Eros and its Discontents (Psychodrama)

 Here we are again, writing voluminously on a core philosophical problem as I find it by analyzing my musical career. In the previous post, the conflict re-emerged, seeming before to have been solved, between succession and integration.  Rather than one hypothesis we have been pursuing which reverses an early hypothesis like so--

I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong.

Wrongness is the learning of a soul who is always myself.

--stablishing a tension between the self/love instinct (integration) and the birth/death instinct (succession) which are encountered in this order, we gave re-birth to the second (first) hypothesis, the soul always learning how he is wrong, the counter-self. We were able to challenge our entire hypothesis which was that our work essentially reversed the flow to solve the problem a dialectic provided, which was the "comic" principle, as the union of self-rejective and self-selective instincts. Phase A leading into Phase B was the real problem, which was first addressed, in the ongoing movement of reversal, as a dialectic, an organic fusion between the two, a third place called Phase C which was both egoistic and anti-egoistic in the same way that a joke is a 'rejective sensation.' A fusion is inconceivable and thereby laughed away as an illusion, and so if this theory is correct which we have lately challenged, the joke came and went and rejected dialectic in favor of the reversal of energy-as-flow, as chronological-flow. Basically saying that two conflicting energies cannot be negotiated, they can only be re-sequenced to avoid their conflict. Succession must lead into integration, because a succession which leads from integration is disintegration. Z goes to "A to Z" whereas A comes from "A to Z." Yet the fusion being inconceivable-- the equalized objects within the joke-- may in effect be another form of the succession idea.

With succession and integration we have another form of the paradox I offered between unification and divergence. If we choose unification, we choose, we diverge from divergence. If we choose divergence, we choose our choice, so we unify with divergence, yes, but this is succession's self-integration, not succession's self-rejection in integration.  The point I made was that everything was individual, and it was through the identity and individuality that any unity could be known-- in the singular-ness of everything, everything is "one." In thinking further about my comedy work which followed Phase A and B and seemed to be Phase C for Comedy, a dialectic of surrealism and rock n' roll, of birth/death and self/love, of a rejective phenomena, an imperfect aesthetics, which is yet socially geared, a recovery of the pleasure principle, the narcissism of love, from the self-rejective spirituality of Phase B.  What shifted around in my head was that I thought more about what Pretentious Double Album, and Delusional Adam in the Garden of Irrelevance, the album's first disc, had to say, what it was meaning. "Adam's delusion is relevance," I said and the liner notes talked about drama, talked about all human dramas being unreal, theatrical constructions, identifications with the reality of self and world, and though PDA has a rather intense Residents-y sense of drama, "Comedy" sure seems like it presents to me "The Garden of Irrelevance," and the feelings I have for "comedy" have been principal it seems in directing me nostalgically towards Phase A, and the love and egoism it represented. Phase D in my career is marked by the arrival of "poetry," and a literary creative career, as an aesthetic principle, which appears to shift things backwards towards the Orphic world of Phase A, reappraised, to enact the full reversal, even as, based on recent experience, I came to question the rejection of comedy for poetry because I was meeting something in the world of poetry I wasn't liking and which was reasserting my comedy side. 

Before I resumed this blog, in April, where I had left things was a dialectical synthesis of Comedy and Poetry in Satirical Art. I was getting sick of the pretensions of poets, the drama queens, and I had been for a long time someone who was graduating "backwards" from Rilke to Ashbery, someone I was into when I was very young but didn't go deeply into. Writing more like Ashbery, eminent in poetry, actually pushed me out of poetry further, because he's such a surrealist and a comedian, and most poets really are in the Rilkean mentality, of philosophizing, confessing, describing, and not exploring the unconscious or language the way Ashbery does. My poetry, though dear to me, was not a hit with these sentimental buffoons, sub-Rilkeans, quickly ascertaining as I did that the mainstream view of modern poetry is just as stupid as I feared it would be, and even my brief alliance with it thanks to Rilke was a queasy one, since Rilke himself is so strange and intense, he only vaguely relates to that larger world of platitudes and aggrandizement in the dramatic emotions he instigates-- though might I add successfully. I think this fucked me a bit, since for me pushing into poetry took me deeper into the reasons I first started writing it, or what opened me to it, which was the surrealist, experimental potential primarily and only later became something more dramatically necessary to me. It was difficult to rediscover that surrealism in it, and then difficult to reassert that surrealism against the dramatic, egoistic voices that were rejecting it. 

