Pseudohauntology: How Netflix's Cecil Hotel Docuseries (Freudo)Marxpilled Me

 In my reflections on the Netflix original adaption Hill House and Blye Manor I wrote 

"if a good ghost story has ever demonstrated anything it is that reality is much scarier than any ghost story...the patients staying at the mental ward I work at would stay up late, playing with Ouija boards, claiming they saw or heard ghosts...Meanwhile, their bones were hollowing out, their heart rates dangerously low, their skin torn up by razor blades, their throats eroded from vomiting, etc. Despite my bosses wish to take away the Ouija, I did not intervene. This was an escape for them, and a somewhat healthy one. This did not stop me, however, from quietly thinking 'the real horror is not the ghost, but what these people have been through, what traumas they've been subjected to, and the significance of their mental anguish.'

The real horror is quite mundane..."

This truth is again confirmed in the recent Netflix original docuseries on the Cecil Hotel. 

A smart, talented, young girl goes missing in a hotel with a dark past. Eerie CCTV footage is released of her last moments in an elevator where she appears to be acting strange, out of character.

With such a set up - one that follows all the horror, mind-bending psychological thriller tropes to such an extent that it ends up perfectly mimicking a psychological horror thriller called Dark Water! - its no surprise that internet sleuths begin to uncover a number of bizarre connections - some of which are completely consistent with my own occultist/hyperstitional research in my own piece Canada Connections: Demon Machines - that border on the eerie and absurd (just watch the documentary, I'm not going to get into them here).

And it's no surprise that from this a number of supernatural and conspiratorial theories developed. Was she demonically possessed? Was it a ghost who is responsible for her strange disappearance (or murder, as is it is later discovered)? Or was it not a ghist but a Satan Worshipping Black Metal musician? Is this all part of a government funded psyop? 

It appears there is a good case to be made for each, but as it turns out the answer is both much more mundane and horrifying - and much more immanent: she suffered from Bipolar II, better known as manic depressive syndrome, which can have psychotic-like symptoms during the manic phases, and she was off her meds. 

Wait, wait! Don't stop reading! We don't have to reify or commit to psychiatric or medical models here at all (I sure don't, and I work as a mental health professional!) to extract the point!

Yes, We don't have to buy into psychiatry, nor do we have to pathologize at all, to acknowledge that some people's 'mental states' - for better or for worse, whether right or wrong - do not map as easily onto the outside world as others' might. In fact, you don't even have to believe that meds are good or effective or any other mental health discourse to acknowledge this. What is clear here is that this young girl had an episode where she became disoriented and at odds with the shared world in a way that caused her to make decisions which most would consider more or less dangerous, and which likely lead to her death. 

She wasn't possessed, tormented by a ghost, or - despite the interesting hyperstitional resonances - a pawn in a gov't psyop (well, maybe this last one...). She was immanently unwell in her body. As I have written elsewhere on my own ghost sightings, the ghost was her own projected, unintegrated bodily experiences, and a symptom of our own lack of understanding. 

But what about the hotel's dark past? The famous serial killer known as the Nightstalker had residence in this hell hole! So many people died there! So many people committed despicable acts! etc.! We can't overlook these facts! It must surely point to something other-worldly! 

Yes and no. Mostly no. It's interesting that people's first reaction is to ascribe some sort of supernatural, transcendental evil or spiritual malady to the hotel rather than simply acknowledge that the hotel is in not just any bad part of town, but perhaps the worst part of town in the entire country, and that the hotel had - both in order to survive and to comply with state law - significantly loosened its standards on who could stay in the hotel, and what the hotel could do remove unruly or dangerous residents and guests. 

That is, inhuman(ist) Capitalist greed on the part of the owner (hiding the danger and marketing the place as safe for tourists) and humanist progressive legislation on the part of the state (laws preventing the eviction of unruly, often criminal guests) lead to a collision of naïve, middle and upper-class people and desperate, zero-sum lower class people; a perfect storm of sexualized murder and libidinal torture on a grand scale; hardened 'super predators' (in a non pejorative sense) and hapless prey. 

In short, its not ethereal demonic forces at play in the building and person, but economic and psychological ones. Or rather, the real demonic forces in the world are economic and psychological ones - material bodies and their incorporeal aspects; collective and individual maladies of bodies, not abstract spiritual sicknesses. 

This is where the the paranoid conspiratorial thinking gets it half right. It correctly attributes significance to the building, the structure and the space it occupies and the way it brings varied people together into that shared space. It goes wrong is when it avoids the inhuman forces of harsh reality that create these situations, and displaces any real, meaningful understanding of the girl's death, the hotel, the history of violence into the mystical, paranoid, religious realm thereby - in a strange twist of irony - making the detectives and their methodologies of investigating, critiquing evidence, and following material clues to their end the ones most in touch with the materialist and scientific realities of classes and society. 

In other words, if here's a reductive bullet point to extract from Marx and all the derivatives projects is that we gloss over real material conflicts and instead substitute grand theoretical abstractions. To harken back to my opening statement about the horror of reality and the mental patients - as a therapist I see this glossing over reality in favor of abstract theory everyday on the ward and in my outpatient private practice: people concoct the most interesting fantasies to explain away why these things keep happening to them, why they keep getting themselves in the same situations, and they wonder aloud about the answer when the answer is always so clear, and they make no inclination of wanting an answer from me.

For example, take the vignette I mentioned in my Entry 28 of my psychoanalysis blog: 

Patient: "I keep putting in job applications and not getting calls back - - I bet they.." [patient devolves into a paranoid theory of how the job hirers must be hiring people with money or connections over him, etc.].

Me: "Have you tried calling back?"

Patient: "No, I haven't"

Me: "If you'd like to test your theory that you are being neglected due to not having connections or money, then you might want to try calling back and seeing if you can't get an interview" 

Similarly, later in the session:

"All my friends are successful in [job field]. I'm in the same field and I can't seem to be as successful as them. It must be because [patient devolves into a paranoid theory of how and why these people have achieved success, etc.].  

Me: "Have you tried asking them what makes them successful instead of theorizing to me about it? You have these people as a resource - - they are your friends, they will answer you, why not ask them?"

It's important to note that I have been working with this fellow for 4 years and we have a good rapport which allows me to be this forward, and its time he challenge his own fantasies and do something if he wants more out of his life. It's time to face reality - test your theory, talk to people who aren't just ideas in your head, and face the fact that - not unlike Occham's Razor - it is often the simple mundane reasons not the complex ones that explain why things happen. 

Tl;dr: whether its ghosts and conspiracies around a murder, or not receiving a call back for a job, the truth of reality is painful and mundane. It's much easier to turn to fantasy (see The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan by Samo Tomsic who documents the link between the thought structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism). 

This is why horror set in the realm of realism - what is often Locvecraftian - is so effective. A detective or someone in a similar role (not unlike the cops in the Cecil docuseries) must uncover an ever deepening plot, following a string of grisly clues that leads them deeper into a harsh reality. John Carpenters In the Mouth of Madness - an ode to Lovecraft - follows this trope, along with the video game Call of Cthullhu. 

