I had several smaller thoughts about the various texts we looked at this week:
1) I thought it was interesting to examine the theme of paranoia through film, a medium itself heavily invested with the desire to know all and to see all (the fear of which constitutes a part of paranoia). In The Conversation, there were several pivotal scenes that were made problematic and as a result undermined the classical formula of the camera as being highest in the heirarchy of knowledge, in which the status of the action as either reality or dream was uncertain. For example, in the hotel when Harry sees the murder, it is filmed in a montage so as to emphasize the hallucinatory aspect of the scene. This scene is pivotal, because it serves to either justify or undermine the character’s claims to be either dually cautious or pathologically paranoid. In another sense, in Enemy of the State, the camera shows itself as naturalized surveillance in scenes where we first see the NSA security camera’s view of the scene, which is then frustrated by an obstacle such as a tree, whereas then the ‘natural’ camera of the story will fill in the blanks of what the NSA can’t see for the audience of the film.
2) In both films, I thought the line between surveillance and paranoia became extremely sketchy. That is, while in both films, Gene Hackman’s (!) character seemed highly paranoid, at the same time that paranoia seemed equally highly justified given the cavalcade of equipment paraded out in both films. It makes infinite sense that someone who makes their living dealing with such equipment, and as a result aware of the means at one’s disposal to surveill, and in a position in which they are dealing with privileged information, would want to be as secretive and paranoid (read: cautious) as possible. It becomes a justified case of self-preservation rather than pathology.
3) I saw Enemy of the State as the waging of a battle of publicity. When the various ‘good guys’ were running away from the NSA, I was struck by the thought: who can they run to? For example, when Jason Lee’s character (the duck scientist) was running it was uncertain where he could go if after all he was already running away from the government. All I could think of was: the media. If he could have run into a newsroom and shouted his story, he would have been saved. That is, if the enemy in this movie is the government, then the only potential hero is the media, or the activated public sphere, which as in Habermas, functions to work over and against the state. In fact the media is present throughout and serves to close the movie, with the headline of “labor lawyer saves day” or whatever it is. In The Conversation, the enemy was the Big Coroporation. Both the government and corporation are symbols of power and are thus useful in creating a compelling case around paranoia and serving to heighten the suspense in these films. They also then play on the fears engaged in Freud’s discussion of paranoia as a repression/projection. That is there is an ambivalence: we want to have a strong government protecting the ‘most powerful nation in the world’ (or however it was stated multiple times in Enemy) and we want rich, successful corporations as a sybmbol of America’s wealth, however because we can’t all participate in that power, it becomes something that can be exploited as the enemy, the ‘bad guy,’ in films like these. That is the repressed desire for power is projected into a hate and fear of the government and corporations. As a result of the exploitation of this fear, I would say more than say offering a treatment of a paranoic, both these films foster paranoia in the audiences that watch them.

posted by Anonymous at 8:30 AM

Schreber’s paranoia with regards to his physical existence and appearance according to both Freud and Santner seem to revolve around the deterioration of his body and his transformation into a woman. Schreber projects himself as a woman when he is with himself, in his appearance and in his relationships with God and Flechsig. Santner traces these realationships back to that of Scherber with his father, a strict man who forced Scherber into a dangerous state of physical self-awareness with his devices and exercises, pinpointed as a cause for his later paranoia regarding his physicality. Therefore, judging by this logic, self-awareness is a prime ingredient of internal paranoia regarding one’s physical state and emotional fate. Can it be assumed, using this aspect of Freud’s analysis (and not the sexual ones, absurd as they are) that awareness contributes most to paranoia? That this type of over-saturation at a young age, or over saturation at a developed age creates a sense of paranoia due to too much knowledge?

In The Conversation, it makes perfect sense that the best surveillance man in the business would also be troubled by a deep paranoia. Harry Caul’s paranoia is based upon the knowledge of the following pieces of information due to his involvement in the surveillance “industry”:

1. There are people who will pay for surveillance services.
2. These people are almost always looking for information that can be used to do harm to those being “watched”.
3. There are perhaps more people who are willing to take this money and conduct surveillance.
4. There are devices that make surveillance possible even in the absence of a recorder or technician.

