Freedom’s Fairytale? Pt. 2 or Love and Temporality

In a recent episode of Lost entitled “The Constant”, Desmond, a character who up until the previous episode had believed to be clairvoyant, begins jumping back and forth through time - his visions acknowledged as incomplete memories. Desmond eventually learns that he has become ‘unstuck’ in time - his consciousness begins to swing back and forth over a span of eight years. By talking to the island’s local physicist he learns that he must discover his constant - an object or person that is the same in both times thereby stabilizing his rapidly decaying being. What brought on his shifting is unknown - only that it occurred when he left the island where, at least so far in the story, there seems to be some sort of time dilation or other spatio-temporal disturbance.

What makes the episode so interesting is that Desmond’s constant is Penny - the love of his life who after he has seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet - spares no expense in finding him (of course there is her name connection, Penelope to that of legend - the woman who waited endlessly for her husband to return from the sea). Why is this interesting? I want to argue that love, by its very nature, is that which sticks us in time and is, paradoxically, what unsticks us, what submits us and raises us above temporality itself.

One of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, point that Zizek makes in The Sublime Object of Ideology is that ‘love is a forced choice.’ He explains this by simply pointing out that one cannot choose who one loves nor can one be forced into loving someone, instead what happens is that the loving subject realizes that they have fallen in love, having already choosen, only after the fact.

Love is, fundamentally, a freely chosen act of unfreedom. It is a choice, made without one’s knowledge that forecloses further choices - particularly when it is considered a ‘thought terminating cliche’ (here we might interject Badiou’s claim apropos Fernando Pessoa that love is a thought) or something with ‘absolute value’ as Russell put it. One can also interpret the anchoring or ’stuckness’ of love in the usual derogatory comments about marriage - in particular husband comments about wives - such as the ‘old ball and chain.’

Despite the negative examples of love’s stuckness, there is unquestionably an appeal to an identitarian anchor when existence is, undeniably, lost in a Heraclitean river of constant change. Hoftstadter, discussing identity, brings up Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus:

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

The question becomes one of the persistence of identity and how plastic our notions of being are. The strongest attempt at solving the paradox is to simply think of the ship as a four dimensional object - taking time into account as a dimension and as part of the object, maintains the object’s self identical nature. In effect any object is made of up three dimensional slices of time which causally effect one another - of course there is the issue of relativity - who is observing the changes, what does it mean to change over time for the observing others? The question of sameness is messy - where does the persistence of a person’s identity break down and they change ‘too much’ - where is the validity of ‘you’re not the person I fell in love with.’ Even four-dimensionalism says nothing about the substance that the ‘I’ refers to or the ‘you’ for that matter.

Love continues to complicate matters in that it changes basic numeracity - the numerical thing that I am, this object in relation to other objects, disavows the possibility that I could fundamentally become a thing that does not fall under the category of my name and yet what happens to the numericity when there is the radical twoness of love by way of Badiou? One might find it useful to dive a bit into the philosophy of Whitehead and argue that the substance of metaphysics is, in fact, not a substance at all but a kind of solidified occasion - a collection of windows - Whitehead’s materiality is an organic one - he reverses Kant - the world isn’t grasped (imperfectly) by the subject the world births the subject as such. Whitehead’s metaphysics however, seems to validate Deleuze’s One-All which dangerously induces a full material nature, a completeness which, under the lens of psychoanalysis (and our own voidal subjectivity) is porous.

To return to the event of love then, how much are the particular spatio-temporal qualities of the lovers involved in the recognition of love as such? If, as Badiou argues, the object of desire, the objet petit a, serves only as the guiding star of the encounter, then it seems that the storm of change surrounding and penetrating the identities of the lovers is of little or no concern as long as the fidelity to the truth, found in the intial encounter (the chance of fate where the lovers met) is lived up to/worked through.

In this sense, and to return us to the force choice of love and “The Constant,” love’s defining feature is that it plasticizes everything around it (hence the cliche ‘love conquers all’). When one says ‘I love you’ it is often followed by, at some time or another, ‘I will always love you and I have always loved you.’ One can read these statements both dichronically and synchronically. ‘I’ve always loved you’ usually means that despite our difficulties my love for you was never nulled and yet, more radically, it can also mean that before I even knew you (experientially) I loved you. In terms of I will always love you - this can be taken as regardless of ‘what happens my love for you will not change’ and also that ‘beyond my and your existence my love for you continues.’

Again it is worth mentioning that, at the beginning of Zizek!, Slavoj says that love is formally evil because you place a fragile person or thing above all else. What makes it formally evil, and not just evil in the standard sense but in the Kantian radically evil sense, is that it is not about an attachment to a particular thing (a love) but the real fragment of that person, that which does not change in the other over time, the very gap of the beloved’s subjectivity. The other side of the coin here would be the event of love, instead of being an amorous encounter a la Badiou, would be given an external justification (or master signifier) - we were meant to be because why else would we be together?

