Click for AMR Podcast #22

In this podcast: Merlitons (see picture)

• AMR Podcast #21: The one about the sharks
• Triangulating Happiness (2007)
• mr. feathers flies again (2006)

‘The folk process is as old as music, and depends on the ability of musicians to adapt from existing sources. A.P. Carter heard an old spiritual, probably while on the road, and arranged it for the Carter Family as “Can’t Feel At Home.” Woody Guthrie took “Can’t Feel At Home” and modified it further into “I Ain’t Got No Home.” As intellectual property laws become more restrictive, the folk process suffers. When Woody sings, “Rich man took my home and drove me from my door,” it relates not only to the human right to shelter, but also to the human right to culture.’
From “The Absent Second, an Explanation,” by Steven Arntson

1. Recombination

I went to a reading by MacArthur grant winning novelist Richard Powers the other night wherein the narrative of science (evolving epistemologies through history) and its influence on our everyday ontologies (how we approach and understand being) was the primary theme. Which is just a heavy way of saying: during the Q&A, he talked about our fluctuating/evolving sense of self as based on technological advances.

Because he’s a novelist, Powers was primarily interested in the intersection of this evolving (imagine, if you can, this word without valuation) self-cognizance as it relates to the mounting context of fictive narrative. I.e. the way we understand both ourselves and the world is constantly changing – Powers primarily invoked self-awareness and DNA mapping – and so should/does literature.

2. Literature and the Aspirational Self

Most interestingly along this line of thought was a discussion of the self in literature as distinct from the experiential self: the aspirationally complete self vs. the self as-is, fragmented. Since my discussion of copyright, plagiarism, and humanity has been unrepentantly Lacanian so far, I feel honor-bound to bring up the fictive imago one last time (for cliffs notes, see: Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background, specifically Part 2. Becoming Human – Towards De-Normalizing Desubjectification):

If it’s going to be suggested that good literary characters are aspirational (and by aspirational I mean comprehensively understood to a degree not possible in reality, as was implied in the discussion) – and I’m not sure I’m on board with this – what sort of psychological holes are we supposed to be using them to fill? And is our admission that there’s a distinction between completionist literary fantasies/reality more prying psychological wedge than emotional spackle?

3. Aspirational Identity and Genomic Change

These would be rhetorical questions – or, anyway, something to talk about with your analyst – if they were questions about literary narrative exclusively – safe… but the overarching take-away from the talk was that: just as DNA is increasingly recombined and rewritten – rewriting, in essence, ourselves – so are we continually rewriting and re-imagining culture (and, by implication – again – ourselves). So the question, if we’re concerned at all with psychic well being, is whether we’re conscious of the differences between representational (re-written) reality… or if ostensibly more complete, but effectually one-dimensional, representations become the aspirations we model ourselves after.

Unspoken, but latent, was the notion that this isn’t just a question of personal, psychological identity – but the province of cutting edge biological/evolutionary inquiry. Which… is a distinction worth talking about. I’m not sure I’m the one to talk about it explicitly, but the suggestion was that DNA is much more suggestable to change than previously thought – even, perhaps, willing to bend to fit the stereotypes of aspirational literary identities. It’s easy to discount sociopolitical criticisms of the monolithic gestalt – itself both a biological and psychological term – but it’s hard to ignore Science.

4. To Sum Up So Far, Pictorially

5. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Revisited

Applied to science – just to drive the point home – this Lacanian rubric is more causal than analytical, describing not only our psyches but influencing our component molecules, etc. It’s Lamarck-ian – you remember him, the guy Darwin out-theorized: genomically, we’re in constant flux and full of latent potential (both good, bad, and smoking out the ennui on the chaise); our Ys and Zs, our technologies and resultant cultural identities – literary and otherwise – create not only a sense of self but the self itself.

Which isn’t such a left-fielder in general ontological discussions – when you’re talking sort of cavalierly about existence… but those discussions usually have a line in the sand: either you’re here in the world, another ape on spaceship earth, electromagnetically vibrating, or you’re something more philosophical and refined. Culture influencing genes fine tuning humanity creating culture, the whole damn thing continually rewriting itself into an ourobouric human palimpsest – that’s another discussion entirely.

