the postal service:give up

Music: Morrissey: Ringleader of the Tormentors Morrissey's new album was released today. I am a happy boy.

I'm jetting tomorrow for the Southern States Communication Association annual meeting in Dallas. I suspect "rosechron" will be uneventful for a week or so.

I thought I might post an edited version of my lecture from the psychoanalysis seminar on Monday. Before I do, I need to set it up: last Friday a number of graduate students received a "prank" letter from the department faculty with news of their "annual review." The review was not good. A number of graduates didn't understand it was a prank and were deeply hurt. I decided that this prank letter was a good example of the objet a or object (a), so I built a lecture around it (we're reading Lacan in the seminar for the next couple of weeks), both as an indirect way for students to discuss "the incident" as well as a more direct way into theory-no more direct way for grads, I figured, than to have the gaze so clearly trotted about. Alas, the prankster outed himself the day before class . . . but I did give the lecture anyway, asking students to bracket their knowledge of the actual subject. (It bears mentioning, however, that the prankster lacked contrition in his apology, which was "backhanded" at best; the prank was simply cruel).

So here's a rough semblance of what I said, more or less, edited.

In his second seminar, which ran in the 1954-1955 academic year, Jacques Lacan made much ado about short story by Edgar Allen Poe titled "The Purloined Letter." Edgar Allen Poe's suspenseful yarn is built around the circulation of a royal secret. The reader is never privy to what the secret is. All we are told by the narrator is that a letter sent to the Queen contains something nasty about the King (presumably it is also a love letter; evidence of an affair, perhaps?). Regardless, the letter incriminates the Queen and its discovery could lead to her death, and the Queen knows it.

The intrigue begins when the Queen spies a royal Minister stealing the letter and replacing it with a harmless surrogate, but she is powerless to stop him because the King is in the room. The Queen is blackmailed by the Minister for months until a witty detective plays the switcheroo game on the original thief, purloining the letter yet again, and thereby reaping a hefty reward from the police. The story closes with the detective fantasizing about the Minister continuing to blackmail the Queen, not knowing that he is no longer in possession of the now doubly purloined letter, and thus unwittingly bringing about his own punishment.

Poe's story is particularly intriguing to Lacan, who argues that it helps to explain the role of the signifier in repetition compulsion (about which more soon), and in a untranslated preface to his seminar of the story, the function of the object (a) or objet petit a.

For Lacan, the letter is the main character of the story. The doubly stolen missive represents the authority of the signifier over the subject. Lacan says:

the tale of The Purloined Letter signifies that there's nothing in destiny, or causality, which can be defined as a function of existence. One can say that, when the characters get a hold of this letter, something gets a hold of them and carries them along and this something clearly has dominion over their individual idiosyncrasies.

Indeed, the letter represents the unrepresentable (the unconscious) and the interference the signifier runs between the subject and that which makes her singularly singular: her inevitable death, the only thing that cannot be gifted [note: this point is taken from my book; I have to rethink it cause it sounds wrong now for some reason]. Insofar as Lacan maintains that the signifier is an absence (it "stands-in," like the harmless surrogate letters in Poe's story), then it always can get the better of us. The Minister believed his authority was vouchsafed by the purloined letter, but in the end, he was holding a meaningless surrogate. The letter is its own agent, and the meaning of each character is determined on the basis of their relation to the letter.

It is precisely because the letter always has the upper hand that Lacan literalizes the letter as a token of the real. In Lacan's analysis of the purloined letter, the formal function of the letter is quite meaningless insofar as its instance as a material presence is the true cause of anxiety. In other words, the purloined letter is analogous to the instance of speech itself in its materiality: utterance as such betokens that which cannot be represented in toto by the symbolic (think here of glossolalia or speaking in tongues, the materiality of babble, a materiality that is startling or ecstatic or creepy). Moreover, for Lacan the letter as such is that which returns and repeats itself--it is the primary exemplar of repetition--and it repeats because there is something about it that escapes representation. It is in this sense that the letter functions as the cause of desiring; the Queen wants the letter; the police want the letter; the detective wants the letter; and the Minister wants the letter--but none of them actually have the letter, and they are blind to their own fixation on the meaning or content (or at least all of them but the detective, but his exception is fleeting).

To put this another way, the desiring of the Queen, the Minister, and the detective is not about getting the letter at all; the letter is a ruse. It could have just as well been another object since the object of desire is ultimately interchangeable. This is not to say that the Queen, the Detective, and the Minister do not think they desire the letter; indeed, they do! This is what we call fixation. Fixation is always a ruse to the real cause of desiring, the object (a).

