Too Much Reality, Research Time, 20/03/2018

When I was first reading Anti-Œdipus and really getting into it, I didn’t fully understand all the book’s arguments about psychiatry. I could follow the political philosophy well, but a more experienced researcher on Gilles Deleuze’s thought told me I needed some more background knowledge on the psychiatry before I could really dig into its concepts.

It’s been about 12 years since then. I think I’ve got this down reasonably.

Now, quite a lot of academic philosophy departments don’t consider Deleuze and Félix Guattari credible voices on scientific or medical issues. This is because they’re French philosophers whose major works dropped in the 1970s, so are associated with dreaded postmodernism.

Flying from reality? An excess of reality? By Mathieu Laca

Many university philosophy departments have characters more like Petersonian reaction than popular stereotypes about the discipline would have you believe.

As I’ve said before, Guattari was a groundbreaking psychiatrist, whose clinic La Borde was at the leading edge of creative new ways to treat psychotics and schizophrenics. The reason is because of his thorough materialism.

Under the influence of Freud – as well as Jung and pretty much the whole psychoanalytic model of thinking – you conceive of psychiatry as a rationalist practice. Your paradigm is what was literally called “the talking cure.”

So psychiatric practice is about the patient themselves analyzing themselves – the actual analyst acts as a guide so the patient learns the tools and understands the arguments and inferences to cure themselves. The patient understands the causes, conditions, nature, and the steps to follow in their daily lives to overcome their mental health problems.

That works for some mental health issues, but when Freud himself dealt with schizophrenics, he could do nothing. He described such patients as falling away from reality. Reality on his thinking was a material order of things and processes which you understood with rational human thought, language, and discourse.

Figure out the nature of a problem in clear thinking, after self-consciously exploring it. You can always fix your own mind if you understand its mechanics. Schizophrenics fall or fly from this because they can’t understand the world’s mechanics – empiricism is impossible.

Guattari had a totally different way to describe the schizophrenic state of mind – an excess of reality. Functioning people perceived and understood with a powerful focus. We cut away so much of a chaotic, messy environment.

Everyone is a machine. How fine is your tuning?
By Nychos

We sit on a busy bus without being overwhelmed by the activity around us – people moving back and forth, weaving through crowds in all directions, fumbling with bags and boxes, announcements of the next stop or slow stretches, cute puppies poking out of purses. We can keep our eye on a couple of things at a time.

We’re also doing this actively – making sense of all this mess on the damn bus. We remember who sat where, when our stop is, waddle to the door two or three stops in advance, stick our gloves deeper in our pockets so we don’t lose them, keeping an eye out for seated riders about to move. We can use this focussed attention as a basis to understand what’s going on and what we should do.

Schizophrenia explodes our focus. We can’t discriminate among possibilities because we spontaneously understand more causal processes than really exist. The imagination flies radically from the most trivial details. A passenger on the bus snorts out a sneeze, and it means that he’s part of the clandestine CIA plot to replace citizens with plastic machines.

We generate an excess of reality – an explosion of causes, explanations, and conditions. Unable to cut away any of our thought in perceiving or understanding, we overwhelm ourselves.

Funny part is, neurological research has a good angle on the causes of schizophrenia. It’s a destabilization of inhibitory signalling processes in the brain’s neural transmission. Destabilizing a process that should be in a proper range of inhibition.

Unable to regulate our reality – our thinking and world.

Knowing the Causes of Power, Research Time, 21/02/2018

There were a lot of reasons Félix Guattari broke with Jacques Lacan and the whole rest of the Freudian-influenced schools of French psychiatry. I talked about a couple last time.

How one point of unquestioned rationalism survived into the science of psychiatry – to understand the causes of the condition is itself part of the cure. How the images arising from singular cases were taken for universal symbol structures of human personalities. Both thanks to the influence of Freud.

Here’s a third issue that constituted such a radical break – the image of the therapist’s authority.

I don’t mean this in the sense of practical, institutional authority. Guattari understood that therapists, clinicians, and those who are responsible for the care and cure of the severely mentally ill required authority to do their jobs. They needed to prescribe drugs, coordinate clinical activities, design a therapy regime.

