Since I have now had
questions
from you and since I've felt some resistances .
Paul-de-Man-Material-Events
Arroway brings back from contact with dead or dad a record of static, white noise, the sound between radio stations, the snow between TV channels.
In the analytic setting this counts down as a show of resistance.
In the other words or worlds of parapsychology, it's the happy medium out of which contact with voices and images of the departed can be made.
In Karl Abraham's essay "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " psychoanalysis took note of new voice-recording technologies as the latest pressure point or push button of resistance. Freud had already addressed the written recording of dreams as bound to the in-session dynamics of transference and resistance. Even or especially the most perfect transcription is vacuum-packed: the dreamer's associations typi- cally vanish, an evacuation that announces the resistance, which if anything is thus better placed to block analytic contact. Abraham could confirm Freud's reservations. One of his patients was so tor- mented by her repeated forgetting of the content of her serial dreaming each time just at the moment she was about to tell Abraham all about it that she suggested the writing cure. But Abraham told her the repress release pressure packed inside a repeating dream would in time break through to consciousness. But she wasn't good about being patient, I mean a patient. She thought she had at least at last interrupted the se- ries of her forgetting when, waking up once more from such a dream, she wrote herself a memo before dropping back to sleep. But then she overslept, was late for her session next morning, and had to hand the slip to Abraham without having had the time to read it first. The mes- sage: "Write down the dream despite agreement" (34). 1
Another one of Abraham's patients, a gadget lover who makes use of a recording device, a dictaphone, to get his dreams down, first for- gets that it wasn't working properly to begin with. A staticky, unclear record was the result. Once the dictaphone has been repaired, he tries it again. But this time even the clearly audible reproduction was so confusing that the patient just couldn't put it all together again as something he could relate or relate to. Only now can the patient begin the work of re-pairing his analytic relationship by remembering in as- sociation, in session, in the transference.
The original fit between Freud's exploration of transference and countertransference phenomena and the analogical hookup he initiat-
ed with such technologies of projection and identification as printing, photography, and film was left behind, in fits and starts, by technolo- gies of as-liveness. New transference phenomena, such as projective identification, were therefore on the rise, same time, same station as the ascent of tape technologies during World War II. Freud's place- holder for this new field of differentiation or diversification was, back then, in the early 1930s, telepathy, a beyond of the transference into and for which Freud saw the telephone already plugging away.
There's the in-session materiality of analysis, from the top of the mourning to the working on the transference and all that it puts in the way. But where analysis keeps the short hand on theory it's the work of analogy that organizes a parallel universal of concepts. This work of analogy was left, up in the dead air between Freud and us, up to the autobiography of media. And Freud's analogical record, espe- cially when it went endopsychic, was technologized on one track and haunted on the other (or same) track. Freud first greeted the figures of the transferential relationship as revenants, spooks. In 1959, Friedrich Ju? rgenson, originally Russian, by then living in Sweden, discovered the Voice Phenomenon. In the same year that saw the realization of video- tape recording and videotape editing, the innovation that made pos- sible live or as-live performances before studio audiences, Ju? rgenson turned on the playback of his tape recorder to listen to the birds he thought he had recorded by leaving the device running outside for a time. "Suddenly the voice of his dead mother addressed him. He heard her saying: 'Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me? ' That was all" (Stemman 92). 2 Konstantin Raudive, also displaced by the events of World War II, from Latvia to Sweden, followed the news of Ju? rgenson's discovery all the way to the source. 3 Like Ju? rgenson, he, too, heard the voice of his own deceased mother, who called him by his boyhood name: "'Kostulit, this is your mother'" (Kubis and Macy 106). Peter Bander, yet another person displaced by the war, was converted to be- lief in Raudive's mediumship when he heard his first electronic voice: you guessed it, it was his long-distant mother speaking to her little boy in German. Then he had just two questions, one for each dead parent:
"I will give father ten seconds, and mother twenty seconds to answer my questioning because my mother would anyhow talk more. "--I then addressed myself to my father and said: "Father can you help me? " (in English). I waited ten seconds and then I said: "Mother, you know what I have to do, am I right in doing it? " I waited twenty five seconds and
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then switched the recorder off. . . . On playback, watching the revolu- tion counter on the tape recorder, I heard within a fraction of the first revolution a man's voice. After only three playbacks, the contents were quite clear to me. The language used was a dialect in which my father used to speak to his intimate friends (and although neither my mother nor I ever spoke it ourselves, we understood it): "Jung, wenn ich doch nur kuennt", (meaning: "Boy, if only I could"). The interesting word is "Jung". This was indeed the way my father used to address me when he was alive. Then came the turn of my mother's answer; again within a fraction of a second after asking my question the answer had manifested itself. "Und trotzdem sagst Du nein. "--A literal translation would mean "And you still say no. "--However, seen in context and knowing my mother's way of speaking, I prefer to translate it: "Whatever I say, you still will do the opposite. " . . . The first electronic voice I ever heard, purporting to be my mother, and the two sentences above, are the only examples I can quote of a personal communication received. (Bander 35)
Bander closes the account with his swearing of an oath of sorts that he never again attempted to make contact with a particular person. He knew his mother's way of speaking and, preferring to translate, ended the direct connection. 4
The interesting word is Jung. Beginning in 1959 Carl Gustav Jung's counsel was regularly offered on the air of the Voice Phenomenon. "His voice appears to manifest itself frequently during Raudive's recordings. Furthermore, what the voice purports to be saying makes sense" (Bander 25). As early as 1946, Jung began working on the UFO phenomenon, a phenomenon in Jung's case of unidentification. In one of his flying-saucer articles, Jung translates Freud's notion of the super- ego into the terms of his notion of a collective unconscious. Via another collectivity, Jung acquitted himself in 1946 for his season of open col- laboration with the Nazi German institution of Aryan psychotherapy through his postwar doctrine of collective guilt. Back in the 1930s, when he agreed to put on a show of legitimacy for the Nazi German eclecticization and totalization of the psychotherapies (including psycho- analysis) by letting them make him into their international leader, Jung's only concern was that he would thus be getting back in contact after all with Freud's science. One has to give him credit for making everything in his life and work after his psychotic break with Freud, no matter how archetypical he thought it was, or whatever, only legible or decodable, point by point, in the terms of negative transference.
Jung's flying-saucer connection hits air pockets of isolated reference to the air war, the miracle rockets, and the foo fighters (which Allied pilots spotted before their eyes giving outer-space assist to the other side). But it's really all about the postwar conditions of life in the 1950s. "These rumours, or the possible physical existence of such ob- jects, seem to me so significant that I feel myself compelled, as once be- fore when events of fateful consequence were brewing for Europe, to sound a note of warning. I know that, just as before, my voice is much too weak to reach the ear of the multitude" (Jung, Flying Saucers 5). A footnote inserted right after "as once before" makes the connection with his 1936 essay "Wotan," which he thus rewrites within the under- world as his warning shout. Back in 1936 it sure looked, by all ac- counts, pro-Nazi in an upbeat. 5
After noting that Jung was reaching the ears of Raudive's set with special clarity, Bander concludes that all the voices Raudive received "were attributable to persons who had died no longer than twenty or thirty years ago; also, when first manifesting themselves, they show definite characteristics of anxiety and eagerness" (25). Raudive established that, no accident, spirits need white noise, vibrations, or carrier sounds to communicate. Without their former vocal organs, spirits must modulate existing static into voice patterns strong enough to be captured on tape. Raudive collected and studied thousands of voices on tape, on which he based his definitive treatise on the Voice Phenomenon. 6
Raudive had one competitor to diss, the discoverer of the uncon- scious, because he was one to know one who could only translate paranormal discoveries back inside the terms or limits of the psyche. "The hypothesis of the unconscious can be confronted by that of an 'anti-world,' which is based on the theory of relativity" (9). As Einstein proved, everything is relatives, dead or alive.
