Jam Sampler

I haven't had much time to explore new music lately. I've been spending eight hours a day in the New York Public Library doing research for my thesis, and then on top of that I have my sleeping disorder to deal with. Ever since my buddies Bob and Bob invited me to OiNK, the Mecca of unscrupulous music nerds, I've downloaded about 80GB of music but only listened to about 5% of it. I'll never know why I got the entire Art of Noise discography or those embarrasing Butthole Surfers albums, just like I'll never know why I don't delete them. Maybe one day I'll want to listen to Pioughd? Luckily, I decided to give the recent Hot Chip-curated installment of the "DJ Kicks" series a listen based mainly on my love for Coming on Strong and The Warning. Aside from a great new Hot Chip song called "My Piano," the mix's best song IMHO is "Nite Moves" by Grovesnor (a.k.a. Hot Chip ex-drummer Rob Smoughton). It's smooth yet emotionally charged, resignedly nostalgic and angrily confused at the same time. Bizarrely, it works equally well as a sexy make out jam and as post break-up cry-along in a way that reminds me of (gasp!) Hall & Oates.

Grovesnor - "Nite Moves"


I've also really been digging the new Black Moth Super Rainbow album, Dandelion Gum. Along with recent albums by Caribou, Four Tet, and Fujiya & Miyagi, Dandelion Gum testifies to the glory that was Krautrock. "Rollerdisco" has Neu! and Can written all over it, but with a hint of shoegaze guitar fuzz thrown in.

Black Moth Super Rainbow - "Rollerdisco"

Two Mesmerizing Videos

I’ve been trying to get my hands on the only official video recording of Lacan speaking ever since seeing clips of it in the recent documentary on Slavoj Zizek. After a long time trolling around YouTube, I found a link to the online video archive Ubuweb, which has the entire recording freely available (albeit without subtitles). The recording is a television broadcast from 1973 of Lacan responding to questions posed by his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, and it completely changed the way I read him. I’ve heard a lot, of course, about Lacan’s infamously deft and difficult verbal style, riddled as it was with wordplay, irony, obscure references to pre-Socratic philosophers and topology, and psychoanalytic neologisms. But this style really needs to be seen directly to be fully appreciated—something is lost in the written transcription through which most of his ideas come down to us. The aim of the broadcast seems to be to provide a lay public with a basic introduction to his ideas, but this is no Psychoanalysis 101. Lacan speaks slowly at times, with long pauses for thought, and then he will suddenly burst out and gesture wildly with his arms. He frequently seems exasperated (with himself? his audience? the idea of being on TV?) and at one point he even starts to shout at the camera. Even though I’m missing a lot of what he says (I think you need to be a native French speaker to pick up on all of his jokes and witticisms), he is completely mesmerizing. Zizek criticizes Lacan for the eccentricity and flamboyancy of his style, saying that he “tries to forget it” while listening for the ideas underneath. Zizek calls himself an “Enlightenment thinker” in his desire for clarity, and has indeed become very famous for his ability to translate Lacan into a more accessible and less frightening language. I don’t think, however, that we can separate Lacan’s style from his ideas so easily. Deeply aware of his position as the sujet-supposé-savoir, Lacan seems to want to destabilize through pure excess his own authority and his own knowledge, to insert a degree of madness into the discourse of the university.

Jacques Lacan - Télévision (1973)

Oh, wait…who is that leathery old guy tricking out Ubuweb’s homepage? That’s Samuel Beckett, man! I did a search for Beckett and was delighted to find the first film version of one of his best short plays, Not I, also from 1973. This play sits very well with Lacan, along, I think, with much of Beckett’s work. The crux of the play is the intersection of “self” and Other—the play’s sole voice is continually tormented by the inability to determine if it, or a mysterious “she,” has been the victim of a tragedy. Along with many of Beckett’s plays, repetition is crucial in Not I in the form of the symptom. Language seems to be slowly cut away from its human moorings. You’ll see what I mean.


