Julien Instructions (Contrast 1)

When I first started reading Julien, which was when we were working on the Mystory, I kept think about how the Mystory may be following the Chinese logic of discerning an overall pattern before it could be fully described (after the end of our career). The problem, however, with comparing the Mystory to the configuration of "propensities" is that, at least according to Julien, the Chinese are concerned with grasping the totality first and then filling in the details. Grasping the general "contours" of a scene is a way of grasping its telos or purpose. There is an emphasis on a kind of "necessity" that has little room for chance or arbitrariness. The military strategist must grasp the entire situation and already believe that he has won before acting. 

This is, in some ways, a non-experimental attitude. In the Mystory, we act without knowing where we are going to go, working from individual details to invent (and discover) the pattern as it emerges. We are neither strategic or tactical in MIchel de Certeau's sense. We do not want to create distance for the sake of grasping the whole "at a glance" (even if this might approach an 'image logic' or 'flash reason'). The totality is not what allows us to see the connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm, but the little detail, Barthes punctum. A little signifier that doesn't "mean" anything, but that gathers and organizes our lives into a pattern. We do not seek the objective situation "out there" and thus adapt and conform to it, but we dwell in an extimate (see Lacan) relation with the world. The outside is inside and the inside is outside. "Shi"  is more like discerning a force that transcends the human being, to which the human should follow in order to be in harmony with the world. 

The point that really brought this home for me was Julien's exploration of landscape painting. Julien, I assume following certain Chinese scholars, evokes a certain conception of the body: 

"Once again a comparison with the human body proves revealing. Regardless of a man's posture whether he is standing upright, walking, sitting, or lying down, each part of his body, down to the smallest joint, will be in harmony with that posture. To push this analogy to its limit--as Chinese critics lvoe to do--rocks are like the skeleton of the mountain, forests are its clothes, grass its hair, waterways its arteries and veins, the clouds its airs, mists its complexion, and temples, belvederes, bridges, and hamlets its jewels" (100)

This allows us to discern our contrast. We must go from totality to partial objects. Psychoanalysis will teach us the way of the partial object, the partial body. The body not as a mirror stage reflection, but as partial zones. These partial objects correspond not to an overall structure, a one to one analogy between the world and the body, but correspond to the senses:  Breast, Mouth, Anus, Gaze. 

We are not a unity that can be grasped as an overall structural configuration, but gathered by partial objects, these experiences of the senses which are linked with our desire. Demand always misses desire.