Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief (2005) is typical teenage fantasy fiction: ..... (2014a); Symbolic Misery, volume 2: The katastrophe of the sensible ...
CHAPTER FIVE: THE ABYSS OF THE OTHER’S DESIRE OR GREK MYTH FOR (NEOLIBERAL) CHILDREN Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief (2005) is typical teenage fantasy fiction: growing up, having an adventure and saving the world while at it. The book focuses on young Percy, a teenager with Attention Deficiency and Hyperactivity Disorder, who is one day told that his biological father is the Olympian god Poseidon. Percy is tasked with a dangerous mission, to find and return Zeus’s master thunderbolt, averting a war among the gods that will certainly wipe out the entire human race. The thunderbolt is also coveted by the Titan Kronos, Zeus’ father. According to the Greek myth, Zeus overpowered their autocratic father. Kronos used to swallow his children alive as soon as they were born, having been told that one of them would one day dethrone him. Zeus was saved by his mother who gave Kronos a rock wrapped up in swaddle cloth to swallow. Kronos was imprisoned in the abyss, confined for all eternity. Percy sets out to achieve his mission with the help of two friends, Annabel, daughter of Athena, and Grover, a satyr1. Before the adventure begins, Percy spends a short time training at Camp Half-blood, a secret camp for demi-god children like himself, born out of the union of an Olympian and a mortal parent. The book conveys an explicit political message: Western civilisation, the roots of which lie in Greek civilisation, must be protected (72). This can only be achieved by reinforcing the hegemony of the Olympians, who are now based in the United States. The political message echoes post 9/11 concerns about US national security as well as conservative discourses about American sovereignty, which is here presented as a natural continuation of the golden age of classical antiquity. The patriotic narrative of the book is redolent with a strong military ethos and a quasi-religious devotion to the Father-God one might not instantly associate with the more individualistic ethos of American culture. The book’s narrator is Percy, who recounts his adventure in wry and often cynical humour, offering a running commentary of 157
his changing relationship with his father and his transition from ignorance to knowledge and from doubt to faith. Danger has a distinctly middle-eastern character. Medusa, one of Percy’s persecutors who petrifies her victims by looking into their eyes, is described as a middleeastern woman wearing a long black down and a veil (172). Percy’s adventure is a panorama of American life, captured through modern sites like the St Louis Arch, a Las Vegas casino, a theme park and several highway diners, all of which Percy and his friends visit as they travel from the East to the West, more specifically, Hollywood, Los Angeles. The emotional economy of the father and son pair (Percy and Poseidon), and, by extension, of all demi-god children to their immortal parents, is important. There is something extremely harsh beneath the entertaining surface. Consider the following: an army of young warriors lives in Camp Half-blood. They train continually, each of them waiting to be assigned a mission that will prove their merit. In the meantime, they languish in the camp, forgotten by their immortal parents. The Olympians, we are told, are uncaring parents. They may need the help of their offspring but remain aloof, cold and indifferent. Even by post-modern standards and the noticeable ‘dark turn’ in teenage fiction (Johnson, 2011), there is something amiss in this cold indifference. What is the point of such emotional destitution in a culture that has traditionally invested heavily on parental love and the emotional well-being of its children? Is this cruel ‘realism’ an indication of the hardship that needs to be endured for the sake of Western capitalist culture? What kind of individual and what kind of society does this new formation envisage and why? According to Stiegler contemporary capitalism is a culture of dis-individuation, disappointment and disenchantment. The death of God – short for the decline of authority and Law from modernity onwards – and its substitution by the rationality of the market produces apathetic individuals and groups deprived of their singularity and their ability to form judgments based by democratic and rational criteria. Individuals and groups are regressing 158
into a psychic mode of herdishness and bêtise (stupidity). Stiegler’s critique of capitalism chimes with other current critiques of neoliberalism, broadly defined as the expansion of economic rationality in all spheres of human activity, including the state and individuals (Brown, 2003). Neoliberalism promulgates the discourse that it is a self-evident and inevitable state of affairs, the only alternative (Giroux, 2005). As a public pedagogy it refutes its own specificity, promoting itself trans-historical and largely unexamined ‘common sense’ (Gilbert, 2013: 13). Further, neoliberalism is essentially antithetical to democratic values (Giroux, 2005: 13), encouraging adherence to ritual forms of behaviour in which individuals are persuaded to engage but without challenging the norms (Giroux, 2005: 21). All these tendencies are evident in Percy Jackson, exacerbated and justified by the state of emergency due to the imminent threat to mankind. An individualistic conception of the self is central to neoliberalism (Gilbert, 2013: 11). The neoliberal individual is both an ideal locus of bio-political intervention and an autonomous unit. According to Wendy Brown, neoliberalism secures consent and generates political inertia by presenting the experience of precarity and individualised impotence as a ‘normal’ and ‘inevitable’ state of being (Brown, 2003: 15). At the same time, the individual is seen as a rational, calculating unit, capable of looking after their own best interests. Moral responsibility is equated to rational action. Mismanagement of life is not condoned (Brown 2003: 15). Self-care and the ability to provide for one’s own needs are considered paramount (Brown, 2006: 694). A recent development in the United States is the alliance or neoliberalism with neoconservativism (Giroux, 2005: 14). This alliance ‘has inadvertently prepared the ground for profoundly anti-democratic political ideas and practices’ (Brown, 2006: 702). Neoconservativism, mainly identified with the political rationality of the Bush administration, is seen as uneven and opportunistically religious (Brown, 2006: 696). It is also characterised 159
by a desire for a strong state, rejection of the vulgarity of mass culture, a return to older forms of family life, and the restoration of private virtue and public spirit. Posing as guardians of a potentially vanishing past and an endangered present, Brown continues, the alliance of neoliberalism and neoconservativism has been successful in displacing democratic values by promoting ‘a civic religion that links family form, consumer practices, political passivity and patriotism’ (2006: 701). On this premises, ‘a governance model of self-interest can marry or jostle against support for governance modelled on church authority and a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty’ (Brown, 2006: 692). In this chapter I explore the tensions, internal contradictions and psychic implications of the capitalist/neo-conservative substratum of the teenage adventure. Drawing on Stiegler I argue that the evidence of stupidity and herdishness we come across in the novel are not simply the side effects of a short-term responses to perceived external threats but reflect the inherent dead-ends of capitalism, a system which is no longer bio-political in the Foucauldian sense but psycho-political. Stiegler invites us to examine this important shift simultaneously on the political, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic level. Two lines of inquiry form the backbone of my argument: first, the indoctrination of the young person, represented in the book by Percy’s gradual induction into the world of the father. Stiegler attributes particular significance to the formation of young minds via processes of grammatisation, that is, the selection, codification and transmission of laws, principles and values disseminated through educational systems which aim to produce the citizen every society considers as ideal. For the ancient Greek polis, for instance, the ideal citizen was an active participant in the public affairs. The education of the Athenian youth, in which the older generations played an important role, aimed to produce both law-abiding citizens and individuals capable of recognising the difference between laws in their everyday application, and Law as an abstract, noetic or universal concept. Capitalism, argues Stiegler, destroys the 160
noetic and substitutes the universal with the global. It produces limited knowledge, limited civic consciousness, limited capacity of abstraction and, ultimately, limited capacity to think; in short, stupidity and herdishness. Below I discuss the most important ideological tropes that support this assessment, namely, Percy’s induction into a mythical past of the inflexible and short-tempered gods who demand respect and compliance, the cultivation of military obedience, the preference for declarative truths over deliberation and judgement, the priority of loyalty and filial devotion over critical thinking, and the gradual transformation of the ambivalence towards the father into awe and gratitude2. The second strand of my argument concerns the succession of generations and the role of the Father in the formation of the young individuals’ expectations for the future. Like many theorists with psychoanalytic leanings, Stiegler argues that capitalism has effected the demise of the superego and, as a result, a profound restructuring of our psychic libidinal economy. He attributes this shift equally to the decline of paternal authority, the weakening of intergenerational bonds and the erosion of care, namely the ability to forms meaningful attachments to others in a nourishing, sustaining environment. In Percy Jackson the misalignment of generations is represented by an admixture of myths: the return of Kronos as a renewed threat means that the original crime of overpowering the (immortal) father must be repeated. But now Zeus and his siblings, once united like the brothers in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, are divided. The pact (Law) that kept them together begins to fray, being replaced by discord (Eris). Zeus is both powerful and powerless, unable to retrieve the thunderbolt for himself. A mortal son of Poseidon (Percy) must return it to Olympus, reversing, as it were, the gesture of Prometheus who stole the fire from the Gods in order to give it to the mortals. And while one son (Zeus) must depose the father (Kronos), a younger son (Percy) must not threaten the rule of his own father (Poseidon and his brother Zeus). To put it in Freudian terms, an original act of aggression, replete with allusions of both 161
Promethean and Totemic beginnings, as well as Oedipal rivalry, must and must not take place. It has been suggested that neoliberalism should be read as dreamwork (Hall cited in Brown, 2006: 693; Žižek, 2008: 73), due to the similarities between the hiatuses in its logic and the logical contradictions present in the manifest content of the dream. If that is the case, what does the genealogical hiatus described in the previous paragraph represent? What is its latent content and why does the threat to western culture come from inside the family? Popular culture often resorts to family conflicts as a soft equivalent of ideological conflicts (Žižek, 2008), a familiar frame of reference which works well because of its very familiarity. In that sense, it could be argued that grandfather Kronos is nothing more than the enemy within who needs to be kept under constant surveillance. But Kronos does not act alone. He has accomplices like Luke, another demi-god child, a ‘nihilist’ who hates the indifferent Olympians and wants to see the end of their reign and of western culture. Such an interpretation would essentially be deemed correct in terms of dominant ideology, but is by no means adequate. What is interesting in Percy Jackson is not so much the vilification of the old, as the manipulation of the young through two very important elements: lack of memory (past) and lack of attention (present). Having being brought up unaware of his heritage, Percy does not have access to the past, the collective heritage that is usually not immediately retrievable but handed down to generations culturally and verbally. Stiegler attributes great importance to the not-directly-lived, and links the cultural dissemination of memory (tertiary memory) to both myths and civic (democratic) values. Memory, he comments, is particularly important today, at a time of general amnesia, indifference and lack of attention.