Samuel Beckett - Not I (1973)

UPDATE: Ubuweb also has Alan Schneider's version of Film (1966), Beckett's only screenplay, on this same page. It's silent black and white, starring Buster Keaton as a man who locks himself in a room with a dog, cat, parrot, and goldfish. I did some quick research and learned that Deleuze thought this was the "greatest Irish film." I also found a link to an audio recording of a symposium on the film hosted by Jean-Michel Rabaté (a sort of idol in this household).

Paprika, or, The Fantasy of Science

I just got back from seeing Satoshi Kon’s new film/mindfuck, Paprika. I feel compelled to write about it because it deals with the intersection of science and mental health, which is an issue I talked about in my last post and something that has been preoccupying me lately. The film has been getting a lot of media attention here in the US—more than Kon’s previous films Perfect Blue or Tokyo Godfathers received, at least. I’m no anime connoisseur, but in terms of sheer visual beauty and complexity Paprika may be unrivaled. I’m pretty sure Kon’s animators came up with ideas for this movie while overdosing on angel dust and peyote. (This is a good thing). My problems with the film are more with its conceptual grounding and implication.

Paprika tells the story of the young and attractive psychiatric researcher, Atsuko Chiba, and a device developed by her team called the “DC Mini” that allows its wearer to enter into the dreams of patients with the intention of curing neuroses and other psychic trauma. The assumption here is that dreams are where the Real of desire can be accessed directly without having to detour through the obscuring and essentially Imaginary effects of “personality” or “consciousness.” It is here that the film’s Freudian/Lacanian heritage appears most clearly, a heritage that is ultimately neglected. The story is similar to Tarsem Singh’s Jennifer Lopez-led sleeper hit The Cell from 2000, although the two films differ wildly in execution. After a DC Mini prototype is stolen, several members of Chiba’s team suddenly seem to lose their minds in rapid succession—she soon discovers that the thief is using the device to insert malicious dreams into the victims’ “subconscious” while they are awake, causing them to act like possessed demons. She works with the device’s inventor, the brilliant yet obese and childlike Dr. Tokita, and soon discovers that the perpetrator of the theft and attacks is none other than the aging and crippled Director of her very own institute. The Director wants to sabotage the DC Mini and prevent it from being approved in Parliament for widespread use.

This Director has become disillusioned with science, apparently, after a lifetime spent in service of it. With increasing frequency, he offers mini-soliloquies on the danger and blindness of technology. The first one seems jarring coming from the head of a scientific research group: “Science is garbage, when faced with a great idea” (I’m quoting from memory). The immediate assumption here is that something resists scientific interpretation and innovation, something escapes its perhaps overly ambitious mandate. The Director firmly believes that he is protecting humanity’s sovereign essence from the invading and classifying gaze provided by the DC Mini; he wants some aspects of the human mind to remain unknowable and inaccessible. The Director seems like a card-carrying Heideggarian here: he believes that technology has precipitated a closure or “forgetting” of access to Being. Technology brings about an “enframing” (Heidegger) of Nature that provides a false sense of security or power for those who operate the technology. The alternative here for Heidegger, as is well known, is a recourse to a “poetic” and nostalgic orientation that provides access to what science has cloaked.

The Director is framed as the villain of the film and Chiba (along with her dream-warrior counterpart Paprika) as the heroine. In the logic of the film, resistance to science is only a short step away from complete, monstrous anarchy—as dreams meld with reality, the Director eventually becomes a blackened, skyscraper-sized creep bent on destroying Tokyo. Somehow, Drs. Chiba and Tokita manage to prevent this from happening and to restore life to normal (don’t ask me to explain how they do this—it involves a transparent baby sucking up the Director’s black slime and then going through puberty). The gorgeous Chiba rejects the obvious romantic interest, the handsome and cunning assistant to the Director, in favor of the grotesque and nearly autistic Tokita based solely on the latter’s scientific genius. (The film actually goes so far as to suggest that this handsome assistant is the Director’s lover, further aligning the poetic, anti-technological perspective with unproductive deviancy). The film ends with the assurance that the DC Mini will soon hit the market and revolutionize scientific psychiatry.

