The American Theater of the Sinthome; A Lacanian journey through the roar of Edward Albee and the desert

dust of Sam Shepard The American Phantasm voiced

Voices becoming other voices.Voices from the dead and living.Hypnotized voices.Sober voices.Working voices.Voices in anguish.Sam Shephard fromTongues.

The object a, Voice Right out of the gateLacanian psychoanalysis is performative.In this paper I will concentrate on the resonance that occurs whenan aesthetic production yields to an untranslatable aspect of voice. The voice as partial object., as Lacan notes, the voice can move as a partial object through the partial drive, evocatory drive. Just as the object little a is hidden in the visual field, so the conception of the function of language as communication hides the object of the voice. ( Stafford). How does the voice travel so that something might also be heard ? How does the object a in the visual field catchs the ear, not the eye, even though it is never fully heard. Rather its enigma is heard ? I beIievethat when we speaking of psychoanalysis, we speak of the words through which the untranslatable object a moves forth, but we often speak to the object a of the imaginary as if it is only a sighted image, yet this sighting is moving glimpsed through oral and written aspects of transmission. They are not so discreet and a very crude read of Lacan is that the image is imaginary and that language is symbolic.( I do believe this discrepancy is where transmission differs from education .) There is much to say about the difference between writing and oration that is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is not incidental that the fiction writer, poet, andplaywright concern themselves with this thing calledvoice . Sometimes you come close to the thing, sometimes it has you in its grip or you have it in your grip, sometimes you chase it down, sometimes it chases you down. Sometimes you lose it. It loses you. Sometime you get lost in it.But when you can catch that place where it belongs to you and other. The subject speaks I would like to follow a line of thinking where the partial object in language that passes between a speaker to a listener operating in poetics, theater, fiction, where free association is primary, is also operating in similar fashion in the setting of psychoanalysis, particularly writing of the type that works patterns of sound and associations, where imaginal associations might be less tightly bound to being inhibited by any one signifier, rather there is a way of working that offers a greater possibility of para praxis, slips and slippages, where these interruptions in any tightly

round narrative..enable a voice of the piece to find its way. We might saya piece of the subject finds its way. Memory, reverie, thought, affect. So it appears to sound not as avoice taken on, but rather the voice(s) voices of the piece(s) are heard. Voice(s) because it is operating betweenyou and other.Between conscious and unconscious, between signification and signified.Voice operates in such a way that any central speaker dissolves, the identification to the central speaker disappears. Yes..this is why we go to analysis to discover, Who am I ? But as Lacan indicates we want to know and we dont want to know. We want

to know and dont want to know about our symptom that is the heart of I. We want to hear all about it, and we dont want to hear it at all..The obect a, a partial drive..makes its way into speechinto a word where it is both lost and found. The real is foreclosed. The drive cannot be accessed. Except the subject resides in words. This object a of the voice operates such that the analysand who attempts to present a picture of himself to the analyst..suddenly finds that this picture dissolves through the words voiced in the context of the analytic setting. The words tell another picture/story..photo/fiction..beginning their operation of sliding in and around and outside the image conveyed through words. But as we deal with language that is not separated from the signified, we are never fully operating outside of imaginary identifications to self and other as we speak. . Ananalysts..identification to patient begins towork in consort with the analysands representations so there is a moving in and out of these snap shots in a variety ofplacements. As Lacan draws in his Schema L, The analysts snapshots and the analysands snapshots are crossing on an imaginary axis where there is language, an unconscious, symptom and images.The analysts in tracking the nuances , plays of language, phrases, words, utterances within framework ofanalytic knowledge. The analyst is tracking words, staying close to the analysands words..thatmay be directing the analyst towards an a embedded, camoflauged in the visual fieldthrough an a that resides in an enigma of the word, the signifyer hidden in the field of speech. The analyst is attempting to following a symbolic axis,

byhearing the words that may speak beyond the snap of analysts wishes the analyst to see.

