Indirect Reflectivity or Really Real Reality or No Way Out

The rift between narrative and non-narrative has been crystallized in the recent writers strike - as it becomes as visible as possible, what exactly it is the writers do for the television industry. Executives have predictably turned to reality television in its various forms to wait out the storm. Reality television is, in fact, almost as old as TV itself, if one counts candid camera and related shows as reality tv.

However, the game shows and hidden camera shows which are only considered reality television in the broad sense - in that it is a program which is generally unscripted. The first truly ‘real’ reality show would be An American Family, where a nuclear family going through a divorce was caught on film. An American Family was shot documentary style and falls in the same category of ‘real’ reality such as Cops and American High. And, interestingly enough, Cops came about because of a crippling writer’s strike in the 1980s.

The question becomes - are reality shows more about constructing an artifice which will generate a particular kind of reality (ie a set of contests and competitions is set up to show us the true competitive/angry/sleazy etc nature of people) or does it actually try to represent something natural or purportedly unconstructed, at least in a narrative sense?

Rob and Big was was funny as it was because it consciously played with the aforementioned tension. From the distance the show appeared rather unremarkable - it was about a semi-professional skate boarder and his body guard. While the two ostensibly make an odd couple - the appeal of the show was in fact not various entertaining moments of strife between them but the remarkable ease of their friendship (the show’s theme song is “Bestfriends”). What also makes the show interesting is that its scripted nature is semi-transparent. In each episode the duo sets about attempting some ridiculous task which they have both suddenly assigned the utmost importance. That is, Rob always acts as if he has just come up with a really silly idea out of nowhere (like putting sacred geometry on his skateboard or deciding to break as many Guinness Book of Word Records as Possible).

Unlike the vast majority of reality shows, there is no face to face confession in Rob and Big, the camera appears far less intrusive. Instead of embodying a real persona, Rob and Big play the roles of reality television personalities. The show purposefully constructs the object of reality television which is supposed to be spontaneous when it is in fact not. The duo’s interesting motto ‘Do work son,’ is partially the generic justification beyond their numerous shenanigans as well as an interesting call to do, to not just sit around doing nothing. Overall the show offered a kind of willing accidental entertainment is coupled with a generic heterogeneous encouragement. Together these themes question the knot, one which I have addressed before, of seriousness and intent. There is a well known quote that it is imperative to take what you do seriously and never take yourself seriously. Here Rob and Big’s take on the narrative plays ruthelssly with the boundaries of seriousness and intent.

Rob and Big, as a self aware reality show, or at least self aware in terms of form (not content), is part of a growing sense that the illusion is to be dropped when it comes to so called reality and, taking Lesie and the Lys as a model, critical ironic distance as well. Leslie Hall seems to be making fun of those who do ridiculous things self critically by doing what seems ridiculous seriously while aware that she’s doing is for an audience. In a sense then, Hall is reflecting on her performance (making sure that it is ironic) which makes it less seriously ridiculous - meaning that it comes off as more earnest (in its attempt to be ridiculous) and therefore seems less like an attempt at being ridiculous and more simply ridiculous thing.

To be clear: what we have here is a kind of non-relfexive Cartesian subjectivity (as Lacan articulates it) run amok that is “I think where I am not” and “I am therefore it thinks” is embodied as “When I think I should act as if I am not thinking and also my social being must have the halo of thought to show that I am aware of my being but not trying to form my being.” This is Zizek’s simultaneous postmodern decline and return of the big Other - the internalization of authority not in a traditionally disciplinary way but in a panoptic function.

Heaps of Slime or Towards a Speculative Realist Politics

Let us make a decision - cut one half of the vicious fluid from the other - for our purposes slime is an organic substance and is different from waste in that waste is what the organic sheds to shed whereas slime harbors a stronger claim to the core of the organism - it’s functions or its essence itself. The beginning of slime is the beginning of life itself - the clutter of pools, some millions of years ago, in which nucleic acids danced and chained together birthing life itself. Amniotic fluid, stolen by Victor Frankenstein by the bucket full (in the most true film adaptation), the glistening trails left by verminous life forms and so forth. There is the move from slime as the trace of life (either as primodrial or putrefaction) to the innocous artificial slime, that is, the stain of life instead of its trace. This domestication of slime, in its severe popularity, seems to coincide with the environmental upshot of the late 1980s and early 1980s - no doubt fueled by the Chernobyl incident, the Antarctic Ozone Hole, as well as the spill of the Exxon Valdez. The cultural explosion seems apparent in the likes of Captain Planet, TMNT, Toxic Avengers, The Stuff, and various Nickelodeon compounds such as Gak, Floam, Goooze, Skweez, and Sqand. Artificial slime would not meet our first definition but to call it sludge would suggest a disintegration of the organic or inorganic and not a purposefully created non-Newtonian fluid.

Might this creative sludge be akin to a zombie populism - a deterritorialized flesh a la Hardt and Negri. As Steven Shaviro wonderfully illustrates, capital has claimed, and will not let go of the monstrousness of things. This is why, in the best zombie narratives, exemplified by Romero’s work, humans are always more of a threat to one another then the zombies, simply because they cling to what capitalism has taught them. We could also later their use of the Golem in relation to characters such as Swamp Thing and The Heap and Man Thing.

We can relate this view of politics back to the explosion of the environmental concern of the late 80s and early 90s - particularly in relation to Captain Planet. Created by Ted Turner, the show was a strong supporter of globalization and NATO as the singular governing body (obviously with the United States as the unofficial center). While writers such as Mike Davis (Planet of Slums) has pointed out globalization’s output of ecological disaster, the moment of Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, signaled the beginning of the end for the USSR. Limp leadership and the failures of Afghanistan and the like, were evident of the eminent collapse and hence, it was a no-brainer that a logic of the global in the sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ and globalized markets, would be wed.

Thus we have the move from the slime that promises either life or death to the slime that gives us the always-already cohesive - that no matter how much one prods the material, it strengthens for the worse. In essence, globalization marks the deterritorialization of the monstrous social - where the more one struggles to escape the faster you sink. Instead of situationist recuperation, we have a meta-recuperation - where the excess of capitalist recuperation is posited as an escape from banality and this escape is codified in terms of new pleasures - Zizek’s supereogic demand of ‘Enjoy!’

Opposed to this false hope of futurity we have the equally misguided false nihilism, of Badiou’s image of the punk rocker who screams no future! Zizek’s Bartleby politics may error towards such useless negativity or may even equate if such a refusal is seen as anything other than a ‘clearing of the field.’ Lee Edelman’s No Future, is a perfect example of how a ‘politics of the Real’ can be misleading. Edelman seems to either conflate or confuse the Real Real and the Imaginary Real - the Real as disgusting void and the real of the narcisstic self, the in oneself more than oneself. How can a politics recognize a horrible sameness, a stupid materiality (such is the meaning of the word golem taking into its various interpretations in Hebrew) without resorting to defeat or romancing an unbearable life (fleshy zombic multitudes somehow outside capital) or blank futurity found in ‘the children are our future’ which is oppressively heternormative and, biological true.

To return to our divided slime that is the trace of life (the zombic) and the promise of life (the baby’s face) how might we bring this to the Real or bring the Real to them without creating a facism of the face (a la Edelman) or a hollow utopian creature (a la Negri and Hardt)? If Zizek represents a more nuanced version of the first then it would seem that Badiou would fall in line with the latter at least in terms of ostensible negativity and positivity. But, in terms of pragmatism, both of these thinkers are consistently critiqued for being too obtuse when it comes to politics coming into practice. While I believe there is some use in synthezing the two in a kind of looking awry at the event, the longevity of Zizek’s disruptive negativity seems to falter as does the murk of Badiou’s pre-Evental time.

Assuming that we are only ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ can there be a politics which is true to our finitude without falling into a hip nihilism which only engenders narcissism or, even worse, Randian objectivism? The closing pages of Nihil Unbound, leans towards what might be a politics, in that, jumping from Freud’s theory of the drive as repetition, there is an inherent will-to-know in humans that is, contrary to most of the universe, negentropic. As mentioned in the last piece, Brassier ignores half of the equation - the axis of alteration - the way in which the external world, whether this externality is something happening to the subject (from the physical outside) or an inexplicable unconcious thought causes a somatic state which is then connected to a consciously experienced externality. We could say that the synchronic axis of alteration is akin to Badiou’s evental politics whereas the axis of iteration is bound to Zizek’s politics of the act.

Bruno Bosteels puts it best when he says the political difference of psychoanalysis and Badiouian politics is “a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou).” However, as Zizek notes here, it is not simply that the break of the act for Lacan is the Truth opposed to Badiou’s fidelity to the event as truth, but that, for Lacan, truth lies after the fact in the response to the act. For Lacan (and ZIzek) truth is a form of already existant fiction whereas, for Baidou, the event is absorbed into a new structure. Zizek critiques Badiou for separating event from being and that keeping the multitude from the crystallizing one of the event, he maintains a naive oppositional stance - the building of a new structure intsead of an internal rupture.

