No More Learning

The trope, the epistemology of tropes, allows for a critical discourse, a transcendental critical discourse, to emerge, which will push the notion of trope to the extreme, trying to saturate your whole field of language. But then certain lin- guistic elements will remain which the concept of trope cannot reach, and which then can be, for example--though there are other possibilities--performative. That process . . . is irreversible. That goes in that direction and you cannot get back from the one to the one before" ("Kant and Schiller," AI 133).
38. For a fairly unilluminating review of this association with Hamlet, see Stanley Cavell, "North by Northwest," in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), 249-64.
39. To address this passage effectively--which is also the movement from a mimetic to an allomorphic order of memory, from advertising jingles as bleak mne- monics to proactive invention--one must be poised between the two, "equally poised," says de Man, if irreversibly: "So it is not a return to the notion of trope and to the notion of cognition; it is equally balanced between both, and equally poised between both, and as such is not a reversal, it's a relapse. And a relapse in that sense is not the same" (AI 133). There are now two "relapses. " To invoke Hitchcock as an example, the site of the relapse is the mimetic image of the narra- tive, every logic of knowingly solicited identification, whereas the other interrupts that like the Waltzing Couples, without reference, descending into Shadow of a Doubt: the order of mechanical memory, inscription, materiality, evinced in the formalized system of markers and signature-effects, parabases and letteral or pre- letteral repetitions that recall the narrative to the machinal prostheses of the visible marked by such devices as the number of names bearing the syllable Mar, the cameos (that effectively collapse any exterior frame into the frame), or the unintel- ligible bar-series.
40. For instance, we find the same "O" or circularity in the pseudonym Cary Grant adopts in To Catch a Thief, that of "Conrad Burns," the lumberman or logger/ lodger from Oregon--the "Con" of cognition linked to such circularity (Rad), in a cutting of trees, or the natural image (the referent become carrier of sense), in a scorching mode, an erasure of and at the "origin" (Oregon) of the referent.
41. The "Oak Room" is another such trope, binding the "O" figure to an in- habitation of the preeminent natural emblem, the tree--a figure familiar not only through other repetitions such as that of Uncle Charles Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, but the rings within the cut giant redwood of Vertigo: supposed to interface natural and human history or time, their invocation of the vertigo-swirl violently places a graphematic anamorphosis within and before the pretense of the "natural" altogether. A similar dispossession of any logic of generation or origination occurs, relentlessly, about the figure of "mother. " The logic of preinhabitation by the mate- rial other is established, of course, in The Lodger.
Resistance in Theory
Laurence A. Rickels
If it is true that the concept of resistance to analysis cannot unify itself, for non- accidental or noncontingent reasons, then the concept of analysis and of psycho- analytic analysis, the very concept of psychoanalysis will have known the same fate. Being determined, if one can say that, only in adversity and in relation to what resists it, psychoanalysis will never gather itself into the unity of a concept or a task. If there is not one resistance, there is not "la psychanalyse"--whether one understands it here as a system of theoretical norms or as a charter of in- stitutional practices.
--Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, 20
Permit me an ellipsis here since I do not have much more time or space. Transference and prosopopeia, like the experience of the undecidable, seem to make a responsibility impossible. It is for that very reason that they require it and perhaps subtract it from the calculable program: they give it a chance. Or, inversely: responsibility, if there is any, requires the experience of the undecid- able as well as that irreducibility of the other, some of whose names are trans- ference, prosopopeia, allegory.
--Jacques Derrida,
"Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," 151
Is it possible to explore a resistance in theory to or in terms of the transferential setting of theorization, from formulation and reformula- tion, for example, to delivery and reappropriation? Yes. The setting shifts to and fits the displaced occasion of the transference dynamic. In the case of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin's pooling and schooling of their thoughts, the correspondence would be the place to
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look for all the staticky aftereffects and side effects of the proposed union in theory (including the forced marriage between Marxism and Freud's science) which add up to a veritable couples theory that cannot be transferred intact and undisclosed to the cognitive-theoretical regis- ters of argument or influence otherwise organizing the reception of the published work. That the reception of the collected works of Adorno and Benjamin doubles as a resistance to acknowledgment of their Freudian formation, repeats or displaces what begins as a resistance in their own theorization, as acted out, for instance, in the closed sessions of their couples dynamic of submission and anticipation.
