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Studio Handbook for End Times / SAMPLE WRITING 1

WRITING SAMPLES 1 Studio handbook for end times: “introduction” 2 Stochastic resonance: Metaphor and metonymy, Bloom’s anxiety system, and virtuality 3 The horizontal atlas: lamella, fantasy, anamorphosis, lucretian flow

Studio Handbook for End Times: Introduction from the outline …

1. Introduction to the studio as personal and therapeutic project. a. Not the usual ego-‐based idea of self-‐help b. What studio does in professional educational programs c. How the studio idea is specifically meaningful when applied to personal reflection d. The “uncanny” aspect of home as the essence of dwelling

AIMS of the introduction: An introduction does not need to be a preview listing ideas to be encountered further in the text. Rather, it is a set-‐up, a preparation. With the surfeit of self-‐help literature that floods the market, the reader needs to make a clean break with this kind of quid pro quo thinking. The up-‐market ideas from psychoanalysis are not difficult; rather, they have been until recently shrouded in technical/professional jargon. The Introduction aims to set up key ideas that will serve the reader for the remainder of the reading project and to establish bonds of trust that will assure the reader that the book is not a series of gimmicks. The reader must accept the invitation to read with adequate awareness of what’s at stake.

TOPICS: The peculiarly American idea that you can and should help yourself; the distortion of psychoanalysis into ego-‐strengthening; the studio as counterpart to the modernized factory. The unnameable: anxiety-‐fear, an “inner division” and an “outer projection.” The intensification of the Real in the Thing, as impossible-‐obscene proximity; escape is through fantasy; hence, the world of popular culture abounds in evidence of anxiety-‐fear’s “extimacy.” The idea of spaces inside of space; the φ as symbol of re-‐entry and bridge to other topics. The technique of “stepping aside” to see subjectivity “face to face.” A Lucretian framework for experiment. The uncanny as place (home) and situation (negation, obversion); metaphor and metonymy; reasons for taking up a personalized inquiry. Harold Bloom’s system of anxiety; Henry Johnstone’s system of authentic travel.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, the “psychoanalytic” (or “analytic”) idea of the human subject

developed by Freud began to hit American shores. At first, it seemed a perfect marriage of Old World wisdom and

New World pragmatics. Freud’s clinical study of hysterics, paranoiacs, and perverts had revealed that mental

illness was not the exception in human culture, it was the rule; it was democratic! There were no sick minds and

healthy minds. There were only minds with various manifestations of the sickness that was the mind. The subject

was the sickness that could not be cured but for death. The best one could hope for was “neurosis,” the cost of

belonging to networks of social relations — family, friends, one’s culture, one’s religion. The universality of this

severe diagnosis opened up the public’s curiosity about their mental life, the adjustment to the increasing

demands of modernism, and — especially — to immodest thoughts about sex. In exchange for the guilty verdict of


science, the public “pled down the sentence,” so to speak. At a cost affordable to a growing educated middle class,

psychoanalysis could provide a new way to imagine subjectivity. While the frame was limited, variations were not.

In an age already heated to the boil with spiritualism and ideas about hidden dimensions of time and space,

science seemed to be offering the same tricks of space and time, but with added comforts of consultation and

control. The séance table was replaced by the analyst’s couch.

The problem, in the minds of the first promoters in the U.S., was that the ideas of psychoanalysis might,

on one hand, be too easily spread unless key terms remained obscure and ambiguous. If people understood the

text too readily, they wouldn’t need experts to translate for them. On the other hand, the real complexities of the

mind would put off many clients willing to pay for treatment only if that treatment promised some eventual cure.

This led to the biggest distortion of all, one that continues to dominate psychiatric practice in the U. S. — that the

aim of treatment is to define and strengthen the ego, the “public” aspect of the personality. The public, misled

with the hopes that their neuroses could be dispelled by a kindly medical expert aiming to build personal

confidence, would embrace analysis as a path to happiness and accomplishment. Psychiatrists, required to be

MDs, would be personal trainers. The MD model — a professional who cures you — provided an upbeat

alternative to Freud’s original and somewhat depressing bottom line.

Figure 1. Charlie Chaplin in the factory gearbox, Modern Times, 1936; DVD: United Artists, 2003.

The shift in psychoanalysis from Freud’s universal sickness to optimistic self-‐help with personal trainers

had a distant echo. The atelier — the French word for the studio in which craftsmen, artists, and architects labored

on their works — embodied the mental process of creativity. It was an “angelic space,” not for the factory-‐like

production of practical goods but for miraculous conception of works of art. Mind and matter blended, forces

flowed and created harmonies. The studio embodied the impossible. Unlike the analyst’s couch, where the past

was invaded to discover its hidden traumas, the studio projected toward a magical future. Both the couch and the

studio sought treasures hidden in the unconscious, but the studio’s conceptions were magic objects that could be

shared as works of art.

The romanticizing of the studio came at a time when factories were struggling to escape the poet William

Blake’s image of them as “dark satanic mills.” New factories were streamlined, bright, hygienic. Work, increasingly


alienating as mass production and the efficiency of assembly lines took over, became discipline (think of Charlie

Chaplin’s construction of the factory scene in Modern Times). The new satanic mill put Satan on a television

screen, broadcasting from his corner office, dictating orders to willing workers. However, the new mill was cleaned

up to secure an even tighter grip on the worker, not just to compel labor but to control thoughts and feelings as

well. It was not good enough to be a slave; it was necessary to want to be a slave; to identify with servitude. The

studio went further than the modern factory floor could. It gave voice to the idea of the autonomous subject, able

to go beyond the dictates of consumer demand; able to realize the hitherto impossible. Where the factory

exemplified the automaton, the perfectly coordinated machine, the studio embodied the ideal of tuchē, Aristotle’s

idea of human opportunism, affordance, and ingenuity making do with things lying at hand.

Marx’s vision of humanity in heavy or light chains was popularized by movies such as Fritz Lang’s

Metropolis and panoramic art such as Diego Rivera’s murals of oppressed humanity struggling for freedom. The

Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German unrest following World War I pitted the model of collective prosperity

against the reality of personal subjection. A new society moved in lock-‐step toward ever-‐increasing material

wealth on one hand and the likelihood of personal alienation and dissatisfaction on the other. If the factory

assembly line was the “dirty fantasy” related to this kind of reality, the studio provided “clean fantasy” — a place

of “spiritual” production, where dissatisfaction and alienation evaporated into the pure bliss of liberated artistic

“conception,” uniting the physical and mental aspects of that term.

This was an unreal idealization of the forces of the times, but it shows how one and the same situation

can only be adequately represented by two fantasies, one “dirty” and the other “clean.” It takes a little time to

realize that the idealization of the studio (sun flowing in from large windows, works of ingenuity being perfected

by thoughtful, happy workers) is simply the obverse of the rigidly disciplined factory. But, what could possibly

serve as the single “reality” behind these two antagonistic images? Freud’s answer was obscured for many years,

and made nearly invisible by ego-‐psychology versions of his work. It was not an answer that could be stated easily,

but it was one that related so directly to our ideas of how space and time are structured that its central, singular

inner antagonism had no option but to produce two strikingly contrasting “scenes.” This idea, this thing with a

built-‐in inner antagonism and obverse material ideals, cannot even be named with one word. Its name can be

pronounced only in the presence of “external circumstances” that seem to call it out as a response; but, in truth, it

would be impossible to say which came first, the circumstances or the subjective response. It would be more

accurate to say that call and response emerged simultaneously and so quickly differentiated, each from the other

— one as an “outside” of external conditions, the other as an “inside” of subjective feelings — that re-‐combining

them would be nearly impossible. The inside-‐outside condition of this thing with the built-‐in division was like the

Roman god Janus, whose multiple faces reduced the north, south, east, and west of material space to a single

entity — an “out there” — that was also, paradoxically, an “in here.” Intimacy and externality were given

permanent polarity on the condition that they would never be allowed to fully separate.


The Janus-‐style name of this new idea that gave rise to both the factory floor and the romanticized artist’s

studio was — anxiety-‐fear. In its mode of spatial and temporal immediacy, “fear” had objects to be afraid of:

natural threats, wild animals, maniacs with weapons, deadly diseases. When the objects of fear were nowhere to

be seen, fear had to be abstracted as anxiety. Anxiety could not find any specific place on any map or any time on a

clock or calendar. The fact that fear and anxiety were one and the same, and that they both found immediate if

paradoxical expressions in spatial objects (or non-‐objects) and places (or imagined/non-‐ places), was Freud’s great

discovery. Fear and anxiety weren’t the same thing, but their original inner division would be the distinctive trait

evident in every separate subsequent experience they shaped. Fear dominated externality, anxiety internality; but

their common topology allowed for complex exchanges The psychoanalyst who sought to rescue Freud from ego-‐

psychology and return to the strict evidence of the clinic, Jacques Lacan, emphasized this point. He even gave a

name to the inside-‐out phenomenon (extimité, Englished into “extimacy”) and, like Agent Mulder in The X Files,

proclaimed that mental truth, instead of being the secure interior conscious possession of the Cartesian subject

who at least knew that she was thinking, was “out there,” an “unconscious” of places, times, and things.

Is the truth-‐out-‐there model not the same as the assertion of the Logical Positivists of the early twentieth

century, that there are literal “facts” of external nature?1 Was this what Lacan had in mind with his idea of

extimacy? No, we would be missing the point of the inside-‐out principle. Each condition, inside or outside, carries

within it — at its innermost heart — the kernel of its opposite condition. To see how the factory floor and the

sunlit studio are essentially the same requires a different way of talking and thinking. We are no longer allowed the

luxury of forming polar oppositions to compare the virtues of one case to the evils of the other. We are not even

allowed the luxury of separating virtue and evil for more than an instant, but since we cannot synthesize them into

a third term neither can we see them together. Our only alternative is motion, the option exhaustively elaborated

by Hegel in his idea of thought as dialectic. This is not the popular idea of “thought as process,” but the more

difficult idea that thought continuously materializes itself as things — which Freud and Lacan were able later to

refine as the Thing (das Ding) — the thing that cannot be assimilated, described, captioned, or harnessed. The

Thing resists destruction because, paradoxically, it is “nothing at all” — one cannot even call it a “construct,” which

would suggest that it is an invention of fantasy. Rather, fantasies are what we have to invent in order to avoid,

cordon off, insulate, hold at bay, or otherwise come to terms with the unbearable proximity of the Thing as “more

real than reality” — the Real, with a capital ‘R’. The Thing is like a zombie, indestructible, “set on automatic.”

Fantasy is the secret weapon that lets us escape (or ignore) the zombie’s fearful approach.

Because fantasy is a means of defending against the impossible-‐obscene proximity of the Real, it was a

focus for Freud and Lacan. Freud saw the couch as a means of releasing fantasies from their owner’s unconscious

“treasuries of signifiers.” Lacan realized the couch was not always necessary. The treasuries were “out there” to be

observed and described. The subject on the couch has already spent a lifetime fitting fantasies into cottages or

mansions, assembling fantasy furniture, structuring fantasy scenarios with family and friends. All of culture, so to

speak, provides evidence of the fantasies that cover over the traumatic Real. When critical theorists such as Slavoj

Žižek sought to make Lacan’s ideas somewhat more understandable to a broader audience, he had little trouble


“finding Freud/Lacan” in popular culture: films, novels, politics, landscapes, jokes — the same domains that had

attracted Freud originally when, during trips to museums of antiquities, he saw that the subject had been living out

its psychoanalytic dramas, in literature, religion, and art, since ancient times. The isolation of the clinic was really a

principle of external isolation. The most public aspects of life carried the dark shadows of the “private”

unconscious, to the extent that one might just as well consider that the unconscious is collective from the start.

The Thing haunted reality (symbolic relationships) while subjects constructed personal and collective fantasies to

move around space and time without colliding with the Real, in the form of Things that occupied

invisible/impossible spaces inside of spaces.

A clever parody of this situation can be found in René Daumal’s unfinished novel, published posthumously

in 1952, Mount Analogue. There, the Thing is described in positive terms, as an invisible jewel (“paradam”) that

can be discovered and possessed only by pure-‐minded explorers whose subjectivities have been sufficiently

prepared by deep learning and religious discipline. The gems all lay within Mount Analogue, the principal feature

of an island located in hyperspace. Ships in the area, thinking they were moving in a straight line, actually sailed

around it, unaware that space itself had been bent to prevent access. The worthy explorers of the book’s

expedition, however, had learned the trick of entry into this space. Performing expert maneuvers, they breached

the “site of exception.” They sent out their advance team to excavate the paradams. The paradam-‐Thing was good

only for those who grasped its meaning, its impossibility, and its existence only in relation to its concealment and

discovery.

