I) Wittgenstein: From language games to forms of life

or when a tiger might talk to a salmon

 

In this first class, we'll dip our toes into the water with some talk about Wittgenstein's understanding of language as always being intimately tied to what he called a a 'form of life'. We'll bridge the gap from last year's work on the infinite game of discourse towards the work we're going to engage in this year on practice and organizational structure and the sort of cultural chaos that slight alterations in a form of life can unleash into the spaces of meaning made up by art, literature, technology and other forms of language. Along the way we'll get our first taste of the rhizome idea with a bit of thinking about interspecies communication and question of just what language is in the first place. Introduce yourself to the menagerie at our first session and come away with a map of the (very near) future.

 

II) Freud: Psychoanalysis is a practice

or lie down and talk

 

We'll get our hands dirty this week with our plunge into the murky waters of the origins of Freud's psychoanalytic procedure, with a run through of the evolution of Charcot's hypnotism into the stripped down simplicity of a chair, a couch, two human beings and one voice in a room that becomes, through the twists and turns of history, a kind of center of the world. We'll look at the crucial role played by the first few psychoanalytic subjects, Joyce's stream of consciousness, Catholic confession, the ancient meditative tradition and the silence of God. There's almost no way it could be boring, so don't you dare miss it!

 

III) Freud: Psychoanalysis is a social structure

or the secret committee

 

With the analyst's office settled, we'll take a look at the way that node grows its roots, with an investigation into the training of psychoanalysts, the minor revolutions that they lead against Freud as the Oedipal-father-phallus-hero-god-king and the circle of dogmatists Freud establishes as a bureaucratic phylactery in an attempt to maintain his control over the community from beyond the grave. We'll talk about pyramid schemes, the illuminati, academia, and paranoiac structures of all kinds. Become a member of the deluminati and learn how heresy is the greatest form of flattery. How could you spend Sunday afternoon doing anything else?

 

IV) Derrida: Its the text, stupid!

or the thing about keyboards

 

As we move from Germany to France, we'll hit things off with a look at Derrida's psychoanalytic argument in Of Grammatology that speech is to writing as sex is to masturbation and how the resulting repression of the idea of writing in the history of Western Thought™ has gotten our notion of what language is into a terrible muddle. This class will focus in on the practice of interpretation and the myriad of problems that come along with the task of actually analyzing anything at all. Derrida threw a Molotov cocktail into the Academy and the fires he started are still burning, come dance in the flames and catch some archive fever. This text is a spoken one and you can become a part of it if only you get your body into the classroom, we'll see you and hear you there!

 

V) Lacan: in the master's voice

or another time and place

 

Lacan was Guattari's psychoanalyst and the leader of a revolution in the heart of Paris, we'll shake hands with his ghost and listen to him speak English through a schizophrenic radio, learn what it means to count all over again, and begin the process of befriending this self-professed psycho. As Heidegger said, he may be the only analyst who is himself in need of an analyst, and he's smack dab in the center of our story. You only get to meet the undead every so often, so don't miss your chance!

 

VI) Lacan: The Short Session and Excommunication

or variations on the standard treatment

 

This week we'll look into just how and why Lacan got himself kicked out of the psychoanalytic establishment with his changes to the standard psychoanalytic treatment. Going from a fifty minute session to a variable length session turns out to be a tiny change that unleashes total havoc on the psychoanalytic community, and we'll look at how Heidegger's notion of the always present possibility of death along with Freud's own attempts to speed up the analytic process inspire Lacan to become the headless king of a dark castle. The manufacture of mystics has long been a mystery, we'll see if there's a chance that Lacan actually solved the case. It'll only happen once.

 

VII) Lacan: Signifier over Signified

or simply symbol-ic

 

Lacan's Hegelian and Saussurean roots come to the fore as we look at his analysis of the structure of desire and the predominance of the symbolic as the thing-in-and-for-itself comes to overtake both the imaginary and the real. Learn some topology, some set theory, some symbolic logic, and some phenomenology. More info packed into an afternoon than your head can handle. Overflow with us and enjoy the beautiful puddles we leave behind.

 

VIII) Deleuze and Guatarri: Anti-Oedipus

or variations on the standard treatment

 

We enter the home stretch with an introduction to schizoanalysis, a breakdown of the heterogeneous assemblages of desiring machines and a crash course in chaosophy. We'll find out what Philip K. Dick, Finnegan's Wake, Lord Schreber and Kafka have to do with 21st century psychology, philosophy, economy and global politics. Schiz out and become a body without organs, all on a Sunday afternoon.

 

XI) Deleuze and Guatarri: Rhizome

or what we are here

 

The introduction of //1000 Plateaus// is probably one of the most widely read chunks of one of the most difficult books on the face of the earth. We'll make sense of it, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty meant by //sens//. Becoming-rhizome is only the beginning, not 'one of us' but many together. Be fruitful and multiply, live with (not in) the word. Join us on the Plateau and get ready to jump to the next one!

 

X) Free Box. A Desiring Machine.

or the keep portland weird routine

 

This class will be field work in the realm of schizoanalysis, taking a look at a few of the desiring machines that make Portland Portland. Come wander through the streets and alleys of a great big hyper-complex rhizome that all of us are already part of. See your home town in a brand new way, and wrap up this journey with a micro-cosmic journey of your own.