Science & Wandering

Reading the First Two Sessions of Lacan’s “Non-Dupes” Seminar

Cartel Presentation for Psychoanalysis in the Subcontinent

My question concerns science and wandering within the context of Lacan’s 21st seminar. I’m going to try to extract some relevant portions of Lacan’s sessions from November 13th and 20th, 1973.

I want to offer a preliminary thought: something happened in 1971 with the seminar titled “… Or Worse.” It seems to me that this was the first of several seminars whose written title was not reducible to what can be heard in what was said. This happened again in 1972–1973 with the seminar “Encore,” and then again the year after, 1973–1974, our current seminar on the non-dupes. Next, in 1974–1975 there was the seminar “R-S-I,” which, in French, sounds like “Heresy.” Finally, in 1976–1977 there was a seminar titled “Love is the Failure of the Unbewoops.” What happened in 1971 to begin this series? I simplify my answer: Lacan was turning his attention away from the father.

In our current seminar, on the non-dupes, Lacan described a movement of the unconscious which “deciphers the subject.” Here, it is not the subject who deciphers the unconscious, but the unconscious which deciphers the subject. This deciphering “has to stop” and “one asks for nothing but that.” The unconscious deciphers the subject and stops only at meaning, which is imaginary: “the imaginary is what stops the deciphering, it is with meaning.”

So much for the imaginary … but, what about the symbolic? Lacan said that religion is capable of producing the symbolic from the imaginary. I want to quote a passage from Jacques-Alain Miller, which gives a direction for my reading today. This is my own translation from his seminar “The Analyst’s Banquet:”

Lacan wedges psychoanalysis between religion and science when he asks a question concerning the father. Religion, in its proper dimension as that which is not reduced to wisdom, is always the religion of the father. […] As for science, it would rather be, I assume, liberation from the father.

Contra Freud, Lacan, at least provisionally, places psychoanalysis on the same side as religion. However, what is curious is that it happens during the same moment when psychoanalysis is no longer under the paradigm of the father. He says this on more than one occasion, but I will extract only one statement: “I am putting us on the same side as where religion functions.” This does not imply that he reduced psychoanalysis to religion. He does not place psychoanalysis on the same side as religion because of the father but rather because of its mode of dupery. Indeed, Lacan sided with the dupes against the non-dupes, despite the fact that non-dupery is one possible consequence of psychoanalysis. He even proposed an ethic, which is how he ended his first session, “founded on the refusal of being non-duped.”

This word “dupe” is derived from a bird, the “hoopoe,” which some label as smart while others label it as stupid. Those who believe it to be a stupid bird claim that it can too easily be trapped, hence deriving the phrase “booby trap.” The non-dupes “refuse to be captured by the space of the speaking-being, they are those who keep their hands free of it.” And by refusing to be captured by the space of the speaking-being, they wander. Lacan says “it wanders,” « a erre ». We can say that the psychoanalyst consents to be trapped by the space of the speaking-being, to be duped. Yet, when we read Lacan, it would seem as though he were wandering in his language. How can it be?

Next, Lacan journeys through etymology to pull out the word errer, related to iterare, which, to my mind, seems proximate to “iterate” or “iteration.” In fact, it is closer to “itinerant.” Lacan reminds us of a figure from medieval literature, which he has focused on for at least two years of his seminar, the “itinerant knight,” prominent in narratives of courtly love. These are members of nobility who lack inherited wealth and land, and who wander, go on quests, without fixed allegiances, for the purposes of temporary employment, fame, prestige, or fortune. In chivalric romance literature, the popular name is “knight-errant,” which translates as “wandering knight.”

It is necessary to make a mistake, to err. Lacan discussed “necessity” one year prior as that which “does not stop being written.” There is a movement of writing which does not cease, and yet, in this movement, there are mistakes; perhaps the mistakes repeat. A question: can we locate in this mistake which repeats, something isolatable, perhaps not entirely reduced to necessity?

