Editorial for Hurly-Burly Issue 7, May 2012 The Three Rs of Psychoanalysis

Adrian Price

THE presentation of the theme of the 2012 NLS Study Days in Tel-Aviv carries an
invitation to take the inroad of Lacans 1973 Television, turning our attention to a questioning, an interrogating as the English-language translation has it. Celui qui minterroge In the text, Lacan refers back to the specific 1960s audience of the cole normale suprieure, the audience of his eleventh Seminar which in 1973 had just been established by Jacques-Alain Miller, saying: For the first time, and particularly with you [chez vous], I felt I was being listened to by ears that were other than morose.1 Miller was of course in the audience of that Seminar, where he posed questions from the floor in a first foreshadowing of his role in Television. The key term here is other than morose, moroseness having been mentioned just above by Lacan within the context of his discussion of affects. Such ears are surely those conducive to the virtue of La Gaia Scienza, which consists not in understanding, not in diving at the meaning, but in flying over it as low as possible. This sweeping flight is a kind of reading, a deciphering that yields its own specific jouissance without getting bogged down. Lacan defines this virtue in reference to the analytic ethic of saying it well, but the complement of knowing how to read already looks to be included in this notion of deciphering. We may read these lines with reference to the contemporary Postface to Seminar XI, penned on 1 January 1973, published here for the first time in English translation, where we meet the same low-altitude cruise in the agile glide of a flight of swallows. This is not merely a recurrence of the same image. Any who might care to predict, Low flies the swallow, rain to follow, on seeing such a phenomenon is putting to work the signifier the spectacle offers. Would such a diviner be enciphering or deciphering? Is the swallows flight coded in nature? You read that there is going to be a storm, says Lacan the following week in his Seminar2, but do they read? [] It cannot be ruled out, but its not terribly certain either. Ultimately, what has to be accounted for is what carries them to the signifier of this fact. Thus, it is a matter of ce qui snonce du signifiant, which Fink best translates as what is enunciated qua signifier. Recently we turned to Lacans borrowing of the Stoics lecton to draw out that aspect of the signifier that makes a signified readable to distinguish it from the signified as such.3 One never dips into signification without
1

Lacan, J., Television transl. by D. Hollier, R. Krauss & A. Michelson in Television/A Challenge to Psychoanalytic Establishment, Norton & Co., New York/London, 1990, p. 24. 2 Lacan, J., The Function of the Written, in The Seminar Book XX, Encore, Norton & Co., New York, p. 37. 3 Lacan, J., Radiophonie, in Autres crits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 415, quoted in Price, A., The Pivot of the Trope, Open Letter, Series 14, No. 8, Spring 2012.