What soon came to be known as the Raudive voices were often agrammatical communications given invariably in several languages at once. 7 Gordon Turner, a well-known spiritual healer, although or be- cause he was turned on to the authenticity of the Voice Phenomenon, worried about the dangers involved in contacting entities who, given the limited range of the tape-recording medium, must inhabit the low- est regions of the next world. 8 According to Turner, the Raudive voices were on the same wavelength as the messages Himmler had received: "There is a direct link between fascism, black magic and contact with impersonating earthbound entities who deliberately delude and pervert
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others. . . . If the . . . voices are stemming from a paranormal source, then I would regard some of the references to Hitler as significant and dangerous" (in Bander 84). 9 But Raudive also summoned Churchill, who is perhaps the most frequently contacted ghost on all the talk shows of the Voice Phenomenon. 10 World War II was--or is it still? -- on the air. 11
In the beginning, ghosts were seen but not heard when photography proved to be the first medium that could record on its own contacts with the otherworld. The projection of the modern rocket was reserved for the purpose of transporting the camera to new vantage points, not only in the service of military surveillance, but also, at the same time, as afterthought or even as main focus, for making first visual contact with outer space. Robert H. Goddard, the Father of American Rocketry, the sole pioneer whose focus was only on space photography, had his POV on target by the time airplanes rose to the occasion of reconnais- sance. But Goddard didn't live to see his photo op. "He died August 10, 1945. A year later, a captured German V-2 (A-4) rocket with a stan- dard De Vry 35 mm motion picture camera was launched from White Sands, New Mexico, reached a peak altitude of 65 miles . . . , and suc- cessfully made a continuous record of its ascent through the Earth's at- mosphere to the threshold of outer space" (Winter 98).
Motion-picture technology had by the late 1940s completely crossed over to sound following intensive industry development inspired by the samples of German magnetic tape brought back to the United States after the war. Established in principle at the turn of the century, Third Reich scientists discovered for the recording the tape medium with just the right chemistry to lead the way to our playback, record, fast for- ward, or rewind functions (A History of Technology 1315). Developed originally for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the tape recorder was right away used to cen- sor any between-the-lines attempts by captive Allied agents to signal warnings mixed in with their Morse messages, which the Nazi captors had filled with false leads. Every Morse message composed by the cap- tive authors was copied, analyzed, and, if necessary, manipulated be- fore being put on the air. The era of simulation thus opened wide. 12 The words from the sponsor were invited to join right in and set their spell: "The first widespread application [of magnetic tape recording] occurred during World War II when speeches by Hitler and other prominent Nazi leaders were broadcast at times and places calculated to confuse Allied intelligence" (The Encyclopedia Americana 282).
Tapes of liveness are the medium of the split second, the splitting and postponement of the broadcast for the little time it takes to censor, ma- nipulate, simulate. But the splitting image of the moment thus gives or takes all the time in the world.
In 1947, in Roswell, the hometown of Goddard's camera-rocket and outer-space research, the UFO phenomenon took off with a crash. Jung would hear a synchronicity; but, to stick to the moment, the V-2 rocket backfire of the primal Roswell sightings is completely in sync with the takeoff of Jung's investment in objects of unidentification. The alien forms that were witnessed or denied were humanoid in appear- ance but reduced in strength and scale, in every part but the head, as though by starvation. The visual contact first established in 1947, which keeps reentering the controversy over destroyed evidence, un- provability, only your imagination, and so on, seems to occupy inter- changeable places with a certain reception, again, of World War II, that went to outer space and back, in the form of believe-it-or-not visi- tations by aliens who have the appearance of the victims we both do and do not recognize. 13
The year 1983 saw the successful first run of the American Associa- tion of Electronic Voice Phenomena, which had "received an inter- national publicity boost with the announcement by George Meek, a re- tired engineer, that he and a medium, William O'Neil, an electronics expert, had built a device called Spiricom that could communicate with the Other Side" (Kubis and Macy 107). Spiricom, which thus offered two-way conversations with the dead, opened up "the new field of ITC, or Instrumental Transcommunication--the use of electronic sys- tems to undertake meaningful communication across dimensions. Thus, George Meek and Bill O'Neil are usually regarded as the fathers of ITC, just as the Wright Brothers are regarded as the fathers of modern flight" (Kubis and Macy 113). 14 Sure enough, soon enough contact could be made with Timestream, the telecommunications corporation on the other side. "Amazingly, Friedrich Ju? rgenson and Dr. Konstantin Raudive, the great pioneers of EVP, . . . have died and are now coming across on television, computer, radio, telephone and fax. . . . Today, Konstantin Raudive and Friedrich Ju? rgenson add a new dimension to their roles as paranormal experimenters. From their perspective on the astral plane, they have become philosophic mentors as well" (Kubis and Macy 114-15). But what gets realized here in the exchange, some- where between parapsychology and philosophy, is the circumvention of the uncanny first contact with what the recording showed.
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Already in 1920 Edison was convinced that there just had to be a radio frequency between the long and the short of the waves which, once he contained it and gave it an on/off gadget switch, would put through the direct connection to the world of the dead. Marconi claimed to have come up with a gadget through which he could travel back in time and record great historical events. He was hoping to get the words spoken by Christ on the cross just for the record. But it all changes once we let the recording speak for itself. Telephone and tele- graph alone, without the recording or taping connections, were never enough. Edison thought he heard voices, like overhearing people speaking in the next room, when he played back a recording of a tele- graphic transmission. Thus he was inspired to invent the answering machine, in which telephone and telegraph would find the completion of their system. 15 Only the recording can speak for itself, and thus for contact with the dead other, while remaining at the same time inadmis- sible as evidence of the senses.