6. Repetition with Difference

So what’s all this got to do with Woody Guthrie? Well, with all his talk about genetic and cultural influence – the forever act of revision and rewriting – what Powers got me thinking about was proprietary litigiousness vs. evolution. Which isn’t a new thought by any means; that epigraph up there, it and its ilk are the basis of many dinner table polemics. What’s different here is the posited connection between culture and biology. Evolution, here, is used non-metaphorically in the strictest Lamarckian sense.

And at its simplest, Lamarckian evolution is merely the idea that an outside stimulus – physical, epistemologically sound – can introduce change into an otherwise static population. If I can quote The Encyclopedia of Post-Modernism for just one or two sentences, just to make a maybe-oblique point: “Repetition is the inscription of difference or otherness within identity. The post-modern conception of repetition is best understood as part of a general critique of the traditional Western assumption that identity is always stable, complete, and atemporal” (338).

7. Life in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The ultimate idea, for most post-modern theorists – and this is something I definitely subscribe to – is that “repetition with difference” – a scientific and psychological fact of life – highlights the uniqueness of every cultural, individual, and biological iteration, aggravating any misplaced notion of trans-temporal sameness that anyone not paying attention might have. In other words: even though we live both linearly and cyclically, repeating basic actions and rituals out of physical and emotional necessity… reproducing – and sometimes it does feel like that Philip Larkin poem, I won’t deny that – we’re always changing.

And, relatedly, we’re faced with lingering doubts re: self-autonomy. The individual, distinct, n’existe pas- so, maybe, like Powers suggested, we have the balm of literature. Culture. Art. Except that off-hand, at the end of his talk, Powers cited Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as an early influence. The tangential message of which (and I admit beforehand, I take liberties with all my theory) is that in contemporary society, the ritual object – Art – has lost its intrinsic religiosity through mass reproduction/use (and this is where literature as filling some sort of psychic hole scares me)… but can be imbued with the same – or close to – through personal/creative context.

8. Life as an Artist in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is near the heart of what I’m trying to get at. Past questioning the autonomous self – and, believe me, I’m past that; past the combination fiction/threat of sameness; past the inability to really know; the infancy of science; the instability of our very foundational building blocks (and, in turn, their component parts) – past all that, all we have is creative agency. It’s too late for me to rehash all the theory, but read any of it: Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida, Bhaba, Butler – it’s all there in different forms – doubt the artifact but not the action, the content but not the enveloping context.

So, in a last ditch effort to bring it all home: some two-bit agency owns the rights to a Woody Guthrie song that was – in its day – not only in its fourth repetition or so culturally but – at its moment of creation – the one-time sonic apex of 250,000 years of mounting context (and I’m only talking societal H. sapiens evolution – it’s 2.2 million for hominids, and we can go back even further). Despite evidence that creation and mounting context are all you have – ontologically or otherwise; regardless of their own insubstantiality in the grand and not-so grand scheme of things; of your own genetic and psychic necessity; of the inherent hilarity/possibility of the world as we live in it… they say you can’t use old amenable Woody to make art out of artifact and effect your own aspirational existence.

What’re you gonna do?

• AMR Podcast #22: Poetry of Departures/Two Feminists
• Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background
• Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon, pt. 3

I first read Society of the Spectacle (1967) as a junior in high school. Along with Salinger’s 9 Stories and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist–which I encountered the following year–it was one of the few books with which I sincerely connected. The common thread of all three, of course, is a protagonist–if Debord can be called the protagonist of his Situationist manifesto–who questions, and in doing so has no place in, a homogenizing society. As Stephen Dedalus spits in Portrait, “[w]hen the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (Chapter 5). Seymour Glass simply kills himself.

