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1. metalepsis seminar WAACsPSU 12 February 2014 EXTERNAL BRAINS THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE LITERALLY METALEPSIS SEMINARIANS 9 ERS AND AUXILIARY MEMBERS thanks again David Levine did we forget to mention lipograms The art of melancholy doesn t arrive on its own it has to be invited it has to be constructed And we have to be aware of the relation of the gap the omission the sudden ending to melancholy s need for nothing and a lot of it Georges Perec s amazing project of lipogrammatology La Disparition Paris Deno l 1969 translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void shows how effective melancholy can be without our awareness that we are all the time making in this novel without the letter e circumlocutions The question is and Perec surely endorses this in his other book Life a User s Manual isn t circumlocution a way of spatializing the unconscious This is a tantalizing clue for it endorses the Lucretian even flow of atoms along a void as ordinary experience s grammatical mode Turbulence clinamen happens when there is an OBSTACLE that can t be symbolized This is if we dare call it by name is the part or partial object of Lacanian fame and we know through our calculus of metalepsis that it is the of demonic invasion Eros cf Venustas Just as La Disparition is able to map the negative the missing e our avoidances hollows swerves detours short cuts etc all talk about th2. The instructor has a reputation to defend so to some extent discourse must be controlled by regulating lines we could describe as an inventory field The whole field is not explored but some lines form the limit beyond which it is senseless to travel In almost all fields in the US and Canada at least Lacan and Vico are outside these lines Deleuze and sometimes Rancie re are in but usually in their own well defended sub zone If you find yourself as a student in a class you cannot be impolite or disruptive so you must respect the cathected field But there are two ways of going outside You cannot bring the monsters in from the terra incognita that is unfair You can however dig some holes If you are really a special kind of dreamer you can float above the whole field as one does in dreams of flying Up or down you have extimacy at your service and the physics of extimacy has been laid out for some centuries by the traditions of melancholy This is a special form of theatrics so it is also good to go to acting class to learn stagecraft You MUST work under the radar And when you are teaching a class yourself you have to create both the cathected field everyone expects it it s the course outline basically and then offer the caves and mountain tops as places for some to discover the ironic limitations of the field This is where the savages at the marginal jungles turn out to be the guides in the hotel lobby and musicians and waiters in th
3. e bar insiders and outsiders at the same time It s up to you to be a good director so it helps to study films to find out what directors do Here s one trick any class or topic is by its nature an attempt an an inventory based on a vari able cathexis valuation any witty response involves finding or constructing a site of exception always structured by reversed predi cation a gap A fake step backwards can be anything from pretending to not know something revealing a weakness or simply opening up a blank spot in a field of knowledge or a thinker s position This is enough to pull the field cathexis of the class or topic past the scale limited breaking point and from that point on it s a new ball game Remember that the two moves are related You must create a void to allow cathexis to be pulled past the point where the scale of the inventory dominates Is this too technical Think of the structure of anomaly It s the same thing It not only disproves prevailing theory in an area of study it restructures the frame and the dimensions with when a new view will be structured That keeps a Ph D for example from being simply an extension of an old framework of knowledge It MUST BE new it MUST challenge the old frame It should not as most art history dissertations are the extension of an old catalog A new inventory is acceptable but 1 hard work 2 hard to establish and 3 probably unacceptable by thos
4. e objects we can t talk about Reverse engineer this The hollow swerve detour etc amounts to body loading in Apollo Robbins sense The object that didn t couldn t exist now negatively exists thanks to the space that now conceals it Manage this space and you will begin to think like an architect evidence Chirality opens up a world A very small world It is the world of those who have discovered it and decided that the best way to keep it secret is put it out in the open the purloined letter technique This is appearing more and more to be the case with the Diana Actezeon myth told so many times by so many authors you would think that the public would get tired of hearing it but despite the mutliple re tellings the secret is still intact Like the lipogram the secret creates a site of exception around Acteeon s transition from inventory cathexis to sinthome cathexis The roundabout movements of the narrative combine Vico tells us to constitute a means of human consciousness based on the idea of a sacred site NOTE this is not the sacred of retail level phenomenology but a connection of distance with preparation and readiness Travel along one constitute the other This is the crane shot of Notorious Cathexis is not only an investment made in an object or objects in a field it is a packing that takes place along the sagittal dimension orthogonal to the field hence Hitchcock s discovery of the technique of building up anxiety as
5. e using the old inventory Since you have to do the trick part before you do the new inventory you can do just the trick part and leave the inventory to others with more time on their hands In effect you create a Zairja condition when you shift from inventory to sinthome because at this point the reader the writer and everyone else become indistinguishable They are all players in a single consciousness that Maurice Halbwachs recognized was a single collective memory This is also what Giulio Camillo realized but no one has yet acknowledged Do not be afraid you will be giving away any secrets These kinds of truths are secrets that keep themselves The creation of a void into which cathexis can rush in and be structured by the sinthome is precisely what Perec and before him Vico realized would happen when nothing else comes to mind laughter Occasionally you meet people from outside the reservation who don t know what reversed predication is Hard to imagine yes but what do you say There are some examples that can be used as a test If the outsider gets the point then they can be trusted if not then the rule applies The half life of missing the point is forever Here is one possible test In the case of laughter crying works just as well it is almost always the case that the object that provokes the laughter is insignificant in comparison to the laughter itself which compels everyone to laugh Even those who don t know or unders
