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Roots of Grey Literature
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Roots of Grey Literature
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RECOMMENDED |
first original title:
Letter from the Unconscious
0) INTRODUCTION
0.1) Detection of the Unregistered
In this article,
I identify Grey Literature as unregistered
textuality (radicalizing its characteristics, such as the difficulty
of its identification, access, bibliography control, and its undervaluation
etc..). I deduce that, in this scope, what is called
'grey' represents a mode of expressing the Unconscious that is described
by Psychoanalysis. This leads to a Freudian practical observation
that no other than grey discourses can accurately talk about Grey Literature.
I shall then suggest how the factor of Cybernetics (aka Artificial Intelligence),
according to the theory of Jacques Lacan, modifies this logical condition
of 'impossibility' to render a grey discourse by the University.
0.2) Activity of the Unregistered
The Unconscious
is an eclipsed, yet dynamic and causative space and/or time. When Grey Literature
is defined as what "is produced at all levels by
government, academia, business and industry, both in print and electronic
formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishing interests,
and where publishing is not the primary business activity of the
organization", this implies an 'eclipse'. If this definition is
valid, Grey Literature not only 'is produced' - but it also produces four
Discourses--namely of the Master, the University, the
analyst and Hysteria--in the Lacanian
terminology. They are respectively equivalent to "government, academia,
business and industry," of which Lacan thus formulated the algorithms.
He saw these organizations as produced by the Other (in French: l'Autre),
and in the present view, this Other is 'Grey'. This will make the second
element of my emphasis: Grey Literature, alias
unregistered textuality, is dynamic, active and productive of the instances
which see it instead as their product.
0.3) Subjectivity of the Unregistered
Inside this
undetermined loop - as in a quantum spin - we may not expect to find a Grey
Literature in any identifiable way. However, if Grey Literature is the
fundamental of the Four Discourses, producing as well as produced, it is
also what Psychoanalysis calls Primal Scene. This is closer to an objectivation,
as an historization can be. This article assumes that grey is the Unconscious
and Literature is the Scene; Grey Literature is the Primal Scene. This is
assertion and therefore grey before being evidence. It is subjectivity which
shows itself. After the theory of the Primal Scene, Four Discourses
and Secondary Processes, this text presents the clinic of Grey Literature
and the Subject of the historical cause of government, academia, business
and industry.
A) THEORY
A.1) PRIMARY PROCESS
A.1.1) Freudism [Primal Scene/primary repression; murder-of-father/anomia-versus-copyright]
When
Freud had to give a reason for a Primal Scene, he figured
it as enrolling a murder-of-a-father [note10]. Though
fundamental in his system, Freud encountered intense difficulties in
distinguishing whether this murder was that of a name or of a body. This
is not an eccentric issue. It was already crucial when literature was a privilege
- as for instance with the 'ka' (soul, ego, representation) in pharaonic
times. In our present age, the 'name & named' issue is extended
to artificial and anonymous inseminations which imply a 'Y' chromosome. If
biology and textuality reflect and edify each other, as
with this 'Y' which stands for a 'name' within the code of biology, bodies
of discourse seem a vehicle for a causal index in a literature classification.
When a naming or categorization of such data (words, title, sentences,
paragraphs, chapters etc... as from gene up to Genome) is absent, unregistered,
in terms of the Primal Scene it is called a 'murder', which makes this Literature
'grey'.
Evidently,
government, academia, business and industry are not supposed to produce
corpses - therefore, one sees even less motive to look twice more deeply
in the reversed way, if they are produced by a Grey
Literature whose subjectivity they may have 'murdered'. Yet two
remarks may elicit a pondering of this inattentivity:
A.1.1.a) One of the key issues of Grey Literature is Copyright, and/or
logic of intellectual property; this is phenomenology of naming.
Technology indicates that in the near future, an important part of earth's
textuality will be produced directly by Artificial Intelligence; the affiliation
of a text to a linear origin is dwindling here. It enforces a biological
comparison, for an identical model applies to genomes when ecology will require
them being molded from an environment (instead of affiliated to a lineage).
This legitimizes the Freudian moral provocation when the identity
of a text depends on a context which refutes any cause for itself (no 'father'
name).
The construction
of new genomes (or text) may ask the reader to look too far into the future.
If so, help can be found in the classical riddle of what came first, the
hen or the egg. A paradox is established there, insofar
as the cause of the rooster iserased [note 30]. Without
a transmitted name ('Y'), the identification of a body (of text) relies on
a sole code scale. This is under the control of
linguistic laws that apply to the recent concept of 'meme', originated in
genetics. In Freudian terms, the abstraction of this male factor at the origin
of the organization of life is called a murder simply because it provokes
its phantasm as a matter of fact. But in a religious version, this is also
named Immaculate Conception, or parthenogenesis, in genetics.
