The Return, part one

“To fear death, then, is foolish, since death is the final and complete annihilation of personal identity, the ultimate release from anxiety and pain.”
Lucretius (On the Nature of Things)

“Children know nothing of the horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors of eternal nothingnes.”
Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)

“(rituals as) temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world…”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Citadelle)

“The occupants of the digital panopticon are not prisoners. Their element is illusory freedom. They feed the digital panopticon with information by exhibiting themselves and shining a light on every part of their lives.”
Byung Chul-Han (In the Swarm)

“ In the affluent society, the authorities are hardly forced to justify their dominion . They deliver the goods; they satisfy the sexual and the aggressive energy of their subjects. Like the unconscious, the destructive power of which they so successfully represent, they are this side of good and evil, and the principle of contradiction has no place in their logic.”
Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization- A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud)

In the last podcast we had a discussion that touched on what we called ‘the cheapening of culture’. And this discussion touched on what are really sort of trivial rituals (James Bond films, pro sports events, etc). And as Byung Chul-Han notes, we live in a ‘ritual poor’ society. And without the reliability of rituals, even trivial ones (and I’m not entirely sure any ritual is actually trivial) our sense of ‘home’ has eroded. Our sense of belonging to a place or a culture. There is something in western Capitalist society that seemed to develop an antagonism to rituals. And I suspect this is partly tied to the obsessive need to see everything in terms of progress. Rituals began to feel un-modern, or anti-modern. The term tribal took on a pejorative connotation. This is understandable given the regressive aspects of tribalism which feel even today as tied to Nationalism and fascism. But how did that happen? How is it that community became tribal and even martial?

“In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar]. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption.”
Byung Chul-Han (The Disappearance of Rituals)

Chul-Han is a very popular philosopher (of sorts) born in South Korea but lives and works (and seldom leaves) Germany. And in a sense he is both a harsh critic of the internet and someone who’s work seems to flourish there. The New Yorker did a short take on him here, and actually it was a pretty fair summation.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-internets-new-favorite-philosopher

I have certainly spent inordinate time criticizing net culture but I also have this blog AND a podcast (with other valued thinkers) and so I am in some sense optimistic that one ‘can’ make the net some form of new ‘campfire’. The question is always begged just how much does the technology itself harm people. And this is a meaningless question, though. The system that creates the platforms for social media are not designed by the people who will use them, and in fact users in general are not consulted.

The problem here is not that Han is wrong (or is it Chul or Byung?). He isn’t. But people today do write meaningful and deeply thoughtful work, people do critique capitalism and work to understand it. I have to come to worry about this tendency to generalizing overall. About everything. Because there are millions who DO surrender autonomy to the social media platforms, and do consume mindlessly on those same platforms, and even old fashioned media (sic) like Taylor Swift concerts, does not mean everyone does. Many do not. The real issue is more to do with the collective effects on the culture, the waning of serious education and what I wrote of in the last post here, that which Adorno termed ‘philistinism’. It is true, as a culture, collectively, aesthetics has been degraded. Of this there is no question. And this in turn has had dire consequences for children in particular. For the entire maturation process. But this is not really a question of internet technology. That is, in a sense, a symptom of a greater set of issues. The fact that the military developed the net is worth remembering.

“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 (The Disappearance of Rituals)

Han says the aesthetic is colonized by the economic. Well, yes, but Adorno and Marcuse and Debord were saying this sixty years ago. This is the thrust of much of Frankfurt School writing, in fact. And one has to then ask why and in what ways exactly. What does that mean, this colonization of the aesthetic? Well, I would say for one thing this discussion is linked at its roots with Capitalism, and with, now, the re-emergence of fascism. The authoritarian tendency in the aforementioned tribalism. Adorno and Benjamin and Debord et al wrote very long and exhaustive theoretical works trying to understand these questions. And this is the point at which I always return to the importance of Freud. But also of theology and anthropology and history. And philosophy.