More generally, it can be seen in films such as Jacob's Ladder, The Shining, or the creepy homeless guy who consumes the Puzzlebox at the end of Hellraiser. Or, in slightly different flavors, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre or House of 1000 Corpses / The Devil's Rejects, or Hostel where the tone of cultural transgression - the naïve city folk or tourists (not unlike the young girl who went to Cecil hotel) overstepping or misunderstanding the country cultural norms - permeates the film and sets the stage for our cast of characters to be punished through slaughter for their thoughtless deeds.  

We this again in its more refined, 'high-culture' art-house form in Ari Aster's recent films Hereditary and Midsommar (the latter of which shares the 'cultural transgression' trope) in which - not unlike The Shining - the most horrific moments of Aster's films are the breakdown in group social dynamics that lead to very real, traumatic violent ruptures in otherwise smooth, trance-like experiences; family or friends act in ways that unsettle us or unground us, distort our common reference points, lead to horrific accidents, or suicides. For Aster, not unlike the point I made above, and at the start, that which is most horrific is that which is most real and also most mundane, that which ruptures our sense of continuity - mental and somatic traumas.

The trauma of the real. 

Paranoia brings manic libidinal energy, but manic libidinal energy needs to be reigned in by scientific method. This is what is attempted - and often failed - with 'scientific socialism' or 'scientific materialism.' It is also, as Tomsic writes in his work, the connection between psychotherapy and social activism: helping people have access to the real in a way that the real informs their collective behaviors.  

Solving Epicurus' Trilemma: An Immanent, Emanating God

I was reading Bill Bryson's 2003 A Short History of Nearly Everything recently. 

He explains early on in the book that to say the 'Big Bang' occurred 'in' space or 'early / prior in time' is a confused statement. Rather, the big bang created space and time, and space expanded as the big bang did, 'filling' it along the way. Unfortunately the book is downstairs in my cold car, and I am upstairs in my warm bed, so I can't quote the book exactly for clarity.

Luckily, another scientific article on the web articulates the same idea:

 "According to modern cosmological theory...the big bang did not occur somewhere in space; it occupied the whole of space. Indeed, it created space...Space is itself infinitely elastic; it is not expanding into anything."

It reminds me of when Nick Land, in some New Center for Research and Practice lecture, reminded his class that 'there is no time in time,' and that to say as much is to contradict Kant and commit a 'transcendental error.' He is referencing the fact that for Kant, space and time are categorical intuitions that without which we could not think or experience anything.

What stuck with me here is that space expanded at the same time this imperceptible singularity event did. The event grew its own space to fill. Self-generated its own sandbox to mess around in. 

Reading this description in Bryson's book trigged a sort of flashback.

It's nearly 9 years ago in my first year of undegrad. My philosophy teacher - a really cool progressive Rabbi who wrote a two volume dissertation on Nietzsche, who first introduced me to Kant by suggesting I read Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics for summer reading, and who would go on to teach me everything from Anselm and Maimonides, to Nietzsche, to Jewish Mysticism etc., - is teaching us the below problem:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

This is known as Epicurus' trilemma. 

It is in part predicated on the problem of free will.

Malevolence and omnipotence can be summed together as omniscience - all knowingness. Epicurus' argument here is 'If God knows someone is going to do something bad, why doesn't he stop it?' So, in other words, how can God be omnipotent and malevolent and still allow bad things. 

So it's a question of 'How can we solve the problem of God knowing of human's evil deeds?'

My answer was that most if not all - including Epicurus' here - understandings of God's omniscience are predicated on the assumption of God knowing in advance the things that occur, and that if we instead assume God knows all things not in advance, but only as they occur in real time, then this trilemma is solved.

That is, God is all knowing - he knows all things the very second they occur - because you cannot know what does not yet exist; you cannot know virtual but unrealized aspects of a process. God knows becomings, and processes of becomings, he does not have advance knowledge of static beings. Like a security guard who watches many videofeeds from many cameras - he knows of things as they occur, but not in advance.

I illustrated this for my professor as a circle emanating outwards. The outer edge of the circle signifies the point at which both the human and God continually gain knowledge at the same time. The significance of the circle is that the area it covers as it expands is equal and infinite. As new becomings continually emerge, so does God's knowledge, in real time. Like ripples on the surface of a lake, emanating outwards. The circle captures unity, and removes temporal linearity, opens up multi-directionality, etc.

Not unlike the modern cosmology of the Big Bang that created its own space while occupying that space with 'substance' at the same time, my circular 'God' is the becomings of the universe manifest in the bodies of the world becoming aware of themselves as they occur in that singular moment. 

"That's kinda like our friend Whitehead's theory of God" my professor cheerfully responded (thus starting my intrigue into Whitehead). 

I've read most of his works and still don't know where this shows up, and I can't remember what he told me years ago, but I believe him.

In this rough sketch of God there are abundant connections to Deleuze and Guattari's Body Without Organs, Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, or Nietzsche's own eternal return of the same, Kabbalah, the CCRU and Accelerationism, etc. which are all recapitulated nicely in Liturgy's theological conceptualizations (she can be found applying the numogram and attending old New Center for Research and Practice lectures). 

I wonder if someone else will - or has already - make these connections...

Anyways, I end with this:

To know everything is not necessarily to know in advance, but to know that immanent, single moment as it unfolds. To the let the immanent and singular know itself. 

Token Humanization: Disney's Foucauldian Hell On Alderaan

Star Wars is not known for its ambiguity, complexity, or three dimensional characters. It's a mystical humanist tale of good and bad, light and dark, etc. 

The bad guys - whether the rather on-the-nose fascist Empire or the cliché corporatist warmongering Droid Trade Federation -  have always been composed of cold, faceless, inhuman copies: Clones, droids, faceless number-for-name identical troops, etc. This is even true for the leaders who are supposed to be unique from the horde! Sure, Vader gets a humanist redemption arc, but the Emporor is essentially faceless, almost formless. 

To this effect, Mark Fisher, responding to the rhetorical question of whether Star Wars 'sold out' by allowing itself to be bought by Disney, framed the film as a shallow, reactionary pastiche that brought nothing new and rehashed the old, while Rick and Morty recently poked fun at how the heroes in Star Wars seem to be able to kill mass amounts of people with little to no feelings, nor any real thought for the consequences of innocents caught in the crossfire. 

Because Star Wars is like the antiquated scientific discussion of the Universe and Entropy - if given enough time, Star Wars will prove these critiques right again (and again, and again...) - Star Wars recently fell into this trap again. 

In Season 2 of the Mandalorian an Imperial pilot takes the moral high ground against a to-be Rebel Alliance / New Republic hero whose innocent family was killed years ago by the Empire. 

