Each stage of Parson's intellectual growth continued to exist around the country in the form of epigones who held steadfastly to what they had learned at the time they were exposed -- or we may say, catechized. (Actually, this point can be made into a more general observation about academic culture -- the same can be said for Ogborn's, Lazarfeld's or Merton's students -- i.e. , that it perpetuates a lot of dead ideas. Not much came out of this response.
Tinnitus is a condition whereby we constantly hallucinate sound. These hallucinations interfere with our ability to respond to the real perceived needs of our body and as such can be a real problem for the sufferer. But as these 'sounds' have no grounding in external events, they are very hard to communicate to others who of course cannot hear them.As usual we have jumped straight over the question of when and why such things need to be communicated to others.
So my problem is, how can drawing help in communicating the issue? The fact that it can externalise an inner feeling or sensation is central to my understanding of drawing's possibility as a conduit between two people, so I'm interested in any ideas that suggest ways that drawing can operate as an extended mind or how our visual imagination can be put to use as a communication tool. ...
This type of thinking and Lacan's long association with the Surrealist movement...ideas about how art could itself embody the extended personality of the artist and in turn affect other people.
His argument in relation to the mirror phase is one aspect of this ability to identify with things or images outside of oneself. This type of identification allows us to move on beyond our former selves. A child sees an older child doing something it cant and so it tries to mirror the older child's behaviour and in doing so gradually becomes able to do something it could not do before. Again this idea was taken up by artists and theorists because it helped to explain how an object like an artwork that is external to other humans, could begin to have an affect on others. Indeed Lacan's term the 'imaginary' emphasised the importance of vision and how we achieve mastery over ourselves and our abilities by imaginative appropriation of the skills or abilities of others. We are born incomplete, a baby with no abilities and Lacan argued that the process of acquiring the skills we need to become an adult was what eventually would constitute the ego.
In using the imaginary as a process of growth or realisation, Lacan opens the door to a reading of art-making as being a process that is also to do with self realisation.
What's worth noting here, as against the seemingly endless variations on this theme of art being put to use as a communication tool and the seemingly endless stringing out of Lacanian verbiage denoting such numbingly simple concepts, is this parable of younger child to older. The competence that is developed in mirroring the behaviour of a more advanced technician may or may not be the same competence as the model. I would think, actually, that it is definitionally bound to diverge, since the effort of a smaller, weaker, less developed child to mirror a more developed one is destined for limited success; the mirroring in this hypothetical can result in perfect imitation neither of the model nor of the cultural archetype; rather, it results in a third thing mediated by all of the factors thus far enumerated.
This seems as good an illustration as any, however, of the limits of art as a communication tool. Though the conceit of the mature, adult artist is to have moved far beyond (or perhaps calculatingly elided) the apish phase, the artist continues to encounter others doing something it cant.