The Discovery of Fire

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

“We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-theworld into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.”
Byung Chul-Han (The Disappearance of Rituals)

“But among the animals only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction.”
Paul Bowles (Conversations with Bowles)

“We are the last, first people.”
Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael)

The fires across Southern California, and in particular the greater Los Angeles area, are an event with implications that extend beyond the material destruction and the economic costs. Mike Davis prophesied such a fire over thirty years ago (see Ecology of Fear). And southern California has had fires for as long as it has existed. The geography of catastrophe. I was born in Burbank, a suburb of LA, in 1951. At St. Joseph’s hospital. My father had lived in El Lay since he was a small boy, around 1908 or 1909. He had come west from Philadelphia because my grandfather was to act in silent movies. My mother moved out in the 20s after winning the Miss Michigan beauty contest (later disqualified because she was married, secretly, to a member of the Purple Gang). Neither ever left.

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. “
Joan Didion (The Santa Anas, Slouching Toward Bethlehem)

Didion quotes Chandler: “On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

If you grow up in southern California, or any part of California, really, you feel the onset of the winds before they arrive. And you know they *will* arrive. Just like earthquakes. Laguna Beach burnt in 1970, and again in 1993. Malibu has already burnt in 1931, in 1956, and again in 1970, and again in 1993. Bel-Air in 1961. And a dozen more and the same, really, for northern California, most recently in the deadly Camp fires of 2018. Didion references the longest Santa Ana condition on record, fourteen days, in 1957.

“On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.”
Joan Didion (Ibid)

The technical term is foehn wind. The notorious Sirocco winds are a foehn. There is a science to this, higher positive ions in relation to negative in the days preceding a Santa Ana. Some claim a higher lead content in the air. Nobody disputes the reality of the effects. But this time the ‘city’ burned. Twelve thousand structures and counting. That had not happened before. And here Mike Davis is relevant again.

“No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” he wrote, from Ecology of Fear. {Its obliteration} “is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory *for* civilisation”. And this is the most profound of his many important observations. Exactly like the post apocalyptic film franchises, and Zombie films, there is a deep unsettling desire FOR destruction. Not that anyone ‘wanted’ these fires, except of course everyone DID want them, on some level. On a mysterious shelf of our Id, buried deep behind other boxes, you will find those exact desires live.

“Across the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless young men—some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.
Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the “mainland,” the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect day.”
Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear)

Writing specifically of Malibu: “The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. “
Mike Davis (Ibid)

The Santa Monica mountains burned in three separate fires in 1931. As Davis observed, there should have been right then an extensive study and public debate about allowing ANY development at all in the Malibu area. But no such debate took place (reminding us the shut down of public debate during Covid is nothing new). And with the logic of instrumental thinking the policies for California governance has been ‘total fire *surpression*’. And such policy is worse than no policy at all. The Tapia tribes of pre White settlements in what is now California, conducted controlled burns to get rid of the shrub, what is the fuel for wildfires. Instead the focus on ignition and not fuel has meant homeowners and developers have simply continued to build and build and build. And since this very affluent area is driven by the desire for segregation from the poor and unwashed of the east side and south central areas of L.A., the unconscious impulse has been for more and more vegetation, especially trees, to manufacture a kind of ersatz ‘privacy’. A class ‘cordon sanitaire’. It is the Democratic Party version of ‘gated community’. A huge Malibu fire in 1956 motivated the Eisenhower administration to grant relief to the very rich homeowners whose houses were destroyed — and soon after a water line from the Metropolitan water dept in downtown was linked with Malibu. The population and building on the far west side exploded.

“The county’s Regional Planning Commission promptly endorsed developers’ wildest fantasies by authorizing a staggering 1,400 percent expansion of the Malibu population over the next generation: from 7,983 residents in 1960 to a projected 117,000 in 1980. Although the California coastal acts of 1972 and 1976, under the populist slogan “Don’t Lock Up the Beach!” eventually slowed this real estate juggernaut (as well as squelching such nightmarish proposals as a Corral Canyon nuclear power plant and an eight-lane freeway through Malibu Canyon), the urbanization of the Malibu coast—Los Angeles’s “backyard Big Sur”—was a fait accompli.”
Mike Davis (Ibid)

There was never any real consideration given to a public trust in the mountains of Malibu, or the public access to the beaches (a fraction of beach is public, the rest privately owned and controlled). Malibu is today only 1.5% black. Its among the whitest cities in the state. And one of the older cities (though Hunter’s plus-ones bring the age down a bit). But this fire went well past Malibu. And the most traumatic destruction occurred in the town of Altadena. Historically a middle class black town, and like neighbouring South Pasadena, a place with countless historic crafstmen style homes, is now entirely burnt to the ground. Something like twelve of these homes were on the National Register of Historic Places.