This would be a major vote in the camp that my movement towards "drama" as of late is actually inauthentic, a regression which occurred at the hands of social pressure. And that "Delusional Adam in the Garden of Irrelevance" is "The delusional drama in the divine comedy," a successive principle which has continued as a primary force in my work without being recognized, or at least being lost at some certain point. So my analysis of comedy as dialectic, strangely, is a rephrasing of where we ended up in April, a way of rejecting comedy for the serious stuff, where satire stood between comedy and drama as the real important art form because it was substantial, meaningful, emotional, dramatic, but that it also didn't shed the pleasure principle of doing so in a fun, entertaining way. Being pushed out of poetry brought me back to satire as an aesthetic principle, to hang on to the revulsions, to stand against the drama queens and against the cruel comedians, Lucifer and Satan.

What I missed in having that fuckup happen to me, of being essentially alienated from myself, was that the comedian was rejected on the basis of their being a dramatic figure. I had to recover the real track of my thinking on the LSD trip in 2005 and understand the developments that came after to really grasp how my rejection of comedy and embrace of poetry, in Phase D of my work, was not a reversal. And I'm still not really sure of that. But a seductive case is made. I said the joke was a "psychologically inconceivable juxtaposition" and that this is why some things are funnier than others-- we may see a juxtaposition which is conceivable, like someone who gets sexually turned on by viewing people getting killed, and it's not funny, but as it travels further from conceivability, someone becomes sexually turned on by juggling cumquats, and it becomes funny, and loses this relation to mere deviance-- mere wrongness becomes funniness. I was very proud of this thesis for a long time until I thought of the "no wire hangers" scene from Mommie Dearest. Because I thought that this scene hits people strangely not because it's a mediocre film and it's played for laughs and camp, and Faye Dunaway is so over-the-top, rather than appropriately dramatized-- I don't think Faye is really too far off from what most parents are like when they freak out, but the way people respond to this scene, and say "There's another Joan Crawford than what that movie showed" and crap like that, I think merely shows that it's neither especially campy or dramatized, the director does a fine job in my opinion, but it's not especially a very stylized film. It could be far more stylized than it is, it lets its material-- Hollywood, Crawford-- do the stylization for it. My theory is that the scene is so memorable because people are uncomfortable with the fact that they find it funny, and do not know quite why they are laughing. The problem is that the situation is funny for the viewer and not funny for Christina Crawford-- and another theory goes, Christina's own, that the film doesn't look from her eyes, but from Joan's, when I don't think that's true either. I saw the film as Christina's story, not Joan's, and felt very identified with Christina by the end.

A crazy person, or a drunk person, can be hilarious, but they're not hilarious when they're coming at you with a knife. What I think "no wire hangers" does is demonstrate a kind of 'child abuse' most people receive from their parents at one point or another, a complete, horrific freakout about nothing, so its something almost everybody knows from the point of view of Christina, but when we see this lunacy and aren't in the room, aren't being whipped by the wire hangers or the bottle of cleanser, we are privileged to "perception" since we no longer occupy the role of "action." We do not have narrative need, and so the event is just a story, an illusion, something happening out there which I'm just a voyeur on. So yes, jokes "hit too close to home" on the basis of their being psychologically conceivable, yet the inconceivability of someone's behavior, what makes us laugh, is enhanced by the fact that it is not happening right in front of us, that it is not something which demands our attention and our response. Our energies are displaced into surviving the madness which is coming down on us, not able to freely perceive the madness as an aesthetic occurrence. Crazy Joan Crawford is both hilarious and horrifying, depending on where you are, and that's what people don't like to admit, that the humor they find in something which happens to someone else is dependent on its not happening to them. Hence, how cruel comedy can be. We laugh at someone's misery because it seems like a cartoon to us, but it's reality for them, and they rightfully spit in our eye. Yet I am right in saying "psychological inconceivability" is a key part of why it can be funny. For instance, a normal scene from Christina's childhood, something ordinary and innocuous, couldn't sponsor the laugh whether I was involved in the scene or not involved in the scene. 

