17
The technical difficulties Lacan had with official psychoanalysis in the 1950s concerned the analytic frame, and the interpretation of the transference that is given when "it's time.
The technical difficulties Lacan had with official psychoanalysis in the 1950s concerned the analytic frame, and the interpretation of the transference that is given when "it's time.
Paul-de-Man-Material-Events
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.
Resistance in Theory 163
164 Laurence A. Rickels
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
Resistance in Theory 165
166 Laurence A. Rickels
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
Resistance in Theory 167
168 Laurence A. Rickels
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.
Resistance in Theory 169
170 Laurence A. Rickels
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.
Resistance in Theory 171
172 Laurence A. Rickels
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. (235)
This security drive covers the analyst with its blanket order whenever he treats the transference as the object or objective of consolidation and then, once interpretation can be made, as the model to which all else can be reduced. Thus all systems are going for the "working through" that grants the analyst open season to do whatever it takes to strength- en the patient's ego.
In a review of transference theories, in particular with regard to their revaluation by object relations analysts, Nathan Leites, another individual radically displaced by the events of World War II, points to the proliferation of disguised transferences that have reversed the original reception of transference work: originally it was the past that was back via transference onto the analyst. But since the 1940s, we tend to see experiences with extra-analytic figures, including fig- ures from the past, as displacements of and defenses against what's being experienced in the relationship to the analyst in session. This reflects the growing admissions of narcissism into analytic theory taken down largely via the analysts who followed Melanie Klein right into the session where anything at all refers to the analyst. Leites notes the paradox that by now direct contact with original objects, rather than via the transference, occurs only when there is death, loss, and bereavement in the patient's life. Leites comments: "what used to be the normal power of the analytic situation has now become the privi- lege of catastrophe (even that extremity, as we have seen earlier, may not suffice to break through the wall which the analyst interposes)" (451).
17
The technical difficulties Lacan had with official psychoanalysis in the 1950s concerned the analytic frame, and the interpretation of the transference that is given when "it's time. " But session time for Lacan was always tape time, voice activated. Catherine Cle? ment comments: "Through lengthy investigation Lacan had come to the conclusion that the length of each session should be adjusted according to what the pa-
tient was saying: some long, some short, in any case no predetermined fixed length" (110). Lacan insisted instead that the adjustment of the length of the session should become one of the techniques of psycho- analysis. In the final analysis, remember, it will all be on tape. Lacan's seminars were also consigned to recording. Cle? ment was there: "there were tape recorders and the room bristled with wires. . . . A stenogra- pher recorded the lectures on a stenographic machine as Lacan spoke" (12-13). To be in control of the time, in session or in seminar, is the prerogative of the one who identifies with the tape recorder. Andy Warhol was raised as his dead sister and wanted to be a machine. He left his memoirs on the call-activated tapes of the other's answering machine.
It is over an audio device that Lacan comes closest to acknowledg- ing an identifiable because-identified-with loss. He takes issue with an analyst from the United Kingdom who confronted her patient when he came to session in a state of stupor with his fear that his recent success- ful radio broadcast on a topic that greatly interested her had aroused her jealousy. "The rest of the account shows that it took a year for the subject to recover from this shock-interpretation, which hadn't failed to have some effect, since he had instantly recovered his spirits" (Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique 31). She makes her duo interpre- tation even though she knows that he went ahead with the broadcast only a few days after his mother's death. Lacan turns to "the psycholo- gy of mourning" to imagine what was going through when the patient went ahead and went through with his scheduled broadcast. While the invisible receiver, the mother, is being addressed by the equally invisible speaker, her son, the missing mother at the same time gets lost in the crowd of invisible listeners.
