Mick Hartley

The mythology of the courageous, disobedient, relentless man

Talking of French intellectuals and Heidegger, here's a piece in the NYRB from Jamieson Webster, who, we learn, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Riding in Cars with Jacques Lacan.

An excerpt:

Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, wrote a biographical text on Lacan and speaks about his intolerance of red lights, how he ran them all the time. Even when Lacan was merely a passenger, if you refused to run a red light, he would get out of the car, walk through the crossing, and have you pick him up on the other side. Apparently, this behavior was a source of great anxiety for his daughter, who had to devise ways to avoid stopping when driving.

Lacan himself drove fast. Once, he took Martin Heidegger and his wife, Elfride, on a day trip to Chartres to visit the cathedral. Though Heidegger was a hero of his, Lacan continued to drive at his characteristic high speed despite Elfride’s frantic protestations. As the story goes, Lacan was completely silent on the long drive back as he pressed harder and harder on the gas pedal.

Catherine Millot, Lacan’s patient and lover, in her autobiographical book, Life with Lacan, wrote of how he used to drive:

[H]is head forward, gripping the steering wheel, treating obstacles with contempt, as one of my women friends noted, never slowing down even for a red light—and as for observing the right of way… well, let’s not go there. The first time, on the autoroute, travelling at some 120mph, I had a fit of the giggles which I suppressed only with difficulty. But even if I’d burst out laughing, he’d never have noticed; he was concentrating too hard… there was no point in imploring him to slow down. Once, his stepdaughter Laurence had come up with a bright idea: she asked him to drive more slowly so that she could “look at the countryside.” He told her: “Just pay more attention.”

Millot and Miller both consider Lacan’s way of driving as part of his ethical stance. One had to follow one’s desire and not give way to inhibitions or norms. If one had to stop, make it a choice; do not yield to an anonymous law or the whims of the other’s demand. His driving ethic is even used to explain his rapacious consumption of luxury goods—Lacan had quite an art collection, and was known for his sartorial extravagance, from custom-made suits in unusual textiles, to furs, and shoes in rare skins. It may even explain why “obstinate” is the last word attributed to Lacan before his death. This is always the story that one encounters about Lacan, part of the mythology of the courageous, disobedient, relentless man. 

I don't know about the writer here, but for myself I wouldn't be entirely confident about putting myself in therapy with a man who considered driving at full speed through red traffic lights "part of his ethical stance". 

Lacan was perhaps the most eccentric and is in many ways still the most revered of those French intellectuals, by those who go for that sort of thing. As is the case here, where his astonishing egotism and irresponsibility are paraded as an example of "the mythology of the courageous, disobedient, relentless man". 

Raymond Tallis said it best, in a review of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 in the TLS....The Shrink from Hell:

Future historians trying to account for the institutionalised fraud that goes under the name of ‘Theory’ will surely accord a central place to the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities. Much of the dogma central to contemporary Theory came from him: that the signifier dominates over the signified; that the world of words creates the world of things; that the ‘I’ is a fiction based upon an Oedipalised negotiation of the transition from mirror to symbolic stages; and so on....

Lacan was born in 1901 into a wealthy middle-class family and trained as a doctor. He was attracted first to neurology but soon abandoned this because the patients’ troubles were too ‘routine’, as his biographer (who clearly sympathises with his inhumanity) explains. If Elizabeth Roudinesco’s account is accurate, he must have made a hash of his first case presentation to the Société Neurologique: his patient, she says, supposedly had ‘pseudobulbar disorders of the spinal cord’—a neurological impossibility. (The innocence with which Roudinesco reports all kinds of clinical cock-ups makes this book a particularly disturbing read for a medic.) Abandoning neurology was obviously a wise career move. Unfortunately, though he lacked all the qualities necessary to make a half-way decent doctor (e.g., kindness, common sense, humility, clinical acumen and solid knowledge), Lacan did not abandon medicine altogether, only its scientific basis.

He chose to be a psychoanalyst where, instead of elucidating diagnoses, he could impose them. He fastened on Marguerite Pantaine, a tragically deluded woman who had attempted to kill a well-known actress. For a year, he and Marguerite were, according to Roudinesco, ‘inseparable’. (She had no choice, being in detention.) The elaborate story he concocted about her became the basis of an entire theory of the sick soul and formed his doctoral thesis. In the great tradition of psychoanalysis, ‘he listened’, Roudinesco says, ‘to no truths other than those which confirmed his own hypotheses’. More precisely, the truth was that which confirmed his hypothesis: into her case, ‘he projected not only his own theories on madness in women but also his own fantasies and family obsessions’. For this soul-rape Lacan was awarded his doctorate and his reputation was made. To the end of her days, Marguerite remained bitterly resentful of the use he had made of her. With good reason: Lacan’s crackpot theories, partly expropriated from Salvador Dali, probably prolonged her incarceration. To add insult to injury, he ‘borrowed’ all her writings and photographs and refused to give any of them back.

