creatures of the simulcast

 

 

Andy Kaufman did a funny stand-up routine back when he was funny and, even, alive. He would come out and stand, shifting from one leg to another, his eyes bright and idiotic, and in that funny unplaceable high pitched foreign accent he would tell the audience that he was going to do some imitations, as comics do. Then he says: this is my aunt X, and proceeds to do an imitation of a figure from his, or at least his persona’s, household.

The humor here, like most of Kaufman’s schtick, is all about pranking the routine of the prank – about stripping away the comic staple and making comedy of it. Here, of course, the expectation that is disappointed into laughter is that the imitation will be of a celebrity. That the aunt is not a celebrity sort of misplaces and transduces the motif. It is a de-vaudeville vaudeville act.

The imitation is parasitic on celebrity culture, which is a good entrance into celebrity culture and our “episodic, anonymous relations” with celebritries – to quote “celebrity studies” scholar Chris Rojek. The fame of the celebrity is defined by some quantitative threshold of episodic, anonymous recognitions. It is possible that Kaufman’s aunt – or Kaufman’s character’s aunt – is recognized by everyone in the family and on the street,  but she is not recognized to the point that a random audience can recognize her.

Celebrity, to this extent, and money share similar structures, and it is hard to imagine, so firmly are they built into modernity through the quotidian, what life would be like outside of them.

Just as the vast majority of people have never studied the way the Treasury issues money on the promise that the face value is a value, so, too, the vast majority have never met in any meaningful way the celebrities that we all talk about and read about all the time. Perhaps you become an economist if you feel compelled to understand how the issuing of money could possibly work. If you are compelled to actually meet the celebrities you “know”, you are more likely to become a stalker.

Mostly, we settle for having a feeling we know what this or that celebrity is like “in real life”. This is a clue, I think, about modern life. As Georg Simmel pointed out – again and again and again – in The Philosophy of Money, money, in its historical development, tends to a more and more quantitative existence, to become a self-claimed marker of value. This is what Simmel meant by abstraction as a social process. Similarly, although celebrity seems utterly sunk in the particular – the particular of Elvis, of Queen Elizabeth, of Prince – the aura of celebrity is an abstraction of the always deferred meeting – the confirmation of what they are “like.” Celebrity without fame, as in the case of Kaufman’s aunt, is possible only in a small world format, where the abstraction of meeting becomes many degrees less – actual meeting becomes many more degrees possible. To be a famous poet, for instance, given the small world of poets, means that others in that world are likely to run into you.

These abstract relations to real people are, once we think about them, a little uncanny. It is as though we were dealing with ghosts, or demons, or gods. How much of our existence should we devote to these people?

There is, too, a temporal aspect. The three celebrities I named are all dead. Yet I’d contend that they still exist in our simultaneity – they exist as they have always existed, as images.

The important thing, within the societies that within the temporal dimension of simultaneity,  is that the public and these publics form out of the same principle – the subordination of haptic space to another kind and degree of proximity, which is mediated by this social mode of temporality. The French 19^th century sociologist Tarde mentions this in connection with the news. News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, an important movement is captured. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity.”  He does not, unfortunately, disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”. But ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. It is in this sense that we are not simply conscious of being simultaneous with, but as well, and more strongly, that the simultaneous is moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front. Tarde picked up on that movement as a crowd phenomenon.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under that baptism and curse. But Fabian’s concern for cultures exogenous to Europe blinded him to the effect of modernity within Europe, and America, where we witness another allochronic effect having to do with the new. Simultaneity is the horizon for a temporal competition – one in which the new, the young, the latest compete against the old, the laggard, the out of touch.

This is how celebrity, far from being some trivial, aleatory thing, is really a symptom of what modernity is all about.  Celebrity contains our multitudes.

Hypochondriaque lecteur - mon semblable

 

The temperature of the Golden Mean is 98.6 F.

Or is it 97.5F?  Surveys differ. The point, however, is that the warmth of my body and the warmth of your body, when healthy, dips lower or higher only by a decimal point or so. Our warmths are a community, and even a bond between us. I don’t have to touch you to know this.

“You are going to make yourself sick.” This is a common enough parental warning. My Grandfather used to worry about wearing a sweater or coat inside, because, according to his calculations – or some advice handed down from some shadowy figure in his background, back in the 1910s – the protection against the cold aided by these vestments was nullified if they were worn in the heated inside environment. I still half believe this is true, though I have never googled it for a fact. To make yourself sick is an interesting, and multiply implicating phrase – it is perhaps our entrance into neurosis.