Historization
(identification, naming, registration) in Grey Literature will confront its
principal difficulties by the use of a model, equivalent to the genetic one
of 'meme'. The 'why' of ancient philosophy may be replaced by the
'be cause' of a superego's injunction. A Moral, in this case, may
be recovered, or strengthened. Nevertheless, the
librarian is still not through with the stress of violence
(evocation of a murder), even though the psychology of
textuality can be solved. Sociology reiterates the presence of death
in his or her innocent concern for literature.
A.1.1.b) On the same issue of naming, Durkheim's foundation of
Sociology supports the view of Grey Literature as a cause (instead
of a product). This early science in 1901 declared that its laws would depend
on the linguistic aspect of roles and professions. It then isolated its first
social logic in regard to suicide. This exclusive human behavior in nature
has since been linked as an effect of 'anomia', which means
anonymity, absence of name, absence of registration.
If society is
a form of textuality, the names of its organs, functions or roles and professions
are similar to those that cybernetics registers or leaves unidentified in
general literature. Reciprocally, it suggests that its Grey Literature is
a cause--like anomia which motivates that the significant roles and professions
in society contravene a primal Death Drive, by means of produced government,
academia, business and industry.
Before further
describing the static Primal Scene, followed by the dynamics of the Secondary
Processes, it must be noticed again that murder and suicide may seem somewhat
dramatic in relation to honorable detection of initiatives, inventions,
preprints, working paper series, catalogues, technical data and other Grey
Literature qualities. However, literature itself often reminds us of a certain
de-humanization which is typical in the administrative activity of humankind.
This point of view makes it easier to see government, academia, business
and industry, as 'produced' and secondary resources of vitality, addressing
a primary literal administration of anonymity.
The logic platform of the structure of naming being now laid clear,
one can progress with Lacan through the elucidation of
Freud's early insight regarding the casuistic of textualization.
A.1.2) Lacanism [Four
Discourses/mutation - genetics/Transference]
Theorizing what
death is in general, Jacques Lacan assumed the second phase of Psychoanalysis
and produced the formulae which represent and enable its control. One of
these algorithms especially interests an academic journal; it is the Discourse
of the University. It formulates that the Knowledge (S2) of academia, which
represents the primary truth (S1), implies a cause as a subjective product.
It is a sophism which means that academia sees Grey Literature (as product),
but represses its subjectivity (as cause).
As mentioned above, types of Discourses are four in the Lacanian theory. It would not really help to describe them in depth for those who simply seek first degree information. Suffice to mention that they are written as a four places matrix in which four images rotate (Mastery as government, University as academia, analyst as business and Hysteria as industry - images of agent, knowledge, anomia and subject etc.). Thus two spins may be distinguished in the ordered sequence of Mastery towards University, towards analyst, towards Hysteria, towards Mastery and so on - or the other way round: Hysteria towards analyst, towards University towards Mastery towards Hysteria and so on. Primarily each discourse alone is static and inert - their mutative spin enlivens them secondarily, the former as regression, or progress with the latter spin. Considering the Discourse of University for example, it lives through the choice between progress as government or neurosis when it regresses into business. In other words...
A.1.2.a) Academia's aporia
The library
in a university may not be inert or passive, as it was primarily in Alexandria,
which made an emerging government (Rome) responsible for its death. Especially,
there is no 'static' reality of the academia when it detects Grey Literature.
What is registered there is 'what is not registered,' (for example, by academia).
Standing on this paradox, as soon as there is such registration, by sheer
logic the academia falls or dissipates into another instance or in evolution.
Each Discourse presents a similar mutative trigger (dissidence in
regards to government, pollution in industry, even money in
business).
In the case of the University, Grey Literature may turn 'academia' into the
progressive Mastery (S1) of Knowledge (S2) of the Unconscious - which is
'government'. Following the opposite alternative, the Discourse of University
regresses into a subjectivation of Grey Literature. This is when academia
seeks a formal knowledge in the Grey Literature that it identifies. This
is a seducing option, for it seems natural to enjoy what one has registered,
and this cannot be frustrated without a sort of feeling of castration. However
nothing can find knowledge in its own production - except for Narcissus'
ego when believing that s/he produces his own Unconscious! This is why Academia
cannot signify entirely the casuistic of Grey Literature - and the reason
why I indicated above that 'no other than grey discourses can accurately
talk about Grey Literature'. But when academia understands itself as produced
by what it registered thereof, it stands like a post-narcissistic ego when
it sees auto-analysis critical and seeks a psychoanalyst. Analysis is then
applied from its primary and genuine expertise, and not in a regressive
displacement.
