Limitless

Thursday, January 5, 2012 7:42 AM Posted by nagual1985

1





Marxian Rating:





On the gradual formation of thoughts in film
By Gabriel Tupinambá
Introduction


Limitless tells the story of Eddie, a failed writer who stumbles across an unknown drug designed to boost one’s intelligence. By secretly using these pills, Eddie is welcomed to the life he always wanted: he writes a long overdue book in three days, makes a ton of money in the stock market in less than a month, and, soon enough, he is consulting for Carl Van Loon, a Wall Street magnate who hires him to overview a multi-million dollar company merger.
On the other hand, the drug quickly starts to show its side-effects: Eddie begins to experience strange black-outs - becoming the suspect of a model’s murder even though he does not remember anything of it - and ends up getting involved with Gennady, a loan shark who discovers Eddie’s secret and wants to use the drug’s power to become a mastermind criminal.
In the end, Eddie manages to kill Gennady and to avoid being blackmailed by Carl Von Loon - who by now knows of the existence of the “smart pills”. Using his great intelligence, he hires a laboratory to synthesize his own perfected version of the pill, which allows him to keep the knowledge and skills he acquired even after the effects of the drug wear off. Rich, intelligent, and with his enemies out of the way: the movie ends with Eddie running for Senate - he plans to be president of the United States.
The first question to ask, of course, is the following: what about this storyline or the character of Eddie is properly “limitless”?
It is clear that the movie title is supposed to name the unending possibilities opened by the drug - yet another premise built upon the notion that our stupidity is neurological rather than ethical. However, what is conveyed by the film is not so much an unlimited opening as the crude limits of Hollywood’s imagination. Just as in the recent Green Lantern (2011) movie - in which the hero’s super power is to be able to materialize anything that he thinks of - Limitless reveals on screen a fundamental impasse: the only way to show how thought produces novelty is to engage with actual thought. There is no possible feigning of thinking, for this fake semblance is already a by product of how thinking takes place in every day life. Because of this, films which deal with the power of thought end up touching on a symptomatic point of the relation between the boundless ocean of possibilities that we are promised today and our utter impossibility to think beyond the most basic rules of the ordinary. This is why Limitless produces the most repetitive conclusion (the best thing is to be president of USA) out of the most general promise of innovation (a pill that allows you to think the best thing to do) - and why the Green Lantern, when given ultimate power to materialize thoughts, is unable to think anything other than a (slightly bigger) machine gun.
What we would like to propose - after a rather long detour through Badiou, detective stories and Karate Kid - is that the crucial problem in the way cinema portrays thought is that of the distinction between information and knowledge - and ultimately, between what is demanded of us and what we desire. And though Hollywood is more than willing to feed the fantasy that intelligence is the product of data gathering and fast-processing - in other words, the final goal of an asymptotic, encyclopedic approximation - its repetitive failure to produce a film about thought that itself thinks offers us the opportunity and the concrete material to investigate how this very failure can help us to locate the proper place of thought of and within cinema.

Some preliminary remarks on the production of truths in cinema
Alain Badiou defines cinema as an impure art. In The False Movements of Cinema, the philosopher locates it as the “‘plus-one’ of the arts, both parasitic and inconsistent” (in Handbook of Inaesthetics, p.83). Cinema is parasitic because it inherently relies on other art forms (theatre, painting, music, etc.), and it is inconsistent because the cinematic art is not founded on what is presented on the screen (images, sounds, etc), but on how these elements are “unpresented” (HI, p.78) - that is, how they are placed at the service of the editing cuts, which both separate and bind them together.
This constitutive impurity introduces cinema, at its very root, into the problematics of the vulgar and the non-artistic. Consider, for example, the distribution of judgements in movies regarding the artistic and the entertaining: to say that a film is “artistic” is, first of all, not a tautology, and, furthermore, it is probably a deprecatory remark (either about the movie or about whoever is saying it). On the other hand, if we say the same thing of painting or a sculpture, it is clear that we are on very different territory. According to the logic of the contemporary art world - with which cinema has only a parasitic relation - the word ‘art’ assigns only four possible destinies to an element. A painted canvas, for example: it is either (a) art; or, if it is not, it can only be (b) an amateur work, (c) a piece of marketing (“graphic design”), or (d) a redefinition of what art is. In other words, vulgarity is something a painting falls back on (in order to retain some value as future art (b), “applied” art (c) or new art (d)), and not something it raises out of. As a last example, just think of the difference between the painting of a movie scene, and a movie sequence based on a painting: while the first is supposed to elevate the movie to a new artistic dignity, we all expect the movie to make the original art work more entertaining.
Because it produces a new relation between the pure and the impure - the artistic and the non-artistic - the “parasitic and inconsistent” status of the cinematic art form also asserts a new logic for the production of its truths. Otherwise put: because a film is not in contradiction with its own vulgarity - like a painting or a symphony would be - the greatness of cinema cannot be thought of in terms of the purification of its idea. Fortunately, outside the domain of instructed opinion - instructed specially on how to pass opinions for serious thought -, the attempt to grasp the cinematic form against the background of classical (or post-modern) art has already been abandoned. But rather unfortunately, this abandonment has in fact turned into an almost unanimous agreement amongst the general public that there is no other logic at play in cinema than that of being good or bad entertainment. Thus, while the opinion of the aristocracy is that cinema shares with other contemporary art forms the vocation to its own purification - an ideal whose model is, no wonder, the meaningless purity of the one dollar bill -, the opinion of the masses (if we can use such a term to denominate the ‘general public’) is that the vocation of cinema is that of its total vulgarization - an ideal whose model is the easy-to-consume commodity. A tensionless opposition, of course.
However, Badiou’s affirmation that cinema is constitutively impure does not lead to this self-perpetuating pair. On the contrary, he maintains that two radical conclusions follow from this claim:
1. “[cinema’s] force as a contemporary art lies precisely in turning (...) the impurity of every idea into an idea in its own right” (HI, p.83)
2. “cinema is a ‘mass art’” (from Cinema as a Democratic Emblem, p.1)
The first statement proposes a short-circuit between the pure and the impure in cinema: the ordinary dimension of the movie - the baseness of its themes and appeal, as well as its vulgarization of other art forms - is not an obstacle to the cinematic idea, for the object of cinema is nothing but the way an idea is always partially caught up in the ordinary - what Badiou calls the law of the situation. Therefore, cinema is not a “failed” art, but an art of failure: the split between the situation and the idea is the very material of its thinking.
The second formulation puts forward another short-circuit, evoking a conjunction of that which is for everyone and that which is strictly singular, whose philosophical import is summarized by Badiou under the name of a “paradoxical relation”:
“In “mass art” we have the paradoxical relation between a pure democratic element (on the side of irruption and evental energy) and an aristocratic element (on the side of individual education, of differential locations of taste).” (CDE, p.2)
It is precisely by giving body to the tension between evental power of an idea - the irruption of what belongs to generic humanity - and the locality of tastes - the negotiation of bodies and languages - that cinema becomes an object of interest for philosophy. The idea of the impure, once we recognize its philosophical dignity, becomes the very means through which one can think the conjunction of the democratic dimension of audiences and the aristocratic unfolding of the arts:
“The simple form of the paradoxical relation: the first great art which is mass in its essence appears and develops in a time which is the time of the avant-gardes. The derived form: cinema imposes impracticable relations between aristocracy and democracy, between invention and familiarity, between novelty and general taste. It is for this reason that philosophy takes an interest in cinema. Because it imposes a vast and obscure complex of paradoxical relations. “To think cinema” comes down to forcing the relation, to arranging the concepts which, under the constraint of real films, shift the established rules of the connection. (CDE, p.2)
To conclude this short presentation, we would like to point out that there is yet another side to the conjunction of these two statements. We have already seen that to tarry with the impurity of cinema in order to think the idea of impurity itself - specially in terms of the conjunction of the democratic and the aristocratic - is to elevate cinema to an idea worthy of philosophical investigation. But here we would like to we propose an additional definition: to allow this thought to shed a light on the law of the ordinary - on the ordination of a world - is to engage in ideology critique.
The first is the question of the thought of cinema, the latter, the question of thought in cinema.

