Style as a Psychoanalytic Concept
There is a familiarity about the term style in our literature and in our discussions. It’s a signifier which is very widely used in a seemingly everyday way by Lacan and by Jacques-Alain Miller, and we talk about one another’s style as an analyst, often regarding a way of working with one’s symptom, sinthome, or a style of jouissance. The question of style as a distinct psychoanalytical concept, less obvious than its everyday sense, was highlighted to me through a paragraph of Jacques-Alain Miller’s course Le banquet des analystes (teaching in the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8, lesson of 24/1/1990):
“So transference of work means that it is not enough to simply transfer the results. It's even why Lacan could say that what he could transmit above all was a style. We mustn't explain this in terms of how he dressed, in terms of mimicry. To say, when it's a question of transmitting, that it's called a style, is the same thing as saying that it's a question of transference of work. It is, if you like, about transferring a style of work. We've seen some psychoanalysis stylists! We were all a bit like that: doing Lacan. But transferring a style is the same thing as saying that one doesn't transfer contents, themes, formulas. In this sense, to transfer a style is the same thing as to transfer the work, to transfer the work itself. I've been told quite often, among colleagues, sometimes with an air of pity: oh yes, you know how to put people to work! As if I were some kind of foreman. But I've never done that as a foreman. I've done it more by an induction effect.”
This course of 1989-90 is set against struggles of the School of the question of how to make use of Lacan when Lacan is not there, after ten years of his absence. And so style here is what cannot be mimiced, and which cannot be immitated by means of the passing on of contents, themes, and formulas (albeit that we are not without them). And style is important because it is the mode of transference of work, and transference of work, as a model of transmission, induction, is the function of the School - so says Miller in this course.
So we have style set up here not as an everyday expression, but as a very particular concept. We find in the same lesson numerous references to Lacan’s writing Psychoanalysis and its Teaching (in his Écrits), which ends with a striking reference to style:
“A return to Freud, which provides the material for a teaching worthy of the name, can only be produced by the pathway by which the most hidden truth manifests itself in the revolutions of culture. This pathway is the only training that I can claim to transmit to those who follow me. It is called: a style.”
In the preceding paragraphs Lacan had said that the post Freudians had left Freud quite clear and free from molestation to be found afresh by him, and we can suppose that Lacan believes that they have not grasped the style of Freud, in this particular sense, by which “hidden truth manifests itself in the revolutions of culture”. There is a question of the new here through the reference to revolution which goes with Miller’s negative definition of style as related to the inimitable - it’s not a matter of doing as the father did, and in his name (the theme of the father and Name-of-the-Father is taken up at several points in Le banquet des analystes, notably from the 6th to 9th lessons, regarding Freud's and Lacan's legacy).
A further reference to style comes in Lacan’s Overture to this Collection opening his Écrits, which is an examination of Buffon’s famous quote “Style is the man himself”. A reading of this Overture is aided by Judith Miller’s 1991 essay, Style is the Man Himself (in Lacan and the Subject of Language, Routledge 1991).
Buffon offers this aphorism in a speech of acceptance of his place at the Académie Français in which he praised style as the mark by which accoding to Buffon, man is what man most essentially is - individuated. For Buffon it is not by the contents of what he says that a man makes his mark, since anyone may invent or discover without finding greatness, but rather in the style by which he makes that knowledge seem homogeneous and transmissible. But furthermore, for Buffon the Académie is a place where those with style may find its recognition among others with style, and this group finds its bearings, its guarantee, under the gaze of their plus one, the King, Louis XV, whose authority over the Académie existed because it was accepted by those who use it as a guarantee (1753, the time of this speech the authority of the king had been under some dispute in parliament, and so we can say that his authority was not to be taken for granted). There is no tranference of work for Buffon, but the seemingly unique mark of each unique stylist, each a man by virtue of the singularity of his style, and distinct from a common law.
Lacan’s first alteration of Buffon’s quote is that Style is the man to whom one speaks which recognises that the sender always receives his message in an inverted form, and as such that style submits to a common law, “Man is no longer the author of his difference, he is the subject of the law of language; it is in the discourse of the Other with a capital O that he finds that by which he exists.” (JAM, Style is the Man Himself) If style is not imitable, it is not by that accord the mark of a false individuation, an indivituation at the level of the subject.
Lacan’s second alteration of Buffon’s account is to say:
“It is the object that (cor)responds to the question about style that I am raising right at the outset. In the place man marked for Buffon, I call for the falling away [chute] of this object, which is revealing due to the fact that the fall isolates this object, both as the cause of desire in which the subject disappears and as sustaining the subject between truth and knowledge. With this itinerary, of which these writings are the milestones, and this style, which the audience to whom they were addressed required, I want to lead the reader to a consequence in which he must pay the price with elbow grease.” (Écrits, p.4-5)
So style responds to the question of the object a through the object falling away, which isolates the object as cause of desire in which the subject disappears, and which sustains the subject between truth and knowledge.
We could consider the object voice, which in a sense is what is present of the voice when meaning, or when what is said, is removed (elsewhere in the Analysts’ Banquet, Miller says that petit a is “exactly that which of jouissance is not equivalent to knowledge) - we see this sometimes in those who may even be well spoken, who speak in order not to say - the presence (of the absence) of the object voice can be rendered emphatic in preventing such saying in favour of the passion for ignorance. And on the contrary, saying well (bien dire) as a mark of the work of psychoanalysis, and a mark of an analyst, could be understood as relating to the fall and isolation of the object voice.
But this is not the object at stake in the example of Buffon which is highlighted by Lacan - rather it is the gaze of the plus one of the King. This is quite to the point with regard to Miller’s seminar, which we could say addressed in the School the problem of the gaze of Lacan, the presence of which persisted all the more in his absence. We may say that with the fall and isolation of the gaze of the King, or of Lacan, there is perhaps an effect of what might be called a seeing well, and a loss of the guarantee both of the group and of the syle of its members. By this fall of the guarantee each is put to work, must pay the price with elbow grease, to find their way without the plus one acting as a guarantee of their place in the social bond of the group. We may associate this with the barring of the Other, as in S of barred A. It necessitates innovation since the Other cannot be leaned on, and it can only function one by one.
This conception of style, in contrast to Buffon’s style in the register of the subject, is one that functions at the level of the parlêtre, the speaking being - and this brings us back to the style of the sinthome, of the style of jouissance. (Talking at the Dublin Day event of the NLS online on 17th January 2021, Marie-Helene Brousse noted that “…la psychanalyse n’a rien à voir avec tous ces bavardages du sujet. Le singulier, ce n’est pas le sujet, c’est l’être parlant.” - “…psychoanalysis has nothing to do with all this chatter on the subject. The singular is not the subject, it is the speaking being.”)
Alasdair Duncan
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