It may be said that, in the imagination of the speaker, it isn't necessarily addressed to those who listen to it, but equally to everyone, the living and the dead. The subject there enters into a relationship of conflict--he might regret that his mother was not able to be a witness to his triumph, but perhaps, at the same time, in the speech which he gave, to his invisible listeners, there was something that was intended for her. (31)
What masses of spirits are summoned to admit the unlocatable receiver of her son's live broadcast! But when we flick the switch from radio to tape recording, what's also lost in the crowd is who the invisible speak- er is and who the invisible receiver.
Resistance in Theory 173
174 Laurence A. Rickels
NOTES
1. Abraham: "The patient had written down, not the dream, but only her in- tention of doing so. . . . About a week after this unsuccessful attempt she was able to relate the dream, which had recurred several more times. Its content derived from a powerful transference. The patient dreamed that I was approaching her, and the dream ended every time by her waking in fright. After other transference symp- toms had made a detailed analysis of this incident necessary, the reason for conceal- ing the dream had disappeared. I should like to mention briefly the motives which lead patients to attach such importance to an immediate writing-down of their dreams. It is in many cases a transference-phenomenon. The patient who brings to the analytical hour notes of a dream unconsciously desires to show the physician that the dream particularly relates to him. In some cases a dream set down in writ- ing and handed to the analyst is in effect a gift to him" (34-35).
2. "For 14 years Ju? rgenson let it be thought that the startling voice of his mother on the bird-call recording was an unexpected event. He now admits that he had been experimenting for several months before with the aim of receiving 'some- thing' on electro-magnetic tape" (Stemman 94).
3. Under the subsection titled "First Contacts" in Breakthrough, Raudive summarizes their relationship: "Towards the end of 1964 a book appeared in Stockholm under the title Ro? sterna fra? n Rymden (Voices from Space). The author's name was Friedrich Ju? rgenson.
"All my life I have been preoccupied with parapsychological problems, especial- ly with those concerning death and life after death. These problems play a part in all my books and particularly in Der Chaosmensch und seine U? berwindung (Chaosman and His Conquest). . . . After the war I lived in Sweden and I am close- ly connected with those interested in parapsychological research in that country. Ju? rgenson's name struck me as that of an outsider.
"Reading Ju? rgenson's book carefully several times gave me a very definite im- pression of the author as a highly sensitive and susceptible man. Many of his ideas seemed to me to have been formed by a vivid imagination; the kind that could con- jure up pictures in an empty room or voices out of the stillness. Later in his book, however, he came to develop a fascinating theme: he maintained that with the help of tape-recorder, microphone and radio he was able to hear voices on tape which he called 'voices from space'; that these voices did not belong to any other 'physical' world, but to a world in contrast to ours, a spiritual world; that the voices were those of the dead. Ju? rgenson gives a detailed account of this in a book called Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (Radio-Link with the Dead), 1967. He heard not only the voices of near relatives or friends, but also those of historical personages of the recent past, such as Hitler, Go? ring, Felix Kersten, the Yoga-author Boris Sacharow, the controversial Chessman etc. . . .
"I felt an immediate sympathy towards Friedrich Ju? rgenson: all that he told me had a ring of sincerity and deep emotional involvement. . . .
"Renewed contact with Ju? rgenson and deeper insight into his personality and his life's history confirmed my view that this man was utterly sincere; that he was completely immersed in the mystery of this phenomenon and firmly convinced that he was dealing with a world beyond--a world into which we merge after death and where we continue our activities in a transcendental existence. Faith and intuition
can never harm a cause; for my part, I endeavoured to understand the phenomenon in its factual sense" (13-15).
4. In one of the books he was moved to write to popularize Raudive's research, Bander wonders "whether it will be possible in the near future to 'dial M for Mother'" (63). But even if Bander doesn't, we can put on Freudian ears and hear the murder with which mother gets associated.