ON RECORD
The recorded voice, the uncanniest double of all, according to Adorno, because it always comes life-size, was the inspiration for Mina Harker's internal assemblage of Bram Stoker's Dracula. She transfers Dr. Seward's audio recording of his journal, which she has just listened to and which she concludes is just too unbearable for another's ears, to typewritten record. All the information gathered in the group service of defeating vampirism makes the transfer, subsequently, to Mina's one record, which she types up in triplicate. At the end of all that typing, all that's left of the group effort that defeated the vampire count, the novel itself, is nothing but a "mass of typewriting," a mass or communion that neither proves nor disproves undeath. But by World War II, tape tech- nology had introduced both the uncannily perfect recording and the undecidability of its truth or simulation. But this vacancy and overfull- ness of tapes, their inadmissibility as evidence and their self-evidence, at the same time invited contact with the Voice Phenomenon, by all ac- counts the widest-ranging communication with the dead to date. When it comes to simulation, we're fast on the intake. Freud originally gave transference phenomena a matching accessory, the transference neuro- sis, an artificial illness that gets generated within the analytic relation- ship as a more tolerable simulation of the disturbance that's out there, bigger than life. Just like an inoculation, the transference neurosis be- stows the great health by proxy or antibody in the course of its minia-
ture illness and cure. Those shocks or shots of inoculation against trau- ma that Walter Benjamin addressed, in Freud's company, are always simulated conditions that, just like transference neuroses, take on an existence of their own in relation to what's out there, bigger than the two of us, and to what's in session, the big between. When every- thing out there can enter the session, the analytic relationship, as trans- ference, the outside traumatic contacts have been dated, miniaturized, simulated, given the gadget click of the analyst's last words: "It's time. "
Paul de Man's 1983 as-live performance "Kant and Schiller" intro- duces class analysis, I mean the analysis of in-class transference, into the writing of his reading. With the sole exception of this lecture, which we have on tape, de Man was not at all interested in the easy reading of mass culture or of its owner's manual, psychoanalysis. This station break, forever marked and dated with remarkably forgettable language, has at the same time absorbed the posthumous shock that Benjamin, still in Freud's company, attributed as aftereffect to all recording following from the click of a gadget connection. It wasn't so necessary for de Man to write the reading in this case, he reassures us, because he's "dealing with a much easier text" (129). What would be improv nightmare over the corpus of Kant is no problem when it's Schiller time. "I'll have some change in pace today, because this time I have not written out a lecture. . . . So what I'll be doing will be . . . more in the nature of a class than a lecture" (129).
The helping "and" reaches across Kant and Schiller, detailed textual analysis and speaking out in class. But the class situation is not an even-anded coupling. There are also secret sharers in the "and" that's dealt us here. Their address lies in the turning around of the Trieb, the pivotal point of de Man's yoking about Kant and Schiller. The other two are, one, Freud--at the first mention of Schiller's Triebe, de Man gives us credit for his aside, "Triebe, a word that you know from Freud" (137)--and, two, the gadget that has it all on tape:
The tropological system in Kant . . . is . . . a purely linguistic structure which was shown to function as such, whereas in Schiller it is the use made of tropes, of chiasmus as the teleology, as the aim of an ideologi- cal desire, namely, the desire to overcome terror--it is in such a way that tropology is made to serve a Trieb, to serve as device. . . . It acquires therefore an empirical and a pragmatic content . . . at the very moment that it asserts its separation from all reality. (147)16
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But the overcoming of terror through the playback or reversal of a device isn't de Man's point, it's ours. When de Man gives his topic for the lecture, namely, the "problem of the question of reversibility, of the reversibility in the type of models which I have been developing on the basis of texts" (132), what seems to get raised at the same time is the question of our misunderstanding. De Man must insist, in contra- distinction to us, on an irreversibility in relations between the perfor- mative and the constative. Even if reinscription or recuperation in cognitive terms takes place, what we have then is a relapse, which, "however, is not the same as a reversal" (133). In the middle of all this setting up and putting down, de Man breaks for a "question which is closer to our concern here. " This is where he directly addresses in- session dynamics. But then the discourse starts breaking up, the con- nection goes bad, static takes over, we're disconnected, and he's back:
because it seems to be, as so often is the case, that . . .
Since I have now had questions from you and since I've felt some resistances . . . You are so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent that I have the feeling that . . . But I know this is not the case and there's always an interesting episode in a series of lectures like that, I know that from ex- perience. One doesn't necessarily begin in as idyllic a mood as things were here. But it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, where certain issues are bound to come up. (131-32)
De Man's transcribed or reinscribed performance puts us in frame for a slightly loopy but still self-contained feedback mechanism or machine for writing. The theme of our regression meets this frame like its match and maker: it's time to talk about the psychology of terror. The psy- chology of terror becomes the thematic interpretation of the regressive reception going down between Kant and Schiller, and between de Man and his audience. Schiller's drives, which, remember, can we talk, we freely associate with Freud, double as the drive to know, represent, or even change nature and as the drive to leave things unaltered by change or preserve oneself ultimately against death. Schiller thus intro- duces a "notion of physical danger, of a threatening physical Nature, in an empirical sense" (139). The danger zone in Kant belongs to "the shock of surprise, of Verwunderung, which we experience when con- fronted with something of extreme magnitude" (139). It's a shock of
recognition that there's a failure of representation within the overall structure of the imagination. But Kant does not tell us about self- preservation, about "how to protect ourselves, so to speak, psychologi- cally, from danger" (139). In contrast, Schiller, just like the rest of us, is directly concerned with the how-to of self-help:
How am I going to fight off terror, how am I going to resist terror? --by means of a psychological device, which emphasizes reason and the abili- ty to maintain reason in the face of terror. That's a way to live through terror, even if you're physically annihilated by it. Curiously, this empha- sis on the practical, this emphasis on the psychological, on the empiri- cal, leads to a greater stress on the abstract powers. (141)
Schiller and the audience make a "correct psychological observation," which, de Man advises, is still just not philosophical enough. "You know that from your own experience if you have ever been in immedi- ate danger. There is a kind of exhilaration of the mind--if you are given the time--at watching yourself being in that state of danger" (142). But de Man's admission of his own experience of dissociation or splitting is so close to Schiller's turn to ultimate safety in the face of terror, which de Man dismisses right in the typeface of what he said we knew by our own experience. What we net from Schiller's safety- zoning prescriptions is the ultimate safety net, called "moral safety. " When all else fails in the face of physically overwhelming danger, you learn to consider the sensory part of your being, that part that can be endangered, as something exterior, dissociated, like a natural object, to which your moral self is completely indifferent.
Schiller argues for terror's imaginative remove from the danger as but its representation. But for all that it remains just as vivid, to the point of turning on our sense of self-preservation, and thus, Schiller concludes, "it produces something analogous to what the real experi- ence would produce" (143). What just doesn't interest de Man is that this production of something analogous is for the medical doctor Schiller just a dosage away from an inoculation, which thus becomes a differentiating part of the argument or procedure. By metonymy and absence, our Freud and a Freudian Benjamin join Schiller at this point of injection. The Benjamin de Man just couldn't shake--for example, among all those trends in criticism he piled up hysterically in his first footnote to "Rhetoric of Temporality"--reads allegory as though it were, looking back to the first works, Benjamin's only pre-Freudian works, the allegory of language origins. This represents a telepathically
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precise elision of the Freudian Benjamin. But even The Origin of the German Mourning Pageant can also be read as looking forward, in close association with Freud's study of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs, for example, to the work on technocultures that will follow out the trauma organization of fields of representation and repetition.
According to Schiller's inside view, without the administration of analogies horror must take us to a place of unprotectedness, the place of origins. According to Freud, repetition is (just in case) the happen- ing event of the psyche's attempt to get back posttrauma into the trans- ferential context of anxiety. In Benjamin's reading, shocks are the inocu- lative shots that give it to the media consumers, but in metabolizable doses of the trauma or horror.
