On Felix Guattari's "Cinema of Desire"

How do we Control and Contextualize Desire?

Selected video excerpt (starting @ 7:40)

:...Guattari believes that in order to understand a history of Desire one also has to understand a history of repression, because repression is necessary in order to structure desire into specific organizations. This is what he believes Cinema's main function is to be, to organize desire through structures of repression, created and mass produced through images. By mass producing these images that construct systems of representation and repression, machines can organize the desires of an entire Society.

So what are the consequences of mass producing these representations like a printer? Guattari believes that the production of representations through these Cinemas is a function that is both a consequence and a means to maintain power in societies. Think about in the example of Plato's Cave, the people looking at the Shadows are completely subject to what representations they produce. This controls their behavior, activities and actions, and most importantly, keeps them in the cave continuing to watch the machine that produces the representations in the shadows.

Guattari cites Oswald Ducrot pointing out that language is not just a means of communication, but also a means of executing power. But how can words have such strong power? Guattari didn't think that words themselves were what had power over material things. That would be kind of like saying if you said words, then you could materialize anything, and obviously, this is not how the real world works. Rather he believed that the words were part of a larger machine that produced many other things that altogether produced a structure that directs flows of power. That is, it isn't language that writes out the law, but rather law is what assembles the language. Instead of saying things and having them materialize into Power, the speech is part of a larger system in which parts that are spoken and parts that have no signifying components all work together to organize power. So since everything we understand is organized and arranged by these structures of power, where things like language are a result of its' actions rather than the reason for it, this means that reality and pleasure can't just be understood in a broad sense, because both our understanding of reality and pleasure are both structured by these organizations of power.

Instead, Guattari states that we have to analyze what he calls "a principle of dominant reality" and "a principle of licit pleasure." The dominant reality organizes everything we understand into a particular paradigm. And licit pleasure is what kinds of pleasure we are allowed to extract from that kind of reality. Desire is forced through these structures created, between this dominant reality and incit pleasures through various authoritarian forces in our lives, ranging from schools, to the workplace, hospitals, and Guattari's emphasis (of course), the movies.

Now remember what I said about how these structures repress desire so that it's shoved into the proper places? It's through this intense repression that desire is forced into an obsession with the boundary between what is allowed, and what is taboo. It keeps hyper-fixating on things that disgust it, but it can't look away, because it continues to extract pleasure from its boundaries by identifying these new kinds of pleasures and subjecting it back to the dominant reality in a manner similar to asceticism and other self- denialist practices. This way, all these new experiences are submitted to the codes of the dominant reality. This is how Guattari believed what he called "Capitalist Eros" worked.

Ah, great, now he's dropping another term, "Capitalist Eros." It might help us to better understand what Capitalist Eros means in the context of psychoanalysis. See, according to Freudian Theory there are these things called drives, which can be kind of thought of as a general tendency for desire to go in One Direction or another. Eros is another name for the "Life Drive", which is associated with a desire for constructive activity such as socialization or reproduction. Its' counterpart is Thanatos, the "Death Drive", which is associated with desire for self-destruction, such as risky behavior.

Capitalist Eros then is the Eros that is applied to the economy, a libidinal economy where we can analyze the transactions of Desire within the context of Capitalist mechanisms. Essentially Guattari is explaining how Capitalism desires to reproduce itself. See, you can't just make people go to work for you to build a massive Society by telling them to do so, nobody's going to do that willingly. So what do you do? You make them want to work for you!

Desire is always trying to escape this repression, so Society needs to continue to adapt to capture these escapes through new, more detailed repressions. This means that in order for Capitalism to reproduce itself, it needs to reproduce the Capitalist Subject in the heart of every person. To make each and every one of us the ideal agent that so many Capitalist economists speak of.

To do this, Capitalism reproduces models of organizing our desire, constructing relations to how we want to position ourselves in society, what we want to consume, and how we want to love. These models are launched into viral circulation through media. Guattari states, "Capitalist Eros launches these models in the same way the automobile industry launches a new line of cars. And the essential function being embedded in every subjectivity? In order to love something, you must own it. The fundamental equation is, 'enjoyment equals possession'." This limits the way that people can express their desire through pleasure, by conceptualizing it through the hierarchy produced by ownership, and a love for productivity for the sake of productivity.

Essentially capitalism doesn't want workers to think they're workers. It wants workers to think that they're little individualist Bourgeoisie, too. It wants them to think that every little interaction is a transaction to extract value in, to screw someone else over. Instead of valuing the work of a trade, such as one that may have been passed down generation to generation, laborers are deterritorialized. Having their subject broken apart so that they are reterritorialized into a new form. They become a commodity directed by their careers, and the continuous development of Technology, on the automation of work. The relationship that workers have to labor adapts and evolves to adapt to the continuous leaks of Desire, by breaking apart the laborer into a multiplicity of new pressures, directed by their relations to production and reproduction. As a result a lot of emphasis is placed on how subjectivity is shaped to various social relations, such as those to work, school, play, and love. This way, Capitalism can produce subjectivities that direct and control the development of all facets of life. Specifically, Guattari emphasizes that Capitalism migrates subjectivities that are grounded in material circumstances towards more abstract, artificial forms. Which I suspect might be because of the continuous increased alienation produced by this continuous deterritorialization between the modes of production and consumption.

