Parapraxes are actions committed "not as planned."
In fact, the opposite is the case: the pattern characteristic of symptoms, parapraxes (Freudian slips) and dreams is that the repressed wish will come out, with poetic irony, in precisely the effort to control or avoid it. Unconscious hatred "kills with kindness." One is so busy suppressing a sexual thought that it slips out as an unconscious pun. (Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions, p.85) (see return of repressed)
theory
path dependency
in theory, techno-science
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that the world would beat a path to the door of the maker of the better mousetrap, yet this is often not the case. Familiarity and custom make the accepted mousetrap seem "good enough," particularly if an effort is required to learn to use the new one. Group use accentuates individual acceptance. (cf. Rupert Sheldrakes concept of morphic fields)
Read Morepeace
in theory
The political representative of the Dalai Lama objected to the word "victory" in a UN resolution drafted by Dag Hammerskjold in support of the Tibetan struggle with the Chinese. When asked what they would call a state of affairs in which their side won, he answered, "We do have words for that. We call that very excellent best peace."
Read Morepersonal space
Here is where I can write in the first person. So this discursive space, at least, can be thought of as personal, as a place of private defintion, grudgingly aware as I may be that my private sphere is socially formed.
Although Phenomenology holds little intellectual appeal these days (its point of view seems naive, its universalizing subjectivity too suspect) I still feel that there should be a place for reporting and sifting through one's own experience. (getting their feel?)
perceptual / conceptual
in abstraction, theory
Conrad Fiedler's aesthetic of "visibility" is based on Kant's distinctions between two different modes by which we come to terms with reality: perceptual and conceptual cognition. Whereas the former is based mainly on visual experience, (even here the visual is given priority over the sensual -- see optic / haptic ) For Kant, conceptual cognition is arrived at through a process of abstraction, the conceptual ordering of perceptual data. Both are autonomous but at the same time equal processes.
Read Moreperspective / narrative
in theory
In his study of the relation between the photographic frame and narrative in film, Steven Heath sees filmic narrative as the fulfilment of the Renaissance impetus for events to have their proper place. He quotes Rosalind Krauss' comments on perspective as "the visual correlate of causality that one thing follows the next in space according to rule...perspective space carried with it the meaning of narrative: a succession of events leading up to and away from this moment; and within that temporal succession--given as spatial analogue--was secreted the "meaning" of both that space and those events". (in "A View of Modernism", Artforum, Sept 1972.) cf. Alois Hildebrand, "The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts" with its stress on the coherence of spatial recession. (see vision)
Read Morephallus
in philosophy, theory
Herm at Getty MuseumIn classical antiquity, the phallus is the figurative representation of the male organ. It is the figure of hierarchy rather than reciprocity. For the classical Athenians, sex was not a private quest for mutual pleasure. It was rather a declaration of one's public status. Defined as the penetration of one body by the body (specifically by the phallos) of another, sex was conceived as an action performed by one person upon another. The elite corps of adult male citizens held to an aggressively phallic norm of sexual conduct, which lead to an ethic of sexual domination in their relations with males and females alike. (David M. Halperin, in Before Sexuality.) According to Michel Foucault, "The Greeks did not see love for one's own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior...Rather, they saw two ways of enjoying one's pleasure...They believed that the same desire attached to anything that was desirable -- boy or girl." (The Use of Pleasure, pp. 187 ff.) It is the persistence of this phallic model in psychoanalysis that feminists have come to resist (see below). It was the contribution of Christianity's radical ascetics to "strip the body of its ancient, civic associations...by means of an increased emphasis on its intrinsic sexuality...joined together in a somber democracy of sexual shame", and to "see the female body as the condensed essence of all human bondage and all human vulnerability. " (Peter Brown, "Bodies and Minds ," in Before Sexuality.)
Read Morephantom limbs
The eminent Philadelphia physician Silas Weir Mitchell first coined the phrase "phantom limb" after the Civil War. In those preantibiotic days, gangrene was a common result of injuries, and surgeons sawed infected limbs off thousands of wounded soldiers. After amputation of movable, functional extremities, the phantom limb seems to be experienced in close to 100 per cent of cases. Oliver Sachs describes them as "fossil images" but explains them as the persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves, especially if there is formation of a neuroma in the stump. (see A Leg to Stand On, p.194,n.) (V. S. Ramachandran has convincingly shown that the locus of the phantom limb is in the brain, not near the hand or leg.
