15 Lacan’s afterlife: Jacques Lacan meets Andy Warhol
Jacques Lacan is a thinker and clinician whose apprehension of recording and broadcast media allows him to live on posthumously with the pop star status he gained in post-war Parisian intellectual life. He is not only a serious rival to the official heirs of Freud, but has emerged as a rival of that other superstar, Jean-Paul Sartre. The history of his exclusion (or excommunication)1 from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and his subsequent notoriety is crucial for the theorization of his reception in Anglophone academia: there is an aura of transgression, or the smell of sulfur surrounding the sovereignty of his actions and thinking. His insistence on the signifier is key to an undoing of a humanist hermeneutics that swaddled more orthodox receptions of Freud. In addition, Lacan’s interest in cybernetics seems to anticipate the plague of questions raised by technological progress. The reactions to his deviation from psychoanalytic orthodoxies revealed the religious fervor with which the guardians of Freudianism tried to protect their territory. Today, Lacan’s work continues to teach us lessons, not only about psychoanalysis, but about media and history as well.
Playing the master on the airwaves allowed for Lacan to perform as both charlatan and master – consider his performance in Télévision: his analytic attitude seemed like a posture of pure provocation of his more conservative colleagues. In his pedagogical performances, Lacan demonstrated that all forms of inter-subjectivity, whether mediated by transference or other forms of telecommunication, are based upon a bewitching mirage of reciprocity or mutual understanding. Using the insights of Structuralist linguistics and anthropology as the conditions for thinking through the question of “la parole,” Lacan often stated the obvious: “To speak is first of all to speak to others” (S III, p. 36). In so doing, however, he emphasized the primary status of linguistic material and revealed the limitations of approaches that neglect it.
How can we “explain” or “unpack” Lacan? Laurence Rickels has taught us that the process of explanation involves the melancholic incorporation of a sovereign discourse that ends up digesting and doing violence to the unassimilable text by pre-chewing it for easier consumption. Moreover, Lacan’s mapping of the four discourses (of the master, university, hysteric, and analyst) invites the work of explanation to take up the discourse of the university. This discourse is the place where all forms of complexity and ambiguity are mapped onto the field of knowledge. The discourse of the university reproduces as a pale, domesticated double the uncanniness of the heterogeneous and the radically diverse. Michel de Certeau pointed the way out of this impasse and towards a historiography that, in its attentiveness to writing and history, demonstrates that it is possible to deal psychoanalytically with unruly subjects of study without wrestling them into submission in order to fulfill the institutional order of the day: it is his work that opened the path for what follows.
Warhol’s Lacan
Putting Jacques Lacan and Andy Warhol together requires an explanation: even if it seems that their paths never crossed, the empirical non-encounter might give way to a conceptual intimacy that has yet to be excavated. While Lacan emerged as an intellectual apostate in the field of psychoanalysis who struggled against truisms of ego-psychology after being banished from the psychoanalytic bureaucracy, Warhol gained notoriety through his photo-silk screen works, which functioned as a seductive polemic against the notion of authenticity in the trace of the artist’s hand and gesture. Both Lacan and Warhol were masters of image control, and they affirmed, albeit in very different ways, the radically mediated quality of intersubjectivity while refusing to concede a space of positive political activity, initiating a negative dialectics with regard to critical thinking that was both the subversion of and the radicalization of the Frankfurt School’s engagement with mass culture. They attacked a modernist Utopia that was based in Lacan’s case on the therapeutic, ego-psychological readings of Freud, and in Warhol’s case on the institutionalization of Abstract Expressionism as high art. Is it mere coincidence that for both Jacques Lacan and Andy Warhol, 1964 proved to be an enormously significant year? In 1964, Lacan gave his first seminar after his official “excommunication” from the Société française de la psychanalyse, the SPF, and, by proxy, the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA); this seminar redefined fundamental issues of Lacan’s teaching, and was called The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.2 The year 1964 was also the one in which Andy Warhol had his first one-person show in New York City at the Leo Castelli Gallery, launching a career as an artist who brought popular culture into the making of “fine art” by affirming the saturation of the visual field with “lapidary iconography” of the commodity and imitating the techniques of mass production. Marcel Duchamp with his ready-mades had hailed the importance of the mass-produced object for contemporary art production, but he was mostly ignored by the painters of the New York School: Warhol took Duchamp’s lessons further.