running the risk of getting ones feet stuck in understanding. Many an inviting branch has been limed with meaning. The lecton offers one way of broaching a principle of reading, even a virtue of reading, that would stand as a complement to the virtue of saying it well. The signifier may indeed, like the thrush, ipse sibi cacat malum, but intrinsically it bears no relation to the signified4. A number of Lacans considerations in 1973 are directed towards the degree of autonomy that the signifier can maintain in relation to the signified. It was being noted back then in the early seventies, at the dawn of the computer age, that science uses the signifier in such a way that considerable chains of letters can be linked up while holding meaning in suspense. To put meaning in suspense is not the same thing as putting the principle of reading itself in suspense, and yet if there is one legacy that the late twentieth century has bequeathed us as regards the use of the signifier, then it is the amassing of signifiers than no one knows how to read. The vast quantity of data at our fingertips today has been extracted, wrought, conjured up, and increasingly without the slightest regard for the lecton. Lacan affirms that, there is no information that stands up unless it is shaped for use.5 The twenty-first century has shown us the first result of pushing the experiment of information unshaped for use to its extreme: A. R. Sorkin writes in his account of the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street was undone by its own smarts, as the complexity of mortgage-backed securities meant that almost no one was able to figure out how to price them in a declining market. No one in his 550-page book complains that there was any shortage of data. The problem was where and how to reinject the lecton once it had been extracted from the data collection methods at the outset. Hypermodern economics is a direct descendant of twentieth century computation techniques. The loose concept of algorithm, the indistinct dividing line between programming language and machine code, owe their haziness to the status to be accorded to the principle of reading. What no one does when searching to tease out the difference between calculation and computation, between calculus and algorithm, is to return to the massive contortion of the notion of reading effected by the invention of the Turing machine. Since when has reading been mapping? Data recognition? Information processing? The technology of reading has shown itself to be just as divorced from the virtue of reading as the technology of writing is from the logical category of the written. In Le sinthome, Lacan indicates that for all their interest, James Fvriers Histoire de lcriture and Ignace Gelbs A Study of Writing pursue a line that stands at one remove from the instance of the letter.6 For there to be such an instance, there has to be a subjective moment in the experience of the technology of writing, as Mark Cousins argued on the pages of our fifth issue.7 This subjective moment is utterly distinct from the technological innovation of writing. The technology of writing may have ushered in a number of things, a remedy for reminding, not remembering fears King Thamus (Phaedrus, 275a), a formidable tool of social bondage, hypothesises

4 5

Lacan, J., The Function of the Written, op. cit., p. 29. Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, op. cit., p. 97. 6 Lacan, Le sminaire, livre XXIII, Le sinthome, Seuil, Paris, 2005, p. 68-9. 7 Cousins, M., Technology and Prosthesis, in Hurly-Burly Issue 5, March 2011, pp. 197-8.

Lvi-Strauss8, but without the subjective moment of reading, it amounts to little more than such administrative machines of convenience or submission. In his Postface, Lacan returns to the sceptical tendentious joke reported by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to illustrate the distinction between the written and what gets read. The ticket issued at the station would be enough to settle the question of the travellers actual destination, but the twofold speech of the distrustful fellows who find themselves together in the railway carriage at Galizia harbours a demand to be interpreted which can only reach its final port of call beyond the twists and turns of truth and falsehood with the inscription of the subjective moment as a matheme: the object a. When a trace has been made to be taken for a false trace, says Lacan in 1962, though in fact they are the traces of my true passage, we know that theres a speaking subject, we know that theres a subject as cause9. The lecton, the letter and the matheme. Our three Rs of psychoanalysis.

THE formalisation that psychoanalysis operates, in clinical practice and theory alike,
runs in the opposite direction of a formalisation that ejects reading. As Jacques-Alain Miller sets out in the five lessons from the 1996-7 seminar series The Other that Doesnt Exist and its Ethics Committees published in this issue, psychoanalysis seeks to measure itself against the results that scientific rigour achieves, but unlike scientific discourse, it does not lead to an absolute exclusion of meaning. These five lessons present an initial detailed enquiry into the principal topics set out in the Presentation of the theme of our forthcoming Tel-Aviv Congress: the place of the symptom with respect to meaning and the real; the essence of rhetoric and the further dimension afforded by the prerogative of reading; ontologys secret and the sense of giddiness to which it gives rise; the vacillating real of science; the contrasting stances of the ethics committee and the analytic ethic; the problematic status of natural jouissance; the analytic manoeuvre of reading ab-sense and the meaningless; and finally the signifiers material effect on the real. They also offer a first analytic examination of the major observation that Jacques-Alain Miller recently echoed in Buenos Aires to steer us towards the 2014 WAP Congress: today, everyone feels that the real has broken away from nature. Ian Hackings paper complements this undertaking by leading us through the subtle yet significant divergence between two major thinkers in contemporary logic and philosophy on the question of natural kinds and natural-kind terms.

