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‘Quo vadis? Where are we going?’ The question only lands once the road ahead is legible. Picture the windscreen as two ribbons of paint that seem to meet somewhere you can’t reach: the vanishing point. That tiny speck is not an object sitting in the scene; it is a rule stamped onto the scene, a way the infinite directions of space leave a mark on a flat surface. Renaissance experimenters learned to fix this mark so pictures would cohere: draw orthogonals toward a point on the horizon and the town square stops buckling; slide the point and the same lines regroup into a new order. A simple craft secret carries a deep claim: straight lines in the world must appear to converge on the image if the view is to feel navigable (🔗; 🔗). (essentialvermeer.com)

The vanishing point as the stain of infinity on a finite screen

Call it a stain because it is not yours to command. No one places a physical pin at ‘distance’; rather, the horizon-level point packages the whole direction ‘out there’ into a dot ‘in here’. That is why a successful road scene calms you: the world looks rule-governed again. And it is why a crooked horizon or a slumped grid unsettles you: the rule is failing. Psychologists once gave that calming function a name — reality testing — the ego’s ongoing check that what it sees tracks an external order, not just an inner wish (🔗; 🔗). The vanishing point is where that check gets visual: when your lane lines won’t converge where they should, your body registers drift before you can phrase it. (Wikipedia)

Three grounds you actually use while looking: testing, normalcy, translation

The first ground is reality testing: the image offers constraints you didn’t invent, and the vanishing point is the simplest one. The second is normalcy: there is never just one valid point. Painters and architects have long worked with families of arrangements — one-point for a face-on hallway, two-point for a building seen at a corner, three-point when the camera tilts so verticals also converge. Everyday orientation quietly rehearses those grammars; shift the camera and the whole construction pivots to another admissible set without the world falling apart (🔗). The third is communication: because more than one vanishing arrangement can organize the same street, talk is often a matter of translating between them — keeping enough of the picture invariant that the other person can ‘see’ what you mean even when their viewpoint is not yours. Parallax, in the strict sense, is that translation problem made method: keep two takes that won’t fuse, and work in the in-between (🔗). (Etchr Lab)

The 2D imaginary and why ‘depth’ arrives as a suspension

A surface gives you width and height, nothing more. Yet a well-timed pause in what you see can make the surface feel like it floats before you: a face seems nearer than the wall, the truck seems to peel away from the road. Depth in perception is not a new substance added to the page; it is a controlled suspension between appearances that your system can hold. The most famous description of that suspension in early psychology is the fort–da rhythm: a child stages absence and return — there and back — to domesticate the anxiety of a vanishing caregiver. The point is not sentimental; it is structural. Presence gains shape because absence is held in the same frame, and meaning is stabilized by letting the back-and-forth run its course (🔗; 🔗). (Freud Museum London)

Why this ‘third dimension’ is really 2.5D: a viewer-centred construction

Vision science long ago stopped pretending the system receives a ready-made 3D world. What it has are two arrays of light intensities and a set of operations to extract structure from them. David Marr’s classic account called the halfway product a ‘2½-D sketch’: viewer-centred surface layout with orientations and depths relative to you, not a god’s-eye model of the scene. The result feels like space, but its coordinates remain pinned to a standpoint; turn your head or shift your seat and the whole construction is recomputed (🔗; 🔗). The ‘half’ in 2½ matters: it keeps the emphasis on how depth arrives — as a maintained relation between incompatible flats — rather than pretending a third axis floats in like a metaphysical gift. (Princeton University)

Parallax as the engine of felt depth: from stereo disparity to motion

Hold a thumb at arm’s length and wink each eye in turn. The jump you see is binocular disparity — the left and right images disagree just enough that the brain can triangulate distance. Move your head sideways while keeping your eyes open and a similar effect arises: motion parallax. Neurophysiology shows that, in the right conditions, a small lateral head movement can produce retinal shifts equivalent to those from binocular differences, and the system exploits both to recover layout. The technical term for the rule that couples the two views is an epipolar constraint; the experiential effect is the ‘click’ of a scene falling into place when the two flats disagree just enough to be mined for depth (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). If the disagreement collapses to zero, the scene flattens; if it balloons, the scene tears. Parallax has to be tuned, not abolished. (CNS)

Opening the topic: destination and arrival without a shrine at the horizon

Returning to the road clarifies the promise and the trap. The vanishing point makes arrival imaginable by organizing what you see into trajectories that can be continued; it never guarantees that you will arrive where the rule points. Treat the speck as a shrine and you court delusion; treat it as a portable operator and you gain the freedom to switch frames without losing the world. Painters already knew this when they shifted from one-point to two-point constructions to suggest a turn, or injected a third convergence to dramatize a tilt. The plurality of ‘right’ points on the horizon is not a failure of truth but a library of ways to keep scenes navigable as you and others move (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). In that sense, every wrapping of the scene that promises depth is, at bottom, a careful warping of a flat that your system can read, provided the constraints hold and the points at infinity are placed where they belong. (essentialvermeer.com)