While these works, exclusive of Society of the Spectacle, are generally considered required reading, they’re specifically associated with formative development. By this I mean that teenagers are supposed to read the contra-societal bildungsromans of Salinger and Joyce in order to get this fundamental societal questioning out of their systems. The angsty teenager is a stereotype that everyone can appreciate – and her psychological trappings, universalized, are consequently ghettoized as juvenilia. In other words, it’s okay for a seventeen year old to oppose the oppressive homogenization of society as long as, seven years down the line, that same teenager becomes another productive cog in the societal machine. Everyone has that friend who read Catcher too late and’ll never understand — this is sort of what I’m talking about.

With student loans on my mind, I’ve been seriously considering the possible necessity of abandoning my attempted disengagement from, if not opposition to, this mass cultural norm (ie clocking in, selling out). Luckily, there’re many theorists who’re similarly critically engaged with America’s anesthetic spectacle, and they all seem to think that the implications of this “robotization” are farther reaching than I’d previously supposed. In short, I don’t really have a choice in the matter. To passively accept the spectacle is to forfeit humanity, to become a fictive (dehumanized / desubjectified) subject. As they’ve yet to be added to any high school summer reading lists, these writers are not normalized into the national spectacle; the academic iconoclasm of Butler and Lacan is still possibly incendiary. In this post — Achieving Humanity: Background – I’m going to address this potentially incendiary iconoclasm with regards to the “spectacle” and humanity, namely the apparently paradoxical dehumanizing process of becoming human in a society of the spectacle: to become human, one has to reject the spectacle, thus shattering the (fictive) self in a intensely desubjectifying act.

As I’ve argued in Appendix C of My Life as an Aerophyte, Lacan’s “Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1936, 1949) can be read through a socio-historical lens as an indictment of the slavishness with which the Nazis malignantly upheld the fictitious imago of a homogenous Germany. Within the context of this post, a parallel can be/should be/is drawn between Lacan’s nationally projected fictive imago and Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Both are mechanisms of societal control, “representations” that effectively replace independent thought and action with an easily manipulated mass mind. The primary difference between the Lacanian national imago and the society of the spectacle, however, is that the national imago is malignant in its potential for action, i.e. the so-called ethnic cleansing of WWII, American jingoism, etc. As expressed in the opening quotation, it’s the inaction of the society of the spectacle that’s so insidious.

2. Becoming Human: Towards De-Normalizing Desubjectification

That’s not to say that one is not a function of the other. The mind-numbing spectacle can both aid the potential “acting out” of a gestalt accepting national subject and be a byproduct of a psychically unaware/(self-)deceiving society. That is, the spectacle can pave the way for a projected national imago–which is more easily accepted by a society of automatons than freethinkers–and/or result from, or enforce, this state of acceptance. In either case, Lacan’s imago and Debord’s spectacle are intertwined enough as to be here considered basically analogous.

Within this context–that is, outside of a reading of “The Mirror Stage” as a transhistorical ontological statement–Lacan’s overarching message is arguably that the fictive imago / spectacle must be recognized as an “illusion,” and that the self (national or otherwise) is necessarily disjointed. Protection against a repetition of Nazi atrocities depends upon this realization (97-99). Without wanting to draw too strong a parallel between the Third Reich and contemporary American society (we could make this argument about any contemporary society, really – but I’m in the US, so…), it’s clear that both largely operate under a projected imago of infallibility and invincibility, and that this fictive imago fixes both societies in a delusional infantile state.

Although not a Lacanian, Judith Butler utilizes a similar psychoanalytic lens in her analysis of post September 11th America, Precarious Life (2004). Within the context of a jingoistic nation that repeatedly fails to recognize the humanity of its “Other,” Butler emphasizes the necessity of an acknowledgment of universal “vulnerability and loss” (20). It’s posited that without this acknowledgment, which is reflective of Lacan’s “recogni[tion of] the knot of imaginary servitude,” the world will be forever stuck in a cycle of violence in which anxiety-ridden nations inevitably clash in attempts to secure their “gestalt of corporeal wholeness.” Heterogeneity cannot be tolerated within this schema of militant homogeneity (100).

