From: Chris Jones <ccjones-AT-turboweb.net.au>
Subject: Re: of the imagination
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 15:18:38 +1100


Hi Paul

I did the attachment with mine quotable encoding, for what Nietzsche 
calls conceptual cripples who use MS Windows OS's so Photoshop should 
be able to open it. It is just a jpeg image of two teenage boys 
fucking, really. Maybe I should have sent it with base 64 encoding?

I am not a lit critic. I don't work. I live as a free spirit on a 
pension.  I am an occasional poet, now writing a novel 
series, and in past lives have been a visual artist, journalist and 
photographer. I have no shame in identity and am a faggot junkie who 
is often assumed to be HIV+ and which State Science medicine (if you 
believe in this stuff) considers in clinical terms to be mentally 
ill. I have no idea what my antibodies say about all this, nor do I 
really care. I also have an auto-immune disease which adds to this 
assumption. I don't go in for this (anti)identity crap about I am 
gay, straight, man, women, black, yellow, white, that comes up on 
this list from time to time. When this is said what is being said is 
"I am afraid of identity and I want to re-instate the ideal identity 
of heterosexual white European male". Identity don't frighten me like 
it frightens this type! This is hetero thinking, always looking to 
the other to establish their gay, dyke, woman, black, yellow, 
identity as straight, drug free, white sane European male. Another 
word for chauvinism. The etymology of homo is difference. Why be 
afraid of an axiomatic thingy?

I was forced against my better judgment to read Lacan as an 
undergrad. The best thing I have ever read of Lacan was the quote 
Sokal picked out.

Lacan states that the penis, cock, prick, whatever you want to call 
it.... [I'll let the new Master do the talking here.]

Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic 
method used here, namely:

S (signifier) = s (the statement),
 s (signified)

With S = (-1), produces: s = sqrt(-1)

.. . . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced 
above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its 
statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).

Now lets see if I got this right... a cock is the square root of 
minus one.  That means a cock is an imaginary number. Mmmm... sounds 
like a sexual fantasy to me... imagine getting fucked by an 
imaginary number... isn't a number street talk for a cock, now?
So, is that anything like getting fucked by a rubber dildo made from 
the plaster cast of a famous porn star? 

Lets look at Mandelbrot fractals which are complex numbers involving 
a mathematical relation with the square root of minus one. HA! Now I 
see, since a fractal doesn't allow for total division that means 
castration is impossible? Mmmm.... I thought castration was central 
to Lacan's theory. Maybe we had better look at Gore Vidal's _Myron_ 
novel where Myra Breckinridge sets out on the time reversible movie 
set to castrate all men who are likely to breed to prevent the world 
from becoming overpopulated. 

 _Myra Breckinridge_, chapter one:

I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in 
garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the 
Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for 'why' or 
'because'. Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the 
balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does 
all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a 
mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left 
three-quarter profile if the key light is no more then five feet high 
during the close shot.

Probably has some reference to the cinema and the face, too, come to 
think of it. But what would Lacan make of this? Perhaps, castration?

Gore writes in chapter 2: The novel being dead, there is no point to 
writing made up stories. 

There is no Monadic realism. Fiction is theory!

Anyway, Paul, you did ask. Most lit critics might consider this the 
ravings of a lunatic... so be it. Lit critics are still leaching off 
us poets.

As for my conceptual cripple quip. The MS Windows operating system is 
designed around the concept of a neo-Kantian dumbing down. Stick with 
the categories for the computer illiterate, says Bill Gates, and make 
sure it has a patent! A conceptual cripple to fetter production and 
consumption. Anyone with an undergrad degree in Communication can 
tell you graphics are more difficult to read then text! MS Windows 
actually makes computers more difficult to use then UNIX ever could.  
Even Mac with OS X has gone UNIX. Richard Stallman, of GNU free 
software fame, also understood that patents stop the possibility of 
a-life. Now, will Mac make Darwin, the kernel in OS X based on BSD 
UNIX open source and also come out for life and never enough 
production and never enough consumption?

Make of this what you will..... tell me about Lacan and Eliot, too.


best wishes

Chris Jones.




On Sunday 02 December 2001 03:58, you wrote:
> Hi Chris, I couldnt download the attachment.  I am
> also a literary critic, but work in literary
> journalism - you might call it that - not academe.  i
> find the academe a bit wearying now, since I had
> enough of it a good while ago, wrote a book on Lacan
> and TS Eliot.  Can you tell me more about your work,
> ciao, Paul M