Theory 4 (Email 5)

Hi Dhanashree

these posts are circling (zooming in) on excellent material, prime for instructions.  We need to know from Theory some version of how reality, the world we experience and observe, what makes it work.  There is a practical dimension to our "pure research," as emblematized in the consultancy theme in Internet Invention (EmerAgency).  And the poetics and final experiment take up a key point of heuretics and mystory, that, as Lacan noted (citing Freud also), this dimension we are addressing (enunciation over/under statement, of desire enframing reflexive consciousness), may not be treated in effigy.  The metaphysics concerns us (it describes the world we are in today, and proposes a mode of action and attitude).  So these phenomena that we observe and the "things" and "persons" with which we interact, what moves them, motivates and causes what we undergo?  Drive.  Everything circulates around a lack/void, including in the empty uncanny place [chora] some materialization that ontologically is objet a (which I write @, for several reasons we should discuss). 

That is what the text says and we adopt as the correct account (provisionally).  We find its slot also in Jullien, where we learn that the Chinese observed something similar, a circulation of force organizing all experience, but they accounted for it with reference to the season cycles, yin-yang (the tai chi).  The Chinese, that is, like the West (Greeks) were attending to life as bios.  Lacan acknowledges the reality of that dimension (obviously), but adds another dimension that must be accounted for as well in metaphysics, libido (beyond need into demand, desire, jouissance).  Drive is the force of libido, and its paradoxical features include the fact that humans are able to gain some bit of satisfaction (of jouissance) without achieving the aim.  It has to do with the capacities of our sensory organs, their polyvalence, and with the integration of nature with culture, hence sublimation.  There are many ways to say being, Aristotle observed.  Lacan would add, there are many ways to enjoy.  No wonder I get a kick out of writing books!