Responding to Paranoid Android...

As I mentioned over the weekend, I have a new post at The Avant Guardian. Look there weekly for my writing on relational aesthetics and be certain to also read the other talented folks there.

I am very fortunate to have already received some comments from folks and here I'd like to respond to one of the readers, Mike. You can read his comments, here.

And here is my response:

@Mike: Thanks for reading! We probably get more in this situation from Heidegger's thinking on technology than from Nietzsche. The abyss in the Nietzsche you're referencing is less illustrative of a relationship with technology and more the fundamental interrelatedness of reality. "Tat tvam asi" - thou art that - in the Upanishads.

Heidegger, similarly, states that our Dasein can be revealed in an attunement of profound boredom. Not that I am bored and from this discover my richest possibilities as a person, but that the universe itself is capable of being completely disinterested in my project because the universe itself is busy with its own project.

But, we should be really clear that Heidegger's thinking on technology was really, really critical to understanding his oeuvre. A primary concern for Heidegger was that modernity in Western Europe, and the Colonies, had facilitated conditions wherein how we related to one another and to the universe at large was completely alienated. We were not only alienated from the products of our labor, as Marx stated, we are alienated from each other to the extent that we don't even understand morality, as Nietzsche stated, but we are also fundamentally alien to ourselves, as Freud stated. Heidegger, as the inheritor of these thinkers, takes this in and says that among the attitudes driving these modes of alienation is also our societies' zealous absorption of efficiency-seeking technology.

If we pursue the most efficient path for too long, we find ourselves, the grossly inefficient things that we are, no longer fit to operate in that context.

Now, if you reread what I wrote you'll see that there is no need for a fetishized object to be alive (although I suspect Nietzsche and I are agreeance that everything is alive if we are just willing to extend ourselves toward it). A fetishized object is simply a relationship. We have relationships with everything thus the Abyss is able to stare back at us. Not anthropomorphized, but, uncannily, we see that Abyss that we've taken for granted and now we realize that it's ubiquitous presence and thrumming life has proceeded without my attention. It's like realizing one day that you've never noticed how many stairs are in your house, or that there has been a bit of graffiti on your bedroom closet wall for years and you never saw it. The Abyss staring back at us, in this moment from Nietzsche, reveals not only that the Abyss (all that empty, unexamined space in our lives) is actually full of life, but that this unexamined and intensely living space is integral to my being.

You're right to ask, why must it be sexualized? That's why I wrote that essay. My response to the question is to ask, generously, if, maybe, in the wake of the tragic loss of a friend Douglas Hines grasped at any and all straws to find a container for his deceased friend. That's what he said he was doing, at least. So, if Roxxxy is supposed to serve as a container, the next question must be, is it appropriate for me, as an outsider, to only see Roxxxy as a sexualized object - shouldn't I also consider Roxxxy as something more than that?

I mean, shouldn't all people, regardless of gender (and let's extend it to all reality), be thought of as more than sex objects - that's why I included the Cindy Sherman and Andrea Fraser photographs. I look at those "art objects" which, in any other context would be see as only sex objects, and I suddenly have something like that Abyss moment: the world has become much larger than I previously thought it was. The world is much more interesting than I previously suspected, and shame on me for having assumed I have the only proper measure of the world, thus reducing the world to it.

Never mind the thorny problems of consciousness and the moral calculus that you seem to suggest in insisting that whatever we might have sex with must meet this requirement of enjoying it as much as me. I'm not saying that sexual encounters shouldn't be enjoyable, but I am saying that if when I'm having sex I'm wondering if the other person is enjoying it as much as me then I am probably entertaining a fantasy.

That is the problem of sex, isn't it? It's supposed to be this moment of dissolution between two people, where we are obliterated in bliss, but sometimes you might find yourself, opening your eyes and saying, "My God, I look like an idiot, this is not sexy." Ridiculous, right? That even when we are engaged in the sex act we would still say that this is not sexy. I refer you to Žižek on this particular matter, here's another good place to start.

Proof that Rickels Was Right?

It seems that Larry Rickels was right: the explosion of horror films has something to do with preparing the audience for surviving future traumatic experiences.

How else should we understand the Saw VI blood drive video above?
It's really great to see this because I think it lends some authority to Rickels' Winnicottian reading of the slasher/horror genre. If I understood him correctly, Rickels sees the popularity of horror movies as a group therapeutic experience. This group therapeutic experience relies on the impinging onto the viewers' psyches traumatic experiences. The reason for its popularity, he seems to be saying, is that the cumulative effect of these traumatic experiences better prepare the viewer. This gets echoed in the formulae of the films in this genre: those who survive in these slasher films tend to be understood as those that are deserving of the future.

