Burn After Reading: a reading

I'm surprised that so many reviews I've seen of Burn After Reading mistake it for, in the normally quite discerning words of Manohla Dargis, "a shaggy sendup of ...the espionage flick." I find it to be a rigorous, and hilarious, examination of heterosexual men's sexuality. It isn't just that I've been reading a lot of Freud lately, right? George Clooney's character constructs a dildo machine for his wife, for Christ's sake! And yet the closest I've seen a critic come to this is in saying the film is a meditation on the loneliness of being single and growing old.
For me, though, this is a film about being paranoid about your penis and the masculine sexual demands that heteronormative culture says it implies. This demand is twofold and a cliche: 1) fulfill your partner, 2) don't let this fulfillment sap your potency. One could see it as almost as a rehashing of Freud's "On the Most Universal Form of Degradation in Erotic Life." But in a way the film deals with the fact that this demand is, precisely, getting a bit old. Ergo paranoia: what do you do when your only scheme for dealing with your masculinity, of making sense of it, is verging on rejecting reality?
And this cliche, this getting old of the thing, is caused of course simply by the existence of women--women who, from the men's perspective, "know" it, who are getting tired of it, who are playing off of it. Thus the men feel the demand not only of the demand, but the need to get over the demand to actually deal with the women, who know. In reality, the women perhaps simply have desires of their own. But this desire itself is figured by the men as knowledge of their crisis, a knowledge that makes them paranoid and unable to see that this desire could be satisfied quite simply--perhaps (!) in a way that is actually unrelated to their crisis. This is the genius of Frances McDormand's acting, which appears narcissistic only because it expresses the simplicity of the goal--to have a desire of their own, even if it is superficial and aimed towards being attractive to men--a simplicity that men, wrapped up with their dicks, can't recognize. In this respect, it's shocking that Dargis would be so blind to (or, rater, identified with) the male gaze of the film, and verge on misogyny in describing McDormand's character as "a cruelly unflattering character whose narcissism is matched only by her witlessness."
Perhaps this is due to the way we perceive--now--anything dealing with U.S. national security: pretty much asexually. We can see the difference if we look at the old (or even new) Bond flims, which we wouldn't describe as movies about "intelligence" (though the extremely boring seriousness of their sex--from the point of view of its heterosexual male gaze, since, lord knows, Daniel Craig provides other possibilities for many people--is also, I think, an indication that anything even coming close to national security is viewed less sexually). Intelligence in combat is for us lacking in libido: it still doesn't make sense for us--though perhaps it should, and perhaps it's beginning to be possible--to say that a terrorist attack is brought about because of a (sexual) desire. But here is where, I think, the film comes in most interestingly. The film sees the intelligence community itself as men's solution to this problem of woman's desire. That is, the bureaucracy acts not unlike Harry's (Clooney's character, which I think is just a Zizek-impression) dildo machine for his wife: a way of dealing with women, a way of getting them to finally just shut up about their desires. It isn't surprising that the film ends with McDormand's character taking money (for cosmetic surgery) from the bureaucracy, in return for a promise to "sit on it"--i.e. not disclose any of the intelligence communities' blunders that her desire has created. We have to hear this old phrase differently after seeing the machine. All in all one could say that the film is a blistering critique of people clinging to the last vestiges of heteronormativity--which I think includes many of these critics who want to pass it off as a spy-spoof! For it also isn't a mistake that the film ends with this precise non-knowledge about what it's own activity is about: the J.K. Simmons' character, a CIA superior, closes the file reflecting on "what we've learned." His answer is not surprising once we know who this "we" is: "nothing." The positive structure produced out of this paranoia over women's desires, the CIA itself, doesn't in the end know what Frances McDormand's character wants, except to, when offered the right money, "sit on" what she knows. Nothing, he says, therefore, but adds something else: "nothing, except not to do it [which for us now means, heteronormativity] again."
One final note on Brad Pitt's brilliant, hilarious, and infinitely charming performance: one reason we love him is that he is the only person to escape all these dynamics. Ironically--and therefore--he is one of the most confidently (not paranoid) male characters there (John Malkovich's character comes close to this at times, but I won't get into that). But--not to give away too much--there are prices to be paid for this: we can't really say he escapes anything, in the end. However, it is interesting to note that basically he retains the same disposition as McDormand's character, and yet we heap upon her--not him, who is probably equally guilty of them--the charges of narcissism and witlessness, and interpret what happens to him as the crucifixion or sacrifice of a hero instead of the justice appropriately meted out to a co-conspirator. To me, this seems the most concrete confirmation that this is a film about men's heterosexual desire, and more generally about sexuality, which can only be misrecognized if you see it as a spy-spoof.