5. Jung's resistance targets psychoanalysis and media technology. In his analy- sis of an actress's UFO dream--the dream thus "comes from California, the classic Saucer country, so to speak"--Jung overlooks the endopsychic perceptiveness of the dreamer, and symptomatically confuses auto-analytic breakthrough with psy- chotic breakdown. In the dream the UFO, which the dreamer first takes to be real, is identified as a trick: "'I looked up behind me and saw someone with a movie pro- jector. '" Jung informs us right away, before commencing commentary, that the "dreamer, a young film actress, was undergoing psychological treatment for a marked dissociation of personality with all the accompanying symptoms. " The commentary, a comment on Jung's disappointment in the actress, is the only one in Jung's collection that does not take the UFO into any account: "The dream insists on the projection character of the UFO. . . . It is not easy to see why the dream brings in the UFO at all, only to dispose of it in this disappointing way. . . . Any in- sight into the nature of the UFO phenomenon is not to be expected from this dream" (Flying Saucers 66-69).
6. Raudive's study, Breakthrough, appeared first in 1968 in German under the title Unho? rbares wird ho? rbar (The inaudible becomes audible). "The publication of the book caused a near riot in parapsychology. The basic attitude was reactionary. Several parapsychologists argued that Raudive was merely picking up radio inter- ference. Others denied that 'taped voices' could even exist and complained that Raudive was projecting his own ideas as to what the random sound on the tapes meant. These arguments are hackneyed and easily refuted. While it must be admit- ted that the voices are often unintelligible, very often they will call Raudive's name quite clearly. When I listened to examples of Raudive's tapes, in a few instances very clear voices were heard, even overlapping with his. It is inconceivable that radio pickups could consistently call Raudive's name or that radio pickups would consistently be picked up on Raudive's tapes, not only in Germany but in England as well" (Rogo 80).
7. Raudive explains: "The sentence construction obeys rules that differ radi- cally from those of ordinary speech, and although the voices seem to speak the same way we do, the anatomy of their speech apparatus must be different from our own" (in Kubis and Macy 106).
8. "Turner pointed out that the communicators, with whom Raudive claimed to have established contact, included Hitler, and there was a strong 'neo-Fascist undertone' to some of the voices" ("Our Next Program" 71).
9. Raudive's mother communicated to her son from the beyond, in three lan- guages at once, that she loved the Jews: "'Mona, ljubi judi'" (Breakthrough 36). 10. But as Turner observed of Raudive's recording of Churchill's voice from the beyond, which aired on British television at the time the Voice Phenomenon had everyone's attention: "This is obviously one of Churchill's less important speeches
which he saved to broadcast from the other side" (in "Our Next Program" 71).
Resistance in Theory 175
176 Laurence A. Rickels
11. Henry Mandel, for example, who doesn't invite any Nazis to his talk-show masses, does tune in, same time, same station, Churchill's ghost: "I wish to remind you in your experiences that, although on a lesser scale than what I underrwent in the last Life Experience--reminding you also that I was the being upon whom many decisions depended, and I underwent grueling responsibilities during the days of the late holocaust of World War Two--I must tell you that your experiences are the same, although on a lesser scale. . . . The 'V' for Victory . . . let it be yours now and evermore. There is no reason to ever accept any intimation of defeat" (156).
12. The Allies had taken note of German broadcasts during the war, which had a clarity of sound and a staying power that beat all records. The mystery was solved in 1944 with the Allied liberation of Radio Luxemburg: a new magnetic tape recorder of unheard-of capacities was waiting for the booty call. As Friedrich Kittler tells the story, the media loop between record and radio had been one-way all the way. Developed in the 1940s for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the magnetic tape recorder, through motori- zation and mobilization, released broadcasting from its record stores. The acoustic chamber of warfare could now be played back (Kittler 162-73). In his Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions, Steven Lubar gives more evidence for the first use of magnetic tape recording: "During the war the Germans improved the tape recorder enormously and put it to use in radio stations, record- ing and rebroadcasting propaganda. (Hitler insisted that all radio programs be recorded so that nothing unauthorized could be broadcast. )" (183). But the credit he gives the enemy is overextended: he thus begins his history of television with the German precursor Nipkow (243), whose alleged role as father of TV was a Nazi plant. Edward Kellogg confirms the scoop on tape: "Development of magnetic coatings on paper or other base materials was undertaken by the AEG [Allgemeine elektrische Gesellschaft] in Germany about 1928, but up to the outbreak of war nothing of outstanding quality had appeared. At the close of the war the American occupying forces brought back samples of a new German magnetic tape and equip- ment. The magnetic material was a finely divided iron oxide, mixed with and coat- ed on a thin Cellulose base. . . . In cleanness of reproduction, low ground noise and volume range the German system set a new high standard" (215).
