From Peirce to Lacan, with Help from Rico the Border Collie

subtitle: A Semiotic Basis for Thinking about Objects of Desire (a, for “objet petit autre”) and “Other” (A, for Autre).

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.

Zizek, Grosz, Bin Laden, The Real, and Sacolick

Well, we are reading about the Real, right?  So, did “they really get” Bin Laden?  Regardless, is it real? or Real?

Sorry to bring up such a politically incorrect topic, but my ex-husband is (gotta say this) the General in charge of the JFK Special Forces Training School and was in Delta Force for many years and also was  Deputy Director of CIA for 2 years.  You can Google him, Bennet Sacolick, I am not b-sing this. He wrote a speech/paper along the lines of Heather’s comments the first night of class, about how one communicates and achieves military objectives more efficaciously by engaging “the other side” as a friend or partner.  You can find it on Google.  Was he for “real”?

My current husband worked with a guy who was in the reserves and after 911 got sent to Pakistan to “work on the phone system.”  All he would say when he got back was how glad he was to be back, as bullets of sweat popped off his neck.  I reveal all of this only to let you know that truly, we will NEVER know.  Did they get him?  How many times did they try?  We will NEVER know. THE MEDIA IS DECIDING THIS FOR US. Or you are, as Zizek decries John Gray for advocating on page 107. 

OK so as for Zizek, I found him much more engaging to read than I expected, (especially given his confrontational speech style) except for on 107 where he says it is relevant to ask how we are looking to God “because it is only in man…that God fully realizes Himself…” My question is:  what if God is a creation of us hupeople?  I liked the way Zizek separated the fetishized goals of productivity that tainted Communism, in its Realization, from the “real” or “ideal” notions underlying communism as a solution for alienation.  When he identifies border issues as thinly disguised racism, nothing could ring “Truer” for me with my Latino kids having just moved from Tucson.  250 words is up but it would be great to line up real-symbolic-imaginary-actual-virtual-True and so forth into a nice little matrix of rows and columns.  

Foster & Kristeva

pg. 130 (on critics of Warhol)

“I find them equally persuasive.  But they cannot both be right… or can they?  Can we read the “Death in America” images as referential and simulacral, connected and disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent?  I think we must, and we can read them in a third way, in terms of traumatic realism.”

I think this is a cop-out.  The real issue with this argument is the binary way we have decided to categorize the world.  And instead of looking into contradiction and trying to become comfortable with it, instead Foster coins traumatic realism so that there is yet another category to call upon.  Granted I think his traumatic realism is compelling in some ways, glossing over a foundational shift in how to think is a mistake.

Some quotes I took to relate to my own work:

pg. 140 (on Lacan) “The screen here is the locus of mediation… for to see this screen would be to be blinded by the gaze or touched by the real.”

(on the sublime) “…some contemporary work refuses this age-old mandate to pacify the gaze, to unite the imaginary and the symbolic against the real.  It is as if this art wanted the gaze to shine, the object to stand, the real to exist, in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire, or at least evoke this sublime condition.”

pg. 142 (on Estes) “…it is difficult to imagine superrealism apart from the tangled lines and lurid surfaces of capitalist spectacle… commodified in a way that, even more than pop, superrealism celebrates rather than questions

Kristeva had little to offer my project in the way that the sublime mentioned in this work is not the kind I would hope to access in my viewer.  Though I do think there is something about the facing of one’s own mortality that is useful in looking at environmental damages, in my project I think that would work against me.

Zizek on Evil- Jolie Ruelle

In Radical Evil as a Freudian Category, Zizek discusses diabolical evil. His definition states that, “‘diabolical’ evil does designate a specific type of evil acts: acts which are not motivated by any pathological motivation, but are done “just for the sake of it,” elevating evil itself into an apriori non-pathological motivation – something akin to Poe’s “imp of perversity.” I am fascinated by this concept of “diabolical evil” because I see it reflected in so many narratives of our society.

Zizek states that, “While Kant claims that “diabolical evil” cannot actually occur (it is not possible for a human being to elevate evil itself into a universal ethical norm), he nonetheless asserts that one should posit it as an abstract possibility.” But hasn’t “diabolical evil” been designated as more than an abstract possibility in the language of our culture. How often are we fed Hollywood plots where one sided “bad guys” do “evil deeds” purely for the sake of it. We adopt a dichotomised view of good and evil,  and teach eachother to define the world around us accordingly.

Zizek concludes by stating that, “Auschwitz is the ultimate argument AGAINST the romanticized notion of “diabolical Evil,” of the evil hero who elevates Evil into an a priori principle… The unbearable horror of Auschwitz resides in the fact that its perpetrators were NOT Byronesque figures who asserted, like Milton’s Satan, “Let Evil be my Good!” - the true cause for alarm resides in the unbridgeable GAP between the horror of what went on and the “human, all too human” character of its perpetrators.” As Zizek points out our greatest fear is not of the actions themselves, but of something far greater.  That these actions are possible within us. That given the right circumstances, we may find ourselves making similar choices. That it is possible for whole communities to shift in such a way as to cause individuals to take unthinkable courses of action, without being evil themselves. Perhaps in our efforts to separate ourselves, our unwillingness to accept the possibilities of our own human nature beyond definitions of good and evil, we are missing the most valuable lessons to be learned from the traumatic events that cause us to form these polarized narratives in the first place.

Kristeva's Abject - Natalie

I think an important focus of Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror” is how she defines the animal aspect of our humanity.  I am a little confused about this.  In parts it comes across as though she is defining “animal” as having a moral or ethical value to it, her brief discussion of perversion.  When she discusses relinquishing oneself to the “animal” aspect of our being, I think this makes more sense to think of “animal” meaning out of our control, instinct, reaction, years of evolutionary programming - thinking more of the  conscious and sub/unconcious or biological aspect to ourselves as animal.  The abject in this case is  recognizing an other within ourselves as Kristeva defines.  Recognizing that we have a self as a conscious/choice-making being and a self as our body, an object of nature, where our control is limited.  When we are made aware of the fact that there is a whole other system working inside our selves - that is part of the larger web of nature outside our bodies - is this the abject?  As she says “the shape of abjection, notifies us of the limits of the human universe. The abject is a case/subcategory of the sublime in which we experience the painful pleasure of jouissance, recognizing the interplay between our internal worlds and external worlds.  It is painful and not purely pleasurable because we are recognizing a void, an oblivion, a potential for our conscious selves to be overwhelmed in that sublime way that negates our importance in the larger web of nature, that de-establishes any hierarchy in which we may think humans sit at the top of.  I feel like this reading was really interesting, but dense, I may be misinterpreting her.

I have an understanding of “catharsis” but can we discuss a little more of what Kristeva means in terms of Poetic catharsis?

Quotations/Points of Interest:

pg. 231, “these bodily fluids …” kiki smith’s sculptures

PG. 232  “the abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.”

pg 233 - “essentially different from ‘uncanniness,’ more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory.”

pg 235 - “a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered”

pg. 236 “The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the momenr when revelation bursts forth.”

pg 238 it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it-on the contrar¡ abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.

pg 237 and in more imaginary fashion in the shape of abjection, notifies us of the limits of the human universe. 

pg 239 For the sublime has no object either.

pg 239 Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here,as objects, and there,as others and sparkling.

pg. 240 The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states 

pg. 243 where man strays on the territories of animal. 

In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task-a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct-amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bortomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression. Through that experience, which is nevertheless managed by the Other, “subject” and “object” push each other away confront each other, collapse, and start again-inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject.