D g r m t x - Installment 0.1 of 101
1 (or 3), or heavy light of god
1 - line ( | ) or...|______3 lines - [A b s t r k t f y i t ]
|_____ 1 = | (or one line) - line = cut or segment
o-n-e
c-u-t
| 1 cordons off 0. As soon as 1 arrives on the spot, limits (e)merge.
1 = cas - tra - ted
| | |
3 3 3 ]- 3 groups of 1 or 3 '3's'
The holy fucking trinity. The divine phallus. | | | | | | | | | | | |
GOD
|
| |
_____
3
God's light, like 1, pollutes.
God's light is heavy, dense. Sucks the air of one's lungs.
Temperature - differentials - induced vacuum pulling a (in) to b (out).
God is colonial - in metaphor and the real. No wonders the Europeans followed his line of (f) light.
- - - - - - - -
D g r m t x - Installment 0.2 of 101
sit in it like an infant in piss.
what an inefficient affair, the body. what
did we ever need this thing for anyhow?
a mind pushes a body outwards; immune system pushes puss out of a reddened and puffing abscess. drain the
wound.
the body, a car accident of material rounded off and pulled together by
the forces of displaced erosion.
-d y x j r g w v i s t r I s w q r
h -
with
a swift and simple displacement, words and letters turn into alphabet soup,
sliding off the smooth surface of the tongue into the continually and
persistently out of reach corners of the room.
can’t out my eye
on it; just put of the corner of my finger.
cut to refrigerator hum. staring
too long into a screen, accidentally confined to a digital space, text in a word
doc, porous and an indefinite distance too deep into last week’s newspapers
clippings.
the ball
drops, its 1999 again. Y2K, squashed like a bug. now on a faster train track. new and improved, but retro, vintage, and a throwback.
post-Y2K landscape - the era of gun control legislation
as understood through the architectural dimensions of an elementary school
cafeteria.
tomorrow’s music video is today’s closed circuit TV loop of a crime.
The future is a melted soup interspersed with glitched-out cultural ice cubes. An
IMBD for snuff films.
0.3 / 101
Caught in a dissociative loop. Treading water but never quite swimming.
Clockwork, no need for sundials in a sundown town.
Alaska aesthetic creep in deep in the bones cold at home alone.
0.4 / 101
0.3 / 101
Caught in a dissociative loop. Treading water but never quite swimming.
Clockwork, no need for sundials in a sundown town.
Alaska aesthetic creep in deep in the bones cold at home alone.
0.4 / 101
(Oc)Cul(t)
De Sac Ghosts
Cartography of associations. Nothing
more, nothing less. Take it or leave it.
General question (the answer of which is as partial as the inquiry
broad): Where does the notion of the ghost come from?
Association 1: From a vulgar critical-Marxist
perspective, the ghost – spirit, Geist, etc. - is an abstraction which owes
itself to naive philosophical idealism. Considering this, but not accepting it
as totality, we look at how a recent television show inverted the material /
immaterial (spirit) distinction through depicting material conditions as
immaterial symbolism referring back to the very material it idealized
(deterritorialization, or turning materialism on its head), and how this
process of idealization is often employed in ‘real life’ ‘ghost.’
Ghost (Dream) in the Machine (TV/Code)
green
contour, white trim - manicured lawns demarcate fading limits, pushing up
against gravel streaked pits, textures dissipate into blue-beige building block
structure, artificially repurposed by dump truck armada (cash register sound),
land sits nicely compacted, slightly raised, beyond swampland…
Reduce this image into a miniature plastic hexagon, highly
detailed, digitalized. Repeat. Ctrl+V. Blue-beige structure and plot of land. Blue-beige
structure and plot of lan… Submit this to a redorange backdrop suspiciously
cardboard.
…
Masterfully evoking the hauntological aesthetics of neglected and
forgotten structures of the past which were so well explored by Mark Fisher, the
Netflix original show The OA takes place in an upper middleclass
suburban condominium complex which has been left incompletely constructed due
to a shortage of funding. This setting parallels a theme of the show, forms
in-between death such as angels and spirits, and worlds in-between death such
as heaven and hell.
The housing project has been left in limbo much like the
main character, a spirit traveling in between worlds in search of her true self
/ body. The former (housing project) is a metaphor for the incomplete journey
of the latter (wayward soul). This is a reversal of the lived reality of many
into a fantasy that appears as uplifting and transcendent for few, the idealism
over materialism ideology rightly criticized by Marx and Marxists.
