The Same but Different

“When two do the same thing, they do not do the same thing.”
Ernst Bloch (Heritage of Our Time)

“President Nixon: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the – let it hang out, so to speak?
Dean: Well, it’s, it isn’t really that –
Haldeman: It’s a limited hang out.
Dean: It’s a limited hang out.
Ehrlichman: It’s a modified limited hang out.”
Whitehouse Tapes (March 22, 1973)

“As to the question whether it is the illness that generates the crime or whether the crime, by its very nature, was always accompanied by something like an illness, [Raskolnikov] still felt unable to resolve the issue”.
Fyodor Dostoyevski (Crime and Punishment)

After a week in Florence, with family, I feel it is hard not to reflect on the city and its art. First of course is the obvious tourist issue. There are a LOT of tourists. And often lines to see the blue ribbon artworks, and this is not a problem unique to Florence, certainly. But it raises a host of other questions about the role of art in 21st century society. I also think Jeff Nichols recent film The Bikeriders (based on Danny Lyon’s iconic photo essay ) warrants a discussion as well. And I say this not because its a great film (it’s not) but because it is a genuinely haunting film, and that is something rarely encountered anymore from Hollywood. And perhaps the manner of its haunting is important.

The first thing I took away from Florence, though, was the city itself. Or rather, the history of this city. For that history, in spite of everything, remains palpable. Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Galileo, Donatello, and Vasari all lived there. And a dozen more, Giotto, Botticelli and Filippo Brunelleschi, and many far less well known but still exceptional painters and sculptors and architects. A visit with the kids to the Da Vinci mechanical museum was actually rather an impressive experience. The figure of Da Vinci looms over everything, finally. And the sheer volume of Da Vinci’s accomplishments is staggering. Da Vinci spent much of his life in Milan however, and one might see Michelangelo as more the soul of Florence. A case can be made, too, for Botticelli, who lived almost the entirety of his life in the neighbourhood of Florence in which he was born, and was buried in his neighbourhood church. He was also 7 years older than Da Vinci. His sensibility was perhaps transitional and found completion in Da Vinci and Michelangelo. The most surprising thing to me was the work of Lippi. I had always liked Fillipo Lippi’s work but in person there is a quality of the spiritual, of innocence even, to his paintings. A quality that is absolutely free of calculation. Lippi was a Carmelite priest and born in 1407, a generation (or two) earlier than Da Vinci. He also mentored the young Botticelli. He was in his person anything but innocent, and despite his priestly vows, he was a notorious womanizer. Born twenty years before Lippi is Donatello. And I have a special fondness for Donatello. And before him was Giotto, the sort of Ur-Renaissance master. And if you read this blog much you will know I have an even greater affection for Giotto. But there is a lot of excellent historical works on all these Renaissance masters so I won’t go into great detail. Worth noting however the painting of Domenico Veneziano (The Alter of the Virgin; Mary and Saints). It is a remarkable work, with extraordinary colours and a singular delicacy. Only two paintings survive by Veneziano, and little is really known of his life.

It is interesting that Michelangelo’s sarcophagus in the Medici Chapel has no lines to view it, or is given much attention, really. And yet this room, and in particular the forms on the actual tombs, are among the purest expression of Michelangelo’s vision. The entire room, the walls, and the unique and even rather peculiar windows and cornices were the work of Michelangelo. And this was a mature phase in his career (1517 through 1527). The marble itself is viewed as remarkably fine. The white is translucent and hypnotic, especially in the figure of ‘Night’. And all the female figures suggest something uncanny and disquieting. It is my favorite of his work, really, for it is a meditation on death by a man who never, it seemed, stopped thinking of his own mortality. So like Da Vinci, the enormity of their output simply defies explanation. This is the true wonder of the Renaissance.