To return to Lost, the show constantly enacts a battle between fate and free will - the characters are constantly refering to the possibility or impossibility of destiny and the events of the show seem to suggest that the gap of choice is tiny or non-existent. If there is to be a kind of choice it is our ability to ‘freely choose’ our destiny - to accept our fate. Ben, the former villain (or perhaps still a villain) saw his great strength in manipulating people especially in his ability to make people ‘freely’ choose what he wants them to do. Here again we have the formal equation of love and evil as freely chosen unfreedom - isn’t the standard war criminal response - ‘I was just following orders’ and doesn’t this, as Zizek suggests, outsource free will?

Contrary to evil however, while the destiny of love is registered in the the big Other, seen as the ‘answer of the Real’ (the universe guided us to one another), responsibility, as such, weighs upon us. Love is, as Badiou says, a slow march, a two-headed interpretation of the world. The test of love is obviously time since, as stated above, attraction is fleeting (as are various identitarian details) and the remainder of each shared shift of experience separates another glob of matter from the void of our being.

To anchor ourselves in the previous entry - how can we be sure that love is testing one’s fidelity to the event of love (or the attachment to one another’s identitarian je ne sais qua) and not simply an example of confirmation bias and anchoring - or put more simply: does love only continue when we are afraid of lonliness and because we are cognitively adept at putting up with discomfort? Or to ask in terms of “The Constant” - what is it about Penny that makes her Desmond’s constant, how is it that she can be the axiom of his existence regardless of time and space?

Stay tuned.

Freedom’s Fairytale? Pt. 1 or Wrinkly Dialectics

Cognitive dissonance, the psychological concept whereby subjects are seriously irked by contrary ideas rattling around in their skulls, recently received a blow at the hands of a discipline-wandering statistician. M. Keith Chen set out to disprove the application of cognitive dissonance to apes’ choice of candy, by way of applying the Monty Hall Paradox (arguing that psychologists were making a serious statistical error). The Paradox goes like this:

There are three doors before you and you are told that behind two of the doors there are goats and behind one door is a sports car. After choosing a door Monty opens one of the two doors that wasn’t chosen and reveals a goat. He then asks if you want to stay with your initial choice or switch. Despite the apparent probabilities of the situation - one should switch regardless. Put most simply - our originally choice will only we right 1/3 of the time whereas switching gives us a 2/3 chance at getting the car.

Chen took note of a popular psychological study in which monkeys were giving three differently colored candies (red, green and blue). If the monkeys favored red over green then, when given the choice between green and blue, they would, overwhelmingly, choose blue since they had, according to cognitive dissonance, associated green with a bad taste. Chen convincingly argues that the researchers overlooked the fact that the initial choice was between equal options (namely that the candies were all the same, setting aside color).

The conclusion is that psychologists utilizing cognitive dissonance assumed that there was nothing to persuade the monkey to choose one color over another (based on sensory data) and that once that choice had been made that they assigned negative value to the color not picked, that the road less traveled was less traveled for a reason.

What are the deeper conclusions here - if we do not necessarily devalue the road not taken, then what happens to the un-choosen and is there any cognitive ramifications when it comes to a choice, to a decision? The very word decision suggests a cut - where one thing is cut in two. As I have discussed earlier apropos Alenka Zupancic’s reading of Kant, the fundamental act of freedom is not a yes but a no, a no to the deterministic elements that entrap us or, put another way, the illusion of freedom, of thinking we are free subjects, allows us a certain amount of freedom. To paraphrase Zupancic this is the Real of the Illusion.

As I argued earlier we can explain the negative act of freedom as such:

1 - I am involved in a question/situation
2 - I must freely choose (my very existence condemns me to freedom)
3 - Because my choice is limited (by external factors), it is not an actual ‘free’ choice
4 - The question/situation is lacking (in Lacanian parlance not-All), and not an actual question/situation
5 - I do not have to answer and therefore I am free

The very refusal of a choice (whether couched in terms of Mu or Hofstadter’s Unasking) seems beneficial to yes or no and yet changing, once a decision has been made, is better than the initial choice. The question remains - why the red candy over the blue? Another reading of this decay of dissonance, suggests a odd view at several other popular psychological categories such as anchoring and confirmation bias.

Gary Marcus’ somewhat interesting but ultimately disappointing text Kludge, describes, with various studies as evidence, how the imperfections of the human brain (due to the sloppiness of evolution) cause our fundamentally irrational behavior.  Marcus seems to make the same categorical error as Chomsky, Dawkins, Dennet and other anayltic thinkers make in that he equates irrationality with stupidity (this is often due to a gross underestimation or misunderstanding of desire).  Furthermore, throughout Kludge Marcus points out the shotty construction of the human brain in comparison to that of computers - paying particular attention to how unsystematic our memory is compared to computers.  One might take EW Dijkstra’s quote “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim” and tweak it thusly: “The question of whether a human can remember is no more interesting than the question of whether a computer can forget.”  The suggestion being (and there is a study which Marcus disregards without explanation) is that our ability to forget allows us to think about possibility - to connect seemingly unrelated thoughts to ‘futurize’ the present.

