Behind The Nightmare

“Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
Walter Benjamin

“Within the universe of Bay Area startup culture, the Elon Musks are the heroes. They seem to have a broad, sweeping vision of the future. But their true pedigree is measured how they manage to amass massivewealth behind their ideas — their ability to do. They believe they have the necessary tools to game reality. Their thinking is built on top of a hyper-commodified religious devotion to the transformative powers of scientific rationalism and a faith in the sanctity of numbers.”
Liz Ryerson

“Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft.”
Gerrard Winstanley

The ascendency of Trump, a reality TV show host, vulgar real estate billionaire, and the first president with his own cologne line, is described personally, and repeatedly, as a narcissist. And I wont argue with that, except that I think narcissism is too complex an idea to just attach to the new celebrity President. For it is a condition that is intwined with history and with social controls and conditioning. Freud introduced the idea of secondary revision in The Interpretation of Dreams, in the section on dream work. Secondary revision is, as a short explanation, one of the processes of symbolization that allows the dream to both reveal and conceal at the same time. Samuel Weber, the best reader of Freud alive today, points out that ‘secondary revision’ is not unique to the unconscious. It is something most everyone does all time during their waking lives. In its crude form it is the manner of layering a faux rational explanation over a conflicted idea or emotion. What Weber calls a ‘specious intelligibility’. In dreams the revision creates a false meaning that helps to hide the more uncomfortable and truer meaning, and in fact this false meaning is usually very far away from the actual meaning of the dream story. In other words, the secondary version is usually too easy, too obvious and facile. The ‘too coherent’ quality of secondary revision can be extrapolated outward on a social scale. Freud makes clear that in waking life there is a desire to make an intelligible whole out of the world around us. So, in a sense, contemporary capitalist society is a sort of tromp-l’oeil manufactured world — and in post modern late capitalism this pseudo real has taken on deeply pathological dimensions.

There are two branches of this revisionism going on in the West, today. One is the imposing of an official mass produced cultural and political narrative. The other is the personal as it has absorbed and overlapped with an ideologically tainted narrative. In the end they are both the same phenomenon but they operate in different ways for different effects and consequences. Now part of this is, as Freud put it, an innate intellectual function that demands unity. And this relates all the way back to animism and early notions of magic. But as Weber said, how can a function *demand*? The short answer today is that consensus has been added to all intellectual activity, at least in nominally social contexts. And here there is a capitalist aspect in so far as unity implies systematic completion, and completion means making sense of everything. Nothing must be wasted. There is an economic model that saturates western thinking today. Its related to risk management. This is the residue of late capitalism that leaves its fingerprints on all mental activity. But there is another cultural aspect to the general secondary revisionism of western society — and this is the need for manufacturing ever deeper horrors and carnage, fictionally, the better to offset the horrors of everyday life. When homeless men freeze to death outside of Hotels, the media covers it as if it were a TV show. The homeless are symbols of failure and laziness, and the new ruthless super ego feels more ingrained in the popular imagination that ever before. This harkens back to Dirty Harry, which may have been an even more significant symbol of psychic and political shifting than was thought at the time. And even at the time it was called fascistic.

“If then, that intellectual function which demands unity, connection, and intelligibility, is able to impose its demands, the energy it requires to do so now seems to have an identifiable sources: the libidinally cathected narcissistic ego.”
Samuel Weber

Kristeva, remember, added to Lacan by seeing language itself as a fetish.

“It is perhaps unavoidable that, when a subject confronts the factitiousness of object relation, when he stands at the place of the want that founds it, the fetish becomes a life preserver, temporary and slippery, but nonetheless indispensable. but is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish?”

There is a narcissistic component that never leaves us, and Weber sees systematic thinking as an aspect of this. The fetishized demand for unity, for completion, is a reflection of the organization of our psyche. And this is where art and narrative play a huge role. Societies have always had stories to help navigate the terrors of the real world. Kafka’s uncompleted oeuvre was a part of the message. All completion is false completion.

Only through popular mass culture these stories, which are ever more reductive, are experienced first and often only as guides to consensus. The compulsion for agreement eclipses more traditional experiences of storytelling. There is an expectation in post Enlightenment western culture that a whole exists and this whole, somehow, magically, is a reflection — so the story goes — of our coherent psychic wholeness. One of the disturbing parts of the Trump story, as a story, is that Trump is not really exactly a narcissist, but is rather a signifier not for incompletion, but for a kind of overcompletion.

