In Search of the Plus-One, Cartel and School Links (2012)

In Search of the Plus-One, Cartel and School Link

Notebooks of the Sigmund Freud School of Psychoanalysis, No. 85, 2012, p. 17-23.

To initiate the discussion we can have today, I propose we revisit a piece of experience from a cartel in which I participate. This experience allows for the exploration of various questions. Some concern the constitution of the cartel, particularly the choice of theme and its support, but what follows focuses mainly on the choice of the Plus-One and the School’s role in the creation of the cartel and its punctuations. It is therefore by cartellizing that I thought of presenting what follows. However, in preparing my intervention, I realized that my argument also relies on or intertwines with my involvement in the “secretariat for cartels and other working collectives.” The question of the Plus-One is a starting point and the common thread for two significant periods of our work: the first covers the first six months between our initial meeting and the declaration of the cartel to the School (November 2010-June 2011), and the second period covers what has occurred up to today.

To initiate the discussion we can have today, I propose we revisit a piece of experience from a cartel in which I participate. This experience allows for the exploration of various questions. Some concern the constitution of the cartel, particularly the choice of theme and its support, but what follows focuses mainly on the choice of the Plus-One and the School’s role in the creation of the cartel and its punctuations. It is therefore by cartellizing that I thought of presenting what follows. However, in preparing my intervention, I realized that my argument also relies on or intertwines with my involvement in the “secretariat for cartels and other working collectives.” The question of the Plus-One is a starting point and the common thread for two significant periods of our work: the first covers the first six months between our initial meeting and the declaration of the cartel to the School (November 2010-June 2011), and the second period covers what has occurred up to today.

The choice of the Plus-One is a specific moment in the constitution of a cartel. It happens that this choice of the Plus-One transforms into a search for the Plus-One, and that this search proves fruitless; at least in appearance, since other discoveries and findings can always emerge.

A little over a year ago now, four of us found ourselves wanting to work in a cartel. We didn’t know each other very well, or even at all. Two of us were then in charge of the secretariat

“for cartels and spaces within the School,” as it was named in the statutes before becoming the secretariat “for cartels and other working collectives.”

Since then, I have taken over this role with Florence Chevrant, who is also involved in a cartel based on the same text — Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty², a cartel that also began to form during the same period as ours. These two cartels emerged, among other reasons (because I could not reduce them to that), from questions shared by the three people involved in the secretariat for cartels. Added to this were individual questions about the cartel as a structure of the School and of work, as each of us might have held them, and which we were interested in placing on our desk. Thus, the question of cartels

within the School or the question of cartels as a School question became a question within the cartel.

I say “I” and “we” because it is a cartel of four people. And what I am presenting here is not a collective production, while being perfectly linked to what happens collectively in this cartel, and today’s presentation illustrates something of it. But it is with the agreement of the cartel members that I am presenting this to you.

So we met, and we chose each other to form a cartel together. Our first meeting in November 2010 allowed us to identify two initial elements: our starting question and a text considered promising for working on this question.

In the logical continuity of our setup, we addressed the question of the Plus-One. How were we going to choose him/her? Did we have a name in mind? On what elements should we rely to make this choice and approach the person concerned? Should we even discuss criteria, or should we stick to possible names? All these questions and others, sometimes more dizzying than I had anticipated, unfolded. And with them, subtly, what would become our problem-shaped question, our Search for the Plus-One.

We quickly agreed that names of possible Plus-Ones would be sought, provided we agreed on the names in question, and that none of the four objected. Thus, one by one, potential Plus-Ones were contacted. Each in turn responded negatively.

Weeks pass since our first meeting; the reading of the text is underway and already occupies us beyond what we probably perceive of it. The prisoners watch us as much as we observe them³. Negative responses follow one after another. We gradually receive them as refusals; they begin to taste like it.

We continue this constitution of the cartel, whose search for the Plus-One and its discovery would mark a decisive step, necessary for us to then declare ourselves to the School.

