[lit-ideas] Phatic: A letter from Diderik

Here's the other one.  Let's all be clear that if it doesn't "send" to his 
liking, it ain't my problem.
Erin
*****************************

I received a letter from Diderik Humble jr. the other day. He's arrived in 
Uqbar now, and the mysterious story of the life and adventures of hisself, his 
erstwhile "companion" Sinsemilla, Managing Director Stimos of the TRU 
Corporation, and Inta, delegate to the Intra-Paracelcist biannual convention at 
Hotel Rio Grande do Sul downtown Uqbar, will continue. Perhaps we will be 
offered answers to significant questions like who is Mundt? Is he, indeed, the 
Master of the Mansion? etc. As I have been swarmed with enthusiastic, and 
occasionally lewd, mails from devoted readers, urging me to continue the tale 
of our friends in Uqbar, I have had little time to actually write down the 
story as its writ. Hence and therefore and without further ado, let me cede the 
floor to Diderik Humble jr., by way of aforementioned letter.
<p align=center><b>*</b></p>

Umfuweto, phatic,

I hope all is well back in The Specter of Kabool, and that you're managing in 
your bungalow on the Bagdad Banks. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations, and 
Sinsemilla sends her regards as well.

Uqbar isn't much like it's rumoured to be. The old buildings are still here, 
sure, but there's a certain barrenness about them. It's like returning to a 
future that somehow got lost in the past. 

Anyway, the other day I attended a lecture on "The Mirror of Sport, or Couching 
the Performer" at the Uqbar Institute of Titting and Tatting. I just missed one 
Prof McEnroy's paper on "Once you Pop you can't Stop: How Nike Changed my Life 
and Other(ed) Observations." The conference was obviously a success, and, amid 
the pools of plastic glasses filled with champagne and mini-sandwiches, I 
managed to lodge myself in Auditorium Terminus, just as one Prof Kingfisher 
took the podium in elegant strides, his coat whirling about him like the flaps 
of a bat-costume, briefly disguising his limp. As he turned to face the 
audience, I realized that he was a rather oldish professor, possibly emeritus, 
I figured, but with a distinct and forceful voice. Professor Kingfisher wore 
dark, slim sunglasses, matching his silver-gray mane and black suit. I'll copy 
some of my lecture notes here. I hope you find some use of them, or not.

<b>Diderik Humble jr's lecture notes</b>

<blockquote>

Lacan's Mirror Stage: Alienating armour of identity. To locate identity ("thou 
art that!") only first step, before journey even begins. What is the world like 
before mirror stage? No way of knowing, since our knowing is always mediated. 
No social, shared knowledge without communication, mediation. Could there be 
knowledge outside the social, shared? We couldn't know: If a tree falls in the 
forest and no-one is there to hear it, would it still make a sound? We can't 
know. We can guess. But no way of determining or knowing it. It is a kind of 
speculative knowledge we're reduced to when trying to speak about the world 
before communication. It is when we start communicating that we enter into the 
world of communicating beings, into society. But entering into society also 
means entering into a structure, a rule-governed practice, and these rules we 
learn only slowly and through much pain and misunderstanding. 

In a sense we could say that the very premise of us communicating is that I can 
distinguish between myself and others. So the sense of I/other is cruical for 
it to be communication what so ever. But what is this I? What am I? Today we 
usually understand this question as a question of identity. What am I becomes 
"what is my identity". But let's consider some possible identities: Woman, man, 
racial, classed (poor/rich or worker/capitalist), sportsman, student, Britney 
Spears fan, YAP, etc. The point is that these classifications and their 
attendant identities (practices, appearances, technologies, methodologies) are 
all given. If I want to be a Britney Spears fan there are certain rules I must 
adher to in order to be recognized as one. And these rules are made before us. 
So identifying with these identities don't makes us individual, as they may 
have promised. We thought, somewhere along the line, that we needed some 
identity that would distinguish us from out parents, friends, school mates, 
rivals, etc., and it turns out that we are simply moving from one kind of 
social constraint to another. 

In fact, going "overboard" in a quest for singularity could be one possible 
characteristic of the obsessional. Perhaps we could say that the obsessional 
has figured out precisely the logic of individualization: She desires the 
supreme, total and absolute individuality, but by the same token acquires 
nothing but confirming the logic of individualism. Confronted with the total 
scope of individualist isolation, the obsessive could be said to engage in an 
attempt to subvert it by over-identifying with it. 

Let's consider the joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian for a second. "You 
are all individuals." The crowd repeats in one voice, "We are all individuals." 
Except one fella who declares: "I'm not." The gist is of course that us being 
called upon to be different individuals can only lead to that everybody become 
more of the same, and the only means through which to subvert it is by denying 
that one is different. It is a paradoxical conclusion, but apparently necessary 
to the game of "individual identity".

This sense we get, then, of this identity which is not me, is the point of 
Jacques Lacan's The Mirror Stage. Our call to "identify ourselves" is perhaps 
precisely one of those requirements we meet when we are engaged in the world of 
social communication, the game of distinguishing self (friend) from other 
(foe). The attendant alienation from our selves is a characteristic effect of 
our passing through the Mirror Stage of childhood development. I will now go 
through some of the central points in Lacan's argument, and will return in the 
end with some notes of how we may use these notions to interrogate the meaning 
and purpose of sport.

- inchoate, disparate, pre-symbolic, fragmented body, imaginary

- indications: dreams, paintings of Bosch, jokes

- stages: hysteria, obsession, paranoiac alienation

- fiction of I (fortress), phantasies, entrance into symbolic order

- primordial jealousy: someone else has something I want (projection, 
repression, mediated desire of the other, Oedipus)

- imaginary servitude

Sport: symbolizing activity par excellance, symbolizing violence, incoherence, 
ordering it

- imaginary servitude: Hand of god shows possibility of breaking symbolization, 
but still not unmediated?

</blockquote>

I'm sorry if some of these notes may turn out incoherent. After the lecture I 
tried to approach Prof Kingfisher for a discussion on the Oedipus complex, but 
as he was immediately swarmed by young teenage girls aching for an autograph on 
some explicit limb, I ended up breaching my ideas to one of the conferees, a 
young lecturer from Ireland.

I asked him if he had ever taught Oedipus Rex in class, and he assured me he 
did, at least once a year, and we exchanged notes on student responses to 
various approaches to the play. I inquired about if he'd ever made use of 
audio-visual material, such as a videogram, and he suggested Guthrie's famous 
1954 version. 

I didn't want to tell him that I hadn't seen it, or never even heard about it.

"What about Fellini's version?" I proposed.

He asked me how it had worked, and I had to admit that it was less than 
satisfactory. Students tended to focus on the graphic violence, amplified by 
Fellini in that he lets Oedipus <i>kill</i> the sphinx. I mean, isn't there a 
difference between shaving and decapitating, now? Also, while instructive, the 
framing narrative wasn't really that helpful for <i>our</i> purpose, ie. in 
that particular class.

"Try Guthrie," the Irishman said, breaking out in a big smile, and slapping me 
on the back like there was no tomorrow. 

Conferences, huh.

Stay well, brother.

Diderik Humble jr.

(sign)

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: