Off with their Heads!

: Un-Mastering the Masters of the University Sean Sturm The University of Auckland The matheme-atics of Jacques Lacans four or more discourses can enable us to account for changes in the university, and the place of dissent within (or outside) it. If, to misapply Lacan, we take the discourse of the university to represent the University 1.0 (the national university that exists to create good citizens), his fifth discourse, that of capitalism, can represent the University 2.0 (the transnational university that exists to generate transcendental, or global, capital).1
Discourse of the university (or U 1.0) S2 a S1 $ Discourse of capitalism (or U 2.0) $ S2 S1 a

Both discourses, Lacan might say, serve the hidden truth of the master: the mathemes that occupy the position of agency (top left on the quadripode) are fake masters, to use Slavoj ieks term,2 namely, knowledge (S2) or learning, embodied in the professorate in the University 1.0, and the subject ($) or consumers, including managers and academics as well as students in the University 2.0. The shift from a ruling discourse that produces a certain subjectivity (learning producing learned subjects) to one that is driven by a certain subjectivity (consumers producing profit) can account for changes in the university. How are we, then, to understand the place of dissent within the university (or outside it, given that the university is now taken to be captive to and of a piece with capitalism)? The discourses of the hysteric and the analyst can be read as dissenting: the hysteric questions the hidden masters of university and capitalist discourse to protest against them;3 the analyst works with the subjectivities that are produced in university discourse and drive capitalist discourse to transform them. But it struck me, when reading Alice and the Cheshire Cats ripostes to the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland, that I might instead construct a sixth discourse: of dissent, or dissensus, to use Jacques Rancires term.4 (The Cheshire Cat hystericises and analyses the Queen; Alice dissents.)
Discourse of dissent S2 a $ S1

Dissent takes the discourse of the university as its starting point, but swaps the covert mathemes (the bottom two mathemes) $ and S1, such that its truth becomes the subject and its product, a new kind of mastery. It is a subjectification of the university and a re-mastering of its universe; how so, my talk will explore.5
1

Before Lacan added a fifth discourse, of capitalism (On Psychoanalytic Discourse, 1972/1978), he took the discourse of the university, the historical successor to the discourse of the master, to represent capitalism (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1968/2007). 2 Slavoj iek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, 2004. 3 For this reason, Lacan came to take the discourse of the hysteric to represent science (e.g., in Television, 1974; 1990). 4 Jacques Rancire, The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics, 2003. 5 Note that Alain Badiou (Philosophy for Militants, 2012) argues by way of Lacans discourses for a remastering of philosophy: for him, philosophy has for the most part been co-opted by the discourse of the

university (it has become antiphilosophy); to find its rightful place, it must appropriate the discourse of the master.