The therapeutic and theoretical rapport with technologization is not imposed from without but, like the work on the transference, in- terprets or interrupts what's already happening. What's on the tapes of media technology at the same time jumps the cut of intervention to anticipate and confirm the psychoanalytic or allegorical theory and therapy of shock, terror, horror. In the year of the discovery of the Voice Phenomenon, Alfred Hitchcock exhibited in Psycho the ultimate scene of horror, the Schauer scene, to which countless slasher and splatter films have been shock-treating us ever since. This serial fol- lowing or understanding of Hitchcock's film never completely reverses the traumatic intersection, in Hitchcock's murder scene, of three un- seens: the murderer's stabbing, the cut of film editing, and the cutting edge of our death wishes. Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, followed up the filmic reception of the Schauer scene with his own book sequel, Psycho II. This time around, the legacy of horror is transmitted through Norman Bates's psychiatrist, who does the psy- cho's mass murdering for him. Although Hitchcock's Psycho had left it all up to psychiatry, which was thus up there, untouchable, to put the aberration of the trans- to rest, the slasher sequels, to this day, re- situate their remakes of the Schauer scene in a transferential setting that cannot contain the transgression, violence, identification cutting across it. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Legacy of Dr. Mabuse, and Spellbound introduced the horror plot of transference transgression. But there is no other plot of horror and terror. Psycho interrupted or extended it, and thus doubled the impact of a scene of horror we've been doubling and containing ever since. The transference transgres- sion was directed with and against us. But that also means that our reception of Psycho keeps on going, going, along Benjamin's lines, as
successful containment and dating of our first traumatic contact with murder, with the mass of murder that the media sensurround in every sense contains. "Most everyone has a Psycho story," Janet Leigh reas- sures us: "People remember where they saw it first, with whom they saw it, their reactions at the time, and the effect the film had on them afterward" (131).
But in Psycho, the problem of the trans-, the across we all must bear, which the closing psychiatric diagnosis has all locked up, is at the same time stored or realized in the taped zone of simulation. Paul Jasmin, hired to provide Mrs. Bates's voice, was amazed by the final audio portion, in which he had a hard time recognizing his share:
In postproduction, . . . [Hitchcock] spliced and blended a mixture of [the voices] so that who's speaking literally changes from word to word and sentence to sentence. He did that to confuse the audience. I recog- nize my voice before Tony carries Mother down the stairs. But the very last speech, the monologue, is all done by a woman--Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette spliced in. (In Leigh 81, 83)
Coming to the Psycho project and projection from his new TV series, Hitchcock constructed the clash of the two media, one old, one new, over a scene of unseen incessant cutting and then, over what's heard in- side the audiotape, the splicing together of different taped voices that gives the psycho's voice or voices a range across identities, generations, and genders. Everything can be made to cross over on tape. And on tape it all jumps the cut of editing, the cut that Hitchcock dreaded so much when not in his hands that he took the hand in marriage of Britain's leading film editor.
At the close of World War II Hitchcock was offered the evidence of Nazi extermination as film assignment. He skipped that ready-made and made Rope instead, a film about the life-or-death stakes of mis- reading notions of superhumanity. The film, which the director wel- comed then as his most exciting project to date, was "shot without cuts" (Gottlieb 284). "Until Rope came along, I had been unable to give full rein to my notion that a camera could photograph one com- plete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, de- vouring action like a giant steam shovel" (275). In 1948 Hitchcock's camera swallowed it all whole, the hole in one. The haunting rebound upon intake was released with the cuts Hitchcock made in 1960, sight unseen but all on tape, right down the receiving line into our psyches.
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REWOUNDING
Lacan delivered his primal mirror-stage address that year in Marienbad, that year of the Berlin Olympics, on his way to attend the games and witness what he hails as "the spirit of the times. " In his text Television, Lacan came full circuit. When he locks in his interest in the discursive event of TV, he shoots right up to the first moon landing. But it's just the tip of realizations of the science fantasy that landed from those first stirrings of Nazi German rockets, and which were transmitted back to Earth, live, via the medium before which Nazi Germans had first stood at total attention.
As documented in the essay "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power," Lacan went to Berlin in 1936 against the mocked protests of Ernst Kris, whose interpretation of a transference Lacan dismisses in the essay as on one fault line with Kris's refusal to go to the Nazi TV show. Kris's patient is a professor who lives in mor- tal dread of being a plagiarist. Yes, there is something missing in Kris's interpretation and intervention that both the patient and Lacan point out or act out. But Lacan in turn misses the reference to improper bur- ial openly lying there between the lines of a disembodied plagiarism.
The mirror stage gives us the preprogram on which prospects for the "phantom, the double, the automaton" are already given, and given without all that static of projection of an identifiable, and be- cause identifiable, material, loss. In Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan admits the loss of Freud's moment or field as constitutive of the trans- ferences brought on by the in-session presence of the analyst, who is, in the first place, witness to this loss ("Presence of the Analyst" 483). We're always inside this transferential frame with all our relations since Freud to Freud. But it's a dead loss, Lacan continues, the source of "a certain deepening of obscurantism, very characteristic of man in our times of supposed information" (483). Lacan thus stresses the noncontact, a "function of missing" that "lies at the center of analytic repetition" (484). "The transference is the means by which the com- munication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the uncon- scious closes up again" (486). The transference closes "shutters" that the analyst must open up. Transference thus also, between the lines and languages, renews the Freudian analogy with photography. The unconscious, however, is all on tape: "The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject" (483).
The essay in which Lacan recounts his rejection of a certain Krissy
understanding of transference and acting out comes across in the long stretch as almost a topography of psychoanalytic history in the twen- ties and thirties and then, looking back, in the fifties, in the decade it takes to skip the Nazi era of psychoanalysis and follow instead the American upbeat of adaptation through that old eclectic mix of psycho- dynamic therapies with or within U. S. psychiatry. But the consolida- tion of ego assets externalized as American is only the late arrival (and victorious rival) of that more primal and less consciously deliberated- upon era of Nazi German accommodations for a greater psychoanalytic setting that was changed, back then already, to the channel of improved efficiency, functioning, healing, bonding.
Thus, when Lacan takes on the American streamlining of analysis in this essay he straddles the almost two-decade span of his own united states of amnesia between the basic conception, research, or first airing of his findings in the thirties and, in the fifties, the final work of revi- sion and publication. In other words, for the fifties, Lacan sets up all the pinhead goals of American neo-analysis--autonomous ego, happi- ness, security, team spirit--for one strike (231). But underneath the tall order of these charges there reemerges, not without psychohistorical connection to the era Lacan always leaves out, long-distant references in theory to melancholia. It's always in the course of duking it out with the dupes of analysis that he trips up and over the melancholic conse- quences of the other's takes on analytic theory.
Object relations is top of a line that slides immediately into implied or excluded zones of material loss. The pattern and patter of American psychology or self-help for success holds on to the related, objectional attempt to balance as "economic" activity the opposition between life and death drives (243). On "the other side of the coin" is the focus on what precisely "eludes the transference, namely, the axis taken from the object relation. " While granting the focus on this relation a noble origin in the work of Karl Abraham (and thus--just take a look--in a melan- cholic collection of parting objects), Lacan attributes to this legacy (with Melanie Klein at the front of this line) the workings of such an imaginary. The "notion of intersubjective introjection," for example, merely reflects the establishment that produced it inside the dual re- lationship (246). The tensions that attracted the object-relationists in the first place, like the span of attention awarded this force field in the same place, come down to a security drive that Lacan diagnoses within Anglo-American analysis.
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It has nothing to do with any counter-transference on the part of this or that individual; it is a question of the consequences of the dual relation, if the therapist does not overcome it, and how can he overcome it if he sees it as the ideal of his action? . . . But that one should confuse the physical necessity, the patient's presence at the appointment, with the analytic relation, is a mistake that will mislead the novice for a long time to come. (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.