This brings us back to the discussion of Cinema. Remember how Guattari said that there were a bunch of different kinds of Cinema? Well all sorts of types of Cinema produced by different kinds of media and social interactions like television, the movies, the press, and now video games and social media act as physical machines that mass-produce subjectivity through each and every consumer collectively producing a dominant reality. Media isn't just a means to communicate, to Guattari they are instruments of power. This can be clearly seen in the current postmodern era where the influence of repressive semiotic regimes, such as reactionary meme culture, Mass micro advertising campaigns with Precision targeting, and the propaganda embedded in video games and movies of the 2000s and 2010s on the internet influences the flows of modern politics, perhaps too too frightening of an extent.

And because these machines direct the flows of power, they direct libido, or the directional flows of Desire. Media in information influences what we want to be, and exists as a mean to assert power. Not just from the raw profits of mass media, but more importantly, through the production of the mass-produced models of subjectivity.

Back when Guattari wrote this, and even now 50 years later in the postmodern era, Media acts as a repressive Force embedding the right ways to enjoy pleasure. It normalizes certain ways of life and makes us collectively think, "this is the way to live". When it's mass-produced in big studios funded with millions of dollars, mass-produced images really can't afford to risk revolutionary imagery that would dismantle its own sources of power. However, Technologies were being introduced in the 1960s that completely changed this situation. The Super8 camera was a consumer grade video camera that could be used to film short movies. Typically used for home video Guattari marks that it has fantastic potential to portray political messages. Instead of forcing a political message into a block of text which may be hard to convey, it can convey ideas much more precisely and directly, through non-linguistic relations displayed on the screen. Being produced on such a small scale allows for micropolitical narratives to be produced and potentially become viral. Something that grows even more possible within the era of social media.

In the current Day, cell phone footage has remarkably important political implications, such as when police brutality is captured on camera. To counteract this deterritorialized media, the State reacts by trying to suppress the recording of such incidents, whether legally or Not, by the officers trying to force people to delete the evidence to maintain media narratives. However, as with any repressive cop there are still means of Escape. When a cell phone camera is carefully propped to look like it is not conspicuously recording, as if one is playing a video game, it may not attract the attention of police officers who may otherwise request to delete it. As a result, the way that we understand the real world is not etched in stone. It can be changed.

And reality is not just a universality, but is situated in a time place and social awareness. This means that, as Guattari puts it, the order of the real has nothing to do with Destiny, one can change it. We are not beholden to one particular way of observing reality.

To demonstrate his point, he is interested in analyzing the structure of three signifying systems systems that organize the order of the real. These are totalitarian systems, psychoanalysis, and structuralism. These systems in particular are chosen because Guattari believes that they are sequential developments of each other, with each being a more deterritorialized form than the last.

What do I mean by this? Well first, let's look at totalitarian systems. These are systems where you have a strict relationship with an authoritarian figure, such as a God, the church, or the State. What's important here is that power is focused around a particularly centralizing Force. This creates a specific signifying regime that focuses around that specific figure, where all of reality converges around it like a giant black hole, and all desire must try to be captured within its' structural boundaries.

However Guattari believed that at the time of his own writing, this isn't how the libidinal economy of the world actually worked anymore. It had developed past this point. Instead, it worked more around a flexible network of signifying nodes, like what we see in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, these nodes are the mother, the father, and the child. The relationships between these three construct all possible relations through the development of the Oedipus complex, which Freudian psychoanalysis believe produces a wide range of neurosis and sexual deviancy. Essentially all relations are now reduced to the relationships, between the self and the family.

The example that Guattari uses is the "Little Hans Case" that Freud brings up. Little Hans was a little boy who was afraid of horses. His dad, who was a fan of Freud's theories, discussed with Freud what could possibly be the issue.

Hmmm, so uh how do I explain this without being demonetized?

Okay, basically Freud concluded that the reason why Hans was scared of horses is because the horse represented Hans's father. "Why" you might ask? Well, because Hans secretly wanted to sleep with his mother but he was afraid of being castrated by his father. As a result, he was scared of the horse because the horse has a huge ..., just like his dad, and appeared to have a mustache, just like his dad. So clearly, the solution was to make Hans have a big ... and sleep with his mother, so that he could just be like his dad and resolve the Oedipus complex.

Yes, I am serious. I am not making this [ __ ] up. I know it's extremely weird.

Guattari, like many of you watching this, objects to this conclusion. He points out the Absurd conclusion is a result of trying to force the situation into the perspective of the Oedipus complex, which clearly favors the interpretation of the father who was already biased towards Freud's theories. What about the experiences of the mother and the child? The mother's narratives are completely submitted to the father's interpretation of the situation, a clear assertion of phallocratic power. And the child is assigned a narrative about wanting to sleep with his mother and kill his father just to make sense of his fear of horses in the context of the Oedipus complex.

Guattari argues that it's not something fundamental to the structure of psychoanalysis that creates the Oedipus complex, but rather social and historical factors that lead to the production of the complex. And he emphasizes how it is produced this way to create artificial consistency in the concept of the family within capitalism. the Screwed Up thing is is because the edus complex our relationship with childhood is completely different than in more traditional Societies. in the past children were essentially free to do whatever they wanted until social initiation. however the reinforcement of the edus complex socially means that child are being initiated at birth, with having every aspect of the child and mother's development under close surveillance through psychology, education, and other social apparatuses. Everything about growing up is now under an analytic microscope.

The Oedipus complex is pervasive, but Guattari points out that all the details are too static to really capture everything. So Capitalism must keep going and continue to deterritorialize the model. This time, instead of having relations between static objects, the development is more towards an abstract relation of "signs" found in structuralist analysis, such as those seen in the work of Guattari's former teacher, Jacques Lacan, whom I will admit, I'm still quite challenged by.