The stained frame: why a flat screen keeps returning a remainder

A cinema screen is a surface that organizes looking. It does this by giving the eye a stable arrangement of lines and faces and by hiding a small disturbance that cannot be integrated. Classic film theory called the disturbance the gaze: not what the viewer directs outward, but what returns from the image as a punctual pressure that the narrative cannot digest. In technical language, the spectator’s eye is satisfied by a coherent field, but the field is tinged by a point that belongs to no character and to no diegetic object. This is why the most polished sequence often feels charged at a single spot: there is a stain that refuses to be “just part of the scenery,” a local insistence that pulls at attention (🔗). In the iconography of the ‘male gaze’, the flat frame is arranged so that a woman’s body bears this insistence: sometimes as spectacle that sutures the viewer into a confident position, sometimes as a snag that won’t let the look close neatly. The logic is double: the frame pacifies by giving the eye a grammar of shots, lighting, and point-of-view alignments, and it destabilizes itself the moment enjoyment pools in a detail that has no narrative reason to be there (🔗; 🔗). (Lacanian Works Exchange)

To say there is no 3D Big Other is to refuse the fantasy of a third term that would reconcile all looks from nowhere in particular. The screen never gains a god’s-eye axis that makes every shot agree; it remains a two-dimensional fantasy-frame marked by that stain of enjoyment. The teaching that ‘there is no sexual relation’ condenses the same refusal: there is no master equation that links two positions without remainder. What takes the place of a reconciling axis is a set of shifts that keep perspectives in play without fusing them. The frame is flat, yet it acquires the feeling of depth by holding apart two inscriptions of the same scene and letting them interfere. That is what parallax is: an interval between takes that will not synthesize, a minimum disagreement through which the scene acquires relief (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). (iclo-nls.org)

The cinematic figure often named ‘Woman’ sits exactly at that fault-line. Not because she supplies a missing essence, but because the frame keeps assigning the remainder to her image. When the plot demands closure, she appears as the one who would make closure possible; when the closure arrives, she recedes into the very mechanism that produced the illusion of resolution. That is why the metaphor of disappearance endures. The title “The Lady Vanishes” has become more than the name of a Hitchcock thriller; it is shorthand for how the promised third term evaporates at the moment it is supposed to guarantee the scene. The character on whom assurance is projected becomes proof that assurance was a function of staging all along, not a substance rescued from the story-world (🔗; 🔗). (perisphere.org)

The same structural point can be made with lines and horizons. In French, the painter’s vanishing line is a ligne de fuite, literally a line of “disappearing into the distance.” The term that Deleuze and Guattari reworked as “line of flight” carries both senses at once: fleeing as in escaping a frame, and “fuite” as in leaking toward the vanishing point. The optical echo is explicit in the translator’s note: the vanishing line in perspective is a point de fuite; the “flight” here is the disappearance drawn into the fabric of the image. When the vanishing points slide along that line, the frame destabilizes. A camera tilt that introduces a third convergence point or an edit that reorients the whole scene does not add a metaphysical dimension; it exposes the image’s reliance on a disappearing edge for its apparent stability (🔗; 🔗). (Libcom Files)

There is a danger in this slide. If the drift of vanishing points is mistaken for access to a higher infinity, the result is a sprint after the horizon the frame projects for itself, a ‘beside the point’ frenzy in which making points becomes a way to miss the point. The cure is to read the slide as a re-framing operator and not as a revelation: an adjustment of lines that changes what can be done in the scene without promising a world beyond the frame. This is where parallax earns its keep. A parallax setup keeps two vantage rules active, lets them conflict in a controlled way, and produces the felt depth from their interval rather than from a newly invented axis. Stereoscopic perception makes the point tangible. Two eyes see slightly different images; the nervous system exploits the difference to compute a layout that feels stable. If the difference collapses, the world flattens. If it inflates without rule, the world tears. A similar tuning governs motion parallax: a small sideways movement of the head across a texture-rich field can deliver near/far relations with the precision of binocular disparity because the system binds the two views with an epipolar constraint. Depth appears as an effect of maintained non-identity, not as a third substance drifting in from elsewhere (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). (Journal of Neuroscience)

The psychoanalytic vocabulary that keeps returning to this topic does so because it has a name for the remainder that stains the image and animates desire. The object-cause of desire, often written as objet a, is neither a precious kernel hidden inside the beloved nor a mere prop; it is the structural leftover that the scene cannot reduce, the precisely placed scrap that sets the circuit of looking into motion. It shows up as a flicker in the field, a smile held too long, a foot that seems to “mean” more than the scene gives it permission to mean. The category matters here because it allows the argument to say: there is no “third D (Woman),” there is only the stain of enjoyment that the frame keeps tethering to a figure. The remainder does not belong to her; the remainder is the structural function that she too is made to carry in a frame that needs a spot for its own surplus (🔗; 🔗). (ResearchGate)

