(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

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In the last third of his seminar on four discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, Analysis), the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, turned to the matter of the small appliance that, through its curiously attractive utility, subjected users to a web of interconnections that interpellated them technologically, politically, and mentally. This web was, he explained, like the spheres of air surrounding land and water and creating their weather and “time” (temps) but with its own geometry of effectiveness, an “a–sphere” whose non-Euclidean topology came with properties of self–intersection and non-orientation that constituted a “second virtuality of effectiveness.” The a–sphere is not a synonym for the technology of the Internet but, rather, a theoretical blue–print for how technology operates, at all levels and all senses, as a “counter–intelligence.” As Norbert Wiener, the inventor of cybernetics argued very early, machine intelligence exists prior to the mechanisms invented to extend it, but the principle of evolution is the same. While AI tends to increased complexity, it simultaneously locks itself into its own devolution. The same is true, Wiener argued, of the human brain, whose very precautions to preserve a “neurotic stability” insured the cataclysm of psychosis. I would wish to continue this idea in terms of “ordinary psychosis,” seen in light of gadgets, hand-held devices, and strategic operational transformations (such as global positioning), which operationalise the function and effectiveness of the “lathouse,” Lacan’s term for the local instance of the alethosphere. I will attach this “modular” of lathouse/alethosphere to Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum and the everyday object.