Brian Massumi Evening Lecture

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The students are required to attend evening lectures given by the faculty each evening as part of our curriculum. Brian Massumi was the fourth person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

[I must apologize for the quality of my notes for this talk: I was very sick during these several days and my ability to write what I heard was very much compromised.]

This paper has a long and checkered history: exploring ritual action and not employing the symbolic but an ontogenetic force.

Thinking of ritual action also gets us reflecting on artistic practice - how art and ethical action are a force. Radical empiricism holds that everything real is felt

Walter Benjamin discussed the difference between how our ancestors danced as clouds is different from how we think of semblance today. "What is this semblance that paradoxically represents nothing?" Benjamin states, "It is relation."

What we feel in the billiard balls is the continued movement, the momentum. Semblance can't be found in snapshots - the relationship of movement is felt rather than composed of discrete units, these units exist, but the dynamism is expressed in relation to their affective tonality - the quality of movement.

The yoking of diverse moments can bring an extreme diversity because it is an expression of nonsensuous linkage (similarity?)

Being nonsensuous, activation contours are a-modal and can jump across orders. Cross-modal transference is inferior to a-modal because [....]

The body is on a life path, a worldline in movement, they are a-modal and present the opportunity to yoking a diversity of potential experience.

To this point, we've been operating with the assumption of a given subject-object relationship. Affect brings form qualitatively to life.

The emergent parent form is an a-modal emergent yoking of diversification. The child will learn to separate-out the sensuous and the objective separation of relationality.

Each new event retraces the historic unfolding traces, even as they advance the worldine. Every body stands for a potential expansion of the universe and are an archive of the shared relationship. Language is where skipping intermediaries is possible.

The autonomy of the qualitative ordering of life [....]

It's not that the world and world order are lost in thought, but language takes up these orders and moves forward the worlding. Language is the potential for movement nonsensuously [....]

Language presents worldlines in advance, language can return us to the sensuous; it's not that the world is lost in language but that we are lost in the delusions of language-speculation.

The constructive truth is pragmactic.
[thinking-feeling (xin 心)]
Through the activity of language (the coming non-local activation, aggregate relation potential), the affective is directly experienced.

Nonsensuous semblance has nothing to do with metaphor or allegory

Thought can be a force toward composition of the world operating on these relational potentialities.

Is the political in need of redefining?

Semblance - ritual action reorders the worlding in its doubling of the event; the [....]

The political needs to avoid reintroducing the content of one locality and imposing it onto another context. A bare activity that animates the other contexts as part of an expansive yoking.

[END OF TALK]

[NOTES TO SELF: ritual propriety (li 禮) requires radical pedagogy which is informed by the transmission of radical empiricism as it teaches the generation of novelty, not aberrance.

Why is peut-être both "maybe" and "perhaps" because this is an event that is activated.

Look at Deleuze's "The Exhausted" about Beckett. Also Benjamin's "On the Mimetic Faculty"

The problem with politics as a term for relationality is like the problem of pharmacy - in both concepts there is this exclusion of the pharmakoi for the purpose of maintaining an economy of what can be yoked in the City's life.

The logic of peut-être both "maybe" and "perhaps" is relationality; it's magical in that it is the allowance of expansive possibility.

Whitehead uses the term penumbra, like a cloud of gnats (from Process and Reality):

Thus, in our actual world of today there is a penumbra of eternal objects, constituted by relevance to the Battle of Waterloo. Some people do admit elements from this penumbral complex into effective feeling, and others wholly exclude them. [...] The elements of this penumbra are propositional prehensions, and not pure conceptual prehensions; for their implication of the particular nexus which is the Battle of Waterloo is an essential factor. Thus an element in this penumbral complex is what is termed a 'proposition.'(185)

Whitehead's is a philosophy of novelty generation so is ritual propriety (li 禮), Ames and Hall use Whitehead in their translations, necessary to avoid aberrance, or is aberrance even possible?]

new post at the avant guardian

This week's popOp installment is now available at the avant guardian, here.

A thousand pardons to interested readers: I am heading back up into the Swiss Alps for the next month to sit in classes at the European Graduate School. This is a pretty intensive time and I'm fairly certain that I will primarily be posting little things on FB and checking email.

I will be sure to transcribe my notes, as I did last year, for those of you that are interested.

Anywho.

This week's post is a brief thought on the meaning of the term "deliberate." Since my popOp posts have all been toward understanding the possibility of agency in a time when the subject has become questionable (what I call spectacular agency); this post continues to palpate the judgement. To judge is to think, to think is not a solitary action but is only possible when one has become questionable to oneself.

To deliberate is to evacuate a court room, or a stage, so as to reintroduce the fiction of truth. Discuss amongst yourselves.

What Is the Process of Appreciating

I'm getting ready to head back to Saas-Fee, Switzerland for another round of classes at the European Graduate School and I'm doing a little cleaning of house.

