My engagement with political and social theory insists upon maturing an encompassing view of our transition into the structures of the 21 st century. Chiefly articulated through philosophical and psychoanalytic logic, my unpacking of political mechanisms are less concerned with the construction of a teleology, and more concerned with an interrogation of intentions, especially in the West. This interrogation necessarily implies a forecast. While I believe it important to itemize the factors informing what political and social structures we endure today in an historical sense, I feel that our retrospective categorization is less valuable than an assessment of what, in terms of desire, underpins its being. Why the West has chosen capitalism as the dominant mode of economic subjectivity, for instance, is of more significance to my ideas about understanding our future than how it has chosen this apparatus. This is but one face of the prism.

From a Lacanian perspective, my dominant intellectual interest is exploring these systems using topology as a writing. In the sense that desire undergirds our experience as subject, we can meaningfully articulate our experience relative to a Geist into which it culminates. Less abstractly philosophical, the intracosm of the apparatus of subjectivity is magnified broadly into the extracosm: this logic, contingent exclusively on the limits imposed by discourse, certain signifiers, or the structural matrix of the political and social bodies to which we entrust the subjectivizing mechanism is responsible for the production of new pathologies, symptoms which yoke us together, and our collective repressions. In the West, we see the condemnation of the subject into the political machine chiefly by his implication in the market: subjectivity is now transactional, and takes on a unique kind of market value that is neither objectal nor value in the traditional sense espoused by ethic. This schema is complicated by the irresistibly-global gravity of our information highway, modified also by the emergence of the social-as-delinquency that now comes to bear on what remains of our collective allegiance to the Laws of the city.

Whereas we might construct Borromean drawings of subjectivity in the sense of individual structure and orientation, I have found it especially useful to scale the topological alphabet up: by situating the social subject in the framework of a larger discursive topology, we can uncover broad symptomatologies, and, in tandem, discern more practically their implications for both the subject itself and the direction of the vectors that come to mark it. Through these drawings, we can come to image the relationships that brand the social body: if we are to speak about social symptoms, we must see to it that there exists a social body—as such, from this locus, we might proceed with a topology to tease out the characteristics proper to this organization. This process evades the pitfalls of the signifier: what we are left to interpret, then, is the real.