[snip: paragraph about secrecy and the secret]

It is also in the second seminar where Lacan introduces, in a roundabout way, the concept of stupidity or foolishness (or "imbecility"). In Poe's story, the police have much trouble locating the stolen letter in the Minister's home: they search and search but cannot find it. The detective, however, discovers it immediately: the letter was hidden in plain sight. The detective, in other words, discovers the true location of the signifier by becoming stupid, by playing the fool and looking for the obvious--a letter sitting out in plain view, not hidden. The detective understood the letter the police were searching for was, in a sense, a ruse. But in the end, however, Dupin is also duped: he also was put in his place by the letter; the letter was in more control of his immediate life than he would have liked to admit. He is smug in his cleverness, not realizing that the letter used him. Besides, says Lacan, the letter will end up in the King's hands at the end of all of this. The signifier cannot be fixed, and the more one exerts control, the more uncontrollable the letter will become.

The lesson here is that we are all stupid before the symbolic, and, to reference Avital Ronell, we are idiots to think that we can control the letter or outwit the signifier. And, to parrot Freud, one is certainly stupid to believe that he or she is self-transparent, that he or she can know the contents of his or her unconscious, or in the ultimate state of delusion, that there is no unconscious (to put this alternately, as ______ said to me yesterday, if you are in your second year of graduate school and have not discovered the asshole, then it is you).

Meaning--the province of interpretation and understanding--of course, this we can navigate, but the formal properties of rhetoric--this is to say, the way in which language establishes relationships between people--is not up for grabs or manipulation. You might think that force cuts through it, but you would be mistaken: force is a willful stupidity too. This is why, Lacan says, the police cannot find the letter, for all they know is a kind of realism, what force precludes, which is a sensitivity to the relation.

Perhaps this why the voice as such is an objet a for some, as it betokens something more than the tonal qualities of speech--the subject of the unconscious, that thing in the voice that is beyond voice, that thing that sets off desiring but which cannot be given. The Queen's desire for the letter is the obverse to our anxiety about hearing our own voices (or rather, the letter is her unconscious voice, speaking the truth that she would have the King dead). You and I do not like to hear the recording of our own voice because we sense that it communicates something to others that you and I would rather repress. Hearing our own voice reminds us of our own stupidity before the symbolic, and in general, we are uncomfortable with our stupidity. Of course, there are those who enjoy hearing their own voices, and we have a name for these sorts of people: they are assholes. Lacan's term for the people is the "obsessive neurotic." A good example of someone who does not tire of his inane voice is George W. Bush, an obsessional neurotic par excellence.

If the lesson here is that we are all stupid before the symbolic, then what Lacan is trying to teach us is to give up the quest for mastery or for a master--to become a Master, or to locate one to fix our desire into the demand of a Master (for example,[name deleted: insert your own powerful uber-figure big name who treats grads like shit but they love him/her anyway]). Failure to give up the search for a master, a subject supposed to know--or the quest for a secret letter, if you want--results in the stupidity of arrogance. What I mean by this is not some rarified abstraction, but quite simply that the ethics of intellectual curiosity goes hand-in-hand with humility. What Lacan's difficult prose teaches is that it is ok to get down with the Postal Service in multiple senses, but ultimately to one sense that we can sum up in a best-selling title: Give Up.

The phrase "Give Up" evokes two meanings at once: first, resignation, as if to admit defeat. But this sense can also mean "knowing" when to "walk away," like Kenny Roger's the Gambler. This is phronesis, a kind of practical wisdom that serves us well, and it need not be remorseful. Indeed, the Lacanian teaching here is to give up our demands and open ourselves to our desiring, to recognize there is no object that satisfies. This also means giving up demanding love from others.

The second sense of "Give Up" implies an "it," as if to say, "give it up." This is a more contemporary colloqualism that usually refers to a request for applause; but it also is the very demand the first sense militates against. "Give it up" is a demand for an impossible love that cannot, in the end, be given (hence, the gesture is immediately insincere; when you clap when you are told to--when someone asks you to give it up or when a sign begins to flash the word applause for the studio audience--the recognition you yield is forced, insincere from the start).

Keeping in mind the important distinction between "give up" and "give it up," the former foregoing the demand for love and the latter reestablishing it, we are now ready to turn from the purloined letter to the prank one, or if you like, to read the purloined letter as a palimpsest, as the prank letter functions similarly to put everyone in his or her place.

The letter that some of you received last Friday was presumably penned by the Department of Communication Studies faculty. I have provided a copy of this prank letter for you on the back of your lecture outline. Let me state at the outset that I had pretty much worked out the lecture for today in respect to this letter before its writer outed himself yesterday. Rather than scrap the lecture I want to continue with it and beg your indulgence, bracketing for the moment the identity of its author so that we might still regard its origin as a secret, so that we might pretend that we do not know the identity of its writer. And, let me add that in some respects its origin remains a secret, insofar as I will suggest the prank was always already lodged in the departmental imaginary, as it is in the imaginary of graduate students everywhere. In other words, the letter, like my lecture, is "cliché" in the extreme.