Once the frame is treated in this way, the question about traversing fantasy gains precision. To traverse it is not to escape the screen or to abolish desire; it is to let the essence that the image promised dissolve and to keep, and even intensify, the structural relation that made the promise felt in the first place. The thick “object” of fantasy loses substance; the relation to the small leftover becomes operative. That is why the discipline prefers to say that traversal dilutes the Essential Fantasy and strengthens the Fundamental Fantasy: the object is revealed as a staging effect, while the relation to the remainder becomes the very lever through which scenes can be rearranged. The work is exacting, because the temptation is always to transform a controlled parallax into a mythical third axis that will solve the scene for good. The counter-instruction is simple and strict. Keep two views that won’t coincide, let the stain do its work in the open, and accept that the only “3D” on offer is the depth that arrives when incompatible flats are held in tension. If the cinema has taught anything, it is that when a narrative tries to seal the gap by installing a guarantor, the guarantor fades at the horizon; when a narrative treats the gap as a rule for arranging scenes, the scenes breathe. (nosubject.com)

Love thy symptom—on the road

‘Thou shalt love thy symptom as thyself’ entered public circulation not as a soft aphorism but as the explicit title of a 1996 documentary built around the proposition that the flaw that kinks a life is not a dirt to be polished away but the very warp that gives it orientation (🔗; 🔗). To translate that imperative into the scene of driving is to accept that the twitch in one’s style, the compulsion to check the mirror again, the insistence on a certain lane, are not just noise. They are the way the field gets a grip on the driver. The lane markings that lean toward a single speck on the horizon make this acceptance practicable: the vanishing point is a stain of infinity on a finite windshield, the little mark that lets straight paths remain straight. The possibility of arrival belongs to that mark, not to any private will; when the lines won’t meet, the body registers drift and the mind calls it anxiety. The old clinical term for this check—reality testing—named exactly that felt difference between an inner push and an outer constraint (🔗; 🔗). (Wikipedia)

Homo Psychologicus and the automobile that mirrors him back

Mid-century psychoanalysis never hid its fascination with the car as a capsule of fantasy and a relay of identification. Accounts of Lacan’s seminars and anecdotes around his driving keep returning to the automobile as an object that magnetizes love and stages a privatized frame of vision: the glass box appears to separate the subject from the world, to grant immunity, to turn others into pure obstacles on ‘my’ route (🔗). The car is not just transport; it is a portable proscenium where an image of mastery can be rehearsed, confirmed by dials and readouts that promise an exact correspondence between “how I am” and “how the world is.” The danger arrives when that correspondence hardens. The vanishing point, which is supposed to be a tool for orientation, is mistaken for a personal Destination. The windshield becomes a shrine, the dashboard becomes doctrine, and the driver stops translating between frames—straight road, sudden rain, work zone, detour—and instead demands that the world confirm the chosen setup. That is how a craft device turns into a creed. (sipp-ispp.com)

‘Yes I can’ as a wrap that warps the impossible real

The motivational overlay that whispers ‘Yes I can’ has a technical name in psychology—self-efficacy—and, as a limited claim about mobilizing effort, it works (🔗; 🔗). The problem begins when the overlay is mistaken for the world’s geometry. A calibration that was meant to steady a hand becomes a metaphysics that insists the horizon will honor the plan. The result is a subtle optical fraud: lawful variations in the field—wind gusts, camber changes, a truck ahead—are misread as personal affront or proof of essence. The imperative to keep going morphs into the belief that the speck on the horizon is owed, that the lines of the world exist to funnel the driver toward a private fulfillment. The wrap of self-assurance becomes a warp of the scene. (Simply Psychology)

Intrinsics take the wheel: when provisional orientation locks to private parameters

Once the driver absolutizes the dashboard—speed, heading, estimated time of arrival—and takes those intrinsics as the truth of the ride, every deviation becomes intolerable. Orientation, which should be provisional and revisable, congeals into identity. In perceptual terms, the vanishing point is being concretized: what was a mathematical convenience for keeping parallels convergent is now upheld as destiny. The clinical vocabulary for this slide is familiar. Fixations begin to hold the scene in place; every jitter is over-interpreted as essence; translation between vantage rules breaks down; the feeling that others’ trajectories are not just different but hostile starts to creep in. The word for that universalization of suspicion is paranoia, a structure long tracked in psychoanalytic literature from Schreber onward, where the world’s geometry seems to aim at the subject rather than merely accommodate many paths (🔗; 🔗). (nosubject.com)

Everyone ‘tests reality’ privately: the new dashboard theatre

When each driver enthrones their own intrinsics, even small tokens become charged as proofs of reality: the correct tone, the visible signal, the chosen word. The very phrase ‘reality testing’ slides from a shared discipline into a private performance, a dashboard theatre where what counts as ‘outside’ is whatever confirms the readouts on the inside (🔗). The effect is not pluralism but collision. Two lanes of admissible vanishing points—the grammar by which a city stays drivable—are displaced by parallel monologues that refuse translation. What follows is not dialogue about routes but an arms race of assertions: my convergence lines, my horizon, my claim to the road.