Thinking, in movies
Cinema relies on certain mechanisms to portray thought on screen, and the genre of detective stories is particularly helpful in isolating these cinematic devices. Let us consider the two most basic of them:
- narration: the detective narrates his own thoughts non-diegetically (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diegesis) - a form most commonly associated with film noir and Cartesian investigations.
- interlocution: the detective discusses his reasoning with a side-kick or presents his conclusions to a stunned gathering - a form most commonly associated with Sherlock Holmes and the Platonic dialogues.
What these two devices have in common is that, in both of them, thought appears as a certain handling of the split between the actions portrayed and the character’s speech (in the case of Descartes and Plato, this distinction is reduced to its minimal dimension, between words and the action of thought itself).
In the first case, we have the superposition of the image of the detective smoking a cigarette in the rain and the narration, usually in his own voice, telling us that he is suspicious of the beautiful woman who just hired him. Something similar is at stake in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, in which we follow the Cartesian subject investigation of the grounds for certainty through Descartes’ narration - in ways which sometimes come dangerously close to the film noir, when, for example, at the end of the first meditation, Descartes becomes suspicious of the beautiful God who seems as malevolent and capricious as a femme fatale...
In the second case, rather than relying on the distinction between diegetical action and non-diegetical narration, the split between the two becomes the suspension of sense within the plot itself: the detective seems sometimes slightly lost, his actions are incomprehensible - until he reveals to us their purpose and the thought-process guiding them. We can better understand now the function of the side-kick - from Watson to Robin - and of the famous final scene of a gathering of policemen and possible suspects: they set the stage for the retroactive precipitation of the detective’s thought into the otherwise senseless scene of his wanderings. In fact, when we consider this simple structure, the naive explanation as to why so many detectives have doctors for side-kicks (or are doctors themselves) - which is that of recognizing the historical basis of the modern detective, the mixture of keen observation and analytical thinking, in the birth of modern medicine and clinic of symptoms - can be supplemented by a more synchronous one: just as the side-kick allows for the detective’s speech to reflect the thoughts suspended between his previous actions and his current conclusions, his medical gaze ties them back to the detective’s body, as a sort of displaced pineal gland.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that, in the case of this particular cinematic device, our lack of understanding of the detective’s actions becomes, once his reasonings is revealed, a confirmation of his superior intelligence. In fact, the detectives who are defined by their intelligence are normally portrayed according to this second method, while movies with detectives whose defining trait is being “street smart” normally recur to superposed narration.
Detective stories also allow us to identify certain crucial distinctions between cinema and literature, as well as to exemplify what Badiou means by cinema’s impure parasitizing of other art forms. The detective genre is, first and foremost, a literary one: from Edgar Alan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, through Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes up to Chandler’s Marlowe - the written text has woven through its detectives an investigation of the process of thought and of the production of knowledge. It is here that we first encounter the methods of narration and interlocution, though we cannot define them, as we did above, according to the tension between (the image of) senseless actions and enlightening (sounding) words.
The first problem is, then, how to create this gap when the words which designate the interior and the exterior are made of the same material. What is guaranteed in cinema by the irreducible division between image and sound, is kept functional in literature only through the craft of the writer - his artistic merits being converted into a mere ‘fact of structure’ in cinema. The relation between the past and the present tense, the declinations of the “he didn’t know”, “little did he know”, “it was him all along”, the structural disposition of characters, etc. are the material at the author’s disposal, the tools available to accomplish what, in cinema, is practically a given. We only have to consider how cinema did away with the narration from the standpoint of the side-kick - a fundamental tool in classic detective stories, such as Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s The Murders at Rue Morgue - to see that certain mechanisms of storytelling simply lose their relevance when the form guarantees the separation between image and sounds.
Because the cinematic form starts off from the split which the literary form struggles to construct, movies allow us to isolate more easily another dimension of this problem, which is at the cause of both methods we described above: the matter of the scene of thought. At stake here is the further comprehension of what takes place in this suspended, hidden scene which is marked on the screen as the interval between the detective’s silent observations at the crime scene and his final speech, or between his impassive cigarette smoking and the voice which tells us about his smokey suspicions. Between these two moments or instances, there is a negative dimension which is retroactively filled by the supposition that thought has taken place.
How can we refine our grasp of this other scene, whose absence mediates the working through of the material clues and the production of knowledge?

