Forgetting to Remember to Forget

Francisco Ribalta. (Dead Christ with Angels, detail. 1610)

Francisco Ribalta. (Dead Christ with Angels, detail. 1610)

“Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected
with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of Symbols.
In a symbol there is concealment yet revelation: here, therefore, by
Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a doubled significance.”

Thomas Carlyle

“No matter what the media make of it, we get the message. As they chanted over television, the whole world was watching—and neither backlash, tear gas, decrepit electoral process, nor the return of Richard Nixon on a platform of law and order could reverse the inevitable “return of the repressed.” Both presidential candidates of the major parties were already undermined by a rhetoric they couldn’t master as they constantly assured us they were socking it to us and telling it like it is.”
Herbert Blau

“Disease for me is a kind of speech…”
Georg Groddeck

Kenneth Burke wrote that word magic had its origins not in a naive belief in words, but in a systematic distrust of words. And that…“…man’s sense of the ineffable could gradually come to be exploited by the use of charms so that the original classless quest could be transformed into a quest for class privilege.”

This led to the development of the priestly class which could obtain goods for itself through word magic, and goods for the nobility with which it was closely aligned. Burke is talking about mysticism, and silence. And he sites the Duke’s opening speech in Twelfth Night which equates the hunt for prey with the hunt for sexual conquest. The silence of the hunter stalking his quarry with the meditative silent search for ideas. The ineffable, the speech that breaks the silence (and spell) and loses possession of the attributes of that which is being considered — and how the mystical is but the compensatory desanctification of speech and its secondary social mechanisms. Desanctification, as practised in tribal societies is the neutralizing of originary powers. All things have power, so early belief systems have it. This is the birth of shamen who in turn give way to priests. And the guardians of power serve to redact the real powers and leak only that amount which cannot come back to haunt them. Think Pierre Omidyar and the wikileaks process. This is true even if Snowden is an asset.

Jean Pierre Yvaral

Jean Pierre Yvaral

The language of religion, and of the mystical retains something, even now, of this experience of bodily, or sensory revelation. And this is the age of noise and chatter, of sound pollution. But it more significantly the age of late capitalism and the eradication of human sensitivity. Burke mentions, unsurprisingly both Freud and Dostoyevsky in the following paragraph from the one quoted above. One could as easily add Kafka (and from this perspective, Kafka feels very much the Kabalist and Doystoyevsky the Eastern Christian). The criminal and the cosmic, per Burke, in Crime and Punishment can be seen in a devalued sense, or rather, in the desanctified addictive behaviors of Las Vegas. And here there resides, within this matrix of mass devaluation, the real truth of contemporary mass manipulation and social control — the idea, which in its preliminary form, Burke mentions when he notes that man searches to purify war, not because he loves war but because a purified and refined war would be more peaceful than the conditions we now experience as peace. This is not terribly far from what Freud was saying, too. This is the age of mass and systematic miss-interpretation. If the government, and its official institutions, cannot make certain voices invisible and silent, then the next best thing is say they mean what they do not.

But this is also, as the age of mass surveillance and the erosion of privacy, also an age of paranoia. And paranoia is directly linked to criminality and guilt. And this is also linked to the now reflexive need for classification and for within that classificatory inclination a kind of faux uniformity. The heterodox is rejected. That which does not fit, is rejected. But sticking with paranoia first; the criminal and his anticipation of punishment is always, to some degree, a kind of mystical experience. It is why great criminal acts exert such a hold on the imagination. A Charles Manson (who perhaps curiously never really *did* anything himself) is still a news item forty years after the event. Detective literature is the search for a search. The solution is never really a solution to the quest, but it must be there, the disappointing Denouement or the solving of the mystery. There is a melancholy aspect to the explanation of the crises. Same as a kind of sadness occurs when a play has arrived at the point where the audience knows whatever was being chased cannot be caught.

 Jusepe de Ribera, (Man with a Skull; 1630).

Jusepe de Ribera, (Man with a Skull; 1630).

There is an intriguing section in Burke I want to quote…

“Thus, we once saw a Marxist (he has since left the Communist Party) get soundly rebuked by his comrades for the suggestion that leftist critics collaborate in a study of “Red Rhetoric.” Despite their constant efforts to find the slogans, catchwords, and formulas that will most effectively influence action in given situations,and their friendliness to “propaganda” or “social significance” in art, they would not allow talk of a “Red Rhetoric.” For them, “Rhetoric” applied solely to the persuasiveness of capitalist, fascist, and other non Marxist terminologies (or “ideologies”). “

Burke adds, in following, that Marxist rhetoric was actually in line with Augustine…

“As a critique of capitalist rhetoric, it is designed to disclose (unmask) sinister factional interests concealed in the bourgeois terms for benign universal interests.”