You don't really want anyone to be authorized only by themselves, do you?

All those required legal authority – the power of a signature. Your decisions had weight, and so needed to be taken with responsibility. That responsibility required thought and devotion, an ethical weight of obligation to act in the patient’s best interest – to let their good guide you.

I read an essay by Guattari a while ago that described the dominant culture of psychiatry and mental health care practice drifting from that ideal. He gives us Lacan’s words, “The analyst is authorized only by himself.”

There are two ways to read this. One is ontologically. The cause of some practicing psychoanalyst in some little town – call him Jack from Paris* – having his authority doesn’t come from Jack himself.

* Paris, Ontario.

Jack has to earn degrees and certifications in the fields you need to be expert as an analyst and therapist. He’s cultivated deep technical and philosophical medical knowledge. His legal powers are enabled by a complex web of institutions, laws, and regulations.

Another way you can read it is ethically. Jack’s authority flows from the trust people put in him – those who hired him, administer his certification renewals, maintain the laws that give him the right to prescribe drugs and therapies, and enforce those laws when they're broken.

Both are correct, of course. And not mutually exclusive. Just looking at different features of the world. The conclusion from both sides of that argument is that the statement “The analyst is authorized only by himself” isn’t adequate to empirical reality. Such an attitude isn’t going to fit properly with the real circumstances of an analyst’s working life.

What happens when a guiding philosophical element of training conflicts so brutally with the reality of practice? Breakdown. You end up with a body of professional analysts who tick the institutional boxes, but practice with none of the respect for the mentally ill that you need to practice properly.

Certainly not enough to transform respect into mutual respect. That’s the authority of expertise, an inescapably ethical relationship. Guattari understood that a philosophical principle of considering the analyst an absolute power – the revealer, prober, curer – undermines the possibility of ethical relationships among therapists and patients.

You can't really hold such a principle and practice medicine at the same time. Thought conditions reality when the reality is our actions and relationships.

That Is One Messed Up Freudian Nightmarescape, Doctor Who: Knock Knock, Reviews, 07/05/2017

The title says it all, honestly. This post is going to explore some images and concepts from different bits of philosophy. Think of it as a little experiment for how I’m going to write some historical riffing passages in Utopias. As well, it’s a good way to makes sense of what is in many ways a well-made but fairly ordinary Doctor Who story.

Doctor Who is built from nightmares, after all. And expert at inspiring them too. “Knock Knock” makes Doctor Who’s relationship with your nightmares very explicit and extremely squirmy.

Hidden Secrets in Twisting Corridors

Another good touch in this episode is how the script combines
terrifying psychologically grotesque narratives with some silly
comedy. Especially seeing Peter Capaldi's run through the classic
routine of the Doctor trying and sort of succeeding at being cool.

In Phil Sandifer’s review of this episode, he was right in many ways. The setting of the haunted house is getting a little old in Doctor Who. It’s played a major or minor role in several stories over the last decade since the release of Steven Moffat’s masterpiece “Blink.”

He’s right that it’s getting tired. You can’t really depend on the trope of the haunted house alone to deliver scares. But I do think Mike Bartlett – in his first contribution to Doctor Who – has written an episode that fits his reputation as one of the better television and theatre writers in Britain today.

“Knock Knock” seems disappointingly straightforward at first glance, but Bartlett has put some thought into just how creepy his scenario is. The haunted house is a good place to put shadows, dank corners, musty cellars, and other corners, alcoves, and cracks that disturb and unsettle a person.

But what is a haunted house? It’s most profoundly a place of secrets – repressed memories, facts, phenomena, and processes. They’re the twisting catacombs of the subconscious articulated as a building where our protagonists live, explore, and risk death trying to understand a terrible mystery.

Of course, I can’t discuss that mystery without warning you of the obvious

SPOILERS!!!

In case you couldn't tell from the section title, I'm totally going there.

“Mother? Mother! Oh God, Mother!!”

