Unconscious/Television, Open Secret, Becoming Press
by 0nty
Transcription
0nty:
At Becoming Press’ launch of Lucas Nassif’s new work, Unconscious/Television, we find ourselves at the crossroads of three projects. On the one hand – of course – we have Lucas’ book, which above all approaches us from the perspective of psychoanalysis, or more precisely, from the perspective of the philosophy of psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan, Guattari, and Deleuze. We then have Open Secret, the curational project of Internet Cinema, organized by Dana Dawud, which accompanies Lucas’ book launch. Open Secret’s approach is difficult to identify, but it speaks – you can’t deny it – from the perspective of experimental cinema, of experimental cinema which is articulating (above all) the form and history of networks, in particular that curious network which we call “the internet.” And finally, we have of course Becoming Press itself, a third discourse which has sutured together these first two, and which approaches us from the perspective of, to paraphrase Deleuze, ‘minor literature’, the independent publishing and dissemination of the otherwise-unseen literary currents which penetrate and decode the institutions of education, culture and art. In this short discussion, I hope to talk a little bit about how these three projects form a knot.
Print–Becoming Press
Becoming Press has published eight books so far, and each, we can say, attempts to decode a certain tangle which registers at the cultural and philosophical level. These tangles range from the knot of intelligence and artificiality, to capitalism and biology, to, in the case of Lucas Nassif, Television (which is to say, cinema, the moving image, animation, and, as we will see, the involved infrastructures…) and the Unconscious.
Becoming Press, as a project committed to the dissemination of literature in print, faces the difficult editorial task of preserving in its methodology and modes of production the strategies which render their published texts, again, ‘minor literatures’ with deterritorializing potentials, which render them, to invoke Eduardo Viveiros DeCastro’s evaluation of Multinaturalism qua Western Discourse, “bombs”.
At a fundamental level, the existence of Becoming Press as an independent publishing house willing to publish anonymous, underground artists and writers exists as a transversal route between the institutions of culture, and the productive authorial forces which covertly animate the galleries of the MoMA and the lecture halls of The New School. Becoming Press represents a rare acknowledgement that the modern transgressive galleries and literary salons exist also on Discord Forums and Instagram Group Chats, and that the cutting edge of avant-garde filmmaking takes place also on TikTok and YouTube Shorts… But it’s no simple matter to ensure that the circuitry of these ‘bombs’ is not faulty, which is to say, that the transversal route does not reverse course, simply reifying the flows of minor literature into a familiar network of institutionally legible signifiers. This is the speciality of Becoming Press, the guarantee that transversal vectors flow in the right direction. Becoming Press specializes in Transversal Vectorization…
It is in this guarantee of flow that Becoming Press finds some of its most experimental methods. In their publication of Dialogues on CoreCore & The Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, for example – I was allowed to adopt a very unconventional editing style designed to preserve the disordered mixture of texts and image which forms the texture of online discourse. Part of the aim of Dialogues on CoreCore was to act as a sort of ‘toll booth’ for academic writing on online avant-garde currents — what the academic had to ‘pay’ in this toll-booth is nothing more or less than contact with some element of the online’s structure, its form. Maybe this could be read as one of Becoming Press’ axioms – the transversal penetration of institutional writing – in particular, print – by means of the incorporation of ‘minor literatures’. What greater ‘minor literature’ than the online? And what greater ‘anti-ideological’ move –again, to paraphrase Deleuze– than to directly apprehend the way such currents are structured – which is to say, after Guattari, how desire operates in them – at the level of the incorporation of form as opposed to the mere interpretation of content, litigated from a safe representational distance?
