the dead

“The projection of one’s own evil reactions into the demons is only a piece of a system, which became the ‘weltanschauung’ of primitives and that we, in the next chapter, will meet as the ‘animistic’. We will then have fixed in place the psychological character of such a system-construction and find our point d’appui again in those system-constructions that the neurotics bring to us. Provisionally we will only betray here, that the socalled “secondary elaboration” of the dream content is the model for all these system-constructions. “

(“Die Projektion der eigenen bösen Regungen in die Dämonen ist nur ein Stück eines Systems, welches die »Weltanschauung« der Primitiven geworden ist und das wir in der nächsten Abhandlung dieser Reihe
als das »animistische« kennenlernen werden. Wir werden dann die psychologischen Charaktere einer solchen Systembildung festzustellen haben und unsere Anhaltspunkte wiederum in der Analyse jener Systembildungen finden, welche uns die Neurosen entgegenbringen. Wir wollen vorläufig nur verraten, daß die sogenannte »sekundäre Bearbeitung« des Trauminhalts das Vorbild für alle diese Systembildungen ist.” – TT, 116)

“The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?” – Tom Paine, the Rights of Man

The dead belong not just to you and me – they are the dead of an order. In fact, there is not, and there cannot be, a rule by which one determines whether I belong to the dead or the dead belong to me. I’ve been looking at one aspect of the fall of the old order – a fall that was the great event in universal history, and is certainly at the center of the story I am telling, of the dissolution of the human limit. It governs my story in the same way Finnegan’s fall reigns over Finnegans Wake’s dreamtime. I’ve been writing about projection because, in Freudian terms, it is the mechanism that drives the “building of systems” – it stands at the beginning of poetry and history.

I’m going to move this thread away from its invisible center - which has been the Marriage of Figaro – to a post-revolutionary story of projection – E.T.A. Hoffman’s story, Kleines Zaches, sogenannte Zinnobar.

saint max brod

The line I've been pursuing is that of understanding projection, of seeing, as Freud writes, how that projection gives us an immage of the dead, and - of our being bound to the dead. The codes of the dead. The books of the dead. The books compiled to honor the dead. The honor due to the dead in the disposition of what they leave behind.

Franz Steiner's book, Taboo (1952), for instance - a great instance, with that catcher's mitt poetry of coincidence - was put together in his honor, after his death, by his students, who saw that in his lifetime, he ... dispersed himself over too many areas. Fled from too many policemen. It is, the book is, according to his student, Mary Douglas, an essential text on taboo.

Steiner runs the word down to its first appearance in a European context is in the Journals of Captain Cook. There's something odd about that, Steiner thinks. After all, Cook is reporting a word, in the 1770s, that must have been known to explorers, to seamen, Dutch and Spanish, a century before that. Yet the word doesn't appear in Spanish texts, or Dutch.

Cook uses it first in connection with the sanctions concerning the dead.

“In connection with human sacrifice in Tahiti, we are told:
“The solemnity itself is called Poore Eree, or Chief’s Prayer; and the victim, who is offered up, Tataa-taboo, or consecrated man. This is the only instance where we have heard the word taboo used at this island, where it seems to have the same mysterious significance as at Tonga; though it is there applied to all cases where things are not to be touched.”

Of course, our notion of the discovery of Tahiti is filled with women who can be touched. The isle of Venus. However, as Steiner points out, Cook’s description of the women is as much about these mysterious meanings as it is about availability. Especially, Cook and his men were puzzled by eating arrangements among the Tahitians. In his journal, Cook doesn’t explicitly use the word taboo in this connection, but he gropes around for a word to describe the principles that seem to make it the case that women and men did not eat together. The most famous image from those voyages to Tahiti are, of course, of available naked women – and yet what struck Cook, as much, was their oddly stubborn refusal to eat the same table as men. The british sailors would invite them to do it – and they would always refuse. And they were adamant.

