Long Sunday

narco-analysis

crosspost from Trinketization 30 July 07

narco-analysis

Dave Boothroyd's book "Culture On Drugs" (2006) is a sound and entertaining read, and is just as much a carefully argued account of the influence of various substances on theory and theorists across a wide field - Freud and Cocaine, Benjamin and Hashish, Sartre and hallucinogens - as it is a commentary on, and plea for, a narco-analytic turn in culture theory. Good. All the way through the book there were important questions raised and important answers offered - and experimental writing is approved here and there (but perhaps not adopted in the text as much as might be anticipated).

All that said however, I think there was something held back...for example, I expected something on Marx and the opium wars: old beardo advocated that the Chinese not prohibit homegrown manufacture of the stuff so as to thereby undermine the East India Company's efforts to force their trade advantage via Indian producers. So basically Marx comes out in favour of legalising Class As! And while I think I would have preferred - or is it that I fear - an extended treatment of Sartre's experiences with amphetamine sulphate (those huge books on Flaubert, more on Flaubert than Flaubert wrote himself), I do appreciate Dave's attempt to cover all the bases in an even handed way. Especially when he works through the Freudian cocaine versions. Freud as experimenter and advocate; Freud as liberated by use; Freud as promoter.

But it was weird to be reading this text just a day after writing out my own notes for a piece on Irma's injection as mentioned by Slavoj Zizek in his little starter book on Lacan. (on Zizek, see here and here). Irma's story - Freud's first dream analysis - is cited in an admittedly perfunctory way by Zizek in order to explain Lacan's contribution to Freud's insight that the melancholic is 'not aware that he has lost the lost object' as a realization [by Lacan] that it is not an inability to mourn a loss, so much as a loss of desire for an object that he may still possess, but which has lost its efficiency, that governs melancholia.

This might have been a great opportunity to consider Freud's own melancholia and mourning in relation to the Irma dream. And here there is much more to be said about the figure of Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow [somehow Dave leaves out the second part of his hyphenated surname]. It is this E-v-F-M to whom Freud had recommended the 'superdrug' cocaine in large quantities, as a substitute for morphine, which Ernst then took in large intravenous injections and became more dependent upon the marching powder than on the M he was into in the first place. So much into it that he died of related complications of the substitution (or what could be caled a 'speedball' syndrome, thanks uncle bill). All so far just a footnote... but what if the guilt Freud exhibits in relation to the faulty diagnosis of Irma's injection in the dream that founds psychoanalysis (in The Interpretation of Dreams Irma has pride of place) were to be read in relation to the later guilt (some 80 or so pages later) that Freud reports in a footnote in relation to Fleischl-Marxow's death? We are familiar with displacements in the dream work, so why not here find the symptomatic explanation of Irma in the text of the dream book itself, and Freud's feelings of responsibility for having introduced his (ten years) older colleague to the drug that would allegedly kill him - though it was more likely to have been a dirty needle, as also noted in relation to the diagnosis of Irma herself. Perhaps I am not expressing this well, but I would be lying if I did not share a little in the melancholia of having read Dave's book, seen mention of E-v-F-M, and yet not seen the connections laid out as clearly as they so seemed to me when we read (thanks Carrie, Nicola, Atticus, Miriam, Saul) the Interpretation in our reading group back in 2001 (on its 100th anniversary). It could be that Freud's loss of his colleague is one he can only admit via a displacement in a dream that forces itself down Irma's neck. Indication - that Irma should be prescribed some of that very same acetate.

So, narco-analysts to be deployed - the deflection of Irma into the text of Lacan deflects once again a forensic investigation that would explain both Freud's interest in injections and Irma's throat, and might lay some blame where blame might-maybe-ought to lie. Dirty needles, guilt and melancholia - time perhaps to lift the lid off this (La)Can of worms, and get back to work...

John @ Trinketization

Piracy and Liberty

An excerpt from my ongoings readings on the history of piracy. Marcus Rediker compares the frontispiece of Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers to Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People.

Tyger and Becoming-Artifical

Hi.  I'm Tharmas, but I listed my username as Roger Whitson.  I've been fascinated by this film short from Brazilian filmmakers Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin for almost a year without knowing precisely what to do with it:

Pomo = LaRouchian wingnuttery?

X-posted from foucaultblog

One of the things one occasionally has to deal with are people's prejudices and misperceptions, bordering on hatred, of anything that seems to threaten the scientific method.