Since Harry is aware of these things and more, and to greater extents than perhaps anyone else in the world, according to Freud and Santner, it makes perfect sense that he would develop a strong paranoia. Harry protects his home and his person against people like him, worries constantly about his privacy, and when he thinks he is being watched, goes to extreme lengths to prevent any further surveillance. Extreme amounts of knowledge promotes this type of paranoia.

posted by Anonymous at 6:21 AM

Michael Bernstein

Apologies for the late blogging.

I found Santner's Foucaultian reading of the Schreber case a compelling point of departure from Freud's psychoanalytic reading:

"Foucault's analyses of power allow us, I think, to follow Schreber much more closely and precisely in his awareness that certain kinds of expert knowledge and research paradigms...may in themselves produce an array of maddening effects in the mind and body of a person positioned as object of such knowledge." (84)

That is, instead of reading Schreber's behavior as a set of symptoms of megalomania or delusional paranoia, Foucault's theoretical model enables us to analyze the very process by which Schreber internalizes the disciplinary gaze to the point of his radical de-centering: it is Flechsig's notion of a purely indexical relationship between symbolic meaning and biochemical processes that impels Schreber to experience "his own language production as a series of mechanical vibrations of nerve fibers set in motion by external physical causes" (75). And it is Schreber's particular relationship to the disciplinary apparatus via his own father that has rendered his body not merely an effect of disciplinary power, but perhaps something of a distortion, or distorted literalization of discipline. If, as Foucault argues, the intensification (sexualization) of the body arises as a product of panoptic power--that is, through the proliferation of various disciplinary discourses--then Schreber's sexualized mutation must bear some relationship to this extreme engagement with the panoptic gaze. According to Santner, it is Schreber's overexposure to disciplinary modes of power that ultimately causes him to literalize that "performative magic"--the process required of the subject to internalize (to the point of self-subjection) and ultimately project outwards the unilateral movement of the disciplinary gaze.

If, pace Foucault, subjectivity functions through the simultaneous process of seeing and being seen, then Cauld's (Hackman's) paranoid anxiety arises from his confused relationship to the gaze. As the "best bugger on the West Coast," the master of surveillance techniques, Cauld functions as the intermediary of disciplinary power, for his assignment is to (re)produce an indexical relationship between the image and the voice, to subject others to surveillance in the name of the anonymous "director" (that omniscient referent of disciplinary power). But what should be the reassurance of his subjectivity, that reciprocal moment of being seen, is paradoxically that which haunts Cauld, that which he does everything in his power to avoid. Much of the film is built around the protagonist's paranoid fear of any potential leakage of his own personal space to the public's eye.

But what occurs in that irruption of blood from the toilet in the hotel bathroom? It is what Slavoj Zizek might call the "stain", the detail that sticks out from the symbolic, an irruption of the Real that exceeds the symbolic order. It is what disturbs a symmetrical relationship between the signifier and signified demanded by the Symbolic. In that overflowing of bodily excess, of the very signifying traces of the crime that occurs in the adjacent hotel room, do we not have some set of uncontainable signifiers produced by the protagonist's gaze itself? What relationship does this have to Cauld's own paranoia? Or to his confused or complicated relationship to the reproduction of disciplinary power? To the radical intensification/sexualization of the body produced, for instance, in Schreber's overexposure to the disciplinary gaze?

posted by Anonymous at 6:07 AM

sorry this is late...
Freud’s theories proved— for me— only to be frustrating accounts of Schreber’s condition (consistently reiterating the hetero- and masculine bias). Most of his rationalizing and mythologizing the unconscious seemed too general and universalizing to be productive, and failed to discuss the hierarchies surrounding a paranoia patient. I much preferred Santner’s emphasis of the historical and social context, and even his rather lengthy rewritings of Kittler and Foucault: “Schreber was traumatized not, as Freud had argued, by a close encounter with purely intrapsychic demons (i.e., previously repressed libidinal desires), but rather by exposure to particular forms of intersubjective power, in the one case, of a more paternal and pedagogical nature, in the other, of a more ‘scientific’ and institutional kind” (p. 77).

