Theory 4 (Email 15)

Hi Jake

  Thanks for this inquiry, which is indeed relevant to our conversation.

Lacan is slippery as we know, so to some extent my account is heuretic and not scholarly, meaning that my reading is in the interests of grammatology and framed by apparatus theory.  In that context, by definition, the digital apparatus emerges from but is not confined to the accomplishments and limitations of the previous apparatus.   Electracy has its own limits but that is not our concern now.  A key to the "optimistic" attitude towards psychoanalysis as ontology for electracy is the provenance of gaze out of existential phenomenology, specifically Merleau-Ponty (and Sartre).  You and I talked a bit about "Flesh" and Lacan's references to M-P's Visible and Invisible, pubished posthumously just at the time of Seminar XI.  M-P argued explicitly that his account was ontological, replacing conceptual or literate "substance" with "element" in the classical sense of earth air fire water.  He overcame cartesian dualism with Flesh, to name the human as within the world in our materiality and sensorium:  we see from one position and are looked at from everywhere.  What attracted me most to M-P is the relevance of his ontology for electracy, in that he insisted that the metaphysics of Flesh exceed the reach of linguistics and language, of discourse (literate metaphysics), so he turned to painters, especially  Cezanne, and then Paul Klee, whose works "authored" so to speak versions  of Flesh as ontology.  As we discussed, Proust was his (and nearly everyone else's, include Deleuze later) prototype or touchstone, referring to his involuntary memory. But he noted that Proust in his novel is composing a hybrid philosophy, and not working directly with Flesh. 

The consistency of M-P's claim is measured relative to Heidegger, for example, who reminded us that Being appears in and is possible for thought only in writing (just as Lacan observed that the Unconscious appears only in Analytic therapy).  The related point from an earlier lecture is that the purpose of therapy is to bring the excluded Real into representation, in order to relieve the suffering you mentioned:  to transform suffering into symptom, as Freud said (into ordinary unhappiness).  We noted in our readings (and my lecture) that Lacan describes a register of drive now accessible that is beyond the pleasure principle.  There are two pleasures (as Barthes noted in Pleasure of the Text also:  pleasure  and bliss).  The apparatus argument is that the tracking of the two pleasures is a map of the discovery or emergence of electracy out of literacy.  The Symbolic (and Imaginary) orders are covered by  literacy, the operations of language and discourse, the defile of the signifier, alienation (in short). That is indeed the locus of the other provoking the emergence of the subject.  The desire of the other.

 

There is another order, the Real, excluded (until now) from discourse, from appearance, from consciousness, withdrawn completely.  Here is the workings of @ (objet petite a), partial objects, circulating around the void, the hole of lack, the Nothing, the gap between need and demand.  The interest of Seminar XI for us is the account of gaze as one of the partial objects, and how it may be brought into representation, at least as image, but in principle in any aesthetic procution.
 

What is confusing and important to clarify (to the extent possible) is that the @ proper is nothing in itself, but is only a relation for the libido, the lamella of erogenous zones:  the part objects are the objects cause of desire (as you know), and any particular item or "thing" that is desired, any "object" in the literate sense, is an ambassador for the object cause.  The drive and the @ are best considered together (in fact we are aware by  now of the interdependence of the 4 fundamental concepts in general and all the subfeatures articulated in the lectures to explain them).  The drive includes four operations (source, impetus, object, aim... something like that?).  These four correlate fairly well with Aristotle's four causes:  material, efficient, formal, final.  What interests Lacan early in the seminar is to explain the Unconscious as the "unrealized" dimension of Limbo between potential and actual:  what interrupts living?

So  in class on Wednesday we will discuss how or in what way the camera and the various practices of photography invented in the arts and popular culture support and enable an ontology of the Real in Lacan sense.  Your spotlight is an excellent test case, but to direct the poetics and its test in an experiment, we will want to correlate the CATTt inventories with some clarity.

