"A House is Not a Home...": The Un-heimlich Maneuver
A Prelude to Heidegger vs The Mothers
(A Few notes on The Sublime, The Un-canny, Aliens, Secrets, Communication, Your Mother
and, oh yes, Architectural Space)
r.cheat/m
It is impossible to think or write without some facade of a house at least rising up, a phantom, to receive and to make a work of our peregrinations. Lost behind our thoughts, the domus is also a mirage in front, the impossible dwelling. Prodigal sons, we engender its patriarchal frugality.
Jean-François Lyotard
Domus and the Megalopolis
in The Inhuman
A the end of the day, the house awaits uswe think. We think of the home, which is a house (although we are all aware of Dionne Warwick's caution that "a house is not a home..." without the concomitant presence of duality), and now, in fact, we can make that improbable collapse of materiality into non-materiality (or into perhaps the spirit of the domus: and how will we negotiate which polar state it will collapse into? Especially since "male" and "female" are collapsing also.) The funny thing about that collapse, like all collapses, is that there is a point of singularity reached beyond which indeterminacy begins and then the position of the singularity itself becomes indeterminate. The oscillating, infinite realm of chiasmos is reached, reversibility, the Turn. We want desperately, oh so fiercely do we want it, that the material of our house, its brick, mortar, wood, to be turned into love, domestic bliss, family; Us (the family) against Them (whoever-or whatever-else is out there). A final line drawn in the sand.
|
US | THEM
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Thought cannot want its house. But the house haunts it.
Jean-François Lyotard
Our cave, er, I mean our house, re-fuges (from the latin, to flee,back) us. We suit up with it, a diaphanous, gossamer web, which is nonetheless (pound-for-pound as they say) stronger that the strongest high-tech material (stronger even than carbon fiber, similar to the stuff in pencils, the ultimate line-drawer-in-the-sandwhich is also stronger-than-the-strongest-high-tech-material, since it embraces and delineates the metaphysics of lines-drawn-in-the-sand. In fact, with the mark we have the ur-line/drawn/in/sand, Over here, on this side of the line we have Us, thought [proper thought at that], my family, my perception, 'my...', 'my...', 'my...'; and over there, 'over' the ur-lineor maybe we have to go under or around the lineis everything else: Them; 'wild', 'crazy', thought [which I half suspect may be your thought].) And so this line we draw is so incredibly strong because, really, it's not there. So it can be as strong as we like. We don't even have to be a good draftsman to draw this line. In fact, the un-canny (un-heimlich; the german origin of heimlich means 'of the home') thing about this line is that it almost seems to draw itself. Almost. (The [un-]heimlich maneuver, we must remember, requires a partner to deliver the necessary blow, unseen, from the back, which will free the victim of the obstruction, an obstruction created by 'wolfing' one's food or having false [prosthetic] teeth. In the first case, one is too much of an animal, in the second, perhaps, one is not enough of an animal: too natural or too artificial. Anyway there is a problem with one of the prime physical gateways to the inside of the body, a blockage which has to be forcibly expelled by a third party---I am assuming that the food blockage was once alive and hence can be (or was) a third 'party'---so that the "un-" can be thrown out and the body can be heimlich once again. The heimlich condition is one of duality; thirdness automatically introduces the "un-" [to be pronounced with an explosive grunt, as if one had been shoved in the stomach, all the time remembering that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach and that an army moves on its stomach. (For a further discussion of carno-phallogocentrism, eating-speaking-interiorizing, and subjectivity, see "Eating Well," or the Calculation of the Subject, An Interview with Jacques Derrida in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. E. Cadava, P. Connor, J.-L. Nancy. ] Ingestion-incorporation-expulsion probably serve as a baseline for metaphor construction and not only those having to do with boundaries per se if we consider the Hegelian dialectic. Certainly, the relationship between architecture and the body, and its repudiations, is so close as to be almost un-theorizable; or rather, perhaps, theorizable only in this sense: what would happen if I never eat food again? What will support boundary maintenance if I eschew chewing? What prosthetic would be possible that would allow be to be deadat least in any traditional senseand yet alive, that is, actively processing material, having an inside and an outside, with each side moving toward the other? In what sense is that related to drawing a line that no one can cross over? A conception/building that no one can inhabit? Is it necessary that anyone inhabit it [and still be architecture]? Is it necessary that anyone be "in" the body [and still be human]? In what state (body, mind, political) would un-housing be possible [necessary, desirable]? What third party governs this un-canny, explosive "un-"? Will it be para-site [mythology, anomalous propagation through history] or symbiote [a reasoned adjudication with this un-canny third partner, techné, heir of the Enlightenment, hair of the dog...] and how can we tell the difference?)
Another thing about the line is this: it becomes a wall. Perhaps not completely infinite in length and height but close enough so that it makes little difference. Except now this wall/line is a little too much, too close, too confining, too opaque. After all, we'd at least like to be able to see through the wall, to at least taunt Them, to let Them know who is ultimately in charge. After all, who built the god damn wall! Let's see a little respect here. So maybe we need a few openings in this magnificent thing we have 'built' (after all, so much stronger for being un-builtthis way it can be put up at a moments notice). We/Us may need a few things from Them. Not that we're not totally self-sufficient mind you! After all, who built the wall in the first place? (well, o.k., so we're not exactly sure, and we may more less have found it, but we are certain that one of Us must have been involved in drawing, er, building, er, living it.)
So We/Us begin to suffocate. No oxygen. (We think). And we can't see straight/very well because, well, there's no light (we think. Although, frankly, we seem to have been breathing and seeing pretty well up to now. So stuff must have been coming from somewhere. Where?)
The only kind of thoughtbut an abject, objective, rejective thoughtwhich is capable of thinking the end of the domus, is perhaps the thought suggested by techno-science.
Jean-François Lyotard, ibid.
