Valkyre

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

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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.


127 Hours

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 9:23 AM Posted by nagual1985

1


Marxian Rating:




What is to live?

By Gabriel Tupinambá



As we take note of the glaring infinity of details and particularities of what there is, we are invited to re-affirm the maxim that to savour existence is to live.


Life, we gather, is the opposite of death. And the more present death is - the more we are haunted by its spectre - the more we learn to appreciate “the little things in life”. Life, then, would be composed of little things.


It is under this maxim that 127 Hours (2010) is inscribed. Crowning the decadent career of the promising director Danny Boyle, who went from Trainspotting (1996) to Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in not much more than a decade, the film also serves the purpose of confirming that those who can only extend their critical discourses to the bemoaning of alienation end up being the ones who reformulate this same alienation and present it as a new-found freedom.


From the myriad of pop culture examples of this same trend of ‘critique of alienation’, think, for instance, of the band Radiohead: whatever little critical capacity was truly at work in the guise of a critique of suburban first-world life in their first albums it nevertheless later came to bloom into a reactionary plea for ecological awareness and “listen to your heart” choruses. The answer to the western man’s anguish would lie somewhere amongst the things in the world, brought about by a new way of looking at them.


So why is it that the “I choose not to choose” in Trainspotting leads to the apology of overcoming our obstacles in 127 Hours? How is it that from the senseless alienation of suburban England we arrived at the new-age eroto-teleology of “This rock was waiting for me, everything in my life led to this moment”?


Let us begin by acknowledging our Virgil.


The question ‘What is it to live?’ has been recently re-taken by our master Badiou in his monumental work Logics of Worlds. It is in his trail that we tread here as we adventure into the desert we are now used to call “peace”. This desert goes by the name of “democratic materialism”, and can be mapped in the following, simple badiouian axiom:


“there are only bodies and languages.” (BADIOU 2008: p.1)


Where ‘bodies’ must be defined as “that which exists in the world” and ‘languages’ as the name of the relations between bodies.


And it is curious that it is also with such an arid landscape as background that the protagonist of 127 Hours stages what is probably one of the the greatest apologies of this axiomatic principle to have ever been made into a film.


The film tells the story of Aron, a mountain climber who gets trapped under a boulder while exploring a Canyon, his weekend sport of choice. Utterly alone and without any food or water supply, with his arm being crushed by an enormous rock, Aron does his best to survive and to remove the huge stone - until the moment he realizes that he is only going to get out of there if he cuts his arm off.


The whole film takes place under the sign of looming death. Aron is alone, starving, thirsty, and in pain. He intercalates his attempts at releasing his arm from the rock with filming himself with a small video-camera, talking about his life and narrating what he is going through. In a way, we as spectators of his little videos are the equivalent to the famous “Wilson”, the volley ball in Cast Away (2000).


There - literally “an arm” away from death - the film finds the perfect reason to invite us without any remorse to wallow in the metamorphosis of needs into desires. At the brink of death, the desire to live is easily reducible to the necessity of surviving.


Aron’s thirst is met with an hallucination about the Gatorade® bottle that he left in his car, miles away from where he currently is trapped. Then, at the moment it becomes almost unbearable, another dream washes over his pain, that of a Coke® add. The ice-cold water drops running on the sides of the glass bottle, the bright colors and some kids jumping into a pool, just like in one of the many adds of soda that come out in the summer. Could anyone say that investing so much in a commodity is a ‘misplacement’ when it is done for the sake of staying alive?


At his most wretched, Aron slides his hand over the smooth stone walls of the cave where he is imprisoned, reaches the furthest he can with his foot to place his body under the warm light of the sun. None of this he does because he needs to survive - here we see his wretchedness lead him to discover a forgotten pleasure in the things he took for granted. And the same is done regarding human contact. The film begins by showing us many different images of crowds - which we will later find out to be images of Aron as well, but he was lost in the midst of all those people - so that, only afterwards, after having survived, does he learn to appreciate being around people, the pleasure of being together.


Let us return for a moment to the axiom we presented above. If “what there is” are ‘bodies and languages’ - elements and relations to and between elements - what regulates such relations? What could serve as a governing principle and thus assign value to certain relations between elements more than to others? If there are only languages and bodies, a law is a language - it cannot be above the tacit agreement of elements and relations - what could have the function of a Law, rather than of a particular law?


Badiou is very clear regarding the limits of the “democratic materialism”:


“democratic materialism does stipulate a global halting point for its multiform tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that aims to regulate all other languages and to govern all bodies will be called dictatorial and totalitarian.


