Ms. Calendar: I teach computer science at the local high school. Giles: A profession that hardly lends itself to the casting of bones. Ms. Calendar: Wrong...you think the realm of the mystical is limited to ancient texts and relics? That bad old science made the magic go away?...The divine exists in cyberspace same as out here. Giles: Are you a witch? Ms. Calendar: I don't have that kinda power. 'Technopagan' is the term. [Giles lets out a chuckle] Ms. Calendar: There are more of us than you think.
There are indeed more of them than you think. Swarms, even...
Or so goes the conversation in Buffy the Vampire Slayer S1E8 'I,Robot...You, Jane" between Giles, the bespectacled British scholar who lives in his library-office surrounded by ancient tomes, and Ms. Calendar, the completely 90s-on-brand, witty, cutting, dark, angular, computer science professor.
And what might these two be talking about? The demon Moloch, of course.
The episode begins in 1418 with Christian (presumably) Monks trapping Moloch in a tome through a binding ritual. In classic campy 90s specialfx fashion, we watch as Moloch's body is literally transformed into text on a page, text that if read aloud will release the demon back into physical form. Flash forward 579 years to 1997 and the Moloch-bound-book has ended up in Giles library where one of his students scans it into his online, digital database, a scanning process - being as it is a form of (machine) reading - that releases Moloch into not physical, but cyberspace.
From here, Moloch infects the internet, or 'the net' as it is referred to, and, in addition to crashing the global economy, disrupts the libidinal one too; he poses as 'Malcom Black' who seduces others into doing his bidding - breaking into the Calax Research and Development (CDR [reminiscent vaguely of CCRU]) labs to have a robot body built. However, despite taking physical form as a robot, not unlike the incident in 1418, Moloch is defeated through a binding ritual - he is disconnected from the internet and pushed into an electrical box where he explodes. Instead of being transformed into words in a book, he is transformed into energy in a surge box, a signal to open an information flow, a diagram.
Here, it is clear I, Robot...You, Jane demonstrates the core thrust of the CCRU. Magic and tech, the occult and the cyber, the ancient and the present, mesh. Going forward brings us back to the old ones. Magic is 'primitive' tech. Everything meshes. Distinctions breakdown. Feedback gets going. Signification - written language - no longer represents or symbolizes, it induces, functionalizes. Asignifying diagrammatics - words that act as - not like as D and G remind us - chemical agents, molecules, particles, etc. Command prompts as spells. Abracadabra is information creation; Hebrew for 'as I speak, so I create.' Hyperstition - fictions make themselves real. For Marx, all that was solid melted into air. For magic-tech, all that is ethereal (signification) meltdowns into solid (physical).
But don't take my word for it...
Giles: I still prefer a good book.
Fritz: The printed page is obsolete. Information isn't bound up anymore. It's an entity. The only reality is virtual. If you're not jacked in, you're not alive.
Ms. Calendar: Thank you, Fritz, for making us all sound like crazy
people...Fritz comes on a little strong, but he does have a point. You know, for the last two years more e-mail was sent than regular mail.
Giles: Oh...
Ms. Calendar: More digitized information went across phone lines than conversation.
Giles: That is a fact that I regard with genuine horror.
Information isn't bound up anymore. Genuine horror, indeed.
This does not stop him from being a demon linked to Land, however, as the popular blogger Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex shows in writing a long reflection on Moloch and the demon's relation to Nick Land's work. It is not my interest here to summarize or analyze the excellent text, but I will say this - Alexander, for better or for worse, equates Land's Gnon with Moloch after pointing out that others have argued Moloch symbolizes - as far as poetry is concerned - Capitalism and its tempting, outside, incentive forces.
So, at the risk of sounding foolishly reductionist, perhaps Moloch was all that the CCRU was ever working towards...
Regardless, one wonders what the aptly named Ms. 'Calendar' (whose extension of her computer science to the analysis of bones brings to mind the archaeologically minded DC Barker and his geotraumatic adventures) and Giles would discuss now, in 2020. We will never know. All that is for certain is that demons don't die, they go cyber. They go viral. They go world dominating. As the tagline to the terrible past-gone-future slasher film Jason X goes, 'evil gets an upgrade.'
The old wizard Zare of the East poured over his tomes as he always did before resting for the night.
Yellowed pages of grimoires long since forgotten by the common folk - those who worked with their hands - crinkled softly as softer hands ran over them.
Gentle muttering seemed to meet up and depart with the ambivalent flicker of candle light caught in the breeze of the tower's high window.
It'd been years. Decades. Nearly a century. Who knew anymore.
The old wizard had prolonged his life precisely by refusing to live it. Holed up in his tower, surrounded by his books, so many bricks constituting a wall. A wall that blocked out the outside. Knowledge always staves off the outside, keeps things tightly in their places.
The wizard knew all the secrets - the secrets of the pages, that is. The secrets of saying 'no' to the outside, to the world.
'The potato grows best in such and such a dirt, with such and such water, etc.' said the farmer.
But Zare, despite his never having been a farmer, knew much better - 'that is not what the book says.'
'This kills the man' said the physician.
'But that is not what my books say' said the wizard.
'Time is an arrow that can't be restrung' said the material man.
'But the book, it says otherwise, and I have scoured through their lines from left to right - not unlike an arrow in that sense - my whole life, so surely I and my books know better. Surely because of this, I understand the outside.'
And so he went on arguing, waiting to find the right word inside his tower to finally paint the right picture of the outside.
Meanwhile, the potatoes grew and the farmers fed the masses. The physicians healed the wounds. The hunters learned from their bows.
The wizard, he grew old. By now 300 or so years had passed and the wizard, so drunk on his own presence, believed, if given the appropriate opportunity, could argue death out of taking his life.
Death reminded him kindly that nature does not argue.
1:
I like to explore coincidences. I believe the connections between seemingly accidental occurrences say something important and can be understood 'scientifically.' Here scientific can be understood a few ways.
It can be rationalist. As Guattari points out in some lecture somewhere, Freud believed all things, including coincidences - which Mark Fisher points out in his book The Weird and the Eerie are part of what Freud called the 'uncanny' - could be traced back to purely rational causes and effects within a mechanistic world. As Guattari puts it, for Freud even the irrational is just the rational waiting to be uncovered.