Theory 4 (Email 14)

Hi Kendra

  "Fetish" is a good anchor for gathering the CATTt.  It is useful even at the basic level of heuretics proper, reminding us to pay attention to terminology.  Psychoanalysis, like any inventive methodology, dealt with the challenge of naming its new areas of inquiry by appropriating some existing vocabulary.  This vocabulary  is catachrestic, meaning that it is a figure for something that does not have a literal sense.  If we keep  in mind the original source of "fetish" we recognize that the term is eloquent, even if Freud used it pejoratively to some extent.  I discuss this in Internet Invention (Marx and Freud both using fetish negatively to name features of the industrial city, versus artists who somewhat later used it positively).  It concerns promoting some ordinary item of everyday life to a position of symbolic power. 

"Castration" is similarly evocative:  a source of much misunderstanding of course, but also eloquent in naming a condition of limit, disempowerment, control, threat--and reminds us of stakes in desidero.  The most relevant thing for us in the discussion is the description of operations and logics associated with fetish and castration.  You picked up on the practical value of Metz's conversation.  He is drawing upon Lacan of course, applying Lacan and psychoanalysis  in general to cinema.  He is using the theory to articulate the match between theory and practice that concerns us also:  that there are features of the camera and photography that correlate with the theoretical account of human primary process (the Unconscious). 

We need cameras to write with or through the Unconscious so to speak.  For  example, the logic of fetishism in the psychoanalytic context is that of denial, disavowal (defense)--the child's denial of sexual difference.  This scene must be generalized to the logic, which persists in adult experience, allowing a person to maintain two conflicting positions simultaneously:  "I know, but all the same" (or, the translation I prefer, "I know, but still...").  I know (= science); but still (= belief).  These two version of reality are on different planes.  We have to assume in the context of grammatology that there is a use value for this operation of primary process.  The "still" has choral functionality (it is conductive). 

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.

Theory 4 (Email 10)

Hi Adam

  Here is the Adam-theorist as ordered by master ulmer!  There was nothing "wrong" in itself with the  jazz reference last week, except  that  it was an interpretation treating Lacan as object of study when heuretics (game that it is) requires us to treat him as method of study.  He tells us what to do, not vice versa (although like  the good courtier or the Chinese sage we also manipulate our resources to suit our invention).  You get a lot of value  out of this example, nicely and explicitly supporting an important aspect of the theory.  We know from the Lacan's (local) Contrast that Freud is the anti-Descartes.  The interesting point for the new dimension of electracy (supplementing the introspective consciousness of literacy) is to describe what  happens beyond the cogito (I think, therefore, I am), that is, when you include the body (which Descartes abjected as mere meat, with dire consequences, according to many).  The Unconscious (as Jacob observed) turns out not to be "ours," or in us -- or rather, the map of our  positioning relative to the unconscious is a moebius strip, a topological figure showing us that the Unconscious functions as an "edge."  It is the edge of inside/outside, with effects Lacan characterized as "extimacy."

Your poem gives a more elegant variation on Freud's alternative cogito (the desidero), "I think where I  am not, and am not where I think."  This aniti-cogito takes into account the split Subject.  That the subject is split within (the split is not subject-object, or me in here vs the world out there, but I/me/other).  The gaze is a field theory of Subject (bringing psychology into line with the other sciences shifting from reference to field relationality of system networks).  The point is central to electracy regarding added value for Google Glass:  we need not only GPS, but EPS -- existential positioning system.  The split between meaning and being is involved, and what we want to learn from Lacan is how to gather all our informing parts (this gathering we have rightly identified  as montage of a surrealist collage sort for example).  Lacan works hard to help us, suggesting one way to characterize our experiment, as learning how to locate and triangulate to take into account the position from which we are regarded, as well as and along with the position from which we look. Note the "French" term:  regard.

Theory 4 (Email 7)

Hi Jacob

 

     An insightful, useful discussion of one of the four concepts at issue in the seminar.  Part of the value of your remarks is to remind us that this distinction between the commonplace or preconception or layman's dictionary understanding (or pop culture) of a disciplinary term applies to any  and all of the active vocabulary in play.  Some of the added value is local due to our CATTt, in which for example "position" becomes freighted with significance, as a central term for Jullien.  Because Jullien does so much with "position," it produces connections with "position" in Lacan, which is equally major.  It doesn't take long to get a parallel (or reoccupation) between surveillance in imperial China and gaze in Western modernity.  A concern of behavior (Morality in our MMM metaphysics, action, act) is motivation, how and if acts hang fire, are put in abeyance, suspended ("souffrance"), on demand of something foreign in me:  A good variation on Superego would be "the Chinese Emperor in me." 

