The Classical Order of Lecturing

To be led by shape, design, sound, gesture, ­spacing, and pattern rather than the idea is to be led by fanciful association more than rational­ized argument. The speaker is led astray by chains of synesthetic similitude that inhibit the ­argument and fail to produce distinct hierarchies and ­definitions. Just because two words or images sound or look alike does not mean that they have a logical, historical, or semantic ­connection – this is a cardinal rule of rigorous scholarship. Put differently, this means that scholarship often follows a chain based on semantic similarity and difference (synonymy and antithesis) but not synesthetic similarity and difference. [1] Schematic play foregrounds the exterior, material, rehearsed, scopic visuality of writing over the bodily, spontaneous, oral-aural vocal transmission of speech. [2] The unmediated reliance on schematic play outside the preserve of poetry suggests ­madness or, worse, lack of seriousness – an infantile, ­immature aestheticism. Extreme aestheticism was classically linked to muteness (the image without words) or babble (the word without semantic meaning) but also to unclarity, music, ­simulacra, inspiration, stupefaction, timelessness, and ­immediacy, whereas reasonable discourse entailed clear and distinct ideas developing into abstract ideals. The proper use of illustration or poetic motifs in dogmatic arguments is to allegorize, prove, or transparently demonstrate the thesis, hegemonic myths, or the morality of the speaker.

Felix Bernstein, “Conchomania” (detail), 2023

Inverting the dogmatic order of things, I lead with the scheme and let the thought follow. What results, while not readily graspable, has a visceral logic and enables slips that betray the social algorithm that encodes the subject. By ­allowing diagrams and imagery (often fed through automated and chance-based processing) to ­supersede argumentation, I do not eliminate myself as a presence but rather let my ­subjectivity and my theses become effects of the ­assembly line of information. I exaggerate and undo the conceit of accuracy through caricature and ­mania – exposing and fraying the edges that mark categorical differences, fanning out the folds that structure a subject rather than offering false closure through a single centerfold. I call this ­approach “threshing” – a disciplinary testing of the thresholds within a given subject.

“Threshing” finds in each subject a ­symptom (a symbolic manifestation) or synthome (a ­synthetic grammar that makes new links). [3]

“Threshing” continuously refreshes and torques the thesis by repeating keywords but altering their meaning through homographic, homonymic, and homophonic variations. So ­instead of stating a thesis and then proving it, each paragraph discloses a new thesis or a new set of connotations for the same thesis.

“Threshing” forces structure onto thought by following logical patterns to contradictory and absurd conclusions that do not serve a clear agenda but devolve into paraconsistent paradox.

“Threshing” subjects the thesis to diagrams, tables, and logical operations. The diagrams, ­however, are rendered fallible by juxtaposing ­contrasting frames, edges, scales, lists, and tables.

“Threshing” undoes the sense of an argument’s having a temporal development, leading to an ultimate goal. The task is to employ the figures of rhetoric without compelling persuasion or suggesting a dialectical movement toward greater clarity. Fragmented tropes are assembled like body parts into an exquisite corpse that ­stultifies developmental progress in a frozen cluster of anachronistic organs – by presenting all the “stages” of psychosexual development at once in diagrams composed of interlocking rims (chains of Venn diagrams and topological rings). These fractal diagrams include all the stages of the morphogenesis of the diagram in the diagram itself.

Felix Bernstein, “The Threshing Zone,” Greene Naftali, New York, 2024

For my lectures on Conchomania (the ­obsession with shells), I traced the use of the shell as an icon and metaphor, starting with Marcel Proust’s famous use of the shell-shaped pastry of the madeleine to convey the oceanic reserve of memory. The pastry bears an esoteric ­connection to the cult of Saint Jacques and his scallop emblem. This led me to Walter Benjamin’s description of the bourgeois interior as a shell-like dwelling full of shell-like cases and Marcel Broodthaers’s use of shells to signify molding, branding, lettering, and the provincial status of Belgium. As I continued to work on shells, I found that the conch was frequently used as metaphor in psychoanalysis, from ­Sigmund Freud’s description of the psychic ­stimulus barrier as a shell-like rind to those of ­autism as an enclosure of the mother and infant in an unbroken shell. Again, I was motivated not by a single meaning of the term shell but rather by its use as a term, image, sound, and scheme. I did not look at “shells” as a trans­historical signified or archetype that denotes the seashell. I followed chains of figurative displacement (shell as exteriority of any kind) and chains of literalization (shell-like exteriors becoming real ­seashells) in order to strip the figure of its power to persuade, categorize, or transparently communicate a single idea. You can never “thresh” out the kernel of an idea from the shell of metaphor; you cannot throw the trappings of tropes away and get to some real truth. But by examining the jagged edges between shells, you can feel out the subtle chains of words hiding behind words.

