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Connective Synthesis

Affect-Time

December 11, 2010
Aevum, Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Productions, Speaking Desire, Subjects

This is the text of my presentation at the recent meeting of the ASCP at the University of Queensland, Brisbane.

Keywords: subjectivity, time, affect, love

Affect-Time

I take my cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive synthesis, “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” (Anti-Oedipus, 16-22), the synthesis that grounds the subject in the moment where affect, hallucination, and delirium (feeling, seeing, thinking) converge.

One gets the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for a chronological order to the emergence of the subject—post affect, post sensation, and post thought—an order that is at the very least counter-intuitive, if not altogether nonsensical.

Presumably, love, hate, sight, touch, thought, and imagination are events that require an agency by which they may be instigated, an agency that has already acquired the capacity to feel, to sense, or to think. What is nonsensical in Deleuze and Guattari is precisely that which undermines the subject that declares itself sovereign over its various faculties, the subject of reason and fact, of philosophy and technology. This subject sees itself the centre of experience and understanding; it may feel, sense, or think this or that but, surely, it is neither this nor that; it is, in principle at least, greater than both and capable of the repression and/or fulfillment of both. Or so the story goes.

With psychoanalysis, we have come to appreciate the subject as less conscious, less autonomous, less reasonable, as a subject that does not forget, for instance, but as a subject that is founded by an act of primary forgetting, a primary repression, that sets up a complex structure of conscious and unconscious processes that will subsequently endure repression and forgetting. This is a subject that does not enact a forgetting but a subject produced by and as forgetting. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is also a subject that does not enact feeling, thinking, or sensing, but a subject produced by and as feeling, thinking, and sensing.

Hence the “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” that marks the I as a product of the confluence of the three registers affect, sensation, thought. As such, the I is not simply influenced (troubled, pleased, perplexed, or pained) by the changes these registers undergo; it is also re-configured, re-defined, and re-produced by them—radically, differently. She may no longer see herself a woman after a radical hysterectomy in her late twenties; he may doubt his masculinity now that he is sexually attracted to another man; she may experience herself as a doctor differently now that she is an analytic patient; he may have transformed into a new person after his appointment as a university professor; and she may never regain her old self since her last tour of duty. As crises of conscious identity we may witness as well as suffer or enjoy, such turning points bespeak an ongoing process of production, of desiring production, perhaps less patently abrupt, but no less transformative.

Affect, sensation, and thought are no mere qualities or extensions of a pre-existing subject but the ground that makes the feeling, sensing, thinking I possible in a very specific register of time, precipitated by them and belonging to them. As such, the time of the I, the time in which it is created, modulated, and lived is a time of eruption. Ah! So that’s who I am! The exclamation marks a pre and a post to which, strictly speaking, it does not belong. This exclamation, rather, lies on a border between two types of time (the timeless and the timely), an interregnum, if you will, that marks a third time whose laws are distinct from both the timelessness of the eternal Subject (with the S capitalised, of course) and the timeliness of the ever so worldly object. This is a time that shares of both but is neither. This is the time of the I, the time of the verb.

“She sees light,” “he envies her,” and “she contemplates travel” do not depict facts or states of being but verbs that insinuate themselves between two entities, establish their relationship to one another and invest in each its temporary status as either subject or object. As an interregnum, the verb is hardly a bridge that allows the subject to cross over and relate to the object—a bridge that may be as conveniently forgotten as it is crossed. The verb is a weaving that links both sides of the divide, invests them with their particular subjective or objective qualities, defines the gap that separates them, and, in the process, shapes the possibilities of its crossing.

Psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a clinical practice, is replete with references, uses, and deployments of the interregnum. In fact, I would go so far as to say that psychoanalysis is primarily a theory and a practice of the interregnum. Invariably, the psychoanalytic topography is of three simultaneous and yet distinct domains, each with its own set of rules and investments, and of psychoanalysis as a sustained appreciation for and intervention in the second of these domains, occupying the space in between first and third, requiring first and third, and required by them, partaking of both in terms of dynamics and directions, and yet belonging to neither.

I offer three examples from Freud. The drive is the porous frontier between psyche and soma, communicating two sets of demands, mental and physical, in consequence of its connection to both (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 121-22). Nestled in between a primordial hallucination set on immediate pleasure and a survivalist reality subject to the facts of nature, the dream is a process whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of thoughts that have no definite ending (The Interpretation of Dreams, 525). The transference is simultaneously an “artificial illness” and a “piece of real experience” that creates a region between illness and life through which the passage from the one to the other is possible (Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, 154).