Maybe We/Us have parasites. We forgot to disinfect before we found, er, drew the line/wall and now, maybe, Them parasites are coming from inside the line, just waiting until the light (seemed) darkest or the breathing more labored. So now, if that's the case, we'll have to line the family up for de-tox. (Daddy has just whipped up a batch of poison (pharmakos) for the little buggers and now all we have to do is take it. Daddy calls this administration process "jimjonesification". We feel sure it will free us of our problems.)
Think of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movie trilogy and especially Alien 3): the housing, or covering over, of 'essential" Otherness, which makes its presence known at the most inopportune time, is torn asunder at the emergence of the parasite, the alien (and compared to the fecundity of the almost overwhelming threat, it takes place in that most barren of spaces: outer). But the explosion is never final. There is always another alien Mother to give birth to a human mother (of whatever gender).
Exactly as Ripley says in Alien 3: "It seems like you've always been with me," speaking to the alien inside her. An observation which is simultaneously medical, psychoanalytic, and theological. Back propagation occurs so that at the emergence of the singularity all previous epistemological and ontological knowledge is re-aligned along the lines of the site of the para-. At which point the para-site loses its unequal status and becomes first among equals. (We might also remember the first time the alien birthing happens: from a human male, at the dinner table, as he is eating what look to be grain sprouts. Persephone and Demeter where art thou?) The transformation from interior to exterior is complete, the line has been demolished, the Third (the un-) has been introduced, the Second (the male) has been elided, and the Mothers' priorities have been established even if human mother and alien Third are apparently destroyed (at the end of Alien 3) in a further apocalyptic transformation witnessed by the transformed theologic of the Fatherswhich Ripley has become, a Father Mother carrying its/her/his un-progeny into the cleansing Fire stoked by the Fathers. The emergence of the Mother leads to the Fire this time.
Other media mothering of the Other would have to include Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There the apocalyptic transformation proceeds in the opposite direction: the 'house' is imposed over the 'home' (human form) wherein the transformation takes place, within a (vegetable) pod, leaving the human form intact but carving it our, or hollowing it, and then refilling it with a vegetal Other which links telepathically all its selves together. This matrix (or Mother) seeks only the transformative joy of converting others to Mother-dom (becoming one with the Matrix.) We might also recall the extreme threatening organicity of the alien home (the space ship) in Alien(s): almost as if the womb had been eviscerated, like a starfish stomach. The internal becomes external momentarily in order to make the external internal: birthing takes place out of the housing in order to make its way back into another housing, a somewhat devious ecology. Perhaps we could call it a Purloined Letter ecology, devious because so obvious: the essence of technique.
HEIDEGGER VERSUS THE MOTHERS
(A paternity suit)
We must start our new description of the universe by making a fuller subdivision than we did before; we then distinguished two forms of realitywe must now add a third. Two were enough at an earlier stage, when we postulated on the one hand an intelligible and unchanging model and on the other a visible and changing copy of it. We did not distinguish a third form, considering two would be enough; but now the argument compels us to try to describe in words a form that is difficult and obscure. What must we suppose its powers and nature to be? In general terms, it is the receptacle (chora) and, as it were, the nurse of all becoming and change.
Plato in Timaeus
Mephistopheles: Goddesses sit enthroned in reverend loneliness
Space is as naught about them, time is less;
the very mention of them is distress
they are the Mothers.
Faust: Mothers!
Mephistopheles: Are you awed?
Faust: Why, it strikes a singular chord.
Mephistopheles: And so it ought. Goddesses undivined
by mortals, names with shrinking by our kind
Go delve the downmost for their habitat;
Blame but yourself that it has come to that.
Faust: Where is the road?
Mephistopheles: No road! Into the unacceded,
the inaccessible; toward the never-pleaded,
the never-pleadable. How is your mood?
There are no locks to probe, no bolts to shift;
By desolations harrowed you will drift.
Can you conceive of wastes of solitude?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust, part II, Dark Gallery
Unless man first establishes himself beforehand in the space proper to his essence and there takes up his dwelling, he will not be capable of anything essential, within the destining now holding sway.
. . . But where is the danger? What is the place for it? Inasmuch as the danger is Being itself, it is both nowhere and everywhere. It has no place as something other than itself. It is itself the placeless dwelling of all presencing. The danger is the epoch of Being coming to presence as Enframing (By which, Heidegger means technology).
. . . . The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly.
Martin Heidegger from
The Question Concerning Technology
Was there an exact moment when phallic-visual-geometric space vanquished earlier perceptions and forms of perception?
The Production of Space
Henri Lefebvre
The shift from a maternal principle (which would retain its importance in the sphere of kinship relations) to the rule of paternity implied the establishment of a specific mental and social space; with the rise of private ownership of the land came the need to divide it up in accordance with abstract principles that would govern both property lines and the status of property-holders.
Lefebvre, ibid.
(Pre-phallic space is absolute space, the space of the sacred [or cursed], according to Lefebvre, and was only indicated, circumscribed, or suggested in archaic life.)...absolute space cannot be understood in terms of a collection of sites and signs; to view it thus is to misapprehend it in the most fundamental way. Rather, it is indeed a space, at once and indistinguishably mental and social, which comprehends the entire existence of the group concerned. . . In a space of this kind there is no 'environment', nor even, properly speaking, any 'site' distinct from the overall texture.
Lefebvre
ibid. p. 240
(This absolute space begins to look a lot like contemporary electronic 'virtual', media space with the difference that there is the abstract, geometric, visual,dare we say it-phallic/scene applied 'over' the mater/obscenealthough there are those who would say it's not applied over anything; it's just extrapolating its way 'forward'. While Lefebvre claims that this absolute space did not govern the private space of family and individual, it is clear that the contemporary absolute space of electronic and perceptual prosthesis does exactly that.)
Hole-y F(r)eud
(wherein we attempt to be re-assured as to the
essential non-existence of scary stuff)
One of the seminal works on the uncanny is an article of the same title by Sigmund Freud. Freud makes quite a few points, the most salient being:
1. In a long etymological digression Freud points out the essential similarity of the terms "heimlich" (or 'of the home', 'homely') and its purported opposite 'unheimlich': Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincided with its opposite, unheimlich".
