The Anxiety of Educators
August 24, 2024
Note: what follows is a transcript of a talk given from some notes to faculty in the Comparative Humanities program at Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan, on May 30th, 2024. This transcript was slightly modified on August 24th for Sublation Magazine.
A question posed on December 22nd, 1978, from Jacques Lacan: “how does one go about teaching what cannot be taught?” This question occurred approximately forty-one years after Sigmund Freud’s popular statement about the three impossible professions of psychoanalysis, governing, and educating. In his 1937 essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud wrote that “it almost seems as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure in advance of achieving unsatisfying results.” We might have been led to conclude that analysis remains in common with the other two had it not been for Freud’s qualification that “it almost seems as if …” which is not equivalent to “it is true that …” since the former invokes a semblance of commonality rather than an equivalence. In fact, the statement actually shows how far removed analysis was thought to be from governing and educating.
In that same essay Freud portrayed the analyst at times almost as if he were a teacher. He wrote that “it is reasonable to expect an analyst, as part of his qualifications […] that in certain analytic situations he can act as a model for this patient and in others as a teacher.” He didn’t indicate that the analyst would engage in academic mimicry but that his teaching would emerge from within “certain analytic situations.” A suitable reformulation of the prior question about what cannot be taught might therefore be: “what is possible of teaching with respect to psychoanalytic experience?” This is not only a suitable reformulation of the question, it is also a properly psychoanalytic one because it does not eschew the impossibilities foundational to its experience. In any case, I see something like a hopefulness in this question from Lacan, even though it’s a question that he asked as he approached the last few years of his life. There is a hopefulness in a question of the possibility of thinking beyond the insularity of the clinical setting.
He was not content to remain at the limit of what doesn’t work or make sense. He asked a question concerning possibility. In fact, I discovered only recently that Lacan did not shy away from deploying this word “possible” throughout his teaching, and not only to explore Aristoteleion or ancient Greek philosophy. He took an interest in the philosophical and functional value of possibility while he was also developing his own psychoanalytic school. It was the mid-1960s, while he was leading his 11th seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. And in 1964, Lacan’s “Founding Act,” a short text which you can easily find online, inaugurated his school with the following statement: “I hereby found, as alone as I ever have been in my relation to the psychoanalytic cause, the Ecole Française de Psychanalyse …” In 1967 he shifted from this lonely act, this promise of a possibility, toward a proposition made within a society. It was a proposition to establish a psychoanalytic device known as the “pass.” It is in this later document that he used the word “possible.”
From 1964 to 1967. From the lonely founding act to its social realization, there was the emergence of a possibility. He used the word favorably when referring to this “pass” because he believed that he discovered an instrument for the transmission of psychoanalytic teaching that remained as close as possible to the “cutting edge of psychoanalytic experience.” I’ll quote a few words from his proposition:
“The psychoanalyst derives his authorization only from himself. This principle is inscribed in the original texts of the School and is decisive for its position. This does not exclude the possibility that the School provides a guarantee that an analyst has come out of its training. The School may do this on its own initiative.”
It is almost as if this statement forms a bridge from psychoanalytic experience to its necessary realization and defense within a social group. Of course, this hasn’t stopped most analysts from gaining lessons from other institutes, or even from unsubscribing entirely from any of them to become a bit like Diogenes; unhinged, suspended within insular satisfaction and indifferent to the social order. Possibility is on the side of the social order. This, precisely, is a point that I’ve only discovered now, after a period of wandering around in this vocabulary. Lacan added, within “l’Etourdit:” “there is no universal that does not reduce itself to the possible.”