Learning, in movies
In a very rudimentary sense, the enactment of learning is the inverse of the staging of thought in cinema. If detective stories rely on the suspension between action and speech in order to locate the brilliancy of a given character, movies which portray learning - from Karate Kid (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087538/) to Finding Forrester (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181536/) - must slowly construct this negative place through the composition of actions and dialogs.
The minimal distinction between these two structures can be exemplified with a simple comparison. In the detective story, there is a re-doubling of the thinker’s actions: at first they seem incomprehensible, and then, after the final conclusion, we realize how the incomprehensible character of the scene actually implied that the detective’s superior reasoning was always present. If we now consider the classic “wax-on, wax-off” scene from Karate Kid (1984), we see a similar redoubling functioning in a different way: at first, the work of the student is meaningless - it marks that he does not know what his master knows - and then, after his training, the student repeats the same mindless actions as the knowledge that he previously did not know - “wax-on, wax-off” is no longer the name of a technique of polishing surfaces, but a martial arts move. The interval between the two actions is not supposed to mark the place of an already pre-existing ability - the detective’s intelligence - but the place where the senseless, repetitive work acceded to knowledge.
This comparison allows us to think another common characteristic of films which focus on the process of learning: they tend to reduce intellectual education to the repetition of the body. The reason for this tendency is almost too evident: in order to stage the movement of elaboration that is proper of thought - for example, the enactment of how someone learns how to draw - it is required that something of this thought be actually worked through - that is, that the actual knowledge of how to draw and paint be presented in the film, which, in turn, relies not so much on the characters, but on the actual cast, crew and production of the movie and on what is available in our concrete network of social relations in terms of that knowledge. In fact, in its generalized form, this invariance has a structuring function in cinema: nothing in a movie scene is co-extensive with the world, but there is something which pierces through the movie scene in the same way that it pierces through the world.
Whatever that is - let us linger in the unnamed for while - it makes its effects clearly felt when we see an actor playing a great painter, who is on the brink of creating a new masterpiece, and the painting that is shown to us on screen is something completely vacuous and ordinary. Here, no argument as to the “make believe” dimension of cinema will keep us from recognizing that the bad painting presented in the film is a bad painting in a movie as much as in an art gallery (though we are more and more accustomed to the opposite movement). This is because the "reference point" of art was never the world to begin with, but something else, which is equally removed from the world as from the staged scene. To portray someone who learns how to paint - or who innovates in the scientific realm, for example - is to bring into the movie a dimension which cuts across fictions and facts alike, for a painting remains subjected to the same apprehension, wherever it is presented. This is, we might say, the other side of cinema’s impurity: that which it strives to substitute - and therefore to vulgarize - nevertheless has its purity caught on screen.
However, movies in which learning take place in the context of martial arts, sports, or military discipline are not necessarily haunted by this other dimension. A montage sequence in which we see the character training, repeating the same movements until he finally gets it right, etc, already convenes the true dimension of effort at stake. The repetition of the body marks the asymptotic “shaping” of a new skill, which is why the montage of different moments of the character’s training does not make us think that something happened in between the shots we are seeing. For example, we are free to imagine what Rocky was doing between the shots which show him punching a sandbag at the gym and the ones where he is running up the museum’s stairs, for all that remains unseen between the two is the further specification of the "curve of learning" that we have already grasped. The fact that cinema relies almost exclusively on the thematics of shaping or conditioning of the body to portray what it is to learn can be further exemplified by the most common strategy used to present the completion of the hero’s apprenticeship: when the student is finally ready, his final challenge is to “let go” of everything he thinks he learned. Ultimately, in today's ideology, to learn is to learn to do without thinking - it is the body who is supposed to know.
We have seen how detective stories can help us circumscribe the place where most movies allocate the scene of thought - in the suspended, and only retroactively filled, gap between the senselessness of certain actions and their later clarification - and we have briefly touched upon the problem which arises when a movie needs to construct this place step by step, so as to portray how a person starts to think about something that he or she could not think before, without reducing this construction to the continuous perfecting of a body.
Let us now examine how these two dimensions come together in the case of Limitless, and what that says about what we think of thought today.