It can be transcendental. In his book on Synchronicity, Jung attempts to 'scientifically' research uncanny coincidences, claiming - and this is roughly speaking as here is not the place to get into Jung - that coincidences are resonances between instantiations of deep historical archetypes. For Jung, the rational is just the irrational waiting to be explored.
It can be hyperstitional. A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses (or, when one arrives at a certain point of time, one looks back and sees the distinction between the two was never that hard, never 'really' there...).
It can also be semiotic, which I believe synthesizes the Freudian rationalist and Jungian transcendent approach with the Landian CCRU approach. Language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that still makes things happen - a kind of functional fiction - does not need to map onto any concrete objects or reality in order to fall into meaningful patterns. There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives, etc. Within limited options, trends catch on, certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material, etc. Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real.
2:
One such set of semiotic coincidences occurs via the assemblage known as The Spice Girls, the British pop band of the late 90s.
Consider the lyrics of their hit Stop off the 1997 album Spiceworld.
When I first listened to the song with my girlfriend I made the joke that the Spice Girls were merely covering the Pink Floyd song Stop off 1982 album The Wall.
This is obviously not true as the only similarities between the 3 minute and 33 second song - yes, 3:33 as seen int he above video, I am not making this up - and the 30 second Floyd track which is 3rd from last on the album is its title, Stop.
However, while listening to the song, I noticed that not only does the song share a name with a Pink Floyd song, but it mentions two other Pink Floyd songs not only in the lyrics but in the same sentence -'Hey you, always on the run.' Hey You, slow opiate ballad off The Wall, and On The Run, intense modular synth loop-collage off The Dark Side of the Moon.
These coincidences could be easily overlooked if not for another layer: the Spice Girls movie, Spice World (1997), contains several cameos from American celebrities such as Meatloaf and Elvis Costello, but also British musicians and celebrities such as Elton John, Roger Moore, and Bob Geldof. It is the last name here that interests us - Bob Geldof played Pink in the film adaption of Pink Floyd's the Wall.
Bob as an unhinged Pink (or MFW I start connecting all the dots between Spice Girls and Pink Floyd)
Again, this could be overlooked, but within the film the Spice Girls are excited to run into Bob, and it is implied Bob and the girls have some sort of friendship.
To sum so far - the Spice Girls include references to two songs off The Wall and one song off The Dark Side of the Moon in a song on the album that shares a name and release date with the movie where the girls run into Bob Geldof, i.e., Pink.
Similarly, UK News Outlet The Daily Mail wrote a short piece on Spice Girl Mel wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt. The shirt, as the images in the article show, is adorned with a popular graphic design from The Wall.
The subtitle of the blog here - The Geri Years Revisited - warrants attention as well. This is a nod to the split(s) that occurred to Pink Floyd throughout the years. The early years saw the band centered around Syd Barett who wrote the majority of the tunes. Then David Gilmoure replaced Barett making Waters as the main writer. Later, Waters would take over the band and eventually have a falling out leading to two Pink Floyds touring at the same time, one lead by Gilmoure one by Waters (syzygic Floyds) . 'The Waters Years' then refers to specific albums towards the end of Pink Floyd's career as a complete band, albums with a specific sound and message - Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and the Final Cut. As one Guardian article on Pink Floyd notes, the Spice Girls and Pink Floyd share some similarities, specifically around this Geri/Waters years:
"OK, so the subject of The Spice Girls On Trial (Five) is a different kind of deal, but maybe there is some common ground: internal bickering (Geri's defection mirrors Waters'), reconciliation and a comeback (even if after only five minutes). Something else, too: it's very hard to dislike the Spice Girls."
Coincidences? Perhaps.
Let's go further still.
The production company that produced and helped write the single Stop also produced Geri's - the Roger Water's of the spice girls - debut solo album, Schizophonic. We should pause over this name. Not only is the album notably associated with schizophrenia, the 'diagnosis' of accelerationism, what Syd Barrett induced in himself through psychedelics, but it's also a concept - the separation of sound from its source thus creating an uncanny effect - Mark Fisher discusses twice in The Weird and the Eerie, the book we mentioned earlier in relation to Freud's uncanny. That's right folks, we've just come full circle. Though Geri most likely used the term to reference her split (schiz = split or cut) from the Spice Girls and her attempt to forge a new sound (phonics), the double meaning and the coincidence can't be ignored.
A final interesting coincidence. According to multiple sources (1 and 2), in the 90s The Spice Girls were hard-line Thatcherites. Thatcher is a fun link here because it gives us three directions to go in.: Nick Land's post-CCRU accelerationist conceptualizations are often accused of being Thatcherite or Reaganite in nature, Fisher, what I consider Land's friendly antithesis, was adamantly critical of Thatcher, while Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, basically an extension of The Wall, is centered on the Falkland War and polemically refers to Thatcher as 'Maggie' throughout the album. Fisher, Land, Spice Girls, Pink Floyd - the whole gang's here.
3:
One could argue that these similarities are merely the result of overlapping populations and identities - British musicians or theorists interested in music (CCRU-Kode9/Jungle connection, AUDINT, etc.) coexisting at a certain time, in a certain political climate, etc. This is both very much to the point and also far too naive. Yes, there's a 'geist,' yes bodies are dispersed across time that act as nodes for channeling outside forces, but why these specific resonances?
I will end without answering this question but instead doing a bit of what Freud cautioned against, and which he accused Jung of - wild analysis.
This, after all, the basic plot of the Spice Girls film, Spiceworld. The film, in a very meta and self-aware fashion very fit for the late 90s, centers on the girls who must expose their record exec's evil exploitative plot in order to reclaim their art and reunify as a band. That is, the movie plays on the fact that The Spice Girls are a pop sensation likely engineered by a record company to manipulate the masses. In this way it hides in plain sight.
This is what leads me to claim that The Spice Girls were a simulation of what British marketing execs believed the British general population believed the British marketing execs believed about the British gen pop. Or, in other less convoluted words, the subjective reflexive game theory of the marketing exec imaging what the consumer thinks of him (the exec) thinking of the consumer.
Ultimately this is not to say we shouldn't enjoy the Spice Girls. There are a number of songs I unironically listen to - 2 Become 1, for example. This is rather to say that when one goes looking, coincidences interlock and create something interesting and previously unheard of. So, listen to the Spice Girls and see where it gets you.
