vilma

EN LT

2004-05-11	Karolis : digest

The first text (on the Attention Deficit Disorder) strikes me as a good model for what I see as a process of developing of the psyche of VILMA, because this “disorder” and all the public phenomena that surround this disease are defined by the problem of the absence of the so-called executive function in the AD/HDer’s brain. This situation around it strikes me as having some structural similarities to our construction of the psyche of VILMA. There is certain absence there that could be defined as the absence of executive function. So all the descriptions in this text that are providing details of the reception of AD/HD in society seem to describe the development of the psyche of VILMA out of nothing. The second text is by Barbara Johnson and it deals with the situation of the prisoners who try to sue as a collective entity, to have their cigarettes back. They try to bring a legal claim as a collective entity, and experience problems because the law doesn’t allow them to figure as a collective entity. The article itself discusses or interprets this controversy by asking what a person is, or how you can tell what is a natural person and what is an artificial person. I think, as a whole it is pertinent to our situation as we are inventing the psyche of VILMA, because somehow a leading impulse in this process – at the very outset – is to impose some anthropomorphic or humanizing notions of identity and voice on this entity called VILMA, or even simulate some natural identity. I think the argument of this article is relevant for thinking about the “right” of VILMA as an artificial collective entity to assert its “artificial” identity, and to develop its sensitivity towards all the phenomena – and the problematic – of artifical identitiy. Personification and artificiality: these are the issues explaining my choice of the article. The third text tells the story of a naturalist, a bird-lover who attempts to use a special scientific Guide to identify birds in a natural environment. The text describes what sort of problems such an attempt is bound to meet. For me, the text is interesting not because of the problematization of some structural aspect of the psyche of VILMA, but because of the way it represents an idea of how it should work. The text ends up identifying a medium of the very process of applying the Guide, i.e. written instructions, to the object of interest, with the purpose of identifying it. The text shows – or, rather, performs – a process in which what is identified is a medium which enables both aspects of the situation, I mean the interpreting agent and the interpreted object, to meet or to constitute each other in a mutual interaction or mutual mediation. I imagine VILMA psyche as an agency, as an instance sensitive to the media or medium conceived as enabling condition which provides space for all sorts of identifying or interpreting activities. The last text, which, in this collection, appears as a short appendix to the text about the bird-lover, is by Paul de Man, and it consists of several theoretical statements concerning nature as a self-deconstructive term. I propose to read it as a sort of formulaic presentation or a short program for the programming of the psyche. I think VILMA should work as infinite regress from a supposedly natural identity towards infinite other “natures”. Any supposed nature presupposes or implies some deeper level, where you can as if discover other natures. In that sense nature discards itself as a nature, as it were.