To return us to slime, Badiou’s politics is the very move from the biological to the synthetic that is, politics is forgoing the trace of life, whether rotting or promising, whereas a psychoanalytic politics embraces the excess of the slime as life, as life being naturally unnatural - hence the negentropy of the drive along the axes of iteration and alteration. The quick political jump, which is the error, is to then proscribe a politics which happens by the very nature of the fleshy multitude, the slime of being. The question becomes: how does one account for the genesis of the multitude in a non-vitalist way, in a philosophically realist way, that does not occlude the possibility of politics? While speculative realism provides a step in the right direction, it that it illustrates the radicality of thought by ‘immanencizing’ the transcendental by binding it to the object, this remains a strong articulation of what Freud called material truth without giving any weight to historical truth - the truth of the unconscious, of affect, of implication.

Brassier, in his texts prior to Nihil Unbound, suggests that Laurelle’s non-philosophy, taken as philosophy, gives as a possibility of thinking capitalism as a decision - that the pre-capital can be thought. While the objects of a pre-capitalism (objects including subjects can be thought) one cannot simply remove the noetic trenches that capital has dug in our gray matter: our relation to capital centers on whether surplus value is Real, ontological or experiential. If capital invented surplus value, if it serves as its objet petit a (as Zizek argues) then how do we account for Harman’s discussion of object’s inherent allure? Or does this equate an excess that is hidden in the object versus an excess that is exuded by the object - that is, since Harman’s allure centers on the hidden depths of the object, can we separate capital’s surplus value as the possibility of the social, the social itself as object? Where Marx stated that the glow of the object relied on the suppression of its material history, the invested labor, doesn’t Harman’s objective allure have to do with the historical truth of objects, that is, there unknown relation and not there unknown being? That is, although Speculative Realism demystifies the object, it essentially mystifies the relation of objects via the occasionalism of Harman, the loss of cause and effects’ linkage via Meillassoux, the objectification of the subject via Brassier and the material excess of ontology a la Grant. This demystification highlights the gap between surplus value (the non-object, or in Laurelle the decision) and the fantasy of endless productivity.

Hence, the implicit politics in Speculative Realism is found in its return to slime as the trace of life, that the smudge of materiality cannot be idealized away, not even in the most basic form of relation itself, in the notion of currency and exchange. This zero point of being is, in a sense, a paradoxically deanthropomorphized bio-politics - that matter matters in that it can think itself as such without recourse to the reflective structures of ethics or democracy. Speculative Realism exposes that the zombic hunger of Hardt and Negri’s multitude is a form of thinking and not a form of being. The psychoanalytic contribution here is that capital, while inhabiting the drive’s mode of iteration, is still subject to alteration. In thinking capital as object we highlight the objects around it as possibly dissociable from it such as democracy and the social.

Non-linearity and Momentum

Following Nick of The Accursed Share’s brilliant remarks on Brassier’s reading of Deleuze, I wish to return to the following passage from Nihil Unbound:

“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).

The above quote has, for several weeks now, has plagued me and I do not believe simply because it is a serious challenge to transcendental Materialism – the philosophical doctrine to which I have been bound to for almost half a decade. The above is indicative of several issues in Speculative Realism that have been bothering me, particularly that of narrative and momentum.

In the above quote Brassier makes several assumptions:

1 – Brassier assumes that Zizek ontologizies the transcendental subject a la Kant and that a transcendental subject is necessary in order to retroactively assume/assert one’s freedom.

2 – Following the subject’s purported transcendentalism, that the subject chooses its objective status (and not its subjective status since, for Brassier, it must always already be transcendental) due to the fact that the absolutization of contingency nulls such a possibility. This is how Brassier concludes that all choice is arbitrary.

First let us engage the first point:

As is clear in his more recent works, Zizek’s use of the transcendental subject is an affirmative positioning and does not bear a necessarily ontological status. For instance, Zizek points out that the transcendental can be a useful political position such as when Mao, in response to the USA’s position of atomic weapons, quipped that it would make little difference to the universe if the entire Chinese race was wiped off the face of the planet. In a vein similar to Lacan’s use of the line from Jarry’s Ubu Roi that ‘Imagine there’s no Poland,’ the idea is that poles would exist even if Poland no longer did.
We might immediately assume that the above reeks of transcendental idealism, but does it necessarily? If the Real is that which guarantees the possibility of consistency, that is, it is that which forces all things to be self limiting to maintain their consistency, doesn’t this fall close to Meillassoux’s concept of factuality, the concept of unreason? The Real is, in essence, the consistency of the failure of things to corrupt one another completely – the guarantee that something, outside of difference, allows for difference as such.

Thus, just because the subject can place itself in a noetic position, does not mean that it is no longer an object. As Zizek argues apropos Daniel Dennet, the subject is caught in the very nexus of determinism. Now let us move on to the second point.

Brassier points out that Meillassoux’s principle of unreason negates the very concept of material determinism. But doesn’t this, as Nick points out, purport a rather odd conception of temporality? Doesn’t Brassier’s comment above collapse the thought that ‘things happened for a, or due to reason’ and ‘things happened the way they did because that is what happened?’ Both Brassier and Meillassoux seem to argue that, because anything can happen due to hyper chaos, then the way things did happen has no bearing on the present. Nick’s mention of Quantum Entanglement is very apt here as is Einstein’s response to it. Einstein referred to the theory as ‘spooky action at a distance’ which, to him, seemed to invalidate physics. Brassier and Meillassoux then are implicit proponents of the principle of locality, that only the present changes the present. But, as many experiments, though controversial, have shown, objects at a distance can and do affect one another. Taking a quantum reading of action at a distance into affect, one might be able to recapitulate Zizek’s forced choice.

Via experiments in quantum teleportation, it has been shown that entangled particles can have an immediate affect on one another but such an effect can only be registered after the experiment has taken place. The collision of these particles brings us to the famous Heisenberg principle and back to Meillassoux and Hume’s billiard balls. As Anton Zeilinger notes, information is smeared across the two particles making it unclear how the first was able to affect the second. Taking into account then that the transcendental position is just a position, if the force of the forced choice can be taken as material, not because of a complete determinism as Brassier suggests (although we may perceive it as such), but because of the speed of influence, because of the incompleteness of objects and that this incompleteness is spread from object to object. There is then, no ‘noumenal/subjective autonomy but only an unconsciousness registering of the collision, taking down on the ‘other scene’ of the brain. Zizek’s mistake then is in regards to the term reflection which, instead, should be articulated as a kind of registration.

The aforementioned Zeilinger has discussed ‘two freedoms’ due to the fact that the choice of instrument to locate the particle effects the result of the outcome but does not completely determine it (because of unpredictability – hyper chaos) hence the freedom of the researcher and that of nature. Zeilinger goes on, in terms similar to Meillassoux’s, to argue for things in and of themselves exist and we can only access them indirectly.  The instrumental arrestation of any particle is inaccurate because the measurement affects the outcome but this does not negate the impossibility of a perception-independent reality.

Have we then swung back to correlationism, that the existence of the in itself is, in fact, dependent on our observation? Clearly not – while our thoughts can reshape matter, it cannot disregard it, nor would the inexistence of our thoughts have any consequence on existence itself. For Meillassoux, our ability to think a time (and following Brassier a place) where there is no thought, is a uniquely human characteristic. But any sort of indirect thinking, that is having thought hypostasized in any way is automatically correlationist. Again, as Nick points out, Brassier’s reading of Deleuze slides between time being contracted by thought and time being reduced to a brute matter, a kind of Schellingesque unground – time as a pulsation of matter itself.

The unconscious disjunction between being and thinking disrupts our relation to time not in a way that we simply spatialize it, but in that we imperfectly experience it and register it in ways that are not chronological. Again, this does not mean that time is merely subjective but neither does it mean that we can have no relation to the past or to the future that is merely imaginary. Choice, then, cannot be reduced to mere compulsion as Brassier would have it – not because we can remove ourselves from the realm of objects affecting objects, but because there are non-local entities affecting our movement and our objective status. The unconscious is not purely noumenal in this sense but simply non-linear.

It would seem that a Speculative Realist theory of representation would have much to learn from psychoanalysis and that Manuel Delanda has much to say in regards to Meillassoux’s issues with the appearence of chaos.

Against Phenomenology

The following is from Plato’s Phaedo, Book 1:

“The philosopher desires death–which the wicked world will insinuate that he also deserves: and perhaps he does, but not in any sense which they are capable of understanding. Enough of them: the real question is, What is the nature of that death which he desires? Death is the separation of soul and body–and the philosopher desires such a separation. He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the mind only to behold the light of truth. All the evils and impurities and necessities of men come from the body. And death separates him from these corruptions, which in life he cannot wholly lay
aside. Why then should he repine when the hour of separation arrives? Why, if he is dead while he lives, should he fear that other death, through which alone he can behold wisdom in her purity?”

On first inspection it would appear that the oppositional stance to Plato’s position here (which smells of rampant universalism) would be one that is cognitive, analytical and ultimately phenomenological. Essentially, the body is all that there is and cognition becomes epiphenomenal - the mere byproduct of physical apparatuses. This view flourished at the turn of the century (Darwin’s Bulldog famously stated that mental experiences were like the train whistle on the train, and to say nothing of Pavlov’s experiments) then died out then flourished again with qualia obsessed scientists who argue that physical experiences determine and events and not thoughts - they dismiss that conscious thinking (which can be couched in terms of free will) have anything to do with subsequent (or any) action following an event or previous action.

