Flatline_Constructs 4.5 The Decline of the Shadow (or, the End of the Marvelous)

Jameson: “Now not the magical speaking beasts or the ‘flowers that look back at you,’ but the marching automata of Blade Runner’s last cavernous private appartment.[289]

For Baudrillard, the arrival of cybernetic modeling systems entails the destruction of the category of the marvelous: the former province of myth, occupied last of all, perhaps, by Surrealism (which was already contributing to its destruction). The melancholy underside to the story we’ve just outlined is the takeover, by hyperreality, of everything surreal, or irreal. In one sense, the hyperreal, for Baudrillard, marks less the decline of the Real than the swallowing of all alternatives to it. Hyperreality – the more real than the real - is a cancerization of the Real, its metastatic occupation of the zones which used to double reality (shadow, dream, and myth); for Baudrillard, the decline of the marvelous is signalled by what he repeatedly chacterizes as the disappearance of the shadow and the double, and their replacement by the cybernetic network. But it is important to understand that the cancerization of the Real is – immediately – also a cancerization of the fictional; the two processes require one another. Only when there is only fiction (and therefore no more fiction) and only the real (and therefore no more reality) does hyperreality begin.

It is interesting to compare Baudrillard’s position in Symbolic Exchange and Death, especially as outlined in the important section of the “Political Economy and Death” chapter entitled “The Double and the Split” with Rosemary Jackson’s literary-historical analysis of the modern fantastic in her Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. This brings us back to the question of the nature of the demonic, since, for Jackson, “The modern fantastic is characterized by a radical shift in the naming, or interpretation of the demonic.” (F 43) In her account of the fantastic, Jackson draws upon Todorov’s influential The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Here, Todorov famously distinguishes between the marvelous, the fantastic and the uncanny. As Jackson explains, in “ Todorov’s diagrammatic representation of the changing forms of the fantastic” there is a “move from the marvelous (which predominates in a climate of belief in supernaturalism and magic) through the purely fantastic (in which no explanation is to be found) to the uncanny (which explains all strangeness as generated by unconscious forces). Thus:

MARVELOUS

FANTASTIC

UNCANNY

Supernatural

Unnatural

Natural (F 25)

For Todorov, the fantastic is defined by an anxiety on the part of the reader and the characters, which takes the form of a hesitation between explanations in terms of the supernatural and the natural. “According to Todorov, the purely fantastic text establishes absolute hesitation in the protagonist and reader; they can neither come to terms with the unfamiliar events described, nor dismiss them as supernatural phenomena. Anxiety, then, is not merely a thematic feature, but is incorporated into the structure of the work to become its defining element.” (F 28)Arguing that the “uncanny” is not a specifically literary mode, Jackson replaces it with the “mimetic”, ultimately placing her version of the fantastic “between the opposite modes of the marvelous and the mimetic.” (F 32)

“It is hardly surprising,” Jackson notes, “that the fantastic comes into its own in the nineteenth century, at precisely that juncture when a supernatural ‘economy’ of ideas was giving way to a natural one, but had not yet been completely displaced by it.” (F 25) So, where once “[t]he term demonic originally denoted a supernatural being, a ghost, or spirit, or genius, or devil and it usually connoted a malignant, destructive force at work” (F 54) ,Jackson shows that during the course of the nineteenth century the demonic comes to stand for something internal to the subject; she describes a move from “a supernatural to a natural economy of images”, with the “natural” understood largely in terms of psychology interiority. “Over the course of the nineteenth century, fantasies structured around dualism - often variations of the Faust myth - reveal the internal origin of the other.” (F 55)Here, in a simultaneous domestication of both the demonic and the unconscious, the “demonic” is no longer “supernatural, but is an aspect of personal and interpersonal life, a manifestation of unconscious desire.” (F 55)

