Is that a real theory, or did you make that up?

I like reading Lacan.

Not always mind you.

Not with some desperate impulse barking at my neck, some super-Ego stand-in demanding that I finish a paper or rebut a critique or otherwise pronounce authoritatively upon (& cite of course!) to demonstrate my worth for the big(bloated)Other in some fashion.

But I find just how freakily bizarre Lacan can be, rather… awe-inspiring.

That so much of his work is spoken opens a particular door to it that I often stand in, looking, and wondering (through the haze of multiple English renderings with my non-French eyes) from the improvising poets' room (my room) into Lacan's (as I imagine it) and feeling as if I know something about how things must just have just started to come out - like a tap being turned on, the pipes creak, then you're talking - and it is not as if one is not thinking all the while (in fact it is challenging to think on one's feet, in one's mouth), but to say that one is magisterially directing with knowledge aforethought each utterance in accordance with some grander argument is perhaps even more absurd (noodle in a pincushion) than to suggest that no thought is being exercised in this process. 

O'Hara

Much more like Frank O'Hara than anyone will probably credit, Jacques is going on his nerve.

Or so it seems to me.

But Lacanians, or such has been my experience, are not comfortable focusing overmuch on his seminars or writings as embodying a poetics - as if to find in the language something not importantly content-relevant and connectable to one's real or imagined internal map of Lacanian thought consigns whatever it is to frivolity. 

I see no necessary contradiction with desiring to both make use of the generative charge of Lacan's poetics - a position which would start with him but go wherever, and another which thinks that attempting to tune him in as best as one is able (an endless and recursive process) is important regardless of whether one ultimately 'agrees' and this attempt is an aid to the very generativity of the poetics.

In correspondence recently with my sis, where I was thinking through some of this same stuff somewhat otherwise, I wrote this;

[Lacan's] poetics i do not talk about but simply use, a poetics that is generative (for me at least) and about which i do not have much of anything to say, though there is endlessly something more one can do with it - "doings" which could never have been predicted entirely from knowledge of Lacan, hence the 'generative'

were the generative poetics not present, then the "specific rigor" [of my approach to Lacan's work, her description] would never have taken hold, nor would giving 2 shits about Lacan in all likelihood

in a very similar way (abstracted from the specific contents); 

i hold you to a higher standard - because i love you

None of which should suggest that my reading and thinking and experience of Lacan is not conflicted and ambivalent in many ways. 

That is, in spite of having found ways to enjoy, I am not immune to the suggestion that something crucial is being said, that he is on the verge of giving us the key to grasping it all - and thus of the need (it could strike at any moment!) to be able to bring the lights up, stand, face the group and say "What Lacan means is…"

And this is surely required if one is to accord with the general demands of the University discourse,.. that flash of mastery "What Lacan means…" - as fleeting as a grimace - is quickly diffused with more and more knowledge, tied to the master's words with citation and exegesis, propped up further by pointing at other names who read him in a similar way.

But saying "What Lacan means…" is a rather secondary if not tertiary posture of mastery already, one that any 'Agent S2' in an actual university setting sneaks up on rather than blurting out in most cases, laying all the bricks of justification and citation before daring to pronounce. 

Obviously - in the tone if not the substance - there is something about this which is displeasing to me, constraining.

There is a poetics in that too I guess, but it isn't one that presses my buttons and - as JL himself argues in Seminar XVII apropos the University discourse. 

"…the difficulty endemic to translating me into academic language will also blight anyone who, for whatever reason, tries their hand at it…" 

"Blight" is an interesting choice - and of course that is Grigg, the translator's choice and I do not have the French original to ponder.

Rather we are to be agents of the S2, knowledge purveying a unique packaging (dare I say brand) of some concatenation of 'a stupid' of signifiers, made to appear to have a meaning and should the they be truly classic, the might simply seem to be their meaning (two echoes there might be worth thinking about sometime, not now).

This unique packaging should be reflected on the c.v.,.. naturally.

Brand Lowther (includes the award-wishing Lowther Method ®™)

Google > Image "brand lowther" gave me this pic and this caption;
"As you might expect, Lowther-based loudspeakers were much in evidence at the show. A pair of vintage Lowthers was spotted in the Lowther America room." Now I want a vintage Lowther loudspeaker!

Superego says: [sigh]

So, I like the idea of having a specific rigor, it sounds so butch but maybe we could spin it nicely if the license that the poetic provides is available as a consequence.