Not that we're saying that people should delight in the torture of others, nor that there is any virtue in putting society on alert at all times. Rickels' reading of this phenomenon is gripping for me though, as it helps me to think about an area that I generally tend to ignore.

Larry Rickels Day 6

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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.

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.

Romero says that the Tales of Hoffmann was a primary influence on Night of the Living Dead.

The Winnicott psychology of adolescence is one that is always passing; it seems we can relate. This transience is related to the barrier of psychosis, this is perhaps how we can understand the Freddie Krueger experiment.

Fetishism
Lacan changed his views, but they were within the field of Freud's. Winnicott refers to the maternal phallus, thus one gets around the gap of loss.

Freud wrote about the fetish after the War, thus his second phase. He brings two examples that don't have anything to do with sexuality:

• the two sons, they both know and did not know that their father was dead - an oscillation between knowing and not knowing the loss of the object of desire.
  
• An oscillation between neurosis and psychosis; for the first time locating neurosis within psychosis itself.
• This disassociation can also be seen in Benjamin's notion of "gadget love"

An imaginative way of living and an ambivalent relationship to the mother can be seen in Winnicott's patient who continues saying she can't feel sorry for the dead. It turns out her mother left her jewelery that she won't wear because she as a rule doesn't wear jewelery.

Both Michael Myers and Freddie Krueger have this moment after killing where they cock their heads to the side and look at the dead as if in that animal startle response

• With Myers we are in the early field of hunting where he doesn't know what to do with the bodies. He experiments with one body but hides the others so that another predator can't track him
• Winnicott refers to this as room for absence, this shift between mourning and melancholia. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, writes about his grandson playing fort/da: it's a game that teaches a child to deal with the absence of the mother, it's about control. This is how the death wish first arises, the child wants the mother to be gone, a goner.
• Until the child can collect memories, there is no room for the mother, thus room for absence. The break in continuity for the child, when the mother is not there, is an impingement such that the child, in reaction, develops a false self, a masked, compliant self.

Winnicott works with regression analysis to relive these moments. A lot of what he has to say deals with timing.

• Out of the gap emerges the impossibility of the absence.
  
• Playing is an interweaving which prepares us for the socius.
  
• Sublimation is placed at the heart of creative and scientific activity because it brackets-out sexuality and so is an alternative to repression in Freud's terms.
  
• The avoidance of repression is an ongoing race against loss of "energy" that gets devoted to repression.

Freud, in his essay on Leonardo DaVinci sees that at the end, his journal is more and more a record of how much he pays his assistant.

Dressed to Kill Brian DiPalma's contribution to the "Psycho Effect"

Freud says that what Schreber loses in his recovery phase is his wealth of sublimations. Whereas our melancholia might lead to our withdrawal such that we don't leave the bed, in Schreber the withdrawal is extreme.

Winnicottian reading of the end of Halloween
"The individual exists by not being found"

The drive to know: seemingly instant desire within humans. How this is afforded, according to Freud, is directly related to sublimation. This cataloging activity is like a foreign body ... this is an attempt to delay the impingement.

• The intellect seeks to protect the psyche, it may even go out and meet offenses so as to collect them and prepare the psyche
• How does not knowing emerge? Winnicott calls it the gap of consciousness, a form of not knowing that Winnicott wants to re-emerge in the course of regression therapy

In Halloween we had to hear Laurie's breathing, like Winnicott's patient that talks about watching the still bird breathing. It is an affirmation of vital life from which the psyche can develop anew.

• Thus the breathing and staring at the houses might be read as not a threat of violence from Myers but the survivor is still breathing! An affirmation of the vital life and while we might have a future encounter, we also can trust that survival is not contingent upon killing and that survival is possible.
• Something changed in the genre of slasher films with the closing sequence of Halloween and this is what motivates Rickels' reading.

The Sandman E.T.A. Hoffmann (1816)

• Freud reads the problem of Nathaniel as being the witness to the primal scene and thus brings the Sandman into being.
  
• Lacan says it is his failure to incorporate his father into the world of objects.
  
• At three different times Nathaniel tries to realize romance and each time the Sandman arrives, a threat of castration.

