Dreamwork and Ideology: Unraveling the Dreamwork That Makes The Dream (nightmare) Work

Introduction:

If you read this blog, or follow my Twitter, you probably know I work in mental health.

Out of grad School I was an eager Psychoanalyst in outpatient practice and a psychodynamic outpatient therapist in schools.

It wasn't long - a year or so - before I traded the school for the ward. I maintained my psychoanalystic practice while working day, eve, and night shifts at a Residential and Inpatient hospital. It was there I began losing interest in pure outpatient work, and began moving up the corporate ladder from day, evening, and night shift to clinician, family therapist, supervisor, and program director. Now, I only see a few select psychoanalytic patients, and I hold a director leadership position in a partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient program. 

Some recent corporate restructuring at my this job pushed me to make decisions that I am not totally comfortable with. Corporate leadership is making decisions that are financially beneficial despite going against best practice and evidence based treatment models. Their pockets will be lined, while the families we serve will suffer.

I predict this will continue to intensify until I am forced to decide between doing things that go against my values, or resigning.  This looming conflict got me reflecting on the corporate work environment and the endless drone of 9-5 (or 8am to 6pm,...I've worked 48 hours in 3 days...).

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work:

"Teamwork makes the dream work" - John C. Maxwell (2002)

"The task of dream interpretation is to unravel what the dream-work has woven" - Freud (1899)

The former you have likely heard - sincerely or ironically - in your corporate workplace. 

The latter is the thrust of Freud's iconic text The Interpretation of Dreams.

Freud primarily theorized that the dream worked to - or, rather, 'dreamwork' served - the purpose of keeping the person asleep when the person's body is processing internal impulses, sensations, and memory traces which could threaten to disturb sleep. 

Modern science has since shown that it is not necessarily true that dreams function to keep us asleep, but for all intents and purposes Freud's hypothesis remains helpful and effective - dreams may not keep us asleep, but they do make relatively coherent, if not still odd and/or confusing, stories out of fragments of random experiences.

Dreamwork is how our mind patches disparate or disconnected impulses, sensations, and memories into stories, or narrative experiences. To use Freud's word, dreamwork 'weaves' together a fabric where there otherwise would've been only threads. Dreamwork is a narrative synthesis that smooths over conflicts, errors, to make the world and our experience tolerable, etc. (this is not unlike the oeuvre of Kant's model of cognition where  our faculties and categories insistently and persistently interface with the outside to produce an experience of the world - i.e., synthesis. Freud was in many ways influenced by Kant, see Tauber's Freud; The Reluctant Philosopher for more on this). 

Teamwork makes the dream work, in its most benign or generous interpretation, is simply true. If people or a group of people want to make something happen, 'yes anding' one another will be more effective than some other approach (this is one understanding of Wilfred Bion's group theory concept of 'basic assumption' - a group must have a common goal that they are willing to work towards). Teamwork - cooperation - can achieve things that were previously thought unachievable.

In a more critical sense, teamwork does not make the dream work, it makes the corporate nightmare work. Some of my readers will undoubtedly have experienced the phrase in this way. They will have experienced it as  'If you dissent from the party line, you are hurting the team;' as a shame mechanism to keep people in line, to keep people doing things they don't believe in. This is a 'They Live' or 'The Matrix' moment where corporate jargon about teamwork works to keep us asleep from the horrors of our jobs, co-workers, or lives.

Team work makes the dreamwork has to be the most unconsciously Freudian slogan for our neoliberal times. Zizek argues this is precisely the function of ideology - to patch together the irrational, nonsensical, and fragmented experiences into a master narrative that one can easily identify with. He even goes as far as to claim that in conceptualizing ideology Marx 'invented the symptom,' or rather what would become the psychoanalytical technical concept of 'symptom' which Lacan - after Freud of course - would later rediscover and operationalize in practice. 

From Kant, to Marx, Frued, Lacan, and finally Zizek - dreamwork is ideology, ideology is dreamwork, both are synthetic narrative operations that make the world tolerable. This is present linguistically and practically in the slogan 'teamwork makes the dreamwork.' The slogan hides the truth yet betrays its secrets in the same breath. But like all (or most) psychoanalytic riddles, the slogan requires inversion (which is the function of the analyst): Dreamwork makes the Teamwork. 

The analysand speaks on the couch in the office, he presents a subjective musing or comment (the slogan as it is - teamwork makes the dreamwork) and the analyst must make sense (synthesize - see Bion's direct integration of Kant and Freud) of the comment, but also transform the comment through the process of analysis (the analyst makes a suggestion - 'perhaps you mean dreamwork makes the teamwork?' - and sees how the analysand responds...).

