The Electrate Unconscious

I am still caught up with Lacan’s extrapolation of the unconscious from his earlier lectures. Perhaps my attraction (or repulsion?) to the unconscious comes from my own preconceptions of this term.

To begin I just want describe my preconception of “the unconscious” and then juxtapose my preconceptions with a specific description of the unconscious from Lacan.

Like many people (I assume), I tend to conceive of the unconscious as synonymous with some kind subliminal, or covert, cognitive state that is essentially identical with a conscious cognitive state but operating at a level just out of my immediate (i.e. “conscious”) grasp. I also think of the unconscious as playing a decisive role in structuring my conscious acts and desires.

Furthermore, my conception of the unconscious also seems to carry two key characteristics: self-identity and spatiality. When I say “self-identity” I mean it in both senses  of the term. My unconscious is in some way identical/constitutive to my-self  and it is also identical to it-self as a thing or substance that is locatable or classifiable in some way, which leads to the second characteristic. Because I conceive of the unconscious as a self-identical substance, I also presuppose its ability to inhabit a particular space, and not only that (if I am being entirely honest), I tend to isolate this space almost exclusively in the brain, an organ that Lacan seems to have very little interest in (at least in this seminar).

Unsurprisingly, I can conclude from this description that my notion of the unconscious has been colored by my encounters with it in various contexts, and because the unconscious is such an important term for psychoanalysis (“being the most essential” as Lacan puts it), it seems important to revise these (mis)conceptions in accordance with Lacan’s descriptions (29).

In his lecture “On the Subject of Certainty” (as well as throughout his entire seminar), Lacan posits a variety of descriptors in conjunction with the unconscious. He refers to it as a “gap,” “pre-ontological,” the “unrealized,” and often moves switches imperceptibly from his description of the unconscious to “desire.”

However, Lacan eventually settles on a clear articulation of three aspects (albeit negative ones) of the unconscious. Lacan writes, “what happens there is inaccessible to contradiction, to spatio-temporal location and also to the function of time” (31).

Lacan’s first quality of the unconscious as “inaccessible to contradiction” seems to complicate my initial formulation of the unconscious as a cognitive state roughly equivalent to the function of consciousness. For it seems that contradiction is one of the foundational principles of conscious subjectivity, its presence granting our rational minds the authority to reject, and thus settle on, particular concepts or claims about the world and ourselves.

In addition, if the unconscious is separate from the constraints of space and time, this would run counter to not only my conception of its presence in the brain but its presence anywhere, even in the body. Although difficult for me to grasp at the moment, the unconscious does not function according the presence/absence binary that I apply to most entities.

When I first approached this text, I assumed that Lacan would present a very clear definition of what exactly the unconscious is. However, since it doesn’t seem like this is going to happen, I will have to trust Lacan and assume that understanding a precise definition of the properties of the unconscious are not as important as understanding how the unconscious functions within his analytic system.

After some feedback from Ulmer, it seems that the instruction to be drawn from this section would be to suspend the conscious processes of induction and deduction in favor of the “primary processes” of conduction and inference in formulating the role of the unconscious in our electrate metaphysics.

The New Language of the Unconscious

Lacan claims that “the unconscious is structured like a language” relations to his notions of the subject and counting (20). Besides the fact that this is one of the phrases for which Lacan is most well known, it also resonates with me at a formal level simply due to its axiomatic brevity. It seems to demand attention, especially considering that Lacan in in the process of explaining “the unconscious,” one of his four fundamental concepts.

First, and as Lacan is quick to note, the phrase is indebted to the structuralism of Claude Levi Strauss, from whom Lacan derives his notion of the “relations that have already been determined” before the establishment of societal or human relations. Lacan writes that these structures “are taken from whatever nature may offer as supports, supports that are arranged in themes of opposition. Nature provides-I must use the word-signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them” (20). Lacan then continues by noting that the most significant aspect of this pre-structuring is how it attunes psychoanalysis to the way in which subject formation occurs at “the level at which there is counting, things are counted, and in this counting he who counts is already included” (20).

Looking again at the way that Lacan structures his argument formally (“I must use the word”), it seems that he wants us to pay attention to the importance of the term “signifiers” in his structuralist account of the unconscious. With this in mind, it seems that Lacan’s phrase, “the unconscious is structured like a language,” might be interpreted as follows: the material signifiers through which meaning arises in language is analogous to the material signifiers through which the unconscious arises in the subject. In addition, these “material signifiers” in the unconscious come from “nature” and thus are not necessarily limited to the signifiers that constitute a language.

It also seems important that Lacan describes these signifiers as coming together “in a creative way,” implying that the unconscious structure which results does not function on a logic that is confined to the physical or “natural” limitations from which its signifiers arose. The connections among the signifiers in the unconscious are akin to the connections we made in the felt section of our mystories.

One instruction to be gleaned from this analysis might be to expand our understanding of language beyond its phonemic emphasis in literacy. We might also consider returning to semiotic/structuralist theory such as Levi-Strauss, Greimas, and Barthes as we attempt to represent signifer relations in our electrate metaphysics. How does the proliferation of image, video, audio, and text initiate a new semiotics?

Taxonomies of Electracy

In his analysis of the shi in ancient Chinese poetry, Julien reproduces a taxonomy of poetic forms created by an 8th century literary critic. Julien writes, “Wang Changling, the author of another list of strategic dispositions in poetry, this one written more than a century earlier, resisted the temptation to be so cryptic; his catalog is easier for us to learn from. In this list we are not distracted by external examples of gesture and posture; the text itself says everything, and we need only interpret it. It might be worth pausing to study it” (118).

An instruction that could be developed from Julien’s focus on the taxonomy of 8th century Chinese poetry in his extrapolation of shi is to locate and “interpret” electrate taxonomies. Important to remember in this instruction is not so much the individual categorizations themselves, but rather the method of categorizing employed by the author.

To do so, we must also partner with Julien in moving away from the dismissive stance that the taxonomy is nothing more than a “desultory, whimsical rumination” and consider the possibility that there may be “discreet and subtle links beneath the apparent disorder” (123).

Possible areas to explore might the sudden proliferation of “list” articles that is currently bombarding social media (buzzfeed in particular comes to mind). Following Julien, it might be more accurate to focus on lists whose subject matter would be inherently difficult to categorize in a rigorous or exhaustive manner (such as poetry). What can the connections initiated through analysis of these categorizations tell us about an electrate metaphysics?