Notes of an old cis- white man on identity and projection

 

                         

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Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy. “The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a. But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond space and time.” (GW VI 28)

Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains” without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense, Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.

As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a process of projection, and thus is the first to use  “identification” in the psychological sense that became part of the ordinary language of the second half of the twentieth century.

 

“Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the

position of him who suffers – a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man,

developed but weak in Civilized man – what would this idea matter to the truth

of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the

more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with

the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been

infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning.”

 

The issue of personal identity travels to France by way of Locke’s translators and readers – such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an identifying self is a definite marker, an intersigne on the way to understanding character under capitalism. That is, to understanding how character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate semantic segments to occupy a certain space of symbols and capacities in those societies that we name by using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition – modern – as if the modern had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new framework altogether. Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian principles of property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification that, as Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense, impossible. Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it working its way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the seemingly esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis.  Just as selfishness can become an acid that so dissolves the self that one is left with an absolute Berkeleyian idealism, personal identity inevitably begins to pose the problem of the maker of persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics of modernity, operating under the unconscious conviction that they live in the modern, face this bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place those schemas of identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though the pre-modern was some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather than the product of the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as something generated within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow and double, an emergent and undeniable force in the matrix. 

2.

"Art of Projection (Projektionskunst) – the exhibition of a proportional extended visible image, which with the help of a magic lantern or of recent projection instruments is thrown as the magnification of certain objects on a white surface" - Meyer’s Conversation Lexicon of 1908

“We get behind the demons, as it were, when we recognize them as projections of hostile feelings, which the survivors cherish against the dead.”

“The process completes itself rather through a particular psychic mechanism, that we are used to calling “projection” in psychoanalysis. The hostility, of which one knows nothing and wants to know nothing, has been thrown out of the inner sphere of perceptions [inneren Wharnehmung] into the outer world, by which one releases its from one’s own person and shoves it off on another person. Not we, the survivors, are glad that we are free of the dead one; no, we mourn him, but he has, curiously enough, become an evil demon, to whom our bad luck is pleasing, and who seeks to bring us into the realm of death. The survivors must now defend themselves against the evil fiend…” – Freud (my translation)

Oh the monsters! Under the opera. Under the pornographic novel. Under the constitutions. And under the monsters, the great grind of life in the old order, on the great estates – taxes and labor duties without end in Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia, Poland… Slavery in Santo Domingo., famine in Bengal…

Freud takes the term from Bleuler, seizes it in a leonine pounce. For here, on the surface, in the shimmer of everyday life of verbal slips, infantile dirty jokes, the herky jerky motion of trams, office politics and thick, thick drapes, here it is that you find the denials, the “I hate to say this”, the “I don’t mean to criticize” – the I don’t mean in general. The demiurge unconscious stirs. Is it awake or asleep?

For Freud, the demons are a projection-creation, and projection itself is the expression of ambivalence. Here, of course, everything seems clear. Locke’s blank sheet of the mind – that white surface - has now been extruded – a screen - as part of a technical process in which images are thrown against it and exaggerated in size. And if we were living in a world that was simply determined, this would suffice. But we are, always, living in a world that has been overdetermined.

For in that world (and aren’t we working in Nemesis’ wake?) the living live with each other in a whisper of suppressed desires, hostilities, purposes, and purposive inattentions – knowing or suspecting what we claim we never knew or suspected, each about each. While one aspect of projection involves transmuting the satisfaction that one has survived the dead and their hostility, another aspect involves the denial that the formerly living loved one had definite moments of hostility, or definite moments of the wrong kind of love. Those evil eye fugues.

And what do we know about other people anyway? Freud notes that projection, in the narrow psychoanalytic sense, is part of a greater system of projection.

