dependencies

public sculpture 1

Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium - its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way. Similarly, on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arises spontaneously, as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to designate the mechanisms of obsessional neurosis - inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement. 

Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949

knots

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20131209-knots-unravel-mysteries-of-fluid-flow/

Here we find ourselves in a thought factory, in which, as in the “Weaver’s Masterpiece”:

	“One tread moves thousands of threads,
	The little shuttles fly back and forth,
	The threads flow on unseen,
	One stroke ties thousands of knots.”

The Revolt in Łódź in 1892

*

The Revolt in Łódź in 1892

Barbara Wachowska

The events which began in Łódź on 2 May 1892 shook the city, which, at that time, was the largest industrial center in Russian-ruled Poland with a population of nearly 150,000. The factory workers who numbered around 40,000 halted their work and went on strike in ‘the leading fortress of our capitalism’—in the words of Julian Marchlewski, one of the leaders of the Polish labor movement. Soon, this protest turned into a general strike. As declared by Konstanty Miller, the governor of the Piotrków province, ‘the workers stopped working and gathered in the city in large numbers’.(1)

The strike of the Łódź proletariat was its first mass protest. It was referred to by the tsarist authorities as a bunt (‘revolt’) and it is known as such among historians. It was not a coincidental occurrence.

*

Contradiction and Overdetermination

Louis Althusser (1962)

The concentration of industrial monopolies, their subordination to financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and of the colonies. Competition between the monopolies made war inevitable. But this same war, which dragged vast masses, even colonial peoples from whom troops were drawn, into limitless suffering, drove its cannon-fodder not only into massacres, but also into history. Everywhere the experience, the horrors of war, were a revelation and confirmation of a whole century’s protest against capitalist exploitation; a focusing-point, too, for hand in hand with this shattering exposure went the effective means of action. But though this effect was felt throughout the greater part of the popular masses of Europe (revolution in Germany and Hungary, mutinies and mass strikes in France and Italy, the Turin soviets), only in Russia, precisely the ‘most backward’ country in Europe, did it produce a triumphant revolution. Why this paradoxical exception? For this basic reason: in the ‘system of imperialist states’ Russia represented the weakest point. The Great War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it had not by itself created it. Already, even in defeat, the 1905 Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia. This weakness was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions then possible in a single State. 

*

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson (1991) 

....the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.

...

Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to rethink these specialised geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space – in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or “empirically”) they really do inhabit a “postindustrial society” from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist – a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.
The second point is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilises an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The existential – the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted – is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is never positioned in or actualised by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge. What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or “scientific” way. Marxian “science” provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualising the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all – and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.
But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions: the Imaginary and the Real, respectively.

What use does the Symbolic have?

When Jean Hyppolite asks: "What use does the Symbolic have?" Lacan answers: "The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real are useful in giving its meaning to a particularly pure symbolic experience, that of analysis." Since the symbolic dimension is the only dimension that cures, "The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct as being what is most fundamental: a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming, insisting in being realised."

A four-term structure maps the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic as replacing the second Freudian topography: ego/id/superego. Two diagonals intersect, while the imaginary rapport links a (the ego) to a' (the other), the line going from S (the subject, the Freudian id) to A (the Other) is interrupted by the first one. The Other is difficult to define: it is the place of language where subjectivity is constituted; it is the place of primal speech linked to the Father; it is the place of the absolute Other, the mother in the demand. The Other makes the subject without him knowing it. 

1954-1955 Le séminaire, Livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse

the veiled image at Saïs

the veiled image at Saïs


turn at the statue of Champollion, says the guide

Lacan / ecrits/ 160

Apocalypse:
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church L. apocalypsis "revelation," from Gk. apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo- "from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal"

Calypso


Sheet of paper has gone missing must look for it at home. It contained:
1. The discussion of the concept of “system” and the doctrine of the extinguishing of intention in the truth, explained in terms of the veiled image of Sais.
2. Discussion of the concept of “essence” as the mark of truth.’

WB 1913-1926 /272

M. Champollion paid a visit, in his way, to the ruins of Sais, ... That part of the enclosure might well have contained great temple of Neith, the chief goddess of Sais, and we drove away, by our musket-shots, some owls, ...