Limitless
We mentioned at the beginning of this review the basic plot line of the movie - how Eddie takes a pill that makes him smarter and the story that follows from this - and we also delineated the basic problem that this story renders apparent - the promise of limitless thought being undermined by what the movie itself is able to think.
An interesting scene to consider, in light of what we have developed above, is when Eddie first takes a pill and experiences its transformation. The first effect is that the world gains color and depth - in fact, if we consider the opening scene, in which the camera zooms in concatenating colorful scenes of the city at night, it is clear that this depth is connected to a sense of constantly moving forward and into, as if there is no looking back, no escape but to go on. This association between perpetual depth and thought is already problematic given what we developed as to the retroactive effect of speech on the gap left open by thought: if there is no going back, if every intellectual move is the optimal way of moving forward (and not of understanding what took place), then a certain similarity to the training of a body is already in place. Once the colorful and bottomless world reveals itself, Eddie realizes that he can now remember things that he only saw once, in passing, a long time ago, and he is also able to connect these "quantum" of memory in an increased speed. Thinking is then indistinguishable from the permutation of the data gathered by memories, according to the (invisible) rules which govern what would be their optimal combination.
This conception of intelligence is articulated in a similar way in another movie - The Matrix - though the "pill" plays here a different role. More than once, the characters within the matrix ask someone outside the system to "download" the knowledge of how to kung-fu or how to pilot a helicopter into their virtual versions. The crucial point being that, though the body outside the matrix is sufficiently connected with the virtual version inside the system so that it can actually die out of "virtual" causes, nevertheless what is learned within the matrix in terms of "downloaded knowledge" is not maintained when the characters unplug. The same thing happens with Eddie: all the things he knows when he takes the pill disappear from his thoughts when the effect wears off. The question, in both cases, is: what is learning if the characters themselves can only access the acquired knowledge within the matrix and within the effects of the pill? We are either in a Cartesian, Malebranchian or Spinozist universe, where the res cogitans is totally disjunct from the res extensa: the first can undergo change without consequences for the latter. But we are also in La Mettrie’s universe, for the res cogitans has the same structure as the res extensa: the division between thought and the body becomes the division between two sorts of bodies.
This is why it is quite curious that, while Neo becomes the One precisely by recognizing the disjunction between the laws of the matrix and the laws of his own insertion in it (i.e. laws of thought), this purely virtual scene in which the true action takes place is nevertheless modeled after the body. If we think about it for a second, once Neo has access to the "code", there is no reason why his battles should be fought with punches rather than on the level of thought (direct articulation of code lines, bypassing the martial arts representation of his struggle). Ultimately, just like in Eddie's case, the pill which sets Neo’s mind free only does so by offering a spectacle whose main function is to further obscure the irreducible dimension of what is to think.
This is also why the problem of experience takes a reduced and strategic function in the process of learning: the time that takes for Neo to become a great kung fu fighter is determined only by the time that it takes for him to let go of what he thought he knew. Similarly, the time that it takes Eddie to learn how to use his recently-acquired capacity for remembering everything and combining everything is determined only by the time it takes him to realize that he must include into his calculations the greed and personal interest of his peers (the character of Carl Van Loon reproaches Eddie at some point for having intelligence without experience - experience meaning "not having had to deal with an ex-wife"). In both cases, the issue of what is learned in a purely intellectual way finds its crucial and final condition on the letting go of the idea that thought cannot be reduced to the body (either as not-thought or as the thought of the necessities of survival).
We are now in position to address a fundamental impasse: the fact that movies about learning and movies based on the intelligence of the main character rarely deal with the problem of transmitting knowledge. A movie in which a student becomes a master will rarely, if ever, show the new master teaching a new student, for that would require us to re-inscribe the new master’s previous apprenticeship back into the problematics of the supposition of thought - to teach “wax-in, wax-off” to someone else, it is not enough to have let go of one’s thoughts. Similarly, while a great detective might be capable of solving several cases with the help of his side-kick, it is unlikely that he should actually teach his ability to him, so that the side-kick too could train his deductive powers. The problem here is that - as Jacques Rancière tirelessly remarks - transmission of knowledge departs from equality, it does not seek to arrive at it, and the conjunction of thought and equality breaks away with the idea that education can be reduced to something like the training of a body.
This impasse is evidently present in Limitless - it is what prevents different characters from finding out they have more in common than they would care to imagine: while Eddie suddenly wanted to change his life and become president of the USA, Gennady remained basically the same crook only with a better vocabulary and some new clothes and Eddie’s ex-wife just read a book “and understood it”. The pill makes Eddie smarter than the others because he was already inherently more prone to it than they were, the pill revealed his potential, it did not add anything. This impasse is further confirmed at the end of the movie: as we watch Eddie dismiss Van Loom’s black mail and continue his very successful campaign for Senate, it is quite evident that it is not in Eddie’s political plans to offer universal healthcare so everyone can have access to the pill.
Ultimately, the strict relation between thought and equality is substituted by the identity between knowledge and opportunity: it is not that thinking confronts us with what is common to all, but rather that by seizing what is common we can move ahead of others. The equality between thinkers is substituted by the equality between the things that are thought - this is the difference between knowledge and information: while the former requires work because the only guarantee of knowledge is that it implies a common ground between the knowers and so we must work to arrive at that grounding, the latter is already coded, carrying its own equality as its form, and promising to think in our place.
Detective movies and other movie genres which rely on the intelligence of their characters explore the potential of thought by keeping it in a suspense that is managed by the editing cuts and its consequences on the scenes which circumscribe it. What is particularly worrying about Limitless - and so many other recent film productions - is that the movie is interested in the suspended scene of thought only insofar as it can substitute the real of thought for the staging of more flexible bodies and more optimized languages - in other words, the current ideals which govern the maintenance of the world as it is.
Nothing is more in line, after all, with certain contemporary doxa than the idea that learning is not very different from the gathering of information - an idea shared by those who consider the internet the "revolution" of our times and those who, seeking a future revolution, rely on the identification of class awareness with dissemination of data. Just as in the case of Limitless, the exacerbated value of being intelligent is inversely proportional to the appearance of any trace of the question of the desire to know - the question which binds thought to its own inertia: not so much how much knowledge can one accumulate, but how much the learning of certain things is dependent on the courage to uphold thought's consequences.
Isn’t this precisely the reason why Neo’s knowledge of kung fu is discontinued between the inside and the outside of the matrix, while the consequences of the Oracle’s words cut indistinctly between the two? The former is a matter of information, the latter a matter of desire. More generally, this is why movies stumble when portraying thought: the idea that knowledge is a matter of gathering evidence and organizing the data in an optimal way consents to cinematic visibility, the problem arises when knowledge must be conceived against the background of what, were it to be known, would impose change upon the very principles which determined what is “optimal” and what is possible to know.
This problematics reflects back into the "in between" of the scene of thought the split which was first that of what is presented on screen (images and sound) and what is left in suspense. In fact, the question of the desire to know is the equivalent of showing a work of art on screen: that we only learn by working through all the reasons not to know, that we truly think only by learning not to confuse thought and the semblance of thought - this is thought at work, and it is the point where portraying thought on screen would be indistinguishable from the movie itself thinking.

Valkyre

Sunday, July 17, 2011 6:26 PM Posted by nagual1985

1





Marxian Rating:






From Scientology to Science of Logic
By Gabriel Tupinambá


The problem

As the bombs fall outside, shaking the foundations of his house and scaring his family to death, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg decides that the time has come: he must do something against this war and this government.

He arrives at the gathering of conspirators filled with purpose and courage. He has a plan. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg exclaims: “we have to kill Hitler.”

At this precise point, you think to yourself that Tom Cruise looks really good with an eye-patch.


The general form of the problem

Let us consider another example, designed to bring out the crucial question at stake in the scene above:

A movie has just began. In the very first scene, we see a line-up room of an american police station, in which different suspects, all looking somewhat alike, are standing against a wall, so that the witness of the crime can recognize which one of them is the culprit. We have no previous backstory to tell us which one will be picked - this, it seems, would be the film’s “first move” in the chess of the plot’s intrigue.

But there is something else: we recognize that one of the men standing against the wall is played by a famous actor.

