Or how to sedate a phantom pain
Because my father had lost a leg in the Second World War when he was just 18 years old, I was familiar with the phenomenon of phantom pain, horribile dictu, from my children's legs onward. When I woke up, I would go into my parents' bedroom and crawl into bed with him over the crutches lying next to the bed and see his bare stump. The sight was not unfamiliar, nor was it terrible. Sometimes, he would wince in pain. And when I, the child, asked him where it hurt, he said that his foot hurt and pointed to a place where there was nothing, just the bedsheet. He said that it was the nerves that hurt and that this was not at all unusual. Many of the young men who had their legs taken off in the military hospital suffered from this. I remember that while he was explaining all this to me, I just looked perplexedly at the stump of his leg and then at the folds of the bedsheet and asked if he could feel the exact spot where it hurt. ‘Yes,’ he said, pointing to the sheet with his finger: right here. And so, even before I learned what a phantom is, I understood that a phantom is a painful absence.
While phantom pain may be an undeniable reality in the physical world, the question of how an experience of loss articulates itself in the symbolic remains a mystery. What happens when a kind of amputation occurs in the realm of our Values, Self-image, and Identity? Does the person struck by such a fatal blow see themselves as an invalid, or are they successful in deceiving themselves about their symbolic loss? This defensive behavior benefits from the fact that we’re operating in the repository of abstract moralities – there’s no before–after in this cloudy realm with its absence of physical conciseness, let alone how the person concerned, upon awakening, must realize they’ve lost a limb. Because, unlike our body members, these symbolic forms, however recondite, can also endure for a long, long time – and as the Amish testify, the denial of a presence may well grow into a form of religiosity. In approaching the question with what a sociologist would call sobriety, it is clear that even socially highly valorized functions can lose value – which eventually leaves their holders with a loss of status – if not faced with a job loss. In any case, the gain in rationality is followed by what is, in fact, a loss of Nature with the entry into the natural world. When Freud spoke of man being transformed as culture progresses into a prosthetic god, this also means his human nature loses certain limbs that are taken for granted – leading to the conclusion that reason necessarily also has a surgically disfiguring function. That we’ve long been able to overlook the dialectic of rationality gain and loss has to do with an intergenerational cycle in which these shifts have played out. Age assumes the losses, while youth personifies innovation. However, digitalisation, with which a new intellectual continent has been kicked into life, has caused a deep social shock, a sudden tremor in which, virtually overnight, certainties once considered unshakeable have dissolved into nothingness.
I had an early experience of this kind, representing something of a dark epiphany, when I encountered my first sequencer program in the recording studio in the 1980s. As a young man, following Czerny's School of Fluency, I'd been practicing scales on the piano for months, but the sequencer made it clear that a sequence of notes could be brought up to speed with the turn of a knob – making all my finger exercises seem pointless. While this experience made me realize the virtuoso ideal had its great future behind it, the recording studio offered a second, perhaps even more radical experience – the insight that perfect mastery of an instrument is a constriction that restricts the sound sensorium in an undue, even pointless way. Because, insofar as the world of sounds could be incorporated into a sampler, everything – even the sound of a toilet flush – had become a musical instrument. Furthermore, musical notation had also fundamentally changed. Whereas I’d previously tried my hand at composing my scores while sitting at the piano, the sound event was no longer the note recorded in a score and no longer an event on an arrow of time but something much more complex. All of a sudden, sound itself had taken on a plasticity reflected in spectrograms, Fourier wave analyses, and the like, and its symbolic treatment was comparable to the work of a sculptor creating a sculpture from the amorphous mass of his raw material.
The question is: how does a society react to such, literally, drastic changes? As it takes time for such changes to be recognized, the first answer is: not at all. People continue as before, so business as usual remains the first civic duty – and because the vast majority follow the inertia of change, it is not difficult to overlook the changes in the soft landscape. Consequently, the sound engineers who were equipped with digital equipment in the public broadcasters didn’t even put the new working techniques into operation – or they gave me, who’d entered their sacred halls as a foreign body, to understand that a) they’d not familiarized themselves with its use, b) the equipment was defective, and c) this whole computer thing was soulless. If you look at all these excuses, it’s obvious the psychological defense mechanisms at work here are those that psychoanalysis has been cataloging for a good century: dissociation (not taking note), devaluation (the soulless computer), primitive idealization (which exaggerates machine learning into a god-like, transhumanist intelligence), and denial, which is all the more convincing when it makes use of group choral speech.