We can then venture to more strictly philosophical territory. The phenomenological push, which still thrives in contemporary theory, can be readily traced to Husserl or, more likely, to the more familiar name, and student of Husserl, Heidegger. Heidegger’s reductionist metaphysics places the world into a kind of object based existence where things are tied to Dasein through their utility and to the world they invoke.

Heidegger, and his ilk, are fascinated by death - Blanchot, Artaud, Baitaille, Levinas and so forth. Death is, more than anything, an un-experiential act, the very limits of our subjectivity in psychoanalysis. It seems that death, as the final judgment, is a phenomenological fascination in that it seems to define the contours of existence as utility/objects/faces et cetera, negatively - the not deathly that we can only partially experience through the other as such. Death, it seems, has a utility in that it unbinds time and being, finally, to give a kind of rest.The complexities of time, as discussed by Zielinski, point towards a radical natural philosophy, towards a temporal, as well as spatial, perforation of the earth. What does this do to Heidegger’s world as such? Do we end up with a porus world, one in which the vile vorticies reek havoc on the stability of being?

In the aforementioned text Plato goes on to say:

“The hollows on the surface of the globe vary in size and shape from that which we inhabit: but all are connected by passages and perforations in the interior of the earth. And there is one huge chasm or opening called Tartarus, into which streams of fire and water and liquid mud are ever flowing; of these small portions find their way to the surface and form seas and rivers and volcanoes. There is a perpetual inhalation and exhalation of the air rising and falling as the waters pass into the depths of the earth and return again, in their course forming lakes and rivers, but never descending below the centre of the earth; for on either side the rivers flowing either way are stopped by a precipice. These rivers are many and mighty, and there are four principal ones, Oceanus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and Cocytus. Oceanus is the river which encircles the earth; Acheron takes an opposite direction, and after flowing under the earth through desert places, at last reaches the Acherusian lake,–this is the river at which the souls of the dead await their return to earth. Pyriphlegethon is a stream of fire, which coils round the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus. The fourth river, Cocytus, is that which is called by the poets the Stygian river, and passes into and forms the lake Styx, from the waters of which it gains new and strange powers. This river, too, falls into Tartarus.”

There is (perhaps unplatonically or supraplatonically if one follows a perverse logic of the forms) a truth to Plato’s false description in that Plato’s description, though unscientific, explains the un-phenomenological grappling of the Earth’s interior. Going back to Zielinski, the work of Althanasius Kircher, in particular his investigation of the crater of Vesuvias, led him to propose a theory regarding Earth’s internal fires and a subterrain ocean. The same kind of thinking was adopted by Hutton who saw the interior of the earth as a massive heat engine. We should say, that in the wake of this massiveness, and against Plato, the philosopher’s most tantilizing escape would be that of death, of denying the wave of nihilism that washes over us when we are met, face to face, with the hollowness of the universe. As Mark Twain put it:

“There is nothing. There is no god and no universe. There is only empty space, and in it, a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible thought, and I am that thought. And god and the universe and time and life and death and joy and sorrow and pain only a grotesque and brutal dream evolved from the frantic imagination and that insane thought.”

Yet, in terms of quantum physics, and as Zizek stated, something went wrong and out of that negativity came something terrible - life as we know it. The attempts to go back and assign an order to the primordial chaos have, as any handful of contemporary theorists will tell you, has failed. And yet, in the hands of Derrideans and Heideggerians and some others, the great chain of being has been fused back together in the illusion of its very denial. There is a kind of mourning where thinkers have tried to give us back some kind of warmth culled from the dead of space. Derrida is most famous here - he tried the promise, friendship, the moment of archiving and so forth. Ray Brassier responds to this kind of thinking thusly:

“The disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity” (Nihil Unbound, p. xi).

Baudrillard began a short chapter in Simulcra and Simulation with the phrase: “When you take everything away nothing is left. This is false.” And that is the truest kernel and, the difference between the phenomenologists and psychoanalysis. For Freud, when you take everything away there is something left - there is the stain of the real - this is clear in his discussions of Jewishness in Moses and Monotheism - there is always a remainder. That remainder is the gap of freedom - the kind of materially Cambrian explosion in which the phenomenological breaks down.

Phenomenology, at its roots, only has, as the ultimate reproach to the ‘rampant nihilism’, the cozy retreat to Heidegger’s cottage of Earth masquerading as a new way of being. The celebration of heterogenity as is advoated by the likes of Foucault, Zielinkski, Manuel De Landa, and others, must, whether they desire to or not, push is in a direction that is, begging for pained sighs, metaphyiscal. Even grasping at anti-transcendental straws such as Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO (Body without organs) - where the transcendental is smuggled under the blanket of the immanent - leaves one with the sense of nice but no cigar

Bone White Clean

/1/ - Porus origins

I devoted an early entry to the subject of Anorexia previously as well as one on Skeletal Ontology - here I am working out a possible synthesis of those arguments via my new found philosophical program - transcendental materialism. So to begin again:

With Skeletal ontology, I discussed that while Nick Cave’s Australia set western The Proposition deals with barren landscapes - there are no skeletons only skeletal structures - unfinished houses, bullet riddled shacks, the eerily empty wire baby crib, a cavernous hideout et cetera. In the film I argued that this exemplifies the unnaturalness of skeletal structures - they are to be added on to where as, with organisms, it is a sign of reduction - of decay.

The strange discrepancy here is included in the romance of the west at large - the idea of settling into undiscovered territory as if that means it is also uninhabited. The important point here is at least two fold:

First, we must take note of the fundamentally unnaturalness of human existence, which we can discuss via Lacan’s term antiphusis (or anti-nature). As Adrian Johnston explains, human existence is always-already unnatural due to the fact that we are born into the cage of language, every bit of our life, even before we are completely conscious of it, is shot through by signifiers we cannot grasp.

Secondly, The Proposition also points out the related matter of the unknowability of our own origin. In multiple texts, such as Civilization and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, Moses and Montheism and in particular the case of the Wolf Man, our own creation must remain an obscure fiction. Again, as I discussed before, Kant echoes this in his piece Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.

/2/ - The thin body as Real

Connecting this to the anorectic body is less strenuous then one would initially think. At first we can take the sharing of the word skeletal quite literally, that the skeletal body, is simultaneously natural, as it is literally closet to our ‘natural state’ which is, oddly, a rotting corpse, and yet unnatural because such a bodily state is unhealthy. This confusion is again illuminated by Freud when in Civilization and its Discontents, he argues that aside from the sexual instincts connection to propagation, as tenuous as that tie is, human existence is driven to death. This death drive (trieb) is not as literal as it sounds, not suicidal, but suggests that humans do not exist to simply prolong their life, humans continue to exist because they wish to choose how and when to die.

In my previous entry on anorexia, I discussed the work of Massimo Recalcati and how he connects the ‘anorexic passion for the mirror’ to the objet petit a, the little piece of the real. Recalcati argues that the anorexic subject wishes to erase this dimension, this part that is ‘in you more than you’ from the body, so that the subject’s being would then correspond directly to the physical apparition in the mirror. As Zizek has pointed out, the mirror image is a desubstantialized image, it is flat which, is even better than hollow. Flatness, in psychoanalysis in particular, is the sort of original state of being: from Freud’s simplified vesicle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to Lacan’s famous ‘man-omlette or lamella.

In regards to anorexia Lacan pointed out, and Bruce Fink reminds us, that it is not that anorexics do not wish to eat, it is simply that the wish to eat nothing, to litteraly consume nothingness itself. Fink goes on to say that anorexia should never be viewed as simply an interruption of the natural process of eating, but should also be taken as a particular manifestation of a larger psychological array - such as paranoia or obsession. Gabriella Ripa di Meana takes this fact to its logical conclusion in her text Figure of Lightness, and identifies a series of different anorexics.

/3/ - Barrens

Aesthetically the scenic skeletal and the corporeal skeletal find shared territory in the barren. The barren appears as simultaneously that which once had life and that is covering over life as well as invoking multiple categories of barrenness through temporality - the suddenly barren (the nuclear wasteland) or the rotting barren (the desert, the tundra).

Immediately we have the specter of the other before us - the possibility of an external cause of desolation in relation to, or perhaps opposed to, an interior decay. The experience of the anorectic subject is startingly familiar - in “Triggering Determinants in Anorexia,” Recalcati discusses how the subjects refusal to eat, particularly in terms of the infant, serves to divide the givening sustenance of the other from the other’s love - essentially when the food is refused, in the youth’s perception, the remainder is love. Aside from this external attack, there is, as has already been mentioned, the force of the internal drive, the objet petit a, which perpetually destabilizes the subject’s spectral image.

Here is the unbearability of anorexia proper - the desire to reduce the body beyond that object which is purely formal and cannot be shrunk via starvation. The issue of course, is that the attempt is to shrink the physical body, the mindless matter of physicality, that, like a strange ineffective shell, attempts to cover objects that are fundamental extimate, as internal but placed outside. The subject reduced to the pure bit of its subjectivity is the absolute other (Time Driven, p. 45). Our being is perforated then, not only by language thereby making our bodies unnatural because of symbolic invasion, but the very ‘ourness’ of our body is false - countless eyes our embedded in our flesh.

The barren body, like the barren screen then, is fundamentally porous, the material is flawed because it can never cover over the no-material, it is a think cover on a too-large skeleton. Similarly, with the cinema screen, it is often the fact that we see more of ourselves in the picture, (there is porosity taken effect, our investment in the skeletal, the exigent object) and less the actual aesthetic covering.