We bump up against the invisible…

Steiner came from a Prague that - when he was writing in 1950 - was as dead and gone as Cook's Tahiti. Back in the day, he knew Max Brod. And that is the man that this post is really about. The man who bumped up against the invisible. The man whose whole whole career proceeded under the mark of a taboo that nobody wanted to speak of. Let’s put Captain Cook back in the frame – put the picture of him, perhaps, on the wall. An adventure story, such as those loved by Brod’s best friend, Franz Kafka.

Brod is most famous not for anything he himself wrote, but for publishing his friend Kafka’s writing – as much as he could find. And yet, he did this in spite of finding this letter among his friend’s affects in that tragic week in 1924, when Kafka died of his tuberculosis:

Liebster Max, meine letzte Bitte: Alles, was sich in meinem Nachlass (also im Buchkasten, Wäscheschrank, Schreibtisch, zu Hause und im Büro, oder wohin sonstirgendetwas vertragen worden sein sollte und dir auffällt) an Tagebüchern, Manuskripten, Briefen, fremden und eignen, Gezeichnetem und so weiter findet, restlos und ungelesen zu verbrennen, ebenso alles Geschriebene oder Gezeichnete, das du oder andre, die du in meinem Namen darum bitten sollst, haben. Briefe, die man dir nicht übergeben will, soll man wenigstens selbst zu verbrennen sich verpflichten.

(Dearest Max, my last request: everything that can be found in my posthumous papers (thus in boxes, cupboards, desks, at home and in the offie, or wherever else they may be that you come upon them) of diaries, manuscripts, letters, my own and those written to me, sketches and so on, should be burned unread and without remnant, even all the written or drawn things that you or others have, that you might have asked for in my name. If there are letters that people will not turn over to you, at least they should promise to burn them themselves.”)

…

By now, there is a quite a literature about Brod and Kafka. It is, to say the least, interesting. On the one hand, what Brod reports about Kafka from direct experience is often quoted as a sort of oral testament of Kafka’s, a Gnostic gospel. On the other hand, Brod’s editing of Kafka’s manuscripts has been attacked, his heavily religious interpretations of Kafka’s work has been ridiculed as something like kitsch by people like Walter Benjamin, his attempts to make Kafka seem like a saint by, for instance, censoring evidence of Kafka going to a brothel has been exposed – and then there is the case of the letter. The contract, the curious pact. Milan Kundera used it as an archetypal symbol of the invasion of the individual’s privacy in Testaments Betrayed. In Rolf Tiedman’s essay on Kafka and shame, he summarizes Kundera’s case like this:

“Because Brod had published "everything, indiscriminately," Kundera charges him with unforgivable indiscretions, with treason against Kafka, for having published "even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod, anyone but its addressee could eventually read.... He betrayed his friend. He acted against his friend's wishes, against the meaning and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew in the man."6 It goes without saying that Kundera cannot sustain this accusation; he has to resort to the supporting construction of a divi- sion between autobiographical material including diaries and letters, on the one hand, and novels and stories, on the other, a construc- tion that seems almost Jesuitical in comparison with the rest of his argument and that is useless for Kafka's work: "With regard to the unfinished prose, I readily concede that it would put any executor in a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varying significance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greater than these."' Kundera would not want to do without Kafka's novels, since he wished to have written them himself; rather-although he never says so directly-he would forego the publication of incom- plete writings of "varying significance" like the texts of the volumes Brod titled Preparations for a Country Wedding and Description of a Struggle." The publication of Kafka's diaries and letters, as Kundera charges vehemently, demonstrated a lack of shame and, in Kun- dera's view, is a capital crime.”

Although Tiedman modifies Kundera’s case, generally, he takes it that, in this contract, this pact, Kafka was the one so easily shamed, Kafka was the one who was shamed, Kafka is like the Josef K at the end of the Trial, who felt, under the executioner’s knife, as if ‘the shame would outlive him” – which Tiedman, taking his clue from Adorno, interprets, literally, as a shame that is ingested by the bystanders, in them, transmitted by them. That they allowed Josef K to be executed…

This story has, however, a funny twist, in that it makes Kafka into a sort of gull. A victim. Devil’s pacts, however, are more… ambivalent than that. I’m interested in what Kafka was doing.

