We need leaders. But first, we need teachers, i.e. subjects supposed to know and teach their field. It’s time for theory professors to stop pretending they are in the clinic.<\/p>
If you ever take online courses in the world of theory, then you likely know teaching is rare<\/em>. Instead, we get people who are trying to refuse the role of \u201csubject supposed to know” (see below). <\/p> While this sounds good in theory, how it actually pans out is a big waste of time for anyone who actually does the readings. If you struggle with the hardest sections of the hardest works in theory, writing about your confusion, and then come hoping for clarification by way of seeing<\/p> then you will most likely be irritated to instead hear a bunch of people who did not do the reading \u201csaying the things that one says\u201d when they have come out the other side of an education system that normalizes perpetual imposter syndrome and social signaling rather than genuine, rigorous, and sustained critical dialogue or growth.<\/p> Instead of getting to hear someone who has read and re-read and re-re-read the text in an attempt to get a firm grasp of the subject-matter, you are likely to see that person turn things over to questions and community contributions \u2014 something usually done under the auspices of \u201cflipping the class room,\u201d trying to be \u201canti-authoritarian horizontalist rhizomes,\u201d and \u201crefuse\u201d the position of \u201csubject supposed to know.\u201d<\/p> The “subject supposed to know” is an effect of transference and is as such structurally impossible in the first person: he is by definition “supposed to know” by another subject. (Looking Awry, 1991, p. 62)<\/p> The \u201csubject supposed to know\u201d is a concept from Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the clinic, patients (analysands) unconsciously put the analyst in the position of the subject supposed to know the solution to their fundamental problems. \u017di\u017eek says it best in his short work How to Read Lacan<\/em>:<\/p> In a slightly different way, this is how the psychoanalyst as the ‘subject supposed to know’ functions in the treatment: once the patient is engaged in the treatment, he has the same absolute certainty that the analyst knows his secret (which only means that the patient is a priori ‘guilty’ of hiding a secret, that there is a secret meaning to be drawn from his acts). The analyst is not an empiricist, probing the patient with different hypotheses, searching for proofs; instead, he embodies the absolute certainty (which Lacan compares to the certainty of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum) of the patient’s unconscious desire. For Lacan, this strange transposition of what I already know in my unconscious onto the figure of the analyst is at the core of the phenomenon of transference in the treatment: I can only arrive at the unconscious meaning of my symptoms if I presuppose that the analyst already knows their meaning. The difference between Freud and Lacan is that while Freud focused on the psychic dynamics of transference as an intersubjective relationship (the patient transfers onto the figure of the analyst his feelings about his father, so that when he seems to talk about the analyst, he ‘really’ talks about his father), Lacan extrapolated from the empirical wealth of transferential phenomena the formal structure of the presupposed meaning.1<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote> This dynamic puts the patient in a state of infantile dependence. Whereas most therapists cultivate this for profit and esteem, the Lacanian analyst has the incredibly difficult job of foiling the analysand\u2019s desire, resisting transference, and refraining from giving authoritative advice or interpretations.<\/p> Lacanian analysts, if they are serious about the theoretical side of things, nevertheless psychoanalyze their patients, they just refrain from giving interpretations. The point is to lead the patient to their own interpretations. This is based in the idea that someone else pointing out your problems or seemingly obvious interpretations results in those problems re-locating. We are all too proficient at adapting to outside-critiques in a way that doesn\u2019t actually change anything from the inside-out.<\/p> This is all fine and good, and I hope we all get to pursue this kind of process in the clinic. But teachers are not analysts. This should be obvious, but for some reason the theorists who are most influenced by Lacan, or his heretical disciple Guattari, are dead set on \u201cteaching\u201d in a way that refuses to lecture.<\/p> Occupy Wall Street was a perfect example of how certain assumptions from the New Left are still alive and well today: a form of critique that sees verticality as the root of all oppression (in this framework \u201chierarchy\u201d becomes a stand-in signifier for \u201cbad\u201d), authority as equivalent to authoritarianism, and the signifiers \u201chorizontal\u201d and \u201cdemocratic\u201d as cure-alls or supreme goals.<\/p> Any American who was around for Bernie or BLM activism in the last seven years should know full well how those Occupy values live on to undermine movement energies. As the horizontalist actvist’s favorite educator Starhawk made clear in her book on horizontal organizing, such \u201cdirect-democracy\u201d forms of anti-vertical organizing can be very empowering and useful for short-term efforts<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p> But don\u2019t take that on faith from me, I will share with you the definitive quote. Before sharing, I really want to emphasize that in anarchist and permaculture\/eco-village organizing communities, Starhawk has been one of the most well-known educators in horizontalist political organizing for almost fifty years \u2014 though she got a huge boost during Occupy, and has taken a serious hit in the last few years thanks to how insularly-cannibalistic the idpol-intersectionalist-BLM Left has become. But more on that later.