It is this understanding that the joke is a "psychologically inconceivable combination perceived from a vantage-point of detachment," which also clicks together with the self-rejective element of Phase B, and the anti-dramatic view of PDA. PDA is a drama, but an anti-dramatic drama. And what it underscores is the presence or absence of narrative need, of the necessity which glues us to the "screen," which makes us take the reality seriously. It's necessity which is always the dramatic story, is what charges our life with drama, what makes love such a grandiose thing and heartbreak such a melodrama. When we feel drama, we feel human need, the severity of human need, the "reality principle" in Freud's view-- and the major realization as it applies to my musical career, is the fact that Phase A and Phase B are both riddled by drama, and Phase B is actually peak drama. It's Phase C which starts shedding this dramatic quality of my music, which unites A with B-- the self-rejective force associated with B, because it is constellating out of the way my music is broadening out of "Apollonian" chord progressions into "Dionysian" atonality, how the breakthrough of the Residents is forever dominating the earlier influences, and even the later influences, yet what I excitingly declare to myself now is that this breakthrough, philosophically made, during Pretentious Double Album, actually took the principle beyond the Residents, who only vaguely suggest this principle, of continuous revolution and innovation in tone and timbre. That the Garden of Irrelevance was in fact the "comedy" world I encountered in Pasadena, and which would have appeared to have become Moontown, to have shown its face as Moontown, rather than the half-face seen as the Garden of Irrelevance during a median point, a place where the "Delusional Adam" material of personal drama was starting to be rejected by a transcendent comedy. 

Since then, "reversals" seem to have been gestured by way of the disillusionment I reached with "immanent comedy," with stand-up comedy, with sketch comedy, with trash comedy. My "comedy" as transcendence is not the same comedy, this is an alien, surrealist comedy, which is beyond human, or any agential, need. It is beyond necessity. And the argument goes, that the ideal of romantic love is actually a corrupt means by which we are driven backwards to regress towards necessity, towards cliché, melodrama, the dream of fulfilled, rather than surpassed, necessity. The horrible realization: romantic love is will to power, a necessity based love that flees from helplessness and vulnerability, an addiction. But my disillusionment with comedy never formally realized, or progressively forgot, how connected my comedy philosophy, my JOKE SCIENCE, was connected to the Garden of Irrelevance. How my Phase B recordings are very much in line with the Residents' dramatic theatricality, but how Phase C integrates the more flippant work of R. Stevie Moore and Tim & Eric into a landscape that draws the image of fully leaving Delusional Adam behind for the Garden of Irrelevance. Problem is then, it becomes "Moontown" and offers a new antithesis, "The Hate Plane." And what that means is more than I can really chew on right now. But I think we'll get there ...

So basically my thought is leaning in this new direction, the idea that I abandoned "comedy" but not, actually, from the viewpoint of a reversal of the circuit that went, initially, from drama to comedy. That I grew bitter, serious, romantic, anti-mystical, anti-pollyanna, and rejected the LSD dream, or as I was saying before reversed the circuit such that the "self/love" re-emerges as the birth of the "birth/death." In this new ideology, which I again am not sure of, the ego and the self are illusions, personal drama is an illusion, which we have no choice but to participate in and have it dictate, to some extent, the nature of our choices. So in a way "it's funny to you because it's not your problem" became the way in which comedy is tentatively rejected, and the way in which comedy is tentatively affirmed. What is rejected in rejecting comedy, perhaps is the idea, which must be dear to comedy's heart, that there are funny things and unfunny things. Funny things and sad things, when funny things and sad things are one in the same. Unfunny things are merely banal, but comedy and tragedy both involve the spectacle of the absurd, seen from two lenses, the lens of the one who's need is cathected with the tragedy, and the one who's need is not. If a play provides catharsis, it is because it is our fantasy, not just a fantasy. When we laugh, we are not fantasizing ...