Read Morephase beauty
in metaphorical, theory
"A flowering spray of lily-of-the-valley exemplifies a growth gradient, after a simple fashion of its own. Along the stalk the growth-rate falls away; the florets are of descending age, from flower to bud; their graded differences of age lead to an exquisite gradation of size and form; the time-interval between one and another, or the "space-time relation" between them all, gives a peculiar beauty -- we may call it phase beauty - to the whole."
(D'Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form, page unknown, quoted in Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz, "Developmental Models of Multicellular Organisms", Artificial Life 2, p.230)
phase boundary
in theory, techno-science
A phase boundary separates different areas of phase space, for example the region of ordered dynamics from the region of chaotic dynamics. The region at or near this boundary is described as the complex area or regime.
philosophical space
in theory, philosophy
According to Egyptian myth, space only came into being when the god of air, Shu, parted the earth from the sky by stepping between them. The creation of a vast gap between earth and sky was called chaos in Hesiod's Cosmogony. In the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu addressed the role, in fact the superiority of the contained over the container, of the space within, of the immaterial.
Read Morephilosophy / chaos
in philosophy, theory
Within the Western tradition, chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, the unordered. Hesiod in the Theogony designates Chaos as that which existed before anything else, when the universe was in a completely undifferentiated state. Later in the Theogony , he uses the term chaos to signify the gap that appeared when Heaven separated from Earth. Eros appears in that gap as rain/semen. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, see in Hesiod's account of chaos, not disorder, "not the eternal precondition of a differentiated world, but a modification of that precondition." (p.39)
Read Moreplane of immanence
in philosophy, theory
For D+G, philosophy is at once the creating of concepts and instituting of the plane of immanence. (What is Philosophy?, p.41) (see also science / philosophy) According to Deleuze, " Immanence is the very vertigo of philosophy." (Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 180, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, "Absolute Immanence" in Potentialities, p. 226) Giorgio Agamben, calls Deleuze's book, What is Philosophy?, the theory of this vertigo.
Read Morepopular culture
in theory
In " Avant-Garde and Kitsch", Clement Greenberg describes a second new cultural phenomenon that appeared in the industrial West: Kitsch. For Greenberg, the new urban masses lost their taste for the folk culture of the countryside, discovered a new capacity for boredom, and set up a pressure on society to provide them with a culture fit for their own consumption. For Greenberg, Kitsch is produced by a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry and erases the values that permit distinctions between good and bad art.
population/typological
One of the changes in biological thinking brought on by Darwinism is the replacement of the typological thought of the morphological rationnalists by the "population thinking" of the current neo-Darwinist synthesis.
Traditional Biology seeks to be a science of forms. The Linnean hierarchy, which is more empirical that rational, seeks to classify forms through a structure of nested classes (taxa) of the traditional, Aristotelian kind, whose members are individual organisms. In this system, a "higher" taxon can be said to be more 'abstract' in relation to a lower one, requiring fewer properties for membership and with a greater extension. But according to Driesch, the Linnean hierachies of genera and species were only related on the basis of empirical abstraction, not on the kind of fundamental concepts that carry principles of division and allow for a rational systematics. In the latter case, according to Driesch, "The so-called ' genus' ... then embraces all its 'species' in such a manner that all peculiarities of the species are represented already in properties of the genus." (The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, p.245)
power
in theory
For Foucault, every relation between forces is a "power relation." Power is not essentially repressive. It is practiced before it is possessed, and it passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters. Therefore we should ask: "How is it practiced?" It is a physics of abstract action. (Deleuze, Foucault, p. 72)
praxis
The tradition of Platonic and idealistic philosophy separates theory from practice in much the same way as it does mind from body, privileging in both cases the "conceptual" (or moral) over the "material".
Praxis philosophies give primacy to a theory of action. The original expression is Aristotle's and refers to a symbolically meaningful activity, whose very doing, not its result, is the fulfillment of a cultural commitment. It can be defined as meaning rather than function.
For the Frankfurt school in its earlier period, prior to 1937, truth was defined as "a moment of correct praxis." Subsequently, in the face of Fascism and Stalinism, the relation between theoretical truth and the political praxis of specific social groups began to appear increasingly remote.
Read Moreprobability
in theory
In his apology for "personal knowledge," Michael Polanyi describes probability as expectation, and surprise as the inverse of probability. (cf information)
He points out that a probability statement cannot be contradicted by the events. Contradiction can only be established by a personal act of appraisal which rejects certain possibilities as being too improbable to be entertained as true. (pp 20 - 24)
Proprioceptive: sense
The proprioceptive sense informs us about the position of our own limbs in relation to one another and to the space around us. Its sensations come from the muscles and tendons and are not localized. The proprioceptive and tactile sensations combine to constitute the haptic. Proprioceptive feedback is an important developmental component in the sense of agency.
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.