Even on the ol' blog. Which lead me to this: a post I began in January of this year and just didn't quite put my hand to it further.

Of course, now I'm no longer struck with whatever it was that got me thinking about this. It's probably, actually, now that I think of it, been cut form one of my popOp posts at the avant guardian. Anyways, here's what I found:

To appreciate (which is a process that requires apprehending the appropriateness of what is at hand, and in so doing raising the value of the thing transformed)

Benjamin's flâneur overcomes this dandy problem by way of memory. Benjamin, building on the works of Marx and Weber, saw the ultimate goal of modernity as the dissolution of all community, and this was being achieved by the gradual erosion of the framework of experience itself. The term is Erfahrung, experience, but it is the shared memory, the interpenetration of experiences, a sharing of the personal in the private and vice versa; in the countryside Erfahrung was possible and the lack of this is the feeling of alienation felt in the City. In the urban centers and in the factories, all human relations were intensely personal and incommunicable, Erlebnis, but paradoxically also available as simply information, a statistic. The modern era meant that there could be the Public space, a space everyone owns (say a city park), but no one belongs in (nobody is allowed to live in the park). In response to this intense feeling of dehumanization came many nihilistic responses, this is the danger of dandyism and hedonism, or art for art's sake.

new post at the avant guardian

popOp's been noticing an awful lot of talk about ninjas lately.

and grown men being arrested in the mountains of Pakistan with 40-inch swords, hunting Osama bin Laden...

what's with that?

Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

April has been a crazy month!

First I presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology's annual meeting in Merida, Mexico.
Then we headed off to Grenoble, France for our dear friends' wedding (felicitations!)
Next week I will be presenting two papers at the Southern Sociology Society's annual meeting.
Last week my best friend got hitched (congratulations, y'all!), and I presented this paper at the North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference.

Those of you that are reading my weekly popOp articles at the avant guardian will recognize some of these images. The popOp writings are my practice for preparing my thesis for The European Graduate School, and what's included here is the outline of my central hypothesis:

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, stated that the spectacle, the idiomatic mode of human relatedness in late Western modernity, is presented as an instrument of unification, but, “the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” This model of sociality, problematic in itself, troubles the possibility of sovereignty. Nonetheless, the works of Debord and the Situationist International have received much-deserved attention in the last decade precisely because investigating spectaclist economic relations provides an evocative analytic for palpating the contours of that new mode of agency required in the fruition of globalization. In this paper is discussed the commodification of memory by examining appropriation-based art practices (e.g. Girl Talk or Kutiman's “Thru You”) and appropriation-based activism (Anonymous) with an eye toward developing further the possibility of agency within these increasingly-isolating relations.

I am calling this mode of sovereignty "spectacular agency," and what follows are some considerations of the sites of this mode of sovereignty as well as a (brief) consideration of the possibility of political action within this mode.

Here's the slide show that went with the talk - apologies, but scribd doesn't share the animations that were present in the original so some of the comedic effect is lost.

Sites of Spectacular Agency: A political theory for everyone and no one

New Post at The Avant Guardian

Please checkity-check my new piece over at The Avant Guardian and leave me some feedback. I greatly benefit from your conversation.

Thinking About Creativity

It's going to seem kinda weird, but almost all of my formal training on the nature of creativity to this point in my life has come from studying Classical Chinese philosophies, Confucianism and Daoism.

The title of this blog comes from my thinking about a Classical Confucian text, the 中庸 (Zhongyong) and my reception of that text in light of contemporary Continental philosophers. I'm specifically interested in the works from Roger Ames and David Hall.

Although I recognize that theirs is a somewhat specific and at times controversial project, I can't shake the feeling that even were their translations wholly wrong (which no one seems to say), what they have to say about the nature of humanity, living, the universe, etc. is what needs to be promoted today.

Today we have this amazing capability, broadly distribute, to create through the appropriation of others' work (the mash-up, DJing, etc.) in a manner that just wasn't possible thirty years ago. To this Ames & Hall have already written:

One must be creative to take full advantage of appropriated culture, both in shaping it for his own place and time, and in using it as a structure through which to realize his own possibilities. He must labor assiduously to acquire the culture transmitted from ancient times but must be able to take it a step further in maximizing the possibilities of the prevailing conditions....Thinking Through Confucius (48)

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) has written a bit about this appropriation activity in his book Rhythm Science where he states, "today, the voice you speak with may not be your own." An uncanny feeling, that I might not be who I state I am; to this Ames & Hall say:

The dynamic of becoming whole, construed aesthetically, is precisely what is meant by a creative process. It is thus that cheng (誠) is to be understood as creativity. Creativity involves both the realization of the focal self and of the field of events, the realization of both particular and context. Self-actualization is a focal process that draws upon an aggregate field of human experience. And the field and focus are reciprocally realized. Focusing the Familiar (32)

The problem of who I am and what is the nature of art are not so distant, it's been discussed and debated by Baudelaire, Breton, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, etc. The problem is this: if who we are is subject to capitalist economic relations, then everything we do, ultimately is a question of how to turn what we do into a commodity to be sold on the marketplace. Don't believe me? Then how do we account for the phrase, "I don't buy it," when we don't believe something? What aren't you buying? Is it that my sincerity is questioned?