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Lack of attention concerns both attention received and attention given. Stiegler repeatedly talks about the ‘I don’t give a damn-ism’ (2010: 41) of modern culture, which is represented in the novel by the in-attention of the Olympian parents that drives children like Luke to nihilism. Inattention is also the lack of sustained and durable focusing which capitalism breeds, oriented, as it is, to the new, the fast and the ephemeral. Capitalism, argues Stiegler, captures and destroys attention by a constant cognitive overflow (2010: 94). Deficiency of attention grows, with ADHD becoming a prime example of this tendency (2010). Percy often speaks of his ADHD, his difficulties in processing external stimuli, his faltering judgement and the problems caused by his impulsive behaviour. I propose treating Percy Jackson broadly as an emblematic child of its time. Rather than dwelling on the sociological and medical accuracy of Stiegler’s claims about ADHD, I propose considering Percy as a young individual that cannot or will not trust his own judgement; a young man who learns to accept authority blindly whilst honing not his democratic ethos but his combat skills; a model soldier who does not want to think; a young person does not quite dream a neoliberal dream – he is ‘awake’ – but is not very keen on questioning what does not makes sense; in short, an individual for which the (capitalist) dream-like hiatuses of memory, care and reason are becoming a way of life. The aporetic capacity of such an individual is perhaps a foregone conclusion: indoctrinated youth is not encouraged to think or to be aporetic. Understanding how this catastrophe is effected and, in the present case, aided by myth, is just as important as knowing what to do in order to address it. It might be worth stating the obvious at this point: Percy Jackson and his young readers are already subjects of capitalism. What lies in front of them, in the form of fiction, is a proposal for a new mythic order based on the Father-God’s command and desire. As a typical representative of American popular culture, the book – now part of a long and successful series – tries to promote a new libidinal economy based on patriotism, disindividuation and 163
fear. To be fair to the book, it contains does contain a honest truth: indeed, there is nihilism amongst younger people, disaffection and discontent. Yet, the book cannot extricate itself from the ideology which creates these conditions, nor does it provide an imaginative critique of them. Instead of that, it defends the status quo via inventing dubious origins, dangers and mythic justifications. The success of this endeavour rests upon accentuating the slim difference between faith cultivated via indoctrination (the case of Percy) and brainwashingnihilism (the case of Luke). But the similarities between the two young men – both products of the same harsh parental culture – are so great that the line is often blurred. Stiegler describes modern capitalism as a catastrophe, inviting us to fully appreciate the tragic conditions of the present before thinking a new way forward. Teenage fictions usually end with a good enough settlement: some goals are achieved, some issues remain outstanding; some emotional and libidinal questions are addressed, others persist and return, especially in sequels. A catastrophe survived? Stiegler differentiates between existing, qua living a meaningful life, and merely subsisting. Below I give an overview of Stiegler’s theory with emphasis on his convergence with psychoanalysis. My reading of Percy Jackson, which starts with the gradual becoming-dedicated of the son, aims to show that the burden of capitalism and the edifice of ideology now become the young individual’s tragic aporetic fate in a milieu of militancy, ignorance and fear.
Theorising disenchantment and misery The growing interest in Bernard Stiegler’s work in recent year is marked by the translation and publication of several of his books in a short period of time. Titles include: Care of the Youth and the Generations (2010); Symbolic Misery, volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch (2014a); Symbolic Misery, volume 2: The katastrophe of the sensible (2015a); The Decadence 164
of Industrial Democracies, Disbelief and Discredit (2011); Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals (2013c); The Lost Spirit of Capitalism (2014b); What Makes Life Worth Living (2013a); The Re-enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism (2014c) and States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st century (2015b). Stiegler has been described as an ‘unorthodox Marxist’ (Hutnyk, 2012: 127), a legatee of both Derridean deconstruction and the Frankfurt School (Gilbert and Roberts, 2012), deeply Heideggerian despite his critique of Heidegger (Bradley, 2011: 125), and ‘oscillating back and forth between transcendental critique (metaphysics, phenomenology, deconstruction) and empirical history (evolutionary biology, palaeontology, techno-science) without ever coming to rest in one or the other (Bradley, 2011). The scope of Stiegler’s argument is certainly ambitious, trying ‘to bring philosophy and cultural theory to bear on immediate social and political problems’ (Gilbert and Roberts, 2012: 6). In this effort he is in dialogue with Freud, Lacan, Husserl, Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Deleuze, and others, having made Simondon’s notion of individuation a core concept of his project. This project unfolds simultaneously on several levels; the philosophical, where Stiegler addresses issues of temporality, technicity and origin; the empirical, where he asks what makes life worth living; the political, where he address the relationship between the individual and the modern polis; the technological, in which he argues that the role of technics, prostheses and technologies have been systematically ignored by philosophy; the psychoanalytic, where he argues for a new libidinal economy capable of counterbalancing the capitalist culture of the drive; the artistic, in which he proposes rethinking our creative capacities, and the sociological where he envisages a more hopeful future via the revival of care, and imagination, in short, the re-enchantment of the world. The concise presentation of
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Stiegler’s theory below focuses on the concept of individuation, the negative effects of capitalism with emphasis on proletarianisation and stupidity/herdishness, Stiegler’s use of key psychoanalytic concepts, his arguments about the importance of inter-generational relation and, finally, his interpretation of the myth of Oedipus. What is individuation? Individuation lies at the heart of Stiegler’s theory and draws heavily on Simondon’s equivalent notion3. Individuation is psychic, collective and mnemotechnical. In order to appreciate the composite character of individuation, we need to start with the concepts of primary and secondary retention which Stiegler borrows from Husserl. Primary retentions are defined as an individual’s temporal experiences of the environment, a ‘selection in temporary fluxes which constitute the fabric of my existence’ (Stiegler, 2011: 111)4. What I retain, argues Stiegler, constitutes my present and my sense of time as what comes to pass, passes, and, as such, becomes my past. Secondary retentions5 are characterized by reciprocity: ‘received, selected, projected and lived by myself and others’ (2011: 112). They form the pre-individual fund, part of the ‘we’ (211: 113). The process of individuation as a combination of the two kinds of retention is defined by Stigler in the following steps: an interpretation of what happens; a re-interpretation of the past experiences of the individual and the secondary retentions; an interpretation of the funds of collective or secondary retentions and pro-tentions that have been transmitted to the individual. In that sense, individuation is always a personal shift which simultaneously changes the context around me, leading to a new relation, distinction and inscription (Stiegler, 2013b: 164). The process affects both the individual and the group, the two changing with one another. This is because the group and the individual look up to the same pre-individual funds ‘woven of the expectations shaping and configuring secondary and
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collective retentions’ and ‘constituted by collective secondary retentions’ (Stiegler, 2011: 113). Stiegler adds a third, or tertiary level of retentions. These are ‘technical retentions of experiences we have not personally lived through’ (Bradley, 2011: 132), or cultural retentions instilled by processes of grammatisation (after Derrida, defined below) and supported by mnemo-technic apparatuses (Stiegler, 2014a: 55). Tertiary retentions are disseminated as orthos logos (correct version or interpretation) and form the horizon of our expectations ‘via the ascendants, parents, institutions, books, world and so on’ (Stiegler, 2011: 115). In each epoch tertiary retentions are disseminated via the linguistic and other system (e.g. media) via an elaborate system of codifications and systematisations (hypomnemata)6. Ideally, individuation should promote singularity. Singularity means being unique, not merely different, and, more important, able to appreciate and seek one’s uniqueness. Stiegler often talks about singularity as a form of elevation (2011: 117), and the possibility of constituting the singular as rising above the quotidian and towards the superegoic and the noetic. The concept of individuation does not remain theoretical and abstract. Stiegler’s philosophy and politics always have a pragmatic and practical aspect. Individuation is doing, praxis. The passage of an idea into actuality occurs in three planes: the psychic, in which the individual has an idea, the social, in which one lives, and the technical (tertiary), which supports the world (2014b: 31). To ask which one of the levels comes first or is more important is a false problem, as none is the origin of the other and are all formed in the process (2014b: 32). Consciousness plays an important role in individuation as the individual must cultivate a critical skill, defined by Stiegler as a filtering process of secondary and, most importantly, of tertiary retentions which are cultural and learned (epiphylogenetic) (2014a: 53). Stiegler
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explains: my uniqueness emerges in the horizon of my secondary and tertiary retentions. My consistence depends on both and feeds back into both. The process has a temporal-futural dimension: ‘I only exist – because the retentional process in which I consist is unique, and because the retentional process is also a protentional process, that is, it is a process that constitutes the horizons of expectations’ (2011: 112). In that sense, my environment, my culture, my heritage has to have the potential to aid individuation in order for me to be able to become, appreciate or conceive of mine. For Stigler there is no individuation without the social group and the environment and vice versa. Thus, he also defines individuation as a desirous identification with the community, so long as one is not absorbed by the latter. A certain differential gap, a minimal distance between the individual and the group, is therefore always necessary: ‘Desire tries to overcome the differential gap that it creates, and in doing so continues this gap […] thus guaranteeing the constituted existence of the community itself’ (Ieven, 2012: 80). It is this very difference and distance that becomes problematic when individuation is eroded.
