Mourning and Loneliness Readings

I'm somewhat cheating here, I wrote this back in October in preparation for the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group. But, it's probably new to you. And, I am working on something for The Avant Guardian check there this Saturday for my new piece.

We are reading two texts that are grappling with how we understand ourselves and how this self that is developed relates to absence. In Freud's "Mourning Melancholia" is discussed the effects of unintentional separation from our love objects; with Melanie Klein's "On the Sense of Loneliness" is asked the question, can we ever overcome our sense of loneliness that is the result of our separation.

(Pictured: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, an example of monumentality)

I've further also suggested reading Nancy Burke's "InVisible Worlds: On Women and Solitude" as well as Judith Butler's "Melancholy Gender - Refused Identification." Burke's essay briefly outlines some developments in contemporary (as of 1997) feminist thinking on the parameters of what it means to have solitude and gender, discussing Chodorow's suggestion that women experience solitude in a manner fundamentally different from men. The essay we've read by Freud has played a crucial role in the development of Judith Butler's thinking. In her 1995 essay she attempts to elaborate her discussions of gender performativity as first discussed in her career-making book Gender Trouble. These suggested readings by Burke and Butler I've put forward so as to enhance our insight into the Klein and Freud essays. But there is an obvious question: why read about mourning, melancholia, or any senses of loneliness? What are the benefits of discussing these topics in a group that has, at least initially, intimated a desire to discuss politics and economics in light of current events unfolding?

Louis Theroux of the BBC recently made a documentary The Most Hated Family in America which seeks to elaborate what is the Westboro Baptist Church and why they are traveling the U.S. protesting the funerals of soldiers that are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan with signs that state "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God for IEDs". If time permits we can view this documentary, as it's relatively short at 45 minutes. Suffice it to say, the members of Westboro Baptist have their rationalizations. According to the membership, it is Biblically-sound and necessary to do the work they do at these moments of public mourning.

In Freud's essay he develops a theory of mourning as well as makes speculations about a term he calls melancholia. The work of mourning, according to these theories, is to assist in the development of the ego character, which I take to be synonymous with a sense of self.

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.

A Little Lingua Trauma

This is the post where I get nailed to a tree: if I've learned nothing else it's that Lacanians will be certain to correct your reading of Lacan and they will be adamant in announcing the insufficiency of one's poor reading. But I gotta start some where and what's below is from the floor of the editing room of a piece I've recently submitted at another blog. That said, I apologize for the [egregiously] disjointed nature of what follows and also apologize for the glaring inaccuracies and superficial understandings that likely will be found below.

In his essay “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996, Hal Foster seeks to present an understanding of postmodernist art of the 1990s. He sees the tendency within contemporary art practices to unite both the imaginary and symbolic against reality. Foster sees this conflict as possible because of the wide-reception of Jacques Lacan's work.

Lacan, another early psychoanalyst and perhaps the first incarnation of the philosopher-as-rockstar (he was something of a national treasure in France before 1968 where he was even on TV). In Lacanian psychoanalysis the human psyche is vulnerable to impingement from the world (as we have read in Melanie Klein elsewhere), but for Lacan reality itself is a special kinda terrifying all its own. Somewhat similar to Freud's suggestion in his essay “The Uncanny” that which is most terrifying is what is most familiar but never quite seen.

As illustration to Freud's point: that moment in the film The Grudge when the woman, being pursued by the angry demon, runs into her apartment, locks the door, runs to her bedroom (SAFE!) and hides under her sheets. Is there nowhere more safe than your own bed? The real horror comes when the demon slithers its way up the bed, just under the sheets making that awful croaking sound.

It is a horrifying scene because the bedroom has ceased to be that familiar place of rest and now is revealed as a place that contains more than we thought it did. The bed prior to the demon had been only so big, and now the demon has revealed to us that it is much more than just what we thought.

But for Lacan this is not impressive – literally child's play – an attempt by children to mask the horror of the Real by covering reality with signs and symbols. The symbolic order, “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work” signs, the size of notebook paper, all that culture stuff – all of this is to mitigate the ever-present danger of the psyche being left vulnerable to the Real. If Lacan is correct, we never experience the Real because of the terror that the Real reality provokes in us.

Again, if Lacan is correct in explaining the symbolic order, then the artist is clearly implicated and perhaps has a unique responsibility to consider the question, “what is the nature of the Real and how might we come into contact with it?” This is the base assumption in Hal Foster's essay and he finds an excellent example in the photographs of Cindy Sherman. (Untitled Film Still no. 21. 1978. above right)

Foster finds effective illustration of the terrifying gaze of the Real and the subsequent investigations into the nature of the Real through abject imagery in the work of Cindy Sherman:

[Sherman's] subjects see, of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze. Often, in the film stills and the centerfolds, this gaze seems to come from another subject, with whom the viewer may be implicated [….] Sherman shows her female subjects as self surveyed, not in phenomenological reflexivity (I see myself seeing myself) but in psychological estrangement (I am not what I imagined myself to be). (110)

As Foster points out in his exploration of themes in '90s art practices, “Today there is a general tendency to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma: a lingua trauma is spoken in popular culture, academic discourse, and art and literary worlds.” (123)

(Left: Untitled Film Still no. 92. 1982)
Perhaps the best representation of this lingua trauma can be found in Atom Egoyan's 2009 film Adoration. Egoyan's film explores this phenomenon, perhaps to point-out that trauma has become the new authenticity: one cannot be trusted without having publicly discussed and exposing one's traumatic experiences.