Although she never explicitly cites Lacan, Butler’s psychoanalytically tempered analysis of a(n inter)national crisis can be read as an almost derivative update of “The Mirror Stage.” In the chapter “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” she writes (28):

[...]when we think about who we “are” and seek to represent ourselves, we cannot represent ourselves as merely bounded beings, for the primary others who are past for me not only live on in the fiber of the boundary that contains me (one meaning of “incorporation”), but they also haunt the way I am, as it were, periodically undone and open to becoming unbounded.

Butler’s emphasis on the impossibility of a “bounded”–or a psychically fettered “whole”–subject is clearly an articulation of Lacan’s cryptic conclusion regarding the importance of recognizing and acknowledging the fragmented self. In both Butler and Lacan, there is no clearly definable, autonomous individual. Rather, existence is a series of checks and balances, a permeable relationship between the I and the Other. Despite the independent-thought stifling, national-imago reinforcing spectacle–for Butler, “media portraits that are often marshaled in the service of war” and other cultural agents that “conceal or displace” the precariousness of life–we are all part of a fragmented, heterogeneous, and yet interconnected, human community (141).

Before this begins to sound unbelievably utopian and naive, I’d like to emphasize that the difficulty of recognizing the impossibility of self-autonomy cannot be overstated. For Lacan, “the I formation is symbolized in dreams by a fortified camp,” an ego stronghold not easily stormed (98). Enigmatically hinting at World War II and the potential malignancies of the fictive imago (I’m referencing his “official” mirror stage essay, published in 1949), Lacan stops short of offering any concrete description of this recognition: “it is not in our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins” (100). Accepting Precarious Life as a continuation of this Lacanian train of thought, it becomes evident that the aforementioned “true journey” is a desubjectifying experience. In order for Americans to recognize their fictive imago for what it truly is, they must come to terms with their own “vulnerability and loss.” This is clearly distinct from our traditionally romanticized, Disney-fied conceptions of human community. The glue of the world Butler proposes–and is passionate about–is misery. It is, less melodramatically, our lack of autonomy, our fragmentation, which ties us together.

Interestingly, according to Butler one can’t be classified as human until the autonomous sense of self (the projected imago) is shattered, and cognizance of fragmentation is achieved. Dehumanization–the deprivation of self-determination and individual control–is in this way a form of “humanization,” a term Butler identifies less with autonomy than with an acknowledgment of vulnerability and consequent acceptance of “collective responsibility” (43). To return to the earlier Lacanian discussion of World War II, this concept of “becoming human” is reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of a soccer game between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sonderkommando, Jewish inmates who were forced to do the dirty work of the concentration camps (26). The “normalcy” of this soccer game amidst the desubjectification of the Musselman and other myriad Nazi war atrocities is, for Agamben, the “true horror of the camp”; by not “understanding,” and thus stopping, it, we are–according to Agamben–destined to forever be its shameful spectators. Without wanting to get too enmeshed in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben writes that “”[i]n shame, the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification” (106). This is in accord with Butler, who implies that we are desubjectified and dehumanized spectators, kept in this state by a spectacle which reinforces a fictive national imago.

For Butler, however, this normalization of desubjectification–a function of the refusal to acknowledge fragmentation–is not confined to Nazi concentration camps and other limit situations. Rather, it’s a function of everyday life. Desubjectification is the norm, to shanghai one of Butler’s buzzwords, and this norm is enforced by the spectacle, “the guardian of sleep.” Herein lies the paradox of becoming human: to become human, one must acknowledge this desubjectification, which is in itself a desubjectifying act. To reiterate, to become human, one must first be dehumanized.

Furthermore, the resultant state of humanity is characterized by what can only really be described as “state of dehumanization,” the fragmentation of the fictive self. The only difference, then, between the human and the dehumanized–or the subject and the desubjectified–is a cognizance of dehumanization / desubjectification. In other words, it is the spectacle that normalizes our desubjectification–our refusal or incapacity to see past our projected imago and recognize a shared vulnerability. This desubjectification then stands between society and a realization of a collective humanity. If this claim can be accepted–if Butler, Lacan, and Debord can be taken at their theoretical word–then the next logical step is a critical evaluation of the spectacle itself.

