The School of decided workers: what kind of work?

I wrote this paper some time before the recent crisis of the pass in the ECF discussed here, and the College of the Pass which followed, and before the publication of the collection of Jacques-Alain Miller's book of presentations on the Pass which contains a presentation made a little after his course of Le Banquet des Analystes, which discusses that Lacan had proposed a pass of entry to the School - that is to say that in addition to the entrant of the School being a decided worker, they may enter in accordance with their place, their work, in analysis. It is understood that this proposal was discussed but not agreed upon during the College of the Pass. In any case, whilst the following paper does not mention the underdeveloped theme of the logic of the School with regard to entry to the School, nonetheless, entry has been predicated, in keeping with Lacan's proposal, on the applicant being promised as a decided worker. As such you may well understand that this text addresses the logic of entry to the School. Miller's paper on the subject in his book distinguishes the entry of the decided worker from their place in analysis. However I argue here that whilst there is a case for entry according to a pass, nonetheless, if we treat work as I do, as something that may be regarded as an analytical concept, then we may come to see that the work of a decided worker is not necessarily seperable from their place in their work as analysands.

This paper was published in Psychoanalytical Notebooks 39, In Existence, which I gladly recommend you to buy.

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The opening half of Jacques-Alain Miller’s Course titled Le Banquet des Analystes presents an argument for the School as a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis, and ‘work’ is a master signifier of this part of the course. Work is presented as fundamental to the logic of the School. We might assume that we know what work is, and certainly those in and around the School do a great variety of kinds of necessary tasks of work to maintain the life of the Schools and their Societies. But I wish to explore an aspect of work which is closely tied to the logic of the School offered by Miller in this course.

Miller’s starting point is Lacan’s Founding Act of 1964, where in opposing the degradations of psychoanalysis elsewhere. Lacan proposes that “the objective of our work is inseparable from the training [formation] to be dispensed within this movement of reconquest” concluding that “I don’t need a long list, just dedicated workers [travailleurs décidés]...”

So from the outset, work, in a certain sense, is inseparable from the formation dispensed within the movement of the School.

Miller relates The Founding Act, to the Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School. The former of which populates the School with decided workers, all equal in front of the work to be done5, and the latter which differentiates these workers as psychoanalysts according to a gradus.6 Nonetheless Miller quotes Lacan in saying, regarding this gradus, that “distinctions will be made according to the work”7. That is to say, that whilst all are equal in front of the work, it is nonetheless in relation to the work that the gradus is decided.

The idea of work in Le Banquet des Analystes is organised by the concept of transference of work, this being an expression drawn from the adjoining notes of the Founding Act, “the teaching of psychoanalysis cannot be transmitted from one subject to the other except along the paths of a transference of work.” And so transference of work is connected with teaching. Miller puts it in this way: 

"The teaching of psychoanalysis can only be transmitted from one subject to another by means of a transference of work. ... This is where the thesis of the transference of work fits in. What does it finally say, this thesis? It evokes the transmission from one subject to another, that is to say a transmission by recurrence of what psychoanalysis teaches. ... 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. ... ...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. " - Le Banquet des Analystes, lesson of 24th January 1990

Transference of work is the transference of the work involved in what is taught – a kind of knowledge, perhaps a style of knowing – from one to another. This is not done by the transference of results, of established knowledge, but by a work of induction, by means of the method of demonstration much favoured by both Lacan and Miller. Demonstration in the sense that mathematics is transmitted by demonstration, in so far as each can follow and do the work of demonstration anew for themselves.

Transference of work relates to the exposure of knowledge, and in this regard is a counterpoint to the work of transference in an analysis. The work of transference is predicated on love, of the supposition of hidden knowledge, and indeed requires the maintenance of knowledge as hidden, as a precious agalma, to be sustained as a condition of love. Rather the transference of work supposes the fall of the work of transference, with the establishment of a decided desire to know. There’s a movement from hidden, “..supposed knowledge to exposed knowledge.” We can see here why it is that whilst all in the School are equal in front of the work of transference of work, the gradus nonetheless operates according to distinctions made according to that work. 

Miller’s hypothesis of the logic of the School is that the production of an analyst is the production of someone who works to say well the new knowledge produced from their analysis. This is the work of the pass, and which continues beyond the pass. So the production of an analyst is the production of a teacher, under the guise of transference of work, as someone who transfers the work of a style of exposing knowledge. The analyst is one who transfers work not least in providing a demonstration by example. (As Miller develops in the lesson of 24th January 1990 of Le Banquet des Analystes”)

But why is it necessary in the School of psychoanalysis that knowledge has this aspect of being demonstrated anew each time?

In much of an analysis what is at stake is the repetition of the same, even if it is posed differently each time in the stories we tell in our analyses. Yet an analysis from the perspective of its end, has a double aspect, that of condensing the same, but not ending in silence with this condensation out-of- meaning (as in hors-sens). But also an aspect of the work of invention, of neologism, since what is condensed to an out-of-meaning, is from the perspective of the end of analysis a fiction, and of what remains, to say something of it must be an act of invention, so as to make a new knowledge of it. 

Furthermore the end of analysis, as demonstrated in the pass, involves the fall, the barring, the de-supposition, of the Other. And with it the fall of the supposition that we can lean on the Other as the locus of an established knowledge. Miller writes: “It is precisely because the Other does not know, that it is necessary to construct, to demonstrate from the truth the effect of the signifier. To do this, one must be duped by the signifier, and more precisely by analytic discourse.” That the Analyst of the School is “...the one who wants to do something with the barred Other. ... ...a subject who uses the lack in the Other or the lack of the Other for a work, that is to say, on the basis of its ignorance and the fact that the Other does not know.” (Le Banquet des Analystes, lesson of 24th January 1990.)