Now, that friendliness to propaganda, and more, to the *social significance* aspect of art, is very true even now. Western culture is a culture of the philistine. And this returns me to the crippling effects of life in Capitalist society. Psychically crippling. For everyone is wounded by denials. The desanctified is not so very far from Adorno’s notions of the disenchanting of society. For it is that loss of an imaginary, a Dionysian body and creative curiosity that is impossible to escape. And denying that simply further disenchants. This was one of Adorno’s most persuasive insights. And part of what formed the dialectic of art and culture — at least in the West. Today, the hostility to art is extreme in both the liberal bourgeoisie, and on the left. And the far right, the ever growing fascistic sensibility, there is not just hostility but a cultural homicidal desire.

Charles Manson, age 16.

Charles Manson, age 16.


“It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed.”
Sigmund Freud

The repetition compulsion then was the force, or instinct, that sought a return to an earlier state of things. Freud was intentionally ambiguous about what *earlier* meant. For he knew the Death Instinct, on the face of it, was almost nonsensical. And yet.

But back to this idea that Burke raises about rhetoric, and more, about ideology. It is to be noted in this context that Marx’s original notion of ideology was found in The German Ideology (per Burke). And there are the now familiar uses of this term (all the various forms of manipulation, of a manufacturing of state mythologies, and the illusions born of selective visions of history, etc), but the last one (cited by Burke here)…

“An inverted genealogy of culture, that makes for “illusion” and “mystification” by treating ideas as primary where they should have been treated as derivative.”

Stuart Redler, photography.

Stuart Redler, photography.


Couple this to the Freudian (and later Lacanian) notion of a return to a previous state of things. An earlier state of things. Of life. And then of mystery and mysticism. The instrumental legacy of the Enlightenment then is one that considers reality in terms of means and ends. And of course this is seen in the contradictions of Capital, where the voice of the pragmatist is usually the least pragmatic, or where the pacifist is the purveyor of the most acute violence. That goes back to this idea of the purification of war. Or more, that the various layers of reason and logic under advanced Capital are expressed, increasingly, in the most spasmodic and unpredictable actions. For the bourgeoisie today, whose sense of purpose or quest often, or usually, goes no further than the pre-formed symbols of their own fictional identity (think Obama during his last eight weeks in office). The liberals fascination with himself. Freud himself said, apropos of the Death Instinct, that one cannot view it but as strange because we see life as predicated upon change and development. Change we can believe in. Slogans and propaganda, rhetoric, has almost always doubled down on just these factors. Make america great *again*. It matters not that it never was — or perhaps, lets define *great*. For Freud, pleasure was the resolving or lessening of tension. As Richard Boothby notes, the death drive psychologically increases tensions, but biologically it aims to lower them, all the way to zero; i.e. death.

“Even having admitted with Lacan that the death drive threatens the ego and not the biological organism, there remains a sense in which the death drive is rooted in the inarticulate strivings of the body. The death drive has its source in the “impossible” depths of the real.”
Richard Boothby

Nadia Lee Cohen, photography.

Nadia Lee Cohen, photography.


The silence of the sanctified. The stalking of not just an idea, but of ourselves. And that is a fatuous word here, but it is that space from which speech comes to violate the meditative, to somehow penetrate that which the body inarticulately strives to reclaim. For this really what performance is, what theatre is always returning to, over and over. But we cannot go *back* to the primordial silence so the only option is to move forward into the rituals of speech, to a stripped down body, a body without real identity, but with only a performative identity, and to repeat the repetitions of rehearsal.