What is key about the drive, the dream, and the transference, about, in essence, the three founding concepts and experiences in psychoanalysis, is that they tell not only of a space between two otherwise incongruous realms but also of a set of rules initially borrowed from both realms but made particular by that space. This is entirely consistent with the nature of the interregnum, not as an intermediary kingdom but as an inter-kingdom and hence a kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. Indeed, there is nothing unitary about the drive, the dream, and the transference; the drive is polymorphous, the dream is overdetermined, and the transference is multilayered.

In between primordial psychic goo that knows nothing of negation or death, that, in other words, is devoid of opposites, and an ego that abides by a commonsensical reality and its law of excluded middle and declares these selfsame opposites inadmissible, lays an unconscious that thrives in the concurrence of opposites. In between the newborn’s oceanic feeling in which there is no room, and even less need, for subjectivity and the adult’s sense of a coalesced conscious self we encounter an I that is the effect of the conjunctive synthesis, an I that much of psychoanalysis has sadly prescribed as developmental, conflict-free, depressive, oedipal, name it what you will, an I that is rather produced, situational, transitional. It is to this I that belong the drive, the dream, the transference, and, by extension, the affect, the affect as verb. But if this I emerges at the exclamation point that is the interregnum between the timeless and the timely, what then of its time and, ultimately, what of its affect’s time?

Roughly halfway through the thirteenth century, and under pressure to accommodate a growing ontological diversity of angels, pre-Christian good men, and un-baptised innocents, the scholastic philosophers, starting with Bonaventure and wrapping up with Frederic of Freiberg, articulated the aevum as a new category of time. In between aeternitas, an abiding and indivisible being that is always already perfect, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing becoming that is lack and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration. A quality of neither godly nor human, the aevum is the time of the angels who are eternal in their substance but finite in their actions. The aevum is hence always already a concurrence of opposites, belonging to neither side of the divide but partaking of both; it is a “diminished” eternity where time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that simultaneously holds all the parts that make up a world; it weaves them into an infinite moment so that, in fact, they do make up a world, one that is passing from without but is “forever after” from within.

I want to take leave of the Scholastics and suggest that, in marking a territory between the two worlds of being and becoming, perfection and lack, the aevum opens onto a much needed, quintessentially human, third. Between sleep and wakefulness is the world of dreaming; between rest and work is the world of playing; between hallucination and practical reason is the world of free-associating. The time of these worlds is the time that does not pass, “ce temps qui ne passe pas,” as Pontalis titled one of his monographs; it is the time-stop (Tick. Tick. Tick…) that was originally designed to measure the passage of time but instead forces time to stand still, as with the note of a bell or an alarm, a time-stop that displaced the flow of sundials and water clocks as a standard of measure, a time-stop first produced in the late thirteenth century, and hence from the same period when the aevum acquired its theological and ontological significance.

The aevum is the time of the libido, perhaps not Saint Augustine’s but definitely Freud’s. In fact, much as he tirelessly advanced the notion that the drive has a history—a radical notion for his time—Freud also held that that history does not unfold in developmental phases. The passages from narcissism to object love, from so-called repudiated homosexuality to paranoia, from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, from any one bodily locus to another, all happen in a spasmodic, paroxytic fashion. The drive moves through eruptive, discontinuous, and yet self-contained totalities in the style of a vicissitude. Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 131). It is this libidinal stratification that paves the way for psychoanalysis as archaeology, albeit an inverted archaeology, since its object is the unintended (the slip, the dream, the forgotten) rather than the monumental.

The time of the drive remains altogether different from the empirical time that is decay, and the indivisible time that is perfection. The time of the drive is the time of volcanic eruption, of enumerating, in integers; it is the time of the aevum and its vicissitudes. This is precisely why the unconscious does not waft in elegant seamlessness from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts, as Deleuze and Guattari declare in the opening lines of Anti-Oedipus. Here, there, and there again. Tick. Tick. Tick… At each location and within each interval, the components are assembled in such a way as to make sense and to lend sense.