Freud, philology, associations

I realize after reading a bit of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life that I've been a bit loose in my use of the word "association," when I am speaking in a Freudian context. That is, I thought I could admit a certain phenomenon without reserve into the category that Freud designates as "association." Actually one needs to narrow down this phenomenon heavily before doing so. That phenomenon is the play on words: word play is not, strictly speaking, associative for Freud, unless one has a specific understanding of what we mean here by each term used here. And, significantly I think, Freud is able to give us this understanding in Psychopathology by distinguishing psychoanalysis from philology.
In chapter five, Freud famously is looking at slips of the tongue. In doing so he makes reference to the work of Rudolf Meringer, a philologist. What Meringer does is look at slips of the tongue precisely in their word-play aspect. That is, he looks at them from the perspective of what is going on linguistically, and tries to show that the rules of the play are inherent to language. According to Meringer, then, in the sort of play going on when someone says "Vorschwein" instead of "Vorschein," or, to take a less famous but equally informative example, when someone says, instead of "Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs antossen" (I ask you to toast our leader), "Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzustossen" (I ask you to belch to the health of our leader), what is determinative for the slip are the elements of language themselves. The tonal similarity between antossen and aufzutossen is more key for the mechanism of the slip than something like the fact that the person toasting might not like the leader. In other words, the slip--and to the extent that we're concerned with the mechanisms behind what we say, even the personal experience behind it, since it only serves to inform the slip--the slip can be reduced to the logic of language: language itself then becomes a the motor behind the slip. (Concomitantly, the aspects of language itself which slip are those which are similar--i.e. the particular material that this motor takes up is suited for this task because of its mimetic capabilities.)
Freud is wary of this, saying rightly that it's a conclusion "such as a linguistic scholar would hope to gain from studying the phenomenon" (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, New Penguin Edition, 55-6). In fact, he sounds a lot like Paul de Man: he is wary of reducing what happens in language to an expanded (because also including tones, etc. etc.) grammar. Unlike de Man, however, in Freud's case this is because this grammar would merely be a sort of logic.
Nevertheless, Freud is extremely aware that what he does--psychoanalysis--looks a lot like tracking down this logic within the workings of language:

It will be obvious that study of the "wandering" verbal but subliminal structures which were not meant to be uttered, together with a demand to know what the speaker was thinking about [i.e. looking at personal experience], approximate the conditions of my own analyses. I too am in search of unconscious material, and indeed I go about it in the same way... (57, tr. modified--Anthea Bell is closer than Strachey to the grammar but is weird and annoying sometimes).

So, Freud himself is saying that psychoanalysis looks sometimes a lot like philology. Not only in what it does, but in the value it attributes to the role of language in life and as something that can help interpret or unlock phenomena. But, he continues:

I too am in search of unconscious material, and indeed I go about it in the same way, except that, using a complex series of associations, I have to trace a longer route from the ideas of the person I am questioning to the discovery of the disruptive element (57).

A "longer route." A route that, according to Freud, goes "outside" the "context intended" for a word (56, tr. modified), as he explains later:

I do not, therefore, think that those instances of obvious or subtler speech disturbances which can ... be subsumed under "slips of the tongue" are mainly due to the influence of phonetic contacts; I believe that such slips derive from ideas outside what the speaker intends to say, which are sufficient to explain the slip (78).

He qualifies this, but in doing so makes it a bit clearer how we have to take this longer route into "more remote" regions:

I do not mean to imply any doubt of the phonetic laws causing sounds to modify each other, but they do not seem to me strong enough to impair correct speech by their own influence alone. In those cases that I have studied closely and of which I can claim some understanding, they merely represent an existing mechanism that can easily be used by a more remote psychic motive without its binding itself to the sphere of influence of those connections (78-9).

