Hello everyone,
Before I even started reading Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, I had already imposed a filter on the text: a kind of excavatory reading that would help me determine how to uncover the
[T]heory needed for our Electracy project. While doing so, I of course wanted to continue to think about Jullien's The Propensity of Things,
since one cannot have a CATTt without the C or a T. But before I delve
into a discussion about that, I want to
first think about the start of Lacan's text and how it allowed me to
relate what he's talking about with what we're trying to construct as a
class.
The initial epiphany occurred
right at the start of the book, when Lacan is relating the reason why
he's in the situation he is, why he's writing and how he came to lecture
in front of this particular audience. When
I was reading it, I felt a parallel experience - a sense of deja vu - to
the experience I felt not when I was working on my own Mystory, but
when I was listening to everyone else present their Mystories to the
class. It was the combination of relating something personal
-- on different levels of personal and intimate -- and connecting it to
academic work (the Career portion of the Mystory is what I saw happening
with Lacan's text). In a way, it was as if Lacan was constructing his
Mystory, letting us know why he was doing
the things he was doing. What his world view about the psychoanalytic
organization was when he started his lectures.
He begins with a conversation
about excommunication. Apart from the religious implications of the
word, I think it's important to think about the more literal meaning of
the word. Ex/communication is realized through
the removal of a communication link from one person to another. This
definition, for me, highlights an essential necessity of language: it it
"pointless" to create a language if you are the only person on the
planet since the linguistic system is a system of
connections between at least two points. Excommunication is meant as a
warning issue: a cease-and-desist from thinking in a particular kind of
way. Lacan was unable to communicate in his home venue, so that is why
he lectures in the present venue. Because of
this warning, excommunication makes an object out of a subject and
elucidates the system of human deals. It is in his explanation -- one
that he denotes as very relevant to his text, that he's not
just rambling on -- that we are able to understand his world
view. Lacan's world view is that of excommunication, betrayal (he
states that "There was nothing particularly exceptional, then, about my
situation, except that being traded by those whom I referred to just now
as colleagues, and even pupils, is sometimes,
if seen from the outside, called by a different name" -- it is
important, then, that he utilizes ex-communication and doesn't even
denote that other name), and elusive stability of subjectivity or truth
(Lacan 5). These are things that not even the master can
avoid.
It is the act of
communication, or language, that I think really allowed me to think
outside the realm of psychoanalysis and into the realm of Electracy. I
find the link between language and psychoanalysis to be a
fascinating technique that one can use in order to gleam, at least a
little, of what Electracy is all about. My understanding of language as
it paralleled psychoanalysis started right away from the beginning of
the text, as I think Lacan intended for it to.
Lacan says, "When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning
(or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the
unconscious. One knows. But only has only to be aware of the fact
to find oneself outside it. There is no friendship there,
in that space that supports this unconscious. All I can do is tell the
truth. No, that isn't so--- I have missed it. There is no truth that, in
passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the
same" (Lacan vii). It is here that the elusive
system of semiotics is illustrated.
Langauge systems exist, at
least in Western thought, always as symbolic (up for interpretation) and
always as a path towards something Real: the Real meaning. This divine
Real greatly mirrors that religious, teleological
Real or End or Infinity that one aspires to but can never achieve. As
with psychoanalysis, then, it is somewhat more simplistic to attribute
language with a kind of religion than with a science. This question of
the science of language or of linguistic systems
is something that I would like to think about in the future, but for now
I think the first step would be to think about the religious-like
characteristics of Electracy. That also poses two inquries. I do not
want to dismiss what art means in language systems
(Statues as representatives of Greek deities come to mind). I also wish
to think about what Jullien presented for our Contrast: in the Chinese
system of art/calligraphy/writing, there is no Real because the elusive
structure is already built into the system.
The idea that one can never hold on to truth is truth itself, in a way.
So how can we think about all of these together and make use of them for
our understanding of Electracy?
That is what I am trying to figure out, and what we are all trying to figure out, I think.
But I fear I have gone on for
much too long. I will close this email with an additional piece of the
puzzle; this is a discussion that Lacan had about a blind man and the
light that he could not see. He says, "the
blind man would be able to follow all our demonstrations ... We would
get him, for example, to finger an object ... We would teach him to
distinguish, by the sense of touch in his finger-ends, on a surface, a
certain configuration that reproduces the mapping
of the images" (93). Although I may be understanding his point in a
different way than he intended, because of the filter I have on my
comprehension, I think the utilization of the blind man is in a way
reminiscent of the bat analogy in the beginning of the
text (page 3). We have a person who is able to use various other senses
to determine meaning; however, the meaning he receives, though the
circuitry of his position, through the connection of one point to
another, and through the vibrational resonance he collects
is always already in the past. He is never in a present moment of truth,
which is exactly what light provides: a truth removed from its position
in reality. How can we think not only about the circuitry of the
language system, but about the circuitry of the
Electracal system so that we can better understand what exactly
Electracy means and how we can utilize it to create?
See you guys soon,
Asmaa
------------------------------------------------------------------Response
The discussion of how the blind experience space
and light connects
with fundamental metaphysical questions, having to do with the relation
of people to world: space, time, causality as three of the most
important themes. Did we review the history of conceptual categories?
The Greeks assumed the categories were in the real
proper, discovered at work there, in the outside given conditions.
Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy was to shift the relation
to argue that the categories are not in the actual external given world
but are functions of human capacity that make
experience possible. That is why it is not possible in Kant's view to
access "things themselves" -- one knowls only by apprehension,
phenomenal only. Epistemology and ontology merge in that version.
With Lacan, as noted, the relation of sensorium to apprehension
-- epistemology and ontology -- is approached through the erogenous
zones, the correlations among the organs directed by desire and
sexuality. The blind experience gaze in the same way as the sighted,
since it is distinct from the eye.
In any case, the posts this round gave much attention to the opening
of the Seminar. This attention perhaps is justified, though certainly
not the most useful material for our project. One important fact
related to it is that psychoanalysis is precisely
an institution, with the various administrative, bureaucratic
"discipline" that goes with it. This institutional setting apart and
constituting, invention and authorizing of a practice, is relevant to
apparatus theory, marking a part of philosophy most useful
for the new apparatus, while leaving behind the baggage of the
tradition.
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