What it then requires is not tolerance, but a ‘right of intervention’: legal, international, and, if needs be, military. Bodies will have to pay for their excesses of language.” (BADIOU 2008: p.2-3)


Or, as he puts it elsewhere:


“no principles should be advanced other than that proclaiming there are no principles” (BADIOU 2009: p.18)


The only overarching principle is that there is nothing which could take such a place - not without being the fascist election of a body (a “charismatic dictator”) or a language (a blinding “doctrine”) which would have been raised to a position that doesn’t belong to it. But, as one might notice, the statement itself - “there are only bodies and languages” - is none of the two. The proclamation that “there are no principles” does in effect take the place of a Law - that is, that “there can be no direct relation of submission to the Law” is still a valid Law according to the democratic materialism’s terms.


How then to present this Law without falling into contradiction with what the Law itself states?


Danny Boyle’s film answers this question with an effusive - maniac even - retort: Death!


Indeed, if Life is contained in existence - and existence is defined by our first badiouian axiom - the only name which can safely take the place of a Law without contradicting the axiom, without being neither a displaced body or language, is Death itself. It is against the background of everything ceasing to be that value can then be ascribed to certain configurations of elements and relations - to an individual’s otherwise meaningless personal taste in music, food, clothing brands, choice of lovers etc.


It is against the background of death that we can confuse existence - the things we exist by - with what can give meaning to life - that which we live for. If there are only languages and bodies, then to live is to savour existence. Life could be defined as the combinatory erotics of things. Not only that, but if “what there is” is the horizon of life, then we must agree that we live for things, we live so that things will exist and have value - our individual existence included - since it is only Death which regulates the meaningfulness of a certain configuration of bodies and languages, and it cannot take the place of such an overarching principle if it doesn’t present itself as the symmetrical opposite of Life.


Life would thus not only be the savoring of existence - but, maybe even more, the short-circuit of the most arrogant (“On my individual life hinges the meaning of everything”) and most subservient (“I am submitted to the dumb permutation of bodies and languages”) savoring of things. We begin to grasp why perspicuous theoreticians such as Jean-Claude Milner or Bruno Latour would venture into expressions such as “the politics of things”. In democratic materialism, it is life which helps the propagation of things, by measuring itself against the only thing which escapes the domain of existence, that is, its own annihilation.


Aron’s story works precisely at this intricate oscillation between praising existence’s manifoldness and fearing the dissolution of the body into nothingness. His desire for life is fueled by his desperate attempt to remain within existence: as death bestows every particular thing, and every particular thing’s infinite particularities, with the urgency and taste of life, to live becomes indistinguishable from merely being.


This is all very good. One could argue that we do take for granted all the things that happen around us, and that we do not engage with others with enough care or appreciation as we should. The problem does not lie in passing over such motherly advice, which could be offered as a regulative idea by any parent who didn’t give in to the yuppie principle of feeding off of his child’s perversions. The problem lies in having to stage such a radical proximity to death - equipped with an obscene fascination with realistically presenting how one cuts an arm off using only a toy knife - to bring across such a moronic moral view of the status quo. The only instance which is ideologically recognized and allowed to occupy publicly such a stance of mastery is Death itself - when the same point of the film could have been made by the Teletubbies.


To better approach this question, let us briefly consider the film in terms of entropy:



As our amusing little graph clearly shows, the classic aristotelian model of the three acts of the drama is reduced in this film to a very weird three-stage process, in which the narrative’s structure could be summed up as [- 50m + 50m] - a plunge whose only reason to happen is to be later “overcome”, finally returning us exactly to where we began. But - precisely because nothing changed - now the dirty water tastes like wine. Quite a miracle, indeed.


But what about the arm? Have we not lost an arm in the process? Yes, and this is the crux of the matter. As Zizek says it “a materialist doesn’t deny miracles, he just reminds us that they leave behind disturbing left-overs”.


As the most basic definition of entropy will show, entropy is the measure of the energy that is spent without being available to any useful work. Well, we see Aron doing extreme sports and being a gregarious person before [- 50m], and at the end of the film, after [+50m], we see him again doing some extreme snowboarding and being surrounded by his friends and family. Did the loss of his arm amount to any useful work? Or better - what must the arm be so that losing it can be considered any sort of useful work, so that it adds to the total work of the film?


The answer to that question is given by Aron himself, in his last recording before cutting his arm off. As we quoted above, he tells the camera that he finally “understands” it all: this huge rock had been waiting for him for millions of years, and he made all the choices in his life so that they could lead him to that situation, so that he could make this difficult choice of cutting away a part of his own body, and thus emerging as a new, stronger man.