The haunted house is part of what the literary theorists call our cultural imaginary. It’s one of the mythic images that gets trotted out because of its signifiers. The haunted house is more than just its TV Tropes list, but is the image common in contemporary global culture for a story of the return of the repressed.

Our myths of a return of ghosts long thought buried take the form of haunted houses. Stephen King’s The Shining depicted the inner spirals and caverns of the haunted house as the repository of echoing energy that centuries of human evil have generated.

The catacombs of the hotel represented in one scene with a hornet’s nest. Not long on subtlety. I hate that book.

But the point here is the sheer ickiness of the Landlord’s nature. The trauma of his mother’s illness and pending death becomes a focus for his entire life, fixating on her to the point of erasing her personality. He speaks of her as his daughter, to justify his aged body.

The Landlord's bargaining in the throes of his trauma began the
process that annihilated any individual subjectivity he could have had.

As well, he communicates with her and the creatures animating her through the mansion itself. The old stone house has merged with his mother and with the creatures. All of it is one entity, which he thinks of only as mother, the duty and love on which he fixed his entire personality and life.

The Landlord needs no name because he’s given it up. He exists only for the sake of his mother, the house.

The son gives himself entirely over to his mother. He sleeps deep inside her every night, rarely leaving the grounds except to find food for her.

I’m just making the sexual nature of the Landlord’s relationship with his mother* as explicit as I can make it. I’m going full Sigmund Freud on this analysis, almost as a riff. On one hand, it’s because I’m not very well-practiced in psychoanalytic writing. On the other hand, I don’t think I need to.

* Who is also a house and who is also a gigantic swarm of alien dryad insects, just so we’ve got all this at the forefront of our minds.

Everything I write in this review, I mean in a very literal sense.
Eaten alive. Eaten and still alive.

To Be Eaten Alive

My own introduction to psychoanalytic thinking largely began with my studies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work. So I learned about it by watching its core ideas being utterly broken apart. Not broken apart, so much as shown to be inadequate.

Even though you can understand a lot about human trauma using the familial Oedipal dynamic that Freud described and popularized, Freudian imagery isn’t a universal set of human psychological laws.

It was one set of images that could help us make sense of some common situations. They didn’t fit all situations, and they weren’t the only images to describe what they were about. So we ran up the wrong way on that tree for a while.

“Knock Knock,” however, is about as Freudian as you can get, clearly. The Landlord is a child Oedipus whose trauma crafted a fixation on his mother to the point where even he erased his own identity in favour of his mission. When his mother became the house, he became the house’s protector, just as he was hers as a human. Landlord.

They are a pure force of becoming, and that's the centre of their horror.

Yet the force animating the House Mother isn’t Freudian at all. It’s a swarm, millions of dryad alien insects that move as one to animate the wood of the house, and feed when they’re hungry. They’re swarms that obey the concentrated power of a self-conscious subject giving them an order.

The dryads are a pure force, remaking the territories they pervade. A wall becomes a mouth. A woman becomes a creaking tree. They wipe the world of one nature and remake it in their own.

That transformation is hidden. The dryads’ reterritorialization of the house and the House Mother is the ontological mystery of “Knock Knock.” That’s the suppressed secret of the house, as to its nature.

Most hauntings are a matter of a ghost, what China Miéville literally called hauntological, in his analysis of horror. It’s the repressed evil that echoes from the past into the present. Morally speaking, it’s the call for justice. That’s the typical image of haunting, the most morally uplifting.

Or else it’s a mutated call, an evil so intense that it’s been perverted into a purely malevolent, hungry energy. That’s the sublimation of genocide and murder of Stephen King’s original Overlook hotel.

"The Rats in the Walls" was the first Lovecraft story I ever read,
and it struck me as I read more of his work how much it stood
out. It was a brilliant story, and a terror that hit me more viscerally
than the more cerebral notes of the Weird for which he's known
best. My own science-fiction work published so far explores
more of what deterritorializing horror can do.