Although they seem drastically different on most issues, I think Heidegger and Lacan sit together well in a rejection of Paprika’s praise of science and along with it the entire reliance on psychopharmacology and its corresponding “theory” (the DSM) that the film seems to represent for our world. As I mentioned in my last post, any change effected in (Lacanian) analysis must occur through a radical reconfiguration of the analysand’s symbolic and imaginary relations—that is, through the skillful manipulation of language. Lacanian psychoanalysis, which I firmly believe to be the only real way of changing a life, requires neither drugs nor technology. Toward the end of his life, Lacan was already familiar with “psychotherapy” and drug-based approaches to mental health—he rejected all of these as being merely “orthopedic,” that is, temporary. Without analysis, the same trauma repeats itself over and over again with tormenting efficiency and regularity.

I’m by no means a Luddite, and I agree for the most part with Badiou’s critique of Heidegger’s privileging of poetry over science. I’m simply skeptical of science’s claim of purchase on human desire and “happiness,” a claim that has garnered a lot of support in the US especially. (I’m thinking of an article by some daffy US government health care official, cited by Bruce Fink in his excellent clinical introduction to Lacan, claiming ludicrously that science will have cured all mental illness-including depression [!]-by the year 2010). You can hardly watch TV today without seeing an ad for an antidepressant that demonstrates just how quickly you can go from sitting with your face in your hands to running on the beach with your dog. Science today fosters this ultimate fantasy of the quick fix, the change without effort, and this does a terrible disservice to the original pioneers in mental health. To use Badiou’s language, a new truth is something that is built: it is an arduous process requiring the most acute fidelity. I think the iPhone is cool and everything, but I don’t think that the chemists behind Zoloft know how to make me happy.

By the way, there were spoilers in this post.

A Future Without Psychoanalysis - Houellebecq and Watts

I finally got around to reading Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles this week, inspired both by my friend’s confession that it made him feel “extremely uncomfortable” and by the ambitious comparisons to Beckett and Céline on the back of the most recent American edition. I’m writing my undergraduate thesis on Beckett and have been seeking out contemporary authors—John Banville, Thomas Bernhard and Maurice Blanchot are often cited—who supposedly work in the literary terrain that he initially pioneered. While I enjoyed The Book of Evidence, Gargoyles, and Death Sentence on their own merits, these novels come nowhere near the radical stylistic and theoretical innovations of Beckett’s Trilogy, or even of an early “developmental” novel like Watt. Beckett’s best novels are so programmatically ahistorical—so hermetically sealed in their complete indifference to banal consensual reality, to the “offal of existence” as he put it—that comparisons to novels that try to represent social issues with some degree of authority seem misguided. Comparing Banville to Beckett is like comparing Chingy to Nas.