And this, what I am calling, ‘haunting’ is particularly poignant in this time of de-enchantment. Daily lives today are battered with constant banality, in both image and word. One cannot spend too much time with figures such as Trump or Kamala Harris and not feel lesser for the experience. I will mention one other work, and that is the Anunciation, by Fra Bartolomeo. It is part of a tabernacle, with both sides of the tablet painted (recto and verso). It may be as uncanny as anything in the Ufizzi, actually. For this was the arrival of Renaissance space. These are tiny book size works (which they were in a sense). And yet the viewer is drawn into a space of infinite complexity. A society that can produce such depth in 9 x 19 cm is worth contemplating.

This was the week war criminal Netanyahu gave his performance before congress in Washington. He received more interruptions of applause than even Kim Jong Il gets. There was nothing unusual in Netanyahu himself or what he said; he lied so many times I think we all lost count. That was to be expected. For the Zionist must perform these rituals of contempt for the ‘other’. It is a part, I am coming to understand, of this zealotry, and such performances are like inverted confessions of a sort. The chosen people (Zionism itself deformed that very idea) must literally and figuratively spit on the ‘other’. These performances are certainly obscene and nakedly self loathing, even as they exhibit equal loathing for their audience. The Zionists of today are actually literally and clinically insane. It might well be that all colonialists have always been insane. Its only that the backdrop has shifted. King Leopold set against a backdrop of the US congress would be viewed as mad, by those not already insnared in this dynamic.

But the real obscenity was the congressional applause. For this was a performance, too. A supplicant symbolically prostrating themselves. The internalizing of the bribery guilt, deeply repressed, surfaces in a display of naked (!) obedience. But it much more than obedience. The congress, the American political class, is already long ago bought and paid for. This is personal, subjective really. It is the subject pantomime of the court eunuch. These bloodless and relatively brain damaged toady-like mendicants are strangely faceless.(Jon Fetterman presents as the externalizing of what all of them are inside). Someone called young Mister Crooks, the alleged Trump would be assassin, ‘incel-faced’. I thought this very perceptive. Funny but also perceptive. American politicians, even the butch square jawed ruling class versions like Gavin Newsome, share this incel-like rubbery expression of blandness. Wipe the make-up off Newsome and there is the face of Thomas Crooks underneath, or Eliot Rodger, or Jared Lee Loughner.

The bought-off politician is common. They have been around since politics began. But this new sort of prenatal like homo-tardigrade is unique historically. All humanness has been sucked out of them. Zionism is a manufacturing center for incel-faced homo tardigrades. I sometimes wonder what Shakespeare might have made out of Yoav Gallant phoning up Joe Biden. Or of Kamala Harris, an obviously visibly intoxicated social climber and her relationship with Willie Brown. Or what Patricia Highsmith might have done with such material, or even Henry James. Hell, even Hunter Thompson.

Or lets look at Nicole Kidman doing PSAs for bug consumption. These are the specific spectacles of today’s capitalism. And they overlap with the trivial, and the infantile — this stuff all feels to be targeting five year olds. And they all seem to titillate on some level, for that is also late stage capitalism. Titillation is incompletion. And speaking of incels and empire and coups — and of violence, the drama that is ‘the last days Joe Biden’ has taken on, if not Shakespearean qualities, something like Alfred Jarry qualities. Biden as Ubu Roi. Eating cockroaches is pure King Ubu. Hunter Biden is straight out of Ubu Roi. In fact Kamala is Ubu, too.

There is actually a surprising amount of variety in perpetrators of mass shootings. At least in the U.S. You have James Eagan Holmes and Eliot Rodger, you have David Lane and Omar Mateen and DeWayne Craddock and Jiverly Antares Wong and Salvador Ramos, Adam Lanza and Dylann Roof. There are so many examples at this point, dating back to the 80s. There were earlier examples, too, like Howard Unruh, in 1949, in Camden, NJ. And it is worth pondering for a moment this phenomenon. And I will below.

But I want to return to the ‘Last Days of Genocide Joe’ first. And this is because in a sense the Biden story is becoming a kind of tipping point in western consciousness.