Lacan published few further cases of his own. Instead, he recycled some of Freud’s well-known cases, in pursuit of his avowed aim of restoring the truth of Freud’s ideas which he believed had been traduced by Freudians. Unfettered by data, he was free to soar and to promulgate those large, untestable and obscure ideas—they were too difficult even for Melanie Klein to understand—that made him into an international superstar and which were cherished by his followers and are foundational for theorrhoeists. His doctrines—a magpie muddle of often unacknowledged expropriations from writers whose disciplines were alien to him, cast in borrowed jargon and opaque neologisms—were Rorschach ink-blots into which anything could be read. Lacan’s ideas were insulated against critical evaluation by his writing style, in which, according to Roudinesco, ‘a dialectic between presence and absence alternated with a logic of space and motion’.

It gets worse...

Hoodie and friend

On the Parkland Walk at Crouch Hill:

Back to Milgram

An article by Tom Whipple in the Times today (£) adds another layer to the controversy over psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous experiment, which purported to show how people would inflict pain on others on the instructions of an authority figure:

In 1961 a group of ordinary Americans were taken one by one into a laboratory and told to give someone an electric shock. This they duly did, listening in as their victim screamed and convulsed in agony in another room.

The moral of this, which became probably the most famous psychology experiment in history, was clear: people will do something monstrous because an authority figure told them to.

That, at least, is the common interpretation of the Milgram experiment, which has been used to explain atrocities ranging from the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. But a previously unpublished analysis suggests an alternative, simpler explanation: a lot of people guessed that the whole thing was a sham.

The analysis, based on questions to the subjects afterwards, suggests that the efforts of Stanley Milgram, the Yale psychologist, to convince people that they really were causing pain were less effective than he admitted. Not only did half of those involved doubt to some degree that they were administering a shock but the data also showed that their level of belief directly affected their behaviour.

According to an analysis published in Social Psychology Quarterly, the more certain people were that the experiment was real, the lower the shock they gave. Tellingly, most of those who were convinced that they were torturing someone defied orders and quit the experiment. Far from being monsters, they chose the moral course of action.  [...]

Gina Perry, from the University of Melbourne, was one of those involved in the reanalysis. She has been investigating the Milgram experiment since writing a book in 2012. In the course of researching it she found evidence that the experiment, cited in textbooks worldwide, had significant flaws.

She said it was unsurprising that many doubted the setup. This was the time of the Candid Camera television shows, which used hidden cameras. Her research found that people were suspicious that the cheque given to the victim as “payment” was dog-eared and apparently used many times, that the cries seemed to come from a speaker and “the unlikelihood of Yale conducting an experiment involving torture”.

The unpublished questionnaire, she said, provided evidence that these doubts should have been a significant corrective to any sweeping conclusions. “Our analysis offers little support for the theory that Milgram’s subjects, despite the usual dictates of conscience, became inattentive functionaries who inflicted painful shocks against an innocent person indifferent to the resulting consequences,” Dr Perry writes.

“The majority of subjects perceived that the learner was suffering and defied the experimenter. Those who were less successfully convinced by the cover story were more obedient.”

If there were a moral to the Milgram experiment then, it may be less about people’s capacity for inhumanity than about scientists’ capacity for self-delusion in the cause of a pet theory.

It's not the most devastating critique, but it's interesting as yet another nail in the coffin of what has become over the years an unassailable "finding" of social psychology.

As I argued years back, the real monsters here weren't the subjects, but the psychologists:

Milgram believed he'd exposed an appalling tendency toward blind submission "even though it took a contrived situation and intense pressure to bring this tendency out and even though there is no evidence that any participant in the experiment ever inflicted suffering on a helpless victim." Suffering was indeed inflicted on some unwitting victims though: the poor wretches who volunteered for the experiments. Reading the responses of some of the subjects as they were told to continue with the punishments is not pleasant:

"I can't stand it! I'm not going to kill that man in there! You hear him hollering?...he's hollering. He can't stand it. What's going to happen to him?...I'm not going to get that man sick in there...know what I mean?...I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering!...[...] I don't mean to be rude, but I think you should look in on him. All you have to do is look in on him. [...] Something might have happened to the gentleman in there, sir!"

This was from one of the "subservient" moral monsters that Milgram thought he'd exposed, but surely the moral monster here was the psychologist urging the subject on....