Needless to say, I do not think that one can justifiably place Houellebecq alongside Beckett, except perhaps at the inane and facile level of “dissatisfaction.” But this post isn’t about Beckett. (I’m prone to florid digressions when it comes to him, I’m afraid.) This post is actually about science fiction and its attitude toward post-structuralism. The Elementary Particles doesn’t appear to be a science fiction novel until the last twenty pages, when the narrator reveals that he is a member of the “post-humanity” that emerged as a result of one of the protagonists’ breakthrough in genetics and cloning. We suddenly realize that the voice describing the incredibly miserable and frustrated lives of brothers Michel and Bruno is not of the same species—it has transcended the petty weaknesses and limitations that Houellebecq portrays disturbingly well. From this evolved vantage, the narrator makes a startling claim that seems to come out of left field: “The global ridicule in which the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze had suddenly foundered, after decades of inane reverence, far from leaving the field clear for new ideas, simply heaped contempt on all those intellectuals active in the ‘human sciences.’ The rise to dominance of scientists in all fields of thought became inevitable” (262). Through the adroit manipulation of DNA, this new race no longer has need for theories of power, desire, language or ontology. There are no more divisions of class or sexuation; reproduction has become an entirely technical affair and sex reduced to a vague androgynous interaction of pure pleasure. Science has found a cure for every problem; humanity has reached the end of history (“now that we have come at last to our destination / Leaving behind a world of division” (4) proclaims the post-human poem that prefaces the novel). For what has been widely touted as a great “novel of ideas” (Wall Street Journal), The Elementary Particles seems violently totalitarian in its recourse to the panacea of science and its perhaps rash dismissal of the great ideas of our time. This, of course, assumes that this is not a completely ironic novel, which is actually a big possibility and a problem that I’m still trying to figure out. After all, the satirist doesn’t have to believe in the ideas in which he or she trades. I find it hard to believe, however, that Houellebecq completely discounts the possibility or legitimacy of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough like the kind described here. Countless passages of the novel seem to be lifted directly from scientific articles and textbooks. He seems especially to resort to scientific jargon at moments when the pathos of the story seems to resist or escape the free indirect discourse he usually prefers. Whatever his ultimate attitude towards science, it remains that it provides him with an accessible and legitimate supplement to traditional literary language, with its own truths, rules, and possibilities for the narrative.

This abrupt rejection of the “big four” of twentieth-century continental theory reminded me of another sci-fi novel I read recently, Blindsight, by the Canadian writer Peter Watts. This is a more standard sci-fi fare: a diverse, quirky crew is assembled to explore an alien ship that has entered earth’s vicinity. I’m not going to talk about all the subtleties of this interesting novel (Steven Shaviro gives a very perceptive analysis here, for those who are curious), but want instead to refer to a single three page rant against psychoanalysis that has only tangential relevance to the plot. The rant comes when the usually transparent narrative voice slips into the role of a scientist-savior and proudly declares that science has “mapped” the human mind to the extent that it has solved all mental illness, unhappiness, and even inefficiency. The narrator unleashes his vitriol for twentieth-century attempts to address these problems, focusing his criticism on Freud (a “witchdoctor”) and psychoanalysis (“voodoo”). Again, the assumption here is that desire and power are no longer problems. Science has discovered how to provide man with what he wants, in a sense. And yet it has also managed somehow to convince man to continue to produce and fulfill his duty in the face of complete satisfaction. Watts seems to sidestep Civilization and its Discontents completely.

It is bizarre that a novel so preoccupied with demonstrating the inadequacy of psychoanalysis would also be so fraught with problems with Otherness and desire (it’s a First Contact novel, duh), altered states approaching on psychosis (note the almost psychedelic passages when the humans attempt to enter the alien ship), and unconscious motivation (the title refers to an automatic behavior or innate response that exists underneath conscious, rational discourse). The content of Blindsight belies the ostensible mastery and transparency that it extols. The fact remains that humans in the future still use language to communicate with each other—this much must be totally clear—and, as such, they are subject to the very aporias and problems articulated by those notorious thinkers so vehemently denounced by scientists and analytic philosophers. To use Lacan’s neologism, both the post-human narrator of The Elementary Particles and the advanced human narrator of Blindsight are still parlêtres, that is, beings constituted in language. They exist only insofar as they use language; for Lacan, ontology belongs to the symbolic order. Language for Lacan can only provide a tortuous limitation and barring off of satisfaction for the subject, a self-sustaining circuit to assure that objects of desire remain perpetually out of reach. The radical freedom and sophistication that these two novels fantasize will require a much more drastic change than science or drugs can ever provide.