“Nowadays one can purchase vegan shoes or clothes; soon there will probably be vegan smartphones too. Neoliberalism often makes use of morality for its own ends. Moral values are consumed as marks of distinction. They are credited to the ego-account, appreciating the value of self. They increase our narcissistic self-respect. Through values we relate not to community but to our own egos.”
Byung Chul-Han (Ibid)

The Covid lockdowns certainly proved the above. Virtue signalling was a deposit in the bank of narcissism and ego identity. But the tricky part here, with Han, is when he talks of ‘being at home’ in the world. (He studied Heidegger at the University). Its not that it’s wrong, its just that this sort of framing sounds like a romanticizing of rural primitiveness. This is that regressive tribalism I noted at the start. The Heideggarian ‘blut & bloden’ stuff. Its not at all wrong per se. We are all homesick. All literature, all stories include an element of homesickness. Han writes that the loss of symbols points toward the atomization of society. Yes, well, but again, how and why? How does that work? Why is western capitalism seeing the gradual but inexorable loss of symbol and ritual. Bly said all leaning takes place in ritual space. And this is true. And there is less learning going on, or rather less learning of a serious kind. There are ‘more’ business schools, larger business post grad departments, and more TED talks. But there is less serious theatre, less quality film, and less good taste. Post graduate classics departments are closing for lack of students.’ The rise of philistinism is pronounced. The rise of irony is limitless. It is a snark culture.

“Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. ”
Byung-Chul Han (Capitalism and the Death Drive)

Snark is an expression of death. In the almost exact same sense as sentimentality.

Now I will add that Han is wrong about ‘binge watching’ films or series (as on Netflix). The expanded narrative is actually the ONLY place one can contemplate duration. His take on this is very strange given his other positions. But rituals are (as he emphasizes) a means to construct duration. And watching anything on a screen is different from watching in a theatre, with live actors. That said, I think film comes very close at times though this becomes very complicated and entails tracking the psychic adjustments that audiences have made over the course of a century to adjust to the *screen*. And early on, in the 50s already, attention had been paid to the built-in authoritarian aspects of cinema.

But here I feel it is worth noting that writers like Frank Furedi, a kind of semi-popularizing pyschologist and sociologist who was pointing out that the 1980s marked a significant rise in public disenchantment with traditional institutions and authority. Again however these notes are not wrong but notably insufficient.

“The ‘disenchantment’ of the world that follows in the wake of the erosion of traditional authority and morality is another theme stressed in the discussion on the decline of religion. The concept of disenchantment, originally developed by the renowned German sociologist Max Weber, pointed to a development whereby the process of rationalisation undermines the spiritual, magical and religious influences over society, thereby depriving life of meaning. It is suggested that for people trying to make sense of their life, disenchantment creates an intense need to comprehend subjective experience. Therapeutic ideology promises to re-enchant subjective experience. It endows the individual’s emotional life with special meaning. By promising to provide unique insight into the individual’s internal life, therapeutic offers to bring people in touch with their ‘true’ selves. Through validating the self, the ideology of emotionalism helps reconstruct a form of spirituality where the individual becomes the focus of attention.”
Frank Furedi (Therapy Culture; Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age) 2004.

And allow me a second observation by Furedi: “Indeed, emotionalism and the language of therapy is as much if not more extensively deployed by opponents of the status quo than by the political elites. Cloud’s study provides a detailed account of the pervasive influence of emotionalism on dissident movements. She writes that in the US since 1968, ‘therapy has become an increasingly persuasive alternative to political action from below’. This view is shared by Lupton, who has remarked that rage has become a central construct through which the lives of the marginalised is defined – indeed the reaction to anything can be presented through rage form.”
Frank Furedi (Ibid)

This is relevant because I think therapy culture is wildly underestimated in influence. Especially by the left. I see attacks on ‘the theory industry’ (sic) which means (presumably) French post structuralists but it also means the Frankfurt School and Freudianism. But as Russell Jacoby showed decades ago now, the migration of radical psychoanalysis to the US meant its dilution and turn toward adjustment (in lieu of the uncovering the truth). Therapy culture was and is deeply reactionary. But none of these groups are monolithic. And its a danger to essentialize or generalize these positions, or more importantly, the cause and effect.

You see this with the anti French Theory guys, those, often on the Stalin-border, ideologically, blaming Foucault and Barthes and whoever for short circuiting left movements of a grassroots sort. The problem is the grassroots people don’t read theory, largely. In fact on the whole not many people at all read this stuff. And this was even true in the 60s and 70s. I agree the CIA and state department wanted to marginalize communist sympathies wheverever they could. The problem is they (the CIA and State Dept) were not at all successful. I know people who were in the Iowa Writers Workshop, full of, apparently, agent provocateurs from the US government. They had no effect. AT ALL. And most everyone knew who was a spook.