For those of you who are not in the department, let me recap the story of this letter: on Friday, the eve of April Fool's day, this letter was mailed to certain graduate students at home, or put into the office mailboxes. It copied onto department letterhead (itself also a copy, a simulacrum, which is telling), and presumably modeled after the sort of "annual review" letter most graduate students get as a measure of their progress. The letter begins this way:

Dear Student,

It is the time of year when the Communication Studies faculty and staff get together and evaluate the performance and placement of all our current students in the department. The Communication Studies department convenes and we go down the list of all our current students.

This introduction creates a scene that immediately cues the objet a, and in this respect in terms of a homology: Is this lettered scene not the non-place or hidden spot from which or at which we encounter the gaze? You'll recall from your reading that the gaze is an objet a or causal part-object of desire because we cannot locate that place from which it comes. The gaze is not reducible to the eye, insofar as becoming the object of a gaze is not a production of seeing. Rather, the gaze emanates from that something more place, it is of the order of the Real and, as such, cannot be captured. Recall in film The Graduate, when Benjamin is in a closed bedroom with Anne Bancroft:

Mrs. Robinson: Benjamin, I am *not* trying to seduce you. Benjamin: I know that, but *please*, Mrs. Robinson, this is difficult... Mrs. Robinson: Would you like me to seduce you? Benjamin: What? Mrs. Robinson: Is that what you're trying to tell me?

Mrs. Robinson's desire is caused by the gaze of the gullible; it is not Benjamin's seeing her that ignites desire; it is the unconscious sexual dynamo within him that gazes out unbeknownst to Benjamin's ego, here dominated by the superintendent of propriety. I mean, to see this point you have to see it, to locate the acting of the eyes. Anyway, Benjamin's desire is ignited by the gaze of Mrs. Robinson--the graduate here being encouraged or discouraged, it makes not difference, by the gaze of the authorial mother, the alma mater that keeps on giving, the Communication Studies faculty, if you like.

So to return to the prank letter, we have a different graduate and scene of seduction altogether: make no mistake, this is a love letter and an attempt to seduce that has gone terribly wrong--or more precisely, that had to happen because it had already been imagined by everyone.

From a psychoanalytic vantage, to analyze this letter we might look for slippages, especially equivocations, for it is in the equivocation or sliding of the signifier that we can discern the outline or shifting of the causal object. There is a notable slip in these first two sentences: Note in line one the agent of the gaze is the Communication Studies "faculty" (and note too that the faculty evoked is the most primary of seeing, and unintended double but one that is most certainly not an accident). In the second line, the agent becomes the Communication Studies department. In effect, this slip from faculty to department widens the non-place that is the origin of the gaze to ourselves--to everyone, indicating that this gaze is consequently self-directed. This move also cleanly identifies the author as not-faculty, as the presumed locus of the voice slides from the White and Black Wizards and Witches to the flying monkeys and Orcs and Hobbits and then back again. The equivocation expands to "we as a group" in the fourth sentence, finally becoming the Royal we. So we have a multiplicity: faculty, the department, and finally, the more abstract Royal We. We are re-reading the Queen's love letter that we want so desperately to keep from the King's sight.

So positioned in the dialectical gaze of the Master, the letter then delivers our infidelity: "Although we are pleased to have you with us [that is, the royal and privileged us, the almighty us of royalty], unfortunately some issues have been raised in regards [sic] to your name during the round table discussion." The irony here is situational. As a brief aside, we did have a faculty meeting today, and you will never guess whose name was mentioned directly as having raised some important issues with community. Nevertheless, the letter continues:

Your advisor had some concerns with you when they were asked to speak about you. Other professors also had things to mention that made the group a little uneasy and concerned us, the faculty. There were some comments made on behave [sic] of the other graduate students in the department they have either been overheard or were asked to be addressed by other students.

Aside from the confused prose, note the slipping again between part and whole, or between less inclusive and more inclusive "we's": on the one hand, the gaze is of the faculty. On the other, it also includes that of the students. Regardless, that this letter is the objet (a) of the graduate subject should be very clear at this point: In one sense, it announces the demand for love from the writer. The letter discloses, despite the attempts to cover and hide in form, the writer's insecurity in respect to the almighty royalty (the faculty) and his peers. Read to the letter-that is, read closely and literally, this is a love letter, a letter that in its very gesture is a demand for love by disclosing your desire, to be loved by the big Other, the faculty, the department. And in this sense the letter is a failure as well-a frontloaded failure, for, as the saying goes, "if you have to ask . . . . " What I'm suggesting is that if you penetrate the letter at the level of the first persona, you locate a divided subject demanding love. In common, cultural parlance, someone might term this a "cry for help."