Lacan took issue with the International Psychoanalytic Association’s emphasis on adaptation to the conditions of post-war existence that were increasingly streamlined according to a society of consumption – or life, American Style. It would seem as if Lacan and Warhol should be at loggerheads then, for one seems to refuse the happiness promised by American, consumerist versions of therapeutic psychoanalysis while the latter seems to produce an art that was ready-made for consumer culture. Benjamin Buchloh argues for the rigor of Warhol’s polemical position against the elitism of high modernist Abstraction. Buchloh demonstrates that Warhol was able to overcome the compromise formations in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose collage technique and citations of commodity culture appear coy and precious next to Warhol’s all-out affirmation of the mass produced image’s invasion of the picture field.3 We cannot separate Warhol’s productivity from the Factory, which provided unique working conditions that he fully exploited. He told collectors outright that he did not make many of his paintings. He is supposed to have “bought” the idea of the Campbell’s soup paintings from a willing seller. He testifies enthusiastically to his admiration for the creativity and energy of others, and speaks of himself as someone barely able to keep up with his dynamic cohorts: “I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work’ because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped.”4 But where others found a magical process of art-making in action, Warhol saw himself as being on the job, “Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.”5
The Factory was comprised of a group of ardent fans and followers who understood on some level that in attacking the foundations of high art, Andy was going to give the motley crew of aspiring rock stars from Long Island, the drug-addled heiresses, the petit bourgeois drag queens and frustrated butch dykes access to an enclave of artistic production that had hitherto included only straight, white, and sometimes closeted males. The notion of alternative access that Lacan promised was somewhat different: he offered his followers a reading of Freud that was punctuated by the advent of the signifier, and in so doing liberated psychoanalysis from the burden of an ossified orthodoxy based upon the normative constrictions of ego-psychology and its emphasis on connectedness, healthy relationships, etc.6 Lacan and Warhol both affirm a subject whose submission to the laws of repetition renders its relationship to the sign (as both letter and icon) inexorable. Under the aegis of the commodity, the barred subjects of Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary art face down the conditions of desire in the field of the signifier.
An alternative psychoanalytic movement crystallized around Lacan’s person and work, which bore the indelible imprint of his defiance and charisma. Before Sherry Turkle studied forms of life on-line, she undertook an investigation of the culture of French psychoanalysis during the seventies and eighties.7 Turkle concludes that Lacan’s emergence as the cult hero of a dissident movement spurred the dissemination of a culture of psychoanalysis in French culture in general. Turkle’s definition of popular culture may be a bit vague (interviews with people from all walks of life seem to suffice as her raw material, and a sampling of newspaper coverage stands in for her work on mass media); she was nevertheless an important witness to the passionate conflicts and intense debates that raged in the Lacanian movement. Her account of the psychoanalytic civil war is corroborated by Elisabeth Roudinesco’s work on the history of psychoanalysis in France. Under the star of Lacan, an enormous amount of work was accomplished, scandals ignited, passions inflamed, careers made and destroyed, people turned on and off. A transferential space of productivity crystallized around his person and this ambience inspired both madness and work.
Critical resistors
Benjamin Buchloh concludes that the political significance of Warhol’s work must be grasped in an allegorically negative manner: before the work of the Pop master, the viewer of contemporary art can no longer deceive herself about the flimsy firewall between art and commerce. Warhol consigns the viewer to the tragic fate of the consumer:
Warhol has unified within his constructs both the entrepreneurial world-view of the late twentieth-century and the phlegmatic vision of the victims of that world view, that of the consumers. The ruthless diffidence and strategically calculated air of detachment of the first, allowed to continue without ever being challenged in terms of its responsibility, combines with that of its opposites, the consumers, who can celebrate in Warhol’s work their proper status of having been erased as subjects. Regulated as they are by the eternally repetitive gestures of alienated production and consumption, they are barred – as are Warhol’s paintings – from access to a dimension of critical resistance.8
Warhol understood the conditions of contemporary art to be barred from critical resistance, and in affirming such a limit, he confronts the situation rather than shrinking from the contemporary conditions of art production. To understand Warhol’s political importance as an artist, we must grasp his asceticism with regard to the possibility of critical resistance. The uncannily affirmative attitude he had toward mass culture on the one hand, and repetition and chance on the other allowed him to vacate artistic intentionality with the rigor of Cage, while going beyond him at the same time. In his mobilization of indifference and contingency, Warhol’s hypnotized gaze was directed at the firmament of the mass-produced and degraded images whose tarnished aura he reproduced and celebrated. In Liz Kotz’s reading of his a: a novel, she emphasizes that the publication of a transcription of conversations with Factory Superstar Ondine deploys the “ready-made” principle of art-making that Duchamp put into place earlier in the twentieth-century. According to Kotz, a: a novel captures the “continuous streaming of language” and the consistency of babble, ambiguity, and nonsense that characterizes oral communication.9 The literary establishment rejected Warhol’s novel as gibberish, refusing to acknowledge that the conceptual mechanisms of a Duchamp, a Cage, or an On Kawara might have an effect on the ideal of literary production as a heroic enterprise. Therefore, Warhol’s work in general, but especially his literary work, is not apolitical in a simple way. By focusing exclusively on a process of painting that attacked the notions of creativity and originality, Warhol undermined the popular idealization of artistic production: therefore, his work and the way in which it is made launches a campaign of destruction against any idealization of creativity or intentionality. By refusing to edit the transcriptions of endless conversations he had with the speed-addled Ondine, he allowed the tape recorder and the transcriber to leave their mark on a work of literature whose radical openness to the accident, the slip-up, the typo, and the lapse of attention is predicated upon the indifference of a time-based medium: electro-magnetic tape. He allowed tape recording and its translation or transcription into text to have the final word in a process he did not hesitate to call “writing.” a: a novel is therefore an anti-novel: it is a novel that aims at destroying lyricism by using low-tech gadgets to take James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” aesthetic literally.