The virtue of the term “sincerity” is that it describes a commitment to one's creative purposes, a solemn affirmation of one's self-actualization....Since all selves are constituted by relationships, integrity means being trustworthy and true in one's associations....integrity is the ground from which self and other arise together to maximize benefit. It is not what you are, but how well and how productively they are able to fare in their synergistic alliances. Focusing the Familiar (33)

The world changes and we must respond, but what is typically neglected in that response to change is the creativity necessary to change with the times.

Not only is change an integral characteristic of things, but real creativity is a condition of this continuing transformative process. That is, our immediate experience is composed of fluid, porous events that entail both persistence and the spontaneous emergence of novelty, both continuity and disjunction. In this evolving order, there is at once familiar rhythm to life, and the newness of each moment. Dao De Jing (16)

This cosmic unfolding is not “cyclical” in the sense of reversability and replication but is rather a continuing spiral that is always coming back upon itself and yet is ever new. Dao De Jing (28)

Who we are, fundamentally, is a creative event:  

Cheng (誠) [creativity], then, is the extending of the specifically human activity of actualizing genuine personhood from man himself to all constituents in the process of existence. Thinking Through Confucius (58)

Wolfgang Schirmacher calls this "artificial life."

New Post at The Avant Guardian

It's that time again, folks. My weekly installment at the fine slice of Internet called The Avant Guardian.

Please take a read and leave a comment there.

Last Night a DJ Saved my Life

Here's an oldy-maybe-goody. I found this while I was poking around for something else. I recently mentioned the pivotal role of the VCR in our shift from the kind of capitalism that Marx wrote about to the spectacular economy (spectaclism) that Guy Debord wrote about. Girl Talk's Night Ripper, while certainly not the announcement of this shift, has been the best example of this shift.

That album continues to be an inspiration. Some dance albums date themselves, get tossed out, then reappropriated by the kids twenty years later (please, please, please: not all of you hipsters should be wearing skinny acid wash jeans, this is the lesson that your twenties will instill in you). But some dance albums tap into something...more. Now, a few years earlier there had been the Avalanches' Since I Left You, which is also an amazing album, and also chock-full of samples. But having a bunch of samples, that's not so unique. De La Soul was having problems with this when I was a kid.

In his book, Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller (you might also know him as DJ Spooky) states, “Rhythm Science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional strategy….” A very significant distinction is made here by Miller about the nature of virtue. The DJ is the music presented and in so being is able to bypass “the notion of ‘critic’ as an ‘authority’ who controls narrative, and to create a new role that’s resonant….”

This is a call for a re-sounding (in the nautical sense, plumbing the depths) of the individual-as-performer, very much a Deleuzean rhizomatic self, where the constant unraveling of the layers of who we think we are reveals no core self, no kernel of me-ness, only a constellation of relations. If this attempt at bypassing control (or creation) of the narrative others experience is going to work Miller’s rhythm science requires the understanding that, “Music like hip-hop and electronica is theatre – it’s about how people live the sounds they hear.” This is the distinction between being an authority and being authoritative and it is this distinction which forced the American Congress to discuss just what to do about Girl Talk and how to control culture by extension.

What was really amazing about Night Ripper was that it collapsed all of the music of my life, Boston from when I was a kid, Nirvana from my adolescence, and all the snap and crunk from when I was working in a restaurant kitchen. Everything all together all at once. It was so intoxicating. It was around this time that I saw Graham Parkes present his video essay on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This was my introduction to the flâneur.

Benjamin didn't originate the flâneur, he appropriated it form Baudelaire. I like that word, appropriate. Baudelaire's world wasn't Benjamin's world, and so Benjamin had to make flâneur appropriate to his context. Where Baudelaire's flâneur was beginning to sense that art had yet to understand the city, Benjamin's flâneur was much more like how we see the revolutionary avant-garde of the 20th century: his flâneur was not simply a botanist of the city sidewalk, Benjamin's flâneur was stirring the stew - very actively critiquing and experimenting with the aesthetic experience.

Baudelaire described the perfect flâneur as one “[who] is like a mirror as vast as the crowd itself, or a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with each one of its movements represents the multiplicity of life and the dynamic grace of all life’s elements.” As such, we experience through his film overlap and superimposition of all that has happened in this place, all at once. The effect is a delirium of being human in humanity. This is precisely the effect produced by Girl Talk’s album. Where the success of Benjamin's Arcades lies in its investigation of place-ness, Girl Talk’s album is successful by its investigation of time. Being a DJ, a rhythm scientist, is all about time-ing.

