Peirce, Lacan, and Rico the Border Collie

or maybe: a small reflection on objects of attention, objects of desire, and musical time

PEIRCE: “What Is a Sign?” <http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm> … “the second chapter of Peirce’s multi-volume “How to Reason: A Critick of Arguments” (also known as “Grand Logic”)”

§1. Three states of mind

Feeling: “a state of mind in which something is present, without compulsion and without reason; it is called Feeling. Except in a half-waking hour, nobody really is in a state of feeling, pure and simple. But whenever we are awake, something is present to the mind, and what is present, without reference to any compulsion or reason, is feeling.” [ICON, EGO, IMAGINARY]

Reaction: a “sense of acting and of being acted upon, which is our sense of the reality of things,—both of outward things and of ourselves…it does not reside in any one Feeling; it comes upon the breaking of one feeling by another feeling. It essentially involves two things acting upon one another.” [INDEX, ID, REAL]

Thinking: to be “aware of learning, or of going through a process by which a phenomenon is found to be governed by a rule, or has a general knowable way of behaving” [SYMBOL, SUPEREGO, SYMBOLIC]

There are three kinds of signs. Firstly, there are likenesses, or icons; which serve to convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them. Secondly, there are indications, or indices; which show something about things, on account of their being physically connected with them. Such is a guidepost, which points down the road to be taken, or a relative pronoun, which is placed just after the name of the thing intended to be denoted, or a vocative exclamation, as “Hi! there,” which acts upon the nerves of the person addressed and forces his attention. Thirdly, there are symbols, or general signs, which have become associated with their meanings by usage. Such are most words, and phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries.

“Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts…So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo (“Every symbol follows from a symbol”)…

James

James’ “Degrees of Intimacy” in “Radical Empiricism” are an extension of Peirce’s concepts above. The word “intimacy” is roughly a synonym for “association”; he is simply discussing a set of ways that things can be connected, and they are useful as basic starting points for breaking down the distinctions between ideas and things, for challenging the mind/body dichotomy, because they probably apply to all things, whether they are conceptual or physical in nature. There are 6 of them, roughly (but not necessarily) in ascending order. Withness, closeness-in-time (or simultaneity), closeness-in-space (BLC: or permeation), similarity/dissimilarity, relations of activity (change, tendency, resistance, cause), and finally “relations…between terms that form states of mind…immediately conscious of continuing each other.”

“The organization of Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments of disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to copenetrate and suffuse each other’s being.” 

BC: in other words, if you only have continuity between states of mind, which are conscious of being continuations of one another, then you have enough information to organize a self. OTHER KINDS OF CONTINUITY, like a sense of how to behave, what one’s relationships to others might be, how you are empowered or disempowered, are only incidental to consciousness, they are not necessary for it. Freud would have agreed.

Lacan

Lacan nudges the psychoanalytic tradition “back to Freud,” after decades of dominance by Anglo-American psychoanalysts (who called themselves “ego psychologists”). Anglo-American psychoanalysis of the 1940s was dedicated to the development of the ego, i.e. a coherent, stable sense of self, as the prime directive of psychoanalysis: mental illnesses ranging from schizophrenia, to paranoia, as well as perversions and other diagnosed disorders were seen as results of an ego crisis of some sort: a failure to distinguish “self” from ones experiences of maternal intimacy, or a development of an ego based on obsessive or dysfunctional relationships to the paternal phallus. The goal of psychoanalysis, was healthy “individuation.”

(A great resource on the Anglo-American psychoanalytic tradition, and its reliance on tropes from the 19th century and from medieval Christianity, is Suzanne Kirschner’s Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis: Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory (Cambridge: University Press, 1996).)

From Lacan’s point of view, Freud’s theory treated the ego as a part of a system involving the superego and the id; it was folly to treat the ego as a special aspect of that system, somehow in need of emphasis. Personhood was the result of an exchange of forces among three unconscious processes, all were essential and inevitable, and the goal was balance between them, rather than the prevalence of one.

For Lacan, psychoanalysis was the study of a relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness, in which “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, structured like a language.” The exchange of Ego (Imaginary), Superego (Symbolic), and Id (Real), is a semiotic exchange, in which differences, repetitions, similarities, and dissimilarities function as symbols, indices, and images to one another. This means that we form a discourse in our heads that is invisible to us. 

