- A belated discovery in my case, Philip K. Dick is nonetheless the poster boy of
my 1991 The Case of California. He reads California as the tech-no-future
within a lexicon heavily mediated by the foreign body of Germanicity. That the German
intertexts or introjects remain largely untranslated and decontextualized in Dick's
narratives redoubles the whammy of their impact as spectral. My current project, "I
Think I Am: Philip K. Dick," provides the greater context for this essay. If I sign
in, once again, with my Freud, a corpus that includes Freud's influence on or in
Frankfurt School thought and deconstruction, I do so at this juncture with special
emphasis on Walter Benjamin (in the setting he shares, right down to the missing list
of your average university repression, with Daniel Paul Schreber and Freud). Freud's
commitment to secularism and (or as) transference does not exclude him from
consideration of religion in the ruins of its former functions or inside psychotic
delusional systems. Indeed, Freud's explicit withdrawal of "worldviews" from the upper
regions into the underworld of psychoanalysis, like his focus on the shifting
borderline with regard to the legibility of psychosis, both contributes to and
reserves a place for the Benjaminian supplement, which is vital to my Freudian
approach.
-
Through Dick I discovered what was already gathering momentum in my critical
sensorium: the necessity of adding Benjamin's rereading of allegory (and all that
follows from it in his diverse work) to Freud's frame for world reading, namely
endopsychic perception. The links of this alliance are at the same time the limits
Freud admits in his approach to psychosis, in which, bottom line, reality testing and
transference are circumvented as condemned sites under reconstruction. Mourning (or
unmourning) is the third term or the summation of the borderline restrictions thus
placed on passage through psychosis. For this essay's booked passage, reality testing
will be left to the side, though still subsumable, on the inside, as loss--loss
conceived, that is, as the test of the reality it itself is (like no other).
Endopsychic perception, as the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic
delusions) of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the unconscious,
grounds Freud's inside-out analysis of the social relation that, owing to the
intrapsychic bottom line subtending relationality, cannot be reduced to the
interpersonal setting. In the reception of Freud's science, only the Freudian approach
I have in mind revalorizes psychotic delusional formation as "recovery" that is full
of itself in the endopsychic mode of discovery. Another way to put it is that Freud
and Benjamin, because they are not technophobic, prove particularly flexible and
expansive readers of psychotic worlds. To read the mass-media socius it is necessary,
from this Freudian perspective, to occupy (or cathect) in the same thought experiment
the border with psychosis as that margin where (psychic) reality begins.
-
Following a discontinuous case of California, from here to Germany, it proves possible to
fold Philip K. Dick's trilogy Valis inside a relay of texts--by Schreber,
Freud, and Benjamin--which together promote a process of secularization in the details and
among the effects of
haunting, while at the same time addressing and maintaining, in
the big picture, the religious frames of reference, but as abandoned ruins, lexicons still
deposited in our range of reference, but deposits without redemption value. As illuminated
by the German intertext or introject's Californian supplement, the overlaps and gaps
between the cluster of notions Benjamin bonded to allegory and the cluster bonding between
Schreber and Freud, which Freud identified as endopsychic, reflect, back in their own time,
the pull of what also made them draw sparks and draw together, namely, the subtle
secularization that Spiritualism introduced into the congregation of discourses, even the
properly disciplined ones.
-
I have elsewhere projected an occult atmosphere of influence binding Freud's study
of Schreber and Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play over the read
corpus of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.[1] My point of departure then as now is Benjamin's short illustrated essay,
"Books by the Insane: From My Collection," which he published in 1928. Here Benjamin
recalls his 1918 purchase in Bern of Schreber's Memoirs:
Had I already heard about the book back then? Or did
I only discover the study a few weeks later, which Freud published on this book in the
third volume of his Short Writings on the Theory of Neurosis? (Leipzig, 1913).
It's all the same. I was immediately captivated. (615-16)
What goes with the flow of these sentences is that his discovery of Schreber's
book and his knowledge of Freud's study are all the same. When he next
summarizes the highlights of Schreber's delusional system, he opens up a pocket
of resemblance between the psychotic's order of the world and the stricken world
of the melancholic allegorist:
The sense of destruction of the world, not
uncommon in paranoia, governs the afflicted to such an extent that the existence of other
human beings can be understood by him only as deception and simulation, and, in order to
come to terms with them, he refers to "quickly made up men," "wonder dolls," "miraculated"
people etc. (616)
What Benjamin finally finds most compelling is the projection and
consolidation of a world in the course of a kind of drama of stations, namely, in
Benjamin's words, "the stations this illness passed through all the way to this remarkably
strict and happy encapsulation of the delusional world" (616-17). -
In my own (still ongoing) reading of mad books, Schreber's work is so far
unique in its invocation of incommensurables, its combo of technoscience as
well as pseudo-science with the shaken structures of religious belief over
his own interminably finite corpus and its haunted sensorium. This ability
of Schreber's delusional order to contain itself in its ongoing internal
juxtapositions and in cohabitation with the reality to which he by rights
returns corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as the encapsulation of his
delusional world. This encapsulation does not, however, like another
Emperor's new closure, refer to an allegedly completed process that, at
least in the way it is maintained in the official record of the Schreber
case, Freud simply sees through. Other accounts of severe mental illness are
either secular psy-fi--for example Operators and Things--or
religious Fantasy, whereby I mean specifically the bookstore-created genre
of Fantasy, which however, at least according to Tolkien, bases its
narratives of other worlds and happy ends on the one Fantasy story that is
at the same time true: the New Testament. The Witnesses is a
good example of this latter genre of psychotic autobiography. In either case
the books tend to keep to a restricted economy of disintegration and
reintegration, ending with a pervasive sense of loss of function--in other
words of depletion of some form of vital energy. In both Perceval's
Narrative and A Mind That Found Itself, the
recovered-mad authors take their former delusional systems with them into
their restored sanity, but only as a special motivation or fervor in the
pursuit of certain activities that in its proximity to the original spark of
derangement leads the psychiatrist to recognize that it's time for a booster
stay in the hospital.
