Living Vicariously

We have a neurological response to what we see on a flickering screen or in a theater, same as we would to the real deal. Aristotle knew this as well as our modern neurologists, though in different terms. Our narratives — the stories we construct that explain to us what things are — are often built in relation to what we see on screens. Movies are exciting precisely because signified and signifier become muddled. Despite that, most of us can make a distinction between a production of Antigone and a real mass homicide.

This is the conundrum, which grows increasingly charged as media subsumes all our referents for ideology and even identity. How we’re liable to behave as a reaction to violent images is still mostly determined by how we were already predisposed to behave. Horror movies aren’t likely to create any mass murderers. But identity is also always a form of play-acting. When we look at the rationalizations of murderers, we don’t see their motive: we see the hidden architecture of their ego. Rationalization has always been a useful psychoanalytic tool.

Consider Maria Abramovic’s performance art piece “Rhythm 0,” when she stood still for 6 hours and offered herself as an object, to be used as people desired, using a selection of preserved “tools”: a razor, a gun, and so on. Most journalistic commentary seems to focus on this as “the Heart of Darkness,” a sort of aestheticized version of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. But it may be more fruitful to see it as a pedagogy of violence, how trauma teaches us that the only “tools” available are things that hurt us, and willfully priming others to engage with us in a way that deepens that cycle of trauma.

Our often casual relationship with fictional violence, even our vicarious excitement, has inarguably problematic implications. Doubly so when that fiction mimics reality, as it always must. But “problematic” only gets us so far, and moralizing is not necessarily the same as morality. The things we know that we know — analysis of rationale — is never enough for us to understand ourselves.

The need for vicarious violence can be considered passive participation in the crime, whatever it is.

There is some commotion. But no, [the victim] does not move anymore. He does nothing anymore… The other apes break off their fights and come to take a look. A circle is formed around the deceased. Silence… Time after time, the same happens. There is total disorder, a lot of aggression and violence; and suddenly… someone is killed. Violence stops, and everybody comes to take a look at the deceased… Suddenly, disorder disappears and an ordered structure comes into being: a circle around the deceased. Moreover, disorder and violence do not return immediately. The circle dissolves, and the apes take up again their daily routine. Rest has come back in the group. — Violence and The Sacred, Girard

Casual cruelty we can recognize, but it does not at once reveal its identity. Instead, we come to the dark side of the moon, psychologically, which is never revealed to us unless if we ourselves go there. As Nietzsche rightfully recognized, this is not a safe exploration, you can’t do it entirely from behind a windshield; the “abysses we look into also look back into us.” This porn as art would seek to bring about confrontation with fascist idealizations as a means of demonstrating their opposite. It is a realm that does not just accidentally lead to misunderstanding, it provokes it. It demands an interrogation.

Following is a long quotation from the introduction to Interrogation Machine, which makes this point elegantly:

In his reaction to the photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated by US soldiers, made public at the end of April 2004, George Bush, as expected, emphasized how the deeds of these soldiers were isolated crimes which do not reflect what America stands and fights for: the values of democracy, freedom, and personal dignity. If this is true, how, then, are we to account for their main feature, the contrast between the “standard” way prisoners were tortured in Saddam’s regime, and the US army tortures? In Saddam’s regime, the emphasis was on direct brutal infliction of pain, while the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. Furthermore, recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces smiling stupidly alongside the twisted, naked bodies of the prisoners, is an integral part of the process, in stark contrast with the secrecy of Saddam’s tortures. When I saw the famous photo of a naked prisoner with a black hood covering his head, electric cable attached to his limbs, standing on a chair in a ridiculous theatrical pose, my first reaction was that this was a shot of the latest performance-art show in Lower Manhattan. The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which cannot but bring to mind the whole scope of American performance art and theatre of cruelty. — Interrogation Machine

This is not only an American issue, it is a re-occuring psychological motif, which has throughout history played its role in the definition of in-group and out-group — initiation and all other rituals which bring us into the social circle, or which thrust us from it — the enactment of taboo, by which societies define their relations to one another and the world around us. In other words, the debasement of the “sacrifice” is not merely, as the quotation would imply, an expression of our dark half. It is a rite of initiation, though the victims may not be the ones who are being initiated — an expression of fundamental power structures. Violence, ritualized and sublimated or literal, remains a primary method that human social hierarchies are formed and re-capitulated.