2. Uncanny feelings arise when we observe inanimate objects which become animated as in dolls and automata, e.g., those things which "excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity."
3. However, it is not long until Freud drops such considerations and turns, of course, to the sexual organs, making a connection between the penis and the eye in an exegesis of the E.T.A. Hoffman story, The Sandman, and, further, attributing uncanny effects "to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood."
4. Freud then considers the theme of the double or the dopplegangerwith a side glance at telepathy between the doubles. The double, Freud believes, dates back to an earlier mental stage of human development. Whereas before, the double was seen as a divine confirmation of immortality, now when it is seen as a projection outward of internal processes, "The 'double' has become a thing of terror..."
5. Related to the idea of duplication is repetition, recurrence of the same thing, which Freud boils down to a 'compulsion to repeat' which he locates in the instincts, which can overrule the pleasure principle and which can therefore seem to have a daemonic character.
6) After a few more examples, Freud strays quite a bit from his 'automata' hypothesis and asserts that "everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfills the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression."
7. The very next paragraph brings yet another couple of hypotheses: the real ('secret') nature of the uncanny is "something repressed which recurs" and that therefore the uncanny is "in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."
8. To round out his collection of examples, Freud leaves the second section with this piece de resistance: "It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs." He continues by making a very long stretch associating one's mother's genitals and the feeling of déjà vu, or having-been-there-before.
9. Freud makes the very helpful observation and distinction (which he himself, cannily enough, has set up for us to find) between the majority of his examples which are fictional and literary and the uncanniness of certain types of experience.
10. However, Freud's differentiation of types of uncanninessthe 'real' (in scare quotes because in a certain sense Freud doesn't think there is anything real about them) and the fictional amount to the same mechanism: The repression of infantile complexes and the subsequent return of the repressed material later in life. Freud conceives of cultural, social life in much the same way as an individual life story. Human culture, for Freud, went through a childhood which it repressed and now comes back as uncanny: "Our primitive forefathers once believed that [omnipotence of thoughts, fulfillment of wishes, secret powers, the return of the dead] were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny..." The truly liberated person (that is, free of animistic beliefs) will have no such disconcerting fear. Reality-testing wins the day in the maturity of the species.
11. But wait! Freud goes on to say that these are really two different things, that is, the uncanny of repressed infantile complexes and a certain cultural uncanniness. It is the difference of animistic beliefs having been surmounted or infantile beliefs having been repressed, a distinction which Freud then goes on to blur.
12. But wait! The imaginative writer does not fit comfortably in either of those categories. Reality-testing has nothing to do with literature (Freud's emphasis). Of course, (says Freud) even if all those elements of the uncanny [wish-fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects] are present in, say, fairy tales, they aren't uncanny since they form the baseline, as it were, of fairy tale reality, so it is not uncanny because its is not unexpected.
13. But wait! As it turns out Freud thinks that there can indeed be a literary uncanny. Strangely (uncannily?) this happens "as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality". It's just that the writer pushes far beyond the ordinary state of what might pass for uncanniness and so he can "even increase his effect, and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality". The distinction between the above which includes the uncanny and the fairy tale, which does not, is a fine and "hazy" one, as Freud admits of so many of his distinctions throughout the essay.
12. But wait! Fred has one last gasp of example-giving and then-a- general-statement which he hopes might clear up any previous mis-understandings. And that bottom line is, as we should come to expect by now, in two parts. The first point being that "...the class of the uncanny which proceeds from repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two" [the other being the surmounting of animistic belief] and in fact we are still not free of these complexes (his penultimate thought in the essay); The second point is a complicated one but seems to be that the novelist can manipulate, increase, or negate our feelings of the uncanny (or fear, which he seems to equate at the end) even though the circumstances of the uncanny are still present.
Freud's last sentence assures us that the apparently infinite dialectic can be pursued in another psychoanalytic place.
Aside from the content, Freud's essay is amazing enough stylistically (which eventually can't be separated from its purported
'truth').
First: the use of exemplariness. Despite the large number of examples Freud provides none seem to quite prove his point...which calls for a general theoretical statement...which calls for a clarifying example, which proves to be not quite clear enough, etc. in an elaborate example of thumb wresting with one's self and a roundelay of mock 'scientificity'. There is no question about who will win the match. In fact, it really doesn't matter whether 'on the one hand...' or 'on the other hand...' wins since they are connected to the same body of presuppositions. Once the psychoanalytic space has been entered, that space cannot be disproved: all proof to the contrary can be shown to be yet another 'example' which proves the psychoanalytic point, a position which goes far beyond the idea of the exception which proves the rule. In psychoanalysis there are no exceptions, as Freud's use of examples in The Uncanny shows. Singularities have no place in psychoanalysis.
(We are on the threshold of a logical difficulty. One might say: "Freud's essay is thus exemplary of the approach of western metaphysics" thereby committing the same 'sin' as that towards which we point. Other than pointing out this abyssal/aporetic point I will go no further with it. It is sometimes better to drop a hot coal than let it burn through although it must be said that western consciousness [which is that of techné, gestell, framing, methodology, etc.] has become ever more adept at handling dangerous and toxic materials even as it introduces a higher level of such. The Freudian stationary and self-confirming dialectical dance is merely one of the latest in a long line of western ontological two-steps. Much of analysis (Freudian and otherwise) might remind the careful reader of the child's adage "I'm rubber, you're glue; everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you".
The fascination of psycho-analysis is that it marked the arrival of a purportedly 'scientific' methodology and study of the human mind when much of it appears to be deeply 'unscientific' in that it relied on 'signature' effects to authorize its efforts and a level of cultural pre-conception imbricated so deeply in the sinews of social life that it was able to pose as merely an objective reflection of reality. This seems to be the aim of most cultural/social movements: the ability to say "Hey, it's not what I think; I'm just reporting the facts, I'm just an objective observer." (The Lacanian extrapolation through and reliance on language has only deepened the problematic. Perhaps at least one version of the Lacanian un-canny can be seen in his explorations of Poe's The Purloined Letter: what is uncanny is that which lies before us but which we are unable to see.)
