VIRTUAL ORPHICALITY:

Telepathy, Virtuality and Encysted Sense Ratios

Robert Cheatham

Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) once made the comment that what black people needed was a typewriter that responded not only to the hand but to gestures. That way, said Jones, Black people's full involvement in their lived space could be shown and not the pale white version which he claimed writing alone gave. It would be a 'semioticwriter' perhaps, attending automatically to the gestural nuances that writing must struggle to translate from the bodily idiom to a linear script. How this full-body 'text' would be 'read' is unclear, much less how it would be recorded. (I take it as a given that Jones wasn't talking about a camcorder, although a point could be made that it does match his requirements. Certainly the rapid rise of the music video and its placement in many homes attest to its 'gesture/texture' capture ability.) Perhaps Jones wasn't entirely serious in his proposal. Rather it served as a gedanktexperiment to illustrate the way many people observe writing and textuality to be a squeezing of communicative capacity into a fairly narrow channel of expressivity 'logocentric' as the phrase now has it. ( it's possible to be led astray here. It should be clear that 'expansion of expressive possibilities' does not necessarily say anything about eliminating textuality or overthrowing mediacy for some form of immediacy, although there are perhaps vulgar deconstuctive critics who would make just such a claim for Jones' idea. Meaning-construction always takes place at the margins of a system [meaning-enforcement at the center]. Jones' idea could just as well be read as extending the bounds of textuality as much as doing away with textuality, as having 'textuality' cover gesture as well as logos. However, a recent book by Colin Falck would take gesture in the opposite direction, toward what he sees as a renewal of the Romantic perspective: "...when once we are embodied we can only have the experience we have [because we can only have conceptual language at all] through a located gesturing which after all proper recognition has been given to the diffÄrance-based nature of linguistic meaning must necessarily be seen as a "reaching-beyond" into an incompletely articulated extra-linguistic "presence." [Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism, p. 22] For Falck, the virtue of gesture is that it is not subsumable under a system of textuality [which amounts to a form of closure for Falck] and therefore leaves the door open for "transcendence", something which he claims "can't be argued away". [Curiously enough, these claims are similar to the claims for gesture made recently by Jean-Franois Lyotard in a paper delivered at Emory University.] However, the claim of resistance to closure does not strike me as what Jones was getting at. Jones position may strike us as contradictory that is, if we consider that he was making a plea for gesture entering into textuality given the subaltern position he felt himself operating from and the simultaneous need to voice opposition to that very same site of absorption yet desiring to have full access to the same writing apparatus as mainstream western culture, with the inclusion of an expanded gestural semiotic.)

This new device would give 'voice' to those bodily codes and gestures which have become marginalized, excluded or regularized. It would somehow take an 'image snapshot' and transfer it to some sort of script, but one that would perhaps pummel the reader in a fashion which linear text could not.

Presumably, from Jones' point of view, it would render a more faithful 'ontological' portrait than could mere words. It would be like the proximity/presencing of voice and yet have some elements of a text in that it could be composed in isolation, would have some form of recordable 'script' so that it could be transferable, reconstitutable. (And translatable? The idea of translation has many levels and facets but two items seem fundamental: there is a torsional 'twisting' of Language into languages, such that communication differences are extreme enough to need mediation and, simultaneously, this mediation is possible, finally, because all languages may be compounded, theoretically, into Language. These two poles appear to delimit the domain of translation, what we might call the movement of identity/difference. Traditionally, translation has appealed to congruence, fusion, centrality of meanings, etc. while newer takes on the problem of translation emphasize difference, untranslatability, aporias. [e.g., see George Steiner, After Babel; Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator; Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel in the collection Difference in Translation] One way around translation, it has been fantasized by many writers, is through telepathy or mind-to-mind contact which eliminates language in favor of Communication. This would presumably be one ideal of translation, as would it also be the ideal of a certain social/communitarian/theological line of thought. Language functions, from this point of view, as problematic, a source of opaqueness which only serves to hinder 'true' communication. Anything which makes transparent, or better yet, eliminates, languages in favor of Language, anything which approaches the state of telepathy, or immediacy, is to be preferred by the identitarian pole of translation/communication studies. The goal of machine translation figures into this dream of a seamless Language. The 'ecstasy of communication' is the relief [relevÄ, aufhebung, sublimation] of immediacy, absorption. The ecstasy of communication is no longer a function of Language; it is a function of the Machine. What has happened to Language [or languages] we don't yet know. Is the Time of Telepathy the time of identity Language or the time of difference the Machine? And...what's the difference?)

Jones' contraption embodied many of the contradictions felt by those who, still, some 300 years after Gutenberg's moveable type, are less than enamored with print and its consequences. Jones' idea was to bring to writing the full bodily involvement and expressivity of jazz, with the simultaneity and freedom of the free jazz movement of the sixties. Writing would no longer be a single long gesture beginning with script and continuing into moveable type, but would become 'writing', a double gesture, somehow including writing's doubling of gesture, same yet different. "The moving hand, having writ, moves on..." would somehow 'move on', so to speak, while still moving, or writing.