/4/ - Flatness and its limits

In Ranciere’s The Future of the Image, (a text, while partially resembling his previous efforts which blended anecdotal history and philosophy, seems to mostly fall from its intended mark) there is a long and circuitous discussion of the image and of depth. Ranciere points out the association of flatness with modernity since Clement Greenberg - the abandonment of the third dimension (p. 103 of The Future of the Image).

In the chapter entitled “The Surface of Design” Ranciere discusses Peter Behrens, the German architect and designer, and his relation to the symbolist poet Mallarme. Contra to Greenberg, Ranciere points out how the flatness of modernity was always sabotaged by the Dadaists, the Pop artists and so forth (p. 104). There is a shared surface for both, (again the threat of techne), a shared surface for the designer and the poet (p. 107).

How can art ever really escape techne, if the space of the production line and the flat canvas allow for the glow of work, is the truth more than work, then production whether it is engulfed in capital or not? Again we seem to be enslaved by the extimate - by the embedded eyes pushed even further by the capitalistic engine of fashion, or the artistic engine of design, depending on how one views it.

In some sense, it seems that the haunting flatness of modernity, of the wasteland will not leave us. In the “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger discusses Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes and the world that is opened up by it. According to Frederic Jameson the shoes are “one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art” (In The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).

Jameson of course addresses Heidegger’s critique directly. He addresses the aforementioned gap, between the world and the earth as “meaningless materiality of the body and nature.” Yet, as we have already seen, materiality, even when it seems blank and meaningless, is host to a parasite, that of the Real, the objet petit a.

/5/ - Extimacy at its limits

For a glow of work, we might wander into awkward territory albeit intentionally so. Here I am taking of the pregnant nude and even pregnant pornography. Could there be an image that so threatens embodies and yet simultaneously threatens exigency? The pregnant body naked always causes a stir. The above photo in particular as well as Britney Spears and a host of other celebrities.

There is, perhaps to return to the unknowability of our origins, something particular blatant about the pregnant body, something too close to the proverbial Darwinian pool. Or is it simply that it is too obvious a signal of hetero-reproductive sexuality?

The image is not overly three dimension but four dimensional - invoking time, the genesis of the species itself in its physical size. It is in this sense that the extimate again threatens the flat land of the anorexic. Isn’t the advent of pregnant porn even more threatening, the extimate and the sexual bound together?

Leonard Nemoy’s Full Body Project and Carson Cresley’s How to Look Good Naked are recent attempts to combat the culture of thinness that they see as rampant in America. However, anyone can guess that media portrayals of thinness do not simply lead to thinness, as anorexia is evidence of a deeper psychological issue as already mentioned. The large nude is only going to appear monstrous to the anorexic subject, beauty cannot be tied to it as the aforementioned gentlemen assert.

 

Isn’t it also interesting that Recalcati’s studies found that anorexic subjects experience an invented separation, some kind of strange mourning from being separated from what they are used to - a kind of melancholia. Again eximacy and anorexia find each and circle around the pregnant nude - the nude is a bearing of the internal which cannot be contained - that which is exactly lived through the anorexic’s habits. The lesson from the nude is that we must let the eximate leave while always caring for its distance from us.

Migrations of Trauma

/1/ - The Uncanny road to trauma…

The translation of the word unheimlich, literally ‘unhomeness’, is uncanny - a philosophical and psychological category all too familiar thanks to the work of Sigmund Freud. Yet, the original German term has a primarily spatial orientation - it is a feeling of not being where one feels like they are. The English definition takes the word in a very different direction, or maybe we should say to a very different place. Canny means knowing and therefore uncanniness becomes a state of unknowing - of not knowing what one knows.

It is important to establish here the difference between not knowing and not knowing what one knows, the latter being the state of the uncanny whereas the former simply has to do with negativity. Where not knowing would be negative, the un at the start of the uncanny signals indefinite judgment. The most well known example of this would be undead - anyone who frequents the cinema knows that being undead does not mean alive but it certainly does not mean dead either - it is somewhere in between.

Having established the uncanny as indefinite judgement, what exactly does it mean to not know what one knows? In his text Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek quotes a wonderfully obscene statement from the former head of the Department of Defense:

“In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.”

The nature of the unknown knowns brings us to the strangeness of cognitive dissonance.

/2/ - Cognitive dissonance

On every season of American Idol the same painful yet funny process of weeding out the awful singers invariably causes two events: either the amateur singer breaks down in tears thereby realizing the comments of the judges, or they complete reject the judgment and storm off in indignation. The two roads represent exactly the split of cognitive dissonance: where the mind, faced with an uncomfortable situation, must either confirm, and therefore change, or deny and remain psychically intact.

In both cases the audience experiences schadenfreude - a pleasure in the the displeasure of others, as they fail before ever being lifted off the ground. Therein lies the difference between human mortality and immortality, between tragedy and comedy proper. It has been stated that the tragic occurs when someone of great stature falls into the mud - this is true if they stay in the mud - comedy occurs when they keep going.

There is an odd reverse version of the experience of watching this split occurring in NBC’s popular To Catch a Predator. When a bewildered man is caught with materials that could suggest nothing other than an intended sexual encounter with an under-aged girl, the suspects follow two routes - they either play stupid or apologize profusely, eventually ending up in tears. Essentially they admit their mistake and throw themselves at the mercy of the television/law, which is fairly rare, or they attempt to somehow undo their situation - they attempt to prove that they were just there to warn the girl, to have a talk with her et cetera.

In the first example the subject seeks validation for their belief; in the second their behavior is attributed to a kind of unacceptable subjectivity (pedophile). In both cases there is a disconnect between being as a subject and being as a set of actions. Or, put another way, it points out the difference between the classical transcendental subject and the more Althusserian subject in process.

/3/ - Losses and Controls

While sticking our noses in the realm of pop singing sensations, it would be incredibly impossible not to discuss a certain Miss Spears. It would be interesting, albeit no doubt impossible, to pinpoint the moment where she passed from a signifier of sexed-up deceptively sweet stardom to transmogrifying into a master signifier for the traumatized citizen par excellence. If there is something more desirable to the general public then a small crystallized moment of the American dream (take any rags to riches story) it is the complete shattering of that graven image.

The most sensational reports of Spears’ recent demise, regardless of their factual content, say more about our vested interests in celebrity collapse then the suffering of a less than functional adult. The details of ‘crazed Britney’s drug cocktail’ were particularly appalling:

“TWO bottles of Nyquil
TWENTY diet pills, including her favourite brand Clenbuterol.
EIGHTEEN herbal uppers specially ordered over the internet.
EIGHTEEN Piriton antihistamine tablets
TWELVE Vicodin painkillers
TEN sleeping pills
UP TO eight antacid reflux tabs
ONE bottle of stomach upset mixture Pepto Bismol
TEN Zantac tablets, an anti-hangover and indigestion drug.
SIX Ritalin, for her attention deficit disorder issues.
TWO empty bottles of painkiller Oxycontin, known as hillbilly heroin, were also found at her home.”

In picturing bald Britney one can peer into the texts of Lauren Berlant, which I discussed here paying particular attention to her notion of fetal citizenship. Spears as the shaved headed threat to her own children, doubly invokes Berlant’s fetal citizenship as well as Lee Edelman’s heteronormative reproductive futurity. Simultaneously Spears embodies a fetal-like victim of the paparazzi-toothed pop culture machine and the threat to helpless creatures (children) as the drug abusing, irresponsible threat which puts a certain politicized reproductivity into jeopardy, it threatens the symbolic American child as such.

This knot is more than likely responsible for the kinds of questions that Jodi Dean, for example, asks at the end of her post here. Dean takes issue with ‘care’: what does it mean to care about something. More specifically this can be thought of in terms of attention - when we pay attention to Britney or Paris Hilton it doesn’t seem that attention means care. At what point is investment empathetic - can the two necessarily be divided?

/4/ - Mimetic Grief

Every few years it seems that some national event grabs the whole of the heart strings and tugs just strong enough to demand a feeling of vapid connectivity. The shootings at Virginia Tech seem to be the most recent example of this, though smaller events are happening all the time that demand a strange kind of empathy; but beyond empathy there is a kind of trauma porn. As I discussed in an earlier entry, the full kind of trauma, often in the form of a national trauma, is taken and spread as far as possible so that its boundlessness is preserved.

Much was made of the involvement of Facebook in the after math of the massacre; the involvement of students in the groups was actually a talking point during my undergraduate graduation. The strange attempt to ‘be a Hokie’ in the wake of the shooting seems to fuel the theories of Berlant, Cvetkovich and Wendy Brown. In the first case, Berlant’s theories of the fetal citizen (as discussed above in relation to Spears) fall nicely in line with experiencing the pain of disasters. Or put in another way, the concept of a privatized public, where issues such as abortion and gay marriage become significantly political, is a reversal of Ranciere’s progression of politics in his text Disagreement. In the text, Ranciere shows how common people were rejected from political discourse because they were marked as being incapable of communication beyond an animalistic way - now we have the so called personal or animalistic cries of being transformed into political impetuses.