Not surprisingly, the aevum is the time of the transference as well. Freud warns that the transference comes about “suddenly” and is “bound to surprise” the clinician; whether as love or hate, its extraordinary powers will recast the entirety of the analytic relationship and give it a new meaning that may potentially “blow away” the success of the work (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 176). The dream too operates along these lines and it is only as an effect of secondary revision that its images acquire a semblance of chronological sequence or order, a semblance of meaning, no less conjunctive than the Deleuzo-Guattarian synthesis but much more prone to ossification than Deleuze and Guattari think it ought to be.

What, then, of the affect? Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, the affect’s time is tracked not through quantitative changes (more and less) but through abrupt and abruptly redefining vicissitudes, through “a circulation of states” of conquest, capture, and offshoots as Deleuze and Guattari say (A Thousand Plateaus, 21). Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, to, in other words, an aevum driven by the concurrence of opposites rather than their absence or inadmissibility, the affect requires its other, even and especially its most oppositional other. It does so neither out of tolerance or maturity nor out of a reasoned recognition of or a resignation to conflict, but because it is specifically alongside that other that it may begin to breathe, to make sense.

Love does not exist without hatred, not only because love stirs a dependence that inflicts a wound on one’s sense of autonomy and in turn generates a hatred toward the beloved whose very presence now speaks a narcissistic injury, not only, as with the familiar refrain, because the pleasure of desire makes manifest the pain of lack, but mainly because love is neither decaying nor perfect, neither timed nor timeless, but rather both decaying and perfect, timed and timeless, because the fabric of love is a connection (“and… and… and…”) “forceful enough to uproot the verb ‘to be’” (A Thousand Plateaus, 25), because it is the I as interregnum that loves the other and in so doing hates itself as conscious and coalesced, deprives itself of what it holds dearest under the banner of generosity, surrender, and sacrifice without which love would not be possible. Whoever thinks angels are “angelic,” that theirs is the time of beatitude and innocence, has it completely wrong.

I close by ceding to Goethe whose Faust put it thus:
One impulse art thou conscious of, at best;
O, never seek to know the other!
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces
(Faust, 1, 2)

Anti- … … …

March 3, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Condensation, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Displacement, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        One of the most striking qualities of the Deleuze-Guattarian schema is its trinitarian structure: production, recording, and consumption; machine, body without organs, and subject; paranoid, miraculating, and celibate; connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; and, finally, delirium, hallucination, and experience.

        The question that presents itself at this point is whether such a schema is but the latest in a series of vignettes that articulate the fundamental processes of thought (primary and secondary) Freud and Lacan had already attempted. Are we, in other words, witnessing a departure or simply a reiteration, no matter how varied, of what has been said and done, analytically and otherwise, on numerous occasions already?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s response is that the triangulations of social delirium, be they Oedipal or symbolic, are inherently static and stultifying; their forceful insistence on immutability and universality has now become drone-like and quasi-hypnotic. The schema that Deleuze and Guattari offer instead is grounded in a logic of counter-stability; its structure may be tripartite but, and forever, its modalities are infinite, its meanings multiple, and its subjects aleatory.

        I want to backtrack a bit here: what Freud had posited as his most cruicial contribution to the study of the psyche was not the fact of the unconscious. Freud had posited the fact of a dynamic unconscious as a form of thought and a process, as in primary process, as the basis for his newly elaborated project. I think that as much as Anti-Oedipus marks itself as profoundly anti-psychoanalytic, it remains most faithful to Freud’s core insights. In the name of flows and machines, the text rejects the Freudian unconscious in favour of an unconscious governed by three productive syntheses: connection, disjunction, and conjunction. However, with structural linguistics and its Lacanian appropriations for background, Deleuze and Guattari have essentially recast the Freudian mechanisms of displacement, condensation, and secondary revision in terms that, though unsettling, are no less psychoanalytic:

  • displacement, circulation along the axis of contiguity-metonymy, is now the connective synthesis (and… and…);
  • condensation, circulation along the axis of selection-metaphor, is now the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…)
  • secondary revision, the arrangement of disparate fragments into commonsensical and identitarian narratives, is now the conjunctive synthesis (so that’s what it is…).

        Deleuze and Guattari identify a psychoanalytic implementation that can only tolerate a “this and that” (mummy and daddy), a “this or that” (masculine or feminine), and a permanent “it’s me” ego. Deleuze and Guattari advance a schizoanalytic implementation where the connections and the disjunctions operate ad-infinitum and the subjectivities to which conjunctions give rise are partial and transitory.

