Foreword: Why Lacan for Art Education?

Abstract

ForewordWhy Lacan for Art Education? Michael Parsons and Sydney R. Walker The work of Lacan has had significant influence in psychoanalytic circles and perhaps even more so in other academic areas, especially in cultural studies and education. But it is not well known in art education. Lacan is still a relative newcomer to art education studies, and the purpose of this special issue of Visual Arts Research (VAR) is to help make the possible value of his work better known to art educators. We think it has much to offer the field, especially as extension and revision of current trends, and we want to explore some of what that might be. We don't see ourselves as committed to Lacanian thought or approaches in any consistent theoretical way. Lacan was a theoretician (as well as a practitioner), but he constantly changed his theory and refused to allow it to be pinned down with too much certainty. Consequently, unlike with Freud's work, those who have used his thought in the humanities—as opposed perhaps to psychoanalytic practice—have tended to use particular concepts or parts of his theory, rather than the theory as whole, to illuminate their topic. Some of these concepts are desire, the objet a, méconnaisance, the Real, the sinthome, the mirror stage, and the Gaze; with the unconscious being the most fundamental of all. The essays here use several of these Lacanian concepts, each in a different way. Lacanian thought seems useful because it allows us to raise questions or focus on issues that otherwise we tend to ignore because they do not fit our current approaches and theories. In very general terms, art education has tended to move in cycles: from an emphasis on the child and expression (Victor Lowenfeld, Herbert Read) to the emphasis on the disciplines of art (discipline-based art education [DBAE]) to a concern with diversity and, most recently, to an emphasis on [Begin Page v] visual culture, post-structural thought, and social justice. All of these phases have no doubt contained differences and controversies, and none were truly systematic or hegemonic, which is perhaps what allows the wheel to turn. Nevertheless, they have each, sequentially, led to the promotion of some interests and topics and the submergence of others. One currently submerged topic is what Lacan called subjectivity, close to what in our literature is usually called the subject. In the visual culture/post-structural paradigm, the subject has been understood as basically constructed as a set of positions taken within a variety of discourses; that is, identity is determined mostly by social influences. It seems fair to say that in general this paradigm has done much better with analyzing the social than the individual: It accounts much better for the effects of the social on persons than for the reverse. For example, it does not do well with the idiosyncrasies and persistence of desire, fantasy, refusal to understand, and thought that falls outside of consciousness. It is true that recently the socially constructed post-structural subject has begun to show signs of morphing into something else. The role of the viewer responding to mass media or artwork has increasingly been acknowledged as an active and creative one. There is recent interest, for example, in the carnivalesque and the "transgressive pleasures" of visual culture (Duncum, 2009). But we have no good way of acknowledging the implications of this. How can we account for the individuality of responses, the fact that individuals often have highly specific obsessions, interpretations, and resistances? And what is the origin of the variety of pleasures in visual culture? ("Pleasures" is surely an inadequate word for the complexities of desire involved.) In his essay, jagodzinski discusses this situation and says that we appear to be faced with a choice between the older belief in an innate identity struggling to get expressed and an ever-changing set of positionalities within multiple discourses. jagodzinski argues that Lacan's account of subjectivity, complex and difficult to follow as it is, offers a way out of this opposition. That account manages to acknowledge—to insist on—the post-structural insights about the influences of social structures, the importance of discourses...