The stalinist left is also full of agent provocateurs, unsurprisingly. Just sayin’. The fact is that the US government has spent inordinate energy and money on anti communist propaganda. The FBI spied on and assassinated what they saw as dangerous domestic leftists (Black Panthers in particular). And this includes Academic research biases and rewards for the ‘right’ message in biographies and histories. But its also the US government and hence not very good at what it does. The sheer volume of stuff has in areas been effective, certainly. And Hollywood has been their very best investment. But the idea of the CIA setting a plan as nuanced as ‘push leftists toward French Theory and away from Lukacs and Losurdo or Michael Parenti, is unlikely. The media censors far leftists. Parenti was never invited to Sunday morning news shows on major networks. They dont make it to talk shows. But the idea of defusing grassroots movements by shoving Foucault down the throats of the University student seems a stretch. Mostly because Foucault is, while weirdly reactionary, not spreading a message of hate for the far left. Nor was Barthes. And Althussar, I think, was actually much better than most of the ‘factory Marxist’ thinkers often cited in opposition. The second aspect I want to mention, to this idea of CIA shaping theory is that Freud is often like collateral damage. I have met very very few leftists who have actually read Freud with any seriousness. Very very very few. People who cite Adorno haven’t, often, read Freud. And those that attack Adorno (and the Frankfurt School) have also not read Freud. And they should. These same people always employ Freudian terminology and theory. But they seem unaware that they are doing so (because, um, they haven’t read him). Like the story of the CIA creating Abstract Expressionism, or by itself popularizing it, these ideas seem appealing to many on the left but they are largely exaggerated, at best, or myth mostly.

If one feels that contradictions do not exist, then consider yourself well indoctrinated. The fascist authority does not allow contradiction.

Wilhelm Reich is another victim of the hard left antagonism for nuance. There is a decided instrumental logic to the brown-red believers. I am often seen as one and that’s not entirely wrong, but this instrumentalized need for non-contradiction also results in a decided hostility to art and culture. But for now I will leave it there. And return to this notion of de-symbolization. Or/and the loss of rituals. I think as a general statement both are true. But also that there were and are other forces besides CIA worrying about student leftists and their syllabi.

“Today, the permanently operating domains of communication and of the production and circulation of information penetrate everywhere. A temporal alignment of the individual with the functioning of markets, two centuries in developing, has made irrelevant distinctions between work and non-work time, between public and private, between everyday life and organized institutional milieus. Under these conditions, the relentless financialization of previously autonomous spheres of social activity continues unchecked. Sleep is the only remaining barrier, the only enduring “natural condition” that capitalism cannot eliminate.”
Jonathan Crary (24/7)

I grew up as a young boy in the 50s. I remember a marked sense of a ‘new world’. There was a desire to leave the horrors of war behind and embrace the marketed promises of a bright Disneyland-like future. And already a sense of community and tradition was being lost. Even as a child I could sense it. There was an old Italian deli on Western Avenue in LA and I loved when my Dad would take me there. Sawdust on the floor, and the smell of five hundred hanging salamis and sides of Prosciutto. And cheeses behind the glass fronted cases. The owner gave me candies and remembered my name. It did not last past the turn to the 60s. Today the last vestiges of old school small restaurants, diners, and coffee shops are leaving LA. Several were around for over 100 years. This is partly the still lingering fallout from the pandemic protocals. The closing of the iconic Pantry diner downtown broke my heart. It also signalled, formally, an end. Of what I am not entirely sure. But an end nonetheless. Gone now. And teary farewells did nothing to stop the death blows. And this is part of psychic adjustment under capitalism. The inexorable falling of the ax on the neck of humanity. And that understanding that you, and others, cannot stop it. The ax will fall. This began seventy years ago and is now almost complete: the elimination of the heterogenous. Western society now proudly displays its literal and symbolic absences (speaking of symbolism).

“Television, as Raymond Williams and others showed, never simply involved choosing to watch discrete programs, but was a more promiscuous interface with a stream of luminous stimulation, albeit with diverse kinds of narrative content. The precise nature of the physiological attraction of television has yet to be specified, and may never be, but a huge amount of statistical and anecdotal evidence obviously has confirmed the truism that it has potent addictive properties. However, television posed the unusual phenomenon of an addictiveness to something that failed to deliver the most basic reward of a habit-forming substance: that is, it provides not even a temporary heightened sense of well-being or pleasure, or a gratifying if brief fall into insensate numbness.”
Jonathan Crary (Ibid)

Now Crary makes another point but one which I think is not entirely correct. Much as the binge watching theory of Han was not quite correct.

