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APCS has embarked on a crucial mission, but this mission risks being undermined by conflicts among different discourses and intellectual communities that define its constituency. My hypothesis is that if we can establish the logical relationship between these discources, we can help not only to reshape our own community but also to transform the current uses of psychoanalysis within diverse academic and social settings. Such transformation, moreover, will help motivate other thinkers and cultural workers to employ theoretical structures for the goal of concrete social change.
As a Contributing Editor of JPCS, I have been struck by the resistance of academic writers to address practical cultural issues. I do not know how many times I have pleaded with writers to focus on a particular social problem, only to have them move in the complete opposite direction. Why does this happen? My thesis is that this turning away from concrete experiences and conditions of human existence and focusing mainly—or even exclusively—on theories and abstract systems of knowledge is a submission to the ideology of postmodernism that runs counter to the most fundamental insights of psychoanalysis in genderal and Lacanian theory in particular.
The postmodern ideology at issue here is captured most elegantly and succinctly in Lacan's notion of the discourse of the University. Such discourse, which is growing more prominent, according to Lacan, privileges abstract symbolic systems of knowledge and effaces all aspects of subjective difference and cultural authority in favor of the pure production of symbolic modes of representation. In other words, people inside and outside of the academy find it difficult to address real concrete social issues because they live in a culture that constantly represses the real and hides the foundational matter and structures that underlie symbolic knowledges. Thus, in the age of the Internet, global capitalism, internationalized mass media, and Bill Clinton, we ar