On dead subjects: a rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) psychoanalytic rhetoric

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See Thomas S. Frentz, “Reconstructing a Rhetoric of the Interior,” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 83–90. I say “radical” because the Lacanian innovation is that the interior is an exteriority, about which more below. For a description of our preference for surfaces, see Joshua Gunn and Barry Brummett, “Popular Communication After Globalization,” Journal of Communication (forthcoming December 2004). Apart from the literature for and against “fantasy theme analysis,” for attacks see Donald G. Ellis, “Post‐Structuralism and Language: Non‐Sense,” Communication Monographs 58 (1991): 213–24, esp. 217–8; Kenneth Rufo, “The Mirror in The Matrix of Media Ecology,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 117–41; and Kenneth Rufo, review of On Belief, by Slavoj Žižek, Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 374–76. See Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Barbara Biesecker, “Rhetorical Studies and the ‘New’ Psychoanalysis: What's the Real Problem? or Framing the Problem of the Real,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 222–39; Michael J. Hyde, “Jacques Lacan's Psychoanalytic Theory of Speech and Language,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 96–114; Loyd S. Pettegrew, “Psychoanalytic Theory: A Neglected Rhetorical Dimension,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 10 (1977): 46–59; and Henry Krips, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Also see Douglas Thomas, “Burke, Nietzsche, and Lacan: Three Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Order,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 336–56. This is not true, of course, for rhetoricians in English departments, who have explored psychoanalysis fruitfully. See James V. Catano, Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self‐Made Man (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001); David Metzger, The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995); and Ellen Quandahl, “‘More Than Lessons in How to Read’: Burke, Freud, and the Resources of Symbolic Transformation,” College English 63 (2001): 633–54. William S. Burroughs's hilarious and horrific novel about Kim Carson, the (final) frontier, and space stations is an apt allegory for infighting over the frontier of the unconscious in the history of psychoanalysis; The Place of Dead Roads (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1983). Christian Lundberg, “The Royal Road Not Taken: Joshua Gunn's ‘Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead’ and Lacan's Symbolic Order,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 495–500. Lundberg, “The Royal Road,” 499. I use the term “occultic” to specify the discriminating function of difficult language (e.g., the creation of insiders and outsiders), in distinction from the “occult,” which connotes secrecy about magical knowledge. For a great musical explication of “psychobabble,” listen to Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons, “Psychobabble.” Performed by the Alan Parsons Project, on Eye in the Sky, Arista, 1982 (compact disk). Also hear Eric Woolfson's soundtrack to the film Freudiana, performed by Franke Howard, Kiki Dee, Eric Woolfson, Chris Rainbow, Alan Parsons, John Miles, and Marti Webb, EMI, 1999 (compact disk). Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 65. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998), xi. Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–52. See Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, “Response: Mystery Science Theater,” Lingua Franca (July–August 1996), in The Sokal Hoax: The Shame That Shook the Academy, ed. by the editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 54–8. Alan Sokal, “Revelation: A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May–June 1996), in The Sokal Hoax, 49–53; and Janny Scott, “Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly,” New York Times, May 18, 1996, in The Sokal Hoax, 76–8. See Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 30–2. See Joshua Gunn, “An Occult Poetics, or, the Secret Rhetoric of Religion,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 29–54; and Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 85–106. See Judith Butler, “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical Resignification,” interview by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, JAC 20 (2000): 727–65; and Michael Warner, “Styles of Intellectual Publics,” in his Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 125–58. See Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic, February 22,1999, 37–45. Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacan's “Subversion of the Subject”: A Close Reading (New York: Other Press, 2002), 3–7; Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 286. This means that the “rhetoric of the interior” becomes shorthand for a psychoanalytic project that ironically rejects the inside/outside binary. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 3–7; and Paul Verhaeghe, “Lacan's Answer to the Classical Mind/Body Deadlock: Retracing Freud's Beyond,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 109–39. This is what I would call a “poetics.” See Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 12. Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 10–11. Jacques Lacan, “The Rat in the Maze,” in Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973 (hereafter S20), ed. Jacques‐Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 142. Also see Jacques Lacan, “The Purloined Letter,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (hereafter S2), ed. Jacques‐Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 191–205. Jacques Lacan, “Where is Speech? Where is Language?” in S2, 283. As David Macey has argued, the attempt of Lacan's intellectual heir, Jacques‐Alain Miller, to decontextualize the thousands of pages of material that compose Écrits such that “the concepts of the late 1960s appear to exist in the texts written before the Second World War” has contributed to a familiar, “stark dilemma” confronting new readers: “total acceptance or total rejection.” See David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (New York: Verso, 1988), 11, ix. One way to account for the differences between Lundberg's and my approach is in terms of my tendency to lean on the early seminars (which are more concerned with the Imaginary) and his preference for the later Lacan. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1966), 160. For another example, see Jacques Lacan, “On Creation Ex Nihilo,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques‐Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 118. Žižek and others often have dealt with this difficulty by referring to first, second, and third “period” Lacan. See Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 131–3, 153–99. Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 9. Joshua Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and Its Decline in U.S. Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 43. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, 3. This is especially the case in the work of analysis, in which “the analyst concretely intervenes in the dialectic of analysis by playing dead … either by his silence where he is the Other with a capital O, or by canceling out his own resistance where he is the other with a lowercase o. In both cases, and via symbolic and imaginary effects, respectively, he makes death present. Still, he must recognize and therefore distinguish his action in each of these two registers.…” Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 132. Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, 36. Fink, Lacan to the Letter, 130–1. Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Postures and Impostures: On Lacan's Style and Use of Mathematical Science,” American Imago 58 (2001): 685–6. I am speaking here of the ego, not intelligence. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1985). Consider Lacan on his style: “Writing is in fact distinguished by a prevalence of the text … which allows for the kind of tightening up that must, to my taste, leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult.” Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” in Écrits, 138; and “The bar [which represents the split of the subject], like everything else that is written, is based only on the following—what is written is not to be understood. That is why 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.” Jacques Lacan, “The Function of the Written,” in S20, 34. The problem is perhaps one particular to the English‐speaking West. Bruce Fink notes that “what works in France—talking over the heads of one's audience and seducing them into doing background reading on the authors and technical terms mentioned—does not work quite as well in the English‐speaking world. Lacan could easily assume that his faithful seminar public … would go to the library or bookstore and ‘bone up’ …” Lacan to the Letter, 130. For the “coming,” see Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Shields, “Defending Symbolic Convergence Theory From an Imaginary Gunn,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 366–773. Warner, “Styles of Intellectual Publics,” 148. Lundberg implies that Žižek's reading of Lacan is problematic because of “Marxist tendencies to ground Lacanian interpretation in the material structures of the Imaginary,” citing the work of Gilbert Chatian [sic] as detailing “the opposition to Žižek's Marxist reading of Lacan” (p. 500, note 2). In personal communication, however, Professor Chaitin noted: “I'm afraid that I cannot take credit for … an argument against Žižek ‘s alleged Marxist read of Lacan. Nor would I wish to do so. Although I air a few minor disagreements with Žižek in my article, ‘Lacan with Adorno?,’ they are not directed against Marxism, and in general I admire his work and say so in print, as in Rhetoric and Culture.” See Gilbert D. Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 243–53; and Gilbert D. Chaitin, “Adorno with Lacan? The Question of Fascist Rationalism,” in Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies, ed. Krzysztof Ziarek and Seamus Deane (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 221–48. The work of reconciling materialism with the psychoanalytic Real is already underway; see Dana Cloud, “The Matrix and Rhetoric’s Desertion of the Real,” unpublished manuscript. Although primary sources should always be at the center of one's understanding of this or that thinker, I do not recommend reading Lacan outside of a seminar or a reading group or without the help of secondary sources, and I bemoan the intellectual conceit often heard about the work of folks like Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner: “read this, and then burn it.” Blind adherence to primary sources may work for some, but for the rest of us “worker bees and ants,” to borrow a phrase from Rorty, I recommend: Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992). Van Haute's Against Adaptation can be fruitfully read along side Lacan's notorious essay, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits, 281–312. This is precisely why Lacan writes as he does: to resist appropriation and to encourage thinking through his cavities. Lundberg, “The Royal Road Not Taken,” 500. See Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter, 38–62; and Melanie Klein, Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (London: Free Press, 1987). Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, trans. Cecil Baines (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), esp. 4–6. Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, trans. David Rapaport (New York: International Universities Press, 1958), 22. Jacques Lacan, “The Circuit,” in S2, 86. “The point is not to adapt him to it [reality],” says Lacan, “but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he assists in its very fabrication.” Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits, 225. Also see Lacan's discussion of the “biological gap” in “A, m, a, S,” in S2, 322–3; and Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 4–5. This is also the charge that many use to dismiss psychoanalytic criticism: who or what gives one the authority or power to interpret what is motivating a person? Further, doesn't psychoanalytic interpretation shield criticism from the critic's unconscious motives and ideological commitments? In its opposition to adaptation, the Lacanian response asks these very same questions of ego‐psychology. Other, less meaningful resistances concern the suggestion that my project is to feature “the agent's relation to the text as a kind of fantasy or fiction.” My argument, however, is that agency as we tend to think of it (not necessarily as Lacan thinks of it) is composed of fantasies or internalized narratives. In this respect my position is more similar to that of Deleuze‐inspired scholarship than familiar modernities: the subject is a “fold” of the exterior (the Symbolic). Another is that I have framed psychoanalysis to “critique poststructuralism's tendency to dissolve text and subject in the play of semiosis or the micro‐analytics of power.” Rather, I have tried to suggest that psychoanalysis acknowledges the radical contingency of social reality and offers an explanation of how rhetorical agency nevertheless exists. Psychoanalysis teaches us why we do not need to be afraid of the posts, but can embrace them as complex understandings of social reality. In other words, the psychoanalytic subject explains the possibility of agency despite the truths of poststructuralism, posthumanism, postmodernism, and so on. Lacan, “Where is Speech?” in S2, 283. For a helpful taxonomy of the many “subjects” in Lacan, see Francis M. Moran, Subject and Agency in Psychoanalysis: Which Is to Be Master? (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 120–47. See Mladen Dolar's discussion of this fading in terms of the forced choice between “being” and “thought” in “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Sic 2: Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 11–40. Lundberg, “The Royal Road,” 497. See Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” in Écrits, 291. Jacques Lacan, “The Hysteric's Question,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques‐Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 167. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” in Écrits, 292. See Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 25. This presents some vexing problems regarding performativity, the body, and inscription. See Judith Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Thom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 254–73. Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 91. Lundberg, “The Royal Road,” 498. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 46. This is the seminar of 1966–1967, La logique du fantasme, on which Žižek's Lacanian theory of fantasy as the “support of reality” rests. Also see Dolar, “Cogito,” 26. Žižek, The Plague, 9. Žižek, The Plague, 10. “In man, the imaginary relation has deviated, insofar as that is where the gap is produced whereby death makes itself felt.” Jacques Lacan, “Some Questions for the Teacher,” in S2, 210. The difficulty here is an ethical one: justice. Understanding the subject as an imaginary, narrative consistency (rhetorical agency) does not need to lead the dissolution of a political subject. There must remain some positive consistency to the subject to maintain an “answerability” to others; there is some element of the self that is not wholly Other. See Mindy Fenske, “The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24 (2004): 1–19; and Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. 65–82. Sigmund Freud, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho‐Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 87. Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), 225. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” in Écrits, 288–9. Also see Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 57. Edward Schiappa, “Sophisticated Modernism and the Continuing Importance of Argument Evaluation,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, vol. 1, ed. G. Thomas Goodnight (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2002), 51–58. Fink notes: “To Lacan's mind, a teaching worthy of the name must not end with the creation of a perfect, complete system; after all, there is no such thing. A genuine teaching continues to evolve, to call itself into question, to forge new concepts. In a word, we can adopt an obsessive stance and say that Lacan is avoiding giving us the (anal) gift we want so that we can size him up and see if he is worthy or not; or we can adopt a more hysterical stance—one perhaps closer to Lacan's own—and say that Lacan himself does not view his texts as constituting any kind of finished theory or system.” Lacan to the Letter, 66–7. For example, see Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, “Disciplining the Feminine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 383–409. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Correspondence to: Joshua Gunn, Communication Studies, 136 Gates Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 17083‐3923. Email: jgunn@lsu.edu. Many thanks to Jim Catano, Tom Frentz, Mirko Hall, and Chris Lundberg for their advice and feedback regarding this essay. Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Correspondence to: Joshua Gunn, Communication Studies, 136 Gates Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 17083‐3923. Email: jgunn@lsu.edu. Many thanks to Jim Catano, Tom Frentz, Mirko Hall, and Chris Lundberg for their advice and feedback regarding this essay.