Another read would focus on the details of the comparison between the father and the Devilish work he does (working on the human body)

• Here we see this story as exemplary of the serial killer
• It builds with the reception of the Sandman early on
• The story of the Sandman isn't traumatic but rather the mother's "melancholic face"
  

On such evenings as these my mother was very melancholy, and immediately the clock struck nine she would say: 'Now, children, to bed - to bed! The Sandman's coming, I can see.' And indeed on each occasion I used to hear something with a heavy, slow step come thudding up the stairs. That I thought must be the Sandman. (1)

From my father's silence and my mother's melancholy face I perceived one evening that the Sandman was coming. I, therefore, feigned great weariness, left the room before nine o'clock, and hid myself in a corner close to the door.(2)

• She is unable to contain what she feels when the Sandman comes and this is what Nathaniel is reading on her face.

Like so many serial killers, we have the sense that the body that is killed is the body that is controlled, contained, and for sexual reasons.

• The mangling of Olympia leads to him revisiting that primal scene between the two fathers working on that alchemical project.
• Nathaniel is someone that has failed to transition from the Oedipal phase and cannot deal with the castration (the replacing of one object for another)
• Unheimlich is that which cannot be contained, unhousedness. Uncanny works on aesthetic registers, but here it is misleading in a wider view.

Derrida's problem of autoimmunity seems to be relevant to understanding Nightmare on Elm Street.


It's interesting to think reflect on the Freddie genesis story: the film is set in the early 1980s and we are told that the parents of the children being terrorized had actually murdered Freddie. It's noteworthy that the children are being punished for their parents' transgressions against the State during the 60s and 70s. That is, the parents, in becoming vigilantes, had transgressed the sovereignty of the State. During the climate of the Reagan and Bush 80s we can see that the State would not be tolerating these outbreaks of autonomous political action.

• We see in Freddie vs. Jason that drugs have been developed so that children can sleep without dreaming, which drains Freddie's life force
• So, Freddie hires Jason to remind children to be afraid of Freddie
• Thus Freddie is defined as a trauma that has to be recharged every once in a while in order to be successful
• Nancy is the only one that can drain Freddie of this, she can protect against this impingement
• In the absence of the "Psycho Effect" Freddie is only demonic - a quality perhaps shared by The Ring and Saw today

With the advent of Scream we have the possibility of mourning as seen in the third installment.

The door literally opens to suggest the possibility of another installation in the series, but we are not afraid because the possibility of overcoming what we've seen has been achieved.

Colloquium: Judith Butler, Larry Rickels, and Avital Ronell

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Today's class was a special joint session with Avital Ronell's morning class (those of us in Larry Rickels' morning class also had Judith Butler in the afternoon). In this, perhaps, symposium is another fold into what it means to be together and to live together. We will be discussing Heidegger's What Is Thinking?, some Melanie Klein, and viewing an interview (Zur Person, a German TV program from 1964) with Hannah Arendt while discussing her ideas on judgement.

We begin with Judith Butler:

Butler offers us some light translation from the above video:

• "Political philosophy - which I avoid - there is always a tension between man as thinking being and man as acting being. Natural philosophy does not allow this."
• Arendt is introduced by Günter Gaus as a major thinker, but she says she doesn't feel like she is a philosopher and points out that she is not accepted as such.

In The Human Condition Arendt distinguishes public and private with forms of speech which belong to the public sphere and those that belong to the private domain.

• The private domain has no speech, it is an arena in which bodies labor; defined by repetitive and transient actions
• To have speech properly means it must be done in the public domain
• These distinctions are based on the Greek polis but they are nonexclusionary; the public depends on the private to exist and yet this dependency is never theorized as a political issue because the public contains the private.

As we listen Arendt's interview, if we think of philosophy as not being a public action, but a private activity, we wonder if the public/private dichotomy is tenable? Can thinking and acting mutually exist?

• Arendt states in the interview, "Heidegger is a philosopher (and solitary), I am a political theorist (and public), thus I do something different," this seems like some sort of gossipy speculation
• There is a shift in her interview where she goes from talking about philosophy to talking about giving commands
• She must the interpellation of philosopher if she is to protect her femininity; perhaps one day there will be a philosopher that does not give commands
• Is she becoming feminine in this move or is she becoming hyper-masculine by becoming a political theorist which takes the public sphere as central, a sphere from which women have historically been excluded (a woman's place being in the home, a private domain)?
• Eichmann's failure to think was a failure not only to maintain an inner dialogue but also a failure to think of somebody else.