3. A Critical Evaluation of the Spectacle Itself

In “Fantasy and Cinema,” from Intimate Revolt (1998), Julia Kristeva criticizes this “so-called society of the spectacle.” Although she makes use of Debord’s Marxist text, plagiarism of which was encouraged, she appropriates his spectacle in the name of psychoanalysis–a tact that I am similarly taking with this essay. Basically, Kristeva credits the spectacle with a slow murder of psychic life and a consequent “robotization” of society. The mechanism by which the spectacle purportedly achieves this robotization is fantasy–or, more specifically, the replacement of individual, intimate fantasy with the canned fantasy of capitalism (67): We are inundated with images, some of which resonate with our fantasies and appease us but which, for lack of interpretive words, do not liberate us. Moreover, the stereotype of these images deprives us of the possibility of creating our own imagery, our own imaginary scenarios.

Fantasy, here succinctly defined as “imaginary scenarios,” carries a lot of weight in psychoanalysis–Freud’s entire career is arguably based upon this concept–and can be understood as both a doorway to the unconscious and an indicator of psychic life. As seen in the above quotation, Kristeva postulates that the capitalist fantasies propagated by the society of the spectacle not only replace individual fantasy, but actually “deprive us of the possibility of creating our own” fantasies. The logic of Kristeva’s argument thus dictates that once society has been completely deprived of the ability to create individual fantasy, the cognizance of dehumanization that becoming human so depends upon will be impossible, and all of “humanity” will finally be connected… but as the cogs of an automated, unthinking capitalist machine. Guy Debord’s comatose society is almost preferable to Kristeva’s, which has no hope of waking up.

As I’m writing on “Fantasy and Cinema,” I’d like to address the issue of films that–like the novels with which I opened this essay–deal specifically with the society of the spectacle and the problems therein. Kristeva doesn’t decry all popular diversions as complicit with an unconscious-stifling spectacle; rather, she differentiates between “great” films and literature and those that work as spectacle–both of which she clearly enjoys. The primary difference is that the spectacular cinema, and I mean this in the pejorative sense of the word, “banaliz[es ...] evil”–which is to say that it functions to normalize the desubjectification which characterizes the society of the spectacle (80). Great art, on the other hand, can “demystify” the spectacle and/or serve as a jumping off point for the individual creation of fantasy.

With this in mind, what are we supposed to think about blockbuster films like The Matrix (1999) and Fight Club (also, weirdly, 1999)? Both films are explicit in their anti-specular discourse–The Matrix went as far as depicting fight scenes between “human” protagonists and the spectacle personified (and vilified)–and yet, combined the movies grossed over 200 million dollars… and the spectacle continues. Despite their superficially anti-specular themes, within my–and Kristeva’s–critical framework these films can be classed as products of the spectacle.

Unlike Catcher in the Rye or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which are undeniably the works of anti-robotization iconoclasts, these and similar movies are produced by the capitalist system as both economic ventures and specularizations of anti-specular discourse. In effect, Hollywood–an industry synonymous with the spectacle–uses these cultural products to mystify Kristeva’s demystification, thereby containing any threat against the spectacle (and the spectacular industry). Again, the distinction between the coding of individual authors and works as “juvenile” and the creation of movies that contain, or neutralize, the same anti-specular message is important: the latter is preemptive, i.e. aggressive, and also masquerades as “revolutionary.” This hollow representation of rebellion allows for a reintroduction of Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt.

Kristeva understands revolt, in its most basic form, as “the questioning and displacement of the past” upon which the future depends. In contrast, the popular definition of revolt–the process of an old regime, x, being subverted and replaced by the new, y–is conceptualized as “stagnant” in that stasis is maintained when one ideology takes the place of another. For Kristeva, the suspension of interrogation in the “rejection of old values in favor of a cult of new values” renders revolt nihilistic, productive of no real change (6). This interrogation is where Kristeva tables her central notion of “intimate revolt” — interrogation as a personal, psychic, and creative questioning. While seemingly diminutive, “as a transformation of man’s relationship to meaning this cultural revolt intrinsically concerns public life and consequently has profoundly political implications” (11).