The problem of our world, of which Daumal’s Mount Analogue is an analogy, is the inside-‐outside issue of

extimacy: how to hop, slide, slip, fly, rematerialize, etc. from one side to the other. Entry is not a simple matter of

crossing over. It is equivalent to death and/or transformation. In fact the folklore surrounding these acts are based

on the topology of extimacy. If so many parts of the human condition can be seen in terms of this bi-‐modal

condition of the inside-‐out, it stands to reason that understanding how the facts of the boundary condition can

generate many insights into diverse matters.

The question becomes: what is, on one hand, an economical, understandable, and accurate way of

learning about the inside-‐out boundary condition that, on the other hand, does not attach it too tightly to any one

specific example?

We must find the “key situations” where the boundary condition is so dominant that it would be

impossible to understand the first thing about them without taking the boundary crossing issue into account —

where the idea of a simple (“transitive”) crossing would just not function. Transitive boundaries are like light

switches. In the up position the lights go on; down turns them off. Up again, they come on, same as before. The

intransitive boundary seems to offer a third option. The switcher looking for light is drawn inside the switch itself,

by the very desire of seeking light. The third option is a hybrid: light that contains a darkness (LD); dark that

contains a small kernel of light (DL). There is no clear case of light and dark, only the hybrid, “cross-‐inscribed”

conditions of obversion — the boundary that has entered into its own boundary-‐ness. The small Greek letter phi,


which will mean many things in the coming essays, φ, uses script to curve back into the space it has just created. It

will be the symbol for this moment of “re-‐entry” and a means of discovering connections with other phenomena

where re-‐entry has played the role of a silent partner.

Pedagogy of the (personal) studio

The studio that embodied the ideal of creative discovery, obverse of the factory floor’s machine perfection, was

nonetheless dedicated to productivity. The abundant windows of the public cliché version linked subjectivity to

this productivity. Light streaming into an interior was a model of conscious awareness. Productivity was to be a

specifically spiritual result. The studio’s adaptation of the rules of consumption, exchange, and enjoyment were

different from the mass-‐produced commodities of industry. Therefore, those who labored in studios tuned Marx’s

idea of “exchange value” to resonate with the values of art, concealed within the “use value” of the functional

work.

It is the “non-‐art,” industrial, aspect of the studio that allows it to go into the everyday, outside world and

qualifies it as a model of personal inquiry. The “studio method” developed in this book has two components to its

forward motion. One aims in the direction of external conditions that are mapped, represented, and experimented

on. The other is “internal” by comparison, but rather than being a vector aimed in the opposite direction of the

external, it holds a right-‐angle position that aligns with the boundary condition itself. This is the line to be both

crossed and entered, the condition to be accepted and acted on. Crossing the line sets subjectivity in motion, and it

is this motion that is to be the gauge of the personal. Entering into the line enters into the “worlds within worlds”

where we see subjectivity, so to speak, “face to face.” Without the action of the former, the visions of the latter

would mean nothing. The studio as a means of discovering subjectivity is a two-‐part process: awareness coupled

with performance.

The usual self-‐help vocabulary does not apply. There is no aim to improve attitudes or skills, no “journey

of self-‐discovery,” no inner peace. Like psychoanalysis, there is no idea of any improvement on the present

condition other than a different attitude toward one’s own conscious and unconscious construction of fantasies in

relation to the Real. If the “art” of fantasy is the fantasy itself, the “non-‐art” component is its function within the

subjectivity of the subject. Where in the artist studio the artist may be seen to stand directly behind the work of

art, in the studio the artist stands “to the side.” The work is not “about” the artist or an expression “from inside”

the artist; it is a sideways, horizontal product. The artist “steps aside” to allow the flow of utility between users and

the objects he/she invents. In the same way, the studio as a model of personal experimentation allows for a

straightforward “functional relationship” to develop between the world and the subjectivity of the experimenter.

The conscious experimenter constructs conditions that allow this essential “stepping aside” so that he/she may

play as both actor and audience in a scene of expanded awareness. The “studio method” cultivates this horizontal

movement.


The uncanny of the subject, the subjective home, and virtually everything else

Extimacy sets the tone for any subjective project that intends to carry forward the insights of the Freudian-‐

Lacanian clinic. In the productive framework of the studio model, Lacan’s idea of extimacy carries subjectivity out

of the studio into the world. It reveals the “sites of exception” wherein the Thing, the Real, constructs its strange

exterior-‐interiors. The face-‐to-‐face is coaxed out of hiding through sympathetic performative enactments. “The

studio” becomes the name for the collection of these enactments. In the corny expression, “self-‐help,” the

emphasis has subtly shifted. The self is the Other, the monster as Thing. Like the little girl who offers the zombie-‐

Thing flowers in the 1931 James Whale production of Frankenstein, we cannot afford to be too innocent or naïve

when confronting the sheer scale, motility, and identify dysfunctions of the Thing. Our project requires both wit

and courage.

Courage. Wit and courage are, specifically, antidotes to the doublet, anxiety-‐fear. Courage is the resource

that defends against presence, or rather, the “over-‐presence of the Real.” It is akin to fantasy, but it cannot avoid

the requirements of the “face to face.” What is this? When we face an Other, the stereognostic, left-‐right, ordering

of the world is distilled and intensified. Unlike the mirror’s direct return of left to left, right to right, the Other

returns a left for a right, a right for a left. The turn is implicit in the face to face, whereas in the mirror, the lack of a

turn creates the uncanny non-‐self within the self we see. Courage, the counterpart to fear, addresses the issue of

presence in the particularly architectural nature of its spatial and temporal structure: its “dimensionalities.” The

scare-‐quotes are not for nothing. In the cause of subjective extimacy-‐exploring, looking for the sites of exception

and the Things they conceal, the usual “Cartesian” dimensions of ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’ do not apply. Time is not just a line

that adds a fourth component to the cubic volume of homogeneous emptiness. Dimensions are constructed; they

are intended to do work. Courage is about the construction of these lines and the utility they must embody.

Wit. When the object of fear is not immediately present, we experience anxiety. This absence allows time

and space to contaminate each other. Stories inside stories, time travel, the uncanny phenomenon of the double,

and the contamination of reality by the dream are not only possible but imminent potentialities. For just this

reason, fantasy uses these four themes in its attempt to domesticate anxiety through fictions that allow our

enjoyment within the protective circumstances of the book, the play, the film, the folk-‐tale. All involve extimacy;

all involve some version of the Thing. Where courage constructs dimensionalities as quick defences against the

over-‐presence of the Real, wit constructs catalogues, atlases — whole libraries — where these defences are

inventoried, maintained, and kept ready for practical use. In the meantime, we rehearse any actual application

through the projected actions of fictional others, kept within the bounds of suspended disbelief, a “once upon a

time” to keep dreaming in its place.

Wit, however, realizes that the protective barrier has leaks. The very contents of these repositories of

fantasy played out by others contain “open sesame” formulæ that tunnel beneath the walls, bribe the guards, or

simply charm open the gates. I would not be the first to suggest that wit in general is all about boundary

management. This was realized in ancient Greece and Rome, where plays such as Plautus’s Amphitryon used the


double theme to create a situation of high comedy. The curling-‐back-‐around of time is the key: this is also the

curling back of the boundary, the “re-‐entry” of the boundary into its own condition. This is why “wit” is not simply

a characterization of something particularly clever or funny, but the designation of a specifically topological

condition-‐technique.

Wit’s topological nature has been recognized throughout history but there exist extremely few

repositories of principles or procedures. From the seventeenth century Mannerist critic, Luis de Góngora, through

to the eighteenth century philosopher of culture, Giambattista Vico, the shape of wit was particularly important.

Wit was the art of agutezza, “sharpness.” Wit was able to penetrate through the thick skulls of the literal-‐minded,

in jokes and ideas; but it was also about the penetration of “impossible thickness of space and time” in the same

spirit is the ship of the explorers in Mount Analogue. Vico explained this by the etymology of cœlum, which was

the Latin word for both “heaven” and “wedge.” He explained that both were metaphor, an “acute” or “argute”

expression that, out of two disconnected terms, formed a passageway that was both remote and sharp. Please pay

attention to both terms. Remoteness is not just a characterization. It has to do with the necessity to go some place

distant, to travel, to be a traveler who, like Homer’s Odysseus, went into strange situations simply to practice his

wit skills. Sharpness, also, is not simply a characterization. It has to do with penetration, entry — especially tricky

or clever boundary-‐crossing, often with the discovery of a literal password or a secret formula that works like a

password. A password is a double signifier. On the surface it means something innocuous, conventional, ordinary.

Attached to this literalism, however, is the pass function. The expression works “secretly” to afford a passage, to

gain an entry. Later, we will see how Jacques Lacan employed this sub-‐function both to study paranoiacs, for

whom all speech was a mi-‐dire or “half-‐speech,” as well as to develop his own manner of speaking, writing, and

knowing. We will encounter the idea elsewhere in the form of kenosis — a way of knowing things “by halves.” This

does not mean that we only may know half of something, but that the process of knowing itself involves “putting

two and two together,” so to speak — a knowledge that reflects on the knower and the knower’s errors as a part

of “that which is sought to be known.”

The pointiness of “acute” wit is also significant in an unexpected literal way. An acute angle is sharp —

less than 90º. Metaphor is a connection linking two things lying close together by a construction that lies in the

distance. The things close together might be parts of a single image, the elements of a streetscape, or the events of

a day. Their “natural” continuity, arising out of adjacency and proximity, leads us to think that being together also

involves the sharing of common causes and rules. Metaphor can interrupt this presumed natural order. It can

create, within normalcy, an anomaly. Metaphor is not the “odd man out,” it is the “odd man in” — in the midst,

but not belonging there. Think for example of Robert Wise’s 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. A spaceship

lands on the Washington D.C. mall. A highly intelligent emissary from outer space, accompanied by a lethal robot,

has come to warn earth’s governments that they must end their aggressive practices. The landing spot of the

spaceship underscores the function of this warning as both prophecy and anomaly. It is cordoned off by tanks and

troops, even though they are ineffective in the face of the visitors’ advanced weapons technologies. The status of

the location, as a “site of exception,” is accompanied by the retroactively realized potential of the distant galaxy,


origin of the space travelers. The boundary between the normal space of the Capitol Mall and the landing site is

linked directly to decisions made in the remote, near-‐infinite depths of outer space.

Wit often seems to “come out of nowhere,” and the acute angle that constructs metaphor is a part of this

sudden immediacy with distant connections. Where courage responds to fear’s immediate threats, wit lays out

structure extending out into space and time. In contrast to metaphor, which carries meaning across (Gk. meta-‐

phieren = “to carry across”), metonymy creates structures; and in the view of both Vico and Lacan, these structure

are primary and requisite to metaphor. Metonymy is the logical basis for metaphor — reversing the usual view

that it is a subcategory of a more general “metaphoric” mentality. Why? And, what does this mean?

Models for the inside-‐outside: take it personally

If this personalization of the “studio situation” makes sense, it is only in the adaption of the studio model, where

private concerns are coupled with public situations, and where the conventional involvement with utility in the

studio requires the architect to “stand to the side” as study develops. The spatial structure of the studio is not the

literal form of the room, its furniture, its windows and doors. It means that the studio is in a significant sense itself

spatial structure, and in this aspect it is metonymy that rules the day. The relation between metaphor and

metonymy is the main clue in the process of extimacy, by which the inquiring personal mind finds, in the external

world, its own image, its contents in cipher form, its unconscious.

The key to metonymy’s primacy lies in time. There are two main instances of time travel that happen in

the course of otherwise normal human experience, two “times outside of times” that bend time, twist its forward-‐

facing arrows, create eddy currents, and open up the present to the past and/or future. These are: (1) festivals and

holidays, where time seems to return to “registration points” that re-‐set personal and collective calendars; and (2)

the condition of ruin and decay, where objects, places, and whole landscapes seem to have fallen out of synch with

their surroundings. The structure — the metonymy — of these instances is difficult to conceive at first, and it is

necessary to refer to a third, mythic condition imagined as the origins of time itself; a time at the edge of time

when humans first realized their own peculiarly human mentality. This event is impossible to know in the sense

that, if it happened at all, it happened before the descriptive powers were available to the human mind. It was the

origin of those descriptive powers, as of all else human. Vico correctly summarized the difficulty of accounting for

these origins by characterizing the intellectual grasp of this first moment of the human as a paradoxical self-‐

confrontation.2 We can, however, trick ourselves into imagining this first event. We can construct a fiction, a

narrative, a picture that “turns out to be truer than we know/knew” if time is allowed to create an anachronism

whose particular topology is itself a key. To discover this topology we need a non-‐Cartesian, non-‐Euclidian way of

talking about time and space.