“The Projection of unconscious hostility by the tabu of the dead on the demons is only a single example out of a series of processes, to which must be attributed the greatest influence on the shaping of primitive spiritual life. In the above mentioned cases, projection serves to close a conflict of feelings; it finds a natural application in a number of psychological situations that lead to neurosis. But projection is not created as an instrument of defence, it also comes into play, where there is no conflict. The projection of inner perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) to the outside is a primitive mechanism that, for instance, also underlies our sense perceptions – and that thus, in the normal course of things, has the greates part in the shaping of our outer world. Under not yet satisfactorily fixed conditions, our inner perceptions of feeling and thought processes become sense perceptions projected outside, applied to the shaping of the outer world, while supposedly remaining in the inner world. This may hang together, genetically, with the fact that the function of attention originally was not turned to the inner world, but instead to the stream of stimuli from the outer world, and of endopsychic processes received only reports about the developments of pleasure and pain. Only with the development (Ausbildung) of an abstract thought language, through the tying together of the sense remnants of word ideas with inner processes, did these themselves become perceptible.”

The trope of the abstract being taken from, projecting, the material – that place where we begin the white mythology – is transformed, here, into a relation of the outer and the inner. Although the inner, Freud carefully notes, isn’t some counterprojection of the outer. If it becomes perceptible, it was operating before the moment of perceptibility.

3.

I was first made aware of my identity as a cis white man at some point in my fifties. Cis-, that transforming prefix, was, until this point, not something I had been called, or had called another.

The cis identity is a curious one. It is late to the identity table – identity by assignment of sex at birth was never a part of the identikit when I was born in 1957. And yet, isn’t the cis identity – the white male cis identity – the blank against which all identities define themselves in the present moment? The white  male cis has played a fundamental historical role: enslaver, colonizer, oppressor, capitalist roader. You don’t have to look back too far – in fact, you don’t have to look back at all. The men’s room that runs the U.S. at the moment, in all its shitty ignobility, is a caricature of the type.

And so: is this my identity? Or is this projection?

When I look at this as the identity that I can’t escape – when I look at it historically, not existentially  – I see a type that, at one time, was defined by two utopias – the one, an international of labor solidarity, and the other, an avant garde that dreamed of abolishing the dominant identities and identity itself, using as its tools critique and transgression. Those utopias are in bad shape today – the former the victim of neoliberalism and the latter ossified, by academia’s absorption of the avant-garde, into routines of griping.

Yet I don’t feel, somehow, existentially burdened by all this. I’m still the happy go lucky, Casper-the-ghost colored graphomaniac buzzing my way deathward and singing a happy song.

Identity? Projection? Identity as projection, projection from an identity, exteriority as a plot of interiority: anxieties that dog us on the path to the good, the true, and the beautiful. But I’m still of the opinion that this is the Dao, the path of all cis- trans- and bird and beast and flower, in spite of present circs.

J.P. Hebel

 

When I was a kid, my folks – like W.G.Sebald’s grandfather – bought a “farmer’s almanac”. Or was it a purchase? Surely in the grocery store or the gas station it was thrown before the cashier and rung up with the soda pop, the ten gallons of gas, and the candy bar,, but I remember the almanac as an almost natural product that appeared on our low table in the living room, like fallen leaves appeared on the lawn  or dirt clods – the latter always good for a satisfying throw at a tree trunk, where it would leave behind a spot of clay – could be found in vacant lots.

I know this about Sebald’s dad because, in his essay on J.P. Hebel, Sebald mentions the Kemton Almanac. Since Hebel is the master almanac writer – comparable to Benjamin Franklin in America – this is as good a way as any to introduce Hebel to an anglophone audience. For German audiences, Hebel has been sat on by the 20^th century greats – Benjamin (whose essay on Hebel is only five pages long in the Collected Writings), Heidegger (whose lecture on Hebel is compared, by Sebald, to other readings popular in the Nazi era, with their seriously distorting version of the Kalendergeschichten, or the Treasury of the Rheinland’s Household Friend, and Sebald himself, in the essay included in A place in the Country. For a writer  of such supreme surface simplicity to  survive this weight, there must be something elastic in the prose. Benjamin’s interpretation of the way Hebel wove space into time with a chronicler’s sense of montage has been taken up by all his modern commentators.

 Reinhard Kosseleck, in his essay Anachronism and Antiquity, analyzed how Albrecht Altdorfer, a sixteenth century painter, collaged together different temporal elements in his painting of the Alexanderschlacht. For instance, although the battle is depicted at its height, the count of the dead on the banners held by figures in the scene tell us how many were killed by the end of the battle. The battlefield is an exemplary instance of the event that is shot through with a certain hollowness, a lack of a center, at least in the experience of those who participate – see Fabrice at Waterloo in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. The where of the battle comes, in a sense, after the battle is over.