This is all very adumbrated and cursory, I know. Houellebecq especially resists this kind of succinct exegesis. And for those who jump at my reduction of ontology to language, know that my thesis is going to address precisely this problem. Right now, I want to address Alain Badiou’s supposed break with Lacan in light of Beckett’s oeuvre, which I think invites both psychoanalytic and anti-psychoanalytic readings. More to come soon. This was my first post in over a year. Cool!

Dragonforce

This is the video for "Through the Fire and Flames," the first single from Dragonforce's new album Inhuman Rampage. I don't plan on posting too often about music, but I have to mention this song. Guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman, possibly the two most technically proficient players alive, trade frenzied solos for a full two minutes. My roommate tells me that they make tabs available for all their songs, although I don't know who these are for. A lot of people reference Dream Theater when talking about this band, but Dream Theater are all about progression and frequently spend ten minutes building intensity, whereas Dragonforce scorch right from the get-go.

Double Vision

I'm a little late on this one. It took me a while to track down a copy here in the States. Thanks, JN!

Tricia Sullivan’s latest novel Double Vision, so far only available in the UK from sci-fi imprint Orbit Books, tells the story of twenty-five year old Karen “Cookie” Orbach as she spends time in two radically different realities. In the world she calls home, suburban New Jersey circa 1984, Cookie is overweight, lonely, and submissive. She plays Dungeons & Dragons, overeats, and reads romance novels during her spare time. But she has a peculiar ability: when she watches TV, she hallucinates and witnesses another existence entirely, one in which a futurisitic all-female army battles tirelessly on a distant planet against a giant entity known only as “The Grid.” The Grid resembles a labyrinthine forest that pulses with life and light, a structure that moves and reconfigures itself with the intensity of a ferocious animal. It emits pheromones and powerful aerosol intoxicants that take control of the human nervous system. It can regenerate dead bodies and incorporate trash and machine parts into its structure. For reasons that become clear throughout the novel, Dataplex, a large corporation, pays Cookie good money to sit in a small room with a TV, observe this war, and then report back to them.

It’s not quite accurate to say that Cookie simply witnesses this other world; she participates in it as well, occupying the body of a sort of biological kite that has been outfitted by the soldiers with reconnaissance gear and sent to fly above the Grid. It is from the perspective of this creature, called Gossamer, that we follow a dual plotline involving one unit’s attempt to locate a missing high-ranking officer. With the help of Machine Front, a computerized command database, the unit travels through the Grid. They are under constant danger of attack by golems, creatures the Grid produces whenever it subsumes a human body. These drones are difficult to deal with; killing one produces nine in its place. And yet, despite the dangers they face, the women of the unit are surprisingly naïve and careless. They discard candy wrappers and copies of Redbook in the Grid, forgetting that it can turn their rubbish into weapons. They complain and cry constantly, lamenting the bad luck that brought them to such a terrible place. They hardly seem like soldiers at all. When they do communicate effectively, it is usually about pop culture back on Earth; at times, these sections of the novel feel like episodes of I Love The 80’s!, as the women prodigiously reference everything from Thriller to M*A*S*H to Ghostbusters.

The abundance of these bizarre references to the commodities of Cookie’s mundane life eventually lead her to discover the true nature of her employment at Dataplex: speculative advertisement research. When she hallucinates in front of the television, Dataplex plays her tapes of new ads, whose products are somehow incorporated into the world of the Grid. Through a process that Sullivan leaves vague, Cookie can predict which ads will work and which ones will not. Companies pay Dataplex well for access to Cookie’s prophecy, and thus the war with the Grid is connected with the very different war of capitalism.