If we take Brod at his word, Kafka left that letter already knowing that Brod would refused to do as instructed. Brod had told Kafka this two years before, when Kafka first showed him the letter. And what funny instructions! If Kafka thought so badly of his botched work, why would he want it hunted down so ardently? It is as if it had a burning importance – an importance to be burnt. Brod was to find letters Kafka wrote – no mean task – and have them burnt. He was to go through everything, a regular anti-treasure hunt. The letter is written in the obsessive rhythm of the animal in the burrow, inventorying his endless defenses against his enemies.

But that’s not all. To my mind the letter’s logical form is closest to the parable, Before the Law, which the sacristan tells Joseph K. in The Trial. In that story, the man outside the law is compelled in a law-like way to wait for being permitted entrance into the law. It is as if he has somehow wandered out of any recognizable social space. Every reader of the novel remembers the chilling end of that parable, the conversation between the man who guards the door to the law and the man who is waiting, and is dying there after all those years:

'What is it you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'You're insatiable.' 'Everyone wants
access to the law,' says the man, 'how come, over all these years, noone but me has asked to be let in?' The doorkeeper can see the man's come to his end, his hearing has faded, and so, so that he can be heard, he shouts to him: 'Nobody else could have got in this way, as this
entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it'."

Such unutterable cruelty!

Kafka’s testament put Brod in the position of the man who sits before the door to the law, and sits there forever. Brod, the man among all men who, Kafka knew, understood the greatness of his writing. Understood, at least, that it was great, although not understanding why, however much he would like to. Why select this person, of all people, as one’s executioner/executor? What kind of trick is that to play?

Perhaps, in the end, you are tired of the one who admires you most. Who loves you for the work. That love like a debt that you owe.

Something happened when Brod picked up that letter. His life changed. It was, in its own wicked way, rather like God’s order to Abraham to kill his son. To obey the order was to disobey the moral law. To disobey the order was to disobey the divine law. And in that moment, the two – which seemed to be one thing – suddenly come apart before your very eyes. Kafka’s writings are full of taboos that are rigorously enforced, even if they exist in no set form, from no set force. Someone must have slandered Josef K. The father, in the Judgment, knows all about his son’s letters to his friend in Russia – knows that far from being a sympathetic friend, he is a rat, a vermin, a betrayer. He is condemned to death. And what happened to Gregor Samsa?

Max Brod, opening that letter, saw the divine order and the moral order come apart. He would revenge himself – revenge himself for the fact that the great work of good that he did, the saving of Kafka’s writings, was made into the act of a shameful thief – by making Kafka, as much as he could, into a saint. For if Kafka wasn’t god, then the script that was printed, oh so minutely, on his chest by Kafka’s finest punishment machine – Dearest Max – would be impossible to read.

Oh, let us not assume too hastily we know what shame is, in this scene, in this scenario, in this history, and who is shameless, and who is not.

I am happy

-I am happy.
-Who is speaking?

A couple of weeks ago I went out with my friend Alan and his friend Owen, who is a philosopher. Trust a philosopher for a beautiful definition – when the conversation came round to the topic of my book, Owen improvised a breathtaking definition of happiness that merged Aristotle and Ricoeur. Unfortunately, my paraphrase won’t be as pretty, but it was something like: happiness is about seeing that one’s life follows a certain purposive narrative, one in which one has been both true to oneself and true to the values one believes in. To achieve this self-fashioning is to be happy. I hope I haven’t deviated too wildly from Owen’s riff.

That riff is, I think, an accurate reflection of how happiness is coded among the cultured level of American, and perhaps simply Western, society in 2009. Happiness, on this reading, is not a patchwork of happy feelings – but it is a judgment. Or, rather, it is an odd hybrid of judgment and intuition, for not only does one judge that this narrative is happy, but that judgment feels happy and reinforces the continuance of the narrative. Finding that I am happy makes me happy, and inclines me to continue in the path I have set out on.

