Re: [-empyre-] Accidents (was for example)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Not only is the net not the unconscious, it is also not sentient in
itself, nor tending towards sentience - this is something that also
appears from time to time.

I agree with your analysis below; I also tend, as I mentioned before, to
follow Penrose and others towards a quantum understanding of memory, etc.
I don't find the mind all that reductive - if it were, there would be no
room for Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, in the first place - the ontology would
have been senseless...

Alan

On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Yvonne Martinsson wrote:

>
>
> Having slept a night on our discussion, I woke up saying that code is a
> structuring and ordering device. This seems to tie in with your - Alan's -
> response that code is a filter.
>
> A common view on the net is that code is the 'unconscious' of computers,
> that it is the hidden undercurrent of the interface, but I think we'll have
> to reverse this view. Isn't it rather that code resembles the symbolic in
> its function? It's restrictive, it structures and orders, just as the
> symbolic harnesses the free mobility of the unconcious and structures it. In
> other words, [my] unease with code may be one aspect of the Freudian
> 'discontents of civilization'.
>
> Note however that I say resemble. I doubt we can claim that code is the
> symbolic for two reasons:
>
> a) code does not signify anything unless it be implemented as software, a
> piece of art, a poem and so forth. The same might possibily be said about
> the alphabet. Do letters mean anything unless they enter the complex chain
> of signification and codification before returning as words, phrases,
> syntagms etc.?
>
> b) you can't read one structure by another, that is, you can't apply a model
> of the psychic or sexual economy to understand the 'digital economy'.
>
> Similarly, Jim, you can't apply a mathematical model to understand the
> psychic economy (I use psychic economy instead of mind because mind situates
> us at once in the mind-body dichotomy). Psychoanalysis has the advantage of
> having developed out of observations and reflections on human behavious and
> speech, but it's still just a theory. The truth of the human mind - if there
> is one - no one knows. Your view of the mind as an algorithm reminds me of
> Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus which I rejected on the grounds of
> their mechanistic - it turned everything into a reduction to input/output of
> data, if I remember correctly - and deterministic view. Nothing is left to
> chance or to the 'accident' Tamara mentions.
>
> Psychoanalysis is one way of approaching the accidental, which is why
> psychoanalysis has been my approach of choice (the thetic phase in Kristeva
> is one opening). In fact, I've spent most of my life trying to understand
> the accidental - I don¹t know if I'm any wiser today - 'it' always slips out
> of my hands, it goes beyond the beyond. Still, the accidental is crucial in
> every aspect of life and creativity. That's where 'I' come from. It is, in
> the words of Derrida, meschances/mes chances (accidents/bad luck/my luck/ my
> chances).
>
> And computers who behave in such eccentric ways! as if there's something
> that goes beyond code, making and remaking me, guiding me off-path,
> accidentally hitting me - edgewise. Meschances/mes chances.
>
>
>     yvonne
>
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>
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>
>
>
>
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