Can we still consider the witness’ recognition of the culprit to be the first “decision point” of the story when, superimposed to this scene, there is another movement of recognition taking place - that of us, the audience, witnessing that a celebrity has chosen to act in this movie?


The problem in terms of representation and presentation

It is undeniable: there are two registers operating in the scene simultaneously. We could say that there is the scene being represented by the characters, and there are certain actors being presented to us.

These two dimensions are obviously not the same - but are they completely separate? That is: is our grasping of the film - or even, the film’s drama itself - not influenced by the presence of its illustrious actors?

Can we simply assign the sentence “we have to kill Hitler” to the character of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg when Tom Cruise wasn’t simply cast to play that part, like the other actors in that scene, but is a multi-millionaire celebrity who actually owned United Artists at that point, the studio which produced Valkyire?


A first answer

One of the most recurrent ways of mocking Hollywoodian action films is to remark that while everyone else is at the mercy of the plethora of bullets flying around, the hero always walks through the battlefield unharmed. How often have we not made ironic remarks when seeing the action hero running amidst explosions and all sort of artillery fire and then emerging out of the mayhem with his hair perfectly intact? “Hollywood films are so unrealistic”, we say. But what are we really saying with this expression?

A first way of understanding this complaint is to argue, as we mostly do, that the problem lies on the relation between characters: because a certain character occupies the position of the hero he is imbued with a super-human quality, while the others remain “mere” mortals. The reasons as to why the Hollywoodian hero has this bulletproof quality are then explained in the most diverse ways: ranging from theory of greek drama (this was somehow an heritage from the greek myths, with its powerful demi-Gods etc) to naive “leftism” (it is all part of a dark scheme to drive the viewer further away from the “real” world, bombarding us with stereotypes etc).

What all these first, spontaneous answers have in common is to attribute the unreality of the film to the unreality of representations. Representations are unreal, they can be manipulated into all sorts of things, and this is what gives them their seductive power. The greek scholar and the anti-totalitarian neo-liberal will agree on this: be it mythology or a political leader, it is precisely the unreality of representations that explains why these different realms exert such a powerful grip on men. The greek myths exaggerate “real life” events into parables, whose imaginative power “touches” and “moves” us deeply. In the same way, the charismatic political leader bombards us with propaganda, and blinded by the vision of an unrealistic better world, we become dangerously blind to his actual fascist plans.

In the same way, the Hollywoodian trait of endowing the action heroes with an unrealistic longevity - a characteristic also present in its great villains and monsters, which always return to scare us when we thought they were finally gone for good - seems to find its support solely on the interplay of representations in an “unrealistic” story.

But what about the problem we first posed? How to account for this other dimension which irrupts when we recognize the famous actor who cries out loud that he is going to kill Hitler?

Here, a friend of the greek scholar and the “lefty” might intervene: the media theorist. He will promptly remind us that Tom Cruise is in the newspapers and television programs all the time and, just like the charismatic political leader, who was inflated by representations into an overpowering entity, he too has become a representation, a character. So what happens in the situation mentioned above is that another representation is superimposed to the actual film. Its function, he will tells us, is to further enslave us: we are drawn to Tom Cruise, who takes advantage of the hero’s qualities to seduce us into recognizing his celebrity status, and we are even more drawn to the story of the movie, whose unreality is now attached to the representation of a celebrity, making it even more irresistible.

This answer might seem quite convincing in explaining the relation between the actor on the screen and the character he plays through the sole reference to representations, but in order to argue in this way, the media theorist must introduce another realm into play, that of a mysterious agency which controls and distorts the story from within, using both Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and Tom Cruise as means to articulate its alienating plot. We are left, then, in the dark when it comes to why such “unreal” representations affect us so much or to what is the relation between representations and those who we consider to be the agents who purposefully distort the stories.


Analysis of first answer

The perspective which answers to our question without the recourse to presentation - explaining Tom Cruise’s participation in terms of his celebrity status, and the Hollywoodian action hero through the unreality of representations - still requires the introduction of another dimension, that of meta-representation. The mythological, the neo-liberal and the media theorist will all account for the unreality of representations by referring to mythical, totalitarian and “mediatic” ideas interfering in the film’s plot, imbuing it with its dark, ideological overtones.

This configuration could be schematized as follows:



Presentation, in this scheme, could be minimally defined as being that which is “outside” of the representative structure of the movie: so, the movie theatre, the cleaning lady, the audience eating popcorn etc.

On the other hand, the realm of the story of the film, that of representation, is distorted, made “unrealistic”, by the pressure that is applied to it by the meta-structure of pre-conceived, ruling idealities, which inflict upon the film these fantastical prerogatives - such as the hero never dying - in order to re-affirm its own validity as meta-principles. Using Tom Cruise to play Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is another of these distorting and alienating measures, designed to guarantee our seduction by the film’s underlying thesis.

So we see that, while presentation and representation are separated as the outside from the inside, the meta-representational level appears as the “dark” inside, twisting representations from within, using them for the ends of power.

Another, maybe more fruitful way of presenting this scheme would be like this:


In which it becomes clear that the structure of presentation/representation/meta-representation is homologous to the structure of outside/inside/hidden core.

We cannot fail to see in this last triad the commonsensical understanding of what the Freudian doctrine supposedly is. Are we, after all, not tempted to call this meta-representational level the “unconscious” level? Given all that we have seen so far, we might even get some Foucaultians to agree with us, recalling Foucault’s preface to the english translation of The Anti-Oedipus, in which the philosopher warned us against “that in us that makes us love power”: there is an instance, hidden deep inside our representations of ourselves, which disrupt knowledge for the sake of power.

Unfortunately, if there is one thing that is wrong with all of this is that this is not the place of the unconscious for Freud: “The unconscious”, our Master has taught us, “is outside” (Lacan, Seminar 11, p.131).


A (complex) question that precedes the (simple) answer

To find another answer to our problem, we must begin by posing a new question: how is it possible to think the unconscious as being outside? We have just defined presentation as the outside of representation - a definition akin to that of the thing as being the outside of consciousness. How can the unconscious be on the side of the thing rather than on the in-side of consciousness? In Drive and its Vicissitudes Freud was faced with this precise question.