The word “possible” or “possibility” occurs multiple times within the proposition from Lacan, but not at all within his founding act. Each time the word was invoked it was embedded within overarching statements concerned with the necessity of safeguarding the impossible profession of psychoanalysis. This, precisely, is the function of the school and the product of its teaching. I take as my orientation that Lacan was actively constructing the possibilities necessary for each one to face up to the contingent consequences of their own psychoanalytic experience. Lacan’s preference for the possible perhaps even led him to state that the goal of psychoanalysis was never to cure or educate but to produce psychoanalysts. In fact, in my estimation, psychoanalysis is more interested in what cannot be cured — that which is impossible to cure — rather than what can be cured.
The psychoanalyst is one who inhabits a social bond known as the analyst’s discourse. It is a discourse that is neither universal nor particular, but for each one, in the singular. I will return to some of this momentarily, but for now I simply want to summarize what I’ve said a moment ago: the psychoanalytic device known as the pass made it possible for each one to transmit something of their psychoanalytic experience to a society. And then there is the real miracle: that a society could possibly recognize it. There is another passage in the Lacanian orientation, in fact there are many, which caught my eye recently while scribbling some notes for today. It is from a text by Jacques-Alain Miller titled “Psychoanalysis in Close Touch with the Social:”
“[So much] would have been impossible if we still had as our reference the fossilized concept of the setting, understood only as the consulting room of the practitioner exercising in a private practice. Psychoanalysis does not depend on the setting, but on the discourse, that is, on the installation of the symbolic coordinates by someone who is an analyst, and whose quality as an analyst does not depend on the location of his consulting room, nor the nature of his clients, but rather on the experience he is engaged in. […] There is an analytic place possible in institutions.”
So, on the one hand, there is the lonely psychoanalytic experience, and, on the other hand, there is the social bond, or what Lacan called discourse. Lacan said it like this: “discourse is what constitutes a social bond.” The two, experience and social bond, converge as a possibility within the analyst’s discourse. The analyst is situated within a discourse, not a clinic or any other setting. This means that there is no reason to reject the possibility of analysts within the university. However, we would not expect them to offer therapy aimed at establishing the well-being of the student or the institution, nor would he transmit knowledge about psychoanalysis. He would be aimed at making spoken interventions. I have found that many people are surprised to learn that psychoanalysis is not a discourse of silence and listening but of effective interpretation oriented by the question of subjectivity. The analyst speaks through subjective effects. Yet, to be clear, there are obstacles for this within the university that make it impossible for us to conduct our work as analysts.
Lacan spoke boldly about the antipathy of university and analytic discourses. However, he also added, late in his teaching, that the university discourse can refresh its teaching by coming up against its own impossibility. Actually, this statement remains a bit of an enigma for me. It’s not as clear as it seems. Firstly, it is unclear if this is a critique, or if it is an attitude of possibility. The latter is certainly possible since he said of it at precisely the moment that his psychoanalytic teaching was entering into the university, quite literally. He even said that he was offering a “positive report,” which would allow the “experiment to continue,” namely the possibility of psychoanalysis in the university. But with the proviso: “so long as it has the freedom to do so, if ever it gets restricted, then out of the university!” Secondly, it is a puzzle for me because Lacan’s statement about ‘university discourse rubbing up against the impossible’ seems to presume that it is a discourse that is itself not reducible to impossibility.
In fact, these are two different points of departure. On the one hand, ‘university discourse’ confronts impossibility, and, on the other hand, ‘university discourse’ is itself ‘impossible.’ What is ‘impossibility?’ Lacan defined it in various ways, but we would be safe to define it as what doesn’t make sense or work. Yet, it persists, perhaps even repeats. In this conception, university discourse interrogates impossibility only to return itself to a prior consistency of knowledge, refreshed. It explains why so many dissertations used to accumulate in the appropriately named “stacks” of university libraries, accumulating dust. It’s not quite like that anymore since paper has given way to bits of energy that travel at the speed of light. Moreover, it’s not quite like that anymore because dissertations are also now out plowing the fields, vibrating woofers, or providing verbage for freshly minted policy documents.
*
It’s always possible that we are all mad.