But the real story here is the sociopathy of the political class in the U.S. (and EU and Canada and UK). Gavin Newsom might well stand in as the avatar of western madness in the flickering light of the inferno. Mayor Karen Bass would be second. For this conflagration exists in multiple registers of meaning. It is a symbol of irrational city planning and the role privilege plays in such irrationality (Hunter Biden had a beachfront home along PCH, which burnt). The role of water, not just in the insanity of one family controlling 40% of it (Resnicks, growers of almonds and pistachios) but its Biblical resonance. Water is to our psyches something inviolable and sacred — something primordial. Which it is, symbolically AND literally. The fireman’s hoses attached to hydrants that could not pump because the reservoirs were dry, stood as the towering Freudian symbol of literal and allegorical impotence. And this fire exists as part of a societal ritual of purification.

I am reminded of my favorite Kafka aphorism…

“Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.”
Franz Kafka (The Zürau Aphorisms)

If zombie and post apocalyptic films are always reconstruction stories, then disaster movies are the super-Ego version of this. One cannot outrun the unconscious, nor the narratives we construct both individually and collectively. And here it is useful to see the fire narrative in light of the loss of meaning overall in western culture. I remember Bly saying all learning takes place in ritual space.

“Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old. Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us. Relentless consumption surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life.”
Byung Chul-Han (Ibid)

“If all psychology since that of Protagoras has elevated man by conceiving him as the measure of all things, it has thereby also treated him from the first as an object, as material for analysis, and transferred to him, once he was included among them, the nullity of things. The denial of objective truth by recourse to the subject implies the negation of the latter: no measure remains for the measure of all things; lapsing into contingency, he becomes untruth. ”
Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia)

Subjectivity now seems to reflect the specialization of contemporary learning. Of university learning. To learn too many things renders one suspect. To specialize is the approved vision for an academic future, or a business future, too, really. Specializing in something is almost taken for granted. And this idea of Man as the measure of all things has, in the West, become highly problematic. Eventually, in a society built on competition and profit, built on ideas of productivity, on the ideology of productivity, man’s measuring of himself is going to turn obsessive, or at least neglect everything that is not man. The reality that many of the wealthiest home owners in Malibu or the Pacific Palisades would have built their homes just as they did even if they had known in advance this inferno would engulf these homes. For in a sense they did know, of course. The need for wealth and the material need to symbolize it, is far greater than a fear of death. The houses will be rebuilt. Meanwhile they can live in one of their other residences.

“The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. Scarcely ever does an unhappily furrowed brow, bearing witness to terrible and long-forgotten exertions, or a moment of pathic stupidity disrupting smooth logic, or an awkward gesture, embarrassingly preserve a trace of vanished life. For socially ordained sacrifice is indeed so universal as to be manifest only in society as a whole, and not in the individual. Society has, as it were, assumed the sickness of all individuals, and in it, in the pent-up lunacy of Fascist acts and all their innumerable precursors and mediators, the subjective fate buried deep in the individual is integrated with its visible objective counterpart.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

Everyone’s life is rounded by fire, and not sleep. Or, perhaps sleep comes later. All stories are about homesickness. All stories are crime stories. And all stories are about exile. And fire is the most ubiquitous of symbols. Northrup Frye, in his introduction to Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, notes “to the imagination fire is not a separable datum of experience, it is already linked by analogy and identity with a dozen other aspects of experience”. Its heat is our heat. Our internal warmth. Its sparks are seeds and its flames phallic metaphors. Fires are always about homesickness. We are looking for that which once warmed us. Our longings, reveries, are both water and fire.