Now, some of you might be thinking, "Lacan, that guy? Isn't he that guy who said something about the Tourist being like a neurotic or something?"

Well yes, but no, but yes, but actually no. See Lacan was complicated as a theorist, but the problem with his work, according to Guattari, wasn't necessarily that he used mathematical terms wrong. In fact, it really doesn't make much of a difference because Guattari is more interested in the very concept of trying to represent the world through an abstract signifying regime.

This approach to analysis broke apart the symbols in psychoanalysis even further to attempt to be complete abstractions that relate to each other based on completely artificial forms. Structuralism thought it was creating a generic language to be able to analyze anything. But according to it, really only moved psychoanalysis from the couch to the screen in the form of film analysis. He doesn't really discuss an indepth criticism of Structuralism here, he's already written enough on that elsewhere, but he does remind everyone of how natural codes can't be reduced to these Structuralist forms. As any geneticist will tell you, genetic code is definitely not like a language. In fact, natural codes also come embedded with parts that are not signified at all, which Guattari calls asignifying, such as visual spatial relationships in art, auditory relations in music, speech, and sound, and the complex logical relations expressed in mathematics, where relationships extend beyond abstract objects.

Another example that he uses to critique this Structuralism, is that there are pre- signifying semiologies, such as pre-Capital societies and the subjectivity of insane people and children, who do not necessarily organize themselves around language-based relationships but can construct meaningful relationships through everything from their bodily movements to sound, gesture, and dance. In comparison, Capitalist expression is reduced into acceptable outputs expressed by dominant meanings. A psychotic person moving their body erratically is not seen as an expression of Desire, but as a threat that needs to be suppressed by the police.

Structuralist analysis pretends to be neutral in its' analysis, but it's very privileging of linguistic objects limits any ability to do so, by again subjecting all activity into a particular Paradigm of relationships.

Currently, the machines of Cinema are used to reinforce the current dominant reality of Capitalism and a cult of possession. In this state they aren't capable of producing much outside of continuing to replicate the dominant reality. However, the power of Cinema is not based merely on the fact that is repeating this dominant reality, but really, that the various aspects of the film such as the framing, actors, camera lenses, and every other choice made in pre-production, production, and post-production, all come together and produce special kinds of Semiotic machines without having a language in particular at all. Instead of being like a language, it is the barrage of sensory experiences produced by the particular arrangement of complex components interacting with each other that ultimately produces the experience of watching a film, and what kind of influence it is capable of producing in the viewer. Cinema in particular, beyond just Languages by itself, has a unique ability to continuously evolve new forms of expression which allows it to adapt to the continuous deterritorialization of pleasure in societies, as mentioned earlier.

Capitalism is able to use these developments to capture and develop evenfurther, more refined and calculated cinematic machines to continue consumer engagement, such as the development of mass-produced media in the 2010s about various minorities. While the production of these films did give employment to minorities and secured both useful roles on their resumés and access to higher classes in society, they exist ultimately to reinforce the dominant reality is a Capitalism, allowing only for the most minimally subversive critiques.

For a particularly in-depth example, Erudite Critic released an excellent video titled, "Why Pixar's Elemental gets Racism Wrong", where they explain how Elemental's exploration of racism can never go beyond a surface level analysis. Where the impact of colonialism and immigration are never truly analyzed in a material context. It's not through the script of the film that produces these repeated constructs, but rather relationships between the characters, their designs, and the way that the art is designed to reinforce symbols seen in real life, correlated with various racial themes.

To better understand what capacities are possible, Guattari cites the film critic Christian Mintz, who states:

"The breadth of the semiotic fabric is a consequence of two distinct causes whose effects are cumulative. On one hand, Cinema encompasses a code language in the Talkies, whose presence itself would be enough to authorize semantic information in the most varied type. Second, other elements of the filmic text, for example, images are themselves languages, whose matter of content has no precise boundaries."

What's important here too, is that film can express content in all sorts of ways beyond just language. With specific examples he cites here, as such as the tonal quality of speech, Instruments, music and Melody, painting and scene construction, the highlights and shadows of black and white photography, and the movements and gestures of the human body.

Guattari then turns to semiotician Umberto Ecco, who points out that Cinema could not be reduced to a system of double articulation, a binary split. See, Cinema doesn't produce meaning because the intersection of two binary axis' between syntax and grammar, and paradigms and representations. Rather, the complex semiotic relationships are produced secondarily, by the processes that produce the film itself. To Guattari, the reason why silent films may feel like they can express a wide range of Desire is not because they are capable of less expression, but because their expression is not modeled into a structure of dominant significations yet.

Think about how as both movies and video games gained more technological power, more Fidelity in their graphics and special effects, that they were able to more cleanly and accurately produce the Capitalist representations, to produce its' dominant reality. Which may be why many in-game developers and film directors deliberately try to use alternative means of expression, especially reaching out to more primitive imagery and user interface design.

Likewise, the mass distribution molecularization of Cinema in the form of Television, a development rapidly accelerating in the time of this piece's writing, subjected cinematic images to the formula of commercial film. Here Guattari makes an interesting point through all of this regarding the freedom of expression. To Guattari, the freedom of speech that Libertarians advocate so heavily for is missing a big part of the equation. After all, just freely opening the gates means that one will continue to repeat the same repressions that they were taught previously, merely deterritorialized and unconscious. Rather, he believes that what is more important is what redirection of flows of desire in the libidinal economy of Cinema can produce.

