You can do interesting things with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Admittedly, this is a strange opening sentence for a Lacanian book about early American sociology. Truthfully, this book is not intended to teach the reader about the academic discipline of sociology. It is not meant to provide a coherent introduction or overview of the troubled relationship between psychoanalysis and sociology. Moreover, it is not meant to gather together some coherent and consistent body of knowledge about sociology (or even about Lacanian psychoanalytic theory). Rather, I would like to provide the reader with my objective up front: the aim of this book is to make an intervention into American sociological discourse from within the Lacanian psychoanalytic orientation. Thus, my orientation is psychoanalytic, and sociology shall merely serve as the field or environment within which I shall attempt to navigate. Or, rather, it is through psychoanalysis that I shall attempt to forge a new path forward within sociological discourse.
But why, then, do I intend to avoid coherent introductions, sustained overviews, and/or consistent bodies of knowledge? When knowledge is the agent of a discourse—that is, when, from the place of knowledge, there is an interrogation of that which has not yet been interrogated or not yet known—we can be sure that we are within what Jacques Lacan named the “university discourse.” This is the discursive orientation found most often within graduate studies departments at Canadian and American universities. Take, for example, the following statement from the University of New Brunswick “Graduate Student Handbook” within the Department of Sociology (where I did two degrees): “[t]he thesis must be an original contribution to knowledge” (UNB Department of Sociology 2018: 9). Here, it is the “not yet known,” the “not yet included,” which is to be put to the service of knowledge. Or, as we shall see, it is the “non-part” of knowledge which must become rendered consistent with prior knowledge. This is the injunction of the university.
Many sociologists will be disappointed by this book precisely because it aims to frustrate the demand for a consistent body of knowledge. The academic sociologist might therefore inquire into the lack of comprehensiveness or into the various exclusions or lack of detail concerning several major early American sociologists such as Jane Addams, Lester F. Ward, Herbert Spencer, and others. Or perhaps the academic sociologist might expose an inadequacy in the various summaries of the work of George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, Charles Horton Cooley, or even, why not, Jacques Lacan. Similarly, an academic reader might protest that this text does not extensively delineate or explicate the various early schools of sociological thought such as conflict theory, structural-functionalism, systems theory, symbolic interactionism, applied sociology, and so on. My claim is that these demands demonstrate something important about the discourse from which the American sociologist is inevitably trained to speak: once again, we are returned to a discourse which demands for itself a consistency of knowledge.
I would like to mark a distinction between “analytic discourse” and “university discourse.” The former is aimed at making an intervention into another discourse by engaging with its foundational presuppositions, and the latter intends only to increase the scope of its own knowledge (which is fundamentally built around an unacknowledged and latent presupposition). Thus, as Jacques-Alain Miller once put it, “one only understands what one thinks one already knows” (Miller 1990). Ecclesiastes states: “of making many books, it is a weariness of the flesh.” It is what one knows, what one’s ego can consolidate, that serves to protect the subject, fleetingly and provisionally, from an encounter with the real of castration anxiety.
Analytic discourse—when it succeeds—addresses a speaker who has been split by the presuppositions of his or her discourse. Put another way, the speaker of a discourse is always split between a fundamental presupposition and its foundational impossibility. This constitutes the “decisional structure” of university discourse. I am borrowing, for my own purposes, the language of Francois Laruelle who has described the project of “non-philosophy” in the following way: its project is one of locating the precise foundational decision, which had to be made within any consistent system of knowledge (in this case, it is philosophy) for it to be capable of speaking its own language, and exposing it as a bit of a fraud. Without the decisional apparatus, then, there is no constitution of knowledge (Laruelle 1999). It is through an interrogation of that split between the transcendental system of knowledge, grounded by a foundational assumption, and its primordial impossibility that the analytic discourse functions to reveal the centrality of castration.
American sociological discourse has since its birth been tormented by anxieties that are waiting for the subject behind any of his or her imaginary substitutions for castration. The American sociologist has been fascinated, captivated—captured even—by images which have at the same time stabilized and destabilized (as if in an endless tug of war) the social link. Analytic discourse moves in another direction and from a different point of departure. It consists of an obfuscation of any imaginary identification on the part of the subject so as to expose the split that exists within and against the hold of the image. The insistence of the imaginary registers a demand for consistency—a consistency in understanding the “self,” or, more often, it is a consistency in the formation and explication of a knowledge. Indeed, the demand for consistency in knowledge is perhaps the imaginary fixation par excellence, and this is why Lacan so forcefully related knowledge and image. As Lola Lopez has put it, “the imaginary does not refer only to the image; the nucleus of the imaginary is consistency” (Lopez 2010).
American sociology has also been plagued by the ideology of capitalist pragmatism. The reader will no doubt wonder why I string these two words together: “capitalist” and “pragmatism.” For now I will only open up the topic by suggesting that the reason the Freudian discovery—the “unconscious,” or, more broadly, “psychoanalysis”—has never been at home within the American context has something to do with this equation: at the level of discourse, “capitalism” is roughly equivalent to “pragmatism.” The discourse-centred approach that I introduce in this book makes this absolutely apparent: capitalism and pragmatism have the same discursive structure. And so too does American sociological discourse. Thus, American sociology is for the most part implicated in the discourse of capitalism.
The first sentence of this book was meant to lure American sociologists: “you can do interesting things with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.” I expect this statement to be appealing to American sociologists because it seems to respond to the demands of pragmatism: “what can you do with your theory?” Put another way: “what is the ‘cash-value’ of your theory?” In this case, the question concerns the cash-value of Lacanian theory for sociological inquiry. This was the expression of the American pragmatist William James, whose work has influenced many of the early sociologists. In particular, his work influenced sociologists working out of the hotspot of Chicago within a tradition that later became known as “symbolic interactionism.” William James used the “cash-value” metaphor to argue that truth is defined precisely by its consequence: “does it work?”, “can it be put to work?”, and “can it be implemented within the chain of truths which have already been accepted as functional?” Bruce Kuklick explained that for James “a belief was true [only] if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semi-hospitable world. […] Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they were efficacious in this environment” (1981: xiv). The cash-value of truth helps us navigate this chaotic environment. It helps us in this environment which is precisely the phallic environment of the pervert who does not know whether or not the phallus has been castrated (and therefore opts for both castration and non-castration, or, in other words, disavowal of castration).
This implies not only that there is something capitalist about American pragmatism (and, by implication, American sociology), but that capitalism is, clinically speaking, perverse. I shall aim to demonstrate that Lacan’s discovery of a fifth discourse (the first four discourses were “Mastery,” “University,” “Hysteria,” and “Analytic”) namely the discourse of capitalism, helps to orient us within American discourse. When we ask the question of the cash-value of Lacanian theory we are really asking about its social utility, or, to put it differently, we are asking how it might be put to use within sociology, and towards what end. Moreover, we are asking how it might be added to the accumulation of truths which have already been discovered within sociology. If a theory is to be accepted within American sociology it must demonstrate that it is capable of sliding into the body of knowledge that already exists. It must be rendered consistent as well as mo...