No More Learning

The direction that takes over the film's course beyond the crop-duster scene's attack by that prosthetic or mechanical sun mimes Roger's adoption of the fictional identity, now aping invention forward--which brings him to the abyss below the presidents' heads. "Here," non-place, at an Earth not only stripped of origin, stripped of personification, preceded by the bar-lines itself, an unearthly Earth. The specular opponents of the mimetic states, America and its nameless Cold War "other," are vaporized before the overriding mimetic politics of the Earth that the very cinematography evokes and participates in. Here a crossing of borders with (and as) the micro-film, of the aesthetic logic of the micro-film in the pre-Columbian fetish artwork (that is, all artwork), is both projected and barred, interrupted, stopped by the professor's agents, by the "aesthetic state. " The micro-film accords with the logic of shock, of "materialistic historiography"--like the canisters of Bartholomew the Strangler associated with the bomb on the bus--with an aesthetic materiality that entails "another conception of language. " Like de Man's project, it marks an "irreversible" movement, a positive "nihilism" preparatory to the possibility of an "event. " It entails the precession of metaphor, the deregulation of an interpretive and tem- poral program, the exposure of mimetic machines, the precession of mute stone "faces," the aesthetic materiality of the micro-film, the fall and the abyss of linguistic specularity--the "passage," in short, from one model of language (tropological, metaphorical, advertising media) to another ("material," performative, exceeding "mother" and earth). It projects a failed transformation of reading at the presidential site where reference and identificatory processes, mnemonic management and the nonhuman appear legislated. Its "irreversibility" is registered in the excess it maintains over all ocularist, auteurist, Oedipal, retro- Cartesian, mimetic, or identificatory "models. " This bar-series occu- pies what de Man perhaps calls the subject position of grammar in all allegory. As measure or rhythm, as what dispossesses and engenders "light" or perception, as the slashing knife of "mother" or the pretense of a serial narrative, as the signature of inscription's precedence to all description, the bar-series is the irreducible prosthesis of the visible, the guarantor (and betrayer) of exteriority--what can always dissolve the mimetic and metaphoric and auratic readings it nonetheless compels.
Political Thrillers 141
142 Tom Cohen
V
Well "before" the silent film The Ring, Hitchcock solicits a problemat- ic of the circle, of circularity and circuitry, that pervades still the comic nil-point of Roger "O. " Thornhill, "Johnny-O" Ferguson, and so on. If this ringlet or circle performatively invokes a mnemonic destructura- tion with a decidedly Zarathustran resonance, it signals a disruption at once of mimetic and temporal ideology. Like an inscription that pre- cipitates both phenomenalization and ideology, it turns back on and counters the logic of generation on behalf of another gamble or risked crossing. In North by Northwest--Hitchcock's name for what de Man calls an "irreversible" direction (and Benjamin, perhaps, a "one-way street")--this movement precedes face or prosopopeia (the visages of Mount Rushmore and the sheer traffic of tropes). It also precedes and evacuates a failed personification of Earth, echoed in the fictional name George Kaplan, one that opens upon a marking system repre- sented by the striation or bars that Jameson remarks; that is, what is not yet semaphoric, a "materiality without matter," neither capable of pathos nor narration nor metaphor nor the pretense of light.
