lacanian jurney
TRANSCRIPT
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The American Theater of the Sinthome
; aLacanian journey through the roar of Edward Albee and the desert dust of
Sam Shepard
The American Phantasm voiced
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not incidental that the fiction writer, poet, andplaywright concern themselves
with “this thing” called“voice”. Sometimes you come close to the thing,
sometimes it has you in its grip or you have it in your grip, sometimes you
chase it down, sometimes it chases you down. Sometimes you lose it. It loses
you. Sometime you get lost in it. But when you can catch that place where it
belongs to you and other. The subject speaks.
I would like to follow a line of thinking where the partial object in
language that passes between a speaker to a listener operating in poetics,
theater, fiction, where free association is primary, is also operating in
similar fashion in the setting of psychoanalysis, particularly writing of thetype that works patterns of sound and associations, where imaginal
associations might be less tightly bound to being inhibited by any one
signifier, rather there is a way of working that offers a greater possibility
of para praxis, slips and slippages, where these interruptions in any tightly
wound narrative…enables the voice(s) of a story to find its way. We might
say a piece of the subject finds its way. Memory, reverie, thought, affect.
So it appears to sound not as a voice “taken on”, but rather the voice(s)
of piece(s) are heard. Voice(s) because the voice is operating betweenthe
body and the other of language. Between conscious and unconscious, between
signification and signified.Voice operates in such a way that any central
speaker dissolves, the identification to the central speaker disappears.
Yes...this is why we go to analysis to discover. “Who is this voice?”
Lacan indicates we want to know and we don’t want to know. We want to know
and don’t want to know about our symptom that remains mute, that is also
speaking in riddles. We want to hear all about it, and we don’t want to hear
it at all. The real is foreclosed. The drive cannot be accessed.The subject
resides in words.Lacan says it is “in words” that you will find the subject
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(Lacan, 1975). The symptom embodied in the real offers itself into the
symbolic when it speaks. The voice is the conduit, the “ real” location
through which an “opening” operates and through which openings can occur.
This object a of the voice operates such that the analysand who attempts to
present a “ picture ” of himself to the analyst...suddenly finds that this
picture dissolvingthrough the words voiced in the context of the analytic
setting. The words tell another picture/story..photo/fiction… beginning their
operation of sliding in and around and outside the image conveyed through
words. But as we deal with language that is notseparated from the signified,
we are never fully operating outside of imaginary identifications to self andother as we speak. Yet, the signifier offers a slip into other
signifieds..other signifiers…these associations that comprise the chain of
signifiers…include the signified as well. If a signified is slipping out
from a metaphoric bind to the signifier, another signified.. a pictorial
association is on the horizon. The signified in its detachment gives way to
hinge onto another signified. In other words images set off by a signifier…
may produce the next signifier. But signifiers are always operating in
relation to imagery.The capacity of the associative quality of links produced
out of a metonomy has to do with the signifieds that move in the same way that
the dream images work to bring forth the sound of language that offer the
routes breaking through the more tightly wound fabric and weaves of language
that move through conscious processes. We are not simply textual machines,
but rather letters are related to perception, and the unconscious of the dream
world that subjects inhabit. And the voice of a subject who speaks with
breath, pauses, laughter, sighs, sobbing and at times, like with Dora,
coughing.
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An analyst’sidentifications to the patient begins towork in consort with the
analysand’s representations so there is a moving in and out of these “snap
shots ” in a variety ofplacements.As Lacan draws in his Schema L (Lacan,
1955). The analyst’s snapshots and the analysand’s snapshots are crossing
on an imaginary axis. The analyst in tracking the nuances, plays of language,
phrases, words, utterances within framework ofanalytic knowledge is attempting
to follow the unconscious through the axis that cuts across the imaginary
axis.The analyst is tracking words, staying close to the analysands’ words
that may be directing the analyst towards an object “ a”… embedded,
camouflaged in the visual fieldthrough an “a “ that resides in an enigma of
the word, the signifier hidden in the field of speech. The analyst is
attempting to follow a symbolic axis, byhearing the words, the sound of words,
that may speak beyond the snap of the picture that the analysand wishes the
analyst to see…that may sneak out of the meaning the analysand wishes to make
and the meaning the analyst wishes to make through conscious ego processes.