In any case, Lacan advanced further: it is necessary to be a dupe of structure, that is to say, to make mistakes. For each structure, then, there are mistakes. For Lacan’s part, it was necessary to be a dupe of the analyst’s structure, its discourse, which he writes:

a → $

This is the top line of the analyst’s discourse. I will not interpret it. I only want to point at the fact that it is written.

The structure never lets go, and this is why it is necessary. It never stops being written. He took another step: “by no longer wishing to be a dupe of the structure, one imagines, in the maddest way …” I quote this only to highlight this word — “imagines” — which is not incidental: by no longer wishing to be a dupe of structure, one expands, inflates, or strengthens the imaginary. The non-dupe inflates the imaginary. It is a question ‘how’ the imaginary expands for the non-dupe.

This led Lacan to open his second session with the following question: “am I enough of a dupe not to make a mistake?” In other words, he wonders if he is “sticking enough to the analytic discourse.” Once again, he writes it, but this time in full.

It is a return to the matheme that he exposed many years prior. Here, we are still in a paradigm of ‘discourse’ from Lacan. He said that he is duped by psychoanalysis, but not at the level of meaning or ideas, or even, we might add, theory. He is duped by it at the level of writing. I want to highlight this point: he was saying that to be duped by psychoanalysis is to be duped by something that is written, that is necessary. I want to write this out in order to guide myself:

Psychoanalysis: duped by writing, “nonsense meaning”

a → $

He calls this writing of the analyst’s discourse “nonsense meaning.” He continues: “it is very difficult to give [these letters] meaning, […] but that does not mean that one cannot make something of them.”

It seems to me that Lacan is still in a moment of transition. On the one hand, he is captured by the analytic discourse, which is written and presented as a matheme. He is captured by this bit of “nonsense meaning.” This is the same matheme he introduced many years prior. I want to call this the paradigm of “discourse.” On the other hand, in this same session, he begins to speak more of the Borromean knot and the non-rapport. For example, he differentiates knots tied at the same intersections, but shown in the mirror: there is the clockwise knot and the counter-clockwise knot, depending upon whether the intersections are ‘above-pass’ or ‘below-pass.’ This Borromean knot quickly moves to the foreground, superseding the writing of the analytic discourse, and it becomes his preoccupation in this session and all classes that follow hereafter.

The matheme is related, in a way, to mathematics, which would seem to situate it more on the side of science. Lacan said, of Freud, that his “mathematics” is “locatable in the logic of his discourse, which is his own wandering.” In fact, here, in this sentence, it is unclear what Lacan is saying: did he say “wandering” or “mistake?” I turned to the audio and found that the sounds are too similar for me to distinguish them, and I do not feel as though we can easily trust the translation from Cormac Gallagher. Lacan continued: “[Freud was either wandering or mistaken, or both because he] tried to render analytic discourse adequate to the scientific discourse.”

I want to interject.

Freud was concerned for a while with defending and spreading psychoanalysis. In 1910, especially, after the inauguration of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and into the 1920s, we can find places in Freud’s writing where he is returning to the question of psychoanalysis and pseudo-psychoanalysis. Was it a question of establishing standards of demarcation? We see these efforts, for example, in his text on “Wild Analysis,” but also in “The Question of Lay Analysis,” and, in a truly extraordinary text, “The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.”

Lacan turned his attention to a section that Freud meant to be included in the 8th edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. However, this section never appeared in that edition, and was only introduced much later in his collected works. It was almost placed there quietly, as an independent text. It was published in 1925 under the title “Some Additional Notes on Dream Interpretation as a Whole.” This text has three short sub-sections, the first and third being of interest to Lacan. Those two sub-sections are titled “The Limits of Interpretation” and “The Occult Significance of Dreams.” Again — is it a question of demarcation with respect to psychoanalysis, a question of its limits, both professionally and technically?

Let us turn our attention to the second section of this text from Freud. Lacan said: “as it was presented by Freud, the occult is defined, very precisely, as what scientific discourse cannot stand.” Lacan concluded: “scientific discourse does not take into account the facts that do not stick to its structure.”

Okay, it is worth pausing here for a moment.