        The anti-Oedipal criticism can be reformulated in the following terms: psychoanalysis has erected unnecessary and institutionally self-serving limits; it has betrayed its own first principle of a dynamic unconscious. It has not gone as far as it can actually go. Guattari stated as much in his notes while preparing the text. In the recently published Ecrits pour l’Anti-Oedipe, he repeatedly admonished Freud and Lacan for reintroducing the subject into the very realm from which they had previously evicted it, for subordinating the unconscious to the logic of unity and coherence, if not in fact then in therapeutic ideal. For Guattari, psychoanalysis has proven itself incapable of tolerating its own discovery of the unconscious as a primary process; it has become little more than an ossified and ossifying secondary revision.

        I want to suggest that, in adopting the notions of slip and dynamic primary process, Anti-Oedipus belongs at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition. That it rejects the Oedipal schema in which Freud encapsulated his findings makes it less Freudian but not any the less psychoanalytic. Before and since Deleuze and Guattari, many in the Kleinian and relational camps have rejected the Oedipal drama as a major hermeneutic key. This did not make them any the less psychoanalytic; it confirmed their commitment to the study of the psyche and to the intervention in its workings. Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to separate the discipline from some of its practitioners may be due to the fact that, sadly, the discipline itself has been governed by doctrinaire allegiances to those prominent amongst the practitioners. One often hears certain Freudians, Kleinians, or Lacanians declaring only members of their schools as the “true” bearers of the psychoanalytic torch; outsiders are dismissed as lost souls or impostors.

PS: see also Anti.

Fetish

November 24, 2007
André Green, Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Fetish, Freud, Guattari, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Sophocles

        It is in terms of this tension that Deleuze and Guattari will understand the fetish, not as an object, a commodity, or a body part; but as the movement, event, and relationship that reverse the connective synthesis and fix the machine as fatefully miraculated, as, in other words, owing its existence to some body without organs without which it cannot survive.

        Oedipus is a telling example of such a fetish. Indeed, many a post-Freudian reading has further complicated our understanding of the tumultuous relationship between father and son: André Green for instance reminds us that Laius was not simply the innocent victim of patricide but the plotter of his own son’s murder as well. In this context, much remains to be said of Jocasta’s collusion with her husband’s plot and of the ideological silence that surrounds that collusion to this day.

        Still, the structure and logic of the myth persist to the point where it has become virtually impossible to experience the familial, either phenomenally or ideologically, without its Sophoclean recordings. However, and should art or history be our guide and inspiration, then let us not overlook the episode that Herodotus tells of Hippocrates who refused to abide by the prophecy’s warning that he not father a son or if he already has one to disown him. Pisistratus, his offspring, would go on to conquer Athens and serve as its ruler. Neither father nor son in this case was any the poorer for disregarding the codes of the deities and the directives of their prophets (Histories, Book One #59-64).

        To put it bluntly, the logic of the fetish here is the intolerant and singular logic of the “without me, you are noting” that one party fosters and with which another colludes. Author and reader, teacher and student, analyst and analysand, parent and child, ruler and ruled; these are some of the structural couplets that breathe in the stagnant air of resentment without which, and in an ironically doubled and nested move, the corresponding institutions of Literature, Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Family, and State would not exist.

        “Without me, you are nothing” is the logic of quasi-causes, of boundaries and restrictions, of confinements and regulations, through which the leak is construed as a threat and the crossing is supposedly a crossing into illegitimacy, chaos, fragmentation, and disintegration. But it is precisely the impermeable boundary itself that divides, consolidates, and reifies the functions of dictator, father, and super ego. Often enough, the crossing is not into chaos but into a more liveable and freer sanity. Instead of health or truth, it is territoriality and power that are the fundamental concerns of the institution and its fetish.

        Ostensibly, this “without me, you are nothing” is but a thin veil for a deep and desperate projection: “without you, I am nothing.” To admit that much is to renounce the fallacy of the hierarchy that allows me to identify myself as your superior (in health, truth, or wealth); it is to renounce my investment in my phantasy of my superiority over you, which is to say, it is to recognize my aggression toward you as someone I wish to subordinate. Freud’s elaborations on the mechanisms of projection and paranoia in his study on Schreber still hold true, as long as one inscribes them within the circuit of the conditional relations of the inter-subjective.