“ One of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time. Now one of the attractions of current systems and products is their operating speed: it has become intolerable for there to be waiting time while something loads or connects.”
Jonathan Crary (Ibid)

One *does* day dream in front of the computer screen. I certainly do. And often I watch pulp dramas specifically TO daydream. Its one of the adjustments humans have made. If we don’t daydream at all we go absolutely pathologically insane. The appeal of speed, though, is true. Though I’m not sure that is something new, however. The scale has changed. I used to get impatient if the librarian took too long to bring my book from special collections. Today I get impatient if my browser takes too many seconds to load. I think we absolutely do daydream, and even do it in a very similar way. I do not think that is the problem. The problem lies more in the ways children are affected (and targeted). The robbing of childhood daydreaming is one of the most harmful aspects of both tech today, but also of establishment beliefs in having to micro manage their children’s inner lives, as well as outer. And robbing children of idle daydreaming creates highly neurotic adults. Or worse.

“Perhaps the most consequential moment in the devaluation of dream occurred in the very last year of the nineteenth century, when Freud completed The Interpretation of Dreams. Here he famously designated dreaming as a cordoned-off arena of primitive irrationality: ‘What once dominated waking life while the mind was still young and incompetent seems now to have been banished into the night . . . Dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded’. { } …he widely held truism that all dreaming is the scrambled, disguised expression of a repressed wish is a colossal reduction of the multiplicity of dream experiences. The readiness of much of Western culture to accept the general outlines of such a thesis is merely evidence of the thoroughness with which the primacy of individual desire and want had penetrated and shaped bourgeois self-understandings by the early twentieth century. As Ernst Bloch and others have argued, the nature of wishes and drives has gone through enormous historical changes over the last 400 years. This is not even to address a much longer time frame during which the notion of “individual desires” may have been meaningless.”
Jonathan Crary (Ibid)

This is all true, although again, a pretty reductive take on Freud. And this is why Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is so important. For Marcuse senses just how complex and deep are Freud’s theories, but also understood the conflicted feelings that Freud felt in how he presented his theories. But largely Crary is right, and later writes:

“Over a century later, it is not difficult to see the irrelevance of some of Freud’s proposals. It is impossible now to conjure up an individual wish or desire so unavowable that it cannot be consciously acknowledged and vicariously gratified. Now, during waking hours, reality shows and websites indifferently detail every conceivable “prohibited” family romance or antagonism, while web pornography and violent gaming cater to any previously unmentionable desire. The unavowable now, in this milieu, is any wish for a collective overturning of omnipresent conditions of social isolation, economic injustice, and compulsory self-interestedness.”
Jonathan Crary (Ibid)

But you see this is not quite how repression works. The fact that one can find various unspeakable perversions on the internet only reinforces the truth of the basic Freudian formula. As much as I like Crary (and who’s work as an art critic is exemplary) his understanding of Freud is deeply flawed.

Allow me here a lengthy quote from the above mentioned Marcuse: “The quest for the origin of repression leads back to the origin of instinctual repression, which occurs during early childhood. The superego is the heir of the Oedipus complex, and the repressive organization of sexuality is chiefly directed against its pregenital and perverse manifestations. Moreover, the “trauma of birth” releases the first expressions of the death instinct — the impulse to return to the Nirvana of the womb —and necessitates the subsequent controls of this impulse. It is in the child that the reality principle completes its work, with such thoroughness and severity that the mature individual’s behavior is hardly more than a repetitive pattern of childhood experiences and reactions. But the childhood experiences which become traumatic under the impact of reality are pre-individual, generic: with individual variations, the protracted dependence of the human infant, the Oedipus situation, and pregenital sexuality all belong to the genus man. Moreover, the unreasonable severity of the superego of the neurotic personality, the unconscious sense of guilt and the unconscious need for punishment, seem to be out of proportion with the actual “sinful” impulses of the individual; the perpetuation tion and (as we shall see) intensification of the sense of guilt throughout maturity “he excessively repressive organization of sexuality, cannot be adequately explained in terms of the still acute danger of individual impulses. Nor can the individual reactions to early traumata be adequately explained by “what the individual himself has experienced”; they deviate from individual experiences “in a way that would accord much better with their being reactions to genetic events” and in general they can be explained only “through such an influence The analysis of the mental structure of the personality is thus forced to regress behind early childhood, from the prehistory of the individual to that of the genus. In the personality, according to Otto Rank, there operates a “biological sense of guilt” which stands for the demands of the species. The moral principles “which the child imbibes from the persons responsible for its upbringing during the first years of its life “reflect” certain phylogenetic echoes of primitive man.”
Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization)

