Theory 4 (Email 12)

Hi Asmaa

   A wonderful post (worth waiting for!).  You have the feel for Lacanian style (and its Chinese cousin) in working through a theoretical issue by means of an art (or other materialized) example.  Potentiality is the central issue as we know, with the Unconscious located in an interval gap of Limbo between Potential and Actual (central and fundamental theme of metaphysics).  Relevant to the lessons of your case example is Lacan's description of the Unconscious as an alternating current, or as a fish net that opens and closes, a "trap" in this respect, whose rhythms one must learn to notice.  In his  famous talk given at the Johns Hopkins Symposium that kicked off poststructuralism in America, Lacan evoked the Unconscious as a figure, as Baltimore in the early morning, before sunrise, with the neon lights of the city blinking on and off.  I appropriated that image to develop a version of conduction that I characterized as reasoneon.  

 

We may recognize the Tai Chi symbol referencing the alternating rhythm of yin-yang, closed and broken lines stacking up into sets of 6, a hexagram as two trigrams, moments of time flowing constantly, frame grabs of process, positions as we know--of Shi.  It is the 0/1 F/T off/on switch constitutive of computing (the invention streams converging).  Leibniz who developed the binomial number system was shocked when he learned about the I Ching from a Jesuit friend returning from mission work in China.  He saw that the 64 hexagram configured the first 64 numbers in a binomial system.  Finally, Lacan made the connection with Electracy explicit when he explained this operation of the Unconscious with reference to electricity itself, and the physics of an electric light (having to do with the properties of current). 

But all of that , as in your case also, is to understand this Real, known as the Unconscious, in order to be able to live with it and thrive in that rhythm.