-
As point of comparison and inspiration, I rely, then, on Dick's trilogy rather
than on another mad book, even though the author was first diagnosed with
schizophrenia during the year he attempted to attend college, and the
trilogy itself can be seen as fictionalized "autobiography" relating to certain
mystical or psychotic experiences that in February and March of 1974, as Dick
writes in the non-fictional word outside the trilogy, "denied the reality, and
the power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This cannot exist; it cannot
exist'" (qtd. in Sutin 214). In the trilogy, containment or consolidation of the
"end of the world" resettles religious beliefs in the extended finitude of
science fiction. In the first volume, also titled Valis, the
protagonist, Horselover Fat, whose contact with God from outer space took the
form of a "beam of pink light" fired directly at or into him (20), turns out to
be the split-off double of Philip Dick, the translation into English words of
his Greek/German proper name. Before the beam skewers his duo dynamic, Fat had
been serving time as bystander at the deaths of a series of young women. "Tied
to him," these "corpses cried for rescue--cried even though they had died"
(126). "Valis" is also the title and subject of a film flickering through the
volumes of the trilogy. It is the acronym for a secret project spelled out as
Vast Active Living Intelligence System and identifiably contained in and
conveyed by an ancient satellite in the film and then apparently at large. Does
this contradict the divine beaming, Fat wants to know. No: "that's a sci-fi
film device, a sci-fi way of explaining it" (154). But the sci-fi device also
attends Christianity's consequent immersion in finitude. Jesus was an
extra-terrestrial. The original Apostolic Christians acquired immortality, the
extended finitude variety, through Logos, a plasmate or living information that
could be absorbed.
-
In The Divine Invasion, the second volume of Dick's trilogy, the
information conveyed by "Valis" (film, satellite, book, or trilogy) provides
frame and background for the clandestine return of Yah or Yahweh to earth, a
fortress Satan sealed tight against God's influence a long time ago. At point of
landing, however, the ship gets identified and blasted. The brain damage that
keeps Yah from remembering that he is God is a plot point in a boy's lifetime:
the other story is that the Godhead has lost touch with part of itself. The
boy's playmate, Zina, steps into this missing place. Zina, whose name in
Roumanian means "fairy," rules a fantasy realm, the "Secret Commonwealth," in
which the real world is doubled but in which all political figures, for
example, are displaced among the rank and file, their oppressive influence
minimized. Zina's fantasy genre challenges Yah to delay the day of reckoning
that would scourge the world. But God will not affirm fantasy or, as He puts it
precisely, wish fulfillment. According to God, the "power of evil" consists in a
"ceasing of reality, the ceasing of existence itself. It is the slow slipping
away of everything that is, until it becomes . . . a phantasm" (136).
-
The point of phantasmic comparison is Linda Fox, a mass music star and media image. God
gives life or reality to the phantasm and to Herb Asher, the Fox's nonstop consumer and
biggest fan, He gives the outside chance of encountering her in the flesh. God thus means
to prove to Zina, who had earlier miraculated up a live semblance of the singer for Asher's
sake, that what is real is always stronger than mere make believe. Asher indeed falls in
love with the real Linda Fox. Zina's fantasy alternative however succeeded in tricking God
into standing by this world, an affirmation that He then cannot take back. Thus the Godhead
is re-paired.
-
It turns out that Linda Fox was realized only as the ultimate medium, the medium
as the message or the immedium, as the Advocate, the figure or placeholder of
Jesus. This figure, as Zina earlier instructs Yah, originally performed services
for the dead only, offering advocacy on their behalf against Satan's
prosecution. A bill of particulars that Satan submitted always weighed in as
proof of sinfulness that could never be deducted or written off: the dead were
condemned to pass through the apparatus of retribution, and ultimately pass into
nothingness. But then, one day, way back in primal time, the Advocate appeared.
If the soul agreed to his representation, then the Advocate would submit a blank
bill of particulars and thus free the soul from an otherwise inevitable doom.
-
The doom of death, however, is never lowered in Dick's novel, for which the secret
commonwealth serves as its internal simulacrum. Yah challenges Zina: "'You admit, then,
that your world is not real?' . . . Zina hesitated. 'It branched off at crucial points, due
to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology; in any
case we can enter retrotime and overrule mistakes in history'" (162). The ability to go
back to a time when the dead are still alive is not only an option for the characters in
The Divine Invasion but is the determining momentum of a narrative in which,
by doubling back again and again, death, as Goethe was given to proclaim, is everywhere
swallowed up by life. However life opens wide only by recycling survivors back in time.
"How many lives do we lead? Herb Asher asked himself. Are we on tape? Is this some kind of
replay?" (166).
-
The last installment of the trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer, doesn't share the Fantasy: the challenge of death--or rather of
the dead--returns, but this time not as the pathogenic impetus for the flight
into Fantasy or Christianity as the redemption of what begins as a paranoid
sci-fi delusional system. Framed by a survivorship that Angel, the narrator, is
hard-pressed to dedicate to mourning, the bulk of the novel transpires in the
recent past when her loved ones were still around. Inside the narrative, the
first to die is soon believed by two out of three survivors to be getting back
in touch with them from the other world. At the same time the same two are
conducting research on the anokhi, yet another substance that initiates
ate and drank on Jesus's historical turf in order to extend finitude
indefinitely. When they consult a medium in Santa Barbara to find out what the
ghost wants, the same two receive the forecast that their deaths are coming
soon. To them, then, it is the death wish that has returned. Angel, only along
for the ride, diagnoses the belief in communication with the other side as a
remarkably isolated, indeed encapsulated form of fixed idea or madness, which
can cohabit with all other functions or systems (113). Back inside the frame, at
the end, in the wake now of all three deaths, Angel runs into another survivor,
Bill, the schizophrenic son of one of the deceased, who tells Angel that now
another one of the three has come back, this time inside him. Whether as her
last tie to the people she loved and lost or as the ghostly return of one of
them, Angel takes Bill home. She brings home, then, as she recognizes in the
transmissions going through Bill, belief systems that are, says Angel, "without
a trace of anything redemptive" (237), but through which they have already
passed and have not yet passed.
