Knowledge as Mode of Connection

Knowledge Inquiries is deeply informed by psychoanalytic practice, where different kinds of listening attend to a question and to the energetic dimensions that gives it form, meaning, and purpose. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, attention to what is not said—as a spatial condition—to the rhythm and tempo of speech, and to what is communicated beyond the explicit exchange opens possibilities. An analytic approach to knowledge development extends this listening into sustained encounters with fields of signification organised around questions and topics of focus, through which knowledge emerges and accumulates. Through attention and practice, time allows specificities of an inquiry to emerge at edges where perception and knowledge take form. This generative engagement sharpens how sense develops and what becomes encounterable, opening access to what could be considered sub-dimensional strata of information becoming discoverable through the meshing between edges of “I and non-I.”[1]

What becomes involved in acquiring and developing knowledge?

To answer this, we may consider alternative forms of knowing through subtler, energetic dimensions of ability-states and encounter not exhausted by signification alone. Here, we may provisionally approach the unconscious as a concept pointing towards subtle connective structures through which forces organise action and motivation, without adopting it as the sole model for understanding pre- and post-linguistic communication. Particular models of the unconscious describe it as structured like a language;[2] and from this notion, we can consider how alternative knowledges may arise through auditioned sequences of logic, taking form within differently ordered, responsive states of awareness intertwined with the body, rather than through explicit language alone. Symbolic language (letters, words, sentences) comes to operate as a late-stage process of communication, whereas phonemic and “sound objects”[3] originate and direct one toward softer and widened forms of audition developed in incipient processes. The unconscious and language help us ask not only what an inquiry explicitly seeks to know, but what gives it force and direction prior to articulation, and what dimensions of reality its message seeks to contact.

To approach the less apparent dimensions of communication, let us think about the prenatal fluidic environment where communication "of subtle things, more subtle than liquid.”[4] comprise “affect-driven, pre-conscious organization,”[5] from which the earliest fluidic associations of sonic signifiers circulate awareness towards something discoverable. Might the earliest forms of audition and circulating communication, before elaborated language, provide a basis for different kinds of knowledge? Could the earliest conditions of phonological syntax, before articulated language, offer insight into subtler ways of approaching, perceiving, proprioceptively sensing, and interpreting what becomes meaningful and recognised as knowledge? Knowledge may arise, for example, when a spoken phrase’s tone, rhythm, and lingering echoes resonate like a musical chord, revealing a sensed network of non-linguistic associations that point towards something while taking direction through the body’s felt response in the encounter.

Linguistic researcher into affective roots of language and educator Kathleen Saint-Onge suggests that “phonemes in ambient sound streams”[6] comprise “language acquisition”[7] as “a precocious environmental adaptation that is bootstrapped by unconscious affective investments in phonemes, starting during gestation.”[8] This means that displacements and patterns of phonemic chains inform the earliest processes of sonic and symbologenic[9] dimensions of communication, shaping what can surface as connective mechanisms through knowing and knowledge. Approaching knowledge through audition as an ability-state deepened by forms of sonic reception gives its acquisition a temporal depth, allowing less apparent forms of responsiveness and expanded domains of vitality to shape its languaged constitution, alongside bodily excess and forces that symbolic registers can only partly coat and address.

This brings us to approaches of alternative forms of knowledge. Psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger develops theory that extends Jacques Lacan’s signifying orders and complexifies linear Symbolic models by tracing subjectivation through maternal relations into pre-symbolic territories. These territories point not to literal uterine or prenatal events involving one’s maternal figure, nor to explicit corporeal specificity, but towards meaningful psychic states that open alternative forms of relating before initiation into language’s sequential order. Ettinger offers a direction for considering “emerging relations” that facilitate “the transmission of non-linguistic knowledge.”[10] These directions open considerations of inter-subjective[11] relations “that embrace connectedness, shareability, fragility, openness, and hospitality”[12], alongside deepened and expanded bodily ability-states that open new ways of relating to one another through distinct yet porous forms of contact and connection. Ettinger uses terms such as “sub-non-conscious”[13] and sub-realities[14] to point towards regions of subjectivation that orient knowledge and encounter with the other within other stratum of knowledges. Her approach offers a “supplementary sphere of subjectivity”[15] that is not entirely unconscious and not entirely conscious.