As we saw have noted before, volupté, in the eighteenth century, shed that aspect of itself that was essentially sociable – that agreeableness towards people – and became centered on the self’s pleasure. Happiness, too, seems originally to have been about feeling, that phenomenon in which the self is king and subject. But it moved (in a movement in which one catches a flash of ambivalence) towards being both a feeling and a judgment. As a judgment, it crosses the border from the private to the public. The king is toppled, and – at the same time that politics becomes the science of creating a society in which the pursuit of happiness is maximally possible – one can ask: how do you know you are happy?
Perhaps you are mistaken. You think you are happy. You aren’t happy.

Of course, this is the Freudian moment. If happiness is not simply a private matter, if I don’t have to accept that the statement “I am happy” must be true, because I say so – at that moment we have another problem: the problem of false happiness. The problem that I am happy is not a judgment, but a delusion. An intimate error. An error about our intimacy. And perhaps an error about our access to that narrative, that self fashioning, that self.

the art of projection

"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 into 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.

The monster's touch

En montant sur le trône, il entra dans le cercle enchanté et sans issue. – Merezhovsky, writing about Alexander I.

The circle that is without an exit and under a spell – isn’t this the circle of the monster? Monster as father substitute. Monster as noble. Monster as libertine. The Monster who demands the right to the first night.

It is impossible for those who have received at least one extra eye from Freud’s angel to ignore the fact that the Marriage of Figaro, which, according to Danton, “killed the nobility”, contains a strong incestuous subplot – the Count, in the story, wants to break up Figaro’s upcoming marriage, in order to have Susanne, Figaro’s fiancé, to himself. One avenue is already closed, since the Count verbally renounced his right to the proverbial “first night”, Thus, he conspires with Marceline, the governess, to make Figaro pay for another contract - a bond he had made with the governess promising to marry her if he couldn’t pay back a sum he’d borrowed from her at any date she named. This plan is spoiled, however, as Figaro recounts the story of his being stolen by the gypsies with details that confirm, for Marceline, that Figaro is her son.

By all accounts, the nobility howled with laughter at the speeches in the play. King Louis XVI, who is usually depicted as one of history’s fall guys, was, at least in this regard, prescient. He read the play before it was put on. The monarch wasn’t in the habit of being a censor, but Beaumarchais was by long, Figaro like ties a familiar in the royal household, the music teacher of Louis’ sisters, a state spy, etc. He pronounced the play dreadful, and said it should not be put on.

Other royalty was not so sensitive. In Poland, the play was actually staged by Prince Nassau, Beaumarchais’s friend, at the court, with the king and various nobles making up the cast.

All of which I bring forward to convince you that an apparently weak link between the overthrow of the old order and Freud’s account of the revolutionary overthrow of the father – which happened in dreamtime, meaning that it is always happening, in a sense. As I hope I’ve made clear, the dissolution of the human limit, or, to reformulate it, the universal-making of universal historywas, from one point of view, the extension of man to the master of the world; but, within that point of view, one price for that extension was the dissolution of the old, defining character of man. His glassy essence was melted down and sold for scrap to the poets, the alienated, the crabby reactionaries, the fevered revolutionaries.

Having made contact with our context – and contact, contagion, Beruehrung, Ansteckung, are very much part of Freud’s text, one we have to get back to – let us go then, you and I, to the introduction of the notion of projection in Totem and Tabu, which occurs in his second chapter. The first chapter is about the incest phobia. The second chapter is entitled, The Tabu and the ambivalence of the feelings ( Gefühlsregungen - affective reactions), and it is here that we can see, like a strategy emerging in a chess game, that the circle of this text is not bound, as one might expect, to return to the infant’s sexuality – but rather, we are enrolled in a movement towards death. But it is a mistake to think that eros is the opposite of thanatos, here – as is signaled by the very word, ambivalence.

The question that Freud wants to answer is: why are ghosts scary? Or: why are the dead fearful?

Why, I could ask, rephrasing this slightly, do I have to wake up and fall back asleep in order to get rid of the monsters?

“This hostility, which in the unconscious bears a painful trace as satisfaction over their death has, by primitives, another fate: it is parried when they shift it to the object of hostility, to the dead themselves. We call this massive defensive process, in the normal as well as the pathological mental life, a projection.”