Sickness, we like to think, is exterior – it is the invading germ, or some dire environmental circumstance. The self, a captain as helpless as the tied down Ulysses, passing by the sirens, can’t, in one view,  of itself make the body sick. Long before Freud, however, this was a disputed issue. In his introduction to his book on various hypochondriacs, Brian Dillon writes:

The history of hypochondria – the history, that is, of what was meant by the word and what we mean by it today – is the history, then, of a “real” disease which has lost most of its symptoms over the course of several centuries, and also of a prodigious variety of imaginary disease that has come to be recognized once more, in our century, as a pathology in itself, a disorder with identifiable symptoms and some possible cures. The chronology is confusing, the vocabulary ambiguous and palimpsestic, the illness at times as chimerical as the horrors imagined by its victims. But the stakes are clear: to think about hypochondria is to think about the nature of sickness in a fundamental sense, to ask what can legitimately be called a disease and what cannot….”

Dillon’s nine portraits of hypchondriacs are mainly English or America – Marcel Proust and Daniel Paul Schreber being the exceptions – and that makes some sense. George Cheyne, the late seventeenth century physician most famous for advocating vegetarianism, wrote a book entitled the English Malady:  or a treatise of Nervous diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, etc. The French associated Spleen with the English character until the twentieth century – Jules Verne’s Phileus Fogg is of the type, a wager away from boredom. Boredom: another typical English malady. The idea was, vaguely, that given a foggy climate and the diet of the wealthy English bourgeoisie, tending to fats and alcohol, hypochondria was a result consistent with what the physician would consider natural history:  

“What we call Nervous Distempers, were certainly, in some small Degree, known and observ'd by the Greek , Roman , and Arabian Physicians, tho' not such a Number of them as now, nor with so high Symptoms, so as to be so particularly taken Notice of, except those call'd Hysterick , which seem to have been known in Greece , from whence they have deriv'd their Name…”

If, as I believe, hypochondria amplifies the sense of some irreducible but misplaced exteriority where the interior, the self is supposed to be, then it makes sense that the novelist and the hypochondriac were bound to meet. It is at the hypersensitive DMZ that we expect to find our great modern novels. This is why The Magic Mountain is such an experience for its faithful readers. Here, the thermometer looms large – one imagines it as a sort of thermometer maypole around which the characters, all with abnormal temperatures, dance. Can you even read the Magic Mountain, really read it, without feeling a bit ‘infected’?

The great readers are all people who, given the time, place and volume, are willing to invert their parents’ warning:  do make yourself sick.  Convalescence is our form of meditation.

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

The merveille comes gloved and heavy

Over the bone cobbled streets

To reckonings and money

And spots of blood on the sheets.

 

Full fathoms five in headlines drowned

We waken, drained – your mule vigor

Carmelized, ridden up and down

Unti we agree on its mortal rigor

 

That has left us speechless for another day.

What pound of flesh did you want

So much that this is the price you pay?

So to absence and this awful can’t.

arcanii imperium and us

 

 

 The scope of covert action could include: (1) political advice and counsel; (2) subsidies to an individual; (3) financial support and “technical assistance” to political parties; ( 4) support of private organizations, including labor unions, business firms, cooperatives, etc.; (5) covert propaganda; (6) “private” training of individuals and exchange of persons; (7) economic operations; and (8) paramilitary [or] political action operations designed to overthrow or to support a regime (like the Bay of Pigs and the programs in Laos). These operations can be classified in various ways: by the degree and type of secrecy required [,] by their legality, and, perhaps, by their benign or hostile character. - Richard Bissell, ex deputy director, CIA, in a secret conference, 1968. https://publicintelligence.net/cia-covert-action-philosophy/

In French, there are two words corresponding to conspiracy in English: conspiration and conjuration. All analogy hunting is imperfect, and I will leave out a third word, complot, to make a conceptual point: conspiration is usually taken to refer to the machinations of an occult society from below, seeking some purpose that dare not be pursued openly due to the forces of order that would crush it.  Conjuration – a swearing-together – is usually taken to refer to a secret group on some higher echelon of society – aristocrats, the king’s ministers, generals. A cabal, the Littré says. Conjuration survives in English as conjure – to call up spirits. In Greek, horkos is to swear, from which we derive the latin exorcizo – exorcize. There is, in the semantic field of the oath, some further connection with the spirits, with elemental powers. That’s a rich field, since it encompasses not only the popular dread of secret policemen and the hidden moves of power players, but also the notion of the unearthly, the uncanny. Indeed, both of these themes have converged continually during the Cold War – that war culture that began in 1945 and was declared over after the overthrow of Soviet power in Russia in 1991. A war culture that gave birth to our own war culture, which is continually searching for a general purpose and a demon enemy.