 

 So we have these popular ideas, and studies have shown that a more or less "vulgar Freudianism" is a default of modern common sense regarding human motives.  Then as you documented, it turns out that the disciplinary term is substantially different.  This happens in all fields (the notion of "force" in physics, for example). 

    Your inference about how to proceed is correct.  What I like about heuretics in general, and theory in particular, is that you can't wing it and expect to accomplish anything, or, winging it produces embarrassment eventually, usually sooner rather  than later.  Rather, you  have to suspend common sense, and follow the instructions of the theory (however wacky or counter-intuitive).  You start in the right direction, noting that while the Unconscious may be structured "like"  a language, it does not include many of the features of formal grammar that literacy developed into the rules of logic, not to mention the practices of inference (abduction, deduction, induction).  Rather, as we know from Part One, the Unconscious thinks via conduction (as I put it), or by dream work.  Everything Lacan says about "primary  process" is this alternative inference system.  The instruction is:  use primary  process operations in your experiment.

Generating Instructions

Image of Wide Scope (personal metaphysics: Ulmer).

Heuretics requires several levels of process:  the first step is to take a set of notes on a resource, in order to generate the inventory of possibilities for the intertext poetics. The notes must be an accurate if reduced and condensed representation of the resource, useful in any project.  The instructions generated from the notes (second level) are relative to the specific experiment (in our case, an electrate metaphysics).  In the spirit of translating hermeneutics into heuretics, the analytical and interpretive arguments of the original are rewritten as rules for production.  The caveat is provided by the history of drama:  the prestige of Aristotle's original poetics, describing the features of an ideal tragedy (Oedipus Rex), became prescriptions for Neoclassical tragedy, having a constraining and ultimately negative effect.  Caveat duly noted, but still at this initial stage the procedure is to select key descriptions to revise into provisional prescriptions. 

The assignment describes the project and experiment, providing the goal the instructions address.  The experiment is to test the conductive image logic used in the Wide Image to perform and communicate the electrate poetics generated in Part Two.  The method is to use the assignment to help read the CATTt texts, beginning with Jullien.  In this context we recognize a certain homology between Jullien and the Wide Image.  The Wide Image was produced from a mystory by means of the Emblem--itself an unpacking of a basic image form: vehicle as material icon with properties and connotations; tenor as answers to three questions, concerning "metaphysics" (the nature of reality), "morality" (how one behaves), "mood" (feeling, attitude).  Jullien's Propensity of Things, not by chance, manifests a similar organization.  The book includes three parts, each with a conclusion: 1: A Logic of Manipulation.  This Part corresponds with Morality (how does one act). 2: The Dragon Motif. Part Two concerns aesthetics, art practices expressing attitude, mood of this world. 3: Conformism and Efficacy; Part Three makes explicit the understanding of reality.  These are an alternative three "Ms" of the H'MMM disciplines (counterpart to the STEM disciplines of literate science) -- a relationship that calls for a separate post.

The immediate point is that in generating instructions for the poetics, one understands that a metaphysics is precisely that cultural environment that directs collectively, as a set-up for a civilization, comprehension of how reality is, how one must behave to thrive in that reality, and the attitude of feeling of this living.  The Wide Images designed in Part One are intuitive, folk metaphysics.  The experiment in Part Two is to correlate and augment the personal metaphysics with a potentially collective version.

Designing a Metaphysics for Electracy

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (Paul Gauguin, 1897).