In The OA, and TV in general, the material or real, in this
case the neighborhood project, is often metaphorical or metonymical (real
material becomes symbolic or stands in for a mere part of a bigger picture) for
an otherworldly realm (the limbo of the migrating angelic spirit) which, in ‘TV
land,’ is considered real. Simplified, in TV-Land something pretty (angel story) is
symbolized by something ugly (failed real estate). In Reality-Land, it is
precisely the opposite. The ugly ‘real’ (housing – real estate – material
substantiation of abstract economic flows) is always tied up neatly with a ‘symbolic’
bow (We rationalize, there must be a good reason for this or that economic
collapse. There must be a world beyond with the answer…). Outside of TV we are
all somewhat aware of the fact that the migrating angelic spirit is a metaphor
for the actual immanent material. The half-constructed neighborhood is very
real while the angel in-between worlds is a symbolic narration used to make
sense of the feeling of living in the very real half-constructed neighborhood (this dynamic appears in another way in the show: The main
character is a woman who went missing as a girl many years prior and was
presumed to be dead until her surprising and seemingly random return to the community
as an adult. In this sense, she has returned from the dead, she is a ghost,
mourned and lost, now returned).
In this sense, The OA (film and TV in general) functions
perfectly like the ‘mechanisms’ of the mind as described by Freud and later
psychoanalytic theorists. The overwhelming or painful ‘real,’ to borrow Lacan’s
terminology without committing to his system, is roughly translated into
symbolic and imaginary terms. The symbolic and imaginary terms are then
projected back onto the skeletal structure or fabric of the ‘real’ whereupon
they ‘overcode’ the real and produce a sort of layered, reflexive construction (overcoded
mixture of fantasy and ‘object’ impression) which is then taken to be real
almost in and of itself, and
thus used as a point of reference by which to judge other objects
experienced alongside the faux thing in itself. Cybernetic
drift, or a sort of augmented Marxist exchange value where material utility is
replaced by a displaced value that is only valuable in relation to other values
(also, see Foucault’s ideas on ‘losing the representation’ in The Order of Things, M. Klein’s concept
of projective identification, or Deleuze and Guattari’s process of coding and
overcoding).
This whole process is less complex than it seems. To be clear, in The
OA what is real and immanent (financial and housing crisis) is turned
into fantasy (symbolic back drop for angelic / spiritual story), and then to
the viewer, the fantasy (symbolic back drop of angelic / spiritual story) in
TV-Land is used to describe what is real and immanent in Real-Land (real life
financial and housing crisis). A=B in X strata; B=A in Y strata (and keep
in mind A=B and B=A don’t equate). X and Y strata interact at point Z, the
viewer-TV unit (Videodrome). Ultimately, the TV-viewer unit is tasked with coding and
decoding
(fitting that D and G’s talk of coding relies on Stuart Hall, media theorist) the messages going in both directions (A=B in
X; B=A in Y; X and Y meet at Z), what a contemporary psychoanalyst might refer
to as the twin vectors of the Freudian after-effect or deferred action [n a c h t r ä g l i c h k e i t ] (see
Dahl, Laplanche, Green, or Žižek).
In this way, The OA has taken tragedy, the traumatizing
real as exemplified by an economic collapse which weighs heavily on the
proletariat (the most recent mid 2000s collapse in America, the anticipatory
dread of another one to come soon), and reversed its implications, displacing
it into a fantasy which is then used as a symbolic tool to convey a
transcendent message as primary, slotting the material reality into a secondary
position. In a sentence, the communication is, ‘Don’t worry about the
economy, that’s just a metaphor on TV for our transcendent soul.’ The real
story becomes but a backdrop for something more interesting. Materialism is
neglected and transformed into a naïve idealism (or Zizek’s ‘western buddhism -‘do
not concern yourself with this worldly mess of half-built housing complexes,
it’s all just Maya. Don’t let that worldly filth distract you lest you miss out
on your very own piece of transcendence’). This is the magic of Freud’s concept
of disavowal (and we will see how disavowal relates to psychosis, melancholia,
etc. soon…). We see this in The OA. As the viewer (and here I must admit
I thoroughly enjoyed the show!) we find ourselves identifying with the
spirit-angel’s quest to find her true self amidst the secondary worldly housing
complex precisely while we as the viewer shell out absurd amounts of money to
rent less than adequate housing in which we sit and watch our TV’s!