The Dryads in the Walls

The dryads are a more Lovecraftian creature. I don’t mean this in the sense of the Weird, Miéville’s abyssal twin to the comforting humanity of ghosts. There’s another kind of nightmare in Lovecraft that he never really pursued, as he did his eruptions of the Weird, the Absolute Other.

I’m talking about the rats in the walls. It’s a nightmare of deterritorialization. The invasion of a force that consumes you by eradicating your shape – what was once solid is now a gas. What was once a personality becomes a yearning hunger with no sense of selfhood or reflection at all.

That’s what the dryads have done to the house. They’ve turned the mansion and its grounds from an ordinary, if ostentatious, dwelling, into a humming vibration of breathing hunger.

The Oedipal sickness of the Landlord and the House Mother have kept a shred of personality left in that deterritorialization. The child-mother fixation remains as a single thread of self-consciousness, of subjecthood, in what should have been the eradication of human personality in the architecture and the organisms in its rooms.

The House Mother was the only one who could hold her body’s shape after the dryads consumed her into wood. And it was because of the incredible force of the Landlord’s grotesque fixation, his parody of love and devotion, with his mother.

If you think about it long enough, this is one of the more unsettling stories Doctor Who has done in some time.
• • •
My other philosophical reviews in this season, Peter Capaldi's last.
The Pilot / The Girl With a Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice

No Future Epilogue: Figural Thoughts in The Real World, Research Time, 14/04/2014

It seems my initial trepidation about publicly admitting that I was engaging with queer theory for the first time has borne out at least a little social awkwardness, especially as I tried to work through what I think Lee Edelman’s political psychoanalytic method misses in reaction to his treatment of A Christmas Carol in No Future. Edelman himself doesn’t seem to be the most representative of queer theory either; many writers who contributed to the field following No Future’s publication paid its intellectual force tribute while distancing themselves from his conclusions. Its influence was notable, because it couldn’t be ignored. But the reaction was to run away.

Reading this book from beginning to end, No Future made a brilliant diagnosis of the cause of such nearly-ubiquitous horrifying violence and hostility toward non-hetero sexualities, the queer.* So many moral compasses throughout human societies, though Edelman focusses specifically on the West, place an idealized and pure image of the child in a zone of inviolability. Any indication that one’s life can be complete without taking part in the procreative activity of humanity becomes at least suspect, and at worst a threat. Hence, the concept of the queer as an inherently destructive figure, a force that would undo society and morality because such a way of living is indifferent to reproduction. All this even though reproduction simply continues humanity toward a future that, despite its value, remains obscure and essentially distant. 

* For anyone who might say that North America and other generally gay-friendly countries have made progress on this front and that such violence is over-estimated, you make too much of what is ultimately too little. Yes, our continent is focussed on concerns like gay marriage, and we no longer criminalize homosexuality, treat it as a disorder to be cured, or officially answer it with a state-administered death penalty. But Edelman opens his last chapter with an account of Matthew Shepard’s brutal 1998 murder. Most importantly, the public discourse around his death revolved around his mother having lost her son, not a young man having been murdered because of his identity. And I remember a lot of news media reports saying that Shepard had made a pass at the men who killed him, implying that his murder was his own fault. And although violence against queer people continues, few if any of these incidents appear on national news media anymore. So yes, enlightenment.

I am confronted with his argument, and I am impressed. It makes sense, and convinces me that it is at least part of the truth. The fear that those who hold traditional moralities have of deviations from family-centric heterosexuality is an existential terror of creatures who appear indifferent to whether their physical lineage continues. Such a moral perspective would feel horrifyingly threatened by the mere appearance of someone who doesn’t share the concern for humanity’s continuation, someone who is content with the present. In the Lacanian frameworks of his thinking, such a person is not even a person in his own right, but the embodiment of the death drive itself, the joy of self-destruction. This is the core of Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurist morality: the sacredness of procreative coupling and the children it creates determines the good.

A staple of psychoanalytic political analysis, as I see in
both Edelman and Slavoj Zizek, is interpreting cultural
products, like Hitchcock's The Birds, as expressions of
self-obscuring social pathologies.

