Lacan and Composition Pedagogy

In his twelfth lecture “What is Speech? What is Language?” Lacan notes that “one doesn't make a dictionary of sentences.”

Lacan has not taught enough freshmen composition courses.

The regurgitation of stock phrases and sentences would seem to counter his remarks concerning the un-lexicalisability of sentences such as “Since the dawn of time.”

These phrases, although not identical, serve to aspire to a similar function within their respective categories. They are hooks, introductory elements, signifiers of transition or addition, etc.

Even if we don't make a dictionary for our language, the dictionary makes itself.

Of course, much of these stock phrases can be blamed on decades of poor writing instruction that directed students towards models of efficiency, or empty containers of form through which a student’s original thoughts could be expressed without the hassle of thinking about how ideas should proceed within closed form writing.

In many ways, the central problem with these forms of writing is the way in which they encourage a writing process (no matter how much the opposite is emphasized) that believes the veracity of its thesis prior to the work necessary to substantiate it. The problem with writing is that we grade writing methodologies in the most superficial of ways: annotated bibliography, first draft, etc.

The type of student writing that has arisen of the last few decades is tied to standards of efficiency that can be seen across all sectors of education from timed standardized testing to ever increasing rates of remediation promulgated by the failed philosophy of No Child Left Behind. The result of this model of efficiency even trickles down to the level of writing and the ever shrinking language that students feel they can employ when composing their thoughts in an academic setting.

Returning to Lacan, the problem is not only that students have an insufficient quantity of signs with which to communicate but this is a fact of which they are entirely unaware due to the functional utility of this limited number of signs. He writes, “As soon as language exists, and the question is precisely to know what minimum number of signs is needed to make a language, there is a concrete universe. All the significations must find a place in it” (287). Although many students simply run through the hoops of essay writing to fulfill their role in the grade economy (and I certainly don’t blame them), there is also another type of student that genuinely subscribes to the ideas and beliefs written down because this “minimum number of signs” nonetheless creates “a concrete universe” through which the student can comprehend the world, potentially imploding these material restrictions from within.