These displacing effects whereby Benjamin's reception in particular has become divided between that of American deconstruction and an- other one identified with a certain sociological humanism, both of which share a symptomatic exclusion of Freud's formative influence, and has then undergone (without saying) ultimate displacement from a difference within Benjamin's thought to a radical separation between his and Adorno's work, also follow from a certain resistance in Paul de Man's theorization. In de Man's essay "The Resistance to Theory," which belongs to a subgenre of his work in which we catch him in the act of what he proclaimed as his main calling, the didactic act, we are given a definition of teaching in theory that adjusts the contrast to a re- lationship in therapy:
Teaching is not primarily an intersubjective relationship between people but a cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially and contiguously involved. The only teaching worthy of the name is scholarly, not personal; analogies between teaching and various aspects of show business or guidance counseling are more often than not excuses for having abdicated the task. (4)
Is it possible that de Man assumes here that "self and other" relations are primarily intersubjective, rather than, as in the transference dy- namic, intrapsychic? Would transference, or for that matter resistance, even begin to take place in a relationship that can only be taken inter- personally? De Man offers up therapeutic correctness as the straw man--and, behind the scenes, invites psychoanalysis to pull the long straw. But then de Man rightly addresses the measure of the "depth of resistance" as the "recurrent strategy of any anxiety to defuse what it considers threatening by magnification or minimization" (5). Then he assigns the "psychological" model to those approaches that "were unable to reach beyond observations that could be paraphrased or
translated in terms of common knowledge" (9). This psychological model, however, at the same time marks the spot de Man is in with this essay, which was commissioned and then rejected by the MLA. But even in its no longer submitted or submissive form, all "traces" of the "original assignment" could not be removed, and they in turn "ac- count for the awkwardness" (still evident in the final product) "of try- ing to be more retrospective and more general than one can legitimate- ly hope to be" (3).
De Man's foreclosure or, if one prefers, bracketing out of psycho- analysis is legend. But that legend became legible in another sense with his resistance address. There are indeed moments in the essay where all you would need to do is replace the subject of de Man's sentences with "psychoanalysis" and an extraordinary compatibility suddenly seems to emerge, but from another place, deep down between the lines. For example:
It is therefore not surprising that contemporary literary theory came into being from outside philosophy and sometimes in conscious rebel- lion against the weight of its tradition. Literary theory may now well have become a legitimate concern of philosophy but it cannot be assimi- lated to it, either factually or theoretically. It contains a necessarily prag- matic moment that certainly weakens it as theory but that adds a sub- versive element of unpredictability and makes it something of a wild card in the serious game of the theoretical disciplines. (8)
Resistance to theory as, in the accumulating turns of de Man's essay, theory's resistance to language, as resistance to reading, as resistance to itself, as its own resistance, sparks recognition of the other closed sys- tem that also must at the same time contain itself in an openly prag- matic moment in which theory is seemingly taught a lessening with re- gard to its limits. Psychoanalytic discourse is pragmatic or (as I would prefer to say) materialist to this extent that it accumulates its body of reformulation in the space of tension between its own self-reference and the emergency contacts it must nevertheless make with what lies outside. The constitutive push and pull in psychoanalytic theory thus lies between the "closure" of the system within which it moves to com- plete itself and that same system's inability to generate all its terms out of itself. Intrapsychically reconfigured, resistance in theory to the transferential setting, to the in-session materiality of analytic dis- course, refers to the "allegorical" tension between the transference materials and the shorthand, in-group idiom, or jargon of the theory.
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This, then, is the discursive force field of psychoanalysis, which I am calling allegorical in Walter Benjamin's sense. It means that, after Freud, we are always in session and at the same time beside ourselves, in the big between of this tension span.
The change I have introduced into the title of de Man's "Resistance to Theory" registers the difference that is already there in de Man's posthumous publications, for example. There is an undeniable in- session dynamic discernible in the transcriptions of taped deliveries of de Man's spontaneous readings or teachings. Among these post- humous reconstructions and publications, "Kant and Schiller" in Aesthetic Ideology invites, already by the transferential force of the "and," closer analysis. The breakdowns or scratches in the groove of this record must be read in terms of a double setting of resistance at once to the transferential setting and to the technologization along for the transmission of the session. It is in the genealogy of tape tech- nology, with which "Kant and Schiller" comes to us complete, that we discover another resistance in theory which is psychohistorical in con- text and metapsychological in fact: still today, for the time being, and for some time to come, every tradition, transmission, and transference coming down to us passes through a Nazi past while at the same time containing saving reference to Freud. Unlike critics who would pass judgment on the modernist institutions and inventions appropriated by National Socialism (including psychoanalysis itself) as collaborationist or, at best, as open invitationals to every application imaginable, I pre- fer to consider these convergences, which are still coming down to us, as "uncanny," in other words, not as limited to the social studies of cause and effect or influence. In this very rereading or rewriting, another possibility for psychoanalytic criticism is offered than the one inform- ing a topic of "resistance to theory. " The resistance that tapes together de Man's and Benjamin's receptions is not different in kind or diagno- sis from what a certain psychoanalytic record has to show for all its troublemaking. Since one return deserves another, I will close by inter- preting the transcribed taped words from Lacan's sponsorship of Freud for their resistance to the transferential setting of the son.
FIRST CONTACT
The 1997 movie Contact looked forward to a future of communica- tion with other worlds that gets lost in the static of the recording. It's a future taken out deep inside the recent past, which is always also, as Adorno wrote to Benjamin in 1936, the most repressed and therefore
most primal, catastrophic past. Every recent past will still be the most repressed--just consider the wrenching turnaround through blackout and nostalgia that makes the decade that came right before come back, surprise attack. But our prehistory of or as catastrophe still refers to what was crossing Adorno and Benjamin's correspondence, the Second Coming of World War. The genealogy of media has us irreversibly stuck in this scratch in the record, deep in the groove of modernism, on the record of psychoanalysis.