It would be helpful to define the scope of madness as delusion. Lacan put it this way: “we are all mad, that is, delusional.” According to Miller, with this statement, which stands isolated within all of Lacan’s teaching, he was trying to dignify madness. The university has perhaps not aligned itself with this orientation though there are corners where depathologization and neurodiversity have taken hold. It’s not that. Lacan’s statement generalized madness within the domain of the social bond. Truthfully, we enjoy our meanings, and often so much that we do so quite stubbornly. [Some giggling came from the back of the room]. The fact that we can enjoy them in ways that are at odds with others can seem a bit funny to us, and, at other times, irritating. On the one hand, some of my communist friends are intent on instituting … what? Universal madness. There are others who would rather withdraw into distinctive groups, segregating from others into their caves of madness. I remember a song from the 1990s, the lyrics were, “Let’s all share a dream under the communist moon.” The problem is that some of us influenced by the dissolution of grand theory haven’t made it any further since we prefer that only some share the dream.
The “some” designates the madness of fraternity, which we can even find today in those spaces that I am tempted to call “encampusments.” In fact, an article published yesterday said it plainly: “are the encampments places of learning?” It’s always possible that we are all mad, except that some of us are equally so. I note with interest that Lacan’s question concerned how “one” can teach, in the singular. It was a teaching that would neither be within the universal nor its complement, the particular. It’s a singular teaching. I’ll leave this topic in suspense for now, without at all rejecting the possibility that the classroom be thought of in the singular; this would require that we absolve ourselves of this impossible common-sense sociology which isolates ‘individual’ and ‘social group.’ It would also allow us to move beyond the contemporary sociologists, especially Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens who have always attempted to overcome the absurd opposition of ‘individual’ and ‘society.’ This has only led them to have the individual absorbed by the environment, each in their own way, through practice or habitus.
What Lacan said was as follows: “[Freud] thought that all is but a dream and that everyone is mad, that is, delusional. This is indeed what the very first step in the direction of teaching demonstrates.” It is clear that Freud’s teaching tended toward the generalization of madness. I’ll provide you with an abridged proof by demarcating a period spanning approximately forty-one years, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Keep in mind that this was the text that introduced the madness of dreaming, a possibility that occurs only when the defenses are lowered and satisfactions heightened. In other words, dreams concern the meaningful satisfactions elaborated by the dream-work within the sleeping state. It even brought Freud to claim that “the madman is the dreamer, awake.” This would be the compass that Freud follows for the next several decades.
For the remainder of his work he was really asking: “to what extent are waking satisfactions permitted without having to institute fresh repressive measures?” It is a question concerning the transposition of dream madness into the domain of waking life. In other words, it is about waking satisfactions. Next, Freud began to analyze symptoms, which he found to be satisfactions passing through the body during the waking state, without repression. In particular, this definition emerges within his 1926 essay “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.” During each phase of his teaching he was observing the space where madness confronts an impossible obstacle. In the classic dream-work, it was the so-called “navel of the dream,” which is an absolute obstacle to any interpretation. During the later period, it was the elaboration of a response to Otto Rank’s theory of “Birth Trauma,” which ruptures our memory system. It was also there in his analysis of symptoms, where the symptom absolutely resists interpretation. During each iteration of his teaching, he maintained the possibility of constantly examining these ‘holes.’
What happened next? He explored the satisfactions of groups, particularly in his theories of sublimation, jokes, and creative writing. We cannot claim that Freud was a Victorian thinker of repressive sexuality because so much of his work demonstrates that he was a prophet of the ‘sex positive’ society. The last period of Freud’s teaching arrives into a world structured by historical mythologies that he would interpret casually, as if they were elements within a waking dream. Freud used the same tools as the dream-work to decipher these mythological meanings. It shows us the full measure of his interest in the meaningful satisfactions of waking life. He attempted to go as far as possible in that direction. During waking life, our lowered defenses and heightened satisfactions can give rise to a madness, which can also become the source of our discontents in culture. This is no less true of his analysis of social groups in 1921, within his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. For example, Freud reasoned that individuals in the group are animated by satisfaction, or what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence:” “a social group shows us [that individuals can suddenly have] weaknesses of intellectual ability, a lack of emotional restraint, an incapacity for moderation and delay, an inclination to exceed every limit …,” and so on.