If choice is not fundamentally conservative via psychocology, what does this say, in a semi-related fashion, about Derrida’s well known neologism differAnce - that meaning is always differed and requires the obfuscation of the other option in order for the choice to appear as such? DifferAnce appears as a kind of meta-cognitive dissonance - that cognitive dissonance is avoided because a certain possibility is disregarded apriori. In other words, I appreciate the red candy only by disregarding the blue and green ones - I always see the red first and I see it at the expense of the blue and green.

A step further would be to suggest whether the initial choice has more to do with almost imperceptible differences among them or a predisposition in the chooser and whether this predisposition is more nature or nurture. Catherine Malabou argues that an opposition of nature and nurture (as well as the material and immaterial) is quickly shattered when one takes a look at the plasticity of the brain. The simply process of learning makes clear that a certain nurturing of nature takes place and that the brain is naturally designed to be nurtured as such. For Malabou the brain’s development is dialectical materialist one.  It should be noted that plasticity takes us into the middle of the conflict between dialectical materialism and metaphysics and subsequently, the difference of transcendence and immanence.

And, as Adrian Johnston strongly argues, our consciousness and our sense of freedom cannot be reduced to mere epiphenomenon - the fact that the ‘mirage’ of consciousness can physically re-wire and reshape the contours of the brain suggests, more than slightly, that our concept of mind has ontologically heft. Is it enough to say that this excess guarantees the abyss of freedom? Apropos Johnson and neuropsychologists like Joseph LeDoux and Francois Ansermet, we can say that even if consciousness is illusion simple acts of what could be called brain excercise - whether it’s learning a song on the piano or re-learning how to write after a stroke, rewrite the material complexities of the brain thereby stretching out our mental and physical capabilities.

So, to return to choice, does it end up in the mechanics of the brain between our ancestral (instinctive) capacities and our deliberative (rational) ones as Marcus puts it? A recent study showed that so called ‘gut decisions’ actually reveal a complex light show on neural imaging machines - suggesting that a split second thought process is not simply visceral, nor is it restricted to the instictive parts of the brain.

To delve into this relationship, and to continue on with decisions, we will, next time, investigate love once again.

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

Why Žižek Matters

Coolness by negation is an ideological move that is instantly recognizable in the relation of sub cultures to their perceived dominate (or popular culture) - once something becomes too popular or acceptable according to mainstream standards it is no longer cool and more obscure objects must be found. The bearers of this negative/cool, which move locust-like onto new ‘unfound interests,’ appear in myriad forms - most popular in the hipster and the postmodernist (and these forms often overlap). Once again I am repeating myself - but here I am talking specifically in regards to the strange non-reception of Žižek as a philosopher.

Žižek has recently broken through an even more popular layer of the pseudo-left (maybe the official left, the ghost of radical politics) - he had an interview this month on Democracy Now! and the first disc of his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, is included in the most recent issue of The Believer. And, not surprisingly, it is still ‘cool to hate’ Zizek in the circles of postmodernity and its kneeling-to-the-Other followers (often part of the multicultural cult of Levinas).

In the center of this hatred lies a assertion that there is a so called cult of Žižek and, as of yet, I have never seen any evidence of this - again a strange resistance. A similarly unfriendly response has been witnessed in regards to Badiou, who falls in a similar vein as Žižek in that both are seen as somewhere opposed to postmodernity and, often derisively, as modern throwbacks. Adrian Johnston, in the preface to Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, points out that there are several Žižek’s, and that one of them is a ‘cultural studies’ Žižek - where too much or all attention is paid to his examples of junk culture and almost nothing to the conclusions he is making.

Most often it seems that the dislike for Žižek is that: 1 - He is running against fashionable post modernity which, in proper Žižekian parlance, is dead but does not know it and 2 - Žižek’s philosophical program is inherently nagging because it undermines agreed upon readings of past philosophers and takes contemporary philosophy and cognitive science and other developments into account.

On both these points Žižek (as well as other Slovenian Lacanian/Hegelians) can be placed along side another group that is striking out against Heideggerian and Derridean legacies - who critique the assertion that philosophy is indefinately and irreparably chained to language and that our sense of politics and philosophical praxis is locked in the bog of being-there regardless of how it is codified in sociological or cultural terms - Speculative Realists. There is not, of course, a pure homogeneity between Žižek’s Transcendental Materialism and these thinkers which include Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman. In addition there is Badiou and his fellow travelers such as Jacques Ranciere, who are opposed to the same, if not a strikingly similar, enemy.