-
In this trilogy Dick staggers as seemingly separable phases the elements he
metabolizes all together now in such works as Ubik and
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In Valis
science fiction, psychosis, mysticism, and metaphysics occupy
interchangeable places. In The Divine Invasion, Dick gives the
Fantasy genre a final reckoning as the ongoing temptation he could only
overcome by turning, as he does in this novel over the spectral issue of the
dead, to science fiction. The final novel, which occupies the recent past of
the scene of writing, is organized around the modern Spiritualist pursuit of
communication with the other side, which is identified as stable formulation
or even constitutive dimension of psychotic delusion--in other words, as
endopsychic perception. The trilogy concludes with unmourning or
melancholia, not so much as one of the psychoses (for example, in accordance
with Freud's initial theorization of narcissistic versus transference
neuroses), but more importantly as the portal to and foundation of all the
psychotic variations on its basic theme, that of the reality (or realities)
of loss. With the Valis cross-sectioning of the psy-fi
condition as
illustration and inspiration, we will revisit as endopsychic allegory the
stations of Freud's and Benjamin's crossing with or through Schreber, and
conclude by considering another Dick novel that can be identified
as his own Schreber narrative and reading.
-
Benjamin's article about his collection of books by the insane concludes
with a reference to another mad book that has come to his attention, which
is the equal of Schreber's Memoirs, but which remains hard to
sell to a reputable press. Does Benjamin thus summon his Origin
book in a setting of exchange or interchange with Schreber's
Memoirs and Freud's study--and down the transferential
corridors of dis-appointment in a former world of legitimation through which
both books first had to pass before they could reach a public, published
forum? What would then also be encapsulated here, at this turn of
identification, is Freud's highly reflexive performance in his Schreber case
study of the staggered interchangeability of his theory, the workings of the
psyche this theory uncovers and illustrates, and the delusions Schreber
records in his Memoirs. The inside-out view of the inner
workings of the psyche projected outwards as the delusional representation
or mass mediatization of our funereal identifications is termed by Freud
endopsychic perception. For Freud, this notion begins in connection with myth
in a letter to Fliess dated 12 December 1897, but first makes it into his
work, on an update, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
A large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way
into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the
external world. The obscure recognition (the endopsychic perception, as it
were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored--it
is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with
paranoia must come to our aid--in the construction of a supernatural
reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the
psychology of the unconscious. (287-88)
-
When Freud enters a paranoid system he encounters analogies internal to it that are doubly
endopsychic:
these and many other details of Schreber's delusional formation sound almost
like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed
in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can
nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had
developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents
of Schreber's book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is
more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is
more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to
believe. (315)
Freud's proprietary frenzy at this juncture, a paranoia of sorts, out of
sorts, refers in the first place to the source of the Schreber book: it was
one of Jung's transference gifts. Freud was wary of its unconscious
itinerary and purpose. Another stopover in Freud's contemplation of such
inside viewing, Jensen's Gradiva, was also one of Jung's gifts.
If we keep in mind that the endopsychic perception first emerges in the
correspondence with Fliess, it proves possible to assign this perception to
a field of reference through which the transference has passed and has not
yet passed. Or, in other words, endopsychic perceptions supply the gap of
noncorrespondence or unfulfillment between the ruinous materiality of the
transference (whether in session or in action) and the theory that would
contain or caption it. Endopsychic perception drives or meets halfway
Freud's work of analogy in the latter mentioned theorization, a work
commensurate with that of mourning through which, moreover, the psyche
builds up to or through our ongoing technologization. -
Once Freud sees it coming--namely, the recurring dissolution of all his
same-sex friendships--he addresses the transference both as a medium of
haunting whereby, in his case, each new friend is really a returning
spook, and, in its reproducibility, as an effect of the printing press: each
new phase of the transference is but a reprinting of the same old
cliché. Where he draws the line with regard to the
homosexual component, Freud identifies an early libidinal bonding with John
Freud, his playmate in early childhood, which got around while encrypting
the relationship to his dead brother Julius. The psychoanalytic
theory of ghosts first arises to account for Leonardo da Vinci's
homoerotic disposition in the context or contest of a speed race between
repression and sublimation that subtends his techno-inventiveness, and then
returns in the study of Schreber's paranoia to address the delusional
order of technical media and ghosts in terms of a recovery from sublimation
breakdown.[2]
- Freud emphasizes that Schreber repeatedly reproaches God for the limits
of His self-awareness. When it comes to human life, God only takes cognizance of
its corpse state, at which endpoint God reclaims the rays, souls, nerves that he
originally deposited when he created the life form that he apparently
immediately represses. Only the afterlife of his creations (when he gets his
nerves back) concerns Him. Schreber inadvertently challenges or entraps God
when, passing for dead--while, perhaps, melancholically playing dead--he is
beset by the deity, who starts harvesting the presumed corpse; but when the
inert body comes alive, God is caught in an act contrary to the order of the
world. The living nerves grab God and prove to be the kind of turn-on that God
can't readily let go. The dead cannot enter the state of bliss as long as the
greater part of the rays of God are attracted to and absorbed in Schreber's
voluptuousness. Because there is such a close relationship between human
voluptuousness and the state of bliss enjoyed by the spirits of the deceased,
Schreber looks forward to future reconciliation with God. But Schreber holds up
the afterlife above while bringing the bliss down to earth. As Freud
underscores, Schreber sexualizes the heavenly state of bliss and thus, we can
add, irrevocably secularizes the afterlife while allegorizing its Heavenly
trappings as to be already dead for.