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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.
In Karl Abraham's essay "Should Patients Write Down Their Dreams? " psychoanalysis took note of new voice-recording technologies as the latest pressure point or push button of resistance. Freud had already addressed the written recording of dreams as bound to the in-session dynamics of transference and resistance. Even or especially the most perfect transcription is vacuum-packed: the dreamer's associations typi- cally vanish, an evacuation that announces the resistance, which if anything is thus better placed to block analytic contact. Abraham could confirm Freud's reservations. One of his patients was so tor- mented by her repeated forgetting of the content of her serial dreaming each time just at the moment she was about to tell Abraham all about it that she suggested the writing cure. But Abraham told her the repress release pressure packed inside a repeating dream would in time break through to consciousness. But she wasn't good about being patient, I mean a patient. She thought she had at least at last interrupted the se- ries of her forgetting when, waking up once more from such a dream, she wrote herself a memo before dropping back to sleep. But then she overslept, was late for her session next morning, and had to hand the slip to Abraham without having had the time to read it first. The mes- sage: "Write down the dream despite agreement" (34). 1
Another one of Abraham's patients, a gadget lover who makes use of a recording device, a dictaphone, to get his dreams down, first for- gets that it wasn't working properly to begin with. A staticky, unclear record was the result. Once the dictaphone has been repaired, he tries it again. But this time even the clearly audible reproduction was so confusing that the patient just couldn't put it all together again as something he could relate or relate to. Only now can the patient begin the work of re-pairing his analytic relationship by remembering in as- sociation, in session, in the transference.
The original fit between Freud's exploration of transference and countertransference phenomena and the analogical hookup he initiat-
ed with such technologies of projection and identification as printing, photography, and film was left behind, in fits and starts, by technolo- gies of as-liveness. New transference phenomena, such as projective identification, were therefore on the rise, same time, same station as the ascent of tape technologies during World War II. Freud's place- holder for this new field of differentiation or diversification was, back then, in the early 1930s, telepathy, a beyond of the transference into and for which Freud saw the telephone already plugging away.
There's the in-session materiality of analysis, from the top of the mourning to the working on the transference and all that it puts in the way. But where analysis keeps the short hand on theory it's the work of analogy that organizes a parallel universal of concepts. This work of analogy was left, up in the dead air between Freud and us, up to the autobiography of media. And Freud's analogical record, espe- cially when it went endopsychic, was technologized on one track and haunted on the other (or same) track. Freud first greeted the figures of the transferential relationship as revenants, spooks. In 1959, Friedrich Ju? rgenson, originally Russian, by then living in Sweden, discovered the Voice Phenomenon. In the same year that saw the realization of video- tape recording and videotape editing, the innovation that made pos- sible live or as-live performances before studio audiences, Ju? rgenson turned on the playback of his tape recorder to listen to the birds he thought he had recorded by leaving the device running outside for a time. "Suddenly the voice of his dead mother addressed him. He heard her saying: 'Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me? ' That was all" (Stemman 92). 2 Konstantin Raudive, also displaced by the events of World War II, from Latvia to Sweden, followed the news of Ju? rgenson's discovery all the way to the source. 3 Like Ju? rgenson, he, too, heard the voice of his own deceased mother, who called him by his boyhood name: "'Kostulit, this is your mother'" (Kubis and Macy 106). Peter Bander, yet another person displaced by the war, was converted to be- lief in Raudive's mediumship when he heard his first electronic voice: you guessed it, it was his long-distant mother speaking to her little boy in German. Then he had just two questions, one for each dead parent:
"I will give father ten seconds, and mother twenty seconds to answer my questioning because my mother would anyhow talk more. "--I then addressed myself to my father and said: "Father can you help me? " (in English). I waited ten seconds and then I said: "Mother, you know what I have to do, am I right in doing it? " I waited twenty five seconds and
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then switched the recorder off. . . . On playback, watching the revolu- tion counter on the tape recorder, I heard within a fraction of the first revolution a man's voice. After only three playbacks, the contents were quite clear to me. The language used was a dialect in which my father used to speak to his intimate friends (and although neither my mother nor I ever spoke it ourselves, we understood it): "Jung, wenn ich doch nur kuennt", (meaning: "Boy, if only I could"). The interesting word is "Jung". This was indeed the way my father used to address me when he was alive. Then came the turn of my mother's answer; again within a fraction of a second after asking my question the answer had manifested itself. "Und trotzdem sagst Du nein. "--A literal translation would mean "And you still say no. "--However, seen in context and knowing my mother's way of speaking, I prefer to translate it: "Whatever I say, you still will do the opposite. " . . . The first electronic voice I ever heard, purporting to be my mother, and the two sentences above, are the only examples I can quote of a personal communication received. (Bander 35)
Bander closes the account with his swearing of an oath of sorts that he never again attempted to make contact with a particular person. He knew his mother's way of speaking and, preferring to translate, ended the direct connection. 4
The interesting word is Jung. Beginning in 1959 Carl Gustav Jung's counsel was regularly offered on the air of the Voice Phenomenon. "His voice appears to manifest itself frequently during Raudive's recordings. Furthermore, what the voice purports to be saying makes sense" (Bander 25). As early as 1946, Jung began working on the UFO phenomenon, a phenomenon in Jung's case of unidentification. In one of his flying-saucer articles, Jung translates Freud's notion of the super- ego into the terms of his notion of a collective unconscious. Via another collectivity, Jung acquitted himself in 1946 for his season of open col- laboration with the Nazi German institution of Aryan psychotherapy through his postwar doctrine of collective guilt. Back in the 1930s, when he agreed to put on a show of legitimacy for the Nazi German eclecticization and totalization of the psychotherapies (including psycho- analysis) by letting them make him into their international leader, Jung's only concern was that he would thus be getting back in contact after all with Freud's science. One has to give him credit for making everything in his life and work after his psychotic break with Freud, no matter how archetypical he thought it was, or whatever, only legible or decodable, point by point, in the terms of negative transference.
Jung's flying-saucer connection hits air pockets of isolated reference to the air war, the miracle rockets, and the foo fighters (which Allied pilots spotted before their eyes giving outer-space assist to the other side). But it's really all about the postwar conditions of life in the 1950s. "These rumours, or the possible physical existence of such ob- jects, seem to me so significant that I feel myself compelled, as once be- fore when events of fateful consequence were brewing for Europe, to sound a note of warning. I know that, just as before, my voice is much too weak to reach the ear of the multitude" (Jung, Flying Saucers 5). A footnote inserted right after "as once before" makes the connection with his 1936 essay "Wotan," which he thus rewrites within the under- world as his warning shout. Back in 1936 it sure looked, by all ac- counts, pro-Nazi in an upbeat. 5
After noting that Jung was reaching the ears of Raudive's set with special clarity, Bander concludes that all the voices Raudive received "were attributable to persons who had died no longer than twenty or thirty years ago; also, when first manifesting themselves, they show definite characteristics of anxiety and eagerness" (25). Raudive established that, no accident, spirits need white noise, vibrations, or carrier sounds to communicate. Without their former vocal organs, spirits must modulate existing static into voice patterns strong enough to be captured on tape. Raudive collected and studied thousands of voices on tape, on which he based his definitive treatise on the Voice Phenomenon. 6
Raudive had one competitor to diss, the discoverer of the uncon- scious, because he was one to know one who could only translate paranormal discoveries back inside the terms or limits of the psyche. "The hypothesis of the unconscious can be confronted by that of an 'anti-world,' which is based on the theory of relativity" (9). As Einstein proved, everything is relatives, dead or alive.