There is an ethics there and one not totally unlike that involved in staging a Return to… the text of someone or other.

Which is not to even pretend that the poetics that I find generative would have found favor with Lacan or that he'd even agree that it is there in his work, just that I feel pieces of it there.

"Poetics" here having less to do with words-language-discourse as such as with the ways of working with them, actual practices but also the stances towards the materials would seem to be important.

Since I am already risking an opposition between the poetic and the academic 'Lacans' let me also not forget the clinical one - arguably the one most crucial for Lacan himself from the beginning to the end of his career. 

My hope to tune Jacques in as best as I can as well as to find the points where more thinking is needed, extensions proposed, modification seems necessary, etc - This is where it shades over into the poetics (theory is then improvised and maybe not scrapped after) (this is very like poetry for me, a poem is written or spoken and later one decides… Not all of them can work. Plus if you aren't failing often then you can't be trying very hard. Sometimes they come in bunches, interrelated but distinct and they keep coming for as long as they keep coming and no longer.) to do perhaps with the way the concepts interact, how they fit together and don't, how they unsettle one another or create tensions, the sorts of narratives that emerge from them, a sense (ultimately my own, and not exactly anything I could argue for) of the propulsion or internal dynamics of this as poetics that makes it available for use.

But, just to make matters more impossible(?), it seems to me that whether some modification to the theory is to be justified as "psychoanalytic" in a meaningful sense of that term, then it would also need, at the bare minimum, to not be armful or contraindicated or somesuch thing in the clinic.

No analysands were harmed in the making of this post (so far).

But yes, that is a tough one as I am not an analyst and never even completed my own analysis - though I do admit that I often wonder about becoming an analyst, being an analyst, ( I hear your slips of the tongue, I do, but have learned mostly to pretend I didn't) etc. 

So those are the three styles or modes that I try to keep in mind, the poetic, the 'specific rigor' (scholarship) & the clinic - the first I feel but have some difficulties explaining and do not really desire to try to explain very much - the second I am always trying to adapt to the specifics of university protocols and whatnot but which my allegiance to scholarly pursuits is not framed by those things (MLA format, disciplinary boundaries, peer review) but by the specific texts that I am excited by - and thirdly by my hallucination of the subject as analysand or analyst, my memories of my analysis and others I read about, my never-ending snooping around in my own associations, slips, dreams.

The weak link is the third one.

Which is not to say that the others are über-robust or anything.

Creeley, natch.

My subject line is a riff on the line that poet Robert Creeley so often repeated.

Creeley was reading somewhere - the midwest I think - and after his reading a man came up and asked him, in all seriousness "Is that a real poem or did you make that up?"

If we put theory in for "poem"…?

The whole problematic of the university discourse as discussed above is evoked once more.

Other jokes are possible.

But speaking as a poet I just want to say, 

That's a real theory

because

I made it up.

You talkin' to me?

Are we pathologizing yet? Lacan's structures of desire: Neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis

I know that this is going to be an issue I'll be forced to navigate, probably more than once, as I'm hoping I'll be able to argue the case that psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian articulations of it, have something useful to offer for thinking about trans subjectivity and embodiment (and about human subjectivity and embodiment more generally). That larger argument is likely not to take on much shape for some months to come, and may take years.      Who knows? 

Talkin' about my d-d-d-dissertation. 

But, given the justifiable intensity of negative responses on the part of trans people to the pathologizing discourses of psychiatry, medicine, and yes, that highly suspect brand of "psychoanalysis" which has become part of the ideological psychiatric state apparatus,.. psychodiagnostics might well be a hard sell. My basic contentions in regard to the psychic situation of trans people feel to me like they ought be utterly noncontroversial, even banal. Here are two of them (maybe all of them, actually);

* There is absolutely nothing inherently "dysfunctional" or "pathological" about being a trans person. Which is not to say that a trans person can't be bat shit crazy, just as, in principle, anybody can be bat shit crazy (I'm thinking of a GSU prof in the music department for example). 

