Theory 4 (Email 3)

Hi Jacob

     A nice transition from my response to Juan, to your post referencing structuralism...

  As noted, we are looking to Lacan for help in defining the account of reality opened up to metaphysics in electracy.  We can approach this account initially just by means of our common sense or popular understanding of psychoanalysis, which, according to some, is now (in its popular or vulgar version) the default explanation of human behavior (psychosis, neurosis and the like).  A quick statement of the reality to be ontologized is the Unconscious.  A virtue of Seminar XI is that (for reasons already discussed) Lacan took a break from pushing forward his more experimental speculations in order to regroup, to review the fundamentals of his project (the four Freudian concepts).  Part of the fun and challenge of heuretics has to do with our appropriation of a theory for purposes of invention, rather than as scholars let alone as experts or masters. 

As with any specialized knowledge, with psychoanalysis there is a vocabulary, touchstone examples and cases, methods.  We orient ourselves by coordinating our  own understanding relative to the unfamiliarity of the theory.  A good point of departure is to track vocabulary, technical terms, not just the four concepts, but the terms used to describe and explore them.  We may correlate and test Lacan's usage relative to Jullien's vocabulary, the terms used in the Cinematics overview (forthcoming), Internet Invention, and of course our own background as students and in popular culture.  Some terms will be foregrounded in this way: for example "position."  We know that a central debate in China (and between East and West) is the role of position in a set up, whether it is entirely deterministic, or the extent to which an agent may manipulate events by means of position. 

 The formula you discussed is a central point of reference, as you noted, scene of many book chapters and mis/understandings.  In heuretics we are responsible not for correctness but for invention.  We need to understand the functionings and manifestations of the unconscious, so we should be able to do something with the analogy (it is like a language).  Part of an instruction would be to note that our interest in electracy is not to return to the function of language in literacy, in alphabetic writing, so there  must be more to language, or language extends beyond what could be managed within the previous apparati, and this more is to be brought into general practice by means of experiments such as ours.

Theory 4 (Email 2)

Hi Samantha

      Lacan is an interesting case among the primary French theorists of post/structuralism in that most of his work is in the form of lectures.  His collection of papers, Ecrits, includes pieces reworked into essays  from lectures.  There are some 26 or so lectures (as far as I know), now mostly available in some published form or other (albeit still unofficial versions in some cases).  I tried to avoid reading them all, but by now have read more than half.  They really are engaging, and reward attention, more than reading works actually composed as books in some cases (Zizek, to name one egregious case, has published more than 60 books).  That Proustian syntax to which Anastasia alluded is apparently the way Lacan spoke, his natural style -- multiple subordinate clauses putting off the direct object.  His speaking style confirmed or demonstrated his point about the role of the quilting point (point de capiton) not just in syntax but at every level of discourse and action:  that we cannot be sure what the meaning of a statement is until the period is closed, and that signification thus is retroactive.  At the same time, the quilting point is at work  all along and a purpose of style is to play with the expectations of interlocutors, to  manipulate hopes and fears (as in narrative and drama). 

  Your comments motivated my opening, to get around to say that the beginning of Seminar XI is not planned in the way a book introduction would be, but is circumstantial, or historical, at least in part, addressing the fact that he had just been excommunicated and hence could not hold the lecture he planned, and had to find a new site -- place and institution -- in which to work (recalling Adam's post also).  The opening is relevant, certainly, as we learn over the course of the year, since Lacan has in mind the comparative history of the two apparati that are our precedents:  religion and science -- wondering where psychoanalysis falls, and what may be learned from his experience of innovations undertaken in the name of a return to the founder of the new practice, Freud himself. 

    Looking back could connect with the adage, reculer pour mieux sauter, crouching in order to leap more forcefully.  His audience is no longer primarily professional or vocational, so he shifts discourse positions, from master to university  (as he  later articulated the available positions:  master, university, hysteric, analyst).  He returns to the four fundamental concepts, inventions of Freud, in order to take them up and develop them further, in order to advance the "Freudian Field."  As our theorist, we consider him to be performing "first philosophy" (metaphysics), opening a new dimension for ontology, just as the Classical Greeks did when  they invented Philosophy and the new institution of the Academy. 