I emphasize the distance metaphor because it seems to show that Freud regarded language as a more familiar and invisible thing when compared to philology's view of it. Or at least that he thought the distance philology possessed with respect to its object was really only a form of proximity when compared with where he needed to go to explain that same object.
This is crucial because what is even clearer is that Freud seeks, in explaining these slips of the tongue, to get beyond just the context intended by a phrase--i.e. that which "should have been said in this situation." We shouldn't have to reference this in order to explain the slip up. Or, more rigorously put, the split between that which should have been said and that which was said can't be seen as internal to language: language does not generate this split. There can be a sphere where linguistic factors aid in the splitting, but a more remote psychic motive is where the splitting takes place, as it were. (We begin to see that mimesis, or the similarity of the words becomes less and less an aspect that can qualify language for the disturbance: if the disturbance comes from elsewhere, it does not matter as much whether it takes up what is similar or not. So two words don't get mixed up, for Freud, depending on whether they are similar or not--you can track this emphasis of his throughout the chapter.)

But the consequences of all this are even more radical: Freud doesn't just want to get beyond a sort of reference to an intention internal to language, he wants to get beyond intent itself in thinking about these mistakes: he wants to think about the substance of language itself as being free from intent. In other words, we shouldn't even have reference to language as something that intends to say something and then does not when, sometimes, it actually does not. In other words, it isn't just that the intent in language takes place in some extra-linguistic space. Pointing this out doesn't tell us enough. For you will never be able to find this place, if you consider it as a place. That is the point: the place in which there is the irruption of the extra-linguistic into the linguistic only takes place in the linguistic--but in such a way that it is never reducible to a linguistic essence.
Now, this is where we see that it is no accident a delay, a spacing, a detour or a distance is used to illustrate what he is talking about. Because what this figure of distance allows is a way to figure the mistakes within language as precisely the irruption of this region as a non-region occuring sometimes within language. The gaps and mistakes in language are just this region in effect.
For it is only thus that they could be motivated in the sense that Freud is getting at when he talks here about a "psychic motive" right alongside "intention" (and its derivative here, "influence"): these slips are motivated, precisely, without intention--that is, without reference to a linguistic context or logic, even as they occur in language and take the form of precisely mistakes in this logic. This is the only way they can be motivated because if the slips or splits in language occured completely outside of language, they could never come into language, and they could never disrupt the psyche such that it would mess up the significance, the meaning of what we are trying to say. That is, they could never remain in accord with the nature of that psychic element of which they are: the unconscious, which "is" just motivation pure and simple, here.
This is the full sense in which we must take what Freud says immediately following his remark on linguistic laws "merely represent[ing] an existing mechanism that can easily be used by a more remote psychic motive without its binding itself to the sphere of influence of those connections:"

In a great many substitutions, a slip of the tongue occurs quite regardless of such laws of phonetics (79).

That is, the "regardless" must be precisely heard as implying the sort of "distance" we were talking about: it is an injunction to go back and trace what is going on, because though it occurs as if by chance, the verbal slip is pure motivation. In other words, the description here of the slip uncannily like how Derrida describes the aporia, which "couldn't care less" about us:

...One is never through with aporias worthy of their name. They wouldn't be what they are--aporias--if one saw or touched their end, even if there were any hope of being done with them. It is thus necessary to treat them differently, and decide otherwise, where they couldn't care less about our decision, and to let go, leaving ourselves in their hands... (On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, 4).

So Freud is not a philologist. But that only makes clear is that he has "to go about it in the same way." Only this way is "a longer route," one that treats of distances, delays, disruptions in language precisely by tracing them, or retracing them, reenacting them (insofar as this takes time), in the distance from language that they themselves, as motivation, remain:

I too am in search of unconscious material, and indeed I go about it in the same way, except that, using a complex series of associations, I have to trace a longer route from the ideas of the person I am questioning to the discovery of the disruptive element (57).

And we see here, precisely, association as this longer route: the route along which he goes, the route considered not from the perspective from philology but psychoanalysis is precisely that of "a complex series of associations." This makes associations irreducible to word play as a merely linguistic phenomenon, since essentially what we are saying here is that language, for Freud, is not a merely linguistic phenomenon. Instead, associations are words that, however much they play, are motivated, in the sense that we now understand all these words. They are--if we can speak of anything actually being anymore, which is a different post--simply language from the perspective of psychoanalysis along which we can search for unconscious material. Associations are language that spans itself across this distance, across this longer route. They are also what describe the relationship--or non-relationship--between psychoanalysis and philology.

