Revelation of Ignorance: Finding Satisfaction in Unsatisfaction

Manya Steinkoler, English

Part 1: Knowledge and Ignorance

I finished my Ph.D. at UC Irvine in the early 1990s, graced with the new power of reading by the Prophets of the Yale Exodus—(the fact that I had had four years of Talmud and ten years of Old Testament study of course was chopped liver—now I was really reading!),  J. Hillis Miller; DeManian epigone Andrej Warminski and company; Wolfgang Iser, famous Neo-Marxists who drove convertible sports cars whose names I forget; and the last of the New Critics, the dear Murray Kreiger—and provided with the essentials of being fashionable about reading by the great luminaries of the Left Bank, the poohbahs of polysemy—Jean Francois Lyotard, Etienne Balibar, Helene Cixous, and by the champion of critique of the metaphysics of presence himself in the flesh, the phenomenal phallus of phallogocentric critique, Jacques Derrida.

So bludgeoned and disheartened by intellectual snobbism, of reputation “making,” intellectual movement stanchioning, political rivalries, so repulsed by the boneheadedness fostered by fandom—graduate students from Ivy league universities vying to fetch Derrida’s dry cleaning—so disheartened by the use of humanities teaching instrumentalized as a tool for whatever political or narcissistic project, so embarrassed by the use of intellectual life as a narcissistic defense, a bulwark against genuine difference, and frankly so uncomfortable reading Kierkegaard in a hot tub, that I handed in the dissertation I had stuck in my car trunk for six months thinking I’d revise it again, and spent the summer selling cars in a local car dealership. In three months, I had graduated to selling airplanes and found myself living in Paris the following year attending Lacanian lectures and going to seminars at the College International de Philosophie and the College de France whenever I could get away.

It was in my own analysis that I was able to rediscover the love of learning, reading, thinking and able to invent a path forward. Three years later, I was back to teaching, and six years later I was a psychoanalyst and a professor.

The banal moral of this story is that there is nothing like graduate school to gull you into believing that knowledge actually means something. There was less hoodwinking, if you can believe it, in persuading people into paying more for the plush leather seats. But the story also tells of the way psychoanalysis can remediate higher education by making me, and it, “fail better,” as Becket might say.

Psychoanalysis allowed me to love reading again and return to teaching because I was able to resituate knowledge, wresting it from a “having” and take pleasure in the surprise poetry of the unconscious, the seat of unknown knowing.

Psychoanalysis reveals that ignorance is part of knowledge. In this sense, it is a practice that has real “anti-phallogocentric” power; one experiences first-hand by way of free association how knowledge partakes of ignorance.

Lacan writes, “Indeed, the analyst cannot follow [the path of training] unless he recognizes in his own knowledge the symptom of his own ignorance, [insofar that] the symptom is the return of the repressed in a compromise [formation] and that repression, here as elsewhere, constitutes the censorship of truth” (emphasis added). (Lacan, Ecrits, 297) Lacan always understood the psychoanalyst and psychoanalysis itself as a symptom.

We “defend” ourselves with knowledge that protects us from truth—which in psychoanalysis would concern the fantasy or the void at the core of signification.  He continues, “The positive fruit of the revelation of ignorance is non-knowledge, which is not a negation of knowledge but rather its most elaborate form” (Lacan, Écrits, p. 297, emphasis added).

So—first—psychoanalysis can help foster “non-knowledge” which is “not knowledge’s negation but its most elaborate form.”

What a wonderful formulation! … What does it mean? What does it mean for us as teachers? “There is a revelation of ignorance” even the way this is said resituates “ignorance” on the side of revelation rather than knowing. That is a useful idea for teachers who generally enjoy “knowing” and their assumed position regarding knowledge—here, a kind of defense. And that this ignorance revealed is not a negation of knowledge but “its most elaborate form.”

Writing, free writing, speaking, brainstorming, invention—without too much teacher presence, maybe just questioning and sharing our excitement to allow that process to continue. Free writing, journaling, without judgment. Short reading assignments with response writing.