Ten refusals later, our list of potential Plus-Ones dwindles, and our questions multiply: are we encountering difficulty due to the choice of text? It is true that having started it, we feel its full density, and we imagine it might be off-putting. That it is relevant for addressing the question of cartels seems obvious to us, without us being able to say precisely why: perhaps it has effects that go beyond us? From black circles to white circles, from fleeting understandings to impasses, we also watch ourselves work, together, and we tell ourselves that it would be a shame not to succeed in getting out of this predicament, not to succeed in constituting this cartel

in due form. But what are the norms, what are the practices? Can we invent and risk getting lost?

Our initial situation, having been and being involved in the secretariat for cartels and other working collectives in the School, undoubtedly plays a role, but clarifying it remains difficult: are we forbidden or hindered by something that would place a burden on us or on others, the burden of the question of cartels as a School question, such that a cartel could be traversed by it, such that we would have allowed ourselves to be caught by a School question, invisible to us and unbearable for this cartel struggling to form? This question remains entirely open today.

A proposal is made to us: “You are four, so why not choose the Plus-One from among yourselves?” It has been almost two months since we first discussed it among ourselves and initially set it aside, prioritizing the continuation of our requests beyond the four of us, hoping someone would accept, hoping to avoid dealing with this possibility which immediately struck us as complex and tinged with impossibility.

This is because we have already constituted something from the initial four who chose each other. The arrival of a Plus-One would be very useful to us. It would save us from having to answer other questions that arise: How to transition from a (4+1) project to a (3+1) project mid-way? Under what conditions? For what effects? If we continue as we are, as four, do we constitute a cartel?

Transitioning from the (4+1) project to (3+1) would imply making it possible for the Plus-One to emerge from where he/she was, to go from (4) to (3+1): this is our first hypothesis. Thought this way, the structure of the cartel would gradually reveal itself, in the process of constitution, at a certain point in our progress in the work, precisely where we experience it as an obstacle, an impediment to the cartel itself. The cartel may have already constituted itself and is gradually becoming legible. Otherwise, we are dependent on someone’s acceptance to be the Plus-One of the cartel: this is our second hypothesis.

As time passed, experience offered and compelled us to consider the first hypothesis, that the Plus-One could emerge from the initial four. If he/she appears, it is because we can give him/her form based on what he/she already is and because he/she functions: the question remains how. Is it enough to discuss and collectively adopt the theoretical arguments for the possibility of the Plus-One’s emergence along the way for none of the effects of this strange constitution to mark the work to come? Or should we precisely allow ourselves to be worked by this strange affair and consider the future effects?

Designating the Plus-One invites a detailed discussion of his/her function, which is a boon for anyone wanting to work in a cartel on cartels. But we cannot wait to exhaust this question before the Plus-One is designated. Moreover, I note in my records that at this stage, the choice of the Plus-One is written as designation.

Can we more easily designate the Plus-One based on each of the four’s proposals, providing a name according to our initial selection method? This Plus-One could not be chosen by all four initial members unless he/she designates him/herself before verifying that the other three also designate him/her. Another dead end here.

We review some writings and accounts of experiences on drawing lots and cartels. This possibility is historically mentioned in certain places under the name of “random cartels.” In each case, it involves resorting to drawing lots to assemble the initial cartel members, before the choice of the Plus-One. No. 2 of the EPSF Notebooks, dedicated to cartels and spaces, mentions it several times as a solution that is not one. In No. 20-21 of Ornicar?, an excerpt reports Jacques Lacan’s response to Pierre Soury on drawing lots for the designation of the Plus-One; the answer is “no, the four who associate choose him/her⁴ .”