We have said already that Becoming Press has succeeded in suturing these two projects, – which are, on the face of it, quite different – Unconscious/Television and Open Secret. We can now say that they have sutured them insofar as the ‘minor literature’ which they export by way of Lucas’ project mirrors, in some way, that network which is captured in Open Secret’s cinematic programme. But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves just yet. There is first the matter of Lucas’ book itself, the manner in which it has been published, through Becoming, in a form which respects this transversal guarantee…
Psychoanalysis–Unconscious/Television
How to penetrate Lucas’ book? It presents us with a dizzying array of elements. David Lynch’s films, the anime Evangelion, Deleuze, Lacan, Guattari, Lamarre… but perhaps the radical in Lucas’ book lies first in his diagnosis of “multi-planar compositions” as-used in Evangelion’s animation.
In a delicate move, Lucas asks us to consider the material parallax between animation-planes as more than a simple optical illusion. He asks us, after Guattari, to reconsider the “iron curtain” between the traditionally Lacanian abstract-machines of the unconscious, and the machinic processes of what Guattari himself already diagnosed, in film, as ‘asignifying’ semiotics, as semiotic forces outside of language and representation. Guattari, who was well aware of the emerging field of extended cognition promoted by philosophers like Francisco Varela, asks us to adopt a decidedly cybernetic point of view in noting that the ‘unconscious’ reaches ‘down’ into material infrastructures just as these same infrastructures reach ‘up’ into the Freudian psyche, the psyche which, we have to say, Freud himself declared ‘extended’ in his dying breaths. The relationship between the Unconscious and Television as articulated by Lucas, is in fact one of mutual relation and causality, rather than ideological distance between material processes and a ‘cultural’ or ‘psychological’ superstructure. It is not enough, Lucas’ methodology suggests, to interpret Television as a frame for narrative, to subject it to an ideological deconstruction which remains, as Guattari suggests, far too ecumenical.
If Lucas demands that we not reduce Television to mere ideological content to be interrogated, but rather a Guattarian network of nonrepresentational forces best served by a schizoanalysis of power and desire, then it is not surprising that we find the most radical element of Lucas’ volume not in its linguistic content, but in the structure of its composition. Lucas’ book, just like Evangelion’s multi-planar composition, is composed of six nearly-independent texts which are knitted with ‘intermissions’. Just like an ‘episode’ of television, each text is a self-sufficient flash of insight connected in a chain, a chain disrupted by ‘commercials’ and “B-Plots”, micro-narratives which “hyperlink” the texts to the broader industrial and discursive world of which this text serves a part. Unconscious/Television admits its situation, we can say, it is a book which knows that it is being circulated, distributed, and it refracts, in the manner of Evangelion’s crystal angels, this structure of circulation within itself. This is precisely the multinaturalist “Bomb” which DeCastro so violently asserted in his debate with Philippe Descola — precisely the ‘smuggling’ of a minor ‘television literature’ into the circulation networks of print in the manner of Amazonian Perspectivism smuggled into french structuralism through a ‘Cannibal Metaphysics’.
This is not to say that Lucas is aloof when locating the unconscious in, for example, the relationship between the nuclear bomb and the Human Instrumentality Project in Evangelion, or the infamous dream-logic of Lynch’s “Red Room” in Twin Peaks ; we find, as readers of a certain generation, that Lucas is also directly importing a “popular unconscious”, a more conventionally “Freudian” unconscious populated with the contents of forgotten childhood memories, dare we say even, repressed memories — of nuclear anxiety and totalitarian projects of state repression. There is a phantom version of Unconscious/Television composed entirely of forgotten and repressed vignettes, beamed into the popular unconscious by satellites and fiber-optics, a much more ‘neurotic’ perspective on the relationship between the unconscious and television. Lucas’ version, however, follows the fundamental Guattarian move of replacing neurosis with schizophrenia — insofar as there is a pathology to be found at the core of television, it is in the irrationality, or ‘madness’ which grounds the rationality of capital’s semiotic operators. This is another polemic Lucas incorporates into his framework : the critique of television must also operate at the level of form, of flows, of machines.