I would suggest reading Freud himself, read the Marcuse, and read Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia. Paul Ricœur’s book Freud and Philosophy, is also very good. In fact there are countless excellent books on psychoanalysis. But there are far more that trivialize and make reductive the majestic complexity of Freud’s vision. (also excellent is Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death).

“As psychology tears the ideological veil and traces the construction of the personality, it is led to dissolve the individual: his autonomous personality appears as the frozen manifestation of the general repression of mankind. Self-consciousness and reason, which have conquered and shaped the historical world, have done so in the image of repression, internal and external. They have worked as the agents of domination; the liberties which they have brought (and these are considerable) grew in the soil of enslavement and have retained the mark of their birth. These are the disturbing implications of Freud’s theory of the personality.”
Herbert Marcuse (Ibid)

And it is here that one starts to understand why Marx and Freud were actually naturally complimentary. As Marcuse notes “By “dissolving” the idea of the ego-personality into its primary components, psychology now bares the sub-individual and pre-individual factors which (largely unconscious to the ego) actually make the individual: it reveals the power of the universal in and over the individuals.”

The hyper individualism of late Capitalism, the insistence on a fairy tale of rugged individualism, is literally only that, a fairy tale. My own impression is that the establishment, the corporate decision makers, and certainly government offices like the state department and even the CIA and FBI, but perhaps more importantly the media corporation CEOs and random billionaire class, are more overtly concerned with ‘thinking’ itself, with critical and independent people than they are with threats from particular theories. They fear everything. They fear those who resist indoctrination. Non conformists. Conspiracy theorists (sic) not because they will reveal a secret conspiracy but because they have exhibited some kind of autonomy. So it is with other countries. An Iran is hated because it is defiantly independent (and has experience with American imperialism) and also because of that it stands in the way of Israeli/American expansionism in the region.

But the storylines of the Imperialist Empire are starting to unravel. And the latest tech innovations feel ever less new. Technology has hit a wall in terms of innovation. Thats not what marketing says, but its true. The focus on AI tends to prove this. AI is nothing, a mirage, a non thing. And while various rare earth minerals are highly sought after, the mining of them remains hugely difficult. Greenland is a nation of only 56 thousand people. That’s the size of a village in Europe. And it has very few miles of roads that link various parts of the country. The minerals (and gems and gold) can’t be mined. They cant be reached. Not to mention the insanely difficult conditions under which anything will be constructed. Roads? Well, its minus 30 or 40 through much of the year and often accompanied by high winds. The arctic is not hospitable. (I live two hundred miles from the arctic circle and I can tell you, as one heads north from where I am, in Norway, conditions get harsher with every passing kilometre). So while the marketing of technology is more intense than ever, the things tech ‘cant’ do seems to grow each year.

No part of Freudian theory has been as rejected as the phylogenic/anthropological part; the archaic heritage and pre-history of man. Partly this is because it is so beyond scientific verification, but also because it pulls the rug out from under the vanities of bourgeois society.

“If the hypothesis defies common sense, it claims, in its defiance, a truth which common sense has been trained to forget.”
Herbert Marcuse (Ibid)

“It is a reasonable surmise that after the killing of the father a time followed when the brothers quarrelled among themselves for the succession, which each of them wanted to obtain for himself alone. They came to see that these fights were as dangerous as they were futile. This hard-won understanding — as well as the memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together and the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile — led at last to a union among them, a sort of social contract. Thus there came into being the first form of a social organization accompanied by a renunciation of instinctual gratification; recognition of mutual obligations; institutions declared sacred, which could not be broken — in short, the beginnings of morality and law”.
Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism)

This is the Freud that Lacan was drawn to. Perhaps paradoxically. It is also derided as unscientific by many on both right and left. One might ponder why. As Marcuse notes, freedom is only achieved by liberation. The narrative of Freudian anthropology is more complex than I am describing here. Guilt, for example, occurs often from uncommitted aggression. Kill the father or don’t, you inherit guilt anyway. Ambivalence is the price of instinctual conflict (Eros and the Death drive). And ambivalence is a profoundly complex topic. And a critical part of the Freudian economy.

