Theory

The Stain

http://vanessaattia.wordpress.com/felt/

It is fortuitous that Vanessa's Felt, which I used as a model for my Mystory, contains a major Lacanian figure: "the stain." "The stain" is our position in a picture. Instead of being a self-conscious, transparent, Cartesian subject, we should see ourselves as the blind spot, that which cannot be seen. Lacan contrasts this with the idea that we are a subject which is able to represent our Weltanschauung or philosophy. This would be a conscious exploration of our position. Instead, we are positioned by the invisible interpellation within the field of the gaze (explored in another post).

Instruction: Recognize our position as the blind spot, as somehow outside the frame of the picture: "if I am anything in the picture, it is always int he form of the screen, whcih I earlier called the stain, the spot" (97).

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The Gaze

For Lacan, our position is not the one looking. Rather, we are the ones being looked at. It does not matter if we are actually surveilled 24/7 by cameras or private detectives. Following Sartre (but departing from his concrete example), "The gaze that I encounter--you can find this in Sartre's own writing--is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other" (84).

Offering his own example, Lacan refers to a fishing expedition: "It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, inf act, were supposed to supply. . .You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!" 

But Lacan insists that it does see him: "it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light , the point at which everything that looks at me is situated--and I am not speaking metaphorically" (95).

He interprets: "it is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape, something other than what I have called the picture"

Instruction: Notice what the 'gaze' is telling us and be willing to be "surprised" by the world. To be fixed in its gaze. It seems like this object, this little glimmer of light, this is the 'wide image' -- that which is no longer a "picture" but a figure, the objet @.

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Drive as "Surrealist Montage"

Lacan writes, "if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage [. . .] the montage of the drive is amontage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail--in the sense in which one speaks ofmontage in a surrealist collage [. . .] I think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected to a gas-tap, a peacock's feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman who is just lying there looking beautiful."

While the image to my left is not exactly the image Lacan imagines, it is the same kind of surrealist collage. Part-objects, ripped out of their context, clash and merge, attract and repulse, to give us a sense of something. It has no "head nor tail" in the sense that it is not teleologically headed toward a particular goal it hopes to achieve (or does achieve). Rather, the part objects endlessly circulate in our minds, as we try and merge these images together. They will never arrive at their "aim," but rather circulate around the rims.

Instruction: Create a surrealist montage from 'part objects' of our Mystory images. Perhaps rather than thinking the Felt as one popcycle section "expressing" another, we should merely think of them as part objects attracting and repulsing, endlessly circulating as our mind's tries to fix them into a meaning (but can't -- we will never arrive. The image is irreducible). 

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Transference

In Freud's psychoanalysis, "transference" is the name given to the process by which a past relation is created in the present between the analysand and the analyst. Interestingly, this "identification" also happens with 'part objects', as in the famous "Dora" case, where Dora identifies Freud with a family figure because, at least according to Freud, they both smoke cigars. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, transference also allows us to see how the Other/Gaze is constituted. When we address the analyst, we are addressing what we think is the analyst's desire, which reveals basically how the Other's desire is structuring our own. Realizing that we are this 'blind spot' that blocks our desire from flowing, from circulating (to use some D&G rhetoric) allows for an epiphany. As Greg Ulmer has pointed out several times in our course, this epiphantic moment where the present and past merge is figure not only in psychoanalytic transference, but also in Benjamin's "dialectical image" and Joyce's "epiphany."

Lacan writes,

"If it is merely at the level of the desire of the Other, is there not something here that must appear to him to be an obstacle to his fading, which is a point at which his desire can never be recognized? This obstacle is never lifted, nor ever to be lifted, for analytic experience shows us that it is in seeing a whole chain come into play at the level of the desire of the Other that the subject's desire is constituted"

That is, in analytic experience, and at least if we reduce the possible engagement to the Symbolic register (signifiers) we cannot structure our desire except in the Other's terms (in its significations). The power of the image, at least according to Ulmer, is that photography can allow us to "write with the world" to "write with partial objects." That is, whereas last time we used google image (which is in some sense still in the "symbolic") if we take our own picture, we should be able to write with the world, to create a punctum which goes "beyond" the studium (Barthes).