/5/ - ‘I’m just documenting’

The feverishly angry responses to Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield are somewhat surprising and yet also somewhat expected. Several reviewers have cried that the film too heavily invokes 9/11 and that it is tasteless and exploitative. While there is one shot of smoke billowing down the street that is very reminiscent of the attack, the direct comparison stops there. The word terrorism is muttered once by a bystander and no antagonistic turns of phrase by the military or anyone else lean towards such a comparison. The reviewers who claim such comparisons seem to think that any devastation in midtown Manhattan is automatically a reference to 9/11, that any destruction in the contemporary era is instantly a reference or a slap in the face. The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis’ review is particularly weak in that she makes where the director and producer are from a stinging point - only people from Los Angles could so callously exploit our city.

Several reviewers also dub it a cross between Godzilla and The Blair Witch, though, while the Blair Witch comparison describes the look of the film, it does not quite grasp the movie’s comments on the archive, on documentation. The characters, as Lisa Schwarzbaum puts it are appropriately unmemorable; they are average 20 something New Yorkers caught in a disaster. This is done most likely to highlight the monster, as well as the very act of documenting. It cannot be a coincidence that the character who controls the camera is called by his last name Hud (which the video game players out there know as an acronym for heads up display - something that shows information without obstructing the users view).

The entire film is set up as a found document, as something that has come into possession of the Department of Defense. The fact that the movie is encapsulated as a found object, a tape buried in rubble, seems to invite comparisons as it appears as a archived object bearing trauma. At the same time the film seems to suggest the threat of documentation superseding the event itself and, furthermore, what the tape struggles to capture is affect. As Cvetkovich notes in An Archive of Feelings, affect, particularly as it relates to living individuals, tends to get lost in the discussion of national trauma. Beyond the films love story functioning to appease certain demographics (and to get the protagonists moving towards instead of away from the monster) it tries to insert some amount of smallness in the immensity of national trauma.

Here we can return to the linguistic confusions surrounding the uncanny - trauma is both an ‘unhomeness’ as well as an unknowing. The found document illustrates the literal (read spatial) divide between us and the subjects of trauma, as well as presenting itself as a document where we can safely search for the unknown known, the deeper meaning behind the event.

On noumenal subjectivity

/1/ - Split being

The core of Shelley Jackson’s text Half Life might be summed up best in the etymology of the word decide. Whereas decision is usually thought of in terms of choice or as a soft act of free will, the meaning of the suffix -cide tells us that the word is far more violent. The suffix -cide is shared by words such as suicide and genocide: it means to cut - to decide then is simply to cut in two.

Jackson’s novel follows the life of Nora who is a conjoined twin whose other half/sister (Blanche) has been asleep for years (arguably since the two went through puberty). In the wake of a stupendous nuclear accident that occurred when Nora/Blanche were conceived - an entire subculture of conjoined twins has emerged and, much to the displeasure of others, Nora has decided to have Blanche surgical excised.

There is an interesting discussion of twoness philosophically - there’s the twoness of movement, the pull and push between stasis and movement, which Badiou discusses aptly in relation to the term anabasis and the twoness of time, which I’ve discussed several times before (perhaps twice?), the relation and contrast between biological time and historical time. The first concept of twoness, the philosophical split - takes us to Nietzsche and his discussion of the noon:

“And it is the great noon when man stands at the midpoint of his course between beast and superman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). One could also take some lines from the last section of Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”:

“Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in
The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.”

Nietzsche’s quote above, and in many of his texts at large, are haunted by a kind of unsure temporality. In Zupancic’s The Shortest Shadow there seems to be a contest between this temporality necessary for becoming and the circular temporality found in Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return.

One could read this twoness of temporality in terms of the confusing nature of Trieb (drive) in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

/2/ - Bodies, bodies and bodies

While the novel appears to be fixated on bodies (and in fact Jackson’s other texts, one of which is a story written on tattoos across the skin of other 300 volunteers, are all about anatomies) Jackson, at the day’s end, seems most concerned with the unknown or unacknowledged sense of ourselves - the unconscious, the Real whatever it is that you want to call it. Despite the physicality of Nora and Blanche’s split/unification, the text discusses twin bodies as bodies, very little in comparison to their state(s) of mind.

Jackson, and by relation the narrator Nora, seem far more interested in the linguistic problematics of being conjoined then the day to day difficulties of being literally attached at the hip. Part of this lacked discussion is do to the simple fact that Blanche is unconscious, but the two seem more at odds in the present state then they do in flashbacks where both could be opting for directional control.

Nora encounters various groups that want to celebrate ‘twofers’ by attempting to bring everyone together, to make everyone a twofer. Part of this involves abandoning the first person singular as a way of and accepting that your existence with your brother or sister is actually a singular existence.

This fascination is also the texts’ largest problem in that Jackson can be overly heavy handed with using the twins as a metaphor for our own split subjectivity. Steven Shaviro raves about the novel - interestingly mulling over it’s status as a postmodern texts. In many ways, both implicit and explicit, Jackson’s text screams Lacanian themes - she repeatedly discusses the wound of being and discusses trauma over and over again. The strongest reading of Jackson’s text may be way in regards to Lyotard’s The Inhuman which, while ostensibly postmodern, seems perpetually haunted by both Freud and Lacan.

/3/ - The complexities of extimacy

Extimacy, a concept I have discussed in earlier entries, is the Lacanian idea that something external is deeply internal to our very being, that there is some alien splinter stuck in our bodies that constantly gives us unease.

Trauma as occurring in the in between palace, between the somatic and the psychical. This third space is hinted at in several Lacanian texts. In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More for instance, the voice, as a Freudian ‘partial object’, is what brings together bodies and languages. The voice is the odd link between language as a set of sounds and symbols and the physical structures which allow for the voice to emanate from the mouth.

The partial object or the extimate objet petit a (little piece of the Real) both are the annoying or unpresentable little pieces which cannot be grasped directly. This objects are the things which challenge the statement - When you take everything away, nothing remains.’ This equation takes place in psychoanalysis in terms of desire, need and drive. Drive is exactly that which remains when you subtract need from desire, is is that which one needs simply because it is needed.

To return to Jackson’s circumscribing of the body, Lacan, in several seminars, systematically removes the somatic connections that the Freduian drive has. The connection of the drive to the body may, at first, appear as an issue in the context of translation. Freud’s use of Trieb is often mistranslated as instinct instead of drive, leading to an automatic connection of Trieb (misconceived as an almost biological factor). Adrian Johnston argues that one should not completely cleave the Freudian drive from the body.

To return to the above discussion of historical time vs genetic time, the time of the society versus the time of the organism. Or, in Nietzsche’s terms, the progression towards eternity as opposed to the eternal return of the same.

/4/ - Impossible reconciliation

Michel Tournier’s Gemini follows the life of two twins (not conjoined) known collectively as Jean-Paul (even their mother confuses one for the other). The two enjoy an almost undivided existence until one of them heads off and falls in love with a woman. The other feels wronged and pursues his brother to the ends of the earth. This want to return to a more idealized state is something I have discussed in several other entries. Even in the opening pages of the novel the mother of twins enjoys breast feeding her children fairly late in life, suggesting a sort of inappropriate closeness.

This return to a state of undifferentiated existence can also be discussed in terms of drive and the two forms of time that have already been discussed. In one sense. drive is a force that exists prior to the phenomenal existence of the subject but the object around which it centers can change due to various signifiers in the subjects life - various experiences can bend the object that the drive seeks. The aim of the drive on the other hand, the basic mechanism of the drive, is not affected by exterior forces, the drive remains an essentially self defeating entity.

So to return to Jackson’s novel, Nora eventually rejects having the surgery to remove her sister from her, or at least her sisters head, when she discovers that the organization behind the surgeries is, oddly, the other side of an organization that promotes the rights of twofers. The ‘two sides of the coin’ logic here is prevalent through the whole novel and there is a play on this concept in the end where it becomes unclear whether Blanche or Nora is actually ‘in charge’ of their shared body.

Beyond the fact that the pseudo unconscious Blanche throws objects, writes notes, attempts to sabotage Nora’s attempts to kill her, on a large scale Jackson seems to be using the ‘underside’ of our existence, the noumenal parts of us, the I that thinks instead of the I that speaks, to show the failures of communal identity.

/5/ - Under current

Jackson’s relentless prodding and lampooning of groups based on identity politics in Half Life seems to suggest that more than a ineffectual political strategy, identity, as a communal viable body, something that carries social currency, is inherently flawed because of the discontents of our own minds.

Furthermore what is important to share is less the outward expressions of our existence, sex, race, gender, body type etc, but the deeper more inexplicable threads of our cogitos. Thus, the real danger in giving up on universal Enlightenment ideas, is not because one might diagonally justify the racism and classicism that such proponents had, but that a sense of community might no longer be possible if it is based on something more ethereal than body or identity politics.

Skeletal Ontologies

/1/ - War wind weathered bones

Let’s risk a fairly ridiculous argument - the western, as a film has exploded in popularity during times of a kind of colonial fear - world war II, 1957 (the height of the cold war due to the launch of Sputnik) and most recently during the first and second Gulf Wars. Previously I’ve suggested how Westerns embody a kind of ‘Enlightenment obscenity’ - it encapsulates the very violent core of the enlightenment project - illustrating the excess that serves as the foundation and disruption of (ie the symptom of in Lacan’s terms) the notion of progress.

