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 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.

Theory 4 (Email 8)

Hi Samantha

   I anticipate your presentation with high expectations!  A terrific move and illustrates a feature of our craft as HEUretics.  Lacan is excessively allusive in his remarks.  The Seminar proper is highly organized, as by now your notes probably have shown you:  it builds systematically, and every move is calculated in the manner of an HBO dramatic series, drawing out the exposition to sustain the  required number of installments.  At the same time, you also may have been frustrated a few times by the disparity in context provided:  Lacan devotes more attention to some examples than to others.  His lecture style is famous as a deliberate attempt to reproduce at least a simulacrum of chimney sweeping for his university audience, to force them to some extent to bring to bear the auditory  skill of listening with  "the third ear" (and this effect no doubt is what Adam responded to with the jazz gambit). 

 

  It often (if not always) is beneficial to pursue Lacan's allusions beyond what he provides himself, especially if the example is associated with explanation of an aspect of the overall theory that  especially interests you, perhaps to isolate in one of your inventory posts.  For example, in discussing linear perspective, and the grid artists used to achieve the effect (mimesis) -- a Cartesian grid, of course, and the classic 9 square layout is available as an overlay in your iPhone today (to help get the "best" composition).  As linear perspective evolved into the baroque, leading to anamorphic and other "distorting" effects, Albrecht Dürer made an engraving, quite famous, showing the artist looking through the screen "trellis" grid at the model.  The model is a woman stretched out on the table, viewed from an "up-skirt" angle -- concerned with effects of foreshortening no doubt.  But Lacan in his mischievous way no doubt intended us to notice this pruient aspect of the scene.  He does not explain, but drops the reference in for those "who  have ears" (as Jesus said regarding his parables). 

  Same with Viridiana.  Your detour into the details of this example are suggestive, provocative, useful. 

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.

Theory 4 (Email 6)

Hi Juan

     Really productive post! An exemplary aspect of this post is the interplay  among theory (libido), Lacan example (lamella), and mystory:  asking and locating "what  is this for me, in my own case?"  A point of sublimation, of course, is  that mounting exhibitions, producing a painting, or any activity of civilization, is itself a source of jouissance.  R. Crumb said he started drawing to meet girls.  It worked of course, but the career that followed left the copulation way behind.  And Lacan also asks of the women:  why does this work? In any case, for our purposes, looking for instructions, the principle is (as you dramatize), to identify a theory of how the world works (how reality  is constituted, what forces construct the possibilities of being and meaning); then be sure by means of examples you have an understanding of how these forces are manifested in actuality, in individual experience of the  lifeworld; then formulate a poetics, a recipe, that may be tested with your  own wide image project.

 In this regard, we are not limited to what is already in the wide image, but may  revisit the whole situation charted by part one, to  pick up aspects also available in the field but not necessarily relevant to the first pattern, but now salient because of the Lacan.  Also, this gap is precisely the dimension of the Unconscious, the Unrealized between potential and actual.  That is the place of our metaphysics.  Be sure also to attend to temporality and cause.  These are the big three of metaphysics --  what  makes experience possible.

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!

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?