Deconstructing Phil. is Back From the Dead

First, there are a few administrative details to consider: Today’s post has no citations since I originally developed it as an outline for a video weblog. The quotes, of course, are still good. I’d also like to provide a quick apologia for the fact that it’s been over 2 months since the last post and, in fact, there have only been 7 entries since January. Mostly, this is the result of a short hospital stay, a few Existential crisises, and the gloomy exigencies of finishing the first year of law school. Instead of using my powers of critical theory against Dr. Phil, I’ve felt compelled to channel my theoretical might at the institution of law school so as to counteract the acknowledged goal of brainwashing students into forgetting everything they’ve ever learned or thought. And I think I’ve been moderately successful. Constitutional law taught me that our nation’s most hallowed document was written by a homogeneous bunch of dilettantes who, in many fundamental ways, misread Rousseau, Locke, and Hume while only selectively admiring aspects of the ancient Roman Republic and Greek city-states. Criminal law suggests that society punishes it’s own members not out of utilitarian benevolence or retributivist motivation, but simply because without incarcerating and institutionalizing certain individuals, no one would ever feel free. In Contracts and Property, I learned that the current legal system—immensely complex and steeped in antiquated traditions—exists primarily to turn simple acts—like buying and selling goods, or living on a tiny piece of land—into situations of meta-exploitation where everything and everyone—even the greatest titans of business—is controlled, represented, and manipulated by a select class (lawyers) with the singular objective of preserving that one exceedingly important legal concept: stare decisis, precedent, tradition, the status quo. This doesn’t relate to the Dr. Phil show, but what of value ever could?

Actually, the Derridian concept of hauntology might make interesting, even if strange, bedfellows out of yesterday’s episode and today’s blog. You see, instead of using his 40 minutes with America to discuss the superego’s regulation of unconscious drives, the contemporary role of the ubermensch, or even Antonio Gramsci’s idea of a hegemonic superstructure, Dr. Phil examined the supernatural (Boo! or, should I say: Boooooooooooooo!). Even with such an abnormal topic as the paranormal, it is easy to imagine how it could turn into a legitimate pursuit, like a critique on pseudosciences, or an illustration of how the reason and logic behind belief is only persuasive to those who, as Slavoj Zizek says: “already believe.” Dr. Phil, on the other hand, decided to take on the subject by talking with James Van Praagh, who he called “a world renowned medium” but who also happens to be the executive producer of a Fox show and the author of a new book, both on the subjects of ghosts and clairvoyance. Dr. Phil opened the show with the remark: “I’m a skeptic. I was trained in the scientific model.” However, I’m not sure the scientific model includes plugging lousy t.v. shows and scam books by following a self-purported medium as he wanders through Hollywood graveyards and studio lots and “reads” audience members. We might be able to make up a bit of what is lacking by “reading” Derrida, particularly Spectres of Marx. Derrida quickly points out that the very first sentence of The Communist Manifesto is “a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism.” After numerous allusion and citations from Hamlet, where ghosts appear and reappear, upsetting the very fabric and core of existence, Derrida introduces hauntology—a mixture of a haunting and ontology. Hauntology is where being and not being co-exist, where the traditional dichotomy of “to be or not to be” is exposed as an illusion. Derrida’s motivation seems to be partially to critique Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History which predicts “an end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government” in “unimprovable” liberal democracies which will lead to “an end of history.” With hauntology, Derrida hypothesizes that the end of communism heralds not the “end of history” but a rebirth of the ghost of Marxism. It is only through the rupture with the past, through the relationship of otherness with the self, through differance, that one can find the present and pressence. Many of the mentalist’s reliable tricks depend on hauntological phenomena. Fake psychics, like James Van Praagh, often talk extremely fast so that the audience is forced to pick out certain parts and disregard others, hopefully the inaccurate statements. Similarly, vague and general statements are habitually used. Van Praagh saw that Dr. Phil’s dead father “was proud of him,” that “there must be a mausoleum” in a cemetery, and that a particular audience member had a dead relative who died in intensive care. The psychic’s initial reading is not complete until it partly reappears and partly dissappears—as the real ghost in the room—in the readee’s replies. The psychic—and here especially we must include Marx— isn’t really telling his or her audience anything, but rather asking them to look inside their past. When Van Praagh asked an audience member if her dead motorcycle-riding, hard rock playing father had a tattoo, maybe of a rose, the response was “not that I know of.” But that is not an end to the history of the question. Von Praagh quickly responded: “Well, will you find out?” This is the “performative interpretation,” transforming what it interprets and that which simultaneously settles and unsettles being. Hauntology, then, is the remainder—the whole/hole—left after the “cold readings” of history, ontology, and non-deconstructive theory. It’s not that long until everything becomes hauntologied, that “something which one does not know, precisely” and which “comes back in advance from the past.” These words I’m writing have already died, but they will reappear, as the ghosts of what they once were to anyone interpreting them, just as I awaken the ghost of Derrida as he spoke with the spirit of Marx, who communed with Hegel, ad infinitum. Derrida claims that “the future can only be for ghosts. And the past” and this is entirely because of ghostly repetitions. Hauntology and psychics both “desynchronize us” in this way. This is true in the television world too, since shows—including Dr. Phil—are taped weeks, if not months in advance of their first air date where they will gain significance and meaning. But it is meaning inside a new and different discourse. For instance, one can easily imagine a Dr. Phil episode on school violence where a bully is interviewed. If, in between the taping and the broadcast, this same student were to brutally attack another student or go on some sort of rampage, it is clear that this has an enormous effect on how the show will be received. In a strange turn of events, as she was promoting her show, it was Jennifer Love Hewitt and not Dr. Phil who made the stupidest comment of the episode: “I have lots of people who I know will pass away one day.” The Derridian take on this is at first the obvious one: well, of course, all people die. And yet there is something which not-lives forever: hauntology. Confusion and hauntology often mix, it is to be expected, because we are all an active part of it: the ghosts to come, happy that we are not yet realized and the perverse grave robbers digging up the past for our own consumption.

