Mapping Signifiers with Prezi

In contrast to the distant reading approach of my last post, I read each set of posts carefully to find serendipitous connections. Each set of blog posts (Julien, Lacan, and Campany) orbits around a distinct term that seems to act as a kind of conceptual filter for the material culled from the text, popping up in almost all of my posts. For Julien, it was movement; Lacan, the unconscious; and Campany, absence.

I made a prezi exploring these connections for each of the texts, locating quote blocks near the term that they appear to be circling. The quotes in the middle relate to all three of the terms. 

Using Big Data Tools on Petit Objets

As an entry point into my poetics (a productive synthesis of my instructions from the three texts used for our experiment) I wanted to test the generative potential of some topic modeling software (MALLET) that has become somewhat popular amongst digital humanists. Essentially, MALLET organizes words from a set of document into a preset number of “topics” based on their statistical likelihood of appearing in the same document.

After running  my 15 blog posts through MALLET, it generated the two data sets below. In the first table, the right column (Terms) is the set of terms that MALLET deemed statistically correlative, and the left column (Possible Topics) is my best guess at the conceptual string that connects these terms. It might be useful to revise the left column as I continue with my poetics or take suggestions for alternate topic possibilities in class.

Possible Topic	Terms
Interpretation	relationship desire painting art position viewer importance material artistic individual attention locating things determined focused artist social author extrapolating
Experimentation	images essay moving process filmic creation experiment audio representation felt unique bresson event metz object collection put logic project
Disparity	writes photography movement frame role kind world campany terms absence late elements part don control means mountain element doesnt
Precision	media julien search bragaglia specific focus tension claims locate photodynamism technology poetry poetics list initiated earlier subtle explicitly explores
Psychoanalysis	subject real agency human lecture approach freud repetition theory network act moments encounter consciousness leads relation traumatic place back
Fluidity	jullien shi contrast metaphysics chinese general western ulmer reality move thinking eastern situation culture aesthetic dynamism victory agent disposition
Unconscious	lacan unconscious function signifiers language conscious relations essential signifier description identical system pre constitutive mapping cut processes state understanding
Discovery	electrate important term metaphysics method concept century level matter characteristics word fact due definition question place made describes addition
Experience	image time film point present de duve nature refers photograph motion simply difficult order past photographic barthes literacy psychoanalysis
Jargon	instruction notion thing post space text moment section mind formulating contradiction instructions structure subjective clear similar posits claim binary

Most of the topics are fairly predictable as is their distribution which essentially aligns with the three different texts. In coming up with names for my topics, I just read the list of words two or three times and wrote down the word that came to my mind. I think the best topics I got were “Precision” and “Experimentation,” a somewhat contradictory pair, both of which figure prominently in my cinematic blogs. Topics such as “Unconscious” and “Psychoanalysis” were not very illuminating, although I think its interesting that “interpretation” figures  prominently in my lacan posts.

Blog	Topic Prevalence 1	Topic Prevalence 2	Topic Prevalence 3
cinematic1	Precision-38%	Discovery-11%	Fluidity-10%
cinematic2	Experience-54%	Discovery-10%	Interpretation-8%
cinematic3	Experimentation-29%	Interpretation-16%	Experience-14%
cinematic4	Disparity-32%	Experience-14%	Experimentation-13%
cinematic5	Experimentation-39%	Experience-17%	Jargon-9%
julien1	Fluidity-26%	Disparity-26%	Interpretation-14%
julien2	Discovery-27%	Fluidity-16%	Disparity-11%
julien3	Fluidity-53%	Discovery-10%	Jargon-8%
julien4	Fluidity-35%	Jargon-15%	Precision-11%
julien5	Discovery-25%	Precision-25%	Jargon-8%
lacan1	Unconscious-33%	Discovery-15%	Jargon-9%
lacan2	Unconscious-38%	Discovery-13.5%	Jargon-11%
lacan3	Interpretation-38%	Psychoanalysis-12%	Jargon-12%
lacan4	Unconscious-30%	Psychoanalysis-25%	Discovery-8%
lacan5	Psychoanalysis-43%	Jargon-14%	Unconscious-12%

Of course, this data is only really valuable for its generative potential considering it is almost entirely dependent on interpretation. But, since “all roads lead to Rome” (i.e. the unconscious), I don’t see a reason why we can’t use tools like this in electracy for mapping constellations of signifiers. Maybe an instruction could be formulated from the most prevalent topics in the three blog sets (unconscious, fluidity, and experience). Here is an attempt: An electrate metaphysics explores the unconscious fluidity of experience.

The Subject as Movement of Signifiers

In his lecture “Of the Network of Signifiers” Lacan provides a more detailed description of the constitutive relationship between signifier and subject. Of course, like most of Lacan’s theoretical points, this description is inseparable from a discussion of the unconscious.

First, Lacan creates an “inaugural” link between the unconscious and the “Unbegriff” (incomprehensible or nonconceptual) which he then reduces to simply “the cut,” claiming that it is also in “a constituent relation to the signifier itself” (43). Importantly, Lacan clarifies in the next paragraph that “all this [cut, unconscious, signifier] happens in the same place,” namely, the subject. In this way, it is is difficult to distinguish Lacan’s subject from the various movements of signification that move through it. Explaining the function of this “cut” in more detail, Lacan writes that it is the thing that gives the unconscious its “pulsative function” and its tendency to “disappear that somehow seems inherent to it.”  

Lacan then notes that this propensity of disappearance inherent to the unconscious is connected to Freud’s discovery that the unconscious is not an extension of consciousness but rather its essential refutations. Furthermore, these refutations of the unconscious (although presumably still “structured like a language”) take the form of “thoughts” that are inseparable from their coincidence with the thinking Cartesian subject. Thus “I think” manifests its certainty only insofar as it is inseparable from the essential refutation in the unconscious of “I doubt.”

Moving on to the implications of this insight, Lacan posits (via Freud) that dreams are the site where the subject is “at home.” In highly cartographic language, Lacan emphasises the importance of mapping “the network” in order to locate the existence of the subject: “One goes back and forth over one’s ground, one crosses one’s path, one cross checks it” (45). As an analogy for the spatial characteristics of this site, Lacan describes the way a beam of light is refracted as it moves from one layer to another. He writes that “this is the locus where the affair of the subject of the unconscious is played out” (45). Due to its location “between perception and consciousness” this site is necessarily non-spatial and non-anatomical, refusing the boundaries initiated by Descartes’ cogito.

Importantly, Lacan notes that the relation of the unconscious to the primary processes is “not only a network formed by random and contiguous associations” but must also “have a relation with causality” (46). Fueled by metaphor, the signifier’s diachronic self-movement across the terrain of the unconscious coincides with its synchronic emergence in the “pre-conscious.”

With this (somewhat) clearer presentation of the relationship between subject and signifier, I think I can posit an instruction to help our search for an electrate metaphysics. In locating the “thoughts” of the unconscious, focus on those moments of subjective “refraction” since these moments point to the cuts in the unconscious that can guide you through the network of signifiers that constitute your subjectivity.However, this mapping can only be done retrospectively, outside of the unconscious. A quote from the preface seems to elucidate this point further: “when the space of a lapsus [slip of the tongue] no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation) then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious. One knows. But one has only to be aware of the fact to find oneself outside it….There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie.” (vii).