#castrationabyss: a warning

Here's a short film I produced--with the help of my associates, Victor Florence and Ezra Stewart-Silver:

"Analysis must avoid the castration abyss." -Lacan

Unconscious Vine Haiku Montage

In an attempt to get at how an individual subject's unconsciousness functions in electracy, I've turned to my own poetic works, as well as Vine. I've made Vine videos of poetry mashups, in which, scrolling through my open poetry manuscript document, I read out loud random lines from random poems. With the images and words in constant flux, maybe we can see how electracy--through image-sharing social media--remixes literary texts, into eight second haiku montages.

(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? 

Lacanian Dramatic Monologue

Lacan's take on excommunication is interesting, specifically his feeling that he himself has been excommunicated from some grand great old intellectual community, some Church, because his teaching method had been censured by the I.P.A.: "What it amounts to is something strictly comparable to what is elsewhere called major excommunication" (page 3).  Here he compares the psychoanalytic community to a religious bureaucracy, whilst comparing himself to that Flying Dutchman of Modern Thought, Spinoza, particularly correlating his (Lacan's) censure with the kherem Spinoza received from Amsterdam's bigwig rabbis in 1656. According to poor Jacques, his blacklisting "was precisely that which Spinoza was condemned to." 

Whenever a person of privilege is silenced or attacked—especially when that person is a white male who holds a powerfully erudite position in a capitalist, patriarchal, and intellectual subculture—history has been made.  Send for the scribes, we've got a goddamn dialectic to uncover!  Though I try not to love Lacan, I must admit I do sympathize with him in that, because of my own white-male privilege, I really don't deserve a poetic voice, just like he doesn't deserve a scholarly one, even though, like Lacan, I work hard and take that work, however praxis-less and self-centered it is, very seriously (I don't count Lacan as Scientist or Philosopher, but he is a groundbreaking lecturer with a fresh avant-garde spirit and some gnarly riffs on Freud).  And for me, someone who, like Lacan, thinks his industry--the Poetry Industry--doesn't welcome his style—regardless of whether the power's that be in said industry are aware of it or not—I feel ostracized and ineffective. 

Lately I've been working on a series of poems entitled "White Male Monologues."  This series explores, through the dramatic monologue form, public and/or private downfalls of infamous white men.  For my blog, and in the spirit of Lacan's lectures, I've composed a piece written from poor Jacques perspective, set at the time he started beefing with the I.P.A.  In my poem, I allude to the lives of Spinoza, Lacan, and myself, and, when it fits, I try to employ the language of psychoanalysis, with hints of Electracy peppered in for relevance.   I may also suggest the censor Lacan's received caused in him a total and complete mental, physical, and emotional breakdown, unlike what it really yielded: a long, lucrative career on the international lecture circuit.

  ​
Excommunication

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors

that can reflect but cannot see

—Louis Aragon

At 4 AM I gaze into the Marriot’s bathroom mirror,

practicing my lecture on the Essence of Comedy. 

In a sweat I’d awoken, after dreaming the worst dream

in which my penis disappeared, then reappeared,

then disappeared again. Per usual, Freud was in the dream, 

before me, looking coked.  He told me to desire, then I awoke. 

At the mirror, I recite: “Each of us at any moment or at any level

may be traded off.  Politics is a matter of trading.” 

Since the censoring, I haven’t slept well.  Sleep’s become a record  

of failure put on repeat, a record spun by some twisted synchrony.   

And it’s most twisted when I travel, in hotel rooms 

like this one, where dreams enter from the castration abyss, 

reeking like the unsolved funk of me.  Consider Spinoza,

the Dutchman whose public life ended at 23; I know how he feels.

These images I sleep with, like his wild theorems, are bubbles

of enigmatic gas, and I can feel them in my stomach.  

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lacan

Shi Wrap-Up, #cranelife

"Shi structures all space, skeletal structures, a spinal columns." 

It's safe to say that, over the semester, our on-going electracy project has influenced my lifestyle. Specifically, with regards to the contrasting text of our CATTt, Jullien's text has forced me to re-imagine my identity and existence as an artist.  I've always been interested in ancient Chinese poetry, but now, while manifesting myself as an egent for an electracy experiment, I want to think of myself as an Ancient Chinese Poet.  Included in this post is a gallery of filtered and re-filtered selfies, portraying me as a poet in flux, in touch with his brushstrokes. 

Also this semester I got my first tattoo, a crane over my heart.  Though this body art is first and foremost a friendship tat, I'd like to think that Jullien's text--and my aesthetic reaction to it--was a major factor.  What better way to live like a mystic!  

"There is no need to forge a morality of sublimation.  Between joy and fear, there is no need to invent salvation.  It is enough to go along with change, change that is also forever regulation, change that helps to create harmony" 

Same Old Shi

White Mountain, Yellow Dragon: Same Old Shi

Wine-drunk, stoned, funky, I'm on top of Poetry Mountain, clicking

screen wall art, searching through the meaningless heaven of a browser,

framed, open, displaying quick tufts of pine and flashing cedar sweeps.

Listening to jazz flute, I crisscrossed a haunted battlefield, twice,

Those dead soldiers don't scare me, and neither do the boatmen's ghosts

or that big yellow dragon, uncoiled—right fucking there!—brush-stroking

through cyber-clouds of marijuana mist. Oh how my mountain floats,

like a signal smoked from tower to tower along the Great Wall.

It floats and sinks and I come down: I become a white sandhill crane,

singing in the wet swamp below, then a dumb duck winging his way

back to some bros down the chain, and next I'm the clouds' pimp (the wind),

sending clouds around and around my white mountain, circulating

in a digital cluster, until that yellow dragon emerges,

and at this instant I feel that maybe I am actually scared,

terrified of my innermost propensities and tensions.

Wow, now my emotional life hits the landscape like a firebird,

a red phoenix, or, hell, a dragon.  My dragon humps the yellow one,

dragon-on-dragon action. Our sex smells like a burnt peach waffle.

Willows wash our crevices. The new moon dries us. The horizon—

Western, pink, overweight, so goddamn Beyond—won't notice our sex. 

When I wrote this poem, I wrote it under-the-influence of the song I posted below.  When you think about it, shi is that "Funk Underneath," sisters and brothers!  This is what I mean in my poem by "jazz flute." 

Propensity

 Regarding The Propensity of Things by Francois Jullien, I dig the poetics stuff, specifically the portion portion of the text that focuses on poetry and the poet's hierarchical position in ancient Chinese Culture,  Also, Jullien lists composition strategies for achieving shi in verse, with dope examples (especially Strategy 9 on pg. 120 and Strategy 17 on pg. 122).  He explains that, in a poem, a surplus of shi moves a text forward. Like feathering an oar while rowing, man. With these motifs in mind, I want to use part of this blog space, a space set up in search for a poetics for electracyto compose and post "Ancient Chinese Internet Poems."

And though, of course, a poems shouldn't be flowery regurgitation of theory (a vomiting of pretty verse from a sick donkey), I've taken Jullien's text to heart while writing and editing these. With electracy in mind, the poems take place in an over-orientalized cyber-reality, a world of pixelated pines and light-emitting mist, constantly in flux, much like--at least through aesthetic depictions--an ancient Chinese landscape.  These poems are ABOUT the Propensity of Identity in an Online Culture, the Poet and Poem as Inevitable Failure plus Waste of Transcendence, the tragic character of a digital landscape, the Death of History, and looming hot-hot-hot Dragon Sex!