13. Hence the overlaps between alien abduction and the child-abuse charge, which as charge is made ultimately against the father of psychoanalysis. Whether as fiction implanted by the analyst or therapist, or as the scene of a crime that analysis with its interest in fantasy and transference helps cover up, repressed memories literalize, split off, and project onto analysis the memory of a repression. The white snow of TV sets now signals the last recollection before hypnosis-induced blackout covers another abduction episode. A repressed memory is always in the first place a memory of a repression that can or cannot come up in session. Whenever it is a question of "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," subsections surface on "Psychotherapeutics. " It is therefore not entirely now-ive that Californian psychotherapist Edith Fiore decided to specialize in overcoming resistances to re- membering the repressed memories of alien abduction, close encounters of the fourth kind. She first made a name for herself in the supermarket checkout head- lines when she published her first specialization, treatment of patients suffering from phantom possession (The Unquiet Dead). In her second book, Encounters,
Fiore declares her split reception of the truth of her patient's repressed memories: "I am a therapist, so my primary goal in doing regressions to close encounters is to help the patient overcome symptoms, problems, and difficulties. Recently, I've taken on the additional role of a UFO investigator, in which collecting data (expos- ing the event) is the primary objective. Often in doing an investigation, I decided to ask questions that may actually have led the person in the suspected direction in order to facilitate our work. If a strict researcher had been peering over my shoul- der, he would have frowned and shaken his head, because he would have been after proof of the validity of the contact, whereas my goal may have changed to quickly relieving anxiety that had surfaced" (5).
14. "EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomena] voices typically speak in short, cryptic and sometimes grammatically poor phrases. They speak in a variety of languages, regardless of the languages known to the listeners" (Guiley 107). "Voices also re- port that they communicate through one of many 'central transmitting agencies' on the Other Side" (107).
15. It was always first in the recording, rather than in the direct telephone con- nection, for example, that we made audio contact with the dead. Parapsychology is as scientific or science-fictive as the space program: mediums possessed and ventrilo- quized at a se? ance or the ghostly caller at the other end of the line just don't cut it.
16. According to Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (second paragraph of section 6), Schiller was the inspiration or placeholder for Freud's Trieblehre.
17. Hans Loewald, for example, still finds application for Freud's 1914 theoreti- cal elaboration of transference and transference neurosis in the treatment of charac- ter neurotics (a population that, since the end of both world wars, has been on the rise). "If we do not cling to the word 'symptoms,' but include the wider areas of char- acter and of ego pathology, this still stands today as the procedure at which we aim. In this sense transference neurosis is not so much an entity to be found in the patient, but an operational concept. We may regard it as denoting the retransformation of a psychic illness which originated in pathogenic interactions with the important per- sons in the child's environment, into an interactional process with a new person, the analyst, in which the pathological infantile interactions and their intrapsychic conse- quences may become transparent and accessible to change by virtue of the analyst's objectivity and of the emergence of novel interaction-possibilities" (429).
REFERENCES
Abraham, Karl. "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " In Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis, ed. Hilda Abraham, trans. Hilda Abraham and D. R. Ellison. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1955 [1913]. 33-35.
Bander, Peter. Voices from the Tapes: Recordings from the Other World. New York: Drake Publishers, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. "U? ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire. " In Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Roy Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenha? user. Vols. 1 and 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980.