This is an excerpt of a chapter of my upcoming E-Book CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism, a Love Story). The book connects, reduces, and clarifies many of my blog posts here into a coherent, dark, comical hyperstitional exploration of how flows emerging from the CCRU have infected the mainstream culture without us knowing it. This particular excerpt can be read with two other blog posts in mind - The Ballad of Kevin Spacey (Space(y)-Time Hyperstition) where I show how Netflix Original House of Cards and Kevin Spacey make eerie fictions become real, and Lemurian TV War (there's a war on for your time) which is my continuation of the CCRU's appendix TV Demonism, a text that highlights the presence of deep, dark, occultist state control and its effects on and in the media.
Nick Land’s Crypto
Netflix Brand
The story goes like this: a little-known Californian company
named Netflix is founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Its
service is simple – rent DVDs to people around America. In 5 years it has 600
thousand members. 3 years later, over 4 million. 2 years later in 2007 it
introduces streaming alongside DVD
renting. Within the decade it spreads across the world and introduces a
streaming only plan. 2 Years later in 2012 it makes another huge move from
renting and streaming others content
to coproducingits own content with another company which culminates in the first
‘Netflix Original,’ Lilyhammer. 1
year later Netflix is making its own
content completely in house, the first pure Netflix Original House of Cards.
If we consider the major events in Netflix’s history – the
founding of the company for renting DVDs, the global spread of the company and
its shift to streaming, its first coproduced original content, and its first
wholly original content - we see that the major changes occur in a 13 year
period between 1997 and 2010, a 2 year period between 2010 and 2012, and
finally a 1 year period between 2012 and 2013. Things pick up speed from 13 –
an unlucky and occult number - to 2 – a twinning number -to 1, all culminating in a political drama
that blends reality and fiction at an alarming rate.
This makes perfect sense as it is but makes even more perfect sense when we consider
the following: Hasting studied computer science, Randolph studied geology, both
were rich entrepreneurs. Could one imagine a more accelerationist resonance
than computer technology interfacing with an understanding of global territory
all within a Californian backdrop? Could one name a better combination for
cultural world domination than West Coast technoscientific global investors? I
think not.
But Hasting and Randolph don’t get all the credit. They’re
merely meat-bags channeling an impersonal vector of capitalism that froths
beneath the surface of Netflix. That is, due to advancements in technology
resulting in changes in media distribution and consumption and how these
advancements and changes benefit people’s economic and time preferences, people
go from primarily renting DVDS to streaming content online in their homes (a
sign of what Guattari would call Integrated World Capitalism’s tendency to
miniaturize its machines as to be internalized by the consumer). Netflix simply
rides the wave, appropriates the forces, and in drafting off these forces, cuts
away its dead weight and tightens its feedback systems; it decentralizes,
dematerializes, deterritorializes.
No more physical DVDs; no more time and money invested in
coordinating bodies to ship and handle DVDs. In fact, Netflix even does away
with the need for an other altogether–
no more simply sharing others’ content, or cooperating with others to produce
content, etc. Like the self-sufficient and auto productive monstrosity of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Netflix
produces and distributes itself in digital bits, incorporeal fragments,
throughout the air. It makes itself the ether, it builds itself into the fabric
of our shared world and the subjectivities produced therein.
If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s an instance of
letting ‘the process,’ with all its spatial-territorial variables, determine
what sticks and what goes, a method that does away with as much mediation, and
human agency as possible. That is, this is all a lot of words to say Netflix is
accelerationist. A banality, but one we need for what is to come.
Introduction
Between Robin Mackay drunk Tweeting, Reza returning to Twitter, and Peter Wolfendale doing whatever it is he does (here Wolf talks about himself, Reza, and neorats), the internet has been buzzing with a revitalized discussion of the libidinal materialists vs. neorationalists divide.
Ok. There probably wasn't really a resurgence of this 'debate,' but I am interested in using these semi-recent Twittersphere happenings to bring up a few strange connections that have been on my mind for a while:
1 - That one time Peter Wolfendale ambushed Nick Land in one of his own New Center for Research and Practice seminars and debated him for 40 minutes.
2 - The strange and sudden disappearance of a website I swear I visited called 'How to argue Nick Land'
Pete suggests we might have to presuppose some philosophical assumptions which Nick challenges by valuing the ability for one to protect one's sovereignty and independence over philosophical coherence. Nick then reminds Pete that patchwork doesn't want 'rational success' it wants 'several experiments many of which will fail.'
Pete thinks Nick's call to fragmentation and local, spatial agreement as opposed to universal globalist imposition is a "Nietzschean position" that posits something along the lines of 'the only ought one ought to have is to have less oughts' (which is not the case, here Peter can't think past his own epistemological model of arguing and convincing others) which Nick responds to by pointing out that Pete seems to want libertarianism without the libertarianism (a soft categorical error).
A notable exchange that summarizes the debate:
Pete: "whenever you appeal to Darwinism as just a brute normative given from which political philosophy will start, you're admitting you don't have an argument"
Nick: "I think that's right because an argument implies agreement and we've given up on agreement...I reject the whole notion of the naturalistic fallacy. It's a occidental philosophical illusion"
When one watches the interchange one cannot help but laugh. Not because Peter isn't smart or interesting. He is (though I find him kind of irritating, I do admit to having his book in my Amazon cart) and Nick cordially thanks him for his contributions. No, one laughs because Peter speaks rapidly, appealing to rigorous philosophical concepts and arguments, speech and appeals that seem to be responding to - not unlike what D and G mention in a quote we cover later - Peter's own internal idea, his own fantasy of Land, more than Land himself. The tone and context seems to indicate that Peter thinks Land is going to buckle under Peter's intellectual weight; that Land, forced into compliance by the mechanisms of logic, will scurry to recant his obviously wrong statements or argue back. Rather, Land listens and basically retorts that he doesn't care. Peter appears to grow more and more frustrated, distraught, unhinged - 'how could my facts and logic have had no sway?' He cannot handle that he has been pontificating into a void. The rationalist undoes himself.
Considering we're on the Twitter plane of consistency and expression, let's take a moment to link this to three related memes;
Land's response by the end of the whole thing (headphone-mic and all).
Wolfendale thinks hes going to dunk on Land with his superior rational argumentation, Land, bored and channeling Deleuze's Nietzschean retort to his hecklers, retorts 'Yes, and?'
Disapearing Websites and Arguing into the Void
This gets us to 2.