To make sense of the story Aron is telling himself when trying to account for what he must to in order to survive, it is not hard to see that the crushed arm’s proper name can only be contingency. Let’s not forget that at the very beginning of the film - as a preparation to what would come next - Aron is seen at home, looking for his swiss army knife. He looks for it in the right place, but doesn’t find it just because he didn’t check the back of the shelf. Then, at the crucial moment in which he decides to start cutting his arm off, he realizes that he doesn’t have a proper knife to do it, only a cheap made-in-china one. But how does he answer to this cunning of Reason? He tells us that it was meant to be. (We are left to wonder if, after the whole incident, he ever woke up in anguish from a nightmare in which a swiss chocolate was maliciously running after him)


At the very moment of telling us that it could not have been otherwise he is already cutting away a certain dimension of his accident - the properly accidental dimension - and once all the contingent elements to which he is subjected are turned into elements of his personal story, elements placed in the world so that he could (necessarily) assert himself as a man, all that is left to do is to get rid of that element which insists to attest to the contrary, which resist such an imaginary platitude: his arm.


It is only when considered from this standpoint that we understand what the hell did this man actually “overcome”: he overcame the restless contingency of his life. Nothing changed, yes - but not only that: he overcame the very space of change. From now on, the things he owns, the relationships he enjoys, none of this could have been otherwise. None of this is the product of a fragile and alterable social reality - thousands of years of histories of struggles, a complex social configuration which requires that under-payed, under-fed children in the third-world work to produce all those items...all those materials traveled through thousands of years just so “he could now have them” in the comfort of his home. Everything converged towards him. Aron is not responsible for the meaning of his World, the World has meaning and this “explains” his responsibility. And if Aron were to doubt this again, the absence of an arm is enough of a reminder of his silent pact with the desert.


The matter of fact is that we must interrogate such an arm. If anything, it is the only subject in the film: just as Kafka’s Odradek or Gogol’s Nose, it the very absurdity of this partial object which could embody the little of any actual life that was at stake in the film.


Imagine, if you will, a movie in which Aron was left behind and the arm - the Arm - overcoming all the petty concerns of his previous life as just another human arm, being of no more use than to hold on to different irrelevant and narcissistic objects, realizes that Aron himself is the most stupid of them all, and cuts himself from him. There would be no question there of the use of such an “overcoming”. The reason why, if one manages to shed away the ironic relation to non-sense, such an alternative story truly does hold some sort of heroism is because it points to something else, something other the servitude to death, the absolute master.


The crucial difference is that, for Aron, cutting off his arm is done in the name of Life, while, for the Arm, cutting off Aron would have been done in the name of releasing it from his “grip”, in the name of Freedom (“In the name of my brothers in Arms, I will no longer serve such a petty little human!”) and Justice (“I will stand against the division of labour between head and hand!”).


What this means is that, as we have seen above apropos of democratic materialism, to directly choose Life is to choose Death, for Death is the only possible Other to Life, the other-wordly threat which can directly give Life some value. To “choose Life” ultimately means to choose to exist, and to exist is an activity which does not distinguish between the living and the inert. This is why Nietzsche said that life has no value. One cannot choose to value Life directly: if you call out to it you are always implicitly calling out for that which gives value to it, in the same way that to recognize the price of something is also to recognize the market that assigns it that value.


But if Life is not its own homonym, it nevertheless goes by many names: Freedom, Justice, Struggle, Thought... And in the surreal tale of the Arm’s proletarian revolt, that place which democratic materialism deems impossible to fill - the place of the Ideal which regulates over bodies and languages - would actually have been filled by something other than Death.


Aron’s Arm, that piece of meat marked by contingency, attached now not to a body, but to a rock (it was Freud who back in 1932 referred to the “rock of castration” in regards to the constitutive place of contingency in sexual difference and the formation of the subject) constitutes thus an exception to the democratic materialist axiom. It states: there is not only the 'necessary' (to live) and the 'possible' (to live through the permutative appraisal of existence), there is also the contingent (to live otherwise) and the impossible (to guide life by an Idea).