Lacan and his lessons can be understood as political precisely because he too maintained a dandy’s indifference (not unlike Warhol’s “phlegmatic vision”) and imperturbability before the events of May 1968. In “Radiophonie” Lacan elaborates upon his refusal of academic notions of pedagogy and his contempt for the idealization of political activism by recounting the following anecdote:
I remember the uneasiness of a young man who wanted to be Marxist and had gotten mixed up with quite a few members of the (one and only) Party, the French Communist Party, who had showed up in strength (God knows why) as I was reading my paper on ‘Dialectics of Desire and the Subversion of the Subject’ . . .
He asked: ‘Do you believe that you will have any sort of effect just by writing a few letters on the blackboard?’ Such an exercise, however, had its effects: and I have the proof – my book, Ecrits, was turned down by the Ford Foundation . . . The Ford Foundation found that its pockets were not deep enough to help the publication and in fact thought that it was quite unthinkable to publish me. It is just that the effect I produce has nothing to do with communication of speech, but everything to do with a displacement of discourse.10
The Ford Foundation refused to fund the translation of Ecrits into English; in contrast, it had provided the funds for the translation of Heinz Hartmann’s Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation,11 written by Hartmann in Vienna in the thirties and published in English in 1958. In this work, Hartmann asserts that the ego should not be seen as the site of conflict between super-ego and id, but rather as a function that allows compromise and accommodation of an unquestioned reality to take place. Lacan had nothing but contempt for Hartmann, who was president of the IPA during the years of his own marginalization, and so this rejection by the American foundation must have been doubly insulting. That he related this anecdote in a radio interview is all the more significant: wired as he was, he understood radio’s function as a super-egoic voice. Radio transforms the voice into aural material that shakes us up because it seems to be audible everywhere, all at once. Lacan is chiding the leftist movement for its naïveté: the demand for “an immediate effect” is part of a fantasy of political efficacy and critical resistance. He is warning his interlocutors that American institutions have an invisible political effect on post-war intellectual life, censoring and policing the translation of texts and that Lacan himself is hardly on the side of power here. With the publication of Frances Stonor Saunders’ Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters,12 we can no longer view the activities of these American philanthropic organizations as innocent: the Ford Foundation was engaged institutionally and ideologically with the Central Intelligence Agency in the dissemination of an imperialist vision of post-war Europe, re-formed and re-structured under American domination.13 Lacan’s position was one predicated on a double refusal: the first resists the Marxist call to immediate and effective action; the second resists reworking his writing to suit the standards of the Ford Foundation.
October revolutions
Rosalind Krauss has condemned the Lacanian account of subjectivity for its complicity in celebrating and affirming the febrile pleasures of visual and popular culture. Mobilizing Lacan’s theorization of identification in relationship to the image, Joan Copjec and Slavoj 
i
ek inverted critical theory’s relationship to popular culture.14 Krauss charges that in this version of Cultural and Visual Studies, there is no possibility of arriving at critical resistance against a consumerist reception of the products of mass media. From Krauss’ arguments, what critical resistance might be is unclear, but it is perhaps related to a distaste for the popular that is reflected in the magazine October, which became the materialist standard against which the work of Lacanians fell short. In a sense, she echoes Lacan’s angry student, and her critique can be paraphrased very roughly as, “Do you think you can have a political effect by describing subjectivity as constituted by an identificatory relationship with the image?” Her mode of critique deploys the negativity of the Frankfurt School without, however, mention of Horkheimer or Adorno. She points out that often Cultural Studies offers nothing more than “a mythical recoding of popular culture.” When she tries to offer an alternative to the infernal repetition of consumerism, however, her lessons become less compelling. She finds Cultural and Visual Studies to be neglectful of historical materialism: she offers critical resistance as a strategy that will put an end to the madness of repetition, mirroring, and mimesis that shapes the relationship between the academic discipline and consumer culture. Like “fetishism,” the term “resistance” does double duty in the line of fire for Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses, playing the uncanny double agent of two entirely different accounts of determinism. Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts (S XI) offers an account of the repetition (automaton) that occurs in language as chance (tuché). This affirmation of repetition is first and foremost a way in which the Lacanian analyst refuses to promise the attainment of the cure as the end of the repetition.
In Krauss’ critique of Cultural Studies, the history of this academic discipline is all but ignored. Visual Studies shaped by Lacanian theory is the stand-in for a discipline that originated in Birmingham, England, shaped by the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. For Krauss, Lacanian theory and its reception in the United States has no history either. We shall discuss the consequence of neglecting the latter: the question of the former is outside the scope of this paper, but should be kept in mind when considering the broad strokes with which Krauss sketches her argument.