The bourgeoisie is the class of perceptual cohesion, if not actual cohesion. The unity of the system is a first priority for this is the class with both a stake in the status quo but also a vulnerability, one that the ruling elite hasn’t to worry about. It is that ersatz respectability that the liberal white American craves. And it is this that marks the biggest departure for mass culture since the realignment that took place in the 60s. Those shaped by the counter culture idea usually find it very hard to understand the submission of the following several generations; and I feel this when I run into people in their 40s or even 50s sometimes. I am surprised at the tacit respect for authority and the desire, so it seems, for conformity. With this comes a disproportionate respect for institutions. And not just the obvious ones, the military or government, but even things like the PTA or Cal Trans or whatever. Now I’ve been thinking of late about the Levellers and Diggers, and by extension the English bourgeois revolutions. But I think this is not an accident, and I suspect it is worth returning to the ways in which the Levellers coalesced into a movement. The Levellers, and True Levellers, were not a class as a traditional Marxist would define it, but rather were made up of small business owners (or what passed for that in the 17th century) and tradespeople and craftsmen, and also modest landowners. Without going into the ideas that drove aspects of this resistance (and the *Norman Yolk* etc) the desire was more for a tearing down of the ruling class and its privileges. With Gerrard Winstanley and the True Levellers, the revolt became more radical and more relevant for today.

Daniel Johnson, in a good short piece on Winstanley, writes….“Winstanley and the Diggers also saw such an incompatibility, though from a distinctly rural and pre-industrial perspective during the development of agrarian capitalism in England. At a time when the enclosure of common lands threw vast numbers of peasants off the land and into wage labor and grinding poverty, Winstanley developed a radical philosophy that associated private ownership of land and wage labor with the exploitation and degradation of people and the earth.” The relevance resides in the inherent ecological dimension of Winstanley’s ideas. He saw the ownership of private property as intrinsically unfair and that somehow the oppression of workers was inseparable from the destruction of the environment. Wage labor itself was immoral and oppressive. By 1650 the Diggers were forming autonomous agricultural communities for the poor, and designing a return of the commons to the people.

Johnson again…

“In the spring of 1607, thousands of people in the Midlands of England rose to prevent the enclosure of their common lands. Participants (mainly rural laborers, artisans, and small farmers) referred to themselves collectively as “diggers” and “levellers”—up to that time terms of elite derision and contempt. Anti-enclosure riots were not, however, new to the early seventeenth century. Large-scale popular opposition to enclosing (the privatization of common lands) and engrossing (the amalgamation of two or more farms into one) dated to the fifteenth century. The conversion of arable to pasture land with the expansion of the cloth industry, a rapidly growing population, and changing class relations in the sixteenth century signaled the rise of agrarian capitalism in the English countryside.9 It is often forgotten that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was in large part a work of social criticism aimed at landholders who enclosed the commons for the production of woolens. The idle English nobility and gentry enclosed all land possible, leaving nothing for food production. Former tenants whose labor was no longer needed in the fields were forced to wander, beg, or steal for their survival, and many found themselves unemployed in “hideous poverty.”

This marked a class consciousness that in retrospect seems surprising only, or mainly, for its lack in terms of unity of vision. It was highly pragmatic and intuitive almost. That Trump is the son of a slumlord and himself a real estate mogul is probably not exactly an accident. His is a view that sees enclosing the commons as quite reasonable. The tenants are to be driven out, put on the other side of a wall if need be.

Goebell’s Gleichhaltung— or the Nazi-fication of culture, drove many writers and artists and thinkers out of Germany in the early 1930s. That Nazi sensibility about culture was a resolved and unified vision for all expression of any kind. Enzo Traverso writing of Benjamin….

