the brilliant pass
Music: Tears for Fears: The Hurting (1982)
I've been thinking more about the subject of signifier and subject of jouissance and how these map onto professional life. Fink is such a clear and beautiful writer, so let me let him do the reminding:
the subject of the signifier might be termed the "Levi-Straussian subject," in that this subject contains knowledge or acts on knowledge without having any idea that he is doing so. If he is asked why he built a hut in his village in such and such a place, his answer seems to have nothing to do with the fundamental oppositions that structure his world and effectively order his village's layout. . . . This is the same kind of knowledge discovered in hypnosis, and in the end it seems not to require a subject at all, in the usual sense of the term. (Lacan to the Letter 143)
I would call this the "scripted subject" or the subject of the living dead, the dead subject if you want, the pure subject of language sans affect, Damasio's example of Phineas Gage. This subject is animated, however, by the subject of jouissance, that which makes humans uniquely human and not zombies or animals of instinct (that is, that which makes us the living dead and not the dead-come-to-life). Both sides or "faces" of the subject are necessary for something "human" to emerge, however, there is no good way for them to relate in any direct sense (this is why psychoanalysis privileges "speech"---it is the locus of the meeting of these two faces or facets).
Two posts ago I cited Fink approvingly in his critique of academic fields, like that of sociology and political science, as ignoring the subject as jouissance in favor of this disembodied knowledge, this subject of the signifier. I cited Burke as my field's exemplar of this willful disavowal of the affective: Burke's understanding of "motive" is, effectively, a script. What are missing are the engine and the fuel. In this respect Burkean theories of rhetoric aspire to linguistics by cutting out the enunciator and muffling affect (except by name). And this brings me to what I shall term "the brilliant pass": overlooking the sins of certain professionals because of their intellectual gifts; outrageous affective transgressions are "allowed" since the signifying traces of their (unconscious) knowledge are simply too good to pass up.
There are facile references to Heidegger here, of course, Burroughs and Althusser. But I'm thinking more locally about the discipline formerly known as Speech-Communication. In the shift from Speech-Communication to Communication Studies in, more or less, the last decade we see the problem: speech, the meeting place of affect and the signifier, got cut out for wider, academic respectability (a shame, to be sure). Yet this move also reflects that willful blindness to rampant assholism in the field: mean-ass scholars who gut and gore with verbal quips are given license to do so because of their intellectual gifts (gifts that appear fully formed on the page, like a slug plucked from Zeus' head). In other words, the subject as jouissance is allowed free reign in exchange for coin of "knowledge." Professionally, we don't police enjoyment and the economies of aggression that continue to circulate victims (emotional and, alas, sometimes physical).
Put more crudely: people presumed to be brilliant get a pass for acting-out. It's difficult not to see the valorization of the "Levi-Straussian subject" at work in the professional domain here, that what gets emphasized as "knowledge" in the journals is the same thing that gets emphasized in social spaces. This tendency is no more obvious than at the awards ceremonies at professional conferences: look what gets honored; borderline pedophiles, well-known misogynists, and generally difficult people are honored with the "good peeps" alike, without any attention to the "energies" these people also inspire and exude. That's too bad.