Look at an example like South Park. South Park became popular because of its raw obscenity and offensiveness, something that audiences have never seen before and desired for desperately. But is South Park's commentary on society really truly subversive? In most cases it appears to reinforce the liberal centralist "we're all stupid" mentality, and resorts to falling back to the status quo. Rarely does South Park actually make commentary that challenges its' audience to produce new lines of thinking+.

The development of the Capitalist Eros and its' influences on the libidinal economy, the bubbling new Pleasures that form on the border of dominant representations in licit pleasure is key to understanding the core problem Guattari is trying to get at. How this Eros creates new forms of pleasure to continue to capture all desire within its boundaries. It tries to codify all desires into abstract forms that can be controlled through binary Flows. In This sense, Desiring production can't be separated from social production, because capitalism will try to convert free roaming desire back into its' paradigms to extract free work and possible Surplus Value. Repeating a politics that both re encloses on itself, reinforcing the position of the self in the relation to hierarchies, as well as repeating an attitude of acceptance of the status quo that somehow these developments are destined and natural.

But desire, unlike Eros, is not structured by codes and laws. Remember, desire is like the state of the game before it's converted into all those structuralist paradigms that determine where the desire ends up. It exists before it's cut and divided up by structures of sex, the family, and Society. It just wants to do what it wants to do, and desire comes first. All structures that are seemingly imposed by it are a product of Desiring production, similar to how when you start a video game abstract structures in memory form representing different aspects of the game. Desire exists before love, psychology, language, and even the laws of nature as we understand them. Guattari then points to children and psychotic people to demonstrate how desire can look without being heavily codified by Society yet, the free association with any kind of love with any other kind of love. Completely unbound by the relationship between the Sexes, or family. Guattari States: 

"It does not respect the ritual games of the war between the Sexes. It is not sexual, it is transsexual."

He doesn't mean that all love is transgender. Rather, he means something more broad. All love goes beyond the Sexes. That love can be something that goes beyond CIS heteronormative expectations like what you see in a Disney movie.

Guattari continues, "Nothing essential leads to the subjugation of the child, the woman, or the homosexual." In a word, it is not centered on dominant significations and values. It participates in open, as signifying semiotics available for better or worse. Nothing depends here on Destiny, but on Collective Arrangements in action.

In conclusion, Cinema has the power to repress desire, to reinforce the Capitalist Eros and libidinal economy. Or, it has the power to potentially liberate it. This Liberation goes beyond just allowing for the offensive. It's about a deliberate influence on the flows of Desire through Cinema, whether it be at the movies, or nowadays in video games, or on social media. There is no real structure that separates social and sexual themes. There is no politics without eroticism, or the other way around, it's all interconnected. Cinema is always political, because whenever it produces and analyzes the figure of a man, woman, child, animal, or any other subject, it produces a set of relations that carry out political implications with it. Something particularly obvious in racist propaganda films, such as "a Birth of a Nation". Repression in films is not about trying to suppress erotic or offensive imagery, but rather repressing images that challenge the status quo of the production of Capitalist Eros.

Guattari wraps it all up with the following:

"In every production, in every sequence, in every frame, a choice is made between a conservative economy of desire and a revolutionary breakthrough. The more a film is conceived and produced according to the relations of production or modeled on capitalist Enterprise, the more chance there is of participating in the libidinal economy of the system. Yet no Theory can furnish the keys to a correct orientation in this domain. One can make a film having life in a Convent as its theme that puts the Revolutionary libido in motion. One can make a film in defense of Revolution that is fascist from the point of view of the economy of desire. In The Last Resort, what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane is not the words and the contents of ideas, but essentially asignifying messages that escape dominant semiology."

Rewritten as "The Lion King" and released in 1994...

What's Buried UNDER the Pyramids at Giza?

 ...Beats me!

Quantum Chewiness: Does Quantum Entropy Explain Gravity?

Grab a Bowl of Popcorn, or some Euclidean Instantons to find out!

I wonder if they sell Foamy Cubits in this Theatre's concession stand?

Quantum Genesis: One (or Two) More of Many?

Are Euclidean Instantons the "Big Pop"?

In Medias Res! The Deleuzian Universe!

The Physics Community Reacts to Kumar's Proposal...

Welcome to the Pathocracy

Digital & Social Media - The Pathocratic Medium

By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)!

Enjoy your freedom!

Deleuze on Leibnitz

Voltaire on the "best possible world" of Leibnitz (for parallax):

In Voltaire's "Candide" (1759), the concept of "the best of all possible worlds" is satirized and challenged through the character of Pangloss, who stubbornly clings to the idea despite witnessing immense suffering and injustice, ultimately leading Candide to reject such naive optimism

The Bio-Chemical Self-Assembly Space Race

Fragmented Narratives: Anti-Oedipal (& Lacanian "Lack") Schizo-Analysis (Deleuze & Guattari)...

Salvador Dalí, "Metamorphosis of Narcissus" (1937)

from Wikipedia:

Deleuze uses the preface to relate the work (Difference and Repetition) to other texts. He describes his philosophical motivation as "a generalized anti-Hegelianism" (xix) and notes that the forces of difference and repetition can serve as conceptual substitutes for identity and negation in Hegel. The importance of this terminological change is that difference and repetition are both positive forces with unpredictable effects. Deleuze suggests that, unlike Hegel, he creates concepts out of a joyful and creative logic that resists the dualism of dialectic: "I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them" (xxi).

Salvador Dali

Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the egg (ab ovo), but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things (In medias res)...

- Horace, "Ars Poetica" (On Homer's "Iliad")

---

Once Upon a Time...as media-driven Profilicity and 2nd Order Self-Observation  came into its' own and Technofeudalism  conquered and replaced Corporate Capitalism..