Although English does not make the same distinction between conspiration and conjuration as French does, you can see that the concept works in any discussion of conspiracy. Conspiracy is allowed, even used as a justification, if it is a breathing together of the enemy, the Other. Thus, communists, the dangerous working class, the Islamic terrorists, are targeted as conspirators, and have been regularly shown to conspire by the establishment press in America, and the political/academic establishment in general. Osama bin Laden’s band conspires. On the other hand, hints of conjuration – of high levels working together as a cabal – almost immediately drive the establishment crazy. The CIA would never conspire to, say, bring narcotics into the country. The FBI would never be an accomplice to the assassination of civil rights leaders. And if by some happenstance we uncover, say, a scheme to sell arms to Iran to supply arms to mercenaries in Nicaragua, this is an aberration and not something that the American government would in any way regularly do. This is conspiracy theory territory. In the post World War II period, the theory of conjuration has been medicalized (as a paranoid delusion) and diabolized (as a myth akin to the anti-semitism of the Nazis).

2.

Because of this conceptual line, we still have an odd and unbalanced history of the twentieth century. After the Soviet Union fell apart, for a brief period, the records of the KGB became available on an unprecedented scale, as did the secret police records of all the Eastern European states. These records have been read naively by academics – mainly the ideologically hardcore among them – as though they told the complete truth. From them, we can get a record of subversives among us. Never mind that bureaucratic files overflow with optimistic statements, obfuscations, lies and error in any organization, not to speak of a secret one. But the records of the intelligence agencies on the winning side – those of the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, etc. – are still a matter of dribs and drabs, of troves of documents heavily redacted by the intelligence agencies themselves, or of troves discovered accidentally and revealed, usually, in hole-in-the-corner lefty publications. One would think that the enormous expansion of police powers and the various “organs” of intelligence should have, by now, achieved the kind of gravitas to deserve serious historical treatment even given this hostile terrain, but as Alain Dewerpe points out in Espion: une anthropologie historique du secret d’Etat contemporaine, the historical profession has made investigation in conjuration a no-go area, one that arouses suspicion of kookiness. Which is why the literature on, say, the CIA during the postwar period is still driven by journalists, sewing fact to fact, speculation to speculation. These journalists are regularly jeered at by the “historians” of the CIA’s house journal, Studies in Intelligence, for their use of anonymous sources and their method of using associations and analogies to establish causes. Of course, the cynicism of these in-house, bought off  historians is functional: after all, we use indirection and supposition because the CIA has laws to protect the release of its records, and has long dodged any uncensored release of the material around, for instance, even such an ancient matter as the Kennedy assassination. It is important to see, too, that it is  ideological: in the twentieth century, the right and its allies have long made their homes in spy agencies and police departments. From taking the Soviet Union for an enemy to taking any supposed “weakening” of attitude towards the Soviet Union for subversion is an easy step. Similarly, these departments were, for most of the cold war, very very white, and very very suspicious of black politicians and activists. Thus, your average libertarian or far right group had little to fear from the cops or the spies: but every leftist group offering even the mildest critique of the war culture, capitalism, or the state of race relations was on the target list.

3.

These are circumstances that have, as it were, blown back on the spirit of democracy in many countries – the U.S. being one of them. If the population is largely suspicious, as every poll shows it is, of the Warren Commission story about the JFK assassination, and if the response of the establishment defenders is to label such suspicions “paranoid”, it will soon become impossible to trust the establishment defenders, and indeed the state itself, as an honest dialogue partner.  The historian Richard Hofstadter, in 1964 (the year in which the Federal government lied about the Tonkin Bay incident, thus pushing U.S. into the most active phase of the Vietnam War), influentially cast the idea that conspiracy theory is a product of a “paranoid” style in American culture. Distrust of the motives of the governors, and their tendency to hide information and manipulate events to their profit, which was common sense to the Founding fathers and is the premise of any advertising campaign worth its retainer, is haughtily dismissed when it is expressed by the groundlings.  The model, which has been followed to this day by such “influencers” as Cass Sunstein, is to laugh at  the notion that something is rotten in a state in which agencies who are resourced with hundreds of billions of dollars get to choose their level of transparency. The problem of conspiracy beliefs, then, can be countered with clever practical tricks. In Sunstein’s Conspiracy theories and Other Dangerous Idea), the suggest is:  “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.” This echoes the program followed by the CIA in the 1960s and 70s, called Operation Chaos. It has, predictably, spawned conspiracy theories about Sunstein himself, which then get turned around and used to show that look, all notion that there is some occult collusion at high levels of the government is nuts! – the last bit of the cycle falling to an article by Andrew Marantz at the New Yorker, who portrays Sunstein and his enemies with zero historical consciousness about the rich history of “cognitive infiltration” by the government in marginal groups, mostly leftwing, throughout the twentieth century.

 

 

4.