The Un-canny Termite in the House of the Exemplary
(Wherein we think about doing/building/being
One Thing
and having people imitate us but it doesnt
work
very will for some Reason)
Anything that exists can serve as an example, that is, a particularity that stands for or represents a generality, a sort of rule or unit of measurement or calculation (or rather the inaugural moment of that unit of measurement or calculation.) Thus an example is a peculiar sort of rule in that an example is a singularity, also. An example is to be first of many to follow. By that token of uniqueness (it being the first), the example has no match but it does extend a call asking that a match be made in the manner of the measurement which it has inaugurated. An example is thus simultaneously part of a series and out of the series. An example cannot be exemplary if nothing follows from it even, or especially, the failures which cannot meet the level which the example sets nor can it be an example if it is not continually differentiated from its fellow members. (This region is occupied by a wide ontological spread ranging from style, fashion, invention, prototype, archetype, phenotype, etc. to principles, laws, rules, etc. See especially Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, Indiana Univ. Press. The relationship between particular and general is thus handled in various ways and the ability to discern the degree of imbrication of particular and general also varies greatly. Heidegger makes the point that reason itself is the most covert in disguising its particularity that is, reason would have us think that it is the only possible ground for operation that in fact it is not a particularity at all. An example perhaps occupies the other end of the spectrum in that it can only operate as an example if its relation to the general is easily perceived.)
The most exemplary examples are usually of a moral/ethical/religious nature: Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, etc. These figures illustrate what the perfect exemplary structure would be: Partly in history, in order to have a series (an example must have followers) and partly out of history (an example must always be more than any other member of the series. Of course being partly out of history insures that no other member can match up. The only way for a subaltern member of a series to become the exemplar is to start another series. The pastor can become like Christ but he cannot become Christ. To do so throws the whole structure out of history)
The single example, cut off from its series, would seem to be exemplary of a true uncanny, something that couldn't exist in a Freudian concept of the uncanny. For Freud uncanniness is a sort of mistaken notion, misprision, méconnaissance. There is no need to worry that 'real' entities, from either inside the organism or outside, are attempting to enter the human sphere. The only place where such an entrance is allowed, for Freud, is in the literary realm, in fiction, in a realm that can be safely demarcated and contained from actual human life. The confusion of those realms for the ordinary human is the source of uncanniness; carried too far, we cease being ordinary and become authors or neurotics. . . or superstitious, which amounts to the same thing for Freud. Exemplariness can thus be seen to lose one of its two legs. It becomes firmly planted in the historical register, collapsed in on itself. This collapse is the signature of twentieth century scientific methodology in all fields as well as the scientisms of popular life which have accompanied it.
Hence, examples themselves must now be seen as firmly contained in a series, with no extenuating circumstances as it were, all elements of which can be seen, examined and analyzed. The originating point of the series, the example, must be shown to have no particular power a paradoxical point since then why was a series started or the power of the exemplary simply represents a happenstance concatenation of events which, on reading backward the series which it happens to initiate, proves to be particularly fruitful.
The power of the uncanny, for Freud, is not that it is an unanchored, untethered exemplary but that it sets itself, poses, as one, while being nothing but another element of a series and not even necessarily the first (although the power of its pose comes from its adoption of firstness or primalness e.g., the primal horde, Oedipus complex, etc.). The temporal regression that psychoanalysis posits serves the function of depositing the uncanny within psychoanalysis and not the subject. The uncanny becomes a systems error, whether in literature, where it becomes enthralled to the doubling which writing, media, and communication necessarily entails, or whether in psychoanalysis, where the error becomes one with the system and hence invisible but with methodological poltergeist, action-at-a-distance, vampirism, lycanthropy, substance-becoming-subject, subject-becoming-substance: the whole panoply of repressed-and-returned phantasmagoria. Method itself becomes a shape-shifter with a secret heart.
How could one have a secret?
Absolute expropriation makes the secret inaccessible to that very one holding its privilege. In this absolute alienation, the holder of the inaccessible can just as well peacefully manage its effects or phenomena, can chatter about them, manipulate them. The invisible remains invisible, out of reach; the visible is only the visible. Simultaneously the most familiar, secret, proper, near, the Heimliche of the Geheimnis [secret)] presents itself as the most foreign, the most disquietening (unheimliche).
. . .
A systems undecidability is here more powerful than the value of truth. . . . Das Unheimlich should de-border, should have de-bordered the opposition, verily the dialectic, of the true/nontrue.
Jacque Derrida, Glas, 51a
This Is Your Brain On Drugs. . .