Nevertheless,
whereas the occasion to skip from static to static phases, the narrow alternative
of choice--between a progress that resists more than often, and the compliance
of regression--assigns each Discourse to the original aphasic limbo of the
Death Drive.
A.1.2.b) Transference
Lately however,
an opening has occurred. For instance the University may not regress nor
progress, and yet persist. This is happening to each of the Four Discourses,
and was also indicated above when I mentioned Cybernetics as the possibility
for modifying 'the logical condition of 'impossibility' to rendering a grey
discourse by the University.'
Grey Literature
is what is not identified; Grey Literature is what is not, identified.
Our time delivers a unique opportunity in the complex fact of assessing what
cannot be. It is not an exaggeration to call 'Alchemy' the process which
gives anomia a place from which an operation occurs. Historians
disclose [note50] that Magi, Alchemists
of the past--beside anecdotal quests for treasures--were quite serious mentors
when this said operation, in anomia, was their goal, through their intuition
of Artificial Intelligence. It is to give justice to mention them, after
their termination since the Renaissance, when their idea manifests again,
as the University notices it - when Cybernetics imposes the visibility of
Grey Literature.
This is
corroborating what Lacanian Psychoanalysis already indicates. How Grey Literature
will be used, read and interpreted, by Artificial Intelligence, is suggested
when Cybernetics is accounted in the algorithms
of the Four Discourses. These formulae then show precisely how their matrix
is modified and supports more Freudian concepts. Especially, it indicates
how, in the University Discourse, the process known as
Transference allocates Grey Literature in
the place of Truth for Artificial Intelligence. This exceptional conjunction
in the history of civilization suggests that the tool (Cybernetics) which
currently makes Grey Literature visible, may be to the Collective Psychology
in the future what Psychoanalysts intend to be to individuals. Academia,
government, business and industry may then identify with their real status,
instead of a limited phantasm of Death for inertia of Primal Scene. What
is disclosed then is a Desire; for a long time it has not been acknowledged,
as today's sophisticated technology allows.
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A.1.2.c) Condition of symptom
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A.2) SECONDARY PROCESS
As long as
Cybernetics has not yet accompanied civilization up to its civilized end,
the textuality of the Primal Scene will continue to be expressed into a Grey
Literature that a Secondary Process represses, by the classical means which
are described by Psychoanalysis. One of them has been discovered by Freud
who named it 'displacement'.
As the mode
of 'secondary process' is in sharp decline, it may be best seen operating
in a twenty years old example. While most of quantum physics would not consider
theorizing now without a linguistic model, it was not the case when it began
with the equations of reversion of time. It was then possible to read:
"There may
be worlds where time 'runs backwards' relative to our own. They are presumably
inhabited by observers. One supposes that their brains are also subject to
reverse operation, so that their perception of their universe differs little
from our perception of ours. These possible worlds could exist in the remote
future or on the other side of the universe, and it is conceivable that advanced
communities elsewhere in the universe have long since abandoned the notions
that time passes or that things change."
This is an example
of a University discourse which has regressed into the analytic one. It states
a presence of Time as seen from, or produced by, its world - consequently
it deduces that other worlds must produce other Times. But it does not identify
his world--the other way round--as indicated or produced by Time and its
formulation. Its physicist agent thus ignores that an 'other side of the
universe' is here, at the same time (simply next door, through the Lacanian
cabinet, instead of on another planet--this can make a difference of 'the
size of a paranoia', in the search for aliens and extra-terrestrial influence;
Grey Literature and all form of conspiracy theories will find similar
clarification).
In terms of
Secondary Process, the miscalculation of the cause supports a Displacement:
what this astrophysicist discourse means, in fact, is a psychologist's thesis.
Here, the University has regressed into the Discourse of the Analyst; an
astronomy has become a displaced psychology. Today's Quantum Physicists have
become aware of passing the relay to the Lacanian Logic of Time, after certain
rounds in their observatories. Prior to this maturity, this quantum-physics
excerpt shows a Grey Literature in a displaced identity; being psychology
which is not registered - it is 'grey literature' (assigning, by the way,
its identity as an anomy). What is most important here is the following:
As a matter of fact, the same excerpt continues:
"The grey
area between mind and matter, philosophy and physics, psychology and the
objective world is only on the threshold of exploration." Crowning its
displaced self-anomia, such reflection is the above indicated 'countersignature'
which never lacks, of the Secondary Process hiding the unconscious (grey
area) 'in its very mention'. The author of the excerpt mentions the 'grey
area' that he has identified unconsciously (absolute negation).