"I was on the Death Star...do you know how many millions were killed on those bases as the galaxy cheered?" the pilot seethes, trying to contain his rage. He continues to provoke, she shoots him in the face. The viewer is supposed to be excited, identified with the hero. [1]*

While watching the scene - before going on to see its conclusion of course - I thought 'odd, it is unlike Star Wars to humanize its enemies, and unlike them to incorporate moral ambiguity (except for that very shoddy attempt in Star Wars: The Last Jedi about arms dealers selling to the Resistance the First Order..).' Then he gets shot in the head and it all makes sense again. I realize it's a humanization that is only there to emphasize his ultimate inhumanity; only there to forever result in a satisfying kill for the hero.

This is what I call token humanization. 

We're all familiar with tokenism in media - when something is injected into a book, show, or film out of obligation to moral pressure, or perhaps to clinch a certain audience and boost views, etc. The key aspect of tokenism is that something progressive is featured in an insincere manner. This does not mean that the presentation isn't sincere - no, for Tokenism to work it has to fool you into believing in its utmost sincerity - but rather it means that the motives behind the presentation are insincere. 

On the one hand, this moment of token humanizing the despicable bad guy is a symptom of our postmodern culture and its obsession with psychologism. Everyone needs a backstory, and Disney - the real evil Empire that gobbles up everything it can reach and spits out pastiche after cash-cow pastiche - knows that in 2020 there is some sort of obligation to humanize the bad guy. Or perhaps they realize there is simply a market for it! Disney doesn't believe it, nor is it consistent with Star Wars, but here it is! As quickly as it comes (an attempt to respond to the pressure, the obligation of painting a three dimensional character and a complex world) it vanishes in the barrel-smoke of a blaster pistol (the return to the narrative consistency of the Star Wars world and its corporate masters, Disney).

On the other hand, this token humanization is perhaps indicative of the tumultuous times; indicative of the inability for one side of the conflict to conceptualize the other. Even if it is evil, is it not possible to understand the evilness without encouraging it? Without agreeing with it? The Talmud Scholar Saul Liberman is known to have said 'Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense - that's scholarship!' Could the same not be said for evil - 'Evil is evil, but the history of evil - that's revolutionary!' Probably not, but there's a thought that is difficult to articulate here that is worth pondering...

Regardless, in the end token humanization of the baddies may be even worse than dehumanization of the baddies! What could be more cruel and sadistic than assigning depth and agency to the play thing before taking it away again. Like mad scientists making a frog conscious of itself seconds before its to be dissected by a 5th grade science class. Or, one may recall Foucault's discussion of torture and punishment, and how theologically inspired torturers in the early centuries of civilization fantasized about killing someone and bringing them back to life to kill them again as punishment! Is this not one description of Hell? Leave it to Disney to bring Hell to Earth through through a children's show (TV Demonism anyone?)!

At the end of the day, we're better off with Space Spaghetti Westerns with one dimensional baddies; stupid movies that know their place! Star Wars is not known for its ambiguity, complexity, or three dimensional characters. It's a mystical humanist tale of good and bad, light and dark, etc. And that's OK.

[1]*

See Slavoj Zizek's 1999 article '‘You May!’Slavoj Žižek writes about the Post-Modern Superego'

"It’s as though a neo-Nazi skinhead, pressed to give reasons for his behavior, started to talk like a social worker, sociologist or social psychologist, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood.

‘Post-Modern racism’, the surprising characteristic of which is its insensitivity to reflection – a neo-Nazi skinhead who beats up black people knows what he’s doing, but does it anyway."

Not Genius Humans Writing Genius Inhumans: Descartes, Kant, Vinge, Jameson, Fisher and the Sci-Fi Outside.

"science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable...Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Posthuman domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are" - Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity 1993. 

There is a genre of movie that center on a hyper intelligent, inhuman, or superhuman protagonist. These are not aliens from a distant world, nor even subjects alienated by global capitalism - they are terrestrial aliens; aliens of this world but unlike it. They are unworldly. 

These characters have elevated reflexes, can anticipate and predict others' thoughts and strategize in advance, etc. 

In Limitless (2011) Bradley Cooper takes a designer drug that makes him fast and smart. 

In Lucy (2014) Scar-Jo accidentally takes a designer drug that makes her fast and smart.

In Hitman Agent 47 (2015) Rupert Friend is not taking designer drugs but is himself a designer drug - a designer baby to be precise; a killer genetically engineered and pumped full of drugs and propaganda at birth to make him a android-like murder. His sister, played by Hannah Ware, is like this too - except more smarter.  

In Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) there are two characters; they are not 'android-like'  but are cyborgs or androids themselves; one a bad guy terminator, one techno-modified heroine.*

*[as an aside - perhaps indicative of cultural trends in media: in 2011, the super-inhuman character is a male, in 2014 a woman, in 2015 and 2019 a man and women - the archetype is complexifying...]

All these characters are supposed to be really smart, and the film goes to great lengths to try and convince the viewer these characters are really smart - the thing is these characters keep doing dumb, boring things. To the viewer they behave in mundane, predictable ways. Cooper, Johansen, Friend, Ware, and the terminator and anti-terminator ultimately just shoot people and maneuver slightly more tactically, efficiently than their opponents. 

What this illustrates are the Kantian epistemological and imaginary limits of the human and its attempt to radically think and radically create outside of one's self; the human attempt to create the inhuman; an attempt, and ultimate failure.

In other words, people who aren't themselves inhuman super intelligent beings cannot conceptualize what it is like to be as such. Thus, the end product in these films is a normal person's normal ideas of a nonnormal person's nonnormal ideas. These character's supposed hyper-superior thought and behavior are merely recycled and rearranged milquetoast thought and behavior. 

Descartes, in his iconic Meditations on First Philosophy, writes

"...the visions that come in sleep are like paintings: they must have been made as copies of real things; so at least these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole – must be real and not imaginary. For even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new. If they do succeed in thinking up something completely fictitious and unreal – not remotely like anything ever seen before – at least the colours used in the picture must be real. Similarly, although these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and so on – could be imaginary, there is no denying that certain even simpler and more universal kinds of things are real. These are the elements out of which we make all our mental images of things – the true and also the false ones." 

We can't think or create new categories. These hyper-supreme characters are like Descartes's animals - recycle from old, boring parts. And the psyche has a limited primordial grid or series of categories from which it filters and assembles the outside. 

Jung, pulling from the likes of Descartes and Kant, refers to this as an archetype which he defines as the way an instinct - or an inorganic geological physical force territorialized and cybneretically birthed into a physiological force within a body (not unlike the Golem myth where mud turns into a creature with some magic...); a deep outside trapped as deep inside. - manifests as a primordial image, or narrative structure. As Fisher points out dealing with similar concepts, Outsideness rips gaps in the fabric of the real which are assembled together with fictions. 

In both his first and last book Fisher uses Fredric Jameson to discuss a similar process: science fiction cannot really conceptualize the future - future society, future tech, etc. - as it can't surpass the epistemic wall that cordons off the future in advance; the deep future can only be conceived in and by the tools of the present or near future. To return to the excerpt of Vinge from our introduction, this is because technology develops in nonlinear, unpredictable ways, and because the most interesting high tech stuff is way out there, authors and filmmakers cannot really imagine the future. 