In a sense, Baudrillard accepts Jackson’s whole story, but, predictably, gives it a melancholy spin, whilst adding a biting cultural political critique. In Baudrillard’s terms, the narrative which places psychological interiority at the endpoint of a disenchanted history is by no means innocent: it is part of a process by which modern western culture defines itself as the inevitable teleological destination of planetary process, appropriating “previous” cultures as its forebears. The destruction of the double goes hand in hand with the production of the (Christian) soul (the ultimate achievement of a “spiritualist” project). For Baudrillard, the rise of “psychological and pyschoanalytic interpretation” (SED 140) as the authorized forms of capitalist realism bring an end to “the primitive double.” (SED 140) “Shadow, spectre, reflection, image” (SED 140), the primitive double haunts post-monotheistic, psychoanalytic culture, which appropriates it as a “crude prefiguration of the soul” (SED 140). Yet “soul and consciousness have everything to do with a principle of the subject’s unification, and nothing to do with the primitive double. On the contrary, the historical advent of the ‘soul’ puts an end to a proliferating exchange with spirits and doubles which, as a direct consequence, gives rise to another figure of the double, wending its way beneath the surfaces of western reason.” (SED 141) This - modern, western - double is inextricably connected with alienation; it is the double as the lost part of the self, “a fantastic ectoplasm, an archaic resurgence issuing from guilt and the depths of the unconscious.” (SED 141) The primitive double, however, is radically non-alienated because it “is a partner with whom the primitive has a personal and concrete relationship, sometimes happy and sometimes not.” (SED 141) Whereas the westerner always apprehends his double as the missing half of a fragmented unity, the primitive has a reciprocal, non-symmetrical relationship with his double. The primitive “really can trade, as we are forever forbidden to do, with his shadow (the real shadow, not a metaphor), as with some original, living thing in order to converse, protect and conciliate this tutelary or hostile shadow. The shadow is precisely not the reflection of an ‘original’ body, it has a full part to play, and it is consequently not an ‘alienated’ part of the subject, but one of the figures of exchange.” (SED 141) Alienation, Baudrillard says, only comes into play when there is an internalization of an “abstract agency [...] - whether psychological (the ego and the ego-ideal), religious (God or the soul) or moral (conscience and the law) to which everything else is subordinated.” (SED 141) Once the introjection of these agencies is achieved, the double ceases to be an ambivalent figure and becomes associated (only) with death and madness, as Baudrillard establishes by reference to a whole tradition of horrific literature:

With the internalization of the soul and consciousness (the principle of identity and equivalence), the subject undergoes a real confinement, similar to the confinement of the mad in the seventeenth century described by Foucault. It is at this point that the primitive thought of the double as exchange and continuity is lost, and the haunting double comes to the fore as the subject’s discontinuity in death and madness. ‘Whoever sees his devil, sees his death’. A vengeful and vampiric double, an unquiet soul, the double begins to prefigure the subject’s death, haunting him in the very midst of his life. This is Dostoevsky’s double, or Peter Schlemihl’s, the man who lost his shadow. We have always interpreted the double as a metaphor of the soul, consciousness, native soil, and so on. Without this incurable idealism and without being taken as a metaphor, the narrative is so much more extraordinary. We have all lost our real shadows, we no longer speak to them, and our bodies have left with them. (SED 142)

Baudrillard then turns to Freud specifically, and to his treatment of the double in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”). The double features in Freud only as a kind of extension of the ego. Freud refers to Rank’s work, in which the double was “originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’”(PFL 14 356) As Baudrillard insists, Freud reads the double in terms of the soul: “probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body” (PFL 356) Thoughts of the double, Freud speculates, must “have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and primitive man.” (PFL 357)

Crucially, for Baudrillard, and for Rosemary Jackson, in “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud revives the correlation of “the old, animistic conception of the universe” (PFL 14 362) with the “omnipotence of thoughts” (PFL 14 362) he had made in the earlier Totem and Taboo (1913). “The Uncanny” is - supposedly - Freud’s attempt to give an account of a very particular feeling of “dread and horror” (PFL 14 339) ; although Gothic Materialism would prefer to regard the essay as an attempt to keep at bay - by means of subjectivization - exactly the dread and horror it affects to confront. Beginning with an inventory of usages of the terms, Freud famously shows that the meaning of the words unheimliche (unhomely) and its ostensible opposite heimlich (homely) continually bleed into one another: “among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich.” (PFL 14 345) For Freud, the feeling of the uncanny arises from this disturbing combination of the strange and the familiar. First of all, referring to a certain “authority” on the uncanny, Jentsch, Freud dismisses the idea that the uncanny is directly connected with “’doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate’” (Jentsch, qtd PFL 14 347) This feeling of intellectual “uncertainty”, Freud says, is not a feature of the uncanny as he understands it. Whilst the theme of the animate doll is, Freud notes, a factor in Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman”, a story he takes to be exemplary of the uncanny, it is not its main theme; this, rather, is that of the sandman who threatens to tear out children’s eyes. Passing through the “substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ” (PFL 14 352) Freud quickly decides that “The Sandman” is really about a fear of castration. Feelings of the “uncanny” can always be traced back to such repressed childhood experiences; “the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something familiar and old-established in the mind.” (PFL 14 363) The idea of dolls coming to life, a theme which, having apparently dismissed, Freud returns to, suggests another “factor from childhood” (PFL 14 355), although this seems to be attributable to infantile wish rather than to infantile fear. “We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people.” (PFL 14 355)

