We Prohibited It Because It’s Illegal!, Research Time, 23/03/2018

I haven’t been in the best headspace this week. All I’ve managed to do is get myself together enough to work on my paying gig at the moment, that think tank paper. Even the last few blog entries were exercises in getting through a conceptual block in the paper’s main argument.

It’s been difficult for me to summon energy beyond that, which has caused me to fall behind on some other commitments. And I’m sorry – but depression can be a pain in the ass. A pain in everything else too, which is why they call it depression.

This weekend will be catchup weekend, I’m just going to get tonight’s post finished – actually a short one this time – get a solid night’s sleep, and get back on track.

A long and unnerving shadow.
Art by Marcelo Neira

My thoughts about the nature of law are kind of funny and sometimes too simple. I knew a lot of legal theorists at McMaster, but I shared very different premises about the nature of law than a lot of that research community.

I don’t see law as something you have a moral obligation to obey. I think the law done right encourages ethical activity, encourages people to treat each other with kindness as individuals and with justice through institutions.

Now, that hardly ever happens in real life, so I actually don’t think we have much obligation beyond fear of punishment to follow the law – insofar as it’s the law. If the law happens to coincide with what’s ethically right, we’re obligated morally to follow it – not because it’s the law, but because the law actually encourages justice.

Examples of laws that encourage justice – laws against theft, assault, killing, fraud; regulating acceptable practices for health care, education delivery, utilities provision, record-keeping, ecological protection.

Still rolling through some of my notes on Ian Buchanan’s book about Anti-Œdipus. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts into my projects that involve politics, law, and the institutions of the state means understanding the conceptions of law that they reacted against in their own theoretical development.

What were the concepts that cast the longest shadow?

The Freudian and Lacanian models that dominated French psychiatry around the time of the Paris Uprising was probably the biggest single shadow. Except probably for Marx. That way of thinking had a disturbing concept of law.

Law, on this model, is prohibition. Law exists as one side of a yin-yang complex with desire – each can’t exist without the other. The manifestation of desire simultaneously manifests the law prohibiting it.

Desire can only develop through being continually stamped down.
What kind of political and social philosophy can come from a
premise like this?
Art by Ashley Montague

That law could be institutional if you live in a bureaucratic state, or cultural if you live in what Lacan and the mainstream Parisian intellectual community called a primitive society. But the law is the prohibition of desire which develops along with and in dialectic with that desire.

Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to this was surprisingly practical. You can’t argue against the concept on its own terms, because the concept rests at the premise of the whole discourse. You can’t talk a Freudian out of Freudian thinking by arguing entirely on Freudian terms.

So you stake out an entirely different way of thinking, and show how well those concepts deal with real-life problems the mainstream can’t handle. Psychiatrically, Freudian rationality can’t deal with schizophrenics.

In the legal-institutional context, Freudian rationality understands desire as something that needs its own prohibition to develop at all. It legitimates law as a necessary repression. Law is legitimate because it represses. Politics that considers repression necessary is fascism.*

* Thinking back to Snyder’s essay again. He also lists Freud as a major influence on Ivan Ilyin, the Russian fascist. Ilyin's conclusion that a civilization develops through the collective suppression of our drives as individuals. He seems to be a profound thinker against democracy. Terrifying.

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.

A Thinker Is a Process Because She’s a Person, Jamming, 12/02/2018

Two passes at the mistake of searching for the universal, for the one true truth.
• • •
I pity the fool who had to write the essay on Sigmund Freud in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy. It’s because there actually isn’t much to say when a thinker so powerfully rejects a former influence in a fit of rage.

One of the most influential books Gilles Deleuze ever wrote was Anti-Œdipus with Félix Guattari – definitely the most influential among the political thinkers who build on his work. That book was built around a detailed, incisive, forceful, and total rejection of the core dynamics of all Freudian thinking.

Freudian concepts of desire dominated French thought about
psychology early in Deleuze and Guattari's career. They
wrote against it with the fury of a betrayed disciple.

Now, before meeting Guattari, Deleuze did take Freud’s ideas seriously. Many of Freud’s ideas were the core principles of the analysis in Deleuze’s book on Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Several chapters in The Logic of Sense explicitly relied on Freud to build a theory of desire and sexuality.

Nothing reversed so radically in Deleuze’s intellectual life than his belief in Freudian ideas. It took meeting Guattari for him to realize that Freudian psychology was the closest thing possible to an opposite of the direction he wanted to develop – a metaphysical framework based on heterogeneity, variety, difference, becoming.

Working with Guattari helped Deleuze realize that Freud’s entire system was built on a premise that those images – Œdipus in particular – constituted a universal structure to human consciousness.

Guattari – a man who worked all his life with schizophrenics – knew from the examples of his daily professional life that it was far from universal. More than that, the dynamics of Œdipal imagery, concepts, and principles in action on people’s personalities and identities grounds an ethic of unearned submission and servitude to authority of force and might. Father–King–Policeman–Gun–Man.

Fucking patriarchy, man.
• • •
Ronald Bogue ended up writing the most boring kind of history of philosophy paper imaginable – the list. He lists and dispassionately describes the appearances Freud’s ideas made in Deleuze’s work. Doesn’t contribute any more analysis than that.