When we laugh, we are not fantasizing ... this is a major idea. Because it distinguishes comedy from the pleasure and play drives it's always associated with. Neither the joke-teller or the joke-hearer are fantasizing, are using illusion as fantasy. Fantasy is a major player in the dramatic situation of tragedy, however; fantasy is the sweet sadness of a dream of liberation concocted by the oppressed.  Now, at the same time I switched from comedy to drama, in my mind, I began to strongly need, emotionally, catharsis and fantasy from the films I enjoyed, and this coincided with the Rilkean energy. As time went on, bitterly, this dissipated, as the sorrow more and more became anger.  Phase D has been on shaky ground; hence the satirical art issue that was the April post. "Poetry is seeming like it is not my ideal any longer, oh no, what to do ... I can't go back to comedy ... comedy is too self-effacing and poetry is too vain, so the median of satire must be the way to go." Satire having the egoism and effacement of an attack.  

In a way this led us back to what has become, more and more, a centralizing idea and my main critique of Freud, perhaps. It is a big critique because it basically "reverses" the core idea of his psychology, that neurosis is the result of repressed sexuality, and sign of the overall dominance of the reality principle. Marcuse calls this the performance principle, and explores how the aesthetic perspective, of narcissism which is invested in both self and world, transcends the restriction.  I'd like to question this entire outlook on civilization, as love in the shackles of utilitarianism, and instead suggest that the world is actually a tyranny of love, that the pleasure principle is the repressive agent, because this would explain why messengers are shot, why no one wants bad news, why people live in denial of abusive relationships, since the real biases of our consciousness are not towards pragmatism, but towards the economization of energy which is the pleasure principle, as homeostasis, biasing us towards love, self, locality, and simplicity. Anyone who pushes against the de facto desire for everything to be "okay," does so under the threat of an alarming thing. We do not occupy a place of neutrality that is pushed either up or down, good or bad, but we are in a state of moderate goodness which is such that it has to be disturbed severely in order for us to make changes to the arrangement. Successful political campaigns may "go negative" or "go positive" in terms of what they preach, but they are always "positive" for the people backing the candidate, always emphasizing the benefit of social togetherness. Shit's gotta get real before people get real, they don't get real as a rule, they buy into happy illusions and then violently inflict them on others. Marcuse points out how Freud's view of the suppression of science by religion contradicts his ideology, how religion, in the post-religious world, appears even more as a pleasure principle. 

What is repressed by civilization is not sexuality, for sexuality is actually the one part of the "unconscious" which is socially welcomed. Yet it is a weak sexuality that emerges, like that of religion, or bourgeois love, because sexuality's distinction from social Eros, from affection, is its fundamental unity with hostile impulses. Sexual trends will go hither and thither in a given society, but Eros will never be forbidden, but gathered into a particular conformist trend that overrules marginalized trends. The only thing that causes 'sexual repression' is the repression of hostility. This is what no one wants to hear about. This is what people want to argue themselves, and others, out of feeling and acting on, for understandable reasons. Revulsion is revolting. Yet rather than revulsion and attraction being "opposites" which compete in our being swung back and forth between eros and thanatos, I would like to suggest that eros and thanatos are completely indistinguishable from each other in sexuality, and Freud's idea of sexuality can actually sound naive, so blurred it is with the overall notion of social and romantic love. 