In addition to being ‘my enemy’s enemy’, these groups have positive shared characteristics:

1 - All are post-Lacanian in that they see Lacan as offering a challenge to philosophy which must be engaged

2 - All believe in overturning Kant’s so called Copernican revolution in thought - in usurping the centrality of the experiencing subject and the pre-set forms of the world

3 - As a result, all seek to conceptualize a world that escapes the bounds of phenomenology and language as limiting or eliminating discussion of ontology and metaphysics

This is not to say that Žižek and those mentioned above, are opting for a direct return to classical metaphysics but instead wish to take Kant’s criticisms to heart while still refusing to acknowledge a premature death of metaphysics.  Žižek’s metaphysics is a non-metaphysics in that his would not support a total system to describe the universe since the universe, as a natural entity, is fundamentally barred, it is not-all.  Events emerge from the cracks and fissures in ontology itself allowing, as Johnston explains it, flecks of eternity to rupture the normal flow of time.

Transcendental material designates the process by which a dialectical process creates an errancy which can not be smoothly reabsorbed into the dialectic, into the chaos which birthed it.  A transcendentally materialist ontogenesis of the subject would claim that we emerge from a chaotic nebula to take functional shape and that this emergence is not simply a delusion of the chaos, an epiphenomenon, since the consequences of its emergence change and are simultaneously changed by the material base.

What makes Žižek important is the simple fact that he approaches the topic of subjectivity and freedom (among other issues) by using psychoanalysis as a lense to examine German Idealism, and that this analysis allows for, and even encourages, a theory of the subject that takes into account but manages to narrowly escape, the scientifically fueled determinism of our age.

Leaky Economy

The following is a nervously humorous exchange from No Country for Old Men:

“Chigurh: What’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss?
Proprietor: Sir?
Chigurh: The most. You ever lost. On a coin toss.
Proprietor: I don’t know. I couldn’t say.
Chigurh: Call it.
Proprietor: Call it?
Chigurh: Yes.
Proprietor: Well - we need to know what it is we’re callin for here.
Chigurh: You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t even be right
Proprietor: I didn’t put nothin up.
Chigurh: Yes you did. You been putting it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it. You know what date is on this coin?
Proprietor: No.
Chigurh: Nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it.
Proprietor: Look… I got to know what I stand to win.
Chigurh: Everything.
Proprietor: How’s that?
Chigurh: You stand to win everything. Call it.
Proprietor: All right. Heads then.
Chigurh: Well done. Don’t put it in your pocket.
Proprietor: Sir?
Chigurh: Don’t put it in your pocket. It’s your lucky quarter.
Proprietor: Where you want me to put it?
Chigurh: Anywhere not in your pocket. Or it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.”

The sometimes remembered French Marxist Jean Joseph Goux remarked on the homology of money and the psychoanalytic phallus - that both are essentially nothing special in and of themselves, but simply point to a kind of presence as presence. In addition and in relation to this, the coin/phallus (and we could also add Levinas’ face of the Other here) circles around a certain conglomerated social (as discussed in my last post) which serves as access to and a bar from the social as such.

In a related way - No Country for Old Men is just as much about debt and payment as it relates to a kind of social momentum. There is essentially no fair trade in the film - there is always a loss, always to much to gain and too much to loose. Several critics of the film have pointed out that we are ripped off cinematically - we don’t receive the death scene of Llewelyn or his wife and we are given the continuing life of Chigurh. We feel ripped off because we don’t receive the payoff from our (emotional and temporal) investment - as is the case with the drug deal gone bad. Even Chigurh’s potential clean up goes beyond its bounds - he kills everyone who gets in his way or even annoys him. Chigurgh attempts to remain outside of the economic, out of the buisness of everything, and acts as a kind of angel of potentiality, going to the very end what he has set out to do, regardless of whether the terms have changed or not. This is summarized best by Chigurh himself when he asks: “if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

In the final scene of action, however, Chigurgh is lowered to the same economic plane as everyone else - he escapes and survives through the use of money.

The endlessness of debt and the impossibility of paying it off, of owning up to the very cost of living (to take it in a literal sense). We might borrow from Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology in regards to what he posits as the antimony of the psyche: that on the one hand I know I will die, I am finite in that my life had a definite beginning and it will have a end and yet, at the same time I am infinite because I neither experienced that birth nor will I experience any death, there is a gap in between where my subjectivity, my sensible existence slips through the fingers of god and reason and everything. The infinite in between the frame of reason and the failure of the sensible bears a plasticity which, for our purposes here, can be defined as monetary.

Sheriff Bell tells his wife about a dream at the end of the film:

“The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night, goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin, hard ridin. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin goin by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down, and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. Then I woke up.”

The Sheriff’s dream tarries with the same plasticity of our leaky economy of being but instead of the movement towards death or life, the constant motion of flipping the coin a la Chigurgh, the Sheriff sits comfortably or uncomfortably in the middle. It’s important to remember that Sheriff Bell’s dream, which he didn’t remember, was about money. His father carrying the fire, carries civilization with him (and tending to the fire is a very Freudian image of civilization) and the Sheriff is not privy to where it came from (birth) or where the path will lead him (death), only that he has to follow.

Regardless of our knowledge we always have to, in no certain terms, discern our place between the two uncertainties - we must grip the fact that value is painfully elastic between these two poles. We are always forced, with or without a Chigurgh before us, to call it.