There is the proposition “it is not the only way, it could be otherwise” and there is the proposition “there is that which could occupy the impossible place”. The world could be otherwise and something other than annihilation could serve as the horizon of a world: by including these two propositions into Badiou’s first axiom we arrive at a new wager, the properly materialist dialectic axiom:


“there are only bodies and languages, except there are truths” (BADIOU 2008: p.4)


A truth is thus not a body nor a language. It is not nurtured by the moronic interplay of existence. Though a truth can exist and appear like a body or a language - or more than them, since it is not only present but eternal - it is conditioned to the faithful inscription of its traces into the world. While the democratic materialist principle holds that one lives by submitting to existence, under the guise of what is called “personal freedom” (the right to submit yourself to existence in whatever way better “expresses” your “free” submission), the materialist dialectic principle holds that one lives by submitting existence not to oneself (as we have just seen, that is the guise under which you submit yourself to existence, after all, we, our bodies and particularities, merely exist as well) but to an Idea.


An individual is not an Idea. A means to express one’s individuality - a person’s “language” - is also not an Idea. Of an Idea we get but the “fitful tracing of a portal”, to quote Stevens, which must then be inscribed into the World. The graceful contingency of an encounter, of a conversation, of a desire to organize, must be forced into the Present. Just like Aron’s Arm - the unsung hero - when the immortal dimension of a truth transfixiates us, it is Aron’s addiction to this abstract Death which we must cut off from us. Love, Politics, Science and Art require us to recognize the truly parasitic nature of our egos. And even though, just like Aron’s Arm, we cannot cut ourselves completely free from it without also losing Life, we can begin by recognizing that it is the ego that parasitizes us, not the other way around.


And to consent to what we have been writing, let us now assert our own fidelity to a truth, by referring directly to the text which has silently been our beacon thus far: ‘What is to Live?’. In it, Badiou gives us a concise definition of a “philosophical directive” on how to roam the desert without confusing its silence with peace:


“It is not a world, as given in the logic of its appearing (the infinite of its objects and relations), which induces the possibility of living—at least not if life is something other than existence. The induction of such a possibility depends on that which acts in the world as the trace of the fulgurating disposition that has befallen that world. That is, the trace of a vanished event. Within worldly appearing, such a trace is always a maximally intense existence. Through the incorporation of the world’s past to the present opened up by the trace, it is possible to learn that prior to what happened and is no longer, the ontological support of this intense existence was an inexistent of the world. The birth of a multiple to the flash of appearing, to which it previously only belonged in an extinguished form, makes a trace in the world and signals towards life.


For those who ask where the true life is, the first philosophical directive is thus the following: ‘Take care of what is born. Interrogate the flashes, probe into their past without glory. You can only put your hope in what inappears.’”


Badiou distinguishes the eternal Present of democratic materialism (the position from which we often tell ourselves, normally listening to Radiohead, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”) from the Present of Eternity as such, the Life which is not subjected to the irrevocable horizon of the body, but to the eternal horizon of the Idea. The first waits for Death, and - as it waits - it is sometimes indistinguishable from this very death. The second - to quote an Immortal - “bears death calmly, and in death, sustains itself (...) it looks the negative in the face and tarries with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being”. Badiou continues:


“Yet it remains important to give a name to this experience [éxperimentation]. It belongs neither to the order of lived experience, nor to that of expression. It is not the finally attained accord between the capacities of a body and the resources of a language. It is the incorporation into the exception of a truth. If we agree to call ‘Idea’ what both manifests itself in the world—what sets forth the being-there of a body—and is an exception to its transcendental logic, we will say, in line with Platonism, that to experience in the present the eternity that authorizes the creation of this present is to experience an Idea. We must therefore accept that for the materialist dialectic, ‘to live’ and ‘to live for an Idea’ are one and the same thing.”



Strategic Addendum:


On Miracles and Misery: reading 127 Hours with The Rite



When we presented our entropy scheme - worried with better understanding what was actually at stake in the otherwise “zero work” structure of the film - we mentioned that the loss of an arm and the terrible threat of death had turned “dirty water into wine”.


This new-found appreciation of existence is presented in 127 Hours as the solution to the loneliness and anguish of a young, handsome, first-world chap who didn’t value the little things in life and was not aware of how important they were to him. But even if Aron’s situation might actually have been truly “radical” (pun intended), his dignity was never at stake. Had he died, at his funeral people would tells us that this was a man who had goals, who loved out-door sports and so on.


On the other hand, this very same mechanism is at play, for example, in the passage from Misery to Poverty, or - as we call it in Brazil - the growth of “the middle-class”. To put it bluntly: against the spectre of Death, a crumb is the bread itself. If one is not faithful to any principle other than “the majestic historical horizon of what doesn’t change” (Brazilians, for instance, are very satisfied with naming this horizon in many different ways), if there is no Idea to guide the organization of the people, or the life of a man, there is nothing to distinguish survival from a life worth living.