Santner’s focus on the presence and weight of the psychiatric institution was significant, but I lost his argument when he started to discuss gender performativity. At certain points, he seemed to suggest that the disciplinary apparatus not only produced normative boundaries but also actively produced the transgressions to those norms:
“the conversion of heteronomy into autonomy so crucial to Moritz Schreber’s medico-pedological system leaves a residue of heteronomy… that not only resists… but returns to haunt and derange the subject whose physical, moral, and aesthetic cultivation that system was designed to achieve” (p. 91) and, in his summary of Butler, “the social laws and institutions regulating gender performances can never achieve full consistency. Rather, such laws will always exhibit an inadvertent and aberrant productivity” (p. 94)
In this case, it seems that the discipline actually produces heterogeneity, or that laws ‘always exhibit’ ‘deviant performances.’ Although I agree that there is a mutual coexistence, I think this formulation is rather too neat– it abstracts and glosses over the hierarchies and struggles really at hand.

posted by Anonymous at 2:40 AM

I regretfully had to miss the screenings tonight, and I am afraid this puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, considering the readings and their relevance to whatever shape our discussion will take tomorrow. It would be nice to have a separate case to examine besides the Schreber one. But, for now I’ll make do with what I’ve got.
Santner’s analysis of Freud’s and several others’ accounts of Schreber’s breakdown and its subsequent ties to his physician, Flechsig, finally rest upon the balance of intersubjective power. Freud’s over-conceived notions of paternal power dynamics in his case study of Schreber leave much to be desired in providing any broad insight into the causes of paranoia. It is not until some of Freud’s concepts are married with Foucault’s that a convincing and far more encompassing argument is made. The link between knowledge and power, and the claims that certain ideological institutions can stake on knowledge, does much to explain the struggles Freud posits between Schreber and the doctor/father/godhead figure of his psychiatrist.
Inserting the idea of panoptic discipline into Freud’s discourse opens up an entirely new psychosocial realm—one which directly relates to, but also transcends the level of psychosexual familial relations, extending into a broader social context. When Santner says that, “Foucault’s analyses of power suggest, however, that just such a disciplinary supplement may ultimately serve to undermine the values they are intended to promote,” he is speaking directly of paranioa. (90) If the panoptic power structure is geared to promote conformity through the fear of being caught, Paranoia is simply the extreme result of Panoptic discipline. The defect of this result is that the Paranoiac then proceeds to constantly evade the symbolic authority through acts against it which do only harm to the paranoid individual.
That symbolic authority is often projected onto individuals: witness the case of the woman who believed to be photographed with her lover. Freud’s notion of the “phantasy of overhearing,” when taken out of the familial, psychosexual context is merely a permutation of a panoptic structure. Freud sexually fetishizes the act of surveillance. This woman, engaged in an act which has a socially imposed taboo, believes to be caught through a mode of panoptic vision, and knowing no-one else to impose the symbolic power on, puts it on her lover and sabotages the relationship. There is a classic defense mechanism at work here—symbolic or not.

posted by Anonymous at 2:10 AM

in section III in santner's article, he states that kittler has an intuition that schreber's psychological issues stem
from trama caused by exposure to particular forms of intersubjective power. If not solely the trama from his
father's personal forms of discipline, but potential from the base of knowledge (of the body) he was exposed
to as a child. More specifically, the "traumatic effects in those positioned as objects of such knowledge" (p.77).
Satner uses this understanding to connect his analysis of the 'case' with foucault and ultimately with schreber's
own obsession with analyzing the inherent powers granted to institutions.

when schreber wrote "towards harmless mental patients the Director of a Public Asylum is after all not an organ
of the security police of authoritative power, but essentially only a medical advisor; on the question of deprivation of
liberty his relation to his patients is in no way different from that of any private practitioner towards his patients" But
ultimately, the state is granted full use of the power associated with the knowledge of one's medical history/condition.
this knowledge gaurantees that the patient will be judged not only for his actions in public, but will be condemned due
to more internalized problem of normalcy. this thought runs completely parallel to all of Foucault's writings on the
where panoptic modes of discipline inherent in instutitional systems starting in the later 19th century. With this
in mind, i find it very interesting that Foucault's only direct reference to the 'case' is that through history, Schreber's
becomes the signifier for the general tendancy that lead to the individuation of the subject and the potential existance
of a subjects life to be read as a 'case' through the lense of new forms of scientific disciplines. The fact that this
particular 'case' lends credibility to the levels of power granted to these disciplines due to the shear interpellatory
forces of these disciplines in trully mindblowing.