In the analytic setting there are two divided subjects, two personal
unconsciouses, and with language the concealing and revealing aspects of the
unconscious through words at play. The analyst, bydialing down the noise of
countertransference that is vulnerable to the pull of the analysand who wishes
to place the analyst in a variety of positionsthrougha snap shot, is guided by
the analysand’s words. By serving as a transferential “ object”, the
analyst has a possibility of discovering where he/she is
objectified/represented through the lens of the imaginary. The transference
position enables what is enacted in the setting to serve as another
cluethrough which the analyst can make sense of what transpires beyond what
the analysand is showing in words. It is a clue of what the analysand wishes
to enact … in these photo/ fantasies of which the analyst is implicated…of
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which the analysand is loath to speak. If the analyst does not gratify the
analysand through a reenactment(a belief that the scene is real or “
authentic), butenables him/herself to “be” implicated in a mise- en- scene
through transference operating, the ongoing curiosity about these placements
enable a further speaking about what lies outside the snap shot, but once
another snap shot is spoken another mise-en-scene arises … the real is
foreclosed but just outside the edges of what is shown in words. What is shown
in words, have little to do with the letter.
When Lacan says that “actors make good analysts ” the liquidity of ego serves
the analyst in ways that enable the analyst to move forth through the role inhis/her person in a way that honors and respects “ actual experiential
exchanges ” produced by the mise- en- scene. As well as to further the
direction of the Lacanian cure through being able to also live outside the
mise- en-scene in the analytic room using the “artificial setting” of the
analytic room to enable a subjects words to fall on the side of the hidden
object a conveyed through “ its ” voice(s). The analyst to do this is
framing through an analytic knowledge resting in the symbolic, but is also
resonating to this attempt (impossible to capture the object a.).that is
moving beyond reach to a tune. It is the moving target..that drives the
repetition compulsion..the suffering…the symptom of the analysand.
This object a of “The voice” is again emphasized when Lacan mentions in his
homage to Duras, “ It is there where the writer goesthat the psychoanalysts
should be ” (Lacan,1975).Lacan is indicating that the writer moves to the
other jouissance, the feminine jouissance that he begins to articulate in
hisencounter of James Joyce’s voice.
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Voices to voices. Scenes of memory and fantasy… rising and falling. Where
the voice of the analyst melts into the brother, where the voice of the
analysand speaks to this brother. Where the voice of the analysand becomes her
father speaking to the analyst who is moved to the position of lover. Put
another way the actor that can act is not “being” an actor. “Being” an
actor, interferes with performance in the same way that “being” an analyst
interferes with analysis. In this sense psychoanalysis is not merely
knowledge, or a profession, it is very much a craft. That is passed through
analysis, transmission, voices…supervising, attuning the listening of those
committed to learning the craft; Learning to listen to the sense of the object
a through voice.
Lacan in his notion of the paranoic ego working to maneuver knowledge through
the mirror stage in a defense against the unknown sees at some level the
communication of knowledge, the teaching of knowledge through the academic
discourse as inhibiting speech at the site of the production of desire.
Because many times the speech utilized in academic discourse remains in the
service to produce replication and redundancy of prior knowledge by operating
in the service of thought, mentation, cogito, intellectualizations that
eclipse the partial object of voice…through demand or command to resound to
bodiesof thought..epic bodies of thought. The object a of the voice, like the
object a through the visual field rests in the” real”…the body. Not of “
bodies” of thought. But in the erogenous zones…on the edge of the lips, the
rims of the body. The symptom is carved through speech, the letter that is
first place between transgression and prohibition where the subject .resides.
..this letter may speak or not. May reach its destination or not. But if it
does…the subject speaks at the intersection of transgression and
prohibiton..at the corner of abjection and acceptability.
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For the academic discourse this necessitates a certain severing of the voice
that is in fact compelled in the analytic setting where an entirely different
form of speaking and listening to words are moved through the practice of
free association. We could say this practice is much more kindred to the
stream of consciousness of Joyce, Beckett, and their influences on the
American playwrights such as Albee and Shephard moving through the specific
history and themes of American theater .
