Theory 4 (Email 9)

Hi Kendra

     The continuity of your inquiry, taking up from your  previous  post and my response, is how this email is supposed to work ideally, and in this case, practically.  It sounds like you got some good relays  from the group regarding my attempt to clarify the  heuretics of theory in preparation for the  band review of possible instructions.  Lacan made interesting use of diagrams throughout his career, and especially in the  second half of his seminars, beginning more or less with XI and continuing to  the end. One of the major shifts of emphasis was away from structuralist tropology (although that work remains important given the tropological nature  of dream work), to topology (so I guess he dropped the "r"?).  That is another  matter, as you noted, but with your ability  with  science perhaps worth pursuing at some point.  There are several books on Lacan and geometry.

 

    Our context in apparatus theory  and grammatology foregrounds the Analytic clinical sessions as a kind of pedagogy, whose rhetoric or poetics we want to identify and extract, to  extrapolate from therapy  to a general education skill crucial to the project of well-being at the core of electracy as metaphysics (well-being is to electracy what science is to literacy or salvation to orality).  In the Analytic session, by means of transference induced through the methods  of the talking cure, the Unconscious appears.  We need to attend closely to Lacan's descriptions of how it appears--oscillation, pulsation, its rhythm and timing, its temporality, since time space cause are matters of metaphysics.  That is what our poetics addresses. We know that there is a dimension of "real" that in principle electracy makes accessible, part of which  depends on the practice we are devising.  We know from Lacan that this "real" (Real), which is not the same as reality, is sexual and is  foreclosed or at least expulsed or abjected outside of speech and even language, but that it nonetheless is a force determining what  happens or not.  

 

The function of Analytic therapy is to instruct individuals is the means for encountering this Real, to bring it into discourse or representation-- and for our extrapolation obviously this "discursive" practice is not only linguistic, certainly not only narrative.  In fact, part of grammatology is the argument that new media capabilities are what make possible bringing this  Real to metaphysics. For now, as you have done, we learn from the Jullien/Lacan match, declaring and demonstrating that art (both broadly and narrowly defined) is the primary device for actualizing a set up (the subject is a set up, an apparatus).  Any and all the examples mounted in the  seminar can help  us understand how the Real has a phenomenal or perceptual/intelligible aspect, although (like chora) it is not itself perceptual nor conceptual.

 We also  know that we are headed (necessarily  and inevitably)  to cinematics.  And Lacan is helpful here  as well, with  his various  camera reference, as you note.