* Psychoanalysts who would wish to claim that all trans people conform to any specific structure of desire (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are being very bad analysts. Just as not every person with bleach blond hair is going to be "conservative", nor is every person with a hairlip going to be "shy" nor is everyone who has had braces going to be "promiscuous". Every person's inhabitation of a structure of desire will be unique, even if those structures qua structures are of a somewhat limited number (neurosis, perversion, psychosis - with the subtypes; hysteria, obsession, paranoia…. sometimes phobia, sort of). I would argue that, if anyone, claiming to speak with analytic authority (already a dubious notion) insists that all of any possible demographic set of people are going to share a single configuration with regard to their desire, that this cannot be anything other than an imaginarization of that "analyst", an elaboration of their own fantasmatic investments in their object of study (those folks they are charged with helping). Certainly these same analysts would be up in arms about my failure to appreciate the uniqueness and specificity of each subject were I to suggest that all heterosexuals or all men were perverts, psychotics or any one structure. 

Weirdly though (sadly, depressingly) there is lot of both of these things going on in the psychoanalytic lit on trans, giving the banalities stated above something of a radical character. Weird, huh? (not that there are any psychoanalysts listening) The commonest reference points are psychosis and hysteria, but I have also seen perversion and phobia suggested. The very plurality of these claims ought to raise some suspicions even before evaluating them. Applied as such, this very much deserves the name of pathologization and it is against the spirit of psychoanalytic thought as I understand it, in that psychoanalysis is not an agent of normalization. If it is used as such, it becomes something else, something other than psychoanalysis (for me at least, we can argue it elsewhere).

But this is where it also gets complicated and fraught for a number of reasons and reasons which ought not be swept under the rug. 

Before thinking about what might be problematic about the following psychodiagnostic categories, I'm going to try to give a brief overview of what I take the Lacanian position about structures of desire to be.  I'll be speaking out of the bag here, not running about like a good grad student and looking for other people who have said similar things to convince you that I am not wrong. How bout you decide?

The different structures of desire are all responses to the impossibility, once we have become speaking beings, of signification ever equalling being. Or we might think of this as a response to language's inability to capture being. There are thus three basic responses to this impossibility and the discomfort/suffering, etc that it imposes. We can deny it and construct any number of fantasies which resituate it not as forever lost (as it is) but as having been stolen, or mislaid, or forbidden or whatever. That would be the neurotic response. Or we can disavow that this happened, a sort of "I know it is lost but it isn't really lost" claim which allows that the subject can be the object, or control the object. This is the perverse response. Or, finally, one can foreclose. That is, one can rule out in advance that there could ever be any signification or even recognition of the loss of being that language entails. The response, in essence, forecloses the Symbolic by means of reducing it to the Imaginary. This is the psychotic response. 

While Freud and certain other analysts have speculated or even insisted that analysis is irrelevant to those with a perverse or psychotic structure, Lacan disagrees. At issue is simply that 99% of what we think of as analytic technique is actually more accurately described as "the technique of the clinic of neurosis". I saw it suggested that to proceed with a psychotic's analysis as if they were a neurotic could in fact be actively detrimental to them. 

Now, a few more points to remember when thinking about psychodiagnostics and lacanian nosological categories.

1. For Lacan there is no "normal" space to occupy. In fact normality as a concept, reference point or standard is absent from Lacan's theory.

2. To be a subject of desire is not a "pathology" because there is no normal against which one would have to judge to say that this or that sort of desiring structure was a deviation and hence, pathological.

3. To be a neurotic does not require that incessant and endless doubts a la Woody Allen (but without the humor) be manifested at the level of someone's everyday behavior. To be a pervert does not require that this subject have anything at all to do with fetishism or any of the sexual practices that we mark as perverse in the vernacular. To be a psychotic does not require that this subject is a raving looney, speaking in nothing but inscrutable babble and unable to make use of logic or reasoning, ever. 

No, the donut is not a fetish.

i. Neurosis is said to be the most common structure. It's central anxiety, that which it doubts most, appears in the form of a question and this question is said to vary whether one is hysteric or obsessional. The hysteric wonders "am I a man or a woman?" and desires to know just what being this or that means (thus we see the denial I mentioned above, the neurotic persists in denying that being can be captured in words). The obsessional asks "am I alive or am I dead?" which is again a question which demands that life (read: being) be given a definitive meaning (i.e., made dead, like the letter). 

ii. Perversion is marked by a kind of certainty (of course it isn't, but IT IS nonetheless) and this certainty is about the object. The pervert knows that they are the object of the Other's jouissance. Cops, judges, military - these are prime perverse life paths as they afford endless opportunities to be the instrument of the big Other's (largely painfully exacted) enjoyment. "Of course I know that I am not the agent of the Other's jouissance, but feel how much the Other enjoys when I punish the lawbreakers!"

