Week 6 of a 16 week semester...

Dear Friends,

I’m writing this as I begin week six of the Fall 2020 semester. For me, the start of a new semester starts out (especially the fall semester) often feels like the start of a run. I feel good. I’m happy to be moving; I’m enjoying the feeling of the movement, the feeling of starting to move faster than I have been.

With a run, I find that the pleasant feeling of getting going wears off sometime between mile three and four, at that point, the run starts to be something that I have to concentrate on and work at if I’m going to keep it going. Likewise, with a semester, the nice feeling of getting going comes to an end about week five or six, at that point, the pattern of the term is no longer new, and I find I have to work to maintain my rhythm.

Another thing that is hard about this point in the semester is 1/4th of the semester is behind me and 3/4ths of the semester remains in front of me. I’m not even halfway there, and the end seems a really long way off in the distance.

Be all this as it may, I’m doing my best to keep going. I do one thing at a time the same way I run one stride at a time.

Lacanian Mojo:

I’ve had many new sign-ups for the newsletter lately, and a few longer-term subscribers have reached out to tell me the thing they like the most about the newsletter is the longer essays about Lacan. I don’t have any good long-form essays in the works at the moment, but I do have some Lacanian stuff that I’ve been thinking about a bunch: How is the practice of psychoanalysis today different than it was in the past?

One of the things that I’ve been reading as I consider this question is is Jacques-Alain Miller’s "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” which is a presentation that Miller gave in 2016.

Here are some quotes from what Miller wrote/said:

Psychoanalysis is changing. This is not a desire, but a fact.

…with certain lightning bolts that come shooting through the dark clouds of Lacan's remarks, he manages to indicate a depth that instructs us as to what psychoanalysis is becoming, and which no longer entirely conforms to what one reckoned it to be.

Right off the bat, Miller is saying that Lacan understood something very important about psychoanalysis, something that the IPA either repressed or disavowed: the time/place that Freud created psychoanalysis from is no longer the time/place the space that the subjects of today occupy. Lacan was not interested in conforming to doing psychoanalysis in a particular way just because “that is always the way it has been done.” No! Lacan was interested in what psychoanalysis was becoming, what it could be, how it was useful as a clinical practice to those who are alive now.

Miller elaborates on this more when he says,

…we cannot fail to see that there has been a break, when Freud invented psychoanalysis under the aegis, as it were, of the reign of Queen Victoria, a paragon of the suppression of sexuality, whereas the twenty-first century is seeing the vast spread of what is called "porno", which amounts to coitus on show in a spectacle that is accessible to anyone on the web by means of a simple click of the mouse. From Victoria to porno, we have not only passed from prohibition to permission. […] This clinic of pornography belongs to the twenty-first century.

In the Victorian era, when Freud started to create psychoanalysis, people were very prohibited. They were prohibited in who they dressed, spoke, and behaved. Compliance with a castrating Name-of-the-Father that was ruthless in the ways it enforced the desire of the Other. During the reign of Victoria, people were forced to live in a rigid class system, if you were a servant and you said you wanted to be something more people would respond by saying, “You shut up you! You’re a servant, and you best learn to like that, because a servant is the best you can hope to be!”

Today we live in a society where people are encouraged to “dream big,” or “love like you’ve never been hurt,” or “become the master of your destiny.” In short: in a society that demands that we give our selves permission to be happy (whatever that means).

We also live in a world where there are endless forms of titillation, where we can anesthetize ourselves from unwelcome thoughts and feelings via any number of distracting forms of amusement (pornography, which Miller references, being one such form of amusement).

Most of the ways we amuse ourselves now have to do with looking into a screen of some sort. We suffer from the symptom of being too gratified by technology.

It is a symptom of the empire of technology that now extends its reign over the most diverse civilizations across the globe, even the most restive ones. We should not surrender our arms faced with this symptom, or others from the same source. They require interpretation from psychoanalysis.

One of the effects of everything being permissible, and all of a person’s desire being gratified, is a desire for what Freud called a “primal father” figure who can and will prevent people from enjoying too much. I believe we see this in the rise of reactionary right-wing political figures and overly restrictive left-wing woker-than-thou speech police.

There is much more in this that I find interesting, but I’ll save that for another edition of the newsletter.

Podcasts:

The semester is making it more difficult for me to record and edit podcasts. However, Jared and I will be interviewing Ryan Engley from Why Theory for InForm:Podcast very soon, which I’m looking forward to.

Here is a link to the most recent InForm:Podcast, and here is a link to an episode we recorded with Todd McGowan, the other half of Why Theory.

I’ve recorded, mixed, and editing the second episode of The Gorman Limit, but I’m not planning to release it until more episodes are also recorded, mixed, and edited. (I don’t want there to be long waits in between the episodes.) TGL will be recorded in a “season format,” with a season being 12 episodes. At the end of a season, I’ll figure out if I’ll do another one, and what format the next season might take. I hope to have a web-space set up so that the audience of that podcast will be able to participate in the direction it takes.

Writing:

I’ve not been posting to my Commonplace Book very much… but on Tuesday of this week I posted a lots of stuff that has been accmulating. The idea of the Commonpace book is to have a repository of snips of text that I can make use of when I write, and making said repository avaliable to other people. I don’t track any kind of stats on who views the Commonplace Book, os it might really just be a place I store things, which would be fine, but I do hope that others are able to use what I put there. (If you do use it let me know!)

Additionally, I’m finding that I have different things that I make all over the web, hosted by all sorts of different service providers. The Commonplace Book is hosted by Blot.im, this newsletter is hosted by Substack, my podcasts are hosted by Transistor.fm, so on and so forth.

While being all over the web lets me play with lots of different services, I’ve decided this is not the way I want my content to be hosted. I’m in the process of planning a massive consolidation of all my web-based content (blog, podcasts, essay, newsletter, etc). When I do pull the tirgger on having everything be hosting in one spot I want to be sure that there are no glitches. This means lots of thining, planning, emailing with a new one-stop-shop web host, and beta-testing.

If all goes well (and it might not!) I hope to have the vast majoirty of my wirtings in one spot and very accessable.

Living in the Jackpot?

In his two most recent novels si-fi author William Gibson refers to something called the jackpot. The Jackpot is an interesting collection of enviornmental, socio-political, and biological things that all combine to create a period of tie where a huge amount of the human population dies. This article in the New Statesmen describes it this way:

Gibson’s latest novel, Agency, is largely a credible account of a coming apocalypse. His characters call it “the Jackpot”. “It’s multi-causal, and it’s of extremely long duration,” he explains. Over many decades, climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors – “I’ve never really had the heart to make up a full list, else I’ll depress myself” – deplete the human race by 80 per cent.

The Jackpot is the mundane cataclysm of modernity itself. It is hundreds of millions of people driving to the supermarket in their SUVs, flying six times a year, and eating medicated animals for dinner. “If the Jackpot is going to happen,” Gibson says, “it’s already happening. It’s been happening for at least 100 years.”

I read this and I feel like I (we!) might be actually be living in this even now. It freaks me out. Seriously, like a lot.

Wrap:

That’s it for this week. I’ll do my best to get another edition out next weekend.

Till then, make glorious mistakes.

-N