Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
Not Political25.The assertion that the alternative isn’t political ignores the translational process between local contexts and the broader symbolic economy through investment of affect in tropeLundberg ’12 (Christian, Associate Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC Chapel Hill, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” University of Alabama Press, November, 2012, pp. 142-143) Finally, directing an economy of trope and investment through the object answers the concerns that some commentators have about the translatability of psychoanalysis to theorizing the social. The object is the site through which one can understand the ways that an economy of trope constitutes and by extension can meaningfully explicate the social. But there is a historical difficulty in making this argument: readings done in the name of the psychoanalytic tradition are often utterly decontextualized. This problem may lie in the presupposition that a universal set of precepts govern all acts of reading, speaking, and interpretation, or it may lie in the fact that often psychoanalytic readings are simply agnostic toward the context within which specific modes of reading and address are situated. Often, author and reader, even if influenced by a network of signifying associations and an economy of trope that exceeds them, are essentially imagined to be speaking, reading, and writing in private—that is, not imagined as emplotted in any particular context. In most cases, it makes no difference to whom the text is addressed, the form that address takes, in what context it is presented, among what others a speaker or author produces a discourse, and what readers or audiences consume it. In some ways, it is understandable that psychoanalytic readings often elide considerations of context, address, and the irreducible specificity of social forms within which tropes circulate, because part of the goal of psychoanalytic criticism is to avoid a reduction of meaning to context. At the same time, in avoiding a reduction to context, one need not elide context entirely; rather, an analytic protocol ought to engage the logic of trope and enjoyment, attending to the ways that such articulations organize and fail to organize a relationship to context and to how discourses are not only “addressed” in the abstract but also the specific forms of address that they take and the specific others to whom they are addressed. Put differently, address is always at least tripartite: it is split between a relationship to the Symbolic in the abstract (the Other), to a particular addressee (an other), and the self to subject (which is other in relation to the unorganized body). The wager of a rhetorical conception of Lacan’s work is that the presence of each of these addressees figures the character of an act of address in ways that are crucially influenced by but not ultimately reducible to the formal charge of language. In ignoring this fact, one also elides the presence of the social field in figuring address, a dynamic that prompted Frederic Jameson to write that: What is so often problematical about psychoanalytic criticism is therefore not its insistence on the subterranean relationships between the literary text on the one hand and the “obsessive metaphor” or the distant and inaccessible childhood on the other: it is rather the absence of any reflection on the transformational process whereby such private materials become public—a transformation which is often, to be sure, so undramatic and inconspicuous as the very act of speech itself. Yet in so far as speech is pre-eminently social, . . . we will do well to keep Durkheim’s stern warning constantly before us as a standard against which to assess the various models psychoanalytic criticism has provided: “Whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false.”27 A rhetorically inflected account of Lacan’s work that focuses on the work of trope and enjoyment in figuring objects of “public utility” provides a crucial link between “subterranean” psychoanalysis and cultural mediation. If the object has public utility, it is precisely because it is the site of this translational process, and because it serves as a site for articulating practices of public making with the economy of tropes and investments that knits together the sign, subject, and social as nodal articulations of an underlying process of tropological exchange. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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