Recall the interview Deleuze and Guattari granted Actuel, as published in Chaosophy — when distinguishing schizoanalysis from the psychoanalysis of their Lacanian ‘rivals’, Deleuze recounts a scenario in which a woman describes her symptoms to her analyst. She says “all day on television, I see tragedies in Vietnam, the student protestors being beaten, and so on, and I feel on the verge of crying,” and then she says “you know, when I was in the resistance, I would use the name ‘Rene’ as a code-word…” and at this point the analyst suddenly regains interest in the analysand, concluding, “ah, Rene, like ‘renaissance’, you wish to be born again,” and the moral of the story is that in schizoanalysis, the analyst would not have to wait until the moment he could project some oedipal interpretation onto some word games. The symptoms can instead be articulated directly by means of the social and material context. So when people say, “all day on the internet I am subjected to algorithms, I am monitored by AI, I am surrounded by advertisements, and so on,” we must not wait for our “Rene” — because the object of analysis — of schizoanalysis — is right there in front of our eyes. This is, above all, the lesson conveyed by Lucas’ book, but precisely by its form and structure.
Film–Open Secret
We have finally arrived at cinema, film. Lucas’ concern with Television extends beyond the theatre — both the theatre of the projectionalist and the Oedipal theatre of representation. It is uncontroversial, at this point, to note that much of what is composed as cinema takes place far away from a ticket booth. Nowhere is this more the case than in what Chuck Tryon termed, as early as 2007, as “internet cinema” or “mobile cinema.” Internet Cinema – while its definition remains contested – involves a deployment of the inherent structures, flows and processes of the internet as principles of editing and composition. Internet Cinema’s materials are gathered, downloaded, filmed, and often even edited on the same smartphones which accompany us in daily life.
Internet Cinema is indeed a foray into “The Crypt”, a concept Lucas invokes in his text and which, particularly in the work of Nick Land, has come to imply the automated “undead” processes of technocapital which achieve a sort of breakout speed in the cybernetic loops of the internet. Nick Land would perhaps call the emerging generation of Internet Cinematographers an example of what he calls a “CyberGothic Culture”, which summons and negotiates with hyperstitional processes through a language of cinematic composition.
An observation made by many of the Open Secret artists is that there is no longer a simple separation between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ life, as the internet is now foundational to what Guattari termed “Global Integrated Capitalism.” The question of an “Internet Cinema” which goes beyond mere ideology is again a question of how such a project enters into a relationship with its object ; precisely the question Becoming Press confronts qua Publishing and Minor Literature, and Lucas confronts qua Television.
Recalling the Guattarian apprehension of ideology as a false opposition between material conditions of production and ‘psychological’ or ‘cultural’ superstructure, a non-ideological internet cinema is precisely one which – in a schizoanalytical fashion – the internet is not so much represented as a gestalt, external, “safe” cultural object but rather adopted (and, if we are optimistic, recoded, weaponized…) as a heterogeneous set of processes, relations and structures. It would thus be more precise to refer not to “internet cinema”, which is overly gestalt, but rather a variety of “molecular” cinemas : such as “auto-suggestion algorithm cinema”, or “auto-censorship cinema”, or “groupchat cinema”...
It is for this reason, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that one does not find technology as a “theme” in internet cinema. This is because, by incorporating online elements directly into modes of editing and composition, technology forms Internet Cinema’s frame of reference, rather than its representational object. Internet Cinema does not wait for “Rene”... Put another way, internet cinema is a deeply realist artistic project concerned with the material conditions of our cybernetic world ; a project which serves as a sort of “abstract expressionism of the superstructure”. There is no difference in method, I contend, between the use of automated online processes to produce art and the use of the ‘automatic’ in, for example, Pollock’s drip-painting. Pollock too, was a realist painter in this subtle sense — a realist painter of the unconscious. And in precisely the same sense, if we ask Lucas, “where is television to be found, in your work?”, the answer does not lie so much in his allusions to this or that television series, but rather the redeployment of the series-structure in the text’s metaformat itself; by which we find, indeed, the means of “smuggling” some new potentiality into the circulations of academic writing. Here we find, at last, our knot… psychoanalysis, film, and print.