Avital Ronell
How are we to understand these phantom diacritical marks (fluttering her eyes, blowing her cigarette smoke into Gaus' face) in her talk about not being welcome into the community of (male) philosophers?

• Heidegger says that TV is an expression of his form of solitary thinking
• Arendt says we are more dependent upon our silence, a partner for thinking, a call she is having that is difficult
• that consciousness is more than being with myself alone but has something to do with being responsible
• Levinas says you are never responsible enough, Derrida says that we must stand against what is unethical, even if alone, even if alone with a friend

Larry Rickels
Here we might have a psychoanalytic reading of Arendt's relationship with Heidegger within this interview using the figure of loneliness, Melanie Klein's On the Sense of Loneliness to suggest where we can detect the relationship to Heidegger

Arendt discusses being alone in her essay Some Questions of Moral Philosophy

(100) I mention these various forms of being alone, or the various ways in which human singularity articulates and actualizes itself, because it is so very easy to confuse them, not only because we tend to be sloppy and unconcerned with distinctions, but also because we they invariably and almost unnoticeably change into one another. The concern with the self as the ultimate standard of moral conduct exists of course only in solitude. Its demonstrable validity is found in the general formula "It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong," which, as we saw, rests on the insight that it is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself. This validity can therefore be maintained only for man insofar as he is a thinking being, needing himself for company for the sake of the thought process.

Earlier in the same essay Arendt discusses the distinctions between solitude and isolation:

(98) Solitude means that though alone, I am together with somebody (myself, that is). It means that I am two-in-one, whereas loneliness as well as isolation do not know this kind of schism, this inner dichotomy in which I can ask questions of myself and receive answers. Solitude and its corresponding activity, which is thinking, can be interrupted either by somebody else addressing me or, like every other activity, by doing something else, or by sheer exhaustion. In any of these cases, the two that I was in thought become one again. If somebody addresses me, I must now talk to him, and not to myself, and in talking to him, I change. [...] Because this one who I now am is without company, I may reach out for company of others - people, books, music - and if they fail me or if I am unable to establish contact with them, I am overcome by boredom and loneliness. For this I do not have to be alone: I can be very bored and very lonely in the midst of a crowd, but not in actual solitude, that is, in my own company, or together with a friend, in the sense of another self. That is why it is much harder to bear being alone in a crowd than in solitude - as Meister Eckhart once remarked.

Isolation, on the other hand:

(99) [O]ccurs when I am neither together with myself nor in the company of others but concerned with things in the world. Isolation can be the natural condition for all kinds of work where I am so concentrated on what I am doing that the presence of others, including myself, can only disturb me. Such work may be productive, the actual fabrication of some new object, but need not be so.... Isolation can also occur as a negative phenomenon....[I]t is the enforced leisure of the politician, or rather of the man who is himself a citizen but has lost contact with his fellow citizens. Isolation in this second negative sense can be borne only if it is transformed into solitude, and every one who is acquainted with Latin literature will know how the Romans, in contrast to the Greeks, discovered solitude and with it philosophy as a way of life in the enforced leisure which accompanies removal from public affairs.

NOTE TO SELF: Does Lynch's talk about Jay-Z's hegemony becomes strained if we start discussing the solitude of hiphop? Is there solitude in hiphop? It seems that the only successful rappers to "leave the game" were Biggie and 2Pac, and clearly these aren't tenable exit strategies.

ALSO: Cato quote at end of the above section: "Never am I more active than when I do nothing, never am I less alone than when I am by myself." In contrast to the 圣人 shengren (sage) who does nothing and in doing nothing leaves nothing undone.

Melanie Klein peruses loneliness as the inevitable break-out of the therapeutic practice; the need to mitigate between hate and love is at the center of integration

• While lack of integration has its pains, the process of integration (in analysis) brings its own pains
• Klein valorizes idealization and seeks to preserve the cleavage between the good and the bad - not the good preserved - this is a Nietzschean moment that separates her from Freud
• Idealization is already marked by Klein as disposable, as integration is never permanent, the glamor of idealization (as the Good Object) is gone, though, at some point.
  
• When it leaves, it leaves us with the loneliness of transference

Arendt moves from the couple (thinking) to the group (acting) through solitude:

(104) ...Socratic morality is politically relevant only in times of crisis and that the self as the ultimate criterion of moral conduct is politically a kind of emergency measure. And this implies that the invocation of allegedly moral principles for matters of everyday conduct is usually a fraud; we hardly need experience to tell us that the narrow moralists who constantly appeal to higher moral principles and fixed standards are usually the first to adhere to whatever fixed standards they are offered....