Swallow:

To swallow the corporate slop, to perform tasks that may go against your values, to get along with coworkers you may otherwise notice yourself having displeasurable reactions to, etc. Some of this is part of growing up, some of it is not; the former is acceptable, the latter detestable. 

To unravel the corporate dreamwork - to analyze it - is to expose the corporate nightmare lurking beneath the surface. 

Take that and do with it what you will.

My Acc isn't dead or alive, but a secret more cute thing

The Good, The Bad, and the Uncute 

Cute/Acc is one possible way out of the double bind of our times - 'the polar bears are drowning, the ice caps melting' or 'the water's making the frogs gay.'

These are the two prevailing brands of apocalyptic larping sucking all the air out of the room.

Both employ manic digital doomscrolling as a means of subtly winning you over as a devoted consumer - and ultimately an unknowing pusher - of their product, their agenda. 

'The world is not enough, everything is bad, and we hold the secret to create the change that will make things better - we just need everyone to buy in, get on board...somehow..." That's the narrative. 

This messaging is a vehicle to reach a goal. Whereas the messaging is the same between the brands, the goal certainly differs. 

The goal for one brand is to construct an ever-moving goalpost fantasy future; the goal for the other a 'retvrn' to a fantasized past.  Both represent a pathological relation to the category of time. Both employ a manic-depressive utopian / dystopian polarity that secretly hides the same apocalyptic fantasy - the destruction of the current irredeemable world. 

To achieve the goal, one brand will propose education or therapy, the other will propose force or coercion. One is miserablist, melodramatic, the other cold, flat. One suicidal, the other homicidal. Both possibly genocidal if their demands are not met - and perhaps more so if they are. 

Is this not the nature of the double bind? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It is no coincidence that damnation is an explicitly religious concept.

But for the everyday person, this double bind does not play out on the this holy, global scale. It's less obvious than that, and therefore far more nefarious. The devil, as we are told as children, lies in the details.

The double bind takes the form of a constant internalized pressure to be a a cutting-edge revolutionary or a stoic reactionary. 

The former: an effective activist that successfully navigates the social sphere and its ever-changing rules on the fly. The self-flagellating kind that does not associate with anyone guilty of reactionary behavior and yet is still cool.  

And the latter? It is an outcome of failing to become the former (just as the former can be an outcome of failing to become the latter, etc....as we will see, it's a cycle).

This 'revolutionary / activist' game, with its ever evolving rules, is complex, high risk low reward. This toxic mix of unsaid rules and expectations unconsciously incentives one to relinquish one's self into a much simpler micro-fascist, reactionary group-think. 

At the same time, the level of commitment required of being a reactionary equally incentives one to drop out of that (racist) race and do something more fun and easy - like being a middle of the road democrat. 

Better keep up on the latest race science! Better not leave too big a carbon footprint!

In other words, it takes a lot of effort to be 'woke,' and it takes just as much effort to to be an asshole (this is kind of the lesson of American History X, is it not?). The constant keeping up with the political jones' of one brand leads to suicide, the other to homicide. Again, both to personal exhaustion, and impersonal genocide - or holy war. Annihilation. 

The double bind of political alignment is cynical and cyclical. Try and commit to one group, burnout, shift to the other, burn out, and so on.

The tough thing is people start to notice this and try and take the 'middle' route, but the result is criticism by and from both sides - now you're a boring lib that stands for nothing. See? Now we're back to the double bind.

So far, this is just your generic blackpill - the 'no one is on your side kid' kind of thing. But the issue is that the blackbill or even clearpill of the supposed 'post' or 'alt' political spectrum only brings you so far. They may be a vacation from the simulation, but they plug you back into the Matrix by at the end of the day, just in time for you to clock in the following morning. Just in time for you to remember you kind of enjoy the comfortable tedium of the 9-5.

But what does this all have to do with cute/acc?

Make Accelerationism Cute Again

Everything I've thus far described is not very cute. It's depressive, grave, violent, exhausting, etc., and like all double binds, it leads to dead ends, learned helplessness. 

Cuteness and the project Maya and Amy are fostering helps us find a way out of this bind. And I'm not being dramatic when I say I think it's also saving lives (if you're into that kind of thing).

What I wrote in my original Cute/Acc blogpost years ago - which is cited in the Cute/Acc book (pg.4; endnote 4 on pg. 51, how flattering :D )- is still true today. 

