Applying theory back onto the theory

'What I propose is a shift in the type of knowledge that critics pursue and disseminate. Currently, most of our professional activity involves a production and distribution of knowledge about texts and their contexts. However satisfying this knowledge might be to those who produce it and consume it, I am not convinced that it is of great use, apart from it's obvious value as professional currency. I think it would be more beneficial for us to pursue knowledge of how various texts and discourses affect those who use them, and how teachers and institutions might operate on and with different types of discourse in ways that challenge students to grow without imposing [sic]preestablished ideas or values on them.' - Mark Bracher, Preface, 'Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change'.

So, what I like about this is that it angles to a shift in a perspective that I'd held dear for a little while, which is that it's very important to hold the cultural context of a text constant, and situate a writer and the writer's means of communication properly, before delving in looking for shreds and spangles of wisdom (or error, dependin' on who yer are) amongst the words and the full stops. Taking the 'de' out of deconstruction and building a little hologram of the lived world of the writer maps neatly onto a fantasy that I'd held, of being able to 'sense' an author, from the words they say and the way that they use them. It also allows that we see a little more deeply into a work than just the superficial storyline - we start looking for the meta-discourse, of how this writing fits with the author's other writings, the other authors of the same sorts of materials of the time, authors throughout history, dada da dada da da.

What I wonder, is why, at this particular juncture in cultural history, does this seem like an attractive and warranted approach to cultural criticism, for this author, Mark Bracher? Lacan readers and Lacanian analysts are far from stereotypical surface dwelling sycophants, but it would seem to me from the Preface and the Introduction so far, the book takes us across a surface perusal of whatever the material might be to look at the work's impact upon our three Lacanian registers, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real via narcissistic or anaclitic modes of desire. Taking Lacan deep into our hearts, but holding the material for analysis lightly upon our palm, perhaps, while we read.

The book takes it's analysis across pornography, political speeches, Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Keat's 'To Autumn'.

Heavens. Dear me, but I think 'I'm in'. :)


Ref:
Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, Discourse and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. London: Cornell Press.