Herbert Blau in speaking of contemporary aesthetic degradation, wrote…

“So: “Who’s there?” No wonder that voice on the ramparts has been like a light in the dark, though it’s the wrong one making the challenge. Of course, as with everything in Hamlet, you won’t see it if you’re not listening. Then, that other voice out of the dark: “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.” Who exactly is being addressed? Onstage, sure, but offstage? They can be in their seats, watching, as in the play within the play, watching and being watched, but there in the unfolding the audience is what happens. Or it does and it doesn’t, depending on who’s there. Some are there for entertainment, but there’s a second meaning of the word, as when one says, “I’ll entertain that question.” But how to entertain it when you don’t know what it is, or in the Hamletic vein, nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Great theatre is always, ALWAYS, ambiguous. It is also always ambivalent. Who is there? The last line of my play The Shaper, is…“something has happened”. The performance happened. But what is that? Who’s there? Probably all great art (we will return to what is meant by ‘great’) is lodged in, or trying to find purchase for or with or on the start of the *silence*. That which precedes speech. And one of the wonders of theatre as an art form is that there is always silence, even if just for a moment, before the curtain is figuratively or literally raised.

Jerimo Jacinto de Espinosa (Penitent Magdalene, detail. 1650).

Jerimo Jacinto de Espinosa (Penitent Magdalene, detail. 1650).


Burke speaks of Carlye’s description of mystery. The mysterious connections between man and animals — looking into an animal’s eyes. The mystery of sex relations. And perhaps most significantly, today, the mysteries imposed by class relations, by a coerced hierarchical order. The master looks into the eyes of *his* servant. Or her servant. The servant. For this is the theatre of subjugation which is repeated without pause. So sadistic is this narrative, a narrative unspoken, that it reflects an interior drama that is layered over all daily activity. And in a secondary sense this is a mitigating factor in the subjective damage that comes from the imposition of intentional mis-reading. Of misinterpretation.

“And all such “mystery” calls for a corresponding rhetoric, in form
quite analogous to sexual expression: for the relations between classes
are like the ways of courtship, rape, seduction, jilting, prostitution,
promiscuity, with variants of sadistic torture or masochistic invitation
to mistreatment.”

Kenneth Burke

Anthony Cairns, photography.

Anthony Cairns, photography.

The rhetoric of the political state today is one infused with not just desanctification, but it is the liturgy of guilt and abasement. An aid package to Israel, an apartheid state, a settler state that inflicts a slow motion annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, is also a fanatical project that must itself, in its own rhetoric to its populace, repeat their own contempt for anyone not them. The U.S. on a logistical ideological level is acting in its self interest, but on another level it is self abasing and masochistically prostrating itself and begging for that same contempt. Sell weapons to the debased monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Help them murder an entire impoverished nation (Yemen). And these are nations who openly show contempt for the gifts the U.S. gives them. For the grammar of subjugation is one, now, that has swallowed language. Listening to the U.S. president this week was to experience a kind of shame. For a minute I could see Dreyer’s Trial of Joan of Arc; but perhaps more, the post script to that film in the late Dreyer, Ordet. For that late Dreyer is about doubt. It is also about silence and speech.

The father, Morton, says quietly, ‘I did not believe’. And no, neither can the audience. For the grammar of belief (not religious, just belief!) is gone.

“Unlike Jung, for whom the basic forms of psychical conflict are posed within a matrix of images and archetypes, Freud is continually drawn toward the very threshold of representation, that outer boundary of the thinkable at which the structures of psychic life trail off into a reservoir of forces that remain active but relatively devoid of form. For Freud, the fundamental problem is that of symbolization itself, the underlying conflict is that between psychically represented and unrepresented somatic forces.”
Richard Boothby

Ordet (Carl Dreyer, dr. 1955).

Ordet (Carl Dreyer, dr. 1955).

The threshold of representation. And this is, really, why culture is so crucial. For the inner cop that lurks now in anyone born into Capital, cannot but act. It is less an inner cop than an inner apparatus of policing. I think much of Phillip K. Dick’s paranoid later period was touching on this all the time. What is ‘out there’ is less of a problem than the fact that out there and in here are blurring all the time. The great mystery, for Burke, was lodged in class relations. And perhaps a somewhat neglected aspect of this long historical narrative is that moment when a priest class is established. A priest class there to negotiate to our passage back to the unspoken. And through that to establish hierarchies of sanctification. The buying of indulgences was the logical next step. (as a side bar note, one of the pre conditions for a plenary indulgence is prayer for the Pope’s intentions. The official Church definition of indulgence is…“the remission before God of the temporal punishment due for sins already forgiven as far as their guilt is concerned.” In other words its time off for good behavior in purgatory.) And this was the ur-hierarchy in a sense. Worth noting that purgatory comes out of a word meaning ‘to purge’. So temporal sin meant a time in purgatorial lock down, where after sufficient penance, the souls of the formerly sinful would pass through the gates of heaven. In any event, Burke notes that social inequality is a mystifying condition. This becomes an interesting perspective on things such as the ‘uncanny’. The soldiers of the crusades were conscripted, but with promises of various indulgences. To do battle for the Church granted one a ‘get out of purgatory free card’. But Burke saw that all rhetoric was a form of persuasion. And hence a mystifying dynamic was born from this, but one that needed class inequality to even exist.