On one side of a certain political spectrum, it is considered an aberration that the university thinks about psychoanalysis or popular culture at all because the objects of academic knowledge should be consecrated by a tradition that seems nevertheless increasingly contingent. From the other side, popular culture’s accessibility is opposed to the elitism of academic objects of study, objects of enigmatic aesthetic value, which the traditional critic serves as a kind of guardian and vestal virgin. iek, however, mines American popular culture for illustrations of the master’s thinking. A method is at work here, and one that demands reflection. Is popular culture the mirror of psychoanalytic theory? For Rickels, California’s specificity as a philosopheme and hieroglyph of modernity can only be read through psychoanalytic theory. For iek, there is no historical marker in place and even the rather obvious relationship between Hitchcock’s Cold War sensibility and Lacan’s relationship to Marshall-planned French academia are abjured in the name of pure theory.
Krauss concludes that the Lacanians have been conspiring with Cultural Studies and modernist aesthetics to produce global capitalism’s most faithful minions, initiated into the pleasures of the dematerialized image, ready to take their full upright positions as competent and depoliticized consumers. It was never quite clear that psychoanalysis aspired to or was capable of offering a critique of capitalism: certainly the very status of critique and criticism should be slightly disturbed by the most radical aspects of the Freudian adventure. Lacan certainly acted more as a Baudelairean agent provocateur during the events of May 1968, but the radicality of his insistence upon a linguistic and Structuralist reading of the analytic relationship was often more performed than communicated. And the foment of those years certainly contributed to the risks he took in his pedagogical and analytical experiments.
When Lacanian lessons are idealized as lapidary aphorisms, we are doomed, like iek, to endless explanations. His are more brilliant than others, but no less symptomatic. It is no accident of course that explanation is the follower’s lot, for under the star of Lacan and in the net of his transferential field, his most difficult, off-the-cuff, improvised statements are received as if they were comprehensible. This apprehension of Lacan forecloses on the material support of his lessons and the role that the tape recorder and transcriber have played in preserving his lessons. Krauss pays lip service to the importance of material supports and alludes to cultural changes that are related to “electronic media [that] are now reorganizing vast segments of the global economy,”15 but she ignores the problem of electromagnetic tape. For Krauss, Cultural Studies suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of visual material, and she sees the emphasis on identification and the mirror stage in psychoanalytically-based cultural theory as being continuous with the modernist refusal of textuality in the visual field. This visual turn and the cultural revolution it promises are symptoms for Krauss of the Academy’s participation in the production of “freshly wrought, imaginary spaces in which subjects of the new cultural and social order might narratively (and phantasmatically) project themselves.”16 Krauss implicitly accuses iek, Copjec, and Norman Bryson of misreading Lacan because they privilege the realm of the imaginary over the realm of the symbolic, and in doing so, neglect the signifier, which Krauss describes as “foundational” for the constitution of the subject. The Four Fundamental Concepts is the place from which most academic Lacanians have derived a theory of subjectivity based upon a specific reading of the gaze, and this work has shaped much of the Anglophone reception of Lacan.17
It is impossible to decide who is right and who is wrong here: it is more important to grasp that in accusing the “Foucauldian and Althusserian Lacanians” of misunderstanding “material supports” Krauss ignores the omnipresent tape recorder and the transcription as the material support on which Lacan’s teaching is based. For fear of belaboring the obvious, I must insist that the Seminars are no more and no less than the reconstitution of taped transcripts and lecture notes. Thus, what is important here is a continued displacement of the question of material support itself – the pseudo-contradiction between image and the signifier defers the very question of transmissibility and comprehensibility. Just as Warhol’s novel was apprehended by the literary establishment as nothing more than gibberish, so have the enigmatic transcriptions of Lacan’s seminars been received by his most fervent followers as enigmatic koans of a psychoanalytic Zen master. It is not my goal here to decide whether or not transcriptions transmit merely nonsense or surplus wisdom: what I would like to point out is that “blah blah blah” and a sage’s parables may not be that far apart, when they persist as the residue of tape recording.
The other condition of material support is the emergence of an “underground” or alternative psychoanalytic milieu with a charismatic master at its center whose work and personality represent a certain relation of absolute openness to recording media. As the influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler has shown, the tape recorder was on all the time. Warhol’s Factory offers us good lessons in understanding repetition, transferential space/time warping and acting out; Lacan’s teaching also created an alternative space for psychoanalysis. In founding his own school, he too saw talented people gravitate into his sphere of influence, ready to work under his tutelage, inspired by his teaching. In Warhol’s case, the Factory’s denizens were inspired by Warhol’s negative charisma and his uncanny ability to aid and abet them in making of themselves the very material of his work. Lacan’s inspiration functioned in the same way because of an ethical position that he took with regard to the International Psychoanalytic Association on the one hand, and the language of psychoanalysis on the other. Warhol’s ethical position with regard to originality and repetition implies, as we have shown, a certain asceticism that was inspiring in its own right. His ethical position is certainly at odds with a moral one – he was not interested in being good or even in being a good artist, and it often seemed at the end of his life that he was much more interested in success, fame, and money. He was ethically consistent: he espoused an admiration for Business Art, and never allowed himself to pretend that he was not just “working.” His refusal of the “magic” originality of the artist and the aura of artistic production was both frightening and liberating.