The maladies of capitalism: symbolic misery, erosion of belief, proletarianisation, hypersynchronisation Stiegler locates his critique of contemporary capitalism in the wider context of the grand epochal shifts from antiquity onwards: with the advent of Christianity the believer replaced the citizen of antiquity, who, in turn, gave way to the worker during the Industrial Revolution. Today, after the digital revolution and the advent of control societies7, the worker has been displaced by the machine, dis-individuated by the devaluation of his labor and himself becoming machine. This argument is not technophobic8, but highlights the annulment of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in hyper-industrial control societies (1014a: 59). In order to reinforce
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this argument, Stigler draws on ancient Greek philosophy and the democratic Athenian polis, which he considers as an epoch of individuation firmly grounded in collective civic life. Stiegler employs a wide civic-philosophical vocabulary derived from antiquity. This includes the myth of Prometheus, the Titan who gave humans the gift of fire as reparation for his brother’s (Epimetheus) forgetfulness and the fact that he had left humans without any qualities. We will discuss the philosophical implications of this myth in the next chapter. Here, suffice it to say that Stiegler uses the Prometheus myth to sum up one of his key argument, namely that humans are prosthetic from the beginning. He also draws on a variation of the myth in which conflict (eris) broke out amongst human about who would control the fire. This resulted in an intervention by the Gods who sent them the additional gifts of dike (justice) and aidos (shame). These gifts, prosthetic and not ‘natural’ as they are, form the basis of communal living. Stigler also borrows the notion of polemos (war, disorder leading to new equilibrium) from Heraclitus. From Aristotle he borrows the notion of the noetic as advent of the onto-theologico-political and from Plato the opposition between hypomnesis (repetition and devices encouraging the process of learning) and anamnesis (rememoration) (2014b). All these terms find their way into the critique of contemporary culture, as we will see below. Capitalism is seen as an irreversible erosion of values. Capitalist rationalisation has resulted in symbolic misery, that is, disenchantment due to the liquidation of the superego, the unleashing of the drives-based tendencies of culture, the impoverishment of collective or secondary retentions and the loss of symbolic efficacy (akin to the demise of the Name of the Father) (2013c; 2014b). As a result, belief has also been eroded. For Stiegler belief does not refer to the theological adherence to God but should be taken to mean good faith and hope in the future, in what is yet to come. Under capitalism belief is replaced by cynicism and nihilism, especially among the young. Stiegler calls this the Antigone complex (2013c: 30), 169
the feeling of being excluded from processes of decision making, and having nothing to look forward to. The new Creon, he adds, is the Market (2013c: 39). Further, capitalist rationalisation substitutes singularity with particularisation (2011: 85), annulling the desire for elevation. Stiegler attributes the lack of appetite for elevation to the substitution of otium, the regime of learning which was once oriented towards the care of the self and others, with negotium, the cultivation of a work ethic subtended by a desire of accumulation and measured by degrees of calculability. The new ethos of ‘calculable bonds’ erodes the openness to the future which was and should remain irreducible to calculation (2011). Stiegel considers contemporary control societies are war societies, where polemos (conflict) is being replaced by evil. The war Stiegler is talking about is internal and inherent to capitalist culture. It concerns the decline of judgment and hermeneia (interpretation), and the failure of the political to produce pacification in a public arena (agora). As the civic values of philia (friendship), justice and shame subside, we are left with a war without rules, in which the contract replaces the Law (2013c). By the same token, capitalism becomes a culture where the exception or excess (Stiegler, 1996: 92) becomes rule ‘but a rule that is never formulated: it lives only through the occurrence of an irregularity, that is, it is not formalisable and calculable by a rule-driven apparatus that would be applicable in every case, each case constituting the different occurrence of this rule by default’ (2011: 125). The profound changes in the economic and cultural organisation of capitalism also effect the proletarianisation of individuals, defined as the generalized exclusion from creative-aesthetic processes, the decline of the noetic, and ‘being formalized through a technique, a machine or an apparatus’9 (Stigler cited in Hutnyk, 2012: 128). To put it simply, television, mass entertainment (e.g. Hollywood) and the internet, all in the service of tertiary memory, produce conformity and a flattening of memory and time, a hyper-synchronisation resulting in the loss of the ability to diachronize, that is, to think in terms of the local, the historical and 170
the discreet, and to form singularities of primary and secondary retentions. Proletarianisation is our participation in a technological history of memory situated between amnesic and hypomnesic memory (Hutnyk, 2012). In other words, we are all turning into passive, ‘debrained’ consumers with a poor sense of time, memory and history, other than the one created for us via the dominant tertiary apparatus.
Stupidity, herdishness and lack of attention Stiegler argues that in order to reignite individuation and singularity we ought to think pharmacologically. By ‘pharmacologically’ he does not mean that life can go either way or that everything is resolved by the expulsion of a scapegoat, a pharmakos. Rather, he invites us to consider the specific syntagmatic conditions and the horizon in which thought and action are to be determined as good or bad. Stiegler develops an elaborate argument against the deterioration of processes of thinking, the loss of distinctness (herdishness) and the lack of attention, all of which are additional side effects of capitalist media-induced uniformity and cultural oblivion. One of the terms he uses is stupidity, broadly defined as: regression from singularity, the mind’s susceptibility to lowering and regression in relation to elevation, life without knowledge, and the destruction of attention. Despite the grim outlook and the relentless advance of capitalism, Stiegler retains his optimism and faith in better things to come. Regression, stupidity and herdishness, he argues, is but an opportunity for a new departure, both noetic and active. In that sense, stupidity as regression is the pharmacological condition of knowledge (2013b: 162). In psychoanalytic terms, and on an individual level, the equivalent of stupidity is regression to an earlier form of psychic organisation or perversion (see Stein, 2010). In Stiegler’s framework of psycho-social individuation, stupidity is primarily defined as the erosion of 171
différence between the individual and the group, even when we accept that the ‘I’ and the milieu can never fully coincide with one another. The confusion of the private and the social, their mutual disindividuation, produces bêtise (stupidity). At the opposite end, the mutual individuation of the individual and the milieu in difference (trans-individuation), is juxtaposed to the superficial inter-individuation or quasi-specific individuation, the falling10 (in Heidegger’s sense) and becoming herdish of both myself and the milieu (2013b: 169). Inattention or the destruction of attention is another effect of cultural degradation. In Taking Care for the Youth and the Generations (2010) Stiegler connects the destruction of attention to the decline of inter- generational care. In making this point he starts with the Foucauldian notion of bio-power, arguing that today bio-power, the manipulation of populations by the State, has been replaced by psycho-power, exercised not necessarily by the State or for the direct benefit of the State, but by various capitalist apparatuses (e.g. the media). The capitalist economy of attention has effected significant changes, not only in the way we think but in our libidinal economy. Stiegler warns against the adverse influence of television and the internet on young minds – their premature immersion in audiovisual pharmaka which destroys attention (2010: 69) – and emphasizes the responsibility of parents and adults in dealing with this trend. Of course these suggestions can be dismissed as alarmist and patronizing (Hutnyk, 2012: 130), but the argument about ruptures in the interior milieu of social groups is somewhat harder to dismiss. Drawing on neuro-biological and cultural research which demonstrates that deep attention (ability to focus on a single task for a prolonged period of time) is declining, and hyper-attention (shorter in duration and focusing on a succession of tasks) is rising, Stiegler argues that modern technologies have effected permanent synaptogenetic changes which, in turn, affect the way perception and consciousness operate. If our ancestors’ mental capacities evolved in line with material culture, it might not be such an exaggeration to say that we perceive and process information differently. 172
Stigler attributes great responsibility to adults, in so far as they are directly involved in children’s primary identifications which are practically indelible and formative of their access to the superego and the Law (2010: 4). Education is important. It is the transmission and intergenerational relationship ‘linking the child as a minor with no access to the reality principle, to living ancestors, who, in turn, will link it to the dead ones’ (2010: 7). Transmission of information and values is a process of formulation and sublimation (2010: 7). This process constitutes attention which is both retention (akin to secondary identifications in psychoanalytic terms) and protention, (the forward looking dimension of time borrowed from phenomenology). Capturing the attention of young minds ‘means capturing attention of the systems formed by these minds’ (2010: 9), shaping the way in which the ego and the id come together, with one another and with the reality principle. Attention is therefore a ‘holding’ of objects. ‘Holding’ in this context is synonymous to desire (Stiegler, 1996: 101). Attention arrives before the object in the same way Desire (in the Lacanian sense) precedes any specific desire for an object. Lack of attention, both its entrapment in artificial audio-visual perception and lack of care, spells the loss of the capacity to desire and to relate to one another on a profound level (2013a: 70). Attention is a temporal process and a tempering of time: to pay attention means to wait, to look to the future: this gesture is ‘attentive to the extent that it is anticipatory [en attende], which is to say, in the language of phenomenology, pro-tended [pro-tendure] and pro-tained [pro-tenue] … a relationship to the future where attention is constituted’ (2014a, 64). It is in this wider convergence of attention as desire and protension that Stiegler often quotes the growing cases of ADHD cases as the modern malaise par excellence. In Taking Care for the Youth and the Generations (2010) it is used as an example of how the psycho-technic and tertiary milieu can become noological, internalized and symbolically associated. Stiegler does not examine the specifics of AHDT in a clinical context and does not consider the socio173
cultural discourses surrounding the condition or its representations, as Foucault would have done. His argument concerns the changing formations of attention and, along with that, the unconscious. Quoting Lacan’s ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ (2010: 18), Stiegler interprets the unconscious as an active entity (personal and collective) which can also be revised and shaped via language (2010: 18) and is subject to fabric alterations on the level of culture (2010: 62). Stiegler has a broad view of the unconscious: he sees it as forged historically through the Foucauldian technologies of the self, especially melete (study), mathesis (learning), processes which shaped cultures from antiquity onwards. Later, the unconscious assumed the more distinct and familiar historical shape ‘of the id called Enlightenment’ (2010: 55). In that progressive historical context, he asks if it makes sense to ignore the profound psychic changes effected by contemporary capitalism. A related question then is how we counter the psychopolitics of inattention and the cognitive overflow so typical of modern culture. Stigler argues that we need to reform the Bildung (‘education’ in the general sense) (2010: 35). His concern is psycho-political and the proposed approach organological. An organology in the Stieglerian idiom is a theory of articulation of bodily organs (brain, hand, eye, genitals, vegetative systems) to artificial organs (tools, instruments, technical support of grammatisation), to social organs (human grouping, families, clans). As part of this process, democracy and citizenship are ways of relating synchronies (of the present) to diachronies (trajectories from past to future protentions) through reason. Diachronisation and reason counterbalance the particularized reason of capitalism and the limited scope of functional knowledge, reinstating the capacity for abstract theoretical reasoning and the savoire theoretique (capacity for theoretical/abstract thought) which gives access to the eide – quasi-transcendental forms and abstract content as in Husserl11 (2010: 67).