Between Surplus Value and Surplus Enjoyment

One of the well known interpretations of Marx’s notion of surplus value is as the added value produced by labor that essentially haunts the object, that hangs about the object and acts as an index to the discrepancy of social relations between owners and workers. As a aura, surplus value represents the extra labor which is not accounted for in payment, and it is that ’something special’ which gives items in the capitalistic system their true value.

Perhaps it is too easy to discuss the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, as it is formally dubbed, in these terms, yet it is hard to resist. Ashley Alexandra Dupre, or ‘Kristen’ has unsurprisingly been at the center of a mass media frenzy for the past several weeks in regards to her (non)relation to Spitzer.

One must immediately bring up Lacan’s discussion of surplus enjoyment, the strange quality which sets us free to enjoy, the twist of blond hair on Madeline’s head in Vertigo, the patent leather boot in account after account in fetishistic reports reported by Kraft-Ebing and so forth. In both cases we never approach the thing as such - the object of surplus value or the object of surplus enjoyment it is, as Zizek says, always behind our back, directing us towards itself. In Lacanian Ink 15 Zizek writes the following:

“Coke functions as the direct embodiment of “IT,” of the pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the mysterious and elusive X we are all after in our compulsive consumption of merchandise. The unexpected result of this feature is not that, since Coke does not satisfy any concrete need, we drink it only as a supplement, after some other drink has satisfied our substantial need - it is rather this very superfluous character that makes our thirst for Coke all the more insatiable: as Jacques-Alain Miller put it succinctly, Coke has the paradoxical property that, the more you drink it, the more you get thirsty, the greater the need to drink more of it - with its strange bittersweet taste, our thirst is never effectively quenched. So, when, some years ago, the publicity motto for Coke was “Coke, that’s IT!” we should discern in it the entire ambiguity: “that’s it” precisely insofar as that’s NEVER effectively IT, precisely insofar as every satisfaction opens up a gap of “I want MORE!”

Don’t we see the exact some relation in regards to Spitzer’s Kristen, what we don’t get, the IT, is the sexual act itself, the contours of their encounters in all their sweaty embarrassment. What we get is everything surrounding the object of our desire - the objet petit a, which is the cause and center of surplus enjoyment. Every image which is purportedly innocent aches with a ‘hidden kernel of sexuality’ and each sexualized picture doesn’t go far enough. Our attitude is similar to the racist’s relation to the racial subject - the objective observation of them only feeds bigotry - if the racial subject acts in a way that doesn’t gel with stereotypes it is a conscious act of deceit whereas anything else simply indexes the ‘truth’ of their race on the whole.

Dupre’s music is rapidly consumed as is interview after interview in some attempt to understand what happened through a textually mediated periphery. Even stranger is the heavy use of facebook and myspace, quoted as if the associated press. Here we come back to Marx’s surplus value but diagonally so - surplus value, instead of a social gap, comes in the form of the mediated social itself - in the form of social networking. In a similar construction as viral marketing, hot spots of conglomerated sociality become surplus value themselves - an advertising positive feedback loop.

The non relation, the scandalous, dangerous sex, is circled around indefinitely by the sold social, the rag paper thereby perpetuating the very absence of community - the voided social which, like the psychoanalytic drive, circles endlessly around the IT, the objet petit a, the very cause of the social itself.

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.

Human and Animal

/1/ - Critical Separation

What is it that separates human beings from animals? It is a simple question in the most broad sense and one that is constantly answered and simultaneously unanswerable. The connective tissue is one immersed in violence - when humans are treated ‘like animals’ do both the torturers and the subjects of torture become less than human or do both become more human? Is the infliction of pain on another person a human act assuming its outside of survival, clearly human and is what makes us human in our suffering the fact that, a la V for Vendetta, there is that which can never be destroyed by violence, the inch of our unknowable subjectivity which grants us the possibility of immortality.

Such capacity for immortality is the only purely human trait according to Badiou’s Ethics. In an interview appendix of the text, Badiou is jokingly attacked by Peter Hallward for being too hard on animals. Badiou states that, in a sort of material sense, we are animals, we belong in the category of animals. What sets is apart on a base level is our use of mathematics and, as Badiou sees it, it is mathematics which is the language which allows us to understand ontology, to access the possibility of subjective fidelity to an event, to become a subject in the wake of an event. Badiou argues that the animality of humans is exceeded by a kind of grace of thought - though the event is itself only materiality, it is a materiality grasped in a way that cannot be reduced to the interactions of the material pieces of our animal brains.

In terms of history of course, the line is blurred through long years of horrific treatment. The institution of slavery, the popularity of humans-as-spectacle in various world’s fairs - the human zoo of the Paris exposition, the odd fame of the Hottentot Venus and so forth. Given that so much animal treatment has primarily to do with enclosure, it should be no surprise that Agamben constructs the difference between animal and human with spatial perception as the material. Following Heidegger, Agamben argues that the animal perceives a mess of small worlds whereas only the human being sees the open as such, the broad system. The chapter entitled ‘Tick’ is an excellent example - the creature is blind and only sniffs out blood to feed on. Nietzsche’s comments about animal memory in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, seem to come to a similar conclusion - the absence of history in animals leaves them in ignorant bliss.

