PHANTOM REGIME
. . . for us as beings who walk upon the earth, the horizontal plane is where our most important movements and activities take place. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
The little baby sleeps on his side,
his dream face turned to the woods;
a fox sleeps with its mouth of color;
& the O in your head, the damaged vowel,
where the skin rises to meet the wound,
what does that spell?
—i don’t know, i don’t know
(since it got to go on living) but
seems like basically it’s kind of a combination: everything means everything plus
there is no hidden meaning—
from Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Brenda Hillman
There’s a certain point in life at which you realize it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion . . . Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time . . .
from Second Place, Rachel Cusk
Catalyzed by evidence of non-expansion, where we would expect it to be, speculative cosmological models propose that dark matter and dark energy may be manifestations of a higher-dimensional structure. “Researchers describe . . . dark energy entering the “phantom regime.” They liken the situation to a ball rolling uphill. “It’s certainly possible, but only if the ball is under the influence of something other than gravity.” If gravity were the only operative force, “this would be an impossible trajectory.”
A slice of a 3D map produced by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument team shows connected strands of galaxies forming the structure of our universe. cr. Claire-Lamman_DESI-collaboration-custom-colormap-package-by-cmastro-scaled
My Lacanian friend Jed, mentoring me in the shapeliness of cosmology-attuned “post-hermeneutic psychoanalysis” which he and his cadre are conceiving and enacting, tells me that topology, a preoccupation and then theoretical mainstay of late Lacan, concerns those aspects of shape that remain invariant under continuous deformation, bending and stretching without breaking (sort of like this sentence . . . ), a model for an approach to psychoanalysis that elides if not eschews, if not chews to pieces the archeological model of diving into wrecks excavating meanings, sardines, whales, stingrays, squid, cuttlefish from the deep.
It slips away and dives back in, only to be found out again. Curiouser and curiouser, every time we dive into the waters of the contemporary, we keep fishing out the same farmed diagnoses: we’re mono-cropping shoals of ADHD . . . & hysteria has gone the way of Atlantis.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-cuttlefish
I am struck by the realization that an analysis may have repetition compulsions all its own. For example, the repetition of the analysts’ interpretation of a repetitious symptom may phase-lock, variations on the theme of stuck/unstuck.
As if one were to go to the dentist several times a week to get the same tooth pulled, because every time it comes out of one part of the body, it reappears in another, a “phantom regime” of the phantom limbs of memory.
The topological turn: surface and the depth are not in a covered / object relation (no extraction needed) but rather are continuous, a one-sided alternation, and rhythmic. Relatedly, in Against Interpretation Susan Sontag criticizes facile glossaries of type, of gleaning typology from symptom.
So: topology against typology?
If psychoanalysis was centered on interpretation, free associations following the rises and falls of mythic arcs, scales and veils punctually falling from the eyes, then post-hermeneutic psychoanalysis turns from archeology and theater to mathematics and cosmology.
A Brechtian turn, we could call it, against the catharsis of anagnorisis. A Woolfian turn, towards rippling waves and away (spatial again) from (an) arc of that analysis that is narratively Aristotelian by way of Sophoclean. Of course, these tendencies have been present in psychoanalysis as it striates and is traversed in turn by linguistics and poststructuralism, including French feminisms that open onto a stage-less night where constellations glint, lit rashes of scenery, semiotic chora/l poetics, a music of metonymy’s substitutions, allegories decayed, symbols crashing like cymbals, so Cixous: “I write by the other light.”
Symptoms as encryptions? Or patterns of torsion and folding that organize psychic space? My (coincidentally, Hula-hooping) mathematician colleague says, rotating her hips inside the torus that she uses as a teaching prop: you can’t simply decide that one branch of mathematics is the real. Topology is only one field among many.
Recently I was stung six times by yellow jackets, the field of my lower leg all perforated, leading to systemic inflammation and continuous deformation, alarming red swells of flesh, and then my form of life was further punctured by a flat tire on the hottest day of the year. . . all these embroideries might, taken together, have the valence of, be readable as, a kind of Morse code, a Tarot card, allegorical, the patter of pattern, calling attention to attention itself, stimulating the famous “second attention”, the “third ear” and its manner of attending to the unusual repetitions to ask: what process might be trying to happen here?
Later, icing the leg, I read of 450 years’ worth of prison sentences given to people who had protested the Prairie Land detention center, alongside another succession of headlines about the European heatwave, fire, smoke, tornado. . . deflated, tired, a tire, a torus, spun out, done in.