The question becomes - do westerns, at their fundamental core, simply reaffirm the barbarity of humanity (the reckless id, the undeniable unconscious) or do they, perhaps more radically, display the very violence of the notion of reason itself?

Nick Cave’s The Proposition is brutal in a variety of aspects - it is episode after episode of extreme violence painted over a landscape of unbearable whiteness. The film seems to weave two large themes together - the fragility of the word (the symbolic) and the animality of humanity. One of the more heavy handed scenes of dialog in the film is when Guy Pierce’s character comes across a drunken bounty hunter. The bounty hunter rants about Darwin’s theory of evolution - laughing manically at the idea that ‘white men’ could be on the same level as natives. The entire film stages a battle between (or maybe just institutes a confusion of) civilization and barbarity. If there is one scene that crystallizes this antimony, it is a shot that only lasts a few seconds but is deeply disturbing. After the youngest of the criminal brothers has been flogged 38 times, the whipper rings out all the blood in the flayed-end whip and it pools sickly in the dirt.

The film seems at once condemn and find sympathy for those who seek to ‘bring civilization to Australia’ One of the main character’s of the film (who seems to shift from villain to anti-hero) is that of Captain Stanley who has convinced himself he must civilize the land in order to keep his delicate wife safe. Stanley tries to stop the flogging of the criminal (especially since he is to die by hanging 5 days or so later) arguing that that would kill him.

Despite the horrid dying landscape what is important to notice is that there are no skeletons only skeletal structures (the captain’s fence, the house where the rape occurred has a bare roof, the bullet riddled hide out of Pierce’s character, the strangely empty wire crib, the porous cave hideout etc). Humans are constantly grimy, bloodied, yellowed like wet paper - what’s important is that we’re never giving direct access to the base of the primal - we never get to see the most basic framework - the always already lost origin. It is namely homes that appear barren and skeletal - representing the uncanny unnaturalness of creation itself. The stark, at times almost blinding, landscape of the film seems to suggest a sort of pre-natal haunting, a haunting that is tumbling over itself trying not to remind us of a sunken weight but the sharp pang of a memory constantly trying to be formed.

To draw a connection to my entry on porosity - the genetic, the forming of experiences as well as the actual genetic, is easily evident in the case of family. At one point in the film two of the characters are discussing what a misanthrope is and another asks, based on their violent past, ‘aren’t we misanthropes’ and the film’s true villain answers ‘no we’re a family.’ The concept of family (fused with that of loyalty) is the how the genetic is construed in order for the ‘civilized characters’ of their film to enjoy their horrific acts. During the flogging scene there is a series of shots where the backs of the onlookers are focused upon. On their yellow and white vests dozens and dozens of flies gather and buzz ominously. The flies are indirectly linked to the natives in the film when the drunken bounty hunter rambles about how when you kill a fly more just appear. Later on the pretentious gentleman tells Captain Stanley that ‘if you’re going to kill one native make sure to kill all of them.’ His tone when he talks about the native in an earlier statement suggests that they are driven by revenge, even though, the most brutal acts of vengeance in the film are carried out by whites.

/2/ - Kant’s Civilization or Freud’s Fons et Origo

Kant’s short introduction to his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View gives off a very proto-Hegelian vibe and also reverberates well with Laclau as well as Lacan. Kant’s argument perfectly highlights why Hegel’s later argument about teleological history - is not ‘eventual’ or to be actualized in praxis, but as a necessary fiction. While Kant proposes a definite end for history, his apparent idealism is more tempered than a naive reading of Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit. Besides the capacity for reason Kant prefigures another Hegelian text when he states that ‘man is the only animal who requires a master.’ Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel, attended by Lacan, provide the perfect intersection of these ideas. Kant argues that humans require a master because of the social nature and because reasons drives them to dominate others (following a vaguely Nietzschean argument). The fact that this drive towards domination exists is what results in the aforementioned fundamental tension - the split being of ontology that Kant, according to commentators such as Žižek, could never come to terms with.

In many ways Freud seems to complicate Kant’s discussion of reason, society and reason by interjecting enjoyment. This move can be seen in terms of a more direct affront to Kant when Lacan, taking up Freud, points out that Kant’s vaunted reason fails in the face of excessive enjoyment (jouissance). In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that sexually crazed libertine faced with the choice between survival or a night with whom desired and then the gallows, would clearly pick survival. Lacan argues against Kant stating that a true libertine would find the threat of the gallows as simply adding to the excitement. The connection of enjoyment to a sort of pure (or impure?) antagonism in society is taken up by the notorious Dr Freud.

Early on in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud suggests a model of the psyche which, in some ways, seems a rough precursor to Paul MacLean’s model of the Triune brain (this is the idea that there is a mammal brain laid over a reptile brain etc.). Freud likens the psyche to the archaeological history of a city where the remnants of past infatuations remain in one form or another as a kind of mental ruin. Freud makes the clever move of seemingly dismissing this argument - that the ruins of a city cannot be easily compared to the psyche. In effect, Freud makes the argument in regards to the usefulness of the ruin argument by making the argument itself into a ruin, a ghost existing in the body of the text.

There is another crossover between Freud and Kant which seems to support ruins/fallen bits of society as haunting human life itself. Reason, for both Kant and Freud, seems to be the retroactively created cause which is beyond the material yet, at the same time, only ever arising from the material, from the actual world. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud lampoons humanity for endlessly trying to find purpose in reality. Here Freud’s concept of will should be seen as a more ‘honest’ view of Kant’s reason - both force humanity onward illogically, or at least in a way that runs against ‘nature.’ The ultimate tension for humans, according to Freud, is the desire to change the world to fit our particular form of happiness and trying to be happy without unnecessary struggle - being happy in avoiding unhappiness, in not doing more than one should.

Let us focus on the struggle to change, on the old ‘westward ho’ kind of mentality.

/3/ - The Science of Expansion

It has no doubt be mentioned in passing, in several texts, that the collusion of science fiction and the western has mostly to do with their shared use of the ideal of the frontier, the view of virginal territory. The very promise of space, however, is shaded by the extreme violence of the frontier - due to the lack of law, of any set coherent rules, and by the sense that once the promise has been fulfilled (once the treasure has been acquired) it is one’s right to obliterate any thing or anyone who would attempt to take it from you. In the Dominion War Arc seasons of Star Trek DS9, there was a simple but startling comment from Sisko’s father in regards to war in space: ‘You’d think with all the room in space people wouldn’t have to fight wars.’ Sci-fi and the western are brought together particularly well in the Firefly series and the anime Cowboy Bebop.

Both of these universes are in the wake of civil war and both fuse the western aesthetic with a non-western aesthetic (Chinese culture in Firefly and Japanese culture in Cowboy Bebop). The unreliable presence of the Law is both creations, is what crystallizes the ‘western feeling’ best. Cowboy Bebop seems to directly connect the destitute state of existence to the failure of rapid expansion in that the construction a gate on the moon (a device allowing for rapid interplanetary flight) resulted in the near destruction of earth. Cowboy Bebop is, at its best, about the irreconcilable tension between past lives/pains and the senseless march towards the future, which, often feels little more than biological survival. Just looking at the three main characters Spike has a past he can’t forget, Faye has a past she can’t remember and Jet lies somewhere in between.

The cross over between the excess of reason/reason’s limit remains murky and, in many ways calls to task the relationship of cognition to the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. For Kant the beautiful belongs to the faculty of understanding whereas the sublime belongs to reason. For Kant reason exhibits a kind of purpose (which going back to his writing on history mentioned above) can be misconstrued as supporting a notion of god. To return to Freud and more importantly to Darwin, one could assume, in a similarly naive way, that Darwin supported a divine force simple because evolution has a ‘purpose.’ The need to assume a consciousness is why Freud’s ‘final insult to humanity’ is the penultimate one - because it points out the irrationality that highlights how we want to explain away the mysteries, the gaps in our existence.

The truly devastating nature of humans expanding their terrority may lie in Agamben’s discussion of the work of Heidegger. In The Open, Agamben discusses how animals are in a truly free state of being because they see the open, the very blankness of space, with ‘all of their eyes’ whereas humans are always looking back upon themselves, always confronted with ‘a sense of no’ (p. 57). Agamben goes on to discuss Heidegger’s complication of this relationship and argues that while animals seem to have a more direct access to the open, it is an open where nothing is concealed or unconcealed. Heidegger’s most well known piece of evidence for this is that of the moth endlessly circling the flame.

Let’s discuss the flame before we discuss the endless circling…

/4/ - Burning the flesh off the bones

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine embodies the enlightenment tension in science fiction well. The film centers around a group of scientists who must ‘reignite the dying sun.’ The whole point of the movie seems to be about confronting the irrational kernel of the enlightenment through the vague ‘tarrying with the sun as a platonic object.’ Three aproaches seem to emerge in regards to dealing with the sun - as scientific object, as sublime object, as communicative object. For most of the crew, the sun moves slowly from scientific to sublime object - the most violent/courageous characters in the film are those who are more ready to accept the sublimity of the sun.

When the captain Kaneda must go on space walk, just before he is incinerated, several of his crew are screaming for him to move to safety. Searle, who spends an inordinate amount of time in the observation room, simply staring at the sun (almost to the point of blindness), asks Kaneda just prior to his death ‘What do you see?’ Searle is also the character who sacrifices himself, almost without even a painful expression, in order to save the rest of the crew. What’s particularly startling about the scene where Searle agrees to doom himself is that instead of the standard unspoken nobility, Searle engages instead in a kind of eager child like excitement at the prospect of being obliterated by the sun.

