There's no problem about the subject except a lot of hooey. It is a simple, imaginary spatial feature--a dot--that is always about three or four inches behind the eyes, moving with them as we move. It exists in our awareness precisely the same way as any other object thing that happens to be behind us--in tension over its possibilities of action that we cannot see, updated by sounds (and, God forbid, smells) that corroborate to various doings--crashes, bangs, rustlings, footsteps, etc; except, of course, for the fact that the subject is silent, odorless, and tasteless.
And since we have never seen the subject, we don't know what it is; if you know that there's a baby behind you, for instance--and you are busying yourself with the dishes, then you know what to be on the alert for; what sounds coming from her and the other objects behind that would be a sign of danger, distress, or something being broken. Likewise you know how to be on the alert if your waiting for the bus and there's some bum behind you who's thinking...God knows what he's thinking but its sure that have to do with your wallet--or worse! But the subject is something we've never encountered, and hence don't know what to do with.
Its like a sign pinned on our back that we can't see or reach to pull off. Like a dog chasing his tail we can't ever seem to catch it in front of us. It just sits there behind us, seeing what we see and do something we known not what behind us. Possessed of all of our feelings, thoughts, awarenesses--but also something more, what one might charitably call "the truth." The subject does stuff, though. Before we're even done with our thoughts it encircles them like an anaconda whose skin is all one big mouth that immediately sinks around what it encircles. If one didn't think of anything, the snake would just sink into itself--which is what it does all the time anyway, as it encircles other things. You want to know what the subject is? Its a Greco-Roman wrestler, that's who that little guy is. And he will fuck. you. up. He'll get you with the suplex so fast you won't even know what hit you.
By all means, if you want to be a mapmaker and get out your measuring tape and try to get the dimensions of this snake--be my guest. I can tell you already that you won't be able to see it to measure, and the only shape you'll get and the only analysis be able to perform is on the shape of the measuring tape itself, as the snake wraps around it. He can wriggle out of any topological description too, and eat it. The black snake of nihilism, as Nietzsche puts it. The Oroboros, the snake that eats itself. But Descartes's intuition was right: the pineal gland is situated right about where the subject should be, and the fact that it actually produces serotonin is not proof that the subject is a mystical object that connects to the body by a voodoo that needs no site of connexion; it proves that it is imaginary.
As a corollary: the imaginary is only viewed by the image of the viewer, which as we said cannot be viewed (unless it is--and then the viewer of that viewer isn't viewed. ha ha.) Thus, the imaginary itself cannot thus be viewed in its entirety, and thus--what we're really dealing with is the unintrepretability of dreams. The inability to transform the imaginary into an image with borders, or a source. The imaginary only has borders within itself; the borders are images of borders. Incipient dream-time. But when does this whole business arise, historically speaking? Again--it is absolutely with the destruction of the firmament. As we've already established: this guy is a tricky one and can wriggle out of most anything; and robbed of a universal home over everything, he shattered into each and every lacuna of our vision, filling it with the old celestial machinery.
So with that being said,there remains a certain discussion of strategies, a discussion of the business of topology, and how the subject is constructed. Plato already described the space that constructs the subject, and did a most admirable topology. The subject is in the cave,and is defined by a certain place in that cave. There are many places that resemble the cave: a classroom resembles it, especially insofar as the teacher is a pat functionary of centrally planned lessons confirmed by tests, and a theater is even more. But the modern American den with its television and computer screens, or better yet the motion picture show, resembles it the most. These places only constitute together 90% of typical waking life during childhood? Where else do you need to look?
This leaves us with the matter of strategy. One immediately has the idea of pitting some kind of mongoose against the snake--but if such a thing were possible, which I cannot see, one would have the problem of the old lady who swallowed a fly. The mongoose would, by necessity, be an even tougher customer than the snake, and there's no way to anticipate its effects.
This leaves us with the strategy enunciated by Burl Ives character in "The Big Country:"
"The next time you come a busting and blazing into my place scaring the kids and the women folks, when you invade my home, like you was the law or God Almighty... then I say to you, I've seen every kind of critter God ever made, and I ain't never seen a more meaner, lower, pitiful, yellow, stinking hyprocrite than you! Now you can swallow up a lot of folks and make them like it, but you ain't swallowing me. I'm stuck in your craw, Major Terrill, and you can't spit me out! You hear me now! You've rode into my place and beat my men for the last time and I give ya warning, you step foot in Blanco Canyon once more and this country goin' to run red with blood until there ain't one of us left! Now I don't hold mine so precious, so if you want to start, here, start now!"
The strategy here is the strategy of "getting stuck in the craw" by developing a shape that the snake can't swallow. This can be in the form of an intellectual exercise in constructing a time bomb of infinite multiplicity that blows in the creatures throat. The problem is that this shape may be the same--or is easily confused--with the snake in itself, when it consumes itself. In this way it amounts to "letting the snake alone" like Schopenhauer's Castle of solipsism, and leaving it to consume itself behind a safe partition. As Ray notes,the idea of partitioning things in the brain is misguided. The brain is necessarily leaky. it will always forget its booby traps while wandering through the labyrinth that is the brain, and fall into the pit all over again. It can, also, as the quote suggests, come in the form of making resistance at the disenfranchised remnants of those communities that have not been assimilated to subjectivity at all. This is better: but the problem is that, in the current form, the disenfranchised either acquiesce or are driven to their one option in a disfiguring suicidal despair. the hope here is to find non-destructive social machines to couple into.
The final strategy, what we could call the Eucharistic or hallucinogenic--the transubstantiatory; things that, when consumed by the subject,have a qualitative effect. That metamorphosize the mouths into pores. That change the all-consuming into a vomitus of long-contained discontents. To change the direction from one of an enclosing shrinking-in, to an outer-directed explosion--with all the suppleness of the anaconda--with which feelings and ideas can attach to. These are all dangerous and messy, though ultimately necessary in many cases, as long as we proceed with due caution. and the goal in this is a subject that takes in and sets lose flows with an expanding and intensifying effect--at times skirting a zone of mutating irradiation--but which don't cycle endlessly, but take in one end and let out the other. Do this all in a way that resonates with the despairing, half-assimilated underclass, and uses both for a machine that does not demolishes, but ceases the near monopoly, of the various cave forms in the middle period of our maturation as children.
The point, however, is that the movement of the subject, its telos and the inward direction of its flow, are functions of a qualitative ideology (a logos in images) and on that level it can be hacked. Try it.
--I should add, by the way, that what all this tries to show that what is powerful in the subject is not its topology but its material, which is novel and amazing. The topological logic of subjectivity qua absolute inwardness is a logic found other places, and is really quite simple. And at any rate this is not mathematical but imaginary and must be dealt with as such.
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