For Gérard Pommier, Lacan’s ethical position also allowed for an explosion of productivity:
After the war, and the Berlin association’s blindness towards or compromises with Nazism, psychoanalysis gained the ground lost in Germany only with great difficulty. On the other hand, Lacan’s ethical position was enough to produce a significant expansion [of psychoanalysis] in France. Ethics . . . evokes Socratic courage, and more simply the strength that certain men have always had to stand up to imposture.18
Pommier is referring to Lacan’s confrontation with the ego-psychological impostors who coveted Freud’s position in the International Psychoanalytic Association after his death. Instead of mourning Freud, Hartmann and company filled in the void with the image of his daughter, Anna Freud, whose ego-syntonic take on psychotherapy shaped the agenda of Freudian associations that wanted her support. In the context of the anecdote from “Radiophonie,” we can also apprehend Lacan’s ethics as having something to do with his refusal to idealize immediacy in the political sphere.
The “live” performance of Lacan’s seminars was captured and preserved obsessively. Friedrich Kittler has identified sound as the medium of the Real: portable technology of sound recording is what made possible the very dissemination of the Lacanian lessons. Kittler reminds us that the seminar was formed by Lacan’s relation to the amplification and recording of his voice:
Only tape heads are capable of inscribing into the real a speech that passes over understanding heads, and all of Lacan’s seminars were spoken via microphone onto tape. Lowlier hands need then only play it back and listen, in order to be able to create a media link between tape recorder, headphones, and typewriter, reporting to the master what he has already said. His words, barely spoken, lay before him in typescript, punctually before the beginning of the next seminar.19
Lacan’s feedback loop was plugged into the various low-tech media: the spontaneity and obscurity of his speech was guaranteed by the transcription that was made for his eyes only. His audience had to be all ears, or else smuggle in tape recorders of their own, which was more and more possible as reel-to-reel gave way to the portable cassette deck favored by Warhol in 196420 as the instrument with which he would write a novel, which he celebrated as his attempt at writing:
I did my first tape recording in 1964 . . . I think it all started because I was trying to do a book. A friend had written me a note saying that everybody we knew was writing a book, so that made me want to keep up and do one too. So I bought that tape recorder and I taped the most interesting person I knew at the time, Ondine, for a whole day.21
Gadget-lovers both,22 Warhol and Lacan understood that writing and speaking had been permanently transformed by technological advances in recording media.
It seemed as if for a while, that Rosalind Krauss and October magazine accepted that a iekian version of Lacanian theory would overcome certain impasses reached by the neo-Marxist Ideologiekritik they had promoted. But in her 1996 critique, she concludes,
Cultural Studies has always proclaimed itself as revolutionary, the avant-garde operating within the Academy – as an insurgency – in the wake of the events of May 1968. Visual Studies has very little to do to map itself onto the model of its (Cultural Studies) model, since, as I have tried to suggest, that earlier model was already thoroughly dependent upon a certain nonmaterialist conception of the image: the image as fundamentally disembodied and phantasmatic. But whether this revolution is indeed an insurgency, or whether it – as an unexceptional case of ‘cultural revolution’ – serves an ever more technologized structure and helps acclimate subjects of that knowledge to increasingly alienated conditions of experience (both of them requirements of global capital) is a question we must continue to ask . . .23
Contemporary subjects need very little help from Cultural Studies to “acclimate” themselves to the strange weather of increasing alienation: in addition, “technologized structure” remains an unexamined evil in this version of the political situation. If Krauss’ argument seems to fall apart here, it is precisely because it falls into a non-dialectical dogmatism that iek along with Fredric Jameson has identified as the constitutive limit of Theodor Adorno’s work, where in trying to break through the “Hegelian self-transparency of notion, he remains thoroughly Hegelian . . .”24 In her recourse to “social conditions” and “materialism,” Krauss invokes these terms like a magical incantation and implies that there is a form of resistant critique that can work against the adaptation of subjects to technology, and in so doing struggle against global capitalism itself. It is self-evident in her argument that technology is a handmaiden of alienation and global capitalism. Thinkers such as Kittler and iek are able to address and play with vulgar materialism and its limits. It is no coincidence that both were educated in the former Soviet bloc and that their disillusionment with materialist accounts of critical resistance and social conditions acted as inspiration to overcome the impasses reached by orthodox leftist notions of critique. It is one of the ironies of the end of the Cold War and certainly a sign of American victory that it is the American who serves up a lesson in Marxism and revolution to the former citizens of the Soviet bloc.25
iek performs a compelling analysis of representational democracy by demonstrating the unbearable abstraction of equality for subjects of such a state. He insists that the persistence of an irrational desire for a strong patriarchal figure in certain emerging nation states cannot be conjured away by the Enlightenment’s magic wand, and criticizes the generalized application of a Western European political model for countries that could not bear the weakness of the Executive branch. Borrowing a page from Carl Schmitt and emphasizing Lacan’s reading of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, iek is able to advocate a therapeutically correct form of constitutional monarchy for the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and beyond.
