Theory 4 (Email 10)

Hi Adam

  Here is the Adam-theorist as ordered by master ulmer!  There was nothing "wrong" in itself with the  jazz reference last week, except  that  it was an interpretation treating Lacan as object of study when heuretics (game that it is) requires us to treat him as method of study.  He tells us what to do, not vice versa (although like  the good courtier or the Chinese sage we also manipulate our resources to suit our invention).  You get a lot of value  out of this example, nicely and explicitly supporting an important aspect of the theory.  We know from the Lacan's (local) Contrast that Freud is the anti-Descartes.  The interesting point for the new dimension of electracy (supplementing the introspective consciousness of literacy) is to describe what  happens beyond the cogito (I think, therefore, I am), that is, when you include the body (which Descartes abjected as mere meat, with dire consequences, according to many).  The Unconscious (as Jacob observed) turns out not to be "ours," or in us -- or rather, the map of our  positioning relative to the unconscious is a moebius strip, a topological figure showing us that the Unconscious functions as an "edge."  It is the edge of inside/outside, with effects Lacan characterized as "extimacy."

Your poem gives a more elegant variation on Freud's alternative cogito (the desidero), "I think where I  am not, and am not where I think."  This aniti-cogito takes into account the split Subject.  That the subject is split within (the split is not subject-object, or me in here vs the world out there, but I/me/other).  The gaze is a field theory of Subject (bringing psychology into line with the other sciences shifting from reference to field relationality of system networks).  The point is central to electracy regarding added value for Google Glass:  we need not only GPS, but EPS -- existential positioning system.  The split between meaning and being is involved, and what we want to learn from Lacan is how to gather all our informing parts (this gathering we have rightly identified  as montage of a surrealist collage sort for example).  Lacan works hard to help us, suggesting one way to characterize our experiment, as learning how to locate and triangulate to take into account the position from which we are regarded, as well as and along with the position from which we look. Note the "French" term:  regard.