Limits cannot be traversed and represented. Real 'limitless' or machine(ic) thought or behavior would be much smarter than boring gunplay - or much more intense, and extreme in its violence. The future, like the hypersupreme, will either be hyper intelligent, or ultraviolent (see the most recent Predator franchise installment which pits an autistic human against a violent alien predator, and the research that relates autism to the dark triad of personality traits...). A highly cinematic 9mm automatic...but without the Oedipal personal theater cinema...

As mentioned, in Fisher's first text Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (1999)

"Gothic Materialism is interested in the ways in which what would appear ultramodern – the gleaming products of a technically sophisticated capitalism – end up being described in the ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fction: zombies, demons...think of it as the continuation of a nonorganic line that is positively antagonistic to progressive temporality. As Iain Hamilton Grant puts it, 'the Terminator has been there before, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent and fuel the primitives’ fears...'

...the nonorganic line as occupied by Gothic Materialism is to be distinguished both from 'the supernatural' (the supposed province of Horror fction) and 'speculative technology' (the home of Science Fiction). For Gothic Materialism, the sublime still belongs to a human(ist) aesthetics of representation (precisely because it fixes what lies beyond representation as the unrepresentable). Gothic Materialism’s aesthetic theory, as we shall see below, derives not from...Kant..." (pg. 3, 14).

In his last text The Weird and the Eerie (2016), Fisher writes 

"the vampire and the werewolf...these creatures are merely empirically monstrous; their appearance recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it" (pg. 15). 

They are supernatural, not weird. As opposed to the boring supernatural, the weird and eerie is rooted in the fragmented outer limits of the natural (or hypernatural) - the Lovecraftian outside (pg. 16-18, 20-21); an deep unknowable outside that is only glimpsed through the horror of a deep unknowable inside - the Freudian unconscious (which Guattari deems 'marchinic' and schizophrenic in nature) which lies beyond Kantian categories (pg. 22); A Jamesonian "nostalgia for the present" (48-50). 

This genre of movie that centers on a hyper-supreme unworldly character with elevated reflexes, who can anticipate and predict others' thoughts and strategize in advance, etc. - the 'limitless' or limit-surpassing characters fail to really bring in the outside and only suceed in illustrating the limitations of representational imagination and humanist narcissism; the failure of the human to conceptualize the machinic. 

It's not all failures though. Like in science, these failures are also an opportunity to precisely explore a positive project; to explore what a film of such nature would be. What would an exploration of the Outside look and feel like? A wash of intensities? Colors? 

One comes to mind...

Too Woke to Be Cancelled: No Imagination in the Land of Antipsychiatrical-Scientological Pop-Feminist Templexive Miserablism

“So don't sit back, kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked. News at ten, your neighborhood is under attack. Put away the crack before the crack put you away. You need to be there when your baby's old enough to relate. So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out. Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive. And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow. But if the offer is shun, you might as well be walkin' on the sun.” 

– Accelerationist Anthem 'Walkin’ on the Sun' by Smash Mouth

The future is cancelled– and now the past too

What do The Handmaids Tale and Madmen have in common?

They’re both ‘woke’ television programs that feature a powerful woman defying the odds and micropolitically resisting the uberpatriarchy from the inside of a hyper-alpha-male dominated leviathan; one is an ironic-critical reflection of a ‘dystopian’ past, the other a paranoiac-critical look towards a dystopian future - and considering the way nostalgia operates within cultural trends, we can easily imagine one lapsing into the other for eternity, like a TV programming montage fever dream.

This one message between the two shows is as morose as it is commonplace in humanist oriented political rhetoric – the past was really bad, and the future, in its similarity to the past, will be really worse unless we learn from (or stop repeating) the past, and you better start now or you’ll be ‘on the wrong side of history’ (which retroactively runs both ways these days).

Through depressing gestures such as these, the present is reduced to a kind of purgatory suspended between two absolute hells, a gesture which sets the scene for an elevated and manic obsession with the need to act swiftly and immediately as to make up for or prevent an already-always happening (or happened) doom –  climate change, drug epidemics, territorial and populist disputes along neighborhood lines, etc., all that was mentioned in the above Smash Mouth 90s hit. If we don’t act now by eradicating the ‘bad’ then it’s all over (serious Y2K vibes).

Against all the advice of reasonable historians and historiographers, these 'woke' shows aim to cancel the past by appealing to the categories of the present, and cancel the future by appealing to categories of the past (this is both good and bad - time get's all scrambled...).

Scientology, Pop-feminism, and Identification 

What is more interesting is that the woman character in both The Handmaids Tale and Madmen are played by actress Elisabeth Moss, a relatively devout, practicing scientologist. Why is someone who practices scientology - a cult that despite its stated positions is clearly antithetical to women, never mind feminism - playing a feminist themed character in two of the biggest television shows to air in the last two decades you ask? Coincidence? Innocuous, unrelated facts?

Unlikely. Based on not only scientology’s own teachings but also on the reports of their past members, scientologists are strongly encouraged if not outright required to join highly visible and profitable media projects – film, TV, charity, etc. - in order to have a platform to spread scientology and recruit new, high value members such as other celebrities and cultural influencers. Nothing new here, just the time tested marketing ploy where an interest group attracts a big name celebrity to endorse - implicitly or explicitly - whatever it is they are selling - ideas, objects, lifestyles, whatever - either through person to person interactions, or on a grand scale through media networks. 

It's important to note that this isn’t isolated to Moss. Laura Prepon who plays a significant character in Orange is the New Black, another clearly 'woke' television show centered on the struggles of woman prisoners, is also a scientologist. And out of the 23 episodes of Scream Queens – a show hailed as a feminist riff on the trend in horror movies for woman to be victims of violence  –almost half feature Kristie Alley, another scientologist (and to a lesser degree, Alanna Masterson who played a girl power type character on The Walking Dead).  But why these shows? And why these characters? Maybe directors tend to write feminist characters anyways, and some of the women cast as feminist characters just happen to be scientologist?

Perhaps, but let’s entertain another idea: If you were a big cult leader who needed to push your creepy agenda as to garner the support of cultural icons who could tip the scales in your world dominating favor where would you look first? I know I would look for what’s popular in the culture at large. Something that’s both rebellious but agreeable, malleable enough to reach various populations but rigid enough to maintain a core audience, and free of critique - or so inoculated against it - that if critiqued, the critique is likely to be discursively preconceived as archaic, conservative, immoral, unethical, sexist, etc. From the onset this rules out controversial or divisive things such as support of gun rights, police, and military, and niche (but still popular) past times such as sports or trades. We don’t see scientology appealing to Kurt Schilling, Chris Kyle (when he was around), or Mike Row. And after all, everyone goes to the movies, everyone has a TV, and not everyone keeps up with politics, sports, and trades. So, if I (as a creepy cult leader) am looking to spread ideas, why not coopt 'woke' culture like the pop-feminism of TV that’s likely to reach the avid fan and the casual watcher, the political and apolitical, alike?