The pair inside/outside is enough to account for the economy of the pleasure principle - that is, the (never realized) principle of homeostatic balance of the psyche and the world: if there are stimuli from the outside, the inside reacts as to balance out those first inputs. Using the concepts of biology and physiology that were at his disposal back then, Freud traces a basic genesis of this fundamental polarity:

“Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living organism, as yet unorientated in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in a position to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one hand, it will be aware of stimuli which can be avoided by muscular action (flight); these it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will also be aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose character of constant pressure persists in spite of it; these stimuli are the signs of an internal world, the evidence of the drives. The perceptual substance of the living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular activity a basis for distinguishing between an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’.”

The infliction of outside pressure on the organism allows it to separate two different sources of stimulation. First, the outside source, which can be neutralized, for example, with muscular action: a strong light is pointed to one’s eyes and one reacts by closing it or turning away from the light to make the excessive stimulation go away. In regards to the duality between mind and body, the same would be valid, for a bodily need could be attended to in the same logic: we are thirsty, we drink water, the thirst goes away.

Up to this point, we are still within the schema presented above, accounting for the primary duality between inside and outside, or presentation (of stimuli) and representation (of what is being stimulated and which then reacts) through the postulate that “the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level, or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition”

But it is now that things get interesting.

The definition of an external source of stimulation is not the only thing which arose from this first split between psyche and world. Consciousness has also become “aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose character of constant pressure persists in spite of it”. There is the external stimulation, but there is also the stimulation that comes from the inside the psychic apparatus itself:

“We thus arrive at the essential nature of the drives in the first place by considering their main characteristics - their origin in sources of stimulation within the organism and their appearance as a constant force - and from this we deduce one of their further features, namely, that no actions of flight avail against them”

We can hear our three friends, the greek scholar, the neo-liberal and the media theorist all anticipating the development of the Freudian text and shouting: “the archetypal!”, “the primitive!”, “the will to death!” - for this internal, constant force would surely be located in that third place, of meta-representations or that “deeper inside”. But what does Freud go on to say here?

“The drive appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body.”

Rather than assigning the place of the drives to a deeper level of consciousness, Freud claims that the drive is a concept “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic” and further, that its origin is a “consequence of [the mind’s] connection with the body”. Rather than pointing to a third register, further removed from the outside, the dimension of the drive is grounded on the fact that, though the psyche is constituted in opposition to the world - an opposition sustains the “three fundamental polarities” which organize the pleasure principle: pleasure/displeasure; subject/object; inside/outside - it must be necessarily still grounded in the material realm.

To say that the unconscious is outside is then to affirm that the excesses and distortions of representations find their cause in the density of representations being fundamentally grounded on the material world as it is prior to being simply allocated “outside”. Because of this asymmetry, which requires representations to have some materiality, there is the unconscious.

We see, then, that the excess which disrupts the “normal” functioning of the psyche is not the product of a third instance that controls them from “behind the scenes” - it is a consequence of the irreducible material weight of representations themselves. Those who took Freud’s reference to biology in the literal sense, mistook it for the claim that the unconscious is neurological. But Lacan, who read Freud not literally, but to the letter, understood that the unconscious is a consequence of the fact that even the supposedly ethereal domain of ideas must partake on the material consequences of existing.

The Freudian discovery, therefore, is not of an unconscious realm - a third place hidden within us - but of an excess that disrupts the dualisms upon which the psyche is constituted. It is this fundamental insight which allowed Freud to analyze the fantasy-formations of hysterics, who desperately tried to elect a figure to whom they could assign the fault for these distortions of their inner life. From Freudian psychoanalysis, the “meta-representational” level is the very fantasmatic support created by a subject who, unable to account for this excessive character inherent to representations as such - produces solely because representations exist -, evokes a third realm which could take responsibility for her terrible destiny.

To return to our previous terminology: the distinction between presentation and representation is thus grounded on presentation itself - it is a thoroughly asymmetrical opposition. What does this entail for our little schematization?

Well, the crucial change is that the “deeper inside”, which we first posited at the most intimate core of representations, as a meta-level, must be now accounted for as a ground that partakes on the very materiality of the outside. As we quoted above, Freud finds the source of the drive, “in consequence of its connection with the body”, in the material support of the psyche.

If we take our first scheme, in a slightly simplified manner:


We see that our task is to schematize the paradoxical way in which the most intimate somehow partakes on the outside. Lacan coined a term for this: extimacy. We must, therefore, account for the "extimate” core of representations:

What we have to do is to add a third extrinsic dimension (a dimension that is not required for the figure to exist, but for us to visualize it) to our drawing, turning it into a torus, a topological figure which has precisely the property we are looking for, that of having an extimate center:


The attentive reader will quickly realize that the extimate core is just an empty place. All we have done is to take the meta-representational level and turn this register into a hole, which makes presentation overflow from within representation. But even this perspicuous reader might find it difficult to see what this insight can tell us about Tom Cruise and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.


A second answer

Let us propose a daring new answer to the question as to why the action hero doesn’t get hurt by the explosions: because the studio needs the film to have at least one hour and a half. Indeed. And not only the studio, but we, the audience, do too.

Would you be satisfied with a movie in which the hero dies twenty minutes into the plot? You would surely want your money back, and the cinema, the studio and everyone else wouldn’t want that. Rather than looking for a deeper, darker agency pulling the strings behind the scenes, let us try to realize that the core of the movie’s ideological structure is extimate to its representations: we, on our velvet chairs, with our popcorns, we are seating on top of it.

Trying to put to use the complex ‘toric’ schema that we constructed above, let us unfold this answer a bit further by assuming the following premise as our starting point: the distinction between the inside and the outside of the movie is asymmetrical, grounded on the outside itself, which then disrupts the realm of representations from within. There is no representation without its presentational support - or, in the case of movies: there is no film direction without film production.

To learn how to read together the elements which are confined to a given configuration (in this case, the representational realm) together with its excesses (its material support, always in excess to what is harmoniously articulated) is to move from the view of the whole to the grasping of totality. This is what Hegel has taught us, and which is encapsulated in his famous sentence from the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Das Wahre ist die Ganze” [Truth is the totality].