“Then, on July 23, 2024 — days after allegedly stepping out of his race — President Biden allegedly phoned in to VP Harris at a campaign event. As Emerald Robinson put it, aren’t there cameras in Delaware? Couldn’t he FaceTime? The disembodied voice eerily told VP Harris she had his support.”
Naomi Wolf (Lawyer Lisa Blog, July 27, 2024)

Sy Hersh wrote a, now well circulated, post on the topic of Biden’s last days. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/leaving-las-vegas

“Then there was the “White House Statement” from President Biden on July 25 2024. First of all, without living humans asking live questions in real time with live responses, there is literally no way to know if this video is shot at the White House, or even if it is not itself some kind of digital mockup. I personally get what has been called by robotics and AI specialists an “uncanny valley” feeling when watching this video — the intuitive sense, which has to do with the human brain’s recognition of other humans’ appearance and behavior, and with humans’ unease when there is a human-looking simulacrum, that something is wrong.”
Naomi Wolf (Ibid)

The question of what amounts to ‘proof of life’ takes us back to the Renaissance, or earlier, really (by way of Hollywood crime film). But more to the point is the question of if it even matters anymore if Biden is some animatronic stand-in or just a CGI. Clearly western governments today are profoundly disconnected from the populace. Again, though, the Last Days movie is unfolding in an atmosphere of humiliation and parody. The FLOTUS goes to Paris to view the Olympics, and is greeted with a weird video of the Statue of Liberty full of gunshot holes and badly battered. Not to mention the drag version of either the Last Supper or something like it (complete with dangling testicles). The above noted sense of Zionist performance, one that entails a curious inverted sense of shame and sadism, both, is replicated by the First Lady’s uncanny series of photo ops in Paris.

I often have fleeting thoughts that Jeffrey Epstein may emerge in a hundred years as the most significant human of late stage capitalism. But, as I say, these are fleeting. And it is oddly coincidental, to some degree, that the Olympics should choose a Da Vinci painting to parody (and really its a relatively obscure painting by Jan van Bijlert, titled Feast of the Gods, circa 1635) that is being, well, sort of parodied. And this is just bread and circuses anyway. The larger point is that this atmosphere of decadence is being normalized at the same moment genocide is being normalized.

“When the martyr Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in February, he said, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal” and it’s still true. The only choices in the UK election were genocide and genocide and it’s the same across increasingly illusory liberal democracies. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to even imperial citizens that no ‘one’ is in charge and that their votes are worse than meaningless. That their elections are just the ritual anointment of regular atrocity, like choosing Coke or Diet Coke, or having a salad bar inside a Wendy’s. Nations, international institutions, media, and universities; these have all been revealed as illusions around a literally inhuman ruling class that simply does not give a fuck about human life and doesn’t even bother hiding it anymore. Now the journalists are dead and the hospitals are destroyed and no one can even count the dead, let alone help the living.”
Indi.ca July 27, 2024

“…the success of National Socialist ideology is countering, for its part, the all too great progress of socialism from utopia to science; in Engels it was conceived totally differently. In this way the enemy triumphs with wild cries of jubilation and undisturbed Irratio, despite its revolutionary situation which makes its victims susceptible at least in socialist terms. In this way an archaism develops which more than understandably blocks the transition to the proletariat. The vulgar Marxists keep no watch over primitiveness and utopia, the National Socialists owe their seduction to them, it will not be the last. Both hell and heaven, berserkers and theology, have been surrendered without a fight to the forces of reaction.”
Ernst Bloch (The Heritage of Our Times ; Amusement Co., Horror, Third Reich, Sept. 1930)

Joe Biden is already the Max Headroom president. The Videodrome president. And the Bloch quote above, and paragraph before it, are all too relevant. I continue to read countless social media attacks on Marxism. Many attacking Marx himself. I continue to also read attacks on communism. These attacks invariably identify the WEF and even Biden and Harris with communists. Admittedly this is a very uneducated class but it is also not small. The sense of the Great Reset as a communist plot is repeated ad nauseam. As previously noted (several times and on the podcast) the conflation of fascism and communism continue unabated, and often by otherwise reasonably (!) intelligent people. Bloch again…