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Libidinal economy and consistence The psyche has an importance place in Stiegler’s organology (Ross, 2011: 146) as do the concepts of ‘libidinal economy’ and the ‘long circuits of desire’. Stigler borrows liberally from different strands of psychoanalysis. In his work Winnicott meets Lacan and both meet Simondon, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Plato. Whether Stiegler does justice to psychoanalysis or not, is beyond the scope of my argument. On the whole, I consider Stiegler and psychoanalysis as complementary, not antagonistic, and it is this complementarity I wish to highlight in the present chapter. It might be useful to reiterate, at this point, that Stiegler’s attention is on the political, philosophical and practical future of societies. Thus, while psychoanalysis traditionally starts from and returns to the individual, Stiegler always connects or ‘plugs’ his psychoanalytic strands of thought onto the political-philosophical level. A good illustration of this creative marriage of ideas is the concept of ‘consistence’ which is central to his theory. Like many others, Stiegel considers capitalism as a culture of the drive which annihilates desire and singularity. The demise of the super ego, the rise of consumption and the ‘death of God’ have left us in a state of an ‘apocalypse without God’ (2013a: 9), that is, at a loss about the meaning of existence. Stiegler proposes that we should rethink both the super-ego and singularity by re-vitalising, what he calls, the level of consistence which comprises of the following: infinity, as opposed to finitude and finite objects, a term with Heideggerian and Derridean connotations; desire and the capacity to desire, as opposed to mere satisfaction of consumer needs; belief and faith, as opposed to disengagement and nihilism, and all the things that ‘do not exist’ but compose the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘noetic’ (see Stiegler, 2011: 8993). Stiegler’s level of consistence evokes the Deleuzian plane of consistence12, the symbolic-cohesive aspects of the Lacanian Other, the Freudian super-ego qua human propensity for higher accomplishments and abstract thought, and the Heideggerian being in 175
the world, all indispensable aspects of healthy individuation and singularity (Stiegler, 2013s: 25). Stigler argues that capitalism has all but destroyed the superego. The latter is defined as noetic and abstract, and as that which ‘does not exist’. Following psychoanalysis, Stiegler considers the capacity for sublimation as the origin of the superego. In that context, he differentiates adaptation to a rule, that is, blind compliance, from adoption, that is, the ability to rise to the abstract quality of the Law (Ross, 2011: 148)13. The Stieglerian superego pertains to the Law. We need to always interpret and invent the Law, he argues, as opposed to merely conforming to it. The ‘spirit’ of the Law should therefore be superegoic, as should be the motivation for action. This is the kind of superego Stiegler wants to see at work, not the repressive kind. When this abstract dimension does not work, he points out, we rely on props, artifices and rosaries. In envisaging a new libidinal economy Stigler starts from the notion of desire14. Echoing the Lacanian position that desire emerges with the separation from the Real and the loss of the object a at an indefinite, non-remembered time, he speaks of a default at origin (2014b: 61). This default – the un-decidability and un-locatability of origin – also chimes with the Derridean notion of différence (deferral and difference) and the notion of infinity. Desire tends to infinity in the sense that no object can ever fully satisfy it. Desire is (desire-for) singularity, both tending to infinity and always remaining open and incomplete (2013a: 43). Desire is therefore ontological, that is, reducible to the concrete objects that satisfy it. Hoping to offer desire-as-singularity as a credible alternative to the destructive driveoperations of capitalism, Stiegler also refers to the Thing (das Ding), the object that does not exist. But instead of turning to Lacan’s object a and the way the latter is inscribed in the everyday economy of desire, he highlight its spiritual-noetic dimension by announcing that
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the Thing constitutes an archi-protension and, ‘like theos in Aristotle, opens up every horizon of expectation’ (2013a: 62, emphasis added). Behind the philosophical language, the message is effectively simple: like desire and singularity, the noetic-Thing resists the commodification and pedestianisation of the familiar and the pleasurable. Keep your eyes fixed on the Thing, or know your Desire as Lacan would advise. Stiegler argues that we ought to reactivate the long circuits of desire15 as opposed to the short circuits of the drive (2013a). The circuits of desire are perhaps visually reminiscent of the lines in Lacan’s complex graph, in which desire passes through the field of the Other, the Imaginary and the drive in its ongoing circular trajectory (Lacan, 1991). To reactive the long circuits of desire does not imply a cessation with existing culture or the liberation of the libido as advocated by Marcuse16. It means relating to object differently. It is at this point that Stiegler turns to Winnicott and the notion of the objec for further psychoanalytic support for his pharmacology. Objects are dual, curative and destructive: pharmacological. The first Winnicottian transitional object, the mother’ holding, is the first pharmakon, a quasi- origin for all objects and all things relational (2013a: 4)17. Stiegler’s pharmacology of the soul, however, looks more towards culture than the individual psyche. Once again, Stiegler, turns to culture arguing that it is the common object18 that interests us, both as object of desire (singularity-infinity) and as object of fetishism-addiction. All societies promote certain attitudes to objects through processes of hypomnesis, and prosthesis. Capitalism is ‘inherently perverse’ (2014b: 3) as it promotes general addiction and fetishism. We therefore need to think objects differently. The status of the unconscious is important in this endeavour and also pharmacological. As a repository of retentions and protentions fostered through a diminishing culture, the unconscious could be reflecting this impoverishment. Yet, the unconscious can also be ‘the
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projector of infinities,’ opening up ‘the intuitive experience of infinite objects of knowledge, that is, of consistencies’ (2013a: 47). Stigler maintains that we must make the unconscious speak and consist. In the unconscious he locates the ‘not yet’ and the ‘outside’ of consciousness from which new, projectable motivation can arise. This he aligns to the Derridean ‘neither in the world nor in consciousness’ (2013a: 47) and the Husserlian ‘transcendental subject that can intuitively know’ (2013a: 46), in order to suggest that the life of the pharmakon begins ‘behind consciousness’ (2013a: 48). It is therefore worth seeking its curative effects in that very dimension. By the same token, Stiegler is keen to redirect the Thing towards culture, not (Lacanian) lack: ‘not a thought of ‘lack’ but of default, that is, of the pharmakon […] a thought that remains yet to come’ (2013a: 75). This, he adds, ‘is the question par excellence of a century – ours – that has not begun well’ (2013a: 75). Stiegler proposes a new pharmacology of symbolic relations (2013a: 72) against nihilism, kenosis, libidinal dis-economy, stupidity and finitisation. He calls for ‘a struggle of the spirit’, both as a critique of its existing structures and as mobilisation of the imagination that will lead to new inscriptions. He calls for fantasy (active imagination), attachment, care, philia (friendship as opposed to strife-eris), and actively observing life’s various viscosities. This is the life, we might add, that takes care of the unconscious and the long circuits of desire with a view to establishing a new libidinal economy, a libidinal economy of infinite immanence (Stiegler, 2013a: 77-78). Political theorists have critiqued Stiegler for not being clear enough about the scope of agency in relation to political action (Marchart, 2012); others for not spelling out exactly how we are supposed to counter the drive-based tendencies of capitalism (Ross, 2011: 149). Stiegler’s project is as much political as it is ethical, calling for a philosophical life in which intellectual abstraction (continuous reference to a plane of consistence) helps individuals and groups to disengage from the concrete and the quotidian, but always feeds back into everyday 178
practices. To think is to act, and to act with dignity (Stiegler, 2010: 170). Passage to the noetic is techno-logical and psychic, itself a long circuit, the very movement of desire: ‘neither equilibrium nor disequilibrium but movement of individuation moved by consistencies’ (2014b: 92). Whether we choose to call this movement desire, singularity or individuation is beside the point. The important thing is that is should always passes through the field of the (Lacanian) Other and (Heideggerian) care. Care (sorge and besorgen)19 in this context is attentiveness to the self and the other. It is not mutual symbiotic existence but rather a permanent inquiry often tinted with wounding, vulnerability and anxiety. Only the affected individual can live an attended life. Attended life and learning to live pharmacologically means being affected, wounded (Stiegler, 2013a: 41), pursuing we and infinite consistence instead of the sovereign ego.
The myth of the (revenant) father and Oedipus’s Epimethean limp Technicity has a special status in Stiegler’s work. Critiquing both Freud and Heidegger for not paying sufficient attention to the role of technics, he argues that humans evolve with rather than invent technical objects, and are essentially prosthetic. The definition of prosthesis is broad and includes both concrete objects, tools and implements, as well as abstract-noetic ones, like memory and heritage and anything that is passed down the generations epiphylogenetically, not through the DNA. Like Lacan, Stiegler considers Freud’s myth of the totemic father as arising from Freud’s adherence to the concept of guilt, adding to that the repression of technics (1996: 61). The real issues behind the murder of the father, argues Stiegler, is that acting out (the killing) is both transgressive-elevating (as it results in the installation of the superego) and technical. Stiegler finds it odd that Freud could surmise that the murder of the farther was made 179
possible by that the invention of ‘a new weapon’ becoming available to the sons, assuming a prior unarmed humanity, instead of a humanity which was not yet parricidal. The emergence of humanity and the weapon are two moments which cannot be separated, he argues. The knife ‘composes these two dimensions as a process, and turns this knot into a weapon […] which opens the age of the superego by imposing the authority of the father in the form of his ghost’. This opening, the thrust of the knife, is also the passage of desire itself (1996: 58).
In a passage reminiscent of Lacan’s account of death in Beyond the Oedipus Complex (2007), Stigler gives a profound account of that which does not exist, namely ‘my’ death – the Real in Lacan. The myth of the dead father, then, is but the representation of the non-experience of death and the return of the (dead-superegoic) father in its haunto-logical echo: ‘Revenance is what already haunts me, me who did not arrive until after this murder, very long after this dreadfully old murder that is, according to the fable told in Totem and Taboo, the very origin of desire: all mortals, that is, all those who desire, are its heirs, and as such they inherit a feeling of guilt’ (2014b: 62). And more importantly: And this already haunts me, and firstly as the instant of my death, that I hallucinate from a young age, as the very experience of time […] And this murder is also, again, the fantasy par excellence of what does not exist insofar as it is above all a matter of the relation to my death, through which alone I can conceive, fear or want the death of the other: for the instant of my death is the only event that counts, the only event that truly happens, but also the only event that never truly happens, since the moment it arrives, I disappear. The instant of my death is therefore, in some way, what, ‘always pending’ [toujour en instance], and not just in potential, par excellence consists (2014b: 62-63; emphasis in the original).