It is not that one sees de Man as a Van Damm type strictly--a double agent, smooth and faintly accented, into "import-export" (the diapha- nous working of a membrane, or border, as we hear of Van Damm)-- but that, like Hamlet, a certain theorization of performance and act seems hyperbolically at stake in the text, one related to a fall that inhabits this direction, which itself ends up on the top of Mount Rushmore--a kind of acceleration-arrestation (like Rapid City), atop the prosopopeia of the Earth in the giant stone faces that Thornhill (Cary Grant) slips across. We might seem, with Van Damm, arrested before such borders are crossed with a micro-film, a material rewriting of the aesthetic that also represents the film we would then be viewing-- it implies a sheer formalism in the absence of any other, any faux interiority. The halted passage out of the "aesthetic state" (America, Denmark) is or would-be Mosaic in structure--devolving into a me- chanical stutter, like Moses', pointing to what the text itself cannot en- tirely pass to (or already has), an otherness that is not that of an other political fiction, an other history, or an other human. The hypnopoetic logic of Hitchcock's practice of reinscription, evoked in the first Man Who Knew Too Much with Uncle Clyde's momentary hypnosis by a black ball (or sun), recurs in the opening of Family Plot as a faux se? ance of sorts (crystal ball evoking a spool, the medium Blanche's mock evo-
cation of "Henry," her H-named helper, and so on)--on which, none- theless, both the dispositions of diverse "family" pasts and futures ap- pear to depend. Irony, as de Man uses it, does not suspend this game but is the predicate of its having consequence at all, and not merely re- peating, or being reinscribed in, the mnemonic system of the "aesthetic state. " In Frenzy's opening, by contrast, the female corpse floating in the river bearing the necktie, the serial destruction of women--and turning their bodies into admired corpses--is linked to the pollution and destruction of an Earth, as well as to the poetry (Wordsworth is being read) whose aesthetic pretexts are intricately complicitous with that evisceration. Hitchcock's assumption of the order of inscription-- the movement, in de Man, from trope to performative, from meta- phoric displacement or figuration to what precedes it--occurs, how- ever, with a deregulation of statist temporality and mappings as well. The circle spins back upon itself, like the agent Louis Bernard's reach- ing for the knife in his back of pure anteriority in the second Man Who Knew Too Much, and finds the originary memory a prosthesis or im- plant, as does the entire Madeleine episode in Vertigo. What is vertigi- nous, what loses ground or earth, is the disclosure that what is being repeated, or sought to return to, like "mother," was not even there the first time--resolves itself into a bar-series, a series of knocking sounds (those, in Marnie, on a window), into which inscriptions themselves appear dissolved. The blackmailer Tracey falling through monumental history at the British Museum, however, plummets from the glass dome into the universal reading room--what Hitchcock is "interrupt- ed" doing in his cameo on a train in the Underground. When the ante- rior ground of inscription is shaken or altered, the "direction" can no longer be mapped as before and after, up or down. The circle or ring figure, in short, like Roger's trajectory, mimes a shift from a mimesis of model and copy (the machine regulating time and reference for the "aesthetic state") to a proactive mimesis without model or copy. This replicates the logical intervention of Benjaminian allegory or "materi- alistic historiography"--which is predicated on a rupture of and with historicism and an intervention within the mnemonic site of inscription itself. Whatever is "Mosaic" about this cinemallographics passes through a zoographematics, much as it disperses the ocular-centrism of an entire epistemo-political history. When, in the opening music hall scene of The 39 Steps, Mr. Memory--the machine-man who, seeming like a camera, only records "facts"--references the Hesiodic muse Mnemosyne, the gesture does not say: modern cinema is the heir of the
Political Thrillers 143
144 Tom Cohen
novel, indeed, of epic poetry, to ennoble the former. It says rather: writ- ing, including the ancient epic sublime, was never anything but depen- dent on this utterly banal and machinal, indeed (a)material, work of inscription, work of sheer exteriority--and that even the ancient texts were nothing other than this apparatus which, if understood, barred the fantasy of a closed "human" system from before the "beginning. " That the entire tradition has been housed in this coerced hermeneutic relapse, in the policial regimes of the aesthetic state.
Perhaps this zoographematics--where "life" is the produced effect of movement, of speed (vif), departing from the programs of animation and the alternating bars or knocking of breath or spirit--is notched al- most in passing in a typically too quick citation in To Catch a Thief (for by now, it is clear, the Hitchcock shot operates like a network of citations preceding any pretext of representation). The picture, of course, is all about simulacra in the absence of any "real thing": the jewel thief called "the cat," the actor Cary Grant who is a thief of iden- tification and projected emotions if not Being itself, is in pursuit of his own copy, a copycat--but the black cat is already, as thief, a figure of imitation. The original "cat" (an oxymoron) must anticipate, hence imitate, his own imitation in a ruptured circularity or "double chase. " In fact, undisclosed at the time, the two are together in a boat sequence early in the film (the "copycat," the "young" French girl Danielle, to whom Grant has given "language" lessons ["nouns," "adjectives"]). The name of the boat flashes before us briefly: Marquis Mouse. At once, an allusion to a marquee reflected in the credit sequence Travel Service window, a mouse evoked that contains the two "cats" that should be pursuing it (the container as contained), the allusion to Mickey Mouse citing, in fact, Steamboat Willy--the first animated fea- ture, precursor to animated film tout court. Animation is what Robin Woods observes, in passing, may be the closest analogue to Hitchcock's cinema--itself a web of preplanned, entirely artificed markings and re- buses. At the "origin" of film, not representation but animation, troped in the Travel Service window itself, reflecting the other scene of a movie marquee across a street traversed (we can make out) by buses like that in Sabotage. The "Travel Service," of course, offers a theoreti- cal commentary on travel, tourism, transport, movement, acceleration, and cinema we need not go into, except to note the final placard in the window that promises transport to a place called "France. " It, too, is a cartoon, a Parisian-style sketch and solicitation with writing on it: if you love life, you will love France. Let us ignore again the name of
Grace Kelly's character, Francie, an American girl about whom the fig- ure of "love" will have to be artificed, compelled or trapped out of a resistant "cat" (Grant). We will only note the role that "life" plays, as a word, in this puzzling hypothesis (if you love life . . . ).