/2/ - Contractual Interrelations

Waltzing through Manhattan instantly gives one an idea of how people will go for their pets emotionally, conceptually and financially. The anthropomorphization of dogs and cats in particular is evidence of the weight of anthrozoological relations. The domestication of the dog and the horse goes back tens of thousands of years and the use of live stock just as far if not further. Despite technological advance, services animals are still widely used to aid the blind and the deaf, and the benefits of human-animal contact for the sick and disabled is still popular.

A brief tour of reality television illustrates human investment in the pet - The Dog Whisperer, documents the inability of humans to control their pets as well as the relative ease of doing so. Interestingly enough, Cesar Milan’s approach is to instruct the owner to become a pack leader, an odd sort of Deleuzian becoming-animal if there ever was one. To become a pack is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to shift from the molar to the molecular, the embrace a sort of errant multiplicity. Dog Town, which tells various stories surrounding the animals and people of a giant rescue in northern Arizona, is evidence of the cost and effort that many are willing to put in to care for sick and homeless animals.

The notorious PETA is, of course, diametrically opposed to such relations. To say nothing of their activism, their media tactics have become increasingly ridiculously. Not too long ago they began a media campaign called the holocaust on your plate. The campaign juxtaposed large pictures of holocaust victims within camp walls with shots of animals in farm cages. The creator of the media argued that the same mindset allowed both to happen. The animalization of the Jews is, of course nothing new. Several of the Nazi texts, particular those that focused on the so called original races from mythological times.

In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, there is an interesting anecdote about the relation of mice to Jews. He writes: “With mice we should also keep in mind the connection in German (a verb derived from Yiddish for Moses, Mausche, and meaning to speak Yiddish or Yiddishized German, and by extension to speak in an incomprehensible way, and by further extension secret dealings, hidden afairs, decit).” (p. 208)

Art Spiegelman’s well known Maus, tells one man’s experience of the holocaust by using anthropomorphic animals: the Jews are mice, the Polish pigs, the Nazis are cats, the Americans dogs and so forth. While there are several critical essays on Maus, they have become hard to find and many focus more of their attention on memory then the animalization of the holocaust. The effect, instead of trivializing history, brings a tenderness through sheer difference that is increasingly hard to find in the plethora of holocaust tales. The likely explanation here would be that of the uncanny valley - that non-humans with human characteristics create a strong emotional response. A somewhat similar attempt is made, in regards to the Iraq War, in Brian Vaughn’s Pride of Baghdad.

/3/ - Deep relations

While several texts have emerged regarding human animal relations, Midas Dekkers’ text Dearest Pet: On Bestiality remains one of the few that critical deals with zoophilia. Dekkers makes a fuss over how despite the intent of affection we have for our pets we can carefully mentally eliminate the possibility of cross species contact. This fear, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, has quite a bit to do with theology - the witch, the devil et cetera, are always bestial, unnatural. D and G, in A Thousand Plateaus, confront psychoanalysis as unduly erasing the category becoming-animal, that it reduces the animal to the drives, to the bare biology, even pre-biological (p. 258-259).

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Naughts (aka Zoo) follows two previously conjoined twins, Oliver and Oswald, whose wives die in a strange car accident. The two of them become obsessed with death, decay and the beginnings of life as well as strange coincidences surrounding the crash - the woman driving, who survived, was named Buick, and lost her baby after taken mercury in the past. She lost another pregnancy in the car crash - the car was a ford mercury. The accident was caused when Buick was distracted by a series of swans - the street she was on was swan lane.

The brothers soon produce time lapse movies of animals decaying, in an attempt to understand what happened to their wives as well as their own grief. Coupled with this is a fascination with amputation - Buick’s leg is amputated because of the crash and she later asks for the second to be done. This amputation, as well as Oswald’s and Oliver’s relationship, is mended through a strange appreciation of symmetry. The twins, both zoologists, relate their own state of being to the zoo in that, in previous times, conjoined twins would be deemed an oddity and locked up in cages, as was the aforementioned venus.

The films most interesting side character is, incidentally, Venus, a seamstress who sells her body and tells extravagant tales of bestiality on the side in hopes of one day being published. The large ominous blue sign of the Zoo, which simply says ZOO in giant blue letters, is seen backwards, as ooz or ooze, as that which all life returns to, as Venus goes of to either have sex with a zebra or die by it, it is not clear. By way of her unseen death, Venus provides a common connection of love and death as well as the knot of not being ever able to know how things end, the specifics of death (what the brothers are trying to understand) nor the beginning, the rising from the ooze.

If, following Badiou, we are capable of escaping the gravity of our bestial nature through a kind of errant immortality, then in what ways do we turn back to the animal?