Late Capitalism, Hauntology, and Melancholia
(Oc)Cul(t) De Sac Refrain: colored contour melt to blank - chemo lawns fade to limits, collapsing
to grey texture change, dissipation hues concreteize, compact fortress-swamp, but
now add open space and heat, compress jpg., bit reduced, repeal, submit this to
a redorange (hemorrhage) backdrop suspiciously cardboard, repeat…
…
A friend of mine lives in a condominium complex much like the one
in The OA. Relatively high-end buildings, paved roads, the works,
dissolve into property lots with only foundations, lots with no houses, roads
that lead only into...[]. Belarus, the Russian ‘Ghost’ town rings in one’s ears.
Lingering morosely, there exists an overwhelming feeling of loss, but, applying
Fisher, its a loss of something that never happened. Grainy image: young man stands in
foundation of house, lost in thought of the structure that would’ve stood there
if not for the drying up of the vital flow of money.
Snap back to the here and now: It all feels very unfair – but a
little familiar. Roads are supposed to go places, at least that’s what we tell
the children. Houses supposed to house. Like seeing an amputee for the first
time as a child, just the basement foundation is unsettling (this word is
particularly etymologically appropriate for explaining this feeling –
"unsettling" arouses the desire to move or act in order to expunge an
intolerable feeling [projective identification]; arouses the desire to not
stand still; no settlement; etc.). This beckons the virtual (v i r t u a l – r i
t u a l v – ritual-v): The house occupies space horizontally as indicated by
the boundaries of the foundation, while also projecting a semblance of the
virtual being of the building into the vertical dimension as well (Stand in the
foundation and look up. Deny the sky its importance and instead focus on the
limits of the foundation’s parameter which is indicative of where the walls
would proceed towards the roof and sky). The virtual occupies both positions. 1
and 0. Phallus and crevice. Žižek’s metaphorical musing of the virtual as the
sewage pipes between the walls of your house – virtual in that they are vital
to the operation of the building, yet disavowed,
not spoken of, not recognized as existing. As he mentions, we only think about
these pipes when the toilet clogs. They are (materially, physically) and are
not (mentally, experientially out of the picture) at the same time.
Schrodinger’s building. Schrodinger’s
flow of piss and shit.
The virtual and actual elements that are displaced in the
incompleteness of a neighborhood complex are a small manifest indication, a
symptom perhaps (we draw closer to melancholia), of a larger system’s complex
maneuverings. One is never sure about the details. About the funds drying up.
What series of events led to the decision to stop building here? Who made the
decision? How did they reach it? Why? To answer the question, one quite
literally must engage in economic analysis (psycho-economical-analysis. Was
this not precisely part of the positive project of schizoanalysis?)
Or
paranoia. Get sad or go crazy.
Freud lays out melancholia as having to do with the folk-biology
economics of internal ‘energy’ and a lost object of investment. As
psychoanalysis evolved, it became less concerned with discovering what happened
in the primal scene (Did the child really lose this or that 'love object,’ did
he/she/they really see the parents in an act of primal lust?), and more
concerned with what meaning is assigned retroactively (here, I’m harkening back
to Dahl and Žižek, even Laplanche, on the twin vectors of deferred
action/aftereffect) to the recollections co-produced between analyst and
analysand in the therapy room regarding the idea of the so-called lost
object/primal scene. The object is already always lost. There is no real
recovery of it. Deleuze and Guattari take this idea of an always already lost
object as evidence precisely of the fact that there is no ‘whole object’ of
which the ‘partial object’ is broken off from (in this move, they value the
materialism of multiplicity over the idealism of the lost total/whole object of
which we only experience fragments of).
Lost and fragmented objects float up for me now: Walking the roads
and lots of my friend’s complex arouses memories of my own experience of the
incomplete neighborhood, fragments of childhood experiences of ghosts and
houses. The sun bearing down, too hot. Wash of pigments. Pixelated.