-manu

posted by Anonymous at 1:11 AM

Sorry for posting this late. Computer troubles plus a sleeping roommate put me behind schedule in terms of posting this.

First of all, let me say that I really really don't care for Will Smith. But that's not really the issue here.

Freud's notion of paranoia indicates that the paranoid subject is a megalomaniac; this is a necessary part of their delusion (at least in the first case. I haven't finished the reading yet, and haven't read the second case study yet). Enemy of the State takes an everyman (granted, a rather well-off one) and makes him more important by virtue of the fact that he has something he shouldn't. Will Smith's character isn't a megalomaniac, or even paranoid. The NSA *is* out to get him. The importance of the video that Jason Lee gets is purely by chance. Same for Will Smith's character. Gene Hackman's character is not paranoid per se -- he actually has a reason to be off the grid.

Our characters aren't paranoid. Perhaps the only paranoia we see in the film is that of Will Smith's wife (I'm terrible with names), under the guise of civil liberties. The delusions of grandeur, the self-importance that is the necessary part of paranoia come in the form of "if they can watch me, they will watch me." Will Smith's response is that if you're not doing anything wrong, then it shouldn't matter. Indeed, this is the typical response to such reasoning. But is this really paranoia? Perhaps. I don't think so. It's not so much a question of personal aggrandizement, but rather that it makes it OK for the government to spy on ANYBODY -- it's not a self-interested claim, I think. In any case, the NSA already has the capability to do whatever it wants (at least in the diagetic world of the movie); what the legislation would do is make it legal.

So. Where is the paranoia?

I think the answer is that the movie itself is paranoiac. Its fantasy is that the NSA can do this. It takes an everyman and it rationalizes its persecution fantasies through a scenario based entirely on chance. Its fantasy is that every man could be the target of such an operation. And that The Man Behind the Curtain is doing it all. That his wife and child and mistress are as well at risk because of whatever chance encounter he happens to have. Its fantasy is that the NSA really can do all of this. I'm not sure that they're wrong.

Peace.

/s

posted by Anonymous at 12:35 AM

=================================
April 8 Reading - p A r A n O i A
=================================

Freud
-----

"For when we refer the causes of certain sensations to the external world, instead of looking for them (as we do in the case of others) inside ourselves, this normal proceeding, too, deserves to be called projection." (66)

I wonder which "certain sensations" Freud has in mind. It may be hard to draw a line between what arises from external and internal sources. For indeed all perceptions draw upon our internal knowledge and
mental processing to produce a meaningful experience from what begins as a purely physical process (light hitting rods and cones, molecules attaching to sensors in our nose, nerves under the skin, etc). The very idea of causation comes from within. All explanations of experience are projections onto the raw sensory data which delivers "reality" to us.

"...these and many other details of Schreber's delusional structure sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have
assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia." (79)

What is an "endopsychic perception" here? It seems that it must mean that Schreber had a particularly "clear view" of the psychic processes. For are not all delusions "visions" of internal processes, as symptoms/signs? In analyzing any psychosis, Freud assumes that by "reading" it he can learn about the original psychic processes which produces the psychosis. In the case of Schreber, the psychosis was easily "read"/translated into the original processes. It a good "perception". This has an interesting correlation in recent research on hallucination. Researchers modeled the way visual signals are produced when deprived of actual input from the eyes; a mathematical simulation based on approximations of neural firing patterns, etc. It turns out that the patterns most commonly seen during hallucination (tunnels, spider webs, whirling) are equivalent to the different ways that neural signals propagate when disconnected from optical input. In other words, you are seeing inside your own head when you hallucinate: endopsychic perception? How is this different from projection?

The Conversation
----------------

The end is an excellent instantiation of Freud's theory of paranoia (manifested by projection). All of the external objects in Harry's world (room) become suspect; possible hiding places for the BUG. Even his religious sensibilities (as marked by his concern with taking the name of Jesus in vain) (internal) are suspicious, causing him to tear open the Virgin Mary (external).