There are philosophers who claim that all events are like battles.

And this sense – transmuted from the unheimlich to the heimlich – is Hebel’s specialty.

Sebald gently chides Benjamin for trying to make Hebel a friend of sorts of the left – a fellow traveller of the ideals of the French revolution.  Sebald, writing in the neo-liberal eighties and nineties, sees Hebel, instead, as a friend of good governance, under the guidance of expert physiocrats guided by good kings. To make this case, Sebald isolates Hebel from such characters as Georg Foster, a circumnavigator of the globe and friend of the Revolution who Hebel surely read; and more, Sebald erases the whole background of ancien regime violence, as though the violence of the French revolution erupted on a peaceful Europe rather than one that had experienced two world wars between colonial powers (the war of Spanish succession and the seven years warp  and the rise of a militarized Prussia in wars that pitted Prussia against Austria and Russia. In the Seven Years war alone, about 700,000 people died. Hebel, in his most famous story, The Unexpected Reunion,  the body of a miner who was buried in an accident is dug up in the mines at Falun, and his now ancient fiancé sees his body, which gives Hebel the opportunity to create a virtuoso chronology that gives us an idea of history as a kind of geology:

“In the meantime the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed by an earthquake, the Seven Years War came and went, the Emperor Francis I died, the Jesuits were dissolved, Poland was partitioned, the Empress Maria Theresa died, and Sturensee was executed, and America became independent, and the combined French and Spanish force failed to take Gibralter. The Turks cooped up General Stein in the Vetrane Cave in Hungary and Emperor Joseph died too. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, the French Revolution came and the long war began, and the Emperor Leopold II too was buried. Napoleon defeated Prussia, the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the farmers sowed and reaped. The millers ground the corn, the blacksmiths hammered, and the miners dug for seams of metal in their workplace under the ground.”

Left out of this list were many things known to Hebel: the acceleration of the slave trade and the profits of the slavery that flowed to the great colonial powers, and the battle for the control of India between the English and the French. Sebald’s Hebel has read Simon Schama and is a friend of Malesherbes, but the real Hebel was much more oblique.

I am less concerned, though, with Hebel’s attitude towards the revolution than I am with the cross between a certain popularizing of enlightenment and the revival of a popular vernacular that found expression in collections of nursery and household tales. To me, this crossroads is epitomized by Charles Perrault, who on the one hand, famously, took the folktale out of the woods and into the boudoir (like La Fontaine), and on the other hand, authored an endless polemical treatise against the ancients and for the moderns.

Hebel speaks in a language, as a “friend of the house”, that would be familiar to the informants of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm – in particular, the daughter of an exiled Huguenot, from whom many of the most famous tales came. Hebel’s, too, are household tales. The news from the enlightenment, in his prose, takes on the air of a folktale. This is a crossed place, seemingly impossible if we hold enlightenment on the one hand to be the opposite of superstition on the other.

In 1703, Charles Perrault’s niece, Mademoisselle L’Heretier, published a book in London entitled La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux, which contained a tale, Ricdin-Ricdon. R-R was a kind of demon or gnome, who offers to spin straw into gold for a girl whose mother had promised the king that she had that exact ability. This tale is better known from the Grimm brothers version, where Ricdin-Ricdon becomes Rumpelstiltskin.  Jack Zipes in his The Fairy Tale as Myth/the Myth as Fairy Tale devotes some space to the “spinning tales”, following his notion that spinning as a home industry suffered a sea change in the 18^th century, from a place of honor to a sort of semi-comic activity performed by ugly old maids.

Hebel makes an extraordinary transposition from the spinning tale to Copernican cosmology in some of his calendar stories explaining to the small town and rural audience the findings of a science that is now, in 1808, more than two hundred years old. In his general remarks about the structure of the universe, Hebel intends to explain that the world is round, and that the sun does not move around the earth.

“Secondly, the earth turns itself around in 24 hours. In fact, imagine if from one point of the globe through its center to another opposed point a long spindle or axle was pulled. These two points we will name the poles. Thus around this axle the earth turns in 24 hours, not after the sun but against the sun, and if a long endless red thread came out, I will say, on the 21^st of March from the sun and reached the earth, and at number it was knotted about a cherry tree or around a crucifix in a field, the globe would have pulled this thread all the way around itself in 24 hours, and so for each day.”

