I'd
like to think about the line that Lacan highlights in his discussion
about the Desire and circuits (and perhaps in doing so, to connect this
email to my last one): "The bow is given the name of life ... and its
work is death" (177). This line was an important one for me in trying to
think about the stopped course of the circuit as an element that
somewhat connects Lacan and Jullien, as a kind of altered understanding
of Jullien's process.
Jullien, as I'm sure we all
remember, utilizes the symbol and literal of the bow in its importance
to the Chinese culture (because it demonstrates Shi and the potential
born from its propensity). I want to think about
the bow in this situation as Lacan does. actually as a cut-off
potential, as the death drive of reproduction operates.
In Electracy. this desire might not be the same; the limbo space that is
filled with anxiety has to become altered. I'm thinking, actually,
of a the last bow that Katniss fires in the movie adaptation of Catching Fire.
In this (sorry for the spoilers) scene Katniss takes an actual circuit,
wraps it around her arrow, and shoots the arrow at the false reality of
the arena. I think of this
example simply because it combines the idea of a circuit with the quote
about the bow. But if we think about it in the way that Lacan does, I
think it's interesting to note that something interesting happens with
this electric current: It gets shot through
the false reality's sky in the form of a lightning bolt, goes through a
tree with copper wire wrapped around it, is transferred to Katniss's
electric wire and goes right back up to the sky that created it in the
first place. But something else also happens
that allows for the circuit not have that complete-circle rotation that
would make this example a failed one. What happens is that the electric
circuit not only travels from one point of the sky and back to that same
point, a residual electric current simultaneously
travels into Katniss's body, leaving her prostrate on the ground.
It is here that I can begin
to envision the idea of an Electrate desire, and not a psychoanalytic
one. Katniss is the glitch in the system, so that changes things a
little bit, as glitches do in our thinking of Lacan's
desire. But it is actually precisely because of she is the glitch that I
want to focus on her. The glitch is that which gives us that duel
feeling of anxiety/desire -- we are anxious about Katniss in general,
but we also want to be her. She becomes the "hollow
object" of our gaze (180). But this, still, is psychoanalytic. However,
I think it can be looked at as Electrate if we think not about Katniss
but about the arena. To think about that which kisses itself, which
closes its mouth so that its desires can't be arrows
that bring a simultaneous life-death to those desires.
The arena is a closed
circuit, something that we talked about during our last class as an
element that we would need when we thought about Electracy. It itself is
a bow, a manifestation of the desire of the Capitol
that is supposed to continue the life of the political system in place,
but it in fact helps to destroy it because it has become a somewhat
closed system (and for all intents and purposes, I want to think about
it this way). If that is the case, then I want
to think about the arena not as the head of an arrow, but as a
Boomerang. A boomerang is unlike an arrow because it ends were it
starts, in the hand of the thrower (theoretically, at least). In this
way, it is like a circuit that has not been stopped in the
middle of it's current. It kills, and then it comes back, kills and
comes back. It is a regenerative object in this way, at the same time
that it is an object of constant-death. It has achieved what arrows
can't because of its potential for infinity.
Electracly, where is the
equivalent almost-closed-circuit? I can think of two examples: the chain
letter and the viral video. But these example depend on he open system
within the closed system of the internet to thrive,
to infect and to kill (if one does not pass the chain letter on). The
system is even more closed when one thinks about Tumblr's posts. These
are reproductive, though, which nullifies the auto-erotic circuit we're
looking for. Can we think about, for instance,
a blog full of private posts, of desires, that are sustained by their
fantasy? Moreover, how can desire thrive if it is constantly
internalized, how can it sustain itself without eventual annihilation?
Perhaps a clue is Lacan's
section on soda-masochism, when he states that "at the moment when the
loop is closed, when it is from one pole to the other that there has
been a reversal, when the other has come into play,
when the subject has taken himself as the end, the terminus of the
drive" (183). Could it be here where Katniss would again reassert
herself into the narrative: when the electric current runs through her,
does she become, for an instant, a part of the system
that she's destroying? At least a part of this is true: District 12, her
home, the place where she became what she was, is itself annihilated.
Katniss can never be the same again. How can we think about this in
terms of an instruction that will increase our
hermeneutic and theoretical understanding of Electracy?
Until next time,
Asmaa
------------------------------------------------------------Response
You have the feel for Lacanian style (and its
Chinese cousin) in working through a theoretical issue by means of an
art (or other materialized) example. Potentiality is the central issue
as we know, with the Unconscious
located in an interval gap of Limbo between Potential and Actual
(central and fundamental theme of metaphysics). Relevant to the lessons
of your case example is Lacan's description of the Unconscious as an
alternating current, or at as a fish net that opens
and closes, a "trap" in this respect, whose rhythms one must learn to
notice. In his famous talk given at the Johns Hopkins Symposium that
kicked off poststructuralism in America, Lacan evoked the Unconscious as
a figure, as Baltimore in the early morning,
before sunrise, with the neon lights of the city blinking on and off. I
appropriated that image to develop a version of conduction that I
characterized as "reasoneon." We may recognize the Tai Chi symbol
referencing the alternating rhythm of yin-yang, closed
and broken lines stacking up into sets of 6, a hexagram as two trigrams,
moments of time flowing constantly, frame grabs of process, positions
as we know--of Shi. It is the 0/1 F/T off/on switch constitutive of
computing (the invention streams converging.
Leibniz who developed the binomial number system was shocked when he
learned about the I Ching from a Jesuit friend returning from mission
work in China. He saw that the 64 hexagram configured the first 64
numbers in a binomial system. Finally, Lacan made
the connection with Electracy explicit when he explained this operation
of the Unconscious with reference to electricity itself, and the physics
of an electric light (having to do with the properties of current).
But all of that , as in your case also, is to understand this Real,
known as the Unconscious, in order to be able to live with it and thrive
in that rhythm. 
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