As much as we maintain having had to choose the four of us to form a cartel, without drawing lots, at this level and on this precise point, fate might once again become our ally to get out of what appears to us as an impasse? But by entrusting ourselves to fate, is the Plus-One of the cartel not designated rather than chosen, and by a means that is inadequate or contrary to the structuring of the cartel? Is this problematic? Is it incompatible with the original selection methods where the initial four choose their Plus-One by common agreement? Is it always by common agreement?

Six months after our first meeting, we have approached multiple questions that stand as points of work for the cartel in the future. We believe we no longer have a choice, and that we must try to see further what might emerge, that we must decide — perhaps like the prisoners — whether it will be enlightening in terms of possibilities or instructive about impossibilities. We draw lots on May 3, 2011, and declare the cartel to the School under the title “Logical Time and Cartel” (EPSF letter of May 26, 2011). The drawing of lots is carried out with a certain circularity: one person writes the four names on slips of paper, another puts the papers in a “hat,” another mixes them, another draws a paper with a name.

A word about the title “Logical Time and Cartel.” One might wonder if this work objective has not put us to the test: where we tried to place the logic of the cartel at the center of our target, it is that which holds us in check.

But let’s return to the drawing of lots.

What did it produce? For several months, we did not revisit it and continued our work, as if nothing had happened. We approached different texts to unfold what the three prisoners invite us to consider.

Then, little by little, through these texts, including Situation of Psychoanalysis in 1956⁵, we re-approach, or should I say we are re-approached by, the “One-in-addition,” the “electrons,” and the “number twos” who are always “number ones”: all avenues to the Plus-One that impose themselves and re-engage us.

What happened in the interim? We realized that we were operating in a special mode of work, a mode where the mere sufficiency of a group does not explain why an absent member brought us to a halt during a meeting. And also when certain events occurred where it would be strange not to perceive, if not a synergy (which we mock), at least a correspondence between us of the effects of work transference.

Then, in the aftermath of the drawing of lots, new hypotheses emerge. Are we in the presence of a negative Plus-One who is not designated as such from the outset, but who is already operating among the four members of the cartel and whom the drawing of lots makes it possible to designate through the cartel’s registration with the School? This negative Plus-One may have been constituted by the negative responses, starting from the first name that said no? These ten refusals may have traced the place of the Plus-One, a missing or hollow Plus-One to whom we gave form or consistency by inscribing him/her among the four of us after having brought him/her forth.

At each work session, we shared the latest refusal collected by one of us, and we continued the work each time, with the Plus-One who was not yet there, then still not there, but already at work. We engaged in the work relying on his/her functional absence.

Perhaps it is not sustainable for a cartel to be structured in this way? Then we will perceive its effects. Saying something about it today may already be one: an effect of the cartel, but also perhaps an effect of the cartel as it is and as it is not. This presentation can serve as an unveiling of a period of work that proved to be a kind of crisis.

The choice of text carried us away, the sophism seized us, and it is from within, with no possibility of bringing anything from outside, that we extricate ourselves from our suspensions, between moments of halt and moments of possibility, hoping sometimes to understand, and still far from the moment of concluding.

And the School’s place in all of this? Since our constitution, the question of cartels articulated with the question of cartels within the School have intertwined. That one of us remains linked to the secretariat for cartels undoubtedly maintains the School within the cartel in a singular way. My intervention today is an example of this. It is indeed with the concern of the secretariat that the School supports the work of members regarding cartels that what, traversing the cartel and having a certain effect on it, gradually became this presentation. The offer transformed into an impetus for work. We initially thought that nothing was ready to be presented, then that this punctuation time could be interesting for what followed. Should a cartel be at the point of concluding to speak, or can it speak at a certain point to understand? I ask this question having already answered it because I believe it is one way to advance with questions that concern everyone’s experience.

Writing these few lines inspired another idea. I could also consider that by speaking today on this question, the cartel brings back to the School a piece of what it had taken with it, a piece of the question of cartels as a School question: this stowaway who allowed no other crew member, in our case, to come aboard when we invited them, and from whom we perhaps hope for a fall or a transformation to move forward?