Arroway, the movie's protagonist, makes audio contact with an alien species that has been staying in touch ever since receiving our first message, transmitted in 1936, when Nazi Germany put on the tele- vision show of live coverage for the Berlin Olympics. Encoded in the line-by-line, connect-the-dots breakdown of the retransmitted video image of Hitler opening the games are instructions for building a rock- et that will take one of us to a first encounter with the alien species. Arroway, who takes the trip, has always been looking for the long dis- tant, the dead or undead, within the outer reaches of long distance. As a child she makes radio contact with ever more distant points on the map and wonders if one day she will contact Saturn or, she adds in passing, maybe even her dead mother. Her father answers that mother's too far gone. Then he goes. He dies of a heart attack, the way to go that always gives the evil I to a survivor's death wishes. We aren't told how she is raised between age ten, when she has two down, and her coming of age as a scientist. A grandparent or, as the actress's name echoes it, a foster parent must have taken over, replacing the particular static that's always given in the Oedipal relation with a kind of trans- parency, the doubling going down, according to Ernest Jones, within the trans-parent relations between grandparents and grandchildren. During this holding-pattern period of her development, Arroway is free, static free, to enter her science fantasy and retrieve losses that all fell down inside the complex. When she goes the longest distance ever gone before, the alien presence openly simulates a West Coast beach on which Arroway can be reunited with her father, because it just knew that this sensurround veiling their direct contact would be easier on her. It is the ultimate and ultimately fantastic gift of the trans-parent.
When Arroway returns to Earth, or to consciousness, all her tapes are filled with static and noise. The transparental encounter has left be- hind only static on the record of evidence of the senses. Two conspiracy theories take over--Roswell-style--where Arroway's consciousness left off for just the moment the tape of the launching recorded. But the
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tapes she brings back record static for the full eighteen hours she claims to have been away, way away. Neither tape seems admissible as truth. But we must work with what we have, with what is brought to the session. Arroway brings back from contact with dead or dad a record of static, white noise, the sound between radio stations, the snow between TV channels. In the analytic setting this counts down as a show of resistance. In the other words or worlds of parapsychology, it's the happy medium out of which contact with voices and images of the departed can be made.
In Karl Abraham's essay "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " psychoanalysis took note of new voice-recording technologies as the latest pressure point or push button of resistance. Freud had already addressed the written recording of dreams as bound to the in-session dynamics of transference and resistance. Even or especially the most perfect transcription is vacuum-packed: the dreamer's associations typi- cally vanish, an evacuation that announces the resistance, which if anything is thus better placed to block analytic contact. Abraham could confirm Freud's reservations. One of his patients was so tor- mented by her repeated forgetting of the content of her serial dreaming each time just at the moment she was about to tell Abraham all about it that she suggested the writing cure. But Abraham told her the repress release pressure packed inside a repeating dream would in time break through to consciousness. But she wasn't good about being patient, I mean a patient. She thought she had at least at last interrupted the se- ries of her forgetting when, waking up once more from such a dream, she wrote herself a memo before dropping back to sleep. But then she overslept, was late for her session next morning, and had to hand the slip to Abraham without having had the time to read it first. The mes- sage: "Write down the dream despite agreement" (34). 1
Another one of Abraham's patients, a gadget lover who makes use of a recording device, a dictaphone, to get his dreams down, first for- gets that it wasn't working properly to begin with. A staticky, unclear record was the result. Once the dictaphone has been repaired, he tries it again. But this time even the clearly audible reproduction was so confusing that the patient just couldn't put it all together again as something he could relate or relate to. Only now can the patient begin the work of re-pairing his analytic relationship by remembering in as- sociation, in session, in the transference.
The original fit between Freud's exploration of transference and countertransference phenomena and the analogical hookup he initiat-
ed with such technologies of projection and identification as printing, photography, and film was left behind, in fits and starts, by technolo- gies of as-liveness. New transference phenomena, such as projective identification, were therefore on the rise, same time, same station as the ascent of tape technologies during World War II. Freud's place- holder for this new field of differentiation or diversification was, back then, in the early 1930s, telepathy, a beyond of the transference into and for which Freud saw the telephone already plugging away.