The villain of the film’s second half, Pinbacker, makes the common mistake of those reading both Kant and Hegel, of attributing the jump of the enlightenment to romanticism requiring a divine consciousness. Pinbacker believes that trying to save the sun is an insult to god and that man has no right. Again we see how see the split between the ‘purpose’ of humanity and a divine intelligence - Capa, the ship’s physicist, is the rightful hero of the story because he asserts that the technological capability of humanity is more of a purpose, in and of itself, than any attempt at arguing for a divine consciousness.

To return to the aforementioned circling of the moth, one should take care to mention the notion of repetition. Repetition itself seems to stand as a kind of tipping point between rational and irrational behavior. While repetition is the essence of practice, laboratory verification, etc. it is also one of the most well recognized symptoms of mental imbalance - the old saying about insanity being when one does the say thing expecting a different result.

Deleuze brings the sameness between repetitions into question in that he argues that difference is primary, and that every iteration creates a difference, that nothing is self identical. (Here one can easily see how Judith Butler is often described as a Deleuzian despite her clumsy attempts to deny it.)

/5/ - Again and again

To bring things to a close then - if progress itself is as irrational as our animalistic desires are the two simply ‘two sides of the same coin (to play Žižekian games) - is progress an animalistic need or desire? One might also argue, via Lacanian psychoanalysis, that because subjectivity is fundamentally intersubjective (our very being is social - composed of our relations to other subjects) society is the complication that arises between the will (or Kant’s reason) and society. As Freud puts it in Civilization and its Discontents society is that which allows an attack on nature via the will (p. 27).

What the western seems to be about then, in regards to all the strands I have tried to pull together in one bloody palm, is the uneasy tension between the most base sense of our being (the skeleton, the bone of our existence) and how that base continues to endlessly betray us and propel us. The western highlights the very violence of the Lacanian symptom, or in the terms of Adrian Johnston’s Time Driven, the tension between biological time (the time of repetition) and historical time (time that can be represented). The western plays out the impossibility of experiencing ‘first causes’ in Kant’s terminology - while first causes are required by reason to make experience intelligible - this starting ground can never be fully experienced (Time Driven, p. 40).

In terms of the subject there is always a noumenal kernel - the structure which we always miss with the eye - we always see through it - it is porous, skeletal. The only experience of this kernel is the slips of the tongue, the mistakes, the meaningless and enigmatic symbols that we encounter over and over again. What makes this argument non-transcendental however, is that such a structure doesn’t actually exist, it is simply a prerequisite for the very possibility of our thinking. The horrible violence of The Proposition, is the attempt to repeat differently - to tweak our animalistic, non-historical behaviors, in a way that benefits us in the long term, that benefits us in a historical fashion.

It is no wonder that the western is so much a genre of revenge - the strange sense that the circle of violence will some day come to an end. To end on a strange pop culture note - the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy contains a sample from the spaghetti western Django, Prepare a Coffin in which the title character drags a coffin behind him that contains a machine gun (and as luck would have it, this element was paid respects to in an episode of Cowboy Bebop). One would be hard pressed to find an image of the violence and ressentiment more fitting than that of Django. Cee-Lo’s lyrics which simply discuss the madness of being an artist/entertainer emphasize the openness of that kind of creative insanity ‘even your emotions have an echo.’

Reason is a kind of horribly violent progress because it sees itself as without ‘experienceable’ ground and therefor the only ‘reasonable’ thing to do is an irrational jump of faith which is accomplished through a series of odd repetitions.

A Capitalistic Sublime?

/1/ - Ontological evacuation and the Sublime

There’s a moment, which I have already mentioned in previous posts, in Alenka Zupancic’s brilliant text Ethics of the Real where she carefully articulates the Kantian sublime. While I will not repeat her discussion in full, what I’ve been endlessly fascinated with is the ontological shift that occurs in order for the horrific to become sublime. As Kant illustrates it - it is not the object or event that decides whether it is horrible or sublime, but strictly the distance that the subject acquires from the horrific that transmogrifies it into the sublime.

The particularly interesting aspect of the shift is that it is fundamentally a narcissistic one. Opposed to popular dogma, narcissism is not about seeing oneself as better than everyone else, it is about seeing oneself as better than oneself, it is about detaching your identity from your body, as seeing yourself as tiny and insignificant. But, as Zupancic makes clear, this insignificance is from the point of view of our own being, separated from our physical body, a bird’s eye view cast upon ourselves. Kant states that the soul’s fortitude is raised, and we think we can match nature’s omnipotence. The kind of ontological evacuation becomes incessantly interesting - how integral is the narcissistic twist to the entire motion? How does the concept of drive relate to the sublime, in that drive seems fundamentally narcissistic (at least according to Zupancic’s argument) but at the same time drive is an internal mechanism, which seems not to be changed or much less effected by outside factors.

Where something like the Freudian Trieb, or death drive more specifically, lends itself to more radical acts, (the Lacanian/Žižekian act, the clearing of the field) it becomes less clear how much the pulsations of drive fuel the quite moments of dissociation. Or, to move to a related Freudian topic, is it the ultimate game of Fort/Da, of the child playing with the spool of thread? To follow the Fort/Da thread, how does the act of self disappearing function? This shouldn’t be confused with sheer apathy, or surrender, but an active motion of emptying yet also surveying, how do we “Turn on, tune in, drop out” or how do we “lay back and just think of England?” Or what about the rough use of the concept of zen?

There’s a Žižekian move that I am tempted to make, but it is one that is ultimately unsatisfying. In The Parallax View, our dear Slavoj argues that the ticklish object is the subject and that the ticklish subject is the object, that, the subject is subjected to the object and the object objects to the subject’s being.

/2/ - An atomized Sublime or The Tribulations of Kanye West

The aforementioned Žižekian move has a strong Kantian feel in that, as Philip Shaw points out in The Sublime, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason he points out how Copernicus understood the movements of the heavenly bodies by focusing not on the spectacle, the planets themselves, but the spectator. Both strands of thought rely on the notion of the spectator not simply having a subjective or otherwise limited point of view, but that the object observed is fundamentally rife with the concept of perception. Looking specifically at Kant’s definition of the sublime, one can take note of the formlessness that’s imperative in the definition, the way Kant’s definition swings from materialist to idealist - it is an object but at the same time unbound, borderless. Or put another way, as Kant states in his Critique of Judgment, the sublime tests the limits of our imagination

The issue I would like to raise here is the possibility of a capitalistic sublime. The issue in regards to the sublime’s relation to capitalism hinges on the temporality of the sublime or in other words - how long is it expected from the horrifying to become a feeling of the sublime? The other related question is whether capitalism can cause a feeling of the sublime because of it’s extreme size or whether it functions more in terms of an atomized sublime.

In regards to the first point - it has been pointed out in the works of anti-capitalists, how there is an odd kind of fearful awe of the machinery of capitalism. While Marx’s Victorian novel style details of the factory come immediately to mind, I beleive that Antonio Gramsci’s writings reveal a more interesting view. In his prison notebook writings, Gramsci seems to have a strange sense of respect for the mind numbing effect of capitalism. One could argue that the mental deadening of the laborer is the slow transformation of the horrible (one’s working conditions, lack of benefits, low wage etc) to a postponed sublime (one’s ‘eventual’ wealth or at least the American dream of ‘economic security’).

On the other hand, and to address the second point, could capitalism function in a more compartmentalized way that seems so small and petty and necessary that it’s that which deadens us, because it seems beneath us? This leads us back to the problem of narcissism being woven into the concept of the sublime. Let’s take a look at a certain Mr West. In particular lyrics to a recent song ‘Cant tell me nothin”:

I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven
When I awoke I spent that on a necklace
I told God I’d be back in a second
Man, it’s so hard not to act reckless

Later on he says:

Must be the pharaohs, he in tune with his soul,
So when he buried in a tomb full of gold.
Treasure, what’s you pleasure?

Certain themes have been present in many of West’s other songs but, for instance many of the songs on Late Registration, he seemed far more critical of obsessing over capitalistic concerns. Jesus Walks, Gold Digger and the remix of Diamonds from Sierra Leone. The aforementioned clash between capitalism as sublime or an atomized sublime, is raised in these two passages. The first passage seems to contradict the concept of woman as das Ding (the Thing) in that heaven itself (the pre-Oedipal womb time) is being rejected in place of a small trinket. The second passage seems to suggest that greed or the need for wealth is the core of humanity, or simply noting the importance of desire. I will return to desire later on.

/3/ - The sublime through the uncanny

The sublime is heavily indebted to the artistic as is Freud’s concept of the uncanny as he woefully notes his need to dip into aesthetic concerns in the latter pages of his study. The uncanny’s relation to the sublime might be able to cast some light on ontological evacuation. In regards to the earlier mention of temporality, Freud seems to suggest that instantaneousness does not lend itself to a feeling of the uncanny, that the uncanny is more about a resurfacing that Freud often relates to a kind of castration anxiety. In this sense both the uncanny and the sublime are pleasurable but only directly and rise from initial feelings of anxiety or terror. Furthermore Kant argued that due to the limits of thought and the errancy of experience, it does not make sense to try and utilize psychology to understand the feeling of the sublime.