I want to add something to this about Karl Popper. Popper, the well-known philosopher of science, outlined, in 1934, an argument that would allow scientists to distinguish their work from pseudo-science, the latter of which included, explicitly, psychoanalysis. He outlined a logic of “falsification” to differentiate scientific from non- or pseudo-scientific propositions: can the proposition be falsified? If the answer to this question is ‘yes,’ then, according to Popper, it can be taken as a proper scientific proposition. The famous example: “all swans are white,” which can be demonstrated as valid because of the possibility of at least one non-white swan. Hence, the formulation: “all swans are submitted to the function white” on the condition that “there exists at least one non-white swan,” that is, “one swan not submitted to the function white.”

I’ve written and said it in this way so that it will resonate. Popper defined his scientific worldview as “prohibitive,” that is, based upon a “prohibition,” because it imposes upon reality “what cannot happen” (i.e., “it cannot happen that all swans are white”). By contrast, pseudoscience is “not prohibitive.” In this way, Popper attaches himself to a scientific structure, and he disengages from pseudo-science. This means also that he disengages from psychoanalysis, since this is what science, in his framework, ultimately cannot stand.

Now, Popper’s scientific structure maps perfectly onto the left side — the masculine side — of Lacan’s chart of sexuation, which was outlined one year prior to this non-dupes seminar. However, for this to be accomplished, truly, it would require that we ignore the phallic function, which is a castrating function. This side of Lacan’s chart of sexuation was also the side of the ‘All,’ to be distinguished from the feminine side, which was that of the ‘Not All’ (i.e., “not all women are not submitted to the phallic function”). It is possible to locate Freud’s analytic societies, from the Wednesday Society onward into the Vienna society, and so on, on the basis of this ‘All.’ I want to translate a point that was made by Jacques-Alain Miller:

[There is a] logic that Lacan proposed for men, for the male side of sexuation, [which is] the male regime of society. It is on the basis of this formula that Freud established the Analytic Societies of the International Association […] Freud gave this ‘All’ its maximum extension, and when I say international, I mean the world, the planet, there was no outside.

Here, this ‘outside,’ means that it wanted no contact, in some sense, with the outside, except through something like — I don’t know what to call it — an initiatory practice, pedagogy or didactics, and so on. Finally, this ‘all,’ this world-view, implies, for science, that “scientific discourse […] wants to know nothing about what does not belong to its system.” So, putting aside the question of the analytic societies for a moment, there is a question of what Freud wanted to know, since he examined, among other things, the occult, telepathy, and so on.

I will move forward a bit more in my reading.

Lacan made an obscure point about Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. He said that ‘the symbolic structure is still to be discovered at the end.’ At first, this was an obscure statement, until I took a risk to interpret it. The interpretation of dreams — not the book but the dream-processes themselves — expands the ‘imaginary.’ Lacan went on to say that the censorship of the dream, which includes metaphor, “expands the thing in the imaginary.” There is an expansion of the imaginary rather than any discovery of the symbolic structure.

Lacan asked us to revisit the first sentence of one of the sections from Freud’s “Some Additional Notes on Dream-Interpretation as a Whole.” I do not know which section he was intending, so I am going to provide both: (1) “it may be asked whether it is possible to give a complete and assured translation into the language of waking life, that is, interpretation, of every product of dream-life,” and (2) “there seems to be no end to the problems of dream-life.” Both of these sentences offer something to chew on. Take the second one, which implies that the dream keeps moving, keeps going, without end.

What about enjoyment, jouissance? Freud’s obscure text discussed the “immediate yield of pleasure,” that is, a satisfaction without delay. Lacan adds that what “really fucks us up is enjoyment.” He even provided us with an analogy: swine who “enjoy the minimum possible” which makes them “slaves of enjoyment.” Swine remain in place, stuck in the mud, a bit like the body while it is dreaming. At this point, there are a number of truly strange statements from Lacan. What we already gather from Lacan is that enjoyment only exists insofar as there are slaves. He says it just like that. There is an increasing emphasis on enjoyment and on its centrality in the treatment since it is what seems to “really fuck us up.” At this point, when the symbolic structure seems to go missing, waiting to be discovered, perhaps so too does the Other. There is a sense in which enjoyment and the Other are beginning to split ways.

