of his unconscious, is an analysand, even when the interpreting is done from the position of the analyst.

The reader is therefore, on some level, always an analysand - an analysand who "knows what he means" but whose interpretation can be given //another reading// than what it means.

Freud's discovery, for Lacan, thus consists not - as it is conventionally understood - of the revelation of a //new meaning// (the unconscious) but of the practical discovery of a new //way of reading.//

The reading necessarily passes through the Other, and in the Other, reads not identity (other or same), but difference and self-difference.

The reading is revolutionary in that it is essentially, constitutively dialogic. It is grounded in division; it cannot by synthesized, summed up in a monologue.

The unconscious is not, in effect, "discovered"; it is //constructed.//

What does it mean to be a reader?

Magic - "the effective action of something that exceeds both the understanding and the control of the person who is subjected to it; it connotes a force to which the reader has no choice but to submit."
 * Less agency for the reader than I am used to. Does meaning still equate to interpretation?

The very quantity of the critical literature to which Poe's poetry has given rise, is itself an indication of its effective poetic power, of the strength with which it drives the reader to an //action,// compels him to a //reading act.//

This ideologically determined, clear-cut opposition between health and sickness is precisely one that Freud's discovery fundamentally unsettles, deconstructs.

If psychoanalysis indeed puts rationality as such in question, it also by the same token puts itself in question.

The question of what makes poetry lies, indeed, not so much in what it was that made Poe write, but in what it is that makes us read him and that ceaselessly drives so many people to write about him.

Unconscious desire, once repressed, survives in displaced symbolic media that govern the subject's life and actions without his ever being aware of their meaning or of the repetitive pattern they structure:

This analysis through repetition is to become, in Lacan's ingenious reading, no less than an //allegory of psychoanalysis.// The intervention of Dupin, who restores the letter to the queen, is thus compared to the intervention of the analyst, who rids the patient of the symptom. The analyst's effectiveness, however, does not spring from his intellectual strength but - insists Lacan - from his position in the repetitive structure.
 * Reflexive analysis.

Repetition is not of //sameness// but of //difference,// not of independent terms or of analogous themes but of a structure of differential interrelationships in which what //returns// is always //other.//

For Lacan, on the other hand, the analyst's task is not to read the letter's hidden referential content, but to situate the superficial indication of its textual movement, to analyze the paradoxically invisible symbolic evidence of its displacement, its structural insistence, in a signifying chain.

Lacan makes the principle of symbolic evidence the guideline for an analysis not of the signified but of the signifier [not what the letter says but the letter itself] - for an analysis of the unconscious (the repressed) not as hidden but on the contrary as //exposed// - in language - through a significant (rhetorical) displacement.

The history of reading has accustomed us to the assumption - usually unquestioned - that reading is finding meaning, that interpretation can dwell only on the meaningful. Lacan's analysis of the signifier opens up a radically new assumption, an assumption that is an insightful logical and methodological consequence of Freud's discovery: that what //can// be read (and perhaps what //should// be read) is not just meaning but the lack of meaning; that significance lies not just in consciousness but, specifically, in its disruption; that the signifier can be analyzed in its effects without its signified being known; that the lack of meaning - the discontinuity in conscious understanding - can and should be interpreted as such, without necessarily being transformed into meaning.