It means inviting students to become excited by their own thought….

Second, it suggests a novel way to consider student “errors.”

In an Introduction to Literature class regarding Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a student wrote, “Oedipus’ mistake was in taking the sphinx for granite.” Smiling—we all love those gems—instead of correcting the mistake, I asked what he meant, “Well, to take something for granite, means to ignore it, right? It means it is so hard and fixed like granite, that we don’t even notice it. So, Oedipus answered the Sphinx and then, the irony was that he was like the sphinx.” His eyes it up. “Oedipus was his own granite!”

You can imagine how crestfallen I was at having to explain the far less inspired correct spelling of the word.

Here we might recall Lacan’s comment, “the true Other gives the answer one does not expect” (Sem II). How can we be more welcoming of the uninvited guests—the typo, the error that speaks, of the students’ mis-understanding that is nevertheless, often an understanding? How can we be more inviting even of the (at times) colossal ignorance of students so that they don’t feel shame at our exasperation that risks closing them down even further?

In an English 101 class, naturally intelligent yet stunningly underprepared, a student could not spell nor barely write. Commenting on a newspaper article about technology and adding his own thoughts as I had asked them to do, the student wrote about the effects of our technology “ediction” with our need for constant “massage texts,” on “self phones” that people are “addicted to” our “culture of obeastity,” where “obeast” people consume like animals.

Another student, a first-generation immigrant from a war-torn country wrote, “the way to cure social problems of youth on the streets and doing drugs is to organize social pogroms. Social Pogoms will direct young men with lots of energy and aggression into communal work and foster social values of collaboration.”

…What are these errors if not example of Lacan’s “not a negation of knowledge, but its most elaborate form”?

Ignorance is knowledge’s partner.  The idea is that language speaks, that errors might speak, and sometimes they can speak more truthfully than their correction can be a pedagogical game changer.

Part II: I can’t get no Unsatisfaction

”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.”

When most people cite Freud’s famous “impossible profession quote,” they underline the “impossibility” of psychoanalysis as a practice purporting a “cure.” “Even Freud said it was impossible!” people throw up their hands when apostrophizing psychoanalysis’s more tenuous claims to behavioral change, often using Woody Allen as the poster child for this claim.

Freud’s comment that psychoanalysis is one of the impossible professions has come to mean more popularly that psychoanalysis is impossible. It is not efficacious perhaps. But what is “efficacious”? Who is asking for this efficaciousness? Paying to lie on a couch and speak four times a week can hardly be called making the “most of one’s time.”

What is less remarked upon regarding Freud’s quote is the wish that subtends this supposed critique of analysis for not delivering satisfying results. This wish for cure often identifies “cure” with a social demand or ideal and the wish to be rid of a symptom to achieve that ideal. “I want to be thin, married, rich, successful, famous.” Example: A patient came because he claimed he wanted good grades in college. When he studied and did his homework, he was successful, he told me, but, well, he never studies or does his homework…

As teachers we can see this as a demand for “success” or “excellence” as super-egoical injunctions that will exacerbate failure they supposedly abjure.

In psychoanalysis, the demand to “get rid of a symptom” is like what Guy Dana discusses as a “constrict” of language, or a “tyranny of the ideal.”  More and more patients want to simply “be well” and come to analysis to “make their symptom go away.” “If I were able to not have social anxiety, my life would be great.” “If I didn’t procrastinate, I would be perfect.” The analyst is addressed: “make what’s wrong with me go away.”

The point that is overlooked is that what is “wrong with you” is something you made and continue to make and concerns your subjectivity and the discourse around you. This touched on the earlier point about ignorance and knowledge. There is a knowing in where you are and what you are doing that you do not know.

The fitting to the ideal is also encountered today with patients waving their diagnoses about like a national flag; “I have OCD therefore I…” “I am manic depressive therefore…” “I have ADHD; I am autistic.” I am not saying they are always wrong—but in our culture of the “fascism of identity,” diagnosis can become a servant of the dominant discourse, an ego defense that constricts subjectivity and thought from emerging.