This is well presented with Simon watching as the passengers of a flight that had, not unlike the “underwear bomber” incident of December 25, 2009, been the target of a potential bombing. Those, now middle aged, passengers argue over the possibility that one can be traumatized by an event that did not occur, after all, no one was even aware of the potential attack until they had landed. Can we call this a new trauma? Is trauma not an impingement in this moment that we must then learn to contain? Or is the traumatic something that happens in our minds alone and expresses itself corporally as we recall and meditate upon the event now remembered as traumatizing.

(Right: Untitled 1531. 1981.)

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

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.

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.

Larry Rickles, 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"

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.

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.

Winnicott was quite aware of Lacan; in one of his chapters he makes reference to the mirror stage, however aptly, the one thing that he would add as a correction would be that Lacan puts the mirror stage first, before the mother's face.

What could this mean?

1) we have the example of a patient that couldn't start her morning until she "put on her face" as an exaggeration of what is normal - trying to get the mirror to notice her. She had to be her own mother. From here he starts talking about Francis Bacon, "in looking at faces... he seems to be trying to get noticed..." See Chapter 9 of Playing and Reality: "Mirror Role of Mother and Family in Child Development" (153-4)

• Mass media is like a relay, a mass therapy or group therapy where we are able to revisit the good enough mother and father
• What distinguishes Winnicott from other psychoanalysts was his stressing of the environment and its possible use in therapeutic settings.

All the people we read today are trying to understand what Freud first noticed that we vacillate between identifying projecting

See Viktor Tausk's On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia (1933)
or perhaps Benjamin's two essays, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (from Illuminations) or his "Origin of German Tragic Drama"

2) the transitional object. Differentiating as the new terrain of the pre-Oedipal phase; he tries to increase the legibility of these first two years of human development. This is a study of illusion as this is a phase of between-ness.

Returning to William Wilson (Poe)
He refers to himself as someone that is privileged due to his lineage; he grows up unchecked (he's the master of the household). He is sent off to school where he continues to seek out something that would contain him and immediately he describes a doubling, meeting his doppelganger.

• He goes to play a prank on his double (11) and does a double-take because at first he sees nothing. He has this corporeal experience of iciness and horror and then goes on to describe an inability to contain the experience.
• We can look to Winnicott's case of the child George who drew a "nothing" which Winnicott interpreted as George drawing his death, a child who has everything available but nothing there, no one to receive it.
• The double in William Wilson is so close that it is like a mask, a low-volume echo, a sound effect that we hear in the film Halloween. In the relationship to the double is not simply descent: undermining oneself in the doubling. As Wilson moves from environment to environment, he does develop (cheating, lying) and somehow coming into contact with the outer world, he is developing psychotically.
• The double (16) has issued an order to stop doing wrong, now the double has interfered in an amorous design. Freud's Uncanny says that there will be an interruption or threat of castration.
• In averting his eyes he has to look at the large mirror (19) and he sees his context as the voice that has been muffled to this point has become louder, (I could have fancied that I myself was speaking..." (20)

Halloween, John Carpenter (1978)
How will this work with the beginning and ending of Carpenter's Halloween? We look to that moment in Texas Chainsaw Massacre where she's being cut-up by the camera and while this is happening there is that terrible laugh track from the cannibal family, this moment of (s)laughter.

• The camera itself is a chainsaw and the projector is the site of both destruction and reconstruction. It's in passing through destruction that these relics of us that survive we can have a sense of self. This is the internal logic in both Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM). They begin in TCM at the mirror stage, going to the neighbor's house, this uncanny place and they are CHAINed to what they SAW; survival is tenuous.
• Everything begins to change with the advent of Carpenter's Halloween because we are allowed to remove the mask. Michael Myers as a figure of violence and his relationship to Laurie - there is a question of adolescence here. The film begins with an unlikely event: a six-year-old taking a knife. (Fast forward to ~ 3:30):

In this film we will have a survival that is not stuck on the killing (unlike in TCM) or survival-through-killing (unlike in Night of the Living Dead); this is the first incident of survival that can be thought of as therapeutic.

In Halloween we're looking at the revalorization of survival. Let's mark that in Texas Chainsaw Massacre what is murderous is the inclusion of humans as something to be consumed. There is a barrier, a failure to distinguish between human and animal as well as a motif of mirror-reversal-world. This is noted in Hegel's Spirit of History - that the animal kingdom is able to strike back. The Evil Eye comes from the hunting scenario where the animal's dying look would curse the hunter - haunting is this look isn't it?

