EF_Lacan

SPAT – Lacan and performative transformation/translation OR Elliptical orbits on the surface of a structure

//The performativity of language – translations through each re-reading and performance, through each concurrent utterance. Through analysis, we read the difference of returning back to a particular phenomenon or subject – could relate to experimental phenomenon. In that the experiment will have different variables, we will observe it differently; make particular assumptions as we return back to it. One needs to be aware of this and read the assumptions and particularities of oneself within the phenomenon:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: //

* “A lesson – any lesson – cannot simply be confused with the words, the terminology it uses to articulate itself. A reading lesson is, precisely, not a statement; it is a performance. It is not theory, it is practice, a practice that derives – as such – its worth from its efficiency, not from its exemplarity; a practice, therefore, that can be exemplary only insofar as it is understood to be a model or a paradigm, not for imitation but for (self) transformation,” (Felman 20)

“But language for Lacan (even his own) is something altogether like a list of terms we should be transformed by, a list of terms into which to write, or to translate, ourselves” (Felman 20)

“[…] The analytic reading is thus essentially the reading of a difference that inhabits language, a kind of mapping in the subject’s discourse of its points of disagreement with, or difference from, itself” (F 21)

//This is pretty typical though – Lacan is even more radical than this idea of what analysis does – “ //For the activity of reading is not just the analyst’s, it is also the analysand’s: interpreting is what takes place on both sides of the analytic situation. The unconscious, in Lacan’s eyes, is not simply the object of psychoanalytical investigation, but its subject (F 21)”

//The unconscious::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: //

“The unconscious is a reader” (F 22)

“The unconscious is not, in effect, “discovered”; it is constructed: it is not a given to be observed, a substance out there that has finally come under the microscope; it is a theoretical construction. The reading is, in other words, of such a nature that it cannot be direct, intuitive; it is constitutively mediated by a hypothesis; it necessitates a theory. But the reading is not theory: it is practice, a practical procedure, partially blind to what it does but which proves to be efficient” (F 23-24).

//Edgar Allen Poe, popularity, detectives. poets and analysts::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: //

“The fact that it so much matters to proclaim that Poe does not matter is but evidence of the extent to which Poe’s poetry is, in effect, a poetry that matters” (F 32).

//WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR POE TO THEN TRAVERSE MEDIA (SIMPSONS, CHILDRENS BOOKS, READINGS ON HIS BIRTHDAY/HALLOWEEN, CITIES TRYING TO CLAIM POE) – his importance moves beyond even mere literature and philosophical scholarship – it has made its way into mass popular culture // //Dynamic interactions between the conscious and unconscious elements of art. //

“What does a repetition compulsion repeat? Interpretation of difference as opposed to interpretation of identity.” “…for Lacan any possible insight into the reality of the unconscious is contingent on a perception of repetition, not as a confirmation of identity, but as the insistence of the indelibility of a difference” (44)

“For Lacan, on the other hand, the analyst’s task is not to read the letter’s hidden referential content, but to situate the superficial indication of its textual movement, to analyze the paradoxically invisible symbolic evidence of its displacement, its structural insistence, in a signifying chain” (F 44).

//Different interpretations through mis-translation – or possibly the right translation for the right context, for a re-reading for a performance and transformation within the reading: Poets are mad or perceived to be mad – yet in this reductionist labeling, those who are not poets, are not mad, cannot reason like one, and as such miss the surface meaning. They try too hard to dig deep down – instead should be skating on the surface structure, taking some meaning from there (??) // //<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">To Lacan, the position of the poet, is thus the position of the analyst //

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">“The clear-cut opposition between madness and health, or between doctor and patient, is unsettled by the odd functioning of the purloined letter of the unconscious, which no one can possess or master. “There is no metalanguage,” says Lacan: there is no language in which interpretation can itself escape the effects of the unconscious; the interpreter is not more immune than the poet to unconscious delusions and errors” (F 49).

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">COLLISION OF OBJECT AND SUBJECT:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: //

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">**locating the unknown and the question, not the known within the text – analyst and literature informing and transforming one another (relates, possibly, to agential realism and Rheinberger – scientific mechanism, experimental systems, whatever)** // //The symptomatic repetition, returning to the trauma – originality in the return to a situation, to an action or way of being – retranslating, reinterpreting – “return to Freud” – analytical dialogue// //<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">Psychoanalysis has a 1) praxis 2) method 3) theory, all of which are original //

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">“This new reflexive mode – instituted by Freud’s way of listening to the discourse of the hysteric and which Lacan will call “the in-mixture of the subjects” – divides the subjects differently, in such a way that they are neither entirely distinguished, separate from each other, nor, correlatively, entirely totalizable but, rather, interfering from within and in one another” (F 61)

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">**HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO TRANSCORPOREALITY AS ALAIMO SEES IT. In this sense (and generally in transcorporeality terms) we are what we eat, we are our environment, it affects onto us, the boundary between us and the outside is permeable (the grey, pulsating mist, the real makes its way in, no matter how we try to keep it out) --- //// <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">BOUNDLESS INTERACTIONS BETWEEN OBSERVER AND SUBJECT? //

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">“The physicist is himself part of the data, the experimenter part of the laboratory. The observer is a fundamental structural, desiring, formative part of the observed. Modern science, in other words, includes the symptom of the observer in the observed. But this is precisely in Lacan’s conception, the gist of Freud’s radical operation” (63).

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">For me, this brings to mind Barad and her contention within the experimental system of ‘where does the experiment end and the observer begin?’ She breaks down boundaries into a series of ‘intra-actions’ where the observer and phenomena are shaped together—their ‘inseparability’::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: //

BARAD: “My reading is that the measured properties refer to phenomena, remembering that phenomena are physical-conceptual “intra-actions” whose unambiguous account requires “a description of all relevant features of the experimental arrangement.” I introduce the neologism //“intra-action//” to signify //the inseparability of “objects” and “agencies of observation”// (in contrast to “interaction,” which reinscribes the contested dichotomy),” (Barad 96).

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">COPERNICUS!! CENTERS! I GET EXCITED ABOUT ASTRONOMY! :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: //

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;"> “For Lacan emphasizes not so much the scientific consequence of the change of center as the scientific process of decentering, that is, the new mode of reflexivity” (64).

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">WAIT, LACAN AS EINSTEIN?? Oh wait, no he’s Kepler. Oh yea, the concentric vs eccentric phrase – which did make me think of Kepler and his theorizing of orbits as elliptical. Still the way that Lacan theorizes the decentering and thinking of centers as possibly different poles to which one gravitates or which have effects (even if not seen) reminds me of Einstein’s gravity – of bends in the fabric of space-time – is it always just dealing with two points? With the elliptical Centers? //

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">“In Lacan’s explicitly and crucially linguistic model of reflexivity, there are no longer distinct centers but only contradictory gravitational pulls”

//<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">DETECTIVE & ANALYSTS AS BRICOLEURS::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: // //<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">“The detective grasps the scene as a ////<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">bricolage ////<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;"> of heterogeneous elements, in which the connection between the murderer’s mise-en-scene and the real events corresponds exactly to that between the manifest dream contents and the latent dream thought, or between the immediate figuration of the rebus an its solution” (Zizek 53-54). //