Fullness of being would be caught by this contraption and transferred to another, let's say participant instead of reader, and the oppressive monochrome print culture would fade away. The 'hand' would have the upper hand over the hand.

The abyssal quality of these meditations on hand/ungraspableness/handiness/ technology becomes more intense in Martin Heidegger's writings. Heidegger seems to bolster Jones rejections of 'white writing' when, in the Parmenides lectures, he castigates the typewriter for destroying language by destroying any kind of essential authenticity through a technical mediation which removes the hand from script, hence, objectifying writing and alienating it from the subject and producing unconnected letters, further intensifying the separateness.

While Heidegger commented on the 'peculiarity' of the hand (in its double nature and developed in the concepts of 'ready-to-hand', or Zuhanden, and 'present-to-hand', or Vorhanden, the former being an unthought availability, or graspability, the latter being an unveiling of what is there because it is veiled and made unavailable for immediate, unthinking use), he was not able to step over fully into the realm of the typewriter:

The contrast between the typewriter and the pen thus continues to speak to the contrast between the ready-to-hand and present-to-hand. If the typewriter facilitates, its facility would seem to stifle thought; it offers the illusion of communication and transparency, opening the entire public sphere that Heidegger relentlessly denounces for its inauthenticity. Yet Heidegger claims that typing hides the hand and obscures character; if so, its readiness-to-hand would also seem to have the qualities of unreadiness-to-hand that Heidegger claims to be necessary if one is to have a genuine relationship to the tool: "The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically." (Being and Time, 99) Heidegger designates three modes of unavailability that make the ready-to-hand unready and, therefore, able to read the derivativeness of mere presence-to-hand: "The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of presence-to-hand in what is ready-to-hand" (Being and Time, 104). The typewriter, especially in its definition as that which hides the hand, would seem capable of making the break that Heidegger considers necessary if one is to pass from the present-to-hand to the ready-to-hand. The refusal to grant this capacity to the typewriter thus speaks to ways in which the natural the hand remains a metaphysical term in Heidegger...Insofar as Heidegger's analysis is also aimed at a denaturalization, the typewriter might serve as an image for the hand on the other side of the break [between the human and the inhuman]. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg. Stanford. 1990. 297-298.

  

HYPE, HYPER-, HYPNO- (Constellation of words found together in Oxford English Dictionary)

Hype - Drug addict Deception, cheating, a confidence trick, a racket, a swindle, a publicity stunt Stimulated, worked up (as from an injection)
Hyper - (preposition and adverb): over, beyond, overmuch, above measure; in combination; to step over, overstep, cross, to throw over or beyond; going across, transposed, throwing over, excess, extravagance, surpassing, exceedingly and so on.

Hypno - before a vowel hypn- combining form of Greek, to sleep. The compounds in Greek were not numerous, and all those employed in English are new formations and chiefly pathological terms.

hypogogic - hallucinations in the phase leading to sleep.

Tera - prefixed to the names of units to form the names of units 1012 (one million million) larger than.

Teraphim - idol, image, means of divination among ancient hebrew people.

Terebration - the action of boring or perforating; trephination.

Teratical - relating to marvels or prodigies.

...the most radical irony would consist in the way that a mathematization of literature, building on an impossible Mathesis, would result in the futile and grotesque multiplication of all books, books by everyone and about everything, a multiplication of insignificance at the very locus of the operation...[and yet] a sort of bottomless generosity of the book and of books, a debauchery of works that would no longer make a work, a proliferation that could no longer be numbered.

The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue-Labarth and Jean-Luc Nancy, 127.

['Hyper-' can only be a 'going beyond' because it is based on a taking apart (fission, dismemberment) and then re-assembling (fusing) the elements in a heteronomous constellation: we are free to put a leg where an arm once was. What is taken apart - is 'naturalness'; what is re-assembled is hyper- (super-) naturalness. In this realm, 'proper fit' has no place. The lesson of success-in-excess can be one of at least two: 1) return to/of propriety (the concept of 'proper fit', conservatism); 2) growth of a new appendage, a third 'hand' that 'grasps' differently. The monstrosity of number two has almost always been too much to bear but not quite (the concept of doubling is fundamental to the occult, and doubling is a necessity of monstrosity. De-monstrations are fundamentally doublings - mappings of 'originary' phenomena. With scientificity however demonstrations are a leeching away of power-from the 'originary'-not an investment.) That 'asymetrisizing' growth (of the 'third limb' or eye) has always been present, of course, in the form of tehknÄ, technology, Heidegger's 'peculiar' hand. Now it becomes stronger. The asymmetry becomes more pronounced over time, to more resemble excess, if not escape. (we are speaking in an evolutionary time frame but a frame which has been greatly resized from its lengthy natural dureÄ . Instead of millenia, decades.)]