‘Universal paranoia’: a warning and a protest

The warning that knowledge has a paranoiac bent if it is built on a mirror of the self rather than on shared constraints is not new; it appears in the literature as a sober observation about how the ego’s certainty turns relations into plots (🔗). The protest against that capture was given another vocabulary by Deleuze and Guattari, who diagnosed the reactionary impulse to recode and re-territorialize every flow the moment it threatens to exceed a personal frame, and who proposed the ‘line of flight’ as a way to unglue identities that have mistaken their dashboard for the whole map (🔗; 🔗). Read together, the warning and the protest form a tight rule for the road. Keep the vanishing point as a tool, not a destination. Let the symptom—the little warp that makes one prefer a certain rhythm of lane changes or a certain spacing to the car ahead—be acknowledged and used, not denied and then enforced on the world. Accept that the frame must sometimes shift and that depth comes from translating between frames rather than from imposing one. The moment the point at infinity is treated as a private shrine, the city turns paranoid. The moment it is treated as a public operator, arrival remains a possibility for many at once. (researchgate.net)

False ground: when intrinsic parameters dress themselves up as truth

The contemporary self arrives at the world the way a driver arrives at the highway with the dashboard already glowing. Numbers, indicators, self-reports, identities, preferences — the intrinsics — do not just inform; they seduce. They promise that orientation can be guaranteed from the inside. That promise is what makes this a false ground. Recent polemics have given this regime a precise name: Hypocritique — the art of naming lack in a profound tone so that nothing is actually renounced. It is the posture that condemns without cutting, that keeps decisions offstage while luxuriating in the ambience of decision. One can watch it at work wherever antagonism is massaged into mood and criticism is converted into a brand of carefulness; an explicit diagnosis has been mounted in essays that describe a “maternal superego” softening every incision into a soothing moderation, a “motheration” that protects scenes from the very cuts they require (🔗; 🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

The false ground shows three faces that look distinct but share a method. The post-Freudian developmentalist translates sequence into telos: the ladder that once helped someone climb becomes a doctrine of where everyone must end up, so every deviation is pathology by definition. The post-Lacanian stimulationist replaces cuts with hacks: transgression and law fuse into a paraphilic superego that commands performance, monetizes failure, and calls the whole loop “optimization.” The post-Žižekian exoticist, finally, curates alterities as boutique calibrations: “lines of flight” are shelved like fragrances, dissent is packaged as an ambience, and antagonism is kept safe in the museum of moods. All three are versions of Hypocritique’s pact: tone over incision, safety over sequence, consolation over constraint. These are not caricatures; they are visible today wherever the soothing atmosphere of criticality protects scenes from acts that would change their coordinates (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

True ground: contextual punctuation and the return of the cut

Against intrinsicism, the reliable ground is not an essence within; it is a practice of punctuation in the Symbolic — the timely insertion of cuts that re-time a sequence so that incompatible views remain operable. This is what the Freudian–Lacanian–Žižekian line defends at the level of craft: the subject is not secured by a hidden kernel but oriented by constraints that do not belong to the ego. The cut has a body. When rightly staged, even a small absurdity — a mismatch that cannot be domesticated into tone — is enough to make the organism feel the difference between a world that answers to a private dashboard and a world that resists it. The point is not to injure but to restore reality testing, to put sequence back on its feet, to bind parallax to a procedure rather than wear it as a mood (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

This ground is compatible with schizoanalysis and with the theory of the truth-event up to a point. Schizoanalysis contributes a disciplined sense of the ligne de fuite — the vanishing line along which a frame can be deterritorialized — but only so long as the slide is used as an operator, not worshipped as a revelation. Even the translator’s note to A Thousand Plateaus underlines the optical double meaning of fuite: fleeing and “disappearing into the distance,” the painter’s vanishing point, point de fuite. The moment the slide is mistaken for a vertical Beyond, it turns into false infinity, a horizon chased as an idol rather than a lever moved inside the scene (🔗; 🔗). Badiou’s ‘event,’ likewise, is strongest when treated as a punctuation mark that convokes fidelity — a decision that sets a new sequence in motion — not as a new essence to enthrone on the dashboard. The secondary literature is unambiguous on this point: the event is undecidable within the situation, the work is the fidelity that follows, and truth is the process that consequence traces (🔗; 🔗). (Internet Archive)

Calibration to an essence: the lure of the ‘special K’

Homo Psychologicus does not simply look; he calibrates. The fantasy is tuned to a supposed essence by positing a special calibration — the ‘special K’ that supposedly makes a person ‘tick’ and guarantees that every scene can be solved from the inside. In practice, this means enthroning intrinsics as ontological: the metric becomes the world. The price of that enthronement is visible wherever a surplus of foundation destabilizes the very system it was meant to support. When surplus grounding is named and tracked, it shows up as a pathology of certainty: the more basis one claims to possess, the less one can translate between frames, and the more every variation is misread as essence confessed. The false ground needs the ‘special K’ because, without it, the scene reverts to relations that no private dashboard can fully domesticate (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

Traversal and deterritorialization: desubstantializing fantasy without destroying orientation