“Voices becoming other voices. Voices from the dead and living. Hypnotized
voices. Sober voices. Working voices. Voices in anguish. ” Sam Shepard.
Those working on Shepard’s production Tongues, purposively changed locationsas they were writing. Shepard describes writing scenes in different settings;
“ a restaurant, a beach , a park, hotel rooms, we sat in a truck and then
towards the end of writing the piece we would meet up at the location of the
Magic Theater San Francisco and perform the piece. Shepard remembers; “
Sometimes we would just talk without trying to push the content into the
structure of the piece. Other times the talk would be translated verbatim and
we would write things down on the spot and then turn it into monologue or
dialogue, trance poem or whatever.” These improvisational, spontaneous ways
of finding voice offers a less intellectualized approach to expression that is
more in keeping with making sense of free associations. Derived through
specific locations. Derived through subjects in specific locations. In the
place and time of the personal unconscious.
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Style
The writing productions that were also influencing Lacan through a stylethat
was meandering ruminating…obscure poetic…running up against the grain of the
more reasoned academic American style of writing about analysis. The Americans
were emphasizing the tamable aspect of the “ threat ” of a wild unconscious
through an adaptive ego writing style that that was clear, crisp andreasoned.
The Americans would emphasize shoring up,Lacan on the other saw the danger
that was being created by attempting to damn up the unconscious through a
psychoanalysis that was moving towards a “winning” approach; the successful
analysis based on a capacity to “function” and adapt to “society”. Lacanin returning to Freud fought the tendency to “normalize” the subject in the
image of the analysts “ ego ” concerned that analysis would be hygienized
rather than separated from the conventions that through the psychoanalytic
discourses that could be deconstructed. What the analysand does with what he
hears of his own unconsciouswould lie in the hands of the subject.
By studying the way the voice works in the theater as opposed to academic
discourse, we may in fact be much closer in line to the voice operating as
partial object in an analysis. It is this type of voicing that is operating
in the analysis that then crosses back over into the psychoanalytic discourse
to become the transmission of psychoanalytic discourse. The subject speaks.
When this aspect of voicing is not reached within the analytic setting or is
lost on the way to explication in a theory of psychoanalytic discourse that
turns into academic discourse then the voice as partial object disappears and
the transmission of psychoanalysis fails. This is important consideration in
any question of how psychoanalytic transmission occurs. The voice speaks the
specificity of the objectthrough a name, an inheritance, a location, a
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symptom. It is spoken through the voices of voiceof a subject operating in the
time of a personal unconscious. Operating on knowledges; overt, covert,
subliminal, transhistorical, unconscious, consciousof the Other.Operating
through a symptom speaking that exist in between the real and symbolic
suspended in the imaginary … if there is to be an honest performance of
Freudian psychoanalysis where the analytic voice…can find its release and can
take its flight home to the personal unconscious.Intimations, particularities,
its tricky arrangements … rearrangements through the way, the route, a pass,
that this voice might travel enabling another radical return to the Freudian
unconscious.
The component of the voice explored through “ method acting ” , particularly
during the Strasbergs’ actingmethod based on the Stanislavski’s work
depicted a certain reality which was catering less to the audience and more to
an actuality that would work through a theater set (here actors backs, for
example, might be turned away from the audience). The audience was no longer
being “ entertained, accommodated. Strasberg’s“method ” - acting required
actors to switch scenes, switch characters, to increase the flexibility with
the whole entire script for the purpose of understanding where each actor was
located as one of an entire ensemble , a voice, fragmenting into many voices
through characters. The American theater, no doubt bolstered by the influence
of stream of consciousness and non- plot plays offered the space to
experiment with and express the transient and fragmented nature of an American
identity that was being produced to resist forces that championed the post-
world war assembly line of a mass production. The theater was tracing the
transienceand disillusionment ofthe complexity of the post -war
Americanpathos.The American theater was generating, through a style of acting
and writing a way to “voice” theobject a…the death drive. Speaking through
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subjects. Subjects existing in the time of the personal
unconscious…influenced by intimate knowledges of family, location, time. The
theater influenced by Beckett and others, as well as Freud in operation
through the avant- garde as opposed to academia, and the American
psychoanalytic organizations shutting out the lay analysts openedto the
Freudian death drive and ushered it into the American public. The American
Institutionalized Freud…lost its voice. The voice of id.