  As for narcissism, we understand by this term in psychoanalysis an orientation necessary for everyday functioning.  Kendra noted a keyword for this new ontology -- desire.  A reduced version of the shift from literacy to electracy would be to say that literacy took care of an ontology of knowledge:  the love of wisdom (sophia, knowledge) at the beginning.  They assumed that this "love" or desire for knowledge was in the  nature of the human (even its defining characteristic).  Psychoanalysis, functioning as electrate metaphysics, takes up the other side of the project:  the love, the desire that motivates and frames knowledge.  This love yields at least a few secrets under scrutiny, and much of the seminar is devoted to understanding the primary role that desire plays in transference, which is the medium that must be made to emerge within the analytic treatment if there is to be healing.  "Transference" is not exclusive to psychoanalysis, and has always  played some role in intersubjective institutions, such as education, religion, politics, but it is foregrounded in psychoanalysis. 

Your comments are valuable in noting Lacan's references to his own ontology, and in looking for instructions.  In the context of our project, the  poetics, we do not want to be psychoanalysts any more than we want to be Chinese.  Rather, the final poetics emerges from the intertext of the  CATTt resources.  For  the  moment we recognize "transference" as an experience for this new institution of the electrate era that may be generalized, with consequences and opportunities of practice for the general population of egents.

Theory4 (Email 1)

Hi  Anastasia

    Thanks for getting us started on this conversation.  An ambitious post including the transition:  The points of reference you defined are good, useful for our purposes, in grounding sufficiently general operations.  We are defining "metaphysics" not in the specialized sense of the science of being qua being (as Aristotle had it), but taking being in its general sense as an attempt to state the truth about what life is, not just THAT nature is, but what it is, how it works, its axioms or principles (the arche). This life refers to us who are living, learning how to act in accord with reality and what is real, so as not to be mistaken, in error, and repeat the same stupidities, such that we may be happy and thrive (so to speak).  Aristotle treated all of that in several text, inventing several different fields of knowledge (not only metaphysics but also logic, ethics, and poetics). 

    I put it that way to pick up on your point about repetition, one of the 4 fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.  Literacy committed to rationality, developing logic out of the affordances of written Greek, in order to get some control over error, the false, the stupid, the deceptive. Socrates as gadfly felt obligated to point out to his interlocutors that they didn't know what  they were doing or saying.  Was reason the answer?  Civilization made a great attempt in that direction, following up the first beginning as Heidegger put it.  And yet, today, we still do  not know what we are doing or saying.  Freud introduced a theoretical concept, the Unconscious, naming this condition.  Our  stupidity does not work the way  literacy thought, it seems.  Try  again, with the other beginning.  People who sought or who seek out psychoanalytic treatment suffer dissatisfaction to the point that they are no longer able to function.  They repeat the  same mistakes, find themselves in the same impasse repeatedly.  Why? what is the cause? What may be done about it?

    Lacan as Theory in the CATTt provides our anagogy:  we accept his account of the Real, reality (provisionally, always), to  explain how things work.  That is what we need from our Lacan instructions, so that our instructions tell us what reality we are looking for and testing in our experiment.  You are right to focus on the examples, just as we noted with  Jullien:  there is a general principle but the examples help orient us to its quality:  crossbow vs spear for example.  The game you rightly featured is famous in the literature, observed by Freud watching his grandson playing with a bobbin on a string.  He was playing "gone" Freud said, and Lacan sites this case.  The bobbin is a signifier, the game is the means by which the child deals with the absence of his mother.  The bobbin is about something else (this is always the case in art, dreams, language).  A relationship is set up, a semiotics, associating the two sounds the child made with two German word (Fort! = Gone; Da! = There); the words in turn associated with the position of the bobbin:  thrown away; retrieved.  In psychoanalysis, of course, games, dreams, jokes, stories, art, literature are not "just" analogies but the very material of the discipline. 

Shi (Instruction)

Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, a thorough account of categories or classification in the history of Western literacy (in other words, a grammatological approach to metaphysics), begins with this declaration:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.

This passage quotes a `certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that `animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed,
(c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs,
(e) sirens,
(f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(1) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies’.

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. (xvi)

Jullien's Propensity of Things removes the mystery of this effect when he explains that such collections are indeed an alternative system of knowledge, functioning not like Western abstract categories that unify by genus and species according to shared properties, but a series of positions (shi) for performing some skill, anything from playing the flute to the equivalent of the kama sutra.  Chinese knowledge does not work with concepts and definitions, but gathers into coherence by means of networks of affinities and contrasts, correlations.