“Thus these people are spellbound, something rages and dreams murkily within them. A piece of German brutality strikes up in them again, has in fact a subconscious or unconscious impetus, instead of a classconscious one; posits not only folk and fatherland as a substitute for their own sinking caste, but fills the frame with very old pictures. The berserker strikes out who marches in every direction where things are to be destroyed; his crazy cruelty reinforces the revenge-drive of the petit bourgeois. Germany, unlike France, was always without the influence of women, without Mary; now it has become totally anti-flower. Hereditary memory of a brighter kind is also a factor, precisely as the myth of the Third Reich; but it has no power to have light in its fire as well. The abstract brutality is rather becoming stronger and giving the myth of the Third Reich an odour of blood which is in keeping with its corruption. { } Their sinking lowers these strata into the proletariat only in socio-economic terms, but ideologically it brings no inclination towards dismantling, towards analysing the situation, towards uncovering the causes and ‘grounds’ of today. Instead the sinking abandons even more the thin layer of reason of the ‘modern age’, brushes in falling very old modes of drive, ways of life and superstructures, and thereby provokes ‘Irratio’. So roughly and so full of warlike eroticism, so usefully as well for the darkest forms of imperialism, one of these young Nazis exclaimed: ‘You do not die for a programme you have understood, you die for a programme you love.’ It is unnecessary to stress the bad Irratio in this exclamation, the reluctance to demand or to betray a programme where none exists at all, the heroic ignorance of backward strata which sooner desire death than insight into their own contradictions.”
Ernst Bloch (Ibid)

Today these petit-bourgeois warriors are identity based. What attracts them to Israel (for most are Zionist supporters) is the ‘irratio’, the odour of artificial blood, in this case, and the sense of how neatly their superficial *love* fits with the churlish avuncular Uncle Bibi. And of course it fits with the entire mythology. Israel is simply the sanitized (and curiously Americanized) version of all other colonial powers. If Lord Kitchner feels too elitist, the manufactured mythology of Israel is perfectly tailored to western taste. The anti Marxism though is tinged (of course) with fear. Some dim flickering awareness that there is something in communism, in men like Fidel or Sankara or Ho Chi Minh, let alone Lenin or Mao, that is far more fertile and potent than a DJ Vance or the Donald, let alone Gavin Newsome.

“The second contradiction, however, the general one to ‘mechanism as a whole’, means that Communism can also still be represented to the employee as empty mechanics, as a process of depersonalization and rationalization, indeed as the mere reverse side of capitalisms. There thus arises – in a crazy yet tenacious confusion of the capitalist and Communist ‘Ratio’ – an anti-mechanistic ‘irrationality’, which is fed by a thousand refinements of the uppermiddle-class Irratio and furnishes at least as powerful a contradiction to the usual vulgar Marxism as it does to capitalism. For the proletarian, who has grown up together with the forces of production, these are no enemy, he sees through them; but the petit bourgeois stands today, on a new level, almost inevitably at the machine-wrecking stage. This is why semiproletarian existence produces false consciousness beyond all measure.”
Ernst Bloch (Ibid)

Bloch could be writing of the anti-communist left today, or the climate left that see great profit to be made from publishing books about the doomsday geometry of climate change, in particular ‘global warming’. Leftists (self identified) who publish a for profit book, replete with a scary orange sun image on the cover. So indoctrinated are most liberals today that the for profit part is never even considered. “Dont you want artists or activists to be paid for their work”? Yes, much more than they are, but I only write for everyone to be able to read it, not to make money. If you write a Hollywood script you would be a moron to do it for free (though many do) but theory and political science should be available to all — since, you know, you want to prevent the earth turning into a charcoal briquet… so you claim. If you believe there is a man made global warming crisis then you publish your book for free…no? Not sell it on Amazon.