The notion of the shell as a discardable casing for a core idea is analogous to any trapping that is shed in development, including form for content, transitional object for mature object, phoneme for word, and foreplay for climax. In psychoanalysis, a crucial discardable form is the erogenous zone – deemed a vestigial, infantile, inhuman, partial, immature, and obsolete remnant of pregenital sexuality that can at most serve as an accompaniment to mature sexual pleasure.

Felix Bernstein, “The Threshing Zone” (detail), 2024

For my June 2024 lecture at Greene Naftali in New York, The Threshing Zone, I devised an imaginary history of the erogenous zones and retraced their invention by Freud. While the ­notion of erogenous zones now seems self-evident, they were not part of medical discourse until Freud. To find how he arrived at his formation of innate polymorphous sexuality, I speculated that he transposed caricatures of homosexual, passive, and feminine bodies onto the infant, as if it were an organic condition to be orally and anally sexualized. I looked at the medical history of “hysterogenous zones” (located around the womb and meant to trigger hysterical episodes), zodiac constellations, and bloodletting points, all of which mark up the body as if it had been preprogrammed by diagrams. Freud smuggled these pagan notions into modernity, as if the body were still susceptible to the influence of gods, planets, ancestors, and malevolent drives. Our current digital and pornographic age has crystallized Freud’s stages into sexual identities and pornographic genres (oral, anal, top, bottom, poly, cuck).

Freud thought that the infant body recapitulated evolutionary and cellular stages with orality connoting a kind of primordial amoeba state. I worked with illustrators, animators, and text-to-image AI to produce new morphogenic imagery – which showed the formation of topologies generated in skin-like substances. I also fabricated 19th-century anatomy illustrations, which show doctors carving logical symbols into the bodies of patients and patients remaking each other’s bodies through branding, cauterizing, and stitching. This built on Jacques Lacan’s use of topology to map stages of mental illness at a level of minutia that was both absurd and reflective of the diagnostic frenzy of modern psychiatry.

Felix Bernstein, “The Threshing Zone,” Greene Naftali, New York, 2024

Erogenous stimulation is an affect ­without a cause – nonetheless, normative psychic develop­ment entails making causal attributions for this stimulus – it comes from inside or outside, it is sexual or anxious, it can be discharged or prolonged, it is caused by this distress, it can be relieved by that action. This symbolization of the erogenous zone leads to a cartographic mastery over sexuality. In early Freud, we find the idea that the breaching of the erogenous threshold floods the organism with so much excitement that a ­psychic apparatus must be developed to manage it – first and foremost, through the projection of the origin of the stimulus to an external object. The erogenous band, originally more like a Mobius strip, becomes divided into a network of external and internal relations, leading ultimately to a clearly organized body that is sexually centered in the genitals. Rather than view psychosexual stages as a developmental adaptation to a coherent bodily image, I envision sex as a set of fragmentary bodily and sensorial parts (letters, rims, holes, sounds) that are synthetically combined into intelligible subjects. But these fully organized subjects can never fully account for the enigmas of the erogenous stimulacrum. We stim, rim, and edge in search of the elusive cause of our excitement, which only redoubles arousal. While there may be degrees of reliability to our claims about sex, no one can help but get off to the futile search for what turns them on. The erogenous threshold marks the undecidable zone of our chains of causation. When the reasonable ground is displaced, we open onto the abyssal chain of dissociation – shards of speech that only signify our perpetual edging never closer to the threshold of coherence.

Evading the abyss, the lecturer collects dispersed sensations into a semblance of meaning. The lecturer is an imposter – pretending to orient, organize, deconstruct, and historicize the drives (scopic, aural, and oral) but only ever conveying their own salacious fantasies.

Felix Bernstein stages psychofictional scenes as lectures, essays, satire, and melodrama, using errant bodies of imagery and discourse to bore holes through crusty ideals. He is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2016) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015), and director, with Gabe Rubin, of Madame de Void: A Melodrama (2018). He has performed at institutions including Artists Space, LA MOCA, Luma Westbau, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Image credit: 1. + 3. + 4. + 5. Courtesy of Felix Bernstein and Greene Naftali; 2. Courtesy of Felix Bernstein

Notes