Apr 8, 2010

Seventh Class - There is not only what there is: Beyond the University Discourse

Date: 20.04.10

Venue: Y3K

Host: Elizabeth Newman

Question: How can art be taught in the University? What follows from this situation, for art and artists?


In the seminar of 1968 called The Other Side of Psychoanalysis Lacan nominated four discourses that structure social relations and thereby produce particular effects: these discourses are that of the Master, the University, the Hysteric and the Analyst. In our current era it could be said that the discourse that dominates is the University Discourse, a discourse fuelled by the conjunction of science and capital to produce a certain kind of knowledge, and certain types of gadgets and technologies. Now that art education is firmly located within this universalizing discourse, where can we find room for singularity, the essential component of creativity and subjectivity? Speaking from the point of view of psychoanalysis, I want to look at the effect of the University discourse upon subjectivity, art education and art practice. Certainly a ‘free school’ is a response to the deadening and alienating effects of this discourse.


The reading I have selected is a paper ‘On Shame’ by Jacques-Alain Miller in which he analyses a comment made by Lacan in the last session of the Seminar, that ‘there is no longer any shame’. Lacan’s comments throughout the seminar - designed to produce a particular effect upon the students - are prescient in their forecasting of current conditions, conditions in which we are compelled to enjoy without limits and to renounce the dignity of our singularity in favour of shamelessness and obscenity.


Lizzy Newman


Reading

Jacques-Alain Miller ‘On Shame’, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, (ed.s) Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, Duke University Press, 2006.


Elizabeth Newman is an artist and psychoanalyst. After attending art school in the early 1980s, and making art throughout the 80s, she took a detour into psychoanalysis during the 1990s, training as an analyst and developing a psychoanalytic practice. Newman lives and works in Melbourne and is currently represented by Neon Parc.