Why phenomenology? (part 1)

I have been trying to think of my fond relationship with phenomenology. What, over the years, has brought me so close to it? Or, what uses--to put it a more practical way--have I been able to make out of it? And where do I stand with relationship to its particular problems? And which practitioner of phenomenology do I find most productive for me?
I first came to phenomenology through work on philosophy of mind--the mind body-problem specifically. What intrigued me most here, though, was more the misfires of the mind when it has input from the body than the more traditional (and difficult) problem of establishing the fact of this input. Perception occurred for me pretty unproblematically. Thus the qualia problem never really interested me (though you might expect that it would). I felt it was just a problem about how we talk about what is represented to us: it was still too connected with problems of establishing that perception occured. I still think that what interests people about qualia is not the qualia themselves, but what it does to a theory of mind. However, what intrigued me at the time was precisely this--what was perceived, the actual forms perceptions themselves took. So the way into this was looking at the stuff we could perceive that was not so cleanly perceived. Definite perceptions, definite input from the body to the mind, but not so definite in terms of its content--not because it remains irreducible to a theory of perception (in positive terms, completely full of qualitative content) but because the content itself is one of discrepancy between the perception and how perception usually works.
So you can see an interest in the anticipatory powers of the bodily schema coming into play--the eventual form that this interest would take. This I picked up in full force with the help of one of my professors, Arthur Melnick, who pursues his Kantian problems with the aid of phenomenology--especially Merleau-Ponty, whose conception of phenomenology remains closest to me, even now, and whose work (I should just note this) colors pretty much everything I will say on the subject here, even when (as I will) I go and look at Husserl. But what is important is that here, in the transit between this initial interest and the eventual fully-fledged phenomenological form of my study, was the first use of phenomenology that I really discerned: it is a sort of thing that can fill out what a language focused roughly on the general form of perception (whether this articulates itself in terms of mind-body input, or, as was the case for Melnick, in terms of Kantian intuition) with more specific concerns about what happens when this general schema can't account for something. To put it a better way, phenomenology picks up this moment in the failure of a general account of mental life not as a "problem," as the phil-mind people take it up, but as the starting point of its analysis. More simply put, failures in perception are precisely indicators as to the fullness of experience itself for phenomenology, because phenomenology is focused on the content of experiences not as just a general stuffing for form, but as distinct instances that have the power to make the usual working of perception take a singular detour. The most extreme way of putting this (and I do so by using all these terms less technically) would be to say that, to a degree, phenomenology allows for experiential content to make the form of its own perception. Or, in even more plain and less burdened language: phenomenology allows for something in experience to cohere such that it generates thereby the terms of its own coherence. (This is largely because what I am describing here is simply the reduction: to take up, theoretically, a "failure" is the beginning of a suspension of the natural attitude.)
However I explain this, what's clear is that this quality makes phenomenology fall into places where more formal theories of perception just don't have anything to say--or, quite frankly, don't want to say anything. Though its aims are much more lofty (and problematic, as its goal is nothing less than the complete reappropriation of this sphere to philosophy), this often makes it work a bit a posteriori, almost a bit empirically, without being beholden to the oppositions these two terms usually enter into. There is a story that someone came up to Sartre who was eating something like an ice cream, and told him with phenomenology he could describe the ice cream--this is what got him exited about it. For me it was very similar, though without the more militant desire to oppose this sort of everyday reality to the high philosophies. If one goes too far with this way of looking at it, one easily makes the mistake (and it is often made by those who don't know phenomenology but want to criticize it) of thinking that phenomenology is a going back to the self-evident, the common sense, the ordinary, when (see Husserl, Ideas I §32) what is at stake is the making-scientific or theoretical of the assumption of self-evidence, an estrangement that brings something like the eating of the ice cream into the theoretical. So, without this militant edge, for me, what is important is the more basic fact that phenomenology can begin to rigorously investigate as completely normal what other theories consider aberrant.
As I said, I took up interest in the body, and this was mostly because that is where a lot of these "aberrations" in perceived or experienced content took place: the double-touch, tricks of perspective due to one's bodily stance, afterimages and the structure of the eye etc. etc. But as you can see, the interest began to take the form of wondering what was special about the phenomenon that it could fall into this particular place all the time--as I said, what was special to me was the forming power of the phenomenological content, or its sort of self-generating coherence, even if it is an aberrant perception. I'll pick this up next time as it took the form of a meditation on finitude, helped by Heidegger (then on to non-phenomena, like writing). This will lead us to another use of phenomenology, one that will emerge from what I am talking about here, which is essentially what Husserl calls "immanence," and moving towards the being of the phenomenon itself--the fact that (and this is really what "immanence" is about for Husserl) its own limit is its condition for emergence.