In other words, it is likely that Elizabeth Moss (Prepon and Alley too), as a good scientologist drone, is memeing scientology into feminism; using feminism as a cultural mechanism to broadcast scientology not unlike how Jim Jones – a cultist and self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxist -  used religion, something Marx, as the banality goes, called the opiate of the masses, as a mechanism to spread his own vulgar 'Marxism' and therefore his own cultist agenda.

Here’s how this kind of memetic contagion (see my old post on memes and cultural viruses) works via some bootleg Freud:

• 1:  Media consumer sees Madmen or Handmaiden’s Tale (ideally both);  consumer identifies with politically charged heroic or admirable character(s); 

• 2: consumer, conflating character’s values with actress’s values, Googles actress who plays character and now identifies with actress (fantasy is now transferred into reality); 

• 3: consumer, curious and wishing to nourish the identification as to increase the good feelings that come with identification, researches actress’s life (fantasy further into reality); 

• 4: consumer is now in contact with scientology and, acting on the mania of phantasmal identification or continuing to conflate the character with the actress and the actress’s beliefs with the consumer’s (and also conflate fantasy and reality), may consider, implicitly or explicitly, scientology’s tenets or values (psychoanalysts refer to these dynamics as transference, when fantasies, feelings, thoughts, and models of behavior associated or for one person are transferred by and through association to another).

We know this simply as 'being a fan' of an actor, performer, etc., purely based on their roles and without knowing anything personal about the actor to make any kind of judgment. 

If this sounds like an all too hasty and a little bit crazy rightwing conspiratorial use and abuse of sociological and psychological processes to attack pop-feminism and wokeness, then you are on the right track in thinking critically, but still may have missed that this kind of thinking is precisely what underlies 'leftwing Cancel Culture' and rightwing conspiracy (like Qanon) alike (my intent is not to play the culture war game here...). To illustrate, let’s take the above example – scientology corrupting our media consumers through association – and fill in its structure with different content:

• 1:  Media consumer sees worldwide Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy; consumer identifies with cool heroic or admirable characters; 

• 2: consumer, now conflating character’s value – or in this case the euphoric feelings one gets from the film – with the actor’s values, or in this case  the director James Gunn’s, identifies with the ‘people’ behind the fantasy; 

• 3: consumer, curious and wishing to nourish the identification or obsession with superhero culture, researches the people who made the film possible such as James Gunn; 

• 4: the consumer is now in contact with some old controversial, provocative, and explicit Tweets from Gunn’s Twitter profile and a platform – so the theory goes – has now been given to these bad tweets by association with the popular film. Per this kind of thinking, if Guardians of the Galaxy is an international, multibillion dollar market object with high visibility, it drags with it into this level of significance the ‘nasty’ tweets of the director (hence the 'woke' metaphors of amplification, platform, voice, spotlight, etc.).  

'Woke' and 'cancel' culture (whatever these wishy-washy ideological buzzwords mean...) both work through identification and contagion (which isn't always of ill will, or inappropriate, but can be misapplied).

Scientology, Antipsychiatry, and Culture Wars

This kind of sloppy reduction – if A can sometimes correlate with C and if A can also sometimes correlate with D, then C must be also be correlated to D - is the ‘guilt by association’ phenomenon that 'Cancel Culture' operationalizes. If you have worked on a project a bad person has worked on you may be next on the chopping block (seen most recently in the Twittersphere in its extreme form when journalist Luke Turner blocked everyone and anyone, including accounts who have never heard of or interacted with the guy, associated with publisher Urbanomics  - if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re blocked by him too). 

So if scientology is ‘problematic,’ to use the nomenclature, then why weren't Handmaid’s Tale and Madmen (not to mention Orange is the New Black and Scream Queens) all cancelled for being not-woke, i.e. associated with Scientology, a cult that by Cancel/Woke Culture’s own rules is harmful to women? This is not to say that the left hasn’t criticized The Handmaiden’s Tale. They have, but rather than calls for cancelations, they’ve engaged simply in low-stakes, left on left criticisms, claiming that that the show shirks away from real feminism or fails at intersectionality – criticisms that inoculate one from any real contact with a critical outside. And it’s also not enough to say that the 'woke' wouldn’t cancel themselves, as they have, after all, what could be more woke than canceling yourself? So, what about this particular case makes it resistance to self-cancelling? 

The short answer is that pop-feminism is too woke to be cancelled. After all – and this is the closet we can get to a ‘control variable’ - they cancelled Danny Masterson, brother of earlier mentioned Alanna Masterson of The Walking Dead, for sexual assault allegations related to his scientologism. And the point is not that he shouldn’t have been cancelled – who gives a shit about Danny, I don't know any details about the case, but I'm sure he probably committed the crime! – the point is that the pop-feminism of the media, even if clearly associated with unwokeness, makes for an entity more resistance to cancellation than any other 'entity.'

In an unconscious utilitarian gesture so characteristic of the modern humanist political agenda, the imagined good derived from Woke-Cancel Culture outweighs whatever bad would or could come from its possible associations to or appropriation by the unwoke. The longer answer is that the overlap here between scientology and feminism is precisely the point of collision – or near-schizophrenic narrative collapse - between Woke Culture and Cancel Culture which are so often tandem and unified in their approach to cultural objects. That is, Woke Culture and Cancel Culture are two parts of the same machine that work towards performing the same function, they are connected but disjunctive: The woke are not cancelled; the cancelled are not woke; the woke do the cancelling; the cancelled do not do the wokeing; the cancelled may become woke; the woke may not become cancelled in that if the woke were to be cancelled they would incorporate and ‘own’ their cancelling and use it as evidence of their wokeness.

That is, Scientology is an object that is enigmatic to the rhythmic mechanistic thrust of ‘Woke -> Cancel -> Woke -> Can…etc.’ This is because Woke-Cancel Culture is not only not inconsistent with Scientology, but almost complicit with it, and therefore ultimately impotent against it. Why? Scientology predicates itself on both moral and legal law - both of which it games almost flawlessly to its own benefit - the same bipedal approach as Woke-Cancel culture. It does everything by the books and plays the role of good guy who’s critical of the ills of society. For example, Scientology, suspicious of the bad intentioned nature and hegemonic position of psychological and psychiatric explanatory models, while also appealing to its own psychological and psychiatric methods and models, perfectly mirrors the anti-psychiatry movement – a movement closely allied with feminism and proto-wokeism -  of late 50s to mid-80s Europe which also, like scientology, engaged in psychological and psychiatric treatment while maintaining a critical distance to hegemonic norms. And to this effect, it’s no surprise that Elisabeth Moss plays famous Scottish anti-psychiatrist and Acid Marxist R.D. Laing’s wife in the film Mad to Be Normal, AND a supporting character in High-Rise, a film centered on a medical professional aptly named Dr. Robert Laing, clearly a reference to R.D. Laing, who lives in a skyscraper that is a too-on-the-nose metaphor for classist society. In short, Woke-Cancel culture can’t cancel that which already claims to itself be more woke and in charge of the cancelling – Woke-Cancel Culture and Scientology are friendly competitors, not enemies. 