“It was not enough to defend the legacy of the Enlightenment against fascism, because an effective struggle should recognize the links connecting fascism to modern rationality itself. Technical, industrial, and scientific progress could transform itself into a source of human and social regression. The development of productive forces could reinforce domination and its means of destruction, as the Great War had clearly proved. Fascism was neither a reaction against modernity nor a new fall of civilization into barbarism; it was rather a peculiar synthesis of the counter-Enlightenment—the rejection of a universal idea of humankind—and a blind cult of modern technology. ”

This is the point in a sense. The counter Enlightenment is what contemporary life exists beneath. That is the best description of the process that has led to the literally insane holding the reins of power. And here is where I think a discussion of culture becomes more telling, more important, simply.

Traverso writing on John Reed’s books, both on the Mexican revolution and the Russian, but also his newspaper articles on Greenwhich Village…or *Bohemia*…for papers in NY.

“To think of the relationship between Bohemia and revolution as a simple playful adventure, superficial and ephemeral, would be extremely restrictive: one might run the risk of not understanding its nature. Revolutions have often been the time (resulting from a transitory, ephemeral historical constellation) when Bohemia (or at least some of its components) has come out of its marginality, has abandoned its ghetto and embraced the forces in movement in society. It has found in revolution its natural accomplishment, as it has been one of the places for its spiritual preparation, its aesthetic anticipation, its utopian prefiguration, sometimes its intellectual elaboration and its political organization. Those who have been exiled and banished and have lost their fatherland stop swimming against the current and take their place in the center of the movement that strives to overthrow the dominant order.”

Then he adds the real question…the post revolutionary moment does not need Bohemias, and mostly doesn’t want them. Or rather, it must somehow control them. Genet knew this, and felt once Palestinians had a country, a home, he would stop working with them. The Soviets tried and succeeded for a while, but eventually institutional unity demands the Bohemian (if we want to continue to use that term) must be pacified somehow. It is why all arts organizations basically work to kill art. In the Capitalist order the arts institution is now just a control mechanism that keeps artists occupied, to a degree anyway. One of the few good outcomes of Trump is that he wants to kill arts funding. It won’t stop art-making, and if it were to, then maybe it should. The de-professionalizing of art is much needed and a necessary step in radicalizing artists.

Traverso notes also the melancholy inherent in radical expression, whether artistic or political. For creativity itself links up with mortality, with decay and with something that for lack of a better word might be called spontaneity. The poet Eli Siegal, back in the 50s, suggested there were two kinds of spontaneity — the first is like the response of the child to a sight of wonder. He or she makes a sound, gasps, and this is the desire to be like what one sees. The opposing form is that which wants to belittle, as a means to make oneself greater. Now this is sort of kistch psychology but Siegal quoted an old (and reasonably authoritarive) book on Indian and Chinese Art ( L’Art indien, l’art chinois, 1928, Ed Henri Martin).

“Originality, variety, mysticism are the three general qualities of Indian art. One must demand of it neither order nor clearness. One observes in the architecture a sort of theatrical phantasmagoria, which is not devoid of seduction. Indian architecture is of an originality which sometimes affirms itself with such extremity that it resembles a defiance to logic and good sense….As to the ornamental sculpture, it seems animated by a sort of frenzy.”

This is a neo colonial perspective on the *Orient* — but its one that continues on today. Still, there is also something revealing and not incorrect in the anti-organizational mysticism of much Vedic sculpture and painting, and certainly architecture. The refusal to accomodate good sense, a funny term I think. Most University arts programs certainly do not demand good taste, not directly and may even discourage it officially. But you cannot be ‘in class’, signed up at the institution, and not be receiving that message on a daily basis. Institutions adhere to economic thinking, to those post Enlightenment ideas of rationality, but more, to the logic of Capital. If Indian art was seductive to those French cultural historians in the 20s, today the seduction is closer to coercion, and it is lent authority through finance and the various rewards in social standing, etc.

The idea of spontaneity is occluded now for reasons that, again, are linked to a mania for resolution. In the 20s, the Surrealists would play *Exquisite Corpse* — as MOMA explains it…

“Surrealist artists played a collaborative, chance-based parlor game, typically involving four players, called Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse). Each participant would draw an image (or, on some occasions, paste an image down) on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal their contribution, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.
Taking turns adding onto each other’s drawings and collages resulted in fantastic composite figures, such as Nude by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray. The resulting nude female figure combines a humorous and absurd array of features—from leaf ears to snowshoe feet. For the Surrealists, Exquisite Corpse was a perfect parlor game, involving elements of unpredictability, chance, unseen elements, and group collaboration—all in service of disrupting the waking mind’s penchant for order.”