To be continued

To be continued

tag the text, flee from the text

First things first. Me, my posts are all feints and fidgets, lately. If you want to read something good instead of my debauched stews - go to Rough Theory, who has been writing about the Grundrisse. As always, Marx, in her hands, begins to seem like a Henry James character - if James had only created a character with his own genius, instead of the subpar strivers from the upper class who never quite live up to the authorial voice in which they are caught. RT's Marx is a man who is hyper-aware of epistemological traps, including the trap of thinking that there are just too many epistemological traps to make broad and monumental generalizations.

More notes in and around Totem and Tabu

1. Lawrence Goldman and Michael Emmison, in a 1995 article on Huli children’s games (the Huli live in New Guinea), lament the paucity of cross cultural studies of children’s games and play. In a brief survey of the field, they find Brian Sutton-Smith’s work, outside of the American-European context, to be too developmentalist. Sutton-Smith, in the seventies, did make some cross-cultural studies of children’s play, but imposed upon these cultures a certain story of upward development – like numerous anthropologists of the sixties, and like Freud – in which a society, as it became more “complex”, showed more complex play patterns among its children. Sutton-Smith was sensitive to the fact that, under the peasant or nomadic order, children were workers in a sense in which they were not in the developed economy. But he was also very attracted to the scale, that totem among comparative ethnographers of the Cold War period. As Goldman and Smith put it, cross cultural studies seem inevitably to quote some archetypal studies of children at play, like LeVine and LeVine’s study of a Gusii community in Kenya, as support for the “low or non-existent status of representational play” in many cultures.

2. Well, these are the marks of universal history. Oh, you might think you won’t fuck with universal history, so it won’t fuck with you. You’d be wrong, little greenie.

Yet, I find in Totem and Tabu, which I have been reading this week, a double movement – on the one hand, the construction of the story of “mankind” since the “first feast of mankind” – that feast in which the sons eat the dead father; on the other hand, the creation of certain concepts, notably ambivalence, projection, and the “omnipotence of thought”, which operate to create a series of counter-correspondences, counter-generalities that put the neurotic at the center of the modern. Our representative neurotic. And that, applied to the ‘scientific’ world view, question its latent layer of narcissism, its own “omnipotence of thought.”

3. I’ve been using Sutton-Smith’s notion of children’s play to shake up our notion of this thing and what it is about. At least Sutton-Smith is coherent – if civilization is the development of more complex forms of life, captured how you will (by modes of production, by levels of science, by some notion of technology), then surely the same process will apply to children.

4. And I’ve been using my own memory of my dreamlife. For I do remember my five year old dreams. I do remember the monsters in those dreams. I do remember the strategies – the hiding in closets and peeping out. The hiding under the bed. The hiding behind a tree. And the need I had, in order to get rid of the monster, to wake up. I had to wake up and decide to kill the monster, and then go back to sleep and do it – although often I didn’t have to. Merely waking up and making that decision allowed me to return to a monsterless sleep. But the difference in modes – dreaming/waking – corresponds to another of Sutton-Smith’s findings: the general inability of children, before the age of 9 or so, to play games of “complex” perspective-taking – that is, games in which defense and attack are mixed. Instead, the attackers correspond absolutely to one side, and the defenders correspond exactly to another. It is always the tagger, and never the tagged.

5. There’s a rich layer of this in farce. Think of Chérubin in Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro. He is always hiding. And by hiding, we know – through a dream logic – that the Count is a monster. But, in farce, the level of a five year old’s thinking (and Cherubin’s androgyny is certainly on the sexual level of the child’s idea of sex) is imposed upon by adult thinking – society’s opinions, which come in the form of a monster. Thus, the Count is continually finding him.

6. It is crucial to Freud’s vision of the first feast of humanity that, in some ways, it is a defeat. Not only do the brothers feel guilty about killing and eating a father that they love, as well as hate, but none of them occupy the father’s place. That place is, as it were, forever banned. It is the ultimate monster place.

7. I must begin with projection. Next post, I will write about projection.

link to my happiness article

My friend Alan saw this and sent me the link. It is me, in the paper, on happiness.