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The primitive weapon, argues Stiegler, the cut in the fabric of memory and time, distances for ever the absolute past which becomes absolute and past in this very movement. This marks the default of origin. Memory and lack of origin pertain to the paternal figure: ‘The de-fault of origin is the absence of the father (in the community of the de-fault which is the de-fault of the community, the all-out war waged by the sons against each other and against the fathers, what is in fact the whole question of heritage) qua the father of all, the father prior to the separation (which only takes place retrospectively). The de-fault is thus the very inaccessibility and incommensurability that turns this de-fault into a past which it is radically impossible to memorize, which constitutes the past (relative, human) by being absolutely lacking (the absolute past is immemorial). It is absolute retentional finitude’ (1996: 102). Extending the theme of the default to the myth of Prometheus he adds: ‘I wish to argue that the son’s murder of the father and the theft of fire – of the power of Zeus – are equivalent (1996: 100). They both mark the rift of immemorial time. And Freud cannot see Prometheus’ punishment as black bile, melancholia, the expression of existential ambiguity of the mortal condition itself. This default is culturally transmitted as a terrifyingly ancient feeling of responsibility. It is the very transmission of this memory (102) that plays the most important role, argues Stiegler. On these premises, he interprets the Sophoclean Oedipus Rex in conjunction with Oedipus Coloneus and Oedipus looking back at his clever reply to the Sphinx. Two arguments are developed in tandem. The first concerns the operation of memory in relation to the past. Memory is finite. Knowledge (connaissance) is recognition (reconnaissance) in the form of recollection; but to recognise requires to forget the old and give place to the new. Memory is retentional finitude (limited and finite) from which only exceptional individuals, like Socrates, can escape and survive in collective heritage20. Their death does not erase them from the memory of city. In that sense, immortality is not living 181
after death; it is living-on in the memory of others (1996: 94). The de-fault of origin (not being able to remember the past directly) is intimately related to immortality as the prostheticity of the soul, the forgetting and the supplements (practices of dissemination of memory) that counter retentional finitude (loss of collective memory). The second part of the argument looks to the future via technicity and prosthesis. Here Stigler comments on the Sphinx’s question and the fact that Oedipus grasps the scope of the questions when he is old (in Oedipus Coloneus) and walks with a stick. The argument chimes with Lacan’s comment about the superficiality of Oedipus’s reply to the Sphinx. Humans invent, imagine, put into effect what they image, and create pros-theses, artifices and expedients. Pros-thesis is what is placed in front, and what is outside, which constitutes the very beginning of what finds itself outside. Mortals cannot exempt themselves from this process, in the same way that Oedipus could not immediately appreciate the scope of destiny and came to understand it only much later. Wisdom always comes after the event (aprés coup), belatedly, and is Epimethean and prosthetic. In Oedipus Coloneus, after a whole life of experience, the stick with which Oedipus walks acquires a different content than in his youthful reply to the Sphinx. At such a moment, ‘these bipeds without feathers will come to understand, at last, what the riddle of the Sphinx means’ (1996: 96). Based on belated recognition and forgetting, Stiegler turns Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth on its head. Freud’s treatment of the myth, he argues, calls for a revision: a moment of prosthesis and learning as epiphylogenetic sedimentation in order to account for the latency period between childhood and adolescence. Is this not a time of forgetting comparable to the Epimethean forgetting? What he calls the Epimethean limp of Oedipus (1996: 106) is a gesture which begun with forgetting, and the heritage question which continues to come back as impossible for us to learn. Freud fails to recognise that this is a
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matter of content, not only of drives (1996: 108). Thus, it is the transmission of the Oedipus myth as a literary-cultural artefact that is more important than its biological validity. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010) Stiegler turns to the figure of the father. The (true) heritage of the father, he argues, can only operate as a Thing, an object of unlimited collective individuation, for which the lay word is the universal. It is not a miraculous or supernatural object but one which needs to be approached as a mystery which requires an initiatory, esoteric discourse in order to be deciphered (2010: 169). The 20th century tried to address it via phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Today the father is emerging as the opposite of the killed patriarch, the idealized sovereign whose authority is reinforced by the degradation of the noetic, the universal and the ontological into the particular and the ontic. This father poses as ‘God’ after the death of God and a source of absolute authority. This cultural affliction needs to be taken into account. The challenge lies in the fact that humans always act like Oedipus, in advance of knowledge – the latter always following aprés coup, in Epimethean form. Acting, like the pharmacological primordial killing of the father, is both a leap and a profanation, a passage to the noetic and to plane of consistencies achieved through technics. The leap is profane and tragic, that is, dedicated to the finite nature of human beings, to knowledge and being-intermittently; to Promethean melancholy (a Promethean characteristic). This is the tragic condition and the true legacy we have to grapple with: our Promethean-Oedipal legacy.
Percy Jackson: The abyss of the Other’s desire Percy is a troubled child. He has dyslexia and ADHD and leads a ‘miserable life’ in Yancey Academy, a school for ‘mental case kids’ (2) and ‘loser freaks’ (8). Percy is trouble-prone and feels he always gets blamed for everything. His best friend is Grover, who is ‘scrawny’ 183
and uses crutches. Adventure starts during a museum visit organised by Mr Brunner, the wheelchair-bound history teacher. In an empty museum hall, one of the teachers, Mrs Dodds, transforms into a mythical creature, a Fury from Hades, and attacks Percy, demanding that he hands back something which he is sure he does not possess. Percy, who is used to the occasional weird experience (16) because his brain often misinterprets things (11) and is sometimes ‘asleep’ (11), thinks he has finally lost his mind completely, but Mr Brunner and Grover, whose true identity is yet to be revealed, explain that this is not the case. They inform him that he is a demi-god. None of this makes sense to a child who is a ‘nobody from a family of nobodies’ (22). Things move fast, as Percy is in danger. Grover escorts him back home in New York, and his mother Sally immediately takes him away to a beach house they used to spend their summer vacations when he was little. Grover returns in the middle of the night, instructing Sally to drive them to Camp Half-blood. Percy finds himself ‘anticipating, wanting us to arrive’ (47). On the way they are attacked by another mythical beast, a Minotaur, who snatches Sally, while Percy and Grover just make it to the camp. This is how Percy is introduced into the domain of the father, a magically protected camp for demi-god children. Consciousness, a specific from of synaptic organisation affected by ADHD, makes him the ideal neoliberal subject: disaffected and in low spirits, un-aware of the past, uncertain about his cognitive capacities and apprehensive yet desirous of the unknown.
Otium for heroes By the standards of adolescent fiction Percy is a typical hero, an ordinary boy taking on a huge danger (O’Keefe 2003). In Camp Half-blood Mr Brunner, who now reveals himself to be a centaur called Chiron, and Grover, who is now a satyr and Percy’s personal protector, facilitate his induction. Dyslexia and ADHD are explained as battle reflexes and having seen 184
too much, rather than too little. Being ‘nobody’, Percy’s life-long complain, is replaced by ‘you are a half-blood’ (88) and eventually by being ‘a demi-god’ (94) and a ‘hero’. The camp is run like a military establishment, with a strict hierarchical organisation, complete with a council of elders and a daily military routine. It is a panorama of healthy and fit young Americans, boys and girls, who, like Captain America, X-Men and other popular fiction heroes, are not in the service of the State but of an independent organisation with greater flexibility and a wider mandate (Dittmer, 2005). The campers live in houses according to their immortal parents, all Ares’ children together, all Hermes’ children together, and so on. There is no ethos of philia (friendship) between the houses or among the residents, only competition. A certain amount of bullying is tolerated as character building. Clarissa, for instance, one of the most belligerent daughters of Ares, takes a disliking to Percy and threatens to pulp him or shove his head down the toilet bowl. At the same time, Luke, who is nice to Percy and proves his good will by stealing some toiletries for him (101), tries to convince the newcomer that these are mostly good people who care for one another (101). One thing is certain: all children languish in the camp, neglected by their divine parents, waiting for a sign of recognition that often never comes and a quest that is systematically denied. They want to believe in their parents but as Luke says, ‘once you start believing in them, it does not get easier’ (100). Thus, on the horizontal level of ‘friends’ or ‘siblings’, it is common lack rather than aspiration that becomes the affective glue of the community. Percy’s induction into the mythical world is overseen by Mr D (Dionysus) who explains that the Greek gods are pretty much alive (67). Science is dismissed for its lack of perspective:
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What will people think of your science two thousand years from now? If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth? Someday people would call you a myth, just created to explain how little boys can get over losing their mothers (68-69). Chiron explains that although the Olympians’ home used to be Mount Olympus in Greece, their place of residence has moved to the States ‘with the heart of the West’ (72): Come now, Percy. What you call “Western civilisation”. Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilisation were obliterated (72). And shortly afterwards: Like it or not – and believe me, plenty of people were not very fond of Rome, either – America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West. And so Olympus is here. And we are here (73). Annabeth and Grover supplement Percy’s education with further details; that monsters, for instance, don’t have hearts; that ‘immortal means immortal’ (68); that ‘your father is not dead’ (87); and that one should always be respectful to the Olympians because they have a tendency to incinerate the non-believers (69). Neoliberal ideology, argues Brown, is declarative, a truth ‘from the gut’ (2006: 707) that draws on the indisputable evidence of the senses – ironically of a child that always misinterprets reality because of AHDT. As scientific objectivity is being dismissed, the young individual is urged to put himself up as the obvious ‘living proof’ of the mythical world. The question ‘Are you a myth?’ does not simply invite the young man to accept the 186