Cle? ment, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 [1981].
de Man, Paul. "Kant and Schiller.
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.
Resistance in Theory 163
164 Laurence A. Rickels
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
Resistance in Theory 165
166 Laurence A. Rickels
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
Resistance in Theory 167
168 Laurence A. Rickels
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.
Resistance in Theory 169
170 Laurence A. Rickels
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.
Resistance in Theory 171
172 Laurence A. Rickels
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. (235)
This security drive covers the analyst with its blanket order whenever he treats the transference as the object or objective of consolidation and then, once interpretation can be made, as the model to which all else can be reduced. Thus all systems are going for the "working through" that grants the analyst open season to do whatever it takes to strength- en the patient's ego.
In a review of transference theories, in particular with regard to their revaluation by object relations analysts, Nathan Leites, another individual radically displaced by the events of World War II, points to the proliferation of disguised transferences that have reversed the original reception of transference work: originally it was the past that was back via transference onto the analyst. But since the 1940s, we tend to see experiences with extra-analytic figures, including fig- ures from the past, as displacements of and defenses against what's being experienced in the relationship to the analyst in session. This reflects the growing admissions of narcissism into analytic theory taken down largely via the analysts who followed Melanie Klein right into the session where anything at all refers to the analyst. Leites notes the paradox that by now direct contact with original objects, rather than via the transference, occurs only when there is death, loss, and bereavement in the patient's life. Leites comments: "what used to be the normal power of the analytic situation has now become the privi- lege of catastrophe (even that extremity, as we have seen earlier, may not suffice to break through the wall which the analyst interposes)" (451).
17
The technical difficulties Lacan had with official psychoanalysis in the 1950s concerned the analytic frame, and the interpretation of the transference that is given when "it's time. " But session time for Lacan was always tape time, voice activated. Catherine Cle? ment comments: "Through lengthy investigation Lacan had come to the conclusion that the length of each session should be adjusted according to what the pa-
tient was saying: some long, some short, in any case no predetermined fixed length" (110). Lacan insisted instead that the adjustment of the length of the session should become one of the techniques of psycho- analysis. In the final analysis, remember, it will all be on tape. Lacan's seminars were also consigned to recording. Cle? ment was there: "there were tape recorders and the room bristled with wires. . . . A stenogra- pher recorded the lectures on a stenographic machine as Lacan spoke" (12-13). To be in control of the time, in session or in seminar, is the prerogative of the one who identifies with the tape recorder. Andy Warhol was raised as his dead sister and wanted to be a machine. He left his memoirs on the call-activated tapes of the other's answering machine.
It is over an audio device that Lacan comes closest to acknowledg- ing an identifiable because-identified-with loss. He takes issue with an analyst from the United Kingdom who confronted her patient when he came to session in a state of stupor with his fear that his recent success- ful radio broadcast on a topic that greatly interested her had aroused her jealousy. "The rest of the account shows that it took a year for the subject to recover from this shock-interpretation, which hadn't failed to have some effect, since he had instantly recovered his spirits" (Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique 31). She makes her duo interpre- tation even though she knows that he went ahead with the broadcast only a few days after his mother's death. Lacan turns to "the psycholo- gy of mourning" to imagine what was going through when the patient went ahead and went through with his scheduled broadcast. While the invisible receiver, the mother, is being addressed by the equally invisible speaker, her son, the missing mother at the same time gets lost in the crowd of invisible listeners.
It may be said that, in the imagination of the speaker, it isn't necessarily addressed to those who listen to it, but equally to everyone, the living and the dead. The subject there enters into a relationship of conflict--he might regret that his mother was not able to be a witness to his triumph, but perhaps, at the same time, in the speech which he gave, to his invisible listeners, there was something that was intended for her. (31)
What masses of spirits are summoned to admit the unlocatable receiver of her son's live broadcast! But when we flick the switch from radio to tape recording, what's also lost in the crowd is who the invisible speak- er is and who the invisible receiver.