Now personally I'm all in favor of the scientific method in its place, but for many people an interest in say Rorty, Latour, Foucault etc. bespeaks an anti-scientific mind on a par with the outer reaches of weirdness. Or, of Lyndon LaRouch, who is apparently making a comeback on campuses and who attracted the ire of this science-based blog for his interest in physics.

LaRouche is quoted as writing:

Once we recognize that scientific knowledge is obtained, not by contemplating the universe, but by studying how we may generate those thoughts which enable us to efficiently act to change the universe, then the principles of cognition underlying the discovery of lawful physical principles, are the epistemological basis for defining the underlying determination of validatable physical laws.

Now that might not make a whole lot of sense but it seems hamless enough.

Not so! To the rescue rides this commentator:

I hate to break it to you, but your local departments of english literature/women’s studies etc etc etc are almost certainly propagating equally nonsensical propaganda to your students, and doing far more harm than these guys. Officially sanctioned crackpottery is far worse than this kind of random lunacy.

The ramparts are under attack. Hold the line!

Despite a few attempts to keep things civil, a poster named "caveman" replies:

Don’t be disingenuous. You know perfectly well that a straw-man caricature of post-modernism is exactly the same thing as post-modernism.

It's not inevitable that these discussions degenerate into caricature, and debate is good, it's just surprising to see these old warmed over relic opinions from the culture wars.

The Eigteenth Brumaire of Gaius Balthar

Happy to join this resurrection process for Long Sunday (which has been a useful lurk-space and links page for me for a very long time). I guess the idea of resurrecting something justifies a return to some topics already sometimes discussed - For me the invite came in relation to this post from Trinketization, [10 July 07], so its resurrected here too - and in anticipation ...

This is written with Laura King, and is the beginnings of a paper for the conference on bsg planned for end of the month. My notetaking has been so frakking slow I cannot tell you, but parts of the plot now seem to show up on Draidis. So say we all. (Mere notes, sorry, see other Sci Fi bits in labels for more):

Lets call it "The Eigteenth Brumaire of Gaius Balthar"

Repetition is the key to both the opening of Marx's great text "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte" and the back story to BSG, this has happened before and it will happen again. We are cylons, we forget we are, we build cylons, we repeat the forgetting...

Things repeat themselves, says Hegel, but Marx adds that he forgot to say the second time round it happens as farce. Hence Gaius, the comical hero of the new Battlestar Galactica remake (3 series done, the final one starts again in Jan).

So, I think this gives us an opportunity to demonstrate how a dexterous analysis from Marx's text can make sense of the changing fortunes/opportunisms of both Gaius Balthar and the Mentat Roslin. And deploying this reading of bsg might then further show how the nuances of Marx's class analysis in his book from 1852 - no simple binary plottings - can help us make sense of the convoluted violences of our lives today - in 2007.

But there should be no simple reading-off from the text to 'correlated' examples from the real, or vice-versa. The search for one-to-one correspondences is forlorn, the borg are not Intel or Microsoft - though its helpful to sometimes see that resistance is not useless (Picard as open source/or Shakespeare).

We project contemporary anxieties into stories, into space, into the future (Feuerbach critique of religion here?). Our constructions of what we do and desire are played out as farce. Gaius is our faulty and insufficient image - a pale mechanism through which greater hopes than his declared intentions are filtered. Gaius himself is cylon (how did he survive the original nuclear destruction of Planet Caprica if not - he just forgets, this little nephew, that he is reborn).

So, its not so much a questiion of who represents who in bsg. Sure, there are elections and unions (both yellow) and so on, but the potatoes in a sack are the (number declining) 'people' in the fleet - represented only by Galactica, or in the figures of Starbuck etc. There is a confusion here, analysed so well by Gayatri Spivak, between darstellung and vertreten (two words in German for one - in English). In Gaius we have the (farcical) representative of the people (their president, because they cannot represent themselves), and the picture of them (their number, they must be represented).

Though suddenly reading CLR James on Moby Dick I am not sure that Adama isn't really Ahab. As all captains are.

Can we plot the co-ordinates of bsg, 18th Brumaire and Melville's novel... .