The story goes like this: one night I'm doing my usual Googling of Nick Land and amidst all the weird stuff I stumbled upon, the strangest was a Yahoo Answers style web page entitled 'How to Argue Nick Land.' The webpage, primitive and sparse in design, had a strange url, and had me worried I was going to receive a virus if I clicked in the wrong area. The content consisted of one poorly phrased question - 'How do you argue Nick Land, his ideas seem to not be open to discussion?' - posted by a user followed by a string of user comments (hence Yahoo answers) that covered the usual cool, warm, lukewarm, and hot takes on Nick Land.
I remember finding the website very strange. Who would obtain a domain for a website centered on one question? Who made these user accounts for such a small, strange website? What would incentive someone to even use such a website with such a small network? etc. What is stranger is a month later when I went to revisit the website it had disappeared completely from the internet. Often one can at least find the url, click it, and get a 404 error. Nothing. I question if I did not simply hallucinate the whole thing in a sleep deprived, caffeine charged state.
Besides how consistent this strange event is with the digital nature of the CCRU, I bring this up to emphasize the effect Land has on others, and the difference between Landian (anti)philosophy and other philosophies - argument.
Nick says 'we've given up on argument.' This Landian discourse is of course reminiscent of my favorite and oft used quote of Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy:
“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable.."
Everyone loves to argue with Nick, from Pete in the New Center seminar, to Reza on and off over the last decade on the internet. Traditional philosophy is stuck in the trap of debate, of arguing. But, as seen with Pete, what happens when the argument, no matter how well thought out, has no bearing, no meaning to the other? Rationality has no sway over the void. Rationality is obsolete. The argument loses all effect, all impact. This does not sit well with those who wish to argue, however, and we get the universal unconscious wish to know 'how to argue Nick Land,' a universal unconscious wish which, it seems, manifests itself as a digital ghost.
"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick’s first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea:
'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'
(The decade ends in 7 days and I find myself occupied by intrusive reflective tendencies. The following amount to something between a blood stain and shrapnel pulled from the wound)
1: Picture this: my partner and I are browsing Disney+. She puts on 'Out of the Box,' the 1998-2004 children's show. For those who have not seen the show, the premise is simple - adults help children arrange simple cardboard boxes into a house-like structure and upon entering the structure it is discovered that the inside is playfully furnished and whimsically decorated in a way that does not correspond with the aesthetic or physical size of the outside, a transformation that is aided by the imagination of course (the motif of magic as in the magicians hat or comedy like the clown car - the internal is bigger than the external). With this gesture Outside the Box simultaneously seats itself in both a raw realism and a phantasmagorical realm.
Elsewhere I wrote about similar 90s children's shows and their secret philosophical aspects. Here it would be tempting to do the same by bringing up Kant in relation to the synthesis of both real and fantasy and inside / outside via imagination, a dual synthesis which seems embodied not only in the show's premise but also its name (i.e. 'thinking outside of the box' makes explicit that thought is always with its limits; to think 'outside' the box means to reject the typical way of doing something for a way that stretches the limits of thought). But as tempting as it is we will only mention it here as a tease before moving onto to something else...
2: Something else: The adults in Outside the Box seem not only to hold a space for the children that is warm, welcoming and conducive to emotional and cognitive learning, but also provide a feeling of being seen and heard that validates a child's deep seated needs - an experience I long for. That is, while watching I couldn't help but morosely think to myself 'I wish my father could've been like this' which instantly reminded me of a recent experience - I am walking in the city with my partner. A father and his son are walking nearby. He stops his son and takes a selfie with him. The two laugh joyously. I feel a strange pang of something cut through my cold veneer for but a moment and I turn to my partner - 'It must be nice to have a dad.'
I remember this and then snap back to the here-and-now, back to Outside the Box. I watch and think 'this is a child's wish for a wonderful home with a wonderful mother and father, but here I am just waiting for the film reel to melt and the monster to climb through the hole in the screen.'
Above: 'grindhouse' (horror genre) film burn effect; Below: repressed Kantian monster (thing in IT self) breaches the representation / real divide - the hyperreal - the hyperhorror
3:19Horr90rs: When I watch Out of the Box I am waiting for the fantasy to melt away and for the underlying trauma of the real to expose itself. I am waiting for the horror.
Shows like Out of the Box resonate with other shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. The latter ran from 1968 to 2001 and, as far as I am concerned, set the standard for children's learning programming.
Also in the 90s, specifically on their second album Life is Peachy (1996), Korn - who all did copious amounts of meth in the 90s - releases the song Mr. Rogers that perfectly encapsulates this repressed horror latent in the child's fantasy realm.
Jonathan Davis (who on the debut album sings about his father raping him), alternating between raging yells, creeping squawks, and haunting drones, sings
"Fred, you told me everybody was my neighbor
They took advantage of me, you let them take their turns hitting me
I wish I would have never watched you
You really made my childhood a failure
What a fucking neighbor
I hate you
Be my neighbor
This fucking hatred I feel
This fucking pain that I feel
My childhood is gone"
The terror of discovering your parents - the ones who are supposed to to be close to you - are estranged from you, the pain of trusting strangers, being mistreated by them, the penetration of the horrific real into the child's fantasy of the well meaning, warm, learning community of like-minded stranger (the liberal utopia?) - the melting of the fantasy home-family movie as the monster crawls through the hole in the film - are all captured here not only by the lyrics but also the sonic structure of the song with its droning melodic introduction interrupted by seemingly out of place low tuned staccato slams followed by eerie guitar riffs and staticy phasored noises.
It is at this point I am reminded of Mark Fisher's approach to music and hauntology, Xenogothic's recent talk of his history of adoption and his previous talk of writing about 90s Nu Metal, but also Nick Land's text 'A Dirty Joke:'
"...the sacred substance amphetamine...After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it [Nick referring to himself in a completely dehumanized way] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane...On one occasion...a car being driven by the sister of its thing (the ruin). It was night, on a motorway. The journey took several hours. During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had followed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile 'writing' practices - it still pretended to be 'getting somewhere' and was buoyant with ardent purpose...It was accompanied to the early hours by a repetitive refrain 'from next door' - a mediocre but plausible rock song whose insistent lyric circled around the words: "Going to hell." ... In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied, the quality seemingly above average, the themes tending to the morbid. "This is a cool radio station," it said to its sister. "The radio isn't on," its sister replied, concerned. Vauung learnt that the ruin's unconscious contained an entire pop industry...Nothing more was said about it. Why upset your family?"