I end with this – as I mentioned earlier, I have no interest in the culture war, nor in defining or exploring 'woke' or 'cancel' culture. These are buzzwords that capture the reactions that tired and stale ideological camps have towards each other, and I have no wish to reify them.

With that said, there is something going on here that is hard to articulate, so I end with a meme;

Broke: Cancel-Woke Culture, in being similar to what it critiques, is hypocritical.

Woke: Hypocrisy is itself a polemic of Cancel-Woke Culture (whatever that is...) that overemphasizes cognitive processes and misunderstands desire, and furthermore, Cancel-Woke Culture (which I have no definition for...), like Scientology, is a cult that operates like a religion and because of this cannot generate the critical distance required to develop the appropriate tools to combat that which it both hates and simultaneously identifies with.

Minoritarian Language, Mircopolitics, and Militant Monism

I've recently spent a week in Jamaica. The following are hazy fragments pulled from the drunken wreckage that the reader may appreciate:

Minoritarian Language: 

While the residents of the wonderful tropic island speak and write in English, the significant cultural language privileged there is 'Patwa' which is a spoken phonetic language that - as if indexing the myriad past colonial forces that produced modern day Jamaica and its peoples - pulls together a variety of other languages and dialectics such as English, Scottish, Spanish, and African. 

For example, 'alright man' is spoken as 'I'ree man;' a sign in a traffic circle read 'Nuh dutty up Jamaica' or 'Don't dirty up Jamaica' (don' litter). And here's one from the Wiki: "im caan biit mi, im dʒos loki dat im won" -  "He can't beat me, he simply got lucky and won."

I'm inclined to say that the language is less representational than other languages for two reasons; 

• 1:While a chain of signifiers is still at play, and while a word still represents a thing (that is, words aren't degenerated completely into sound / used as brute force inductors, like a tic, screech, or a growl), it is significant that the brute force of the throat-chest coupling and how it makes use of air to produce phonemes is preserved alongside the representational aspect of the language;

• 2: The language is not written, it is spoken, and with that, it is less abstract-rule-bound, and therefore more fluid, flexible, and open to drift. Speakers toy with the intonations, emphasis, harshness, etc. Speaking certainly relies on stored information - conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit, etc., - of the language, but each encounter between enunciators is a relatively unique event. A historical story of global power landgrabs plays itself out in the mouth of each islander; a cascade of alien languages inhabit bodies performing a kind of linguistic dance. 

Ok, I am getting a bit carried away (I've been drinking). In other words, for the most part if you know English, you can hear the language and intuit its meaning without needing to know Patwa,, and the fact that it is not written and therefore more open to interpretation means that it  is less deadlocked by representation. 

Deleuze and Guattari return to these concepts again and again throughout A Thousand Plateaus:

"vocal substance, which brings into play various organic elements: not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips...the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout...the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips...an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human females have breasts...deterritorialized mammary glands: the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more, seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the 'supple larynx' is a development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly" (pg. 60-61). 

"each minor language has a properly dialectical zone of variation...it is rare to find clear boundaries on dialect maps; instead, there are transitional and limitrophe zones, zones of indiscernibility. It is also said that 'the Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than any system of spelling...Black English has its own grammar, which is not defined by a sum of mistakes or infractions against standard English" (pg. 101-102) [more by me on Quebecois here].

The authors go on in explaining that all speaking is a kind of singing, and that any major language, such as British English, is picked apart and reworked by 'the minorities of the world.' The majoritarian is homogenous, while the minoritarian is "potential...becoming" (pg. 106). 

Micropolitics

For Deleuze and Guattari, minor language and non-representation are linked to vital politics. 

The authors note that representation is an unavoidable evil, but one that should be employed in a way that decreases the overall amount of representaton in the world. That is, it is to be avoided, but one can only avoid it by using it. The only way out is through.

This amounts to a Molecular or micropolitics (see here for more) - or an attempt at nonrepresentational politics. A politics that is not mired in language, which Guattari often described as "impotent." A politics whose energy is not captured by a deadening linguistic apparatus that must appeal to an other.

As Land puts it in his NRx text The Dark Enlightenment - 'exit not voice.'

Democracy is the epitome of representational politics. It's all voice, no exit, and to make matters worse, the multiple voices of the crowd (polyvocality) are reduced (overcoded) to the one 'representative' that symbolically stands in for the many via bureaucracy. 

As Land continues in The Dark Enlightenment 

"the democratic mechanism in extremis, separating individuals and local populations from the consequences of their decisions by scrambling their behavior through large-scale, centralized re-distribution systems. You decide what you do, but then vote on the consequences. How could anyone say ‘no’ to that?

No surprise that over 30 years of EU membership Greeks have been eagerly cooperating with a social-engineering mega-project that strips out all short-wave social signals and re-routes feedback through the grandiose circuitry of European solidarity, ensuring that all economically-relevant information is red-shifted through the heat-death sump of the European Central Bank...thus effectively disabling all financial feedback on domestic policy choices."

Don't worry - I have a stupid vignette for this too. It has a bit of a set up, so hang in there.

• 1: When we landed I had a local beer in the airport lounge. Rather than bring me the can, it was poured into a Styrofoam cup. I am not being hyperbolic when I say it smelled exactly like sewage, or low tide. I drank it anyways.

• 2: Later, while being taxied, we drove past a large factory-looking building which we were informed is the plant the local beer I had earlier in the lounge is produced at. This was a building with no security - not a single guard, fence, or camera. 

• 3: Even later, while walking along the beech I saw a pool of murky rainwater that had collected in a concrete divot - "maybe that's the beer they gave me earlier" I joked to my girlfriend. "Everyone here drinks that stuff, so everyone would get sick, and they'd all know exactly what unguarded building to storm if so" she retorted. "A good incentive to produce a beer that is in fact not poison, as the product feedback would be instant, and extreme, unlike America where'd you'd have to call Bud Lite's hotline, and proceed with a long legal battle" I responded. 

It's merely an anecdote, but on this small island, local populations are not separated from the consequences of their actions, their behaviors remain relatively unscrambled, unvoted upon, and therefore the financial feedback loops remain intact. Perhaps a minoritarian language obstructed or deccelerated the development of linguistic, representational, symbolic, abstract bureaucratic apparatuses of capture?  

Militant Monism 

My girlfriend and I are being taxied in a van whose entire insides have been covered in leather and suede. It's sticky and I've had a few. The driver is making small talk so I start small-talking back. 

Driver looks back: 

"We don't like the cops here, they're all corrupt, but the military - we like them. They aren't corrupt. They really protect the people. They do the job the cops are supposed to do but don't. And they're not allowed to leave the island. Only protect, not fight wars." 

Interesting. Cops bad, military good. Not what we'd expect with our Western ACAB notions that lump all armed authority together. 