It is in this way, that we can see that in terms of the transmission of knowledge, the logic of the School is that established knowledge cannot be relied upon as that which is guaranteed in advance by the Other. Miller says of it that “...it is not an ultimate novelty of Lacan to have said, in 1978, that it is up to each analyst to reinvent psychoanalysis. This notion is already included in the principle of 1967. ... The notion of ... reinventing psychoanalysis [is] part of the concept of the School.”16 But this does not mean that it is a School of anything goes by way of novelty. Rather the established knowledge of the School is passed on by demonstration, to be proven anew each time, by and for each who is involved in psychoanalysis. Restyled. 

Among the various terms relating to the new, there is one employed rarely by Lacan, but more often by Miller, that of novation (The term is found in French in Seminar XI, as well as at the end of Radiophonie). This legal term, the signification of which is the same in French as English, indicates the substitution of an old contract with a new one. And indeed we can see this aspect of the guarantee of law through the perspective of another text of Miller’s. A quite different tack regarding the Other and innovation, of novation even (although the word is not used there), can be noted when in 1998 Miller made some presentations at a conference in Barcelona which formed the basis for a book, ...du nouveau! Introduction au Séminaire V de Lacan. In this work Miller deals with the idea of the new in psychoanalysis starting from the treatment of the witz, or joke, in Seminar V. The joke depends for its effect on a novelty. Miller works there with what is given in Seminar V, that “Lacan says that the joke is really accomplished only once the Other has recognised it as such. This is the leitmotiv of the first lessons: the witz must be sanctioned by the Other. ... The Other returns the ball, he puts the message in the code as a joke, he says in the code “this is a joke”. If no one does this, there is no joke.” (Miller, J.-A., ...du nouveau!, Introduction au Séminaire V de Lacan, Paris, Rue Huysmans, 2000)

The witz nonetheless has an aspect which is quite without Other. Miller confirms that Freud sees in the witz that, “Freud begins with the baby ... with the sounds of the mouth, with babble.” Thus drawing the relation of the witz to lalangue. That babble part of language in its relation to the One-all-alone, that is to say, without Other.20 But none the less, some kind of Other is involved thereafter, organising what comes from this babble in the social field.

The novelty of a witz, as any novelty, requiring an Other to sanction and recognise its status as new, is given here as a principle of the foundation of the School. It’s a necessary foundation, given that the IPA was unwilling to sanction the novelty of Lacan’s teaching. Miller says indeed that “The Lacanian neologism has in a way produced its Other who approves it. If an Other official refuses to codify you, you surrender, or you give birth to an Other in your hands. We, we came, we have been absorbed, swallowed up in this place where the sanction of the psychoanalytic Other did not come.”21 Thus the School was founded in order to provide a kind of newly made Other which comes from, and which can affirm, its neologisms. Indeed the pass itself is given as a form of neologism, made to recognise neologisms: “The structure of the witz teaches us the techniques of the new. It is a question of producing a gap, but supplemented by its recognition by the Other. The whole thing is not to disconcert the Other. His acquiescence and consent must still be obtained. The Other must still say yes. ... If you think about it, this structure is nothing other than that of the pass.”

It’s a contradiction. On the one hand, there’s no Other. It’s barred, it’s inexistent. On the other hand, the School constitutes an Other which sanctions the kinds of new that, after all, are bound up with, arise from, a relation to the inexistence of the Other. What kind of Other can the School be?

Firstly, Miller notes that “[t]here is no joke except in the particular. There is not joke in the abstract.” The Other of the School is one which is local and not universal, from the same parish, and thus a “limited Other”, even if “the Other’s witness has an abstract character.”24 That is to say that this is an Other that draws on “...neither the genre nor the class, but the particular example...” That is to say, an Other that concerns itself only with what is singular to each, as we can understand of the Other of the School of the guarantee of a pass that can only be taken one-by-one. As soon as we think we know from established knowledge of previous passes what a pass looks like, it’s gone. 

The Other of this guarantee is specified by Miller in relation to the Name-of- the-Father as the Other in the Other which says yes. But Miller says that Lacan does not at all give this Other of the Name-of-the-Father “...an ontological position [...] The Name-of-the-Father is not a being, but an instrument, a semblant. It is a signifier as a semblant that has the advantage of allowing us to find ourselves in relation to signifiers and signifieds.” 

Miller at this point has not yet drawn and elaborated the distinction between being and existence, employing the former in a way that he might perhaps later state the latter,28 but we can see that what is at stake in the Other of the yes of the guarantee of the School is that it is a semblant. And developing Lacan’s reference from Seminar XXIII, in his 1998-99 course relating to the inexistence of the Other, L’Autre quit n’existe pas et set comités d’éthique, Miller says (and in relation to what Eric Laurent has said of the witz): “One can pass without the Name-of-the-Father provided one uses it. How do we understand it today? Perhaps in this way: one can do without the Name-of- the-Father qua real provided one makes use of it as a semblant.”

So we can say that the Other of the School is something that we can desuppose at the level of existence, on the basis that we make use of it as the semblant it is. It is an instrument, the minimal framework necessary to obtain the function of a guarantee for the new that is required of the School, without believing in it qua real.

If the School requires the transference of work as a condition of the inexistence of the Other, in relation to the neologism proper to the end of analysis, and requires the novation by which existing knowledge is renewed though the inductive effect of demonstration, then this inexistent Other has another side too. That of the necessity of an invented Other as instrument, as semblant, of which we must make use for there to be a School that may guarantee something of its novel work. 

Alasdair Duncan

www.alasdairduncan.com