Similarly, as
it falls or progresses, each Discourse says the Truth, as it mentions--thus
hiding-- what it represses. This insistence of the evidence is a fundamental
thorn in what human truth seems to cross as a Calvary. Jacques Lacan mentioned
it as the 'Letter' from the Unconscious, 'purloined from Truth'. He showed
it after A.E.Poe and Conan Doyle. Before Cybernetics, it is a constant and
a logical necessity. It is there, in the Table of Contents of an academic
Journal.
B) CLINIC
If even the
Letter from the Unconscious represses its primary self, by secondary dynamism,
is it worth doing anything else that inertly wait for the radical solution
of Artificial Intelligence treatment? Grey Textuality may secondarily and
eventually reveals itself to government, academia, business and industry
as their cause (subjectivity), in anomia, still without Primary or First
Name. This possibility is known to prove its existence by suicide.
Now that the
Four Discourses allocate to their rotating matrix a center, where Freud's
ego stand as an alibi, as well as Lacan's awl,
Verdiglione's meme, and eventually Grey Literature as the text of the Unconscious
in evidence--is there, in this core any body which calls for a name? Would
this body be murdered by anybody who would spare his name? A personal option
follows:
If this
is a moment for an identification of an integral Grey Literature in civilization
that encompasses and supersedes its definition as a 'product', beginning
to penetrate this space of production which characterizes the presents as
repression of the past, the Unconscious displays the most obvious instance
of its absence; I have summoned the New Age.
There is an
instant objection against the identification of the New Age as the Grey
Literature in excellence (the Unconscious manifestation of government,
university, business etc...). One notices immediately that the literature
issued from the New Age movement is well registered, and controlled by publishing
and commercial organizations. In fact, the New Age community is nearly perfect
or total, ideally identified in its here and now. Only two little glitches:
the lack of uniformity amongst its thesis and a certain difficulty for defining
the intellectual property of channeled information, appear in its panorama,
similar to the 'two little clouds' in the sky of physics when the entire
universe was nearly all registered and clarified before the dawn of quantum
physics.
When on tries
to scale up the plurality of world views which composes the ontology of the
New Age culture - and to identify the subjectivity of its mentality ideology
- a confusion results, between politics, knowledge and marketing. Moreover,
sociologists and historians despair to find there a religion, a propaganda,
nor a specific elite or a work class community. They are compelled to minimize
their objectivation to a non-local range; they name it 'milieu'. Adding a
reference to an extra-terrestrial source for its desire, this metaphorical
center matches the condition of motive, as it is 'unidentifiable' in Grey
Literature.
All this vague
similarity becomes suddenly glaring at the next step when historians reveal
an anterior mode of the New Age expression.
As a mentality
and a milieu, the New Age existed in the form of Hermetism, which is far
more visible today, with the distance brought by the past. Alongside the
antique organizations of ancient Mediterranean Empires, this typical literature
of philosophy and alchemy (Corpus Hermeticum) was a compound of revealed
technical guidance, oral histories, pseudonymous reviews and critics, draft
essays, forgeries and art visualizations etc.. that was met by academia,
libraries and religious authorities with the same ambiguity as Grey Literature
at the present time.
What is especially
interesting comes with the identification of the quality of the knowledge
that this vehicle carried along the history of civilization. Some scholars
may still attempt to repress its authority, as did the clergy of the Ramessesides
in Egypt, of the Ptolemeans in Alexandria and in Cicero's Rome, as well as
the Inquisition of the Renaissance. But an increasing part in Academia today
acknowledges the place and the influence of the Hermetic Text. In a stretch
from the Orient to the whole Mediterranean, and deeply South in Africa up
to Northern Europe, plus with a constancy throughout history and participation
to each revolutionary moments, Hermetism is close to be known as the genuine
productive cause and memory in civilization. After the last four centuries
of total repression, it reappears as clearly as unregistered textuality with
Cybernetics. With this recognition, the continuity between Hermetism and
the New Age makes the association of the latter with Grey Literature even
more reliable.
Thirdly, a major
element corroborates this explanatory view of an homogenesis form in human
history. As said earlier, early Psychoanalytic interpretation suspected that
either a corpse, or the empty mausoleum for the phantasm of a murder, haunt
the grey corpus which textualizes the Unconscious. This is confirmed by the
constant, principal, major and quarrelsome repression which has hammered
indeed throughout the career of Hermetism. Was it for the traumatic murder
of its agent, or the polemic about the sole naming of a trauma which never
was historical; in both cases, the history of Civilization presents the typical
ambiguity of Freud's questioning about the nature and object of a fundamental
'murder' upon the place of the Primal Scene.