The workable alternative is difficult but specific. Traversing fantasy does not mean purging images or abolishing desire; it means thinning the thick object that fantasy presents as essence and intensifying the relation to the leftover that actually animates the circuit. Psychoanalysis has a sharp name for that leftover — the object cause of desire — and a set of mathemes that formalize its position in the scene. In this vocabulary, the crossing has two simultaneous effects: the Essential Fantasy with its thick object dissolves as staging, while the Fundamental Fantasy — the relation to the small remainder that cannot be integrated — becomes operational. The point is widely affirmed in accessible summaries: traversing the fantasy is the acceptance of an inconsistent, non-All order that dispenses with a guarantor, and the shift in position relative to the remainder that makes action possible again (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). In the neighboring idiom of schizoanalysis, “deterritorialization” names a parallel move at the level of frames: not a leap to a beyond, but a controlled slide that changes what can be done inside the field (🔗). (nosubject.com)

Naming the posture: Hypocritique as the theater that protects essence from the cut

The convergence of developmentalist telos, stimulationist hacking, and exoticist curation is not accidental; it is the protective theater for the essence-calibration. In that theater, the maternal superego pampers the beautifully dissatisfied ideal ego, tone substitutes for incision, and industry forms around the performance of criticality. The through-line has been spelled out with unusual frankness: Hypocritique condemns without cutting, protects scenes from consequence, and elevates the atmosphere of critique into a clerisy that polices mood while evading the decisive act (🔗; 🔗). The antidote returns us to the true ground: contextual punctuation as a rule of work. Bind concept to a cut; expose the calibration smuggled into your claim; re-state the scene at the level of relations that do not answer to your intrinsics; and keep frames translatable even when they do not coincide. Only then does orientation stop pretending to be essence and resume its proper task: making arrival possible without turning the horizon into a shrine. (Žižekian Analysis)

Wrapping the field into a pose

Two pictures of the same scene can cohere without anyone knowing the camera’s private settings. That cohere-rule is encoded by a matrix called F, the fundamental matrix, which enforces a simple epipolar relation between corresponding image points and is defined only up to scale. It belongs to the field of relations; it does not presume a viewer’s focal length, principal point, or skew. Standard vision texts present it as the algebraic record of a geometric fact: for any point in one image, its partner in the other must lie on a specific line, and the collection of such line–point pairings obeys a single constraint across the whole image pair (🔗). When the camera’s internal settings are asserted — when a calibration K is posited for each view — the same relation can be rewritten in calibrated coordinates and compressed into a different 3×3 object, E, the essential matrix. In that calibrated domain, E has a distinctive fingerprint: two equal singular values and a third that vanishes, a pattern that allows one to read off the relative rotation and the translation direction between the views. The crucial link is compact and mercilessly instructive: . The pose appears because the calibration was assumed; change K and the numbers that seemed to reveal the scene’s ‘angles and distances’ change with it (🔗; 🔗; 🔗).

Essence by assumption

This is the practical meaning packed into the slogan ‘you can only believe in the essence by positing the special K.’ The belief that a scene yields a single privileged pose, ready to be read like a verdict, is already a wager on a normalization. Calibrate the images and E becomes legible as orientation; remove the calibration and you are returned to F, the bare constraint that any admissible pose must respect. The point is not to disparage calibration — modern vision depends on it — but to keep a clean separation between what the field demands and what a framing adds. The difference is visible across introductions to stereo: the uncalibrated relation reduces the search for correspondences to a line, while the calibrated case authorizes an upgrade to metric structure, depth, and camera motion. Both are lawful; only one carries the viewer’s private optics inside it (🔗; 🔗).

Why this matters for what a body feels

Call the invariant driver in the scene jouissance if one wants the psychoanalytic name: not a polite satisfaction but an enjoyment that presses beyond a comfortable limit, a surplus push that can feel excessive, even painful, as it insists (🔗; 🔗). The claim here is disciplined by the vision lesson. If different calibrations can wrap the same field into different poses without changing the underlying constraint, then quite different cultural framings can wrap the same drive into different narratives of ‘what it really is’ without changing the push itself. The motor doesn’t flip when the framing flips. One can watch a parallel in basic neuroscience: many excitations that feel incomparable on the surface — sexual climax, opioid euphoria, stimulant rush — converge on overlapping reward circuits or receptor families, producing common forms of reinforcement even as their phenomenology diverges (🔗; 🔗). In other words, framings differ, but the drive’s insistence remains; the costumes change, the pressure does not.

Minimal math, maximal hygiene

A few spare facts complete the hygiene. F lives at the level of projective relation and carries no units; multiply it by any nonzero scalar and the constraint it encodes doesn’t change. E lives at the level of calibrated relation, and its internal fingerprint (two equal singular values, one zero) is the algebraic memory of how it is built from a rotation and a translation-as-skew. The tidy decompositions that extract camera motion from E are only as ‘true’ as the calibration that made E possible in the first place. Treating those decompositions as revelations of essence is like mistaking the dashboard for the road. The sober reading is simpler and more durable: E is just F in costume, and the costume is K. Keep the costume when you need pose; drop it when you need to see what holds regardless of your settings (🔗; 🔗; 🔗).