Gauguin's masterpiece, whose title alludes to a catechism Gauguin learned during his school days, introduces our heuretics of metaphysics.  In the first part of the semester we used Internet Invention as guide for composing an Image of Wide Scope. In the second project the goal is to develop a theoretical framework situating the wide image in an electrate metaphysics.  In fact, the claim is that a wide image is a mystorical metaphysics.  The electrate metaphysics is generated using the CATTt heuristic:  Contrast = Jullien, Propensity of Things; Analogy = Cinematics; Theory = Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis; Target = the Internet; tale = blog.  One purpose of the seminar is to gain some experience operating the CATTt, which was derived from a pattern emerging withing the genre of discourse on method (see Ulmer, Heuretics: The  Logic of Invention). A rule of thumb is: any hermeneutics may become heuretics: it happens through a certain style of reading:  description becomes guide to prescription -- look for instructions.

The CATTt slots function like a spread in Tarot reading (or in any template): the slot itself is active and inflects any resource it receives.  The syntax of CATTt begins with the articulation of a problem: Contrast repels; Target attracts.  Contrast: the extant metaphysics of literacy are fine as far as they go, but are relative to their apparatus. Target: The Internet requires a native metaphysics.  The C & T are kenotic, emptying out, opening a site for invention.  The procedure is to inventory the respective resources to understand the terms of the problem, both what is being rejected, that for which an alternative is sought, and the affordances of the new condition.  Solution is generated from an inventory of Analogy and Theory.  Analogy is an extant related practice suggesting possibilities of the new discourse; Theory identifies the principles structuring the invention as a whole (the What of the enterprise).  The heuretic produces four inventories, four lists, each list inflected by its slot.  A pattern of correspondences emerges in the intertext created by the juxtaposition of lists.  This pattern is configured into a poetics, a forumla or recipe of instructions for composing (in our case) an electrate metaphysics.  The blog medium supports and organizes this process of collection, inventory, and correlation.

In our project, this poetics is immediately tried, correlated with the first project, the Wide Image.

Part II: Fla4 (Fla Vor; Flavor) Florida Still

Nemesis

Part II of the seminar begins now, continuing with the project to invent konsult. Konsult is to the EmerAgency what dialogue was to the Academy in Athens. We are inventing a discourse on method for electrate consulting -- pedagogy among institutions, for (in)corporate beings.  It is self-help deliberative reason for citizen decision on behalf of well-being.  The heuretic project begins with this name for a practice that remains to be designed and tested.  Konsult may occur within tourism or other leisure experience (skole = "leisure" in Greek), reoccupying the ancient practice of Theoria (theory tour), supported by Appiphany and related devices of ubimage.  It  is not only equipment of ubiquitous computing, but a practice of deliberative rhetoric, framing experience with an aesthetic attitude, to receive counsel (der Rat) from avatar (function).

The prototype encounters Cabot-Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville, Florida, included within Region 4 of the 10 Regions organizing Superfund administration.  Konsult appropriates the discourses of popular culture that inculcate aesthetic attitude as vernacular discourse:  tourism, cinema, television, digital games, to develop a behavior or conduct of sitesensing.  Call it flavor for short -- #Fla4:  fla (Fl) vor (four), to use conductive (Wake) linguistics.  Vor as German preposition carries us to the matter.  Place (Dative) of course: "though in referring to place only when it indicates condition or rest (if it answers the question 'where?') before, previous or prior to, ere, antecedent to (in time); before, in front of, ahead of (in place); in presence of; for, on account of, through, because of, with (joy, etc.)' from or against (with verbs of protection, warning, etc.); in preference to, more than, above."  Let us skip to the adverb: "only in nach vie -, as always, as ever, still, now as before."  Still (guide word).

More to come, but to review:  konsult functions as flash reason in dromosphere conditions, turbulence of Entstellung (distortion) as norm. Tropics of dreamwork, condensation, displacement, mise-en-scene, secondary elaboration:  defenses, nescience, resistance to thought and feeling, diversion as constant turning (away) of attention, framing not just gaze but every part object and its sense:  Perception and its cultural project are created (deliberately) to filter out stimuli/information/realization. The logic known as "fetish" operates freely and seemingly without resistance (it is resistance as such):  I know, but still... (current locus classicus:  "I know Obama has a U.S. birth certificate, but still...").  Cynical reason (Sloterdijk). Against but still, there is flavor.