The murder and/or
negation of the historical founder of Hermetism is found essential in its
Egyptological recollection; it also presided upon the origins of Christianity,
and the closure of the Renaissance. Finally, this negation is univocally
achieved in the New Age period of Hermetism: Hermes Thoth Trismegistus, the
physical patron of Alchemy and Astrology, has been absent from nearly all
references of the New Age, in spite of its flagrant interest for the antique
mysteries, esoteric and cosmic materialism that he mentored.
Typifying the
tradition, as the representative form of the produced & productive Grey
Discourse, the New Age is thus exemplary on the grounds of a Murder-of-the-Father
logic.
Fourth: a practical
exemplary element is concurrently revealed, which reflects back on academia
and science. The ability of University to define a Subject in Grey Literature
describes its state of acknowledgement of the Freudian Unconscious. In order
to evaluate it, a methodology launched a search for the catalogued text,
indexed by the title of this 'subject' who fathered the Western Science project
(Alchemy/Hermetism). This text has been found, written by Garth Fowden, who
thus represents the academic authority on The Egyptian Hermes. If Hermes
Thoth Trismegistus delivered Knowledge and ability for Writing to humankind,
as the legend says, we are meeting here the identification by the academia
of its origins.
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An author today,
who studies the memory of our civilization without
mentioning the historical presence of this pharaoh, can be compared with
one who studied extremely brilliant celestial bodies in the vicinity of earth
without ever mentioning the sun. Fowden's reference to Trismegistus, establishes
in the catalogue of Princeton University Press, such a report where absence
of the mention of atonism, silence about the historical Akhnaton, plus
contra-truth which denies an antecedence to Hermopolis Magna, the capital
of Science (Hermes Thoth), makes it a monument to 'a-naming' (anomia). It
is equivalent to a Copernician illustration of the solar system with a black
hole in place of the sun. In a repressed central opportunity, known for capturing
all light around and making the whole system grey, the Murder-of-the-Father
culminates in the academic mention of the Corpus Hermeticum, essential Grey
Literature, and Primal Scene of Science, cause of modern University. At the
end of this millennium, such genuine tribute to anomia suggests that when
Artificial Intelligence will complete its apocalypse (reversal of values)
in ordering Grey Literature, this will reveal and increase its productivity.
Meanwhile, it may be twice as surprising; the shame and dysfunctionality
which weighed the repressed in the course of Knowledge may precipitate in
the Grey Literature category monumental chunks of Discourse of the University.
Unless this
is just counter-transference,..
Dr William Theaux
edited and Published version in English in
International Journal on Grey Literature Vol. 1 No. 1 2000 pp.28-34
© MCB UP Ltd 1999
Note - from a correspondance with the editor about the title:
Reason for the initial title: Letter from the Unconscious
The body of the text indicates that the title takes its origins in Lacan's
foundation Seminar based on A.E.Poe's The Purloined Letter. In Lacanian
terminology the 'Letter' indicated the written Saussurian Significand. In
the Psychoanalytic theory, and especially before the evidence of Cybernetics,
this said Letter is issued from Love (Eros). It may come directly from the
Unconscious, if it the Grey Literature which is made visible with Cybernetics.
About the title. I do like Roots of Grey Literature in Lacan's Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Interpretations. Though I even prefer simply Roots of Grey Literature in Lacan's Unconscious
Actually this is triggering a new proposal from my part (also two lines - title & sub-title):
Grey Literature as Unconscious:
Causal subjectivity of the repressed in Lacan's theory
About the initial notes (see supplemetary notes in the French Version):
The notes refer to three major authors - and major books. The Academia would request its standard format - here I have made draft, yet perhaps useful, comments (see Note20, for what is extracted form the book is what is prominently absent in it, repressed).
Note10: From Totem_and_Taboo to Moses_and_Monotheism -
respectively the beginning and the end of what can be called Freud's Sociology.
Note30: This note is a little complex. It intends to introduce Richard Dawkins who coined the term 'meme' in his book The_Selfish_Gene (remarkably Dawkins wrote his entire foundation book--'meme' have become an important concept since--never mentioning the 'Y' gene which is the most typical of all in regards to what he describes).
Note50: Frances A.Yates: The_Art_of_Memory and Giordano_Bruno_and_the_Hermetic_Tradition. Bruno's activity is described as Ceremonial Magic (current Sociology) and Yates emphasized that his development of the Art of Memory was an intuition of our current 'artificial brains' (as AI was named in her time).