There is a remarkable paragraph from Burke, writing of William Empson’s book on Pastoral poetry.

“But the important consideration, for our purposes, is the concern with a politeness, or humility, stemming simultaneously from the conventions of love poetry and the mimetics of social inferiority. Empson analyzes variants of literary simplicity, irony, and mock-simplicity, as developed out of social pudencies (Carlyle’s “Schaam, Modesty”). That is, the “mystery” is still present in such expression, but it is transformed into subtle embarrassments that cover a range extending from outright flattery to ironically veiled challenge. Or we might say that the “reverence” of social privilege has been attenuated into respect, the respect itself sometimes being qualified until it has moved as far in the direction of disrespect as one might go without unmistakably showing his hand.”

Octav Bancila. (The Confession of the Peasant, 1925).

Octav Bancila. (The Confession of the Peasant, 1925).

Empson saw in much pastoral poetry a rhetoric of advantage. And that romantic courtship itself recreated the grammar of power. But more than that, it also enclosed within it a kind of sado/masochistic abnegation. That irony plays such a significant part in the poetics of this era, and then to examine the evolution of irony over the subsequent decades, it is hard not to see the lurking psychological violence that accompanies material inequality (with its own obvious violences). The rise of a certain definition of reason, that of instrumentality and practicality, the reason of the burgher and the scientist both, now must see in creativity and artistic expression a kind of unreason. And not just an unreason, but a nefarious lack of discipline and slacker-like unreason. And it is directed as a weapon of class violence against the young. For the possibility that the young will not grow into obedient servants of industry, is cause for anxiety and fear. For charity is an acute violence, and the rhetoric of charity is pure sadism. Running alongside this is the devaluation of language as a tool for expression of the ineffable. The mysteries today are best left locked down, out of sight. And their relationship to culture must be denied as well. For the Death Instinct is obscurely but intimately connected to speech and language. This was the heart of Lacan’s insight, actually. The troubling escape into speech and all that brought with it, is also the source or genesis of desire. That the subject is a speaking subject who is part of of a signifying chain (per Boothby).

Groddeck, who is useful to re-read I think, saw illness as a voice. Sickness and speech went together. Both were expressions, at that threshold of expression, of the unconscious. When Bush Sr. spoke of the plague of drugs in modern society he touched his nose briefly, unconsciously. Groddeck noted the tonsil inflammation children so often suffer and suggested it reflected something of a policing of early speech. The mysterious, that which exists in the unspoken, find a detoured expression in art. The uncanny, of course, is a complex of things, one of which is certainly repressed material. And it is why the false uncanny (think David Lynch, but a dozen others) is so pernicious.

Richard Pousette Dart

Richard Pousette Dart

For the manufactured *strange* of a Lynch serves as a masking mechanism. It is another part of a rhetoric of advantage. In the place of the unsettling comes a counterfeit version. The mystery of class antagonism is masked, then, as well. The strange simply *is*. Weird just falls from the sky.

“Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the very origin of every variety of animation”.
Jacques Lacan

The links that exist between hierarchies of all kinds, and most significantly in class hierarchies, are entwined with the trauma of speech. But speech itself is not simply speech. Speech is that which becomes social. The rhetoric of the U.S. liberal class is almost entirely a rhetoric of masking coercion.

“Such considerations make us alert to the ingredient of rhetoric in all socialization, considered as a moralizing process. The individual person,
striving to form himself in accordance with the communicative norms that match the cooperative ways of his society, is by the same token concerned with the rhetoric of identification.”