NOTES
1. Such "transport" as a precession--yet promise--or metaphoric "travel" is extensively developed as a deceptive trope for the movement heard in cinema in the "Travel Service" window opening To Catch a Thief 's credit sequence.
2. In the early British films, this political regime marks itself before the film credits by way of the prominently displayed governmental certificate of censorship. This, as seems never remarked, implicitly extends to the topos of what is called "England" in all of the "political thrillers" of that phase.
3. This association--that of chocolate (the black sun, the film bonbon) with excrement--is made all too plain in the first Man Who Knew Too Much, when Lawrence is held in the Temple of the Sun Worshipers by Abbott. The gun-toting cleaning woman, who does not want to be associated with holding the little girl, is made to take off her skirt to reveal black-stockinged legs so she won't leave. In a visual pun easy to miss but impossible to ignore, her handler reaches down to take a chocolate off of a shelf at the very level of her buttocks when bent over, then pops it in his mouth. The routine fits into a series of interrogations of representa- tion, death, "knowing," consumption, fake light, deception of the (film) audience, and so on.
4. Hitchcock has been approached as a figurative problematic with a system of marking, as by Gilles Deleuze: "Hitchcock produces original signs, in accordance with the two types of relations, natural and abstract. In accordance with the natu- ral relation, a term refers back to other terms in a customary series such that each can be 'interpreted' by the others: these are marks; but it is always possible for one of these terms to leap outside the web and suddenly appear in conditions which take it out of its series, or set it in contradiction with it, which we will refer to as the demark" (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 203). The latest of these may be Slavoj Z? iz? ek's notion of sinthoms ("Hitchcock's Sinthoms," in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Z? iz? ek [New York, Verso, 1992], 125-28), in each case only producing a random tropology to avoid theorizing the prefigural logics of the "mark" as such (as Hitchcock italicizes that through his series of "Mar-" names). Hitchcock has become one of the, if not the most "theorized" of film texts--in part in response to something that exceeds the critical models available to "film theory" as that has evolved in conjunction with cultural studies more and more. Even Z? iz? ek, who deems Hitchcock a "theoretical phenomenon" (Everything 2) generat- ing systems of thinking possible to juxtapose to Hegel and Lacan, blocks the lin- guistic theorization that is its basis--pleaing, instead, for a movement "beyond 'the wall of language'" that sustains this mimetic ("Cartesian") tradition. The stature "Hitchcock" has risen to as an agent of transformation is remarked indirectly by Godard: "I incorporate Hitchcock into the Histoire(s) [du cine? ma] because I believe
Political Thrillers 145
146 Tom Cohen
that at a certain epoch he had absolute control over the world. More so than Hitler, or Napoleon. No one before him was ever in such control over the public. This was the control of poetry. Hitchcock was a poet on a universal scale, unlike Rilke. He was the only poe`te maudit to encounter immense success. What is quite surprising with Hitchcock is that you don't remember the plot of Notorious, nor why Janet Leigh goes to the Bates Motel. You remember the pair of glasses, or the windmill-- that is what millions and millions of people remember" (Jean-Luc Godard, inter- view with Jonathan Rosenbaum in "Bande-annonce pour les Histoire(s) du cine? ma de Godard," Trafic 21 [spring 1997]: 12). In the article in which this quote is cited, George Collins's "Incidence of Instant and Flux on Temporal and Pictorial Objects, Listeners and Spectators" (Tekhnema 4: 26-61), Nietzsche is linked to Hitchcock by addressing "Nietzsche's three throws at 'maintaining a sense' for 'God' in light of the will to power. " Collins: "Is the age of the spread of the American way of life inscribed on its films throughout the world the same age as Hitchcock's, or a subse- quent one, an underlying one? Might Hitchcock only be an epiphenomenon in the process of its ineluctable advance? " (28). Or its deconstruction? This association of Hitchcock with the thinking of technicity before a (Nietzschean) passage antici- pates a next reading of his text that would move beyond those programmed by mimetic "relapse" of culturalist hermeneutics, identity politics, neo-Lacanian codes.