TELE-

IF telepathy could seduce Freud..., it is only because it carries a myth, that of the most total communion at the greatest distance, the myth of identity in difference. The same thought is thought at the same time by two people who do not see one another. The thought of two distinct and distant people becomes the thought of one. One cannot dream of a more beautiful realization of the symbiotic relation, without the risks of absorption and annihilation that it involves. It is symbiosis without encumbrances, pure and absolute pleasure without drawbacks. Through telepathy one returns to the one in the midst of separation.

 Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go,  
                                                  Franois Roustang.

HYSTERESIS: Phenomena in which the response of a physical system to an external influence depends not only on the present magnitude of that influence but also on the previous history of the system. Expressed mathematically, the response to the external influence is a double-valued function, one value applies when the influence is increasing, the other when the influence is decreasing.

 - Columbia Dictionary

Roustang contends that all of Freud's writing on the idea of 'thought-transference' was an attempt to exorcise it from his thought and that telepathy is a pre-eminent example of the 'un-canny' and hence of the the double, doppleganger: Thought-transference appears here [in Freud] as a constitutive element of the 'double'. The exchange of thoughts or psychical processes between one person and another increases, so that progressively, like a pattern that appears when the lines and traces are sufficiently numerous, one becomes the replica of the other, and it is no longer known who is who. (Psychoanalysis..., 51)

Transference, for Freud, maintains telepathy and occultism while doing away with it (making Hegel smile): "With the transference, one is on the side of scientific objectivity and not in an unstable, obscure, or confused relation." (Psychoanalysis..., 51)

Freud wished his analysists to turn into recording devices, or telephone receivers simply picking up signals: "He must turn his unconsious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconsious of the patient; he must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone." (Roustang quoting Freud, 52) Thinking, of course, that such devices are clear of contamination and are 'simply' or 'merely': On January 30, 1978 - a Monday - I got a telephone call in the evening. It [the phone] did not ring normally but in a deadened sound, so at first I did not know if it was as call or not. I picked up the receiver, asking, "Hello, Hello?"

All of a sudden I heard, distinctly and unmistakenly real, my father's voice...My father died on September 24, 1974, at the age of 56 years.

I heard his voice quite clearly: "I am here Daddy...here Daddy." At the third time, he said it more intensely: "Here, Daddy", asking immediately afterwards: "How is Mommy, how is Mommy?" And all of a sudden, the whole thing was over and gone.

(Phone Calls From the Dead, D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless, p. 78. It would be too 'simply' or 'merely' also to place this quote in oedipal configurations alone...and who is to say that the occult does not most effectively place its call through the most primal social groupings?)

Freud's take on thought-transference is that the analyst 'reads' the mind through subtle displacements of the musculature ('gesture', if you wish), that what appears at first glance to be an 'etheric' phenomena is solely a materialist, somatic one. Therefore the task of the medium and the analyst is for all intents and purposes the same, with the exception that the analyst is not threatened with a flooding of subjectivity by another subjectivity which, paradoxically, threatens subjectivity.

Psychoanalytic view of telepathy: that there is nothing but a process of 'making wishes', or the movement from latent to manifest, or unconscious to conscious, or primary to secondary process. There is no hidden agency that directs the movement. Everything, in theory, can be brought to consciousness and worked on. The 'text' wherein these 'readings' take place is the body. Nothing can enter into this text/body - reader/analyst position which has not been placed there by a previously so-constituted relationship. The un-canniness of apparent mind-to-mind transfer is 'simply' the communication of bodies at a level below conscious cognition. It is therefore the job of the analyst (reader) to 'simply' become more conscious, to turn him/herself into both a transparent receiver, i.e., one who possesses no unconscious and then become a reader of the received messages, that is, one who does perhaps possess an unconscious, at least to the degree of having an ensemble of linguistic and interpretive skills which are not always fully conscious or articulated but which can be used to articulate. The interpreter/agent/medium/analyst/reader cannot remain fully, purely, or only instrumental: there must come a point when the telephone receiver takes on a life of its own and becomes a transmitter. But how is this switch to happen? and what is to be transmitted?

Morphic Resonance: "Chemical and biological forms are repeated not because they are determined by changeless laws or eternal Forms, but because of a causal influence from previous similar forms. This influence would require an action across space and time unlike any known type of physical action.

On this view, the unique form taken up by a system would not be physically determined in advance of its first appearance. Nevertheless it would be repeated because the form of the first system would itself determine the form taken up by subsequent similar systems....The hypothesis of formative causation is concerned only with the repetition of forms and not with the reasons for their appearance in the first place....The physical analogy which seems most appropriate is that of resonance. Energetic resonance occurs when a system is acted on by an alternating force which coincides with the natural frequency of vibration. [For example] the 'sympathetic' vibration of stretched strings in response to appropriate sound waves, the tuning of radio sets to the frequency of radio waves given out by transmitters, the absorption of light waves of particular frequencies by atoms and molecules...