I wouldn’t claim that Lacan followed a different path during his forty-so years of teaching between the 1940s and 1980s. For example, Lacan’s earlier formulations led him toward his ‘unconscious-structured-like-a-language’ which promoted classical interpretive techniques on the part of the analyst. Next, he foregrounded the symptom as a site of waking satisfaction while emphasizing its social utility. Finally, during the last years, he turned toward ‘myth,’ a word which suddenly populated his discourse alongside that other word, a much better one, which I’ve now just mentioned: “discourse.” The word myth is like a key for me. It allows me to unlock discourse as ‘madness,’ except that, unlike the analytic discourse, each believes that it is the truth. Moreover, each presents itself as the ‘norm,’ which makes madness ‘norm-ill.’
Lacan didn’t use the word “myth” synonymously with “mytheme,” since his objective wasn’t anymore the “unconscious-structured-like-a-language,” a linguistic substratum of the world. Perhaps this was the position of Roland Barthes, who erroneously believed that myth was simply a type of “language robbery.” Barthes held firm, like Chomsky and others tried to do for a while, to language as a universal or common structure. Personally, I’m not at all inclined to believe that myth involves any theft whatsoever. On the contrary, it seems to reveal the passageway through which one could believe, that is the possibility (or not) of being duped by an arbitrary pairing of satisfaction with meaning. Nothing of our satisfaction is ever truly robbed. I found a fascinating passage from Lacan’s early teaching, from his Ecrits, written in 1946: “madness is experienced entirely within the register of meaning.” It is like a lifelong compass for Lacan. It could be read alongside a statement made in his last period: “the unconscious is precisely the hypothesis that we do not dream only when we are asleep.”
*
I return to his School.
The school is not without its version of the “course” or the “semester.” It is also not without its mode of social organization. It is a social bond whose relationship to knowledge is like a whirlwind, one with a constant sabotaging of various group effects. If I were to provide a pedagogical and political axiom for the impossible it would be this: neither hierarchy nor fraternity! It’s my anarchist pedagogy, but only because it’s first of all psychoanalytic. For each theme of study, a singular invention could be recognized, or not, by the institution; recognized not for its utility or meaning, but for its desire to pursue the contours of this impossible endeavor toward which one’s compass has been set. Moreover, I admire a classroom no longer obliged to follow the norm-illization time; one no longer inclined to iron-out the wrinkle of any logical unfolding of a teaching which unfolds according to its own logical time. There is a moment of understanding, … but I’m convinced that it doesn’t occur within the classroom. It occurs after a moment of impact, a moment which the normal model cannot do anything but sabotage.
Why couldn’t the time of the classroom be punctuated by an impact when it is most likely to resonate? For each interval of time, a punctuation at the moment of resonance, when a satisfaction and meaning no longer form a couple, so that a new possibility can be carried outside into the field of knowledge. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to install the provisions necessary for a moment of impact, scandalous as it would be for the university discourse and all that is now common to the classroom and its function within wider society. Its effect would nonetheless be undeniable. It requires a few teachers, resolute in their desire, and whose training, overflowing from an experience within the impossible labyrinths of thought, continuously push them to make a mess of things. Afterall, what is the aim of teaching? Perhaps it has nothing to do with the well-being of students or wider society, nor with the transmission of knowledge or skills — unfortunately also referred to as ‘know-how’ — or even with advancing the interests of an ‘it works.’