“Normalcy” is glued together using three dimensions of space with a fourth line reserved for the

movement of time. Metonymy can be imagined only if we adopt something akin to Lucretius’s idea, that all of

reality is moving along in parallel, through a “void.” (Later, we will make a case about the origins and particulars of


this void.) It is easy enough to get to this idea by imagining a highway with multiple lanes of heavy traffic, all

moving along at a constant speed. Relative to each other, the drivers perceive stability in the formation. Only when

one vehicle speeds up, slows down, or swerves is motion within the group of fast-‐moving cars and trucks, evident.

The “void” is the highway, a reserve of emptiness that is filled evenly and dynamically.

Lucretius’s flow of atoms, which was punned by the Irish author James Joyce in his monumental work,

Finnegans Wake, as “Eve and Adams,” is indeed capable of creating an Edenic effect. A swerve is like the apple

from the Tree of Knowledge offered by the serpent. It disrupts. It creates turbulence. The upshot is that Eve and

Adam are evicted from the Paradise of unawareness into a wilderness of … fear and anxiety. The metonymical

spatial structure of the human mental world, in other words, is this “turning out” of space, this eviction, this

introduction to the negative conditions of presence (fear) and absence (anxiety). The metonymy behind this

swerve that begins the human scene survives to manage presence and absence in what follows: the entire saga of

human life on earth, first conceived in mythical and, later, Biblical terms and scientifically explained in the

psychoanalytical-‐topological accounts of Freud, Lacan, and others.

How do we take this account seriously, as something that, by giving, a fictional, mythic account of origins,

will ultimately make sense in scientific, even clinical terms? Certainly, using Lucretius to underwrite the story of

Eden would be a tough sell for agnostics, skeptics, or atheists … any non-‐believers who do not accept religious

accounts of creation and human origins. Here is a rather curious defence.

Does magic exist? “No.” Well, “yes and no.” A magician’s performance can be called effective without the

least acknowledgement of any magic agency. The magician in fact prefers that audience members do not believe in

magic, that they are ideally and maximally sceptical. A “true believer” would take no pleasure in having his/her

beliefs reversed by the magician’s amazing tricks. The magic — the real magic — comes when something

impossible is converted into undeniable evidence. The impossible and reality are conjoined in the magic act —

particularly because the denial, the scepticism is not dispelled with the experience! The “impossible” becomes a

component of reality, converting into the Real, the “impossible/Real.” It is the combination of extreme opposites

that is the essence of the experience. And, if we look carefully, we will notice that the combination is a mix of

negatives and negations.

This is the stuff of myth — the “impossible/Real.” The myth of Eden is at first a story that presents a

“diagetic” situation, i.e. the contents of the story about Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the mysterious absent God

who can be heard walking in the background. The structure (metonymy) of the story is, however, a curious parallel

of these diagetic details. By imagining the fictional characters, we have “already and always” swallowed their

functional roles inside the imagination. Their external aspect is evident: we can tell the story to others; we can

write it down. Their internal aspect is that they do to our brain what the story says they do in the fictional space-‐

time of the story. They flip space in their expulsion from Eden to the Wilderness (Eden is forever impossible to

relocate; there is no option to return). They initiate human time, from their immortal existence to mortality that

converts eternity into genealogy (hence, the detailed Biblical accounts of who begat whom). Immortality takes two


forms, one belong to gods alone, the other abstractly supported by the practices of sexual unions and families

whose descendants carry on the spirits of their fathers and mothers. The first is a lake, the latter a system of

streams and rivers flowing into the ocean.

Martin Heidegger’s distinction between “ontic” (what happens, what exists) and “ontological” (the

accounts of what happens and exists) sets up the logic of the impossible/Real that re-‐purposes the myth of the

Garden of Eden. As a metaphor in and by itself, Eden is only a story. With the activation of metonymy lying hidden

within the metaphor, which takes place silently in the imagination, a Real emerges that supercedes the “true or

false” questions literalists focus on in their defence of the myth as a fundamentally accurate account of human

origins. Eden is both “just a story” and Real, in the same way that the magician’s performance is effective in a

space beyond the belief in magic agency. Where metaphor is about a projection of possible, contingent truths,

metonymy realizes something greater, something Real, something that can be experienced only through a

“performative” context that does not allow a detached point of view or need a carefully constructed supporting

argument to defend it.

The impossible/Real is, if anything, “uncanny.” In the German adjective unheimlich, we have the key for

carrying this aspect into the territory where a curious person, adopting an “ studio model,” can carry out

experiments.

In Freud’s early exposition on the uncanny, he was particularly interested in the etymology of unheimlich.

“Home,” he noted, was a place designed to expel both fear and anxiety. Its walls kept out unwanted rain, cold, and

heat; wild animals could not enter. At the same time it concealed what was valuable and intimate to its residents.

It secured their secrets and protected them from the discovery of strangers. The subtle key is the relation of the

adjective heimlich to Heim, the noun for “home.” The physical thing becomes a quality, and the quality extends to

a variety of conditions and situations. The space of the literal thing becomes a mental space of qualities that,

becoming portable in the adjective, escape the geographical and temporal limits of the physical thing.

Inside the home, all is well. There are no wild animals, no uninvited strangers, no anxiety or fear. Outside,

things are different, they are un-‐heimlich. The home has been taken outside through negation. Here is a source of

something quite curious. Because the home conceals secrets, and because secrets are essentially negative in their

“being unknown,” in their “inaccessibility to knowledge,” something homey can also be “hidden” and “dangerous.”

Its negative quality lends it to the atmosphere of anxiety. The very thing designed to dispel fear now becomes a

source of anxiety, of uneasiness. Freud: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an

ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-‐

species of heimlich. Let us retain this discovery, which we do not yet properly understand, alongside of Schelling’s

definition of the ‘uncanny’. Then if we examine individual instances of uncanniness, these indications will become

comprehensible to us.”3 When we take the literal home (think of the literal Eden) out of its metaphorical stability

(think of Lucretius’s “even flow of atoms” as this stability of the object in space and time), we discover its

metonymical, adjectival, portable, unease. In the adjective, where the stable Edenic home has been turned out


into the wilderness of new potential applications, so to speak, as an adjective, it has encountered itself, in an

obverse form! There is a painting by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, entitled “Not to be Reproduced” (La

Reproduction Interdit, 1937). It shows a young man facing a mirror (Fig. 2). Instead of reflecting his face, however,

the mirror shows his back. The viewers of the painting see two images of the back of the figure, but the laws of

physics have been obverted. The mirror refuses to behave. The heimlich home meets the unheimlich as a negative,

a Doppelgänger; Dr. Jekyl meets Mr. Hyde.

Figure 2. René Magritte, “Not to Be Reproduced” (1937). Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Fate throws us a life-‐preserver, thanks to Magritte. At the base of the mirror in the painting is a book. The

book is particularly well chosen for this tricky mirror situation. It is Edgar Allan Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur

Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). This book is peculiar in that it is divided into two distinct halves.4 Events in the

first half are echoed in the second. There is a void, a middle, created by the relationship — an adjectival,

metonymic condition — between the initial elements and their secondary echoes. This middle is a “secret code,” a

cipher. It resides “anamorphically” both inside and outside the text. Like the myth, it is both true and false, real

and unreal, homey and uncanny, impossible and Real. Whatever else we might say about this tricky text, we have

evidence that, whatever its defects and achievements, a writer whose particular skills in ciphering led him to

conduct such an experiment in a fictional text, clearly knew the rules, the potentials, and the consequences of

metonymy. This is the mandate passed on to the reader who, in turn, would like to construct similar experiments

in an “architectural studio mode.”

With a model space (the studio), various models of practice (art, architecture, landscape architecture,

product design, etc.), a physical framework (Lucretius), a scientific vocabulary (Vico, Freud, Lacan), and model

examples (myths, Eden, Magritte, Poe, etc. — more will follow), it is possible to offer the reader whose experience

and maturity points in the direction of personal satisfaction rather than professional expertise directed for the

good of others an escape.


Escape from what? This is not an offer of some pleasant illusion or beneficial health program. So, why do

it? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-‐Strauss reported that, when he asked one of his informants during his study of

South American Indian mythology if their stories were useful in reinforcing customs and cultural ideas, the

response was surprising. No, the informant said, the myths were simply “good to think.” The myths were good in

themselves, but only in the mental performances they afforded. Perhaps the customs and cultural practices made

them better survivors of the jungle, more thoughtful ecologists, happier workers, etc., but that was not the point.

These were side-‐effects, unintended consequences, things that seemed important to outsiders and, hence,

elevated by science into the “reasons” for the myths. But, the informant’s insight is more important. The myths

“were good to think.” They created a psychic ecology that could be considered as a means of optimizing the

subjectivity that we can only approximate through Freudian-‐Lacanian and other terms. For the subject who cannot

take on the difficult project of the clinical understanding of subjectivity — for the subject who simply wishes to be

as much of a lucid subject as possible in the short time left to him/her — an experimental attitude is the only

alternative. The model space, practice, physical framework, vocabulary, and examples are objective, testable, and

adjustable. They are the beginning of a voluntary, new, and exploratory relationship to one’s own subjectivity —

for it’s own sake.

Two paradigms for subjectivity’s escape: Harold Bloom “askesis” and Henry Johnstone’s “heroic travel”

The unusual self-‐help program advocated in this book focuses on projects of escape. In one sense, escape is a

“flight from the Enchanter,” i.e. sources of delusion and misinformation, systems of knowledge that prevent

subjects from discovering anything outside of the systems we know collectively as “ideology.” If we follow Louis

Althusser’s insights, that ideology is adopted by subjects who willingly but unconsciously submit to it, who inscribe

generic rules and orders into the very center of their being as a subject in society, we are tempted to see ideology

as transparent. We aren’t aware of its existence because it seems to be existence itself. There is no framework

outside of ideology that would allow us any objective view.

This viewpoint is depressing, but fortunately untrue. If ideology were as transparent and unconscious as

Althusser claimed, he himself would not have been able to articulate his own anti-‐ideological views or advise

subjects about freeing themselves from blind subservience. Ideology would work perfectly, but we know it doesn’t.

One perceptive writer, Mladen Dolar, has argued that the process of subjecting the subject is not complete. There

is a small residuum, a remainder.5 This left-‐over offers the subject a means of escape from the “enchantment” of

ideology. Dolar’s view is similar to the basic set-‐up of Miguel de Cervantes’ world-‐class novel, Don Quixote (1605

and 1615). Don Quixote reverses the usual formula of reality. Reality, he holds, is the result of “evil enchanters”

who have magicked the “real” objects of romance, such as the magical helmet of the fictional King Mambrino, a

character in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Inamorato (1499), for example, into an ordinary washbasin. As in the

Lucretian model, there is already an on-‐going dynamic force designed to make appearances appear stable and

immobile. Any escape from this “enchantment” involves a de-‐ or re-‐magicking, formalized as a quest, journey, or

discovery process. Dolar specifies, for this process, psychoanalysis, the subject’s coming to terms with his/her own


desires, i.e. their “constructed” nature. The results of this “clinical/analytical” alternative to ideology are well

known. The subject realizes the structure of subjectivity and his/her role in creating and then misrecognizing it.

This is not a book about psychoanalysis, but it recognizes the strategic identity of psychoanalysis with the

“studio situation.” One benefit is that many terms and examples from psychoanalysis have special value for the

proposed project of experimental involvement with extimacy. For example, the term extimacy itself cannot be

properly understood outside of the Lacanian context where it was first articulated as a critical dynamic of

subjectivity. To the objection of psychoanalysts who would refuse to admit any alternative to psychoanalysis as a

“cure” for ideology’s illusions, one can make two responses. The first is based on the idea that any escape from

ideology is inherently political, and vice versa. An act in the Lacanian sense is always radical, a protest against the

prevailing order, against the forced choices imposed by society, culture, and law. Without the “act,” there is no

political order, since the political is essentially revolutionary, dialectic, “Hegelian” in its use of confrontation and

alternation.

The political response is inherently collective. The other response is inherently individual, personal,

isolated. It is not anti-‐political, rather it is politics turned upside-‐down. It is a resistance even to the collectivised

forms of resistance one imagines to exist in radical politics. It is the act of the individual who renounces the

collective at one level, in order to embrace it at another. There are two classical formulations of this renunciation,

one well known, the other virtually unknown. The first is the literary critic Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, an

account of poetic imagination as necessarily a flight from the over-‐presence of powerful predecessors.6 The young

poet is “interpellated” (in Althusser’s terminology, not Bloom’s) by the older poet, whose words turn the younger

poet into a ventriloquist’s dummy. The older poet is literally dead, but the younger poet is “mortified” by the

inability to find his/her own voice. (The French word for dummy, le mort, is literally, “the dead man.”) Bloom

advances a series of six terms that define the anxiety of the poet and its “cure” in the emergence of a new voice

that discovers a new and uncanny way of taking over the old. In a dramatic use of anachronism, the younger poet

discovers that the older poet “had been using the younger poet’s words all along,” that the younger poet’s reading

had projected unconscious thoughts into the older poet’s poems, which had “domesticated” the precursor in an

uncanny, undiscovered cipher.