A 'resonant' effect of form upon form across space and time would resemble energetic resonance in its selectivity, but it could not be accounted for in terms of any of the known types of resonance, nor would it involve a transmission of energy. In order to distinguish it form energetic resonance, the process will be called morphic resonance [and it also] takes place between vibrating systems....morphic resonance takes place only from the past...[with] morphic resonance the form of a system, including its characteristic internal structure and vibrational frequencies, becomes present to a subsequent system with a similar form; the spatio-temporal pattern of the former superimposes itself on the latter.

A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, Rupert Sheldrake, p. 93-97

"The passion of analysis becomes the same passion that binds together a mob, or lovers, or parents and their children; it is what unites them without the need to communicate. The principle of 'direct psychical transference' is never to be separated; it is to remain glued to one another in order to be one, or better still, to be one in the other. Every patient, whether he knows it or not, dreams of dissolving into or being engulfed by this silent or talkative womb which leaves him no autonomy."

Psychoanalysis... p.60.

What is the dream of psychoanalysis? Unveiling of interior mental processes through communicative efficacy, to create a more transparent and mobile inner life, to create a methodology, a machine, a communication machine, which sits at the threshold of interior and exterior (like Maxwell's demon in physics, perhaps) with no life of its own other than as traffic agent. This operator would perhaps have something of the character of a mirror, a switchboard, and an archaeological dig. The ideal therapist acts as a non-intervening interventionist, a transparent yet efficacious (opaque) agent/excavator: leverage through communication. The perfect combination of tele- and hyper- impulses. Manipulation that does not appear as manipulation since, after all, it's only 'facilitated' communication. (One could include here all forms of communication which include an 'interior' and an 'exterior' such as with the dead. The linkage of mourning and its blockage, forms of tele, including telepathy, and the hyper- and their connections with the arrival of modernism some hundred or more years ago and its anticipated demise/fruition with a 'post-' age [an 'after' appropriate to the hyper- 'beyond'] all speak to an apocalyptic unbearable nearness and/ or intimacy ["...moving incessantly from mourning to telepathy, from the most impossible distance to the most unbearable proximity." Ned Lukacher in Mourning Becomes Telepathy in Cinders, Jacques Derrida, Nebraska, 1992.], all residing in the chiasmatic now that being-modern [being alive, not thinking of the dead] both craves and distains. Communication by means of the beyond or communication with the beyond? Or After the Beyond?)

What is the dream of hypermedia? It would be the gathering of all media into an imbricated mass. Instant communicability between one media system and another. The many in the service of one. A written word opens into a segment of video which might turn into a section of computer graphics which might turn to the dictionary and that there would be a virtually infinite number of paths through the mono-block of mediatization. (In order for such to be possible there would have to be a rethinking of the spatiotemporal and causality. Unless the process of going through the mono-block somehow fundamentally changes the constitution of the media constellation, the range of path-taking becomes severely limited, i.e., it would be no different that thumbing through a book forward and backwards or going to the middle or stopping to check a footnote. If path-taking is to be a fundamental part of hyper-media, path-taking itself must belong in the realm of the hyper and that involves disturbances of causality). Much the same mechanism that Freud proposed for dreamwork: condensation (and expansion) and displacement, metaphor and metonomy.

In one scenario, narrative order is maintained since there is indeed an author 'behind' the software, even if it is based on freely chosen branching paths.

The second scenario is one in which the 'author' simply sets up the possiblities for relations between groups of materials and then the relation between the machine and the navigator ('reader') weaves the 'text'. (As was seen earlier this is much the same way in which the analyst views the analytic relationship, i.e., simply as a facilitator.)

The last scenario is that both materials and paths are arranged by the interplay of machine and human agent. (This is not the limit of the regression. The very last scenario would be speculation on the arrangement, or origin and motivation, of machine and human agent. At that point we will have begun to enter into a species of onto-theological and politico-aesthetic speculation and critique.) This third scenario is most commonly called the research mode, but there is no reason it could not be used outside a scientific context. This release into greater public awareness of the possibilities of 'research' as a mode of moving through the world involves a great shift in subjective sensibilities and turns the concept of Truth into a much more malleable entity. (For example, see the work of Jean-Franois Lyotard, particularly The Postmodern Condition and the discussion of the relation between narrative knowledge [didactics] and scientific knowledge [dialectics], esp. pages 23-26. Much of postmodernist discourse can be seen as meditations and speculations as to the effect such a shift of perception has on the human community. Broadly speaking, this shift if one of increasing intrusions of what Gilles Deleuze has called the "machinic phylum", the set of self-organizing processes of the universe, as it has worked its way through physical, material resources in past millenia and is now beginning to effect changes in perceptual and conceptual structures through widespread installation and use of telematic devices and computer chips. See especially, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa. One of the major human components of the machinic phylum is the "research paradigm". Hypertext work is the research paradigm set into the heart of narrative knowledge. What might be disturbing to some is the degree De Land asserts that such 'advanced thinking', literally, advance guarde, or 'avante guarde', has been determined by aggressivity and the search for logistical support structures for war, aggression, and an expansion of the 'frame' [Gestell in Heidegerrian terminology] of technology in support of ever-higher levels of cooperation.)