Dr. Phil Now or Never

Today we were treated to another dose of “Dr. Phil Now!” where Dr. Philistine investigated the very current phenomenon of school shootings. Obviously, we shouldn’t belittle the trauma felt by victims of any violence, nor should we condone brutal, inhumane behavior. At the same time, it might be just as wrong to refrain from belittling Dr. Phil, allowing his brutal, inhumane brand of psychology to persist without criticism. This issue touches upon many political ramifications such as gun control, education policy, and the rights and freedoms afforded to individuals (particularly young people). The most interesting fallacy related to school shootings, though, is not overtly political, but rather historical. Dr. Phil repeats an oft reported error so familiar to media reports, expert explications, and uneasy community meetings: these acts of violence are new and anomalous. This is an irrefutable—and perhaps deliberate—distortion of the historical record. A Columbine survivor and guest added: “one thing got me into college, I thought it didn’t happen there.” Again, this is the historical record being annihilated. Even between the Columbine shooting and the Virginia Tech massacre (which apparently re-opened this victim’s eyes) there were at least 9 shootings on college campuses resulting in 19 deaths and many more injuries. In fact, there are dozens more similar acts of violence going back to at least 1936 where a student at Lehigh University killed himself and his English professor after demanded that his grade be changed. In 1966, for instance, a meticulously planned shooting by a deranged, well-armed shooter took place atop the Tower at the University of Texas which killed 16 and wounded more than 30 more. In fact, a reasonable (though necessarily morbid) examination of the relevant history shows that almost all the common assumptions are wrong. Some of the most deadly school related killings in modern times don’t even take place in America, but rather as part of broader conflicts in places like Bratunac in Yugoslavia, Stalino in Ukraine, Hue in Vietnam, and Beslen in Russia. As these events also illustrate, such attacks are also often not the result of, as Dr. Phil muses, “heartbroken teenage boys” and “loners” but rather adults (or, more ominously by groups of adults) with deep felt social, political, and personal grudges. Even in America, the deadliest school-related killing was not perpetrated by a depressed, socially awkward adolescent at a modern, suburban campus. Instead, it was at a rural Bath, Michigan schoolhouse in the year 1927 when a 55 year old school board treasurer and farmer killed 45 students and teachers, injuring 58 more. Disgruntled over his foreclosed farm, difficult family situation, and other townspeople who ignored his fight for lower taxes, the killer used dynamite and combinations of shrapnel to destroy his own home and set off explosions in three locations at the township’s only school. The purpose of recounting these gruesome events is not to glorify them or even compare body counts as part of a dismal contest, but instead to point out that they are not completely new phenomena, nor do they follow (at least with any great regularity) any of the characteristics so meticulously mapped out and emphasized by Dr. Phil. This is quite different from Santayana’s famous claim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana Reason in Common Sense). It is difficult to see how anything can be repeated when it is forgotten, covered up, or unknown to begin with. There are many conceptions of history. Hegel and Marx posit dialectics where various stages and interactions are thought to lead to progress and eventually a teleological perfection. Others, like Walter Benjamin, read history as a persistent accumulation of chaos and catastrophe, with progress coming in the form of the backward-flung angel hurling through the post-lapsarian state (Illuminations). In this sense, it doesn’t really matter whether our age is the pinnacle of human existence or the nadir, or even if our time is not substantially different from anything that has already occurred. What is important is that virtually all reputable sciences, philosophies, and psychological movements (predicated on the idea that past events affect subsequent consciousness) must take account of past events and consider a broader historical context. Otherwise, as Dr. Phil demonstrates, one’s historical perspective mirrors that dangerous relationship where the subject becomes an illogical and introverted, social outsider obsessed with destruction.