It is not enough just to recognize one's interpellation. We don't have to use the other's signifiers. We are not "subject to" the wide image in the same way that we are subjected to the signifiers of analytic speech. Photography may open us to another way to structure our desire: a desire that is particular to ourselves. A way to write with the objet @. The objet @ are potentially infinite, no longer merely corresponding to the ones identified by Lacan.

The instruction is to Create a transferential relation to the world, that is, find a way to Felt present/past. Take a picture that involuntarily reminds you of something in your past. 

Lacan writes that the transference "closure of the unconscious" but paradoxically, it is only this moment of closure (this recognition, this identification, this affective tie, thispunctum) that allows "interpretation" (which we must remember is not oriented toward "meaning" but toward the knot, toward the stain, toward the spot -- the irreducible signifier, the objet @) to begin to take place. Lacan writes,

"The contraction of [the transference's] function, which causes it to be apprehended as the point of impact of the force of interpretation by the very fact that, in relation to the unconscious, it is a moment of closure--this is why we must treat it is as what it is, namely, a knot [. . .] it is a knot and it prompts us to account for it" (131).

It is the "tie" that allows for interpretation and punctuation of the signifier that gathers, that we are "subjected" to. It is not to be "dissolved" through pointing out the transference's "illusory" character because, like ideology, it doesn't really help to point out that it is "imaginary." As Althusser understands ideology: it is an imaginary relation to a real condition of existence. It has an effect on the subject. The Other's gaze has force.

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From Homunculus to Lamella

If the Theory spot is supposed to tell us the metaphysics, the how the world is, then it is necessary to address the status of the 'subject' in psychoanalysis. We are told, variously, that the subject is a "split subject," that the subject is a "subject-with-holes," that the subject is a stain, a spot, a knot, an irreducible kernel of non-sense, that nonetheless enacts a force. The subject is not: transparent self-consciousness who represents a world view, mind/body split, a subject fully in control (the unconscious surprises us). Lacan gives an excellent image of these two types of subjects.

1.) The Homunculus: "I will pinpoint the function fo the Cartesian cogito by the term monster or homunculus. . .whenever one has wished to account for inanity or psychological discordance by the present, inside man, of the celebrated little fellow who governs him, who is the driver, the point of synthesis we now say. The function of this little fellow was already denounced by pre-Socratic thought" (141). 

The homunculus is the idea of the "soul" separate from the body or the mark. In contrast to the homunculus. 

2.) The Lamella: "The lamella is something extra flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something--I will tell you shortly why--that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings,  -- because it survives any deivison, any scissiparous intervention. And it can run around." (197)

Because we have sexed reproduction, the objet a are the libido's "representatives" (its ambassadors) -- "And ti is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The objets a are merely its representatives, its figures.  The breast--as equivocal, as an element characteristic of the mammiferous organization, the placenta for example--certainly represents a part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object" (198). 

Ulmer reads this as the metaphysical principle that our "organs," our sense organs, are OUT THERE IN THE WORLD. As he humorously put it recently, "My trailer is in Tallahassee, but my scrotum is in Tennessee" (Ulmer, Facebook). 

We are connected to the lamella (and by extension our partial objects) via our drives, the drive that circulates around the objet @. 

Instruction: Find part of ourselves externally in the lamella

A Lamella roof is "used to cover wide, open areas with no supporting members (domes). 

A Lamella roof is "used to cover wide, open areas with no supporting members (domes)

"Lamella" is also used in mycology (Mushrooms): "a papery rip beneath a mushroom cap.

All of these images are incredibly suggestive of the structure of the lamella. The Lamella has a "rim," as we can clearly see in the mushroom lamella. There are, furthermore, Lamella of the lower eyelid, which further links Lacan's use of it to the "opening and closing" of the unconscious, like the opening and closing of a camera shutter.