I think of this text because in its entirety it captures and induces in me a deep, unrelenting, inarticulate sadness. Not a sadness that is a mourning or a wishing for change, but a complete renunciatory sadness that borders on eroticism. A coming to grips with the raped world. A let down. Though originally published somewhere between 2005 and 2007, it appears as the last text in Fanged Noumena which plays perfectly into this let down feeling in that Fanged Noumena is a trip that continually picks up speed as it moves from Land's rather tame early academic texts to his full blown strange and schizoid diagrammatic rants; its a mania and escalates into increasing psychosis until the mania hits the roof, the meth high dies, and the crash sets in.
2019 is a crash.
2020...?
(My energy drink is wearing off so I am trailing out...)
Thanks Giving is Cancelled This Year
The story goes like this: you've either found some time between the turkey, stuffing and other fixings to check Twitter and you've run into the 'I am going to Pwn/school/dunk on my family politically this thanksgiving' narrative or you were personally participating in it and posting about it on Twitter for the first group to see.
Let's take a look at this narrative.
Here's a Tweet from the ACLU, a 'nonpartisan legal organization,' that lists some 'favorite thanksgiving conversation starters' which end up being strangely partisan and potentially divisive and provocative topics that, depending on your family and its age and class composition, will likely start a tense argument if not a full blown fight.
For the record, I don't personally disagree with the topics raised in the ACLU tweet (using a person's preferred pronouns, not firing people for being part of the LGBQTA+, etc.). Let's not get bogged down in the political particulars, i.e. the content. What interests us is the expression or form. Simply put, these are topics that one would pick to arouse feelings in others (whether in favor or not), i.e., these are topics that are likely to lead to a miserable time with your family.
Luckily I don't have to say much more to argue this point - that people are trying to start an argument - because John Cook (who has ties to 'Gawker') has already done the work for me in his article How To Pick a Fight With Your Relatives This Thanksgiving. In what may be an attempt to be funny - and if it is an attempt it falls flat - this article describes how one can 'pick a target' and 'engage with the enemy' in front of an audience until the target gets so angry they leave the table, the ultimate point being 'to use your retrograde family to feel better about yourself.' The old adage (derived from Freud's analysis of Jokes) that humor contains a truth that is difficult for the subject to experience and therefore must be distorted and defended is clearly at play here as the sadism underlying the attempt to educate our backwards elders comes to the forefront. Of course this piece could be satire (though the sadistic wish would seem to still ring true) so lets look at a milder article - Amy McArthy's You’re Morally Obligated to Call Out Your Racist Relatives at Thanksgiving. The narrative is not new and the article can be summed so briefly it sounds like an Onion article 'some people say thanks giving dinner is not a good place to get political but it really is a good place to get political because bad things happen and if you don't get political at thanks giving dinner then you're being a bystander and therefore you're bad too.' We've heard it a thousand times so we will spend no more time here... To top it all off, let's head over to Jacobin where Cook's sadism and McArthy's moralism synthesize into one monolithic abomination - Jane Mcalavey's How to Organize Your Friends and Family on Thanksgiving which seems to try and give people an idea of how to effectively sway your family to your political position without incurring resistance (as opposed to Cook and McArthy whose method will lead to defensive argument without a political results). The article goes on to lay out a very systematic way to absolutely dominate and control a conversation to produce your preferred results - or what the author calls 'the science and art of successful conversation.' The real creepy thing is not trying to convince someone to believe something you believe, but the way the author describes how you can frame and structure a conversation - often ignoring or invalidating the other person's actual feelings in the process - as to corner them into being forced to comply or agree. In a strange plot twist, here Jacobin, bulwark of the popular left, comes full-circle with institutions it likely critiques such as law enforcement who use certain verbal tactics to take control of situations, and sexual abusers who demoralize their victims with certain rhetoric.
What we're getting at, and as some of these articles point out, the thanks giving dinner table is a microcosm for the larger political reality. This is true but not in the way that these people mean. The fantasy between these texts is that argumentation, whether overt and explicit or covert and discrete, will (to be/is, i.e. ontological claim) lead to some sort of meaningful politics, and that this should (should, i.e. moral claim) be engaged in. As I've said elsewhere (Cognition Don't Cut It No More)
"Deleuze and Guattari remind us that classical philosophy and democracy, both of which are bound up with naturalist-representational and rational-debate / intelligible discussion...are both bastard abominations of the Greeks:
'The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that...Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." ...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends?... In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses....'
(What is Philosophy? pg. 28-29)."
So if arguments at thanksgiving is democracy reduced into a micro model (democratic politics is of course the premiere molar, Oedipal discourse so its no surprise we see it miniaturized into the actual family) then - to evoke (or invoke) Mark Fisher - what, if any, is the alternative?
Patchwork and Psychic Reality
Here's an answer that Fisher sadly did not arrive at but Nick Land did - patchwork. Recently in a private communication with Nick Land I had asked a question that about Capitalism's tendency to autoselect itself and if other modes were simply obsolete and therefore not selected. Land reminded me that 'Patchwork is about getting away from all this,' that is, I was unintentionally slipped back into a false democratic problematization of things - it's not about Capitalism vs. Socialism/Communism, it's about Capitalism and Communism but, as Land says in an interview somewhere (I forget), 'Just don't involve me, do that stuff away from me.'
tl;dr metaphor: instead of everyone getting on the same page and writing the same book, give everyone a different page to write on and fill the world with different books
For another example that gets at the important dynamic at play beneath the antipolitics: patients often come into my office for their psychoanalytic sessions complaining essentially that other people have thoughts and ideas about them that they can't change - 'So and so makes me so mad! He thinks I am being selfish because I won't bring what's his face to the airport. Me? Selfish? I do so much for...' Sometimes the madness turns to sadness, other times the reverse. My response is not like my humanist colleagues who join the patient in defending against their fear of being selfish and their wish to possess omnipotent control of their self image through others' eyes. No, where my colleagues say 'how foolish for him to think you selfish, you do a lot, he must not see that,' I say 'Maybe you are selfish but you shouldn't feel bad about it and shouldn't care that So and So thinks you're selfish.' The former is concerned with negation and justification (either so and so shouldn't think that or the patient shouldn't think that), the latter is Nietzschean and affirmative (like when a heckler calls Deleuze gay and he says 'yes and so?).
tl;dr: 'I'm really not selfish because my therapist thinks so, so I am actually good after all' (fantasy of redemption, projecting the bad, idealizing the good, all of which keeps the person clinging to the lost object and therefore mired in melancholia) VS. 'I am selfish but why should I care about others' opinions on my selfishness, and why should I morally critique myself for wanting to not waste my time bringing so and so to the airport (accepting the reality of innate drives and instincts, integrating the bad and good aspects of self, owning the projection, giving up the lost object and escaping melancholia).