"Philosophy is the translation of Eros into Logos" 

- Byung-Chul Han 

"...and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called, 'Love'"

 - Plato "Symposium" (Aristophanes' Speech)

"If One IS Not, then Nothing IS"

- Plato, "Parmenides"

SOCRATES: Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore I would not have you be too easily persuaded of it. Reflect well and like a man, and do not easily accept such a doctrine; for you are young and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me.

CRATYLUS: I will do as you say, though I can assure you, Socrates, that I have been considering the matter already, and the result of a great deal of trouble and consideration is that I incline to Heracleitus.

SOCRATES: Then, another day, my friend, when you come back, you shall give me a lesson; but at present, go into the country, as you are intending, and Hermogenes shall set you on your way.

CRATYLUS: Very good, Socrates; I hope, however, that you will continue to think about these things yourself.

-Plato, "Cratylus" 

William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer"

"Who ails tongue coddeau, aspace of dumbillsilly? And they fell upong one another: and themselves have fallen. And still nowanights and by nights of yore do all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lover say only: Cull me ere I wilt to thee!: and, but a little later: Pluck me whilst I blush! Well may they wilt, marry, and profusedly blush, be troth! For that saying is as old as howitts. Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn't it the truath I'm tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmyccan timped hir, tampting Tam. Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow!

Hop!"

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"  

---

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decoded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occassioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise.

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake" 

In Medias Res!

Slavoj Zizek, "The Logic of Courtly Love & Feminine Subjectivity"

Zizekian Moments

Slavoj Zizek, "The Parallax of Lack and Surplus in Politics"

Excerpt from Slavoj Zizek video above:

Marx's vision of Communism remains all too much a vision of Capitalism without Capital, without Capitalism. Marx always speaks as if we have this incredible dynamic in Capitalism, but then at a certain stage of development, you drop the form of Capital, search for profit, and so on; and you will get uh self-propelled, even more crazy, wild expansion reproduction. I think precisely, and here I'm entering your topic of lack and access, I think that precisely, leaps as we are experiencing today, this will not happen. 

The greatest Hegelian Insight that we get is that something that may appear to be an obstacle to full development of a field is its' condition of possibility. So you take away the obstacle, and you lose, at the same time, what this was an obstacle to. 

Now we take an example, I apologize myself sincerely but I just don't have a better example, if it will sound slightly male chauvinist, no? It's an old story that I repeat again all the time. I was flirting, years ago with a lady. I will not tell you "where, who said, "The last lover who saw me naked told me that my body is perfect... just, it was "almost perfect", it would have been just better, if I were to lose just two pounds. And I told her immediately, "just don't do that." Because you need this imperfection to give birth to the fantasy, "My god, without that you would be perfect!" But if you take away the obstacle, she would just be bland, average, you lose it.

So, I will not lose time here, something along this, I think, happens with Marx, when he all the time says that "the form of Capital is the obstacle." Yes, but only in the form of this obstacle can the expanded self reproduction function.

...and What Am I For the Others?  

a consumer,  a footsoldier,  a voter, a taxpaying revenue source, an entrepreneur...?

Che Vuoi? 

...a free-entrepreneur of the self?

...the commodification of the Self!

Got a better idea (ie- LIMITED Commerce, NOT Capitalism) that doesn't lead to technofeudalism?

Speak Now or Forever Remain a Cloud-Serf!

On Byung-Chul Han's "The Spirit of Hope" in Cormack McCarthy's "The Road"; Existence Between Wonder and Fear

Doomscrolling refers to the act of compulsively consuming negative or distressing news and information online, often for extended periods. It is characterized by:

Excessive scrolling: Spending a significant amount of time scrolling through negative content.

Negative focus: Seeking out and consuming primarily negative news and stories.

Emotional distress: Experiencing anxiety, depression, or other negative emotions as a result of the content consumed.

Neglecting other activities: Spending so much time doomscrolling that other important activities are neglected.

Doomscrolling can have detrimental effects on mental health, leading to increased anxiety, depression, and feelings of hopelessness. It can also create a sense of helplessness and reinforce negative beliefs

On the Need for Radical Hope, for carrying the fire of Prometheus inside Pandora's box, her "body".

"Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its' Horizons."

- Václav Havel

It is a sweet thing to draw out

a long, long life in cheerful hopes,

and feed the spirit in the bright

benignity of happiness:

but I shiver when I see you

wasted with ten thousand pains,

all because you did not tremble

at the name of Zeus…

— Aeschylus, "Prometheus Bound"

Acting with Faith in the Absence of Certain or Scientific Knowledge.

A Life acting with not only 'Certainty'... but also supplemented with Wonder and Mystery and especially a transcendent HOPE to bridge them with Certainty and overcome and prevent submission to what otherwise might result in the numbness of a fear induced apathy! Especially when there is no post-apocalyptal Rescue Mission coming to save you and/ or us... and you need a Holy Spirit to help bridge and transcend the Father and the Son  A 'surplus value' of Spirit to draw upon and use to face your fears and near despair... and persevere...

...or better, overcome our circumstances past, present, and future.

Soviet Cybernetics

Stop Being Such a Fascist!

An Analysis of Felix Guattari's Totalitarian Chemistry on "Why Everyone Wants to be a Fascist"

Selected excerpts from video above:

...There are many ways that these problems can be explored. He suggests that the modern origins can be traced to "the repression against the Communards of 1871", explaining that modern forms have evolved different ways of seizing collective desire based on local relations and transformations to production. Their history is inseparable from their social transversality. Effectively, the machines that fascism has deployed in the past are continuing to proliferate into new forms - he describes it as a "totalitarian chemistry" that proliferates across social and individual structures, even including guilt and neurosis. As the social division of labor evolves, it has necessitated larger and larger organizations of productive groupings, but this has resulted in increasing molecularization of the human element "of industry, of the economy, of education, of information, etc.".