The last turn: excitement without metaphysics

From here the closing claim follows without theatrics. ‘Being high’ in the broadest sense — a brief absurd lift, orgasmic peak, psychedelic blaze, motivational surge — is best treated as a recalibration of the viewing apparatus, a change of K that warps the field into a newly vivid pose. It can be medically risky or personally meaningful, but it is not evidence of a new drive being born each time. The field relation that persists across framings is what lets scenes be translated; the invariance of the push is what lets very different overlays feel uncannily linked in their afterglow. Keep the distinction clear and both domains become usable: calibrate when you need angles and distances; return to the constraint when you need to remember what does not answer to your intrinsics. The essence appears only under a chosen K; the pressure that keeps returning does not wait for permission. (Oxford Robotics)

EF/E as a compulsory optics—and why it breeds a culture of pose

The ideology often nicknamed Homo Psychologicus clings to a pairing that flatters his dashboard: Essential Fantasy, the thick belief that there is a kernel to be revealed, and the “essential” pose that calibrated vision seems to deliver. In technical vision, once camera intrinsics are assumed, the essential matrix lets one read off relative rotation and translation; put differently, when calibration is in place, the world becomes computable as angle and distance (🔗; 🔗). Under this EF/E mindset, computing angles and distances is not just helpful—it is mandatory, because the very experience of “truth” has been equated with a readout. Remove the calibration and one falls back to the fundamental relation between views—F—which carries no units and encodes only the lawful co-variation of points; EF/E reads that return to mere relation as loss rather than as sobriety (🔗). (Oxford Robotics)

The same compulsion governs the psychology: if truth is whatever confirms the intrinsics, then the subject must be embedded in an ego-flattering illusion. Classic accounts called the corrective “reality testing,” the ego’s check that an outer constraint resists inner wish; when this check collapses, the readout becomes the world and not merely a guide within it (🔗; 🔗). The price is subtle: a person begins to mistake the camera’s certainty for ontological certainty, and ordinary variance in the field is moralized as evidence about essence. (GoodTherapy)

From here the only durable product is I-machination: the endless spawning of images of oneself for an apparatus that craves confirmation. Exhibition and self-presentation studies have been documenting this loop for more than a decade, showing how online display both expresses and amplifies a demand for recognition; in several samples, exhibitionism mediates the link between competences sought online and disclosure behaviors, and traits tied to self-objectification predict performative posting styles (🔗; 🔗). The frame learns to treat metrics as mirrors and mirrors as mandates. (PMC)

Once EF grounds itself, its first clinical smell is fixation. Obsessional neurosis has long been described as the compulsive re-computation of a single rule to defer a decisive cut—rituals, ceremonials, the addiction to checking that everything still lines up; in modern primers and archives alike, obsessional formats are precisely the ones that keep repeating a verification in place of a choice (🔗; 🔗). The second smell is hysteric over-meaning: variability must confess a kernel. Hysterical presentations have, from early case material onward, essentialized the smallest deviation as a clue to the “truth” of the other, turning lawful shifts into tribunals of interpretation (🔗; 🔗). (bpsi.org)

Push EF a step further and the geometry of others’ viewpoints stops being negotiable and starts feeling conspiratorial. Paranoia, which psychoanalytic history treats as clinically central from the Schreber case forward, is exactly this privatization of a vanishing point: my horizon is universal; your line of sight is a plot. Historical surveys of Lacan’s work on paranoia show how knowledge itself acquires a paranoiac structure when certainty is secured in the mirror rather than through shared constraints (🔗; 🔗). As the set of admissible vanishing points narrows to one, translation between frames collapses into vigilance. (PMC)

EF does not grow alone; it is fed by a scopic economy that rewards looking without cutting. Cinema’s best-known analysis of this economy remains the essay on “visual pleasure,” where the screen is arranged to align a spectator with a commanding look and to eroticize the very mechanism that glues the spectator to the frame. The set-up stages voyeurism, builds reassurance around a spectacle, and routes anxiety through an object placed to bear the scene’s surplus; that is why the grammar of shots, point-of-view, and concealment keeps returning as an engine of perverse satisfaction (🔗; 🔗; 🔗). In the social-media sequel, exhibitionism generalizes the same logic from auditorium to feed: the self becomes content, the feed becomes tribunal, and the command to show oneself is laundered as authenticity. Recent and emerging studies tie platform consumption to narcissism/exhibitionism patterns and document how display mediates the drive for recognition (🔗; 🔗). (Columbia University)

The endpoint is predictable in 2025: EF universalizes as puppetware. Deepfake tooling, now cheap and increasingly user-friendly, manufactures “essential” identities on demand—perfectly calibrated poses that satisfy a viewer’s expectation of angle and distance while remaining indifferent to provenance. Policy and culture reports warn of a crisis of knowing fueled by synthetic video and voice, citing documented frauds and a swelling market for generative content; news desks have already chronicled cases where employees, convinced by a pose-consistent video call, moved sums on the order of tens of millions (🔗). Even cautious newswire summaries of UNESCO’s earlier warnings track the same danger at the level of historical memory: if the apparatus can produce plausible scenes at will, denial and revisionism gain an engine and a mask (🔗). Industry trackers amplify the horizon with aggressive counts of synthetic media and fraud growth; even if one treats those numbers as directional rather than definitive, the thrust is unmistakable: pose is outpacing proof (🔗). (UNESCO)