“My second part is a rereading of ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924c, SE XIX, pp. 155–70). A sharp, critical rereading, working over an eminently contestable and contradictory text in order to make it yield its elements of truth. “This, Freud’s most comprehensive text on masochism, dates from 1924, an important date, when the theory of the death drive— initially put forward ‘tentatively’, as a purely ‘speculative’ hypothesis —took on the appearance of dogma, or rather, of metaphysics (the metaphysical age being characterised, for Auguste Comte as for Freud, by the recourse to purely abstract entities). Freud, it is true, did not go the whole distance with metaphysics, always refusing to speak of Thanatos or destrudo. To push reification to its full extreme, we had to wait for Melanie Klein. Why take on a text which I consider to be a hazardous construction, made up of imbalances and contortions, whose intricacy is almost baroque? Doubtless because it is an exciting text, as exciting as a neurosis, especially when one starts to see things a little more clearly. One finds there the strata of successive theorisations, revealing contradictions, irritating but fertile once the shell is cracked, and also the creativity which is always at work. And in fact, even in an edifice to be deconstructed, how many splendidly carved pieces there are, worth using again!”
Jean Laplanche (Essays on Otherness)

In Freud there are three types of masochism: Erotogenic, feminine, and moral. The erotic version is excitation through suffering. (in the short version). The second is, per Freud, an essential aspect of femininity, or sexual fantasy. The third is the most relevant here. The moral is without a directly erotic aspect. It is a social relation. interpersonal/intrapersonal, in other words. The feminine version of masochism means a kind of passivity. A gay ‘bottom’ is, de facto, a bit masochistic. But I have written before about queer attractions, the uniform, the hyper masculine etc. What matters here, far more, is the moral.

“How, then, is a ‘sadistic superego’ to be represented? If the superego is an agency which is itself identificatory, how could it find its enjoyment in the identification with the suffering object—that is… with the ego? Here, the anthropomorphism of agencies, which elsewhere is justified, finds its absurd limit. It remains true that in this description of moral masochism an essential element is certainly highlighted, i.e. the resexualisation of morality, via the Oedipus complex and the masochist fantasy which supports it: ‘being beaten, being copulated with, by the father’. There is no masochism without sexuality, no masochism unless one can—and must—find traces of sexual excitation, if not of orgasm. Freud is always imperturbably steered, in his description of moral masochism, by the compass of sexuality.”
Jean Laplanche (Ibid)

Laplanche himself, elsewhere has commented “Freud…always considered the pleasure of causing suffering as more enigmatic and requiring a more complex explanation than the pleasure of suffering:… ” (Life and Death in Psychoanalysis)

This is, no doubt, an important point. If I am suggesting that the western colonial sensibility (which is a form of fascism but not identical, perhaps) is a part of an elaborate psychical architecture culminating in Zionism, then the tensions within the fanatical settler mentality and their unravelling is easier to understand. As is the homo-eroticism of the IDF.

“Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois democratic system such as free elections, equality before the law, parliaments; and it also extols authoritarianism and the reactionary union of the church with the state. In Portugal and Spain, it was the Catholic church — in South Africa, it was the Dutch Reformed church.”
Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972)

The pleasure of causing suffering. Here we circle back to the mass shooter phenomenon as well as settler colonialism. And to the fact, as I have endlessly gone on about, that the world remains utterly mysterious. Science has done remarkable things, in medicine for example (though hardly all of it) but technology is killing us. And the tech addictions and belief systems associated with those who privilege scientific authority in an absolute way, are making life ever more difficult and stressful. Travel today (for example my trip to Florence) was an endless series of frustrations having to do with Q codes and online errors and the impossibility of reaching a human being to provide answers.

