#simon mackmin

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Lacan comments, in Encore (1999, p.97), that ‘The foundation of knowledge is that the jouissance of its exercise is the same as that of its acquisition’. According to Soler (2016, p.111) this ‘can mean only one thing: there is neither loss nor entropy. A signifier that has been transformed into jouissance in the process of its acquisition – in other words that has become an element of knowledge – will be enjoyed with the same jouissance (that is without loss) in the exercise of knowledge’. Thus, the elements of lalangue, whether letters or signs, are enjoyed and re-enjoyed without loss. ‘This’, says Soler (2016, p.112), ‘is a different constant than that of the joui-sense-laden fundamental fantasy’. This is a departure from the hegemony of the unary trait/signifier that indexes an experience for the first time, thus producing a loss. This process, as we know, causes object (a) to be subtracted, the loss thus perpetuated in the jouissance of repetition. It seems that the elements of lalangue, in the form of letters or signs, are enjoyed and re-enjoyed in the autistic subjects’ inventions, without such a loss. It is the fact that they are enjoyed without loss which perhaps is the critical aspect of the superior homeostasis described by Miller (2019, p.147). Belief in the real unconscious i.e. in knowledge that is enjoyed in the real outside of meaning, is the precondition, ‘for one to be able to identify with the symptom, with the constant in which one cannot believe and yet forces itself upon one and is experienced – either in exultation or fascination (in the case of James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake) or, on the contrary and more generally speaking, in horror or execration. Unless one manages, in the end, to make it one’s own perhaps even with a certain amount of enthusiasm’ (Soler, 2016, p.112). This horror and execration can be seen in Grandin, Joey and Charlie, prior to the evolution of the sinthome, which is an engineered subjectivity that is fully one’s own. In terms of coherence, this represents a gradual process, from total chaos and overwhelming affect to a local coherence, which constitutes a temporary localisation and relief, and finally to the refined sinthomatic invention, which constitutes a global coherence that ‘takes within its parentheses life in its entirety’ (Miller, 2011, p.62).

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Satisfaction jouissance

Here jouissance has been afforded a ‘second status’ in Lacan’s teaching (Miller, 2019, p.147). The first status is the status of ‘excess jouissance’ that must be distinguished from pleasure. Pleasure in the Freudian sense translates to a state of homeostasis. This state is interrupted by the object (a) that exceeds the limits of well-being and pleasure. In the master’s discourse of Seminar XVII Lacan inserts this object into the structure of language, but by Seminar XX he ‘had to bring out an amorphous space where he placed jouissance (J), precisely to deny that one could imprison it in that way’. This is the point at which Lacan shifts to the topological structuring embodied in the structure of knots which have nothing to do with the structure of language (Miller, 2019, p.145). The second status of jouissance, which begins in Seminar XX: Encore, is the ‘satisfaction jouissance’ which, according to Miller (2019, p.147), is ‘not at all the jouissance of the previous status’. The satisfaction jouissance is the restoration of a ‘superior homeostasis under the guise of a functioning, that includes the excess, that routinises it. It is what Lacan calls the sinthome’ (Miller, 2019, p.147). Miller (2019, p.147) represents this as follows, with homeostasis represented by ‘an arrow that loops into a circle’.

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What is clear in Lacan’s configuration is that the anxieties lie outside of meaning but not outside of the body. The real outside of the symbolic does not manifest as a ‘Joui-sens’, Lacan’s term for enjoyment of meaning, which can be linked to the truth sought out in one’s biography, life narrative and in analysis (Soler, 2016). Its manifestation is in the affect of anxiety, in the symptom, or both. Soler refers to this as the manifestation of ‘a jouissance that is already denatured – in other words, marked and fixated by the very ‘moteriality’ of lalangue’ (Soler, 2016, p.43). The term ‘moteriality’ is a condensation of ‘mot’ (word) and materiality and indicates the coming together of two things that lie outside of meaning i.e. ‘the enjoying substance and lalangue’ (Soler, 2016, p.43). As previously stated, lalangue is real and not symbolic. It is a multitude of elements that convey no meaning ‘each being able to receive a plethora of meanings depending on the different linguistic constructions in which they are used’ (Soler, 2016, p.43). Science, of course, offers its own ‘plethora’ of ways of making sense. As I attempted to indicate by placing the sinthomatic knot over JA, (a) and sense, the letter of science and the quantification it facilitates, can form a particular structure or subjective algorithm in which the elements of lalangue are manifest. When the subject refers to him or herself as an automaton, a computer or a cyborg, we are in the ballpark of the mathematical being, where the letter mediates the way in which lalangue effects the body as enjoying substance (Soler, 2016). It is a delusion of calculus.

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‘Meaning is essentially satisfaction, meaning is jouissance. Nothing decides meaning, I could say, if not satisfaction. What do we call understanding? If I had to be quick about it, I would say that to understand is to be content. Sometimes we are contented with having understood nothing. But to understand has an essential connection with being content. The question of interpretation – the question what does it mean? – opens onto explanations, onto translations extending to infinity. When do we stop explaining? When the other admits to being content. In interpretation it is a case of finding out at which point the subject is satisfied, at which point the question of the meaning of meaning becomes ridiculous. The meaning of meaning is jouissance’ (Miller, 2019(b), p.37).

