emma lieber, impossible professions — counter
emma lieber seems to have a few fun students and likely a lot of fun classes but not a lot of fun things to say about autotheory
emma lieber writes: "what would happen to education—to the spoken and written productions of both educators and students—if pedagogy were more explicitly and consciously understood as what it essentially is, that is, as a transferential activity, and one that achieves its work as much by way of what lacan called the “saying” (the fact, contours, implications, and transferential weight of speech and articulation)". she is writing this in the context of a student program that is meta-theoretically evaluating autotheory, and from inside a psychoanalytic discourse that is positioned for some reason as evaluating pedagogy, likely that the auto-referentiality of an auto-theoretical meta-evaluation itself "finds its host" so to say in a pedagogical atmosphere or is required by publishers on the basis of status. this same pedagogical atmosphere is then used to posteriori justify an attempt to either consider or participate in a transferential discourse rather than what lieber calls through lacan a university discourse.
the actual content of emma's message in its entirety is well reasoned, decent, and most importantly properly delianated and moving in a consistently well scaffolded direction (0), yet, as will be shown through indexing, emma struggles to discover what it is about transferential discourse in its form that seperates it from a university discourse. lieber's writing is itself situated in academic discourse (1), but also takes up an academic writing-form (2). it also holds its own material message as a meta-evaluative standpoint upon which or through which to write through and practically discover the idea (3) rather than as an utterance or speculative declaration through which to self-discover the concept necessary to bypass the functional limits of the philosophical problem (4). the problem with holding the idea that transferentiality is to be discovered as a project kills the speculative value behind this very concept once it is programmatically officialized (5) not because practicality kills reason but because lieber's particular deliverance fails to be "sincere" (in its style not its message) to enter into a non-university abiding discoursive model (6). simultaneously, the auto-theoretical pronounces that appear as intimacies in this very writing look more like they aesthetically undermine the necessity of the autotheoretical narrative model (7) at least in its formulation in this text, making this writing a tragically more vulgarized yet nonetheless equally academic university discourse
at the same time, it is precisely in the idea of transferentiality as a programmatic or projective tendency that emma emphasizes over lacan's seemingly far more nuanced point, which collapses the stakes, and this very programmatism, whilst on its own not necessarily harmful, begins to be harmful when that same authotheoretical instinct collapses the care that french writers like a lacan or derrida would put into the articulation (8). take his wording: "the fact, contours and implications of articulation". what does emma truly imply with wording such as "in fifteen years of teaching, it was by far the most stimulating course i have ever taught" / " i had never seen a class more invested in the material, both in speaking in class and in writing assignments, because i had never taught a course in which the material was so close to the students’ sense of themselves and their lives." (examples of 7)
emma is not hypocritical, she explicitly notes "few contemporary psychoanalytic writers take on freud’s autotheoretical writing position within their own work; contemporary educational practices tend to ignore the role of the unconscious, and students are often taught to banish the “i” from academic writing, though educators know well that the aim of education is subjective change". (example of 5) and, in order to not bastardize the writing, its important to note how emma behaves towards transmission when in regards to castration "thus it seems to me that psychoanalytic theory and educational practice too often forget their own foundational premise, which is that transmission is a performative procedure: that is, that change takes place as much along the axis of form as along the axis of content." (which is spoken from the perspective of the very academy responsible for these discourses, and as such, example of 6)
the idea here would be that lieber believes that she can salvage the writing through the form by participating in a self-enucniation, or by expressing her direct emotional engagement or social notes on the topic itself. yet, this pronouncement drowns the concepts of the discourse into an immediacy that expels their worth as objects of consideration, which undermines the point of surfacing the unconscious through the statements. in the very structural form of the writing she retains a largely dominating academic perspective towards freud, lacan, cixous and barthes with only very ocassional slight gestures that take away from our ability to observe any of her statements as either an attempt at scholarship or an attempt at conceptual enunciation (ex. "thus, we took as a guiding mantra roland barthes’s claim, in a lover’s discourse, that his text is not a “psychological portrait” but a “structural one”) (example of 2).
truly, in her own declarations, the constant use not only of "i" but of a shadowy "we" looming in a supposed shared practice collapses not only the distance that would enable a better reading, but trade in the point of a nuanced elaboration of a concept for a programmatic re-discovery of ideas that looks like it serves her own discovery more than the universal or global benefit or need for an interspersed actually helpful non-academic discovery, a legacy or iconic pursuit (ex. "certainly, most of us have the sense that theory only makes sense from the vantage point of living, as much as this truth is often disavowed in the academy) (example of 3) (example of 4)
the minor-intimate qualities of autotheory look like nothing more than minor-vulgar qualities, the ones found in light economic-social communications, such as trading, barter, gossip, small talk on the streets, or general status-appraisals. the earlier examples of "her general pleasure towards the class" don't surface any spontaneous unconscious motives because the content behind them is boring and doesnt point to any fear, any interesting mechanism of capture, any totality of genuine discoursive formation, nothing dark is revealed because the author is already pacing herself away from anything spontaneous that could rupture or reveal anything in the text. that is the more nuanced reading of lacan's own point, what these articulations point to in what he calls university discourse isn't about content or form but about mechanism and subject, what is allowed to be spoken about isn't something you can beat through a freer articulation or participation, but is a mechanism of deliverance where subjectivity is, as lieber herself points out, something that emerges through the language of expected allowance, not protected allowance.