Relations

November 16, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Mourning, Nietzsche, Schizoanalysis

        My incursion into this bit of intellectual and institutional history helps me situate Anti-Oedipus not only within the psychoanalytic context but also within that of one of the most pressing concerns that have marked the twentieth century. Deleuze and Guattari were by no means impermeable to the pressures and pleasures to take sides in the experience versus abstraction debate: Einstein/Heisenberg, Freud/Lacan. One might even extend the scenario to the artistic domain and add, for instance, Picasso/Kandinsky to the list of couplets.

        However, Deleuze and Guattari opted for the third possibility, the one that neither physics nor psychoanalysis had acknowledged. I am referring here to that possibility one finds in Nietzsche’s, or at least in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s, works. Indeed, Deleuze had already argued that Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism did not consist in the privileging of experience at the expense of abstraction since Plato himself never did dismiss experience in the first place. What the Greek philosopher had actually done was to prioritise amongst the various experiences in order to distinguish between the good copies of the ideal and universal Forms from their bad and cheap imitations.

        For those of you who might be a bit uncomfortable with my characterization of Lacan as a Platonist, you might want to keep in mind the practices of selection and valuation that the schemas of the Platonic Form and the Lacanian Symbolic discharge through the couplets good copy/cheap imitation and full speech/empty speech respectively.

        In any case, and to return to Deleuze’s Nietzsche, a reversal of Platonism is effected only when the distinction good copy/bad copy and the system of reference upon which it is based (the Form) have been dismantled. For Nietzsche, the antithesis of the duality true world (Form) and apparent world (copy) is ostensibly the duality world and nothing (The Will to Power #567).

        Consequently, “coming to know means ‘to place oneself in a conditional relation to something’; to feel oneself conditioned by something and oneself to condition it—it is therefore under all circumstances establishing, denoting, and making-conscious of conditions (not forthcoming entities, things, what is ‘in-itself’)” (#555). For Nietzsche, the world we know is a world of conditional relations and not of objects. Stripped of such relations, it ceases to exist. Translated into Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, these relations are not to be understood in causal terms; rather, they are to be subsumed under the heading of machinic production and its corollaries.

        Had Heisenberg read Nietzsche? I do not know. However, and notwithstanding his will to abstraction, the physicist recognized that the thing-in-itself, the electron, could not be represented and was hence experientially unknowable in itself. Feynman’s diagram is again the schema of an event, of a conditional relation of repulsion between two electrons. We do know that Freud had in fact read Nietzsche and that he had developed a conditional relation of envy and resentment toward the philosopher who, as he somewhere put it, had intuited the conclusions that he had had to spend an entire lifetime observing clinically. We also know that Lacan’s conditional relation to the German philosopher was one of admiration: he had read and eulogized his texts as an adolescent and then, after he had completed his medical studies, had been exposed to them once again via Georges Bataille, both at Acephale and the Collège de sociologie.

        It is rather unfortunate but perhaps not too surprising that envy, resentment, and admiration obscured one of Nietzsche’s most fundamental insights: what is to be analysed is not the unconscious as a thing in itself but the relations and the events which constitute it, and that such an analysis must itself figure among these relations and hence be the object of its own analysis. Of course, both Freud and Lacan, each in his own particular way, made extensive clinical use of such relations and events, especially in their transferential echoes. Invariably however, that use was motivated by an epistemophilic drive whose principal aim was the “truth” of the analysand’s unconscious; the interpretation (Freud) or dialectisation (Lacan) of the transference is relevant only insofar as it makes explicit the analysand’s psyche in its wishes, histories, patterns, and frustrations.

        Even within those other clinical quarters where the reciprocal relational nature of the analytic encounter had been underscored—the so-called “two person” psychologies of Fairbairn, Klein, and Winnicott for instance—the (sufficiently analysed) analyst’s share, his or her counter-transference, has been invariably filed under the rubric of the analysand’s projective identifications, reverberations, or deficits and hence, yet again, pertaining to the supposed truth of the latter’s unconscious. While indeed highly useful, such clinical strategies remain bound to the understanding of the unconscious as a discreet and knowable object merely influenced by its relations to other equally discreet objects.