There's the in-session materiality of analysis, from the top of the mourning to the working on the transference and all that it puts in the way. But where analysis keeps the short hand on theory it's the work of analogy that organizes a parallel universal of concepts. This work of analogy was left, up in the dead air between Freud and us, up to the autobiography of media. And Freud's analogical record, espe- cially when it went endopsychic, was technologized on one track and haunted on the other (or same) track. Freud first greeted the figures of the transferential relationship as revenants, spooks. In 1959, Friedrich Ju? rgenson, originally Russian, by then living in Sweden, discovered the Voice Phenomenon. In the same year that saw the realization of video- tape recording and videotape editing, the innovation that made pos- sible live or as-live performances before studio audiences, Ju? rgenson turned on the playback of his tape recorder to listen to the birds he thought he had recorded by leaving the device running outside for a time. "Suddenly the voice of his dead mother addressed him. He heard her saying: 'Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me? ' That was all" (Stemman 92). 2 Konstantin Raudive, also displaced by the events of World War II, from Latvia to Sweden, followed the news of Ju? rgenson's discovery all the way to the source. 3 Like Ju? rgenson, he, too, heard the voice of his own deceased mother, who called him by his boyhood name: "'Kostulit, this is your mother'" (Kubis and Macy 106). Peter Bander, yet another person displaced by the war, was converted to be- lief in Raudive's mediumship when he heard his first electronic voice: you guessed it, it was his long-distant mother speaking to her little boy in German. Then he had just two questions, one for each dead parent:
"I will give father ten seconds, and mother twenty seconds to answer my questioning because my mother would anyhow talk more. "--I then addressed myself to my father and said: "Father can you help me? " (in English). I waited ten seconds and then I said: "Mother, you know what I have to do, am I right in doing it? " I waited twenty five seconds and
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then switched the recorder off. . . . On playback, watching the revolu- tion counter on the tape recorder, I heard within a fraction of the first revolution a man's voice. After only three playbacks, the contents were quite clear to me. The language used was a dialect in which my father used to speak to his intimate friends (and although neither my mother nor I ever spoke it ourselves, we understood it): "Jung, wenn ich doch nur kuennt", (meaning: "Boy, if only I could"). The interesting word is "Jung". This was indeed the way my father used to address me when he was alive. Then came the turn of my mother's answer; again within a fraction of a second after asking my question the answer had manifested itself. "Und trotzdem sagst Du nein. "--A literal translation would mean "And you still say no. "--However, seen in context and knowing my mother's way of speaking, I prefer to translate it: "Whatever I say, you still will do the opposite. " . . . The first electronic voice I ever heard, purporting to be my mother, and the two sentences above, are the only examples I can quote of a personal communication received. (Bander 35)
Bander closes the account with his swearing of an oath of sorts that he never again attempted to make contact with a particular person. He knew his mother's way of speaking and, preferring to translate, ended the direct connection. 4
The interesting word is Jung. Beginning in 1959 Carl Gustav Jung's counsel was regularly offered on the air of the Voice Phenomenon. "His voice appears to manifest itself frequently during Raudive's recordings. Furthermore, what the voice purports to be saying makes sense" (Bander 25). As early as 1946, Jung began working on the UFO phenomenon, a phenomenon in Jung's case of unidentification. In one of his flying-saucer articles, Jung translates Freud's notion of the super- ego into the terms of his notion of a collective unconscious. Via another collectivity, Jung acquitted himself in 1946 for his season of open col- laboration with the Nazi German institution of Aryan psychotherapy through his postwar doctrine of collective guilt. Back in the 1930s, when he agreed to put on a show of legitimacy for the Nazi German eclecticization and totalization of the psychotherapies (including psycho- analysis) by letting them make him into their international leader, Jung's only concern was that he would thus be getting back in contact after all with Freud's science. One has to give him credit for making everything in his life and work after his psychotic break with Freud, no matter how archetypical he thought it was, or whatever, only legible or decodable, point by point, in the terms of negative transference.
Jung's flying-saucer connection hits air pockets of isolated reference to the air war, the miracle rockets, and the foo fighters (which Allied pilots spotted before their eyes giving outer-space assist to the other side). But it's really all about the postwar conditions of life in the 1950s. "These rumours, or the possible physical existence of such ob- jects, seem to me so significant that I feel myself compelled, as once be- fore when events of fateful consequence were brewing for Europe, to sound a note of warning. I know that, just as before, my voice is much too weak to reach the ear of the multitude" (Jung, Flying Saucers 5). A footnote inserted right after "as once before" makes the connection with his 1936 essay "Wotan," which he thus rewrites within the under- world as his warning shout. Back in 1936 it sure looked, by all ac- counts, pro-Nazi in an upbeat. 5
After noting that Jung was reaching the ears of Raudive's set with special clarity, Bander concludes that all the voices Raudive received "were attributable to persons who had died no longer than twenty or thirty years ago; also, when first manifesting themselves, they show definite characteristics of anxiety and eagerness" (25). Raudive established that, no accident, spirits need white noise, vibrations, or carrier sounds to communicate. Without their former vocal organs, spirits must modulate existing static into voice patterns strong enough to be captured on tape. Raudive collected and studied thousands of voices on tape, on which he based his definitive treatise on the Voice Phenomenon. 6
Raudive had one competitor to diss, the discoverer of the uncon- scious, because he was one to know one who could only translate paranormal discoveries back inside the terms or limits of the psyche. "The hypothesis of the unconscious can be confronted by that of an 'anti-world,' which is based on the theory of relativity" (9). As Einstein proved, everything is relatives, dead or alive.
What soon came to be known as the Raudive voices were often agrammatical communications given invariably in several languages at once. 7 Gordon Turner, a well-known spiritual healer, although or be- cause he was turned on to the authenticity of the Voice Phenomenon, worried about the dangers involved in contacting entities who, given the limited range of the tape-recording medium, must inhabit the low- est regions of the next world. 8 According to Turner, the Raudive voices were on the same wavelength as the messages Himmler had received: "There is a direct link between fascism, black magic and contact with impersonating earthbound entities who deliberately delude and pervert
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others. . . . If the . . . voices are stemming from a paranormal source, then I would regard some of the references to Hitler as significant and dangerous" (in Bander 84). 9 But Raudive also summoned Churchill, who is perhaps the most frequently contacted ghost on all the talk shows of the Voice Phenomenon. 10 World War II was--or is it still? -- on the air. 11
In the beginning, ghosts were seen but not heard when photography proved to be the first medium that could record on its own contacts with the otherworld. The projection of the modern rocket was reserved for the purpose of transporting the camera to new vantage points, not only in the service of military surveillance, but also, at the same time, as afterthought or even as main focus, for making first visual contact with outer space. Robert H. Goddard, the Father of American Rocketry, the sole pioneer whose focus was only on space photography, had his POV on target by the time airplanes rose to the occasion of reconnais- sance. But Goddard didn't live to see his photo op. "He died August 10, 1945. A year later, a captured German V-2 (A-4) rocket with a stan- dard De Vry 35 mm motion picture camera was launched from White Sands, New Mexico, reached a peak altitude of 65 miles . . .
