So, I staged an encounter between the 3 loops of RSI and the seven colours of the rainbow flag. I thought that the rainbow’s spectrum might figure, might represent, a way of thinking about what happens both in the process of analysis and in artistic practice and engagement. In my four rainbow prints of a person’s words, the white light around and within the print is also the more-or-less white light of the room within the viewer stands. The violence of your viewing imposes meaning or protests: it’s raw! However much the white box-frame shouts “this is conceptual art!”, the words, if read, overwhelm with their immediacy, witnessing and calling us to the place of a witness, a third.
I’ve been attending Jean-Gerard Bursztein’s seminars in ‘subjective topology’ for many years. The seminars are profoundly original and a wonderful way of getting to terms with the ways that the later Lacan’s topological thinking can be extended. A central argument of Lacanian topology has to to do with the localisation of the different forms of jouissance. In the following paragraphs, I discuss this topological argument. Before I started attending Bursztein’s seminars and also before I started training at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, I attended a Bion seminar. My thinking in Prismatic Heresy is partly Bionian and partly Lacanian; but also wholly idiosyncratic and eccentric.
Let’s start with the Lacanian arguments about the different modes of jouissance. To give ostentive definitions: in exhibiting my Prismatic Heresy in an art gallery and writing about it for publication, I suffer and enjoy my audience as big Other; I suffer and enjoy queering Lacanian and Bionian theory in ways that transform symbolic, real and the phallic jouissance that inhabits the zone between symbolic and real; and I experience the jouissance of meaning emergent in my analysis and practice. The feminine or other (not Othered) jouissance that Lacan conceives of as outside but in relation to the 3-in-1 of RSI is also encounterable, engageable with, in extremity; Lacan’s example is mysticism, but there are a wide range of artistic, philosophical, and meditative practices that enable engagement with ‘feminine’, other jouissance. The process within which I sorted the words of the transcript into the colours of the rainbow, my Prismatic Heresy, was deeply meditative and my engagement with other jouissance.
Jouissance of the big Other, the enjoyment and suffering of our masochistic relation to, in the first instance, our primary caregiver, is localised, according to a Lacanian topological way of thinking, as being in the area that in the figure of RSI is between real and imaginary (see figure 2). If you read down the passages coloured orange in Prismatic Heresy 2, you will hear the ways in which this participant discussed their relation to the big Other during the 50 minutes: “Do you want to transition?” “Ah, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know”…”while I believe in the past you would either go the whole way or nothing, nowadays, yeah, like a half way through is more accepted than before”… “if someone asked me now”… “if I was with a man there would be no questions like that but with a woman the question of family, of creating a family comes into question; and then, again, I don’t know how to think about it.” If we were to think of these statements in terms of the early Lacan, where psychoanalytic work is seen as a move from imaginary to symbolic, we would focus on the ways that this person, having become aware of their relation to the big Other, is now moving more into the symbolic. However, using a Bionian vertex, we can we can focus on this subject’s openness to thinking and feeling as process rather than as content.
Phallic jouissance, written with the big Phi of presence-and-absence, is localised, according to this Lacanian topological way of thinking as in the junction of real and symbolic (see figure 2). The subject in Prismatic Heresy 3 discusses how they wrestle something a little more symbolic from the real, a process that is coloured orange in my image, “yeah, where is my thinking time? What am I? Gay? Transgender? What the fuck am I? Am I Dad? What am I? I’m nobody.” This, too, can be understood from a Bionian vertex: alpha function versus beta function. That is, beta function is concrete thinking, as when Bion’s patient ducked and put his hands protectively over his head, experiencing Bion’s words as blows. Alpha function can be expressed in many practices, in activities done in places as diverse as a martial arts dojo and a chemistry laboratory. Unlike Lacan’s symbolic, alpha function isn’t always grounded or knotted by a master signifier or the Name of the Father. Alpha function can be idiosyncratic (as in a work of art) or widely shared (mythology).