(Wherein we have bad dreams concerning Invasion of the Body Snatchers and are unable to sleep very well
because we are considering the philosophical
implications of the idea/actuality
of Prosthetic Space)
. . . the similarity of the sublime and the uncanny: similar at least in that they are the opposite poles of being which chiasmatically collide. Explosive overwhelming Being, uncognizable, untranslatable, ineffable, overflowing parousia (presence), the most complete expression of the solar aspect in human life; and the uncanny: hidden, silent, barely able, if at all, to be perceived, untranslatable because it speaks no language, ineffable because it can be discerned only by its effects, it lives out of the corner of the eye, a puddle of Mercury (named after the hermaphrodite messenger god, by way of the planet closest to the sun; phenomenologically, perhaps it should have been named Pluto), the most complete expression of the lunar aspect in human life. And should we decide to characterize these in sexual/gender terms? Or even hormonal chemistry? or even prosthetic/psychedelic/ psychotropic/entheogenic terms?And should we decide to characterize these in terms of mood? Are they really there? are they constructed, are they given to us and how can we tell the difference? They form the limits of the human phenomenological experience. To get to them is already to get beyond them. Getting to them is not the same thing as writing about them. Getting beyond them is not the same thing as understanding them; it may simply be to move into another space. The mood of this space is anxiety; it culminates in terror: In anxiety the subject no longer knows who he is. He attends at his own deconstruction, so to speak. He is no longer a subject, but an indeterminate being who feels himself invaded by a disquieting strangeness. . . . Terror is anxiety in the face of the disquieting abyss (abgrund ), which escapes calculating thought. The hidden abyss upon which the assurance of technology is projected is more terrorizing than anxiety producing. Terror is as it were anxiety about being, essential anxiety. (Michel Haar, Attunement and Thinking, in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, eds. Dreyfus and Hall). To see where and what to build/construct, we see through the mood of the age. For Heidegger our age is anxiety and terror (for the Greeks astonishment, for medievals certainty and its corollary doubt. The manifestations of these moods are, in historical order, gods, creatures, and fields of forces.) One can certainly see a sort of progression here but it becomes difficult to do a future projection. What would be a coming mood, what would be the next manifestation ( assuming that we have not reached the end of mood/history. And what would it mean to go forward beyond a field of force ?) Once we have played all the keys on the piano do we jump to another instrument (where assuredly the keys are the same but the timbre is different)? Or do we give up the idea of music (or master narratives, or totalities, or subjectivities, or humanisms, or bodies, etc.) altogether? And isnt that a necessity of life, thought, and labor conceived as force fields? But perhaps there is yet something we dont know.
We believe we are at home (heimisch)in the immediate circle of beings. That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary (geheur). Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment, a perpetual reserve in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, strange.
Martin Heidegger in The Origin of Art
The sociologist Simmel sees showing and hiding, secrecy and publicity, as two poles, like yin and yang, between which societies oscillate in their historical development. I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say, profaned.
Norman O. Brown in Apocalypse: the Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis
The place of that original Mystery for western civilization which Brown discusses many have placed in ancient Greece. Much of Martin Heideggers writings were attempts to wipe the mental slate clean and get back to that original western mystery, the original home of Western Man (you may emphasize Man if you wish) to find the original exemplar which would then freshen and revitalize the series to follow, to get past that point of exhaustion to which Brown points. (There could follow a debate concerning the correctness or even possibility of this getting back. Nevertheless many proponents of historical revisionism do propose a getting back. They simply disagree on where we should get back to, which exemplar we should use to valorize the resulting series, what mechanism we should peer through.)
The concept of home, heimat, house has played a large part in Heideggers thinking concerning this exemplary mechanism. In an article entitled Heideggers House: The Violence of the Domestic, (in the journal Public6 ) Mark Wigley traces the trope of the home through Heideggers writings in order to locate the violence of the domestic itself in the logics of everyday life, its relationship to historical and ideological violence and, in the last sentence of the essay, the violence of the simplest acts of enclosure.
Ranging through Being and Time; Building , Dwelling, Thinking; the Der Spiegel interview, and other writings, Wigley attempts to expose the politics of the house as well as presumably its cognates: home, homeland, hospitality, hostility. (He quotes Elaine Scarry that the roots of the words for protection which turn around hos for house, are also the roots of the words for aggression, like hostility.)
He also quotes the rhetoric used by Richard Wolin, Otto Poggeler, Hugo Ott, and David Hirsh in condemning Heidegger and his cognates (that is, deconstructionists) charging them with using the same rhetoric for which they condemn Heidegger, and therefore failing to really address the politics of the house, which are far from domestic.
Wigleys points about Heidegger seems to be:
1) that Heideggers retreat to his own, literal, particular house in the Black Forest was seen by Heidegger as a retreat from the violence of the Nazis;
2) that Heidegger thought this sort of retreat to be the true home of philosophy, both in its concrete, particular aspect (the isolated home in the Black Forest) and in its exemplary, generalizable aspect (the western metaphysical tradition, the ultimate of which was ancient Greece);
3) that, Wigley asserts, this domestic quietism, far from being an innocent withdrawal, is in fact implicated in the gravest acts of violence, presumably in some way other than Arendts banality of evil; perhaps there is a secret, active agent (of evil) in domesticity (from all that has gone before in this paper we may get an inkling of the name of this violence: the uncanny and perhaps a certain alliance with the female/feminine, an aspect that is peculiarly not mentioned once by Wigley even though domesticity is most often associated with the female);
4) that Heidegger radically opposes dwelling and technology. The networks of communication disrupt dwelling by definition. Perhaps, for Wigley, this opposition to communication is the complicitous active agent from above, a subborn opaqueness which refuses, certainly it cant be language, but that which language carries or is carried by: communication ( to complicate matters, much is made of the fact in Heidegger circles that Heidegger had a phone put in his university office while Edmund Husserl refused one. See The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell.) Perhaps it is the violence which Bartleby the Scrivener, in the short story of the same title by Poe, provokes with his constant refusals and the escalating attempts to force him to communicate (Bartleby, of course, refuses even the communion of food. The only thing which passes his lips is the rather laconic Id rather not.) But surely we are confronting something different with Heidegger, notwithstanding his notorious silence concerning the Holocaust, since he never ceased his linguistic gregariousness. However, does Wigley take this later poetic Heidegger to be nothing more than an example of evacuated communication (perhaps a precursor of Benjaminian media-ized evacuated experience), a loquacious teutonic Bartleby whose messages are empty because they arise from the vacuum of the domestic? (Keeping mind that the domestic is hardly a vacuum simply because it is not continually traversed by technological messages. In fact, the opposite could be asserted as can be seen in the following quotes. But it should be kept in mind that the uncannys domain is a certain sort of absence, or at least terroistic expectation of absence-becoming-presence, the anxiety that comes not from something being present, but a feeling of imminent arrival into an empty space. The precondition for the uncanny is a vaccum and vacuum appears anywhere consciousness assembles, constructs, communicates, analyzes. Thus it may be proper to speculate that the uncanny is the wave of the future for human life in general just as it has become the mainstay of technologized representational media systems---especially cinema. If previous structuralisms, deriving initially from Platonism, always have their culmination in various forms of the sublime, then perhaps post-structuralisms have their relevé - relief - in the uncanny. It is perhaps not possible to tell whether these are millennia long oscillations. Both positions obviously exist simultaneously. A Nietzschean analysis would allow the possibility that both are firmly within the western tradition even though they point outside the circumference of that tradition. To be without a home implies the presence of a home somewhere and to be comfortably sheltered can always lead to the street. What could it possibly mean to think otherwise?)