Except of course games such as Exquisite Corpse, while often yeilding terrifically interesting results, has nothing much to do with unpredictability. The unpredictable is to stop the game at some point. Spontaneity is that which the bourgeois westerner imagines as acting spontaneous. Anyone who has taken an acting class knows that one of the things one always learns is ‘not to indicate’. (For example if you want to listen, the actor on stage can indicate this by cupping his hand against his ear and squinches up his face….indicating LISTENING). Today people perform the role of themselves and act it badly. They indicate as they stand against the trompe l’oeil backdrop of advanced Capitalism. Spontaneity today is loosening the restraints of impulse control.

This touches on the way in which (as I’ve written about before) that the off stage is the unconscious. Children run at intermission to look behind the wings. On old maps, the cartographers drew monsters where the known world ended. As children we are fascinated by the margins, the monsters and unknown. Only the bureaucrat likes the known, is drawn to the map where monsters have been driven away. The quest for the unpredictable is killed off in bourgeois society. Capitalism and finance are there to put up barriers to the wings of our inner theatre, road blocks, and navel blockades to the place where the world ends. First, first they say, we must monopolize the unknown, we must make it known, in secret, and buy it and hoard it, and then, THEN, you can come in and pay a fee to visit it. But its OUR head, it is the secret seas of my own brain you might exclaim. No matter. Pay or go away.

“…those who hate the Jews, like all who are used to judging the individual in the light of negative aspects of the alien group to which he belongs, judge according to clichés.”
Horkheimer

The bourgeoisie in the U.S. today think in cliche, especially when exercising the resentments that inevitably build up throughout their lives. And in a sense this topic of unity or completion, for they are linked, is one that in a cultural sense explains some of the bottomless depression that most modern writing exudes in the reader. I cannot read most contemporary fiction without feeling I am becoming a menace to those around me and maybe myself. Which again returns me to Kafka. For it is Kafka more than any other modern writer who outlined the terms of the nightmare.

“Behind the nightmare exactitudes of Kafka’s setting lies the topography of Prague and of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its decline.”
George Steiner

I quoted an interesting article by Liz Ryerson at the top. She continued …

“The sort of class of technocratic math dorks Zunger or Garland belong to might be able to function within the bubble of Silicon Valley tech culture or the culture of Washington political insiders, but they don’t actually have any insight into what most people in the real world experience and how those things manifest themselves on a broader human scale, because their lives are lived incredibly insulated from these experiences…{ } Our popular culture has become so steeped in a deeply cynical sort of practicality, where many of us are able recognize the contradictions and hypocrisies of modern society, but we also cynically accept that we can’t really do much of anything about them. The awareness of this incremental progress being largely the result of a long-term collective struggle becomes completely erased and co-opted. By making displays of bigoted behavior as the ultimate embodiment of evil we have a built-in justification for moving selfishly within the system because we’ve displaced our shame of our own cultural complicity with the destruction our way of life causes onto a convenient scapegoat. This, it turns out, opens the door for people to use bigoted language we have deemed “too far” as a show of power and dominance.”

The sensitivity, prophetic and condensed, expressed by Kafka, was a display of its own extinction. The constant cartoon horror of popular culture, whether DC comix, or the lastest serial killer story, is never disturbing because we, the audience, sense — even if not consciously — that the cartoon is there to shield us from the truth of how much worse it is in actuality. Ryerson ended an earlier essay this way…

“…over the years, videogames have only become more violent, have only ventured much further into simulated realism meant to more convincingly substitute for a disappointing and disempowering reality, have only catered much more deeply and pervasively to the entitlements of their users, and have only become more ingrained and ever-present in culture. where we stand now, videogames have deeply entrenched themselves as the primary venue for disempowered people to elect themselves as servants and act out the sociopathic fantasies of the ruling class.”

The disappointing and disempowering reality she speaks of is indeed both those things, but is more. It is what I suggested earlier; it is over complete. I remember a radio interview done in Poland years ago by Werner Herzog where he said how he hated American lighting in buildings and homes. How they seemed, the Americans, to hate shadows. And he concluded, but a room without shadows cannot be lived in because you will go insane.