Again, its important to understand that to Guattari, individuals do not communicate directly to other people but rather participate in a "a transhuman chain of organs is formed and enters into conjunction with semiotic chains and an intersection of material flows." This molecularization exploded to such a point that they are "capable of liberating the atomic energy of desire". As a result, both totalitarian modes of capitalist and socialist systems have "to continually perfect and miniuraturize their repressive machines".

Guattari thus concludes that in order to understand the machines that compose totalitarian powers, one has to focus on the micropolitical struggle. Without this focus, abstractions and generalizations form and one finds themselves back in the realm of totalitarianism, and repression regains its power. Guattari is basically interested in a theory that does not alienate the source of desire from its power. So, in order to fight back against this, one has to continually focus on the molecular because totalitarianism constantly is adapting to new social transformations and producing new generalizations.

As an example, Hitler as a unique individual here was not necessarily special but his form repeated itself through "dreams, deliriums, in the contorted behavior of policemen, and even on the leather jackets of some gangs who, without knowing anything about Nazism, reproduce the icons of Hitlerism." Even in the modern day, Hitlerism runs rampant, such as being embedded in popular conspiracy theories shared frequently online.

Guattari is concerned that analyzing fascism through social/ historical/ political/ psychoanalytic generalizations is not enough because fascism is crystalizing, or otherwise finding itself emerging through these processes in more and more microscopic formulations in all walks of life. "By pretending that the individual has a negligible role in history, they would like to make us believe that we can do nothing but stand with hands tied in the face of the hysterical gesticulations or paranoiac manipulations of local tyrants and bureaucrats of every kind. A micropolitics of desire means that henceforth we will refuse to allow any fascist formula to slip by, on whatever scale it may manifest itself, including within the scale of the family or even within the scale of our own personal economy."...

---

...Anyways, narratives persisting through society, especially through mass media, reinforce the idea at this time that fascism was a problem that came and went, and was defeated by a rosy image of the united forces of capitalism and socialism, which is a repainting of history that hides the reality that the bourgoisie tolerated fascism until it was a threat to itself. Guattari points out that while there was a group of bourgoisie who were external to fascism, critical of its instability and ability to stir desire in the masses, that international capitalism was willing to tolerate its presence until there were other means to control class struggle. The union was not to "save democracy" but to respond to a catastrophic political failure whose runaway libidinal spiral was so dangerous that "the planet was seized by a crisis that seemed like the end of the world".

He says that the reason why leftist alternatives in Italy and Germany failed was because they offered no alternative to this release of desire. In comparison, oftentimes the answer given is that fascist states are able to produce more immediate answers to political crisises in the short term, in contrast "with the powerlessness of the socio-democratic governments of the Weimar Republic". What these explanations fail to understand is the fact that fascism, through its ability to release the desire of the masses, was a huge threat to capitalism, even a bigger threat than the October revolution. The threat came from the fact that fascism triggered a mass "death instinct" in the masses. Basically, by reterritorializing onto a fascist leader, state and society, the masses removed themselves from a reality that they hated - they'd literally rather have a society that destroys itself than be forced into dominant meanings.

But through this process, fascism recaptures this desire back into a new set of dominant meanings through its theatre of hysteria, which results in its own internal instability. Guattari states that fascist meanings emerge from a "composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one". Nazi Germany was so obsessed with death that it was obsessed even with its own death - to the point that it continued to fight in the war for years after it effectively had been lost. In comparison, Stalinism was much more stable.

Capitalism, in comparison to fascism, tries to molecularize and alienate workers while tapping into their "potentiality for desire". It installs its program on all social stratifications in such a way that it entirely codes the individual's perspective of the world. Capitalism tries to avoid large scale social movements and regulates itself through the state, and tries to contain breakout conflicts by confining issues to economic and localized territories.

Stalinism in comparison placed the power of the party over the military/police ect. (in contrast to fascism, where they are relatively on the same level), overcoding the machines of power and placing the masses under control, including the international proletariat. The failure of Stalinism is a result of its inability to adapt to the "molecularization of the work force" - in other words, capitalism's ability to encroach more and more into more tight spaces. Essentially, over time, various failures in the party to control this repression allowed the other social machines to gain more power over time, destabilizing the power in the party. This forced the political question back down to the subject of the particular, which allowed capitalism to integrate into communist parties through its molecularization. This destabilized Stalinism and caused it to effectively collapse. Even though at the time of the writing it still existed in smaller organizations like parties and unions, it operates on the older socio-democratic model and doesn't account for revolutionary releases of desire like May 1968.

With the collapse of Stalinism as competition, the capitalist system needs to develop new forms of totalitarianism. It needs to deal with new problems like racism, sexual repression, the oppression of the mentally and physically disabled, prisons, immigration ect., and to deal with these problems it will repress everything that can't be contained into economic objectives. Guattari explains that fascism is trying to root itself in any structure that is trying to adapt desire for the profit economy.

To wrap it up, Guattari writes the following, which I think should just be preserved in its entireity for its importance:

"We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: "Fascism will not make it again." Fascism has already "made it," and it continues to "make it." It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micropolitical economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone's desire. We must stop, once and for all, being misled by the sinister buffooneries of those socio-democrats who are so astonished that their army, allegedly the most democratic in the world, launches, without notice, the worst of fascist repressions. A military machine as such crystallizes a fascist desire, no matter what the political regime may be. Trotsky's army, Mao's army, and Castro's army have been no exceptions: which in no way detracts from their respective merits.