5) To simply occupy space is already to be estranged from the possibility of dwelling. The all-too-familiar experience of space veils a radical unfamiliarity.
Homelessness, therefore, can even, if not especially, be written into the experience of the apparently familiar space of the home itself. Rather than simply a spatial detachment from the house, it is the confusion of the house as such produced by the contemporary technological manifestations of metaphysics (radio, television, magazines, the typewriter, urban life, etc.)
. . . . . . .
The house becomes the very site of homelessness if the house is the traditional figure of presence, the technologies of representation parasitically attached to it and dissimlating its boundaries such that they no longer define enclosure, become Heideggers figure of homelessness. (Wigley, p. 101)
The question might reasonably be asked whether Heideggerean homelessness shares features with the other major official theory concerning the uncanny, that of Freud. The first entry for uncanny in Being and Time is as follows:
In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar idefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the nothing and nowhere. But here uncanniness also means not-being-at-home . . . as Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the world. Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-world. Being-in enters into the existential mode of the not-at-home. Nothing else is meant by our talk about uncanniness. (P. 233/189)
The second reference comes in the section called Conscience as the Call of Care:
In the face of its thrownness Dasein flees to the relief which comes with the supposed freedom of the they-self. This fleeing has been described as a fleeing in the face of the uncanniness which is basically determinative for individualized Bein-in-the-world. Uncanniness reveals itself authentically in the basic state-of-mind of anxiety,. . . what if this Dasein which finds itself (sich befindet) in the very depths of its uncanniness, should be the caller of the call of conscience? (p. 321/277)
And in relation to our earlier remarks on Bartleby the Scrivener:
The call does not report events; it calls without uttering anything. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent.
. . . .
The call is away from absorption by the they and into the reticence of his existent potentiality-for-Being. When the caller reaches him to whom the appeal is made, it does so with a cold assurance which is uncanny but is by no means obvious. Wherein lies the basis for this assurance if not in the fact that when Dasein has been individualized down to itself in its uncanniness, it is for itself something that simply cannot be mistaken for anything else? (Emphasise RC. P.322/278)
The Freudian uncanny would be a form of remembering, reminiscence, or recollection which yet does not recognize itself as such; this uncanny is a representational system which has momentarily forgotten its codes and hence lies its startling character for the percipient. We are spooked by the uncanny because we have forgotten that the origin of the the representational series (of any sort), its exemplar, and the terminus of that series in outer space are actually one and the same thing (that thing being female genitalia according to Freud). There is no need to be frightened, says psychoanalysis: there are no bogey men, no fateful coincidences (in fact not fate at all, only character), no haunted houses, no sacred spaces. Or rather, you have to look no farther than your pants to find them. Of course there are mothers but no Mothers, only Fathers. (See The Spectral Mother for the elision of the mother in Freud). There is only the straight shaft of linked representations and projections. Our problems come, says Freud, when we forget some of those links in the representation chain and ascribe them to other agencies. Women are epecially bad about this even to the point of having somatic manifestations of this faillure-to-make-the-links. (Freud called it hysteria and it definitely carried uncanny components for Freud.) Bodily spatial inscriptions themselves begin to contort and mutate in the presence/absence of these elided linkages. A new spatial topography is struggling to make its appearance. Psychoanaysis is there to chart the return (re-membering) to the old co-ordinates, to re-collect. The uncanny is a symptom of a symptom. Space does not exist since space implies a disconnection and all disconnections in Freud are simply various species of forgettings and/or various evasions based on forgetting. From a Heideggerian point of view psychoanalysis is a mono-block of the they, a black hole. The psychoanalytic event horizon is the (M)other--which it promptly goes on to elide and to hysterically turn into a father. (The mechanisms of these elisions need not concern us now. Needless to say, there are many women charting them.) The return of the Mothers is cause even now for many to utter Goethes line (through Mephistopheles of course): The very mention of them is distress. Where the uncanny appears, the Mothers are nearby, that is, absent; when the uncanny has disappeared (and the Sublime of the fathers is not even a distant memory), there the Mothers live, downmost where there are no locks to probe, no bolts to shift. A peculiar texture of the Arché indeed. Its not even clear where the door is: . . . A door isnt entirely real. To take it for such would result in strange misunderstandings. If you observe a door, and you deduce from that, that it produces drafts, youd take it under your arm to the desert to cool down. Jacques Lacan.
The Heideggerean uncanny asserts the originality of the beginning of the chain of representations, the something that simply cannot be mistaken for anything else. It is the isolation which induces this anxiety which is linked to the uncanny, the dis-membering which comes from nothing. Yet this vertiginous call-from-the-nothingness (like a telephone call from the beyond) comes from me and yet from beyond and over me. This call poses as an alien manifestation: The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. (B & T. 321/277)
Whereas Freud is anxious to cross-over this open space, this abyss, this wound (a word that Freudians are to make much of in relation to female genitalia) in the fabric of space and time, by curving it back in a most prosaic way to the genitals, Heidegger is not so anxious to do so: We must first let the full enigmatical character of this Being emerge, even if all we can do is to come down to a genuine breakdown over its solution, and to formulate anew the question about the Being of thrown projective Being-in-the-world. (B & T. p. 188)
Everything works. Thats whats uncanny. Es funktioniert alles. Das ist gerade das Unheimliche, that it works, and that technology continues to rip and uproot man from the earth. I dont know whether youre frightened. I am when I see TV transmissions of the earth from the moon. We dont need an atom bomb. Man has already been uprooted from the earth. Whats left are purely technical relations. Where man lives today is no longer an earth (Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger, 17). Technology is no tool and it no longer has anything to do with tools, but it provides an uncanny deracinating grid whose locality is a literalization of the Unheimliche, two ocular shapes spying on one another, the earth seeing itself from the moon, ripped out of its socket, axially dislodged, bleeding, rendering the centering effect of an A-bomb completely aconceptual (The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell, 40.)