What I'm starting to think, not too different from the Oedipus complex, is that the consummation of a love depends on the completion of the murder of a rival, in a sense, or at least is necessarily an expression of violence towards a rival. That sexual excitement differs from Platonic affection in the absence of hostility affection has, and that what makes things sexually exciting in this way-- is that the lover is a weapon against the rival.  And there are good reasons for this. We human beings are defensive creatures, defensive animals, in a survival situation, requiring food, sex, emotional support, warmth, shelter, medical assistance, and so forth. We have needs, we are involved in this unfunny, banal, and sometimes and perhaps ultimately tragic, drama of survival-- as utilitarian beings. Here is where Freud would interject that this is precisely what the reality principle is, the drama of survival, which we are forced to live through, which places a lattice pattern on our desires, which would be polymorphous but take specific forms. I think this might be a little crazy though because we do not 'see' desire in some pure way, like air inside a balloon. And instead, we only see it in the form it is "sculpted" in.  This is just the nature of reality and need, and play detaches us from need, hence it is the pleasure principle. But I would say fundamentally we are not trying to maintain that exertion, we do not "internalize" that exertion because it is constantly external, but gravitate from high-stress situations towards people or activities we are familiar with and which establish trust. A high-stress situation could include the introduction of information that challenges our pleasure principle, and this would result in resistance. But our utilitarian life, our survival-game, is not won but played in terms of sexual activity. That sexual activity is an expression of hostility for our rivals, who may not be rivals for the affections of our lover, just enemies of ourselves. And beyond sexuality, which is far from censored in society, what is censored, what is almost unspeakable, is all the violence which sexuality represents-- the married couples who rub their friends' nose in shit with their weddings, the bragging, the public "reassurance" of one's sexuality. There are a million voices out there who want to talk you out of your anger, and have you think about things from alternative points of view that diminish your rage, ultimately, by disparaging you. Our parents begin this trend, who may not necessarily punish us for our sexual feelings, and may encourage that. But it would seem to be universal that everyone wants to get away from violence, within themselves or within the world. So when we get angry, we make excuses, and wait for it to become an explosive problem to address it.

If an explosion of anger is a sin, it is a sin because it represents an internal suppression of anger, a denial, which overcame its repression in a nasty, vulgar, dramatic way. Like Joan Crawford and "no wire hangers" certainly seems to demonstrate, and the notion of "shadow projection" in Jung's thought also makes this clear, that when we project a shadow we ultimately run from unconscious hostility, not sexuality. Eros is not "captured" by civilization, thanatos is, hatred is, and funneled away from its real-world cause and projected upon abstract groupings of people. So for radical liberals or conservatives, people can be demonized as "evil white men" or "deep state elites" and so forth, which, like the 'two minutes hate' in Orwell's 1984, allows us to forget the banal origins of rage-- the failure of relationships with social peers and family members being principal in the manufacture of rage. And of course we are all complicit in this 'shadow projection' -- which in Jung's thought means the unloved element about myself whereas I'm dismissing that, the unloved element about myself is always my real hostile feelings about specific individuals who I know, not my self-judgment in some mystical dream-like dance that is barely psychologically coherent in Jung's theory -- we're all complicit in this repression, because we're motivated by the pleasure principle, the social principle, to have friends, to have family, and if we refuse that happiness it is because the suffering it causes is unbearable, so we all want to find enemies out in the world, large groups, categories, we can project upon politically, to escape the sad, cruel, ordinary fact of a powerful resentment for your best friend or lover or parent whose company you have enjoyed but who causes you great pain. We're all in this room with each other, and the televisions are on. And we'd rather shout curses on the herds we see trooping past the screen, than admit that we really hate one another in this room, we'd like to find catharsis for our rage-- hence the success of politically slanted cable news, which can almost feel taboo and sexual a pleasure, to hear someone backing up your own point of view, bluntly, rudely, aggressively, and not espousing the even-steven journalistic neutrality that usually holds opposing points of view "in balance." We sublimate our rage out of kindness, affection, empathy-- we pity what we hate-- no one, or almost no one, wants hatred and rage-- hatred and rage are the voices of necessity, and love is the voice of needlessness. Yet we live in a world of hate, a world that does not meet our needs without our taking action, and this very action against equilibrium, against homeostasis, the will itself, the impetus for all action, is essentially hatred. 

