(Ben)Jamin' with Dr. Phil: part 1?

Today is Christmas, a holiday with strong Messianic overtones. It seems only fitting, therefore, that we celebrate with an exegesis of Walter Benjamin, the Jewish philosopher who points out that “like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power.” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, 254). Benjamin writes that “there is a secret agreement between the past generations and the present one” wherein the past asserts a claim that “cannot be settled cheaply.” (Ibid.) Benjamin’s philosophy of time is probably best expressed through his conception of “the angel of history.” (257). Benjamin’s description is worth a closer examination:

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (257-258).

In fact, we call this storm the t.v. schedule. One of the particularly interesting aspects of Benjamin’s portrayal of history is what it does to the viewer. Besides the approximate deification, the viewer is actually flummoxed. For one, the angel of history cannot see where he or she is going. If it is being blown away from Paradise with such force, it also seems that it will not be able to return, at least not any time soon. Perhaps most importantly, the angel is in a constant state of parallax and vertigo as it continually sees history building as a giant trail of self-created refuse and wreckage. This can all be easily adapted to the small scale temporal world that exists on and around television. Somewhat recent inventions and industry changes such as Tivo or DVDs of popular shows do, in some ways, alleviated the pain and chaos felt by the angel. In its most basic sense, however, watching television forces the viewer to take the position of the angel. Television cannot, of course, show the future. The viewer is placated and distracted with elaborate (often trashy) images of the past in lieu of control and awareness which must remain, if anywhere, in the spontaneous blackness and snow of dead air and lost signals. It is probably no secret that sitcoms and dramas are filmed months in advance. So are many “reality” shows. Even live sports and news events are broadcast with a standard 7 second delay. This is not to say that the television universe is entirely without order. We, the angelic viewers, know when the shows we like are usually on. We’re aided by guides and advertisements, and even within programs we are introduced to motifs, patterns, and limits. If each generation places a “weak Messianic power” in the generations that it expects to follow, we might also say that we found our television viewing habits on an überweak Messianic power. As a simple thought experiment, imagine your favorite show being cancelled, perhaps inexplicably, mid-season. Would it not cause one to mourn for that which was supposed to come while losing at least some faith in what is left? But, in television, as with all things containing an important temporal component, there are far more überweak Messianic powers at stake. With relatively little leeway, we expect the tone, format, and style of our favorite shows to continue unchanged. In short, we expected to see new—and yet oddly familiar—wreckage dumped in front of us as we travel, blindly, through time. As Dr. Phil said in yesterday’s episode: “video doesn’t lie.” However, Benjamin’s model makes one question in what way video could ever tell the truth. As he writes: “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” and “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” (255). Yet there is a very interesting added element, one which is partially unique to television, or at least modern communication and art: the repeat. While this might appear to offer a loophole, since the wreckage is returning, for a moment allowing one to see a small portion of the future, this is, in fact, not entirely the case. We will have to look backwards yet again, to Benjamin’s previous and most famous essay: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Deconstructing Phil. Is Back; Believe It or Not

