(Con)Figuring Lacan

"The reason we go for poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom."

                                    -Jacques Lacan

So, after my in-class failure last week (lol), I want to make another attempt at demonstrating how Lacan uses examples from art works to propel his overarching theory of psychoanalysis forward, so that, perhaps, we can successfully do the same in an attempt to develop some metaphysics of Electracy and an Digital Poetics. 

To preface Chapter 2 of his lecture, titled "The Freudian Unconscious and Ours," Lacan reads Aragon's poem "Contre-chant":

In vain your image comes to meet me

And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find

On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors

That can reflect but cannot see

Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Though Lacan adds that the poem "has no relation to what I am about to say," I'm not sure he is being entirely honest.  For me, the first stanza perfectly encapsulates Lacan's notion of the Gaze, while the second, moreover, uncovers a bit of what it means—from a Lacanian perspective—to be an online Subject, thus providing a psychoanalytic conduit towards Electracy.    

When the "I" of Aragon's poem becomes aware of the "You," this you does not cross the threshold of the I-speaker—instead it projects a "dreamt-of shadow," which can be construed as what Lacan labels anamorphosis: "That which is of the mode of the image in the field of vision is therefore reducible to the simple schema that enables us to establish anamorphosis" (86).  This image mode, for Lacan, is represented by a point on a surface, which he calls the geometral point. 

Regarding the geometral dimension of the Gaze, Lacan maintains that the point "allows us to glimpse how the subject who concerns us is caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision" (92).  Therefore, it appears (pun intended), Aragon's speaker traces the Gaze ideally, which is, of course, severed from both the poem's eye and I. 

Perhaps, also, to provide the poem extra Lacanian baggage, the "You" and the "I" aren't organically-separated entities but instead constituting a split of the subject and therefore involving Lacan's description of Repetition: "It is necessary to ground this repetition first of all in the very split that occurs in the subject in relation to the encounter;" (69) and/or, with regards to his notion of the Drive, suggests a single mouth kissing itself, which, for both Freud and Lacan, is "the ideal model of auto-eroticism" (179).    

Speaking of auto-eroticism, I'd like to shift gears now to the internet—specifically to how Aragon's poem's second stanza might whisper, "Electracy, Electracy, Electracy." First off, I love that the speaker calls her/himself a "wretch," one "that can reflect but cannot see."  For me, psychoanalysis aside, this perfectly describes the lost subject of the digital age, of Generation Me. 

Since, for Ulmer's theory of Electracy, "Subjects formed in an electronic apparatus will not be constructed in terms of self" (Ulmer), we must locate a fresh form of subjectivity.  And because we don't want some selfless and/or selfish mega-conglomerate of wretches, arrested in the mirror-stage—at least I don't think we do—we must pierce through the digital gaze to find the sunny side of things (though I'm not sure we have such virtuous a telos, do we?).  

In the poem, Aragon's speaker suffers from an empty eye and a fresh haunting, which is the absence of the "you."  Indeed the situation looks dire, but maybe Lacan can help.  Lacan recognizes that "the eye is endowed with a power to separate" (115), but, alluding directly to this reflective ailment Aragon describes, Lacan maintains that, at this vital point, "the subject must "find an opportunity for an essential integration" (159), for which a metaphysical model of Electracy should also be searching.  So, if "literacy and electracy in collaboration produce a civilizational left-brain right-brain integration" Ulmer), maybe it—and by it I mean, specifically for our project, the synthesis of psychoanalysis and electracy, using the CATTt—can provide a theoretical elixir for the severed digitized subject; or maybe not?