, and suc- cessfully made a continuous record of its ascent through the Earth's at- mosphere to the threshold of outer space" (Winter 98).
Motion-picture technology had by the late 1940s completely crossed over to sound following intensive industry development inspired by the samples of German magnetic tape brought back to the United States after the war. Established in principle at the turn of the century, Third Reich scientists discovered for the recording the tape medium with just the right chemistry to lead the way to our playback, record, fast for- ward, or rewind functions (A History of Technology 1315). Developed originally for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the tape recorder was right away used to cen- sor any between-the-lines attempts by captive Allied agents to signal warnings mixed in with their Morse messages, which the Nazi captors had filled with false leads. Every Morse message composed by the cap- tive authors was copied, analyzed, and, if necessary, manipulated be- fore being put on the air. The era of simulation thus opened wide. 12 The words from the sponsor were invited to join right in and set their spell: "The first widespread application [of magnetic tape recording] occurred during World War II when speeches by Hitler and other prominent Nazi leaders were broadcast at times and places calculated to confuse Allied intelligence" (The Encyclopedia Americana 282).
Tapes of liveness are the medium of the split second, the splitting and postponement of the broadcast for the little time it takes to censor, ma- nipulate, simulate. But the splitting image of the moment thus gives or takes all the time in the world.
In 1947, in Roswell, the hometown of Goddard's camera-rocket and outer-space research, the UFO phenomenon took off with a crash. Jung would hear a synchronicity; but, to stick to the moment, the V-2 rocket backfire of the primal Roswell sightings is completely in sync with the takeoff of Jung's investment in objects of unidentification. The alien forms that were witnessed or denied were humanoid in appear- ance but reduced in strength and scale, in every part but the head, as though by starvation. The visual contact first established in 1947, which keeps reentering the controversy over destroyed evidence, un- provability, only your imagination, and so on, seems to occupy inter- changeable places with a certain reception, again, of World War II, that went to outer space and back, in the form of believe-it-or-not visi- tations by aliens who have the appearance of the victims we both do and do not recognize. 13
The year 1983 saw the successful first run of the American Associa- tion of Electronic Voice Phenomena, which had "received an inter- national publicity boost with the announcement by George Meek, a re- tired engineer, that he and a medium, William O'Neil, an electronics expert, had built a device called Spiricom that could communicate with the Other Side" (Kubis and Macy 107). Spiricom, which thus offered two-way conversations with the dead, opened up "the new field of ITC, or Instrumental Transcommunication--the use of electronic sys- tems to undertake meaningful communication across dimensions. Thus, George Meek and Bill O'Neil are usually regarded as the fathers of ITC, just as the Wright Brothers are regarded as the fathers of modern flight" (Kubis and Macy 113). 14 Sure enough, soon enough contact could be made with Timestream, the telecommunications corporation on the other side. "Amazingly, Friedrich Ju? rgenson and Dr. Konstantin Raudive, the great pioneers of EVP, . . . have died and are now coming across on television, computer, radio, telephone and fax. . . . Today, Konstantin Raudive and Friedrich Ju? rgenson add a new dimension to their roles as paranormal experimenters. From their perspective on the astral plane, they have become philosophic mentors as well" (Kubis and Macy 114-15). But what gets realized here in the exchange, some- where between parapsychology and philosophy, is the circumvention of the uncanny first contact with what the recording showed.
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Already in 1920 Edison was convinced that there just had to be a radio frequency between the long and the short of the waves which, once he contained it and gave it an on/off gadget switch, would put through the direct connection to the world of the dead. Marconi claimed to have come up with a gadget through which he could travel back in time and record great historical events. He was hoping to get the words spoken by Christ on the cross just for the record. But it all changes once we let the recording speak for itself. Telephone and tele- graph alone, without the recording or taping connections, were never enough. Edison thought he heard voices, like overhearing people speaking in the next room, when he played back a recording of a tele- graphic transmission. Thus he was inspired to invent the answering machine, in which telephone and telegraph would find the completion of their system. 15 Only the recording can speak for itself, and thus for contact with the dead other, while remaining at the same time inadmis- sible as evidence of the senses.