The relay for a heuretics of electrate metaphysics is the refinement of the very notion of "apparatus" itself, the resonance between the "disposition" or configuration of a situation, producing a potentiality, with dispositif and the Wide Image matrix.   Works of art, especially landscape painting, are the prototype for actualizing and exploring a specific "set-up," and set-up as such.  The formal coherence of relationships within a set up, the design of tensions, the style (efficacy) of the design, create an effect of vitality.  This vitality or dynamism has metaphysical significance, emblematized in the dragon as the icon of a Chinese disposition.  The vitality or dynamism experienced in making and contemplating art directly concerns our inquiry into metaphysics, with ontology as the study precisely of being (life).  The feeling of vitality in art expresses the force of being.

A rule for heuretic instructions is to note in Jullien any points of analogy, as well as direct comparison/contrast between East and West.  The categorial theme concerns shi as the guiding notion for observing Chinese metaphysics (despite Jullien claiming that Chinese landscape painting evokes the invisible force governing reality without resorting to metaphysics).  The instruction is first to locate the relationship, and then to ask:  what is that for electracy (to be answered by means of the CATTt)? There are numerous useful analogies, but the one featured  here as instruction is the following (commenting on the list of shi or positions for learning a skill such as playing a musical instrument).

 These positions in movement (and of movement) defy thought cast in the mold of dichotomies.  For us too, the only way to describe them is through metaphor, by resorting to a cinematographic technique, for instance, and envisaging these series of shi as so many "freeze frames."  Alternatively, using the terms of graphic representation, one might liken them to "sections" made for a drawing of an object imagined as divided across planes; the series of shi could thus be thought of as so many different sections cut through a continuous movement. Each section reveals in itself a fixed plane, but one reads it as a "configuration" matching the dynamic force invested in it (114).

The choice of this particular analogy (shi as cinematographic freeze frame), is motivated by our CATTt Analogy-- a book on "Cinematics," treating artists's explorations of relations between photography and cinema.  The instruction is: Art forms capture and realize potential set-ups, even in an experimental way.  Specifically, be alert for a pattern (a configuration) emerging across the CATTt referencing freeze frame and related photographic and filmic devices.

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.

The Propensity of Things

(Cover Art) Dragon in Clouds

Jullien's study functions as Contrast in the CATTt for an electrate metaphysics.  Given the rule of heuretics-- that the poetics must be confined to the assigned resources -- it is desirable to have generous resources.  The looseness of the heuristics can be frustrating.  The first thing to note is that we are not contrasting with Jullien himself, but with the literate metaphysics he describes.  Some confusion may arise to begin with since Jullien himself produces our contrast for us.  A stricter CATTt might have placed Aristotle's Metaphysics in Contrast, in which case an inversion of that inventory might have resembled an ersatz "China" (just as, in Heuretics, an inversion of Descartes's Discourse on Method resembled a certain "Deleuze").  Derrida recommended in Of Grammatology that a theory and history of writing must include all literacies, not just alphabetic writing but also Chinese, Mayan, Egyptian (et. al.). Electracy in other words learns from and also distinguishes itself from all existing writing.

Thus Jullien occupies Contrast in a complex manner.  His method is to explain Chinese metaphysics for Western readers by a systematic comparison and contrast between Classical Chinese culture and Western (especially Classical Greek) culture.  Our inventory extracts several levels of generative material from this arrangement: 1) Every major point of contrast may first be read as identifying a slot of any metaphysics.  Our understanding of "metaphysics" as such derives from Jullien's survey of these two civilizations:  we need to generate an entry for these slots by extracting from our Analogy and Theory our own version of what the contrast defines. 2) Chinese metaphysics may be construed as "opposite" to Alphabetic (Greek), and certainly it is "different" in principle, beginning with the difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages.  This difference accounts for why at times there are parallels rather than oppositions found in our inventories, so that Jullien produces some analogies as well as contrasts.  At the same time, the Chinese case is still a literacy, albeit calligraphic and ideogrammic.  While it is true that some major inventors of electracy, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Ezra Pound, used Asian writing and arts as relays for their exemplary innovations, nonetheless an electrate metaphysics will not be Chinese anymore than Greek.  Its exact relation to extant civilizations is not oppositional, however, but syncretic, operating as apparatus for a global civilization.

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.