Theory 4 (Email 4)

Hi Anastasia

     The question of adaptation of Lacan to electracy is central to our heuretic concerns.  I mentioned in introducing Lacan relative to the CATTt that psychoanalysis is one of several sites of apprenticeship, transitional forms, suggesting practices that may be appropriated and repurposed and moved into "general electracy" (part of an electrate education).  Our project frame in any case prompts us to ask about this adaptability, since we are doing grammatology.  "Tragedy" was a transitional institution for Classical Greece, partly religious ritual, partly modern theater.  A symptom of the new mode of identity experience and behavior emerging in literacy was manifested in theater in the figure  of Thespis, the first actor to perform as an individual fictional person (stepping out from the Chorus to speak as a person).  The grammatological analogy (using apparatus comparison/contrasts to find opportunities for invention) is that "subject" as theorized in psychoanalysis names and develops a new mode of identity specific to electracy.  The account of subject in Seminar XI (and throughout all the seminars) is not so much about the identity we have had all along, but of a sort that we may achieve within the capacities of the digital apparatus.  The experience of being referenced, of course, is not new (desire, for example), but the account of how it works, and the behaviors recommended for accomplishing well-being, are a new possibility for how to address the irreducible human condition (mortaltiy, finitude associated with the fact that sexuality or sexual reproduction for survival of the species and the lure of pleasure that goes with it condemns individuals to death).  Apparatus always includes identity formation and institutional practices along with technology in the analysis and invention of culture.
 

 The related point of adaptation is to assume -- just as you noted -- that Analysis as clinical therapy, in its treatment of patients (Analysands) suffering with various degrees of disabling neurosis, perversion, or even psychosis, models styles of self-knowledge that may be generalized to everyday thriving. The historical analogy -- one that  Lacan himself used frequently-- is with Socrates, who practiced dialectics without writing.  Freud managed the Unconscious without a therapist (although his correspondence with his friend and colleague, Fliess, is considered to be a kind of proto-analysis, and these letters are the scene of the invention of psychoanalysis).  The four fundamental concepts name the elements of one experience that Analysts-in-training must undergo (an encounter with the Unconscious). Our poetics proposes to extract from the training features of a practice that  may be generalized for electrate being, relative to the metaphysics of pleasure-pain (jouissance), productive of well-being.

As you said, our question then is:  what are the details?  what is the nature  of this reality now supposedly accessible to ontology, such that we may access and manage it?