the picture that the

In the analytic setting there are two divided subjects, two personal unconscious, and with language the concealing and revealing aspects of the unconscious through words at play. The analyst by tuning down the noise of countertransference to the pull of the analysand who wishes to place the analyst in a variety of positionsthrougha snap shot allows the analyst to be guided by the analysands words by erving as atransferential object to discover where the placements fall. The transference position enables what is enacted in the setting to serve as another clue.through which the analyst can make sense of what transpires beyond what the analysandis showing in words. It is a clue of what the analysand wishes to enactin these photo/ fantasies of which the analyst is implicated. If the analyst does not gratify the analysandby reenactments, a belief that the scene is real or authentic. But rather that amis en scene through transference operates. the ongoing curiosity about these placements enable a further speaking about what lies outside the snap shot, but once another snap shot is spoken another scene arisesthe real is foreclosed but just outside the edges of what is shown in words. When Lacan says that Actors make good analyst the liquidity of ego serves the analystin ways that enable the analyst to move forth through the role in his/her person in a way that honorsand respectsactual experienced exchanges produced by the mis- en- scene. As well as to further the direction of the Lacanian cure through being able to also live outside the mis- en-scene in the analytic room using the artificial setting of the analytic room to enable a subjects words to fall on the side of the hidden object a conveyed through its voice(s). The analyst to do this is framing through an analytic knowledge resting in the symbolic, but is also resonating to this attempt (impossible to capture the object a.).that is moving beyond reach to a tune and is the moving target..that drives the repetition compulsion..the sufferingthe symptom of the analysand. This object a of The voice is again emphasized when Lacan mentions in his homage to Duras, it is there where the writer goess that the psychoanalysts should be .Lacan is indicating that the writer moves to the

other jouissance, the feminine jouissance that he begins to articulate in hisencounter of James Joyces voice. Voices to voices..that prompt scenes of memory and fantasy rising and falling. Where the voice of the analyst melts into the brother, where the voice of the analysand speaks to this brother. Where the voice of the analysand becomes her father speaking to the analyst who is moved to the position of lover.Put another way the actor that can act is not being an actor. Being an actor, interferes with performance in the same way that being an analyst interferes with analysis. In this sense psychoanalysis is not merely knowledge, or a profession, it is very much a craft. That is passed through analysis, transmission, voicessupervising, attuning the listening of those committed to learning the craft; object a of voice . Learning to listen to the

Lacan in his notion of the paranoic ego working to maneuver knowledge through the mirror stage in a defense against the unknown sees at some level the communication of knowledge, the teaching of knowledge through the academic discourse as inhibiting speech as the site of the production of desire. Because many times the speech utilized in academic discourse remains in the service to produce replication and redundancy of prior knowledge by operating in the service of thought, mentation, cogita, intellectualizations that eclipses the partial object of voicethrough demand or command to resound to bodysof thought..epic bodies of thought. The object a of the voice, like the object a through the visual field in the body not of thought. But in the erogenous zoneson the edge of the lips, the rims of the body. The symptom is carved through speech, the letter that is first place between transgression and prohibition where as subject .resides. ..this letter may be speak or not. May reach its destination or not. But if it does. The subject speaks at the intersection of transgression and prohibiton..at the corner of abjecton and acceptability. For the academic discourse this necessitates a certain severing of the voice that is in fact compelled in the analytic setting where an entirely different form of speaking and listening to words are moved through the practice of free association. We could say this practice is much more kindred to the stream of consciousness of Joyce, Beckett, and their influences on the

American playwrights such as Albee and Shephard moving through the specific history and themes of American theater . Voices becoming other voices.Voices from the dead and living.Hypnotized voices.Sober voices.Working voices.Voices in anguish. Sam Shepard. Those working on Shepards production Tongues, purposively changed locations as they were writing. Shepard describes writing scenes in different settingss;a restaurant, a beach , a park, hotel rooms, we sat in a truck and then towards the end of writing the piece we would meet up at the location of the Magic Theater San Francisco and perform the piece. Shepard remembers Sometimes we would just talk without trying to push the content into the structure of the piece. Other times the talk would be translated verbatim and we would write things down on the spot and then turn it into monologue or dialogue, trance poem or whatever. These improvisational, spontaneous ways of finding voice offers a less intellectualized approach to expression that is more in keeping with making sense of free associations. Derived through specific locations.Derived through subjects in specific locations.In the place and time of the personal unconscious.

Style The writing productions that were also influencing Lacan through a stylethat was meandering ruminatingobscure poeticrunning up against the grain of the more reasoned academic American style of writing about analysis. The Americans were emphasizing the tamable aspect of the threat of a wild unconscious through an adaptive egoa writing that that was clear and reasoned. The Americans would emphasize shoring up, Lacan on the other saw the danger that was being created by attempting to damn up the unconscious through a psychoanalysis that was moving towards a winning approach; the successful analysis based on capacity to function and adapt to society. Lacan in returning to Freud, fought the tendency to normalize the subject in the image of the analysts ego concerned that analysis would be hygienized rather than separated from the conventions that through the psychoanalytic