That is all possible. But it seems to me that our profession could be better served by the installation of the very function which we are forced to constantly put into question: the aim of teaching. Perhaps psychoanalysis remains a possible space of refuge against the pressures that now threaten any possible aim of teaching within the university. Lacan’s teaching provides an orientation, but he refused to give it to us in the form of a pill. It remains forever unfinished, raw, and it often introduces large margins of misunderstanding. He changed his position frequently, even during the same session; resituating himself with respect to what he thought he knew. In doing so, he reinvigorated his field and kept knowledge in movement, maintaining the place from which this movement is possible: an impossible hole.
This practice led him toward moments of clarity. Unfortunately, some of these have now become Lacanian aphorisms now prevalent among internet bedroom philosophers, many of which have settled into well-worn political, pedagogical, and philosophical treatises. I will summarize all of this with the following simple statement: Lacan’s teaching was of boundless possibility. He described his own teaching in the following way: “what I trace in front of you are the very tracks around which I ask questions of myself, vaguely; my thoughts wander before things eventually become clear.” In other words, you will not find a place where meaning settles in Lacan’s teaching in relation to other areas of his teaching. It doesn’t mean that his teaching doesn’t hold itself together, because it does, inasmuch as it was always oriented, like Freud’s, by his psychoanalytic compass.
There is life pulsating in every statement. During each moment, he was animated by a question aimed at his own impossible profession. He wasn’t moved by the cult of ‘whatever works,’ like the pragmatists who gain ground every day within the university; nor was he propelled by the discourses of schoolmasters intent on conveying prefabricated knowledge as if through the radio transmitter.
It was during the uprisings of the late 1960s in France that he truly became a sociologist. His founding act established the basis. But first of all he needed to recognize himself as excluded from the university discourse which preceded him. It was easy because his own dedication to teaching led him to become excommunicated from that discourse, from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). To be very clear, he was excommunicated from that society because of a teaching that led him to take seriously what I’ve been calling the ‘moment of impact,’ or what is more commonly referred to as the ‘variable length session.’
The IPA remained convinced that the proper path was to separate the training of teachers from the experience promoted by teaching, that is, the experience of psychoanalysis. The way they accomplished it was to sustain an initiatory society upheld by gatekeepers who standardized the practice by governing the internal knowledge of the field. On the other hand, Lacan was focused, even during his seminars, on the problem of the rise of comrades or fraternities. The former was a social bond based upon the principle of initiation within a social bond while the latter was based upon segregation between social bonds. His school offered a model of social organization that was neither hierarchical nor horizontal, but a whirlwind. This is how Lacan refreshed the Freudian field. And he wasn’t afraid to pull the rug out from the entire thing to start again from nothing if it was not as close as possible to the cutting edge of psychoanalytic experience.
By the way, that’s exactly what he did in the 1980s when his students began to equate the school with Lacan. He announced the dissolution of his school. One of his prized colleagues said to him, which I paraphrase: “But Lacan, the school, it’s you.” She could have also said that it was a symptom of Lacan. I paraphrase his response: “there’s one problem with that. It is I who dissolves this school.” To the surprise of everyone, then, he set them free again to face up to their own psychoanalytic desire, to refresh and re-energize the school. A pile of people turned to Lacan, to follow him, and he insisted that he would never make a “whole” out of them. But there are many ways to pull the rug. Hence, a modest step forward: return to foundations and pull the rug. I hesitate to mention it, but even Jacques Derrida tried to show us that this is always possible, in any discourse. Those texts and traditions that now inspire the comrades around the world are based upon yesterday’s theories, which have become ossified, taken-for-granted, and consistent with the environment.