Bloom did not seem to be aware of any system that unified his six terms. While askesis (contraction,

retreat, isolation) was a response to the over-‐presence of the dæmon of influence, he did not discuss the

resonance of this anxiety in the repetition of the theme of halves in other terms: tesseræ (token of absence),

clinamen (swerve, exception), apophrades (prophetic voice, voice of the dead), kenosis (dialectic knowledge “by

halves”). The “flight from the Enchanter” theme in folk-‐lore, novels, and films, however, shows a clear and tight

pattern regulating this “knowledge by halves,” and the supporting evidence of these popular culture sources allow

us to expand Bloom’s system into something essential and productive for the personal studio project.

The other, considerably more obscure, resource for the personalized studio is Henry W. Johnstone, Jr.’s

“categories of travel,” based on the philosopher’s consideration of Homer’s Odyssey in terms of the authenticity of


travel.7 Authenticity is the basis of identity: who am I, Odysseus seems to ask in his twelve-‐part flight from his

responsibilities as a general under Agamemnon in his war against Troy. Just as battle materialized around the idea

of the city and its destruction, Odysseus’s journey escaped the political order through encounters with the foreign

Other: the apathetic Lotus-‐eaters, the inhospitable Cyclops, the cannibalistic Lestrygonians. Each “host”

constituted a problem brought out specifically by travel, each was a test of travel’s “authenticity.” Where home

(ideology) concealed the structure of authenticity within its political formulations, travel away from home brought

out the (metonymical) essence of travel. The identity of the traveler — always misidentified within the ideology of

home — could be “put to the test.” In key cases, Odysseus makes this relationship evident. For example, he uses

an invented name, “Nobody,” to fool the Cyclops so that he will not be able to call his fellow Cyclopes to his aid

after Odysseus blinds him.

Johnstone realized that his episodic categories formed a system, but he did not provide any details. This

guide does, and it relates Johnstone’s travel advice to Bloom’s as well. In one sense, Bloom’s terms are about

courage, Johnstone’s about wit. Together, they reveal structure — metonymy — and thus provide us a blueprint

for converting the studio model into a portable mental template.


SAMPLE “MIDDLE” CHAPTER: Stochastic Resonance: Metaphor and Metonymy, Bloom’s Anxiety System, and Virtuality

from the outline …

2. Stochastic resonance and Bloom’s “anxiety system” a. Ideas of stochastic resonance; relation to metaphor; negation and forced choice; extimacy b. Each term, taken separately, as a “password”

i. askesis ii. clinamen iii. kenosis iv. tesseræ v. apophrades vi. dæmon

c. The dynamic system connecting the terms; relation to Johstone’s categories of travel d. The role and function of anxiety

This early chapter is, as with all samples, intensely theoretical, in contrast to the approximately one-‐third of the book intended to be graphic, experimental, and documentary. The aim is to present the reviewer with the backbone of the book’s thinking. This is the basis of the resilience of the idea of the personal studio — that it holds together as an idea with many possible variations and misreadings that the reader may and should make. The idea of stochastic resonance is key. It allows the reader to move away from authoritarian ideas of mastery toward more durable and reliable practices that have, in the hands of artists, authors, and thinkers in all periods of history, provided frameworks that allow the conversion of errors into happy accidents. The fact that this strategy has been popular but is not generally understood by philosophers of cultural critics is a measure of the distance this book can and must go toward exploring new ground. The password into this territory is Lacan’s idea of extimacy, the inside-‐out function of boundaries and “sites of exception.”

TOPICS: The stochastic field. Background: aphasia and metaphor. Distinction between metaphor and metonymy. The “forced choice.” Negation and the logic of extimacy (◊). Using Bloom’s terms to achieve stochastic resonance. Resonance and virtuality: detached and attached.

The “stochastic field” is a personal set of interrelated references that guide study, thought, and reflection. The field

maximizes the usefulness of accidents and possibility of discoveries, hence the term “stochastic.” But, the ultimate

ambition of the field is to seek properties of the field that, unlike determinate rationality, derive meaning from

“resonance” effects such as echo, after-‐image, negation, absence, and error. The aim of using the field is to start

over from scratch, to rebuild, to shatter and reconstruct. In this process, the contrasting but intimate structural

relations between metaphor and metonymy are key. Metaphor’s strategy of replacement and substitution

presume metonymy’s creation of dimensions and connections that are unimaginable from metaphor’s “Euclidean”

perspective.

The 18c. Neapolitan philosopher of culture Giambattista Vico and the 20c. French psychoanalyst Jacques

Lacan are in agreement about the subject of anxiety and fear: they are the one and the same, differing only in the

manner of engagement of the perceptible, material environment.8 Where fear is fashioned within the particular

dimensions, lines of sight, weights and measures of immediate experience, anxiety is indefinite and invisible. This

does not mean, however, that anxiety does not have its “world,” its conditions of entry and exit, its own physics.


To put it crudely for the purposes of mental experimentation, fear covers the visible, anxiety the invisible. Fear’s

mode is immediacy; anxiety’s mode is the Elsewhere.

This contrast bears directly on human experience down to the level of micro-‐detail, but it also has

profound implications for the most abstract and universal level of human collectivity and individuality: the relation

of experience to language and, more precisely, of language to metaphor. For Vico, metaphor was the term that

included four fundamental “operations”: metaphor proper, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Through these Vico

was able to describe the general cultural historical stages associated with mythic gods, twinned heroes, and

modern scoundrels. Even for Vico, however, the dynamics between metaphor proper and metonymy constituted a

kind of “primary machine” powering human experience. Structuralists like Claude Lévi-‐Strauss and semioticians

such as Roman Jacobson regarded metaphor and metonymy in terms of fundamental directions of the mind,

language, and other sign systems. Where metaphor produced meaning out of semblance, a “coherence model of

truth,” metonymy directed logic through consistent patterns of correspondence. Ernst Cassirer had anticipated this

elemental coupling in his review of the “pathology of consciousness,” the studies of aphasia after World War I and

the abundance of cases of brain damage that allowed neuroscience to flourish with new theories.9 In particular,

the evidence of neurological pathology was key.10 Early researchers such as Gelb and Goldstein grouped aphasias

into two fundamental types: (1) semblance aphasia, which seemed “metaphorical” in its lost functionalities of

recognition and familiarity with whole appearances; and (2) contiguity aphasia, the loss of the ability to relate

parts to wholes, things structured by adjacency, touch, and function.

The temptation to isolate a mimetic “semblance ability” from a deductive “contiguity ability” led some

Structuralists and semioticians to postulate independent, competing forces shaping consciousness.11 Metaphor

became the motif of the “creative-‐humanist” mentality; metonymy powered rationality, deductive powers,

instrumental relationships. In short, metaphor funded the province of artists and poets, metonymy was employed

by scientists and philosophers. It did not take much to embroider this contrast, placing metaphor on to a pedestal

to be worshiped by humanists (e.g. Gadamer’s Truth and Method, 1960) and giving metonymy credit for running

the Enlightenment and, later, industry, business, and the cynical politics of the Welfare State. These extrapolations

went too far, to say the least, for the original contrast of metaphor and metonymy had emphasized their

functional unity. Vico had recognized this in his revolutionary discovery of the basis of mythic thought, the

“imaginative universal,” which coupled the image-‐function of, in his favorite example, the sky as Jove, with the

complicit and retro-‐active creation of a cosmic structure as the context for the sky’s appearance as “face.” Lacan

might add that a face is always a “face of,” a “face for” — a facing in some direction, away from something, toward

something.

Cassirer, too, sought to keep metaphor and metonymy functionally tied by reviewing, in the evidence

from languages, ethnologies, cultural institutions, etc., the continual exchanges between space and time, universal

and particular, abstractions and materialities. But, it remained for Jacques Lacan to point precisely to the way

differences between metaphor and metonymy that could explain this great variety of empirical cases yet still


maintain a bond at the functional level. Lacan created a matheme that seems impenetrable at first, but his point is

important. Metonymy does what it does by employing the energies of absence, negation, and resistance.

F (S … S’) ≅ S (—) s

Ed Pluth provides an expert translation:

The [upper case] Ss stand for signifiers, and the s for a signified effect. This formula expresses

much that we already know about metonymy: the movement from one signifier to another in the

signifying chain (S … S’) is congruent to or tantamount to (S≅) one signifier giving the effect of there being

a signified somewhere, an effect that is not placed in the signifying chain but that “resonates” beyond the

signifying chain, indeed, beyond the signifier itself (S—s). The bar between S and s can then be taken to

represent a gap between signifiers and the signified effect but also as a minus sign, such that metonymy

gives us signifiers with an absent signified effect. “Resonance” is perhaps the ideal term for expressing

what it is that metonymy achieves.12

Absence is metonymy’s way of “preparing a way” for metaphor, which differs from metonymy by being a

substitution, a “misrecognition,” a total eclipse. Metonymy is both a departure from this immediacy of exchange,

of one image for another; and the elaboration of a structure beyond this exchange, which is recognized only in

retrospect — something that “must have been there all along,” for metaphor to happen. Metonymy is barred from

“signaling” directly. It must “signalize.” For the sky-‐face and thunder-‐word of Jove, in Vico’s example, there had

already to be a system of stars, an underworld, a taxonomy of plants and their medicines, an infinity of human

languages … everything in fact required to make a human cosmos both curious and infinite.

Resonance is key to the functionality of the “stochastic field” that I put forward to replace the idea of

“research method.” In biology, stochastic resonance is the evolved sensitivity to weak signals emitted by

predators. Lying beneath the normal thresholds of animal perception, specialized features develop — the classic

example are the hairs on the backs of chameleons — that use ambient noise to amplify weak signals. Experiments

that subtract the background noise de-‐activate the system. The hairs are unable to use “noise” to function as a

resonator for the weak signal; the chameleon is attacked and killed. Killing, in terms of thought and speculation, is

the end of the line, worse than “nonsense” which, as Gilles Deleuze has demonstrated in The Logic of Sense (1969),

has its own complex qualities. Noise, for thought, has to do with detail that appears at first to be trivial and

irrelevant. It is collected without intention; accumulated without purpose or order; unsorted; raw. At the level of

collection, such detail cannot be defended on any ground. It is private, “idiotic.” However, rather than rejecting

this phase of thought, the stochastic field method argues that idiocy is not just useful but critical. In fact, the idea

of random collection of data is at the conceptual heart of all scientific data-‐collection and, hence, the foundation of

the formation of any “scientific thesis.” The stochastic field is what distinguishes science from ideology. Science


finds what is “out there”; ideology finds only “what it put there in the first place.” Without the concept of

randomness and noise, there can be no thesis about “the signal,” no detection, no response.

In science, response is “thesis.” For art and personal discovery, the response is to enlarge the field, while

“deepening” it conceptually, through work that gradually takes on a public quality. Both are dependent on the idea

of a field that is implicitly stochastic, but unlike science art is able to import and incorporate diverse materials from

popular culture, other media, fragments, shifted modalities of communication, documents, archives — that is,

anything that, by failing the test of meaningfulness, assures its initial “randomized/stochastic” status. What

disqualifies an artifact for science in effect qualifies it for art. Science must “turn on intentionality” after the

collection is made and the field has been filled. Art must not only keep its intentionality in the off-‐position; it must

make intentionality itself a player within the field.

In art, we have the “paradigm exemplar” of James Joyce, a compulsive note-‐taker. No detail was too

trivial to escape Joyce’s notice and meticulous recording. Through his habit of levelling all events, conversations,

visual and acoustic phenomena, motives, and thoughts to the same plane, he was able to, literally, create what has

been inaccurately described as a “stream of consciousness.” In fact, Joyce used the randomness of his collected

details to construct a stochastic field that was able to recreate the effects of a collective unconsciousness. The

resonance principle carefully managed in the canonical chapters of Ulysses became the over-‐determined

philological and phonological echoes that ricocheted throughout Finnegans Wake. Joyce “signalized” to the reader

not just the history of the cosmos but his debt to Vico’s theory of the origins of culture in the words of thunder,

four of which he transcribed to reveal complex linguistic structures and histories.13 Joyce clearly realized what Vico

had accomplished, but no scholar has fully appreciated the kinship between the two “stochasticians.”