Love is a default, not a choice. Happiness is a default, not a choice. And this default represses the necessity that makes a choice as long as it possibly can, forcing it to the surface through extreme anxiety. The obsessional neurotic, in my view, is not stifling sexual desire-- in terms of love as we'd recognize it-- or even the lack of love, as Freud seems to show it, the libido goes this way and that. The love can't meet its target, and so it becomes blocked, censored, says Freud. This treats love as the choice, rather than the condition, the default, love as the libido-- whereas I might be saying that hatred is the libido, the will which exerts itself, at cost, against the homeostasis of a loving unification with one's surroundings when they are no longer suitable. That the "death instinct" is really more like "love," in that Freud says its just the will to return activity to nothing, and the "life instinct," being an excitement, is more this willful violence. Loving sentiments are calm and soothing to hear expressed, but when a person's body acts upon them, the movement has the disorienting character of aggression, of something passionately willed, forced. Someone is appreciating us from a distance, and then feeding us to themselves. This is why I say that true sexual love, close sexual relationship, if it is fragile or difficult outside of the impersonal sexual exchanges which go no further than the body, is fragile and difficult on account of the fact that the lover must be understood as a weapon against the psychological rival, this enhances their attraction and desirability, and very much unconsciously, since in the throes of love we are focused on affection, not on the rival. I suspect it is always a matter of shared values, and the shared hostile values are most important, more than any covalent, overall narcissism in which I am you and you are me and thus we love each other. Romeo & Juliet kills its lovers because they cannot soldier for the same team. 

One of the most touching things you might see between two people in a couple, a true sign of intimacy and closeness, is when they both ditto each other's disparaging judgment, when they share the same enemy. If two lovers can both bash Trump or Biden, there's a great happiness there. Romantic "revolutionaries" or "reactionaries" style themselves as soldiers in some kind of fight. Conversely, soldiers at war make for the sublimest, most romantic experiences of friendship there can ever be. Our hatred and anger is the ugliest thing about ourselves, the ugliest necessity of our reality, the grimmest part of it, such that I think that if our lover can be pissed off about the same thing it is a safer bet of their compatibility with us than if we are interested in the same thing. I would say having the same interests is less vital, for someone may be exciting for having different interests, yet these different interests in themselves I don't think are enough. I think what tips things over into someone being truly attractive to us is their being a weapon against the rival, the enemy of my enemy is my lover, and that common ground is what structures the intoxication with someone who has different interests than ourselves-- those different interest somehow organizes the expansion of resistance to the enemy.  But a difference of interests can be a problem, and not an advantage, precisely when what someone is interested in comes to land in an enemy camp, what we realize ourselves critically devoted to opposing. They are into something which irritates us, hence they are an enemy. Alienation and irritation are different. Variety is the spice of life, except when poisons and feces are counted among the various items.  

Hostility is and will always be repressed, a reality-principle which we do not want to listen to, so swayed are we by a social pleasure-principle, a homeostasis. In chasing after sex, Freud did pave the right road, the road towards the hostility which is involved with sex, which he also intuits even if he plays games with the ideas that are unnecessary and which try to explain religion on the basis of its sexual controls. Essentially he's just trying to diagnose religion and its guilt-- and that's what he comes to, secret, taboo sexuality, a primal sin that must be atoned, and well, he sublimes the whole reflex into psychoanalysis, which takes over the functionality, except atonement is now 'catharsis.' Freud agrees with guilt, and re-defines confession in an amoral, scientific exchange. And he speaks with a merry glow about love, a concealed metaphysical hunger lurks in his work, which sees life as the battle of love and death, and psychoanalysis as a weapon wielded against death-- not too different from the religions he contradicts, as I'm far from the first to say. And all religions contradict one another. In fact maybe the only way to not be religious is not to contradict religions.