possibilities of a magical universe but to subscribe to the incontrovertible and self-evident logic of authority and tradition. Compared to classic children’s fiction, several dislocations can be observed. In children’s fiction moral development was traditionally attained gradually, via the entire trajectory of the adventure, culminating in the ability to negotiate conflicting models and restoring cognitive equilibrium (Kohlberg cited in Grimes, 2002: 195, 204). In Percy Jackson, as we just saw, there is a shift from moral development to acceptance of absolute moral authority, the choice being made blindly at the very beginning. Percy’s induction to tradition, the past he cannot be personally remembered, is installed by the tertiary devices of myths and dogmas which do not only impart fanciful alternatives to reality but dictate the ‘correct’ (orthos logos) attitude to ideology and power. Neoliberal hypomnesic practices pivot on ignorance rather than knowledge: political ‘myths’ are named ‘tradition’. In neoconservative doctrine the authority of tradition is unambiguous and guides moral judgement and education. Neither the educator nor the educated needs to know why (Furrow 2009). Moreover, the technologies of the self that usually underpin democratic education, the study (melete) and the cultivation of the ability to question and interpret, are curbed: parrhesia (fearless speech) is discouraged; silence and obedience are encouraged; fear of punishment reinforces the lessons, and the individuality of the campers is diminished as they are transformed into warriors caring only for victory and survival. The camp is not a polis run by the principles of shame (aidos) and justice (dike) but a military group interacting on strife and aggressive competition. The pedagogues – especially Mr D as a representative of the older generation and the divine order – are bored cynics who do not fail to remind the campers that they consider this job an affliction. Mathesis (learning) as a long process of adoption of the Law, is replaced by a quick and forceful process of adaptation. If American children’s fiction was once built around prioritising the children’s feelings and the freedom to 187
see life as one chooses (Griswold, 1993: 234), today it leans towards survival. In the militarized milieu of the camp, which echoes post 9/11 concerns of security and patriotism, little room is left for the Delphic ‘know thyself’. The ‘battle for intelligence’ is being replaced by ‘the intelligence for battle’. On the road: re-configuring the libidinal economy A few days after Percy’s arrival, news reach the camp of the theft of Zeus’ thunderbolt. Percy is told that Zeus suspects him of being the thief, having committed the crime on behalf of his father Poseidon and their other brother, Hades, lord of the Underworld. Percy is tasked to retrieve the bolt, despite protesting his innocence. He demands to know more about the task but is told to be content that this is a sign of recognition from his father. Every mortal asks ‘Who am I?’, Chiron admonishes, and this is a question that we all wanted answered (73). However, in lieu of a concrete genealogical answers, one has to go ahead with one’s task: ‘All we can do, child, is follow our destiny’ (156). The typical heroic quest provides an answer to the question of destiny through the process of libidinal development. For Campbell, the quest takes the young man into ‘the crooked lanes of one’s spiritual labyrinth’ (1993: 101), in a landscape full of symbolic figures. Dangers and ordeals allow the hero to dissolve and transcend the infantile images of his personal past. Each ordeal deepens the challenge of the previous stage by putting the (infantile) ego to death (Campbell 1993: 109) on the way to achieving an autonomous self. Percy’s libidinal development, which starts at the camp with the induction to the (cultural) myths of time immemorial, continues with the immersion into the ways of the Olympian Father. But first he is told the myths of Kronos and Prometheus combined; how the ancient regime of Kronos was a time of savagery, and how the good Titan Prometheus brought fire to mankind. But ‘even then Prometheus was branded a radical thinker’, adds Mr Brunner (156). Throughout
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the journey to the West, Percy will see how mortals wasted their gifts, degrading their environment, polluting the rivers, clogging the planet with waste and being cruel to animals. In the Lotus Casino of Las Vegas, for instance, Percy will come across a lost generation of young men and women who are stuck in the year 1977, living in amnesic timeless pleasure. The new hero needs a new conservative ethos. The relationship with the father is a mixture of doubt and ecstatic communion with divinity. In world mythology doubt is usually feminine and an integral part of the hero’s ordeal concerns facing a female adversary, usually a goddess who is either a temptress or a source of knowledge (Campbell, 1993: 161). In Percy Jackson female adversaries are a source of doubt. At different points of his journey Percy is persecuted by Medusa, the Furies and the Chimera, all emissaries of Kronos. Medusa asks Percy: ‘Do you really want to help the gods; do you know what awaits you… do not be a pawn of the Olympians’ (180, emphasis added). The young hero must resist doubt, Medusa’s soft voice and the female monster’s snarling questions. Percy will kill Medusa, just like his mythical namesake, but this will not assuage his doubt. Unable to make sense of his mandate and overwhelmed by ADHD and emotion, Percy will try to elicit a response from Poseidon by posting the slain Medusa’s head to Olympus. ‘I am impertinent’ (187), comments Percy, and ‘I had a major talent for ticking off gods’ (186). The word ‘pawn’, which is central to doubt, recurs in the novel and is one of the most poignant signifiers. ‘Pawn’ connotes lack of free will. In terms of the son’s libidinal economy it suggests being attached to the Father’s desire and spells psychic servitude. ‘Pawn’ further highlights the paradox of an ideology that demands both free individuality and compliance with conservative authority. The problematic relationship to the father is shown in its cruellest form when Percy and his friends are lured by Ares (who is in the service of Kronos) into a disused amusement part and a ride called the Tunnel of Love, a room of mirrors and no 189
apparent exist. Percy and his friends realise that their lives are in danger and frantically try to escape. An impulsive decision by Percy saves them. As they break out of the room, Percy notices that there are cameras everywhere, transmitting live images to Olympus for the entertainment of the Gods. He looks at the cameras and yells: ‘Show’s over!’ (241), adding: ‘The Gods kept toying with me. At least Hephaestus had the decency to be honest about it – he’d put cameras and advertised me as entertainment. But even when the cameras weren’t rolling, I had a feeling my quest was been watched. I was a source of amusement for the gods’ (247). Amusement (a-muse-ment), notes Stiegler, is the gift of the Muses, mutual enchantment of the adult and the child and care expressed though laughter in the transitional space of play (2010: 14). Amusement in Percy Jackson is lack of care and profound indifference. Being exposed to the gaze of the Gods normally chimes with the religious ‘God is watching over us’ (Furrow 2009: 52). However, being exposed to the gaze of the indifferent Olympians, for whom the difference between life and death appears superfluous, spells masochistic dedication of oneself to the enjoyment of the father(s). Such a self-effacing gesture, which is neither heroic nor does it afford recognition of one’s individuality, makes one a superfluous object, an a-bject. The reversal of doubt and a sense of communion with the father (Poseidon) are built gradually and constitute a properly mystical experience. We can characterise this experience as a vertical relationship with the Father (see Stein, 2010)21. In St Louis, on the Gateway Arch, Percy is attacked by a Chimera (207). He jumps into the polluted river to save himself and retrieve his sword. Fearing he is about to meet his death he prays: ‘Father help me’ (211), and miraculously survives the fall intact:
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A whiteout of bubbles. I sank through the murk, sure that I was about to end up embedded in fifty metres of mud and lost forever… I was falling slowly, bubbles trickling up through my fingers. I settled on the river bottom soundlessly… I had not been flattened into a pancake…. I wasn’t wet...I was underwater and breathing normally…I imagined a woman’s voice: Percy what do you say? Thank you…Father (213). Percy adds: ‘Why had Poseidon saved me? The more I thought about it, the more ashamed I felt’ (213). At other times, an emissary of the father – Poseidon will not appear in person until the very end – conveys the latter’s command. A mermaid instructs Percy to go to Santa Monica Beach. ‘It’s your father’s will’ (214), she says. Feeling honoured by the mandate, Percy is left speechless – ‘the words jammed up my throat’ (214). After the mermaid departs, Percy thinks ‘Thank you, Father’ (215). Immersed in the water in the Pacific, Percy marvels at Poseidon’s power: ‘How could there be a god who could control all that? What did my science teacher used to say - two-thirds of the earth’s surface was covered in water? How could I be the son of someone that powerful? (270). The hero’s second birth from water is a typical motif in the hero myth and a further proof of his exceptional nature (Rank, 2015). But something quite different occurs in the present story. The vertical communion with the father is an ecstatic solitary self-surrender, joyous and sweet (Stein, 2010: 24). The son comes to terms with the father’s aloofness and greatness. The emotional frustration at being a plaything of the gods, the lack of active care and the submission to an indifferent father, engender a young fanatic willing to do anything ‘in the name of the father’. Stein shows how religious fanaticism pivots on the figure of a strong God, whom she rightly calls ‘mythopoetic’ (2010: 86) because of his regressive qualities. The induction to this God is slow: the son learns to adhere to a punitive, indifferent and brutal
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figure gradually. When love is thwarted, it turns into masochistic submission (2010: 38). Devotion creates a mesmerised, mechanised mind (31) reinforced through ‘moments of total alienation from the outer world’ (2010: 28) and experiences of ‘disjointed mystical, religious feelings and vague awe’ (Kohut cited in Stein, 2010: 31), pretty much like Percy’s immersion in the water. The subject, Stein continues, ‘adheres to the idealised persecutory inner object, while the world, having become insignificant and contemptible, vanishes in derealisation’ (31). At the same time, horizontal relations with siblings and peers which encourage plurality and difference – Stein actually uses the term ‘democratic horizontal sensibility’ (2010: 86) – are made secondary. Verticality reinforces binary thinking and oppression which, in turn, engender a mystical homoeros, a state of merger and abjection with a self-abnegating disposition (2010: 41). This surrender to Father-God, I would argue, is cultivated throughout Percy’s journey and becomes a major technology of the formation of the young mind. I would not go as far as saying that the book actively encourages religious fanaticism. I would point out, however, that it appears to dream the unwavering, inflexible dedication to the figure of authority, the exact opposite of the democratic ideals. Dreams do not obey the reality principle. Stiegler argues that care, akin to sublimation, is the process in which the object of desire (initially the mother of the farther in the Oedipus complex) turns it into an unconditional object which produces durability (in Arendt’s sense), social attachment and philia (friendship) (2010: 169). Regarding the relationship between the parent and the child as exemplary of this process, Stiegler characterizes parental care as the project which contains and transforms this object into ‘an object of unlimited collective individuation – which in the lay world is called the universal’ (2010: 169, emphasis in the original). Stiegler uses the word ‘mystagogic’ for this process. In Percy Jackson this mystagogy leads not away from the father but towards him as object of desire. Brutal psycho-power is exercised upon the 192
mesmerised mind via the manipulation of consciousness (impaired by AHDT). This are not limited to teenage literature. Enthrallment undermines rationality. Reflexes, vigilance and the instinct of survival (2010: 78) – all capitalist priorities according to Stiegler – are encouraged over critical learning. Intuitive knowledge, here reinforced every time Percy is ‘in touch’ with water and his combat skills, takes priority of judgement (2010: 110). We cannot fail to notice that the new form of thinking does not focus on democratic values but on suppressing heterogeneity, multiplicity and difference in favour of subordination to a superior, immutable will. Immortality is exchanged for immutability (the preservations of the Olympian regime). Magical thinking as projection of the evil outwards, ensures the delay of one’s own death by slaying monsters. Identification with the paternal ideal gives its place to deindividuation, as the young man is gradually immersed in the glory of the father. In getting accustomed to the idea of death gradually, in a smooth passage, death ceased to be death and the passage is fearless (Stein, 2010: 29). Percy the son immerses himself in the father slowly, in the water, the fearlessness of death, the ‘new’ womb of the Father. The rebirth of the hero from the Father’s womb, the new libidinal arrangement, is now complete.