/4/ - Battles or separation unraveled

The history channel’s recent special Life After Humans, wonders what would happen if every human on the planet was to up and leave. The show devotes most of its time to structural decay and the inevitable rampancy of animals after our sudden departure but also shows the severity of our current impact on them in myriad ways. For one, the special talked of how roads violently carve up the migration paths of many animals, most notably bears.

Warner Hertzog’s Grizzly Man is, at least partially, about a failed attempt to return to nature. The film follows Timothy Treadwell, an animal enthusiast who, along with his girlfriend, was found eaten alive by bears - his watch ticking on a disembodied hand. Treadwell, as well as various other animal hunters, many of which seem to care far less about conservation than he did, are written off, particularly when they die, as fools who tested the mettle of Mother Nature and hence none of us should be surprised.

Returning to Life After Humans, there is an ever present motif in disaster and apocalyptic/post apocalyptic films - that of the animals once enslaved, turning back to nature or perhaps, more accurately, reasserting their nature despite their bonds. The deer wondering through the abandoned school, the horse and carriage wondering without driver or passenger. Is this suggestive of a naive return to nature, to some harmony?

The very concept of nature itself, seen through the eyes of humans, is unnatural, such as when Lacan articulates the concept of antiphusis or anti-nature. As Lacanians such as Adrian Johnston and Lorenzo Chisea have discussed, human existence is shot through with the symbolic from the moment of our birth. Just as there is something always already ruined about humans (as animals at least) there is always the bit of the beast that cannot be erased from the animal - that glimmer of hunger or chance at escape which remains. The weighing question is the same that is at the end of the film Equus: who is it that really has the bit in the mouth?

Flows of knowledge through Late Capitalism

/1/ - On education

Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster is a text that has been throughly dissected for its pedagogical uses. In the book Ranciere documents the intellectual adventures of Joseph Jacotot, a man who in the 18th and 19th centuries, struggled to further his views of intellectual emancipation.

Jacotot, who due to the dominating politics of the time, was forced to teach students who spoke a language he did not know. Using an interpreter Jacotot instructed the students to read a bilingual edition of a book and then, through their reading, he instructed them to write and think in the French language. Amazed at the results, Jacotot decided on three principles:

1 - All men have equal intelligence

2 - Every man has received from god the ability to instruct himself

3 - Everything is in everything

Jacotot singlehandedly waged war against the Old masters and, in particular, attacked the idea of explication. Jacotot questioned why one mind needed to explain a text to another mind - why couldn’t the mind of the student figure out the text, what did explication do? Jacotot went on to argue that parents could teach their children subjects they didn’t know - all that was needed was that these new instructors could verify not the details of the particular knowledge, but that the student is confident in their knowledge.

If there is one concern in Ranciere’s description of Jacotot’s intellectual adventures it is that the temptation towards home schooling is too great. Immediately the connection between Jacotot and the present arises in orbit of the sticky issue of ‘personal responsibility.’ Even a cursory glance at the innards of late capitalism makes it clear that governmental bodies have, in order to justify their disintegration of social programs, risen the stakes for personal responsibility when it comes to parenting. With the burden shifted more and more towards the parents, the governments operating within late capitalism can move more money into defense, war mongering and the like, despite their official stance of caring for American families and the ‘children of the future.’

Ranciere states that universal teaching, the form of education which emancipates the individual, cannot be systematized or set within the status quo in any way - universal teaching cannot be that which is utilized by the various orders of society. Can parents of children or any non-official orator successful take on the task of intellectual emancipation, how is it even possible that any sort of cerebral equality can be saved in the current moment?

/2/ - The desacrilization of everything

Jacotot’s first statement, that everyone is equally intelligent, appears as a pill harder and harder to swallow. The simple growth of population presents us with more and more opportunities to be in the discomforting position of being overwhelmed by stupidity. The vast media machines of late capitalism make this only more obvious via television and internet. While it may be more broadly further validation of Baudrillard’s paranoic warnings about ‘values last tango,’ the discursive treatment of love in the aforementioned media spaces is exceptionally troubling when it comes to knowledge.

VH1 may be the bastion of such worry - I Love New York, Flavor of Love, Rock of Love and so forth, expose the failure of individuals taking love seriously. Here Lacan’s early indictment of love as fundamentally narcissitic is apt - such non-subjects throw love in a piebald construction of sexual favors, games and contests. The sliver of truth here is the fact, that I have discussed on numerous occasions, that love cannot be approached directly. Such TV shows however attempt to provoke love accidentally.

The excessively pathetic competitions on such programs beg a stamp of simple stupidity on the majority of humanity and makes the audience question the Jacotot’s assertion regarding the equality of intelligence. All joking aside, how does one explain the behavoir of contestants who are willing to strip for a burned out rockstar who was in a one hit wonder band? The traditional response would be because ‘they don’t know any better,’ thereby invoking the standard Marxist argument - that they do not know what they do (to paraphrase christ). Zizek among others have pointed out the limitations of such an articulation of ideology and have suggested, in its place, a more fetishistic attitude as the core of ideology - that instead of ‘they are doing but they don’t know they are doing it’ it becomes ‘they know they are doing it but they do it anyways.’