5. The trope of the "aesthetic state" is developed in the previously unpublished talk, "Kant and Schiller," in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 129-62; hereafter AI.
6. A particularly inventive use of this is the name of the assassin-marksman Ramon in the first Man Who Knew Too Much: Ramon, which reverses as "No- Mar," also cites Amon Ra, laying down the faux thematic of Egyptic sun worship-- that is, the worship of imaginary light, of Schillerian relapse--that he too uses as a front: in the process, a breakdown of the name Ramon also links "repetition" (R[a]) to the proper, to property, to what is mine or "mon" (The 39 Steps' final show at the Palladium, for instance, being "Crazy Month," remarking Hannay's "Montreal" allusion in the music hall scene). I will return to the "bar-series," which William Rothman calls Hitchcock's "signature" and locates in every film.
7. Not only this, but more often than not it is this project that cites Benjamin, inversely, as one of the earliest "mourners" of this "loss of humanity" in today's "society"; the "aura" is mourned--the opposite of Benjamin's point--and this le- gitimizes numerous attempts to reinstate it. Film "theory" and the cultural studies' reading of film, despite the desires of each, adheres to a model of cinema that Benjamin declared closed with the advent, precisely, of cinema itself.
8. Paul de Man, "'Conclusions': Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Transla- tor,'" in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); hereafter RT.
9. Indeed, if he is caught in elaborating a nonterm, "allegory," which Benjamin dropped as unable to sustain the burden put on it--that of transforming the historial from within an epistemo-critical network of material and mnemonic traces, within monads, as he termed the sites of intervention--it is part of the gamble.
10. Eduardo Cadava, "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History," Diacritics 22:3-4 (fall-winter 1992): 86, 87. If I use this "rapport" to read Hitch-
cock, it is not that in shifting from a literary text to the sabotage of the cinemato- graphic pretense to mimesis we are engaging, simply, in a more "political," referen- tial event: the event reflexively theorized within every Hitchcock text (to which titles such as Secret Agent semiotically aver and disname) has to do, above all, with the way the aesthetic text transformatively theorizes its material, mnemonic, and allohuman role in the history of otherness for a hypothetical and inscribed "com- munity," as well as how (as with Benjamin) the cinematic apparatus is conceived as analogous to the site of inscription. Hitchcock apprehends the installation of a tex- tual system as working within the technical apparatus of cultural mnemonics in a manner that stands to divest and alter the very domain of face, memory, the visible: the cultural regime of mimetic-humanism, ideology of the "aesthetic state. "
11. When To Catch a Thief opens with the prefigural and mobile trace of the black cat signifying (Promethean) theft, or the first Man Who Knew Too Much with a skeet or marksman's shoot in which a black disk is shot down, a black sun, light is preceded--generated and eclipsed--by the mark. Implying a cinematic logic fre- quently theorized in Hitchcock's invocations of travel and tourism, de Man focuses in commenting on a passage in Locke on the idea of motion and its relation to metaphor: "motion is a passage [Locke says] and passage is a translation; transla- tion, once again, means motion, piles motion upon motion. It is no mere play of words that 'translate' is translated in German as u? bersetzen, which itself trans- lates the Greek meta phorein or metaphor" (AI 38). Passage, translate, motion, metaphor--the series collapses at the very point, we might say, where "light" does, where setzen (as the domain of positing, the event, inscription) itself passes into a hypermode, u? ber-setzen, into a mode of passage that cannot be affirmed within its own (representational) system, unless and except by passing outself of a system for which such passage must be projected.
12. This persists, of course, with the "birds" in that film blotting out of the very idea of the solar in a multiplicity of simulacra, of black holes, "(a)material," machi- nal animation; such interfaces with formal logics that emerge, for instance, where de Man in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" notes a coincidence of a con- cept of pure ocular vision with a totally nonsolar logic: "Not being part of trope or figuration, the purely aesthetic vision of the natural world is in no way solar. It is not the sudden discovery of a true world as an unveiling, as the a-letheia of Heidegger's Lichtung. It is not a solar world and we are explicitly told that we are not to think of the stars as 'suns moving in circles'" (AI 82).