“Animistic” beliefs, for Freud, are to be regarded as belonging to the most primitive part of the mind, an ontogenetic equivalent of the phylogenetic stage of the “savage”. In Rosemary Jackson’s reconstruction:

Phylogenetic evolution

Ontogenetic evolution

1 ANIMISTIC

Men ascribe omnipotence to themselves.

NARCISSISM/

AUTO-EROTICISM

2 RELIGIOUS

Power is transferred to gods, the individual believes he has some influence with them.

ATTACHMENT

TO LOVE OBJECT

3 SCIENTIFIC

Leaves no room for human omnipotence. The subject becomes resigned to the laws of necessity, and the inevitability of death. (F 71)

ABANDONMENT TO

REALITY PRINCIPLE

Baudrillard cleverly turns these arguments against Freud. “This is how psychology, our authority in the depths, our own ‘next world’, this omnipotence, magical narcissism, fear of the dead, this animism or primitive psychical apparatus, is quietly palmed off on the savages in order then to recuperate them for ourselves as ‘archaic traces,”, Baudrillard fulminates. But Baudrillard shows – rather elegantly – how it is Freud himself (and the “psychologistic culture” of which he stands as representative) which is guilty of projecting its own interior states onto the “savages.” The thesis of the “omnipotence of thoughts” applies less to primitive culture than to a modern – and postmodern – culture which insists on the category of the “psychological” as a cross-cultural universal. “Freud does not think this is what he said in speaking of ‘narcissitic overvaluation of ... mental processes’. If there is such an overvaluation of one’s own mental processes (to the point of exporting this theory, as we have done with our morality and techniques, to the core of every culture), then it is Freud’s overvaluation, along with our whole psychologistic culture.” (SED 143)

Freud’s dismissal of the double – or, what amounts to the same thing, his psycho-reductive account of it – constitutes a contribution to a “spiritual” project through which all previous cultures are absorbed and transformed into precursors, “archaic traces.” Freud’s supposedly atheistic psychoanalysis is, for Baudrillard, actually continuous with a Christian westernization (whose moves it recapitulates, but even more successfully).“This is what kills off the proliferation of doubles and spirits, consigning them once again to the spectral, embryonic corridors of unconscious folklore, like the ancient gods that Christianity vertefeult, that is, transformed into demons.” (SED 142) This process of transformation is completed by Freud – and Rank’s – psychologization of the double. “By a final ruse of spirituality, this internalisation also psychologises doubles,” Baudrillard complains. “In fact, it is interpretation in terms of an archaic psychical apparatus that it is the very last form of the Verteufeleung, the demonic corruption and elimination of the primitive double.” (SED 142)[290] But it may well be that children and “savages” have the last laugh.

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[290] Note Freud’s own reduction of the demon to the father figure in his “A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis.” Here Freud also discusses the process of verteufeult Baudrillard describes (the transformation of gods into demons). “Concerning the Evil Demon, we know that he is regarded as the antithesis of God and yet is very close to him in nature. His history has not yet been as well studied as that of God; not all religions have adopted the Evil Spirit, the opponent of God, and his prototype in the life of the individual has so far remained obscure. One thing, however, is certain: gods can turn into evil demons when new gods oust them. When one people has been conquered by another, their fallen gods not seldom turn into demons in the eyes of the conqueror. [...]

The contradictions in the original nature of God are [...] a reflection of the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for the father, it is not to be wondered at that his hostile attitude to his father, too, which is one of hating and fearing him and of making complaints against him, should have come to expression in the form of Satan.” (Freud, “The Devil as Father-Substitute” in “A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis”, 400-401)