Hi, I'm feeling both ordinary
& a wee bit psychotic

iii. Psychosis too has a sort of certainty involved, though it is different in character I think. To play it out in an impossible monologue, we might imagine it like this; "No object can be lost." But when we speak of psychosis as well as the word "psychotic," in the popular mind, this means raving psychopath or serial killer or some such thing. This is not what it means to Lacan. I've long wondered about the psychic state of the psychotic who has not had a dramatic "psychotic break". I understand that J-A.Miller and perhaps others have written some about this under the heading "ordinary psychosis" but I have not read any of this work. Suffice to say that most psychotic subjects are not in a psychotic break at all times, rather contingent factors in their may lives provoke such an event by undermining the master signifiers that allow psychotic subjects to operate in the social world. I see no way to sustain an argument about whether or not most psychotic subjects will or will not ever have a psychotic break during their lifetimes, but my ungrounded hunch is that a great many never do and probably have as good a chance as any other sort of subject of being a "productive member of society"  (or whatever)

4. No structure is immune to being shaken. The psychotic break is surely dramatic (at least in one's imagination, if not always in "reality") but neurotics have break-downs and perverts undoubtedly as well. Likewise the implicit or explicit valuations that one now and then hears applied to one or another structure - hysteria, perversion and, via Deleuze and Guatarri "schizophrenia" (as a brand of psychosis) - which then get championed as somehow exceptional and radical and the path toward the future. I call bunk on all that. It's divisive, potentially abjecting, and simply wrong. It is not unlike the reverse image of the blanket claim that all trans people are ______…. just as ill-founded and just as un-psychoanalytic. A psychotic break is serious business, no doubt, and that it has such marked effects on language is fascinating as well. I do not know as much about psychosis as I would like, but I strongly suspect that the world has known serial killers and sociopaths who were neurotic or perverse.

5. Who is psychodiagnostics for? Seriously. How would you answer that? Here is who it is not for: the analysand. If in your analysis you and your analyst are going round and round about whether you are an hysteric or an obsessional you are not having an analysis, you are aiding in your own pathologization or you're engaged perhaps in some bassakward sort of analytic game. Psychodiagnostics is a guide for the analyst. But in principle, every analysis must have the potential to reconfigure what we understand of the theory. Psychodiagnostics in that perspective would then be a way for them to assess, as best they can, which structure this analysand might be and to adjust their clinical method accordingly, because, as noted above, simply applying the clinical methods of the clinic of neurosis to perverse or psychotic subjects would likely be ineffective (with the perverse) or even detrimental (for psychotics). Given this, when looking to psychoanalysis to help one think through one's dreams or to try to understand others or to provide a gloss on film, it pays to be much more circumspect that most (non-clinical?) Lacanians are wont to be. If a good analyst does not ever tell an analysand You Are This (hysteric, obsessional, perverse, psychotic)!  I would suggest that even if one is not an analyst that a similar restraint and attendance to the unique specifics of oneself, others, or cultural texts guided by, but never ruled through psychoanalytic theory, is actually more psychoanalytic than the reverse would be.

Now, I've kinda shot my wad already - but I promised to consider these nosological categories critically as well, so here goes…

Each of these terms is fraught with difficulties, some internal to psychoanalysis and many external. Hysteria evokes centuries of pathologizing of women and indeed is tied quite firmly - even in Lacan - to feminine subjects, even if those terms, for Lacan, do not denote the same things they do for others - but this is much of the problem! too many competeing claims on a term. Perversion is heavily overdetermined in a whips and chains direction in the popular mind, but from what I understand about the BDSM scene - specifically of ideas like the 'safe word' or the practice of having a contract about the activities to come (pun?) would incline me to suspect that the majority of the folks engaged in such activities are not perverts at all. If the perverse subject acts as the instrument of the big Other's enjoyment, no contract with a mere so-n-so sort of other, or 'safe word' will place a limit on the jouissance of the Other. In fact the very offering up of oneself for "punishment" might negate the potential of it taking place if the other subject is truly perverse. & as noted, psychosis collocates with sociopath and psychopath and serial killer and lunatic and it is nearly unimaginable that a notion like that of "ordinary psychosis" will counter the gravitational push and pull of the established social meanings.