Automaton and the forced choice

The classic fictional story using the theme of contamination works this way. Characters make choices they take to

be freely made at the time; they endure accidents; take advantage of unforeseen opportunities. At some point,

someone may be suspicious that all has not been completely done or encountered by chance, but in general the

plot progresses to the point where all discover a latent design — a point where the “pieces of the puzzle have

come together,” all the more surprising because no one before this had recognized that there had in fact been a

puzzle. The structure of contamination of free choice by latent design is most typically chiastic. The line of

“everyday actions” proceeds in response to perceived attractions, threats, obstacles, and lures. Beneath this line

however a solid vector develops, at first remote and invisible. “Remainders” or “surpluses” from the everyday are

taken up by this vector, stored and ordered for later employment. The subterranean line might simply be a kind of

“antiterra” into which a character might fall or a dream might be sent as an emissary, but if it is not parallel, it will

converge with the line of ordinary reality. As it nears, details that were at first meaningless, irrelevant, become

clues. They establish a geography that places free choice in the tangible vicinity of the fate that has been


unrecognized. And, because temporality is the basis for this convergent landscape, the two lines and their cross-‐

traffic constitute a ticking clock that predicts the exact moment when the two forces will meld.

Because space and time are carefully synchronized by the more abstract ideas of free choice and fate, the

chiasmus structure is effective in novels, films, and epics. It allows authors to move freely from action to

exposition, description to reflection. It is a “meta-‐map” of what is happening at multiple levels in the narrative.

But, there is an even more universal application of chiasmus: the structure of the psychology of the “forced

choice.” Lacan’s favorite example of the forced choice involves the well-‐known robber’s demand: “Your money or

your life!” Clearly this only appears to be a choice. If the victim chooses money, then there will be no life to enjoy

money, or anything else, with. The choice is to give up the money. The “or” is an illusion. Forced choice is the

preferred medium of ideology, and evidence of how ideology operates transparently within subjects who adopt it

thinking they have done so freely, as a matter of personal preference. In the case of ideology, power asserts itself

through irrationality. The first stage, the appearance of free choice, conceals the element of subversion that will

intensify in a series of steps. Slavoj Žižek’s example of “the borrowed kettle” illustrates this. The borrower of a

kettle returns it with damage, and the loaner complains. The borrower defends his/her position with three

successive and self-‐negating defenses:

• I never borrowed that kettle!

• When I returned it (negating the claim that it was never borrowed), it was undamaged.

• When I borrowed it, it was already broken! — negating both the second claim and the first.

Ideology, in sum, gets out of being responsible for the abuse it has brought about. The stages of negation

are, in fact, the three classic forms of Hegelian negation: denial (Verneinung), renunciation (Verleugnung), and

foreclosure (Verwerfung). These would seem inconsequential were they not also the main mechanisms behind the

three increasingly more radical forms of mental illness: neurosis (denial), perversion (renunciation, usually of

paternal authority), and full-‐blown psychosis (a negation of negation itself, characterized by delusion, paranoia,

and mania). In its final “psychotic” state, ideology brings about a world-‐view that is both irrefutable — locked in by

its reversed, retroactive logic — and terrifying. Because it has done so gradually, through interlocking sequences

where negation has been advanced with increasing aggressiveness, the negation has worked. Žižek supplies a

follow-‐up example from the Iraq invasion of 2004:

• Saddam Hussein is definitely concealing Weapons of Mass Destruction.

• Although we have not so far found any of these WMDs, they must be found and destroyed.

• Although there were no WMDs, it was a good idea to get rid of Hussein anyway.

Political observers as well as philosophers will agree that the final claim reveals the real reason, which was

suppressed at the beginning but not yet acceptable to the public. The first and second claims constitute a set of

predications that is reversed. “WMDs would justify the war” becomes “the war proves that there must have been

WMDs. Hussein ‘has’ them, even if he only imagines he has them.” Another way of considering this reversal is the


metonymy of container-‐for-‐contained, what Lacan would write as <>, also abbreviated as a poinçon, ◊. Thanks to

the self-‐referential and recursive operation of this metonymy, the “last stage” reveals itself to have been the initial

motive, although each successive negation involved the (metaphoric) substitution of an increasingly inclusive

negation: ∼A>∼B>∼C> à < à <> (extimacy).

Forced choice is not an oxymoron, nor is it the subversion of a Manichean duality of opposites. The

illusion of choice allows the operation of an “automaton,” a machine that puts into effect what seems at first to be

completely impossible. In the fictional plot, characters cannot be zombies following the dictates of a maniacal

author-‐dictator. They must be seen to pursue purely private goals, with personal means and motives, making free

choices. This freedom must be, in effect, “pure.” It may in fact be shown to be pure in contrast to some coercive

influence (lovers who flee from the rule of their parents; peasants who overturn their monarchs; pets who escape

their abusive masters). The “flight from the Oppressor” is justified by the attempt of the oppressor to manipulate

and control.

So, at what point does this flight from the Oppressor become an “appointment in Samarrah,” where, as in

the classic story, a servant hearing that Death is looking for him, escapes to Samarrah; which is precisely the place

that Death has set up the future meeting? In the more resonant example, Œdipus Rex, Sophocles plays through a

series of ironic coincidences that convert free choice, justified responses, etc. to the impossible-‐Real plan that fate

has in mind and Tiresius has predicted: the murder of the father, the seduction of the mother. Here, Lacan’s

matheme, ◊, uses its <> conversion logic to turn time as well as space inside out. Another Lacanian idea,

“extimacy” (extimité), puts forced choice into its purest moral form: we intend to do one thing but may in fact be

doing the opposite. Our blindness to the automaton of negation makes the choices we make, based on the belief

that our goal is “out there,” “some place we want to be,” will always be “right here.” The goal will be incorporated

into the aim. The vector we consciously construct as a straight line, xày, is really a circle, xàx’, where a small gap

exists “between” x and x’ that is in fact a gap inside of the identity of x from the beginning. Hegel’s famous

deconstruction of A=A, the basis of logical identity, offers philosophical pedigree for this psychoanalytical point:

the mirror image that refuses to obey the rules of optics.

The gap, which is at the same time an inside frame, shows how reversed predication, the stages of

negation allow the initial “ideological” desire to be Real though seemingly “impossible.” When Aristotle introduced

the idea of automaton as “natural accident,” a supplemental kind of causality he added as an annex to his

discussion of formal, final, efficient, and material cause in The Physics, he coupled it with a term to cover human

affordance and opportunism, tuchē — free, advantageous choice. In tuchē, there is an implicit “metaphorical”

logic. Lacan’s matheme for metaphor proper is useful here:

F (S/S’)S ≅ S (+) s

Ed Pluth, again, has a helpful translation of this formula:


This formula indicates that a signified effect is produced by a substitution of one signifier for

another signifier, and that one of the signifiers in the operation becomes the stand-‐in for this effect itself,

as indicated by the fragment of the formula: S ≅ S (+) s: here S is a signifier charged with a signified …

Metaphor does not only create a signified effect that exceeds any particular signifier, it also achieves an

incarnation of this effect in a particular signifier, which then acts as the “signified” of the metaphor. This is

evoked by the plus sign in the formula which, Lacan explains, manifests “the crossing of the bar” between

the signifier and the signified.14

On this basis, Pluth goes on to say, we can see just why the difference between metaphor and metonymy

was so important for Lacan. Metonymy serves as the framework within which something completely new can

appear — metaphor! What we see in the classic example of metonymy, “forty sails” meaning “forty ships,” we get

a substitution, admittedly; but what we get in addition is the idea of the horizon as the limit to surveillance; the

sudden appearance of ships; only the uppermost parts of the ships are visible. We have not just the substitution,

but the conditions of visibility which makes the substitution not just a figure of speech. We have a point of view,

the horizon, and the anticipation of surveillance, liquidated by the sudden sighting. Metonymy brings not only the

substitution practice of metaphor, it sets the scene and even draws the maps.

In terms of the forced choice, we might say that metonymy operates in the subterranean subjunctive

mode of the automaton; that it is “realized” only through superficial metaphor, which “coincides” with it at a point

where the fatalism of automaton is recognized “in a flash” and in the order in which it constructed the contingent

appearances that were only illusions of free choice (tuchē). Tuchē at this point “converts” to automaton. Free

choice “converts” to determinism. The “true” (Vico’s verum) becomes, or turns out “to have been all along,” the

factum, the made (Vico: verum ipsum factum). Where metaphor presents us with an enigma that eclipses other

competing realities, metonymy “resonates at a distance,” through a protocol of negations. This is not an idle

characterization. Remember the New Testament story of Jesus’s prediction that the self-‐professed ever-‐loyal

disciple Peter would “betray him three times before the coming of the dawn.” After the Crucifixion, Peter is

interrogated by the investigating constabulary. At the point of his third “no,” that he had never known the man

called Jesus, he realized the truth of the prophecy. The fact that Carravaggio paints this moment as illuminated

from some interior point, with the dark soldier casting a light as well as a question on to Peter, turns the simple

vector, A=A into A⟘A: there is a third option. Besides the red of the Real or blue pill of the Symbolic, Nemo needs

another pill. Fleeing persecution, Peter’s tuchē confirms what he had before thought impossible. It makes a Real

through the conjunction of metaphor (the opportunistic escape attempt) with metonymy (resonance of the

prophecy from the “enigmatic” distance of the past affirmation).

The stochastic field

Where fear is present, vivid, materialistic — the stuff of tuchē — it can be resisted only through a succession of

metaphoric transfers, each of which eclipses the previous one. This may be a succession of moments or a change


of scene. Anxiety, however, lurks in the enigmatic quality of each of these eclipse actions. It is the metonymy of

absent “meaning effects,” of the “negation of negations” that relate the metaphoric tuchē chiastically to the

metonymic automaton. Our escape from the labyrinth constructed of negations and forced choices is provided by

the Lacanian <>, the use of double inscription, introjection, or crisscross that converts the situation of opposition

(pairing, polarization, contrast, etc.) into one of the relatively more dynamic exchanges involving inside framing,

reversed predication, and the uncanny traditions of folklore, ritual practices, ethnologies, and popular culture

(film, graphic arts, fictional literature, etc.).

Anxiety/fear can be understood in the system Bloom specifies for the anxiety of the poet. Dæmon is the

influence of the predecessor, though not exclusively. It contaminates the younger poet’s writing, thoughts, and

even actions to the point that the subject misrecognizes him/herself and is unconscious of the “ventriloquism” by

which the precursor continues to speak through his/her new incarnation (the figure of apophrades). I have

organized Bloom’s schema to open it up to the more general issues of anxiety. The first step has been to relate it to

the stochastic field designed to optimize the discovery process — to bring to everyday encounters the potential of

the kind of gnosis Bloom called kenosis. The symmetries of Bloom’s system of six terms gives precedence to the

opposition between askesis and dæmon. The dæmon is the Enchanter, askesis is the “flight from the Enchanter”

that can take various forms: a literal escape, mental or meditative isolation, adoption of a discipline, etc.

Responses may be generalized to the degree by which they all adopt a strategy of distanciation. Dimensions of

separation are constructed to combine time and space in the construction of the cordon sanitaire required to

escape the contamination of the irresistible influence.

Although not all escapes should be regarded automatically as flights from an Enchanter, the theme of the

fugitive in art, film, and literature should examined in terms of its attention to the “Bloomian” dimensions of

anxiety. In particular, we should expect to find not just the primary opposition of askesis and dæmon but the

organization of the remaining four terms to reflect the central paradox of this opposition — the topography of

tuchē, where the field of “horizontal” escape opportunities are haunted by the (metonymical) force that is itself

divided according to flight and enchantment. Clinamen and tessera, the swerve within Lucretius’s famous “flow

model” of coordinated synchronicities, and the (originally ceramic) half-‐token of friendship broken at the moment

of parting, constitute a material dyad complemented by the “spiritual” dyad of apophrades (voice of the dead) and

kenosis (knowledge, gnosis). Clinamen and tessera specify (1) a site of exception, where the time and space of the

Lucretian “even flow of atoms” is topologically altered, while (2) the signification of this site and its use as a refuge

or trap is based on a logic of the “partial” object, a fragment whose meaning is based on an absence. In parallel,

apophrades and kenosis constitute a spiritual twin, themselves twinned with their own version of the dæmon-‐

askesis dynamic. With tessera, the aspect of the part, the fragment, the detail, is given by the broken edge. This is

the means of authenticating reunion with the missing half. Its accidental shape forms a cipher that will serve as a

password to gain entry to the “site of exception.” In the project to break the German code during World War II,

Alan Turing directed a group of code experts at Bletchley Park, an estate halfway between Oxford and Cambridge.


The strength of the German code lay in its use of a “polyalphabetic cipher,” a code based on substitution not of

one alphabet for another, which can be quickly broken once any one word is discovered, but of the substitution of

a new alphabet with each letter (“Trimethius’s cipher”). In effect, the code “codes itself.”

