Two short texts from Covid times
During the time of Covid I wrote two short texts for the Lacanian Review Online, one admitedly more serious than the other, and which is also presented in the book Letters in Quarantine .
Here are those two texts:
Miasmas
We don’t so often speak of miasmas now, but they once explained all kinds of illnesses the causes of which were not quite clear. Miasmas were invisible vaporous emanations, or “bad air” from decaying organic matter on those foreign parts of moorlands or urban areas. A miasma has never been detected. Whilst miasmic explanations of disease held sway for centuries, we have other theories about the spread of disease now, and so we don’t take miasmas to be a material reality. None the less, the expression remains.
Lacan mentions miasmas in the second chapter of Seminar XI in talking about causes, and which Jacques-Alain Miller takes up in his 1988 seminar Cause et consentement, with the emphasis of a separation of cause and effect, with a cut, stumbling block, distance, deviation, or hole in continuity there, this is what Miller draws from Lacan. Those things where a continuity sustains, such as gravity, may be known as a law except in so far as distance may take its effect there, such as the gravitational pull of the moon effecting the tides.
“…miasmas are the cause of fever—… there is a hole, and something that oscillates in the interval". This is how Lacan describes the miasma – that cause of fever which is characterised by a hole, by an effect of something oscillating in the interval between cause and effect.
It seems to me that miasma could be one name of something which may be apparent in our experience, in our clinic, now, in the suffering which the coronavirus brings aside from any material infection. Miasmas could be understood in some regard in the manner of something else which fell out of scientific use – the gaze. Being that which is not the seeing or being seen, not that which can be traced in a continuity, but that which evades, drops out of the laws of visibility, a cause, not a law. And which we attend to in our clinical work, localising, dissipating, distancing, there are any number of ways of working with what can be so distressing in an experience of the gaze.
It seems that in this time of the virus, beyond the microscopic droplets of infected airbourne material which may or may not reach us, there is an atmosphere. A thickening of the air with what is not there, marked by a hole between cause and effect, a miasma, experienced as both foreign and intimate to the body, outside and in. Aside from the practical measures we may take to care for ourselves and others against the material of the virus, and which is not the realm of psychoanalysis, we work with something which was not necessarily of so obvious before, which perhaps miasma names.
Alasdair Duncan, March 2020
France is bacon
There is a story, a meme, which is finding a revival on the internet just now, circulating on Facebook, and no doubt elsewhere too. The story relates to a celebrated post on Reddit from a decade ago, in which the poster (Lard_Baron) said that when he was a child his father said to him “Knowledge is Power – Francis Bacon”, to which he had heard “Knowledge is Power, France is bacon”. What, he had wondered, was the link between the two? Lard Baron says that he’d tell the quote to people, and they’d nod knowingly, which he found strange. Or someone would say “Knowledge is Power”, and he’d complete the quote – “France is Bacon”, and they’d look oddly at him. He’d ask a teacher the meaning of the quote and they’d explain Knowledge is Power, and totally ignore the meaning of France is bacon. When prompted further for explanation – “France is bacon?”, they’d respond enigmatically “yes”, and he didn’t have the confidence to press further.
There is a sense in which to the matter of knowledge reduced to a device of power, with all its imaginary effects, the non-sense of France is bacon is the perfect response, a deflation. And it is not just France which is bacon now, we all are a bit, some of us more than others perhaps.
At a time when imaginary effects related to knowledge and power, and of not knowing, are widely felt to be pressing, we see its effects in the daily press of news and commentary trying to make meaning where there is something, or a certain nothing, difficult to digest, just as in the rise of conspiracy theories, this well timed meme, with its deflationary effect on imaginary jouissance, may not be without its uses.
Alasdair Duncan, April 2020
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