-
The outside chance of renewal at this crisis point that, in the eternity
Schreber contemplates, happens because it recurs, will always be performed
in the medium of a ghost seer: "'a seer of spirits' . . . must under certain
circumstances be 'unmanned' (transformed into a woman) once he has entered
into indissoluble contact with divine nerves (rays)" (45). Schreber counts
himself one of the greatest ghost seers, at the head of a line drawn through
the Wandering Jew, the Maid of Orleans, the Crusaders in search of the holy
lance, the Emperor Constantine, and, in his own day, "so-called Spiritualist
mediums" (78-80).
-
In Radio Schreber, Wolfgang Hagen carefully reconstructs the
Spiritualist context of Schreber's Memoirs, beginning with its
cornerstone, footnote number 36, which drops from Schreber's declared
interest in scientific work based on the theory of evolution as evidence of
his basically nonreligious sensibility which, he submits, really should give
credence to his new-found relations with God. Hagen shows, however, that
"evolution" in Du Prel's cited work, for example, is linked to a basic
sensibility or soul at the atomic level that causes the chaotic atomic mass
to develop ordered structures on its own. Hagen's study is filled with the
details of the works Schreber explicitly includes and the inevitable
intertexts he doesn't name, like works by Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner
and Gustav Theodor Fechner. The complex, situated in the overlaps between
science and Spiritualism, keeps returning to two basic assumptions: that of
the atomic soul already mentioned and that of a fourth dimension that makes
as much possible as it openly declares unprovable. Du Prel, again, turns in
the work Schreber claims to have read repeatedly to the theory of a fourth
spatial dimension according to which the world we perceive is just the
"projection picture of a four-dimensional world in a three-dimensional
cognition apparatus." Fechner, one of the first to formulate the theory of a
fourth dimension, argues, as Hagen cites for compatibility with Schreber's
system, that because we are rolling in our three-dimensional ball through
the fourth dimension, as are all the balls within the big 3-D ball,
everything that we will experience is already there and everything that we
have already experienced is still there. Our three-dimensional surface
exists only through the fourth dimension, has already passed through it and
hasn't yet passed through it. "I dare not decide," Schreber pauses to
reflect in his Memoirs,
whether one can simply say that
God and the heavenly bodies are one and the same, or whether one has to
think of the totality of God's nerves as being above and behind the stars,
so that the stars themselves and particularly our sun would only represent
stations, through which God's miraculous creative power travels to our earth
(and perhaps to other inhabited planets). Equally I dare not say whether the
celestial bodies themselves (fixed stars, planets, etc.) were created by
God, or whether divine creation is limited to the organic world; in which
case there would be room for the Nebular Hypothesis of Kant-Laplace side by
side with the existence of a living God whose existence has become absolute
certainty for me. Perhaps the full truth lies (by way of a fourth dimension)
in a diagonal combination or resultant of both trends of thought impossible
for man to grasp. (8)
-
The discourse of or on Spiritualism, pro or contra, relies regularly on
analogies with media technologization. Among the scientists and theorists
gathered together in Schreber's note 36 we find immediate recourse to telegraphy and the
telephone, invoked to describe the manner of communication with ghosts or to
evoke the absurdity of the belief in spirits or even to signify its redundancy
in our mediatized setting (with the telephone in place, for example, there is no
need for telepathy, which is, in quality, a less direct connection). The
conjunction of both analogies that Freud identifies as endopsychic when they are
developed into a system of thought or order of the world, can be found in
Schreber's footnote underworld where, ever since the breach of overstimulation
destroyed his world, Schreber consigns as
introjects in flotation the very batteries running the rewired transference in the new world order
of recovery. In note 58, then, Schreber gives the following two analogies as the
derisive translations of the basic language by the soul of Flechsig, Schreber's
treating physician and, according to Freud, the brother of all transferences.
This soul's expression for being among fleeting improvised men is "amongst the
fossils . . . following its tendency . . . to replace the basic language by
some modern-sounding and therefore almost ridiculous terms. Thus it also likes
to speak of a 'principle of light-telegraphy,' to indicate the mutual attraction
of rays and nerves" (118).
-
As shorthand for my inability to follow Hagen beyond the point of contact with
this Spiritualist context into his far-reaching new history of the emergence of
a psychotic discourse of analogization with occult and technical media (out of
the delay in the scientific understanding of the same electricity that could be
more readily harnessed and made to transmit), I note that he overlooks his one
colleague and precursor in the basic matter of locating the place of publication
of Schreber's Memoirs.[3] In
"Books by the Insane: From My Collection," Benjamin indeed identifies the
publishing house standing behind Schreber's Memoirs as a well-known
gathering place for Spiritist or Spiritualist studies, and recognizes in
Schreber's "theological" system (with its God Who can approach only corpses
without danger to Himself, Who is familiar with the concept of railways, and
Whose basic language unfolds as an antiquated but powerful German) its
Spiritualist provenance. But, and this Hagen indeed demonstrates, it takes one
immersed in Spiritualism to see through Schreber's discourse to the bare bones
of its ghost communications.
-
Before closing Origin of the German Mourning Play, Benjamin returns to a contrast
between the Baroque German mourning plays and the mourning plays of Calderón (whose
successful mourning plays Benjamin associates with the exceptional case of Goethe):
The inadequacy of the German mourning play is rooted in the deficient development of the
intrigue, which seldom even remotely approaches that of the Spanish dramatist. The intrigue
alone would have been able to bring about that allegorical totality of scenic organization,
thanks to which one of the images of the sequence stands out, in the image of the
apotheosis, as different in kind, and gives mourning at one and the same time the cue for
its entry and its exit. The powerful design of this form should be thought through to its
conclusion; only under this condition is it possible to discuss the idea of the German
mourning play. (409)
This thinking-through requirement gives interminable mourning the last word.