This kind of distanced enjoyment is fairly obvious - we enjoy junk TV, tabloids, trashy magazines et cetera by maintaining a kind of superiority to the document - we assert that we are not the intended audience, that unlike the others who enjoy such garbage earnestly, we are enjoying it ironically.

So how are not simply in a cultural quagmire, a simple mess of decayed meaning? In Manifesto for Philosophy, one of his earlier texts, Badiou writes:

“for Marx, and for us, desacrilization is not in the least nihilistic, insofar as ‘nihilism’ must signify that which declares that the access to being and truth is impossible. On the contrary, desacrilization is a necessary condition for the disclosing of such an approach to thought. It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital: it exposes the pure multiple as the foundation of presentation; it denounces every effect of One as a simple, precarious configuration; it dismisses the symbolic representations in which the bond found a semblance of being. That this destitution operates in the most complete barbarity must not conceal its properly ontological virtue” (p. 56-57).

/3/ - Everything is in everything and everything is ruined

To take Badiou’s statement alongside Jacotot’s, we may find new fuel to pursue cultural studies, but with the fact in mind that the dissection of difference the pop cultural gestalt, is meaningless. What is important, and what is arguably the point of this blog, is to attempt to find the bits of junk culture that speak to various dimensions of ontology. Yet it is not simply ineffectual post-modernists who are the challengers here but there is also a group of several lesser known philosophers working in France who are an interesting threat to ontology as meaning or meaning as ontology as an equation.

Francois Laruelle’s work is proudly called non-philosophy, a philosophy that proudly ignores and rejects classic weighty philosophical issues such as ethics, aesthetics, being et cetera. Laruelle states that he is attempting to develop a science of philosophy, a transcendental approach to philosophy itself. Ray Brassier’s short introductory piece on Laruelle, “Axiomatic Heresy: The non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle,” categories Laruelle’s work as the zenith of formal invention, of being the best example of how a thinker is revolutionary because of how they same something and not what they talk about. Brassier ends his text with the following:

“Consequently, if non-philosophy can be contrasted to the postmodern pragmatist’s ’supermarket trolley’ approach to philosophy, where the philosophical consumer’s personal predilections provide the sole criterion for choosing between competing philosophies, and where the academy now figures as a sort of intellectual superstore, it is not as yet another theoretical novelty - the latest fad, the next big thing - but as a means of turning the practice of philosophy itself into an exercise in perpetual invention.”

In an interview, though really more a debate, with Derrida, Laruelle voids the distinction, made by several philosophers, most notably in recent times by Badiou, of classical philosophy from critical philosophy. The split is usually placed at the time of Kant’s self proclaimed Copernican revolution, his attack on both the rationalist and empiricist traditions which led him to create a more mind centered model of the universe.

Brassier himself is involved in an all together different philosophical movement - speculative realism which is similarly hostile to Kant’s critical philosophy and his belief that human thought is embedded in and determines the world around us. Quentin Meillassoux, another speculative realist, argues that Kant’s move allows philosophers to avoid determining the pre-human world, the ancestral world as he terms it.

/4/ - Swamp of Correlations

Both the approach of non-philosophy and the speculative realists, see too much connection, or perhaps too much unity, among various current philosophies. There does seem to be some currency in Brassier’s derogatory comment surrounding the academy - that it has become an intellectual super store, where students pick and choose based on their own ‘personal predilections.’ Yet, at the same time, Brassier seems to be stupefying the students participating in the academic machine. Taking Jacotot’s second and third axioms, doesn’t the cross pollination of various theoretical endeavors allow for some sort of infant novelty, doesn’t it open space for a thinker, in utero, to take a stab at the greats?

Furthermore, Brassier does not mention how the status of various modes of thought require a more or less indirect approach depending upon the academic institution. In the American higher education milieu, it can be quite difficult to study continental theory directly - often the only option is to approach it through another discipline such as literature, geography, social studies and the like.

It must be accepted that everyone is able, if not always willing, to instruct themselves, to learn. If, as Zizek quips in Astra Taylor’s documentary about him, ‘we all accept that global capitalism is here to stay,’ it is difficult to imagine a way in which the desire to self teach can be creatively galvanized. While capitalism, as Badiou says, makes the pure multiple clear, it also allows for the allusion of various non-events, in the case of random popularity and celebrity.

Ultimately there must be some radical division between personal responsibility and a feverish desire to self fashion. If there is any kernel of hope, or any seed of destruction in late capitalism, it is the capacity to increase the amount of one’s free time, as strange as that may seem given the connected state of business, and work towards something that doesn’t guarantee personal glory. At the closing of his interesting text Deep Time of the Media, Siegfried Zielinksi has an interesting example of this: the open software movement. To paraphrase him - there needs to be a search for ’serious wasteful activity.

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.