The story so far:
1) The relation of original to copy, signal to noise, stamp to stamped-out, exemplar to series: in other words, particular to universal.
What is at stake in exemplarity is a certain idea of planning and the architectonic in general in the face of the freedom, the autoproductivity, of the exemplar and its necessary followers. (For the exemplary to be constitutive of a true one-of, it must institute a series, we recall; it must institute but not submit. The series to follow must submit but not institute. This is tantamount to saying that modernist works must create not only themselves but also their audience.) The course of modern(ist) planning (or way-making) must thereby tread a delicate balance: the exemplar must somehow convince the series of the rightness of its exemplarity (i.e., the Master Plan, Work, etc.) and that they, the members of the series, are in no position to be exemplars because of historical positioning (sorry, thats just the way it is.). Meanwhile everyone waits for the next exemplar. Everything must be relative until the next exemplar arrives, then there must be at least a temporary tropism that is modernism. Post modernism sees the scam and henceforth every indian wants to be chief. The post-historical moment does not open and then shut somewhat later (modernism): it opens and shuts simultaneously.
One may begin to get an (uncanny) feeling of the similarity of modernist auto-engendering and production, and exemplar/series to issues of the ontology of the human family, Father and Mother, male and female and the resultant epistemologies. The sublime can only arise from the ideology of the autoproduction of the Father and his series. Does that leave only abjection for the uncanny Mother? And is it then Mothers all the way... to rephrase the old Hindu myth of the creation of the world?
2) Where does a real building stand in relation to such metaphysical demographics? Are there any real buildings (dwellings, housings, casings, matrices) or are there only real buildings? Stumping ones foot against a rock doesnt refute much here.
3) Does having a body make any difference? Does not having a body make any difference? To who? Is there such a thing as not having a male body? A female body?
4) What is the relationship of not-having-a-body to having a building? (or building a have-ing for that matter, since only be-ings can have. Culture/society is the dwelling of have-ing. Is be-ing only have-ing?)
5) Can there be an exhaustion of the space of a culture, even the hidden spaces of a culture, its secret architectures so that it becomes susceptible to invasion (Does architecture have an immune system? What is it protecting?) As a form of spatial aggression, what can invasion mean if inside (secret) and outside (public space) disappear? What does the evacuative methodologies of science vis-a-vis the body and mind have to do with the communicative evisceration of public space electronically?
6) A simple spatio-temporal-onto-epistemo-techno-etc. question: intrusion or extrusion? Alterity and Sublimity intersect with each other, represent each other, take us into the place where the other, which in its radical alterity never appears, appears. J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, p. 175.
A pit, then, deep above all in meaning. It connected the city, the space above ground, land-as-soil and land-as-territory, to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which sere those of fertility and death, of the beginning and the end, of birth and burial. . .The pit was also a passageway through which dead soulds could return to the bosom of the earth and then re-emerge and be reborn. As locus of time, of births and tombs, vagina of the nurturing earth-as-mother, dark corridor emerging from the depths, cavern opening to the light, estuary of hidden forces and mouth of the realm of shadows, the mundus terrified as it glorified. In its ambiguity it it encompassed the greatest fouldness and the greatest purity, life and death, fertility and destruction, horror and fascination. Mundus ist immundus.
Henri Lefebvre, ibid, 242.
. . . that the pyramid becomes once again the pit that it always will have been such is the enigma. We will have to ask if this enigma is to be sought out, like truth speaking by itself from the bottom of a well, or if it is to be deciphered, like an unverifiable inscription left behind on the facade of a monument.
Jacques Derrida,
The Pit and the Pyramid:
Introduction to Hegels
Semiology in Margins of
Philosophy, 77
(This entire essay is quite evocative concerning representation, writing, memory, mourning, incarnation, etc. but most pertinent for this essay is a footnote which presumably alludes to the then-work-in-progress Glas and which will deal with sexual difference in the dialectical speculative economy and which will bring to light the organization and displacement of this chain which reassembles the values of night, sepulcher, and divinefamilialfeminine law as the law of singularityand does so around the pit and the pyramid. p. 77. Of course displacement itself might be seen as this law of singularity. We might also term it intrusion [in opposition, perhaps, to extrusion?] Somewheremaybe everywherealong this concatenated chain lies the un-canny. As the quote intimates, it is not only, now, in Delphic prophecy [the bottom of the well] but also in the scientific/technical/hermeneutic enterprise [the inscription on the monument]. Derrida himself has been perceived as an uncanny philosopher [Sarah Kofman]. The burden of the uncanny is a heavy one to bear despite (perhaps because of) its fascination: the desire is often to collapse it, usually into the sublime or one of its jouissance-ridden offshoots as the following quote attests. Instead of the pit and pyramid, we might term this quote about the pit and the pendulum (sacrifice): Strange and familiar, homely and sinister, the paradoxes of the uncanny are those that Derrida discovers in metaphor (as well as more generally in writing, in the gramm) and sacrifice in the victim. In its simultaneous attraction and repulsion, the uncanny exhibits the antinomial structure of the sacred, the sacrilized victim, the object of desire. The uncanny is a modality of the sacred, with this difference when related to the sacrificial scenario [that is, when conceived anthropologically]: it is no longer unknowable when traced to its institutional origin; its very unknowability is knowable as the mystification informing sacrificial substitution. Deconstruction is accordingly historicized rather than invalidated once its attention to the uncanny is shown to reflect the crisis of all cultural signs. If it is to survive, it must not mistake the symptom for the cure.
