Nobus, Dany. Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2005. p 132.
Doing justice to the radical difference of the model of knowledge that Lacan constructs in Seminar XVII thus also requires attention to the manner in which its positioning of the discourses of the master and that of the analyst corresponds to a distinction between a technocratic social order and the liberating potential of an unconscious.
For Marx, the ‘secret product’ of modernity is surplus value, extracted from the labour of the worker and concealed within class structures and divisions of labour.
To Lacan, following Marx’s terminology, the secret product is surplus jouissance, generated as a by-product of the technocratic orders of knowledge by which the subject is determined, and accessible in the analytic setting through a knowledge whose exercise corresponds to its acquisition. The discourse of the analyst, in which knowledge operates in the place of truth, corresponds neither to culture nor to its products and heralds the possibility of revolution and radical change.
‘Keep going. March. Keep on knowing more’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 120). With these words, Lacan relayed the disembodied, motiveless command of the modern master. … In the master’s command, the agency that issues the order to know and the actual agents of knowledge that are set to work by this order … in the headlong pursuit of ‘knowledge for its own sake’.
However, rather than endorsing the psychoanalytic value of this command to know more, Lacan insists on the value of stupidity, ignorance, loose talk and bullshit— the disavowed waste products of the epistemological drive — and the manner in which this ‘waste of knowledge’ indicates the path from conscious knowledge (connaissance) to unconscious reason (savoir) and thence to jouissance.
Lacan’s introduction of the discourses of the master, the university, the analyst and the hysteric is subsumed within a deeper logic, which juxtaposes the position of the analyst with the changing face, or increasing facelessness, of the master within modern forms of social life. The role of the ‘master’s discourse’ is to mark the beginning of a dynamic of concealment and subterfuge, which the analyst’s discourse exposes to scrutiny. Yet this same process of concealment, alienation and dissimulation has created the analytic function itself. In the formulae of the four discourses, the discourse of the master and that of the analyst are two aspects of the state of knowledge within modernity. 132
Mastery survived, developed and dissimulated itself through the progressive and violent transformation of tacit and embodied knowledge into abstract social agency.
In turn, analytic work occupies the sites of this process in the damaged bodies and psyches of modernity’s subjects, identifying mastery’s loci of control, its causes and its divisive effects.
As such, embodied knowledge or ‘know-how’ is co-opted to mastery, which then resides as the hidden kernel of a self-perfecting technological consciousness. This technological consciousness ultimately conceals the weakness and infirmity of the classical master within a ‘master function’ that efficiently disposes of social products, bodies and of knowledge. 133
Psychoanalysis addresses the ‘master function’ by setting up camp in the very sites of epistemological division and the traces they leave in the organization of the self.
The logic of misunderstanding that exists between academics and analysts is laid out in the dynamic relationship established by the four discourses. ‘The university discourse’ is another term for an apparatus of dissimulation and concealment in which the impotence of the master is disguised by the puissance [strength power] and agency of knowledge itself, alienated into a social product that exists ‘for its own sake’ and for the sake of the master simultaneously.
Quackelbeen thus completely ignores, or fails to understand, Lacan’s injunction that the four discourses are not abstractions to be applied to real situations, but are ‘already inscribed in what functions as this reality’ (Lacan 1991 [1969– 70]: 13). The discourses are not to be used as keys to the meaning of speech, but as means of separating speech from meaning, thus isolating the reality of the unconscious from the real world as it is generally understood. 137