What threads these scenes is not a hatred of computation or images but a warning about what happens when calibration is mistaken for ontology. EF/E makes computing angle and distance compulsory and embeds the subject in a flattering delusion; it turns imagination into I-machination, recodes variance as confession, compresses a city’s plural vanishing points into a single privatized axis, eroticizes voyeurism in one chamber and mandates exhibitionism in the next, and finally automates the whole sequence with puppetware that manufactures “essence” on tap. The remedy cannot be to smash the dashboard; modern life needs metrics. The sober move is to keep them in their place: use calibration to operate, but return to the field’s constraints when testing what is real; let images move, but refuse to let the readout pretend it is the road.

Contextual punctuation at the level of FF/F

What punctuates a discourse in the Lacanian sense is not a comma or a dash but an act that re-times the sequence, forces a new place for the subject, and binds what would otherwise remain a drift of impressions. This is the level of FF/F: the fundamental fantasy as relation, and the field relations that hold views together even when no private calibration is assumed. A small, rightly staged “cut” is enough to flip a scene from tone to rule; when the cut is felt, reality testing resumes, sequence regains prestige, and the subject stops asking the world to mirror an inner certainty and starts reading constraints that do not belong to the ego (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

Every wrapping of essence is, in this register, a warping. In computer vision the lesson is blunt: a calibrated E only appears after a K has been assumed; without that special framing, the invariant is the fundamental relation F that any admissible pose must respect. Treat the calibrated clarity as the thing itself and the scene gets mystified; treat it as a wrap and the field is freed to speak again. The point is methodological, not anti-technical: keep calibration to operate, but return to the relation when testing what is real (🔗; 🔗). (Oxford Robotics)

Analysis extracts K in this sense: not the lens itself but the cherished normalization that has been smuggled into the claim. Once that extraction is accomplished, pathogenic fixations tend to slacken. Variations that looked like confessions of essence are re-seen as lawful shifts of a projective scene. The demand that every jitter “must mean” is replaced by a capacity to distinguish genuine signals from the background of transformations that any perspective enforces. This is precisely what a reality-restoring cut does in practice: it makes the device show inside the scene—provenance, schedule, threshold, limit—so that persuasion by mood gives way to orientation by rule (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

Vanishing points, peeled from poetization, belong to this sober hygiene. In projective geometry they are not mystic destinations but the images of points at infinity; parallels meet there because perspective demands it. Rendered plainly, they anchor reality testing: when lines that should converge don’t, you are drifting. Rendered plural, they anchor normalcy: a city stays navigable because more than one vanishing arrangement is admissible and translatable. The page need not be mystical to be deep; the mathematics of points at infinity already carries the sense in which a flat surface can lawfully host directions without inventing a new dimension (🔗; 🔗). (Wikipedia)

At this level, EFs cancel out. The “essential fantasy” that thickens an object into a kernel relies on a calibration masquerading as ontology. When the analysis names and removes that normalization, the kernel thins back into staging. Intrinsic parameters—those private settings that promised a guaranteed read—reveal themselves as inconclusive lures: helpful for operating when declared, distorting when naturalized. The gain is not a loss of meaning but a cessation of over-meaning: the scene no longer demands that every micro-variation testify to an essence, and the subject can stop policing the image for the impossible guarantee that a myth of depth had promised. That is why a good absurdity—timed, owned, and allowed to show its device—can be curative: it makes the rule palpable and the fetish fall away (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

“Folklore” becomes “folklure” at precisely this hinge. Stories, customs, shared slogans—these are powerful because they smuggle calibrations inside forms everyone recognizes. To call them “folklure” is to mark their lure-function: they bind groups to vanishing points they do not experience as choices. The corrective is not iconoclasm but ground-truthing: recover the projective rules the stories ride on and the lure loses its blackmail. Folklore can still be cherished as memory and craft, but it is no longer allowed to decide where lines must meet simply because they used to meet there (🔗; 🔗). (Fiveable)

Only FF—the fundamental relation to the leftover that structures desire—can cope when projection itself goes strange. Psychosis is not merely a wrong belief; phenomenological work describes it as a disturbance of ipseity, a reconfiguration of the minimal self in which the very background of experience is altered. Under that pressure, enforcing “one more essence” does not help; it intensifies persecution. What does help are procedures that re-multiply translatable vanishing sets, restore constraints that survive any private normalization, and give the subject a way to inhabit an image without being swallowed by it. In plain clinical English: rebuild handles on the field so that reality testing can be reconvened at a level prior to argument, where a world holds together again (🔗; 🔗). (Lirias)

From here the much-abused phrase plane of immanence can be reclaimed without mystification. It is not a promise of transcendence but a name for the surface on which many compatible operations can be laid down at once. Expand that plane and you do not reveal a “beyond”; you stock the field with provisional orientation-helpers: shared marks, translatable vanishing sets, explicit devices, declared thresholds. Used this way, the plane does not float free of constraint—it is the catalogue of constraints you can work with, extended without installing a sovereign guarantee. The literature presents it as a “plane of consistency,” a surface where relations, speeds, and slownesses are coordinated without appeal to a higher judge; that is precisely why it pairs so well with the FF/F discipline, which keeps orientations usable without enthroning a hidden K (🔗; 🔗). (Wikipedia)