One should be quite satisfied with some bread crumbs - and if one is not... there is nothing like a life trapped under the rock of the static management of neo-liberal policies, loomed by the threat of dying of starvation, to learn how to appreciate the subtle flavors of the state’s social crumbles! (See Brecht’s “From Nothing comes Nothing” for a re-staging of 127 Hours which considers this obverse side of the apology to existence.)


It is apropos of Misery that the true dimension of the Miracle of the metamorphosis of the “crumbles into bread” - a miracle granted to us by Death - can be properly understood. What is the function of Misery if not to confirm - at the cost of the expropriation of the life of millions - that at the most bare register, survival coincides with, or even outweighs, life?


Misery as the minimal conformance of bodies and languages - Death as the only overarching principle governing everything from bare to cultural life. How is it then that the combinatory power of elements and relations gives us the feeling of being so spiritual, so full of life, but a brief examination of these configurations - or even an irresponsible pop song, incapable of replacing the anguish it sets off with any worthy celebration of an Idea - open up to such a aimless and pointless wandering around, such a perverse banquet of the lives of those who have nothing, silently offered in sacrifice to the dark horizon of our passions?


There is a scene in The Rite (2011), the latest exorcism movie, which perfectly exemplifies how nihilism can pass for true faith.


The young priest Micheal was in a crisis of faith and went to Rome to learn how to exorcise demons. He is assigned to accompany Father Lucas, an unorthodox exorcist who, later in the film, becomes himself possessed by a demon. Micheal, shaken by his father’s death and the reluctant disposition to accept that what he witnessed was not simply a psychological disturbance, has now to battle against the devil himself.


The possessed Father Lucas then goes on into standard demonic procedure: he crushes the priest’s spirit and reveals terrible details of Micheal’s life, showing how weak he is. But here the amazing twist comes in - a true touch of genius (of the Devil).


After all the bashing, and feeling quite terrible, Micheal leaves the room. Then, as he is hopelessly looking at the distance, his love-interest, a latin-american reporter who was there with him (Hollywood’s new cliché - third-world women who are in contact with some “primitive” sexuality - could also be understood as that of the third-world women who is supposed to know that life is deep down a matter of survival) tells him that he is looking for faith in the wrong place. He shouldn’t be looking for God beyond his (individual) body or his language (of individual expressions). He should learn to believe in himself. And a brief flashback of a memory of his mother, together with the brazilian girl’s hips are enough incentives to re-ignite the flame of his self-worth.


He storms into the room again, and begins “I, who believe...” and now, when demonic Father Lucas pushes him against the wall and says “you don’t believe in anything!”, Michael already has an answer to the Devil: “I believe in you, thus I believe in God”. He has seen the Devil’s doings so he can now believe in God. But as the film goes on to crown this sweet sequitur as a glorious exorcism, the actual events that follow it say something quite different.


As the young priest cries “I’ve seen thus I believe” the Devil actually realizes that his job was done. He lets go of Micheal and allows the priest to finish the exorcism - but not before telling him ... “I will always be with you”.


It is not difficult to recognize under the defeat of the Devil the victory of democratic materialism. Though the Devil pretends to accept the priest’s claim as a demonstration of true faith, he (more than anyone, probably) knows that the Devil is not the opposite of God, just as Death is not the opposite of Life. The priest almost literally admitted that God is only worthy of faith because of the Devil - just like Life, in the democratic materialist regime, only has value because it is defined as the opposite of Death.


And once the Devil's discourse was being spoken by Micheal’s own lips (wasn’t he somehow possessed as well?) the Devil had nothing else to do there. Another soldier ready! What better way to educate satanists then to create a desert and invite us to call it “peace”?


Writing about how the common man thinks in abstractions without ever realizing it, Hegel mentions that to have a person coincide with a predicate - a man who is fully identified by others with his profession or with the crime he committed etc - is one of the most common ways of how abstraction appears in everyday life. Today, in our “post-everything” society, like young priest Micheal, we pride ourselves of having overcome such ideological barriers which separate us from one another. We are free men, ready to respect each other’s differences, ready to admit that there is a multiplicity of bodies, and a multiplicity of languages organizing those bodies. Nevertheless, like young priest Micheal, we should have been more careful before such effusive appraisal of our capacity to savour existence in all its irreconcilable details: no one is taken to be the master, that is true, but that doesn’t make us less of servants - servants who, not even knowing who we serve, fail to escape the grasp of such abstract identifications. And this, Hegel writes, "could drive one to make a pact with the devil.” (Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly? )


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