This third scenario, in hypercyber media, would be a wandering through a maze of data points, fabricating (and having them fabricated) connections. Sometimes narrativity would seem present, sometimes it would seem as if there were simply juxtapositions of words and images, both moving and still. Sometimes meaning would seem to appear, sometimes nonsense. Sometimes it would be difficult to tell the difference. (Where these 'data points' come from would be another problem. Putative critics of hypertechnology would be dismissive of this 'research paradigm' business since the reader/navigator is not providing the 'primary' or field data points and that therefore unseen forces could manipulate the secondary data field and that the linked nature of a hyperfield would lend itself more readily to such manipulation and to hiding the nature of the manipulation. This is not necessarily an easy criticism to answer except to say that it assumes a greater unity in the hyperfield than may be warranted. The counter-vailing claim would be that the opposite is more likely to be true, that the arrival of the hyper- signals a diaspora of knowledge, a plenitude that threatens to innundate our capacity to deal with it and that therefore acts as fragmenting mechanism. Many would say in fact that there resides a major facet of the 'postmodern condition'. Here is the fertile chaotic soup in which the machinic phylum operates best.)

Hypermedia would be total communication but that is not the same thing as total communion. Prime factor in telepathy: hidden communion. (The question of totality is an unresolvable one in any question concerning totality since in order to determine that there is a total identity between two events, there must be a yet more total observer position which is part of the system, which invalidates the claims of totality for the first two.)

In similar manner the question of degree of occultation is not fully resolvable since any interpretive position necessarily involves a certain 'opaque' element (the tain of the mirror), otherwise, it would not be able to 'reflect-upon' and interpret.

"Communication between various forms of organic life is a unification tendencyÒa search for the lost union and inertia. We may compare it to the principle of 'entropy' from physics." (Hidden Communion: Studies in the Commnunication Theory of Telepathy, Joost A.M. Meerloo, 1964, New York, p. 3.)

Meerloo: Overload of senses in daily life, causes a retreat to archaic processes. We appear to be 'sleep walking' so pre-occupied are we with internal processes: "With senses only partially awake, we live largely in the immediate present. We move in a state of pre-occupation approaching sleep; although we still don't call it trance, it is often but a matter of degree...By day we become so involved in the business of living - that is to say, with the constant cannonade of stimuli from outside, with its upheavals, turmoils and mass-pressures - that we seem meer puppets. We feel ourselves dominated by our senses." (Meerloo, op. cit. p. 22.) Somehow, according to Meerloo, this sensory overload causes a sensory shutdown. At that point the true, intuitive process of 'making sense' can appear - but only after the overload. Then, as one further step beyond, a different form of communication takes place, deeper, more indicative of feelings and a truer reading of the 'total statel of any given human situation. We are here, according to Meerloo, far removed from any media; or actually, so mired, so deep into the hyman subject that we have somehow emerged on the other side: transpersonal but with no (media) strings attached - media overload - intuition - telepathy.

This is an echo of Freud's thesis that perhaps telepathy is an archaic vestige of earlier evolutionary history when simultaneous horde movements were necessary for survival and that it functioned when other communication channels were 'congested or frustrated'. Telepathy would be a kind of hyper-communication network, communicating only the truest of data: emotional states and not just any emotional states but those devoted to survival. Occasionally other material might leak through.

Then comes the last stage, the one which is still before us but which I see seeing us coming and which, softwarily, will have anticipated us right from the start. In this way a life totally transformed, converted, paralysed by telepathy would await us, given over to its networks and its schemes across the whole surface of its body, in all its angles, tangled up in the web of histories and times without the least resistance on our part. On the contrary we would take on a zealous participation, the most provocative experimental initiatives. People would no longer have us roud, they would avoid us as if we were addicts, we would frighten everybody (so fort, so da!).

Telepathy, Oxford Literary Review, Jacques Derrida, #12, p. 21

So, in the psychoanalytic scenario there could be an inverse relationship of media, most broadly considered, and telepathy, keeping in mind that the telephone was Freud's favored analogy with telepathy: "Everything happens as if she had been informed by telephone"..."one could speak of a psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy" (Freud quoted in Derrida, op. cit. p. 36.). It's almost like a recipitate: Out of the super (hyper)- saturated conditions of everyday life appears this communication-without-distance (immediate, simultaneous) and communication-without-time (prophetic dreams, deja vu), mysterious because of apparent connections with the 'solution'. Something that even surpasses the Hegelian Aufhebung, something that alludes to, yet simultaneously avoids the dialectic. (We may be mything something here.) And just as simultaneously threatens and promises. Derrida: "Fort/da, tele pathy against telepathy, distance against menacing immediacy, but also the opposite, feeling (always close to oneself, it is thought), against the suffering of distancing that would also be called telepathy..." (p. 36)

In Telepathy (Oxford Literary Review, #12), Jacques Derrida implies the inextricableness ot 'writing' to a theory of 'telepathy', of a question of 'befores' and 'afters' and the confusion of those, of the possibility of subject-ization, as well as the necessary constitutive doubling of communication systems and that...