Resistance in Theory 173
174 Laurence A. Rickels
NOTES
1. Abraham: "The patient had written down, not the dream, but only her in- tention of doing so. . . . About a week after this unsuccessful attempt she was able to relate the dream, which had recurred several more times. Its content derived from a powerful transference. The patient dreamed that I was approaching her, and the dream ended every time by her waking in fright. After other transference symp- toms had made a detailed analysis of this incident necessary, the reason for conceal- ing the dream had disappeared. I should like to mention briefly the motives which lead patients to attach such importance to an immediate writing-down of their dreams. It is in many cases a transference-phenomenon. The patient who brings to the analytical hour notes of a dream unconsciously desires to show the physician that the dream particularly relates to him. In some cases a dream set down in writ- ing and handed to the analyst is in effect a gift to him" (34-35).
2. "For 14 years Ju? rgenson let it be thought that the startling voice of his mother on the bird-call recording was an unexpected event. He now admits that he had been experimenting for several months before with the aim of receiving 'some- thing' on electro-magnetic tape" (Stemman 94).
3. Under the subsection titled "First Contacts" in Breakthrough, Raudive summarizes their relationship: "Towards the end of 1964 a book appeared in Stockholm under the title Ro? sterna fra? n Rymden (Voices from Space). The author's name was Friedrich Ju? rgenson.
"All my life I have been preoccupied with parapsychological problems, especial- ly with those concerning death and life after death. These problems play a part in all my books and particularly in Der Chaosmensch und seine U? berwindung (Chaosman and His Conquest). . . . After the war I lived in Sweden and I am close- ly connected with those interested in parapsychological research in that country. Ju? rgenson's name struck me as that of an outsider.
"Reading Ju? rgenson's book carefully several times gave me a very definite im- pression of the author as a highly sensitive and susceptible man. Many of his ideas seemed to me to have been formed by a vivid imagination; the kind that could con- jure up pictures in an empty room or voices out of the stillness. Later in his book, however, he came to develop a fascinating theme: he maintained that with the help of tape-recorder, microphone and radio he was able to hear voices on tape which he called 'voices from space'; that these voices did not belong to any other 'physical' world, but to a world in contrast to ours, a spiritual world; that the voices were those of the dead. Ju? rgenson gives a detailed account of this in a book called Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (Radio-Link with the Dead), 1967. He heard not only the voices of near relatives or friends, but also those of historical personages of the recent past, such as Hitler, Go? ring, Felix Kersten, the Yoga-author Boris Sacharow, the controversial Chessman etc. . . .
"I felt an immediate sympathy towards Friedrich Ju? rgenson: all that he told me had a ring of sincerity and deep emotional involvement. . . .
"Renewed contact with Ju? rgenson and deeper insight into his personality and his life's history confirmed my view that this man was utterly sincere; that he was completely immersed in the mystery of this phenomenon and firmly convinced that he was dealing with a world beyond--a world into which we merge after death and where we continue our activities in a transcendental existence. Faith and intuition
can never harm a cause; for my part, I endeavoured to understand the phenomenon in its factual sense" (13-15).
4. In one of the books he was moved to write to popularize Raudive's research, Bander wonders "whether it will be possible in the near future to 'dial M for Mother'" (63). But even if Bander doesn't, we can put on Freudian ears and hear the murder with which mother gets associated.