And it’s the machinations of capitalism, not alien warfare, that form the ideological heart of this novel. As she flounders among the strip malls of New Jersey, trying to reconcile her two competing realities without developing full-blown schizophrenia, Cookie becomes skeptical about development and civilization. She wonders “how a piece of land that was once a forest full of wildlife and Indians could become so loaded with abstract thought. Road engineering. The mechanics of cars. Architecture. Wiring schema, sewage, plumbing” (207). In her own innocent way, she articulates some of the basic problems and sacrifices that come with late capitalism and its attendant social structure. She mourns the loss of a vaguely bucolic, pre-capitalistic serenity and oneness, supposing that everyone would be happier without “rows and rows of houses, and buildings, and roads” (107) and yet she realizes that forsaking the dreary confines of civilization also means forsaking the technological benefits upon which she has come to depend. This dependency is taken to the extreme in the world of the Grid. Machine Front, an apex of technological sophistication, has complete control over the human army and tells each soldier exactly what she should be doing at all times. And the soldiers gladly relinquish this crucial responsibility; Machine Front authority gives them more time to read Ladies Home Journal and gush over Cyndi Lauper. Sullivan makes it obvious that these people would not survive for five minutes without the help of Machine Front. Cookie comes to understand that she participates daily in humanity’s slow march towards enslavement to its own products, and yet she doesn’t know what to do with this understanding until the very end.

So far, all of this is old hat for the sci-fi genre. Sullivan’s strengths lie in her ability to push further, to represent in the Grid what it means to be caught up in capital. The Grid offers itself as a visceral analogue to the relationships and networks that govern capitalist economies. Just as capital cannot circulate and grow without certain inputs and carriers (raw materials, labor, emotion, desire, etc.), and just as it is meaningless and impotent when not moving from one place to another, so does the Grid demand new man-made products and restructure itself incessantly. There is no such thing as stability in either system. The generative economy of the Grid is also obscene in much the same way as the subjects of capitalism desire their financial growth to be. Just as one Golem can become many in a fantastic surge of excess occurring at death, so does capitalism hinge on the fantasy of “easy money,” on the potential for a well-invested small sum to explode into a fortune, seemingly out of nowhere. And when one soldier ventures underneath the Grid into a surreal metropolis called the SynchroniCity (ahem, the Police?), she marvels at the supreme inclusiveness of the network of commodities displayed there, saying “it goes on and on, an unspooling web of connections where everything leads to everything else, into language and through math and out again, behind the stars and under the sea” (206). Escape from this web seems impossible; it has even begun to speak through us, compromising our ability to even articulate the problem.

So how do Sullivan’s characters deal with the webs and currents they find themselves caught in? On the Grid world, a certain semi-human group discovers how to use the Grid itself as a way of resisting the army’s imperial desire. They capture a human missile and hook it into the SynchroniCity, which then starts to “unpack” its technology and extract all the forces that went into its creation. They “turn the missile inside out and…draw out everything that it implied” (206). And this is what makes for the hallucinatory nature of this city; it is filled with the physical manifestations of the developmental stages of the missile and the civilization that wields it. “The cart horses that pulled the wood that fuelled the fire that Copernicus wrote by are in that [missile]” (206), and consequently they appear in the Grid. Cookie’s rebellion, on the other hand, is relatively docile and simple. She quits the job that she believes to exploitative, and she attacks the karate instructor who disgraces her friend. She receives a short jail sentence but rather than buy her way out with a good lawyer, she decides to take a break from normal life. She learns to assert her agency and resists what she determines to be unjust. And she might not be capable of influencing the world beyond this limited scope.

It is the juxtaposition of these two instances of revolutionary gestures that finally forms Sullivan’s “double vision.” Cookie’s modest resistance in her daily life coupled with the purely aesthetic, supernatural resistance in the Grid world provides a template for revolution in general, Sullivan seems to suggest: one must cultivate a utopian ideal alongside everyday strategies of change and progress. And yet this novel is sad because there is such a huge gap between the utopian and the quotidian, and because Cookie is frankly not ambitious enough to extend beyond her personal circumstances and make a universal proclamation that could actually benefit others. In the end, Double Vision may not loosen any shackles in our world, but maybe I’m asking too much of it. As a commodity, it served its purpose: while reading it I forgot, if only for a while, about our long slow march into the future.