(According to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the 'experience' of romantic writing is: "the use of all genres, the appeal to the fragment, the questioning of literary property and of 'authority' by the challenge of anonymity." Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, op. cit., p. 9)

The conjunction of hyper-technology and theory: the expression of Romanticism in its fullest form. The expectation of going over and through into a new dimension of comprehension, availability, a paradoxical immediate-through-mediacy, a fragmentation that somehow goes beyond fragmentation in to a Magical Fusion in virtual space: The old Romantic notion of self-engendering, auto-production (the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, the Jena School, etc. of the artistic work that creates its own theory and conditions of existence. Here, do we find the ultimate in humanism, its furthest tether , the chiasmatic point at which auto-production becomes other-production, both on the same assembly line? [Beyond, ahem, which we find Mary Shelley and the good doctor Victor, waiting to be plugged into the final Beyond-and-Back. Apparently, piecing fragments together can have some drawbacks, one of which is the return of the de-monstrable Other.] And do we then also find, a necessary correlate of any 'ultimate', any 'tether', any 'necessity', something beyond that region which is not that region's own? In humanism's case, it begins to open into an in-human realm, something the Romantics were well aware of. The 'sublime' is nothing if not a formulation of the boundary conditions of monstrosity.)

The realm of the 'hyper-' is constituted in this same region which was staked out nearly 200 years ago at the instauration of the Romantic/Novel. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy: "A veritable romantic unconscious is discernable today, in most of the central motifs of our 'modernity'....From the idea of a possible formalization of literature (or of cultural productions in general) to the use of linguistic models (and a model based on the principle of the auto-structuration of language; from an analytic approach to works based on the hypothesis of auto-engendering to the to the aggravation of the problematic of a subject permanently rejecting subjectivism (that of inspiration, for example, or the ineffable, or the function of the author, etc.); from this problematic of the (speaking or writing) subject to a general theory of the historical or social subject; from a belief that the work's conditions of production or fabrication are inscribed within it to the thesis of a dissolution of all processes of production in the abyss of the Subject." (The Literary Absolute, p.15-16.)

The 'hyper-' has not escaped from those conditions. It still embodies the perplexity of taking a step forward and finding oneself at the same spot one just abandoned. The technological enclosure (Heideggerian Gestell, again) that now determines the 'hyper' and its mediation with literature is in step with this stepping out (or over)/stepping back. One could even say that the hyper/cyber is the fulfillment of those conditions and not the 'stepping over' but the necessary prelude for a perhaps always-deferred 'going beyond' which actually resides in the ever-expanding machinic phylum.

This confusion of 'before' and 'after' is not endemic to modernism and is certainly anathema to 'progress' as it is usually thought. To be sure, Romanticism's notions of self-engendering, auto-poiesis, a general 'mechanical' and statistical distribution of duties concerning the imagination and its placement outside the subject (one thinks of the Oulipo school of mathematical and mechanically derived literature) is firmly in step with various notions of artificial Intelligence (and the simultaneous teleological closure at one end and re-opening at the other) and distributed and imbricated 'texts' which the hyper represents and the beyond it claims to embody. (Like Heideggerean capitalization, Romanticism and Modernism is the difference between beyond and the Beyond; it shares more than a little with being and Being.)

The optimists/re-humanists think: yes, perhaps, but it is a beyond (and not the Beyond) with which we can cope, can adapt to our own purposes, which will be subservient to us, after all it's only a tool, it's no different now than when fire or hammer-and-nails were introduced, we can make it accessible; the human is the same as the infinite, they are interchangeable; there is no capitalization, there is only de-capita(tion)lization, the instauration of organs-without-bodies, pure functional sites without any metaphysics of containment. Sheer writing without any originary impulse, a writing that can happen automatically: "Through the machine, the unconscious writes much more surely than natural script does..." (Roland Barthes quoted by Goldberg, Writing Matters..., p. 288)

The pessimist/humanist fears that this is indeed the case, that the auto-production of the human subject suffers a closure, extinguishes all last vestiges of resistance . (See The Theory-Death of the Avante-Guarde by Paul Mann for a good treatment of the exhaustion of counter-movements which are endemic/necessary for modernism/romanticism.) Here, there must be a limitation (legislated? enforced with a police action?) to the movement of the third hand; the prosthetilization of mind and body must have a distinct limitation, say the first two hands, ever aware of being eclipsed and/or monsterized.