Without moving too far into psychoanalytic theory, I am instead interested in suggesting how widened sensitivities may perceive different knowledges through energetic and affective contact, and how these encounters shape what can be patterned and transmitted between us in ways language only partly touches. Expanded states of sensitivity may attune us to less familiar forms of contacting and being contacted by others, allowing knowing and awareness to develop as experience that circulates through signification and moves adaptively between us as a process of knowledging.

How, then, is knowledge received and codified?

To answer this, I consider how ethical attention may take form through alternative listening and responsiveness to form, pattern, and resonance before settling on linguistic specificity, preserving opacity and otherness rather than enclosing what is sensed within familiar parameters, established beliefs, or assuming it is fully understood. This ethic deepens a condition that has long informed my pursuit of truthful knowledge: remaining receptive while questioning how perception and pre-perception, as sense and awareness, become interpretation, what that interpretation permits us to claim, and what it may limit or bar us from knowing with one another.  An ethical approach to knowledge may work through the tension of not knowing, keeping inquiry open while becoming highly specific to what is encountered, so that knowledge can develop on its own terms without being determined in advance by established social orders, human or otherwise. Not knowing may unsettle those less accustomed to holding uncertainty alongside resonance. Yet questions can coexist alongside affirmation as to what is transmitted between us, without requiring certainty. This distinction allows knowledge to deepen as a specialised, connective process maybe likened to a bridge rather than a final, fixed destination.

While our individual experiences shape how we encounter and interpret what connects us and passes between us, I have often wondered: can we develop or access highly specialised forms of knowledge attuned to individual access to the Real while still addressing a broader reality that exists regardless of subjective contact? In other words, how might one sense, acquire, and articulate alternative kinds of knowledge that remain as specialised as the conditions from which they arise, yet open to re-address? Language’s constraints may give knowledge specificity, forming a sign-based bridge towards states of knowing that exceed what is signified. I ask this to open questions of sensitivity and ethics in relation to what becomes codified and recognised as knowledge.

This leads me to share how I explore these questions through aesthetics in my upcoming book, The Expanded Object: Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and a Painting’s Presence (2027). There, I ask how affective, bodied, and relational information can be imagined, discovered, reworked, transformed, and known. Through sustained examination of autistic and psychotic modes of psychic life, without reducing them to pathology, I explore the theoretical structures of widened subjectivities and how their differing relations to the Symbolic and Real may open ways of knowing that cannot be fully accounted for by metaphor, unconscious or subconscious processes, or shared reality alone. At this intersection of psychic process and meaning, language may take unfamiliar forms attuned to the subject’s reality, articulating knowledge specific to what is encountered. Rather than developing an entirely new subjectivising realm or rewriting existing accounts of the unconscious, I explore expanded dimensions and phenomena of experience that both precede and constitute subjectivity, approaching encounter and invention as neither simply imagination nor confined to a single reality on which we must all agree. In the book, I attend to the inflections and nuances of what becomes encounterable, ultimately asking how psychic processes and beliefs acquire social authority through discourse that defines what becomes accessible and what remains beyond reach. I approach both the limits and connective potential of knowledge, asking how language shapes what can be recognised, what it leaves of encounter unaccounted for, and what implicit motivations may guide its definitions. Remaining open to these remainders allows inquiry into regions of perception and sensory awareness from which uncommon knowledge may take form.