dicourses could be deconstructed. What the analysand does with what he hears of his own unconscious, would lie in the hands of the subject. By studying the way the voice works in the theater as opposed to academic discourse, we may in fact be much closer in line to the voice operating as partial object in an analysis . It is this type of voicing that is operating in the analysis that then crosses back over into the psychoanalytic discourse to become the transmission of psychoanalytic discourse. The subject speaks. When this aspect of voicing is not reached within the analytic setting or is lost on the way to explication in a theory of psychoanalytic discourse that turns into academic discourse then the voice as partial object disappears and the transmission of psychoanalysis fails. This is important consideration in any question of how psychoanalytic transmission occurs. The voice speaks the specificity of the object ..through aname, an inheritance, a location, a symptom. It is spoken through the voicesof voice..of a subject operating in the time of a personal unconscious. Operating on knowledges; overt, covert, subliminal. Unconscious, conscious..of the Other.Through a symptom speaking that exist in between the real and symbolic suspended in the imaginary if there is to be an honest performance of Freudian psychoanalysis where the analytic voice can find its release and can take its flight home to the personal unconscious.Through intimations, its particularities, its tricky arrangements rearrangementsit is through the way, the route, a pass, that this voice might travel..enablinganother radical return to the Freudian unconscious. The component of the voice explored through method acting , particularly during the Strasbergs actingmethod based on the Stanislavskis work depicted a certain reality which was catering less to the audience and more to an actuality that would work through a theater set (here actors backs, for example, might be turned away from the audience). The audience was no longer being entertained, accommodated. Strasbergsmethod acting requiredactors to switch scenes, switch characters, to increase the flexibility with the whole entire script for the purpose of understanding where each actor was located as one of an entire ensemble , a voice, fragmenting into many voices through characters. The American theater, no doubt bolstered by the influence of stream of consciousness and non- plot

plays offered the space to experiment with and express the transient and fragmented nature of an American identity that was being produced to resist forces that championed the post- world war assembly line of a mass production. The theater was tracing the transienceand disillusionment of the complexity of the post -war americanpathos.The American theater was generating, through a style of acting and writing a way to voice theobject a..thedeath drive.Speaking through subjects.Subjects existing in the time of the personal unconsciousinfluenced by intimate knowledges of family, location, time.The theater influenced by Beckett and others, as well as Freud in operation through the avant-garde as opposed to academia, and the American psychoanalytic organizations shutting out the lay analysts opened ..to the Freudian death drive and ushered it into the American public. The American Institutionalized Freudlost its voice. The voice of id. It is important to note that this was also time of exodus from Europe of psychoanalytic immigrants attempting to gain a foothold through the medical establishment. Interestingly, their discourses established American ego psychology which in many ways indicated that these immigrants harbored an idealism about the ego that was no doubt impacted by their own relationship to a lived nighmare that may have spawned a strong Darwinian message. The strong survive, the weak parish. The immigrants capacity to survive World War II became something of special credence perhaps regarding these survivors of the holocaust. The individuals capacity to survive mass destruction was based on an individual will against all odds perhaps meshing well with the American success of winning the war. This survival orientation along with the lure of authorizing psychoanalysis through medical establishments in America anchored the voice of a psychoanalysis that was on the side of the adaptive ego defenses rather than on the side of maintaining the Freudian unconscious. Yet, the medical establishment was not the only route where psychoanalysis traveled. However, when psychoanalysis began to become a profession, the American professional associations distanced themselves from the lay analyst movement that wasprominent in Europe. While Freud abstracted from the clinic through academic routes, the voice that would continue to carry Freuds unabridged death drivewas the voice of American Dramatic theater. Theater productions were much more influenced by Paris than the medical establishment through which Freuds death drive would be obliterated. Lacan

in returning to Freud moves against the edification of Freud to fit the bujousAmerican post- war attitude. In Lacans later work as he begins to place more emphasis on the real,Lacan returns to the erogenous impasses Freud maps on the real of the body to further his commitment to the Freudian unconscious and to place the symptom as a lens through which any body of knowledge is generated so that the partial drives, would not be lost in revisions of psychoanalysis through the clinical practice or the academic explorations. We could say that in both instances, the clinic and in academia, the voice as partial object became faintdifficult to hear. Lacans voice as a psychoanalyst, however, was loudly resonant. Meandering, associative, jokes, puns, playing around all the while transmitting the analytic discourse that was directed towards death drive. His performance spoke the return to theunconscious in a speaking that often occurs in the analytic setting. The transferences to Lacan were in large part to a voice that could resonate to the tune of the object a performatively speaking. Here we note that for some this would be an irresistableseduction..thatwould prompt speaking, talking, and acting and dressing in imitation Lacans style. Memorizing text or seminars line by line a certain aspect of a mirroring transference wherein this taking on of the personae of the person of the analyst in some way offers this possibility of finding the voice Imagined by the neurotic as ultimate jouissance afforded to Lacan as the originator the lead actor in his radical return to Freud. The Primal father.Or in some more perverse sense a fetish through which the pervert becomes bound in an instrumental way to fetishize, to slip into the skin of Lacan. To in a sense completeLacan, parasitically.But this is exactly why Lacan indicates that the

