Lacan's source of Desire

Spider Web Catches and Gives Meaning

Identification is Creation. Stay strong and let's know what Jacques Lacan might have meant when he talked about the structure of language being tied to an understanding that permitted him to interpret the Psyche, a pit where the unconscious and primal writhed around in unholy complaint.

It always seems as though the business of being a human being starts off messy in its unutterred silence. It's not messy. Until it comes into the world it's a like a well packed suitcase, all neat and tidy in a small orderly space, and as an entropy expressing itself it sounds like an opportunity looking to escape, it needs a hole in the fence, it embraces disorder and it becomes one of us. Over the years, stuff get's lost, bad habits like the metaphysical absolute of irony get acquired, along with disease, wrinkles, rat poison instead of collagen, impossible fantasies, figments of the imagination, heart conditions and aneurysms. So no wonder people have yearned for a structure with which to interpret the language of the creature that lurks within, or the unconscious, sometimes called the Psyche, the Ego, it's a long list, each attempt at definition an inspiration behind a wonderful disparagement.

We all remember being called puerile and cretinous by shell-shocked teachers of Latin and Greek, but very few of us, I think, even as infants, have been called unmediated and prelinguistic and yet that's how the illiterate within, the raw unconscious, has been described by those fluent in the Symbolic Order, which is another way of signifying the mental range of ideas associated with the structure or the language of the unconscious. This mental range isn't simply did the cat sit on the mat or didn't it? No, this mental range of ideas includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. It's all there rolling around in the unconscious doing devious things, upsetting a lifestyle and confusing the emotions.

Let's call up a coherent self and give out the name Ego. This is the chap or chappess who does what he or she can to run the unconscious. The Ego is the one to open a dialogue with. In our coffee clutch, or whatever, we identify our feelings within the context of a Symbolic Order, which is still a mental range of ideas that includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. In the process of identifying a feeling we give it a signifier or a word that creates it in our minds and we start adding meaning to this signified feeling we've identified with a word. This stream of meanings includes where that word lies within the entire Symbolic order. 

And soon enough, as dialogue continues, an unfillable void is observed, it's a great big hole Lacan called "lack," something missing, that needs to be filled. One of the titles that's been given to "lack" is the Source of Desire. Other things too, many of them the Ego might be reluctant to discuss because the "I" as manager of the unconscious, inventor of words and head communicator with the outside world isn't much of anything. The point is "lack" is structural, it's been there since first breath, if "Lack" were history Arendt's understanding of history would suit it. And there again, a lot of lack-pot-holes, have been filled by an immodest creator of words with buckets of make believe.

The color of structuralism

Barn

A good year for end of times yellow. Don't kid yourself about all this cowardice stuff, that all stemmed from the Spanish Inquisition when heretics where marked as yellow, same with Jews, traitors and anyone else who despite being frail and weak and usually a minority, didn't buckle under. When you think structure, think yellow and the way meaning slides through language.

Our word yellow comes from the Indo European, and in my view more civilized, side of our language where it meant to shine or gleam. My own preference is gleam and I'll tell you why. There's a flycatcher round here called a Phoebe. But there's no way a Phoebe's chest is allowed to be called white, because as a devil who has chased out generations of barn swallows, The Phoebe is both still and she gleams in dark places. There's Femme Fatale green to a Phoebe's white. Not to mention the associations between white, devil, Zanzibar and aimless wandering.

Anyway, Structuralism was fond in its belief that language had created a universal and stable structure of meaning, and would have described a Phoebe as a flycatcher with a white chest

The Story of Action: Many Beginnings but No End.

Late Yellows

Causally and logically linked in a sequence of unfolding, is a predetermined telos that offers the stability so many demand of history. Such an unfolding offered a trusted and reliable stability, but Isadora Wing in her individual life wanted a more liberating experience.

Arendt's contribution to stability was more like a ruptured, eventual, contingency driven by the unpredictable freedom of human beings. In Arendt's view the end of human history would be the disappearance of us people. In no way, shape or form is freedom stable.

Isadora Wing was the heroine mighty bored with Mr. Wing in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Mr. Wing was a Freudian. The boyfriend, called Adrian Goodlove, was bathed in the establishment of mid twentieth century British Psychoanalytical Society, his Mrs. Wing gave him an opportunity to both explore and engage in the Freudian stables of libido, repressed desire and transference. But Adrian had an interest in the insights of the Frenchman Jacques Lacan who was promoting the idea of desire, lust, boinking, and the ancillary details, as structures in a psyche maintained by language and narrative, a story. Desire, as tied to language rather than mechanics of baby making, easily slid into a desire for recognition. Mrs Wing was a neurotic and a Published Poet who taught creative stuff, it was hard work being an authentic voice in an inauthentic world dominated by well paid shrinks, one of them dastardly in his lack of professionalism.

Tempting to believe that Isadora would be as putty in the hands of an English fiend called Adrian. But no. He turned out needy, domineering, he'd taken the connection Jacques Lacan had made between physical desire in a psyche that was both shaped and structured by language as a desire for recognition by the other a little too literally. It made Adrian dull as nails. Isadora's passion to slide into  wordless and mindless exchanges of bodily fluids on a psychiatrist couch or anywhere else got lost to a clever translation and went unrequited.

History and freedom are messy

The Disciple in All of Us

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker

Metamodern Oscillation, feelings, truth, freedom and lies.

There's a lot of words here, so let's talk about Preppers, Survivalists, and just accept that in the good old Postmodern World of ten years ago, when we were all Ironic, cigarette smoking and proud of our morpheme laden Metaphysical Attitude, we were content to define preppers as not only weird, heavily armed, underground dwelling and scary, but as Woke Postmodernists in Good Standing we were also obliged to think of these fellow citizens as engaged in a doomed reaction to a Melancholy Critique of our society.

These days of course we're allowed to use words like dim-witted or moronic, even autistic as long as we place the blame on the medical profession, but we are learning to accept our status as an underclass in an oscillation that's placed an A for Effort as the only viable grading of opinion. Which is the cynical way of suggesting that Metamodern Structure of Feelings that promote a regular oscillation between naughty and nice would have found a home in Goebbels' back office behind the door which reads "Moving On." And why?

In a Society, the Self is not the Project, Society is the project, which if true, does rather suggest that orientating the self toward society is the project. Hence Freedom, Truth, Feelings, a mix of realities that can only be brought into a unison through a series of lies, or if you prefer myths that work to create belief through the feelings of faith. It's just a sad fact God doesn't work so well anymore.

How lucky Can-Bobby is. He doesn't feel. No wonder Schlegel became a religious nut. I prefer Ironic Seriousness as the coverall for the Metamodernist Mind.