Some time goes by in hot silence. Then:

"We don't like politicians around here either. They divide people. See that statute - that's Samuel Sharpe. He was a revolutionary. Our revolutionaries are people, not politicians" 

Later, I'm sitting on the beach drinking a fruity cocktail and Bob Marley's 1973 hit 'I Shot the Sheriff' comes on. As we all know, the lyrics go

'I Shot the Sheriff, but I Didn't Shoot the Deputy'

In other words, I will own up to killing the local authority, but I won't own up to killing the authority above the local authority. In other words, I shot the cops (we don't like cops), but I didn't shoot the military (we like the military). 

Next, Marley's 'One Love/People Get Ready' came on. 

Cops are likened to the corrupt government and the corrupt politicians that divide people - separate people from themselves, incentives, feedback, etc., - but the military are likened to the militant revolutionaries that fought against politicians in order to unite people - that is, one love, one people.  

The cops look inward, to regulate, and are disliked, while the military acts as a wall to keep others out so that the civilians can live their lives. If the Jamaicans I met had their way, they'd do away with cops, solve problems on an individual, case by case basis (like they do with their crazy driving), and utilize the military for its purely negative function of keeping threats out - as a kind of hard border of bodies. 

Proto-patchwork anyone?

Some Scattered Notes on Guattari's Machinic Unconscious (Music, Literature, Schizoanalysis)

No "seperation of the literary field and the scientific field." Rather, "a work like this [Proust] constitutes a scientific exploration in the same category as the work of Freud or Newton" (pg. 231).

As written in Anti-Oedipus, a particle smashes into a letter; speech that induces affect, as opposed to impotently representing - i.e., diagrammatics. 

That is, rather than literature - fiction for example - representing a real "outside" (lower case o, as opposed to Outside); rather than language symbolizing or imagining material, Proust's work - or any literary work for D and G -  is an "index" of "hyper-deterrioalized menal objects" (pg. 231) close to a "theory of incorporeals" (pg. 232).

An index of forces. A cargo manifest.  Diagram of forces, vectors, flows. An image of thought - "an asignifying machinic index" (pg. 240).

Language only roughly grasps these fleeting thoughts (and remember, schizos 'suffer' from 'flight of ideas'...); "fuzzy" "sensations" of "unclassifiable realities" (pg. 233) experienced not unlike  how one suffers from "synesthesia" (pg. 231) or the overlapping of senses. 

As it is written in A Thousand Plateaus 

"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.' " (pg. 150-151).

Proust's work is not linguistic, but harmonic, rhythmic. Music, not logic - or a logic of music, of affect.

Proust's work is a physical act of "acceleration" (pg. 232) not unlike music itself. Acceleration is a matter of time and space, and time is just motion, or change in space. "Musical motifs as actual ideas...the closeness of the intervals between the five notes...and the constant repetition of two of them..." (pg. 233).  Likewise, music is a matter of time and space - meter and tempo. Dynamic force.

A note itself is the difference between pitches, or physical vibrations and how they resonate with the morphology of the body. The lesser the difference, the more the notes conflict, a conflict which creates a psychoacoustic phenomenon in the ear that then creates the illusion of the note moving, pulsing. 

Space, time, difference, force. 

Complex, impersonal, inhuman reality "aestheticizes" (pg. 237) itself, "cyrstalizes" (pg. 336) itself into a passage, a motif, that can be grappled, played with by the senses. 

"The analysis of the unconscious must follow - at its own risk - all the lines of the rhizome constituting an assemblage..." (pg. 238). All must emphasized. Even - no especially - the inhuman ones. Ones that "shake up the ego" (pg. 239). 

To schizoanalyze Proust, one must look at all the forces that come together and produce an event with emergent qualities.  

To schizoanalyze anything, one must index all the forces, inhuman and otherwise. 

Hillhouse / Blye Manor: Mnemics, Traumatics, Therapeutics, and Haunted Attics

Mnemics (memory); Traumatics (injury); Therapeutics (therapy);  Haunted attics (haunted attics).

The first three (memory, injury, and therapy) first:

For Freud, a certain kind of forgetting is pathological; For Nietzsche, a certain kind of remembering.

For Freud, repression is an instance of forgetting that disrupts bodily processes; a dematerialization that leads to dystonic symptoms.

In Studies On Hysteria he writes

"intentional repression is...the basis for the conversion...total or partial, of the sum of excitation. The sum of excitation, being cut off from psychical association, finds its way all the more easily along the wrong path to a somatic innervation...the repressed idea takes its revenge...by becoming pathogenic" (pg. 102).

"the repressed idea would persist as a memory trace that is weak (has little intensity), while the affect that is torn from it would be used for a somatic innervation (that is, the excitation is 'converted'). It would seem, then, that it is precisely through its repression that the idea becomes the cause of morbid symptoms...becomes pathogenic" (pg. 251).

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the main cause of illness is when material and its forces are separated from it’s a/effects such as when a stimuli (Id, instinct, drive, thought, affect, feeling etc.) is denied by the 'subject' (superego censors the ego, ego censors the Id, Id overwhelms the ego or overstimulates the body, ego and superego conflict, etc.) and therefore becomes detached, decontextualized, displaced, and transformed into a symptom (the inside is projected outside, into an object, as in the bodily appendages in the hysteria case of Anna O., or the horse in the obsessional neurosis case of little Hans, a foot the object of displaced sexual fixation for the fetishist, etc.). 

Following this line of thinking, that which is repressed is often that which is traumatic. The 'material-> force->a/effect' diagram would not be interrupted if not for its implications. As Wilfred Bion has shown, one destroys his or her associative links between body sensations, affects, feelings, and ideas, because the anticipated outcome of the possible associative chain is highly disturbing, or possibly dangerous (for those without good impulse control: 'anger = violence, so to prevent violence, I will eject anger, leading to schizophrenia). 

We've been trained by decades of unrelenting humanist social worker cultural influence to think that trauma is an instance of a toxic external stimuli overwhelming or damaging a subject, but for Freud what constitutes trauma is not necessarily an external threat, but rather whatever is found overstimulating and intolerable arising from 'inside' and thereby ejected, blocked, etc. In this sense, trauma is an intense affect unable to be contained by the psychic apparatus. An overhwelming stimulus - whether form inside or out - unable to be processed and used by the 'inside' (relatively speaking) system. In all cases, trauma is libidinal excess - and even a lack, or a negative, such as a death, is an excess of absence. 

In other words, thinking and feeling is traumatic to the body. 

About two decades after his exploration of hysteria, this model of thought is put to use by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia to explore not hysteria, but what would now be called (somewhat incorrectly) depression. In experience-near language: if something makes me sad such as a loved one dying, and for whatever reason (perhaps my father told me to be a man, perhaps I feel that if I begin to cry I may never stop, etc.) I am not able to access and utilize my sadness and convert it into appropriate thought or action such as talking about sadness, ritualization, or crying, then sadness and the behavior or thought it intends to trigger become disconnected, and with this disconnection, melancholic affects become free-floating, freed up to attach to other thoughts, affects, and stimuli. Perhaps now something that I previously found cheerful now saddens me in a way not proportionate to the object, or perhaps I know feel a general sense of sadness without knowing why. 