It's still true that Cute/Acc is a light-hearted response to the overly serious R/Acc and L/Acc; it's true that Cute/Acc address what Nietzsche called 'the serious man'  whose "thinking is...never something light, divine, something closely related to the dance and to playful high spirits;"  it's true that in place of the serious man for whom "'Thinking' and 'taking something seriously...gravely,' are...the same" (Beyond Good and Evil) Maya and Amy suggest the option of the 'cute man'...or 'cute blob' for whom thinking is a dance or a song. These are all true.

But what is now more clearer than ever after Maya and Amy's lil text is that Cute/Acc challenges this 'serious man' not just through a libidinal injection of high spirits but also through the act of course correcting the cringe R/Acc and L/Acc vectors in a practical manner.

What was the course?

The course was this: Under all of the dressings, R/Acc and L/Acc were essentially both attempts at doing away with the concepts of human agency and rational order as organizing or driving principles of culture, and in their place encourage a radical openness to the element of experimentation, accident, and chaos, elements that seemed to be 'metaphysically'  present at the base of our world.

The notion is - or was - simple: you're not as in control as you think you are, all kinds of inhuman forces push you around (oversimplified: numbers, genes, chemicals, forces of nature, forces of god, forces of state, drives, incentives, etc., etc.). You can try and control or fight against those forces, but resistance is futile - or deadly. Thus, one must learn to lean in and push and pull with these forces. 

This is exemplified in the CCRU's notion that 'it's not what you're playing, it's what's playing you' ... 'like a meat puppet.' Or again, most simply and clearly in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus where the authors encourage the reader to learn the rhythm and curves of the milieu or plane in order to subvert them, as opposed to trying to violently break from the milieu. The former is how one may change the surrounding by becoming it, the latter is how you become a fascist (trying to control what can't be controlled) or a suicidal psychotic (their words, not mine - though as a psychoanalyst and therapist, this is what I sometimes see). This is also what the Xenofeminist (Amy contributed to their main text) mean when they say 'if nature is unjust, change nature.'

And what needed correcting?

What started as an opening up of the body, an invitation of experimentation, accident, chaos into the body  - what the R/Acc or L/Acc may describe as 'opening up to Outsideness' or 'radical alterity,' or what Nietzsche describes as becoming "a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) - what started as that anti-agency praxis lapsed back into agency bullshit (or what D & G describe as de- and re-territorialization).

By accident, it seems, R/Acc becomes interested in bolstering state power, supporting police, dampening undesirable behavior, and buying bitcoin. The experimentation results in something ultimately indistinguishable from racist, conservative talking points. The supposed acceleration seems to slow down. Meanwhile, L/Acc can't figure out if it wants people to have luxuries and commodities provided by a benevolent gratifying state, or to suffer violently with no belongings or property until capitalism collapses. The experimentation becomes indistinguishable from some derivative of a vulgar Marxism or vulgar anti-Marxism. The supposed acceleration here too seems to slow down too. The way(s) out get us deeper back in. 

Both end up preserving a human vision of the world that impotently fantasizes of a new, better world to replace this sinful one. And the path to the new world is some deadly, unsustainable lifestyle fad whose end goal has yet to materialize. This can be exemplified by the urban accelerationism legend - after Land went psychotic and dropped out of academia, not to be seen for some amount of time, a colleague saw him on the street in Canada or the UK and remarked at his abrupt disappearance and long absence. Land responded something to the effect of 'you can't fully escape the human, it always crawls back, so here I am.' 

R/Acc and L/Acc lack the tools to ward off this inevitable return to the all too human.

Cute course corrects this by reinvigorating the exploration, experimentation, and chaos in a way that does not seem to pledge allegiance to a right or left politic. 

Here, Cute/Acc can be said to be in line with contemporary philosophers who imagine their function in the world as posing better questions, articulating novel practices, and seeking new limit experiences. That is, contemporary philosophy attempts to map new territories. Cute is a guide to traversing some sort of new territory.

This is what cute is to some extent. It is the not so easily defined element at play in culture, or between persons. What makes a smile cute? It sticks in your head as a freeze frame, and part of what makes it stick is that you can't fully explain it. It doesn't fit. Cute is the opposite of eerie. Eerie - which Mark Fisher wrote wonderfully on - lingers, not fully symbolized, never truly integrated, etc. It nags at the back of the mind. Cute is this, but without the cryptic stuff. What makes a little feature stand out - it's cute. What makes a little jingle from a song - an 'ear worm' as the music marketeers call it - go round and round your head literally all day? It's cute, it hacks into your biology and get's stuck there. Cute is somewhere in-between the big molar ideas or senses. It's something little that tickles you.

Amy and Maya know this and put it into words more creatively than most of us could. They're onto something.