Rematerializing the Ghost
Clarification: The house (haunting site) becomes the ghost. Form
and expression are relative. The medium collapses into the message, vice versa,
etc. It is not the ghost that haunts the house, traveling between walls, but
rather the ghost of the house that never was that haunts what is, haunts us. That
is, an absence of walls through which a ghost could pass is in fact the thing
that brings about the ghastliest ghost. It is what becomes the new ghost. 21stcenturyhauntology.
The ghost of a wall, the ghost of a house. The ghost stories of the future will
be a brute return of the oppressed – repressed – the past ghost story,
that of the ghost town. One utters ‘Everyone got up and moved one day, mining
(stone) was no longer viable, deforestation (wood) left us with nothing. The
workers went elsewhere.’
My friend’s housing complex and The OA housing
complex are similar in that they are both haunted.
Does not the ghost always come with its complimentary structure
(haunting site)? The ghost in the machine. The stage or theater in the phantom
of the opera, all of Europe and the specter that haunts it, the haunted house
in most tales or horror films, the ghost ship (a floating house), the ghost
town (a collection of houses), so on and so on. Though, breaking this pattern,
there are the cases of haunted mining shafts, caves, and forests. In these
cases, instead of the house (the most common haunted structure I would argue),
it is the raw material of the house, wood (forest) and stone (cave and mine),
that is haunted in its natural form ( It appears to me that haunted nature
seems to be more associated with the East, such as Aokigahara, and the wide
spread ideas of spirits of nature, while the west, whether originally like this
considering the destruction of the true western native people could have
changed western cultural values significantly,
seems to be more concerned with haunted industrial and familial
structures like buildings). Essence or spirit and material are fused –
preindustrial.
It is fitting that each of these materials is a basic industrial
material which corresponds to a particular location in the house that is often
depicted as being most haunted, the basement (stone) [ One theory of ghosts is that they are not
spirits, but natural phenomenon seen so frequently in basements due to the
magnetic fields created by certain stones grinding together. This seems to be a
naïve physicalist approach that discredits the psychological aspects of
imagining a ghost. Fisher revives this theory in an interesting way by
explicating the Shining with a nonreductive version of it] and the attic
(wood), locations in the house which then further correspond metaphorically to
parts of the mind – mind as attic, unconscious as basement (or see Climbing Up the Walls by Radiohead).
The house is a
plane that accompanies the ghost. It gives the ghost its shape. It allows one
to be trapped as much as it allows one the freedom to escape being trapped.
A ghost is always accompanied by a structure (its haunting site)
because, just like in the case of The OA where the real housing crisis was inverted into a symbolic backdrop,
we have inverted our experience. With the ghost story, we have symbolized the
real and realized the symbolic. We have made transcendental that which is most
immanent. The house as a material structure comes first. It is real. The ghost
comes second. It is symbolic or imaginary, but none the less still real (the
affect aroused by a ‘ghost,’ even if completely imaginary, must still be
considered immanent and material, precisely the incorporeal aspect of a body that
Deleuze and Guattari speak of, or the cybernetic-theoryfictio-hyperstition of
Fisher and the CCRU). Believe it and it will believe in you.
Drift from theory to experience without justification: A friend of mine (who will remain
nameless as he has only recently come to process these events healthily through
finishing a fruitful analysis with a colleague), when he was young, and
following marital problems between his parents, moved with his family to an large
old house in the woods. The house felt wrong – wrong doesn’t cut it.
‘Paranormal’ activity began shortly after moving in. The father would hear
children’s voices, things had been rearranged in the attic between one day and
the next, etc. The basement was dark. You were being watched. Everything always
seemed dim, too cold or too hot. Everyone angry all the time. It was all work
and no play (the essence of capitalism).
It didn’t take much. The father was convinced the house was
haunted. The previous owner abandoned the house and apparently had some
connections to criminal groups. It was theorized that perhaps there were
murders committed in the house. Despite my friend’s lack of direct paranormal
experiences, and the serious doubts the family had about the whole thing, the
feeling of being haunted infected the whole family.
My friend and his family lived there less than a year, each day walking
on eggshells. The slightest misstep setting off the bomb that was the family
unit (Nuclear family). As a child, my friend believed the house to be haunted.