The Asiatic journal and monthly register for British and foreign India, China and Australasia Vol 27







Novalis Die Lehrlinge zu Sais 1799

I. The Pupil. — Men travel in manifold paths: whoso traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing which one meets with everywhere, on wings of birds, shells of eggs, in clouds, in the snow, in crystals, in forms of rocks, in freezing waters, in the interior and exterior of mountains, of plants, animals, men, in the lights of the sky, in plates of glass and pitch when touched and struck on, in the filings round the magnet, and the singular conjunctures of Chance. In such Figures one anticipates the key to that wondrous Writing, the grammar of it; but this Anticipation will not fix itself into shape, and appears as if, after all, it would not become such a key for us. An Alcahest seems poured out over the senses of men. Only for a moment will their wishes, their thoughts thicken into form. Thus do their Anticipations arise; but after short whiles, all is again swimming vaguely before them, even as it did.


TO ENVISION ✴ 39 Flusser / technical image
And so it looks as though our historical development in the West has reached a final stage that does not look significantly different from a Buddhist worldview: a veil of Maya surrounds the yawning nothingness of nirvana. From this standpoint, the powerful stream of Western history is about to empty into the ocean of the timeless Orient.
There is considerable evidence that such a suicidal view of Western society is justified. And yet this view largely overlooks what is significant in the current cultural revolution. That is, the visionary power that we are beginning to use and that we owe to technical images makes us capable of calculating and computing the whirring nothingness around us. Therefore our illusions are not things we should abandon to fall into nirvana but rather are quite the opposite, our answer to the yawing nothingness that threatens us. The veil of technical images that surrounds us, as similar as it may appear to an Oriental veil, challenges us to an engagement neatly opposed to the Oriental. Our veil is not to be torn but rather woven more and more closely. The following chapters are dedicated to looking at this increasingly dense mesh.

the upper and the lower Waters

א



א

We are forced then to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier - which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and the lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segments of correspondence.
All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like 'anchoring points', [points de capiton] as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.

(Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 154)

א

polish yer hexayurt

On Tuesday November 3d, and the tenth of his sicknesse, he became worse than before, all his former accidents encreasing exceedingly, his boundings being turned into convulsions, his raving and benumbing becoming greater, the fever more violent; where upon bleeding was agiane proposed by Doctor Mayerne and the favourers thereof, who still affirmed that he did mislike the too sparing proceeding with his Highnesse; alledging, that in this case of extremity, they must, if they meane to save his life, proceed in the cure, as though it were to some meane person, forgetting him to be a Prince whom they now had in hand, otherwise he said, for ought he saw, because he was a Prince he must die, but if he were a meane person he might be saved. This day for the easing of the extreme paine of his head, the hair was shaved away, and the pigeons and cupping glasses applied to lessen and draw away the humour and that superfluous blood from the head, which he endured with wonderfull and admirable patience, as though he had beene insensible of paine; yet all without any good, save perhaps for some small seeming hope of comfort for the present. Now began the pilots who guided this frail barque of his Highnesse’s body almost to despaire to escape the ensuing tempests; some of whose lookes did now more than ever discourage the rest. For this night he became very weake, the fever augmenting, the raving becoming worse than ever, in which he began to tosse and tumble, to sing in his sleepe, proffering to have leaped out of bed, gathering the sheets together, the convulsions being more violent.

...in order to leave the reader no other way out than the way in... Lacan / Ecrits / Five / The agency of the letter..

portolano

Fredric Jameson (1991)

Postmodernism
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.
Yet Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s model does not yet, in fact, really correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch’s subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organised around the still subject-centred or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open sea.
Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments - compass, sextant, and theodolite – correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.

Ocelli

Father, can't you see …

after sir henry lee

real/ symbolic/ imaginary

Borromean rings

The structure of the knot is such that the cutting of any one ring will liberate all of the others.

true lover's knot

lacan's quilting point Point de capiton

insulating tape, passe partout, copper 2010

The lover's knot is entwined in the iconography of Elizabethan portraiture: an ideological portraiture which invents the subject emblazoned with its patrimony, inlaid with emblematic capital and cryptic over-connections The depicted knot appears as one thread complexly interwoven, but I found by following the drawing on the sleeve of Sir Henry Lee that in fact it can only be made with two threads. Loosely woven they present a geometrical balance, when tightened, they strangle one another.

painter stainer

An interesting little account of the Painter Stainers was written in 1880 by Mr. G. C. Crace, then Master, and printed for private circulation. He reminds us that a picture on canvas was formerly called a stained cloth, as one on a panel was a table, perhaps from the French tableau.

Lacan conceives the gaze as the subject's objective correlative, a material correlative to the master signifier at the core of a symbolic identification. Subverting the distinction between inside and outside, it describes the point in a tableau from which the subject's gaze is returned, the point where a viewer is "hooked onto" a picture without being able to assume the position of a neutral observer.

prone

le sujet suppose savoir