“The crime is re-enacted in the conflict of the old and new generation, in revolt and rebellion against established authority — and in subsequent repentance: in the restoration and glorification of authority. In explaining this strange perpetual recurrence, Freud suggested the hypothesis of the return of the repressed, which he illustrated by the psychology of religion.”
Herbert Marcuse (Ibid)

There is another topic, well, several, related to this thesis. One is the allegorical reading of Judaism and Christianity, of Jesus the Son, and envy of the older religion of the Jews, of anxiety linked to circumcision and castration –Jesus the Redeemer etc… and it flies in the face of the Freud that wrote The Future of an Illusion (which Marcuse notes). But the Freud of Future of an Illusion is perhaps the weakest version of Freud, and as Marcuse again observes, the one that places him most closely to the dialectic of the Enlightenment. It was the Freud who longed for scientific validation.

Religion, at least Christianity in all its forms, no longer feels antagonistic to science. But here is required a note on the idea of ‘return of the repressed’, for I believe that Freud himself did not really grasp the entirety of an idea I think is probably, at least in essence, correct. When Freud suggests archaic memory traces or strengthening of the instincts etc, he is looking for the rational explanation. There is no rational explanation. But this is what tradition and ritual do, partly. So when Han speaks of a ritual and symbol poor society, he suggests a society in which the institutions and structures of organizing, with the ideologies and both base and superstructure, that in differing ways, carry with them archaic repression, have lost this capacity, or who’s absence leaves men and women with the emptiness of our hollow present. Now, what does ‘return of the repressed’ exactly mean? It means that one has to make a poetic leap in a sense, and see that humans, the only living organisms with language, create stories. Stories create self. The theatre of the mind, too, which stages and then re-stages the primal crime — symbolically again — (or usually) and in the case of contemporary western society, carry narratives that reflect exchange values (Marx meets Freud) and class, privilege, and authority. The missing parent, the parental screen substitute, the weakened father. These stories are shaped by the world around now, that changes and whose changes are absorbed and digested over time by the structures and form of capitalism. As they once did by monarchy and court intrigues, so they do today by bureaucratic schemes and collusions, by the machinations of corporations and anonymous calculations. In fact I would argue today’s advanced capitalist society features anonymity as among its most salient features. Traverso noted that WW1 marked the first anonymous war, the first war in which one killed men one could not see. At a distance often. ‘That’ anonymity was transferred to civilian society, to the halls of bourgeois institutional impersonality.

And it is at this point, too, that it should be clear, I think, why a Heidegger with all this up-market blood and soil imagery, and with what is a clear fairy tale, literally, of the human which is only human when he/she stands in the openness of Being. Though sometimes you can substitute Dasein here. Its rather fluid, it seems. But one sees that this sort of quasi religious imaging is much more appealing than the Freudian where one looks at Patricide and guilt, at castration and the puberty rites of breaking parental chains of authority. In the fascist forest of cool glades and rivers, humble woodsmen, dwellers in the grottos, with muddy boots; there the human must open like a flower. Or something.

It is also why western interest in Eastern religions and disciplines grew exponentially after the second world war. The imagry and mileiu of the Zen temple or Buddhist monastery, viewed from a cultural outside, was experienced as less anxiety producing and less corrupted than the modern Christian church, at least Catholicism — in which the repressed forms and emotional symbolizing can be taken back to the Inquisition. It also felt less anonymous I suspect, and operative on a more personal scale. And it is interesting and worth writing about (I hope in a later blog post) the sense of what the unconscious and identity mean for Madhyamaka and Yogaˉcaˉra Buddhism.

In the U.S., the political legacy, emotionally and in turns of an idea like ‘return of the repressed’, carries the scars of genocide and slavery, the harsh punitive prohibitions of Puritanism and the ruthlessness that accompanies all settler colonial projects. The ethos of domination and exploitation. What the U.S. government did through policies such as Manifest Destiny is mirrored rather shockingly by the Zionist ‘Greater Israel’ plan ( which goes back at least to the 1960s and the Lema’an Eretz Yisrael HaSheleima, or Greater Israel Movement). The US needs Israel not only as a colonial ally in the region but it needs Israel to recreate the guilt and ambivalence of its own history. Return of the repressed.