(The problematics of addiction and drug use and the concomitant War on Drugs, are perhaps the clearest indications of what would be involved in prosthetic extirpation and limitation: the already everywhere always nature of the supplement of technicity, its pharmakonological nature., and the drastic, indeed, at the level of ontology, results which the elimination of the prosthetic would require: dis-memberment - what Daniel Paul Schreber called "soul-murder"; of course, he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Just ask S. Freud. Policing of such an environment requires not only external measures but also internal; the result of such paranoia is total mobilization which brings about the very measures it means to forestall since there must be a foreign object, implant, ideology placed in every citizen. Total paranoia is the reign of total prosthetization. Citizen Schreber is our shining example and Herr Professor Victor Tausk is our klaxon.

Schreber: "At times M. and Sch. unloaded into my body a part of their bodies in the form of a foul mass in order 'to remove themselves'; M. repeatedly placed himself into my arm as a so-called 'large nerve' (a jelly-like mass about the size of a cherry) through which in a certain sense he participated in my thinking and my sensations like the other rays or nerves..." and "We are used to thinking all impressions we receive from the outer world are mediated through the five senses, particularly that all light and sound sensations are mediated through eye and ear. This may be correct in normal circumstances. However, in the case of a human being who like myself has entered into contact with rays and whose head is in consequence so to speak illuminated by rays, this is not all. I receive light and sound sensations which are projected direct on to my inner nervous system by the rays; for their reception the external organs of seeing and hearing are not necessary. I see such events even with eyes closed and where sound is concerned would hear them as in the case of the 'voices', even if it were possible to seal my ears hermetically against all other sounds."

(Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Daniel Paul Schreber, Harvard, 1988, p.115/117.)

Victor Tausk: "The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical lnowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

The main effects of the influencing machine are the following:

  1. It makes the patient see pictures. When this is the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph. The pictures are seen on a single plane, on walls or windowpanes, and unlike typical visual hallucinations are not three dimensional.
  2. It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient's knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain. In such cases, the machine is often called a 'suggestion-apparatus. Its construction cannot be explained, but its function consists in the transmission or'draining off' of thoughts and feelings by one or several persecutors.
  3. It produces motor phenomena in the body, erections and seminal emissions, that are intended to deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him. This is accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity, magnetism, or X-rays.
  4. It creates sensations that in part cannot be described, because they are strange to the patient himself, and that in part are sensed as electrical, magnetic, or due to air-currents.
  5. It is also responsible for other occurences in the patient's body, such as cutaneous eruptions, abscesses, or other pathological processes. Victor Tausk, On the Origin of the "influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1933, #2, p. 521-522)
An annunciation can be accomplished, something can happen without for all that being realized. An event can take place which is not real. My customary distinction between interanl and external reality is perhaps not sufficient here. It signals towards some event that no idea of reality helps us think. But then you will say, if what is announced in the annunciation clearly bears the index of 'external reality', what is one to do with it? Well, treat it as an index, it can signify, telephone, telesignal another event which arrives before the other, without the other, according to another time, another space, etc. (Telepathy, Derrida, p. 25)

Evidence. Everything is evidence and nothing is evidence. What constitutes evidence? What supports it, what makes it work 'in favor of' or 'against'? We all know that evidence doesn't 'speak for itself'. It requires a spokesperson, an interface, someone who can explain it to us. ('Perfect evidence' would require the perfect interface/spokesperson: "The Holy Grail of ineractive design is to make it intuitive - meaning that the electronic information environment so neatly mirrors the way people imagine themselves that it seems like a direct extension of their minds." Jim Gasperini quoted in The Ultimate User Interface, Bob Jacobson, in Byte, April 1992. Who's got the evidence?) The most apparent facts can therefore be the most deceptive. Context is one of the governors for interpretation. But whose context? Whose space? Whose time? Certainly not the most obvious, the most availabel, the most ready-to-hand, since that is precisely what is under consideration. (You can't explain a sedative by saying 'well, there is simply a sleep-inducing quality in the tablet.")

The introduction of tele-pathy into the network of context/evidence severely compromises what would purport to be the necessary way of going about the human sciences. Causality is junked. If there is an occult telematics, a covert suggestion-at-a-distance how could we possibly divide up the psychic pie in either time or space: You are over there, I am here. This is what I think, that is what you think. Perhaps, says tele-pathy, I am over there as well as here. Perhaps my thought is not my own. Like the cartoon of the dummy on the knee: schizo-ventriloquism comes into its own hear/here - says the dummy: "I hear voices in your head" - the generalized condition of all telematics. Stay tuned to the radio. I'll telephone you later tonight.

Telepathy could thus be seen as the precursor to a type of research that dares the imagination as regards oneself and others, that refuses to be imprisoned in systems, mythologies, and universal symbolic equivalents. Telepathy would be the name of an ongoing and groping research that at the moment of its emergence and in the area of its relevanceÒhad not grasped either the true scope of its own inquiry or the conceptual rigor necessary for its elaboration.

Maria Torok, afterword to Wolfman's Magic Word, p. 86.