For Kittler, the states of emergency and states of exception evoked by war-time produce the greatest leaps in technological innovation while technical media are mapped onto the Lacanian schema of Symbolic, Imaginary, Real: the typewriter is the medium of the Symbolic, film the medium of the Imaginary and sound recording the medium of the Real.26 Great leaps forward in technological progress are based upon a war-time psychology of shortages and extreme measures. From telegraph to radar, sonar, rocket technologies, and the Internet (a by-product of the Cold War), Kittler shows that innovation always takes place under duress. He underlines what iek, Krauss, and Cultural and Visual Studies miss when they intellectualize mass media and popular culture by making it the bone of academic contention:
Technical media have neither to do with intellectuals nor with mass culture. They are strategies of the Real. Storage media were built for the trenches of World War I, transmission media for the lightning strikes of World War II, universal computing media for the SDI: chu d’un désastre obscur, as Mallarmé would have it, fallen from an obscure disaster. Or, as General Curtis D. Schleher put it in his Introduction to Electronic Warfare: ‘It is a universally accepted military principle that the victory in every future war will be on the side which can best control the electro-magnetic spectrum.’27
Star quality
The very possibility of teaching critical resistance seems to rest upon a notion of communication that Lacan seeks to undermine. Lacan has formulated most forcefully the ways in which “disinterested communication is ultimately only failed testimony, that is, something upon which everybody is agreed” (S III, p. 38). The difficulty of Lacanian formulations lends itself to a certain kind of obsessional explication, whether it be through endless “introductions” or brilliant demonstrations that scan the multifarious narratives and images of popular culture for the example and the illustration that will unlock the enigmatic formulations of the master. Slavoj iek has overcome the difficulty of Lacan’s lessons by making the material of the Lacanian example the very stuff of popular culture itself. After reading enough iek, it might appear that academic Lacanianism was the very addressee of popular culture itself. If one does not recognize the Lacanian aphorism that iek is putting to the test, one recognizes more easily the examples that he chooses to cite – and identifies with the jubilation of his powers of interpretation. Ranging from film noir to science fiction, from Hitchcock to Stephen King to the advertising jingle, iek has made popular culture the material of the Lacanian lesson and offered a certain kind of initiation into the master’s teaching. He is not only involved with the smuggling of contraband or the degraded objects of popular culture into the halls of academia, his approach aspires to free us of a certain mode of leftist or materialist critique that has proven radically incapable of accounting for the pleasures and complexities of mass-media constructions of the gaze and the contingency of subject formation.
iek’s account of transference and intersubjectivity is derived from Hitchcock’s films and the logic of how “we effectively become something by pretending that we already are that. To grasp the dialectic of this movement, we have to take into account the crucial fact that this ‘outside’ is never simply a ‘mask’ we wear in public but is rather the symbolic order itself.”28 The affirmation of masks and superficiality in all its forms is a direct attack on high modernist notions of esthetic sublimity in both gesture and representation. In an interview with Gretchen Berg, Warhol said: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”29 Lacan launched an attack on the notion of authenticity in intersubjectivity: the beginnings of work on the gaze would lead him to theorize the superficiality of the subject in terms of topography. The surface, skin, or inscriptional support for the signifier became a liminal space of difference and differentiation upon which the signifier would make itself legible. Topography and the matheme become the enigmatic formulae of a kind of subjectivity without depth. He, like Warhol, attracted to his person, because of his personal charisma, a group of ardent followers who would represent the Lacanian movement, a dissident form of psychoanalysis that would be called the Ecole freudienne de Paris. In iekian terms, the by-product of Warhol’s flatness would be the transferential field of magical attraction, or
objet petit a.
Both Krauss and iek seem to understand Lacan, albeit for very different purposes. Krauss’ rehearsal of Lacanian gaze theory goes off without a hitch. If one re-reads the actual seminars on the gaze, things become much more ambiguous. iek’s famous rhetorical move often begins, “Is it not obvious that . . .?” seducing us with an example taken from everyday life in juxtaposition with some Lacanian paradox. For Lacan himself, ambiguity is a condition of language: Jean-Michel Rabaté has shown that this is one of the reasons why Lacan favored literature as a way of thinking through and resolving difficult problems.30 We can also recognize that transcription captures the spontaneity of the improvised and the extemporaneous in a pedagogical performance: often, the process of decontextualization itself provides Lacan’s pronouncements with an aura of enigmatic complexity. Of course, the process of editing a transcription adds another layer of complexity to the attempts to reconstitute the unpredictability of the pronouncement. Warhol was correct to try to “write” by tape recorder.
The confusion of words, the unaccountability of certain turns of phrase make understanding what Lacan says very difficult. Lacan shows, in Seminar III, The Psychoses, that the précieuses of the seventeenth century tried to refine a language of the salons that would be a mark of their elite status, but certain expressions that they innovated, such as “le mot me manque,”31 have passed into everyday, contemporary French. He then goes on to talk about how much confusion there is about words and their meanings. This takes place in the context of a discussion of Schreber’s memoirs and Freud’s reading of them. The psychotic’s slippery relationship to meaning and complexity is shown to be on a continuum with confusions of everyday usage:
The state of a language can be characterized as much by what is absent as by what is present. In the dialogue with the famous miracled birds you find funny things . . . – who among you has not heard amnesty and armistice commonly confused in language that is not especially uneducated? If I asked each of you in turn what you understand by superstition, for example, I’m sure that we would get a fair idea of the confusion that is possible in your minds on the subject of a word in current usage – after a while, superstructure would end up appearing.