13. De Man: "reine Sprache, a pure language, which does not exist except as a permanent disjunction which inhabits all languages as such, including and especial- ly the language one calls one's own" (RT 104).
14. William Rothman, Hitchcock--The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 33.
15. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 233; Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 265.
16. De Man, "Kant and Schiller," in AI 133.
17. This Benjamin, covertly, appears to derive from too precise a reading of the material dimension of The Birth of Tragedy, upon which the Trauerspiel seems to be grafted. It is not surprising that de Man's seeming turn from tropological systems
Political Thrillers 147
148 Tom Cohen
toward an implicit materiality (out of which trans-epochal ideological wars are marked), leads in his late essays to a seemingly ceaseless--if only occasionally marked--Auseinandersetzung with Benjamin, a recurrent pretext, moreover, of going "beyond" topoi one associates with the earlier critic, such as aura (or personi- fication), mourning, the reading of Baudelaire, allegory.
18. Benjamin concludes the "Work of Art" essay by addressing the state of hu- manity during overt war: "Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art" (in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968], 262-63). What Benjamin calls a "commu- nist" seems to be something like de Man ("communism responds by politicizing art"): this is the entire direction (that word is used) of the "Aesthetic Ideology" papers. What "politicizing art" means suggests locating where the techne ? of signs operates through mnemonic systems to program the sensoria and modes of meta- phoric "experience," and where the aesthetic is itself constituted as a ghost catego- ry to neutralize or manage this excess.
19. This review was first called "Reading Hitchcock" when it appeared in October, and later redubbed "Allegorizing Hitchcock" as a chapter in Signatures of the Visible: in each case, for reasons unnoted, retaining a clearly de Manian echo. See Fredric Jameson, "Allegorizing Hitchcock," in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 97-127.
20. Fredric Jameson, "Spatial Systems in North by Northwest," in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), 51. 21. Such memorization, which pretends to internalize, defines a moment of
sheer exteriorization which de Man reminds us Hegel terms auswendig lernen.
22. An analysis of this inversion might begin with Scottie's final accusation to Judy/Madeleine about what a good "pupil" she had been (technically, of Elstir--a name otherwise evocative of a Proustian motif in which mnemonics and the aes- thetic are reprogrammed). The references in North by Northwest to Hamlet suggest a "rotten" or paralyzed state. Such recalls the paralyzing contradiction between a knowledge of inscription (do not forget! ) and the order of phenomenalization that denies, inverts, "relapses" from or Schillerizes their import (Denmark's present court)--Iris Henderson's knowledge, in The Lady Vanishes, of Miss Froy, whose presence (like inscription) everyone denies on the train, yet who turns up, in Egyptian fashion, as a mummy (Miss Froy wrapped in bandages). "Iris's" Hamletian counterknowledge is structurally cited as that of the eye (iris) and tropology (color)--the knowledge of "perception" countered by a premimetic anteriority allied to the Egyptian. In Marnie, an office mate flirts appallingly: "Have I got a danish for you"--that is, an abysmal version of this Hamletian bind, troped as a
banality.
23. In fact, like Benjamin's trope of "natural history"--which does not refer to
nature of (human) history--the collapse of temporal perspectives operates in paral- lel to a caesura inhabiting linguistic structures, which de Man might call, simply enough, "death. "
24. Interestingly, the crossing or passage that is of course blocked in The 39 Steps (Mr. Memory does not get "out" of the country, any more than Van Damm
will) can never "succeed" in the same representational logics. It is associated with Professor Jordan, that is, a site of Mosaic crossing as though "out" of the Egypt not of hieroglyphic cinema so much as the always already inverted desert of the aesthet- ic state and its police. While this is denoted as "England" in the British "thrillers," it is expanded to include the double system of Cold War others by North by Northwest (much as, during the world war period, it began to include "both" sides of the conflict, the democratic and the fascist West as specular others in the same systematics). Thus, in the later film Professor Jordan is split into Van Damm and "the professor"--chief of an American spy operation never identified as either CIA or FBI, any more than the enemy other is definitively identified or referenced as the Soviet Union. Many Hitchcockian political "thrillers" track and perform a failed usurpation or transformation that, at the same time, testifies to the latter's having already been the case technically. The specter of an (ana)Mosaic crossing, or pass- ing, which is also to say of aporia, is disseminated in Hitchcock by the syllable port-, heard both as door or passage and carrier, feet, material steps or signifiers (Portland Place, Constance Porter, Portland [Oregon]): this collusion, which re- turns us to the prefigural motif of transport (and translation), couples the transfor- mation of impasse to passage with a shift from signified to material carrier--what Benjamin calls "to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized" of allegorical and mnemotechnic praxis--from trope to performative: the nonexistent di-rection called "north by northwest. " (For an account of how the figure of "Annabella" Smith in The 39 Steps triggers an exploration of the Greek motif of the aesthetic and the materiality of steps--led through Hesiod, Mnemosyne, and Mr. Memory-- see the last chapter of my Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]. )
25. Today, perhaps, there is a distinct relation between how the "human" con- structs itself semantically--that is, as a closed system--and the impending devasta- tion of terrestrial systems and reserves we might want to call material, a relation be- tween models of reference and models of consumption. It is interesting that the problematic of this "materiality" returns at a time presented with the predicted human-governed impasses in the material environments and interlocking bio- systems of Earth, aporia that confront us in daily media simultaneously deferred and neutralized as information. De Man is interested in a kind of criminality, to know something about it, which we might hear in association with what Derrida, in The Politics of Friendship, calls "that crime in which . . . the political being of politics, the concept of politics in its most powerful tradition is constituted. " See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), ix.
26. See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 233; Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 265. In the context of noting that for Benjamin in the "Translation" essay "history is not human . . . it is not natural . . . it is not phe- nomenal . . . and it is not temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a temporal structure" [92]), we hear that "we are to understand natural changes from the perspective of history, rather than understand history from the perspective of natural changes" (83). Like the concept of "natural history" in Benjamin, which has nothing to do with "nature" but much to do with a nonhuman
Political Thrillers 149
150 Tom Cohen
figure of history, any trope of "nature" is to be understood in terms of semiotic ef- fects and systems.
27. Among ecocritics the connection between the evisceration of biosystems and language conventions that program human perception has not gone unre- marked--although it is typically mapped, along the phenomenological model, by inversion. That is the case, say, in David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous: Percep- tion and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996), which nonetheless mounts its critique from within the very program he would, without knowing it, disrupt: phenomenology is presented as the longed-for norm to be returned to, whereas alphabetic representation--the materiality of the letter-- marked the historical alienation of the human from nonhuman otherness and the senses. So the work of the prosaic, of the letter in de Man, here intervenes at the heart of the human escapade or parenthesis--it is an acceleration of attention to and use of this site, of allowing it to theorize its (a)materiality at the point where "perception" is phenomenalized or programmed, which ruptures the human semantic and perceptual closure Abram properly assaults. For if "materialistic historiography" departs from a suspension of historicist narrative and turns to where the trace accords with a movement of anteriority that belongs to significa- tion but is not explicitly human, it is not because the letter or mark resembles na- ture. The materiality of the letter jams any transparency of the aesthetic state, and in Abram's inverse reading it is the letter, in fact, that stands as a disruptive inter- vention of the material in the "human" epistemo-political systems--one that also leads to a deregulation of perceptual blinds, organic and empiricist borders, tempo- ralization, and programmatics of reserve, identity, and economy that rely on its oc- clusion. The eviscerations of terrestrial traces and nonhuman reserves, it seems, may be programmed by models of reference: it is into these systems and programs that de Man, and Hitchcock, differently intervene. The "shift" that de Man tracks posits a technicity that traverses the human and alternative life-forms jointly as effects--where, too, the figure of "life" (like death for de Man) occurs as a linguis- tic dilemma in a specific sense.
28. This includes an allusion to fingerprints that leads us back through a vertigi- nous meditation of the precedence of prints (including the alluded to detective film, Fingerprints, which Blackmail momentarily alludes to itself as within its narrative) and of artificed narrative to all pretense of documentation or fact.
29. The class warfare signaled by the sabot is kept in play by Hitchcock and, as in de Man's use of the "slave" trope, linked to the materiality of inscription.
Thus, in To Catch a Thief, the motif of service, or "service compris," is tied to the lower- class kitchen help, ex-thieves connected to Bertani's restaurant and his new thieving operation (actually, as the denouement italicizes, a film-production unit, as the kitchen too is inflected to be): cinema's space of ironization is associated, as in Benjamin, with class struggle--though less with the idea of "liberation" than ex- posure, pure exteriorization, to which the semantics of class struggle too falls prey. For a more epistemo-political analysis of this problematic, see chapter 5 of my Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998).