“In ancient Greece, certain seers practiced ornithomancy: divination of the future by observing the flight of the birds. According to Aeschylus, it was Prometheus, the bringer of technology, who introduced ornithomancy to the ancients by designating some as fortuitous and some as sinister.18 Prometheus also promoted haruspicy, the examination of birds’ entrails for omens — a kind of primitive hacking. Today’s haruspex is the obsessive online investigator, spending hours picking over the traces of events, gutting them and splaying out their innards, poking at their joints and picking out fragments of steel, plastic, and black carbon.
Many conspiracy theories, then, might be a kind of folk knowing: an unconscious augury of the conditions, produced by those with a deep, even hidden, awareness of current conditions and no way to articulate them in scientifically acceptable terms. But a world that has no way of admitting such differently articulated accounts is in danger of falling prey to far worse stories — from antiscientific public panics to blood libels — and of failing to hear voices of genuine and necessary warning. { } In the far north of Canada, indigenous people claim that the sun no longer sets where it used to, and that the stars are out of alignment. The weather is changing in strange and unpredictable ways. Warm, unpredictable winds blow from new directions; severe flooding threatens towns and villages. Even the animals are changing their patterns of life, struggling to adapt to the uncertain conditions. This is how the world is described in Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, by Nunavut filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and environmental scientist Ian Mauro, a series of interviews with Inuit elders in which they recount firsthand their experiences of the world around them — experiences informed by decades of observing the climate firsthand. The sun is setting in a different place, they say, often kilometers from where it used to. The earth itself is off-kilter.
James Bridle (Conspiracies, Climate, and the New Dark Age: an extract from my book about Technology and the End of the Future)

Disenchantment. I don’t believe the climate agenda in the least. The earth may or may not be getting warmer. Parts might be getting warmer and some parts cooling. I don’t believe anyone knows. But the cause is certainly not cow farts or anything to do with carbon. The pollution problem is caused by capitalism and its offshoot war and the violent extractive industries that feed new electronic gadgets and data centers. But I think there is a situation now, in much of the West, certainly the U.S. and EU, in which insanity in the ruling class has increased, but more significantly, it is naked. The madness is no longer obscured or mystified, but is now close to an emblem of honour. The shrieking Ego announces ‘ I am batshit crazy and sadistic’! Nichole Kidman eats bugs because she either thinks the climate crisis narrative is real and she is trying to help humanity, or she has no intention of ever herself ACTUALLY eating insects, but was paid a lot of money to pretend to eat them for the camera. Benjamin Netanyahu lies openly but is applauded for it. How much does Bibi believe of what he says?

“…the repetition always implies a change, however minute it might be. The “eternal return of the same” that Freud evokes is not at all the unlimited repetition of the identical. Even if limited in the extreme, a change in the analytic situation that is revealed in a new version of what has previously been expressed always indicates important work— the call of unrelenting desire.”
Michel De M’Uzan (The Same and the Identical, Psychoanalytical Quarterly, 2007)

As Jean Luc Godard said once in conversation, ‘its all the same, only a little bit different’. This is a critically important idea. The repetition is not quite ever identical. For desire is part of what has been erased by technology. In digital technology the repetition IS identical. Or it gives the illusion of being identical. Social media is a repetition machine.

“However, in the second year of life the anal-erogenous zone seems to become the chief executive of all excitation which now, no matter where it originates, tends to be discharged through defecation. The primary aim of anal eroticism is certainly the enjoyment of pleasurable sensations in excretion. { } The origin and character of the connection between anal and sadistic drives, hinted at in the term for the organization level (anal sadism), is analogous to the discussed connection between orality and sadism. It is due partly to frustrating influences and partly to the character of the incorporation aims. However, two factors must be added. First, the fact that elimination objectively is as “destructive” as incorporation; the object of the first anal-sadistic action is the feces themselves, their “pinching off” being perceived as a kind of sadistic act; later on, persons are treated as the feces previously were treated.”
Otto Fenichel (The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis)

What I am trying to identify, this naked bragging about sadism and cruelty, a performative form of shame, even disgust, is also acutely aggressive. The organizing principle is anal sadistic. What is missed, often, in examining the personas of a Gallant or a Ben Gvir, or a Donald Trump or Anthony Blinken is the self hatred. They are fascistically authoritarian, yes, sure, but they are also deeply abjected, the anal sadistic bully is also ashamed of playing with his or her own feces.