“When I was sick my father would light a fire in my room. He would take great care in arranging the logs over the kindling chips and in slipping the handful of shavings between the and¬ irons. To fail to light the fire would have been incredibly stupid. I could not imagine my father having any equal in the performance of this function, which he would never allow anyone else to carry out. Indeed, I do not think I lit a fire myself before was eighteen years old.”
Gaston Bachelard (Psychoanalysis of Fire)

That uniquely American desire for purification crops up in film as well as literature. The opening monologue in Taxi Driver captures this sense of great floods, great fires, great earthquakes — to wash (or burn) away the sins and dirt, the moral filth as well as the material. The very particular capitalist trajectory of the US is something I have been pondering of late. Travis Bickle wants a great flood. Wants the dirt and sin washed away. Washed clean. Televangelists pray for apocalypse. The dominionists and the 3rd temple fanatics (Pete Hegsmith, Ted Cruz) want end times. For capitalism was critiqued by Marx, and a million later thinkers following on Marx and Engels, but the U.S. was always something else, too. It was puritan, calvinist, and it had a plantation system. A slave economy. It was fragmented by ethnicity, and when one examines the colonial period its clear that the largest immigrant group were Germans, and then Irish and Scots. A few French and of course black African slaves. The character of the New England states, for example, it shaped by the sensibility and personalities of Protestant English reformists, Puritans — and this ancestry has cast a disproportionately large shadow on American culture and society.

But the point here is that contemporary societal structures mimic macro forms and micro. Today’s professional sports league, particularly the NFL and NBA owners, are bastions of New England protestant tight sphinctered parsimony– and these leagues also mimic southern plantations, cotton and tobacco. No matter how many millions and millions of dollars pro black athletes make, they can never shake off the residue of slavery and minstrel shows— the eyes of the fans have replaced the eyes of men on horseback , shotgun on their lap, watching the chain gang. White team owners are the anointed captains of Capital. Owning your own black athletic star is a kind of initiation for white Republicans.

Beneath the psychic surface lies two massively significant groups; black African slaves and Amerindian decendents of Aztec, Maya, Toltotec and Zapotec (and ten or twelve more indigenous cultures) and to a lesser degree the Inca, Chimor, and Moche et al. further south. The third influence are Native American tribes, the six hundred tribes that were genocided by European invaders (settlers). Those (probably six or seven million people) haunt America even today. And the fact that football is dominant in spectator sports should not be lost on anyone. The symbolic war sport between two teams; replete with head trauma (CTE) that has not reduced involvement in the sport, even at the high school level, or attendance — quite the opposite –speaks to something illusive and obvious at the same time. The fires were coming. They WOULD come. One day. And yet houses continued to be built in the most intensive fire zones. At the same time homelessness grew. More and more people living on the street. In their cars. Or under bridges or freeway overpasses. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe more.

The US and its obsession with guns, with gun violence, is reflecting this subjective personal tribunal. I wrote before (several of the recent posts in fact) about changes in the collective unconscious of the United States. In 1972 a part time busboy named Arthur Bremer shot governor George Wallace, who was running for president. Travis Bickle is based, largely, on Arthur Bremer. Bremer was twenty two when he shot Wallace. He kept a diary.

“Took a 4 hour walk around this slum. Alleys and some parts of sidewalks are dirt. Not concrete dirt covered, but dirt. Some of the weeds between the curbs & the sidewalks are taller than me 5’’6. But mostly they average between my waist & chest level, some times growing this high on both sides of the sidewalk giving an impression of walking thru an animal trail in a woods. Litter abounds. “
Arthur Bremer (Assassin’s Diary)

The diary entries run to about 100 pages. They are astonishingly empty in one sense. This was not a manifesto. It is a record of the flotsam and jetsam of America, circa 1970. And of Canada. Bremer drove a lot during the time he stalked both Nixon and Wallace. It is both material flotsam and jetsam but also mental debris, mental waste product.

“Two days later, in Laurel, Maryland, Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace. Bremer was wearing sunglasses and a red, white, and blue shirt decorated with Wallace buttons. At least one witness remembered that as Wallace left the speaker’s rostrum, behind which he had been shielded by bulletproof glass, Bremer cried out: “Hey George! Hey George! Over here!” Later that same day the newspapers reported that a search of Bremer’s room in Milwaukee had uncovered, among his other possessions, a Confederate battle flag, a gun catalogue, and a pornographic comic book. He apparently had no friends. The few people with whom he had been acquainted described him as being timid and withdrawn. Somebody said he had wanted to become a writer or a commercial photographer; somebody else remembered that his mother had refused to let him try out for the high-school football team. Otherwise the record remained pathetically incomplete, the blank spaces suggesting the vast loneliness of a life condemned to impotence and failure.”
Harding Lemay (Afterward to Assassin’s Diary)