Outline: CATTt

Smile Now, Cry Later (Francesco Clemente)

The challenge of heuretics is that of creating a discourse on method:  The method you need has to be generated even while you are applying it.  Blogs are a good support for this generative practice, since they enable a developmental unfolding.  A project experiment is set (the design of konsult for EmerAgency catalysis of public policy dilemmas), a set of resources are chosen as generators, assigned to slots in the CATTt, and each resource is inventoried in turn, in a sequence from which emerges an intertext, to be synthesized and integrated into a working recipe.  Blogs document this process, inventorying each resource as it is encountered, itemizing instructions from the operating features of the resource, testing them in part, while moving through the sequence, integrating instructions for further testing.  The result is both a commentary on and demonstration of the desired poetics.

What are the operating features available in the CATTt for Part One?
Theory:  Avatar Emergency

• Rationale:  "Prudence" as a "time virtue," good judgment integrating experience of past and present for a decision promising optimal outcomes in the future.  Prudence must be updated for electrate conditions of dromosphere.
• Relay (Model):  Titian, Allegory of Prudence -- the artist's decision resolving a family dilemma, celebrated in a painting associating each relevant person with an animal selected from an iconographic tradition.
• Encounter:  Titian updated by Francesco Clemente for a museum exhibit of artists's appropriations of famous works from the archive (collection).  This update opens up the original relay to further invention.
• Epiphany:  Poetics of sudden thought (encounters between microcosm/macrocosm) established in both religious and secular versions, codified in modernist poetry as correspondences, objective correlative and the like. Some ordinary feature of quotidian circumstances (external setting) triggers (catalyzes) a feeling of recognition, of identity, as a figure (tenor) of Mood (Stimmung, Heidegger).
• Memory:  Catalysis (outside environment triggering inside recognition) happens through memory:  some past Moment of experience, enduring in subconscious memory, matches some sensory aspect of the present situation. Ulmer reflects upon the formative events of his year studying in Spain, including enduring memories of a night sleeping outside with a companion in an olive orchard, as well as his adoption of the diaries of Franz Kafka as a tutor author for his own journals that year.
• Event:  Ulmer constructs an allegory through reflection on family vacations, situations in which the family travels to Florence Italy, Key West Florida, and Ponte Vedra Beach. 
• Image/Pastiche:  the allegory is formalized in a collection of three snapshots (White-crowned pigeon, Gelato sign, sand castle) associated with three members of the family) plus anecdotes about the events associated with each image.  In addition, Ulmer composes a pastiche of an aphorism selected from Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks, offered as "motto" for the allegory, using Kafka's form and style to express a philosophical version of the commemorated judgment.
• Ubimage:  it may be worth putting a point on this outline:  konsult is designed specifically as an electrate contribution to the technics of ubiquitous-pervasive computing.

The further step of using the CATTt is to extrapolate from these operating features, to adopt them as forms only, substituting one's own materials suggested by the relay, to test an allegory of prudence (aesthetic judgment) drawing on equivalents of the features found in the source Theory.

The related point is that the exercise defined in AE is not left as is, but is modified by intertextual synthesis with subsequent resources:  Contrast (Universal Experience) and tale (Once).  Universal Experience develops the setting of the encounter as within the institution of tourism (the community already has an aesthetic structure for the gaze or collective attention --attraction).  Once (Wenders) as tale specifies how to represent the allegory in photography and anecdotes, including Einstellung as an extension of epiphany into photography.

CATTt

Every discourse on method in the Western tradition manifests an implicit generator, a poetics, whose operating features are remembered in the acronym CATTt: Contrast/ Analogy/ Theory/ Target/ tale. The assigned readings for the seminar cover each one of the slots:
C = Marchand on American advertising (commodity form).
A = Evans (Ed.) on modernist arts (appropriation device).
T = Deleuze & Guattari, natural history of concept.
T = Virno on a way to address public policy questions (as joke).
t = Dean, a guide to stand-up comedy (how to compose a routine).