(S III, pp. 115)
Kristin Ross has pointed to the French denial of complicity with colonial conflict after the Algerian War and has added a new dimension to our understanding of the post-war French situation; however, her condemnation of certain intellectual positions does not take into account the fact that responding to a historical situation often takes place in a deferred manner.32 In 1957, the year of the Seminar on Psychoses, the year of the Battle of Algiers, Lacan was working on Schreber’s account of his psychotic break with reality. After weeks of being unable to sleep, he gave in to the fantasy that he was being transformed into a woman so that he could have sex with God and thereby prevent the destruction of the world. If Lacan was talking about war in the Seminar on Psychoses, it was the intra-subjective conflict of the psychotic however and it had everything to do with securing the boundaries of one’s identity. Lacan was indeed talking about war in the Seminar on Psychoses; it was just not the kind of war that Ross would have recognized.
The difficulty of the Lacanian seminars is legendary, but the obscurity of his language acquired a kind of radiance all its own. Claude Lévi-Strauss reminisces about attending Lacan’s first seminar in 1964 at the Ecole normale supérieure:
What was striking was the kind of radiant influence emanating from both Lacan’s physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans functioning in exotic societies, and I rediscovered there a kind of equivalent of the shaman’s power. I confess that, as far as what I heard went, I didn’t understand. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand.33
The magic that iek ascribes to
objet petit a is obviously what is produced by Lacan himself. Understanding the difficulty of the master is the magic that the master creates for his most devoted interlocutors and followers. According to iek,
The Lacanian name for this by-product of our activity is objet petit a, the hidden treasure, that which is ‘in us more than ourselves,’ that elusive, unattainable X that confers upon all our deeds an aura of magic, although it cannot be pinned down to any of our positive qualities . . . The subject can never fully dominate and manipulate the way he provokes transference in others; there is always something ‘magic’ about it.34
This magic that is beyond our grasp is also one of the material conditions of Lacan’s aura. For if Lévi-Strauss testified to his incomprehension, he also saw that his fellow audience members were captured by incomprehensibility, seemed to understand in order to stand in the auratic circle.
Lacan and Warhol also put into practice, at least for a time, a kind of radical affirmation and permissiveness with regard to the fans who because of their growing notoriety were attracted to their persons. There are many accounts of the early Factory, but McShine’s is perhaps the most succinct:
In addition to serving as a studio, the Factory became Warhol’s own Hollywood set, and the maestro found himself surrounded by a coterie of acquaintances and friends: jeunesse (some dorés, some tarnished), glamorous transvestites, eager dealers, avid collectors, avant-garde matrons of New York society, prescient young curators, precocious pets and the cunning curious. This cast became the subject of his films . . . Surrounded by the ‘beautiful people’ and intrigued by his own drawing power, Warhol regarded himself as director and impresario both within and outside the Factory, with the power to invent ‘superstars.’35
In Roudinesco’s description of Lacan’s cabinet after the founding of his school, the EFP, we can see a peculiar similarity between the two scenes:
. . . [T]he door at the rue de Lille was open to anyone and without appointment: to members and non-members, to analysands and the ‘sick,’ to robbers, thugs, psychotics, and the troubled . . . In sum, anyone could show up at his home to discuss absolutely anything . . . Very early on, Lacan contracted the habit of no longer giving appointments at fixed times. He was unable to refuse anyone and anyone could come to his sessions according to his whim or need. The Doctor’s house was an immense asylum in which one could move about freely, its doors open from morning to night, among first editions, artistic masterpieces, and piles of manuscripts.36
The chaos of their semi-public, semi-private spaces of work and speculation is predicated on the question of the experiment: for Lacan as for Warhol, the question of the unpredictable became a factor of everyday life and everyday work. Age and a confrontation with mortality would decrease their openness, but in the early sixties, the anti-institutionality of their work-sites presents a Utopic idea of work that was more speculative than practical.
Friedrich Kittler highlights Lacan’s relationship to recording devices as a condition of the master’s difficulty; what the Lévi-Strauss anecdote reveals is the quality of the listening: Lacan’s rapt interlocutors also had an effect upon the master’s pronouncements. The listening was hardwired to the magic of the Lacanian charisma. That is, Lacan was not only speaking to the tape heads: his performance was a performance for those who bathed in the enjoyment of understanding the incomprehensible.
Both Warhol and Lacan were working through ideas about the principle of repetition, albeit in fantastically different spaces: for Lacan, Freud’s theories of repetition had to be amplified by an insistence on the signifier. In order to reinvest language with the radical contingency of the signifier, Lacan undoes the everyday notion of communication by showing that the clinic is a space of exchanges that are irreducible to interpretation on the level of meaning alone. This ostensibly modest lesson, unassimilable by mainstream psychoanalysts, has reshaped certain areas of literary and cultural studies. For Warhol, painting became a space where low-tech strategies of repetition such as silk-screening would replace the authenticating gesture of the artist’s hand. Shortly after the success of his first one-man show in New York City, Warhol “retired” from painting.37 Both Lacan and Warhol represent different faces of masterful opacity in their relationship to recording devices: one baffles because of the complexity of his recorded speech, the other because of the simplicity of his utterances (often punctuated merely by the word “wow”). Both, however, understand that a certain detachment with regard to repetition is necessary in the age of mechanical reproduction, when the effects of the political can only be registered in a negative way.
