You know, none of this would have happened if your car hadn't broken down.
world in fragments, ken ----------
Well, if I had made it over to SF that afternoon, we would have just gotten stink-o, and babbled incoherently.
I was serious about Piaget. If your interested in how mathematical ideas find their way into theories about the formation of the mind, Piaget has something to say.
In any event, I haven't read any Lacan. It was just that I recognized a certain impulse in your quotes.
I've heard that Lacan was nuts, scribbled, and made paper cut-outs. Well, been there, done that, and have drawers full. Only I was trying to design a series of sculptures that fit together in a variety of ways and discovered a few geometric tricks. I thought that's interesting. Why the hell does that work, like that? I immediately blew off three years or so scribbling, making cardboard cuts and asking math and sci friends, what's this, what's that--and, buying math books in a kind of random frenzy. The post was a quick summary of some of the territory and some of the correspondences I found.
In other words, I'll bet that Lacan had some insight, some hint of ordering and went nuts trying to figure it out. That is very easy to imagine. If you've never been exposed to some of these ideas, it seems like a weird sort of magic--and you definitely get high when something finally clicks. I mean that's what philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, writers, artists, and all the assorted nuts of the imaginary realm do. Some are just further gone than others.
Math is a little like religion. It is easy to fixate and invent arbitrary systems, announce the second coming, etc.--and pretty soon its time for the heavy meds and few years in the day room.
The structuralists were full of these arbitrary systems and it is easy to see why there was such a strong reaction against them, especially in linguistics and semotics. When logical correspondences are discovered in symbolic forms, they give the illusion of a system where there probably isn't any system at all. Astrology, the magic numbers that fascinated the Pythagoreans and similar examples come to mind. On the other hand, sometimes, there really is a system--Galois's discovery of groups was one of those rare positive examples.
Well, more anon.
Chuck