Dear Visitors! drugsinmilk has gone on holiday.
Hopefully, it will be back on 10 August, 2009
What Žižek tells us about the anxiety of the Other in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real seems to be working in the staggering Milos Forman movie: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What is this about?
In his seminar on Anxiety, Lacan designated the true aim of the masochist: it is not to provoke jouissance in the Other but to generate anxiety. That is to say, if the subject acknowledges/admits his submissive position in the game, he also wants to make the rules and precisely this rule-making act is what makes the Other anxious: just think of the “innocent” rape fantasies.
For example in the movie, Choke a woman gets her desire fulfilled by meeting up strangers telling them the script (i.e how she wants to be “raped”) in great details- she admits her submission, but it is exactly which gives her the upper hand during the “play”. The Other might find the situation hard to control, that is why, for example in this movie, Victor leaves the room, being perplexed by the exact wishes from her.
In another recet reading of mine, The Collector, we can also recognize this pattern: the castrated character Frederick willingly admits his inability to cope with his dream having come true- hence the Lacanian “curse”: we should be aware what we wish for, it might come true.
In the Forman movie, these mechanisms of setting the rules by the lunatics shows the growing tension and anxiety within the staff, precisely because their professional reaction to subversive elements such as McMurphy only involves ECT ( abbr. for electroconvulsive therapy). The method might mute the deliquent to a braindead state, but this is exactly what impotent person does: they annihiliate the weaker to prove his potency, no matter what. This is the most-inner fear of the staff: the ECT-machine embodies their inability to cope with the ‘lunatics’. Instead of curing therapy (think of how Billy’s stuttering stopped after a night spent with a hooker), the choose a pervert method of humiliating attitude towards the inmates.
Within this heterotopia (Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, Pendleton, US-OR), we can see the weakness of the medical Other: the the able body is the image of the Other, here, are the ‘lunatics’ and ‘perverts’ different from Nurse Ratched – whose name refers to ‘wretched’?
It would be pointless to talk about the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke along with Fight Club, precisely because if two movies are from the same author, it doesn’t necessary require drawing analogies between them. Nevertheless, i can’t help noticing the presence of the group therapy and the derogating illustration of sex and the main character as a socially incapable person, an urban misfit, a deviant hero of our time.
Choke also tackles mummy-daddy issues, the inability for anchoring down to a partner possibly stemmed from the lack of a normal childhood (i’m being really superflous here- what is “normal”?)
What I did like about Palahniuk is the originality around which he constructs his stories: the idea of choking and how it is played out, the the setting of colonial America etc…
When I re-watched Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult movie, Donnie Darko, the movie was more compelling, than the time I last saw it, which was..hmm..some 8 years ago. Anyhow, the question is still lingering around: Isn’t Donnie Darko the visual representation of he logic of Borge’s The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)? I took a seminar on Digital Theory and quite interestingly this concept of ”the garden”is what many dynamic medium use (wikipedia.com or we can say that even the Internet itself is what the intertextuality per se). To escape from general assumptions, let me reflect on the incompossible worlds, which is a groundbreaking idea in the history of cinema, yet, we are unable to accomplish to entirely visualize this idea. (and some parts of me say, we will never be able to do so). Deleuze’s and Leibnitz’s approach to the notion of free will and predestination could be used in New Cinema, as well.
David Norman Rodowick in his “Deleuze’s Time Machines”, talks about the possibility of a naval battle to illustrate the notion of imcompossible worlds, but I found a better example:
Think of a machine that can take you back in time August 2001 and you warn the authorities what is gonna happen in September. The chain of events will justify you (let’s just skip the scenario, when thorough investigation will be made to clarify your innocence, i.e how the hell did you know this information) and finally the attach does not take place. Mission accomplished, now, you wanna get back where you freakin came from. But that place is a place where 2001 doesn’t take place, a totally new space. What happens to you? Where you came the attach did take place, therefore that place does not exist anymore! Because of you have changed the entire history of the world (not just yours!) your action induced-theoretically-an alternative reality, where the WTC stands and one where it doesn’t. This theory is stemming from quantum theory, where EVERYTHING is possible. These two places is what I see to be an example of the incompossible worlds. This highly adoptable theoretization belongs to Keith Mayes, thanks to him!
