Theory 4 (Email 13)

Hi Aaron

    A good way to situate your deferred participation in the email back-channel conversation about process.  One's first impression of a week's email could easily be that there is no pattern or tendency, in that each post picks up on a different piece of the elephant, so to speak, and then the response may or may not get around to reminding all that we are talking about a camel (?).  Your primer is a reminder of this gee and haw dimension of the exchange.  The first point always is just regarding heuretics, the logic of invention, and the CATTt , its chief heuristic.  We are indeed appropriating Lacan rather than attempting to be scholars of psychoanalysis (and certainly not wanting to be clinicians of neuroses).  Nor are we repurposing him entirely either, of course, since the proviso is that he is describing a Real for our metaphysics, whose ontology we intend to test and explore in our experiments. 

Next step then is to come to some agreement about what the theory has to offer, and it would be good to be more or less on the same page about this, the same screen, even though each experiment can and should be specific and partial (necessarily), and all the better for it, since an apparatus is not invented in a day by a solipsist.  We left off the week you missed (for a very good reason) with a clear (hopefully) statement of what we needed to get from Lacan:  an idea central to the theory about the nature and operation of the  Unconscious + an example or collection of examples helping locate how the Real of the theory is manifested in experience, such that  we might be able to work with it in our own projects (returning to the Wide Image). 

This past week the concluding lecture, following a productive and creative Band, clarified our purpose, as extracting or extrapolating a pedagogy for general electracy from the procedures of psychoanalytic training analysis, considered as a transitional practice moving from literacy to the new apparatus (from medicine, even from science, to something else, concerning how to enjoy.