30. In his own attempt to appropriate Jameson's trope for what becomes, in practice, a more generally mimetic or regressive hermeneutic (Hitchcock as pro-
grammatic exemplar of a certain interpretation of Lacanian mappings, one hinged on a posthumanist yet still occulist and auteurist trope of the "gaze"), Z? iz? ek at- tempts to summarize: "This modernist notion of allegory is, of course, opposed to the traditional one: within the traditional narrative space, the diegetic content func- tions as the allegory of some transcendental entity (flesh-and-blood individuals per- sonify transcendent principles: Love, temptation, Betrayal, etc. ; they procure exter- nal clothing for suprasensible Ideas), whereas in the modern space, the diegetic content is posited and conceived as the allegory of its own process of enun- ciation. . . . The classical Marxist reproach here would be, of course, that the ulti- mate function of such an allegorical procedure, by means of which the product re- flects its own formal process, is to render invisible its social mediation and thereby neutralize its sociocritical potential--as if, in order to fill out the void of social con- tent, the work turns to its own form. . . . Yet one is tempted to defend here the exact opposite of this line of argument: the strongest 'ideologico-critical' potential of Hitchcock's films is contained precisely in their allegorical nature" (Slavoj Z? iz? ek, "'In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,'" in Everything, 218-19).
31. The agency and figure of the black cat--thief, eclipsed sun, what precedes "light"--in the France of To Catch a Thief is linked directly, if covertly, to the French poet of cats, Baudelaire, and specifically the text "Correspondances," in readings of which Benjamin's (and de Man's) conception of "allegory" is elaborated. This becomes explicit during the drive to inspect villas with the "real-estate list. "
32. To assign Picadilly the moniker of "center of the world" is more than a de- scriptive exploitation, since it depends on the word itself. Like "Inspector Le Pic," the first syllable both tropes a mimetic pretense--picturation--yet ties it to a letter sequence, (d)ill(y), which abrupts and suspends that. Elsewhere in Hitchcock, the syllable Pi- will be linked to a destructive sublime ("What causes pips in poultry? " asks the frustrated interlocutor of Mr. Memory opening The 39 Steps, that is, a dis- ease that brings down flightless birds), but a numerical inscription, either 1 and 3 or 3 and 1, tied to a muting of the subject, a "death" that precedes human speech or coincides with its auto-dispossession. Thus Pi is incribed as the Pythagorean Pi-- 3. 14--in The Torn Curtain, much as the number thirteen haunts the entire Hitchcock opus (and names a lost early title directly, not to mention the auteur's birth date). Hence, "ill" less cites than performs a letteral variant of the bar-series-- / / / as i-l-l--which is verified, among other texts, in Marnie, both in the name Lil's troping of the erased pre-Edenic female (Lillith) and in the zombie children's choral: "Mother, mother I am ill, send for the doctor on the hill," and so on, where the word ill emerges directly in association with the bar-series--what returns us, as Marnie frequently does, to Spellbound.
33. He must be dismembered, erased, and sacrificed as a witness to the family's sexless fictitiousness and his own function as excess, as simulacrum. Stevie, in this, recalls the boy who interrupts Hitchcock reading on the train cameo of Blackmail.
34. One could say of Hitchcock's Sabotage--or its history of reception--what de Man says of a passage in Hegel on the Gesetz der A? usserlichkeit: "Completely devoid of aura or e? clat, it offers nothing to please anyone" (AI 116).
35. The term Abbauen is applicable particularly given the "construction" site, a digging in the street before the Bijou, a signal that the text conceives itself as a fun- damental reworking of the site of transport and of the "earth. "
Political Thrillers 151
152 Tom Cohen
36. This is one reason for Mrs. V's excessive, "mad" Homeric laughter when watching the Disney cartoon after learning of Stevie's erasure: she disowns any mimetic ideology of film.
37. De Man's text reads: "this passage, if it is thus conceived, that is, the pas- sage from trope to performative--and I insist on the necessity of this, so the model is not the performative, the model is the passage from trope to performative--this passage occurs always, and can only occur, by ways of an epistemological critique of trope. 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
153
154 Laurence A. Rickels
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.
Resistance in Theory 155
156 Laurence A. Rickels
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
Resistance in Theory 157
158 Laurence A. Rickels
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
Resistance in Theory 159
160 Laurence A. Rickels
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.