It is important to note that this was also time of exodus from Europe of
psychoanalytic immigrants attempting to gain a foothold through the medical
establishment. Interestingly, their discourses established American egopsychology which in many ways indicated that these immigrants harbored
anidealism about the ego that was no doubt impacted by their own relationship
to a lived nightmare that may have spawned a strong Darwinian message. The
strong survive, the weak parish. The immigrant’s capacity to survive World
War II became something of special credence perhaps regarding these survivors
of the holocaust. The individual’s capacity to survive mass destruction was
based on an individual “will” against all odds perhaps meshing well with the
American “success” of winning the war. This survival orientation along with
the lure of “authorizing” psychoanalysis through medical establishments in
America anchored the voice of a psychoanalysis that was on the side of the
adaptive ego defenses rather than on the side of maintaining the Freudian
unconscious. Yet, the medical establishment was not the only route where
psychoanalysis traveled. However, when psychoanalysis began to become a
profession, the American professional associations distanced themselves from
the lay analyst movement that wasprominent in Europe. While Freud abstracted
from the clinic through academic routes, the voice that would continue to
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carry Freud’s unabridged death drive…was the voice of American Dramatic
Theater.
Theater productions were much more influenced by Paris than the medical
establishment through which Freud’s death drive would be obliterated. Lacan
in returning to Freud moves against the edification of Freud to fit the
bourgeoisieAmerican post- war attitude. In Lacan’s later work as he begins
to place more emphasis on the real, Lacan returns to the erogenous impasses
Freud maps on the real of the body to further his commitment to the Freudian
unconscious and to place the symptom as a lens through which any “body” of
knowledge is generated so that the partial drives, would not be lost inrevisions of psychoanalysis through the clinical practice or the academic
explorations. We could say thatin both instances, the clinic and in academia,
the voice as partial object became faint…difficult to hear.
Lacan’s voice as a psychoanalyst, however, was loudly resonant. Meandering,
associative, jokes, puns, playing around … all the while transmitting the
analytic discourse that was directed towards death drive. His performance
spoke the return to theunconscious in a speaking that often occurs in the
analytic setting. The transferences to Lacan were in large part to a voice
that could resonate to the tune of the object a … performatively speaking.
Here we note that for some this would be an irresistible seductionthat would
prompt speaking, talking, and acting and dressing in imitation Lacan’s style.
Memorizing text or seminars line by line. A certain mirroring transference
occurred wherein this taking on of the personae of the person of the analyst
in some way offers this possibility of finding the voice imagined by the
neurotic as ultimate jouissance afforded to Lacan as the originator… the lead
actor in his radical return to Freud. The Primal father. Or in some more
perverse sense a fetish through which the pervert becomes bound in an
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instrumental way to fetishize, to slip into the skin of Lacan. To in a sense
complete Lacan, parasitically.But this is exactly why Lacan indicates that the
actor makes a good analyst in that psychoanalysis cannot work through
symptomatic placements of Lacan on the side of inhibition of the neurotic or
disinhibition of the pervert. Rather the subject regardless of symptomatic
relations to law is offered a time to find their own voice between
transgresson and prohibition.Sinthomatic voice. We can acknowledge that Lacan
found his very Frenchvoicing of Freud, but psychoanalysis is not owned by any
geography. As the unconscious is not specific to a cultural location. It rises
and falls in accordance to where it is permitted to speak and whereit is
heard. This could as easily be Harlem as Paris. And might be.In this sense
Psychoanalysis rises and falls on the singular voice in the time of the
personal unconscious. It is an intimate enterprise. That is transmitted in
letters. Letters that are often received as intimate, not necessarily
disclosing, but intimate. The letter lies in between transgression and
prohibition. These letters that are spoken and written about psychoanalysis
are as hidden as they are revealing. They can bar, as well as raise the bar.These letters of psychoanalysis.