Whereas Kant (and subsequently Lacan) see the sublime as a kind of transcendent object, Žižek argues against this, following Hegel, that the sublime object is simply a stand in for the horrible negativity of being, the impossibility of wholeness, the terrible night of the world. While Žižek’s account is somewhat satisfying, it does not seem to speak to the particular problem of the capitalistic deadening, or does it? If labor allows us to switch our brains off, it seems to be motivated by something orientated towards the future and less connected to a psychoanalytic brand of temporality.

The capitalist sublime, if there can be such a thing, seems more like a false opening (more like the Kantian sublime) then a false covering over of a kind of negativity. Or put another way, it seems more of a concern via Proudhon than Marx. The capitalistic zen, the my mind/soul is somewhere else, seems to function through a kind of atomized sublime, the idea that each screw turned gets one closer to the displaced future where the capitalist realists live. Or back to Mr West: “He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes, This week he’s moppin’ floors, next week it’s the fries.”

So does the sublime have any place in here, in the atomized, bit by bit deadening which we take as a bridge to the capitalist utopia. Whereas the uncanny is an odd return to home, a wishful fear as Freud point out. It seems that while the uncanny fundamentally requires time and the sublime asks for distance, both are rooted in the feminine - the sublime in women as das Ding and the uncanny in female genitalia (as it is for some neurotics according to Freud).

/4/ - That certain longing

One could bring up Žižek’s argument here that capitalism serves as the imaginary real of our time, as that which binds the visible possibility of worlds (as he argues in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality - much to the chagrin of Ernesto Laclau) but still something doesn’t seem to sit quite right.

Also, to follow an idea brought up by Larval Subjects, can bricks of our ontology be deposited into texts, into objects? Following the arguments in Georges Poulet’s article “Criticism and the Interiority of Experience” one could argue that one’s consciousness is effectively invaded by another in the seemingly benign act of reading. The fashionable death of the author (a la Derrida and his cohorts) may snuff out this line of thinking perhaps a bit too quickly (and I myself am tempted to do following my distrust of phenomenology) and we find ourselves back at the place of strange exchanges of idealism and materialism in Kant’s work. Does all text itself illicit a kind of view of unboundness that is found along the sublime path? Or to broaden the question and to return to the atomized sublime - do all material objects have that sublime glow, that warmth of congealed labor, do we arrive back at the stoop of Marx?

The ontological evacuation of the sublime in capitalism seems to not be a sacrificing of the body to alleviate the mind, but the very elevation of the act of evacuation itself which may be the very American aspect of global capitalism at it’s worst. And if, as Žižek argues, the entire capitalistic machinery runs on the concept of the drive, how is it possible to break out a context where we are presently dead (or undead) and the impossible is placed in a constantly postponed dream of a lucrative existence. The feeling of the sublime is not so much postponed but the deadening feel of labor is eliminated as we see ourselves eventually living the good life. Our narcissism is not so much one of survival, of ourselves before the welled up ocean, but of our possibility to stop striving endlessly.

Philip Shaw ends his text The Sublime in a fairly disconcerting way - arguing for a return to the beautiful, that reintroducing desire in the context of the sublime is the only to save ourselves from nihilistic rumination. Following the work of John Milbank (and other Chrisitan figures who see the need to combat ‘postmodern nihilism’) Shaw falls in step with a kind of Levinasian reliance on the other - that the combination of two incomplete beings can give a kind of completeness, bring us back to beauty. Somewhere Lacan is laughing, desire never brings us quiet, it takes us to an empty house where we see ourselves looking in the window, sadly feeling our wallet.

The Interspace of the graphic novel

/1/ - Graphic novel or comic book?

The idea of a field like comic book studies (which is a not really established field within another not really established field - Popular Culture Studies) might appear pretty laughable even to non-academics, or more serious lit folks who thumb their noses at comics in general. Comics, for many, are still viewed as a children’s medium despite the fact that comics have grown up with their readers - becoming more and more adult over time. They have not, as far as their self professed aim, been ‘for kids’ specifically since the end of the Silver age in comics (roughly the early 70s) one of the events signaling this shift being the death of Spiderman’s girlfriend (for a time) Gwen Stacy (also see women in refrigerators - which criticizes comics for using the death of women as major plot points).

This ‘growing up’ of sorts could also be seen in part due to another reason the end of the golden started to happen in ‘54 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by Dr Frederic Wertham. Most of Wertham’s claims are the kind that today would be leveled against video games, save his accusations that comics were advocating homosexuality (Batman was clearly fucking Robin) and supposedly Wonder Woman was causing lesbianism (his evidence for this was her independence and her golden lasso of course).

The decline of the serial and the rise of the trade paperback has most likely attributed to this as well - the difference between comic books and graphic novels is similar to the supposed difference between HBO and TV - it looks better, its more expensive and it is more explicit. But, after all, there is still the perception that comics/graphic novels are ‘low art’ simply because of their association with less skilled art and/or as being geared towards a less intelligent audience. Bill Waterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame had this to say about the artistic division and comics:

At times it seems the very sequential nature of graphic novels/comic books proves deeply destructive in terms of their being recognized as art, why? That will be addressed in a bit, but more on comics as a medium/art form. There have been some events in the world of comics in the last few decades to eschew some of the more negative views of them. For instance, Art Spigelman’s Maus which won a special Pulitzer prize, Allen Moore’s The Watchmen which won a Hugo award.

Because of the superhero renaissance staring in the last 10 years or so with films like X1-X3, Blade trilogy, Spiderman films, The Crow series, Batman Begins, Superman Returns, American Splendor, Ghost World, Art School Confidential, A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, V for Vendetta, Constantine, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tank Girl, Men in Black, The Shadow, The Rocketeer, Hell boy and several other, comics have experienced a somewhat renewed spotlight upon them. But what the transformation of comic to film makes clear is the peculiar difference of graphic novels.

/2/ - Interspatiality

The wealth of the graphic novel lies in the very strangeness of drawing, something I discussed in a previous entry. To summarize the point quickly - Badiou points out how in drawing the whiteness of the page is both a ‘closed totality’, in which the lines are contained and, at the same time, the background only becomes such once the lines are drawn. The act of drawing that both cuts into and creates background can similarly be seen in terms of the comic as a medium. While comics/graphic novels can be viewed as simply an illustrated story I think such a view leaves out the specific effect that illustrations create, when combined with the written word.

While there are many excellent examples of this, I believe that Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets does an exceptional job of taking advantage of said attribute. In many scenes/pages, Thompson plays heavily with the panel borders and within the panels to mix the characters with their surroundings. Charles Burns uses similar techniques in his novel Black hole. There is an interesting tradition of the subject and it’s relation to a given background that Žižek discusses in his forward to Adrian Johnston’s amazing text Time Driven. In the forward Žižek notes how with the Mona Lisa how the figure seems to not fit with her dark, almost gothic surroundings. Žižek compares this to the cheesy effect in older films where a screen is projected behind the actors while they are in a car, in a train etc. [This kind of disjointed landscape effect is taken to the extreme in the film Airplane! when the Captain is driving to the airport the screen changes from passing trees to various anachronistic battles, impossible settings etc.]

Žižek argues that this effect represents the peculiarity of modernity, where, through Kant’s ‘transcendental turn’, the subject no longer ‘fits’ into the world, the entire being of the subject becomes an excess, an protuberant object, a spot on the fabric of reality. As Žižek writes in his article “The Thing from Inner Space”: “Jacques Lacan Defines Art itself with regard to the Thing: in his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he claims that art as such is always organized around the central Void of the impossible-real Thing - a statement which, perhaps, should be read as a variation on Rilke’s old thesis that “Beauty is the last veil that covers the Horrible.”

To bring the discussion back to the realm of the graphic novel, doesn’t the explanation of the Joker’s madness in that it is explained as a ’super sanity’ as being too in touch with reality. And wasn’t that one of the better insights of Freud during the Victorian era? The fact that those with mental illnesses were not less human but all too human?

/3/ - Betrayal of the eye

If the peak of modernism was about the disjunctive (non)relation between the subject and it’s background, then what does the graphic novel speak to, how does drawing as a form of art connect to a certain kind of psychology? The key to the graphic novel is not just what is left ‘outside of the frame’ but in that it highlights what is left out when one goes from one frame to the next. Instead of being just the slowness of the eye, as it would be in cinema, the graphic novel uses the lack of movement as a border itself, it is a series of snapshots which refuses to be placed at the ‘appropriate’ speed of the eye.

We can take this argument a bit further, and into somewhat strange terrain, by taking a look at serial killing, naturalism and representation. In her text Pretend we’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Annalee Newitz discusses how naturalism, and in particular Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, presupposes the American obsession with serial killings (one should immediately question the boundary between impressionism and naturalism in literature). Newitz argues that what is at stake in naturalism is an anxiety of contextualization and, more importantly, the problem of how to place oneself in relation to the text. Newitz discusses Walter Benjamin’s well known “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and notes his statement regarding how the reproducibility of film and photograph, inherently lend themselves to a decontexualizing effect. [A quick side note and swerve back to the realm of comics - one should think of the character Mojo and how well he disgustingly embodies Benjamin's nightmare as a partially mechanical alien who utilizes 'mystical powers' to control entire populations with the media.]