HURLY-BURLY strives to offer a contemporary perspective on clinical, social and

political issues. When current affairs conspire to combine the three, the editorial committee take it as incumbent upon us to provide a swift yet suitably detailed echo. On 12 January 2012, the French MP Daniel Fasquelle unveiled his parliamentary bill seeking an end to psychoanalytic practices in the accompaniment
8

Lvi-Stauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by J. & D. Weightman, Penguin, 1992, pp. 298300. 9 Lacan, J., Le sminaire livre X, Langoisse, Seuil, Paris, 2004, p. 78.

of autistic persons. It provoked outcry in a nation still reeling from the unprecedented attacks on psychoanalysis that accompanied the misguided Accoyer Amendement10 and its various concomitant Healthcare roadmaps. A sustained and far-reaching rebuttal was not long in coming: voices within Fasquelles own party made it publicly known that they found his proposals harmful to patients and their families11; the psychoanalysts made their position on the treatment of autism clear in a statement of Our Convictions issued by the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Child12; parents and families of autistic persons expressed their strong reservations through various media and internet outlets. Then on 13 February, the French newspaper Libration published a leaked report from the Haut autorit de sant claiming that, the absence of data on their effectiveness and the diversity of opinions expressed does not allow us to conclude on the pertinence of interventions based on psychoanalytic approaches. This leak was quickly followed by a rash of articles in the French media, but by far the most powerful response to the report was Jean-Claude Malevals article, Listen to the Autists!, published on 14 February in Lacan Quotidien (the daily on-line organ that has been providing an ongoing reflection on the debate and an influential platform for practitioners, political representatives, and parents of autistic children).13 The following day an international petition was launched in favour of the clinical approach to autism, at the initiative of the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Child.14 Today, in the space of just three months, the petition counts over 11, 000 signatories. On 4 March, the cole de la Cause freudienne held its first press conference on Autism and Psychoanalysis in Paris.15 Several other events followed across France, with further events planned in Brussels and Seville responding to the pressing need for such public representation and debate beyond the local French situation. This is not the place to pursue the chronicle of these recent turbulent months, rather suffice it to note that this was the impetus behind what amounts to a long overdue English-language exposition of the psychoanalytic treatment of autism inspired by the Lacanian orientation such as it has evolved in various European and South American institutions over these last decades.16 The texts from our special dossier on Autism and Psychoanalysis, composed in extremis over the month of April, gather clinical contributions from a host of recent publications and conferences.
10

We can report however that in a recent development the 7 May 2012 Decree signed by the outgoing French Prime Minister, Franois Fillon, suppressing any requirement for psychologists to use the title psychotherapist effectively represents another nail in the coffin of the Accoyer bill. 11 Antier, E., Lettre ouverte Daniel Fasquelle concernant la proposition de loi visant larrt des pratiques psychanalytiques dans laccompagnement des autistes in Lacan Quotidien, Issue 147, 3 February 2012, pp. 5-6. 12 The statement is published in this issue of Hurly-Burly, pp. 165-170. 13 Likewise available here in English translation, pp. 171-92. 14 The petition can be signed on-line at: www.lacanquotidien.fr/blog/textepetition/ 15 An on-line video of the event is hosted at: laregledujeu.org/2012/03/07/9189/autisme-etpsychanalyse/ 16 This concern is shared by our sister publication, the Psychoanalytical Notebooks of the London Society, whose next issue, guest edited by P. Naveau, will also include a feature section on autism and psychoanalysis.

THE reader will draw his own conclusions from this fortuitous juxtaposition between
the themes of reading and writing, between The Construction of Social Reality and The Social Construction of What?, between the realism of the name and the filling out of thAthing, but the provocative anachronistic inclusion of D. W. Winnicotts 1969 letter in our Hypermodern Times section is a deliberate statement to the effect that for all its subtle divergences in technique and perspective, the discipline of psychoanalysis maintains from its founding moment to its latter-day incarnations a firm ethical position that is not only unwavering, but indeed permits of reading the future from the present, and the present from the past. Tis time, Tis time, the Harpy cries.