At issue, perhaps, is whether one wishes to talk psychoanalysis only with insiders, or whether one might wish to be able to bring psychoanalysis to those who know none of the terminology and who thus are NOT going to hear these terms as meant by Lacan without an enormous amount of groundwork being laid. Groundwork that will need to be laid again and again with each new person. (& if you think these are thorny issues, wait until you ponder sexuation and Lacan's understanding of the words Man, Woman, Masculine, and Feminine - and prepare for a bit of mind fuck if they are new to you).

Is there any solution to this? 

One could simply foreclose psychoanalysis I guess.

One could attempt to clarify the structure, dynamics and functioning of these terms and propose other ways to name them. This looks like the best strategy to me, but it is not an easy road either. 

If this woman can get a snake to drink
milk out of a straw, surely I can convince
someone to give psychoanalysis
another hearing...

& here is another wrinkle, at a tangent from the above. Per Lacan, once we adopt a structure as the basic template for our desirous relations, we are stuck there. So, once a perv, always a perv. But I find myself wondering about that. That is, for some time I entertained the idea that the psychotic break might very well be visited on anyone, and that it would at that moment impose a psychotic structure upon what had been a neurotic or perverse subject. I say this due to personal experience to a degree, when something heavily invested falls, when that S1 is undermined and no longer ties anything down... these moments can be harrowing, the values of all things seem suspended. Then, what are to we to make of the claim - relevant to the clinic of neurosis - that the analysand must becomes hystericized? If, said of an hysteric analysand, what does this mean exactly? & if said of an obsessional, ditto. (I think that this refers not to structure but to discourse, per seminar xvii, but I might be wrong). & then what about perverse enjoyment, that is when we enjoy seeing someone being subjected to the law "they got what they deserved!"… does this implicate the subject in a perverse structure in any way or not, perhaps because it is not that enjoying subject who imposes the law upon the transgressor?  Or, more succinctly - how do we know that subjects are forever tied to one and only one structure? What havoc would it play with the theory if we proposed that subjects - in certain very specific situations - might move from one structure to another? Would this be a useful flexibility or a monkey wrench into the clinical theory?

Done.                   (dang, close to 2,500 words)

Could I talk my dissertation into being?

I heard last night of a professor that I know who had planned to write a dissertation with a model like this:

Theoretical chunk

3-4 chapters using the theory to read Lit

Conclusion

… but then… clarifying the theory bit and answering to questions put to him about that turned it into the dissertation. 

… I heard two others remark, bemusedly, that their dissertations were Five Paragraph Expository Essays writ large, structurally speaking. 

… "You can never explain too much" another said. 

Then I made various raunchy insinuations about footnotes, none of which are pertinent here.

But somehow, I want to do all the shit that they tell you not to do. 

Think of it as a book not a diss.

Structure it in a more complex way, such that, perhaps, it has something of a method for its movement from idea to idea, or, going further into poetics, it makes use of prompts, is constructed off the page as a series of improvisations and then transcrib-o-formed into something which captures part of my speech patterns as certain poems have done. (that last act connects to many things i have thought about voice, see below).

Could a text be structured topologically? what the fuck does that mean? 

Could I, in significant part (if not all or most) talk my dissertation into being?

. . . quasi Antin perhaps, but I'd have something of a course plotted, a lattice of ideas on a page that would be there to refer to, even the loosey goosey 'word cloud' would do the job.

I'd ask if my theory friends would like to start a salon, but wait - I've tried that. or it was a journal (still a good idea). 

                             video?          hello youtube? 

Can one do a dissertation refusing an endpoint, any specific goal and instead grow something until it feels done? (this is again garden variety assemblage/method poetics, but telos is hard to find here)

the Tractatus is a rather austere model - but I'm thinking of some principle of connection and collocation which would be used to assemble as many small and tightly contained 'chunks' )technical term for poets, you might not know it( these generated as needed to perform tasks, exemplification, context creation, linkage, concept creation, concept deployment, object analysis, image analysis, relational analysis (those last three - read them as real, imaginary, symbolic?) … various functions are determined to be needed here here and here, chunks which perform these functions are sorted into the places. Then if the chunks are quasi-transcriptions, tightened into ecrit...

Ok, so then… 

Way back when on the blog, I had this post wondering about dissertation stuff and I took a pot shot at what a trajectory through it might've involved. Here it be (note the implicit 5 para essay vibe as well):

Language Embodied / Embodied Language 

• What psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan preeminently, have to contribute to understanding the body's imbrication in language. 

• Voice, a unique site of interface between the two, particularly at its more extreme points or edges - sound poetry, glossolalia, aphasias, psychosis as well as in modes which diminish the sense of subjective engagement as with routinized and depersonalized speech or parapraxes as discussed by Freud and others.