Nietzsche in his preface to The Birth of Tragedy, “This book should have sung.” This is what a good DJ is about – reading the crowd for the right tune to play next, the right context in which to insert another influence, and this is what a good philosopher does. The self-overcoming of nihilism may make the most sense in DJ culture, because a good DJ understands that playing the same track over and again, or simply going through what has been deemed au courant is equally as crushing to the party.

The DJ, to be the proper rhythm scientist, must be an authoritative performer rather than the authority figure. What kind of fun is the party if the person running the show is a cop? The DJ must learn something about overcoming the nihilism that comes with being 24 hour party people - to quote a recent Chemical Brothers song, "the pills won't save you now." Night Ripper is such a danceable album for the same reason that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra must dance: the self-overcoming of nihilism is best expressed in the affirmatory act of dance; that is, to will something eternally is to affirm all that has lead to this point, not simply to repeat ad infinitum. To successfully DJ one must note that distinction. The endless repetition of the same is the history of authoritarianism; the collapse of the history as only passing (the opening of today to those that are to come) is the way of the authoritative performer. Music is the ideal manner in which to transmit this truth.

The performance of this music is not only the performance of notes on a scale, but an opening to a discussion of what is worth transmitting in culture and this is made manifest by the virtuoso’s act (a virtuous action). Music performance bears a significant truth by being true to those that have come before and this musical truth continues to be truth-full if it is performed in a manner that can be trusted by those to come. This musical truth is the same truth of culture. The real absurdity of the current entertainment regime is their insistence that culture can be, like wind in a bag, controlled by their agents.

Jacques Rancière Day 3

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

Jacques Rancière taught a class entitled: POLITICS OF AESTHETICS wherein we discuss the relationship between what is allowed to be seen and the dominant political regime.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The question of the aesthetic effect - the result of the aesthetic framing; Kant and Schiller dismiss the efficient model of art which is instrumentalized to teach morality (see Rousseau's Letters on the Theatre).

At the heart of the aesthetic is this dismissal seen in Schiller's Twenty-Second Letter.

• A radical separation of the artist's intention and the art object and its contents;
  
• what is at work is a separation of the interior contents that would be seen as beautiful
  
• it is free of concept and so it is free beauty.
• Schiller says that it produces effect by the general feeling not by the transfer of energies.

The political effects of the aesthetic effect

An upheaval of hierarchies of what is sensible.

• Both experiencing and communicating this effect are now equally available to all.
  
• Based on this universality, embedded in individual sensory experience, is the basis of a new community.
  
• An aesthetic education and revolution - the transformation of experience rather than the French Revolution which was just the same power structure replacing the former power structure.

An experience of doing nothing, a suspension is perhaps better, a revolution of the sensory experience. It is first a potential, but this may be at the very basis of the Communist revolution - it must be more than simply a political revolution. Marx proposed a human revolution.

The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling) in this text is a call for community where ideas are everybody's, they were avid readers of Schiller and admirers of the French Revolution.

The invention of Abstract Forms, intimately related with Soviet policy, was developed as a new means of creating community. I'm not dealing with Humanism vs. Totalitarianism, but how the transformation of the aesthetic experience transformed the way in which politics is possible and, yes, young Marx was a part of this.

The idea of the sensory revolution is not a principle by which all are bound into a new community of aesthetes (and then to fascism as Benjamin suggests); rather the people can form a community of sharing a capacity to both experience and a capacity to communicate this experience.

There are two models:

1. The artist says, "I want to produce this effect that makes my point," and this is the efficiency model
2. Kant and Schiller are claiming that the relationship between the viewer and the art object produces this aesthetic effect, not the artists' intentions or execution; it is a paradox because artists want, always, to create art that would have this effect.

Hegel's Lessons on Aesthetics (1830s, published posthumously in 1860s)
Probably this was written in 1828. This text and the Barthes text both share the problem of aesthetic equality: how does any subject become an art subject, how can something enter the realm of art?

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Judith Butler Day 5

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

Judith Butler taught a class entitled ETHICS AND POLITICS AFTER THE SUBJECT. The first half of the classes were focused on Hannah Arendt: performativity, politics, political theory (sovereignty, zionism), "Questions of Judgement."

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The first half of this class we discuss binationalism and Israel; the second half we discuss transgender and psychoanalysis things.

Why does she work on both of these issues?

