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.