To continue with the quotation,

…It is in this feature that brings us to the crux of the matter: to anyone acquainted with the reality of the US way of life, the photos immediately brought to mind the obscene underside of US popular culture- for example, the initiation rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo in order to be accepted into a closed community. Do we not see similar photos at regular intervals in the US press, when some scandal explodes in an Army unit or on a high school campus, where an initiation ritual goes too far and soldiers or students get hurt beyond a level considered tolerable? … Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World nation: in being submitted to these humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture. They got a taste of its obscene underside, which forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom. …In march 2003, none other than Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “there are known knowns, There are things we known that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we known we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial forth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know — which is precisely the Freudian unconscious — the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself” as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the “unknown unknowns” the threats from Saddam which we do not even suspect, the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the dangers are: in the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, although they form the background of our public values. … So Bush was wrong: what we get when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the US way of life. (ibid)

What better example of our unknown knowing is there than a brutal re-enactment of the Abu Ghraib incident, shown on a porn website as a form of entertainment, for people to masturbate to from a safe distance — safe from the potential shame of participation, but allowed to engage with it by proxy, like drivers rubbernecking at an accident?

What else is the bulk of our news watching, in truth? Sympathy porn, torture porn, grievance porn. Nothing could be more to the point than this vicarious violence, enacted upon the degraded subject of our (supposed) desire. What better demonstration of precisely what is hidden behind our collective cultural mask of civility, or the outstretched hand of our “foreign diplomacy”? What better way to see it than in something so awful, so absurd?

Even this kind of analysis of such a subject is, in its way, nothing more than a farce. Atrocity can have an unintentional element of the surreal, even the comedic. At our worst moments, many of us find, to our own horror, that our reaction is to laugh rather than cry. This is how life ends, as a joke that forgets itself before the punchline. (We might bookend Milan Kundera’s literary career with this observation, The Joke, his first novel about the tragi-comedy of Communism, and The Festival of Insignificance, quite possibly his last work, dealing in an elliptical sense with the narcissistic insignificance of our lives.) Carl Jung, also, seemed to want to lead patients in this direction. The alchemical process deals with the unification of the dark and the light, of the transformation of the dross, of base materials, to a more refined form. Shit to gold.

In the aggregate, we re-visit the same blind brutality on ourselves again and again, one generation after the next. Who wouldn’t want to get off this awful carnival ride? But we must stay a while longer, for it is not the monster that peeks through at us, but merely our own banal mirror image.

When those same powers who enmonster their scapegoats reach a tipping point, a critical mass, of political ire, they abruptly and with bullying swagger enmonster themselves. The shock troops of reaction embrace their own supposed monstrousness. (From this investment emerged, for example, the Nazi Werwolf program.) Such are by far more dreadful than any monster because, their own aggrandizements notwithstanding, they are not monsters. They are more banal and more evil. — Thesis on Monsters, Mieville

On a personal level, before it can be transformed, it must be identified. That process does not mean we should support the horrific, it does not mean condone it; it means that we must identify the roots of cruelty in ourselves, peel back its shroud so that it recognizes itself, look into its eye, and laugh. The Jungian observation holds true: he who is illuminated with the brightest of lights will have the darkest of shadows. The alchemical process calls for opposites to be brought back into contact, so they can balance one another, rather than cleaved in two, so they can redouble their animosity. Dark humor is kind of a tacit recognition of the bleakness of existence, a celebration to our imminent frailty and failure, but also the fact that recognition is shared, if we can laugh together. Laughter in the face of meaninglessness, futility, cruelty is an expression of being beyond their grasp.

The absurd is the point of the sword. But we must beware, because, in being a sort of inoculation against negativity, it can allow us to come so close to it that we think we have come home.

If one considers the dangerous tensions which technology and its consequences have engendered in the masses at large — tendencies which at critical stages take on a psychotic character — one also has to recognize that this same technologization has created the possibility of psychic immunization against such mass psychoses. It does so by certain films in which the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses. — The Work of Art, Benjamin

We shouldn’t also forget: myths act through us even when we are unconscious of them.

The Theater of Ultra-Violence

“Violence is never just abstract violence… violence is a kind of brutal imposition of the real.” –Zizek

Unconscious vengeance, the establishment of social hierarchies through hazing and bullying, and the blurred lines between known behavior and unknown motive — all these are distinctly human. Violence underwrites these transactions, in one way or another. Mass shootings seem to be the more explicitly American expression of this psychology.