Just as  Lamarck's teleological conception of animal behavior was supplanted by Darwin's random variation, and the conscious-actor model of human behavior replaced by the unconscious drives of behaviorism or early psychoanalysis, so cute/acc may too replace the accelerationism(s) of old.

Cute hits the reset button on the state polarity. It gets back to that space under and between the R and L.

And if in Cute/Acc we by chance see agency return, as it did with R and L/acc, then we must try and see agency as something to be played with in the way we are shown through Nietzsche's Zarasthura or D & G's schizo; in the way that it is only reinforced so it may hold more chaos without imploding into suicide or psychosis, or exploding into homicide or fascism.

Cuteness Be My Jesus

Cuteness saves.

Transition could have saved him (or her...or whatever)? Maybe.

Cuteness could have saved him (or her...or wha...)? Definitely. 

It saves lives, I mentioned earlier.

When I was speaking with Amy and Maya, among other cute company, I reiterated some of my thoughts about cute as a way out of the R-L double bind. Amy responded with a personal story about seeing her friends of various political positions within the Acc orbit burnout. She wondered if there was not a way to play with these accelerationist concepts without going mad (I'm taking liberties, Amy can always correct me :D).

For a person who does not see themselves in the hypermasculine BAP-overman, or the feminine Trad-wive; who does not see themselves in the stoic right or the revolutionary left; to someone who feels like they don't belong; someone who may not care that the polar ice caps are melting, or that the frogs are gay; for a person like this, experimenting with your own agency and leaning into what you want to do regardless of the rules - in the face of shame -  can go a long way. After all, if there is no God (or even if there is - especially if there is [but that's for another blog]) and nature - the contemporary stand in for God - can be changed, then all there is left is precisely what we want to do with our time (desire). We can be sickly with our time - retvrn to the impossible past, forever seek an unreachable future- or we can be creative with our tine.

What this means for me is - and it's a bit cringe -  that after my mom died, it became very evident to me that you're here for a finite amount of time, so you might as well be yourself. Experimenting and being yourself may mean a lot of things. It doesn't necessarily mean being trans, or nonbinary, feminine, masculine, this, or that - it can - but it means doing what feels right. For me it was taking up boxing, but also calming down and not being so judgmental of others, not being a micromanager at work - letting a little chaos in. This can be for some a way out of anxiety, depression, despair, exhaustion, misery, violence, etc. 

Cuteness as Category

Critique of capitalism? Capitalism is the critique. Maybe, but try again.

Critique of cute? Cute is the critique. That will work.

A final thought: this is not to say depression, graveness, exhaustion, violence, etc., can't be cute. But to say that is to make a kind of categorical error. It's not so much that depression and violence can be or become cute, but more like cuteness can become depressing, or violent if it is not cultivated.

Things don't become cute, cuteness becomes other things. 

Cuteness is where we start. Cuteness as base libidinal materialism.

In Defense of David Gordon Green's Horror: His Films Are Accidentally 'Communist?' (Or Capitalism - A Deal with the Devil)

In 2018, David Gordon Greer, a director and producer primarily known for his comedies, started what would become a new trend for him - rebooting beloved classic horror films.  He reimagined the Halloween franchise as a trilogy - Halloween, Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends - and most recently, starting with The Exorcist: Believer, he has begun reimagining the The Exorcist franchise as a fresh trilogy as well. 

Green's horror reboots receive mediocre reviews from film critics and are disliked - even hated - by hardcore franchise fans.  We could explain the reactions as 'fanboys gatekeeping,' which may be at play here, but I think the reaction to the films has more to do with the 'American Psyche' or the values of the American film industry viewer than it does the actual quality of the films. 

I think Green plays with egalitarian and nonhierarchical themes while also carefully avoiding the typical pitfalls so common to these kinds of storytelling elements, chiefly the reduction of complexity to a liberal or neo-liberal pastiche. 

To understand what I mean we have to go back to Hegel's unpublished essay from 1804 - no just kidding. To understand what I mean we need to look at the values implied in the narratives and characters of the original films and see how the reboot they deviates.

In the original Halloween, Michael Myers is a killing machine, and there is no rhyme or reason to his violence. Then in the sequel, they began to retroactively write in an occult story - that there was some sort of family link, some sort of curse. This curse / sibling story line took over the remainder of the original Halloween franchise, even incluing original Halloween movies that were themselves reboots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_(franchise)

Notions of occult evil rituals (the Salem witch hysteria of 1800s, the devil worshipper hysteria of the 70s and 80s, etc.) and family ties are kind of 'molar' or normative story telling elements. They imply a pure child was corrupted by an evil source that spoiled the protective layer or function of the family, and now as a result, there is violence inside the family (the incest taboo). Very capitalist.