<\/p> What follows is not just Starhawk\u2019s principled and preferred approach to organizing, but it also sums up the assumptions and preferences of the New Left from America to France \u2014 this is, then, the practical bullet point version of what Deleuze and Guattari are getting at when they say at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, \u201cWe are tired of trees.\u201d<\/p> Collaborative is the term I\u2019ve chosen to describe groups that are based on shared power and the inherent worth and value of each member. Brafman and Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, characterize what they call starfish groups as very amorphous and fluid. Because power and knowledge are distributed, individual units quickly respond to a multitude of internal and external forces \u2014 they are constantly spreading, growing, shrinking, mutating, dying off and reemerging. This quality makes them very flexible.2<\/p>\n\n How do I define a collaborative group? It\u2019s a group that has most if not all of the following characteristics:<\/p>\n\n The crucial point, for anyone who cares about long-term, wide-scale, and fundamental forms of transformation capable of counter-acting the political and economic structures that produce and subtend mainstream culture, is obviously the last one: \u201c[Collaborative, rhizomatic, horizontalist groups, circles, and networks are] often ephemeral, for better or worse.\u201d<\/p> Whereas Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze and Guattari saw the liberation of desire and general release of all that had hitherto been repressed as a genuine opportunity for overcoming capital, Capital had no problem at all adapting.<\/p> Activists and hippies famously burnt out and then opted back in for \u201cthe long march through the institutions,\u201d filling the ranks of what Barbara Ehrenreich documented and theorized as the emerging “professional managerial class” (PMC).3<\/a> It turned out that creative sublimation and personal forms of counter-cultural transgression were hyper-amenable to the development of consumer capitalism. In this context, \u201cradical activism\u201d became a phase one goes through as a rite of passage to adult progressive careerism.<\/p> As Benedict Cryptofash recently dragged out in delightful detail, there are still rosy eyed \u201cradical\u201d progressives in academia touting the personal transformations spurred on by Occupy.4<\/a> Cryptofash’s case in point is Gabriel Winant, a self-congratulatory history professor at the University of Chicago whose account of Occupy is particularly revealing:<\/p> Whereas others looking back on the past decade would be hard-pressed to discern how Occupy did anything to disrupt the capitalist development it protested, Winant defines the success of Occupy in terms of the formative influence its shared experience had on a budding generation of \u201cideological\u201d workers in academia and other cultural fields. Occupy\u2019s inability to transform the objective society is not important because, for Winant, it did something more profound: it changed the subjectivities of the important people whose experiences within Occupy would inform their professional roles in cultural institutions. Indeed, the participants \u201cwould change not the state but themselves, and then carry that change with them elsewhere.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote> “Ephemeral” forms of organizing is especially convenient<\/em> if all one is going for is short-term feelings of personal transformation and bragging rights to put on one’s virtual resume or C.V., especially if that is to be done as fast as possible. While it is hard to imagine many people consciously choosing to “accelerate” a process that needs slow deliberation and time to develop, much less doing so for cynical reasons such as building their C.V., it is even harder to imagine that so many would go this route if it was inconvenient in the short-term. <\/p> \u201cEphemeral\u201d means passing out of existence almost as fast as it came in, relative to the human timeframe. A good example of ephemeral organizing: Think CHAZ, the anarchist mutual aid \u201csociety\u201d that popped up for a couple of months during the height of the 2020 George Floyd protests in Seattle\u2014before people died and they realized they wanted cops and ambulances after all. Christopher F. Rufo wrote about one of the most telling moments from that series of events:<\/p> While these kinds of pseudo symbolic theatrics are transformative for the individuals who will go around talking about how they \u201cdid something\u201d for the rest of their lives, nothing really ever changes. As in activism, so in academia, where \u201caccelerating everything\u201d is seen as a prime objective \u2014 to the point of throwing out the idea of any canon at all, saying reading and rationality is white, or that we must graduate students faster so they can go do activism.<\/p> A perfect example of this is when Cornel West went on the news to talk about his article in defense<\/a> of \u201cWestern classics.\u201d6<\/a> He made the basic and undeniable point that there is inherent value to having a basis in the history of ideas, and with that, studying \u201cWestern\u201d classics.<\/p>The Subject Supposed to Know<\/h1>
A specter is haunting radical class rooms: The specter of The 1960s New Left.<\/h1>
On June 10, with the goal of building consensus and designating leadership for the movement, protesters organized the first CHAZ People\u2019s Assembly. After setting up a stage and PA system, one of the initial speakers raised the question of legitimate authority, asking the audience: \u201cWhat\u2019s the structure, how are we going to achieve some sort of communal hierarchy that we all feel comfortable with?\u201d The audience booed and insisted that the movement should remain \u201chorizontal\u201d and leaderless. At the end of the People\u2019s Assembly, racial-justice activist Julie Chang Shulman conceded that no leadership had been established but that the group had settled on the ideological principles of an \u201cabolitionist framework\u201d and \u201ccommitment to solidarity and accountability to Black and Indigenous communities.\u201d5<\/a><\/pre>