Numbers
A machine is never on its own.
One (the machine—the author, the infant, the analysand for instance) is not the originary number. A machine is always producing of a flow, of a product.
Two (the machine and its flow—author and text, mother and milk, analysand and speech) is not the originary number either. A machine produces not only a product but also a product that is producing of another, that is itself a machine, a consuming machine to be more precise.
Three (the machine, its flow, and the machine that consumes that flow—author, text, and reader; mother, milk, and infant; analysand, speech, and analyst) is still not the originary number. The presence of a machine presupposes not only another that it produces but yet a third by which it had been preceded and produced, and so on.
Infinity is the originary number. The presence of a machine is made possible only in an infinite series or string (and… and… and…) of connecting, producing, consuming, and recording machines. The series itself can exist only in an immensely complicated matrix or network of production among whose components we may count sexuality, kinship, market forces, intellectual histories, legal and juridical constraints, scientific and aesthetic achievements, and physiological contingencies. Ultimately, meaning resides in such activities; it is not deferred till the moment of a product as an end.
The clinical implication here is twofold. First, the distinction between reality and unconscious phantasy, between what belongs to the everyday and what is “properly” psychoanalytic, is in the understanding of the relationships and events between machines (production, consumption, etc…) and not in the nature of the object as such. The priority then is to appreciate that the clinical practice and its material and ideological surround are fundamentally implicated in one another. Second, the notion of termination as cure, truth, or position is never truly “terminal;” the connective synthesis is endless in its dynamic and the clinical concern, as indeed it has now become for many, is much less with an end to a process than it is with its extension beyond the point where the presence of the analyst is mandatory.
This entry was posted on 26 October 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Anti-Oedipus, Connective Synthesis, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Termination . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