Marantz’s lack of notice of the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and the infinite variety of homegrown subversives divisions generated by urban police departments is in contrast to pop culture’s hyper-attention: Netflix writers, for instance, regularly so regularly use MKUltra as their muse that the heirs of Sidney Gottlieb could probably sue for points. Conspiracy (or, as I will call it from now on, conjuration) is a popular framework  for films, tv, and fiction, from Gravity’s Rainbow to the X files. For leftist artists, it has resulted in the replacement of earnest socialist realism (in which workers produce and are exploited) with glitzy assassination plots (in which freelancers with guns and no pension plans are the vital political players). JFK, here, is vaguely assimilated to King Arthur, just as the bogus Camelot label promised, and the king is always being brought down by evil. Conjuration, here, stands in contrast to  your random superhero film, where the enemy is more usually a conspirator of the old police tradition – a criminal after the wealth of the wealthiest, in alliance, often, with some vaguely leftist extremist – see Poison Ivy in the Batman films, a veritable Earth Firster, for testimony.

Given this pop richesse, you would think that there would be a rich social science literature on the effect of the CIA and military secret programs on American democracy, such as it is. I don’t mean by this just the study of the programs themselves – I mean the study, as well, of the effect of them being blown, being known, and being shown. American citizenship has been demoralized by all of this: by both the disclosures and the refusal to disclose. We know more about, say, lab leaks in China than we do about lab leaks in the U.S., and more about the KGB’s agents in place in the states in the Cold War than about America’s agents in place in the Soviet Union – which fell thirty years ago. Thus, our history is in a curious state, rather like the cat in Schroedinger’s thought experiment. And this is a scandal. Democracy has a past dimension – it requires clarity about the past. And we haven’t got that yet, not by a longshot.

 

Dreams of the Neoliberal Reich

 

When I was a callow youth – or even, one might say, a stupid one – I used to take great pleasure in making up prank tapes for my answering machine. I made one which I considered a true chef d’oeuvre in which, after saying I was not in, I said: today we are having a great sale on heroin and cocaine! Its our way of saying thanks to our many customers. Kilo of H at a mere 100 bucks! We must be crazy to sell it so cheap, but we can: cause of Volume!

My roommates at the time did not think much of this prank. It was soon changed.

Freedom of speech has always been a bit of a compromise. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech – both, as we well know, are freedoms you have to pay for, one way or another. In the lectures to the introduction of psychoanalysis, Freud uses the image of the customs office as a support for the observation that the “eigene Ich” – the Ego itself – enters into every dream, “even where it has hidden itself under the manifest content”. The dream involves a man who is traveling across a border with a lot of baggage, who claims he has nothing to declare. The customs officers open the baggage and find contraband.

I think this is a nice instance of the pervasiveness of the collective ego function. As is my prank answering machine tape, with its jejune transgression of a taboo. In fact, the total power of the “state” – and I include in the state the powers that be, the multinationals, the billionaires, etc., as I find the separation between the powers and the legally instituted powers to be, for the purposes of analysis, subordinate to their solidarity – has its nightside in dreams.

Charlotte Beradt, who fled Germany in 1939, made a survey of the dreams of her  colleagues, friends, etc. She worked at the Fischer publishing house, and in New York was a great and close friend to Hannah Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Bluecher. Fleeing with her husband to New York, she lacked the money and patronage to set up shop as an intellectual, so she made her apartment into a beauty shop. She cut and dyed the hair of intellectuals. She published her book, The Third Reich of Dreams, in the sixties, after she had returned to Germany. It struck a chord.  

This dream struck me:

"It was about eight o’clock in the evening. As usual at that time of the day, I was talking on the telephone with my brother, my only friend and confidant. [This appraisal of the brother’s relationship was a true one.] After having taken the precaution of praising Hitler’s policies and life in the National Community, I said, 'Nothing gives me pleasure anymore.’ [In fact, he had said this on the telephone earlier in the evening.]

"In the middle of the night the telephone rang. A dull voice [corresponding to the expressionless faces we have encountered in previous dreams] said merely, 'This is the Monitoring Office.’ I knew immediately that my crime lay in what I had said about not finding pleasure in anything, and I found myself arguing my case, begging and pleading that this one time I be forgiven — please just don’t report anything this one time, don’t pass it on, please just forget it. The voice remained absolutely silent and then hung up without a word, leaving me in agonizing uncertainty.”

 

This nightmare, and my prank call, are related structurally in the same way that Freud thought that jokes and dreams are psychodynamically related. The Ueber-Ich, which can’t allow any deviations from the rule, actually does allow deviations from the rule – for the Ueber-Ich, like all policing institutions, is corrupt. The draconian War against Drugs in this perspective comes out in all its totalitarian glory, claiming the subject’s very chemistry. And the idea that joy does not come through strength, through the Fuehrer-prinzip, is so censored that even in Beradt’s friend’s dream it must be whispered on the phone – and be punished by an even greater degree of whisper, a mere menacing phone silence.

Is someone collecting the dreams of the Neoliberal era, which in my case are all about debts and empty bank accounts? Someone should.