• modes of address, how we are called, what are the names by which we are interpellated - "Am I that name?" a reference to Sojourner Truth, Fanon asks, "Am I a [white] man?"
• My son just calls me JB and I'm fine with whatever, which is lame, I guess.
• It is from the basis of my Jewish education I came to be vocally critical of Israel, which got me called a lot of names.
• This chills intellectual inquiry.
• I feel my work has been concerned with implicit and explicit censorship - Hannah Arendt was called a lot of names
• There are questions of fracturous co-habitation and community, which is part of the thinking in transgender thinking.

There is always in Israel the question of impingement, the border is part of the territory and exposed to the nonterritory and so it is an ethical question of alterity. We think of Levinas' face, but he explicitly said the Palestinians do not have a face. I know, it's a problem that we must deal with when thinking with Levinas.

• What would it mean to take this Levinasian idea, to take it to a place even he was unwilling to go? (we are referred to Jonathon N. Boyarin)
• Benjamin seems to have an idea of the messianic (youtube) that is not progressive and is sporadic and ...(temporary?)
• Scholem separates from Arendt and Benjamin by claiming that Messianism is progressive and based on an ancient claim that this is situated in time. See Raluca Eddon
• The Question of Zion, Jacqueline Rose - she blames Messianism stating the catastrophe of Israel is recreated so as to establish this Messianic narrative; but, she fails to account for the different forms of Messianism.

It's hard to say there is a religious movement in Arendt; at least, she would deny it. Gershom Scholem sent Arendt a letter after Eichmann in Jerusalem. They had worked together. He called her heartless. Primo Levi was also called heartless in 1982.

• Arendt is said to have no love for the Jewish people, to which she replied, "No, I have no love for nations, I love persons."
• Physis and not nomos (social order) - to say, "I am not a Jew," is to say, "I am a Man," is to talk about phusis, the natural order. It is a given and something to be thankful for.
• To understand her position we have to understand what she is doing with the nation-state: they inevitably create exiles and refugees for those that are not part of the nation
• A nation for Jews of Jews is problematic for Arendt because its similarities to Nazism. In her mind, when you base a state on a homogeneous population it is problematic because this leads to another Holocaust.
• This critique does not come from only outside of Israel (how subversive!) we can look to Idith Zertal (although mainly in French) and Adi Ophir

In Arendt's "Zionism Reconsidered" she terms it absurd that Israel be installed by superpowers that must inevitably, constantly, reinforce their interest and to not federate will inexorably lead to problems with their neighbors in the region.

• she becomes concerned with the stateless in the late-40s early 50s; perhaps this is due to her own forced exile.
• we are recommended to read Edward Said's "Freud and the Non-European"
• By focusing on the problematic of the diaspora, Said takes up the idea of the political diaspora
• Arendt does call for home and belonging, but these can never be the basis of a polity b/c a plurality cannot have one part that is exemplary of the whole.
• To have a polity is to accept the unchosen stranger, perhaps an echo of Levinas

Seems to me, when thinkers are interested in sovereignty, as today, what Schmidt and Agamben call for does describe some of what's going on.

• Federated binationalism seems to be an experiment in critiquing sovereignty and perhaps federations resemble/result in smaller forms of self-determinism.
• Statelessness is a condition where there is an extreme distribution of power among a few
• This is not a metaphysical state, but metaphysics is under siege

Butler is very enthusiastic about Eyal Weizman, who sees the problem as an architectural one
She also recommends the film Arna's Children:


Note to Self: Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" as a non-linguistic action which demonstrates how we might live adjacently?

Gender
Who counts as real or who has recognizable gender? This is a question that shows ontology changes the way in which we recognize the world.

• it's an Hegelian problem of recognition
• Whose lives are mournable? grew from this. There is an unequal distribution of grieve-ability and this is largely dependent upon the dominant framing among the media.
• Antigone's claim was that she wanted to bury her brother in public.
• Plato wanted to ban poets because the public would grieve voluptuously, they would fatten on grief.

To decide to become transman is not necessarily rooted in terms of repudiating one's gender, that there might be something positive in doing this issue has largely been ignored.

• Here Butler tells us a great story about attending an GLBT poetry slam in San Francisco during which one poet, who was working towards becoming male from female, recited a poem that ended with the lines "fuck the DSM-IV, and fuck you, Judith Butler." This has been told before, apparently.
• The poet rejected "Butler" (the interpellation) for being a representation of gender non-fixity, which does not meet her needs for being understood as a fixed-gender person.
• It is an unfortunate problem to have to address one that we no longer wish to address because it is often necessary to tell that person - we have this need to live within a name.
• We might think of Kate Borstein as a closet Deleuzean, where the transformation never ends, which brings her closer to my thinking.
• Can we think of transexuality without reinforcing sociological/psychological categories in our call for recognition?

Note to Self: ways this might relate to 荀子 Xunzi's "Proper Naming"

Melancholia
We're recommended to read Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

• Mourning - where loss is accepted
• Melancholia - where loss is not allowed. Self-laceration is a way of preserving the other in our bodies. We are angry at the lost and strike-out at them, now housed in ourselves. This is the basis of Freud's idea of the superego.