The only force that can reckon with Michael is his psychiatrist Dr. Loomis who once thought he could contain or heal Michael, but now realizes he cannot... and this is why he carries a .357. So the only force that can wrangle the incesstual / violent evil is a fearless male mental health / psychiatry through force. First as control, then as violence. Very phalic, very capitalist. 

In Greens Halloween Michael Myers loses the shallow occult stuff, and keeps the family stuff only for it to be subverted and shown as impotent. Additionally, the chief narrative elements from the original franchise(s) lose their centrality or phallic / capitalist nature. What do I mean by this? Michael Myers becomes less of a corrupted human type character and more of a bigger than life legend-type aura that lingers and haunts the town of Haddonfield. He is disembodied, abstracted, and becomes an idea more than a person. Through disembodying the character, he comes to truly embody or re-embody the boogeyman, which is the whole goal the original franchise set out to achieve. Everyone lives in the shadow of this boogey man in the closet. Michael's shadow is part of the community and town itself. Even when he is not around, his presence lingers and affects the behavior of all (trauma? ideology? anyone?). Dr. Loomis - and all individuals as we will see - alone are powerless against his aura of fear, and even more powerless when Michael actually returns in the flesh. This is no longer a story about an good being becoming corrupted into an evil being that is eventually triumphed over by a lone good guy (or girl), nor a story of an isolated family cursed by a cult, it is now a story of how a community understands their shared history, and how they heal from it through overcoming an abstract negative shape.

This communtiy aspect becomes more evident in the second and third installment of the triology where a mass hysteria takes over the town causing people to begin rioting and killing one another out of fear that one of them may actually be Michael Myers. It is not invididual actors that solve this problem, the problem is only solved when a group of different thinkers come together to work out a more effective way of overcoming their fear. In the end  - spoilers - Laurie (Lee Curtis) can't even kill Michael on her own, she needs the assistance of the entire town who throw his body into a meat grinder, signifying the absolute destruction of his myth (spirit) and body. 

Green's Halloween trilogy is about a community that overcomes a fear and trauma routed in its material history, a fear and trauma that compels them to take the easy way out, that of dividing and attacking each other, a community that overcomes all of this and joins together to heal. Here Green succeeds where horror icon and legend Stephen King does not. For King, it is often the case that the 'real' and 'material' (domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child neglect and abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.) are manifestations of bad and evil spirits (The Shining). In more sophisticated horror, it is precisely the opposite - it is the mundane real and material events, lacking in any metaphysical obscurity or depth, that are horrifying. I've mentioned this in another blog): when the patients in my mental ward thought the place was haunted I reminded them that real life is scarier than any ghost. 

Green's Halloween trilogy captures the horror of a real community doing bad things reacting to a shared event that occurred. How does this 'realism' (though the movie itself is a kind of fantasy, not realism) and its nonhierarchical story telling elements not succumb to liberal pastiche? The liberal pastiche version of this is when characters resolve their differences quickly, without process, and project all the 'bad' tension or conflict into the 'bad' force or person outside of the community. In Greens Halloween universe, the characters do not suddenly 'realize they were alike all along,' and that 'Michael is the source of their problems,' but rather, they realize they are fundamentally different than each other while being fundamentally alike in one way - what they all share in common is some aspect or another is that they can be, under the right circumstances (Fear), killers just like Michael Myers. This is not to be confused with the right wing rhetoric of 'everyone is a killer if given the chance, it's a dog eat dog world.' Rather, what we're seeing with Green is what Melanie Klein would call 'the integration of the good and bad object without the split off projected object.' The community members do not resolve their differences, but recognize how their differences play with one another, and the members do not see Michael as an 'other,' but as a part of their individual and collective selves that needs to be reconciled with (what Jung might call 'the shadow' - Michael is after-all referred to as 'the shape' who lurks in shadows in the original film). 

This move from individualism to community response is not only evident in the Halloween franchise, but also the first installment of the new Exorcist franchise.

In Exorcist: The Believer the daughters of two different families - one black, the other white, one a believer in God, the other one who once believed has since lost his faith - become possessed by a demonic force. The opposed families must come together and utilize their varying persepctives and life histories to save their children. Like Halloween, in The Believer, the story does not stop at two lone parents, as the conflict spills over into the community which then plays a larger role. 

When the church refuses to get involved, the neighbors of the families step in to help, resulting in a kind of DIY (Punk) exorcist. At the last minute the priest from the catholic church is persuaded to join but - spoilers - his neck is almost instantly snapped by the demonically possessed girls and he is killed. Again, the individual expert cannot solve the problem, only the community members with no formal expertise can by coming together. 