6. madame am just a cloud in pants We don t want to scare the hell out of anyone with crazy talk but neither do we wish to given into the happy talk of ideology Marjorie Perloff has unearthed some lost lines from the deeply sad melancholic Mayakovsky that we might regard as advice want to be understood by my country and if am not never mind will pass over my native land sideways as a slanted rain passes There is a story in Swedish folklore about fairies who live in our four dimensions three plus time the same way two dimensional silhouettes live in a 3 D space To disappear they just turn sideways This is not impossible A reality check reveals that body loading creates just the right extra dimension to allow a four dimensional being to create an extra dimension into which it may turn sideways In other words if you believe in what you are talking about it should be real enough to use in life Turning sideways in a thesis or research paper amounts to taking a fake step backwards For work that is too bold for prime time an essay that wishes to support it can frame it in the negative and this critical skeptical askesis allows for a bit of rotation of the object at hand Here I ve re formatted an old essay a disguised book review of a non existent book worked up for publication in New Observations Below is a diagram of that happens in the academy You sign up for courses the courses are taught usually responsibly
7. nted by Freud and Lacan that we can begin to call the shots on how chirality works to establish subjectivity And when Agent Mulder of The X Files used to say and was quoted by Zizek frequently The truth is out there we are able thanks to Lacan to remember the POSITION OF TRUTH i e that it s a place in the spatial field designated for the four discourses As Paul Verhaeghe points out TRUTH is in both the fourth position and the first position It is the thing that has been dropped out at the initial moment of enunciation the nonc that like the Bomb shout that clears the room does not have to be present in fact its absence is the very thing that gets results Meaning that resonates from a distance uses the logic of metonymy From a distance This is architecture stuff Distance must be constructed by the Imaginary and the distance from which Truth resonates from a point of origin to appear at an end that will have apocalyptic results is an interesting concept It may be that 4 1 is for one pe tricks of the trade Our business is unfortunately not in the corporate headquarters of Great Ideas but down in the retail outlets where everyday sales figures are tallied and compared We have papers to write exams to give and or pass colleagues to collaborate with or not We are as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky said to comfort a lone woman fellow passenger on a dark street car when he walked on board Don t worry
8. one travels along this dimension to create a scale crisis where at some extreme point cathexis will be forced to shift gear This kind of talk may seem strange at first but consider the prestigious list of those who have been signalizing to us using the purloined letter PR scheme 1 the story of Simonides and the birth of artificial memory really the birth of IT 2 Camillo s memory theater with its one position out of place 3 Dante s use of the number 9 4 Vico s whistle blower leak of the whole secret in paragraph 528 5 Vanvitelli s portrayal of the Diana Acteeon myth at Caserta 6 E A Poe s dramatic demonstration in 1845 7 Joyce s cosmic deployment in Finnegans Wake 8 re discoveries and employments all along that we may have missed Cervantes Shakespeare Rabelais plus the modern ones we have ignored Hitchcock Lynch John Ford Apollo Robbins In some of these examples Diana and Acteeon are mentioned by name in some they are de personified a reversal of the personification process of myth and in some they are simply the space of the field and the path But when Wallace Stevens describes a Jar in Tennessee we know in advance where the jar is and what it holds It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill Freed of interpretation we can go directly to enactment in the good company of those who know just what this letter is and where to put it Don t forget that it is only through the language inve
9. tand what they are laughing at are laughing and they really mean it When you hear a joke in a language you don t understand you can sometimes be provoked into laughing by a number of factors outside the strict meaning of words In such cases the best explanation of events is that laughter is laughing the laughers The laughers are automatons who a material causes of the laughter but the laughter itself has the message In the case of professional mourners which i ek often cites the mourners automate the process of mourning but like Tibetan prayer wheels they perform the essential service of allowing the mourner to have private rather than public reactions An extension of this automation argument requiring reversed predication is another Zizek example of a collection of videos or music CDs that are able to do the watching listening for you that is you are relieved of responsibility to have to do it all yourself The collection has the authority to reversely predicate the situation This is clear in many collections of art esp by museums where the function of spectatorship has been automated That no one actually looks at the art is the intended main function of the museum and perhaps this is good because if people actually looked at art they would be compelled to go insane That is the true radical content of most works of art has to be domesticated by art historians to see art as examples of rather than as sites of excep
10. tion places of radical transformed meaning Occasionally there are times when this protective cover is blown off and the artwork gets to you anyway In this case the artwork laughs or cries through whoever is standing nearby workshop ideas The opportunity to do workshops one in Cincinnati and one in Los Angeles has provoked the thought what the hell should we do Can t just show more film clips They should be performances that engage and provoke with an idea that can be expanded by each individual participant in a unique way Props and the use of stage space is essential any theatrical idea you have will be appreciated With only 30 minutes or so to convert the skeptics the presentation has to be tight and witty The background essay first draft is finished and available NEWSLITTER ARCHIVE 1 january 1 2 january 8 3 january 15 4 january 22 5S january 29 6 february 5 remember our motto unlimited semiosis
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