5. Jung's resistance targets psychoanalysis and media technology. In his analy- sis of an actress's UFO dream--the dream thus "comes from California, the classic Saucer country, so to speak"--Jung overlooks the endopsychic perceptiveness of the dreamer, and symptomatically confuses auto-analytic breakthrough with psy- chotic breakdown. In the dream the UFO, which the dreamer first takes to be real, is identified as a trick: "'I looked up behind me and saw someone with a movie pro- jector. '" Jung informs us right away, before commencing commentary, that the "dreamer, a young film actress, was undergoing psychological treatment for a marked dissociation of personality with all the accompanying symptoms. " The commentary, a comment on Jung's disappointment in the actress, is the only one in Jung's collection that does not take the UFO into any account: "The dream insists on the projection character of the UFO. . . . It is not easy to see why the dream brings in the UFO at all, only to dispose of it in this disappointing way. . . . Any in- sight into the nature of the UFO phenomenon is not to be expected from this dream" (Flying Saucers 66-69).
6. Raudive's study, Breakthrough, appeared first in 1968 in German under the title Unho? rbares wird ho? rbar (The inaudible becomes audible). "The publication of the book caused a near riot in parapsychology. The basic attitude was reactionary. Several parapsychologists argued that Raudive was merely picking up radio inter- ference. Others denied that 'taped voices' could even exist and complained that Raudive was projecting his own ideas as to what the random sound on the tapes meant. These arguments are hackneyed and easily refuted. While it must be admit- ted that the voices are often unintelligible, very often they will call Raudive's name quite clearly. When I listened to examples of Raudive's tapes, in a few instances very clear voices were heard, even overlapping with his. It is inconceivable that radio pickups could consistently call Raudive's name or that radio pickups would consistently be picked up on Raudive's tapes, not only in Germany but in England as well" (Rogo 80).
7. Raudive explains: "The sentence construction obeys rules that differ radi- cally from those of ordinary speech, and although the voices seem to speak the same way we do, the anatomy of their speech apparatus must be different from our own" (in Kubis and Macy 106).
8. "Turner pointed out that the communicators, with whom Raudive claimed to have established contact, included Hitler, and there was a strong 'neo-Fascist undertone' to some of the voices" ("Our Next Program" 71).
9. Raudive's mother communicated to her son from the beyond, in three lan- guages at once, that she loved the Jews: "'Mona, ljubi judi'" (Breakthrough 36). 10. But as Turner observed of Raudive's recording of Churchill's voice from the beyond, which aired on British television at the time the Voice Phenomenon had everyone's attention: "This is obviously one of Churchill's less important speeches
which he saved to broadcast from the other side" (in "Our Next Program" 71).
Resistance in Theory 175
176 Laurence A. Rickels
11. Henry Mandel, for example, who doesn't invite any Nazis to his talk-show masses, does tune in, same time, same station, Churchill's ghost: "I wish to remind you in your experiences that, although on a lesser scale than what I underrwent in the last Life Experience--reminding you also that I was the being upon whom many decisions depended, and I underwent grueling responsibilities during the days of the late holocaust of World War Two--I must tell you that your experiences are the same, although on a lesser scale. . . . The 'V' for Victory . . . let it be yours now and evermore. There is no reason to ever accept any intimation of defeat" (156).
12. The Allies had taken note of German broadcasts during the war, which had a clarity of sound and a staying power that beat all records. The mystery was solved in 1944 with the Allied liberation of Radio Luxemburg: a new magnetic tape recorder of unheard-of capacities was waiting for the booty call. As Friedrich Kittler tells the story, the media loop between record and radio had been one-way all the way. Developed in the 1940s for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the magnetic tape recorder, through motori- zation and mobilization, released broadcasting from its record stores. The acoustic chamber of warfare could now be played back (Kittler 162-73). In his Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions, Steven Lubar gives more evidence for the first use of magnetic tape recording: "During the war the Germans improved the tape recorder enormously and put it to use in radio stations, record- ing and rebroadcasting propaganda. (Hitler insisted that all radio programs be recorded so that nothing unauthorized could be broadcast. )" (183). But the credit he gives the enemy is overextended: he thus begins his history of television with the German precursor Nipkow (243), whose alleged role as father of TV was a Nazi plant. Edward Kellogg confirms the scoop on tape: "Development of magnetic coatings on paper or other base materials was undertaken by the AEG [Allgemeine elektrische Gesellschaft] in Germany about 1928, but up to the outbreak of war nothing of outstanding quality had appeared. At the close of the war the American occupying forces brought back samples of a new German magnetic tape and equip- ment. The magnetic material was a finely divided iron oxide, mixed with and coat- ed on a thin Cellulose base. . . . In cleanness of reproduction, low ground noise and volume range the German system set a new high standard" (215).