Andrew J. McKenna
Violence and Difference:
Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 176.)
Un-Bodied Men
If the sublime and the uncanny function in a complimentary but opposing fashion, and if the tapering point of the historical sublime culminates in hysterical dismemberment the brightest, most sober, solar aspect leading more readily, eventually, through a persistent sublime gaze, to an emphasis on the gaps, aporias, etc. which are thereby glaringly illuminated; and if the culmination of this is a vast hysterical/mechanical/porous aggregate (modern technical society/culture) then it must be said that it is the uncanny which leaks through, in a hysteretic, lunar fashion. (In physics, hysteresis is a lagging of the effect in a body when the forces acting on it are changed.) The uncanny becomes a perpetual lag, the remainder/revenant always left out. The very idea of leakage itself belongs to the hysteretic uncanny. (The sublime is a volumetric exercise: daming up, blockage, an increase in production which can only lead to hysteria characterized by dislocation, fragmentation. Thence begins the leakage/sedimentation/hysteretical production. What is it that is lagging? What is it that is advancing? Who/what is susceptible to which? Hasnt this leakage/uncanny/ lunacy always already been here? Check index for: Male. Female. Technology. History, end of. Human consciousness, diaspora of the. Environment, death of. Artificial, the.)
The battle ground of hysteria/hysteresis, sublime/uncanny must always revolve around the resources of the body, incorporation, ingestion, subjectivity, etc. The doubling formation of the uncanny: a breakaway formation, the etheric body leaked to another body - within the same body! The body left behind can only feel abjection through the pressure of the dismembering sublime: The void which opens up in the realm of the Mothers is the emptiness of the abject. Kristeva describes it as that position in the psychogeography of the individual in which neither subject nor object exist but rather the pure movement of splitting, the very creation of positionality itself. (Effects of Abjection in the Texts of Walter Benjamin, Helga Geyer-Ryan. MLN 107, P. 301.)
The prosthetic is the very embodiment of that splitting, breaking away: phantom limbs, phantom organs, phantom minds, phantom sexes. Heidegger, ever the father, wants to claim paternity for the phantom child of modernity, but only by placing the original fuck 2500 years ago, in ancient Greece among the Ancient Fathers. This is a case where we do know who the father(s) are. This multiple paternity should let us in on the idea that we are moving into the uncanny. The Fathers staunched the flow of the mother/child (Persephone/Demeter) and turned to the father/prosthetic, instituting a secret which could only begin to be announced with a machine culture. Platos attempt to parse off unreality makers that is, the poets, poesis, the divine madness in general (shall we do a reading backward from here and find to which sex this divine madness finally points? Start at Dionysus/Orpheus and work your way back, not forward, from there.) Eleusis marks both beginning and end. The machine begins to disappear. The famous question why did the Greeks not have technology? can perhaps be answered by saying that they were giving birth to the form and idea of the machine. In order for the machine to appear, there must be the social/cultural space. The secret which the Greek/Judeo/Christian culture carries is similar to the secret that Ripley carried in Alien3. That secret is now in the process of being published. (In terms of a Heideggerean discourse of concealment/revelation, there could be no full disclosure, since that would be through the aegis of techné, Gestell, the framing effect of technology, which would provide yet another concealment of being.) The full prosthetization of the species marks the full extent of paternity, the farthest reach of rational-ization (which, to be sure, we have not reached yet), which is the full extent of the sublime (hysteria, and an accompanying autism or mutism) and which marks the full return of the uncanny (hysteresis, and the accompanying porosity of all institutions, structures, and cognitions).
Un-Manned Bodies
Perhaps the two Fathers who best exemplify these two positions are Immanuel Kant and Judge Schreber, Kant being a pure Father and Judge Schreber a Father becoming a Mother and a Voluptuous one at that. (As the nineteenth century rounded into the twentieth Judge Daniel Paul Screber was admitted into the psychiatric clinic of the University of Leipzig. He would continue to be hospitalized off and on until his death in 1907. Freud studied Schrebers book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and found it germinal for developing his theory of paranoia as/and repressed homosexual fantasies. Anyone who bothers to actually read the book will find a much more complex case however. Schrebers book is a rich compendium of his speculations/fantasies/hallucinations/fears etc. but some of the most pertinent points concern rays or nerves from God which might detour by way of the planets and stars and their effect on his body of making it more voluptuous and female-like, and the intimate connection of the body and language. The introduction by Samuel Weber in the Harvard University Press edition is recommended.)
The perfect couple to lead us into the modern world: a Father who couldnt find a way to open the gates (categories) and a father claiming to be a mother who couldnt shut down the gates. One might easily claim that their un-wholly union gives a pale premonition of the post-modernwhich assuredly has not fully arrived yet.
(But assuming that it does arrive, what then? Where in fact are the Mothers?)
Of course, we must take it for granted that we are all Schrebers children now, we are all susceptible to the rays and nerves of media which continually flood our sensoriums with voluptuous cross-dressing, a future knowledge which Schreber cunningly ascribed to his divine rays: A new race of beings from the spirit of Schreber..., a race wholly permeable to the un-canny and the un-manned, in both the cybernetic and gender senses.
And dear old Father Kant, late from the bank as usual. Manny runs a tight ship but hes always working, working, working, never enough time for his brother/mother/cross-dressing friend Schreber. And Mannys false leg has been hurting him, phantom pain his physician has termed it. And Daniel Paul, Daniel Pauls girtle is too tight (as usual) but he simply must be able to fit into that new party dress. Perhaps a different penis sheath would do the trick.
Speaking of that, where did all the women go?
Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration, and hollowingprobably the only counterweight to abjection. While everything elseits archeology and its exhaustionis only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms usand that cancels our existence (Céline).
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
To Be Continued
next time:
False Limbs, Brains and Spaces (Including Wombs):
Stuff Stuck On Bodies and In Brains or: The Dream of a New Body (Where Did Our Love Go?)
Resources
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