“Even a casual observer of the current state of the arts and sciences is able to discern that humanism, both as a philosophical position and as a cultural attitude, is under suspicion. The project and language of humanism alike have fallen into disfavor and have become fashionable targets of critique.”
Calvin Schrag (Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity.1989)

This segues, sort of anyway, to this trend that suggests the human brain is a computer, or that AI can attain consciousness or sentience. The answer to both is obviously no. But the real question is why do such notions have such appeal?

John Haughland has a ridiculous book (but much reviewed and actually taken seriously)…I quote from the preface:

““AI” wants only the genuine article: machines with minds, in the full and literal sense. This is not science fiction, but real science, based on a theoretical conception as deep as it is daring: namely, we are, at root, computers ourselves. That idea–the idea that thinking and computing are radically the same–is the topic of this book. “
John Haughland (Artificial Intelligence)

Dennis Weiss, a professor at York College, has a nice essay debunking much of this stuff.

“Axiomatic to much of contemporary philosophy and AI is the belief in the efficacy of science, said to represent the epitome of human achievement. Cognitive science, Haugeland tells us, is the name of a field defined by an imminent “grand interdisciplinary
marriage” in which a number of enthusiasts have taken the vows. Indeed, in the opening paragraph Haugeland succeeds in literally conjoining philosophy and science (“philosophy/science”)—they become one, with philosophy being the better for the match.
Philosophy by itself is no match for science. After all, philosophers have made no progress in addressing these issues, despite having millenia to deal with them. AI, unlike philosophy, is “real science” and the standard according to which we should measure progress in addressing those questions that philosophers have made scant progress in answering is a scientific standard. What that standard may be and why it is the only relevant standard in this debate remains unclear.”
Dennis Weiss (Artificial Intelligence and the Return of the Repressed)

This also brings to mind the excellent Yarden Katz and his book Artificial Whiteness. For Katz is astute in understanding ´how deeply embedded is the ideology of white supremacism in AI. And to mind, Jonathan Beller and his essential The Message is Murder.

“I have tried to show that while AI claims to be devoted to the same problems that philosophers have dealt with for millenia, the question of our nature and place in the universe, and claims to have a great impact on our understanding of real people, we never do get to the subject at hand. The topic of human nature is left untouched, unexplicated. It remains the repressed in the discourse of AI.”
Dennis Weiss (Ibid)

But I think to fully understand the massive attempts at marketing AI as a societal game changer, one must go back to WW2 and the so called political Freudians, and then how the US government as well as Madison Avenue worked to change the culture surrounding US power and supremecy. For it is this insistence that fuels a lot of the absurdity of artificial intelligence’s claims. But also to understand the wilful ignorance regards Freud and his followers in many left circles. (I had yet another debate this week with someone who is strongly pro Losurdo but anti Freud and anti Reich and anti Adorno). And it is perhaps useful to look back at the that group in Berlin, close associates of Freud, prior to the rise of National Socialism. These figures, like Freud himself, saw psychoanalysis as a theory of civilization, with profound political implications, and not just as an individual clinical treatment.

I would urge people to read Russell Jacoby’s other book on psychoanalysis, The Repression of Psychoanalysis. But today, the seemingly obsessive need to promote AI and various other ‘new’ technologies are panaceas to the obvious widespread misery of the populations of the West, has to be seen as an updated version of the psychoanalytic theories of fascism mid century.

“Since the nineteenth century antisemitism had served as an effective tactic of re-directing and deflecting revolutionary affects and energies, for Fenichel it thus bound with the historical emergence of the politically conscious working classes. Construing Jews as objects of hostility and disgust ‘resolved’ and channelled elsewhere the psychic tensions of the proletariat. In this account, the working classes were positioned in a dual and paradoxical relation to political authority: they simultaneously sought to rebel against those who held power and desired to obey. As a ‘condensation of [these] most contradictory tendencies’, antisemitism channelled the proletarian urge to ‘rebel […] against the authorities’, as well as offered an opportunity for a ‘cruel suppression and punishment of this instinctual rebellion, […] directed against oneself’ (Fennichel 1940). There is thus a link between the mass antisemitic sentiments and the fear and terror experienced by the subject at their own ‘rebellious drives.”
Magdalena Zolkos (The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism: Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’)

The early psychoanalysts around Freud in Vienna tended to be deferential to the Master. Those in Berlin, which included Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein, Georg Simmel, and Karl Abraham, were overtly political and overtly —mostly —Marxist. In Vienna there was Jung and Ernst Jones, Heinz Hartman and Ernst Kris. There was overlap to be certain but the radical social conscience of psychoanalysis was found in the Berlin circle. The rage directed at Jews in Germany and Austria was really a rage against self by an alienated and hopeless working class, one that saw little to be optimistic about regards their children, or themselves. Reich was one who certainly began to see this reality as it extended into the future, and certainly found it in the US post WW2. A finding that would never allow his survival.