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Ten years after his seminar on Anxiety (1962-63), in Encore, Lacan extended his thesis in terms of affects that are related to the real. He called these affects enigmatic affects; ‘they too, attest to the fact that the subject is approaching something real’ (Soler, 2016, p.102). Enigmatic affects, ‘which are effects of the unknown knowledge residing in lalangue’, are revelatory, in that they attest to the irreducibility of the unconscious as lalangue (Soler, 2016, p.102). An enigmatic affect attests to its function as a sign of lalangue when it becomes a mystery to the subject. In talking about elementary phenomena Miller (2005) tells us that all S1’s are elementary initially because they do not know what they signify until they are grounded by an S2. Discourse produces many affects that one could class as standard, in that by organising shared experiences, it also programs shared affects, such as grief for example. ‘The individual unconscious and the truth of jouissance that it implies’, however, preside over affects not shared with others (Soler, 2016, p.104). We decipher the unconscious as language in a hypothetical way, but the undecipherable unconscious of lalangue is experienced via symptoms and subjective affects that remain incalculable. Therefore, I would say that some affects arise in the body as enigmatic but, as with Miller’s invention of delusion, they are located within a body of knowledge governed by the letter of science. Thus, while they remain outside of meaning, they are integrated into a functional and calculated structure that is enjoyed, that satisfies. As such, enigmatic affects attest to knowledge that remains foreign to the subject or more precisely to knowledge that is enjoyed. ‘In the enjoying, the conquest of this knowledge is renewed every time it is exercised’ (Soler, 2016, p.109). This is a second mode of belief which finds enjoyment of the real outside meaning. It creates a new faith by bringing calculation to the place of the father (Soler, 2016).

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Anxiety and enigmatic affects

Anxiety and enigmatic affects, both prominent affects in autistic subjects, are affects related to the real. Anxiety is the affect par excellence in this regard and indeed Lacan dedicated a whole seminar to it. Anxiety, in essence, does not mislead precisely because it remains moored to what caused it. If we think about anxiety, for example, as the ‘unknown as experienced’, then it takes anxiety beyond the object (a) which is merely the unknown of the barred Other (Soler, 2016). The real outside of the symbolic, according to Soler (2016, p.41), ‘does not speak, has no Other and concerns the facticity of the living being outside of meaning. It manifests itself in varied contexts, running the gamut from those in which jouissance, which goes beyond the subject, emerges outside of meaning, to the effects of the new discourse – science – that forecloses the subject. This is not the same register as anxiety related to the symbolic’. The ‘facticity of the living being outside meaning’ is an interesting term and integral to not only the autistic subject, but to the notion of a division between meaning and sense. The jouissance of the real outside of the symbolic, and the anxiety it provokes, has no mooring other than the letter of science. It is clear, as I have demonstrated, that this anxiety can be reduced and regulated in some way, although not eliminated of course, through scientific discourse with all its technical applications. The ‘facticity of the living being’ is in line with Galileo’s thesis regarding the idea that ‘being is mathematical’ (Miller, 2019, p.73).

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The capitalist discourse as an algorithm effectively schematises the continued process of refining that can be observed in the autistic subject. In Joey’s case the position of (a), which would initially be the place of the fan as a device for the localisation of jouissance, is also the place of the complex tubes and the rectifier. As the supplementary organs (a) become more refined, they have a structuring effect in terms of him realising himself as a subject, and further securing the relation between electricity as a master signifier and the ‘real as the mystery of the speaking body’ (Lacan, 1999, p.131).

I am not suggesting here that the autistic subject is the direct subjective correlate of the capitalist discourse. It is the configuration of mathemes that I am proposing as constituent of autistic structure. Consumer capitalism is of course based on consumer desire, driven by the subject’s lack. My utility of the capitalist discourse algorithm regarding the autistic subject is of a different order in which the critical aspect is how the autist appeals to scientific knowledge to address the enigma of the body. The motor here is not desire but an attempt to codify the real. I want to use the example of Steve Jobs here. Jobs famously said ‘Some people give the customers what they want, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they are going to want before they do. People don’t know what they want until you show them’ (Mui, 2011). What is aimed at here, it seems, is to calculate through algorithm what is beyond articulation i.e. to give body and to locate that which ex-sists. The drive to predict and calculate is aimed at solving the disorder of the real and is central to science and the autistic subject. It represents a fundamentally Galilean position in that Miller (2019, p.73) tells us ‘to say there is something of knowledge in the real is to seize science in its Galilean definition. Galileo’s science is not presented as a figure of speech: his point of view is rather that being itself is mathematical’.

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When Bentham was just 21, he made a will listing precise instructions pertaining ‘to the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame’. His skeleton was to be ‘clad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me and seated upright on a chair under a placard reading ‘Auto-Icon’’. Bentham suggested that his corpse might then be able to preside over regular meetings of his utilitarian followers. Here, it seems, in death as in life there is a mathematical formalisation of the body, potentially an effect of the tension between existence and ex-sistence. We can perhaps see in Bentham’s ‘Auto-icon’ an insurance policy for the permanent existence of his body and a memorial to his idiosyncratic formalisation of the real. The term ‘Auto-icon’ captures the relationship between the real of the body and the letter of science with the formulaic efficiency one would expect of Bentham. His request to have his body present at meetings in which ‘disciples should be disposed to meet together on some day or days of the year for the purpose of commemorating the founder of the greatest happiness system or morals and legislation’ is a testimony to its function. One could argue that the ‘Auto-icon’ takes on panoptic qualities in terms of his body watching over ‘his disciples’. ‘Surveillance’, after all, ‘confiscates the gaze for its own profit, appropriates it, and submits the inmate to it’ (Miller, 1987, p.4). Bentham himself, becomes the ‘polyvalent apparatus of surveillance’, a point which is perhaps best captured in the glass eyes, which for ten years before his death, he kept on his person so that they may be inserted into his preserved head in accordance with his will (Miller, 1987, p.3).