• Voice as object.

• Speech (parole) vs Langue, as well as Speech as semiosis (ala Peirce).

It seems to me that this offers at least the potential to allow for some discussion of art (if I limit to performance art or sound art that uses voice), film (obviously, though the devil will be in the details), fiction (this is less obvious, perhaps there are pioneering studies to be made of author's reading their work? the text-heavy and disembodied nature of most fiction is harder to envision in this daydream I am having), and, without any difficulty, poetry (the biggest challenge here perhaps being that I've tended to avoid writing about the stuff I love the most, not wanting to link it to the dynamics of the academic economy).

There is some of this that I still have a big pull toward. By tags; Body, Voice, Speech all with Psychoanalysis obviously. The ways that we can see, measure, otherwise discern or perhaps only posit upon the body itself the effects of language (as it is treated here) but ultimately the effects of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The object voice - voice as objet a - as Real. Voice as unique intersection of language and body, voice in the three orders… that sort of thing. 

Hi, I'm Charles Peirce.

I don't get into it above but when I mention Peirce I was think about ways to use Peirce as an alternative vocabulary for discussing speech. That book call The Machinery of Talk by Anne Freadman - there was something I read in that that made me think of other ways than Saussure and Jakobson to talk about speech, still using the idea of the chain and of the automaton - but ditching the X Y axes of the formalist/structuralist style. 

Charles Peirce en femme
Google -> Image :
"charles peirce"

What I'm shying away from at present is certain ways of talking about language, and even more of using the various awkward or technical argots of the many regional discourses or disciplines that already have their own distinctly regional investments in language as the pre-eminent object of interest, or that through which all else must be filtered, or both. That is, a definite demoting of language as the privileged prism through which to grok everything else. It has its place, but maybe it's a place best thought of as but one ring out of a borromean chain (minimum is three rings, but in principle there is no limit to how many rings).

What has changed is the routes taken toward the body. 

I spent some months reading things about brains. Neuroplasticity. There are posts here, look if you care. & I lined up some books by the neuropsychoanalytic folks really and truly intending to read them when I swerved into another territory and suddenly I was reading about sex and gender as lens on the body and then just for their own sakes, and then something tripped me into reading specifically about transgender issues - I think it was coming upon Please Select Your Gender (Patricia Gherovici) on Karnac's site and then getting it and that sent me deeper into trans stuff on the one hand and coincidentally Dean's Beyond Sexuality has a chapter on trans, and off I went on another book buying spree. & other stuff too, more than can be mentioned here etc.

Bzzzzzz Bzzzzzzz

Am still wondering about my pre-order that keeps getting delayed of that book by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou which promises to be smart, psychoanalytic and all about brain stuff and neuroscience and philosophy and what not. 

So, not ruling out a bit of neuro/psycho-analytic input (broadly construed).

But it seems much more immediately of interest to think about what in a recent post, I called the trans effect, would be upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically in so far as it addresses itself to the body and voice. 

& with regard to the readings of texts. I'm torn. I see the utility of that endeavor - at least relative to certain kinds of jobs - but then again, I have never had any real idea about what job I might get with what I do, and the whole poetry backdoor plan is also there and not forgotten. (Not that it is a golden parachute or any thing like that). But, wrt "readings" again, I'd much rather do 20 small ones, that were machines of exemplification or problematization of the theory - rather than being theoretical explications of the texts in question. (off the top of my head, I have the analysts discourse in Faulkner's The Hamlet, lots of things I could still do with Black Hole, there is Inland Empire to draw from I guess, my queer reading of Malina, could it not also be a trans reading to a small degree (is Ich, the woman "trapped inside the body" of Malina, a man?), I could do many things with Spicer possibly again working with lacanian discourses and or with Peirce, The Limits of Control and the desire of the Other?, & somewhere I do want to get pooperific - not just as a nod to Cal's interests either (tho, it will serve that purpose) but to work with abjection and thus to be able to highlight processes which produce abjection in others (like the Master's, but potentially other discourses as well) which is surely pertinent to trans people who are targeted rather mercilessly in precisely those ways. I could go on.

Echt!

If I did this tomorrow, would it sound like a different dissertation entirely? 

[things largely left out - Queer theory, Sexuation/Sexual Difference vs Gender / Sex, Ideology Critique, ...oops]