Now as time travel is in the game- which is one of the central themes of the movie -it is high time to talk the fictitious book of Roberta Sparrow’s “The Philosophy of Time Travel”. The book -along with Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”- refers to the Einstein- Rosen Bridge Theory. It discusses a quite astonishing question, concerning free will. From some characters’ navel area a jelly-like lightning comes out, designating his path. Donnie, being able to see this can question his own free will or what God pre-decided for us.
Donnie Darko provides the possibility for presenting two alternative worlds for the viewers, the idea of which could be a useful and feasible for New Cinema.
As I was looking for some ending thoughts for my seminar paper, I stumbled upon a riveting analysis of le sinthome – my latest and absorbing issue – here. paramodern studies claims – referring to Paul Verhaeghe and Frederic Declercq that the subject is called Lacanian Neosubject if he:
“tries to come and go with the Real of the jouissance
dictated by its own drive, without falling back into the previous trap of stuffing it full of signification”
This helped establish a point in my discussion of the sinthomatic subject in the comic adaptation of Paul Auster’s “City of Glass”, apoint where further inquires can be made. Daniel Quinn, at least I believe, is the Lacanian Neosubject as he subordinates himself with his on his sinthome (i.e writing), stemmed from a trauma and unconsciously identifies himself with detective Paul Auster. The essay, entitled “Empty texts: The Lacanian (con-) textualization of the a-chiasmatic logic of the sinthomatic subject in the comic book adaptation of Paul Auster’s „City of Glass”(1994). This paper dealsi with the one-way misidentification.
There is something mysterious in le sinthome: it is an effect of the Real that haunts us from the outside. As being transferred from the Real in it symptomatic form, the effect of le sinthome is what connects the subject to his fantasy, that is we can enjoy our fantasies through the symptomatic joussaince.(more precisely, the joussaince of the symptom). Then, the symptom is thought from the fantasy.
That is, we are bound to the primacy of our sinthome (∑), as Jacques Alain Miller put it in “The Sinthome, a Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy”. So, my question is quite simple: how is it possible that an Order of such importance resists to verbalization, or description?
Sometimes I just can’t help noticing phenomena that could be mere coincidences. For instance, if a mediocre movie called Number 23 makes me realize that it is a manifestation of a Lacanian-Joycean interpretation of le sinthome. As soon as I realized that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon is present when I talk about the movie and the sinthome (FYI it was Lacan’s 23rd Seminar, where he dealt with this Order), it suddenly struck me: isn’t it just the same proble Joyce was involved in, or what the notebooks connote for Paul Auster?
The movie may uncounsciously play with the breakdown of the external self-representing/defining mediums that constitute and guarantee the subject’s coherence. With Joyce, these mediums are veiled so psychoses was to be avoided, but the more interesting part in the movie is that they’re not hidden anymore: as our hero realizes his trauma that actually haunted him in the form of nightmares or in a certain number; so this trauma is revealed and the Symbolic veiling is shattered.
On the other hand, the character,played by Jim Carrey wants to identify himself with the main hero from the book, entitled “Number 23″, which is the opposite case as in the example of Joyce.
Recently, I’ve found myself quite getting more immersed into the genre of the so-called post-rock. Two names are worth mentioning: God Is An Astronaut and my favourite one: Russian Circles. Their songs are usually instrumental with some catchy metal riffs.
Russian Circles: Campaign
In her text, The Speaking Subject, Kristeva analyzes the two Orders that constitutes the (speaking) subject en procés. Her approach to visualize her two modalities (Semiotic and Symbolic) is to call Thom’s Catastrophe Theory to help. This theory is a part of the so called bifurcation theories and supposes that “all structures are the result of the interaction of two communicating spaces; spaces, however, which do not obey the same laws.”
The Semiotic – the quasi-dimension of the Lacanian Real and Imaginary- and the Symbolic are thus the constitutives of the subject and – I believe – can be visualized by the Lorenz attractors.
These are governing us together and this dynamic construction is what co-ordinates our mental “space”.