“The fact that this pleasure is experienced at a time when the primary feelings of omnipotence are still operative can be seen in the magical narcissistic overvaluation of the power of the individual’s bowel movements; this finds expression in many neurotic and superstitious remnants . Though the pleasure is attained by the stimulation of the rectal mucous membrane, the feces, as the instrument by which this pleasure is attained, also become a libidinal object. They represent a thing which first is one’s own body but which is transformed into an external object, the model of anything that may be lost; and thus they especially represent “possession,…”
Otto Fenichel (Ibid)

Capitalism, private property, is foundationally linked to anality. Shitting on people is now also, simultaneously, coprophagic. The performative shame and guilt (see Netanyahu) is also eating ones own shit. Soldiers of the IDF make videos mocking the weeping mothers of dead Palestinian children. They make videos of breaking the toys of dead children. The political leaders in Tel Aviv openly claim they are proud to commit genocide (several have actually used that word).

“Thus the feces become an ambivalently loved object. They are loved and held back or reintrojected and played with, and they are hated and pinched off. { } This care and, later on, conflicts aroused by the child’s training toward cleanliness gradually turn the autoerotic anal strivings into object strivings. Then, objects may be treated exactly like feces. They may be retained or introjected (there are various types of anal incorporation) as well as eliminated and pinched off . The training for cleanliness gives ample opportunity for sensual and hostile gratifications. The “narcissistic overvaluation expresses itself now in a feeling of power over the mother in giving or not giving the feces. Other anal tendencies directed at objects are the impulses to share anal activities with somebody else: to defecate together, to watch and exhibit anal activities, to smear together, to defecate on another person or to have another person defecate on oneself. All these anal object strivings are ambivalently oriented. They may express tenderness in an archaic way, as well as, after their condemnation, hostility and contempt (“to play a dirty trick on somebody.”
Otto Fenichel (Ibid)

Freud referred several times, when writing about guilt and the Oedipus complex, of ‘reading a dark trace’.

“It is during the latency period – the period between early infancy and puberty – that the inner counterforces (shame, disgust and compassion) and the social constructions around morality and authority are built up to combat sexual urges. { } He sees disgust as a reaction to what was previously experienced as pleasure. During the process whereby polymorphous perversion is contained and erogenous zones are subsumed under the primacy of the sexual organs, disgust is directed at the desire which had been bound up with those zones which later become erogenous, particularly the mouth and anus. This is true of shame, too, but principally as regards visual pleasure: voyeurs are without shame, but in a “normal” person visual pleasure is restrained. And which perversion does morality curtail? If disgust can be linked with the formally erogenous zones (mouth and anus) and shame with voyeurism, then it is reasonable to assume that morality, too, can be linked to a third group of perversions Freud mentions, to wit, sadism and masochism.”
Herman Westerlink (Figures of the Unconscious)

In 1884 George Beard came up with the idea of neurasthenia. That sexuality was connected with nervousness and anxiety. And that this was a modern condition. That there was far more mental pressure on individuals than in previous eras. Whether this is exactly true or not, I suspect that the sexual nerves so designated were a ‘modern’ expression of a deeper and close to universal psychic state.

Morality remained, for Freud, somewhat enigmatic. At least its origin.

“Freud does write that the anxiety of conscience, the ego’s fear of the superego, is rooted in castration anxiety. Ultimately, the ego wants to hold on to the narcissistic ideal of being loved. Castration anxiety is thus fear of losing parental love.”
Herman Westerlink (Ibid)

One can see the evolution of guilt and shame in western societies today. Partly this is the loss of adequate parenting, the habituation to screens, and the increasingly absent father. Authority is outsourced to big tech, in essence. When I have mentioned patriarchy I get a lot of pushback but this is just a missreading. And it speaks to a reductive aspect of much feminism. But I do get it, and I think the better description here is just a missing father, and perhaps that coupled to a distracted mother, and maybe both.