 
Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak. And whether it is the former or the latter depends on the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire."

Dark Matter May Be Keeping an Ion You!

Processing Trauma Through Art

"Philosophy is the translation of Eros into Logos" 

- Byung-Chul Han

...because Survival in Insufficient!

Achieving Stage 3+ thru Simulacra... thereby strengthening Foundational Stages 1&2...and overcoming the trauma...  overwriting one's pre-Existing (-) Pathos/ Logos with a new and cathartic Pathos(+) and altered Logos(+)

Kasper Møller Nielsen, "Harri Mäcklin: From Self-Forgetfulness to We-Experiences"

I spent three wonderful months at the CFS, , from the beginning of November 2019 till the end of January 2020. Though I would have loved to stay longer, in retrospect my timing was most fortunate: when my departure was getting close, there were only a few cases of Covid-19 around Europe, and there was no talk of a global pandemic. Fast forward a few weeks, and both Denmark and Finland closed their borders and the universities went under lockdown.

Now I view my stay in Copenhagen like the calm before a storm. I knew I was in for a hectic spring when I returned to Helsinki, where I currently work as a postdoc, so I made sure to enjoy all the peace I had in Copenhagen. Little did I know how unusual the spring would turn out to be.

I came to the CFS to learn more about different models of subjectivity and self-consciousness. My background is in aesthetics and hermeneutic phenomenology, and I thought I needed more tools to deepen my understanding of certain questions that came up during my PhD project. I wrote my PhD on the phenomenology of aesthetic immersion – on those peculiar experiences where an artwork or some other aesthetic phenomenon consumes one’s attention to the extent that one’s sense of time, space, and place radically alters. One aspect of immersion that I didn’t dwell upon sufficiently is an experience I call aesthetic self-forgetfulness, which is often described in aesthetic literature but still far too little understood. This experience has to do with the situation where one becomes so deeply consumed by an aesthetic phenomenon that one is no longer present to oneself as the subject of the experience. Descriptions of such experiences enter aesthetic discourses during the 18th century (at the latest), and from thereon they have made steady appearances both in art theory and criticism – the most famous formulation being Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of aesthetic experience in the third book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818). What strikes me odd in existing discussions – which tend to be very brief and sketchy – is that they very rarely stop to ask what precisely the “self” is that is forgotten in aesthetic self-forgetfulness. Indeed, to my knowledge the only explicit mention of this question is in Moritz Geiger’s brilliant, but nowadays all too little-known essay Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses (1913), and even Geiger merely touches the issue in passing. My interest lies in deciphering what precisely occurs in experiences of aesthetic self-forgetfulness and what such experiences tell us about the structure of selfhood. Furthermore, such experiences have affinities with other unusual experiences, such as mystical or flow experiences and even psychopathological self-disturbances, which are also characterised by some kind of alteration in self-consciousness. There thus rises question of how aesthetic immersion relates to and differs from these experiences.

One of the outcomes of my stay at the CFS was that I realized how the talk of self-forgetfulness is to some extent misguiding. This is because some pre-reflective layer of self-consciousness must remain intact even if deeply immersive situations bar reflective self-consciousness. This is testified by the fact that people can identify experiences of immersion as something that happened to them, even if they weren’t aware of themselves during the experience itself – if immersion entailed a complete annihilation of the self, this identification would not be possible. This it seems that the “self” that is forgotten in aesthetic self-forgetfulness is a more robust layer of selfhood – but precisely what that is remains to be worked out.

Though my stay at the CFS greatly benefited my current project, I think the real learning experiences lie elsewhere. During my stay, the Center was starting the new ERC-project “Who Are We?”. I have to confess I knew the mere rudiments of the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, so I found the weekly seminars and invited lectures on the topics very enlightening. However, I think that I came to understand the importance of we-experiences in a somewhat more practical manner. There is a very strong sense of community at the CFS, and I felt very welcome from my first day onwards. Doing research is often solitary work, and I greatly enjoyed the Center’s communal atmosphere, where people can think together, share ideas, and vent out frustrations. Now, having worked from home for almost three months with no end in sight, I cherish this sense of “we” that permeated my stay at the Center: the shared lunches, the Friday beers at the campus bar, the chats by the coffee machine – and even the charades at the Christmas dinner, where I made a fool of myself trying to mime a whale. Building such a feeling of togetherness is something I wish to carry forward into my own academic communities.

---

from Aesthetic Self-forgetfullness

When the French author Denis Diderot visited the Paris Salon in 1767, a small painting of a pastoral river scene caught his eye. The painting, Claude Joseph Vernet’s Occupations of the Riverbank (1766), stirred in Diderot what he describes as a ‘rapture’ (délire), where he felt like physically entering the painting and finally losing himself there (Diderot, 1995, p. 98). Diderot likens this ‘still sweeter pleasure of forgetting myself’ (ibid.) to a divine state:

Where am I at this moment? What is all this surrounding me? I don’t know, I can’t say. What’s lacking? Nothing. What do I want? Nothing. If there is a God, his being must be like this, taking pleasure in himself. (Diderot, 1995, p. 98)

After having a similar experience with another painting, Diderot (1995, p. 216) goes on to claim that when ‘one forgets oneself’ (on s’oublie) in such a way in front of a painting, art is ‘at its most magical’.

