The Internet is a technology, a machine. Like transport it has many benefits but also many unpleasant and unwanted side effects which range from disruption of the environment to build roads, pollution and the possibility of accidents that end in sever injury or death.
Each of there have their analogue in the on line world, no doubt. And I see no reason not to draw attention to this.
I regret that I will not have the experience of creating a software artifact in a team. That I never really had that experience in a good way.
I could dwell on why that might be.
An image I have for software development is that of being a welder, using specialist welding equipment.
There is little doubt but that there is a sense of the power a welder has in their hands. Images of this have become iconic.
But being a welder embraces many skills and specialisms. No one would expect just to pick up the equipment, no one would expect to an instant move from welding in one sort of production line to a completely different one.
Few have the luxury of being able to reflect on these things. The overriding necessity is to earn a living.
How one may feel about being on a team welding a battle ship?
Very proud.
But, if it were a battle ship for the Kriegsmarine (Hitler's war navy)? Retrospective feelings? Why shouldn't a feeling of pride remain?
It is not simple.
The overriding necessity is to earn a living, to do, to be seen to do.
So someone speaks to me about evidence based therapy and I become alarmed because I know what has really happened is that the government has convinced people that crude data gathering is a way of finding and establishing evidence.
And this returns immediately to my inability to work well in a productive group.
I want to know the purpose. But I also want there to be a purpose.
I also get into trouble with Lacan at this point. There seems little purpose to me in something that is basically unintelligible. Or I suspect the motive is chicanery and self aggrandisement.
This distresses me. Despite that I still find many of the ideas that are (thrown?) around thought provoking.
We are motivated to do. To do what?
Must we be so motivated. Must we build battle ships and huge cargo ships? Must we build?
Lacan does have some interesting thoughts that touch on this, his basic trilogy - something like this is probably basically correct (and thinking about C.S. Peirce).
I move from a series of operations to considering some activities.
When reading a text as rich as Lacan, that embraces so many different and complex ideas, when engaged in anything, reading Lacan or not, but how I read Lacan is what I am considering, there is the operation of sweeping everything aside to concentrate on what is narrowly to hand.
Building software is a series of such operations (dealing with a language), verified as correct and repeatable.
The broader activity of reading Lacan though?
I can find a footnote in Seminar XX (page 18, footnote 12, English translation) that touches on this well known issue of the difference between meaning and the system of signs.
Returning to the tripartite relationship (subject, object, predicate) we have A (the big Other, the battle ship above), then, looking at page 28, the paragraphs including that marked 31 (to correspond with the original French), what Lacan has to say is perfectly intelligible, although I'm not sure I would say it like this. Nevertheless it belongs to his system which I expect is more or less consistent through his writings.
Here he explains the relationship of a to A, of the Other to the object little a.
What happens here is that A is wrapped in the function S, the signifier, and one can see that this must be correct in some way. I have designated some battle ship in the above paragraph where I discuss it. What Lacan must be pointing out is the movement which in my paragraph would be described in terms of the otherness of the coming into existence and actual life of the (some) battle ship and how it comes about that we must think of it as some (here fictitious) object, the object little a, as is said.
Predication here is this function, I expect.
This is enough for me now. I don't aspire to the complexities of Lacan and am quite content when I can see a simple triangular relationship, which is about as far as my mind goes.
I might explore other such in Lacan's work elsewhere.
If this is clarity or occlusion I am unsure.
The Levinasian issues of ethics remain.