        Consider, however, the dynamics of mourning and melancholia as they were first elaborated by Freud and subsequently deployed by Klein as the launch pad for her theorizing the ubiquity of ambivalence. What have remained under-investigated are much less the mourner’s responses to the experience of object loss and what these responses betray of his or her psychological structures and strategies, but rather the qualitative transformations in the relations the mourner has had to the supposedly lost object. At the level of the unconscious, neither objects nor relations ever die; they only get transformed. What is experienced is hence not so much the loss of the object but the abrupt reshaping of one’s relationship to it.

        Consequently, mourning and melancholia are amongst the vicissitudes of one’s relationship to other relations and not to objects. Such vicissitudes never occur in a vacuum; they are invariably predicated upon—which is to say produced, recorded, and consumed by—the current, as well as the long history of, relations of so-called loss the mourner has witnessed, learned, and been shaped by. The logic of the connective synthesis is as relevant here as it is in the context of the desiring machines and it is no coincidence that Deleuze and Guattari will speak of the body without organs as the unproductive, un-consumable, and imageless “full body of death” (8). The desiring machines do not cease to exist; with the emergence of the body without organs the flow of the connective synthesis is halted momentarily but only to be further reconfigured and organized.

Of Applications – 2

November 10, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Lacan, Machines, Schizoanalysis

        I would like to return once again to the question of theory, its practices, its links and dislocations. What is the theory of the body without organs that is being proposed in the second section of Chapter One of Anti-Oedipus? What is its basis? Can one speak of it as having a basis at all?

        The first synthesis, the connective (and… and… and…) synthesis of production, the producing/product identity, implicitly suggests what Deleuze had to spell out later on in a conversation with Foucault on the logic of “Intellectuals and Power.” The duality theory/practice is a producing product Deleuze insists; practice is invariably informed and driven by an often implicit but not any the less potent set of theoretical presuppositions while theory itself is a practice whose laws and dynamics are subject to transformation and interruption.

        This question of the duality theory/practice is by no means specific to the fields of political participation or psychoanalytic intervention. Indeed, the break that quantum mechanics for instance effected from relativity theory in the mid 1920’s was propelled, and in one respect at least, by a reordering of the axioms of scientific priority governing experience and observation. Einstein and Schrödinger had abstracted from the phenomena of observable daily experience imagery that they then reinterpreted for the atomic realm. The macroscopic experience of two like-charged billiard balls repelling each other was transferred onto the atomic domain to explain the behavior of electrons (Figure 1).

Figure 1

        Likewise, the atom itself was understood and represented as a minuscule solar system with its own internal gravitational dynamics (Figure 2).

Figure 2

        In this model, experience and its figurative representation are imposed onto the theory; they shape it and ground its claim to truth. With his quantum mechanics, Heisenberg quickly came to challenge relativity theory on the basis of reality’s inherent discontinuity and dubious causality; he insisted that, as a matter of principle, neither could be accurately visualized or known. Heisenberg argued that mathematical abstraction must precede any diagrammatic representation and it in fact took more than twenty years (from 1925 to 1948) for such a representation to catch up and make its presence onto the stage.

Figure 3

        Feynman’s diagram of two electrons exchanging a light quantum (Figure 3) could not have been drawn without the mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics. The difference between figures 1 and 3 is twofold: the first is in the order of priority (experience/representation versus theory); the second—the one of particular interest to me at this point—is in the nature of the representation itself; figure 1 is the image of two objects in motion whereas figure 3 is the schema of an event between two unrepresentable objects.

        Much like Einstein, Freud relied on the accounts of everyday life and experience to ground and shape his theories. And just as much as relativity theory extrapolated patterns of experience from the macroscopic onto the atomic, Freud relished his incursions into anthropology and archaeology in order to draw homologies between the developments of the species (phylogeny) and those of the individual (ontogeny). The Platonism that quantum mechanics has come to reflect, the idea that mathematics is the true language of nature, is echoed in Lacan’s investment initially in topological constructs and subsequently, in the last decade of his career, in the formulae that were meant to encapsulate the workings of the unconscious: the mathemes. Amongst the most invoked of these are the mathemes of the four discourses—the hysteric’s, the analyst’s, the master’s, and the university’s—from Seminar 20, On Feminine Sexuality. These mathemes were designed to achieve at least two things: first, to bridge the gap between word and experience and hence make possible the transmission of knowledge, specifically, psychoanalytic knowledge; and, second, to redress the confusion to which both word and experience must inevitably give rise.

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