What soon came to be known as the Raudive voices were often agrammatical communications given invariably in several languages at once. 7 Gordon Turner, a well-known spiritual healer, although or be- cause he was turned on to the authenticity of the Voice Phenomenon, worried about the dangers involved in contacting entities who, given the limited range of the tape-recording medium, must inhabit the low- est regions of the next world. 8 According to Turner, the Raudive voices were on the same wavelength as the messages Himmler had received: "There is a direct link between fascism, black magic and contact with impersonating earthbound entities who deliberately delude and pervert
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others. . . . If the . . . voices are stemming from a paranormal source, then I would regard some of the references to Hitler as significant and dangerous" (in Bander 84). 9 But Raudive also summoned Churchill, who is perhaps the most frequently contacted ghost on all the talk shows of the Voice Phenomenon. 10 World War II was--or is it still? -- on the air. 11
In the beginning, ghosts were seen but not heard when photography proved to be the first medium that could record on its own contacts with the otherworld. The projection of the modern rocket was reserved for the purpose of transporting the camera to new vantage points, not only in the service of military surveillance, but also, at the same time, as afterthought or even as main focus, for making first visual contact with outer space. Robert H. Goddard, the Father of American Rocketry, the sole pioneer whose focus was only on space photography, had his POV on target by the time airplanes rose to the occasion of reconnais- sance. But Goddard didn't live to see his photo op. "He died August 10, 1945. A year later, a captured German V-2 (A-4) rocket with a stan- dard De Vry 35 mm motion picture camera was launched from White Sands, New Mexico, reached a peak altitude of 65 miles . . . , and suc- cessfully made a continuous record of its ascent through the Earth's at- mosphere to the threshold of outer space" (Winter 98).
Motion-picture technology had by the late 1940s completely crossed over to sound following intensive industry development inspired by the samples of German magnetic tape brought back to the United States after the war. Established in principle at the turn of the century, Third Reich scientists discovered for the recording the tape medium with just the right chemistry to lead the way to our playback, record, fast for- ward, or rewind functions (A History of Technology 1315). Developed originally for the purpose of war reporting along battle lines where no record had gone before, the tape recorder was right away used to cen- sor any between-the-lines attempts by captive Allied agents to signal warnings mixed in with their Morse messages, which the Nazi captors had filled with false leads. Every Morse message composed by the cap- tive authors was copied, analyzed, and, if necessary, manipulated be- fore being put on the air. The era of simulation thus opened wide. 12 The words from the sponsor were invited to join right in and set their spell: "The first widespread application [of magnetic tape recording] occurred during World War II when speeches by Hitler and other prominent Nazi leaders were broadcast at times and places calculated to confuse Allied intelligence" (The Encyclopedia Americana 282).
Tapes of liveness are the medium of the split second, the splitting and postponement of the broadcast for the little time it takes to censor, ma- nipulate, simulate. But the splitting image of the moment thus gives or takes all the time in the world.
In 1947, in Roswell, the hometown of Goddard's camera-rocket and outer-space research, the UFO phenomenon took off with a crash. Jung would hear a synchronicity; but, to stick to the moment, the V-2 rocket backfire of the primal Roswell sightings is completely in sync with the takeoff of Jung's investment in objects of unidentification. The alien forms that were witnessed or denied were humanoid in appear- ance but reduced in strength and scale, in every part but the head, as though by starvation. The visual contact first established in 1947, which keeps reentering the controversy over destroyed evidence, un- provability, only your imagination, and so on, seems to occupy inter- changeable places with a certain reception, again, of World War II, that went to outer space and back, in the form of believe-it-or-not visi- tations by aliens who have the appearance of the victims we both do and do not recognize. 13
The year 1983 saw the successful first run of the American Associa- tion of Electronic Voice Phenomena, which had "received an inter- national publicity boost with the announcement by George Meek, a re- tired engineer, that he and a medium, William O'Neil, an electronics expert, had built a device called Spiricom that could communicate with the Other Side" (Kubis and Macy 107). Spiricom, which thus offered two-way conversations with the dead, opened up "the new field of ITC, or Instrumental Transcommunication--the use of electronic sys- tems to undertake meaningful communication across dimensions. Thus, George Meek and Bill O'Neil are usually regarded as the fathers of ITC, just as the Wright Brothers are regarded as the fathers of modern flight" (Kubis and Macy 113). 14 Sure enough, soon enough contact could be made with Timestream, the telecommunications corporation on the other side. "Amazingly, Friedrich Ju? rgenson and Dr. Konstantin Raudive, the great pioneers of EVP, . . . have died and are now coming across on television, computer, radio, telephone and fax. . . . Today, Konstantin Raudive and Friedrich Ju? rgenson add a new dimension to their roles as paranormal experimenters. From their perspective on the astral plane, they have become philosophic mentors as well" (Kubis and Macy 114-15). But what gets realized here in the exchange, some- where between parapsychology and philosophy, is the circumvention of the uncanny first contact with what the recording showed.
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Already in 1920 Edison was convinced that there just had to be a radio frequency between the long and the short of the waves which, once he contained it and gave it an on/off gadget switch, would put through the direct connection to the world of the dead. Marconi claimed to have come up with a gadget through which he could travel back in time and record great historical events. He was hoping to get the words spoken by Christ on the cross just for the record. But it all changes once we let the recording speak for itself. Telephone and tele- graph alone, without the recording or taping connections, were never enough. Edison thought he heard voices, like overhearing people speaking in the next room, when he played back a recording of a tele- graphic transmission. Thus he was inspired to invent the answering machine, in which telephone and telegraph would find the completion of their system. 15 Only the recording can speak for itself, and thus for contact with the dead other, while remaining at the same time inadmis- sible as evidence of the senses.