We set that semiotic exchange in motion first in the mirror stage, which is a function of sensory perception: perception of similarity and dissimilarity. The image is similar to me (it resembles me, it is an icon), and it proves my coherence by its dissimilarity from objects of desire, and drive…from “objets petit a” or “objets petit autre.” The ego is constituted by the coherence of S, the subject, and its dissimilarity from the “little other.”

But when Lacan refers to the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other,” he is describing the main activity of the unconscious as a language, mediating the ego’s relationship to id and super-ego through difference and repetition. F. Saussure’s Course in Linguistics was a point of reference: according to Saussure, you can’t have a word, a semiotic unit in language [[-> words are Symbols, in Peirce’s configuration: signs that represent via convention <—]] without both of these notions. 

Repetition is necessary because without repetition there can be no convention, no “law,” no grammar. 

Difference is necessary because every symbolic utterance gains its value as a way of distinguishing that value from something it is not. (Recall that one of the accomplishments of the German border collie Rico, that potentially enshrined the “humanness” of his cognition (), was the capacity to attach meaning and value to unfamiliar symbols. His companions named an object he’d never heard of before., and asked him, in essense, to show recognition of the object by fetching. How do you know a symbol that has never been repeated? By its difference from symbols that have been repeated.

This is an example of the “discourse of the Other”: Rico hasn’t experienced the sign’s repetition…and yet it stands clearly in the symbolic order of (a discourse of repetition) for the Other, for Rico’s companions. Just the fact that Rico responds to the sign by running into the toy room, makes clear that he “knows” in some sense that the sign is meaningful to the Other, knows that it is paired with a referent.

When Lacan referred to the paternal “non,” as the initial catalyst of the symbolic order, the break from infantile amorphousness, he was not merely making reference to the cultural norm/stereotype of “father’s language” as a disciplinary, prohibitive force, he was referring literally to the logical dimension of negation which is exclusion, which separates being from not being, the one from the other. 

BLC: If Rico really is experiencing discourse, i.e. language as it mediates similarity and dissimilarity, self and other, then for him words “Rico NO!” would not simply mean “warning, submit to my authority, I am threatening you!” (as in expressions of power in wolf packs). It would signify a logical exclusion: every no takes an object of exclusion that implies an inclusion, implies a yes. Rico would hear “DON’T CHEW (but wait, chew later, when signaled)” or “DON’T RUN (but stay put).” 

(BLC: If I were allowed to work Rico, this would be the question, a hybrid of performative and scientific methodologies. We would not be asking what Paul Bloom asks, i.e. 

>>> BLOOM: is Rico appreciating “No” as a child would, as flexible term that can be applied to many situations? Or is he just associating behaviors via conditioning? (see last paragraph, inset, in <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/304/5677/1605.full>)

In some sense, Bloom’s question is impossible, or moot, becasue we aren’t really sure that human behavior is anything more than an elaborate network of conditioned mental states. (Are we?) 

I would somehow ask instead: “Rico, is your self organized and mediated by having and not having, by doing and not doing, by recognizing and not recognizing?” (Has Rico developed a symbolic order.) When Rico passes from ignorance about the word “octopus” (an unrepeated utterance, a detached signifier), to the moment of connecting the word to l’objet petit autre, an object of desire, is Rico beginning discourse with the Other, beginning to shape an ego in relation to the super-ego, the social space in which desire is regulated and mediated? We will have to think about empirical ways to ask that question.

Guest Commentary: A Response to Zizek (James Pollack 4/26/11)

 Zizek’s evisceration of static notions of ethical distinction (Good, Evil, Radical Evil, Diabolical Evil) comes to its fiery conclusion by declaring a break in the narrative binding together Kant’s ideological lineage and that of the twentieth century’s most infamous exterminators, the German Nazis.  He posits a historical definition of identity as dialogical by way of Kant, pointing out its greatest thought problem prior to Auschwitz:  judicial regicide.  That is, what happens when the destruction of law is carried out through its function?  According to Kant, revenge; according to Zizek, revolution.  One can move, as Zizek does, from the body royal to the body proper, and back again:  The bestowal of human rights upon those who cannot receive them by those who cannot give them; the humanitarianisation of politcs.  Zizek’s quest against hipocrisy is, though he’d deny this characterization, a noble one.  It’s worth destroying the Wagnerian hero to destroy the cult of the Führer.  It exposes a terrifying facet of human experience — we create it as it creates us.  There is no causality.  While Zizek undoubtedly succeeds in tearing down our fragile defense against the weight of this knowledge, he makes no attempt at understanding (and proffers no apology for doing so).