We catch a whiff of Heidegger just prior to the above quote:

(104) This ambiguity, that the same act will make good men better and bad men worse, was once alluded to by Nietzsche who complained of having been misunderstood by a woman: "She told me that she had no morality - and I thought that she had, like myself, a more severe morality." The misunderstanding is common although the reproach in this particular case (Lou Andreas Salome) was far off the mark.

Heidegger must have been the Good Object at one point: the two-in-one continues to threaten the none-in-one.

Butler
Avital mentioned Arendt not feeling welcome - this is the expression of a wound. Perhaps she might be anticipating a wounding, thus wounding herself so as to control the wounding.

• Did she not feel Heidegger was appreciative enough?
• Who is this other with whom I must think?
  
• Do I preserve the Other by a melancholic sense of loss?
  
• this cleavage (that Larry mentioned) as the precondition for thought?

Ronell
Derrida refers to Lot's offering to the strangers when discussing hospitality

Kant situates us so:

• we are hosting a guest and the cops come looking for the guest - do we tell the truth and give the guest over to them or do we lie?
• Kant says give the guest over
• Arendt says Kant did not have an ear fir the possibility of the horror that can occur in his truth-telling world

Arendt's address is to Heidegger's text on Hölderlin (Andenken) and is perhaps more concerned with remembrance; a bringing together of thinking and memory

• That which is mourned, homecomings, are toward the future; this loneliness is in this sense a two-in-one
• She is performing an excentric half, calls forward to the core of Heidegger's What Is Thinking? so as to aberrate it

Is Heidegger trying to birth Nietzsche? Is Nietzsche what Heidegger meant by home? Arendt screams Nietzsche, she is pregnant with the future.

Both Heidegger and Arendt state that they are not philosophers, they are both upset with philosophy

• Heidegger is now a thinker
• The will to listening and obeying are both intimately connected for Heidegger as was pointed out by Nietzsche -
  

  (What Is Called Thinking?, 48) "You just wait - I'll teach you what we call obedience!" a mother might say to her boy who won't come home. Does she promise him a definition of obedience? No. Or is she going to give him a lecture? No again, if she is a proper mother. Rather, she will convey to him what obedience is. Or better, the other way around: she will bring him to obey. Her success will be more lasting the less she scolds him; it will be easier, the more directly she can get him to listen - not just condescend to listen, but listen in such a way that he can no longer stop wanting to do it. And why? Because his ears have been opened and he now can hear what is in accord with his nature. Learning, then, cannot be brought about by scolding.
  

  
  
• What does he who is taught by the proper mother hear?
• The son who is not present - is Heidegger calling Nietzsche home? not to keep him but to lose him?
• The mother of muses, remembrance and memory, is first invoked in What Is Called Thinking?

Rickels
Adorno is the figure in Germany in 1964 (during the Zur Person interview), Arendt at this time is editing Benjamin's Illuminations where she says Adorno was Benjamin's best student [Ronell here quips, "And then Arendt put her cigarette out!"]

Ronell
Zen-like practice so as to maintain a relationship with the self; an ethical injunction

NOTE TO SELF: if we're to follow this thought out we should consider ningen 人間 (the betweenness of humanity)

Butler

(99) If somebody addresses me, I must now talk to him, and not to myself, and in talking to him, I change. I become one, possessing of course self-awareness, that is, consciousness, but no longer fully and articulately in possession of myself.

There is a dynamic movement between me and the Other in thinking - I can only be within the context between us.

Ronell
One is defanged as a philosopher at points - what does one take recourse to in an emergency? What is a person vs. personality?

Rickels
There is the ability now, through mass technologization, to self-administer the shock so as to survive

NOTE TO SELF: overcoming by undergoing the work of being together - as transformative

Ronell
from What Is Thinking? (54) "[N]o thinker can be overcome by our refuting him and stacking up around him a literature of refutation. What a thinker has thought can be mastered only if we refer everything in his thought that is still unthought back to its originary truth."

Rickels
It's as though her training is immersed in the political as finitude

Ronell
from Some Questions of Moral Philosophy

(95) The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and without remembrance, nothing can hold them back. For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur - the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.

Butler
Speech as radical self-generation:

(SQMP, 95) Taking our cue from Socrates' justification of his moral proposition, we may now say that in this process of thought in which I actualize the specifically human difference of speech, I explicitly constitute myself a person, and I shall remain one to the extent that I am capable of such constitution ever again and anew. If this is what we commonly call personality, and it has nothing to do with gifts and intelligence, it is the simple, almost automatic result of thoughtfullness. To put it another way, in granting pardon, it is the person not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive.