Ultimately, one of the significant 'lessons' of psychoanalysis is that what we call 'objective reality' is the meeting of two or more subjects' 'psychic reality,' that is, what people want, believe, and feel (what Lacan might call desire - let's not get too technical) come into contact and create an irreducible differential between two sets of 'psychic facts' that cannot be reduced to one another or an appeal to some third party (real Outsideness as opposed 'alterity in advance').
That is, why do we care so much about abstract oughts that compel us to change others' beliefs? What good does it do us and them? To come back to Fisher's 'is there an alternative [to useless democractic debate at the table, or closer to what Fisher might mean, political deadlock and Capitalist overlording]' - everyone's wondering why depression seems so commonplace but it seems obvious to me that people let politicians and the journalists who themselves are simply mouthpieces for these politicians get in the way of simply enjoying the small things in life such as eating and spending time with loved ones. Enjoy your meal with your loved ones. Instead of making yourself miserable or chasing the brief high of PWNING your fucking grandad (which comes with the miserable crash afterwards - the reality that defeating a relative in an argument wont reverse global warming) forget about that stuff and do whats in your power as long as it links up to what you really want.
Semi-Wholesome Postscript
This year I didn't see anyone I didn't want to. I stayed at home with my loved one and we cooked together. I texted a few friends and let them know I was thankful for them. This recharges me, helps me feel good. And tomorrow I'll go back to work where I try and help people with certain challenges (who want to be helped - not forcing things) learn about themselves so they can feel better. This is how you effectively 'change' the world (if that's what you're after), not by inducing miserable arguments...
Descartes, Kant, Freud, and Tinnitus
Tinnitus is one of the most interesting natural phenomenon to occur to the body not simply because there are competing medical explanations for the condition (which is rare it seems for common conditions) but because such a little condition packs so much far reaching, conceptually synthesizing punch.
That is, its existence as an experienced phenomenon perfectly demonstrates
the synthetic Kantian mind
the psychoanalytic symptom
the postcartesian (and probably therefore neokantian or Freudian) discussion of mind-body relations
(and for these reasons, it is therefore also the official Accelerationist condition which we will cover later...).
As anyone effected knows, and as the various hypotheses indicate, tinnitus is in part caused by exposure to excessively loud or prolonged noises. This pattern of sound volume raises the 'noise floor' or the threshold for sound (your ears attempt to adapt to the new loud norm of sound level) in your body which can lead to ringing and thus external silence worsens tinnitus in that it brings attention to the ringing. But this is a tautological and idealist explanation that leaves us wondering 'but what causes the ringing and can we root the cause in a meaningful materialism?'
The theory I have read is that the small hairs in the inner ear that vibrate in order to help send and perceive 'ambient room sound' are destroyed - i.e. the capacity to hear certain frequencies is limited or negated - and thus the mind attempts to fill in the frequency gaps with anything at all over nothing. What the mind in conjunction with the damage body (or how the damaged body translates into the 'mind' - think phantom limb syndrome which is similar but not exact...) comes up with is the most basic unit of sound, a simple singular pitch (to test electronic musical equipment musical technicians will generate a Sine Wave or a steady pitch to test the harmonic response and range of an item; when one tunes an instrument one plays a simple A440hz to tune to. This is similar to how one attempts to use a neutral or clear stand or holding vessel if one wishes to showcase a piece of art. In other words, to emphasize the nature of object external variables necessary to the object are limited).
Tl;dr: the pitch or ringing in tinnitus is a place holder in the gap of presence and absence, or the attempt to symbolize absence.
For both a reason why I might have tinnitus (making and listening to this kind of music) and a glimpse into what tinnitus itself sounds like (screeching analogue feedback pitches from oscillators), see the above (the reason is itself a mode of what it causes - a feedback loop, a hypearreal horror).
The EP is aptly named 'Time's Arrow' consistent with accelerationism, the theory of time. Dominick Fernow barks 'How does the body still work after all this time...' and elweshere slowly enunciates 'now the smoke goes back into the cigarette...'
This relates to Kant nicely. The mind as conceptualized by Kantians is productive, synthetic, positive yet limited and unable to conceptualize a pure negative. You can't hear nothing, you can hear the lack of, or space created in contradistinction to louder sounds, and when you listen closely to what you think is a 'lack' of sound (silence) you notice quieter, ambient sounds. Thus, your mind cannot conceptualize a gap in sound and uses it productive and synthetic creative qualities to produce a basic pitch (as I have said elsewhere, unless you are schizophrenic, the mind already-always actively and passively synthesizes sense experience into a somewhat sensible narrative). Thus I am tempted to say this pitch of tinnitus is a basic Noumenal experience of Outsideness. The tinnitus pitch is a mind produced experience at its limit in relation to a damaged body.
This explication moves tinnitus from the flaccid medical category to the psychological and philosophical domain - tinnitus is a body-mental (dual aspect monism) event concerned with perception of presence in the wake of absence. For Descartes the mind and body are separate (dualism). For Freud, especially his early work like his Scientific Project, the mind is produced as a side effect or residue of the body's naturally occurring vital processes (internal drives, instincts, how the phenotype unfolds, etc. - Freud cycles between vulgar dualism and dual-aspect monism...). That is, for Freud and many other psychoanalysts physical or bodily (somatic) processes transform into or are translated into mental processes. This is how psychoanalysts arrive at the idea of a symptom - very vulgarly put, there has been a negation (project, disavow, repress, something so that it becomes unconscious) of an internal drive or instinct, thought or feeling, which has expressed itself in a positive way as a symptom (i.e. a symptom is a positive sign for a negative that has occurred in a developmental process). Likewise, ringing occurs as a positive sound in the gap of a negative that has resulted from the destruction (negation resulting in demonstration of a mental limit) of a bodily function.