To generalize, the code coding itself gets to the heart of the function of the tessera, whose materiality is

the basis of what seems to be impossible: “a new code for every message” or, more radically, “a new code for

every part of the message.” The code addresses the communication system itself. It is in this regard the essence of

the automaton: a self-‐sufficient creator of enigmas. This is not such a strange idea if we transpose it into the

anecdote passed on by Slavoj Žižek, of the two friends living in East Germany who, when one of them leaves to

work in Siberia, agree on a system of letter-‐writing that will elude the censors. “If I am saying something true, I will

use blue ink; if I have to say something that is false, I’ll use red.” The first letter comes: “Everything is wonderful

here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and

luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”15 The point is that the code must refer not to a projected

independent matter lying outside the communication, but to the code of communication itself. This “meta-‐code”

and the “enigma” of metaphor/metonymy are the same thing. Bloom’s system shows how this enigma can be

condensed into the condition of the halves, tesseræ, which are not halves of some “thing” but, radically, halves

that ARE the thing, or, as Lacan might write it, the Thing.

This self-‐referential topology of the tessera not only creates the password to gain admission to the “site of

exception,” the clinamen; it discloses the structure of the clinamen, a “fractal” enclosure that is simultaneously the

enclosed — Lacan’s example of the “cross cap” that contains itself (<>). The absent component of metonymy,

which resonates through its absence, its distance, is simultaneously an intimacy, a proximity, that haunts the

center and kernel of the enclosure of the exception. Like the Poe story, “Masque of the Red Death,” the plague

excluded by the fortified mansion appears at its center, disguised as itself, surprising the revelers with the horrific

message of contamination. Here is dæmon at its best/worst. The flight from the dæmon is a flight to the dæmon.

It must be conceded that the stochastic field is precisely stochastic because it appears at first to support

the “horizontal” project of flight, tuchē, while its topography subverts the horizontal with a vertical dæmon whose

two components — a zenith an a nadir, so to speak — are both everywhere and nowhere. This is resonance at its

purest: a signal that can be amplified by anything as long as this anything is reduced to the level of white noise: the

field.

In the visual arts this is a common technique: the visual ground against which a figure may emerge. Meyer

Shapiro has documented the relation of this ground to the historical emergence of the frame as a conventional

means of surrounding a painting or photograph.16 The original ambiguity of the ground-‐figure relationship, which

troubled artists as ancient as those who were painting in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, was never resolved.

The wood and gesso frame around the modern painting is just as troubling. Is it a window? A wall? A script? A

charged temenos? All the original possibilities have not been scared away by the exorcism of quadration. Un coup


de dès jamais n’oublira le hazard (“A throw of the dice will never eliminate chance” — Mallarmé). This is the

“message” of clinamen-‐tesseræ that is “carried across” to the spiritual condition of apophrades-‐kenosis. It

specifies that kenosis designates a specific kind of knowledge: a “knowledge by halves.” Further, we are obliged by

Bloom’s theme of anxiety to take the haunting theme seriously, whatever our religious beliefs. Apophrades, the

return of the dead on days set aside specially to permit them a return to their accustomed abodes, is also a

“return” to an “empty location” that is simultaneously a “site of exception” and a “place of a voice” — specifically

an “acousmatic” (stochastically resonant) voice.17

In sum, the question of the eclipse of the young poet by the dead/absent precursor, the dæmon, has an

unexpected ending if we consider the place of the voice as a reversed predication of the ventriloquist’s comedy

act. The 1945 Arturo Cavalcanti film, Dead of Night, provides us with a detailed example in its penultimate episode,

a story told by the Dutch psychiatrist at an English weekend country house-‐party. The psychiatrist has, all through

the other guests’ tales (the structure follows the Decameron design), resisted the idea of any reality of ghosts,

travel through time, or the contamination of reality by dreams. “Yet,” he says, “this story made me stop and think

… made me stop and think a good deal!”

An American ventriloquist visiting Paris sees another ventriloquist’s act at Club Beulah. The wooden

dummy seems to get the better of his “master,” reversing the obvious direction of the Great Chain of Being, so to

speak. Visiting the artist in his dressing room, the American witnesses a startling effect: the dummy seems to be

speaking while its master is in the bathroom shaving. The dummy makes homo-‐erotic advances on the American; it

seems he wants to find a new employer. The psychiatrist sees that the dummy has become allied with a

suppressed content in the master’s mind, and that indeed the dummy is materializing a psychotic insurrection.

Cavalcanti gets Bloom’s formula perfectly. Apophrades has revealed the “clinical truth” of the master’s psychosis;

its form follows the logic of the tesseræ within the site of exception created by performance.

Popular culture — naïvely we should think — testifies on behalf of Bloom’s system’s ability to define the

stochastic field and its vicissitudes. The fact that Dead of Night “doesn’t give a damn” about theory guarantees

that its truths are unmotivated, its vision unclouded. We can almost translate it “raw” as long as we remember the

problematic of the red ink.

The “forbidden forms” of virtuality

Architecture, landscape, painting, film, and the other “visual” arts regularly deal with the kind of virtual space that

is the basis of digital graphics: accounting for the space (and/or time) that lies outside of the frame, beyond the

page or screen, behind the edge of the object seen from a certain point of view, beyond the horizons that limit our

view. Immediately, we see how metonymy, as the rhetorical figure of absence, deals with this edge in all its

versions. The “sail” for “ship” metonymy is not just a substitution of one attribute for the original object; it is a

reconstruction of the moment when ships first appear at the horizon’s edge. They are sighted thanks to what is


highest, most visible, and first. The anxiety of the sailor in the crow’s nest waiting for the approach of the enemy is

converted, by this metonymy, into a fear that now has not just spatial and temporal coordinates; it has an action

plan. If the ships are friendly, signal flags must be raised; if they are enemy ships, cannon must be readied or a

flight must be navigated. “Fight or flight” is built into the horizon of the kind of virtuality where affordance is based

on spatial and temporal continuity. When things are proximate, relationships must be determined; responses

adjusted. This may not be apparent in the case of Aristotle’s sensus communis, where the absent or hidden

aspects of an object are collected into the concept of the object that “has” its properties. The front side of a box or

ball “has” its other side, which we do not see from our particular point of view. The landscape “has” its valleys and

mountains and caves whether or not we can possibly visit them. This possession is virtual; it is granted as a part of

the admission that perception takes place in a plenum where out point of view is contingent and adjustable.

All of this is to say that tuchē is linked to the virtuality of the continuous field, that the continuous field

requires a guarantee of permanence and independence from the point of view. Its contents “do not give a damn”

whether we are watching or not; this is the principle that assures us access to the conditionally hidden contents of

the field. Digital or any other graphic means of representing this situation aspire to extending access. The “fly

through” lives out the ideal dream of gaining access without incurring costs or requiring passwords. It seems to

give wings to the imagination as well as the (Lacanian) imaginary.

Detached virtuality

When other kinds of virtuality are recognized, the theme of transgression is introduced. Unlike the free passage

guaranteed by tuchē, two forms of virtuality deal with cases of detachment or attachment that violate implicit laws

of nature or culture. When a shadow or reflection takes leave of its original and exercises autonomy; when a soul

leaves the deceased; when a parent’s trait (einziger Zug, Freud’s “unary trait”) is picked up unconsciously by the

son or daughter; when an organ (the famous “partial objects” of Lacan: breast, feces, phallus, gaze) operates

independently from the body it belongs to; when a space is split by performance’s “fourth wall”; when a book is

opened … the life of the complete organism now endows the partial object with animus, a “mind of its own,”

automaton. The broad range of phenomena included in the virtuality of detachment would seem to exempt any

presentation from having to explain what’s going on. From the fairy-‐tales of the nursery on throughout life, we are

given so many examples of this kind of virtuality that it is built into our imagination as an instant resource, a kind of

algorithm that can be activated in an instant, recognized in a flash. There is no mystery to the fact that this kind of

mystery of detachment has a predictable function in art, literature, and even the more “realistic” modalities of

architecture and landscape study.

Attached virtuality

The level of acceptance accorded to the motif of detached virtuality in its full range of applications throughout the

arts and personal imagination can be assumed de facto by its complementary form, “attached virtuality.” If


detached virtuality can be represented as a vector headed away from a “natural conjunction,” attached virtuality is

the arrow coming in the reverse direction, toward a conjunction that will forever be a conjunctio oppositorum.

When waking life seems to be scripted by the previous night’s dream; when the love life of an actor in a play

begins to resemble that of the fictional character she plays; whenever “history repeats itself”; the attached

virtuality of contamination is operating. The quality of the virtual here is metaphoric. The spell of the foreign

influence aims to eclipse totally the “free nature” of its victim. Substitution overtakes any empirical difference. The

“vertical” overwhelms the “horizontal.” In Alfred Hitchcock’s appropriately named 1958 psychological thriller

Vertigo, the heiress Madeleine believes herself to be possessed by the spirit of her ancestress, Carlotta Valdez.

Carlotta’s tragedy begins to work like a magnet, drawing her into danger and eventually suicide. We do not have to

believe in this magic; it is enough to see how easily the detective hired by her husband, Scottie, is led to believe it.

His willing subscription to the thesis of attached virtuality, despite the conjunctio oppositorum, is a part of the plot

designed to set him up as the ideal witness of Madeleine’s suicide. Madeleine, however, is not Madeleine, but an

actress (Judy) hired to play out the masquerade of the haunted heiress. Scottie falls in love with Judy and, after the

faked suicide, runs into her on a city street, looking more like a shop girl than a shipping magnate’s wife. The

contamination now runs in reverse. The unary trait, the einziger Zug, lies as a irreducible remainder in Judy that

Scottie works to expand through a new wardrobe, new hairstyle, and dinners at the fabled Ernie’s Restaurant in

hopes of resurrecting the “dead” Madeleine. It is locked in, because “there is a contamination when there is no

contamination.” That is, Judy is/was “actually” Madeleine, but also “never Madeleine” because the fictional story-‐

inside-‐the-‐story was an ephemeral trick.

Vertigo, like other artworks using recursion in this way, demonstrates the effectiveness of attached

virtuality. It sticks to reality once it gets a foothold. It has the power of the “forced choice” of the three-‐step

negational logic that binds the master to the servant and servant to the master in a lock of reversed predication.

There is no point in telling the victims of attached virtuality they are free to escape the imaginary Unseen Hand of

fate. They know, as we do not, that once one has drunk of the milk of Paradise (or Hell), things can’t be reversed.

The virtualities of attachment and detachment expand the stochastic field of personal research like

nothing else. The open the doors of popular culture, converting, as the authors of Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and

Out might say, trivia into symptoms of the Real. Once we read “enigma” in the language of metonymy and

metaphor, the Ur-‐text so to speak, we begin to see with our ears and hear with our eyes as the synæsthesia of

automaton is revealed. The limited virtuality of continuity, which only takes us around corners and over the

parapets, seems meagre in comparison to the illicit rituals of detachment and attachment. Fear in its presence,

and anxiety in its absence; and metaphor/metonymy in their economies of form and logic; use Bloom’s six-‐point

schema as a jewel of incomparable value, refracting, resonating, constructing and collapsing the distances by

which fear is brought home to make un-‐home.


SAMPLE “LATE” CHAPTER: The horizontal atlas: lamella, fantasy, anamorphosis, lucretian flow

from the outline …

7. Diagraming as a form of archiving the results of the personal studio e. Key diagrams f. The “horizontal atlas”: lamella, fantasy, anamorphosis, Lucretian flow g. Deconstructing the “arrogance of the zenith” by “horizontal strategies” h. The antipodes: zenith and nadir: internal and external error i. Envoi

This is an intensely theoretical interlude that comes late in the book. Its aim is to consolidate themes that have been introduced earlier and bundle them together under headings that have historical significance in established fields. Again, theoretical work is used as a sample not to give an overall idea of the book, which generally alternates between visual-‐speculative sections and theoretical exposition, but to offer the review precisely the points where the book’s theoretical “rubber” hits the road. It is impossible to gauge visual materials even when well captioned, without knowing how narratives are being constructed or what critical-‐historical-‐theoretical frameworks are used to frame the work. The book should “work” even when the reader chooses to skip theoretical materials; but it should not fail if the more sophisticated reader should wish to dig deeper. There should be convincing arguments that support at least the plausibility of the main idea; and where the reader is sympathetic, theoretical sections should do more than support speculation — they should guide it, under the “new management” of the perceptive reader.

TOPICS: Eccentric atlases versus the arrogance of the zenith. Merleau-‐Ponty’s idea of the “flesh of the world, converted into Lacan’s notion of the lamella (thin tissue). The dead-‐alive status of the lamella; conditions of anamorphosis, the externalized unconscious, the uncanny, and strategies employed by authors such as Poe to create “works within works” that function as a poetic unconscious. Lucretius’s flow model as critical to the “askesis” of sites of exception.