The U.S., I think, adjusted very poorly to both the evolving technologies of the 20th century, and 21st, but also to the psychic wounds of genocide and slavery. One some level this the United States is a country invented by Dostoyevksy. The precursors to Arthur Bremer are there in Notes from Underground, but also in Camus and Patricia Highsmith, in Emily Dickenson, Paul Bowles, and later in Raymond Carver. But if you watch mainstream (what was once called network) TV you will see almost nothing that relates to, or reflects reality. The cartoon jingoism of cop shows and military shows is increasingly surreal to watch. The fires and Gaza have re-framed everything now, too. Those surreal fascist dramas feel different after these fires. After the tik tok streamed genocide of the IDF.

Knustler, for all his problematic positions, certainly gets this:

“Governor Gavin Newsom dallied on a smoke-filled street with CNN’s disaster specialist, Anderson Cooper, pretending to manage the situation, which was, in fact, completely out of control. Among the things the governor has been criticized for is poor forest and brush management. Mr. Newsom has been lately working to pass a $25-million bill to fund measures for “Trump-proofing” California. For that same $25-million, he could have hired 500 workers at $50,000-a-year to cut brush around Los Angeles County. That is, if he didn’t avail himself of work-gangs from the California penitentiaries.{ } You can’t overstate the amount and degree of family devastation to be endured in the months and years ahead. For one thing, many homeowners recently had their fire insurance cancelled. Decades of punitive bureaucracy made rate increases difficult in wildfire-prone areas, so companies like Allstate decided to quit doing business in the state. So, many of the thousands of lost houses will be total losses. A great many of these were multi-million-dollar houses, even modest ones built in the 1960s, due to the extreme desirability of neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills, and Malibu Beach. Some middle-class people had their entire nest-eggs vested in these houses. Comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla put out an insightful video rant about just how difficult it will be to rebuild, even if you had homeowner’s insurance — or happened to be a very wealthy Hollywood actor. He put a spotlight on the monumentally obstructive permitting process in Los Angeles County, including additional onerous environmental agency hurdles that anyone would meet attempting to construct a new building in California. Also consider: where are the thousands of competent building contractors going to come from to work on so many replacement houses in one locality at the same time?”
James Howard Kuntsler (Apocalypse Still Unspooling, Jan 10th, 2025)

Kuntsler also notes the dire effect this will have on film production. Hollywood has been using Vancouver and Atlanta and other places around the south and southwest for years, but expect this to be a full blown exodus now. The shocking lack of government planning and foresight is almost hard to believe. But that is the part of this allegory that needs a deeper read.

There is, or has been since the Enlightenment, a nagging question of ‘what is the purpose’? The purpose of what you ask. Anything. Philosophy, thinking, theory. One can come up with side bar answers of a sort. But this is both a stupid pointless question and a question worth, or necessarily worth answering. Science is now about profit. What is the purpose means can we market it.

“The obstacle isn’t the recourse to meaning, nor is it the personalist grievance. It is the resistance and the deepening of the notion of cause that psychoanalysis provides. The investigation, analysis, and interpretation of symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, parapraxes, etc., all this may be thought of as a quest for meaning. Beyond meaning, however, what Freud teaches us is that what we are searching for is another content and consequently a real cause. And in the constant evolution of Freud’s thinking on this subject, the idea of the id, the idea that we are acted upon by this set of obscure causes to which he gives that name, puts a virtually definitive seal on this recognition of our fundamental decenteredness.”
Jean Laplanche (Essays on Otherness)

Beyond meaning. Another kind of content. Another kind of meaning. This is really why Freud matters. And it was gradually eroded, this search for the Id beneath the Id.

To blame this in any way on climate change is to help an historical amnesia, to lose more completely the sense of homesickness we have largely abdicated already. To further forget our desires.

“These scientific explanations originate in an arid and cursory rationalism which claims to be profiting by recurring factual evidence; but which is, however, quite unrelated to the psychological conditions of the primitive discoveries { } One can study only what one has first dreamed about. Science is formed rather on a reverie than on an experiment, and it takes a good many experiments to dispel the mists of the dream.”
Gaston Bachelard (Ibid)

Bachelard examines early man and the discovery of fire. The point is really that fire is eroticized and that even the rubbing of sticks together suggests something masturbatory.