ON RECORD
The recorded voice, the uncanniest double of all, according to Adorno, because it always comes life-size, was the inspiration for Mina Harker's internal assemblage of Bram Stoker's Dracula. She transfers Dr. Seward's audio recording of his journal, which she has just listened to and which she concludes is just too unbearable for another's ears, to typewritten record. All the information gathered in the group service of defeating vampirism makes the transfer, subsequently, to Mina's one record, which she types up in triplicate. At the end of all that typing, all that's left of the group effort that defeated the vampire count, the novel itself, is nothing but a "mass of typewriting," a mass or communion that neither proves nor disproves undeath. But by World War II, tape tech- nology had introduced both the uncannily perfect recording and the undecidability of its truth or simulation. But this vacancy and overfull- ness of tapes, their inadmissibility as evidence and their self-evidence, at the same time invited contact with the Voice Phenomenon, by all ac- counts the widest-ranging communication with the dead to date. When it comes to simulation, we're fast on the intake. Freud originally gave transference phenomena a matching accessory, the transference neuro- sis, an artificial illness that gets generated within the analytic relation- ship as a more tolerable simulation of the disturbance that's out there, bigger than life. Just like an inoculation, the transference neurosis be- stows the great health by proxy or antibody in the course of its minia-
ture illness and cure. Those shocks or shots of inoculation against trau- ma that Walter Benjamin addressed, in Freud's company, are always simulated conditions that, just like transference neuroses, take on an existence of their own in relation to what's out there, bigger than the two of us, and to what's in session, the big between. When every- thing out there can enter the session, the analytic relationship, as trans- ference, the outside traumatic contacts have been dated, miniaturized, simulated, given the gadget click of the analyst's last words: "It's time. "
Paul de Man's 1983 as-live performance "Kant and Schiller" intro- duces class analysis, I mean the analysis of in-class transference, into the writing of his reading. With the sole exception of this lecture, which we have on tape, de Man was not at all interested in the easy reading of mass culture or of its owner's manual, psychoanalysis. This station break, forever marked and dated with remarkably forgettable language, has at the same time absorbed the posthumous shock that Benjamin, still in Freud's company, attributed as aftereffect to all recording following from the click of a gadget connection. It wasn't so necessary for de Man to write the reading in this case, he reassures us, because he's "dealing with a much easier text" (129). What would be improv nightmare over the corpus of Kant is no problem when it's Schiller time. "I'll have some change in pace today, because this time I have not written out a lecture. . . . So what I'll be doing will be . . . more in the nature of a class than a lecture" (129).
The helping "and" reaches across Kant and Schiller, detailed textual analysis and speaking out in class. But the class situation is not an even-anded coupling. There are also secret sharers in the "and" that's dealt us here. Their address lies in the turning around of the Trieb, the pivotal point of de Man's yoking about Kant and Schiller. The other two are, one, Freud--at the first mention of Schiller's Triebe, de Man gives us credit for his aside, "Triebe, a word that you know from Freud" (137)--and, two, the gadget that has it all on tape:
The tropological system in Kant . . . is . . . a purely linguistic structure which was shown to function as such, whereas in Schiller it is the use made of tropes, of chiasmus as the teleology, as the aim of an ideologi- cal desire, namely, the desire to overcome terror--it is in such a way that tropology is made to serve a Trieb, to serve as device. . . . It acquires therefore an empirical and a pragmatic content . . . at the very moment that it asserts its separation from all reality. (147)16
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But the overcoming of terror through the playback or reversal of a device isn't de Man's point, it's ours. When de Man gives his topic for the lecture, namely, the "problem of the question of reversibility, of the reversibility in the type of models which I have been developing on the basis of texts" (132), what seems to get raised at the same time is the question of our misunderstanding. De Man must insist, in contra- distinction to us, on an irreversibility in relations between the perfor- mative and the constative. Even if reinscription or recuperation in cognitive terms takes place, what we have then is a relapse, which, "however, is not the same as a reversal" (133). In the middle of all this setting up and putting down, de Man breaks for a "question which is closer to our concern here. " This is where he directly addresses in- session dynamics. But then the discourse starts breaking up, the con- nection goes bad, static takes over, we're disconnected, and he's back:
because it seems to be, as so often is the case, that . . . Since I have now had questions from you and since I've felt some resistances . . . You are so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent that I have the feeling that . . . But I know this is not the case and there's always an interesting episode in a series of lectures like that, I know that from ex- perience. One doesn't necessarily begin in as idyllic a mood as things were here. But it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, where certain issues are bound to come up. (131-32)
De Man's transcribed or reinscribed performance puts us in frame for a slightly loopy but still self-contained feedback mechanism or machine for writing. The theme of our regression meets this frame like its match and maker: it's time to talk about the psychology of terror. The psy- chology of terror becomes the thematic interpretation of the regressive reception going down between Kant and Schiller, and between de Man and his audience. Schiller's drives, which, remember, can we talk, we freely associate with Freud, double as the drive to know, represent, or even change nature and as the drive to leave things unaltered by change or preserve oneself ultimately against death. Schiller thus intro- duces a "notion of physical danger, of a threatening physical Nature, in an empirical sense" (139). The danger zone in Kant belongs to "the shock of surprise, of Verwunderung, which we experience when con- fronted with something of extreme magnitude" (139). It's a shock of
recognition that there's a failure of representation within the overall structure of the imagination. But Kant does not tell us about self- preservation, about "how to protect ourselves, so to speak, psychologi- cally, from danger" (139). In contrast, Schiller, just like the rest of us, is directly concerned with the how-to of self-help:
How am I going to fight off terror, how am I going to resist terror? --by means of a psychological device, which emphasizes reason and the abili- ty to maintain reason in the face of terror. That's a way to live through terror, even if you're physically annihilated by it. Curiously, this empha- sis on the practical, this emphasis on the psychological, on the empiri- cal, leads to a greater stress on the abstract powers. (141)
Schiller and the audience make a "correct psychological observation," which, de Man advises, is still just not philosophical enough. "You know that from your own experience if you have ever been in immedi- ate danger. There is a kind of exhilaration of the mind--if you are given the time--at watching yourself being in that state of danger" (142). But de Man's admission of his own experience of dissociation or splitting is so close to Schiller's turn to ultimate safety in the face of terror, which de Man dismisses right in the typeface of what he said we knew by our own experience. What we net from Schiller's safety- zoning prescriptions is the ultimate safety net, called "moral safety. " When all else fails in the face of physically overwhelming danger, you learn to consider the sensory part of your being, that part that can be endangered, as something exterior, dissociated, like a natural object, to which your moral self is completely indifferent.