The through-line is simple enough to carry forward. Contextual punctuation is the craft of cutting at the level where relations live, not where essences are dreamed; every wrap that claims to deliver the kernel is a warp that needs to be declared as such; extracting the calibration that secured the illusion is how fixations let go; arbitrary jitter stops being scripture when vanishing points are returned to their mathematics; folklore is read as lure and released from blackmail; psychotic distortions are met by rebuilding field-handles rather than by preaching a new depth; and the plane of immanence expands by stocking operations that keep scenes navigable for more than one eye at a time. That is the ethics of FF/F: keep what binds, cut what embalms, and let depth arrive from the interval, not from a throne. (Oxford Robotics)

The skeleton I used while prompting:

Title: Every Wrapping is a Warping

“Quo vadis? Where are we going?”
Imagine driving a car on a road
‘Making a point’: Vanishing Point
Opening a topic: destination, arrival

VP: the stain of infinity on the finite screen
Ground for reality testing, saves from delusion
Ground of normalcy: a set of vanishing points
Ground of communication: translation of VPs

2D imaginary, gains depth by the 3rd dimension
3rd dimension: suspension, fort-da, ebb and flow
Imaginary X-Y and symbolic Z: not really 3D but 2.5D
Parallax view gives depth perception like stereo vision

2D male gaze, stained by ‘the’ woman’s ebb and flow
There is no 3D (big other), only 2D fantasy frame stained
There is no 3rd D (woman), only the stain of enjoyment
There is no Z-rotation (sexual relation), only parallax shifts

Deleuze & Guattari: line of flight = Vanishing Line
VPs shift on VL: 2D frame destabilized by 3rd D
Making points ‘beside the point’: false infinity
Woman can only exist as “The Lady Vanishes”

Freud-Lacan-Žižek: traversing the fantasy
Does the traverse dilute or intensify the fantasy?
It dissolves/desubstantializes the essence of the object:
It dilutes the Essential Fantasy (EF) with the object in objectivity
It intensifies the Fundamental Fantasy (FF) with objet a = objetality

Žižek: “Thou shalt love thy symptom as thyself” (1996)
Lacan: Homo Psychologicus loves his automobile as himself
Driving on the road, the vanishing point: possibility of arrival
Wraps imagination “Yes I can” by warping the impossible real
Homo Psychologicus essentializes the VP as his Destination
Provisional orientation is locked on to his intrinsic parameters
Everybody tests his/her/their (pronoun fetish) own reality!
VP concretized = Universal Paranoia (Lacan warned, D&G protested)

Intrinsic parameters (of Homo Psychologicus): false ground
1) Post-Freudian developmentalists
2) Post-Lacanian stimulationists
3) Post-Žižekian exoticists
This is the position of Hypocritique!

Contextual punctuation (of Symbolic Order): true ground
1) Freudian-Lacanian-Žižekian Psychoanalysis (true heir)
2) Deleuzian & Guattarian Schizoanalysis (up to a point)
3) Badiouian Truth-Event (up to a point)

Homo Psychologicus CALIBRATES his fantasy to an ESSENCE (false)
Finding the ‘special K’ (?) that ‘makes him tick’, ‘floats his boat’ etc.
‘Fantasy traversal’ & ‘deterritorialization’ desubstantializes fantasy
Not essential fantasy with K, but the fundamental fantasy without K

In computer vision, essential matrix E is a calibrated viewpoint
Fundamental matrix F is independent of the calibration matrix K
You get the E by wrapping/warping the F with K: E = (K’)^T * F * K
You can only believe in ‘the essence’ by assuming the ‘special K’
But jouissance is always the same: no special K, only varied framings = ideologies
Being ‘high’ is just absurdity, orgasm, psychedelic drug, any excitation

The ideology of Homo Psychologicus sticks to EF/E
Computing angle & distance of objects is mandatory
Embedding the subject in ego delusion is mandatory
Only product: spawning of imagination = I-machination
EF grounds itself on fixations: obsessional neurosis
EF essentializes all variability: hysterical neurosis
EF unhinges the set of VPs: universal paranoia
EF is fed by cinematic voyeurism: perversion
EF is universalized by social media exhibitionism
EF will explode by puppetware = free AI deepfakes

Contextual punctuation moves at the level of FF/F
Every ‘wrapping’ of essence is truly a ‘warping’/distortion
Analysis extracts calibration K to unlock pathogenic fixations
No longer needs to impute meaning to arbitrary variations
VPs peeled off from poetization and revealed in their maths
EFs cancel out, intrinsic parameters: irrelevant, inconclusive lure
Folklore is actually folklure. VPs are ground truth for reality testing
Only FF can deal with psychotic distortions of projective transformations
Expands the ‘plane of immanence’: lots of provisional orientation helpers