Architects draw to see the world, but the world’s most significant new spatial logics are escaping the optics of

projective drawings, even high-‐resolution digital animations. When drawings become maps, the ambition to

describe spaces completely becomes ideological, and their blindness political. New conditions on the ground call

for new kinds of maps and drawings to understand the space that has evolved in the social and economic turmoil

following the 2008 recession.

Stefano Boeri, editor of Abitare and lecturer at Columbia, MIT, and Harvard, has blamed this graphical shortfall on

the general “zenithal arrogance” of planning that, in mapping the landscape “from above,” has ignored the spatial

logics that are the in-‐fill of capitalism — in-‐between spaces that, escaping ordinances and social conventions, call

for a new kind of “eccentric atlas” to describe and, hopefully, explain how economic dysfunctionality works on the

ground.

[We see that] what has changed our territory has not been new districts, large buildings and

infrastructures (roads, flyovers, rail tracks, tunnels), but rather a multitude of solitary and


amassed buildings: detached houses, hangars, shopping centers, apartment blocks, garages and

office complexes.18

In his teaching, Boeri takes on the challenge of these new spaces in the search for a new type of

“eccentric atlas” capable of describing this systematic disinterest, in hopes of discovering its order. He notes, about

the spontaneous independent emergence of several examples of eccentric atlas projects, that the new

geographers interest themselves in a horizontal topology that resists the “arrogance of the zenith.” Zenithal

thinking, Boeri warns, subordinates all facts to hierarchical systems logic; each observation falls beneath others

that group it, and above others, which it constrains. A horizontal atlas, in contrast, must be able to address the

issues of obversion, contradiction, intransitivity, and dialectical Aufhebung. In Boeri’s own atlas projects, he

specifies that

On the one hand the conceptual atlas will work on semantics detailing the nature and spatial

quality of boundary devices and distilling from that a sort of “glossary.” On the other, the atlas …

will give space to maps describing the relationship between spatial limits, living conditions and

habits and the local-‐communal areas (e.g. maps showing fenced-‐in areas, maps showing the

routes and roads used by the different populations, maps showing the different meeting places

… etc.) … where the boundary generates conflict and imbalances even down to the most locally

digested, or accepted, domestic experiences of everyday life.19

These atlas projects are, up to now, free of unpaid debts to demanding philosophical sources, even when

sources such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus are clearly relevant. However, it would be impossible

for the philosophically interested outsider to overlook how one concept in particular has drifted in, below the

radar, from the later writings of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty. This is the idea of the “flesh

of the world,” controversial insofar as it has been so variously interpreted by Merleau-‐Ponty’s followers. From the

tantalizing clues given in Phenomenology of Perception, the case is put in sober terms in the philosopher’s last

work, The Visible and the Invisible.20 Acts of perception are radically structured in ways that do not yield to

standard constructs of (observing) subjects and (perceived) objects. Perception is a dynamic exchange of energy

between active and passive, visibility and invisibility, looking and being seen. This innovative concept sets off an

explosion inside not just phenomenology but humanist approaches in general, whose “subjectivities” had up to

this point followed a continuous tradition of unified self-‐hood from Aristotle to Hans-‐Georg Gadamer. Not only is

the subject pulverized in the idea of flesh, Merleau-‐Ponty seems to go beyond even Jacques Lacan in grounding

experience in his redistribution of subjectivity.

This explosion has been too much for some loyal phenomenologists, who have used it to justify a less-‐

than-‐sober romanticism, epitomized by David Abrams, a performance artist and writer, for whom flesh involves

“the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as

interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity.”21 Is there some middle ground to save Merleau-‐Ponty’s


“flesh” as a reliable ontology for Boeri’s project of mapping “horizontal spaces” left over from the “zenithal

arrogance” of planning, capitalist economies, and Neoliberal politics of the post-‐modern era? Beori himself has

never given any indication of being aware of any kind of “flesh of the world,” despite his general moves away from

humanist consolidations of the subject as well as from Positivist reifications of the object. Within the constraints of

a short essay, I will try to answer “yes”—there is some middle ground—and give solid reasons why readers may

wish to expand the idea of the horizontal atlas according to their own lights.

Flesh of the world

In his later years, Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty moved closer to the theories of the controversial psychoanalyst Jacques

Lacan. Many moments in Visibility and Invisibility (1964) might be credited to Lacan’s early involvements with the

Imaginary, summed up by his famous documentation of the “mirror stage” of early childhood. Later, visibility

themes surface under various Lacanian flags: anamorphosis, the “phallic” signifier, aphanesis (disappearance of

the subject), the partial object (the organ that survives outside the body). Each idea contributes to a possible

revisionary reading of “the flesh of the world.” But, for a fast track to the center of concerns of the horizontal atlas,

I recommend substituting Lacan’s idea of the lamella, an idea that is not only close to the literal function of flesh,

but one that brings to Merleau-‐Ponty’s flesh of the world an uncanny radical functionality that relates directly to

Boeri’s idea that “horizontal organization” lies within “vertical/zenithal organization” as an invisible remainder.22

The lamella is, simultaneously, an interface, a boundary, and an organ. It “mediates” inside and outside.23

At the same time, it performs an act of converting inside and outside — what Lacan identified through the

neologism extimité, an “intimate exterior,” complemented by an antipodal objectified interior. The flip of inside

and outside is the lamella’s function. At the same time, its (biological) status as both live and dead tissue deepen

the meaning of the flip, which is not just between two kinds of space but between the existential states of life and

death. The lamella does not allow a “clean cut” between any polarized commodities. There is always a small

remainder, so that in life we always find a kernel of death, in the form of a fate that leads us to a pre-‐determined

end; just as in death, there is a surviving kernel of life that, in all cultures, requires the observance of two deaths,

first a literal death and, at an interval defined to equal the period of mourning, a symbolic death when, in religious

terms, the soul is allowed to rest.

It would be impossible to deny that the lamella is flesh; clearly, it is the essence of flesh, particularly in the

way that Merleau-‐Ponty conflated flesh to the skin involved in acts of touch. But, lamella offers many supplements

to the flesh idea while retaining the original “atom” that resists subject-‐object simplification.

Activating the lamella for a pedagogical plan

Architectural theory typically complicates the studio situation. It delays action, disrupts the organic flow.

When theory is momentarily silenced, studio moves ahead materially, poetically — so the romanticized version

would have it. The program for taking the flesh of the world into the personalized studio follows Boeri’s insight


into the function of the atlas. This atlas would not be simply “eccentric,” it would be, specifically, horizontal. That

is, it would see the phenomenon of the space-‐inside-‐the-‐space-‐of-‐ideology as a problem of the complex “obverse”

dimensionality embodied by the lamella. Rather than rely on the traditional “interlinear translation” format of

theory/practice, column of text on one side, sketches and diagrams on the other, a “hopscotch” matrix is required,

to be filled in a seemingly random sequence, like the crossword puzzle of the dyslexic. Rather than depending on

theory to “supplement” the actions of studio, theory itself must be “extimated” by the horizontal atlas in order to

activate language that will instigate and not just describe. Theory, in short, must specify an urgency, a “what’s

next?”

The horizontal atlas is a series of “maps,” as with all atlases; but because it moves within the thin-‐thick

tissue of the lamella, refusing guidance from the “zenithal” interpellation of ideology working from above, the atlas

itself resembles those plans of underground sewers made by Resistance fighters in the cities of Eastern Europe

during World War II. Passageways connecting cellars, sewers, service walls, and other underground structures

anticipated the “rhizome” metaphor of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to such a degree that they might be

regarded as the true forerunner of the military deployment of smooth versus striated spaces.24 The connections

between horizontality and subversive military actions should be taken seriously. The lamella model is inherently a

“guerilla action.” It runs within a flat invisible space, violating the norms of boundary behavior just as, as an idea, it

runs below the surface of “standard” epistemology and ontology.25

Drawing with the “impossible” virtualities of detachment and detachment

Narratives play a big role in the studio arts, if only because narratives provide temporal or historical contexts for

everyday life. I would claim that, if the general cultural function of narrative is the construction of fantasy, then the

structural kernel of narrative is, quite literally, the specific genre known as the fantastic. “Fantasy” does not mean

that all literature involves breaking the rules of “realistic” social behavior and Newtonian physics. Rather, narrative

— all narrative — involves the performative, and in the performative there is the implied presence of four “rules”

that are made into explicit techniques by the literary genre of fantastic.

These — the list is from Jorge Luis Borges — are: (1) travel through time; (2) the story-‐in-‐the-‐story; (3)

contamination of reality by the dream; and (4) the theme of the double. The list shows that the fantastic zooms in

on precisely those aspects of space and time where the Lacanian factor of “extimacy” (extimité) forces a flip in the

space-‐time continuum that is also used as a point of discovery.26 Fortunately, for architecture as a “studio

method,” this flip can be modeled and drawn. It is re-‐fashioned by two kinds of virtuality: a “detachment

virtuality,” where two elements bound physically and logically are separated — a shadow escapes its “owner,” for

example; and an “attachment virtuality,” where a remote, alien element suddenly appears in the center of a space

(as in the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still) or person (the 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate). By means

of these two forms of virtuality, narrative’s essence, the fantastic in its four space-‐time-‐disruptive forms becomes

the stuff of the studio.


Virtual space and time has been, in Positivist (i.e. zenithal) terms, conceived as a space-‐time continuum.

What lies outside of a frame, or a cone of vision, is added through a geometric framework that permits rotation,

motion of the POV, etc. Detached and attached virtuality, like the Resistance fighter’s map of urban underground

passages, breaks the rules of continuous virtuality and, hence, projective representation. In so doing, it activates

the categories of the Freudian-‐Jentschian uncanny. Freud’s emphasis on optics and identity serve architecture

studio’s interests perfectly.27 The Unheimlich and anamorphosis are virtually identical, as demonstrated by Freud’s

literary example, E. T. A. Hoffman’s story, The Sandman. Ernst Jentsch condensed the uncanny into two cross-‐

inscribed paradigms: the case of Life inscribed at its center by a small remainder of Death that functions to draw

the living toward a fatalistic end; and the case of the Dead who “refuses to die” — the universal condition of

“between the two deaths,” where momentum carries the soul of the deceased past the point of death into a space

that must be resolved during the period of mourning.28

Combining anamorphosis with these two exemplary states of life-‐in-‐death and death-‐in-‐life, we have the

first principles of the personalized studio and its project of the horizontal atlas. A “drawing” must question the

frame and violate it. Like the “map” of railway line connections that shows space and time simultaneously, new

drawings must adopt the attitude of Lucretius in his De rerum natura. All solid reality must be represented as a

synchronized flow “along a void” toward an “ideological” goal. Deviations from this flow must be depicted as

clinamen, swerves or turbulences that interrupt this ideological flow. The glue that holds the flow together,

imagined as a kind of φ phenomenon akin to the “gap” that gives rise to the illusion of motion in cinema, is in

contrast a dynamic φ that gives rise to the illusion of stasis — Vitruvius’s firmitas, which affords human utilitas.

The “odd man (woman) out” turns out to be Venustas, none other than the Eros, the dæmon that is the function of

extimacy: a remote divinity appears in the midst not just of subjective space but of the subject herself.

This gemisch of the “forbidden virtualities,” the four themes of the fantastic, the paradigmatic conditions

of the uncanny, and the horizontality of the lamella-‐like personal studio atlas is not a remote speculative dream. It

already exists in poems, paintings, narratives, films, and architecture. The historical models have been around but

gone unrecognized by the radical historicism of critics who follow the strict rules of chronology. In the horizontal

atlas, three forms of time travel are not only allowed but essential:

(1) The “origins of architecture,” which take as their paradigm an imagined situation imperfectly

described by Vitruvius but more accurately understood by Giambattista Vico: a space-‐time correlated to the

emergence of human thought and language proper, in its ability to divide enunciation into performative and

indicative functions. In the first clearings in the proverbial ancient forests, humans “activated” the cosmos through

ritual, music, and costume. Gesture and dance framed the diverse narrative content that storied the birth of the

universe, which was at the same time a cosmology of the human (un)conscious. This anecdote can be treated

literally only at the risk of becoming ridiculous. Its truth lies in its fictionality, and its fictionality not only allows for

but requires that it be packaged for export and operationalized at all levels of studio activity. The components of

this account of origins become techniques of drawing, as in the case of Dennis Maher’s practice of drawing (the


space of a corner, in one example) with two hands at once. The mi-‐dire of paranoia-‐insurgency is, fundamentally,

the “anamorphosis” of stereognosis: a world understood through its polarities — left/right, subject/shadow,

face/reflection.

(2) The “ends of architecture,” which take as their paradigm the destruction/ruin of architecture. Here,

the phenomenon of cross-‐inscription involves the φ that serves cinema in creating the illusion of motion but in the

Lucretian flow-‐model provides the illusion of stasis. In destruction, the φ comes loose. It forms a temenos that is at

once a boundary of horror and uncanniness and a point to which vision is compelled to return. Thus, the slow-‐

motion film of the demolition of the Pruitt-‐Igoe projects in Chicago (Fig. 1) and the destruction of the World Trade

Towers on 9/11 were both followed by obsessive replayings. The component of return to the “void” of destruction

is the key. The Lucretian void, which is conventionally displayed as a horizontal lateral movement, is in fact circular.

The glue, φ, when it loosens its hold, creates circular openings reminiscent of the circular clearings of the first

(sylvan) architecture.

Figure 1. The controlled demolition of the Pruitt-‐Igoe Housing Project, St. Louis, April 1972. Source: U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development.

(3) “Sites of exception,” which take as their paradigm the Festarchitektur of annual holidays,

observances, and other celebrations, where the point seems to be to realize Bernard Tschumi’s comment, that

fireworks are the perfect architecture. For holidays, buildings are festooned and lit as if to simulate destruction by

a fire that returns them to an original crystalline state. They rush forward to a premature apocalypse, as in the

simulated wreckage of Rebecca Horn’s “Homentage a la Barceloneta” (Fig. 2). Immolation functions to cover over,

typically, the gaps in the calendar where secular time is unable to square itself with cosmic clocks. The religious

labors of the pilgrimage constitute another kind of site of exception where the shape of the journey is defined by

sequential narrative (Canterbury Tales) as well as spiritual stages. The pilgrim’s destination, defined by some

miraculous artifact, further informs the process of exception by specifying its “impossible-‐Real” status, achieved


through a (Lacanian) “partial object” — an example that spans the conceptual distance between mi-‐dire and

“between the two deaths,” revealing at the same time the major role played by anamorphosis in the concept of

witness in relation to the miraculous.

Figure 2. “Homentage à la Barceloneta, Rebecca Horn, Architect. Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Source:

Photo by author.

Revised idea of work of the personal studio

The “work of studio” is, in most vocation-‐directed architecture programs, drawn from the model of the

professional architectural office. The material ends of an architectural design, communicated through drawings

and specifications serving as contracts, renounce the required prior stages of speculation, trial-‐and-‐error, and

fantasy. The achievement of the workable building as a system of necessities supplants the free choices and

contingencies of the earlier stages. In terms of our idea of the “zenithal arrogance” of the standard plan, free

choice exists as a horizontal space concealed within the retroactive intentionality of the building project. It is time

to seriously think about this horizontal space in terms of (1) anamorphosis, as a “building within a building” or

“landscape within a landscape” as well as (2) the lamella, a “neither dead nor alive” layered space in which the

Lucretian flow of firmitas/utilitas is opened up by the φ holding together their collective illusion. A “site of

exception” is the place of the human (architectural) unconscious. This is not a radical rhetorical gesture on my part.

History offers abundant evidence of how sites of exception have been articulated, as “uncanny spaces,” and how it

is essential to recognize, even in literary and musical examples, the key function of architecture.

Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story, “The Purloined Letter,” illustrates the connections between

anamorphosis (the letter is hidden “in plain view”); Lucretian flow and clinamen (Dupin recovers the letter by


creating a “site of exception” employing an ingenious use of the φ, etc.); and the lamella (the letter, “hidden” in a

conventional card rack — a phonic palindrome, to show us that Poe was consciously thinking of these tricks all

along — and the story itself is structured as a chiastic palindrome, with the “left-‐hand” side of the narrative

matching, through coded crossovers, “right-‐hand” interpretive phrases).29 Poe was a master of ciphers and codes.

He could work out most “replacement ciphers” (where one letter substitutes for another) in his head. The opening

words are themselves a miniature example of chiasmus: “It was an odd evening …” [emphasis mine]. The game of

odds and evens (Mora) had been played in Europe for over two thousand years, and Poe wrote about how to win:

know whether your opponent is smart or stupid. The phrase matching odd evening at the end of the story is a

quotation about the myth of Thyestes and Atreus, twin brothers who ruled Mycenae in turn (the story is complex

and involves a miraculous inversion of time, when Zeus causes the sun to reverse its course). In other words, Poe

was not only able to activate a kind of horizontality within the “vertical” (literal) reading of the narrative, but he

was aware of the rich historical heritage within the idea of horizontal reading.

Poe forces us to accept a revised idea of “work,” and to apply this idea to the project of the horizontal

atlas. Work, in the architectural studio or elsewhere (i.e. for any artist in any medium) is only partly defined by the

“vertical” demands of ideology — the network of symbolic relationships that constitute societies, cultures, and

nations. Within each vertical regime, a remainder, which we envisage as a “site of exception,” lies, “horizontally,”

to be opened through an appropriate password, a mi-‐dire, a guerilla action involving an idea of drawing. There is

no better word for horizontality, since in drawing we combine a variety of stereognostics: left-‐right, figure-‐ground,

frame-‐framed, etc. Dennis Maher’s example is paradigmatic: only two hands can address the issue of the corner,

i.e. the problematic void, and the deployment of the φ as an optic tied to identity.30

Negation is the modality of such drawing, and the intellectual background for the personalized studio is

Hegelian. The blow-‐back against theory in the contemporary research studio is misconceived. Experimentation

with the machine-‐human interface and even biometric metaphors should be revisited with more rigor. History —

in particular the “secret histories” that link Hegelian dialectic with their proper antecedents in Lurianic mysticism,

Plato’s involvement with initiatory cults, and shamanism in general should not be forgotten. Hegel would advise us

to substitute, in our mapping of the horizontal lamella, a conversion of Vitruvius’s two-‐part illusion of firmitas and

utilitas through its exception, the third, Venus/Eros: i.e. the dæmonic. I am not advocating ghost stories here.

Rather, I borrow from the critical condition of eclipse, where what is ultimately revelatory is concealed by what

seems to be evident from an ideological point of view. Eclipse calls for a disciplined contraction, a “flight from the

enchantment of ideology” — what the literary critic Harold Bloom labeled “askesis.”31 Because detachment and

discipline are traditions of the studio, askesis offers an identity of form and method echoed in the logic of the

monastery, the island utopia, the lost kingdom. All of these are repositories of disciplined detachment, in which we

should reform the Vitruvian virtues as dysfunctions: of motion (the space inside a space), scale (anachronism, time

inside time), and identity (the “knowledge by halves,” mi-‐dire, passwords). Through these, a new “horizontal

architecture” may emerge to temper the voice of the present and, at the same time, hear the voices of the past.


The graphic form of this horizontal architecture is the horizontal atlas, where lamella is revealed as the true “flesh

of the world.” This is the work of architecture.

Endnotes

1 It should be noted that science’s key breakthroughs — General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, etc. — characteristically contradict the simplistic divisions between observer and observed that Positivism originally promoted. In fact, revolutionary theories tend to be about the relationships between the subject-‐observer and the world and the difficulties of neatly separating them. Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability (the modus ponens “proof”) pointed up the critical role of presuppositions, which can be neither confirmed nor disproven. They exist outside the realm of science but, critically, are essential in that they establish such key components as the possibility of a point of view and the limits of knowledge. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959).

2 Giambattista Vico claimed that he had discovered the principle of this “first logic,” condensed into the idea of an “imaginative universal” (universale fantastico) able to, so to speak, make something out of nothing. He reported that his discovery took a good twenty years of his life, but that it unlocked the structure of the human project as progressive and dynamic, beginning with a mythic view and ending in “scientific realism.” Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1744), trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1996), §§381, 460, 809, 1033. See also Donald Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2003).

3 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 148.

4 The discovery of Poe’s use of chiasmus in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and several short stories, including most famously, “The Purloined Letter,” is credited to Richard Kopley, “Formal Considerations of the Dupin Mysteries,” Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 7-‐26. Kopley does not use the word “chiasmus” and so does not relate Poe’s technique to this ancient classical and Biblical device. Where counterpoint and symmetry are concerned, literature and art could have supplied many useful comparisons. Chiasmus can be considered to be the “Mirror Stage” of poetry, where the work can literally reflect on itself and introduce new meanings silently and invisibly through links that are perceived by the reader but present only in the negative in the actual work.

5 Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, 2 (Spring/Summer 1993): 75–96

6 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

7 Henry W. Johnstone, Jr., “Odysseus as a Traveler: A Categorial Study,” in Categories: A Colloquium (University Park, PA: Department of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, 1978).

8 Vico’s thoughts are known mainly through his magus opus, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1948). Jacques Lacan’s works appeared originally in the form of public lectures, most of which have been translated into English, and guides to these, authored by, among others the psychoanalyst Bruce Fink and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek.

9 Ernst Cassirer, “Toward a Pathology of Symbolic Consciousness,” Chapter 6, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, v. 3 in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1957), 205–278.

10 Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1948).

11 The contrast between metaphoric semblance and metonymic contiguity was not lost on anthropologists who had long distinguished “sympathetic/imitative magic” (creating effects at a distance through the construction of look-‐alike proxies) from “contagious magic” (e.g. actions on an article belonging to a victim). The distinction was popularized by


the great collator of myths and magic practices, Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1914).

12 Ed Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature, ed. Charles Shepherdson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 36.

13 Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976).

14 Pluth, Signifiers and Acts, 36.

15 Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Occupy Wall Street: A Transcript,” accessed October 8, 2012, http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/slavoj-‐zizek-‐at-‐occupy-‐wall-‐street-‐transcript.

16 Meyer Shapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-‐Sings,” Semiotica 1, 3 (1969): 223–242.

17 The acousmatic voice idea was developed by Michel Chion in reference to the off-‐screen voice used in cinema. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1999).

18 Stefano Boeri, “Eclectic Atlases,” in The Cybercities Reader, ed. Stephen Graham (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 117–122.

19 Stefano Boeri, “Flow and/or Boundaries,” accessed September 17, 2012, http://www.archiviostefanoboeri.net/admin/work_detail.asp?id=61.

20 Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 105, 185, 316, 373. See also, by the same author, The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 163, 168, 170, 179 186; and The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), iv, 111, 138, 144, 248–249, 255, 259, 261, 267, 281–282.

21 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-‐than Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 66. Abrams goes on to identify this elemental matrix with the “interdependent web of earthly life.” This is a subjectivity extrapolated to the stars, going beyond even the miraculous cosmic conversion of Molly Bloom in the last pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

22 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 187–200.

23 I use “mediate” cautiously because Lacan’s idea of the organ is neither “functional” (e.g. the heart as a pump, skin as a wrapper, etc.) nor transitive (reliably and consistently segregating inside from outside). Rather, the organ involves “the extimate” (extimité), an active double inscription of outside and inside, such that exteriority becomes intimate, and interiority is externalized. Jacques-‐Alain Miller, “Extimacy,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Françoise Massardier-‐Kenney (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), 74–87. This latter case is familiar as the process described by Louis Althusser as “interpellation,” the appearance of the authoritarian Other at the radical center of the subject, as a void. Louis Althusser “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

24 See Eyal Weizman on the ease of reading A Thousand Plateaus for military advice. Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London and New York: Verso, 2007).


25 Horizontality, conditional access, and “insurgency movement” are related by Jacques Lacan’s idea of mi-‐dire, the half-‐

speech necessitated in conditions of paranoia. After all, what is insurgency other than a militarization of the psychotic state of paranoia? The horizontal atlas goes below the radar of “instrumental representation,” for example, by relating more to the “square wave” function of anamorphosis, where concealed visibilities immediately pop into view once the key POV has been located. Along the theme of the personalized studio, finding this POV is a matter of interpolation and spatial violation, not geometric plotting; the POV is associated with an anti-‐ideological space that can be accessed only through a password, a use of language that inserts, in the signifying function, a silent key.

26 Donald A. Yates, “Introduction,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. James Irby (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1962).

27 Sigmund Freud, “Die Unheimlich,” Imago 5 (1914), 5-‐6. Reprinted in D. McLintock, trans., The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).

28 Jentsch, Ernst, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch–Neurologische Wochenschrift 8, 22 (August 26, 1906): 195–198 and 8, 23 (September 1, 1906): 203–205. Lacan’s idea of “between the two deaths” is covered in the case of Antigone in “Antigone between Two Deaths,” Chapter 21 in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-‐Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986).

29 Kopley, “Formal Considerations.”

30 Dennis Maher, “Between Gesture and Measure: Drawing with Two Hands,” program statement for the Corbelletti Competition, Penn State University, September 2012. Maher teaches and designs installations in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

31 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1997). The full set of Bloom’s terms could easily be adopted for use in the horizontal atlas: kenosis (knowledge by halves), askesis (contraction, withdrawal, discipline), clinamen (exception, swerve), tesseræ (mi-‐dire, in our terms), apophrades (the return of the dead, “acousmatic” voices of the past), and dæmon (in our terms, both paralyzing influence of precedent/ideology and Eros).

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