A shift from Ecology to Echology means the following [1]:

1) Our demands about the environment echo one another.

2) The resonance among our demands symptomatically implicates us within (and entangles us with) the environment in which we dwell.

Psychoanalysis has a word for the resonant “intra-action” (Barad) among the demands: It’s called desire. Desire moves by hinging on the demand for love (or the demand to be acknowledged as an interlocutor) that is present in any demand [2].

The world of scientific objectivity is typically founded on the disavowal of this desirous intra-action among the demands. If the scientist is going to speak about A and B as two distinct symbols, the demand for A must have nothing to do with the demand for B. Of course, if someone has a reason to speak about A and B, these symbols must surely have a practical contextual relation. But the quintessential scientific gesture is to exclude (preferably foreclose or at least disavow) this practical relation between A and B, and treat them as indifferent terms. The scientist must suspend their symbolic significance and reduce them to signs with merely indexical functions, typically in order to assign numbers to them. This is called statistics.

If A and B are statistical parameters, they must function merely as signs that index certain numbers, they are prohibited from functioning as signifiers that represent the subject for other signifiers. This is how modern logic sutures the subject of science:

[Modern logic] is indisputably the strictly determined consequence of an attempt to suture the subject of science, and Gödel’s last theorem shows that the attempt fails there, meaning that the subject in question remains the correlate of science, but an antinomic correlate since science turns out to be defined by the deadlocked endeavor to suture the subject. (Lacan, Écrits, p. 731)

The ideal scientist would radically foreclose the symbolic entanglements among A, B, C. But in practice this ideal is never achieved and the scientific objectivity is based on a disavowal in which the scientist knows very well that A, B, C are (subjectively and politically) related symbols yet acts as if they were unrelated objective indices. The statistical science is notorious for functioning as a means of fabricating false information due to this disavowal of subjectivity inherent in its operation.

Can we imagine beyond the statistical disavowal? What would statistics become if it were to confront and assume the disavowal of subjective desire inherent in its operation? Let me coin a new word to designate the consequence of this confrontation and assumption: Dynamistics.

Dynamistics is what statistics would become if it were able to assume and follow the desirous intra-action among the symbolic demands.

When some event is called statistically significant, it means that the event is not likely to have resulted from pure chance. For example, if we toss a coin, it is likely to turn up Heads or Tails, but it is pretty unlikely to land vertically. If we observe that the coin is standing up, we are compelled to suppose the existence of an external factor, like a hand holding it. The factor of pure chance is called the null hypothesis and the external factor is called the alternative hypothesis.

When some event is called dynamistically significant, it means that the event is a coincidence that calls for an interpretation. Such coincidences initially appear nonsensical, but as such they drive the sense-making [3]. In dynamistics, the null hypothesis refers to the tacit inarticulate assumptions that form the symptomatic ground of the present subjective-political situation; in other words, it refers to the current ideology. On the other hand, the alternative hypothesis refers to anything that emerges externally in the horizon of the null hypothesis, anything that appears on the Other Scene beyond the usual screen of the null hypothesis. It is crucial to comprehend that the alternative hypothesis is extimately entangled with the null hypothesis, so that the alternative hypothesis can get lost or radically change shape when there is a shift in the null hypothesis.

In Lacanian sexuation, phallic jouissance is the null hypothesis and the so-called ‘Other jouissance’ is its inherent alternative hypothesis [4]. In psychoanalysis, the practical basis of dynamistical significance is hysteria. The analyst hystericizes the subject and interprets the dynamistically significant bits that occur in his/her speech in order to produce meaningful new signifiers.

Let us conclude with Lacan’s words against statistics:

Let’s get rid of this average Joe, who does not exist. He is a statistical fiction. There are individuals, and that is all. When I hear people talking about the person on the street, studies of public opinion, mass phenomena, and so on, I think of all the patients that I’ve seen on the couch in forty years of listening.  None of them in any measure resembled the others. None of them had the same phobias and anxieties, the same way of talking, the same fear of not understanding. Who is the average Joe: me, you, my concierge, the president of the Republic? (1974 interview with Jacques Lacan)

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Echology, Echosystems, Echocide”, “Ego is Echocide before Ecocide”

[2] See “Interlocutorship and the Four Discourses”, “Demand and Desire on Lacan’s Torus”, “The Intersectional Field of Desire around the Central Void”

[3] The interpretive sense-making has a limit which is alternatively called the dream-navel, enjoy-meant, or dyna-mystical significance.

[4] See “Proof is masculine, evidence is feminine”, see also “The strange angel-making bed of ‘another jouissance than phallic jouissance’”