psycho-sexual space

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud warned the reader against the view of the mind as physically spatial. Such an error would be mistaking "the scaffold" for "the building". Yet his "topographical" accounts of the unconsious are thoroughly spatial.

One of the earliest reflexes of a breast-fed newborn is to turn its head towards the person, male or female, who is holding it in the nursing position (that is, in a horizontal position. Later, the baby will stare at the face of the mother unwaveringly during the act of nursing. During this time she feels the nipple in her mouth while at the same time she sees the mother's face. Ren Spitz describes this experience as the origins of the distinction between contact perception (oral tactile) and distance perception, between haptic and optic perception.

The dyad of reciprocal relations between mother and child, between object and subject, are the first form of "object relations," which later become social relations. Karl Abraham invented the term of "object relations" to describe persons or things which mediate instinctual discharge for a given person. Melanie Klein developed the theory in relation to the mother as principal object and used children's play as a basis for understanding their cognition. D.W. Winnecott describes the holding environment, the "potential space" between the baby and the mother that comes into being during the phase of repudiation, when the baby is at a stage of separating out the mother from the self and the mother is lowering the degree of adaptation to the baby's needs. (He also compares this moment to late stages of psychiatric treatment) Confidence in the mother's reliability, and therefore in that of other people and things, makes possible a separating-out of the not-me from the me. The move from dependence to autonomy is achieved by the filling in of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and with all that eventually adds up to a cultural life. (Playing and Reality, pp 107-9)

Jessica Benjamin links the intersubjective realm of the holding environment and transitional experience to the experience of inner self, which she sees as enabling the experience of women's desire. ("A Desire of One's Own, in Teresa de Lauretis, ed. Feminist Studies / Critical Studies) see body.

The analysis of the mirror stage accounts for the child's aquisition of notions of spatiality and temporality. (see also ego)For the first time, the child is not absorbed by its environment (both occupying no space at all and being all-pervasive) but is now part of space, taking up a place or location in space. The "buccal" space of the neonate, the space that can be contained in or exploited by the child's mouth, is replaced with the first notion of a binarized space, capable of being divided into real and virtual planes. The virtual duplication of the subject's body, the creation of a symmetry measured from the picture plane, is necessary for these more sophisticated, abstract, and derivative notions of spatiality. (see body image.)The mirror stage is a link between space and representation.

J.-B. Pontalis observed that Charcot's space at the Salpetri re was a full, theatrical space -- which is, in fact, the space of the hysteric -- which Freud replaced with an empty, purely mental space. The analyst sat out of sight of the patient, who reclined on a couch without the presence of any other spectators. ("Between Freud and Charcot: from One Scene to the Other" , in Frontiers in Psychoanalysis)

In "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia" (first published in Minotaure in 1935 and playing a crucial role in Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. published in English in October 31, Winter 1984) Roger Caillois talks about "depersonalization by assimilation into space" in both psychosis and animal mimicry. (see bwo) Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment.

Surrealism and the city as the place of chance (and magical) encounter. "Ce qui me s duit dans une telle mani re de voir, c'est qu'a perte de vue elle est recr atrice de d sir" (Andr Breton, L'Amour Fou) magnetic fields as the actions of desire.

resonance

Resonance: when waves resonate, their amplitudes pile up on top of each other, as opposed to interference, which reduces their amplitudes.

A feedback loop creates a resonance that grows without bound.

The Desana Indians of Columbia describe the sky as a brain, its two hemispheres divided by the Milky Way. Their brains, they say, are in resonance with the sky. This integrates them into the world and gives them a sense of their role in the cosmos.

The qualitative aspects of pleasure have been difficult to formulate for psychoanalysis, which uses the "hydraulic" model of tension and release. Hans Loewald suggests that "resonance" between systems of psychic organization, (love, for example) forms of "hypercathexis," might help understand the pleasure in higher organization and unpleasure in less or lower organization -- of the exitation inherent in living substance. (this is similar to Kant's philosophical pleasures -- see critique of judgement )

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers talk about the resonance between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity in the success of the clock metaphor of the universe. Gilles Deleuze proposes that "philosophy, art, and science come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons." For Deleuze and Guattari, the interaction of actual and virtual is a resonance.

For Deleuze, "the central state is constituted ..by the organization of resonance among centers." (Thousand Plateaus, p.211) "a central computing eye scanning all of the radii."