In other words, intimate revolt involves an individual questioning (and consequent demystification) of the spectacle and the projected fictive imago–to return to Lacan–that allows for the creation of fantasy on a personal level. In turn, this cognizance and re-creation of psychic life inevitably leads to a more humanist society. Destruction of the spectacle would not even be a necessary precaution of this transcendent society, as a general cognizance of the spectacle would neutralize its anesthetic power. As Kristeva makes clear, what is necessary is merely a demystification. Within this interpretative context, the hollow revolt bought en mass at the multiplex is particularly dark. Rather than enable Kristeva’s near-romantic notion of intimate revolt, these movies act as hypocritical agents of stultification; the revolt they portray–a raging against the simulacra, attempts at individuality–lull an increasingly robotized society into accepting a fantasy of critical questioning of both the self and the spectacle.

Doubly troubling is that, given our non-critical acceptance of such films (i.e. the spectacle), our desubjectification/ dehumanization can actually increase. The projected imago of the (average) contemporary “subject” is no longer even a deeply personal ideal; rather, it is a copy of a literally projected fiction. To put it simply, rather than enter into a transitive relationship with our parents, our reflection in the mirror, or even a photograph of ourselves etc., we accept the imago offered to us by the spectacle itself. In this manner, we, the spectator, become incorporated into the spectacle (and vice versa). The further removed we become from acceptance of our fragmentation, the more concrete our dehumanization–and the less we feel it.

4. Better Living through Consciousness/Cognizance

While an overarching theme of the above-mentioned works, from Society of the Spectacle to “The Mirror Stage,” is the necessity of recognizing the fiction of the projected imago (individual and societal), this call to “become human” has gone largely unheeded. The “society of the spectacle” is a term cavalierly batted about in academia, and–thanks in part to movies like the ones mentioned above–has even become something of a cliché in popular culture. Despite the above-discussed texts, even the radical concept of recognition of and revolt against the spectacle has been normalized/naturalized into the national spectacular.

This continued societal complacence can’t be attributed to a failing on the parts of Lacan, Debord, Kristeva, or Butler, however; their works are simply, and understandably, not popular. On second thought, we can definitely blame them: bad scene, everyone’s fault. And even if they were popularized, reading these works does not automatically result in humanization… as previously noted, the difficulty of this paradoxically desubjectifying process can’t be emphasized enough. On the other hand, popularizing the messages of these works through mass culture mediums–as in the movies discussed–is demonstrably not the solution to the problem of societal robotization. The self-doubting question Debord continues to raise, even in the early 90s, “[h]ow can the poor be made to work once their illusions have been shattered[...],” is rendered moot, as the shattering of illusions has yet to occur (10).

When both academic and pop-culture intervention is proven ineffective (on a mass scale) against the normalization of desubjectification in contemporary society, when humanity is slipping away unnoticed from those who embrace the meaninglessness and simplicity of the spectacle, it seems the only possible chance of societal redemption lays with those individuals who remain resistant to psychic death. While continued academic and art-culture consciousness raising is a function of this resistance, society must be defended by consciousness raising individuals, not institutions. What is needed is a non-elitist grassroots movement, a gradual, person-to-person acknowledgment of the simulacra, the fictive images that dominate our lives. As the spectacle has replaced our fantasies with its own, so too do we need to re-appropriate our fantasies, to–as Kristeva so eloquently enunciates–learn to create again. Only when society has extricated itself from the spectacle can we, as spectators, begin to gradually distance ourselves from the fiction of homogeneity that threatens to achieve realization.

Next: Achieving Humanity: Theory with Praxis!

Selected Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002.

• AMR Podcast #22: Poetry of Departures/Two Feminists
• Civil Disobedience: J-B. Lamarck & the Aspirational Self
• rethinking plagiarism: the death of text as authorial icon pt. 2