“Thus, as is often the case, the legend of fire is the legend of licentious love.{ } How can it be better stated that nostalgia is the memory of the warmth of the nest, the memory of the cherished love for the ‘calidum innatum.'”
Gaston Bachelard (Ibid)

“We are, I think, justified in assuming that some of the functions which we know from the later ego are there at the beginning. Prominent amongst these functions is that of dealing with anxiety. I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the death instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution. The fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to an object—or rather it is experienced as the fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object.”
Melanie Klein (Envy and Gratitude and Other Works)

Fear of annihilation. The child, pre linguistic, suffers anxiety, an anxiety that begins with the separation of birth. Very young children of one or two, like infants, have nightmares. Night terrors, sometimes. In hallucinatory gratification there is both an annihilation of that which causes fear, AND the creation of an ideal object. This is Klein’s sort of blueprint for early childhood psychology.

“In passing I would mention that in this early phase splitting, denial and omnipotence play a role similar to that of repression at a later stage of ego-development. In considering the importance of the processes of denial and omnipotence at a stage which is characterized by persecutory fear and schizoid mechanisms, we may remember the delusions of both grandeur and of persecution in schizophrenia.”
Melanie Klein (Ibid)

Capitalism encourages various registers of schizophrenic mimicry. The wildfires who everyone KNEW were coming, but which threat was denied just as it was viewed as something, if it did happen, if it appeared, would not be a threat. Threats turn into non threats. And this is partly how technology intersects. Nothing was developed to fight wildfires. Planes and helicopters dropped water from large sacks. That’s it. Some places the convict crews fighting the fires turned to controlled burns, counter burns in a sense, to deprive the advancing fire of fuel. Like tribes did in the 1600s and 1700s. And before. The infantile belief in omnipotence. And I see this again and again in contemporary life. The disbelief in something before your eyes. And it is coupled to this evangelical belief in tech. Omnipotence. Denial and Omnipotence.

The reality is that tech does very little to make life better, whatever we think ‘better’ might be.

“The projection of split-off parts of the self into another person essentially influences object-relations, emotional life and the personality as a whole. To illustrate this contention I will select as an instance two universal phenomena which are interlinked: the feeling of loneliness and fear of parting. We know that one source of the depressive feelings accompanying parting from people can be found in the fear of the destruction of the object by the aggressive impulses directed against it. But it is more specifically the splitting and projective processes which underlie this fear.”
Melanie Klein (Ibid)

The role of media covering the fire, much as it has covered the genocide in Gaza, also contributes to a personalizing of the catastrophe. It is ‘my’ catastrophe. A designer wildfire.

“Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. Scarcely ever does an unhappily furrowed brow, bearing witness to terrible and long-forgotten exertions, or a moment of pathic stupidity disrupting smooth logic, or an awkward gesture, embarrassingly preserve a trace of vanished life. For socially ordained sacrifice is indeed so universal as to be manifest only in society as a whole, and not in the individual. Society has, as it were, assumed the sickness of all individuals, and in it, in the pent-up lunacy of Fascist acts and all their innumerable precursors and mediators, the subjective fate buried deep in the individual is integrated with its visible objective counterpart. And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

The news has agendas. They cover up , not cover the story.

“…the introduction of ‘ritual studies’ as a schoolsubject has recently been advocated as a means of reviving the exercise of ritual repetition as a cultural technique. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity. What is the origin of the intensity that characterizes repetition and protects it against becoming routine? For Kierkegaard repetition and recollection represent the same movement but in opposite directions, ‘because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards’. Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.”
Byung Chul-Han (ibid)

This reads like an exercise book for theatre. Kierkegaard also says we only get tired of the new, we never get tired of the old. Media, corporate news media cover-up. They hide not just the real story (I fear they very often don’t know the real story) but any and all stories. The media creates a frame that in turn creates a particular kind of news voyeur. A tourist. An emotional dilettante for news. The very idea of news is pernicious.

Repetition as a form of recollection. This is beautiful. This is theatre. This is rehearsal. And compulsive repetition is, I suspect, the by product of this too often cultural tourism, emotional tourists. (It is interesting that Shahid Bolson calls the Zionist settlers ‘seasonal zionists’). The fascist must not remember. Recollection is too close to revolutionary. The recitation of text, for actors in theatre, is a kind of thinking, as theatre itself is a kind of thinking, and it is memory, but not just of the lines. It is this ‘recollection’, this memory that is not exactly collective, it is the memory of the world.