The subject of popular culture and mass media is the barred subject of politics: the condition of its powerlessness is transformed by its momentary consecration as an object of knowledge. In pointing to the increasing sophistication of consumption of popular culture in academic discourse, Krauss isolates a problem with Cultural and Visual Studies, but what she misses is the institutional frame of her own arguments. A more “correct” reading of Lacan makes no difference in the application of his theories if the historiography of Lacanian reception is neglected. In any case, the legacy of Lacan continues to provoke thought and debate, and his lessons and his career can be analyzed in terms of the allegorical missed encounter with his contemporary, Andy Warhol. The Frankfurt School took the criticism of enjoyment to its very limit by demonstrating that mass culture offered a miniaturized outlet for libidinal release. “Fun” becomes the name of the diminished pleasures that are offered to us. Along with “fun” comes an enervated political sphere.
Criticism is a word related to crisis: the saturation of the visual field with mass-produced images and the technologization of the archives have both led to a crisis in the university itself. Cultural Studies tries to make studying more “fun” by offering easy transgressions of disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Is this perhaps its fatal error? If it is, Krauss’ corrective seems no more effective at addressing the critical situation in which we find ourselves. She wants to be more correct than her colleagues, whom she denounces as having offered a false promise of revolution: in so doing, she plays her super-egoic role with gusto, and acts as the fierce guardian of a political orthodoxy whose territoriality can only subsist and persist within the confines of the university. How can we renounce such Pyrrhic victories in order to promote a more experimental, more generous kind of thinking and engagement with history, theory, and aesthetic production? Lacan taught that the discourse of the university is indeed doomed to slavishness, which as we know, has its own pleasures.
1. See the dossier on “excommunication” in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
2. The seminar was given in 1964. The text of the seminar was published in 1973 as Le Séminaire XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil).
3. Benjamin Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s one-dimensional art: 1956–1966,” Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989).
4. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1975), p. 96.
5. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 178.
6. Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Press, 1958).
7. Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, 2nd edn. (New York: Guilford Press, 1992).
8. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s one-dimensional art: 1956–1966,” p. 57.
9. See Liz Kotz, “Words on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Read as ‘Art’: Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warhol” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2001), especially “Conclusion: An aesthetics of the index?” pp. 350–62.
10. Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 407.
11. Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Universities Press, 1958).
12. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000).
13. Edward H. Berman’s The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983) provides a detailed account of the ways in which the philanthropic organizations, under the rubric of “world peace” studies, worked closely with government agencies to further the agenda of Cold War American foreign policy: foreign students were supported as were foreign elites, specific topics of research encouraged, others dismissed.
14. Laurence Rickels has, throughout his work, insisted upon the radical compatibility of psychoanalysis with mass media, technology and popular culture, but his inversion of the hierarchies of critical theory has proven less consumable than iek’s: his work on modernity, California, and perversion is more historical and is entirely involved with Freud rather than Lacan. Lacan proves more popular with Anglophone theorists of popular culture.
15. Rosalind Krauss, “Welcome to the cultural revolution,” October 77 (Summer 1996), p. 84.
16. Krauss, “Welcome to the cultural revolution,” p. 84.
17. See Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation, eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Mosey (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
18. Gérard Pommier, La Névrose infantile de la psychanalyse (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1989), pp. 62–3. Author’s translation.
19. Friedrich Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), pp. 50–1.
20. For more on Warhol’s relationship to his tape recorder, see Peter Krapp, “Andy’s wedding: Reading Warhol” in Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses, eds. Michael Syrotinski and Ian MacLachlan (Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 2001), pp. 295–310.
21. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, pp. 94–5.
22. See Laurence Rickels, The Case of California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
23. Krauss, “Welcome to the cultural revolution,” p. 96.
24. Slavoj iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 83–4.
25. I must thank my students in the Basic Seminar class of Fall 1999 at the University of Minnesota for bringing this point home to me.
26. Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), p. 45.
27. Friedrich Kittler, “Media wars,” Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), pp. 128–9.
28. Slavoj iek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 73–4.
29. Gretchen Berg, “Andy: My True Story,” Los Angeles Free Press (17 March 1967), p. 3. Quoted in Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s one-dimensional art: 1956–1966,” p. 39.
30. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jacques Lacan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 12.
31. This can be translated loosely as “language fails to do justice to . . .” or “I do not have the words for . . .” or more literally, “I am missing the word for . . .”
32. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).
33. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien avec J.-A. Miller and A. Grosrichard,” in L’Ane 20 (January-February, 1985). Quoted in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 362.
34. iek, Looking Awry, p. 77.
35. Kynaston McShine, “Introduction” in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 18.
36. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., pp. 418–19.
37. McShine, “Introduction,” p. 18.