Benjamin conjures successful mourning, the kind that's only passing through, as
limit concept of the German Baroque mourning play, right after floating a Devil
pageant past us, according to which allegory cannot but fall for the Satanic
perspective that introduces and subsumes it, and thus in the end "faithlessly
leap" (in Benjamin's words) toward God. Benjamin describes allegory's act of
suicitation, a return to Devil and God that allegory otherwise interminably
postpones: everything unique to allegory, Benjamin underscores, would otherwise
be lost. -
In his 1925 essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Benjamin attempts to
generate a reading of the novel out of itself. He ends up identifying Ottilie's
withdrawal from speech and life as, verbatim, a death drive. Benjamin concluded that
this is a work dedicated to adolescence, to the bottom line of the Teen Age: namely,
preparedness for death. A proper death thus emerges out of the duration of young life.
The only candidate for ghost of the departed in Goethe's uncanny novel, in which
haunting, however, is strictly circumscribed, is Ottilie's ghost appearance in her
handmaiden's eyes only: in a vision she sits up in the coffin and blesses the girl,
whose self-recriminations are forgiven, whose shattering fall just moments before, a
momentum that is associated (even in the history of the words involved) with
Trauer (mourning), is miraculously reversed. Thus in this Christian niche
death captions the ghost: but then this spirit of the departed is forgotten or
forgiven in a comfort zone only for those who fall for resurrection. Otherwise, the
apparitions in Elective Affinities are telepathic videophone connections,
two-way dreams that keep physically separated lovers in meta-touch. To borrow a term
from Benjamin's mentor, Paul Häberlin, a term cited in fact by Freud in
Totem and Taboo, they are "sexual ghosts." Häberlin, who introduced
Benjamin to psychoanalysis in 1916 in a course of study at the University in Bern
which settled Freud's thought within range of occult analogies and phenomena, unpacked
a couple of case studies to show that certain ghosts, even in households that count a
recent death, refer only to desired but prohibited contact with living sexual objects.
-
Ottilie's undecaying corpse is ensconced within a certain psychoanalytic reception of
the endopsychic doubling between Schreber and Freud. Down this receiving line, Hanns
Sachs[4] derived from Freud on Schreber and Victor
Tausk's follow-up treatment, in light of the Schreber study, of the delusional system
of Natalija A., a genealogical scheduling of narcissism's shift from body-based
self-loving to the self-esteem of power surges and other strivings to the beat of self
criticism. In Antiquity this shift could be deferred: the restriction of technical
developments or difficulties to the invention of playthings only subtends this
deferral. But the crisis point must always also be reached as the uncanniness of
zomboid dependency on the dead or undead body that does not go or let go. According to
Sachs, the invention of machines that undermine bodily proportions and limits skips
the uncanny beat of the body by projecting its missing place way outside itself as the
techno-reassembly of parts and partings. The psychotic thus projects techno delusions
to get out from under the uncanny body.
-
The mill on the grounds of Eduard and Charlotte's estate that, through its
grinding, its Mahlen, doubles, says Benjamin, as emblem of death (139),
offers a supplemental scenario for Ottilie's preservation. Because as she lies
there undecaying, she is in the most vulnerable spot imaginable, especially in a
novel given to earmark the ambivalence toward commemoration that
underlies, for example, the architect's plans for funerary monuments based on
his study of the relics he has collected by desecrating graves. Grinding, like
cremation, represents then a removal of the site specific
to desecration of all the contents of a complete and untouched tomb. Other than
the mill, we encounter in Goethe's novel only optical instruments and playthings,
like the portable camera obscura the British traveler uses to record his
landscape souvenirs. Benjamin registers a certain pervasiveness of these
placeholders of a missing technologization when he notes that the pictorial
elements in Goethe's narrative are more in line with the perspective of a
stereoscope.
-
The assistant comments on the way the plans of Eduard's father, which are only
now achieving fruition, are ignored by Eduard and Charlotte as they make their
improvements in other parts of the estate: "Few people are capable of concerning
themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently
captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main
to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost" (278). Charlotte is quick to
understand, she says, but only up to a point of displacement, whereby she shunts
to the side the direct impact of this span of attention or tension dedicated to
mourning, and wonders instead whether the present tense doesn't serve to mislead
us into thinking that we are the authors of our actions while we are in fact
merely cooperating with the tendencies of the times. Thus the funerary
implications are lined up on the side, out of site, like the monuments she
uproots from their proper places and sidelines in the cemetery she hopes to turn
into the friendliest place on earth.
-
What links and separates Benjamin's "Goethe's Elective Affinities"
and his Origin book is contained in a translation Benjamin summons
in his study of the Baroque mourning play: Gryphius deliberately replaces
deus ex machina with spirit from the grave (313). The stricken world
of allegory is the turf of what recently was. Signification begins once life
lapses into lifelessness. It is, as in its visitation by ghosts, a world of
mourners or unmourners. When they enter the stage they left ghosts shock. It is
part of the nature of allegories to shock. That is how they become dated (359),
how they leave a date mark. When Tolkien altogether rejects the claim that there
are allegories in The Lord of the Rings, he takes issue,
specifically, with the timely or tendentious reach of allegories that cannot but
inscribe onward into the work's real-time setting or context ("Forward").
The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien emphasizes, is in no wise shaped by
the events of World War II otherwise surrounding his scene of writing.
Allegorization thus looks forward to the gadget connection, the spin of a dial
or flick of the switch that, according to Benjamin (in his essay "Some Motifs in
Baudelaire"), mediates and buffers the incapacitating shock of technologization.
The pushbutton control release of shock, its administration as inoculative
shots, preserves or internalizes a body-proportional comfort zone inside
technologization. The gadget controls also stamp moments with date marks,
marking them as dated memories, emptied out but secured, and which are, as far
as their determining force goes, forgettable. Thus in the forgettogether of
moviegoers doubling over with sadistic laughter over Mickey Mouse's destructive
character, the realization of sadistic fantasies and masochistic delusions is
prevented, just as psychotic disintegration under techno mass conditions is
forestalled on the shock or shot installment plan ("Kunstwerk").