When material forces and e/affects are disconnected, and these kinds of 'pathological' rhythms are enforced, or when one experiences a trauma one is unconsciously attempting to process and master after the fact, one is prone to compulsively repeat the same conflicts. When one has no insight into what impersonal forces operate their body like a meat puppet, and one follows crystalized paths, one repeats the same, creates the same, etc. Put differently, when one cannot remember certain aspects of the past, and at the same time cannot forget certain aspects of the past (see Nolan's Memento, for example), one is certainly doomed to repeat the past forever; one's future is just the past. This is what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle refers to as 'the repetition compulsion.' 

This is in part why a (misused and misunderstood) goal of psychoanalysis is 'to make conscious what is unconscious,' with its method being to use language to connect instinct, impulse, affect, and thought. 

Nietzsche, on the other hand, champions the position that to want to 'make more consciousness' is itself sickly and neurotic, and that one should aim to become less conscious, more intoxicated, and more in touch with instincts and impulses. In this sense, Nietzsche explicitly encourages a kind of 'forgetfulness' as both a way to return to instinct, but also remedy resentfulness. 

The small, serious, resentful man worries too much about history, both personal and collective. He carries the weight of burdens that aren't his to bear - Christ's cross, a people's national history and its forced allegiance, the state's humanist spooks, etc. - and he feels obligated to bear them to the ugly end; to be guilty for a sin - cultural or theological -  he did not commit, to be loyal to an abstract people composed of ancestors he never knew nor agreed with, to follow totems and taboos that don't serve him, etc. The small, sickly, serious man remembers all who have wronged him, or  all those who wronged the people and places he's supposed to be loyal to, and he does not let these memories go, refuses to move on. He cannot forget. He feels eternally owed payment that is lost to time. The small, sickly, serious man is stuck in the past and thus he can neither experience the present nor forge the future. 

To synthesize Nietzsche and Freud, Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents that some repression of instincts and impulses is healthy to function in our everyday life, and additionally he has the concept of primal repression, where things that were never meant to be conscious are never recorded to begin with - they are repressed from the start. Both are a healthy repression, a healthy Nietzschean forgetting. I tell some of my patients 'we probably don't want or need to remember early memories of feeling in extreme danger, or even the many benign experiences that don't stay with us...' 

Finally, as with Nietzsche, for Freud, part of the healing process of analysis is a forgetting that is not sickly like repression that opens up space for new thoughts and feelings, new 'object relations.' That is, old ossified unconscious cognitive, thought economizing tools - internal representations, predictive models constructed from aggregated experiences of personal history, etc., such as a 'cold mother' or 'harsh father' -  these are broken down (analyzed), associated to new 'objects' (the analyst) and their associative networks loosened up. Instead of 'when A, then B, then C' the patient now has recourse to 'when A, perhaps B, C, D, or E, depending on X, Y, Z,' etc. Thoughts, affects, and behavior matrices are now complexified. In other words, stereotyping models are less rigid, more able to dynamically map the real, present moments (neurosis is after all a valuation of ghosts of the past over traces of the present). 

To forget in a Nietzschean sense, to remember in a Freudian, and then forget and remember anew in both senses, are two sides of the same therapeutic coin.  We must reconnect with our repressed past, but also forget that which we obsess over, that which we mourn, that which does not aid us. 

Now - Haunted attics:

In the Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek argues that Marx discovered the Freudian symptom in that he, as I described above regarding Freud, shows that Capitalism through its mediating function of capital, exchange value, etc., disconnects the material from its effect/affect, thereby dematerializing the world, throwing things into disarray. Mark Fisher, who Zizek refers to as his friend (Ziz also writes a nice blurb on the back of Fisher's Capitalist Realism),  reimagines Derrida's hauntology (which was in reference to Marx and Engels famous line about the specter of Capitalism), while Derrida's wife - a psychoanalyst - likens Derrida's hauntology to psychoanalysis in that the analyst excavates the analysand's past, dredges up old memories, phenomenon that linger long past the body that prompted it, i.e. ghosts.  

This all a lot to say that Psychoanalysis and Marxism align in their materialist conceptualization of pathology. In this limited sense, psychoanalysis is a 'hauntology.' Following this, in a moment of Marxian structuralism, 'Haunt' etymologically breaks down into 'hant' or 'home;' Ghost, into geist, or spirit / soul. This means that the material house is the substructure or base material for the superstructure that is the spirit. To this effect, if a good ghost story has ever demonstrated anything it is that reality is much scarier than any ghost story. As several characters recount in Haunting of Hill House, 'a house is like a body, the pipes are veins, this room a heart, that one a stomach, etc...' 

Not unlike The Shining - which Haunting of Blye / Hill clearly borrows much of its conceptualization of ghosts from - The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Blye Manor are stories about real trauma, human stories, family dramas that use 'ghosts' to  communicate real but inarticulate, inexpressible horror (as horror is apt to do). Hill House is the better written of the series, but Blye Manor, in its simplicity, is a better account of the healing process of remembering and forgetting. 

Without belaboring the point and giving too much away, in Blye Manor traumatic events of the past beget the telling of traumatic historical narratives, narratives which are told and retold, each time becoming more traumatic as the teller attempts to split off or deny (and denial is an explicit theme of the show) the trauma by covering up the negative emotions or events with wishful, overly-idealized, fantasies and dreams. Eventually some of the ghosts become aware - conscious - of their existence as a ghost through repeating the same memories until they desire a new outcome, a new point of growth for their narrative arc. At the same time, we the viewer learn of a ghost so mired in negation, and resentment, that it has completely forgotten its own narrative - why it haunts - and reverted to a brute mechanistic loop; that is, the ghost quite literally follows the same exact track, the same path, every night, each time fading away more and more from its original event that trapped it in the ghostly world

That is, some ghosts remember their trauma so that they may forget and move on, while others forget and continue to repress their trauma so that they compulsively repeat. What eventually heals the resentful ghost (thereby freeing all the other ghosts in the house) is when someone - a survivor of the ghastly house -  is able to tell a new story about the haunted house, a story that turns the 'ghost story' into a 'love story.' This mirrors one of the scientific understandings of contemporary psychotherapy, that retelling a story - a narrative of the self - over and over in therapy to another who listens restructures the narrative and provides a healthy distance from the original traumatic events via language. That is, through therapy one gradually and implicitly learns to tell a neutral, then good story through internalizing the therapist, where one could previously only tell a bad story. 

As a final caveat: the patients staying at the mental ward I work at would stay up late, playing with Ouija boards, claiming they saw or heard ghosts, say things move on their own, etc. Meanwhile, they're bones were hollowing out, their heart rates dangerously low, their skin torn up by razor blades, their throats eroded from vomiting, etc. Despite my bosses wish to take away the Ouija, I did not intervene. This was an escape for them, and a somewhat healthy one. This did not stop me, however, from quietly thinking 'the real horror is not the ghost, but what these people have been through, what traumas they've been subjected to, and the significance of their mental anguish.

The real horror is quite mundane...

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(for a related blogpost, see my exploration of hauntology and ghosts here)