Rupert Sheldrake believes that morphogenetic events resonate with each other, that it becomes progressively easier for a particular form to occur as its occurrences accumulate. He cites the formation of crystals as an example, in which occurrences of a new cristalline form seem to occur shortly after a first one is observed, in places with no direct relation to the first occurrence. For Sheldrake the probability of the new form occurring increases rapidly with each occurrence, starting with the first.

One wonders, however, why Chinese isn't easier to learn if so many people speak it.

ritual

"It is not too much to say that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts." (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 62)

The sociologist Paul Lukes suggests that we use ritual to refer to "rule-governed activity of a symbolic character which draws the attention of its participants to objects of thought and feeling which they hold to be of a special significance."

In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton calls for the analysis of "social habit-memory" as consisting essentially of legitimating performances, a particular kind of ritual. He draws upon the work of Maurice Halbwachs, (Les cadres sociaux de la m moire and La m moire collective ) who thought of memories as bound together into an ensemble of thoughts common to a group. For Halbwachs, groups provide individuals with frameworks within which there memories are localized, by a kind of mapping into both the mental and material spaces of the group. For Halbwachs the idea of an individual memory, absolutely separate from social memory, is an abstraction almost devoid of meaning.

All rites are repetitive, and repetition automatically implies continuity with the past. Drawing on Claude Levi-Strauss, Giorgio Agamben describes the function of ritual to adjust the contradiction between mythic past and present, reabsorbing all events into a synchronic structure, while the function of play is a symmetrically opposed operation: to break down the whole structure into events.

Mary Douglas criticizes modern anthropology for thinking of magic as efficacious rite. For her, this is a European belief that institutes a false distinction between primitive and modern.

In modern religous life, there is a long and vigorous anti-ritualistic tradition, echoing the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, that claims that external forms can become empty and mock the truths they stand for. (in this sense, they can be described as mechanical.) But this account, which contrasts the formalisms and "emptiness" of ritual with acts that are "sincere" or "authentic," ignores the function of ritual as the expression of feeling or belief. Instead, rites have the capacity to give value and meaning to the life of those who perform them. (Connerton, pp 44-5) In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton stresses the importance of commemorative rituals. The feature that they share, and which sets them apart from the more general category of rites, is that they do not simply imply continuity with the past but explicitly claim such continuity. Connerton infers that commemorative ceremonies play a significant role in the shaping of communal memory.

Do rituals create the beliefs that they are meant to express? see ideology.

One consequence of the failure of ritual is panic.

Gregory Bateson describes ritual in terms of unusually real or literal ascriptions of logical type

In biological accounts of communication, ritualization is "the evolutionary modification of a behavior pattern that turns it into a signal (sign) used in communication or at least improves its its efficacy a a signal (sign)." (Wilson, Sociobiology, p.594) According to contemporary neo-Darwinism, adaptive pressures will select certain behaviours as important references. For instance, in flocking birds, it is important to know when to take off. In a speculative account of the origins of language, Robert N. Brandon describes a process of ritualization which selects behaviour patterns with perceived iconicity to the referent of the sign, for example, when birds just prior to flight characteristically crouch, raise their tails, and slightly spread their wings. According to Brandon, these iconic signs can subsequentlybe transferred to other referents, as in mating behavior, for instance. While they become increasing symbolic (arbitrary) in synchronic analysis, they remain "phylogenetically iconic." (?)

The effectiveness of such a sign can be increased through increased ritualization, for example, in pigeons, where the preflight pattern of behaviour which serves as sign of flight has been exaggerated beyond what is physiologically necessary. Konrad Lorenz studied these movements in the 1930's and called them "intention movements." For Lorentz and Tinbergen, intention movements provided the raw material from which signals are sharpened through natural selection. The term was subsequently dropped by ethologists, presumably by behaviorists who rejected the mentalistic implications of the term. For Ronald Griffin, in Animal Minds, "we may hope that the revival of interest in animal thinking will lead cognitive ethologists to reopen the study of the degree to which intention movements may indeed be signals of conscious intent." (p. 16)

see local / global for the role of ritual in maintaining locality. For Arjun Appadurai, One of the most remarkable features of the ritual process is its highly specific way of localizing duration and extension, of giving these categories names and properties, values and meanings, symptoms and legibility.