File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0402, message 99


Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 21:11:17 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Ball: "Prime Time Psychoanalysis" (pre-Newman Lacanian anarchism?)


This essay, from 1987, finds one aspect of the
Lacanian legacy as being the resurgence of anarchism
since the Sixties, but doesn't cite who exactly this
assertion is in reference to, obviously it is not Saul
Newman (who by the way has a new book coming called
"Unstable Universalities: Postmodernity and Radical
Politics"), so who or what is it?

***

Prime Time Psychoanalysis

http://www2.rpa.net/~vsw/afterimage/ball.htm

by Edward Ball

Jacques Lacan died six years ago, leaving his renegade
version of psychoanalysis to be debated by columns of
followers in deconstructionist criticism, film theory,
feminism and psychoanalysis proper. Throughout his
50-year career, Lacan cultivated an aura of personal
mystique with the care of a diva. In contrast to
Freud's even, statesmanlike style, the French analyst
spoke and wrote in apocryphal tones, like some oracle
of the unconscious. For this Lacan withstood endless
criticism; meanwhile, his adherents multiplied. Thrown
out of establishment psychoanalytic institutions,
Lacan's star profile eventually cast a shadow over
them. By the time his theory spilled over into liberal
arts curricula during the '60s and '70s, Lacan's
influence had reached far beyond that of any
psychoanalyst since Freud himself.

In 1972 Jacques-Alain Miller, then an analyst in
training, approached Lacan to request a television
interview. The idea of broadcasting Lacan into the
living rooms of France must have seemed progressive to
the post-1968 French intelligentsia (and strangely, to
the government television bureaucrats who permitted
it). "I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the
common man," said Miller at the recent colloquium
(April 9-10) in New York City organized around that
interview and called "Jacques Lacan: Television." The
two-hour program aired in 1973 on the French
government TV network O.R.T.F. under the title,
Psychoanalysis. Who knows how it was received; Lacan's
onscreen pronouncements are as opaque as anything he
wrote.

Psychoanalysis has survived as the only document of
Lacan on film, the only record of the once-notorious
lecture style that the analyst showcased at his
infamous seminars in Paris during the late '60s to
early '70s. It is important to see intellectual icons
like Lacan speak before an audience or on film. The
specular event diminishes the preciousness of their
writing. This, at any rate, was the greatest value of
"Jacques Lacan: Television," which was organized by
October magazine and the French psychoanalytic journal
Ornicar?, and took place at Cooper Union, an art
school in lower Manhattan. Psychoanalysis was dug out
of the vaults for the meeting, subtitled, and screened
with lavish introductory hype. About 100 Lacan
specialists and fellow travelers showed up to watch.
The black and white print broke a few times, the sound
was lost and finally the showmanlike Lacan was left
gesticulating silently to the rhythm of the subtitles
beneath his chin. Nervous laughter filled the
auditorium; spectators were here to see the
intellectual hero no matter what.

In the filmed interview, Lacan moves through his
various poses: a teacher, an ironist, a demagogue, a
new messiah of psychoanalysis. In the first minute,
the neo-Freudian upbraids the offscreen interviewer
Miller, who had wanted Lacan to simplify things for
the camera: "Why should I use a different tone here
than for my seminar? . . . I am speaking to those who
are savvy, to the non-idiots, to the supposed
analysts." Later, he muses with immoderate self-irony:
"You know that I've got an answer to everything . . .
Who doesn't know that it's with psychoanalysis that
I've made it big. That makes me a self-made man." One
imagines a viewer in Normandy dialing through the
channels and coming upon Lacan's histrionics. What
kind of television was this?

In her remarks at the conference the following day,
Yale comparative literature professor Shoshana Felman
summarized the Psychoanalysis interview for Lacan:
"You want to see me. I will give you a show. You want
a reader's digest of my theory, I will give you
reader's indigestion."

Lacan has always been for insiders only. The sectarian
quality of his thought was symbolized at the "Lacan:
Television" gathering by the presence of his daughter,
Judith Lacan Miller, who introduced the film and
claimed never to have spoken previously at a meeting
about her father. A peculiar nepotism could also be
seen in the figure of Jacques-Alain Miller, the
honored guest at the conference, who since
Psychoanalysis has married Judith Lacan and who now
alone controls the reproduction rights to Lacan's
prized seminars.

The day-long presentation of papers following the
screening circled in the rarefied air of Lacanian
terminology, yet if one accepted their remote probing,
some of the presentations were excellent. One was
delivered by a man who must be the only Lacanian from
the Eastern bloc, Slavoj Zizek, a Yugoslavian critic
now teaching in Paris, who admits with a smile to
having just finished a book of "orthodox" Lacanian
film theory on Hitchcock in his native tongue,
Serbo-Croatian ("it was on the best-seller list").
Zizek cracked serious jokes about television cartoons
and Stalinism as they relate to Lacan. In another
paper embroidered with inside humor, Jeffrey Mehlman,
a longtime translator of Lacan into English, sought to
demonstrate how the ambitious Freudian was fearful of
being shunted into the failing discipline of
psychoanalysis and that "Lacanian psychoanalysis is an
effort to achieve its own liberation," an argument
corroborated by Lacan's lifelong posturing as a
fugitive intellectual surrounded by enemies and fools.
And in the most lucid presentation of the day,
Shoshana Felman elegantly took apart the filmed
interview: "Psychoanalysis is a trap for the
spectator's gaze, a means for seeing Lacan as king. .
. . Lacan is playing God onscreen."

For those who could not see Lacan playing God for the
camera at Cooper Union, a slightly shorter version of
the interview can be found in October's Spring 1987
issue (#40), itself a translation of the 1974 book
T?l?vision that Lacan produced out of the episode.

Unfortunately, the antics of Jacques-Alain Miller cast
a shadow over "Lacan: Television." The self-selected
heir apparent to Lacan seems to have in mind to manage
the interpretation of his dead father-in-law's
thought. After interrupting speakers toward the end of
the New York meeting, during his purported summary
remarks, Miller grabbed the microphone and strode
around the floor like a Freudian Phil Donahue,
fielding questions from a disappearing audience. If
Jacques-Alain Miller is the new oracle of Lacanian
analysis, then perhaps there is a way of ignoring him.

At the peak of the "Lacanian moment" of cultural
criticism in the 1970s, when his writings infiltrated
university classrooms, Lacan had rebuilt
psychoanalysis into a revolutionizing discourse that
fueled opposition philosophy: Marxism, anarchism, as
well as feminism and deconstruction. The 1973
television interview was a failed effort to get the
word out further. Today Lacan is still read, but he
has been ghettoized by his own success in the academy.
"Jacques Lacan: Television" was a reminder that
Lacanian psychoanalysis has always done fine as
marginalia, but it has no pull in ordinary society. As
one speaker, John Rajchman, remarked: "The
Enlightenment ideal held that philosophy is free only
when it is public. Lacan could never become public."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Edward Ball was a New York City-based media critic. He
is currently missing in action.


===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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