And this process can be effectively reversed. Obscene enjoyment comes back to bite us in the slick marketing of ISIS, which uses our relationship to media as fiction to sell real world atrocity. So we see Facebook “performances” of real beheadings followed by denouncement, and their historical revisionism and execution of scholars are all a form of calculated “PR.” It is awful, and yet unsurprising that we see even this flipped again, for instance with HSBC corporate training videos including “spoof” beheadings as some form of perverse team building.

The amount of scare quotes required to write that paragraph is excessive, but if we do away with them, it might get lost which is real and which is “real.” Can we even tell the difference anymore? Trump’s three ring circus of a campaign was the height of demagoguery, a farce against reason itself which depended quite centrally on the flattening of the real. A malignantly narcissistic reality TV host leading a mish-mash of apocalyptic cultists into the White House — if the plot had been pitched twenty years ago for television it would have been dismissed as unrealistic. Now it is our reality.

The proliferation of ISIS or Sandy Hook conspiracy theories may be an expression of this very problem. The juxtaposition of the two creates the perpetual sense of the surreal that seems to permeate modern life. Uncertainty is the new normal, the basis of an ongoing epistemic crisis that arguably began with the printing press. And violence seems to bring this to the fore. A common refrain of survivors during Aurora Colorado theater shooting, and throughout the aftermath, was that it seemed like a movie.

Also consider the strange rhetorical alliances formed through enemies in such circumstances. For instance, ISIS released brochures detailing the strategy of the “grey zone,” and their need to radicalize moderate muslims. With the United States now closing its borders and hunkering down, all they need is a few more “performances” and the government might substantiate internment camps. It’s a synergistic if not mutual relationship between those who would be the Crusaders and those who would be the Jihadists. Overtly you fight your enemy, covertly you are creating mutually beneficial chaos by establishing an oppositional narrative. Our enemies are invariably funhouse mirror images of our own atrocities.

When Theodore Dalrymple’s wrote his review of “A Clockwork Orange,” “A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece,” Aurora and Sandy Hook had yet to happen, and ISIS was still gestating. But in it we see him wrestling with some of the issues raised by these events. He begins,

When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called “ultra-violence.” The film had been controversial in Britain; its detractors, who wanted it banned, charged that it glamorized and thereby promoted violence. The young men dressed as droogs seemed to confirm the charge, though of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still, even a merely sartorial identification with psychopathic violence shocked me, for it implied an imaginative sympathy with such violence; and seeing those young men outside the theater was my first intimation that art, literature, and ideas might have profound — and not necessarily favorable — social consequences. A year later, a group of young men raped a 17-year-old girl in Britain as they sang “Singing in the Rain,” a real-life replay of one of the film’s most notorious scenes.

Contrast that with another point of view. In Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,” he proposes that violence originates in and must be turned against ideology, rather than externalized. When it cannot be, violence is a possible result.

…Exactly the same holds for the terrifying bouts of violence Anders Behring Breivik’s murder spree in Oslo. Exploding a bomb in front of the government building and then killing dozens of young members of the social democratic party in an island close to Oslo. Many commentators tried to dismiss this as a clear case of personal insanity but I think Breivik’s manifesto is well worth reading. …It’s exactly like Travis Bickle’s killing spree at the end of the Taxi Driver. When he is there, barely alive, he symbolically with his fingers points a gun at his own head; clear sign that all this violence was basically suicidal. He was on the right path, in a way, Travis of the Taxi Driver. You should have the outburst of violence — and you should direct it at yourself in a very specific way, at what in yourself chains you, ties you to the ruling ideology.

As he explains in an earlier scene, “even the most brutal violence is the enacting of a certain symbolic deadlock.” This struggle — fictionalized in John Nada’s struggle with his friend to put on “critique of ideology glasses” in “They Live,” to look past ideology by putting them on; or the suicidal outburst of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” where his lack of self knowledge and projection trap him in a destructive script — becomes a real world outburst precisely when it can no longer articulate itself.

Our inability to wrestle with these conflicts internally results in irrational physical outbursts. Violence is an expression of what we haven’t otherwise been able to process, and violent media is both a way to act that through without actually harming people, or a way of immersing ourselves further in violent impulses. It can serve as invocation or banishment, purgative or costive.