Student example: “I have learning disabilities.” This very bright student had myriad grammar and spelling errors, but verbally he was wicked smart, head and shoulders above the rest of the class. Wait for it!—His mother was learning disability therapist. I told him I didn’t believe he had any learning disabilities. He countered that he failed all the tests and had proven he had them. I told him that if my mother were a learning disabilities’ specialist, I would have learning disabilities too. He laughed. I told him that I thought he could get an A in English, but he might want to keep it a secret. He burst out laughing. By mid-semester, we had worked through all his grammar and usage errors except apostrophes. The apostrophe indicating possession was the only error he seemed to hold on to. I wondered about it.  Then one day he told me that he was adopted at birth by a New York Jewish family and his biological mother had been a rodeo cowgirl [Yes this is true] who couldn’t afford to keep her job and a baby. His adopted mother had always told him, “We wanted you! You were so wanted, even more than naturally born children since we picked you!” etc etc. I decided he had earned his problem with apostrophes showing possession and I would not try to correct it.

People who come to analysis come with a demand, however naïve or puerile, and often with a diagnosis; something is wrong.

What of our community college students who come to our classes? Do they have a demand? Or do they simply want to find out what our demand is, so that if they are good students, they will meet it.  Or do they sit in class, more and more frequently nowadays because it is a place to sit, often on their phone seemingly undisturbed, where our demand—even that they turn off their phone—means little or nothing to them, and even the threat of failing is met with a mildly depressive shrug if that.

The patient knows something is wrong and wants it fixed. The good student knows that doing what the teacher asks is what is required to “get ahead.”  The depressed student is incapable of engaging in the game to begin with.  It might look like these two kinds of students—the ones who meet the teacher’s demand and the ones who ignore it—don’t have not much in common.

Let us return to Freud: Freud situates his new profession, psychoanalysis, on the level with those unsatisfying ones—teaching and governing.   In a world today that promises satisfaction, “customer satisfaction,” endless satisfaction, satisfaction is no longer limited to enjoying products; people themselves are reduced to satisfying products: doctors, nurses and teachers are required to be “satisfying,”—“How did we do today?” asks New York Presbyterian Hospital after your gall bladder was removed, “Was the reception area clean?”

We live in a world very far away from a discourse where Freud’s “unsatisfying results” can be fathomed, let alone opted for. As teachers, particularly teachers at a community college, we are pressured to produce results, meet “measurable outcomes” universally applying them to an unimaginably diverse student body, to students with wildly varied levels of preparedness.

Students themselves are fatigued from a discourse of totality that ejects them as individual subjects. And this not only on an intellectual level, but often socially, politically, historically, economically. We are fatigued by class size and our sense of our own helplessness in front of such students, not to mention our own pressures to perform well on evaluations, secure our jobs, advance etc; we are nervous about meeting the supposed “outcomes” that we sense are lies.

I propose we consider “unsatisfying results” as our most noble aim.  The epic journeys of education and psychoanalysis provide the possibility of being unsatisfied, of allowing that un-satisfaction a place, and as a result to birth speech and thought and let it continue to speak. Unsatisfied is not the same as dissatisfied—which can have its own taste of acrimonious jouissance and ressentiment. Regarding education, we must navigate between “the Scylla of non-interference and the Charybdis of frustration,” writes Freud (1933).

We read Euripides’ Hecuba and a section from Thucydides Peloponnesian War in my world literature class this semester. One of the students was upset come essay writing time. “If I can’t tell who the good guys are, how am I supposed to write a paper?” he asked. “Could that be the point?” I responded. “The point of the play or of the paper writing?” he asked, and I was silent.

Steady as she goes….

Works Cited

• Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 23 (1937-1939)
• Lacan, Ecrits, translated by Bruce Fink, W W Norton & Co. 2007

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