Imagine Rumpelstiltskin as a cosmological god, instead of an earth spirit. Although that crucifix… I’m assuming it is a tombstone. A symbol of death and resurrection, renewed in the Copernican order, and published in a Calendar. Hebel, whose writing is so Heimlich, always lands us in these unheimliche places.

Taking the intoxication out: late capitalism, what a drag

 

Walter Benjamin was convinced that gambling – and the gambler – was the temporal coordinate of the stroll, and the flaneur.  The gambler was an intrusion, he thought, into the bourgeois sphere of a custom determined, originally, by the economic conditions of feudalism.  This was in keeping with the Marxist nearsightedness about the function of credit and finance in high capitalism. But within those myopic limits, Benjamin’s theory of the “intoxication” of gambling is interesting.

“With the briefness of the game it [the time factor]  has in fact its own condition. The briefer the play, the rawer emerges the  element of chance, the smaller or the briefer the suite of combinations, that in the course of the party are brought out. In other words: the greater the component of chance in a game, the quicker it happens.   This circumstance becomes decisive when it comes to determining what, exactly, constitutes the intoxication of the gambler. It rests on the property of the game of chance, to provoke the intellectual actuality that brings the constellations forward in quick succession, which – each one quite independently from the others – calls on a completely new, original reaction of the player.”

Benjamin’s model for gambling was cards, and the casino. The very depressing article in Bloomberg about the gambler, Bill Benter, who “cracked” the horseracing code is about taking the joy, the intoxication,  out of addiction – a very 21^st century approach to the problem of killing time. Horse racing was, in the 19^th and 20^th century, presented as the relic of feudal times – the province of aristocrats and Bourbon kings from Kentucky. Bill Benter, as it were, stormed the Bastille with his computer, and has made, according to the article, billions from his algorithmically massaged bets. Never has money seemed a bigger drag.

My first encounter with gambling was at the horse track in Bossier City, to which I was taken by my boss, H. At that time, I was going to college and working part time at a hardware store in Shreveport. H. was the assistant manager of the store, and he wanted to teach me how to bet on a sure thing. The sure things had four legs and jockeys on top of them.  As it turned out, they were not so sure – which H., to his sorrow, discovered. H. covered his debts by “borrowing” from the store, and so the downward spiral goes.

 

My own young self thought gambling, as well as drugs and the rock n roll lifestyle, was romantic. My older self thinks the ultimate gambler was the shooter in Las Vegas, taking a private bet with himself that he could take out x number of lives in a certain time frame and even get away with it. From killing time to killing – freedom’s just another word for nothing much to lose.

As Ferenzi and Turner (2012) point out, problem gambling was late to be medicalized. About the time my friend H. was quietly cleaning out the till and spending it on what he hoped would be a winning trifecta, the DSM-III was putting this kind of gambling on its list of addictions, along with alcohol and other ingested stuff.  There is a lot of  controversy about the addiction model for “deviant” behavior – and this controversy definitely reflects a class bias. A winner – whether a wall street firm making money on derivatives and currency trading or a man who uses algorithms to win horse races – is considered less a deviant than a genius. A loser – my friend H., or my roommate in New Orleans, later on, who lost everything at the horse races including the rent money – is not given such a friendly lens.  H.’s gains were, on the addictive model, pathological. Benter’s gains, on the other hand, are “returns”.

 

“Their returns kept growing. Woods made $10 million in the 1994-95 season and bought a Rolls-Royce that he never drove. Benter purchased a stake in a French vineyard. It was impossible to keep their success secret, and they both attracted employees and hangers-on, some of whom switched back and forth between the Benter and Woods teams. One was Bob Moore, a manic New Zealander whose passions were cocaine and video analysis. He’d watch footage of past races to identify horses that should have won but were bumped or blocked and prevented from doing so. It worked as a kind of bad-luck adjuster and made the algorithms more effective.”

As we all know, chaos is a kind of determinate dynamical system. There are rules here, dude. But why, oh why, does it have to be so fucking joyless?