Now digitalisation doesn’t represent a gradual change but is something akin to a seismic tremor: a foreign body that strikes our thinking like an extraterrestrial comet. However, the entire field of knowledge is subjected to this shock, and a new intellectual continent is breaking through. While most of our contemporaries, as consumers, believe this is a very welcome state of affairs, they also feel a deep sense of unease wherever this new way of thinking comes to them, not as a gain but as a loss of rationality. This is where a problem comes into play that goes far beyond the usual rationalization measures. For inasmuch as the computer is a Universal Machine that, in turn, emits programs in its own image, its threats are as boundless as the world of sounds, which, virtually at any rate, have been transformed into musical instruments. Consequently, victims of this threat of rationality can’t locate the danger and instead have to realize their personal intellectual edifice is becoming uncanny. Because, as Freud said, the individual is no longer ‘master in his own house,’ what is his own becomes alien, and something like an evacuation of Self-Image takes place. In this sense, the virtuoso loses his virtù; he must experience that a whole armada of instruments has been added to virtuality. If we remember the starting point of this text, we could say we’re dealing with a placeless phantom pain, a pain not affecting a specific limb but the core of our being-with-oneself. It’s hardly reassuring that the house’s inventory and its outward appearance still appear mostly unchanged. The fact that the spiritual building has become secret is a form of horror vacui. And this is so frightening not because it's not possible to assign a culprit to the horror but because we know this entity can strike us across a broad front – no, more than that, strike us everywhere, which is nothing other than the promise of the digital world: Anything. Anytime. Anywhere.
If you consider the uncanniness of the outdated intellectual edifice, the protective and safeguarding measures that its inhabitants resort to become understandable. It can even be said that much of the calamities of our current discourse seem fed by such phantom pains. Either way, it becomes understandable that and why the culture war has centered on questions of Identity and Identity Politics and how, instead of talking about concrete problems, we constantly stray into the realm of the moral. If here, we understand Marshall McLuhan's remarking on moral indignation as lending dignity to the idiot’s moral indignation is a technique used to endow an idiot1 is much less about malicious characterization than it’s an expression of a privatization process – if not one of deeply profound degradation, bearing in mind that the ancient Greek idiotes goes back to the personal – it brings moralization clearly into relief an attempt at mastery over this uncanny. About the ad hominem argument, hasn’t the horror vacui been banished from our psyche – haven’t we arrested an adversary? But because this opponent is nothing more than an inverted mirror image of ourselves and because he, like ourselves, is no longer master of our own house (or as Theodor Däubler said: The enemy is my own question in disguise2 ), the perhorresed other must take on some fantastical stature, becoming the diabolon: the arch adversarial enemy of the human race.
Photo: M. Burckhardt/Leonardo.aiThis journey into phantasm leads us back to the beginning, to the question of how phantom pain can be contained in the Symbolic? And while my father, in the apparent absence of his lost limb, was forced to come to terms with the loss, the phantom pain felt in the Symbolic allows us to disguise the irretrievability of a loss where we don a flawless Costume of Identity as we blame the externalized opponent for all discrepancies. If he were rendered harmless – so the theory goes – then the misery would be over, and everything would be as it was before. But since the source of our discomforting unease with the digital mental continent can’t be eliminated, the phantom pains can only be numbed by indulging in a more potent sedative in the form of phantom lust. Here, it’s worth recalling Marx's famous remark:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the spirit of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.3
Looking at contemporary idealogisms, it is noticeable how they all represent a form of phantom lust exhausted in the sedation of placeless fears. This is what makes contemporary apocalypticism, ignited by fears of a looming climate catastrophe, the perfect phantasm for how this feeling of inner emptiness turns into a form of self-efficacy, allowing you to imagine yourself as a prophet and missionary preaching repentance to a blinded world (with all its fossils). And with the purity of its doctrine, which tolerates no contradiction and castigates its critics as deniers and apostates, this moment of church formation is also given – the last generation may believe itself to be a band of those called to save the world from catastrophe. That this is less about the cause than about one's personal state of mind makes it clear we are not acting in the field of reason here, but it’s solely about numbing the phantom pain of a damaged Identity. And how easy this is: you go to the museum and smear the Mona Lisa with soup or simply put on a T-shirt that reads in large letters: I'm Number One. Why try harder! If you keep this impulse in mind, you understand why postmodern society indulges in Identity Politics, Oikophobia, and Climate Apocalypticism – and, conversely, why we don't make the slightest effort to commit ourselves to rationality’s surpluses in the digital world. After all, going into productivity would mean that instead of wishing to conduct an orchestra of beloved devils, you would have to deal with the unheard-of movement into an open future.
Translated: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt
1'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.' Benedetti, P. and N. DeHart – Forward Through the Rearview Mirror-Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 167. [Translator’s note]
2‘Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt.’ Däubler, T. – Sang an Palermo, in: Theodor Däubler, Hymne an Italien, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1919, pp. 57-69. [Translator’s note]
3‘Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ Marx, K. -- Introduction, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, edited by J. O’Malley. Cambridge University Press, 1970. [Translator’s note]