Freud's way out of this bind is to say that there is a rage against the lost object;

• what would it take to disengage this formation?
• we must forget and let go of that other

What happens if we think of this as a cultural strategy?

• At a cultural level, where there are those that can't be mourned, we get a culturally-induced melancholia
  
• such that we don't have the vocabulary to describe the loss we have.

What is lost for transgendered people is the ability to be articulated because we are in a transphobic culture.

[END OF CLASS]

Symposium: Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben

Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben combined a session of their classes to discuss ideas about THE PROBLEM OF THE SUBJECT AND ACTION.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

Judith Butler (JB): We're going to jump from topic to topic

Giorgio Agamben (GA): this peculiar liturgy of the trial. connect the office of Eichmann - who spoke Officialese - see the film The Specialist (trailer at the link). He presents himself as just a man of the law, there is the counterpart in the film (the prosecutor). The problem became the bureaucracy.

JB: Arendt refers to the trial as a spectacle, would this correspond to liturgy

GA: ...It's embarrassing to see the inability of the Law here: the calls for papers, this call to the bureaucracy.

JB: The mystery of the Law, its administrative tragedy in its ridiculousness, is there a legitimate Law and an illegitimate Law? Or do they both participate in liturgy?

GA: There is this book The Mystery of the Process (???). The truth of the Law is the process. The normativity is not the essence, the process itself is the truth of Law. To distinguish in the process might, after Schmidt, be legality and legitimacy. This is hypothetical, the Nazi laws were legal but not legitimate. Today this is not easy to do, Arendt takes a position outside Law, from a moral position.

JB: I'm wondering if we could talk about Kafka for a minute. The way you're discussing Law suggests there is no grounding outside of jurisprudence, no moral call. Perhaps we could talk of a Kafkan law?

GA: But there is no House of Law, it shifts, sometimes it's in the laundry room...

JB: But there is a resonance between what you are saying, that Law is only maintained due to a faith in the liturgical process.

GA: Kafka's process shows what he thinks. Law is a process, it is never clear if he's been accused. Law is something in which man's subjectivity gets involved. It is K that goes to the House of Judgement, the Priest tells him the Law wants nothing from him. The novel starts with calumny, from the Latin calumnia, the Roman process would put the accused on a list, thus the falsely accused was a great problem. Those that are found guilty of calumnia are branded with the letter "K" on their foreheads (read this discussion!). Each man calumniates himself, thus K goes to the House of Law.

JB: Doesn't one's name falsely name and carry an ineffable guilt from another time? In The Illuminations Arendt writes about the transmission, a sickness of transmission - there is no chain of command in the trial, there are these exoteric ways in which Law is transmitted. K carries him in ways that we cannot trace. Is there a difference in Jewish Law and liturgical Law? Is there more than one model of the transmission of the Law?

GA: Benjamin says that ours is a transmission that has nothing more to transmit. We are this moment now: we have a transmission but it has nothing to tell us.

JB: Are there many?

GA: There are many, yes. In Kafka the Law rebels against itself so that the stories of the Talmud are vying for transmission of the Law.

JB: Is Justice recoverable or is it lost?

GA: Law is the door of Justice, when we study Law but don't apply it we enter the House of Law.

Tim Giman-Sevcik (PhD student): Do we accept the death penalty?

GA: I do not support any form of punishment at all. I recognize that people will be punished, but how can we be pro-Punishment?

JB: I do not support capital punishment and I think this would be true for Eichmann. Maybe one has to work with these passions, for seeing destruction, and sober-up from this intoxicated destructiveness that exists. This is a Nietzschean problem.

• Naming should be subjected to the same liabilities of any other transmission

GA: Happiness is beyond naming.

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JB: I do believe we need accountability, but how to use the juridical as the primary organ for sensing aggrievements and that suffering can somehow be equated to a punishment against the guilty. Perhaps there is no subject which can be found guilty for certain crimes. Perhaps some kinds of happiness that courts can't give us.

• If we were to base our politics on the sovereign decider, we would have a Schmidtian disaster.

(Micah asks Agamben about his thoughts on The Coming Insurrection)

GA: The Coming Insurrection was written by friends of mine and it is difficult to talk about. We should be concerned that now every political action outside of Parliament is equated with terrorism.

Larry Rickels, Day 3

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

Let's return to these films and begin to examine the place of the failure of interpretation of the "psycho" moment

• Therapy and theory are coterminus in Winnicott, unlike in Freud where there is a distance between the transference moment and the theory of psychology
• Winnicott seeks to make the therapeutic session both the place of therapy and theory

Where Freud comes to be used for mass communication and technologization - we can see it in Benjamin's Themes and Motifs of Baudelaire and perhaps also in these films

• The masking of Michael Myers is a doubling; Leatherface is slightly different in that his is perhaps a melancholic collecting
• Freddie, Jason, Michael Myers - they become a cartoon, really, an expression of superegoic parenting that scolds against teenage sexuality
• They've become transcendentalized as evil and demonic and thus are encoded as part of the symbolic order

What's with vampire movies these days?