We already know very well what Marx meant by commodity fetishism and alienation. We are perfectly attuned to Giyatri Spivak’s theory on the subaltern. It’s about time that we as teachers stop knowing it so well. Miller said of Lacan that he was “always reformulating, remobilizing, and he never said ‘it’s ready’ about his thinking at any point.” Why couldn’t our classroom produce a whirlwind of meaning? I have a question: “where is ‘meaning,’ from the perspective of the contemporary classroom?” I’ll ask it another way: “what is the function of the classroom today, if any, in relation to the world which surrounds it?” Does the classroom consist with the ‘world,’ as in the topology of a sphere? Or, could the classroom be conceived as a ‘hole’ in the world, presenting us with a toric world that spins around? These are questions that Marshall McLuhan was increasingly led toward during the later part of his life.
He didn’t exactly follow the path of topology, but he said in the 1970s that “we live in a new environment in which all of the answers are outside of the school-room. […] If the answers are outside, why not put the questions inside? And why don’t we set up a dialogue between outside and inside?” Once again, it’s a topological question. McLuhan could not have conceived of a ‘hole,’ since, for him, it was always covered by the question mark. I’ve even gone looking for ‘holes’ in McLuhan’s thinking and all I could find were missing concepts of the ‘hole,’ which shows the madness of McLuhan’s scholarship. He was interested in the difference of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ according to the vantage-point of teachers and he saw the outside world as mad, but could not recognize the madness of what’s also inside. It’s at this point that my ideas are going to get a bit confused, so I’ll ask for your forgiveness as I try to pursue them until the end today.
Today it is the scientific discourse, which is what Lacan called it, that marches straight into the classroom. It’s difficult because the university discourse was often thought as a discourse of possibility rubbing up against impossibilities. The scientific discourse is, on the other hand, a discourse of impossibility, though it certainly has its insights, such as formulae and schemata. The classroom is a space increasingly occupied by the strange convergence of capitalism, science, and pragmatics. Here, the impossible rubs up against discourse. You likely already know that pragmatism was born in the United States, and that it introduced a disruption into epistemologies of truth by boldly claiming that one should evaluate a truth according to its effects or consequences. The problem with the pragmatic classroom is that it increasingly topologizes a sphere, suturing the ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ In such cases, we lose ourselves as subjects into the environment since the interior and exterior become continuous, without boundary.
As the university goes marching outside to the civil society partners, toward the promotion of engaged citizenry, and so on, those outside elements also come marching inside. And we lose the space from which any subjective question could have ever been sustained. In other words, instead of brushing up against impossibilities, the discourse becomes devoured by them. What’s more is that students no longer seem to bring questions with them into the classroom. It’s not nostalgia speaking today, but I do bring a prophecy: the rapid disappearance of the question within the classroom. A question is only possible from the standpoint of subjective desire, which means that something of satisfaction had to go missing in order for the question to be raised. Nothing was stolen here. This is the precondition for any interrogation of masters, whether they be from the school, political establishment, or, why not add, colonial order. This new environment, which seems to me to be impossible, points toward exactly what it was that Lacan foresaw as the push of scientific discourse. He said that it would cause a “relaxation of the university discourse.”
Perhaps what is relaxed is the question. If students already know everything then the professor is no longer the one who is supposed to know. This is paradoxically the triumph of university discourse since it has realized the very impossibility through which it has always been animated, but it has also, consequently, brought students to the point of certainty. Moreover, it marks an intensity and qualitative shift in our contemporary discontents. It is the student who is now an expert of ‘lived experience.’ And, what’s more, the new pedagogies shift students to ‘this’ or ‘that’ place on the discouragingly named ‘field trips’ to special regions, monuments, museums, or communities. Those places are also brought inside of the classroom, into our appropriately named ‘d-labs’ and ‘playgrounds.’ I encourage you to read last week’s New York Times where an article boasted that museums are now shifting inside of university campuses in America, seeking refuge.