In either event, evil is as unsatisfying an answer of motive as any other. Ideology explains how underlying impulses express themselves. But neither ever fully reveal their source. When we level the playing field and see all narratives as equivalent qua myth, many of our ethic-aesthetics become coherent: for instance, the American love of anti-heroes. We love the rebel, the under-dog. Tony Mantana from “Scarface” or “Dirty Harry.” The outcast has a strange role to play in the U.S.. They were misunderstood and abused, but through an often furious outburst, they proved them all wrong. This comes through clearest in the self-narratives of mass murderers. How many heroes and anti-heroes are defined most of all by their kill count? How many real-world mobsters and killers see themselves as a fusion of Dirty Harry and Elvis?

The dichotomy is hard to come to terms with. It’s troubling. It should be troubling. But the last thing we should do is brush what troubles us out of sight. It is liable to breed in that darkness, like the rise of Trumpism as Freudian “revenge of the repressed.” Instead, we must be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas simultaneously, such as the quotations from Zizek and Dalrymple, and recognize that the constant wrestling of one against the other — without any final solution — is how we can improve anything at all, without enforcing one set of values above all others. We may find cognitive dissonance deeply uncomfortable, but it may be one of our greatest tools for transformation. In this we can find the first inkling of what an artist and art movement must do, or at the least, where they must begin. As discussed in Interrogation Machine,

“Coincidentia Oppositorum” is a key alchemical procedure with acute mystical connotations. … Alchemical and ideological processes (both often referred or alluded to by NSK) produce subtle and intangible mystical effects that surround the combination of opposites, as in the case of Orwell’s “Blackwhite” concept. … Deleuze and Guattari argue that Kafka’s work reveals the secret architectures of power — the internal workings of a system. NSK’s repeated intensive combination of “public” opposites reveals “secret” connections: between Nazism and Stalinism, science and mysticism, nationality and postmodernity, popular music and social control, and so on. These combinations interrogate and undermine the public image and self-image of institutions and ideologies, and refer to deeper, “universal” levels of underlying reality that conflict with contemporary postmodern relativism.

When we shut down contradiction simply because it’s problematic, we move further away from the truth. When we try to force the world to conform to a single moral frame, we can deceive one another and ourselves. This is how fundamentalism commonly expresses itself, enforcing its monoculture by eliminating difference.

None of this lessens the brutality of violence, or the pervasive challenges of trauma, nor does it mean we need to agree in any sense with the perspectives we entertain. Alexei Monroe’s repeated use of the word “interrogation” (popular in many other cultural theory books as well) is not just allusion to the book’s title, it denotes a posture of artistic engagement with ideas, so that even what we say or portray within this mode allows for ironic distance. This use of irony has been quickly adopted by various subcultures online as a means of avoiding moral culpability, which is a mistake on several levels. But it does serve to instruct us in how we relate to media, through a confrontation with its roots in ourselves. We only know how we feel about something once we have played it out. Children’s games of imagination are quite instructive, as they demonstrate a mental process that continues throughout our lives, only in a more subtle and hidden form. So watch that war atrocity on TV. Play a character or explore a train of thought you’re deeply uncomfortable with. Lolita wasn’t meant as a glorification of pedophilia, after all. We must be conscious of what we’re doing, and remember that all public performances ultimately re-enter the real. As Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation,

The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, that is posed here. For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated holdup than to a real holdup. Because the latter does nothing but disturb the order of things, the right to property, whereas the former attacks the reality principle itself. Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation. But the difficulty is proportional to the danger. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no “objective” difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery, the signs do not lean to one side or another. To the established order they are always of the order of the real. Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible — in short, remain close to the “truth,” in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real — that is, to the established order itself, well before institutions and justice come into play.

Ironic distance can grant new perspectives, but it does not keep us from reaping the repercussions of our actions. We may also consider Keats’ Negative Capability. Yet it is only the aesthetic impulse which provides a means of transfiguring abomination into the sublime.

As Heinlein recognized, man is a creature that laughs at wrongness. Does this laughter transform? Does tragi-comedy relieve us of complicity? Perhaps not, but it does allow us to approach it without fear of being taken in by it, and this proximity allows for further transformation to occur. Only then can we change. Only then can we change others.