The empirical foundations of logic has always been a thorny topic for philosophy, since its inception with Plato. It doesn’t seem to make sense that atoms or matter would arrange themselves into syllogisms, but they nonetheless behave themselves in light of them. Freud made an original contribution to the topic, if we have eyes to see it. The unconscious, Freud repeatedly tells us, has at its disposal only the operator ‘and’. It works by way of ceaseless conjunction. One of the jobs of the analyst, he advises, is to see in these ceaseless ands so much attempted pawing for the other operators: the conditional ‘if-then’, the disjunctive ‘or’, the negation ‘not’. A dream will be filled with monstrous and confusing amalgams, conjunctions beyond all limit: “I was at school, but it was also on a boat”, “We were playing a game on a board, but it was also a conversation with an elbow, which all seemed to be of utmost importance for some reason”. With the unconscious, we discover we sit atop an engine that takes all considerations, all elements, and turns them into an unbounded combinatorics. But far from this being a confusion, a faculty going beyond its means with meager and primitive tools, the treasure of psychoanalysis is precisely to have discovered the connections between disparates that the unconscious treats as obvious and trivial. In listening to the ‘childish’, and wild, play of the unconscious in its endless conjunctions, we come to see the secret affinities between things; an entire network of thick throated signification, where words are stacked upon each other helter-skelter and uttered in an unfurling portmanteau without end.
The body, thus, reveals itself to be a conjunction engine. A cartoon about a monster, or some such critter, automatically consuming everything it encounters, the birthday cake, the kitchen table, the parent, the bus, the teacher, will delight a child to no end. And even better if these consumptions emerge as new figurations on the monster: a table nose, a teacher arm, birthday cake hair. The drawings of children testify to this engine’s rumblings, where we see figures drawn with twenty fingers on a hand, and four heads to a body, a sun made of spirals that only ends out of exhaustion. And we shouldn’t forget the first rule of creative improvisation: never “No, not…”, always “Yes, and…”. The additive forms the series, whereas all of the other operators work to partition into sets, but these sets would be empty, devoid of the vital principles that would see them filled and thereby differentiable in the first place, if it wasn’t for this most transparent and seemingly token of all of the operators: and.
The ‘and’ of the unconscious, its power to conjoin anything and everything, is not only the origin of monsters (the creatures of myth and dream, that disturbs the adult, and delights the child, within us), but also the origin of our ability to assimilate the endless becomings and transformations we undergo, while keeping ourselves constant and intact. At once the very source of identity, and the very going-beyond-going-mad at the locus of all loss of identity. The principle for both figure and abyss. We are something comic, standing still while we transform: the leg of a dog, an umbrella nose, broccoli sprouting from our ears, a trauma, a desire, a wish, and a plan, welding and churning, while we count coins on a bus. A nightmarish amalgamation with a sunny disposition. In here is the secret of time, and our resilience, which amount to the same thing. Our perdurance. But also here is a curious lesson for logic, from strange shores: the conjunction is of a whole other level, it operates with a different syntax to the conditional and the disjunctive and the negation. This is perhaps why it seems the most token of the bunch, the most easily substitutible and cancelable. Like it’s an idle visitor to the activity of our most tense thought, always willing to gracefully exit, and go on driving that never sleeping engine. And, and, and…