The notion of the reverse world can be seen in Germany, among numerous other places, where you poke your head through a wooden screen to reveal the pig is cooking you rather than you cooking the pig:

The shift from being hunters to keeping animals creates problems of food and death: we spare the animals life and so their lives are at our disposal. In killing an animal a totemic ritual began, where the community had to come together and, in a sense, reintroduce the animal into the community

Interesting to note that at the time of the advent of the large Chicago slaughterhouses we also have the first records of serial killers.

• We can't get around the problem of food and death - it's related to the family, identification is phantasmatic cannibalization of the mother: we share an identity with what we eat.
• There is a delicate balancing act between the animals and humans such that we don't destroy one another.

With the cargo cult the white man became vengeful spirits that withheld the means of communication with the dead. They established a date when the dead, who make cargo, would return and in order for this to happen the had to destroy all their things. They are thus creating an uberviolence to deal with the dead.



There is an ambiguity in how the film ends; it does begin the epidemic of slasher films.

• the scanning of the rooms at the beginning of the film has a hunter quality that is different from the scanning of empty homes at the end of the film.
  
• There is not, perhaps, the looking forward to future violence, but that we walk away from this traum

Stations of Laurie's Survival
In the course of the struggle at the end we see stations of her survival:

• will she be like Sally, at the end of TCM, paralyzed on the couch? He's not dead yet. Since he is unkillable, doesn't it relieve survival from having to kill to survive?
  
• We have the next station where Michael is slashing through the door (a la Psycho), she inherits the knife.
  
• The psychiatrist joins in the fray, perfectly fine with his patient being a demon figure that we can only hope to kill.
  
• At this moment she unmasks him. This changes everything because we can no longer be in his POV - her survival wouldn't be possible were we to continue in his mask.
  
• We can't help but notice her breathing - we're no longer at his disposal as his container, we now have room for Laurie in the film.

"Struggling Through the Doldrums"
In Winnicott's "Struggling Through the Doldrums" he argues that because of the atomic bomb we can no longer have a world war and so we can no longer justify military discipline.

• This ushers in adolescence and the Teen Age because whatever adolescent psychology is, it is group or mass psychology.
• Within the teen group the identified member (members of deviance) are essential to adolescence containing itself and group adhesion.
• Groups are adhered through the most inconsequential lines: a makeshift operation and it's at its strongest when one figure, mascot, forces the environment to react and thus the group reinforces itself in being attacked.

[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]

Avital Ronell's Evening Lecture

Avital Ronell gave an evening lecture entitled Have I Been Destroyed? which is part of an on-going work on authority.

For Hannah Arendt, the disappearing of authority is a calamity, what follows in the evacuating of enmity is monstrous.

For Kojeve authority (God) is out because the loss of God means we cannot root ethics in transcendence.

• Authority is like an emergency supply in the absence of God
• Is authority replaceable?
• Questioning authority isn't enough, we must draw back authority

How does one know whether the University has not destroyed me?

Trauma is what structures you:

• Truth was once affiliated with ruin and the resolution of the traumatic
  
• We are more responsible for an untraceable cause than ever before with minimal signage and modest moral directives
• Nancy situates our moment at the moment of tragedy
• We'll consider the destiny of democracy in the loss of tragedy

How do we imbue meaning into "human dignity" post Kant?

• "I wobble in place without truth that is my only point"
• Kojeve insists authority is not about force, "it doesn't get down an' dirty," it supersedes force with a sovereign aloofness
• But Kojeve misses the violence of language (Lacan)

Where do we locate authority's domain? Kant removed it from people and offices because it would be abusive to leave authority there, so he relocated authority to Law.

Derrida sees Law as not docile but an internal relationship with violence and power

Psychoanalysis is crowded-out bu Kojeve, Freud is begrudgingly brought into political analysis:

• Kojeve brings out the pleasure of judging which troubles justice; it's become acute and sexual, the psyche is outfitted with a juridical [something...], thus all these tv dramas
• we can see Kant sent judgement to the aesthetic realm so as to make judging sexy

Modern politics is located in Martin Luther, who targets judgement:

• He was fearful of a libidinal abandon in judgement cutting into the field of authority both worldly and eternal
• Faith meant that one could judge for oneself in these times
• The problem for Luther and Calvin was that one could go as far as becoming a conscientious objector

The price of linking justice, judgement, and love are strictly constrained by Luther so as to avoid the whole system of worldly order:

• he thought there would be nothing but murder and bloodshed
• not everyone is able to judge but only those invested with the sovereignty of the sword (Arendt seems to also be afraid of everyone judging)
• peasants cannot be allowed to judge and mercy is neither here nor there; so, there is no reprieve from the authority
  
• there is a libidinal joy in judgement; as Kafka showed us, Luther's father was a total asshole and we're still paying for it.

There is the rush to/of judgement, in drug terms

Not only is there the enjoyment in judging, but we also put ourselves up for review because there is pleasure in being judged.

Why was the official prescription for the crisis in the banlieus from both Sarkozy and Royale to increase the paternal presence?

Arendt asked in '58, what is authority?

• traces it back to education and child-rearing
• this is where authority is seen as a natural prerequisite

Who invented authority? Plato in response to the murder of Socrates

For Kojeve, Japan was the future of the West