-
Like the allegorist, the paranoid takes enigmatic pleasure, in other words a sadist's
delight, in watching the world end. The death drive is unrepresentable in all its
purity. But when it mixes with eros you can recognize it striking a pose in sadism.
According to Benjamin, sadism (or sadomasochism) attends allegory, the only pleasure,
but a powerful one, allowed the melancholic. "It is indeed characteristic of the
sadist that he humiliates his object and then--or thereby--satisfies it"
(Ursprung 360). In the
same way the allegorist secures an object melancholically as dead but preserved and
thus as "unconditionally in his power" (359).
-
Schreber squeezed transcendence down inside finitude, but on the upbeat, by deferring the
processes of completion at work upon him. Benjamin shows where the world begins for the Baroque
allegorist and melancholic: with the recent passing of the narcissistically loved other--and
thus inside and during the afterlife of Ottilie. In becoming a woman whose voluptuousness is
derived from all things feminine, Schreber looks at narcissism from both sides now while
deferring and pursuing Ottilie's other end, the one reserved for the allegorist's enigmatic
pleasure. Being in transit still means he has to endure vivisection by the God of corpses.
However, even when he's all messed up, just like Mickey Mouse he gets reanimated, restored so
he can bounce back for more.
-
When the mythic pagan world gets secularized (witness the example of Socrates),
Christianity picks up the slacker as martyr, but the allegory doesn't stop
there, doesn't stop its own process of secularization. "If the church had been
able quite simply to banish the gods from the memory of the faithful,
allegorical language would never have come into being. For it is not an epigonal
victory monument; but rather the word which is intended to exorcise a surviving
remnant of antique life" (396). While allegory thus seeks to contain and
reformat the return of paganism, its ultimate issue is the secularization that
thus indwells even "Christian" allegory. In Christianity's postulation of an
other world that is, by definition, too good for this world, and of the death of
death (or in the Devil's offer of uninterrupted quality time until the certain
deadline) as also in the pagan or neo-pagan overcoming of death within the
eternally recurring finitude of life, it is the prospect of the recent past, the
era of loss and mourning, that is being shunted to the side, but thereby to the
inside, as defective cornerstone of all of the above.
-
Goethe, as Schreber notes and as Freud is moved to record, is one of the longest
lasting personalized souls, with a memory that can still come down to earth from
the beyond for one hundred years or so. Like his Faust, Goethe receives just one
more lifetime in which to be able to affirm life. After their personalized or
ghostly phase ceases, a generic phase takes over whereby the former souls are
absorbed within greater bodies of rays. For the most part Schreber encounters a
double disappearing act of the souls of persons he has known in his lifetime
and on his own person. While single nights could also always
acquire the duration of centuries, growing numbers of these departed souls
attracted to or through Schreber's growing nervousness soon dissolve on his head
or in his body. Many of the souls lead a brief existence on his head
as little men before they too exit. While contact with ghosts led many of
Spiritualism's initiates to renew their vows with religion, faithlessly I would
add, the opening up of the recent past that not only religion must repress is
constitutively secular and in Benjamin's sense allegorical. The outside chance
that there are more times than a lifetime does not add up to the immortality of
the soul or to reunion with God. As Schreber advises, souls otherwise still
recognizable as specific individuals (in other words, ghosts) sometimes pretend
to be "God's omnipotence itself" (51).
-
In his study of Philip K. Dick, titled I Am Alive and You Are
Dead, Emmanuel Carrère catches up with his subject in the act of
reading Freud's study of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous
Illness. According to Carrère, Dick immediately fantasized writing
up the Schreber delusional system as a science fiction novel, in other words as
an event in an alternative future universe. Dick's working title: "The Man Whom
God Wanted to Change into a Woman and Penetrate with Larvae in Order to Save the
World." Carrère reconstructs thoughts crossing Dick's mind: "What if
Schreber was right? What if his supposed delusions were in fact an accurate
description of reality? What if Freud was just . . . pathologizing a man
who understood better what was really going on?" (39). What did come out of his
encounter with Freud on Schreber was his 1959 novel Time Out of
Joint, which turns on the defensive functioning of a psychotic delusional
system in its encapsulated form. Dick borrows from Schreber this form of the
encapsulation of his system, the unique stability of Schreber's world and word
view in or according to his Memoirs, which is precisely the
quality Benjamin underscores in his reflections on Schreber's
Memoirs in "Books by the Insane: From My
Collection." Time Out of Joint, however, records and performs the
doomed efforts of sustaining this encapsulated delusional world as fantastic
system.
-
Since we can take Freud's Schreber study as Dick's point of departure, the world
of 1959, the year in which the novel was published, a world that comes complete
with the fraying edges and margins through which one can glimpse figures of control, manipulation, or even persecution, is Gumm's new
delusional order. It turns out that the world he lost in his psychotic break is
that of the late 1990s, a world at civil war with the men and women on the moon.
In the meantime "One Happy World," a movement against outer space exploration
and colonization, prevails on earth, while the "expansionists," who at first
oppose the isolationist movement on earth as in the heavens, settle on the far
side of the moon so that, from the other side, they can fire missiles at earth
without fear of retaliation. Gumm, world-famous for the success of his business
ventures or gambles, is pressed into predicting where the next
missiles from the moon would strike. Under these pressures to perform,
heightened furthermore by a mounting conflict of conscience motivating him to
side with the expansionists, Gumm develops what is called a "withdrawal
psychosis."