Now he sees something different:
The mother and children (my friend included) wanted
to live there. The father – the one who would go on to experience the
paranormal activity –did not. It makes sense now to assume that the father
harbored resentment and rage at the rest of the family for ‘forcing’ them him live
there. This unaddressed rage was projected into the house in the form of ghosts
(Some
supporting clinical evidence: My friend has an early memory of being a young
boy in the kitchen of his childhood house. The long window-blinds by the large
window were moving which frightened him. He asked his father if it was the wind
moving the blinds. The father sadistically pretended he could not see the
blinds moving, and then surmised that if they were, my friend might be seeing a
ghost. As any child might, my friend became incredibly fearful. The father then
criticized my friend for being foolish. Furthermore, the father had a history
before and after living in this house of blaming ‘ghosts’ for moving items on
him. That is, he would open a drawer –‘I know I left my watch in here. Where is
it? It’s not possible I moved it. I don’t remember moving. I didn’t move it. Well,
there it goes again. The ghost moved the watch on me!’ If the other family
members did not agree with this ‘ghost’ scenario, the father would erupt into
rage, feeling persecuted – ‘what, you think I am crazy? Fuck you.’ The father
had no tolerance for any sort of ‘dystonic’ feeling. This was the father’s
manner of dealing with the intolerable minor frustration that he had possibly
misplaced an item. The intolerable feeling was projected into a ‘ghost’ which
inhabited a structural space, a house. This is consistent with M. Klein’s and
subsequent object relations theorists’ findings regarding projection. There was
no ghost, just an angry father and an absent mother).
The ghosts were then in turn used as evidence to support the
notion of moving out of the house. This is precisely how TV works as
illustrated earlier (again, see Klein’s projective identification, Tausk’s
paper on the influencing machine, and Bion’s paper on bizarre objects). Just as
in The OA where material housing is made symbolic while the symbolic spirit
is made real, the real rage of my family member regarding the house and the
familial dynamics was projected into a ghost, and then used as a reason to be
justified in being enraged and wishing to move out. “Don’t you see now how
right I was about this place!” Paranoid patriarchs stave off melancholic
response through projecting intolerable anger. Simple.
This is not an isolated incident. Look no further than the Oscar
nominated film Beloved. A former black slave who escaped her master is
‘haunted’ by the ghost of the baby daughter she killed in order to ‘save’ from
being taken back into slavery. The ghost haunts the mother’s house, killing her
dog, tearing parts of the house down, terrorizing the family. On a
socio-historical level, the ghost is obviously symbolic of the slavery of
blacks, a past which America will never shake off and in fact continues to
renew and relive. It is mentally and sometimes physically, inescapable for
those involved (Going back further, we can say that America’s first gruesome
crimes were the slaughtering of the Native people of the continent. Fitting
that a common storyline for horror films or stories is the cliché of the ‘old
Indian burial ground’).
On a more individual level,
the ghost is a projection of mother’s rage towards her daughter (be quiet
child, you will give away my position as I am being hunted and I will be found,
you will slow me down in my escape, etc. – child as burden) as well as a projection
of her guilt of acting on her rage / fear. The lost object is a ghost rattling
around in the head, or the attic, or the basement.
These loosely connected ideas are tied tougher well by one of the
most famous haunted houses, the Amityville House. There are countless
documentaries, books, an original film, spawning several sequels, and a remake,
all centered on the events of Amityville. It is supposed to be a ‘true’ case of
a haunting. In the films, the most haunted areas are the attic and the basement
(the basement itself contains a secret room painted red that was a sort of gate
to hell). Perhaps most striking aspect of this film is how some of the scariest
scenes are actually a result of the way the family structure breaks down,
something we also see, of course, in The Shining as well, with its
undertones of an abusive father, and a mother unable to protect her son. One
may witness this in many B level horror films as well, where the ghost often
turns the father into a ‘bad man,’ making dinners tense, and often instilling
the threat of violent destruction at any moment. The father is ‘cured’ through
being murdered or moving out of the haunted house.
This is precisely in line with my thesis here: like TV, the ghost
is a projection of the real, and the real is not actually a stage for the
ghost, but precisely its generating factor.
We should remember that in Freud’s early metapsychology,
melancholia and psychosis are opposing positions. Here, perhaps only in the
subtext, I have shown how – and this is typical, I would argue true, for all
concepts that are opposed –- the two positions share the same unconscious thought processes
and perhaps even ontological-social phenomenon. (The psychotic family member,
the melancholic son, the ghost between. The father, the son, and the holy
spirit).