13. Hence the overlaps between alien abduction and the child-abuse charge, which as charge is made ultimately against the father of psychoanalysis. Whether as fiction implanted by the analyst or therapist, or as the scene of a crime that analysis with its interest in fantasy and transference helps cover up, repressed memories literalize, split off, and project onto analysis the memory of a repression. The white snow of TV sets now signals the last recollection before hypnosis-induced blackout covers another abduction episode. A repressed memory is always in the first place a memory of a repression that can or cannot come up in session. Whenever it is a question of "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," subsections surface on "Psychotherapeutics. " It is therefore not entirely now-ive that Californian psychotherapist Edith Fiore decided to specialize in overcoming resistances to re- membering the repressed memories of alien abduction, close encounters of the fourth kind. She first made a name for herself in the supermarket checkout head- lines when she published her first specialization, treatment of patients suffering from phantom possession (The Unquiet Dead). In her second book, Encounters,
Fiore declares her split reception of the truth of her patient's repressed memories: "I am a therapist, so my primary goal in doing regressions to close encounters is to help the patient overcome symptoms, problems, and difficulties. Recently, I've taken on the additional role of a UFO investigator, in which collecting data (expos- ing the event) is the primary objective. Often in doing an investigation, I decided to ask questions that may actually have led the person in the suspected direction in order to facilitate our work. If a strict researcher had been peering over my shoul- der, he would have frowned and shaken his head, because he would have been after proof of the validity of the contact, whereas my goal may have changed to quickly relieving anxiety that had surfaced" (5).
14. "EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomena] voices typically speak in short, cryptic and sometimes grammatically poor phrases. They speak in a variety of languages, regardless of the languages known to the listeners" (Guiley 107). "Voices also re- port that they communicate through one of many 'central transmitting agencies' on the Other Side" (107).
15. It was always first in the recording, rather than in the direct telephone con- nection, for example, that we made audio contact with the dead. Parapsychology is as scientific or science-fictive as the space program: mediums possessed and ventrilo- quized at a se? ance or the ghostly caller at the other end of the line just don't cut it.
16. According to Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (second paragraph of section 6), Schiller was the inspiration or placeholder for Freud's Trieblehre.
17. Hans Loewald, for example, still finds application for Freud's 1914 theoreti- cal elaboration of transference and transference neurosis in the treatment of charac- ter neurotics (a population that, since the end of both world wars, has been on the rise). "If we do not cling to the word 'symptoms,' but include the wider areas of char- acter and of ego pathology, this still stands today as the procedure at which we aim. In this sense transference neurosis is not so much an entity to be found in the patient, but an operational concept. We may regard it as denoting the retransformation of a psychic illness which originated in pathogenic interactions with the important per- sons in the child's environment, into an interactional process with a new person, the analyst, in which the pathological infantile interactions and their intrapsychic conse- quences may become transparent and accessible to change by virtue of the analyst's objectivity and of the emergence of novel interaction-possibilities" (429).
REFERENCES
Abraham, Karl. "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " In Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis, ed. Hilda Abraham, trans. Hilda Abraham and D. R. Ellison. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1955 [1913]. 33-35.
Bander, Peter. Voices from the Tapes: Recordings from the Other World. New York: Drake Publishers, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. "U? ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire. " In Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Roy Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenha? user. Vols. 1 and 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980.
Cle? ment, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 [1981].
de Man, Paul. "Kant and Schiller.