There are paradoxes here. Chul-Han quotes Heidegger, and in truth an awful lot of Heidegger is dangerously close to Adorno and Benjamin. The later Heidegger especially.

“And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world.”
Martin Heidegger (Memorial Address from Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit)

But Heidegger, while correct in identifying this, shifts toward a strange (to me anyway) kitsch vision of rural-ness. For Heidegger ‘Dasein’ must ‘do the work’ (whatever that might mean). The romantic rural landscape, for Heidegger, migrates to the interior landscape, and unsurprisingly the fascistic aesthetics seem oddly invisible to him. But for purposes here, there is something very insightful about how technology itself does not just change reality, or just change what we ‘think’ reality is or isn’t, but that it does something deeper, more mysterious. Heidegger may be driven by his deformed notions of Greek pure thinking, his (I think) profound reading of the Pre-Socratics, and how Roman thought destroyed by literalizing it (in a sense, he is re-creating what Klein and Freud and Lacan all focused on, vis a vie ‘das ding’) but his dialectics never go beyond this romantic idea of farm-authenticity. His analysis of the Pre-Socratic greeks is partly just perverse, but it is also a kind of repetition, a kind of translation as recollection. There is something profound in these exercises, but one cannot shake the darker implications of a kitsch fascist aesthetics, a kitsch farmyard and forest.

“The first group of things, consisting of man-made objects, reflects the bright rural world. But it has little to do with the real world of the peasants. Rather, it is a counter-world designed by Heidegger as a reaction to a world dominated by modern technology, and then projected on to the world of the peasants. It resembles very much that romantic counter-world to which the tourists, criticized by Heidegger, are on their way. In a certain respect, Heidegger is himself a tourist, a pilgrim-tourist. After all, Heidegger, like the romantic tourist, is on a pilgrimage to an imaginary There.”
Byung Chul-Han (Threshold)

Heidegger’s ‘counter world’ is like a museum of ‘the rural’. The voyeurs (or tourists) are like those metropole ticket buyers at the Paris World’s Fair (1889) watching the human zoos of colonial powers.

“The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.”
Byung Chul-Han (Disappearance of Rituals)

I think this self-performance is so pervasive now that it goes unnoticed. Our interior lives are film strips. (Jonathan Beller talks of this). So, Heidegger intuits quite rightly many of the issues around technology, but he fails to reach past this Aryan mythos that directly fed Fascism. Reality TV is both cause and effect here. Western society began to think cinematically post WW2. And the best films of the fifties and sixties can be seen as prophetic cautionary tales of a diminished humanity. The McCarthy era parables like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the anti corporate films from Tati or Billy Wilder (The Apartment), or even the sun-lit noirs of Lang and Aldrich. In a sense the best dramatists were all looking for a strategy to recollect (Heiner Müller, Pinter, Botho Strauss, Von Kroetz, and Howard Brenton and Beckett and Genet).

“We live in a culture of the affect. Where ritual gestures and manners decay, affect and emotion gain the upper hand. On social media, too, the scenic distance that is constitutive of the public sphere is reduced, and the result is affective communication without distance. The narcissistic cult of authenticity makes us blind to the symbolic force of forms, which exert a substantial influence on emotion and thought. We may imagine a ritual turn that re-establishes the priority of forms. It would invert the relationship between inside and outside, spirit and body. The body moves the spirit, not vice versa. Body does not follow spirit, but spirit follows body. We may also say: the medium produces the message. This is the force of ritual. External forms lead to internal changes. Thus, ritual forms of politeness have mental effects. The semblance of beauty produces a beautiful soul, not vice versa…”
Byung Chul-Han (Ibid)

This is an important observation. The semblance of beauty produces a beautiful soul not the other way round. I take this to mean that discernment, the attention to aesthetic choice, creates a kind of beauty, or harmony in our interior lives. It is a re-balancing of the psyche. And that enriches out lives, and begins a kind of cultural infrastructure. It mediates ideology, too. And this is exactly where kitsch and sentimentality and forced inauthentic smiley face culture robs the society of exactly this beauty. It is exactly why ‘truth’ matters. In a society as narcissistic as that of the U.S. today, this matters more than ever. The cultic spell of advanced capitalism is only broken by speaking the truth. The truth on a stage and not on a screen.

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