Next, he adds a rather odd and demonstrably false claim, that there was no slavery in China. Of course, it is widely known that China has a long and bloody history of slavery, which continues today. Lacan jumps ahead: “the result was that they never managed to do science.” Yet, we know that China leads the world in science, and that it has for quite some time. This is clear from their scientific research institutes, manufacturing and gadget industries, vaccines and pharmaceuticals, military technology, and so on. Indeed, it is often claimed that China is decades ahead of the rest of the world in terms of science. Perhaps this is not a consequence of the Popperian paradigm of science, that of the ‘All.’ Perhaps, then, China is, for Lacan, neither scientific nor a culture with slaves, because it is outside of the Popperian scientific worldview.

As I’m reading these two sessions I remain oriented by what Jacques-Alain Miller has called the ‘paradigms of jouissance’ within Lacan’s entire teaching. Here, it would seem, we are situated within two paradigms which are overlapping: that of “discursive jouissance,” which emphasizes discourse, among other things, and that of the “non-rapport,” which is also the period when knots and topology come to the fore as orienting procedures. In this second session of the seminar, the two certainly overlap, but the second paradigm takes precedence at the end. In this movement there is also a movement from the centrality of the ‘All’ to that of the ‘Not All.’ If we take it with a pinch of salt, then we could write the first to second session as a movement on the question of science from the Popperian ‘All’ to that of the Feyerabendian ‘Not All.’

All → Not-All

I’m taking some liberties here, but I think that it does help me situate the question of science and wandering within these two seminars. Lacan has not yet abandoned the discursive paradigm, though we can see it receding as he oscillates between the analyst’s discourse, as written, and the Borromean knot, which he physically plays with, using his body, drawing it, writing it, moving around strings, and so on.

Twenty years prior to the non-dupes seminar, Paul Feyerabend published his famous book on science Against Method. Feyerabend placed science on the side of enjoyment, without limits or demarcation — on the side of novelty and surprise, that is, contingency. This ‘real’ of science can be distinguished from the ‘real’ of psychoanalysis which is impossible, and concerns a topological ‘hole.’ This emphasis on the impossible and the hole was not discussed in the earlier part of the session. The earlier part of the session focused on what is ‘written,’ that is, on ‘nonsense meaning’ within the analyst’s discourse. The latter part of the session focused on what cannot be written, that is, the ‘hole’ or the sexual rapport. Again, to orient myself a bit, I’ve written this in the following way:

nonsense meaning (written) → hole (never ceases to not be written)

For Feyerabend, the ‘real’ of science was on the side of contingency, epistemic surprise, which persists. Yet, the imaginary inflates. His anarchist method is against. The title could just as easily have been: Against Popper, or Against All. What does Feyerabend imagine? He imagines Popperian science to be dogmatic, tyrannical, narrow-minded, and so on. For Feyerabend, it is when science does not follow the rules that it brushes up against novelty. So, he is constantly up against this problem.

If I were to place Lacan’s movement from session one to session two, then, it would be a movement or oscillation among Popperian and Feyerabendian science. Except that Lacan locates the Real of psychoanalysis against the expansion of the imaginary, in the topological hole.

By way of conclusion, we can see, in the session, that Lacan leads us toward the paradigm of the non-rapport. He said: “what ensures that the sexual relationship cannot be written, is precisely the hole there, that all language as such fills, the access of the speaking being to something which indeed presents itself as touching the Real at a certain point.” He continued: “the real is impossible […] because it never arrives, ever at the point where the sexual relation can be inscribed.” I would say that this is perhaps where the paradigm of the ‘non-rapport’ begins, and it is where science becomes thought of as a ‘real’ to be distinguished from that of psychoanalysis. It is the emergence of a thinking of science as Feyerabendian rather than Popperian.