-
In the course of his withdrawal, he refers one day to his intercept
predictions as
"today's puzzle." Thus those who work with and depend on Gumm follow him into the
safer world of his boyhood where the local paper runs a contest or puzzle, "Where Will the
Little Green Man Be Next," to engage his talent. His daily entry predicting the
Green Man's
next appearance intercepts another missile strike. "One Happy Worlders," who volunteer to
be, in effect, test subjects, are reprogrammed to share Gumm's fantasy as his
friends and
family in it together in the simulated town and time they call home. But that's why other
members of his household, who only think they are related to one another, can also share
Gumm's growing sense that their environment may be a false front concealing another world
in which they in fact live, but without knowing it.
-
The daily newspaper contest is accompanied by a series of clues that engage Gumm
in free association: "The clues did not give any help, but he assumed that in
some peripheral fashion they contained data, and he memorized them as a matter
of habit, hoping that their message would reach him subliminally--since it never
did literally" (37). The associations that come to mind--"he let the crypticism
lie about in his mind, sinking down layer by layer. To trip reflexes or
whatever"--include sex, California, food, and homosexuality. Is this where
Freud's study and Schreber's Memoirs part company or are part
family? Are the associations Freud's words to the vise keeping Gumm or Schreber
inside the enlisted or institutionalized delusion? Gumm's 1959 world seems
suffused with a certain Freudian fluency that keeps everyone in check. "Evil
suspicions" that "only reflect projections of your own warped psyche . . . [as]
Freud showed" (79) and "anxiety" as "a transformation of repressed hostility"
leading to one's "domestic problems" being "projected outward onto a world
screen" (183) are two examples in lieu of any number of similar exchanges in
Freud's name. One more example that brings us back to the starting point of the
Freudian association: When Gumm makes up a name to fill in a blank, his sister
knows that his slip is showing.
-
"There's no random," Margo said. "Freud has shown that there's always a psychological
reason. Think about the name 'Selkirk.' What does it suggest to you?" . . . These damn
associations, he thought. As in the puzzle clues. No matter how hard a person tried, he
never got them under control. They continued to run him. "I have it," he said finally. "The
man that the book Robinson Crusoe was based on." . . . "I wonder why you thought of that,"
Margo said. "A man living alone on a tiny island, creating his own society around him, his
own world." . . . "Because," Ragle said, "I spent a couple of years on such an island
during World War Two." (85)
Ragle Gumm withdraws back to the era of his own childhood but, at the same time, as his
father. The father is history. His father's war stories become Gumm's personal history,
which is also grounded in World War II. The Freudian associations that maintain Gumm's 1959
world through the control release and recycling of tensions nevertheless will not stop
short of holding Gumm's simulated world under the sway of his internal world. -
Gumm's return to sanity and crossover to the side of the expansionists
on the moon, also referred to as lunatics, closes the novel on the upbeat. It is
an observation made in psychoanalysis, however, that the turn to politics in a
setting of deep regression, no matter how commendable or rational the objective
and sentiment, is always a strong sign of degeneration toward or along the
narcissistic bottom line or borderline of the psyche. Sane again or just another
lunatic, Gumm now recognizes, under the guidance of one of the lunatics who
infiltrated his simulated world in order to trigger anamnesis, that his world of
1959 is his childhood fantasy of adulthood. He doesn't flash on the most recent
Book-of-the-Month club selection, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as continuity
error because it is precisely the transitional object pulling him through his
childhood:
Again he felt the weight of the thing in his hands, the dusty, rough pressure of the fabric
and paper. Himself, off in the quiet and shadows of the yard, nose down, eyes fixed on the
text. Keeping it with him in his room, rereading it because it was a stable element; it did
not change. (250)
Inside the childhood into which Ragle Gumm psychotically withdraws we find
secretly etched the spot of withdrawal he was already and still is in.
-
While the anachronistic book was included, radios had to be edited out of this version of
1959 because the long-distance transmissions going through would undermine the controlled
environment, the small world after all of 1959. And yet Gumm's memories via his
father include
manning a radio transmitter during World War II. Thus radios in the revision of 1959 have
been replaced by television sets, which are considered the same as radios only more so,
with video portion added on. That the radio, constructed fantastically as superfluous in
the TV era, belongs in the paternal past doesn't stop it from serving ultimately, as it
served Freud by analogy, as superego.
-
Via his nephew's crystal set, which his uncle's war stories inspired the
boy to build, Gumm listens in on the pilot conversations transmitting from
planes flying overhead. When he hears the voices above referring to "Ragle
Gumm" while pointing out that he lives down there right below, he is convinced
that he is breaking up along with the static on the line.
I'm . . . psychotic. Hallucinations. . . . Insane.
Infantile and lunatic. . . . Daydreams, at best. Fantasies about rocket ships
shooting by overhead, armies and conspiracies. Paranoia. A paranoiac psychosis.
Imagining that I'm the center of a vast effort by millions of men and women,
involving billions of dollars and infinite work . . . a universe revolving
around me. (119)
He decides he needs the break you get. But he can't get there without running up against
evidence that it's not all in his head. Looking back upon the 1959 he leaves behind, he
analyzes how the operators in charge of maintaining his withdrawal psychosis had to
construct the delusion as a daydream-like fantasy, a strategy that also lowered the doom on
their enterprise.
Like a daydream, he thought. Keeping in the good. Excluding the undesirable. But such a
natural thing, he realized. They overlooked a radio every now and then. They kept
forgetting that in the illusion the radio did not exist; they kept slipping up in just such
trifles. Typical difficulty in maintaining daydreams . . . they failed to be consistent.