Tinnitus and Deterritorialization (accelerate your tinnitus)
Rust Cohle from season 1 of True Detective suffers from synethesia, a properly Kantian condition.
He tastes colors, sees sounds, etc. For this condition, the senses are mixed or associated with one another without natural limits. This is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, part of what Kant refers to as a 'categorical' or 'transcendental' error. Bion said its meaningless to say 'psychoanalysis isn't scientific enough,' you need to say 'psychoanalysis isn't psychoanalytic enough.' Similarly, you wouldn't say 'the oval is not yellow enough' you would say its not round enough. A triangle 'does not lack enough salt and therefore it is not a triangle' but rather 'a triangle needs a certain amount of angles,' etc. Certain objects have qualities that pertain them and qualities that it would make no sense to apply to them.
And this is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari challenge (turning Kant in on himself) with their concept of deterritorialization and the BwO (which is just accelerationism). In A Thousand Plateaus they write
"Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly…Where psychoanalysis says, ‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet."
But accelerate too fast and you'll go mad...
When I first got tinnitus I panicked and thought my life was over. I thought I would never hear again. I was lost. The fact that I was faced with a new reality in which I had done irreversible damage to my body and would have to adjust to the consequences shocked and frightened me. But what was worse than this was that, like Cohle, my senses began to bleed into one another because of, unlike Cohle, the hearing loss and ringing of tinnitus. I felt disconnected from the outside human world and felt like I was not in my own body, my sight seemed to have worsened, my taste amplified, and my tendency to use my hands to feel things had increased tenfold. Significantly damaging one sense drastically effected how my other senses worked in giving me sense of integration. Insulated in a dulled, muffled tomb, I felt as if I was melting into the world, becoming one with the impersonal Outside (despite feeling disconnected with the human outside). Looking back I believe the shock coupled with having a completely new experience of myself without a relied upon sense gave me a strange look at myself from someone else's perspective (dissociation - and it did not help that the doctors prescribed me amphetamines that I took with coffee...)
What helped me keep from going crazy (besides my loved ones and accepting that time is irreversible and entropy inevitable [a nice accelerationist lesson]) was the conceptualization of tinnitus as an additional productive force in my body's arsenal - 'fuck it, instead of ignoring the ringing I am going to focus on it and try to make it worse.' I began noticing micro-tonal fluctuations in the pitches, and how there was sometimes a subtle rhythm. I soon began to enjoy my pitches and would notice when they would change and why. Now I realize that despite still wishing I had taken better care of my ears, I carry with me something not all do, an extra component. Not only do I simply passively hear sound, but I actively produce sound only I can hear. It is real, related to the physical body, but only ever able to be experienced by me.
So accelerate your tinnitus and enjoy your symptom....
1:Word Association
Let's play a word association game.
I say Nietzsche. You say what?
For most its 'God is dead' and all that other highschool cottage industry run of the mill run of the mouth run amok slop you'd expect from a new age atheist (secular protestant) wearing a fedora. Or perhaps its the silly diatribes - he was a fascist, a megalomaniac, an idiot - that you would expect from, well, a new wave theist (secular protestant) wearing a fedora.
Say you're not a new age atheist (secular protestant) or new wave theist (secular protestant). I say Nietzsche. You say...? Hopefully things like "How to Philosophize with a Hammer" and "Why I Am So Clever?" Ok. I know what you're thinking. I've rigged the game here. These are the things I want to talk about anyways. Yes. This is because I am so clever.
2:Why I Am So Clever
I've been at this blog for about 7 months and am beginning to reflect on my work and its limited reception (lowest views on a piece 25, highest 755). I think to myself the following questions:
'why should people read my blog?
'what does it offer?'
'what makes it stick out in the marketplace of ideas?'
I narcissistically answer myself
'becausemy work shows the power of the mind's faculty for synthesis. I pull together disparate and heterogeneous elements that at a glance appear not to relate, not to be connected, and I connect them with my own internal narrative organizational power.'
I continue to reflect and then I get to thinking this is philosophizing with a hammer. Instead of reacting to something, I'm interested in creating something (what Felix Guattari in an interview compares to using semiotic material in the same way one uses Legos, what he terms an assemblage of enunciation). This is why I am so clever. I hammer things together that don't seem to fit in an attempt to make something new, even if it is a Frankensteinian monster (and is not horror that which ruptures us from our dogmatic slumber and forces us into the real?). But is this connecting of seemingly disparate elements the work of a hammer or some other tool?
3:How to Philosophize with Duct Tape or The Use and Abuse of Guattari-Deleuze
(Bigger section here means 3 subparts).
3a:Hammer Time
But first - when philosophizing how exactly do you use the hammer? And on what does one use it on? Nietzsche writes
"To pose questions here with a hammer for once, and maybe to hear in reply that well-known hollow tone which tells of bloated innards—how delightful for one who has ears even behind his ears—for me the old psychologist and pied piper, in whose presence precisely what would like to stay quiet has to speak up...eternal idols that are touched here with the hammer as with a tuning fork..."
The psychologist bangs the the 'ole thing around to see what its really made of. To see what it says when its poked and prodded (and here we see the early roots of psychoanalysis...Freud's ruthless interrogative method and it's softer cousin Teddy Reik's 'listening with the third ear'). The hammer is the perfect tool for this aesthetic act - if the object is weak the hammer smashes through its defenses and then builds them back up so that it may be strong. If the object is already strong the hammer recoils from the surface of the strike and the object rings out its true tone, that which is immutable, apodictic. The first is dismantling values and voices that aren't your own (neurosis) but you think are your own (superego), the second is getting to the core of your real values and experiences in life (appropriate ego strength in relation to the instincts and transvaluation of values, health).
3b:Assemblage Theory
That's the early Freudian psychoanalytic method. Later comes Bion, a British Kantian who grew up in India, with his theories of knowledge and internal mental synthesis. For Bion, unlike Freud, the analyst does not smash through defenses, he understands them and tries to connect the often disconnected dots that patients bring to the session. In short, the Bionian analyst makes sense out of (alpha function) nonsense (beta elements) so that the patient can use that sense (alpha elements) to further explore their nonsense (non psychotic sense of self in the world).
