Constitutive Lack or Lack of Constituency?Deep structure is always injected just under the surface.

There is no irony in a constitutive lack: Standing together in absentia is no antagonism except between an ox and a moron, and that empty constitution can be a deadly simulacron whose hyper-reality is the schizophrenia of civilisation, depending as it does on eviscerating those who already have no stomach for it. If there is no center, there is no space for a master signifier – no deep structure, no operating system. Lack is (by definition) always an ex post facto destitution if not a positive refusal where the only absent presence is a void, not to be confused with a vacuum which is merely the flip side of gravity like suck and blow is to a straw. Antagonism (literally posited as the death instinct) is a stand against life such that arguments need no justification, being sufficient unto themselves like any proper fictional phantasm. It is not the antimagnetic repulsion or bounce of a back to back or belly to belly dance which may produce a gravitational spin and future entanglement which is also to say, if one is up on Poe, "electrifyingly shocking" and in no way lacking in possibility (see Pitter-patter & Pata Pata, where an exchange is never the intention nor an uncontested crossing of lines, and if that generation is antagonistic, where the fuck are the storks when we need them?).

"The imperative in Lacanian theory is to “accept” lack, whereas the logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity. The difference between mythical and non-mythical versions leads politically to the difference between acceptance of blockages and attempts to overcome them. Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as exemplified by Laclau’s insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat.

...Žižek’s “revolutionary” insistence on the need for masochistic selfdegradation,‘subjective destitution’ and identification with a Master and a Cause, not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation. This is a reterritorializing “contingency” which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology, where ‘under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves’, not the conditions,

...According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician’s denial of difference so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, ‘as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to be able to say yes’. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is ‘light, aerial and affirmative’. ‘There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of differences’, differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity

...‘Ours is no art of mutilation, but of excess, superabundance, amazement’, declares Hakim Bey. Though ‘truly fearful things’ exist in the world, they can perhaps be overcome - ‘on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear’ (1991, 37, 78). A constitutive “I-don’t-know”, if such a concept is thinkable, would involve precisely such a free play of differences, and not, to use Žižek’s term, the ‘good terror’ which ensures that this free play is brought to a halt."

– A. Robinson

see – The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique

From The Book of Irrevelations

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."

– Anatole France

Learning Theory, aka "the psychology of learning", may be a misnomer. If we exerted a bit of the principle of reversibility, a possibility witnessed in every natural language (and I use that term, natural, in the broadest possible sense exclusive of certain mathematical systems which deny the possibility of error, their own error being found in the equally-witnessed fact that blunder seems to drive civilisation itself more rigidly than could any accurate collective of acuity, demonstrating that a mathematically precise universe is inductively unreasonable), and instead called it "Teaching Theory", we might easier deduce that it is "a theory of instruction in obedience" as well as "in-stilling an obedience to theory": "When the alarm sounds, I know it is time to eat; hunger is irrelevant". Such was the discovery of Pavlov. But more commonly, we hear: "When the clock winds down, I must deliver massive jolts of electricity to the subject at hand". This will produce the desired effusion, dispensed from the lubricious glands, to induce ravenous desires for consumption. Repetition ensures we can dispense with the electricity altogether, as the merest ringing noise or tinnitus will turn the trick of induced performance, as if an armored armydildo just shouted "Associate this, motherfucker!" and it is no longer of any concern to watch out the fingers aren't bitten off in the frenzy of the "thirst" for knowledge manifest by apt pupils – this is why aptitude and attitude are thought to co-vary with turgid dilation. Teaching must foremost instill a proper attitude before any performance will be forthcoming or worthy of remuneration. Like every student in every school, Pavlov's dogs not only lived in cages, but were taught to call them "home" – wander too far and the bell will be inaudible, producing a snap like an overdrawn bungy-chord or the sound made in the intervening space twixt a turtle and a crocodile, irregardless of what your nose tells you might be palatable ahead. Only a dictionary would fail to equate the synonymic relation between security and tragedy, although it is quite handy at producing a concussion.

"One must recognize that the mental health establishment, which the National Institute represents, assumes (a conventional assumption in this society) that the expenditure of vast sums of money on so-called research will eventually reveal the "causes of mental illness" – that money in research can reveal the cause and cure of anything. This is not merely a scientific idea, but is deeply related to the fact that the tragic contradictions of life have little or no standing in our society. We seek to cure people of everything; we tinker with the machine. All the ills that the flesh and spirit of man are heir to, are reduced to abstractions. We are dedicated to the proposition that pain can be eliminated. An instrumental, hyper-civilized, consumer and clinically oriented culture such as ours generates, and simultaneously avoids acknowledging the contradictions that are the occasions for tragedy. Moreover, we are led to confuse the merely pitiful with the tragic. We perceive the crack-up of the individual in society as we would an automobile accident: hardly as a struggle for awareness that is at once moribund and transcendent. In the broadest sense, schizophrenia is the process through which the inadequacy of the culture is concretized in the consciousness of individuals; and that in-adequacy may be as deeply sensed, without being named, as it is reflected in "pathological" behavior. Yet the tragic struggle for awareness remains a catastrophic, insurmountable challenge because it cannot be located in a culture which fails to serve as the ground for the development of the self. But it is precisely the tragic experience which is the hallmark of the healthy culture, where persons have not been converted into objects, and where the struggle for meaning is a drama enacted and re-enacted in the decisions confronted during the ordinary course of life."

– Schizophrenia and Civilisation by Stanley Diamond