But what unnerves me about Edelman’s thinking is that he doesn’t articulate an alternative to this good. He actually defines queer sexuality as an affront to this good, living articulations of the death drive. No Future carries through his initial statement that radical conservative opponents of queerness having a place in society are right about its nature: to be queer is to be a living social expression of the joy in self-annihilation. Edelman’s own illustrations of the meaning of queerness from the films of Hitchcock show this. Martin Landau’s Leonard from North by Northwest responds to Cary Grant’s pleas to help him save Eva Marie Saint for the sake of their forming a reproductive couple by forcing them to fall off Mount Rushmore. The cultural and social-psychoanalytic meaning of queerness is the embrace of death and the joy in it.

Even worse is his illustration of the meaning of queerness for children themselves: these cultural meanings, which are all but essential in their metaphorical structure, are Hitchcock’s Birds themselves as they mercilessly attack and terrorize small towns and schoolyards. There is no reason for this attack; it is an uncontrollable force of nature which destroys whatever sees good in the continuation of existence into the future.

I can argue, as I attempted in Sunday’s post, that psychoanalytic political theory, while useful for ideological understanding, is terrible at incorporating the complicating processes of actual historical development into its analyses. None of that complexifying critique will prevent this conclusion that sickens me. Understanding society and ideology with the tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis means accepting its central ordering concepts as dogma. Any opposition to Eros, the productive love that builds an amorphous futurity, is Thanatos, an incarnation of the death drive. Not wanting to develop significations that elide the emptiness of actual existence embraces the destruction of everything. On Edelman’s reading, queer sexualities actually are this destructive force. 

And I simply won’t have it. No argument, no critical thoughts, no witty jokes, no conceptual engagement. I understand Edelman’s perspective; it’s very clear in the book. And I don’t want any. 

I described at the end of yesterday’s post that psychoanalytic political theory could be useful in the analysis of ideologies. But it shouldn’t be anyone’s only tool. It ignores history as a social phenomenon, but also as individual material singularities — people. In concentrating so much on mapping worldly phenomena and cultural products to its framework of interpretive concepts, figurative meanings become more important than real life. Edelman himself admits that his interpretation is more about what phenomena represent than the phenomena themselves. You can find an amazing story, which is also meaningful, but you discover nothing of the world.

No Future 2: Entrancing Images Whose Truths Can Find No Fact to Prove Them, Research Time, 13/04/2014

Continued from last post. Lee Edelman’s book No Future has a fascinating reading of the wider cultural meaning of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that ubiquitous storyline that is more frequently attended every holiday season by more people than go to Church. The story has become such a stereotype that everyone has done some version of it — every mediocre sitcom’s Christmas episode, Bill Murray, the Muppets, Doctor Who.* Edelman considers it, and the sentimentality that it wields for its power, to be an assault on queer sexualities and people, denouncing them as inherently evil and cruel creatures who must be converted to family values.

* The only reason I can think Doctor Who’s version of A Christmas Carol would be exempt from Edelman’s critique of the storyline is that it isn’t a child who saves that story’s Scrooge from his ethical wasteland. Instead, it’s his love for a terminally ill woman, a love that itself has no future, but lives only in its fleeting, indelible experiences. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

As much as I love The Muppets, and the particular beauty
of their production of A Christmas Carol, Robin has always
been so cloyingly sentimental that it drives me mad.

The lynchpin of Edelman’s argument of what A Christmas Carol means in contemporary culture lies in the character of Tiny Tim. Now, what the story means today is distinct from what Dickens himself may have intended in its authorship, but something very important is lost from our understanding when we forget this historical continuity between the conditions and motives of authorship and a work’s contemporary significance. As for Tiny Tim, Dickens renders him with such over-the-top sentimentality that he is less a character in his own right than an injunction and plea for pity in literary form. He’s an entirely abstract plea for love, not for any particular child, but to all suffering children. The literary form makes Tiny Tim more remarkable an image, the kind of singularity in each of its forms (even the mawkish Robin Frog) whose evocation of sympathy is so much more powerful than the mere, “Think of the poor, suffering children!” But for Edelman, Tiny Tim is no more than the pure voice of the morality of reproductive futurism, the valorization of the child’s purity as unquestionably the primary social good.