Here's Milgram: "I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes he was reduced to a twitching stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his ear lobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered "oh God let's stop it". And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end." It never occurs to Milgram that his own behaviour might be subject to the same moral scrutiny he's so keen to apply to this poor man. The subjects are accused of subservience to authority, yet Milgram himself is the one inflicting suffering on others in the name of a higher authority; namely science. The subjects at least displayed their conflict, but not Milgram. He inflicts real suffering on his subjects and never has a moment's hesitation as to whether he should proceed or not. His subjects go through hell inflicting what is in fact sham suffering - and they're the ones who apparently demonstrate the moral failings of humanity!

This is entrapment; this is fraud. This experiment tells us nothing except the lengths psychologists will go to to justify disgraceful behaviour and then build a career on it. So why is it so highly regarded, and so often cited as one of the key experiments of the 20th century? Because it fits in with the cliched thinking that we all have a dark side, that we're all capable of being Eichmanns, that underneath the cultured surface we're all monsters. We're all guilty....

The experiment as normally understood certainly has no relevance to the Eichmann situation. Eichmann and his like were not conflicted about what they did; they didn't suffer agonies of conscience. It didn't occur to them, because they accepted the moral consensus. They believed that Europe should be cleansed of Jews because they accepted the Nazi view that Jews were a contamination that needed to be removed. Eichmann didn't sit at his desk sweating away, "Oh God, if only someone else had this responsibility! I know it's wrong, but I can't disobey the Fuhrer!" That's not how it was. He just accepted that suffering was necessary in the name of a higher cause. But there is a real lesson for us now. The parallel to Eichmann is not in the subjects' behaviour but in Milgram's: how people can blithely inflict suffering in the name of a higher cause, never have a moment's doubt about what they're doing, and be lauded for their efforts by their peers.

Kim's orphans

Oliver Twist, North Korea style. From the Daily NK:

As part of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s efforts to show his “love for the people,” the regime set about rebuilding boarding schools for orphans throughout the country in 2015. However, these institutions are now facing questions due to the death of an orphan at one of the facilities in Pyongsong.

The child reportedly died due to stress from excessive schoolwork, according to the North Korean authorities. Daily NK sources report, however, that the boarding school staff also failed to properly feed the children in their care and even stole their food to pay off the school’s debts.

“A student at Pyongsong Boarding School died after being forced to work too hard,” a South Pyongan Province-based source told Daily NK.

“The teachers were punishing several students for failing to make the grade in classes when several of them fainted from exhaustion. They were sent to a local hospital, but one died.”

A separate source in South Pyongan Province reported that the orphans’ malnutrition was so severe that they could not endure the harsh treatment they were receiving.

“Pyongsong educational authorities recently told the teachers to turn all middle school students into outstanding students,” she said.

“The students were forced to stay up without sleep and had to do schoolwork all night. Students who passed the tests were allowed to head back to their dormitories to sleep, but those that failed had to stay up until they passed the test.”

Children at the facility were not given enough food, which led to malnourishment. “Their meals were just made up of foul-tasting salt soup with corn noodles,” she said.

“Each child was supposed to get 500 grams of corn per day, but much of this was stolen by the staff, so the kids got even less to eat.”

Pyongsong Boarding School was rebuilt on orders from Kim Jong Un in 2016 and has modern facilities including a swimming pool, grass sports field, and sauna. The cost of the revamp, however, was taken on by the school itself, forcing it into debt.

After coming to power, Kim highlighted his “love for children” and visited boarding schools housing orphans of various ages. During a visit to a boarding school in Wonsan in 2015, Kim stated that raising orphans to become “outstanding pillars of society” was the “firm decision” made by the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). He then ordered the revamp of around 20 such facilities throughout the country.

Despite his emphasis on children and his “love for the people,” Kim placed responsibility on local governments to manage the reconstruction of the boarding schools. These local governments ended up going into debt during the reconstruction process and are now rife with corrupt practices by boarding school employees stemming from the debts.

Dockland views

High rise building in Docklands was generally put on hold after the 2008 crash, but it's back with a vengeance now. Whatever the rest of the country may be thinking about Brexit, the developers here seem confident enough. 

Down through Canary Wharf, under the river to Greenwich, round on the Thames path - where trumpet players practice - to Woolwich, with a final view over London City Airport.

The motto of international white supremacists

Well, what a surprise. The theorist behind the “great replacement” meme, so beloved of the new far right, is a French intellectual and former pupil of Roland Barthes. 

Fear of a “great replacement” lurks in the consciousness of the growing far right and fascist movements of the West. It was there motivating Anders Breivik’s terrorist attack in Norway in 2011, and again at the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi demonstrations in the infamous slogan “Jews will not replace us.” And it was there in the Pittsburgh massacre, the Christchurch massacre, the El Paso massacre. In the wake of these events, the slogan keeps popping up in the U.S. and international news and with it the name of its author, Renaud Camus. 