In the urban, industrialized northern hemisphere it is winter. The days are cloudy, and short. Darkness—both metaphorical and meteorological—prevails as final exams force the most well-intentioned students into an inescapable abyss of anxiety and incomprehension. In short, the time is perfect for reading Kafka, that fun-loving lawyer who teaches that man cannot know the Law, though the Law knows a man better than himself. Today’s episode of Dr. Phil brought 5 (later 4, when 1 quit) judgmental people into the Dr. Phil house. Unfortunately, Dr. P.’s characterization and theory about what constitutes a judgmental person is, as usual, vapificialess (which is my new portmanteau for vapid, superficial, and some other “random” word such as: useless, meaningless, senseless, or reckless). Kafka, on the other hand, provides an elaborate schema of different meanings and meta-meanings of judgment in his aptly named short story, “The Judgment” (which can be read here, though all citations come from The Complete Stories). The judgmental people in the Dr. P. house all fit into easily stereotyped categories, there was the “chauvinist,” the “anti-social,” “the bitch,” and my two favorites, a poor excuse for an “elitist” and a holier-than-thou Christian Right revivalist who is, according to the Dr. P. show, a “moralist.” Such cliché caricatures of judge-mentality do exist in Kafka’s work, as they do in P.’s. Like so many of P.’s guests, the unseen, but oft talked about friend of Georg, who lives in the distant and alien land of Russia is described as “dissatisfied with his prospects,” “embittered,” and “estranged”(77, 78). Georg, the proto-protagonist, is preoccupied with passively keeping various people in his life (his father, his friend, his fiancé, his friends) separate in easily classifiable groups under his defensive control, again similar to many of the guests. Even confined to the trite and shallow characterization put forward by P of what judgmental means, Georg’s father would take the whole bakery along with the cake. Having come to the decision that his son is a deceitful, bad person (read: actually inhuman), the father takes judgmental action. He purports to have spent years secretly corresponding with Georg’s friend telling him truths Georg was ashamed to admit to gain an advantage and, in turn, reveal these truths to Georg, screaming “till now, you’ve known only about yourself…you have been a devilish human being!” The next line is the key: “And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” This is interesting because it is, in effect, the most extreme statement and manifestation of Dr. P.’s conception of being judgmental: I don’t like you, I want you to die. At the same time, it shows how trivial and flawed it is. After all, no reasonable person would think, just because someone says they want you to die, you have to, or even should. There’s no judicial-political, economic, or social authority here. The father may carry familial authority, but in modern times that is hardly enough to make such a judgment binding. Except, of course, for the fact that Georg’s last name is Bendemann, German for boundman. This is one of the higher levels of judgment at play, one with deep and far ranging effects, one which, if Dr. P. has any inkling or notion of it, he’s been more preoccupied with showing that he knows how to keep a secret. This does not mean it does not exist on the Dr. P. show; like in Kafka’s work, there are deeper, more insidious examples of ideological interplay at stake in every judgment. While Kafka is quite cognizant of these deeper truths to acts of judgments, focusing about them in the story, to Dr. P. they remain only latent and subtle, if they appear at all. What he does say, though, is that being judgmental is about “get them, before they get you.” In the same show, he said “you are responsible to your own creations, you did this to yourself.” These phrases seem incongruous, if not utterly contradictory. Kafka it seems, rejects the first, or rather subsumes it beneath the second. How does “The Judgment” end? Simply put, in Georg’s suicide. But the fact that it is suicide—one killing one’s self—is very important here. The father suddenly seems to disappear. Kafka writes: “George felt himself urged from the room…he swung himself over” a bridge (87-88). This is Dr. P’s idea that “you are responsible for your own creations,” but all judgments, including those made to get someone “before they get me” are also subject to this ambivalent, Existential test. Slavoj Žižek theorizes this counter-intuitive causality quite well in his essay on another one of Kafka’s notable works, The Trial. He writes:

“The necessary structural illusion which drives people to believe that truth can be found in laws describes precisely the mechanism of transference: transference is this supposition of a Truth, of a Meaning behind the stupid, traumatic, inconsistent fact of the Law. In other words, ‘transference’ names the vicious circle of belief: the reasons why we should believe are persuasive only to those who already believe.” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 38)

Replace Kafka’s sweeping, metaphorical idea of Law with his more specific idea of judgments, and you learn that, to follow any authority’s judgment is, in fact, only to follow one’s own judgment, the pre-existing belief in the authoritativeness. Of course this is true of the judgmental people who fit Dr. P.’s more provincial model, but, more subversively, it is true of everyone. Dr. P. equates a judgmental nature as constantly looking down at people, but one could just as easily say that listening to a judgment, no matter the source, is looking up at someone without any real justification. There seems to be one final form of judge-mentality that even Kafka does not appear to be fully conscious of—forget Dr. P. In his diary entries, Kafka writes of the one night when he wrote “The Judgment” by saying that it came out of his head “like a real birth.” (Diaries, 214). He adds that: “only I have the hand that can reach to the body itself” (Ibid.) At first glance, this seems like the way a visceral, relieved writer would boast of his work. But one needs to remember how closely the story involves not just the father and son relationship, but the importance of spawning something versus causing death, including one’s own. In addition to these ever-present motifs, the story’s famous last sentence, in its original German, carries a deep sexual, progenitive implication that it loses in translation. The “unending stream of traffic” that is going over the bridge is the societal materialization of violent ejaculation, where jouissance, where pain and pleasure, life and death, and authority and belief meet, the source and site of the ultimate judgment.

Dr. Phil Drives Me Crazy (And Drives 41 People into Trees)

This news was brought to my attention by my brother. No time for theory, but enjoy.

Dr. Phil bus crash

Will This Message Self-Deconstruct?

For the next three weeks, Deconstructing Phil. is going on a writer's strike. However, Dr. Phil is continuing on, so we hope that our patrons will bravely assume the role of thesis to Dr. Phil's antithesis by sending in guest blogs. If not, we'll be back in three weeks. Now you know what's happening; but why don't you watch the video below to see if Brecht is right that it's more fun to watch how something happens?