to expect a way of speaking is already to become castrated (in the sense that lieber uses this word), and university discourse is precisely this, the massachussets press under which this book was printed certainly would have peer reviewed anything else away (example of 1), or the ai that proof-reads the script, it would point to anything genuienly novel in the work and question its existence or presence, unless it has a "tourettes" politically-protective veil around it (and even then, the exception to the rule becomes the new rule, and becomes protected by those who emphasize the order of the exception rather than the order of the rule, becoming a meta order of the rule which governs the frame anyways).
there are also trivial statements that play that very same academically-discoursive game that lieber supposedly wants to avoid, even if they serve a discoursive point, such as "many canonical autotheoretical works (nelson, kraus, and preciado, among others) both pay homage to and resist psychoanalytic insights", which serves as nothing more than a status-appraisal, for, if lieber so wanted to emphasize the project of autotheory, why did she also not smear testo cream on herself and write this text in first person anti-sovereign rhetoric rather than from within an academic landscape? it is true that discourse doesn't have to appear as its own form of practiced immanent critique, but then how come lieber emphasized form over content as was previously shown? it may be because by form it just so happens that the writing form she is participating in is incapable of holding her argument and thus falls on its own form, or worse, subsumes its own critique, which would be devastating for her own project.
the very same positivist-programmatic paradigm is cruical for lieber's focus on pedagogy precisely because pedagogy attempts to model the possibilities of controlled articulation rather than to concentrate the consequences of "an" articulation - an articulation that cannot show up in a writing that is trying to be declaratory. yet, university discourses themselves attempt to mask their own declaratory qualities by trying to put themselves in the self-subsumed condition whereby their project or perspective on the world, regardless of if it believes it has political aspirations or not, tries to see itself as both an articulation and a declaration, but an articulation that is political yet a declaration that is not political, so as to appear that the message is as non-corrupted as possible. lieber notes "this, essentially, is what the autotheoretical space opens up: the possibility of an endless layering of responses, or an ongoing registration of the commerce between inside and outside, you into me and me into someone else. a moebius strip, communication ad infinitum, everyone gets to have a say.
there is an implicit communitarian urging to this project." the emphasis on communitarianism is interesting, given that what is being shown is a "model" of ongoing discourses that is itself a projected, a controlled, a planned inference into articulation, and not only that, one that believes there is a quality to be gained in a control of self-presentation, an idea so far from the conclusions surrounding subjectivity that appear in psychoanalysis (such as the irreconcilability between the pleasure and death principle as one example, or the inability to attain the object of desire) that it is jarring that such pronouncements as "everyone gets to have a say" appear alongside the idea that articulation is connected to castration.
yet, nonetheless, lieber does excuse her contradictory apprasails and practices in regards to forms of writing in the following email-examples of auto-theoretical exchange, which, although written by her students and not herself, and, stylistically still written in the behavior of a conscious communication of intent, one that is behaviorally no different than the most intentional cultural model of expected social exchange, they reveal the intimacy that can at the very least behave theoretically due to its speculative and unconscious value, even if it behaves sentimentally and even socially in practice. in the first exchange, john writes to bush that in his therapy he discovered the parallels between jewish holocaust asphyxiation, grandma's cigarette death asphyxiation, his own almost breech babe birth asphyxation and the anxiety of the last day of class bringing on its own asphyxation, relating all of this to the act of transmitting a writing. on its own not conceptually provocative at all, it is quite possibly socially teeming with potential capture-points, ones that can aid in attaching virality (in the non transmittive, novelty-oriented sense) to social mechanism by positing a subject of analysis. john makes himself this subject, and as such, allows the concepts to proliferate through him, making himself up to be the sacrifice, the surface of the lore of the concepts themselves, something that would likely be harder if it weren't for this auto-subjective postulation.
in the next reply, bush writes "in other words, you get s + m. make of that what you will." in reference to the residual deficit when you combine her last name with john and lieber herself. cruically, she doesn't reply with as much intimacy to john, writing simply that she is "looking forward to whats to come" rather than that she has also been thinking of him. maybe, her thinking of him is already represented in their email exchange, but the cliche is more about how, in an attempt to prove the non-representationalism of language, the actionability of these statements lessens as the inferral grows. more specifically, making of "sadomasochism" what the reader (john, and now everyone else in the world who looks at this book) can make, seems entirely non-private, entirely envisioned within clear stakes. at best, the cliche is that the sadomasochism of their exchanges should follow a public pursuit, like an expected quality or resolution of something.
does bush create real stakes in this dialogue, or does the reader know the real stakes in emma's name? clearly not, and yet, to infer such a thing brings about its own cliche reminiscent of the poor, nay, entirely emptied stakes of the exchange. the point proves itself, everybody is happy, the email exchange ends. analyzing the last few emails is a matter or profanity rather than decency, an accidental involvement into a social affair. bush writes "p.s. i realize i’ve been using the em dash a lot in this email. or, as we so affectionately named it, after someone who puts it to good use, the “emma dash.”" the ultimate auto-theoretical subject, with all of the iconicity yet none of the immanence (consistent report and exposure of self-situatedness, productive stakes, resonances that are able to hold or express potential insights) required to write in the narrative of worthwhile auto-thought.
what these exchanges show is that the auto-theoretical form requires a subject who can bear the exposure of being genuinely at stake, not just a subject who performs at-stake-ness through naming dark things. john's asphyxiation chain, even if speculative, is a naming, not a bearing. bush's reply, even worse, a naming-declaration, with all the gnostic value already pre-packaged in the character (of emma, of the trio, of their relation) and none of the deserved deliverance.