Administrative Update

In our ongoing effort to reinvigorate and rejuvenate Long Sunday, we are pleased to announce the first of the new contributors to Long Sunday: Adam Thurschwell, Barret Weber, Jeremy Crampton and Old. Adam is an associate professor of law at Cleveland State University. He maintains his own blog entitled Before the Law. Barret is a provisional PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Alberta. He also contributes to The Yolk: A Blog Theory. Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. He maintains Foucault Blog. Old is a street pastor with the Mennonite Central Committee in Toronto.

Play: Never the Sinner

Please Join Us As

Woodshed Collective

Presents
The New York Return of

Never the Sinner
The Leopold and Loeb Story

By John Logan

Conceived by Woodshed Collective
Directed by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn
The Outer Citric Circle Award for
Outstanding Off-Broadway Play Returns to New York City July 13-28.

Never the Sinner
July 13 – 28

Flamboyan Theater, CSV Cultural Center (107 Suffolk St.)
Tuesday-Saturday @ 8pm.
Sundays: July 15 and 22 @ 3pm
Saturdays: July 21 and 28 @ 2pm

All Tickets $18
www.smarttix.com or call 212-868-4444

(Featuring Long Sunday contributor Stephen Squibb!)

Partisanship, polemics and politics

Hello, Long Sunday!  The editors have kindly invited me to post here on an occasional basis.  I maintain the Foucaultblog, an ongoing experiment to see whether it is possible to create a space where one does not already know the answers to questions and pose already as an expert.  I welcome your comments either here on back at the entry on Foucaultblog.

Is it possible to be honestly partisan?

We hear a lot of talk these days about the need for bipartisanship (I'm thinking of statements coming out of Capitol Hill), and in light of the poll findings I posted yesterday about American's distrust of political bias in the university, you might be justified in concluding that the source of the problem is partisanship.

Foucault famously observed that he preferred "problematizations, not polemics" and defined the former:

Problematization doesn't mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn't exist. It is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 257.

So are problematizations and partisanship compatible? One might initially think not.

Infinitely Demanding? Not really...

Since I am feeling guilty about not posting, I'm posting some remarks that really aren't even up to the level of a blog post. They are more like notes for a blog post or sketches for blog posts to come (but necessarily deferred). Anyway, I skimmed Simon Critchley's new book, Infinitely Demanding, yesterday. All you anarchists who hate the state and reduce politics to funny and provocative street theater will love this book. The rest of you? Not so much.

LS and you

One of my flaws as a teacher is that I really can't handle "dead time." I jabber through silences. When the conversation stops, even if only momentarily, my heart drops, a belt of adrenaline hits my arteries, and I kick things back on to track, for better or worse. I've heard stories about teachers who are better about this, who can stand 5 minutes of silence without freaking out. Alas, I'm not sure if prolonged stoppages will ever be for me.

So just imagine what the near-silence chez nous is having on me! LS is having a bit of a slow period. A prolonged slow period, actually. Which is totally understandable. People are busy, things need to get done, and if anyone knows about the ebb and flow of blogjuice, it's me. (I've been killing my blogs off since before many of you had heard the word "blog" for the first time...)

But I'll admit, this is starting to make me a bit sad. It wouldn't be an overstatement, I think, to say that at one point LS was one of the blogs to turn to if you were interested in an amalgam of theory, left politics, loosely literary analysis, and related fields. It is a blog that should exist, don't you agree?

Anyway, this is dangerous pool, for certain, but desperate times call for desperate posts. If you are interested in writing for LS, I encourage you to write me and say so. I think that we would be especially interested in people who have some blogging / writing experience, and, obviously, have some interests in common with those that have written for the site in the past. So tell me a little bit about yourself, point me to your own blog / writings / whatever. And I'll let the others know about your interest and we'll go from there.

One thing: don't count yourself out because of your professional position or lack thereof. We've always been a pretty eclectic group on this front. A lot of graduate students, a lot of non-academics, a few faculty folks. Mostly what I'm interested in are people who would like to write here fairly regularly, who write well, and have an interest in one or more of the following fields:

- left politics
- "theory" and philosophy
- politically or theoretically inflected approaches to literature, film, popular culture, music, art, architecture, philosophy, and so on...
- other  issues that have some connection to the above.

 

Another thing: obviously pseudonymity is fine by me, so don't let that rule you out either.

This is obviously a bit dangerous, as maybe no one will write me and then the question becomes where to go from there. We don't want that to happen, so drop me a line...