The community exorcises the girls successfully because they believe, but also because they did not take the easy way out. This 'easy way out' motif, present as well in Green's Halloween, is the inverse of egalitarian and non-hierarchical approach. It is a bargain with the devil. 

In The Believer the demon, mid-exorcist via the possessed girls, gives the community members a choice - it tells one father 'I'll let your child go if you stop the exorcist' meaning one girl would live and the other die. This is of course a classic demon riddle or tempting bargain - if you do something evil against your neighbor I will give you what you want. This mirrors the choice that the main character (not the character being given the choice by the demon during the exorcist, but the other father whose child would die) has to make at the beginning of the film: his pregnant wife is injured, if she gives birth the baby will live but she - mother - will die. He must choose to cut the baby out and let her life, or let her give birth, and let his wife / the mother die (this is the origin to his lost faith). 

In Halloween, as mentioned earlier, the 'easy way out' or bargain with the devil is fear. To live in fear beneath the shadow of Michael Myers is easier than fighting to heal or escape its grasp; to attack one's neighbor in a bout of mass hysteria, fearing that the neighbor is Michael, these are all easier than overcoming fear. 

This is the classic trope that fear divides people, and when people are divided into a 'dog-eat-dog' 'survival of the fittest' mentality, they take the short-term reward over the long term benefit.

Capitalism is and always has been about time preference. Those few who come out 'on top' supposedly are able to take the long term benefit over the short term (investment business ontology - work hard now so you don't have to work at all later), and those supposedly poor and less worthy who feed into the machine grab up the short term reward over the long term (consumerism - shitty fast food, drunks, alcohol, porn, media now, don't think about tomorrow). 

Whether Green is this or that political alignment is not in question here. Whether his movies accidentally tap into a complex social critique that was not present in the original films could be the question - I think they do. I think his films remind that capitalism is always a deal with the devil.

Reflections on People Writing on Bombs: Resentment, Overkill, and Empty Signification

Since WWII American soliders have written messages on the bombs and missiles soon to be dropped on or launched at the opposition.

In 2006, Israeli children were photographed participating in the same behavior - writing messages on bombs / missiles headed to Lebanon. This image has recently been circulating the internet social media platforms with many incorrectly assuming it is a contemporary image of Israel children signing bombs headed to current day Gaza. 

Give a military regime enough time and any misconception, like the one above, may become a reality - as of 2024, the president of Israel was photographed signing bombs headed for Gaza. 

This 2024 moment is not an isolated incident, but a moment in a long history of writing on bombs. 

This is a curious behavior, and I believe others may have thoughts about it. I know I do. I notice in myself a strong reaction to it.

Why write a message on an explosive? Clearly the 'enemy' will never recieve it as it will detonate before being read - or if it is read, somehow, the reaction cannot be witnessed as the witness will instantly die. Is the message not then for the enemy, but perhaps for someone else? 'Mabye it is then for the allies of the one writing the message?' we may conclude. If so, it is then likely an act to arouse feelings of comradery and unity among the ranks, etc., not an act meant to truly convey a message across the gap of subjectivity to a real and whole person on the 'other' side. This is puzzling, though, as the allies already agree with enough of the party line to fight a war. If we take this as true, then the message on the bomb is - like most language, signification, etc. - redudant to the allies and empty to the enemies.

The message is itself death, and the reciever of the message is already imagined dead; the writing is for the living who witness the death and simultaneously require no convincing to believe in the justification of the death. Words are not needed for any of this. It's all seemingly already decided in advance.

So the message is empty to all. So isn't it enough to just blow up the enemy? Why must we send a message that is never recieved by any of its parties? If we cannot answer this, it would mean this act of writing is purely performative (this much should be obvious, but I think the 'psyhchological' process is worth extrapolating). Though the act agrees with the powers that be, the act of writing or use of language itself does not invoke any of that existing power (the bomb will be dropped regardless of the writing); it challenges no existing power; does not compel any latent or virtual power to come into existence. 

It is superfluous. Writing a message on a bomb goes beyond 'just doing what needs to be done' - i.e., the cold efficent functionalism of war -  and thus it slips into death-ritual battle-cry performance. It is now a social ritual, a religious moment, a moral attack, a magical gesture. A dead letter - one that embodies the Lacan-Derrida discourse of 'whether a letter is already always recieved' or not. The bomb - and its inscription - is a letter that is always recieved. 