Second, the letter is the objet a because it speaks directly of lack. The third paragraph reads:

We care about your success dearly and only want the best for you as an employee, student, and family member of our close communication community so we hope we can do anything and everything to appease these issues. The issues we have with you will not go away and dealing with them as soon as possible is the only way we can correct them, satisfy all the parties involved, and move on toward our combined goals of success.

In other words, you are missing something--you lack something. And your lack is situated precisely within an Oedipal frame: "we love you as a family member." Describing the department scene as a "family" immediately evokes the transference: in loco parentis, of course, is the motto of university education. But clearly this is a spanking, a laying down of the law of the father: "my son, this hurts me more than it hurts you."

The enjoyment of laying down the law as a shadow or surrogate, however, is hitched curiously to the "goals of success." Success is the ultimate goal of your graduate experience, the letter announces. Now, the original meaning of success is a penultimate or final stage; in this sense, your success as a graduate student would be the achievement of independence. That is to say, leaving the family. The letter consequently promises the impossible: achieving independence by prostrating oneself to the father. The letter admonishes students to their advisors: to achieve independence from our family you must, of course, prostrate yourself to the family. Is this impossibility nothing other than the objet a again, the promise of an impossible Love? Is this not what Lacan would term "love's deception." As Anthony Keidis puts it, "what I got you gotta get it put in you," as if to say the Royal We has the object that you want to make you whole.

Success, however, has a more used meaning than that of the next stage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, success is: "The prosperous achievement of something attempted; the attainment of an object according to one's desire: now often with particular reference to the attainment of wealth or position." Note that success therefore does implicate an illusion: the achievement of the object of desire! But desire as such is objectless! To keep working, it can never be satisfied. Success in this sense is only possible in death. Ultimately, then, the prank letter is the objet a in the sense that it evokes the gaze, and more importantly, the promise of love, that the faculty, or the department, or the Royal We have the object of our desires, and can provide it for us, if we will simply give into the borg. Consequently, this is a love letter in two related senses: as a prank, it is a demand for love by its writer; however, it is also a love letter in the sense that it promises an impossible love, that the Big Other can make you whole, and restore the jouissance you sacrificed to become a subject in the first place.

And so we find, after reading this letter, that Lacan is not so rarified after all, since his thinking helps us to make sense of our own feelings and stupidities. I have already suggested that the fantasy of judgment--here the gaze of the Big Other--is central to the graduate student imagination. In a very real sense, most of us as the graduate subject have worried about "being found out," that is, we worry that someone, perhaps our better self, will disclose that we are fakers, that we're not as smart as people think that we are, and we worry about our own (won?) competence. Like the man in therapy who worries about the smallness of his penis, we don't want to be found out; not being found out, this is the anxiety of graduate school. And so the fantasy of surveillance, of the gaze of the Big Other, is everywhere in the graduate unconscious, surfacing in the grousing and charges of unfairness and what not that percolates at Happy Hours and non-academic gatherings. And so the idea of an omniscient faculty assembling to criticize you, specifically, to take YOU down, is quite common. Like the purloined letter, this prank was hidden in plain sight. Its very obviousness is what keeps it from manifesting itself. Consequently, it takes a very stupid person to find it, it takes a ventriloquist, or you might say, it takes a dummy.

Stupidity, then, being an imbecile before the power of the Symbolic, can manifest itself in the figure of the Fool or the figure of the Asshole. The fool is that individual who speaks truth to power precisely because he or she does not take herself seriously, and does not think it is possible to control meaning. The fool is the person who chases after the Holy Grail, but knows in some sense the grail is not getable. The fool enjoys his or her lack. The asshole, however, does not understand the power of the symbolic, and often becomes the unwitting mouthpiece of the unconscious. The asshole believes he is in full mastery of language and can control its interpretation; he believes that equivocation is impossible. Indeed, the asshole believes that there is no unconscious and that he can do nothing wrong. The asshole lacks contrition. For this reason, some the most brilliant shit comes out of the anus of assholes. But it is also for this reason that we also get bad poetry.

To make a long story short, the prank letter was stolen in the sense it lurked and belong to individuals but was made communal, although in another sense it was snatched and taken in secret from the collective unconscious of this place. The failure to reckon with the prank as a symbolic structure, as a letter that will arrive at its destination no matter what, is the bad kind of stupidity. In this sense, the prankster is truly the one pranked, and this is precisely because he does not understand how or why the joke is on him. Given the apology I read yesterday, success remains his pursuit; that is why he is an imbecile, dumb to the fact that he has been used--just like the Poe's thief. Saying this, however, I don’t' want to be a Dupin either: I reckon, like you, my reading is facile.