It is an issue independent of the issue of whether hostility is good, or wise, or moral, to act on. The hostility reflects a judgment and the judgment reflects a hostility. Judgment is the main, central operation of the mind, to Kant it negotiates between the practical reason and the theoretical reason, between our necessities and our understandings. I should do this. The facts of the matter are such-and-such. This is valuable, therefore I should do this, because the facts of the matter are such-and-such.  The facts present necessity to us in relation to our value, necessity is not necessarily proclaimed by the facts, or by the value, but by the interaction between them. This actually might serve to say that I see the matter differently, that value is fundamental, not central, and what is central-- as in perhaps "local"-- is actually the mental concept of necessity. Subject and object are combined in necessity, in practical reason. For value proclaims the good or bad of something, and fact proclaims the existence or non-existence of something. Necessity proclaims what we should do based on what we value, and the facts as they stand. The reason Kant can view judgment as central, as a mediator between two forms of reason, is because it is closest to ourselves. Judgment is both closest to ourselves, and "disinterested," like the detachment that permits us to find something funny that is tragic for a participant. (The joke is a disinterested, psychologically inconceivable combination.) It is disinterested because uninvolved with the facts, with the defensive reality-principle. This requires amplification. So for instance, when I judge something with love or with hatred, it is heedless of the fact that this thing exists or not-- if I love it and it's not there, I long for it, a necessity called "desire" is born. If I hate it and it's there, I wish to avoid it, a necessity called "anxiety" is born. But I may hate it and feel no anxiety, as I do when I laugh at Joan Crawford's "no wire hangers" scene. Or I may love it and feel no desire, as I do when I get what I want. So the fact of presence/absence declares the emotional situation, and thus sexual desire is not repressed, but instigated by the so-called reality principle, if the reality-principle is actually just the sizing-up of the facts. Sexual appreciation, the aesthetic judgment, however, is intertwined with revulsion, is just a psychological and biological "value system" out of which "instincts" emerge, which express these values, rather than a competition between creation and destruction. 

Our rage is the true face of this unconscious sexuality because it is the face of it we are completely indisposed to look at, and can only be inclined to look at by its being absolutely overwhelming. "Desire" and "anxiety" are very similar forms of excitement, only instinctual movements, towards or away, embrace or withdrawal. They in themselves are "practical reasons," shoulds, not the values upon which those shoulds stand, they do not declare in themselves what is desired or what makes one anxious, and indeed, these can differ from person to person in directly contradictory ways, where one's terror is another person's comedy. As evidenced by Mommie Dearest again, by the fact that we lack either desire or anxiety as we look at the funny scene, with respect to the scene. We may project some upon it, which is the operation of fantasy, but that is not necessarily what happens in a work of art. Just as a work of art should not be necessarily taken as the "object" which is defined by the "argument" it makes, since that argument is in an aesthetic register which contemplates it indifferently, so too should the artwork not be taken as the "object" which is defined by our empathy with the "actions" it indicates. If "art" is an "argument" then we have a fantasy-relation to it, an empathy with its representation, not its will. In Full Metal Jacket, Private Pyle keeps laughing at the Drill Sergeant, until he is forced to strangle himself with the Sergeant's hand. It is a challenging scene because we the viewer are laughing at the Drill Sergeant. Kubrick shows us exactly what it would take to stop laughing, which lands with us, with great drama. 

Now this introduces a problem, because I am arguing that we have unconscious hostility, that hostility is the truly most repulsive thing in the world, and it even organizes the hostility that the world is known for by way of sublimation, because our true hostility is ordinary, non-political, circumstantial. This is the psychological theory, and then my artistic theory is going this way directly opposite to anger, towards comedy, which is essentially the pleasure principle I say is doing the repressing of the rage. The detachment from self, from sexuality, from indeed love, which is love. So my ideas are tied in a knot here. Because based on my psychological theory I should be of the opinion that Interpretation #1 is correct, that our art has been discovering unconscious rage that was suppressed during a key time in my life, socially and personally, on the basis of spiritual ideals. The Garden of Irrelevance is the equilibrium of the pleasure principle! It is the "everything's okay" thesis, the self/love/locality/simplicity bias, the one which profound alarms are needed to disturb, to result in aggressive action, reaction. Fantasy does not stand so opposed to reality as it seems, fantasy is an extension of "drama," of a lurid, erotic projection upon films and pieces of music of our own lust/rage, our unconscious values. Comedy shows exactly the pleasure-principle's suppression of the "reality-principle" -- as does Existence Music, for the traumatic content in the album is negated by a ... fantasy? Here we reach a double-meaning of fantasy. For fantasy can be our dramatic projection upon something, which is not avoidant, which is psychodrama. And this is what I was really arguing about theater and projections in the play. But fantasy can also be the detachment-fantasy of comedy, the denial of the will.