I will be painting with a broad brush when I say this, but I do think even in doing so I do not evoke any strawmen fallacies / arguments: This is all kind of odd behavior for the militaristic types. The militartistic personality espouses 'honor' 'duty' 'valor' 'efficency' etc. The strong silent soldier of any nation does not mince words, they 'get the job done.' Even when it is 'get the job done at whatever the cost' the cost is still concerned with efficency, not superfluous writing. And even when the solider graduates and becomes an intelligence official, he continues to refrain mincing words. Like in a computer or machine, words are solely functional bits of code; they are units or packets of information that make something happen - open or close gates, resolve decisions leading to other branches of possibilities, etc. -  they are not for conversing or sharing. All of this considered, writing on a bomb is a petty behavior that contradicts this 'get the job done efficently and without emotions' aesthetic / practice. It's a crack in the terminator armor. Writing on a bomb shows that there are some pretty intense feelings possibly tied up with some fantasies that can't be contained by the efficency and coldness narrative.

In more precise terms - one possible conclusion is that writing empty messages on bombs is a resentful appeal to an imaginary audience watching the war; it goes beyond 'just doing what needs to be done' and implies some emotional need to punch down on people who can't respond as they're not present or are already dead. It's the equivalent of 'talking behind someone's back.' It fails at being true communication of any kind as any spoken or written communication that does not function to transfer information that both parties can utilize to make decisions or connect meaningfully - this could be the intersubjective meeting of worlds, or the agreeance of not intersubjectively meeting, or behavioral management such as boundary setting, friendship forming, agreeing on terms of fighting, etc. - any communcitation that does not aim to do those things is in fact spiteful and more about hurting or conveying hurt than it is about repairing or restoring a real way of being in the world.

The empty message of writing on a bomb responds to a personal or collective internal and emotional need - the need to feel powerful when the bomb is exercising all the power, a need to express anger, to enjoy unity. It is the human security system creeping up in all its insecurity, faintly mumbling to itself 'Yes, the silent hand of the market of the war machine - the assmelage of the killing machinery, the deep almost metaphysical flow of economic forces, the supposed behavioral incentives, etc. -  this is doing all the work, and I want to remind you the human puppet is here as well to hastily scribble some marks on the explosive ordanence, to take some last minute credit!' Meat puppets riding the coattails of the forces of death.

This is the enjoyment of death.The extraction of pleasure from destruction. One may be tempted to crudely frame this as Nietzschean. Is it not Nietzschean to enjoy the destruction, identify with the power symbolized by the bomb, and shake off any moral voice that would say 'no, don't write that' and instead act? No. It is not Nietzschean, that is the liberalization of violence - 'oh, but all destruction contains in it creation.' No. There is no power in this gesture, no growth, no grasping at an outside that would challenge one to learn and overcome one's self and one's world, only the succumbing to an appeal to an existent order of power, an imaginary audience of projected fantasies, and its impotent defenses against insecurity. Submitting to an established power unecessarily and cruely adding insult to injury is not Nietzschean.

It's a little bit of salt in the wound; but remember salt in the wound of the other  - like salting the earth (Carthage?), or how video-gamers get 'salty' and trash talk - is about cuasing pain in others and preventing healing and re-growth, while salt in your own wound functions to do the opposite; to disinfect and encourage healing. Salt in the other's wound is 'I already beat you, now I'll spit in your face too.' 

This is called 'overkill.' We see and use this term in our everyday life, but it has a technical application.

In Thirst for Annihilation, Nick Land Writes

“The most profound word to emerge from the military history of recent times is 'overkill'...Superficially it is irrelevant whether one is killed by a slingshot or by a stupendous quantity of high-explosive, napalm, and white phosphorous, and in this sense overkill is merely an economic term signifying an unnecessary wastage of weaponry. Yet the Vietnam war - in whose scorched soil this word was germinated - was not merely the culmination of a series of military and industrial tendencies leading to the quantification of destructive power on a monetary basis, it was also a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence. Whilst a systematic tendency to overkill meant that ordnance was wasted on the already charred and blasted corpses of the Vietnamese, a subterranean displacement of overkill meant that the demoralized soldiers of America's conscript army were 'wasted' ('blitzed', 'bombed-out') on heroin, marijuana and LSD. 

This intersection implies...that the absolute lack of restraint...in the burning, dismemberment, and general obliteration of life, was the obscure heart of an introjected craving; of a desire that found its echo in the hyperbolic dimension of war. 

Is it not obvious that the hyper-comprehensive annihilation so liberally distributed by the US war-machine throughout south-east Asia became a powerful (if displaced) object of Western envy? Almost everything that has happened in the mass domains of noninstitutional pharmacology, sexuality, and electric music in the wake of this conflict attests strongly to such a longing. What is desired is that one be 'wiped out' . 