*For purposes of the prose I’d normally end here, since I dont’ have time to really pursue this, but I think that there’s something to be compared between Camus (especially his concept of responsiblity), Sartre, and other post-WW2 writers on how to deal with understanding a lack of causality.  Perhaps some of the current genocide studies literature might be helpful, although I’d imagine somewhat less so.  

along with Selections from Slavoj Zizek’s “Radical Evil as a Freudian Category”

http://www.lacan.com/zizlovevigilantes.html

This difference points towards the different attitude towards Enlightenment: Stalinism still conceives itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, within which truth is accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved he is, which is why he is subjectively responsible for his crimes, in contrast to the Nazis, for whom the guilt of the Jews is a direct fact of their very biological constitution – one does not have to prove that they are guilty, they are guilty solely by being Jews.

  Modern Greece thus literally arose as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy, and, since the right of fantasy is the fundamental right, should one not draw from it the extremely non-PC conclusion that not only should Germany and England return to Greece the ancient monuments they plundered and which are now displayed in the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum – Greeks should even voluntarily offer to Germany and Greece whatever old monuments they still possess, since these monuments only have value for the Western ideological fantasy.

The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind oftableau vivant, which cannot but bring to our mind the whole scope of American performance art and “theatre of cruelty,” the photos of Mapplethorpe, the weird scenes in David Lynch’s films…

This reasoning tells more than it intends to say: it puts the prisoner almost literally into the position of living dead, those who are in a way already dead (their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of murderous bombings), so that they are now cases of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, his life no longer counts.

Rony Brauman who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo, made a pertinent observation about how the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as “humanitarian,” the very recasting of the political-military conflict into the humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political choice, that of, basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict. 

In short, the paradox is that one is deprived of human rights precisely when one is effectively, in one’s social reality, reduced to a human being “in general,” without citizenship, profession, etc., that is to say, precisely when one effectively becomes the ideal BEARER of “universal human rights” (which belong to me “independently of” my profession, sex, citizenship, religion, ethnic identity…).

 Because, if he were to assert the actual possibility of “diabolical evil,” he would found it impossible to distinguish it from the Good – since both acts would be non-pathologically motivated, the travesty of justice would become indistinguishable from justice itself.

Sade’s argument, of course, is that pain is to be given priority over pleasure on account of its greater longevity - pleasures are passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). This link can be further substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of a young girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact). Doesn’t this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of the immortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is not the fantasmatic “truth” of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the immortality of the body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation?

Wagner’s solution to Freud’s antagonism of Eros and Thanatos is thus the identity of the two poles: love itself culminates in death, its true object is death, the longing for the beloved is the longing for death.

The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny EXCESS of life, for an “undead” urge which persist beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.

What, however, nonetheless distinguishes Levi from the fashionable elevation of the holocaust into an untouchable transcendent Evil is that, at this very point, he introduces the distinction (on which Lacan relies all the time) between understanding and knowledge - he pursues: “We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from where it springs /…/. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.” For this reason, one should turn around the standard notion of holocaust as the historical actualization of “radical (or, rather, diabolical) Evil”: Auschwitz is the ultimate argument AGAINST the romanticized notion of “diabolical Evil,” of the evil hero who elevates Evil into an a priori principle. As Hannah Arendt was right to emphasize, the unbearable horror of Auschwitz resides in the fact that its perpetrators were NOT Byronesque figures who asserted, like Milton’s Satan, “Let Evil be my Good!” - the true cause for alarm resides in the unbridgeable GAP between the horror of what went on and the “human, all too human” character of its perpetrators.

A Time-obsessed Glance At Peirce

The works of Charles Peirce (1839-1914) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) are two major points of reference for the role of signification in language, identity, and thought. Positioning this somewhat philosophical review at the beginning of the seminar—Lacan will be our main topic for week 2—will make it possible for us to read the work of Žižek, Kraus, Kondo, and others with a more confident vocabulary and hopefully a stronger dose of intuition.

Peirce spent his whole life grappling with problems of signification, and in various ways defined the terms for the “linguistic turn” in 20th-century philosophy. Peirce was part of an American movement, sometimes called “Pragmatism”, who were profoundly skeptical of any objective notions of truth, and strived to break down boundaries between disciplines, in order to engage a more fluid production of knowledge. Among the important contributions of Peirce, not to be fully recognized until the late 20th-century, was to consider the realm of transactions between objects and the mind, and especially semiotic transactions, to be just as “real” as the independent nodes in that transaction.