ON RECORD
The recorded voice, the uncanniest double of all, according to Adorno, because it always comes life-size, was the inspiration for Mina Harker's internal assemblage of Bram Stoker's Dracula. She transfers Dr. Seward's audio recording of his journal, which she has just listened to and which she concludes is just too unbearable for another's ears, to typewritten record. All the information gathered in the group service of defeating vampirism makes the transfer, subsequently, to Mina's one record, which she types up in triplicate. At the end of all that typing, all that's left of the group effort that defeated the vampire count, the novel itself, is nothing but a "mass of typewriting," a mass or communion that neither proves nor disproves undeath. But by World War II, tape tech- nology had introduced both the uncannily perfect recording and the undecidability of its truth or simulation. But this vacancy and overfull- ness of tapes, their inadmissibility as evidence and their self-evidence, at the same time invited contact with the Voice Phenomenon, by all ac- counts the widest-ranging communication with the dead to date. When it comes to simulation, we're fast on the intake. Freud originally gave transference phenomena a matching accessory, the transference neuro- sis, an artificial illness that gets generated within the analytic relation- ship as a more tolerable simulation of the disturbance that's out there, bigger than life. Just like an inoculation, the transference neurosis be- stows the great health by proxy or antibody in the course of its minia-
ture illness and cure. Those shocks or shots of inoculation against trau- ma that Walter Benjamin addressed, in Freud's company, are always simulated conditions that, just like transference neuroses, take on an existence of their own in relation to what's out there, bigger than the two of us, and to what's in session, the big between. When every- thing out there can enter the session, the analytic relationship, as trans- ference, the outside traumatic contacts have been dated, miniaturized, simulated, given the gadget click of the analyst's last words: "It's time. "
Paul de Man's 1983 as-live performance "Kant and Schiller" intro- duces class analysis, I mean the analysis of in-class transference, into the writing of his reading. With the sole exception of this lecture, which we have on tape, de Man was not at all interested in the easy reading of mass culture or of its owner's manual, psychoanalysis. This station break, forever marked and dated with remarkably forgettable language, has at the same time absorbed the posthumous shock that Benjamin, still in Freud's company, attributed as aftereffect to all recording following from the click of a gadget connection. It wasn't so necessary for de Man to write the reading in this case, he reassures us, because he's "dealing with a much easier text" (129). What would be improv nightmare over the corpus of Kant is no problem when it's Schiller time. "I'll have some change in pace today, because this time I have not written out a lecture. . . . So what I'll be doing will be . . . more in the nature of a class than a lecture" (129).
The helping "and" reaches across Kant and Schiller, detailed textual analysis and speaking out in class. But the class situation is not an even-anded coupling. There are also secret sharers in the "and" that's dealt us here. Their address lies in the turning around of the Trieb, the pivotal point of de Man's yoking about Kant and Schiller. The other two are, one, Freud--at the first mention of Schiller's Triebe, de Man gives us credit for his aside, "Triebe, a word that you know from Freud" (137)--and, two, the gadget that has it all on tape:
The tropological system in Kant . . . is . . . a purely linguistic structure which was shown to function as such, whereas in Schiller it is the use made of tropes, of chiasmus as the teleology, as the aim of an ideologi- cal desire, namely, the desire to overcome terror--it is in such a way that tropology is made to serve a Trieb, to serve as device. . . . It acquires therefore an empirical and a pragmatic content . . . at the very moment that it asserts its separation from all reality. (147)16
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But the overcoming of terror through the playback or reversal of a device isn't de Man's point, it's ours. When de Man gives his topic for the lecture, namely, the "problem of the question of reversibility, of the reversibility in the type of models which I have been developing on the basis of texts" (132), what seems to get raised at the same time is the question of our misunderstanding. De Man must insist, in contra- distinction to us, on an irreversibility in relations between the perfor- mative and the constative. Even if reinscription or recuperation in cognitive terms takes place, what we have then is a relapse, which, "however, is not the same as a reversal" (133). In the middle of all this setting up and putting down, de Man breaks for a "question which is closer to our concern here. " This is where he directly addresses in- session dynamics. But then the discourse starts breaking up, the con- nection goes bad, static takes over, we're disconnected, and he's back:
because it seems to be, as so often is the case, that . . .
Since I have now had questions from you and since I've felt some resistances . . . You are so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent that I have the feeling that . . . But I know this is not the case and there's always an interesting episode in a series of lectures like that, I know that from ex- perience. One doesn't necessarily begin in as idyllic a mood as things were here. But it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, where certain issues are bound to come up. (131-32)
De Man's transcribed or reinscribed performance puts us in frame for a slightly loopy but still self-contained feedback mechanism or machine for writing. The theme of our regression meets this frame like its match and maker: it's time to talk about the psychology of terror. The psy- chology of terror becomes the thematic interpretation of the regressive reception going down between Kant and Schiller, and between de Man and his audience. Schiller's drives, which, remember, can we talk, we freely associate with Freud, double as the drive to know, represent, or even change nature and as the drive to leave things unaltered by change or preserve oneself ultimately against death. Schiller thus intro- duces a "notion of physical danger, of a threatening physical Nature, in an empirical sense" (139). The danger zone in Kant belongs to "the shock of surprise, of Verwunderung, which we experience when con- fronted with something of extreme magnitude" (139). It's a shock of
recognition that there's a failure of representation within the overall structure of the imagination. But Kant does not tell us about self- preservation, about "how to protect ourselves, so to speak, psychologi- cally, from danger" (139). In contrast, Schiller, just like the rest of us, is directly concerned with the how-to of self-help:
How am I going to fight off terror, how am I going to resist terror? --by means of a psychological device, which emphasizes reason and the abili- ty to maintain reason in the face of terror. That's a way to live through terror, even if you're physically annihilated by it. Curiously, this empha- sis on the practical, this emphasis on the psychological, on the empiri- cal, leads to a greater stress on the abstract powers. (141)
Schiller and the audience make a "correct psychological observation," which, de Man advises, is still just not philosophical enough. "You know that from your own experience if you have ever been in immedi- ate danger. There is a kind of exhilaration of the mind--if you are given the time--at watching yourself being in that state of danger" (142). But de Man's admission of his own experience of dissociation or splitting is so close to Schiller's turn to ultimate safety in the face of terror, which de Man dismisses right in the typeface of what he said we knew by our own experience. What we net from Schiller's safety- zoning prescriptions is the ultimate safety net, called "moral safety. " When all else fails in the face of physically overwhelming danger, you learn to consider the sensory part of your being, that part that can be endangered, as something exterior, dissociated, like a natural object, to which your moral self is completely indifferent.
Schiller argues for terror's imaginative remove from the danger as but its representation. But for all that it remains just as vivid, to the point of turning on our sense of self-preservation, and thus, Schiller concludes, "it produces something analogous to what the real experi- ence would produce" (143). What just doesn't interest de Man is that this production of something analogous is for the medical doctor Schiller just a dosage away from an inoculation, which thus becomes a differentiating part of the argument or procedure. By metonymy and absence, our Freud and a Freudian Benjamin join Schiller at this point of injection. The Benjamin de Man just couldn't shake--for example, among all those trends in criticism he piled up hysterically in his first footnote to "Rhetoric of Temporality"--reads allegory as though it were, looking back to the first works, Benjamin's only pre-Freudian works, the allegory of language origins. This represents a telepathically
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precise elision of the Freudian Benjamin. But even The Origin of the German Mourning Pageant can also be read as looking forward, in close association with Freud's study of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs, for example, to the work on technocultures that will follow out the trauma organization of fields of representation and repetition.
According to Schiller's inside view, without the administration of analogies horror must take us to a place of unprotectedness, the place of origins. According to Freud, repetition is (just in case) the happen- ing event of the psyche's attempt to get back posttrauma into the trans- ferential context of anxiety. In Benjamin's reading, shocks are the inocu- lative shots that give it to the media consumers, but in metabolizable doses of the trauma or horror.