Camus has no relation to that earlier French writer, Albert, the great humanist with whom he shares a surname. Renaud Camus is the originator of the infamous phrase “great replacement”—grand remplacement—in the original, that has become the motto of international white supremacists and mass murderers who fret over white populations being replaced by an invasion of immigrants.  [...]

[I]n 2000 Camus wrote that Jews, with few exceptions, cannot enjoy an organic relation with the French language, culture, and literature. In order to really have an authentic connection with French culture, Camus wrote, one must have been French for several centuries at least. Those few sentences provoked an outrage in the French center-left press. [...]

If there is a natural connection between culture, place, and ethnicity, then mass migrations threaten that natural connection. The immigrants from the Maghreb and Africa, like the Jews who inhabited France before them, will never be genuinely French, no matter how deeply they imbibe French literature and culture. There is something essentialist, and certainly romantic, in that conception. Ironically enough, Camus began as a disciple of Roland Barthes, the literary theorist who in fact wrote the foreword to a very early book by Camus, thus helping to launch his literary career. Camus is not only a reactionary, he is also an adept of postmodern theory and in his early career was very fond of experimental and avant-garde writing. [...]

Following in a long tradition of reactionary thought dating back to the opponents of the French Revolution, Camus sees democracy as a degradation of high culture and embraces an elitist vision of society where only the elect are the shepherds of culture. There are overlaps with the Marxist left’s vociferations against the petty bourgeoisie, such as in the work of the filmmaker and poet Pasolini, but Camus’ rejection of liberal democracy is closer to Heidegger’s than to the revolutionary left. It is a celebration of roots and dwelling and the integrity and authenticity of the homeland. 

We've seen this movie before, and it didn't end well.

Heidegger's reputation, as supposedly one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, rests on his following among French intellectuals, who saw him as the "Godfather of Theory". He was however, as we now know, an unrepentant antisemite, and an early and passionate supporter of National Socialism.

Bizarrely, such was the influence of the man that he was lauded even - especially - on the left. Jonathan Rée, for instance, co-founder of that home of critical theory in the UK, Radical Philosophy, saw Heidegger's critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity" as an essential basis for a left critique of late capitalism. As I've argued before, if you're keen to analyse the shortcomings of modern western society, it's perhaps wise not to base your analysis on the works of a thinker who saw enemies in world Jewry and British democracy, and the answer in National Socialism. At least, with this latest iteration of the name of the great German philosopher, they've got a better handle on the true nature of his thought.

Where would we be without French intellectuals, eh?

Corn shuckers

Marion Post Wolcott - October 1940. "Resting after dinner following a corn shucking on Hooper Farm in Corbett Ridge section. Caswell County, North Carolina."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

Intermission

Off for a few days. Back Tuesday the 27th.

A little twist

Street photography from around the world, with Maciej Dakowicz:

Most people say that street photography features people photographed public places in candid, un-posed situations. In my opinion this definition is too broad as it includes portraiture, travel or editorial photography, which might have nothing to do with the genre. Thus, the definition can be refined to define proper street photography by adding just one word – a “twist”. A little twist – something clever, funny, unexpected, surprising or ambiguous. Something making you scratch your head, putting a smile on your face or simply making you say “nice…” So you can also say, that street photography is changing ordinary things into extraordinary through the act of photographing them. And a street photo does not have to be taken literally in the street – it can be shot indoors, on the beach or in the forest, at any place where photographers can take candid, unposed pictures. But what matters is that little “twist” elevating the photo to a different level. Unfortunately, these twists do not come often. So I don’t call myself a street photographer. I am just a photographer who sometimes manages to take a street photograph.

Varanasi, India, 2011 © Maciej Dakowicz

Essaouira, Morocco, 2009 © Maciej Dakowicz

Armenia, 2017 © Maciej Dakowicz

Cardiff after dark, 2007 © Maciej Dakowicz

Rajshahi, Bangladesh, 2013 © Maciej Dakowicz

Kolkata, India, 2015 © Maciej Dakowicz

Varanasi, India, 2015 © Maciej Dakowicz

Kairouan, Tunisia, 2011 © Maciej Dakowicz

Amman, Jordan, 2011 © Maciej Dakowicz

Dwarka, India, 2012 © Maciej Dakowicz

Diu, India, 2012 © Maciej Dakowicz

Mumbai, India, 2012 © Maciej Dakowicz

Kamshet, India, 2015 © Maciej Dakowicz

Happy Hollow

March 28, 1901. "Happy Hollow -- Hot Springs, Arkansas." With a range of attractions, including "Gypsy Camp" fortune tellers, "Edison's Latest Productions", and "Captain Bogardus Shooting School and Gallery". 

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]