Schiller argues for terror's imaginative remove from the danger as but its representation. But for all that it remains just as vivid, to the point of turning on our sense of self-preservation, and thus, Schiller concludes, "it produces something analogous to what the real experi- ence would produce" (143). What just doesn't interest de Man is that this production of something analogous is for the medical doctor Schiller just a dosage away from an inoculation, which thus becomes a differentiating part of the argument or procedure. By metonymy and absence, our Freud and a Freudian Benjamin join Schiller at this point of injection. The Benjamin de Man just couldn't shake--for example, among all those trends in criticism he piled up hysterically in his first footnote to "Rhetoric of Temporality"--reads allegory as though it were, looking back to the first works, Benjamin's only pre-Freudian works, the allegory of language origins. This represents a telepathically
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precise elision of the Freudian Benjamin. But even The Origin of the German Mourning Pageant can also be read as looking forward, in close association with Freud's study of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs, for example, to the work on technocultures that will follow out the trauma organization of fields of representation and repetition.
According to Schiller's inside view, without the administration of analogies horror must take us to a place of unprotectedness, the place of origins. According to Freud, repetition is (just in case) the happen- ing event of the psyche's attempt to get back posttrauma into the trans- ferential context of anxiety. In Benjamin's reading, shocks are the inocu- lative shots that give it to the media consumers, but in metabolizable doses of the trauma or horror.
The therapeutic and theoretical rapport with technologization is not imposed from without but, like the work on the transference, in- terprets or interrupts what's already happening. What's on the tapes of media technology at the same time jumps the cut of intervention to anticipate and confirm the psychoanalytic or allegorical theory and therapy of shock, terror, horror. In the year of the discovery of the Voice Phenomenon, Alfred Hitchcock exhibited in Psycho the ultimate scene of horror, the Schauer scene, to which countless slasher and splatter films have been shock-treating us ever since. This serial fol- lowing or understanding of Hitchcock's film never completely reverses the traumatic intersection, in Hitchcock's murder scene, of three un- seens: the murderer's stabbing, the cut of film editing, and the cutting edge of our death wishes. Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, followed up the filmic reception of the Schauer scene with his own book sequel, Psycho II. This time around, the legacy of horror is transmitted through Norman Bates's psychiatrist, who does the psy- cho's mass murdering for him. Although Hitchcock's Psycho had left it all up to psychiatry, which was thus up there, untouchable, to put the aberration of the trans- to rest, the slasher sequels, to this day, re- situate their remakes of the Schauer scene in a transferential setting that cannot contain the transgression, violence, identification cutting across it. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Legacy of Dr. Mabuse, and Spellbound introduced the horror plot of transference transgression. But there is no other plot of horror and terror. Psycho interrupted or extended it, and thus doubled the impact of a scene of horror we've been doubling and containing ever since. The transference transgres- sion was directed with and against us. But that also means that our reception of Psycho keeps on going, going, along Benjamin's lines, as
successful containment and dating of our first traumatic contact with murder, with the mass of murder that the media sensurround in every sense contains. "Most everyone has a Psycho story," Janet Leigh reas- sures us: "People remember where they saw it first, with whom they saw it, their reactions at the time, and the effect the film had on them afterward" (131).
But in Psycho, the problem of the trans-, the across we all must bear, which the closing psychiatric diagnosis has all locked up, is at the same time stored or realized in the taped zone of simulation. Paul Jasmin, hired to provide Mrs. Bates's voice, was amazed by the final audio portion, in which he had a hard time recognizing his share:
In postproduction, . . . [Hitchcock] spliced and blended a mixture of [the voices] so that who's speaking literally changes from word to word and sentence to sentence. He did that to confuse the audience. I recog- nize my voice before Tony carries Mother down the stairs. But the very last speech, the monologue, is all done by a woman--Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette spliced in. (In Leigh 81, 83)
Coming to the Psycho project and projection from his new TV series, Hitchcock constructed the clash of the two media, one old, one new, over a scene of unseen incessant cutting and then, over what's heard in- side the audiotape, the splicing together of different taped voices that gives the psycho's voice or voices a range across identities, generations, and genders. Everything can be made to cross over on tape. And on tape it all jumps the cut of editing, the cut that Hitchcock dreaded so much when not in his hands that he took the hand in marriage of Britain's leading film editor.