For psychoanalysis, for the modern world, 'telepathy' acts as the sign of a 'foreign body', a secret controller, sending out signals, linking up disparate regimes. It is the zone of always, already, the necessary pre-condition for any sort of signal to reach its mark: in order for the signal to reach its mark it must already be there! And yet it is also that terrible zone of turbulence beyond all symbolic currencies, all systemic methodological exazerbations of inscription processes, a zone of much uncertainty. It is the ur-type of the hyper-, er, that is to say, of the beyond and the Beyond.

It is indeed a discursive formation that is the general condition of literature and criticism. Nicholas Royle: "One would be envisaging, then, a discourse which would be neither literary nor critical, and both at once. It would engage, no doubt, with the thought of the literary text as reading-machine, as reading-effect, that is always in advance including, forseeing, its addressee - this would be the telepathic structure - but without knowing where it is going, who is speaking or who is listening, or at what distance." (Telepathy: From Jane Austen and Henry James, Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review #12, p. 58.)

We've come a long way to have traveled no further than we have - but then that happens when you're in hyper-drive. Motionless travel is common to another area of human experience: myth. (Paranomastically speaking, we might call it the mything-drive, a particular lisping form of post-modernism which is detailed by its absence [missing] and through a further parsing action turning it into singularity, particularity, atotality [my thing] which might further conjoin with a gendered critique of a Lacanian/Heideggerean/Freudian sort [my "Thing"].)

Certainly considerations of myth is often what is missing in many modern (and post-modern) accounts of the world. Which is not to say that 'mything' is absent, especially if one accepts, as did the Romantics, that myth is representation at work (and not simply a representation of something), that it represents the power of performativity, of the coming-into the world of 'fictioning' as well as the total organization of the world's conceptual and perceptual resources, such that it can cause itself to disappear from sightÒbut not from efficaciousness. Consider this next quote from Nancy in light of the new world of the hyper-: "The totalization of myths goes hand in hand with the myth of totalization, and the 'new' mythology essentially consists in the production of a speech that would unite, totalize, and thereby put (back) into the world the totality of the words, discourses, and songs of a humanity in the process of reaching its fulfillment (or reaching its end)." (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 51. This whole book is valuable but see especially the chapters Myth Interrupted and Of Divine Places .) But of course we no longer have mythic speech (or at any rate only as its lisping variant). As Nancy points out, we only have interruption, caesura, breaks, fragments, impossibilities, communication without communion. And yet, still, what goes around, comes around. Maybe the gods have not checked their letterbox yet.

"Face to face, but without seeing each other form now on, the gods and men are abandoned to writing. This abandonment is the sign given to us for our history yet to come. It has only just begun. My God! We are only just beginning to write." (Nancy, op. cit., p. 135)

ELEMENTS OF THE ORPHEUS MYTH:

  1. Differing versions/paths of the myth
  2. Orpheus descens to the underworld to retreive wife Eurydice, loses her to underworld twice because he turns and looks at her
  3. Magical musical powers, ability to entrance
  4. Originator of writing and all the arts; lyre is symbol, also robe, net and krater (form of mixing bowl)
  5. Espoused metempsychosis and transmigration of souls
  6. Patron of Pythagorean music experiments
  7. Number theology
  8. The originator of homosexual love, at least among the Thracians Murdered by Thracian women for either: rejecting them or enticing away their husbands or: murdered and dismembered by Maenads sent by Dionysus
  9. Body of Orpheus dismembered, head and lyre thrown into river, the head continuing to sing, while it floated to the isle of Lesbos where
  10. head was buried in the shrine of Dionysos where it became an oracle and lyre went to the temple of Apollo
  11. Central to Orphic myth is the slaying of Dionysos by the Titans who cut him up, boiled, roasted and ate the pieces. From the soot humans were formed; from the scattered remains Dionysos rose again. Thus for the Greeks, Orpheus provided a forum for meditation on themes of the one and the many, the fragment and the whole (something which fascinated a generation of German Romanticists and part of the architecture of modernism), death and the afterlife, and ingestion and incorporation (Orphics were vegetarian and practiced an ascetic lifestyle) and of course books and writing. The Orphics were the recepients of some of the first charges of obscurantism; in fact, Orpheus means obscure in Greek.
  12. It is no wonder that Orpheus has served as the patron myth of artists through the ages and still serves in that capacity today (See Under the Spell of Orpheus: The Persistance of a Myth in Twentieth Century Art, Judith E. Bernstock, 1991) just as it is not surprising that Fredrich Nietzsche's first book was on Greek tragedy and myth. Technical systems do not dispell myth; they release it even as they are haunted by it. The virtual Beyond (finite transcendence as Derrida calls it) becomes its site of manifestation. The complete dismantling of the body becomes a spiritual exercise even as it was for the shamanistic Orpheus. It is not clear what the complete dismantling of the mind becomes.

    Walter Benjamin: The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.

    A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres and triangles.