02 November 2006

Fractal Instantiations

I came across this blog riffing on my description of Lacan's aphorisms as fractal patterns over at HauntedGeographies. Nic gives a far more beautiful description of this fractal contagion than I could ever hope to achieve.
Whilst engaging in some mild cyber-‘flaneury’– I stumbled across this post on Larval Subjects. The quote below refers to the notoriously difficult work of Lacan, and in particular– his heavily loaded aphorisms. Some of the more extreme examples are described as:

‘fractal instantiations of his thought in extremely condensed form, articulating the whole of some element of his topology from a particular vantage.’

This is the idea that a fragment or torn segment of map can somehow speak for a whole territory, the rent in the canvas that reveals a universe. The macro understood through the micro, fractal as synecdoche. Poetic images that skip and jump– for instance, where ‘sails’ replace ‘ships’, and a fleet is understood as a ‘1000 sails’. Information is purposefully withheld for effect, and loss becomes a vernacular.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dear Levi,

In an earlier post you write,

I often have the experience of thinking that I'm thinking something entirely new (for myself) at the time I think it, only to reread something I wrote years ago and find a nearly identical formulation. Why is it so impossible to be before oneself? Or why does thought seem so forgetful of itself?

You are not alone, as Deleuze says (in a refreshing mix of coquetry and self-awareness),

I am not an intellectual, because I have no Bildung available, no reserves. What I know, I only know in relation to what I’m doing now, and if I return to it after an interval of some years I have to start all over again.

It is quite comfortable not to have an opinion or attitude about this or that. We do not suffer from lack of communication, rather we suffer under the forces that compel us to express ourselves when we really don’t have much to say.


(From interview in Magazine Littéraire, no. 257, September 1988, in Pourparlers 1972-1990)

Orla

November 02, 2006 3:25 PM  

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