Peirce wouldn’t accept the commonplace assumption that we begin with a mental entity like a self or a mind, existing in another entity called the world; likewise, he bypassed inquiries into the nature of the self and the nature of the world—basic concerns of European artists and philosophers for millenia. Why bypass those things? Because all evidence about them is hopelessly circular: we know that whatever we think about the world is given to us by the unique biases of the self, and we know that whatever we think about the self is given to us by an endless stream of unique contextual relationships to the world. Ironically, Peirce argued, the relationships themselves (i.e. the transactions between the mind and the things in the world) — which might seem more fluid or complicated — actually have a more objective reality. I can never be completely sure of whether a lighthouse is real or imaginary, or whether I, a boat pilot, am real or imaginary. But the nature of transaction between the lighthouse and the pilot is astonishly clear. The light is an indicator of the location of a shoreline; the light’s size and angle of inclination indicate my distance from the shoreline. The pilot might make an error, or misunderstand a lighthouse; the light might even present an illusion—these facts are still uncertain, but the means of indication (i.e. the nature of the transcation) can’t seriously be disputed. The abundance of these transactions is part of what inspires the work of Freud, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss. But Peirce’s work leaps in a different direction, in his frequent recognition that the mind is not a stable force, with signification eminating to and from it; instead, the mind itself is made up of its transactional activities. By challenging the primacy of “mind” and “world”, Peirce thus opened the door for a profound critical project that anticipates the post-structuralism of Lacan and Barthes.

Peirce, Charles (1931-58 [1894]). “What is a Sign?” Available at the Peirce Edition Project:

<http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm> (Transcribed from The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. A. Burks, C. Harthshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard.)

Two other easy & effective resources on Peirce:

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/>

<http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/semiotics.htm>

Notes on the Kristevan "Abject"

Kristeva, Julia (1997). “Powers of Horror” [1982]. Translated by Leon S. Rudiez. In Kelly Oliver, ed., The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 229-247. Originally published in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.

p 229-230
“When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain ‘ego’ that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven [meaning] away.”

In this last sentence, Kristeva invokes Freudian theory involving the ego, superego, and id, of which the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real are loose analogues ^1 [<— see the first comment below for my unbelievably audacious summary of the Freudian conception of the unconsious]. Merging the ego and the superego is a Freudian conception, one that informs the Oedipal struggle between son and father.

For Kristeva, a particular way of thinking about death, shit, perversion, and radical dysfunction is emerging: the abject […UNlike “l’autre”, or the blessed union of self and “differance”] “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses”…a place from which the patriarchal ego/superego tag-team has driven all meaning.

Kristeva isn’t describing a simple, unilateral action. Three actions emerge:
    1. The abject is what is jettisoned, expunged, like shit from the rectum.
    2. The abject draws us to an unfamiliar space,-
    3 a & b.  -from which meaning is driven, and to which the abject is banished.

Kristeva suggests that the ego exerts these last two drivings, perhaps, in order to maintain the superego’s symbolic order to which the abject doesn’t conform. (“And yet,” Kristeva adds “…the abject does not cease challenging its master” but instead continues to make itself known. BLC: but we know this already—if it were to submit to banishment, it would in doing so conform to our symbolic logic, and the reason to banish it would dissapate.)

“To each ego its object,” [S <> a] “to each superego its abject”; each ideology, each system of production and territorialization of meaning and value, has its abject, … a Real which the subject within the symbolic realm constantly recognizes, but never knows how to acknowledge. And with the phrase “I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other”, BLC: Kristeva implies the abjectness of abuse, and clarifies something on the theoretical level, too, that we are always in the presence of the abject, we think of it, then we move elsewhere, then think of it again; returning to it each time, we (don’t we?) try to figure out what everyone else must be thinking of it.

Surely, even though no one says so openly, this is what’s expected—that I put up with the abject. Surely everyone else has this figured out. Surely there are good reasons that I should not be fascinated, drawn, to the abject, reasons which mature persons have internalized and that I eventually will internalize also.

Notes on Peirce's Semiotics

    Peirce says: “We make observations of known signs, and then by ‘a process which I will not object to naming Abstraction’ are led to fallible (i.e. quasi-necessary) claims on the topic of what ‘must be.’  That abstraction is itself a kind of observation.”
    In too many words to paraphrase, Peirce goes on to suggest something that should serve as an introduction to any discussion of semiotics: that we are so bound up in the acts of interpreting and signifying, that our common words for thinking about representation are inadeqaute for thinking about representation.  To make really clear statements about signs, we cannot just say that a sign has certain features, and because of the arrangement and those features, has a meaning. We have to look at how signs operate upon each other, and how those operations work in time: turn backward, overlap, and co-exist with each other. Each of the nine terms below is best considered as an entity that emerges or appears in a process, rather than having a stable, immutable reality.