Jacoby transcribes an anecdote from Simmell’s notebooks, written during the Berlin years prior to WW2. On the grounds of the hospital at which Simmel was an intern, during a visit by Freud…

“Once while walking about the grounds of the Sanitarium we came to a place where a large police dog was chained. I knew him to be vicious and he was released only at night to watch the premises. I warned Freud not to go near him. “Please keep away from him Professor. He’s very vicious.” Freud gave me a gently admonishing smile, calmly stepped up to the dog and released him. And while the huge dog gratefully lept upon the fragile form of the Professor, who patted his newest follower, Freud said to me:“If you had been chained up all your life, you’d be vicious too.”
Russell Jacoby (The Repression of Psychoanalysis)

Earlier, in 1918, Freud delivered an address in Budapest.

“The necessities of our own existence limit our work to the well-to-do classes.” However “the poor man has just as much right to help for his mind.” For this reason Freud dreamed a “fantastic” idea which “belongs to the future” when “the conscience of the community will awake” and provide free psychoanalytic care.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

The Berlin institute set up free mental health care for the poor and working classes. Jacoby notes “Later, in language never again used by establishment psychoanalysis, Eitingon bemoaned the decline of ‘’authentic proletarian elements” and the rise of bourgeois intellectuals among Institute patients.”

It is here that one should remember the United States and Operation Paperclip. The US needed National Socialism just as it needs Zionism.

“Loewenstein suggests that European nation-states had not changed or done away with that ‘ambivalence’, but, rather, inherited and incorporated it within nineteenth-century minority politics. This further sheds light on a controversial point in Christians and Jews, which is that its use of the term ‘anti-Christianism’ to characterize the collective fantasies galvanized by German fascism and elucidate their importance in relation to its persecutory and exterminatory rhetoric and practices. German fascism disturbed the historical ‘equilibrium’ (or ‘ambivalence’) that had characterized attitudes to the Jewish minorities. Jews were attacked as Jews, but also as Christianity’s ‘double’ to ‘root out […] from the German mind any attachments or preoccupations which did not exclusively serve the interests [of the fascist state]’ and eliminate ‘ethical principles [of] the superego’ by subordinating morality to state interest.”
Magdalena Zolkos (Ibid)

This is going to have to be part one of a long posting. There is very much more to say on the return of the repressed idea, and how one can see the reactionary elements in much of the left today, the confused state of the bourgeoisie and the growing misery of the public overall. The growing self victimization and need to shed the untreated guilt, societally, in the West, all speaks to

Zolkos quotes from Simmel’s 1946 paper Antisemitism and Mass Psychopathology:

“Whereas at the collective level, antisemitism corresponds to what Gustave Le Bon called ‘crowd-mindedness’ of modern individuals (2006 [1896]), at the level of individual psyche, it exemplifies the broader discriminatory and aggressive tendencies that manifest in modern society. Simmel calls it an ‘infantile regression’ to the oral stage (1946), which in psychoanalytic theory is associated with the desire for violent incorporation of the other (biting, devouring, etc.). This ‘pathological symptom formation’ enables the return of the subjugated, repressed and sublimated aggressive instincts (Simmel 1946). By placing European fascism at the interstices of the research into modern mass psychology and the psychoanalytic discourse of ego regression, Simmel depicts that the nexus of fascism and anti-Semitism as a psycho-social shift from the ‘inner ego-superego conflict’ to the ‘outer ego-object conflict’ (1946). In result, the text carefully traces the quotidian and socially normalized expressions of antisemitism, including prejudicial or stereotyping language, which for Simmel is continuous with acts of violence. Whether ‘ideational aggression’, or what Simmel also calls ‘a pogrom of words’, turns into ‘physical aggression’, or ‘a pogrom of actions’, is a matter of power constellations, and not two distinct phenomena.”
Magdalena Zolkos (Ibid)

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