Heidegger sounded the call:

(WICT? 49) ...[A] man who teaches must at times grow noisy. In fact, he may have to scream and scream, although the aim is to make his students learn so quiet a thing as thinking. Nietzsche, most quiet and shiest of men, knew of this necessity. He endured the agony of having to scream. In a decade when the world at large still knew nothing of world wars, when faith in "progress" was virtually the religion of the civilized peoples and nations, Nietzsche screamed out into the world: "The wasteland grows..." [...] What was once the scream "The wasteland grows...," now threatens to turn into chatter. The threat of this perversion is part of what gives us food for thought. The threat is that perhaps this most thoughtful thought will today, and still more tomorrow, become suddenly no more than a platitude, and as platitude spread and circulate. This fashion of talking platitudes is at work in that endless profusion of books describing the state of the world today. They describe what its by nature is indescribable, because it lends itself to being thought about only in a thinking that is a kind of appeal, a call - and therefore must at times become a scream. Script easily smothers the scream, especially if the script exhausts itself in description, and aims to keep men's imagination busy by supplying it constantly with new matter. The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way.

[END OF CLASS]

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 2

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"

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.

We began class with a discussion of Ulmer's evening lecture.

Back to Psycho

Norman as TV: he switches between stations (personalities), he's not able to cross over except on the audio track.

A genealogical digression: the train as conveyor belt of neurosis

• the first case of male hysteria was at the time of the use of trains and this symbolizes something
• the term "psycho" became slang after WWI; Freud, et al. called it war neurosis or shell shock - wherein the soldier endures an uncanny doubling of the ego
• psychoanalysis became famous because it was the only treatment at that time that could get the soldiers back out on the frontlines
• Freud was first included into the U.S. military after they saw that the Nazis were also employing psychoanalytic ideas
• now we call it Post-Traumatic Disorder

The "slasher" genre develops the "splatter" phase which is more oral and features cannibalism, etc.

Night of the Living Dead 1968, Romero:

• A reference to "The Shower Scene" is made in this film
• there is this need to show what ghouls eat in this film (when the daughter eats the father in the basement, 83 minutes in)
• this is a critical moment in the development of the horror genre as it is the removal of the invisibility of violence in the genre

Interesting to note the role of the TV in this film: they refuse to go into the basement because they believe their relationship to media will keep them alive

The zombie attack is called an epidemic of mass murder, their told not to pay their respects to the dead

It must be remembered that this film is released in the wake of the murder of MLK, and perhaps this film suggests to us today that everyone is implicated in his murder as society functioning as itself had created these conditions

• we are those posses, wandering around taking pleasure in the wanton killing

Romero introduces the terror of survival - those that die in the film do so because they are not worthy of the future.

The Psycho effect: the murderer and the victim redefine life as surviving, the status of surviving is altered in various films

"The survivor is mankind's worst character," Canetti stated in his Crowds and Power.

• The command is a suspended death sentence
  
• commands are older than speech and originate in flight
  
• the herd in fleeing a predator is the first crowd formation
  
• and it is the origin of the sacrifice
• Judge Schreber is the ultimate survivor because he has absorbed all the energy of those that have died

Cannibal Killers
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974, Hooper
"The film you are about to see is true," as the trailer informs us, was a direct response to the Watergate as well as Vietnam War lies of the contemporary moment. Hooper was in many ways responding to the brutality of his times:

Some college kids - loosely liberal, returning to the sticks, from which they came

Taxidermy (a nod to Psycho?) gone wild.

The "Shower Scene" is alluded to here with the extreme close-up of the eye, she seems to be literally vivisected by the camera

Follow this link to view the ending

She is rescued by a truck, named Black Maria, which is the same name as Thomas Edison (the father of film)'s theater and lab.

What we are exposed to here is the economy of the recording of destruction.

The inspiration for Psycho was the true story of Ed Gein, he was also the inspiration for Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, as well as the inspiration for the Leatherface character in this film.
We were fully inside Ed Gein's home with this film.

This machine of destruction and recording (the whirring of the chainsaw as an allusion to the camera recording) is finally interrupted.

Her survival begs the question, this was alluded to in the trailer: Must we be chained to what we have seen?
What kind of work must we do to shake-off that impact?

The problem of the slaughterhouse is the problem of food and death.

[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]