At the close of World War II Hitchcock was offered the evidence of Nazi extermination as film assignment. He skipped that ready-made and made Rope instead, a film about the life-or-death stakes of mis- reading notions of superhumanity. The film, which the director wel- comed then as his most exciting project to date, was "shot without cuts" (Gottlieb 284). "Until Rope came along, I had been unable to give full rein to my notion that a camera could photograph one com- plete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, de- vouring action like a giant steam shovel" (275). In 1948 Hitchcock's camera swallowed it all whole, the hole in one. The haunting rebound upon intake was released with the cuts Hitchcock made in 1960, sight unseen but all on tape, right down the receiving line into our psyches.
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REWOUNDING
Lacan delivered his primal mirror-stage address that year in Marienbad, that year of the Berlin Olympics, on his way to attend the games and witness what he hails as "the spirit of the times. " In his text Television, Lacan came full circuit. When he locks in his interest in the discursive event of TV, he shoots right up to the first moon landing. But it's just the tip of realizations of the science fantasy that landed from those first stirrings of Nazi German rockets, and which were transmitted back to Earth, live, via the medium before which Nazi Germans had first stood at total attention.
As documented in the essay "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power," Lacan went to Berlin in 1936 against the mocked protests of Ernst Kris, whose interpretation of a transference Lacan dismisses in the essay as on one fault line with Kris's refusal to go to the Nazi TV show. Kris's patient is a professor who lives in mor- tal dread of being a plagiarist. Yes, there is something missing in Kris's interpretation and intervention that both the patient and Lacan point out or act out. But Lacan in turn misses the reference to improper bur- ial openly lying there between the lines of a disembodied plagiarism.
The mirror stage gives us the preprogram on which prospects for the "phantom, the double, the automaton" are already given, and given without all that static of projection of an identifiable, and be- cause identifiable, material, loss. In Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan admits the loss of Freud's moment or field as constitutive of the trans- ferences brought on by the in-session presence of the analyst, who is, in the first place, witness to this loss ("Presence of the Analyst" 483). We're always inside this transferential frame with all our relations since Freud to Freud. But it's a dead loss, Lacan continues, the source of "a certain deepening of obscurantism, very characteristic of man in our times of supposed information" (483). Lacan thus stresses the noncontact, a "function of missing" that "lies at the center of analytic repetition" (484). "The transference is the means by which the com- munication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the uncon- scious closes up again" (486). The transference closes "shutters" that the analyst must open up. Transference thus also, between the lines and languages, renews the Freudian analogy with photography. The unconscious, however, is all on tape: "The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject" (483).
The essay in which Lacan recounts his rejection of a certain Krissy
understanding of transference and acting out comes across in the long stretch as almost a topography of psychoanalytic history in the twen- ties and thirties and then, looking back, in the fifties, in the decade it takes to skip the Nazi era of psychoanalysis and follow instead the American upbeat of adaptation through that old eclectic mix of psycho- dynamic therapies with or within U. S. psychiatry. But the consolida- tion of ego assets externalized as American is only the late arrival (and victorious rival) of that more primal and less consciously deliberated- upon era of Nazi German accommodations for a greater psychoanalytic setting that was changed, back then already, to the channel of improved efficiency, functioning, healing, bonding.
Thus, when Lacan takes on the American streamlining of analysis in this essay he straddles the almost two-decade span of his own united states of amnesia between the basic conception, research, or first airing of his findings in the thirties and, in the fifties, the final work of revi- sion and publication. In other words, for the fifties, Lacan sets up all the pinhead goals of American neo-analysis--autonomous ego, happi- ness, security, team spirit--for one strike (231). But underneath the tall order of these charges there reemerges, not without psychohistorical connection to the era Lacan always leaves out, long-distant references in theory to melancholia. It's always in the course of duking it out with the dupes of analysis that he trips up and over the melancholic conse- quences of the other's takes on analytic theory.
Object relations is top of a line that slides immediately into implied or excluded zones of material loss. The pattern and patter of American psychology or self-help for success holds on to the related, objectional attempt to balance as "economic" activity the opposition between life and death drives (243). On "the other side of the coin" is the focus on what precisely "eludes the transference, namely, the axis taken from the object relation. " While granting the focus on this relation a noble origin in the work of Karl Abraham (and thus--just take a look--in a melan- cholic collection of parting objects), Lacan attributes to this legacy (with Melanie Klein at the front of this line) the workings of such an imaginary. The "notion of intersubjective introjection," for example, merely reflects the establishment that produced it inside the dual re- lationship (246). The tensions that attracted the object-relationists in the first place, like the span of attention awarded this force field in the same place, come down to a security drive that Lacan diagnoses within Anglo-American analysis.
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It has nothing to do with any counter-transference on the part of this or that individual; it is a question of the consequences of the dual relation, if the therapist does not overcome it, and how can he overcome it if he sees it as the ideal of his action? . . . But that one should confuse the physical necessity, the patient's presence at the appointment, with the analytic relation, is a mistake that will mislead the novice for a long time to come.