“Off with their Heads!”: Un-Mastering the Masters of the University

An abstract for an upcoming talkfest on Lacan and the Discourse of Capitalism at Massey University in Wellington . . .

The matheme-atics of Jacques Lacan’s four — or more — discourses can enable us to account for changes in the university, and the place of dissent within (or outside) it. If, to misapply Lacan, we take the discourse of the university to represent the University 1.0 (the national university that exists to create good citizens), his fifth discourse, that of capitalism, can represent the University 2.0 (the transnational university that exists to generate transcendental, or global, capital).[1]

Both discourses, Lacan might say, serve the hidden truth of the master: the mathemes that occupy the position of agency (top left on the quadripode) are “fake masters,” to use Slavoj Žižek’s term,[2] namely,

1. in the University 1.0, knowledge (S2) — or learning, embodied in the professorate, and
2. in the University 2.0, the subject ($) — or consumers, including managers and academics as well as students.

The shift from a ruling discourse that produces a certain subjectivity (learning producing learned subjects) to one that is driven by a certain subjectivity (consumers producing profit) can account for changes in the university.

How are we, then, to understand the place of dissent within the university (or outside it, given that the university is now taken to be captive to and of a piece with capitalism)? The discourses of the hysteric and the analyst can be read as dissenting: the hysteric questions the hidden masters of university and capitalist discourse to protest against them;[3] the analyst works with the subjectivities that are produced in university discourse and drive capitalist discourse to transform them. But it struck me, when reading Alice and the Cheshire Cat’s ripostes to the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (link), that I might instead construct a sixth discourse: of dissent, or dissensus, to use Jacques Rancière’s term.[4] (The Cheshire Cat hystericises and analyses the Queen; Alice dissents.)

Dissent takes the discourse of the university as its starting point, but swaps the “covert” mathemes (the bottom two mathemes) $ and S1, such that its truth becomes the subject and its product, a new kind of mastery. It is a “subjectification” of the university and a re-mastering of its universe; how so, my talk will explore.[5]

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[1] Before Lacan added a fifth discourse, of capitalism (“On Psychoanalytic Discourse,” 1972/1978), he took the discourse of the university, the historical successor to the discourse of the master, to represent capitalism (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1968/2007).

[2] Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, 2004.

[3] For this reason, Lacan came to take the discourse of the hysteric to represent science, which offers — or ought to offer — an implicit critique of the status quo of knowledge (e.g., in Television, 1974; 1990).

[4] Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” 2003.

[5] Note that Alain Badiou (Philosophy for Militants, 2012) argues by way of Lacan’s discourses for a re-mastering of philosophy: for him, philosophy has for the most part been co-opted by the discourse of the university (it has become antiphilosophy); to find its rightful place, it must re-appropriate the discourse of the master.

Lacan’s Four (or Five) Discourses (beware, all ye who enter here!)

Jacan Lacques (1901-1981)

For Lacan, language is intersubjective (speech always implies a speaker and someone spoken to) and forms & transforms us as subjects intrasubjectively/psychologically, intersubjectively/socially and extrasubjectively/environmentally (speech is how we relate to ourselves, each other and the world, i.e., acts are speech acts).

What I’m trying to articulate is that what dominates [society] is the practice of language. (Lacan 2007: 239)

Hence, he uses the term discourse (after ’68) for the four possible modes of intersubjective relations (the theory of discourses is his response to the Marxism of the ’68ers). Discourse determines the thought, affect, enjoyment, meaning and identity of the subject.

[I]t is on discourse that every determination of the subject depends. (178)

Thus, changes in discourse can produce changes in intra-, inter- and extrasubjective “reality.”

Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1971)

The terms and positions

1. $ the barred subject [sujet], hence also the symptom (≠ the ego = the Id: das Es) → alienation
2. S₁ the master-signifier [signifiant-maitre], itself empty but an “anchoring point” (point de capiton, lit. “upholstery button”) around which other signifiers can stabilize, halting the endless play of signifiers by organizing affect and knowledge, thus deferring desire (e.g., the commodity in capitalism), a.k.a. Truth, norms → values
3. S₂ the system of know-how and knowledge (savoir), a.k.a. the “battery of signifiers,” structured syntagmatically (by metonymy/displacement) and paradigmatically (by metaphor/substitution) → belief
4. a the object of desire [objet petit a] as the surplus/excess (plus-de-jouir/Mehrlust, cf. Marx’s Mehrwert: surplus value) → enjoyment (jouissance)

The terms always appear in this order on the square or “quadripode”: subject → master-signifier → knowledge → object. They shift relative to four positions: the agent (what is dominant), truth (its condition of possibility), the other (what is called into action by the agent) and the product (what is produced as a result):

(The left-hand positions represent the subject speaking; the right-hand positions, what is to be assumed by the subject spoken to. The top positions are manifest; the bottom positions, latent.)

This grid borrows from the medieval logic of statements, viz., term → opposite → negation → negation of the negation (sameness → alterity → difference → identity):

It also resembles Greimas’s semiotic square:

The structure of the discourses

The combination of terms and positions generates the four algorithms of the “universe of mastery,” all derived from the discourse of the master (note that the discourse of the university, for example, does not just apply to the university as a social institution):

1. the discourse of the master (governing/policing): the master-signifier is master and represents the subject for all other signifiers; knowledge is put to work, but representing knowledge as a whole (i.e., an object) is impossible (i.e., the object a remains);
2. the discourse of the university (teaching/encoding): knowledge is master (nowadays, science and technology) and represents the master-signifier; the object is put to work, i.e., domesticated (as “objectivity”), representing the subject as powerless;
3. the discourse of the hysteric (desiring/questioning or resisting): the subject is master and represents the object; the master-signifier is put to work, representing knowledge as powerless; and
4. the discourse of the analyst (healing/revolutionizing): the object (and thus the analyst as object of the analysand’s desire) represents knowledge (unlike medicine, psychoanalysis does not use knowledge to cure a symptom); the subject is put to work, but representing a whole subject is impossible.

To take literary reading as an example,

1. the masterful reader tries to read everything (S₂) the same way;
2. the hysterical reader reads for the key (S₁) to the text;
3. the universalist reader reads “objectively” (a); and
4. the analytical reader reads symptomatically ($).

There are different versions of each discourse. Taking mastery, there is

1. the philosopher’s mastery, which erases the subject in favour of knowledge and represses truth;
2. the capitalist’s, which demands efficiency without knowing why; and
3. the physician’s, which uses knowledge to cure a symptom.

There are political relationships between discourses: the university discourse is often slave to the master, insofar as the university serves the master’s discourse of the day: once the university served the Church, then the Nation, now the Market.

Lacan also hinted that there might be a fifth discourse — an alternate universe, even — that of the capitalist, which is not derived from the universe of mastery (cf. Bryant on the Universe of Capitalism). (Any number of combinations other than those of the universe of mastery are possible if we allow the order of the terms in the quadripode to change.)

The position of the agent is occupied by the subject as consumer, who does not address the Other, but the truth, i.e., the Market as master signifier. Through the Market, the subject can ask knowledge, i.e. science and technology, to produce objects to be consumed, i.e. commodities, that can never completely fulfil the subject’s desire.

See

• Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar 17: L’Envers de la Psychoanalyse (1969-70), trans. Russell Grigg (1991; New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
• Mark Bracher, “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Bracher (New York: NYUP, 1994) 107-28.