    Signs are systems that have three parts or aspects: “the sign (itself)” (on which more immediately below), an “object” (the thing being signified), and an “interpretant sign” (a sort of means, or function, of interpretation, shared with other signs). Resist the urge to see these three aspects/parts of the signifying process as being fully independent categories—each is a potentially emergent issue affected broadly and loosely by the others. They are neither completely bound, nor completely independent; more like the parts of a windchime or a baby’s mobile, than separate knobs or switches on a user interface.

1. “The sign (itself)“—also called representamen, is what “brings something” to us, and is the thing that is interpreted in relation to something else.

2. “Idea”/”Object“—also called the representand, the thing (or “quasi-thing”) for which the sign actually stands. Objects can be “immediate” (and stable) or “dynamic” (in which a process occurs, as in the temperature indicated by a thermometer — any sign that one checks back on from time to time).

3. “Interpretant sign“—also called abstraction: for example, the effect of the sign on the mind (or a “quasi-mind”). Interpretants can be immediate (inherent?), dynamic (process of affecting an interpretation in a particular context), or final (full result of an interpretation). One interpretant can correspond to a thousand different images or actualities or fascimiles of an index finger pointing across the road, that is, they all have the same type of relationship to an object across the road.

To be a sign, in other words, the “sign (itself)” (1 above) has to relate to two other things: an interpretant that gives it a way of making meaning (2 above), and an object, that it stands for, or points to (3 above). An index finger, for example, signifies by implying a line that extends through the bearer’s forearm, down the finger, and through space (2 above), to connect that line to an object (3 above). A stop sign (1) signifies by the convention of red octagons, and the word “stop” (2), and by connecting that convention to an object: the point in a drivers’ procedure where stopping is required (3). Anything in the world that has these two kinds of relationships with the world is a sign.

    In turn, each of these aspects or parts of the sign can function in three different ways:

THE SIGN ITSELF:

1. QUALISIGN—that an aspect or quality or state of a thing is what does the work of signifying. Think of the octagon, and the red, formed by a stop-sign, as qualities that act in a representational manner, together.

2. SINSIGN—that a fact or actuality or thing is what does the work of signifying. The presence of a stop sign commands a process: stop, look, then go. Its actual location tells you where to stop.

3. LEGISIGN—that a law, a tedency, a norm, or an ongoing action/process/behavior (with emphasis on the word ongoing) is what does the work of signifying. The patterns of presences and absences of stop signs among a variety of street corners communicates a pattern of stopping and going that each driver interprets in connection with other drivers.

THE MANNER OF RELATION TO ITS OBJECT:

1. ICON—via resemblance, a sign that “looks like”, “sounds like”, or “simulates”. The upward-pointing hand, faced palm toward you, is meant to keep you from moving forward, or to prevent your movement through a crosswalk; it does so because it resembles a person stopping you physically. Yellow can resembles fire in a “flammable” warning. An icon on a computer desktop usually resembles the file or application to which it points.

2. INDEX—via physical connection, spatial/temporal connection, or connection via orientation; a sign that “points.” A pronoun can be an index for its capacity to point (via temporal connection) to a noun. An index finger points across a road to an object that an interpreting mind is meant to call into consciousness. An index in a book points from concepts in an organized list, next to signifying page numbers, via spatial connection to the page itself, a reference to the listed concept.

3. SYMBOL—via convention; a sign that is established in a vocabulary of arbitrary signifiers, and is put to use in cultures or specialized subcultures outside of which the sign would not function. With few iconic exceptions, words and numbers are symbols of what they mean. X marks a spot, a checkerboard flag symbolizes the winner in an automobile race.

THE MANNER OF RELATION TO ITS INTERPRETANT:

1. RHEME—when a sign is “term-like”, standing to its interpretant via its quality. The octagonality and redness of stop-signs are rhemes; they are the qualities of an individual stop sign that connects it to the “stop interpretant”.

2. DICISIGN—when a sign stands to its interpretant in respect of fact, or actuality.

3. ARGUMENT—when a sign stands to its interpretant in respect of “habit or law.”