To stay back in time, the daydream-like fantasy must be wish-fulfilled, as always, in
or as the future, but this future is also in the past. The present tense (or tension)
is what must be bracketed out for the fantasy to continue to play. Thus the double
lunacy of the novel's happy ending pulls the emergency brake on the degenerative
in-between-ness of Ragle Gumm's Schreber-like worlds of intrigue, the ongoing present
tension (or tense) transmitting since Gumm's childhood. -
Dick's fictions therefore never include recollections of past lives. His
focus is always on memories of some alternate present. Whatever else the
present tense may be, it is where the dead are, which is why it is elided in
day dreams, the Fantasy genre, and Christianity. The Fantasy genre is not
only Dick's first contact with and choice of fiction, it also engages him
and his delegates throughout his work as fateful temptation, which, however,
even Jahveh in The Divine Invasion must reject. In an interview
Dick turns up the contrast between Fantasy and science fiction within their
respective spans of retention:
In Fantasy, you never go back to believing there are trolls, unicorns . . . and so on.
But in science fiction, you read it, and it's not true now but there are things which
are not true now which are going to be someday. . . . It's like all science fiction
occurs in alternate future universes, so it could actually happen someday. (Cover)
In this life we pass in and out of Fantasy. When we die, however, we enter Fantasy,
the other world, for keeps. The basis of Fantasy's appeal, at least according to
Tolkien, is Christianity: the Fantasy that is also true. The happy ending may be
escapist in everyday life, but in the end (of life) it becomes the Great Escape, the
overcoming of death that Christianity advertises ("On Fairy-Stories"). Although a
declared Christian, Dick is also paranoid, and wary therefore of unambivalence. Even
though in Ubik the interchangeable essence of consumer goods that promote
perfectibility announces itself in the last commercial spot as the Christian God,
nowhere does the novel admit truth in advertising, which would be the Fantasy moment
in this doubly mass culture. -
But it's not just any history that is alternate. Time Out of
Joint forecasts that, in the late 1990s, One Happy World--which consists,
however, only of U.S. coordinates--will see the first phase of a struggle on earth
whose winning and losing sides resemble those of the 2004 U.S. electoral map. A
withdrawal psychosis must be retrofitted to keep this narrative transferentially
grounded in World War II. While Dick is careful to show that the cultivation of
psychosis, because it would fix its focus as fantasy, would necessarily lose control
upon the return of internal objects, subsequent novels suggest that he was revising
his sense of a happy ending outside delusion--in other words, outside the alterations
along for the ride of alternate realities. The Man in the High Castle,
Dick's first novel explicitly employing the device of alternate history, therefore
re-metabolizes the outcome of World War II across at least two post-war decades-long
histories. By 1977 Dick is convinced that this novel is not only fiction. "But there
was an alternate world, a previous present, in which that particular time track
actualized--actualized and then was abolished due to intervention at some prior date"
("If You Find" 245). Variables undergo reprogramming "along the linear time axis of
our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds" ("If You Find" 241). In
writing for over twenty years about counterfeit or semi-real worlds and deranged
private worlds-of-one into which, however, others too can be drawn, Dick was sensing,
as he only now realizes, "the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent
to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one that the majority of us, by
general consent, agree on" ("If You Find" 240). Rather than the black hole of loss,
the present is in Dick's view the neutral gear through which alternate realities shift
into actualization or pass out of existence, but at the same time not in linear time.
Finitude is therefore not so much foreclosed or redeemed as given all the times in the
world to pass on.
-
Dick includes Christianity among all the frames of reference he traverses,
sunken ruins mired in the so-called tomb world. Although Dick confounds the flat
line of this underworld--in Ubik, for example, through such
countermeasures as half-life, the sci-fi bio-technological recasting of haunting
as the halving of any full-life that could assert that it was at last at
rest--still every deposit in the frame or name of reference is without
redemption value. Compatible with the overlap between allegory as conceived by
Benjamin and endopsychic perception according to Freud, the notion of alternate
realities (or histories or universes) fundamental to Dick's narratives maintains
all the frames of reference as throwbacks that survive in the present tense of
an indefinite number of parallel settings. Alternate history suspends the
dotting of the vanishing point between the recent past and the near future and
thus, for the time being, forestalls the repression that otherwise scrubs down
and detonates this realm of the dead, the undead, and the living.
-
Ragle Gumm is restored to a world at civil war, a war between
siblings, we are told, which thus only counts victims. Dick maintained a
primal sibling bond at his own origin as the break with reality constitutive
of his corpus. As he also found occasion daily, by all accounts, to reveal
in conversation--it was the exchange that never varied--he was born
prematurely together with his twin sister who didn't survive their head
start. Dick felt throughout his life the determining influence of his
survival of his twin sister. From this mythic or psychotic origin onward,
Dick speculated, he had inhabited a realm of undecidability specific to
mourning over the other's death conceived as double loss: both parties to
the death lose the other. Indeed Dick claimed he could not decide who had
died: he could be the memory crossing his surviving twin's mind. Dick's
signal investment in alternative present worlds derives from this unique
specialization within the work of mourning or unmourning.
-
Dick's introduction of at least two realities that occupy interchangeable places
in his fiction, which he subsequently refines as alternate history in The
Man in the High Castle, for example, or as half-life in
Ubik, originally or primally draws its inspiration from the twin's
death that to his mind could, alternatively, have all along been his own. In
losing each other, either twin could be dead or alive. Hence Carrère's
title: "I am alive and you are dead." The span of the "and" embraces the recent
past and the near future as the period of uncertainty about the reality of one's
world that both parties to one death must face.
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
rickels@gss.ucsb.edu
COPYRIGHT © 2007 Laurence A. Rickels. READERS MAY USE
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Notes
1. Citations from Schreber's
Denkwürdigkeiten eines
Nervenkranken are to the English translation by Macalpine and
Hunter.
2. I explore these missing links--these links with the
missing--at far, far greater length in Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German
Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988). The infrastructure of Freud references
can be found among that property's disclosures.
3. Specifically, he "loses" Benjamin's reference to
Schreber's press in a footnote in passing, writing it off as minimizing and passing
reference on Benjamin's part, one that Hagen moreover blames in good measure for the
lack of interest taken in this Spiritualist context by Schreber scholars (110 n.307).
4. Originally published as "Die Verspätung des
Maschinenzeitalters" in Imago in 1934.
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