There's a masterful essay in cultural theory on how Freudian
philosophy of desire and sexuality leads to the ideology of Zardoz.
But I'm not about to write it. That would mean I'd have to watch
Zardoz.

Bogue’s essay expresses a weird kind of regret that Deleuze rejected Freudianism and never relied on Freud’s work again. I can’t quite explain it.

Best I can do is speculate – about the habits and norms of the academics of the global university system. Not what everyone does, of course. I’m just talking about the tendencies people get socialized into as they teach their courses, hunt for research grants and contracts, submit their articles and edit their journals, chase tenure.

There’s a tendency to crave wholeness in a primary material philosopher. At conferences, in classes, and in articles, so many ask questions like, “What was Aristotle’s concept of the soul?” for example. As if there could only be one answer to that question.

Some philosophers are allowed breaks. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those, but he was so extreme in declaring it in his life that no one can deny it. Kant was way more professional with his declaration, but it was still pretty extreme.

I was trained to think of such figures as outliers in the broader tradition of philosophy – those were consistent thinkers. Even the two Kants and the two Wittgensteins are each treated as being consistent. The concepts are clear in each one. You’d get weird looks if you suggested that the primary material thinkers were just as uncertain of the ideas they wrote about and the concepts they developed as anyone else.

So much secondary material is scholarship arguing over what a given philosopher really meant by a particular concept. If even the primary material writers didn’t quite know the exact concept – if they were figuring it all out like the rest of us – there isn’t any real hook for why they’re among the ranks of the great philosophers.

Well, there is. It’s the ambition, care, and skill with which they wrote their battles with difficult, vital concepts. Plus, they had the social and institutional connections and reputations to publish their work where it would be widely read and taken seriously.

If you think primary material philosophers reached any truth that make them categorically different from anyone else. We don’t read Aristotle to follow and join along with his concepts about the nature of the soul – We read Aristotle to know Aristotle’s concept of the soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t. You know that everybody shits, right?

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

Trapped in a Dualism, Research Time, 14/02/2014

After meeting so many people who do not take Freud
seriously, I also have trouble taking Freud seriously.
The huge number of critiques of his ideas, as well as the
huge number of penis jokes that can be so easily made
at his expense, offer me no help in this.

If there is one figure in the history of philosophy who I have never much wanted to delve into, it’s Sigmund Freud. Yet he is also a fascinating liminal point where philosophy, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and medicine all blur together. As well, Félix Guattari once called Freud a brilliant literary thinker because of the evocative power of the images with which he described subjectivity and states of mind. But there was simply so much Freud that, as an academic researcher, I could not specialize in his work without the study of Freud monopolizing all my time. Freud’s work can be interesting, but finding the interesting parts under all of everything else there is more work than a single person can handle if he wants to do something else early in his career.

It’s why I’m glad I have theorists like Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Zizek to rely on, to bring Freud’s ideas in various forms to philosophical conversations that touch on wider issues: the nature of subjectivity, the psychological dimensions of political philosophy, and so on. 

But in one chapter of Living in the End Times, Zizek points to a single issue in Freud’s work that I find very illuminating of a particular way of thinking about the human mind. This isn’t so prevalent anymore, ironically enough thanks to the psychological and neurological science that developed after Freud’s remarkable epoch of a career. One chapter of this book is an exploration of the nature of trauma, particularly the impact of trauma on the subject, and what that impact reveals about the nature of the subject. Trauma, says Zizek (following an argument from philosopher Catharine Malabou) is the blunt force of an explosion that literally shocks the subject into a catastrophic state. A traumatized person is utterly transformed, a character that cannot return to the state of existence before that shattering act. Malabou offers a vision of subjectivity that understands trauma as a wound with an external cause.

And this conception of trauma wouldn’t be so strange were it not for the ideas of Freud, who saw trauma as an internal breakdown that could be healed by uncovering the meaning that the damage to your personality is hiding. This is terribly contrary to how we understand trauma today, and how Zizek and Malabou conceive of trauma in their books. Talk therapy for victims of PTSD is not about revealing any hidden childhood scars that are the true roots of their traumas. Modern trauma has real, obvious causes: soldiers watched their friends die horribly, children see their parents and siblings immolated in white phosphorus, whole towns of women are gang raped and mutilated. There is no secret meaning here to uncover, only wounds that must be somehow healed.

A wild speculation occurs to me as to why Freud may have thought this way. I’ve done no scholarship on the matter, or much else in terms of research. I am only wondering. Perhaps Freud still clung onto a shade of the old-fashioned dualism that saw mind as a separate substance from matter, obeying its own rules of causality. If the physical was the realm of affects, then the mental would be the realm of meanings. Since trauma is a mental occurrence, so goes this dualistic reasoning, it would have to operate according to the causality of meanings and associations. That was David Hume’s idea as well, that the mind worked not by efficient causality, but by the association of ideas. If trauma is mental, and the mental is a realm of meanings, then trauma is a matter of hidden meanings. A sad, misdirected idea, but fascinating in its own right.