This obsessive drive for totality, for a completion that encloses all intellectual space, is the financialized extension of this hyper rationality; a rationality that morphed into algorithmic dependence. The trust afforded computational speed seems to eclipse all other factors. If its done quickly, then it is accepted. Mass accelerated data processing and projections, which while often accurate, are only accurate within this space that has exiled the literal and figurative shadows of life and death. And to say they are accurate begs the question of what accurate means, exactly. This is science essentially. And science achieves amazing things. But science is not inherently blessed with virtue. And an interesting discussion is to be had around the topic of cost — both human and historical — for the ascension of science as an almost religion. For the contemporary notion of science is identical, really, to what is meant by reasonable and rational. And this is where the repressed returns, I’d say.

The kind of prose that Kafka wrote is no longer possible. The collective memory of a dying Europe, the first hint of that eruption of bourgeois sadism that was to become National Socialism bounced around the corners of Kafka’s world — the one he actually inhabited. The clerk’s offices, the single entry ledgers, the dust and narrow streets and the insufficient light. Melville wrote of it in Bartelby the Scrivner. Melville was the prophet of the new world. Kafka of the old. Robert Musil, Herman Broch, and others all touched on corners of the change that was occuring. The counter-enlightenment was descending on the European empire. Kafka’s prose was (and I touched on this last posting) a kind of archaism. He did not accept the idea of progress, or the Enlightenment itself and we know this for a fact because he wrote in the voice of long memory. The mythology of ancient and pagan sensibilities was always there as an echo. But he did not emulate or appropriate. He simply did not flinch from this new (and obviously not new) Death Instinct that was surfacing. The first world war, and then the second. Hiroshima and all that has followed. The seeds are there in those shadow laden streets of Prague. Just as it is there on the Pequod, and in the vast spaces of the Pacific ocean. Melville and Kafka. Everyone else is coming after.

Richard Brodhead wrote in his study of Melville…

“A year before starting “Moby-Dick,” Melville wrote to his father-in-law, ‘So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’”

This was the time of the writing of Pierre, or The Ambiguities. One of the least read of any book by a major author. It is a book about failure, though really, it is more about tracing the socio historical borders of failure. Grant Maierhofer mentions among the precursors to Pierre, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a book to which I have had a long and maybe unhealthy attachment. Written in 1824 by Scotsman James Hogg, a self educated farmhand. Hogg was to become friends with Sir Walter Scott, but he was always the voice of the outsider. In Maierhofer’s short analysis of this least read novel of Melville, other names come up; Beckett, Joyce, Jim Thompson and Celine, and John Cage and Pollock. And to these I would add Herman Broch, Peter Handke, and Thomas Bernhard. And, oh, a dozen others. But these are the voices of the margins. That are not describing the margins, but writing from and in the margins. They describe the inside, they look in at the monopoly interests trying to enclose the commons. For there is an indelible political shadow story that runs alongside great work — and a good part of it is simply class based analysis. For those who turn away from the world behind the theatre flats on stage, who have no curiosity what is behind them, or in the wings, a compensatory version of personal exploration must be substituted. And this is, in a sense, what reality TV is all about. Tests of courage and, yes, spontaneity. Again, trompe l’oeil Capitalist landscapes in which these manufactured *selves* venture forth to indicate their legitimacy.

I end with a paragraph from Adam Phillips introduction to H.D.’s book on Freud. It is a wonderful book to read for many reasons. But in light of this brief posting on spontaneity and curiosity and the implications, psychically, of Capital…it has, it seems to me, relavance. And it speaks to the revisionism that goes on 24 hours a day in the Counter Enlightenment.

“It is easy now for a psychoanalyst or a so-called patient to be struck in H. D.’s account by just how unorthodox a Freudian Freud was: he lends H. D. books, introduces her to his family, shows her his art-objects, talks about another patient, and generally gossips with her. There is an ease and a friendliness and a sense of real enjoyment in the way Freud works with H. D., that is not at all incompatible with the seriousness of the project, and that is the real lesson of the master (it reveals how strangely professionalized and hemmed in the psychoanalysts quickly became, caricatured and discredited rather than engaged with)”