In the Science of Logic, Hegel addresses precisely the problem of shifting the perspective from the duality of inside/outside to that which considers the internal as grounded on the external:

“The first of the identities of inner and outer we have considered is the substrate which is indifferent to the difference of these determinations as to a form external to it, or, the identity as content. The second is the unmediated identity of their difference, the immediate conversion of each into its opposite, or the identity as pure form. But these two identities are only the sides of one totality; or, the totality itself is only the conversion of one into the other. The totality as substrate and content is this immediacy, which is reflected into itself, only through the presupposing reflection of form which sublates their difference and posits itself as indifferent identity, as a reflected unity, over against it. Or, the content is the form itself in so far as this determines itself as difference, making itself into one of its sides as externality, but into the other as an immediacy that is reflected into itself, or into inner.
(...)
What something is, therefore, it is wholly in its externality; its externality is its totality and equally is its unity reflected into itself. Its Appearance is not only reflection-into-an-other but reflection-into-self, and its externality is, therefore, the expression or utterance of what it is in itself; and since its content and form are thus utterly identical, it is, in and for itself, nothing but this, to express or manifest itself. It is the manifesting of its essence in such a manner that this essence consists simply and solely in being that which manifests itself.

The essential relation, in this identity of Appearance with the inner or with essence, has determined itself into actuality.” (Hegel, Science of Logic §1154-1157)

This means that we should not take for granted the fact that the film is actual - even if only in bits and pieces, just between the scattered “action!” and “cut!” of the director, even if only without all the special effects etc, the film we are seeing on the screen took place in the world and required the work of hundreds of skilled and unskilled workers and the investment sometimes of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This insight is an invitation for us to consider how much of what we acknowledge as important aspects of the plot, or as interesting details of the scene, was actually chosen on account of the material basis of production. This does not entail that we should let go of what we first assumed to be deep ideological motifs at play in the movie, but it does require us to understand that ideology as a substantial realm - the different invisible ideological formations alienating us through preconceived ideas that are being shoved down our throats etc - appears only after ideology as structure - that is, it appears only to cover up the fact that the instance that actually occupies this place “behind the scenes” is the concrete network of social relations, of which we are also a part.

In this sense, we would not have to disagree with our three friends - who are by now either confused or disappointed with our answer - but merely to point out that meta-representations are produced there where the representations can’t but touch upon the materiality of the world, in a short-circuit that threatens the inside/outside, pleasure/displeasure, subject/object dualities.

To prove this point, let us try to go down “the road not taken” and, rather than analyzing the way the audience perceives the film and its ideological vicissitudes, focus on a group of people to whom the belief in a clear-cut separation between presence and representation requires more complicated ideological acrobatics: the Hollywoodian actor.


Tom Cruise - a case study

The conclusion we have just arrived at - that the extimate core of the film’s representations is its very grounding on concrete social relations - allows us to meditate a bit on the consequences of having Tom Cruise and Claus von Stauffenberg declaring in unison that the time has come to kill Hitler.

So, instead of focusing on the consequences for the audience of having Tom Cruise as Colonel von Stauffenberg, let us consider the consequences for Tom Cruise himself of playing the brave Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. After all, even though Tom Cruise himself might not know this, the concrete network of social relations includes him as much as anyone in the audience of his movies.

A corollary of the statement that “the unconscious is outside” is that the determinations of the subject are not contained in the individual’s interiority, as some sort of hidden wealth, but are constituted above all by the things that he speaks and that are spoken to him. The intersubjective register in which representations dwell, determines the subject not because of what they mean but because of their materiality: for example, a subject can be determined by the signifier “rabbit”, as the name of how the Other recognized him in his early infancy, but this does not imply that he was determined as a “bunny”: the word sticks to him as a parasite, surviving and determining his choices precisely because it can take any meaning: “rabbit”, “habit” or daily ritual, “habit” of a priest, “rabbies” as in rage...From the statement “the unconscious is outside” it follows that words, like representations in general, have material consequences.

Now, what could be the consequences of an actor saying throughout his career things like “I must kill Hitler”, “I have to save the World”, “I will prevent the bomb from exploding” etc?

The immediate reproach to this question is, of course, that there are no consequences. The actor is payed, this is his work, no serious actor would confuse himself with the character he plays. And it is true: even in the analytical situation, in which nothing else matters other than the consequences of speech, it is the analyst’s payment which removes him from the circuit of signifying determinations. But even then, the analyst still can find himself caught up in the analysand’s speech in unexpected ways. This is why there is such a thing as analytical supervision.

Furthermore, the actor in question, as so many big Hollywoodian stars today, also produces his movies. In fact, he even owned the studio which financed the making of Valkyire. Can we still consider that the actor’s payment removes him from the itinerary of identifications ensued by the story when he has chosen the script, payed for its rights, and participated in the financing of the movie himself? Rather than functioning as “pawns” in the production, some Hollywoodian actors today are responsible for the very setting up of the stage and the the production of films that they themselves chose to be made. This brings the actor closer to the position of a regular guy who enacts (in a very expensive way) his favorite stories than to that of an actor which serves as the support for the plots which will say something to the audience about its own fantasies. Actually, in interviews Tom Cruise reveals that he made the movie happen because he thought this was a story that had to be told, because he always wanted to work with the director...and because he always wanted to kill Hitler.

So what could be the consequences of the words of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg for Tom Cruise?

The first thing we note is that two apparently unrelated phenomena emerged simultaneously: on one hand, more and more Hollywoodian actors began investing their huge paychecks back into the movie business, producing films and often acting in the films that they made viable. On the other hand, Scientology became a huge phenomena, supported specially by movie stars.

Scientology began with a sci-fi novel, by author L. Ron Hubbard, which gained a lot of popularity and developed - like other sci-fi stories, like Star Wars - some sort of cult atmosphere around its more faithful fans, facilitated specially by Hubbard’s own philosophical and religious ambitions regarding the content of his stories. With time, the cult remained, the fictional status faded away. Today Scientology is a Church with more than 25 000 adepts.

We are not interested here in any sort of polemics regarding such an irrelevant matter. What makes Scientology useful to us is simply the relation between its fundamental religious narrative and our case study.