The Sinthome as Stylized Voice
Lacan describes the kernel of the symptom as that which holds a residue of the
Real. His work in Le Sinthome (1975) was influenced by the writings of James
Joyce. Lacan traced the structure of the symptom through the complex
linguistic productions that manifests through a stream of conscious writing
that was not so held back or oppressed by the cohesive meaning that comprises
a social conversation..or we might even say a “ rational ” dialectic. This
does not mean that the rational or secondary processes are devalued. Not at
all. But as both repression and revelation happen in language, the
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deconstruction of the intellectual paranoic egoic defenses comprising
languaginggive way to voice. The snap shot of intellectual ideas, give way to
the voice (s) that stray out of the shot. But are within ear shot. Lacan
places the inhibition of the symptom between the imaginary and symbolic. We
might say that in Seminar XX, Lacan begins to look at the relationship to the
symbolic in terms of phallic and feminine jouissance wherein the symptom is
either constrained by a fear of castration related to transgression of the
law, or the symptom may be less bound to the phallic jouissance and more
resonate with a feminine jouissance which emphasis the imaginary that has a
certain access to the foreclosed real through a less encumbered relationship
to the law of the father. Lacan’s encounter, Bakero (2012) will say
transference?to Joyces” text. Lacanhears a“suppleance” in Joyces text ”
that expressed the relationship between the subject and a phantasmic location
….. set between the Imaginary and Real. That we might say could plug up the
real (in words) to ward off a full immersion into psychosis. This suppleance
enabled Joyce to function by utilizing signification to work through an
underlying psychotic structure by engaging a symbolic. The symbolic was notso taken over by a neurotic accommodating a father, but rather words we could
say were more on the side of the realand in this way would transgress, the law
of the father. Here Lacan could challenge the languaging pressured by a
superegoic force that would threatened to cooptpsychoanalysis. But we have to
ask what does this say about the audience that got Joycereally got Joyce. It
actually says quite a bit. The audience that appreciated Joyce was not
comprised of only psychotics. There was a resonance with perhaps another
jouissance, the Other jouissance that was not phallic and not necessarily
psychotic. The other jouissance could dismantle the symbolic structures that
begin to get stagnant and confused with “ the ” truth.Lacan began to
understand that the symbolic often fossilized into phallic meaning such that a
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regression to a gaze stifled the subjects speech and catered to a knowledge
that believed it was the “ real ” . This worked against and inhibited the
kernel of the Real within the symptom where the layer of the gaze would have
to be deconstructed through a retroactive movement against the conclusive
meanings breaking out the enigma of the signifiers so that the mirage of the
gaze, the veneer that covered the unconscious in a bounded way that protected
castration anxiety could give way to an encounter of what was not so bound by
the law of the father…not so bound in inhibition..a fear of the transgression
of which the letter was lodged. It was this piece of clinical analytic
workthat Lacan began to move through his reading of James Joyce to articulate
how the symptom might develop into a sinthome where a subjects voice could be
heard. Where the symptom is no longer weighted by a phallic jouissance where
the foreclosed real will inevitable returning in the trauma through the
repetition compulsion…rather than falling as a voice into making” a sense, a
jouissense , that is not perhaps so intellectual, but enables a speaking on
the side of the voice. Carving what is uncarvedof the symptom in a way that
enables the tick or the affliction to now work on the side of the life of thesubject so that…the subject speaks.
References:
Bakero, Martin 2012, Presentation Apres Coup, NYC
Lacan, Jacques (1975) Le Sinthome, Cormack Gallagher (trans) Ireland
Lacan, Jacques (1985) Homage to Duras, Onicar Journal, Paris
Lacan, Jacques (1975)_Geneva Lecture on the Symptom, Russell Griggs (Trans)
Shepard, Sam (1984) Seven Plays, Random House, Inc. NYC
Stafford, Mark (have yet to track down date ) Ex Nihilo, Apres Coup
Archives.