Question:
- what is the connection between surveillance and sex?
posted by Anonymous at 11:36 PM

In the middle of his delineation of Schreber’s distinction between the medical and juridical realms of power, Santner says that “Schreber is arguing that the state has no mandate pertaining to the physical of mental health of its citizens” (81) which to me seems reminiscent of the kinds of extensions of the public into the private that we discussed in Habermas. To Habermas, the private sphere has come increasingly under the control of the public state authority as a result of the “public responsibilities” that implicitly contradict Schreber’s argument. He says that he should be able to continue in his official capacity as long as his medical proclivities don’t interfere with the operation of his daily (public) life, but this is precisely the kind of power that has become a part of the public sphere to Habermas and which is mobilized by the swarming disciplines of Foucault. “The disciplines transform the performative dimensions of symbolic authority into regulations for the material control and administration of bodies and populations” (91). In principle, it is impossible to argue the truth of these claims, but I think that there seems to be a public limit of the extension of these powers, the level to which the “reasonable citizen” will allow the conflation of the public and private spheres. For instance, most citizens accept the necessity of traffic regulations – stopping at red lights and speed limits – as a necessary impingement on personal rights, but many Americans bristle when it is implied that somehow there is a public responsibility to mandate that all motorcyclists must wear helmets. Is there any kind of defining limit as to how much public responsibility for the private Americans are willing to accept or is that line necessarily an ambiguous one? Even more fundamentally, do we agree with Schreber that the state has no mandate pertaining to the physical and mental health of its citizens, or is there a responsibility by our shared humanity and is it necessarily paranoiac to resent or fear the extension of public control over the private life? What separates the Branch Dividians or militia men from less “fringe” elements like the characters in the movies we screened who just don’t want to be watched by anyone, particularly the government?
posted by Anonymous at 11:30 PM

Hello everyone
I'm having a bad blog day... I just posted my reponse three times,
please disregard this repetition and do not take it as a cheap means of emphasis...
seems blogger is giving me a lot of trouble today.
shawn
posted by Anonymous at 3:21 PM

Shawn Greenlee
Response April 7, 2002

In The Conversation, Harry Caul (Hackman), early in the film insists (in speaking apparently with his landlord) that he has “nothing personal except his keys”, and in response to questioning by his lover that he has no secrets. Yet he defends his right to privacy in such a way that we may interpret his hyper-awareness of details in conversations (the one that is the focal point of the film as well as the various dialogues throughout the film) as paranoid. This idea: that of having nothing that is secretive yet must be protected as if secret, is a major dilemma we have approached in class. It is one of unreasonable search and seizure, of violation of civil liberties. Caul’s paranoia is warranted, but also crippling. We might ask, what right to privacy does one who specializes in the violation of other’s privacy have? We see the betrayal he experiences as the tapes are stolen; his guard down; his vigilance oddly not “with it”, a little out-dated (a sign of internalized frustration/angst or a desire to be publicized?). We understand that he is aware of his influence over the outcome of events, yet struggling with his responsibility to those events. He is hired merely as a technician but the dilemma arises when his morality is calling. Information as documentation has the potential to used and thus his actions as a surveillance technician are problematic given the super-ego he feels accountable to. He is described by his fellow “bugger” as “lonely and anonymous”. It is when this anonymity is broken, that Caul becomes irate – disturbed when the microphone is turned upon him, when his conversations thought within the reasonable expectation of privacy are revealed, and used against him in social or political situations, pushing him further into loneliness and anonymity.

Santner in discussing Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, states that sexuality is understood in the modern sense as “a defining and essential feature of human existence, as the locus of one’s core identity, the expression of which comes to be seen as a form of self-expression considered to be crucial for one’s mental and physical well-being” (p.87). He goes on to state that this conception of sexuality is linked with a panoptical self-surveillance.

With Harry Caul, it appears that he is suffering from a bit of panoptical paranoia, that he does indeed have secrets and things kept personal…we see his interest in jazz music (his frustration in self-expression…and perhaps more importantly his failure to define the core of his identity via sexuality). He also displays his worry over his feeling of accountability to the actions of others made possible by his actions. Caul is locked in a struggle against self-surveillance. This feeling of accountability is more highly realized when the statement comes from Harrison Ford’s character, that Caul is being watched. The realization being that not only is God aware but also a social structure – a social structure that threatens to publicize, something seemingly desired and despised simulataneously…

posted by Anonymous at 2:56 PM