The fear of losing parental love no longer follows the contours of earlier family configurations. And this is one of the takeaways here, that dynamics in place for hundreds of years have been technologically altered. Exchange value covers everything with a thin cuticle of opaque toxins. The ego fears the Super Ego is the most profound sense, now, and the Ego also cannot clearly tap into its own interior life. The parading of loathing and shame and its projections, from Bibi to Macron to Trudeau, is increasingly childish in its content. The structural aspects remain but they are tethered to the most purile stupidity of meanings.

A final word on The Bikeriders. Danny Lyon’s book, released in 1968, became a kind of seminal and iconic work. Lyon went on to do other great stuff, too. But The Bikeriders captured something absolutely profound in American culture. Those working class guys were already nearly extinct, and that is part of the story of the film. In one sense its an updated version of The Wild Bunch. (and a half dozen other westerns). It echoes John Huston’s neglected Fat City, too. For this slow dying away, men out of time, is a very American theme. It even goes back to Twain and Melville, really. Jeff Nichols made a film that at its worst was respectful. And I think that is important. It was probably over edited (seems to be something that happens a lot these days, see Kevin Costner’s Horizon) and no doubt the studio had to come fuck it up a bit more. Manhola Dargis has an actually rather sharp review in the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/movies/the-bikeriders-review-austin-butler.html

It is a book about, mostly, male beauty. The same way The Magnificent Seven was. Which was also, another end of an era sort of tale. The western in fact, from a certain perspective, cannot help but be about men out of their time. Point Blank was about this, so were a number of post WW2 American noirs. Films like Nightmoves or The Last Run (both written by Alan Sharp) touched on these themes. Peckinpah, as noted, always touched on them. In the Nichols film Tom Hardy is the magnetic pole while (to push this metaphor) Austin Butler is the geographic. Jodie Comer is excellent but almost too excellent, if that makes sense. But even when trying to use her as a device to get inside the narrative, the film demands we stay with Hardy and Butler. Damion Harrell (great in Quarry, the best TV show prematurely cancelled EVER) is very good. Harrell has a voice that is deceptively powerful. In fact this is a film that foregrounds voices far more than is typical today. Hardy is doing something-like a Brando (referenced, of course, in the film itself) but crossed out with Mike Tyson maybe. Butler is far better than he should be. The film lacks much in the way of structure, really, and partly this is because a narrative of dissolution is always going to lack a climax. The film wanders off as the men in the club mostly did. Into dead end jobs, and relationships. Some content, enough, some not. The Vietnam war is never fully addressed but its presence is felt, and partly this presence is what serves as the *explanation* for the growing criminality of the bike gang.

I called the film haunting, and I say that because it foreshadows the madness of this moment, today, July whatever twenty twenty four. This was the last epoch of pre-internet, at least of pre-automation. Unions had not been destroyed but the sense of promises broken was already palpable. This was not San Francisco or even New York. This was the midwest. Chicago. And the Chicago club became notorious and very violent over time. That’s the story, in fact. A version of the American Dream, already outdated, already betrayed. The American working class was increasingly abandoned. Abandoned and reviled, really. Those today who refer to ‘flyover states’, or ‘deplorables’ are part of that abandoning process. And into that void steps the fascist orator. In this case Donald Trump. Now to be absolutely clear, Obama and Clinton and Biden are all just as fascistic as Trump. Maybe even more so, in terms of policy. But this is a banalizing, too, of the authoritarian leader. Here one bumps into the Oedipal issue again. But the style codes are clear with Trump. As they were with Mussolini. Hitler was more enigmatic, in a sense. And more ambivalent. The Hugo Boss uniforms, the Coco Chanel followers, the British fascists, the very clear Dutch and Baltic fascist sympathies, this rendered the Nazis as both more and less than Mussolini. For Mussolini was one dimensional. Today the performance of sadism is not too far from Hitler’s performative presentation. Only it is Max Headroom doing Hitler. It is a world of Megachurches and Christian Zionists. It is also as if Zionists forgot the story of a chosen people was metaphorical.

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