Kenneth Burke

Alex Kanevsky

Alex Kanevsky


Identification is with a moralizing principle of adjustment, and of maturity. In fact *maturity* is among the most violent of all principles today. George Clooney’s comment that Hillary was the only grown up in the election speaks to this. The idea that only the mature can identify other mature partners in some social scheme that favors only privilege. The bourgeoisie is forever struggling with maturity as an idea. And the idea of maturity is also tied into the new *fake news* propaganda campaign of the last days of Obama. Facebook has enlisted ‘Snopes’ to help determine (sic) what is meant by disputable content. The hidden meaning, or hidden rhetoric, is one that says rational science is not magic; the rhetoric of boredom. And magic is what was left behind by civilized men and women. Or mature people. Mature people don’t believe in magic (except in reality they believe in it far more than anyone else). Mature is thus a shorthand for conformity. The dissident voice is now equated with a tribal shaman. Conspiracy is incantation. Against this new rhetoric of the white liberal is a demand that all backdrops be neutral. And neutrality is expressed or represented by a shadow free image of exactly what it claims it is not. In other words, the neutral is now represented by images that remove all that makes them specific. Neutrality is generic, and without specific qualities. The picture that exhibits no qualities of any sort is exemplary today. Maturity is then, by extension, a characterless bland air brushed ad. In Hollywood, the rise of Comic book blockbusters is the rise of CGI imagery. For the computer generated image is without depth or specificity. I have personally been told countless times how dissenting views are “just as biased as what you dissent against”. There is the implied notion of critical judgement as being an affront to this neutral world view — that is a principle that de facto erases the possibility of dissent. It is the loss of meaning, as well. Oh you are just as biased as the NY Times. Nevermind the circulation of the mass media, of mainstream news outlets is in the tens of millions. Never mind that. But lurking in back of this is the deeper trauma of class distinctions. All who are not employed in propping up the establishment must be the servant class. And the servant class is expected to blush and stammer, to display the various symptoms of self consciousness in the face of class authority. And here is where Burke’s comments on persuasion and persuasion and courtship are so relevant.

Georg Groddeck

Georg Groddeck


“The problem with “rationalized reason” is that by progressively replacing our experience of others as unique and vulnerable individuals with an impersonal, “externalist” appeal to laws and putatively universal norms, it drives this demand out.”
Espen Hammer

The stage of advanced capitalism is one in which an insistence on bureaucratic legitimacy is essential. The public is never without electronic information, all of it tacitly reinforcing the validity of hierarchy. Martha Rosler noted a number of years ago that the elevation of celebrity was another means to replace genuine magic with an artificial magic, one that favored displays of wealth and commodity. Rosler was writing of photography, in particular.

“ {the} restructuring of culture in this period of advanced capitalism
into a more homogenous version of the ‘society of the spectacle.”

Martha Rosler

What this does is two things; one is to substitute ideas on magic and mystery, and second, to lessen the idea of facticity of photographic images. Of course today the rise of the internet and photoshopping has removed all vestige of facticity anyway. One wonders if, in an age where people actually talk to each other less and less, if childhood tonsillitis won’t decrease. Perhaps to be replaced with new forms of carpal tunnel syndrome. But perhaps the body is ever more distanced from speech. From language. Everything is read, not seen. And its not even read, its scanned. Do people hear themselves as they once did?

Mattia Preti.17th century.

Mattia Preti.17th century.


The loss of narrative coherency is obvious today in mass culture. And the loss is not experienced as incoherence, but rather read as fragments in a mosaic made up of other fragments, and all of them given partial attention. It is normalizing the fragment, but its not a fragment even, for a fragment suggests a whole from which it was taken. Today the fragment *is* the whole. There are no rituals in a universe of partial fragmented attention. If that development, historically, of priest classes helped to desanctify mystery, a mystery of silence, then the development of a new dumbness of scanning and virtual community may well signal a final loss of the memory of a silence of pre speech — or rather the loss of remembering their was a loss. Childhood amnesia will lengthen, all the way through adolescence. Silence will no longer be full but empty. The naturalizing of class hierarchies is all but complete. Those with privilege do not look into their servant’s eyes. Not because they refuse to but because they cannot. The very existence of the enigmatic is all but lost. It is the forgetting to remember to forget society. Forgotten is the fact that classless intuitive reflection was stolen away. Forgotten is how some came to sell control to others. And forgotten is that the psychic exhaustion of the contemporary world of the West is not a law. It is not mandatory. The criminal mystic, it is possible, can return, and not the repressed.

Comments

  1. John, sorry to post this here, but wasn’t sure where else to ask you the question: What is your take on the LA Equity Waiver Theater controversy, where the waiver will no longer be granted to the 99 seat theaters?

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