• The shift from zombies to vampires should be seen as a sign of hope: the eight years of the Bush Administration was to zombies as vampires is to the Obama Administration
• Saw should be understood, like Se7en, as a morality play for educational purposes, wherein the victim participates in the murder and they seek to find the CSI-styled DNA-certainty of why they are locked in that room.

Back to Benjamin
The essay on Baudelaire folds out a contrast of experience and memory from Freud and psychoanalysis as well as the German language itself

• Gedächtnis - memory that protects and preserves, commemoration, and it is linked to rote memory
• Erinnerung - remembering that is all about forgetting, remembering that over-records and thus erases; it protects against stimuli
• Consciousness defends against overstimulation and both Freud and Benjamin talk of these as shocks: the more often one is shocked the less affecting it becomes

But, traumatic shocks will occur, these breach our readiness and modes of preparedness and deeply affect us

• The traumatic event is revisited in the flashback and is linked with the serial dreaming of war neurotics
• The trauma victim sought to master the traumatic stimulus from the point when the traumatic event occurred
• This repetition might not be unlike Kierkegaard's idea of repetition, call it seriality, a return to remembering to forget

As Winnicott became more interested in regression therapy, he felt we had an in-born capacity to defend ourselves from impinging by cataloging which occurs in linear recording

• This categorizing and recording occurs so that they can be dealt with later (and forgotten)
• Remembering as defense and then remembering to forget

Illusion occupies different places for the transitional object:

• the loss of the original omnipotence is bridged or staggered through the use of illusion in the transitional object
• the transitional object gives the child a temporary rest stop in the constant onslaught of living
• The transitional object is always to be seen as an agreement that the question, "Did you conceive of this?" will not be asked - but isn't this an invitation to approach it?
• It shows how easily the social contract can be broken
• the purpose of the transitional object is for differentiation

Freud and Benjamin again

• The memory of "the shower scene" is constitutively disposable, the traumatic memory has been made disposable
• the more shocks we experience the more guarded our minds become

2 forms of experience in Benjamin:

1. Erlebnis - committed to a time line of working on it so it may be crossed-off the list
2. Erfahrung - open less under voluntary control

The shock is where we are most alive with our time, this is unfortunate as we are actively working against being shocked

• the hope of this work is that we might not become dead to our sensorium
• Canetti says of the crowd-feeling (which is destructive), that the dosed shock must be within a closed crowd
• Benjamin allows for an ingroup, a comfort zone that is provided by gadget-love; a connection with a control panel - massification becomes more intimate in the control panel
• He argues that the match marked the onset of the countless developments of technological innovation which would transform the human world where we are able to experience the shock
• "The camera gave the moment of posthumous shock," his understanding of how every gadget-lover can administer the shock in an intimate, ingroup setting

Prosthesis (Ernst Kapp) was shared or recycled by McLuhan when he read Freud or Buckminster Fuller. Kapp, while living in Texas said the axe in Texas was so much closer to the hand than the axes in Germany.

The film actor is fragmented, transported, and reassembled through film and the audience is fabricated in the sensorium.

• "The film image is separable and transportable" Benjamin wrote this at the time when Lacan was writing about the Mirror Stage
• The image is pitched first to the camera and the scene is only created upon editing

What underlies belief in surveillance?

• There is something comforting about it, right?
• None of our suffering will go unnoticed, as Nietzsche said
• But it's not a comfort that is available to us, something has been satisfied, though we might not enjoy it immediately
• Derrida pointed out that live media requires the belief that this live transmission from Baghdad is really from there and is live

Benjamin says Painter : Magician :: Surgeon : Cameraman

• What is skipped in the surgical approach is the interpersonal meditation. It is in that sense that the cut of editing is what guides us to this place of affirmation - that through technology we appreciate Nature
• The Delay of the Machine Age (Hanns Sachs) what separates Antiquity from the Industrial Age? There has been a shift from primary to secondary narcissism - the latter is shareable and always has to deal with managing ego
• The primary narcissism is like the zombie where the body is always decomposing and we walk around dead
• Every schizophrenic shows us the emergency exit through the uncanny use of technology (Judge Schreber)
• "The delusion is the act of recovery," Freud

Note to self: Canetti's "the living's sense of superiority to the dead," is not Confucian at all - what is the relationship between the dead and death in psychoanalysis and philosophy?

