or maybe: a small reflection on objects of attention, objects of desire, and musical time
PEIRCE: “What Is a Sign?” <http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm> … “the second chapter of Peirce’s multi-volume “How to Reason: A Critick of Arguments” (also known as “Grand Logic”)”
§1. Three states of mind
Feeling: “a state of mind in which something is present, without compulsion and without reason; it is called Feeling. Except in a half-waking hour, nobody really is in a state of feeling, pure and simple. But whenever we are awake, something is present to the mind, and what is present, without reference to any compulsion or reason, is feeling.” [ICON, EGO, IMAGINARY]
Reaction: a “sense of acting and of being acted upon, which is our sense of the reality of things,—both of outward things and of ourselves…it does not reside in any one Feeling; it comes upon the breaking of one feeling by another feeling. It essentially involves two things acting upon one another.” [INDEX, ID, REAL]
Thinking: to be “aware of learning, or of going through a process by which a phenomenon is found to be governed by a rule, or has a general knowable way of behaving” [SYMBOL, SUPEREGO, SYMBOLIC]
There are three kinds of signs. Firstly, there are likenesses, or icons; which serve to convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them. Secondly, there are indications, or indices; which show something about things, on account of their being physically connected with them. Such is a guidepost, which points down the road to be taken, or a relative pronoun, which is placed just after the name of the thing intended to be denoted, or a vocative exclamation, as “Hi! there,” which acts upon the nerves of the person addressed and forces his attention. Thirdly, there are symbols, or general signs, which have become associated with their meanings by usage. Such are most words, and phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries.
“Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts…So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo (“Every symbol follows from a symbol”)…
James
James’ “Degrees of Intimacy” in “Radical Empiricism” are an extension of Peirce’s concepts above. The word “intimacy” is roughly a synonym for “association”; he is simply discussing a set of ways that things can be connected, and they are useful as basic starting points for breaking down the distinctions between ideas and things, for challenging the mind/body dichotomy, because they probably apply to all things, whether they are conceptual or physical in nature. There are 6 of them, roughly (but not necessarily) in ascending order. Withness, closeness-in-time (or simultaneity), closeness-in-space (BLC: or permeation), similarity/dissimilarity, relations of activity (change, tendency, resistance, cause), and finally “relations…between terms that form states of mind…immediately conscious of continuing each other.”
“The organization of Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments of disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to copenetrate and suffuse each other’s being.”
BC: in other words, if you only have continuity between states of mind, which are conscious of being continuations of one another, then you have enough information to organize a self. OTHER KINDS OF CONTINUITY, like a sense of how to behave, what one’s relationships to others might be, how you are empowered or disempowered, are only incidental to consciousness, they are not necessary for it. Freud would have agreed.
Lacan
Lacan nudges the psychoanalytic tradition “back to Freud,” after decades of dominance by Anglo-American psychoanalysts (who called themselves “ego psychologists”). Anglo-American psychoanalysis of the 1940s was dedicated to the development of the ego, i.e. a coherent, stable sense of self, as the prime directive of psychoanalysis: mental illnesses ranging from schizophrenia, to paranoia, as well as perversions and other diagnosed disorders were seen as results of an ego crisis of some sort: a failure to distinguish “self” from ones experiences of maternal intimacy, or a development of an ego based on obsessive or dysfunctional relationships to the paternal phallus. The goal of psychoanalysis, was healthy “individuation.”
(A great resource on the Anglo-American psychoanalytic tradition, and its reliance on tropes from the 19th century and from medieval Christianity, is Suzanne Kirschner’s Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis: Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory (Cambridge: University Press, 1996).)
From Lacan’s point of view, Freud’s theory treated the ego as a part of a system involving the superego and the id; it was folly to treat the ego as a special aspect of that system, somehow in need of emphasis. Personhood was the result of an exchange of forces among three unconscious processes, all were essential and inevitable, and the goal was balance between them, rather than the prevalence of one.
For Lacan, psychoanalysis was the study of a relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness, in which “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, structured like a language.” The exchange of Ego (Imaginary), Superego (Symbolic), and Id (Real), is a semiotic exchange, in which differences, repetitions, similarities, and dissimilarities function as symbols, indices, and images to one another. This means that we form a discourse in our heads that is invisible to us.
We set that semiotic exchange in motion first in the mirror stage, which is a function of sensory perception: perception of similarity and dissimilarity. The image is similar to me (it resembles me, it is an icon), and it proves my coherence by its dissimilarity from objects of desire, and drive…from “objets petit a” or “objets petit autre.” The ego is constituted by the coherence of S, the subject, and its dissimilarity from the “little other.”
But when Lacan refers to the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other,” he is describing the main activity of the unconscious as a language, mediating the ego’s relationship to id and super-ego through difference and repetition. F. Saussure’s Course in Linguistics was a point of reference: according to Saussure, you can’t have a word, a semiotic unit in language [[-> words are Symbols, in Peirce’s configuration: signs that represent via convention <—]] without both of these notions.
Repetition is necessary because without repetition there can be no convention, no “law,” no grammar.
Difference is necessary because every symbolic utterance gains its value as a way of distinguishing that value from something it is not. (Recall that one of the accomplishments of the German border collie Rico, that potentially enshrined the “humanness” of his cognition (), was the capacity to attach meaning and value to unfamiliar symbols. His companions named an object he’d never heard of before., and asked him, in essense, to show recognition of the object by fetching. How do you know a symbol that has never been repeated? By its difference from symbols that have been repeated.
This is an example of the “discourse of the Other”: Rico hasn’t experienced the sign’s repetition…and yet it stands clearly in the symbolic order of (a discourse of repetition) for the Other, for Rico’s companions. Just the fact that Rico responds to the sign by running into the toy room, makes clear that he “knows” in some sense that the sign is meaningful to the Other, knows that it is paired with a referent.
When Lacan referred to the paternal “non,” as the initial catalyst of the symbolic order, the break from infantile amorphousness, he was not merely making reference to the cultural norm/stereotype of “father’s language” as a disciplinary, prohibitive force, he was referring literally to the logical dimension of negation which is exclusion, which separates being from not being, the one from the other.
BLC: If Rico really is experiencing discourse, i.e. language as it mediates similarity and dissimilarity, self and other, then for him words “Rico NO!” would not simply mean “warning, submit to my authority, I am threatening you!” (as in expressions of power in wolf packs). It would signify a logical exclusion: every no takes an object of exclusion that implies an inclusion, implies a yes. Rico would hear “DON’T CHEW (but wait, chew later, when signaled)” or “DON’T RUN (but stay put).”
(BLC: If I were allowed to work Rico, this would be the question, a hybrid of performative and scientific methodologies. We would not be asking what Paul Bloom asks, i.e.
>>> BLOOM: is Rico appreciating “No” as a child would, as flexible term that can be applied to many situations? Or is he just associating behaviors via conditioning? (see last paragraph, inset, in <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/304/5677/1605.full>)
In some sense, Bloom’s question is impossible, or moot, becasue we aren’t really sure that human behavior is anything more than an elaborate network of conditioned mental states. (Are we?)
I would somehow ask instead: “Rico, is your self organized and mediated by having and not having, by doing and not doing, by recognizing and not recognizing?” (Has Rico developed a symbolic order.) When Rico passes from ignorance about the word “octopus” (an unrepeated utterance, a detached signifier), to the moment of connecting the word to l’objet petit autre, an object of desire, is Rico beginning discourse with the Other, beginning to shape an ego in relation to the super-ego, the social space in which desire is regulated and mediated? We will have to think about empirical ways to ask that question.