Atelier de Claude Joseph Vernet (1714 -1789)

Les Occupations du rivage (titre d’après l’estampe de Le Bas), 1766

Huile sur toile - 49 x 39 cm

Langres, Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot

Photo : Christie’s

UnSafe at ANY Speed...

Stranger Danger!

Care to Watch Some Velivision?

"Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthy irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus twos."

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

"Is the strays world moving mound or what static babel is this, tell us?" 

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake" 

"Happily you were not quite so successful in the process verbal whereby you would sublimate your blepharospasmockical suppressions, it seems?"

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

"The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.  Still onappealed to by the cycles and unappalled by the recoursers we feel all serene, never you fret, as regards our dutyful cask."

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

...Some M-m-m-m-m-VV?

Limbic Resonance...

"Limbic Resonance" can be described as “a symphony of mutual and internal adaptation.” The premise that humans will subconsciously synchronize with others closest to them is explored here, as musicians gradually move out of hocket to new mechanisms within their instrument families, and then ultimately create uniformity across the ensemble. Each section of this piece is modeled after one facet of a sound amplitude envelope, or ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) and altogether displays a transition from non-pitched sound to wholly sympathetic vibration.

On Schizophrenic Advertising (Excerpt):

So the challenge for advertisers under Late Capitalism is to create Identity formations that could be created as quickly as possible, persist long enough for the consumer to buy the product, but also disappear quickly enough for new formations to form for new products. Of course, with our media technology, this formation does not have to last long at all. Most of us can immediately order a product at the click of a button, or consume brands through streaming services. The result is a cultural tempo unparalleled in history. People assume and shed identities like never before, leading them to consume like never before. And the result is exactly what Fredric Jameson was talking about when he applied Lacan's theory of Schizophrenia to culture.

Peretti summarizes the result of this, "This type of acceleration encourages weak Egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily. An essentially Schizo person can have a quick Ego formation and buy a new wardrobe to complement his or her new Identity. This Identity must be quickly forsaken as Styles change and, as contradictory media images barrage the individual psyche. The person becomes Schizo again, prepared for another round of Lacanian identification and catalog shopping. The "Ideal-I"s that the Capitalist Media offer are perhaps even less complex than the infantile Imago of the child's own reflection. Needless to say, such an ego wears out fast, inspiring the consumer to shop around for another one."

I Myself (Ego) Do Not See, I Can Only be Shown... by the 'Others' (SuperEgo's) Gaze!

Of the many possible underdetermined hermeneutical associations of the word "passencore" we have "passenger", ie- that one is a passenger to one's own journey, identity, and maladies. This message is at the very heart of the psychic libidinal journey through identity that is "Finnegans Wake". Confronting all sorts of anxieties complexes and impulses in the process.

Additionally, one could read that the Invader which Sir Tristram is here, invading from Over the short sea, who is the psychic 'other' of the dreamer, carries with him passengers, or multitudes, which threaten one from various angles. Thus "Finnegans Wake" is in part a persecution narrative, dealing with the psychological discomfort involved not only with facing against others, but facing the discontinuities within oneself. Which describes thus the ambivalent relationship of the self to its' own memory and iteration through time, leaving one often feeling at odds with oneself.

"Main character syndrome" is a social media term describing the tendency to view oneself as the central protagonist in life, often leading to self-centered behaviors and a lack of empathy for others.

Got Neuralink?

The limbic grounds us to 'reality' @ J (Jouissance)

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means... I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it."

-Andrei Tarkovsky

Muh, Democracy! Reflections in Hindsight.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand"

-Richard Feynman 

...and the Law of Unintended Consequences!

Zeynip Tufekci, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives"

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.

Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right?

Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.

Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted — if at all! — with the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or beyond it, the world.

You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test potential gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.

Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.

Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had once proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses, you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide. It did not. Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city.

Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.

The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists, and which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Spooked, the co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

The second influential publication to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak was a letter published in early 2020 in The Lancet. The letter, which described the idea as a conspiracy theory, appeared to be the work of a group of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to public document requests by U.S. Right to Know, the public later learned that behind the scenes, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, had drafted and circulated the letter, while strategizing on how to hide his tracks and telling the signatories that it “will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.” The Lancet later published an addendum disclosing Daszak’s conflict of interest as a collaborator of the Wuhan lab, but the journal did not retract the letter.

And they had assistance. Thanks to more public records requests and congressional subpoenas, the public learned that David Morens, a senior scientific adviser to Fauci at N.I.H., wrote to Daszak that he had learned how to make “emails disappear,” especially emails about pandemic origins. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote.

It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate may have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries, they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials, or the organizations they represent, to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they may have withheld relevant information and even misled the public. Such self-scrutiny is especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated child has died of measles and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out by the top of the federal government. But a clumsy, misguided effort like this didn’t just fail, it backfired. These half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.

After a few dogged journalists, a small nonprofit pursuing Freedom of Information requests and an independent group of researchers brought these issues to light, followed by a congressional investigation, the Biden administration finally banned EcoHealth from all federal grants for five years.
That’s a start. The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. had already come to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.

Only an honest conversation will lead us forward. Like any field with the potential to inflict harm on a global scale, research with dangerous, potentially super-transmissible pathogens cannot be left to self-regulation or lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The goal should be an international treaty guiding biosafety, but we don’t have to be frozen in place until one appears. Leading journals could refuse to publish research that doesn’t conform to safety standards, the way they already reject research that doesn’t conform to ethical standards. Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses or computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. If some risky research is truly irreplaceable, it should be held to the highest safety conditions, and conducted far away from cities.

We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third.