Scrooge, in contrast, is a voice of pure death. Dickens even describes him freezing cold, making him resemble a walking corpse. Because Edelman is so Lacanian that it hurts sometimes, he understands Scrooge as a masochistic version of the Freudian death drive. So far, so Disney. But in the previous chapter, Edelman has walked us through Jacques Lacan’s argument that the death drive actually expresses a kind of joy. The technical term in Lacanian language is jouissance: the soul’s fiery exhilaration as you burn yourself away to ashes. Edelman has already identified this joyfulness with the life of the queer, because children and reproduction are not involved in this kind of love,** only enjoyment in the present. It only helps that it’s so easy to read Scrooge’s personal and professional partnership with Marley as a closeted gay relationship.

** This statement only applies to Edelman’s ideal concept of the queer, as many actual people of many sexualities are still interested in raising children in their households, and should receive all the social benefits and support for parenthood that straight people do. But Edelman introduces No Future as focussing only on what queerness and cultural products involving it figure, not what actual queer people think and believe.

So when Scrooge is finally overcome by the sentimental pleas for pity that echo from Tiny Tim, Edelman reads it as the norms of aggressive straight morality, reproductive futurism, overwriting his queer nature. In Dickens’ original words, Scrooge becomes a celibate second father to Tiny Tim. So this universally beloved story constitutes an act of violence and hostility to queer sexualities and people.

Removing A Christmas Carol from its original historical
and political context overwrites the lives of everyone who
suffered under the hideous conditions of 19th century
factory labour.

This is one analysis of the modern cultural meaning of A Christmas Carol. But the continuing phenomenon of A Christmas Carol in all its aspects is more complex than just its cultural meaning. Remember the conditions of its generation: It is essentially a political pamphlet in the form of a novella, one of the most successful such pamphlets. Charles Dickens wrote with an entirely different political consciousness than we have today. His primary political motivation was labour reform, particularly ending the prevalent practice in Britain of child factory labour. Tiny Tim, Scrooge, and A Christmas Carol constituted a touchstone in the political movement of emancipating children from tortuous factory labour. It required an immense philosophical transformation throughout European society to make people believe sincerely and wholeheartedly that children did not belong in factories. Insofar as he was a tireless political advocate for a marginalized people, the children of the poor, Dickens was an intellectual social liberator, a similar function Edelman can serve for the queer community. It’s just that Dickens chose sentimentality, not Lacanian psychoanalytic political theory, as his weapon. As such, he was much more effective.

Edelman, to me at least, seems more Lacanian than Jacques Lacan himself. So he thinks in a way that I suspect, porting frameworks of understanding from psychoanalysis to the entirety of society. But even if psychoanalysis is a useful such framework for individual people, societies operate according to entirely different mechanisms, and are constituted quite differently. Ecological and economic processes come to the forefront in the constitution of a society. So, to me, a solid framework to understand the cultural imaginary, where our cultural products develop personal meanings, requires a merger of frameworks for thinking appropriate to the individual and those for the social and ecological. The result would likely radically transform both. Lacanian social theory moves too simply in transferring its philosophical frameworks.

And I think the biggest mistake of Lacanian thinking is that the metaphorical aspect of thought, what a social phenomenon figures, becomes more important than its actual history. Just as psychoanalysis diagnoses people through metaphorical figuration, rational engagement with our most a-rational thoughts, psychoanalytic political theory diagnoses societies by analyzing cultural products as the expressions of unspoken social drives. 

It suffers from the same incompleteness as psychoanalysis: the analysis misses critical aspects of the world by ignoring the historical development of societies and the actual lives of people, each of whom are more singular than its metaphors. So the products of psychoanalytic political theory become generalities of which every real-world example is an exception. A diagnostic image that makes perfect sense, but has no practical instantiation.