Learning through ‘doing’ and ‘service,’ as in maker-spaces, internships, and design thinking has now gone mainstream; educational platforms promote the free reign of insular satisfaction, worlds of insular meaning where each can say whatever they say (I wouldn’t say what they desire to say, since today’s world is more Buddhist than we are willing to admit) and be whatever they claim to be. It is the merging of satisfaction with meaning, permitted within the classroom without any requirement of fresh repressive measures. Incidentally, the buzz on social media for the last two weeks concerns an exchange between Giyatri Spivak and a student at the Delhi university, JNU. Spivak insisted on a common domain of satisfaction and maining, one that would be for all, or universal. Here, once again, we see the confrontation of the time between the universality of discourse and its impossibility.
*
Okay.
I want to move toward some concluding thoughts, which are not at all formulated or reasonably argued. I hope that I’ve shown you some explanation for the claim that I have been sustaining for many years, namely that we now dream outside of ourselves. I was surprised to learn just yesterday that Marshall McLuhan already made this claim, which for the last seven years I had thought was my own. Except, I would add, knowledge constitutes our environment, surrounding us in a world that is spherical, by which I mean without bounds. We swim in the boundarylessness of our environment. Recently, an expert on artificial intelligence asked his audience the following question: “how many of you actually make use of artificial intelligence on a daily basis?” A few hands were raised. It was a common-sense question aimed at a supposedly common-sensical audience. By the way, the question already limited the scope of the answer. It presumed in advance that we are separated from our media, and that media is not at all constitutive of the environment.
Perhaps what we require is a refresher on media theory. How can we explore the consequences of the claim that artificial intelligence is neither gadget nor tool, but environment? In other words, how can we do away with this stubborn thesis concerning the ‘utility’ of media? McLuhan famously said that we shape our tools and our tools go on to shape us. It offers a perspectival shift from media as utility toward media as determinative structure. A place from which to nonetheless begin might be the recent anxiety of educators. It is an emerging anxiety. I cannot hear anything but the anxiety of educators ever since the emergence of artificial intelligence and the chatbot. It signals something impossible about our profession. It is an anxiety that would be better approached by admitting the question that it forces us to ask: what are the aims of education? This anxiety also keeps slipping toward anger, which is an emotion we expect when the little pegs don’t fit into the little holes: students are plagiarizing, constantly cheating, and so on. That has the convenience of absolving us of our question, and it provides us with the advantage of allowing us to return to the pedagogy of paper.
It emerged long after the anxiety of scientists, which Lacan forewarned in the 1970s. It is akin to the anxiety of any impossible profession. I quote Lacan: “there is something Freud didn’t talk about because it was taboo for him, namely the scientist’s position. It too is an impossible profession, but science doesn’t yet have the slightest inkling that it is, which is lucky for science. Scientists are only now beginning to have anxiety attacks.” It is an anxiety that signals something impossible, outside of discourse, which doesn’t mean that it’s not effective since it has obviously produced mutations in the university discourse. Moreover, it has done so through its gadgets, even those which allow us to move from science to fiction, as in the artificial intelligence chatbot.
This shift from the university as possible toward its impossibility brings panic. Are innovations in the classroom happening faster than we can keep up with them? I quote Andrew McLuhan who said recently that “innovation moves at the speed of light, but regulation at the speed of paper.” There is one solution which the classroom has as its advantage, so long as it keeps at least one foot in the world of paper, and it serves as a temporary plug in the innovation-machine that threatens the classroom: it is the body. The body is not much different from a sheet of paper, and this is a fact that I can prove simply by showing you some of my tattoos. But the hologram of the body, which was accelerated by the television — our first out-of-body experience — removes the possibility for teaching. The body which sits in my zoom classroom, with thoughtful furrowed brows, thinking, on loop every fifteen minutes, has forfeited the possibility for thought. It is why the body is a precondition for possibility and for teaching. This is the lesson that I am taught by the experience of those patients and new social movements who go to great lengths to believe in their body, no matter what the stakes. They teach me about the impossible because they keep me on my toes, always forcing me to gather the courage to rise up and face this cold new environment.
I’ll stop at these unfinished thoughts since they might perhaps orient me toward a third possible moment in the question of contemporary education.
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