Looking at William Wilson (E.A.Poe, 1839)

• before the essay on "The Uncanny" Poe sees the uncanny doubling of the war veteran whose uncanny double is the Warrior
• In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he says the double can be reclaimed

We begin with an enormous sense of alienation

(WW, 3) Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! [...] hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? [...] I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.

• The psycho here is not a failure of interpretation but a want for successful interpretation
• What is it he sees? It is nothing. He reinstates the familiar story of sarcastic imitation. Is this the relic of parental identification (we draw sarcastic pictures of the Teacher, our parents, etc.), but this parental container is simply not enough and he leaves the academy
  

  (WW, 11) I looked; - and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable terror. [...] Not thus he appeared.... Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?
  

  
  
• His immediate school fellows had never noticed this constant imitation
  

  (WW, 9) But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself,) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our school fellows. That he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent [the parent?]; but that he could discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration.
  

  
  

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 1

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

The dominance of slasher/splatter films in the '80s is perhaps more indicative of trauma and therapeutic engagement with "The Shower Scene" but this Psycho effect is over.

• there can be the interminability of both therapy and film; the late '80s seemed to be the end of the Psycho effect.
• Benjamin's "surgical intervention" can be seen at Universal Studios where the shower scene is endlessly repeated such that the effect of that scene has been attenuated
• this has led to a mass preparedness in anticipation of the disaster with its incumbent energy

Perhaps the most horrible moment in the genre is the underrepresented: we turn to the hitchhiker in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and we see nothing in that face.

Situating the Psycho

1. within the horror genre
2. within psychotherapy

With vampirism one encounters melancholic yearning, holding on to the dead, including unmournable deaths and being cut-off by the Oedipal

The Devil - the pre-Oedipal father or primitive Father - primarily this is a select-client relationship with the Devil. What does the client get from the Devil? They get the Father, but one becomes the child of an adopted, choice-marked Father.

• We can see the Devil-father as an absolute authority, not triangulating with the mother and the root of sexual difference
• The Devil is the only occult figure that doesn't grant immortal life (unlike the Vampire)
• This is because he celebrates finitude, it presupposes that it will be uninhibited - not stuck on this existence or attached.
• So the Client must substitute without stopping
• The Client gets quality time with the knowledge of a certain deadline in future

Freddy Krueger, a demonic figure, comes about at the rise of DNA testing, where it was first utilized in paternity suits; it's key moment at that time was when it was utilized in a British court case to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the father had abused his daughter.

• (The first use of DNA in this manner was proposed by Alec Jeffreys; Rickels has the story wrong: the first use of this technique was a paternity case, but there was no rape.)

The Psychopath is a completely tendentious term

• everywhere we have a sense that the "psycho" is untreatable
• the psychopath represents a failure of a whole tradition of interpretation that culminates in psychoanalysis

D.W. Winnicott has a reputation as being "psychoanalysis lite": being too agreeable

• He has reconstructed the psyche based on a belief that the "psycho" state is easily possible
• Early on he wouldn't treat adolescents, turning them over to incarceration, but he had a turning point wherein he noticed in antisocial children's behaviors a gesture for hope
• We shouldn't dismiss these bad behaviors as only that, but these are attempts made by the children to communicate a point:
  
• a signal of hope that illuminates the lost environment

What we have surrendered to the "psychopath" is precisely what the psychopath is looking for: ego-management, and this is cause for hope.

Quick etymology

• Hope - indoeuropean, has roots in hunting language; refers to startled hesitation where one rethinks the next move; the word in German hunting language (Jägerspache) refers to this hesitation
• Schauer - German; Horror, associated with the powerful storms from the North Sea

The horror genre has always this environment of survival, the best way to survive is to kill.

• The survivor is part of the psychopathic environment
• with each survivor, the scope of hope grows more and more

Delinquency as a Sign of Hope (Winnicott): to catch them as early as possible; the senselessness of the antisocial behaveior, pre-Winnicottian-intervention

• There is a break in good parenting, leading to confusion. Sometimes the parent will spoil the child (not always useful)
• from this antisocial behavior may appear and from this we can hope because the child is trying to find a way to reconcile
• Winnicott privileges the psychotic because the psychotic has protected his authentic self; given this, therapy can be used to recover

Because we're all doomed, good enough mothering always falls short, we're all antisocial and potentially psychopathic. His group therapy sessions mean that we can have these revisitings and we can work through it together.

Psycho, A. Hitchcock.

• There is something accusatory about the swooping camera in the beginning of the film.
• That this scene is in such a heavy-named town (Phoenix), we can easily imagine a slashed town where violence is hard to contain.
• She is the image of the mother turned around, to whom you show disrespect, "You make respectability sound disrespectful."
• The "Shower Scene" itself: the violence of having been eradicated so completely and quickly.

Does film mummify its subject? The stuffed birds in the parlor

• there is something about the film medium that destroys its subject in order to preserve it

[END OF CLASS]