actor makes a good analyst in that psychoanalysis cannot work through symptomatic placements of Lacan on the side of inhibition of the neurotic or disinhibition of the pervert. Rather the subject regardless of symptomatic relations to law is offered a time to find their own voice between transgresson and prohibition.Sinthomatic voice. We can acknowledge that Lacan found his very frenchvoicing of Freud, but psychoanalysis is not owned by any geography. As the unconscious is not specific to a cultural location. It rises and falls in accordance to where it is permitted to speak and whereit is heard. This could as easily be Harlem as Paris.And might be.In this sense Psychoanalysis rises and falls on the singular voice in the time of the

personal unconscious. It is an intimate enterprise. That is transmitted in letters. Letters that are often received as intimate, not necessarily disclosing, but intimate.The letter lies in between transgression and prohibition. These letters that are spoken and written about psychoanalysis are as hidden as they are revealing. They can bar, as well as raise the bar.These letters of psychoanalysis. The Sinthome as Stylized Voice Lacan describes the kernel of the symptom as that which holds a residue of the Real. Joyce. His work in Le Sinthome(1975) was influenced by the writings of James Lacan traced the structure of the symptom through the complex

linguistic productions that manifests through a stream of conscious writing that was not so held back or oppressed by the cohesive meaning that comprises a social conversation..or we might even say a rational dialectic. This does not mean that the rational or secondary processes are devalued.Not at all. But as both of repression the and revelation happen in language, the

deconstruction

intellectual

paranoicegoic

defenses

comprising

languaging..give way to voice. The snap shot of intellectual ideas, give way to the voice (s) that stray out of the shot. But are within ear shot.Lacan places the inhibition of the symptom betweenthe imaginary and symbolic. We

might say that in Seminar XX, Lacan begins to look at the relationship to the symbolic in terms of phallic and feminine jouissance wherein the symptom is either constrained by a fear of castration related to transgression of the law, or the symptom may be less bound to the phallic jouissance and more resonate with a feminine jouissance which emphasis the imaginary that has a certain access to the foreclosed real through a less encumbered relationship to the law of the father. Lacans encounter, Bakero wills say

transference?toJoyces

text. Lacanhears asuppleance inJoyces text that location ..

expressed the relationship between the subject and a phantasmic

set between the Imaginary and Real.

That we might say could plug up the real

(in words) to ward off a full immersion into psychosis. Thissuppleance enabled Joyce to function by utilizing signification to work through an underlying psychotic structure by engaging a symbolic. The symbolic was not so taken over by a neurotic accommodatinf a father, but rather words we could say were more on the side of the real..and in this way would transgress, the law of the father. Challenging the languaging of a superegoic force that would threatened to coopt..psychoanalysis. But we have to ask what does this say about the It actually says quite a bit. The

audience that got Joyce..really got Joyce.

audience that appreciated Joyce was not comprised of only psychotics. There was a resonance with perhaps another jouissance, the Otherjouissance that was not phallic and not necessarily psychoticthe other jouissancecould dismantle the symbolic structures that begin to get stagnant and confused with the truth.Lacan began to understand that the symbolic often fossilized into phallic meaning such that a regression to a gaze stifled the subjects speech and catered to a knowledge that believedit was the real . This worked

against and inhibited the kernel of the Real within

the symptom where the

layer of the gaze would have to be deconstructed through a retroactive movement against the conclusive meanings breaking out the enigma of the signifyers so that the mirage of the gaze, the veneer that covered the unconscious in a bounded way that protected castration anxiety could give way to an encounter of what was not so bound by the law of the father not so bound in inhibition..a fear of the transgression of which the letter was lodgedit was this piece of clinical analytic through his reading of James Joyce to workthat Lacan began to move

articulate how the symptom might Where the

develop into a sinthome, where a subjects voice could be heard.

symptom is no longer weighted by a phallic jouissance where the foreclosed real will inevitable returning in the trauma through the repetition compulsion

rather

than falling as a voice into making a sense, a jouissense, that is

not perhaps so intellectual, but enables a speaking on the side of the voice. Carving what is uncarvedof the symptom in a way that enables the tick or the affliction to now work on the side of the life of the subject so that the subject speaks.