After being a scientologist for some time, and going through several stages of spiritual enlightenment, one is finally granted access to the secret knowledge of Scientology’s cosmogony, something like their Old Testament. This information, of course, is now available online. This is an excerpt taken from an expository article from the L.A. Times:

“Shrouded in mystery and kept in locked cabinets at select church locations, the course is called Operating Thetan III, billed by the church as "the final secret of the catastrophe which laid waste to this sector of the galaxy." It is taught only to the most advanced church members, at fees ranging to $6,000.

Hubbard told his followers that while unlocking the secret, he "became very ill, almost lost this body and somehow or another brought it off and obtained the material and was able to live through it."

Here's what he said he learned:

Seventy-five million years ago a tyrant named Xenu (pronounced Zee-new) ruled the Galactic Confederation, an alliance of 76 planets, including Earth, then called Teegeeack.

To control overpopulation and solidify his power, Xenu instructed his loyal officers to capture beings of all shapes and sizes from the various planets, freeze them in a compound of alcohol and glycol and fly them by the billions to Earth in planes resembling DC-8s. Some of the beings were captured after they were duped into showing up for a phony tax investigation.

The beings were deposited or chained near 10 volcanoes scattered around the planet. After hydrogen bombs were dropped on them, their thetans were captured by Xenu's forces and implanted with sexual perversion, religion and other notions to obscure their memory of what Xenu had done.

Soon after, a revolt erupted. Xenu was imprisoned in a wire cage within a mountain, where he remains today.

But the damage was done.

During the last 75 million years, these implanted thetans have affixed themselves by the thousands to people on Earth. Called "body thetans," they overwhelm the main thetan who resides within a person, causing confusion and internal conflict.

In the Operating Thetan III course, Scientologists are taught to scan their bodies for "pressure points," indicating the presence of these bad thetans. Using techniques prescribed by Hubbard, church members make telepathic contact with these thetans and remind them of Xenu's treachery. With that, Hubbard said, the thetans detach themselves.” ( LA Times )

Let us not be deceived by the easy polemics. The crucial aspect at stake here is not that this is a delirious narrative, but what sort of delirious narrative it is and what purpose does it serve. The denunciation of the scandalous usually costs the grasping of totality, for it requires us to exclude ourselves from the field of what we see.

We have asked what could be the consequences for Tom Cruise of acting in War of the Worlds and so many other action films, specially when being payed no longer protects him from the material effects of the parts he represents. Doesn’t Scientology provide us with an answer?

In a time of such volatile “veracity”, when the difference between the tabloid and the film poster is reduced to not much more than that between a news headline and a movie title, is it such a preposterous hypothesis that Scientology might offer to the Hollywoodian actor a way to account for the surplus produced by the movie’s representations but which are in excess to its domain? Think of Will Smith: after having being “legend” and having the fate of mankind depending solely on him, how could he go back to meaninglessness, to a life without an interplanetary tyrant?

Our hypothesis is the following: the uncanny proximity between the action film storyline and the Scientology cosmogonical narrative is an example which confirms that the true locus of ideology is not to be searched for in the content of the film’s distortions, but in their very form. What is ideological about a movie is precisely the way it cannot but reflect within its representations the fundamental support it derives from the concrete network of social relations. Through the Hegelian concept of totality we can grasp Scientology as a symptom: it gives us the truth of Hollywood.

First of all, there is the film industry, which produces films. Then we arrive at the split between presentation of the film material and the representation of the story and their supposedly transparent separation. But given that this separation is fundamentally grounded on the process of production itself - which feeds of it to better sell its cultural products - presentation and representation cannot but have some uncanny intersection.

This “extimate” point - in which presentation produces representation, and where representation has consequences for presentation itself - is normally “neutralized” by money: one of the principle functions of money is to constitute the absolute separation between the realm of exchange-value and the realm of use-value, that is, the separation between the product of work as belonging to the representational realm, defined solely by the relational values of the commodity, and the product of work insofar as it directly a consequence of the labour of the worker.

Today, the obscene payment checks of Hollywoodian stars, as well as their newly-acquired positions in the production of films, threatens to overflow the separation between presentation and representation - after all, they are on the verge of beginning to produce and star movies about their own lives, since celebrities are the only people everyone seems to know. In this way, the Hollywoodian actor gets caught up in the intersection between the two realms: on one side, already noted by the media theorist, Valkyrie only gets made because the german colonel is Tom Cruise. But on the other side, still vastly unexplored, Tom Cruise makes the movie possible so that he can be the one saying and acting in a certain way, in a given situation of his interest.

The first aspect has no consequences other than the re-working of the film grammar, which now must also consider the expectations of the audience and their prior knowledge and investment in the actors. The second aspect has vast consequences, for it signals a certain re-configuration of the ideological field: maybe the difference between Wagner and Spielberg is that back in Wagner’s time, the aristocracy was seating in the audience, but now it demands a part in the opera itself. When we say that Scientology gives the truth of Hollywood what is at stake is precisely this shift: isn’t Scientology today a space-opera without a stage, or even, the very universalization of the stage? In a curious way, Scientology allows one to account for the intersection between presentation and representation not by further re-affirming their distinction, like money does, but by radically collapsing the two together. It names the excess of Hollywood itself.

And Tom Cruise’s newfound faith in the “thetans” is a perfect example of this: once the Hollywoodian star is in a position to stage his own ambitions on the big screen, to see himself fighting to achieve what every man dreams of having done - facing the terrible tyrant in order to save the world - there must be an instance which can regulate the actual, material consequences of being Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg on the film set.

The Church of Scientology is a new sort of institution whose function is to allow us to neutralize a certain excess which originates in the relation between the current modes of production and the representations that arise from it, the relation between ourselves as work force and as proprietors profiting from the exchange market. Indeed: there where even money fails to exempt us from recognizing ourselves in the consequences of our work, the deep, hidden secrets of other galaxies can come to our rescue.

What we find here is the operation of the passage from:

To:

That is, the creation of Xenu out of the disavowed materiality of representations.

Ultimately, we should realize that this intrusion of perverse fantasies - perverse because they are enacted by the subject, rather than simply fantasized - is fundamentally an operation of substitution. As we have said, it is money, and its own Xanu-like fantasies, which normally halts the recognition of oneself in the consequences of work - Scientology appears here as a substitutive formation in its place: this means, of course, that money must share some structural trait with the great Xanu. On this matter, we invite the reader to read Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour.


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