Technics and objects The penultimate stage of the quest takes Percy to the Underworld, where he comes very close to the object of his nightmares: Kronos. If the (good) farther communicates with the son in ecstatic isolation, the (evil) grandfather appears in dreams of darkness and speaks in disembodied voices. The Underworld is eerie and Percy, once again, finds himself muttering a prayer to his father (290). Lord Hades looks like the composite image of several ‘evil’ leaders, Adolph Hitler and Napoleon, and ‘the terrorist leaders who direct suicide bombers’ (309). But ‘true evil’ (Kronos) does not have a face and lies in the abyss, in Tartarus. Percy 193
hears a deep whisper, an evil voice coming from deep. It possesses powerful magic and makes him feel cold. A force like gravity tries to pull Grover and Percy into the abyss. The thing in the abyss howls with frustration as they escape (306). In the meeting with Hades Percy realises that the lord of the Underworld is not such a bad guy after all, and definitely not the thief. But suddenly the thunderbolt is discovered among Percy’s possession. Hades confirms that Percy could not have been capable of such strong magic, and Percy realises that there must be someone else who is trying to turn the gods against one another. He suspects that it is Ares, the god of war. When the latter admits that had no choice but to help Kronos, Percy knows what he has to do: reach Olympus, return the thunderbolt, and warn the Gods that Kronos is stirring. Localizing and spatializing evil tames and stabilizes it. Kaplan (2003) shows how the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came to represent the antipode of homeland and Ground Zero in American imagination. We could borrow this argument to propose that Tartarus, the antipode to Olympus, pins evil (Kronos) to a specific locus and binds anxiety to an imaginary place. An interesting phenomenon takes place during Percy’s encounter with Kronos. It concerns the act of seeing for oneself, the literal and metaphorical witnessing which subtends the ‘obviousness’ of the Olympian cause is cultivated throughout the novel as the self-evident logic of neoliberalism. At the crucial moment of encountering Kronos Percy does not actually see what lies in the dark pit of Tartarus. Thus, the originary splitting between good and evil is predicated on blindness. It is this crucial difference between seeing and not seeing, that is ultimately transformed into blind faith. Consequently, neither one’s evidenced of the senses nor separation of seeing from not seeing are fundamentally relevant to the logic of Olympian power. The transgression of the simple laws of rationality constitutes exemplary dreamwork.
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The ascent to Olympus is dream-like, a daze (338). Percy meets the Olympians who present themselves to him in giant human form. Zeus expresses his gratitude. Percy turns his gaze to Poseidon with awe: ‘His hair was black like mine. His face had the same brooding look that had always branded me a rebel… I dared not look up. My heart was racing. I could feel the energy emanating from the two gods’ (340). Looking at Poseidon again: ‘I was not sure what I saw in his face. There was no clear sing of love or approval. Nothing to encourage me. It was like looking at the ocean: some days, you could tell what mood it was in (341). Poseidon recognises Percy as his son, congratulates him for what he did, promises to free Sally from Hades, but has no tender words for his offspring. Instead of that, he calls Percy his ‘wrongdoing’ (341). Percy comments: ‘a lump welled up my throat’ (341). Although Percy craves Poseidon’s love he muses: ‘I was glad Poseidon was so distant. If he’d tried to apologise, or told me he loved me, or even smiled, it would’ve felt fake. Like a human dad making some lame excuse for not being around’ (342). Then shortly before Percy departs, Poseidon adds: ‘Still, I am sorry you were born, child. I have brought you a hero’s fate, and a hero’s fate is never happy. It is never anything but tragic’ (346). Percy tries not to feel hurt and mutters ‘I don’t mind, Father’ (346). What does it take for the child to realise that without the thunderbolt the Father is nothing? What does it take to grasp that repressive authority pivots on preventing access to self-evident knowledge (in essence, stupidity) through fear and the threat of violence? This typical totalitarian operation (the seduction of power as Baudrillard would say) is inflicted as a necessary measure under the state of emergency. The con-fusion (as opposed to composition)22 of the signifiers of ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’ lies at the heart of the son’s emotional manipulation, just like the confusion of seeing and not seeing: the Olympians need nothing – read everything – from their sons and daughters. The same applies to power:
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Kronos is weak and needs to the thunderbolt to rise from the abyss. The Olympians are mighty but also need the thunderbolt. Both need their offspring to act on their behalf. The archaic father, argues Stein, poses as both ‘the phallus for his son’ (2010: 52) and the one who ‘begets the son from the phallus’ (2010: 93). The father who reclaims the phallus, we could add in a more Stieglerian vein, disrupts the dissemination and inheritance as passage of meaning and the phallus (qua object) from one generation to the next. In the Lacanian Symbolic order, the signification of the phallus is the operation through which the subject loses the penis (castration complex) but gains access to the Law and a place in the network of Symbolic relations. In Percy Jackson the symbolic, noetic passage to sublimation is degraded into a particularized thing (object) and the passage is hardly attained. ‘A wrongdoing’ is hardly a signifier of symbolic emplacement. The son remains in limbo, deprived of continuity and heritage. In that sense, the thunderbolt is the obsolete technical object that used to be the phallus of historical continuation, which now divides the generations into a chronological dis-equilibrium. This object inflicts upon the child a sense of privation on the level of the Real (you are nothing) and a frustration (at the level of imaginary investment and love) for his own mortality and expendability; it does not connect one to infinity. In the end, Percy realizes that he is no better than a transient object (pawn) in an indifferent (immortal) game. The adventure ends with Percy and his friends returning to Camp Half-blood, to a warm welcome. The real thief and helper of Kronos, Luke, must now be revealed. Luke, as we said, is the disenchanted, dejected child that has turned against the Olympian fathers. He is a ‘nihilist’ who speaks the language of doubt like Medusa and the other monsters. He tells Percy: ‘Didn’t you realise how useless all is? All the heroics – being pawns of the god. They should’ve been overthrown thousands of years ago, but they’ve hung on, thanks to us’. (365). This son owes no allegiance to the Olympians: ‘Their precious “western civilisation” is a 196
disease, Percy. It is killing the world. The only way to stop it is to burn it to the ground, start over with something more honest’ (365). Percy reminds him: ‘you are talking of our parents’ (365). Luke admits helping Kronos rise out of Tartarus. Percy shouts: ‘He [Kronus] is brainwashing you’ (366). Luke replies: ‘All gods know how to do is replay their past... I wanted to pull Olympus down stone by stone. Olympians are so arrogant… There is a new golden age coming’ (367).
Towards a new libidinal and political arrangement For a long time, the Ur-story of American children’s literature was that children must overthrow their parents and become independent. Of central interest was the advocacy of positive thinking and the child’s own wish for independence and responsibility. A staple element of the plot was the emotional upheaval, especially when encountering a villain who was not a parent but a parental figure, a grandfather, aunt, uncle or persecutor outside the family (Griswold, 1993: 12). A range of political and ideological elements were often reflected. Several classic children’s books were imbued with the effort to define the American soul. In Huckleberry Finn and Tarzan, for instance, we come across the theme of natural as opposed to inherited nobility, at a time when America was attempting to revise the view of itself, through a new myth that echoed republicanism as well as the keenness of a country to define itself as parentless, Adamic and a-historical (Lerer, 2009: 101). In Huckleberry Finn the story of the son’s emancipation was played against the background of an absent father, and the reader was left wondering if that father would ever return. Post 9/11, and in the global market of children’s best sellers which often play only lip service to the values of independent selfhood (Zipes, 2001; Nicholajeva, 2008), the waiting is over, the father has returned.