The therapeutic and theoretical rapport with technologization is not imposed from without but, like the work on the transference, in- terprets or interrupts what's already happening. What's on the tapes of media technology at the same time jumps the cut of intervention to anticipate and confirm the psychoanalytic or allegorical theory and therapy of shock, terror, horror. In the year of the discovery of the Voice Phenomenon, Alfred Hitchcock exhibited in Psycho the ultimate scene of horror, the Schauer scene, to which countless slasher and splatter films have been shock-treating us ever since. This serial fol- lowing or understanding of Hitchcock's film never completely reverses the traumatic intersection, in Hitchcock's murder scene, of three un- seens: the murderer's stabbing, the cut of film editing, and the cutting edge of our death wishes. Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, followed up the filmic reception of the Schauer scene with his own book sequel, Psycho II. This time around, the legacy of horror is transmitted through Norman Bates's psychiatrist, who does the psy- cho's mass murdering for him. Although Hitchcock's Psycho had left it all up to psychiatry, which was thus up there, untouchable, to put the aberration of the trans- to rest, the slasher sequels, to this day, re- situate their remakes of the Schauer scene in a transferential setting that cannot contain the transgression, violence, identification cutting across it. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Legacy of Dr. Mabuse, and Spellbound introduced the horror plot of transference transgression. But there is no other plot of horror and terror. Psycho interrupted or extended it, and thus doubled the impact of a scene of horror we've been doubling and containing ever since. The transference transgres- sion was directed with and against us. But that also means that our reception of Psycho keeps on going, going, along Benjamin's lines, as
successful containment and dating of our first traumatic contact with murder, with the mass of murder that the media sensurround in every sense contains. "Most everyone has a Psycho story," Janet Leigh reas- sures us: "People remember where they saw it first, with whom they saw it, their reactions at the time, and the effect the film had on them afterward" (131).
But in Psycho, the problem of the trans-, the across we all must bear, which the closing psychiatric diagnosis has all locked up, is at the same time stored or realized in the taped zone of simulation. Paul Jasmin, hired to provide Mrs. Bates's voice, was amazed by the final audio portion, in which he had a hard time recognizing his share:
In postproduction, . . . [Hitchcock] spliced and blended a mixture of [the voices] so that who's speaking literally changes from word to word and sentence to sentence. He did that to confuse the audience. I recog- nize my voice before Tony carries Mother down the stairs. But the very last speech, the monologue, is all done by a woman--Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette spliced in. (In Leigh 81, 83)
Coming to the Psycho project and projection from his new TV series, Hitchcock constructed the clash of the two media, one old, one new, over a scene of unseen incessant cutting and then, over what's heard in- side the audiotape, the splicing together of different taped voices that gives the psycho's voice or voices a range across identities, generations, and genders. Everything can be made to cross over on tape. And on tape it all jumps the cut of editing, the cut that Hitchcock dreaded so much when not in his hands that he took the hand in marriage of Britain's leading film editor.
At the close of World War II Hitchcock was offered the evidence of Nazi extermination as film assignment. He skipped that ready-made and made Rope instead, a film about the life-or-death stakes of mis- reading notions of superhumanity. The film, which the director wel- comed then as his most exciting project to date, was "shot without cuts" (Gottlieb 284). "Until Rope came along, I had been unable to give full rein to my notion that a camera could photograph one com- plete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, de- vouring action like a giant steam shovel" (275). In 1948 Hitchcock's camera swallowed it all whole, the hole in one. The haunting rebound upon intake was released with the cuts Hitchcock made in 1960, sight unseen but all on tape, right down the receiving line into our psyches.
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REWOUNDING
Lacan delivered his primal mirror-stage address that year in Marienbad, that year of the Berlin Olympics, on his way to attend the games and witness what he hails as "the spirit of the times. " In his text Television, Lacan came full circuit. When he locks in his interest in the discursive event of TV, he shoots right up to the first moon landing. But it's just the tip of realizations of the science fantasy that landed from those first stirrings of Nazi German rockets, and which were transmitted back to Earth, live, via the medium before which Nazi Germans had first stood at total attention.
As documented in the essay "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power," Lacan went to Berlin in 1936 against the mocked protests of Ernst Kris, whose interpretation of a transference Lacan dismisses in the essay as on one fault line with Kris's refusal to go to the Nazi TV show. Kris's patient is a professor who lives in mor- tal dread of being a plagiarist. Yes, there is something missing in Kris's interpretation and intervention that both the patient and Lacan point out or act out. But Lacan in turn misses the reference to improper bur- ial openly lying there between the lines of a disembodied plagiarism.
The mirror stage gives us the preprogram on which prospects for the "phantom, the double, the automaton" are already given, and given without all that static of projection of an identifiable, and be- cause identifiable, material, loss. In Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan admits the loss of Freud's moment or field as constitutive of the trans- ferences brought on by the in-session presence of the analyst, who is, in the first place, witness to this loss ("Presence of the Analyst" 483). We're always inside this transferential frame with all our relations since Freud to Freud. But it's a dead loss, Lacan continues, the source of "a certain deepening of obscurantism, very characteristic of man in our times of supposed information" (483). Lacan thus stresses the noncontact, a "function of missing" that "lies at the center of analytic repetition" (484). "The transference is the means by which the com- munication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the uncon- scious closes up again" (486). The transference closes "shutters" that the analyst must open up. Transference thus also, between the lines and languages, renews the Freudian analogy with photography. The unconscious, however, is all on tape: "The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject" (483).
The essay in which Lacan recounts his rejection of a certain Krissy
understanding of transference and acting out comes across in the long stretch as almost a topography of psychoanalytic history in the twen- ties and thirties and then, looking back, in the fifties, in the decade it takes to skip the Nazi era of psychoanalysis and follow instead the American upbeat of adaptation through that old eclectic mix of psycho- dynamic therapies with or within U. S. psychiatry. But the consolida- tion of ego assets externalized as American is only the late arrival (and victorious rival) of that more primal and less consciously deliberated- upon era of Nazi German accommodations for a greater psychoanalytic setting that was changed, back then already, to the channel of improved efficiency, functioning, healing, bonding.
Thus, when Lacan takes on the American streamlining of analysis in this essay he straddles the almost two-decade span of his own united states of amnesia between the basic conception, research, or first airing of his findings in the thirties and, in the fifties, the final work of revi- sion and publication. In other words, for the fifties, Lacan sets up all the pinhead goals of American neo-analysis--autonomous ego, happi- ness, security, team spirit--for one strike (231). But underneath the tall order of these charges there reemerges, not without psychohistorical connection to the era Lacan always leaves out, long-distant references in theory to melancholia. It's always in the course of duking it out with the dupes of analysis that he trips up and over the melancholic conse- quences of the other's takes on analytic theory.
Object relations is top of a line that slides immediately into implied or excluded zones of material loss. The pattern and patter of American psychology or self-help for success holds on to the related, objectional attempt to balance as "economic" activity the opposition between life and death drives (243). On "the other side of the coin" is the focus on what precisely "eludes the transference, namely, the axis taken from the object relation. " While granting the focus on this relation a noble origin in the work of Karl Abraham (and thus--just take a look--in a melan- cholic collection of parting objects), Lacan attributes to this legacy (with Melanie Klein at the front of this line) the workings of such an imaginary. The "notion of intersubjective introjection," for example, merely reflects the establishment that produced it inside the dual re- lationship (246). The tensions that attracted the object-relationists in the first place, like the span of attention awarded this force field in the same place, come down to a security drive that Lacan diagnoses within Anglo-American analysis.
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It has nothing to do with any counter-transference on the part of this or that individual; it is a question of the consequences of the dual relation, if the therapist does not overcome it, and how can he overcome it if he sees it as the ideal of his action? . . . But that one should confuse the physical necessity, the patient's presence at the appointment, with the analytic relation, is a mistake that will mislead the novice for a long time to come. (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.
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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.