In Deleuze and Guattari's terms this feedback cycle of sense and nonsense would be called 'de- and re-territorialization' while the subject or ego that composes this process or is composed of this process would be called 'an assemblage of eunciation' or 'desiring machine' (this is not to conflate the terms but to move quickly and not get stuck in details better left to the real philosophers as opposed to me, a mere psycho-social-analyst). Similarly, for Deleuze and Guattari - who were polemically referred to as 'old Kantians' -the concept of synthesis holds an important position in their larger assemblage theory.
So Assemblage, Desiring Machine, and Synthesis are all connected. Let's carelessly rush through these concepts.
An assemblage is a grouping together or collection of heterogeneous components or, in other words, pulling together things that don't seem to go together and seeing how they go together and what they produce. It is, like a desiring machine, a meeting place between organic and inorganic milieus that produces a new effect. It is not reducable to its parts and in fact creates new properties whose emergence is wholly dependent on the particular parts assembled or synthesized.
Active synthesis is an adjustment to Kant's passive synthesis. The object world imprints its experiences onto us and as an organism with mental faculties and certain senses we put the pieces together (beta, alpha, and alpha function mentioned above). As I put it when explaining this to students - have you ever tried to actively not make sense out of all the stuff that comes your way? Probably not. We're always already making sense (unless we're psychotic).
In addition to passive and active synthesis there is connective, conjunctive, and disjunctive synthesis.
connective = if...,then
conjunctive = and
disjunctive = or
Let's put these concepts to work in relation to a person and its biological, psychological, and social existence. Connective synthesis is the most primal and basic act of investing libido (attention, energy, whatever) in an object. If I invest then I get something I need to survive or feel good in return - 'If I suck at the breast then I will get satiated.' Conjunctive is left over energy - 'if I suck at the breast then I will be satiated, and then, in addition to the breast, I can use my left over energy to explore or play with a toy (or, I can suck on the breast and also want to be like daddy).' Disjunctive is 'If I suck at the breast then I will be satiated, and in addition to the breast I can also want to explore or play with a toy, or I could go to sleep, or I could play with my toes, or I...'
Furthermore, disjunctive synthesis, put generally based on my reading of D and G, is also a relationship wherein a ‘not’ or a ‘lack’ is a connection through inclusive disjunction as opposed to a ‘not-being’ or non-existent, that is, a negation or exclusive disjunction. The difference between 'A' and the constant ‘is-not-like A’ is a very existent thought, feeling, or behavior which requires a preexistent ‘A is like A’ which is secondarily negated. In other words, it’s not a negative or a gap, it’s a positive connection through two different objects being brought together.
3c:Duct Tape
The tl;dr here is that I am so clever because I apply D and G's assemblage theory - which is thought to be abstract, silly jargon, etc. - to direct, shared cultural experiences in a meaningful way that goes beyond itself. In other words, my work which I listed above - Smash Mouth, PBS Kids, Tim Heidecker, French Language, OJ Simpson, Accelerationism, etc. - is a collection of heterogeneous components (beta elements) which I've first passively experienced (passive synthesis) and then actively pulled together through theoretical thinking and enjoyment (active synthesis / desire / alpha function) into meaningful connections (alpha elements) the effects or outcome of which amount to more than the sum of their parts (generative feedback as in a diagram or hyperstition). This is not necessarily the work of a hammer - or just the hammer - but of duct tape. I smash things together that don't belong and then heavily apply the duct tape to keep 'em together.
an duct tape assemblage someone should probably alert the authorities about...
The accepted but somewhat cringe quip about duct tape is that it's the modern fix-all tool, so it is somewhat fitting that a tough fabric (interwoven heterogeneous micro particles) based adhesive that is often used to build or repair things would (sort of but not really) replace the hammer (duct tape is certainly the millennial hammer).
In fact, the very nature of duct tape is itself an assemblage. Consider the following:
"In the 1940s, the tale goes, the US military asked Johnson & Johnson to come up with 'a waterproof, strong cloth based tape that could keep moisture out of ammunition cases.' The tape J&J produced was (allegedly) called “duck tape,” either because its cloth base was cotton duck (a plain-weave fabric, lighter than canvas) or because it repelled water (as in 'off a duck’s back'). 'Duck tape,' by this account, became 'duct tape' only during the postwar building boom, when its chief use became taping heating ducts" (Tale of the Tape).
The military commissions what is essentially a health care company composed of a family of businessmen to make a new kind of adhesive. Different industries with different aims and their flows of money connect over different needs and desires and produce a shared physical object. The general public then utilizes this object in a way that is different than the way the first two parties intended. The function of the object drifts and along with its function the signs and system of signs tied to the function and object (in Marxian terms, use value of material becomes commidity fetish). War ends, needs change, and Duck turns into Duct.
Conclusion
So why read my blog?
Because I make theory (fictions) real in interesting ways (and have totally unneeded conclusion sections) and, in addition to offering a model that I believe is more condusive to any other model for understanding others and the Outside, this very way of thinking is important to living in an enjoyable and healthy way while also actively creating a world that one would want to live in.
Abstract: In this text I examine the recent film Joker through a psychoanalytic perspective. The text uses theoretical and clinical thinking and begins by addressing the form of the film - its genre, its intended viewer, its place in culture - before moving onto the content, that is, the stuff that's actually in the film.The primary points argued are:
Ontological / Sexual difference not simple difference: The film is in large about the irreducible ontological difference that is evoked through deep psychoanalytic encounters with regressed individuals and how these primitive states translate into later developmental states.
Preoedipal not oedipal: Part of this means that Joker or Arthur Fleck is at a preoedipal stage of development, and therefore closer to a schizophrenic than anything else, but appears as if he was having an oedipal conflict.
Apolitical not Political: The consequence of this position is that Joker/Fleck is not a political subject as political thought and action can only meaningfully take place, as far as intent and conceptualization is concerned, on oedipal levels of development. Rather, Joker's inarticulate apolitical rage is appropriated by populists with their own political aims.
Index: 1: Introduction or Bowling for Gotham - What Genre Are You / What Viewer Am I 2: Form - Imaginary Other, Assemblage of Enunciation, Counter/Transference, and Object Relations / Sexual Difference and Ontological Gap / Language and Affect 3: Content - A Schizo Out For A Walk...(One Or Several Theories) / Emotionally Dysregulated Adolescents 4: Conclusion or Watchmen, De Niro, and Orange "OJ The Juice" is the New Black Simpson