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Individuality in late capitalism is not bio-political but psycho-political, shaped through new regimes of attention and retention that are both cultural and libidinal. Of course Percy Jackson is just one example of teenage fiction and does not represent the entire body of the genre. However, it represents a certain trend and we could use it as a starting point for some legitimate reflections. The first one is that the ideal contemporary teenage subject is an amnesic individual, pliable and receptive of reinterpretations of memory and politics. Such reinterpretations take place at the cusp of consciousness and forgetting, via new process of learning (otium), which emphasises compliance and blind faith. The manipulation of consciousness and time affects at least two aspects of time: the historical time of culture and politics, which gives way for timeless mythical greatness, and the personal-libidinal rhythmic time of a child’s access to the Father, here represented via the radical re-intervention of the ‘breathing’ patterns of the child. The resulting fiction is fit for a society permanently at war or in a state of emergency. It does not uphold an ideal democratic polis but a militarized ethos with a preference for clandestine elites. In this context, knowledge (connaissance) is not important. If the democratic city was founded on obedience to the laws as well as respect for the Law (abstract, noetic), the new regime encourages devotion to mythical-ossified dogma. The active and ongoing process of interpretation (hermeneia), which is central to the democratic process, is replaced by the suppression of aporia. This suppression curtails individuation as an active co-development of the individual with the polis, encouraging disindividuation as an assimilation of the one to the group and the cultivation of a mesmerized mind. It takes an optimist like Stiegler to see the pharmacological potential of such regression-stupidity. On the libidinal level, the choice between ‘brainwashed’ and ‘pawn’ connotes choosing between Olympian sovereignty and the dark forces of evil. But let us be clear: the binary choice between this father (Olympian) and that father (Kronos) is ideological. The 198
psychoanalytic choice is between the desire of father and overcoming it. For Stein, sacrificing everything to a sovereign God is predicated on a devotion which is essentially fundamentalist (Stein 2010: 45). Stein observes that when the archaic fantasy of the persecuting parental figure cannot be disintegrated, the omnipotent father becomes split and goes on living internally, ‘demanding constant proofs of its grandeur by means of the son’s servitude’ (2010: 84). This further implies that the Oedipal tensions are not resolved. The Father splits into Kronos, who devours his children, and a Laios figure (Stein’s own expression), a father who sends soldiers to war (Stein, 2010: 100). From a Stieglerian perspective, the persistent desire for a superegoic God effects the fall of the universal-noetic into an absolute particular, a God who manifests Himself through absolute, unconditional demands (2010: 50). For Stiegler such a psychic structure is para-suicidal, a symptom of our time, and effectively the result of disaffection (2013c: 61). On the parent-child level, the lack of parental care annihilates the mutual dependence on one another as love and philia. Thus we could say that in Percy Jackson the real horror is not Kronos the revenant, but the Olympians Zeus or Poseidon who, in their divine indifference, do not consist as symbolic forces but exists as Real and randomly manifesting powers. Thus, Poseidon can return ‘out of the blue’, literally from the Real. On the level of retentions, the lack of memory and the deficiency of attention (ADHD) could be read as broad symbolic symptoms of an era than cannot think itself critically-reflexively or envisage a way forward. The lack of perspective inherent in the state of emergency – always reacting, always under threat – reproduces and exacerbates the hiatuses or logic and reason, a dream-like and mythical ideological formulation in which capitalism figures as a story foretold with nothing new to add (Fisher, 2009: 6). Myth, then, becomes synonymous with a permanent ‘collective’ unconscious upon which the lack of understanding (faulty perception
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in Percy’s case) is grafted as defense against aporia. The desire for interpretation (hermemeia) is condemned as impertinence. On the generational level, the rejection of aporia and hermeneia chime with a loss continuation and communication between generations as that which does not exist and for that reason all the more consists (Stiegler, 2013a: 125). The new myth is one of procreational and affective dissonance. Thus, the new situation requires a holistic adoption of the myth as an explanatory pattern rather than the development of genuine relations between parent and child, savoir faire and adaptation. The young simply have to bear their fate as tragedy. This is presented as both one’s choice and one’s own responsibility. The child does not see the he or she is scapegoated23, just like the disaffected Luke turned pharmakos. On the level of politics, the separation of good and evil is put forward as a tangible origin. Lacan, Foucault and others draw attention to the equi-primordiality of good and evil (Shepherdson, 1995) and how their splitting creates the illusion of a solid ‘beginning’ of time, an origin (Žižek, 1997: 11). Moreover, the separation of good and evil stands for the disavowal of the link between the two, further establishing a just cause and an original condition. Here, (evil) Kronos must be defeated again for the (good) Olympian order to continue to exist. This is now deployed as the ‘primordial’ and self-evident articulation of eternal order. Such a moment usually capitalises on the separation between the justified and lawful use of violence by the State and its opposite, the latter represented by Luke and Kronos. For Agamben (2014) the awareness of the separation of the lawful from the lawless use of violence lies at the heart of western democracy, founded on the very dialectic of nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence. As long as these elements remain separated their dialectic works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal indetermination and to a fusion into a unique power with two sides, when the state of emergency becomes the rule, the political system transforms into an apparatus of death. This is the problem we encounter in 200
Percy Jackson: the increasing convergence of nomos and anomy in a state of emergency, and the dramatic similarity between the opposite sides. This confusion gives rise to a desire for clarity (aporia) which does not take the direction of an interpretation (hermeneia) but of the illusory and mythic reinforcement of the figure of power, namely, the Father. The idealisation of the sovereign, then, attempts to subject the super-ego (abstract, noetic) to the service of the id, which does away with compassion, human dignity and the fetters of individual ethical responsibility, turning one into an actor on God’s behalf (see Stein, 2010). Fanaticism, argues Stein, is rooted in the lack of care and abolishing one’s judgement in favour of an apocalyptic scenario of final judgement. The need to believe and transcend the ordinary reverts to a need for magic and a desire to rival Enlightenment rationality (Stein, 2010: 47) , reflected in Percy Jackson as the abolition of science in favour of myth24. Stein finds this regression consonant with the West’s inability to deal with evil, death and sacrifice. Poseidon tells Percy that his legacy is a tragic fate (346). But what is really tragic in this novel when catastrophe is, after all, survived? Why does the child remain so attached to the neglectful father? Because, as Stiegler would argue, ones wishes to believe and gain access to the anelpiston, the unexpected hope and fear of the future. In Percy Jackson the anelpiston is superseded by the father’s return ‘out of the blue’. Out of the blue does not spell faith in the future but abeyance and constant vigilance. This is a catastrophe of the personal: a constant fiction as opposed to fiction of constancy. It legitimizes symbolic misery and becoming disposable as an unavoidable and even desirable heroic status. Disposability spells disindividuation and the opposite of durability (Stiegler, 2013a: 63). But if I can no longer love myself or in/the other, am I not deprived of my singularity? If I cannot see the instance of my death but as suspended death, am I not deprived of my singularity? Catharsis, I would suggest, which occurs at the end the tragic play, is the equivalent of the re-opening of the long circuits of desire. No such scope in Percy Jackson. Only dis-individuation and stupidity. 201
But, as Luke notes, those who are not duped do not enjoy a better fate in control societies: structural cynicism as way of surviving dis-individuation does not foster noetic attachment to a father, nor trust nor hope for the future. It is a non-sense choice. Collective catastrophe follows a similar pattern when aporia, in the democratic sense of examining and interpreting the Law, wanes. A culture that cannot interpret or transgress, that is, break away from its own norms, is condemned to reproducing ghosts of guilt, avatars of perversion and blind faith. In that context, (always) resurrecting Kronos and binding seduction to blindness afford pseudo-knowledge and deceptive alternatives to hermeneia. The myth of the eternal return of evil lends itself to capitalism-neoliberalism as ‘durable fiction’. Capitalism mutates. The obsolete ideal of ‘opportunities for all’ transforms into ‘a dream of the few’, to which one would hope to belong. This capitalism for the few meets the erosion of the polis through the new processes of grammatisation and learning (mathesis). A teenage fiction is ideal for articulating the new political message. In doing so it participates in the tertiarisation and a formation of collective memory, making the case for stupidity, perverse libidinal economy and herding.
1
In Greek mythology satyrs are half human half goat, usually having goat’s legs and hooves.
2
For a psychoanalytic reading of the book with emphasis the classic hero’s journey see Voela
(2016). 3
Although Stiegler relies heavily on Simondon for this very important concept he critiques
Simondon for failing to appreciate the role of technics in individuation. 4
For the relationship between Stiegler and Husserl see Bradley (2011) and Stigler’s own
“Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus” (1996). 5
For a lucid cinematic example of Stiegler’s use of Heidegger and Husserl and the role of
memory see Swiboda (2012). 202
6
For a critique of Foucault see Stiegler 2010.
7
Stiegler has borrowed this concept from Deleuze (see, for instance, 2011:80)
8
See Hansen for a discussion of Stiegler’s attitude to different aspects of technology (2012).
9
‘Proletarianised libidinal economy’ means that ‘the rate of profit no longer has to do with a
credit crisis, but is rather the consequence of a culture of corruption, where capital becomes mafia-esque and dominant, and Freud-esque consumption-drive is no longer to be understood in relation to the equation ‘production equals surplus over constant and variable cost of production’ (Hutnyk, 2012: 143). 10
‘To fall’ has the flavor of lapsing or deterioration and connotes decay, decline, wasting
away. Falling is to be understood in relation to the Dasein’s pursuit of authenticity. Heidegger insists that ‘fallen’ is not a term of moral disapproval and has nothing to do with the Christian fall from grace. The fall is an angst-driven ‘flight of Dasein from itself as authentic ability tobe-itself’ (Inwood, 1999: 66-8). 11
See Stiegler (1996) for a discussion of his use of Husserl’s work. See also 2014a: 52-52 for
the use of Husserl’s primary-secondary retentions in individuation, and 2013a 45-49 for Husserl’s break with Kant in his concept of the transcendental subject. 12
In Deleuze the plane of consistence or immanence is the plane of becoming, between
(chaotic) events and structured thinking, on which some kind of unity can be thought (Parr, 2011: 204-6). 13
Stiegler ties the question of desire to the question of knowledge, emphasising that the
noetic makes the difference between merely obeying-adapting and its opposite, adopting (see Ross, 2011: 148). 14
Stiegler uses the notion of desire to moderate the extreme historicity of the Marxist
economic accounts of capitalist economy (Ross, 2011: 147). He also tries to ‘correct’ the lack of historical specificity in Freud (e.g. the account of trauma) by bringing in Husserl’s notion 203
of secondary and tertiary retentions. The combination of the two strands results in the concept of adoption (Ross, 2001: 148). 15
Desire is understood both as a property of the individual and as identification with
community, affective relationships and instrumental practices coming under the horizon of technics (Ieven, 2012: 78). 16
The Lost Spirit of Capitalism (2014b) is Stiegler’s most extensive discussion-critique of
Marcuse’s work. 17
In Winnicott Stigler also finds the notion of the false self, which chimes with the
Heideggerian concept of the inauthentic self (2013a). 18
See Stiegler (1996) for a discussion of the object and his use of the subject-object in
relation to flux and ideal content (1996: 75). Stiegler speaks of an irreducible inadequation. This is not a relation of inadequation between subject and object but of inner perception to external facts that make up experience and intended ideality. Husserl shows that this does not concern an opposition of inner and outer realities but temporality. Stigler relates this difference to radical lack or default within the flux, a temporality which works together with the prostheticity of memory. 19
Sorge (care), besorgen (concern) and fürsorge (solicitude) are interrelated concepts. Sorge
or care is the anxiety or worry arising out of apprehensions concerning the future and refers to both external cause an inner state. Besorgen means: (a) 'to get or acquire; (b) 'to attend to, take care of something; (c) 'to be concerned about something. Fürsorge is 'actively caring for someone who needs help'. Sorge pertains to Dasein, Besorgen to its activities in the world, and Fürsorge to its being with others. All three modes have ‘concern’ as their kind of being. Care and concern are related to authenticity in the following manner: concern is guided not by knowledge or explicit rules, but by its informal know-how. Authenticity favours helping others to stand on their own two feet over reducing them to dependency. Moreover, care, 204
rather than the persistence and self-awareness of an I or ego, or the continuity and coherence of experiences, makes Dasein a unified, autonomous self (Inwood, 1999: 35-37). Stiegler does not elaborate how faithfully we should adhere to Heidegger’s definitions of sorge and rather uses care as a relational priority with emphasis on becoming. 20
Stiegler (1995) discusses the exceptional status of individuals like Socrates in the Platonic
dialogues, discussing the ‘return’ of Socrates as revenant and immortal to the collective memory of Athens-polis. 21
‘Vertical’ is juxtaposed to the ‘horizontal’ of the more egalitarian relations one establishes
with siblings. 22
Stiegler proposes that we should be focusing on how different terms compose in order to
‘transcend’ polarity and opposition. Here, the terms do not compose, they just lose their signifying difference. 23
Stiegler draws attention to the habit of scapegoated children of the neoliberal age (2013a:
119-123); children turned remainder of the capitalist rationality. 24
Stein quotes Dykema: ‘Patriarchal monotheism is consistent with and continuous with both
coercive fundamentalism and liberal religion of loving-kindness and compassion most of us would prefer’ (2010: 48).
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