Drawing on my long-term experience in psychoanalysis and lifelong pursuit of what I call truth, while finding myself outside social norms and their conventions, I propose that psychic structures and perceptive apparatuses may be as varied in their orientations as the people through whom they take form. Approaching inquiry as a connective process particular to each encounter may then change how we attend to what reveals itself, allowing knowledge to become meaningful and resonant through the contact itself. In this spirit, I advocate for radical forms of self-awareness and self-theorising through which particular forms of knowledge can become shareable as a connective force. Exploring psychoanalytic accounts of widened subjectivity, I seek to move beyond any single school towards more relevant and accessible ethical domains developed through aesthetics. An aesthetic ethic attends to form-based, energetic, and affectively attuned ways of knowing that are less reliant on the fixing and limiting dimensions of linearised Symbolic orders, which bind subjects to the human world in ways that, I propose, may not function for everyone. I propose that knowledge may become an artefact of discovery and a multidirectional bridge, taking form through encounter while opening access to more primary, intuitive, and expansive modes of engagement that may, in turn, transform us and reveal more of what may become possible.

Knowledge Inquiries emerged in the process of many years of discovery and practice, attuning to something akin to Ettinger’s “border-linking”[16] or “trans-subjectivity”[17], where participatory forms of becoming deepen what is possible, imagined, and knowable, allowing both unfamiliar and re-encountered temporal planes to be approached anew. Knowledge Inquiries thus seeks to engage with novelty and invention through a nuanced ethics responsive to how we signify, attune to, and find resonance with multiple knowledges. Its rigour lies in deepening what is approached and expanding what becomes possible through encounters with the otherness of reality and forms of life, living, and nature that exceed our expectations. I offer an invitation for you to sense a deeper possibility so that together we may develop ways of knowing beyond what we previously thought possible: knowledge that speaks to the specificity of your inquiry, your own nature, and the nature you seek to discover.

NOTES

[1] Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 192.

[2] Jacques Lacan. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton, 2006. 737.

[3] Kathleen Saint-Onge. Françoise Dolto on Languaged Learning in Utero. Routledge, 2026. 52.

[4] Françoise Dolto, “Chapitre 4.” In Françoise Dolto: Séminaire de psychanalyse d’enfants, Tome 1, edited by L. Caldaguès (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982), 61, quoted and translated in Kathleen Saint-Onge, Françoise Dolto on Languaged Learning in Utero (New York: Routledge, 2026), 2.

[5] Saint-Onge. Françoise Dolto on Languaged Learning in Utero.

[6] Ibid., 22.

[7] Ibid., 22.

[8] Ibid., 22.

[9] The late French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto develops the notion of the symbologenic in The Unconscious Body Image, exploring the symbol’s relation to the body through signs that operate as generative thresholds rather than static representations. I approach this as a way for language to direct the subject towards deeper somatic knowledge rather than contain or capture bodily excess. See Françoise Dolto, The Unconscious Body Image, trans. Sharmini Bailly (Routledge, 2022).

[10] Anna Kisiel. Corporeal Aesth/ethics: The Body in Bracha L. Ettinger’s Theory and Art. Punctum Books, 2026, 50.

[11] Ibid., 52.

[12] Ibid., 15

[13] Ibid., 79.

[14] Bracha L. Ettinger, “Life Drive and the Feminine | Bracha L. Ettinger | Nov. 25, 2021.” YouTube, uploaded by Lacan in Scotland, 9 Mar. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFPfzVGHIk. Accessed 16 Aug. 2026. Timestamp 23:49.

[15] Anna Kisiel. Corporeal Aesth/ethics, 31.

[16] Griselda Pollock, “Introduction: Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?”, in The Matrixial Borderspace, by Bracha L. Ettinger, ed. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 18.

[17] Bracha L. Ettinger, “Bracha L. Ettinger Seminar: Late Lacan and After (Session One).” YouTube, uploaded by Emancipations with Daniel Tutt, 28 Apr. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=e17d6r7I5pw. 17:25.