We briefly referred on the episode to the fact that, as for Marx, for Lacan, all ostensibly theoretical talk is really tainted in some way. Whereas for Marx, we're really just repeating, or perhaps reacting to in some more complicated way, the ideology of those in power. Lacan, following Freud, looks for a psychological explanation, for an underlying meaning or meaning structure that is in some way responsible for what we're really saying, whether we know it or not.
Fink deals with this in Ch. 9 of his book "The Four Discourses." These are:
1. The Master's Discourse. This is discourse ruled by the master signifier, which has no literal meaning. From p. 131:
The master must be obeyed--not because we'll all be better off that way or for some other such rationale--but because he or she says so. NO justification is given for his or her power: it just is... The master must show no weakness, and therefore carefully hides the fact that he or she, like everyone else, is a being of language and has succumbed to symbolic castration: the split between conscious and unconscious brought on by the signifier is veiled in the master's discourse...
2. The University Discourse. Where the master doesn't care about knowledge, this does; it provides "a sort of legitimation or rationalization of the master's will." He doesn't actually dismiss what he considers genuine science here; that would be in category 3. The bulk of academia will go here, though, and just as for Marx, be used to support the political power structure despite any pretense at objectivity.
3. The Hysteric's Discourse. From p. 133-4:
The hysteric goas at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge. The hysteric's discourse is the exact opposite of the university discourse... a hysteric gets off on knowledge... Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria.... The hysteric pushes the master--incarnated in a partner, teacher, or whomever--to the point where he or she can find the master's knowledge lacking...
4. The Analyst's Discourse. From p. 135:
Object (a), as cause of desire, is the agent here... The analyst plays the part of... pure desiring subject, and interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between the conscious and unconscious shows through... As it appears concretely in the analytic situation, a master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient's discourse to a halt... it could be... a reference to the death of a loved one, the name of a disease, or a variety of other things... While the analyst adopts the analytic discourse, the analysand is... backed into the hysteric's discourse... The analyst, by pointing to the fact that the analysand is not the master of his or her own discourse, instantes the analysand as divided between conscious speaking subject and some other (subject) speaking at the same time through the same mouthpiece... Clearly the motor force of the process is object (a)--the analalyst operating as pure desirousness.
In the descriptions above I've left out more than I've included, and particularly with #4, it's difficult to understand what kind of discourse it is without having in mind Lacan's view of how the subject arises through alienation. Basically, there are four elements involved (each of which corresponds to one of the above, in the order I've given them): The master signifier (language itself as an agent, as our "self"), the "other" (also, of course, a product of language), the unconscious, and the intervention of an analyst or other individual. One of these being dominant makes the type of discourse what it is. One of the points in laying out these types is to say that there is no "metadiscourse" that escapes the limitations of the four listed. From p. 137: "Psychoanalysis' claim to fame does not reside in providing an archimedian point outside of discourse, but simply in elucidating the structure of discourse itself."
We didn't bother to go into this much on the podcast. I find it not particularly convincing. Whatever the psychological motives behind an utterance, we can't reduce the meaning to those motives. We can still try to evaluate the content itself, and if somehow our judgment is undermined by psychological and social factors, well, that's something we'll have to look out for, but the possibility is not a cause for global skepticism.
For another, probably clearer account of the four discourses, read the Wikipedia entry.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Wayne Schroeder says
April 19, 2013 at 12:58 amMark:
Thanks for weighing in on the discourses, seemingly not at the core of Lacan’s contributions. I have always had the feeling that if we reverse engineer Lacan, and convert his symbolic talk into regular talk, we can better see what he means (what a concept, which I think we all share).
I interpret the four discourses as two polarities between the Master (objet a of Power/False Authority) and Analyst (objet a of Desire/False Truth), and the polarity of Hysteric (Real) and University (anti-Real), thus encompassing a sliding scale of positions of the Matrix upon which each of us fall (True/False scale and Real/Unreal scale).
All discourses are illusions from which we need to awake, and recognize that there is an (m)Other agent that speaks through us that is not us. (Even the analyst is not his own analyst.)
P.S. You won’t find an objet a of Power or False Authority anywhere in Lacan, that is my reverse engineering.
dmf says
April 19, 2013 at 9:26 amML, what is “the content itself” apart from how we (in all of our historcized embodiment) express/interpret it, by what hermeneutic alchemy do we come to the uncut stuff?
http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm
Mark Linsenmayer says
April 19, 2013 at 9:51 amOK, I see you’re challenging the everyday distinction between motives and content. This is a good point in bringing out the differences between the kind of motive-doubting that we see in Freud and Nietzsche and maybe what’s in Lacan and Marx. For Nietzsche, of course the sentence has a literal meaning, but in asking why someone would judge such a sentence (not just any sentence, but, e.g. a sentence about values or aesthetics or unfalsifiable metaphysics… anything that would count as a “world view”) to be true or not, you look at the character of the individual (which does take things from culture), so Englishmen so like utilitarianism because of a distasteful tinge of character common among Englishmen (according to N.).
Once you deny that there is really a sense to the term “literal meaning” without sketching some hermeneutic edifice, then that’s where you start talking about discourses whose meanings would apparently have to be opaque to outsiders. I’m just going to admit at this point that I’ve not studied enough Gadamer or Derrida or whomever to feel that I truly understand such a position well enough to criticize it effectively or incorporate it into my understanding of what Fink said about Lacan.
dmf says
April 19, 2013 at 10:21 amfair enough, I would just add that if the Heideggerian/Hegelian modes are too foreign one could also come at these matters via folks like Austin, Wittgenstein, and their followers like Dan Hutto who quotes Dewey to say:
“experience is intelligent or charged with meanings,a union of the precarious, novel, irregular with settled, assured and uniform– a union that also defines the artistic and the aesthetic”
Experience and Nature
http://www.academia.edu/245547/Enactivism_Why_be_Radical
Avishmar says
May 21, 2014 at 3:16 pmis it permissible to combine the discourses with sexuation like this guy does?
http://www.academia.edu/5984726/Sexuated_Topology_and_the_Suspension_of_Meaning_A_Non-Hermeneutical_Phenomenological_Approach_to_Textual_Analysis
JanneM says
March 23, 2015 at 10:34 am“Whatever the psychological motives behind an utterance, we can’t reduce the meaning to those motives. We can still try to evaluate the content itself, and if somehow our judgment is undermined by psychological and social factors, well, that’s something we’ll have to look out for, but the possibility is not a cause for global skepticism”
Actually, it is.
The idea behind this is that there is no such thing as randomness. One can’t say ‘random things’. It’s always in relation to something – which means everything is ‘altered’ or ‘determined’ by the speaking being/subject.
So when one states “purely objective fact”, it is no such thing.
Global skeptism is kinda required if one doesn’t want to take things as “objective facts” (sorry for my lack of better phrasing). It is really, really interesting and world-view altering when you start to notice parallels among all kinds of ‘facts’ that people – professionals and common folk – state and their personal life events, personality or personal history. These determine what they are blind for.