After the explicit emergence of an overkill craving, destruction can no longer be referred to any orthodox determination of the death drive (as Nirvana-principle), because death is only the base-line from which an exorbitantantly 'masochistic' demand departs. Death is to the thirst for overkill what survival is to a conventional notion of Thanatos: minimal satiation. Desiring to die, like desiring to breathe, is a hollow affirmation of the inevitable. It is only with overkill that desire distances itself from fate sufficiently to generate an intensive magnitude of excitation.” (p.47-48).

Overkill, argues, Land is not an arbitrary miscalculation or mis-usage of military ordance, it is libidinal yearning to wipe something out and reap enjoyment from the excess. Remember taking that extra shot at the bar when you're already beyond drunk? Is not the hazy thought in that moment 'fuck it, who cares about tomorrow!' This is overkill. The annihilation of the present, and forgoing of a future for the present indulgence in excess. The letters written on a bomb would be cut by Occham's razor. They are excess; wasted time and energy- overkill. Overkill can be ok on a personal level, but when it's done on a national level we may have reason to be concerned.

Though it has been claimed the Israeli army utilizes Deleuze and Guattari in their practices of warefare, in the spirit I am outling here, writing on a bomb can broadly be considered an inversion of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than turning a concept into a brick, or a word into a chemical, Herzog and those who came before him turn a brick (of explosives) into a concept, a cehmical (reaction) into a word.  In this sense it is the ultimate culmination of academia, like a journal editor rejecting your a paper and leaving a snide comment (the paper's already rejected, why bother leaving a comment?). It is the disavowal of the real violence through language games which creates a circuit of perverted enjoyment. In this sense, again, it is not Nietzschean. 

I offer an anaologous situation: In my role as a therapist, when a family comes to me to try and better function together, one common area of work is helping kids and parents focus on what they need from each other in the present, rather than what they want to say to each other about the past. Parents will say things like 'I need Jane to understand why sneaking out of the house to vape with boys was bad and scary for us' and kids will say things like 'I need my parents to believe and asgree with what I believe or I can't live with them.' I tell parents they need to forgoe expecting their child to magically want to do something different as what they are doing - though it may have risks - may feel pretty fun and rewarding to them (the kid). Instead, parents are instructed to set concrete, value and judgment free boundaries - 'we get you want to sneak out and do those things, we get that you probably won't change how you feel, and we want to let you know what we have to do as parents if that happens.' Here are the terms kid, do what you're going to do given the info (this always reminds me the cop and robber dynamic in good cop and robber films like Heat. In these films, the good guy and bad guy have a mutual respect for the role they play, and the don't take it personally. Robbers have to rob, cops have to pursue). Similarly, I tell kids 'You can't change what your parents think in their heads, but you can ask them to respond to you differently in how they act. So if there's a behavior that indicates to you they don't believe you and agree with you, we can work on them having a different response.' Mom and dad can believe sneaking out to vape is bad, they don't have to endorse this, but mabye they can stop morally critiquing their child's character, and instead stick to enforcing the boundaries. Usually kids and parents start to talk about what they need from one another, and they change how they act with eachother to reflect those needs. The 'problem' behaviors don't always go away, but how the aftermath is handled often does, and this helps families function and survive together (if there's not a life in immediate danger, it's not the job of the therapist to judge what is or isn't good for kids and families, just help them reconcile their goals and co-exist, assuming that is what they want from therapy. If kids want to emancipate, or families want to send their kids away, I send them somewhere else - that is not my place to decide!).

Anyways, I don't endorse violence in anyway, and I don't like war, but I am a bit of cynic and find it hard to imagine a world without war. What I do get interested in  is how nations, political actors, and the media try and fit a war into a narrative with a hero and a villain. 

Again, when I say these following things I am not endorsing them, just imagining how these postmodern, 'capitalist realism' 'PR types' think about framing a war in the age of TV.

From a purely PR perspective, I think a war that is impersonal - or at least framed that way - has better 'optics,' but once you start making it personal, the optics start to decline, and you get a glimpse that despite there being very strong and real material / economic factors to a war, there is also perhaps a personal dimension at play as well. That is, you can't be the hero of the narrative and utilize overkill too. If you want to maintain the hero illusion to the other, you need to be humble; you need to show no enjoyment in the act of destruction, even if it is present. If it is present, you need to maturely manage it - not by spitefully writing on a bomb. The fact that humility in the fact of destruction is challenging for some in a war, again, may indicate that there is more personal and emotional reasons for the violence. It arouses a reaction - is this a game to you? Do you take joy in this? 

So, when someone enjoys the excess of violence, there is likely going to be a 'moral' or emotional reaction to that, and it will likely not be good for your cause. 

It is also likely not good for your soul.