Murder He Wrote

Today’s episode of Dr. Phil showed that, even with the ongoing writers’ strike, fiction and humor are far from extinct on the airwaves. Yesterday’s episode focused on Wade, who was brought to the Phil by Michelle, his wife. She had recently started to suspect that her husband was a compulsive liar and, as per usual, cheating on her. The standard schema of accusations, phil plashbacks, yelling, lie detector results, crying, and excuses resulted. No big surprises, until the last 5 minutes or so, where we learned that the next episode (today’s) would reveal how Wade admits not only to a long list of affairs and marital transgressions, but also multiple rapes and murders. Apparently, after the show, when heading back to Iowa (to get their divorce) Wade told Michelle that he had vague memories of raping his ex-wife and a co-worker, as well as a time where he picked up a hitchhiker who refused to have sexual intercourse, leading him to a violent outrage, murdering and dumping the woman’s body on the side of the road. Adding to the intrigue, the audience learns of restraining orders, fruitless FBI investigations, death threats, stalkings, and suicide attempts from basically all the parties involved except Phil. While adding a certain dimension of excitement, and, perhaps most importantly, providing reason to extend the show for 2 more days, it’s also extremely unbelievable. After all, as Dr. Phil actually made clear on the first show, Wade is a compulsive liar, fibbing about little inconsequential things and distorting big, important matters. Considering Wade’s modus operandi, it seems far more likely that this new story of murder is a different, albeit perhaps more intense and perverse, outlet for his persistently compulsive lying. The ethical complications, therefore, are not so apparent. One interesting authority to consult would be St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, particularly question 110, “the vices opposed to truth.” Aquinas writes of Wade’s condition, calling it “the lie which is told ‘out of mere lust of lying and deceiving.’ This proceeds from a habit, wherefore the Philosopher [Aristotle] says (Ethic. iv, 7) that ‘the liar, when he lies from habit, delights in lying.’” (article 2). Perhaps more importantly, in terms of ethical consequences, Aquinas argues that this type of lie has its “own measure of gravity without addition or diminution.” (article 2). Aquinas believes that lies, by their very nature are sinful and bad—though some are worse than others depending on the nature of the lie, its end, and its nature as a sin. The compulsive lie is only unique in that the nature (as a lie and sin) and end can provide neither mitigation nor further condemnation. This should call attention to Aquinas’ notion that all lies are intrinsically wrong. Why does he say this? Following Aristotle, and more directly Augustine, Aquinas justifies this claim by writing: “words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind.” (article 3). This is a startling discovery in the modern age and is a drastic contrast with any poststructuralist idea, since the latter philosophy is founded upon the concept that words do not (and can not) truthfully express intellectual ideas in a natural way. If we take poststructuralists’ model of language and signs as accurate, while simultaneously following Aquinas’ moral code as complete and true, then we are left with no choice but to conclude that all communication is a lie. This isn’t that difficult to imagine, especially considering today’s episode of Dr. Phil, where, in just 20 minutes we learned that Wade is a serial killer, Michelle enjoys cutting herself, and Dr. Phil kept huge secrets from his loyal fan-base. At the same time, these accusations must all be accompanied by words like: “potentially,” “appear,” or “according to…” Is everyone, including Dr. Phil, a liar? If we take Aquinas’ words literally—that it is “unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind”—then the most innocent and well-meant thought-experiment, hypothetical, or act of subjective thinking could be construed as unethical whereas an objectively false accusation, if honestly believed, is completely moral and blameless. To deconstruct Aquinas and Phil side-by-side, it seems strange that, despite the Saintly one’s definition of lying, Summa Theologica is structurally supported by unconcealed lies. Aquinas offers many articles, containing questions, followed by several short objections, then his answers to them, plus concise and exact replies to each objection. Thus, each original objection is a hypothetical strawman for burning down, seeming to fit the philosopher’s own description of a lie. In a similar way, the Dr. Phil show exhibits a deeply rooted structural lie by attempting to focus on a “real” and “serious” problem—i.e. compulsive lying—only to completely disregard a problem when a more attractive (for ratings, revenue, etc.) interpretation comes along—i.e. the compulsive liar is telling the truth about being a serial killer. If, as on the Dr. Phil show, everyone’s a liar, then the act of lying honestly might become a question of aesthetics more than ethics.

Anorexic to Dr. Phil: "Bite me"

Today’s Dr. Phil show dealt with eating disorder, primarily anorexia and bulimia. I had expected it to be a particularly telling episode, especially from the previews, which showed Phil staring down an emaciated girl with the words “you are going to die...soon!” In fact, McGraw was far more reasonable and reasoned than normal. He went out of his way several times to say “it’s not as easy as saying: start eating,” and he did make several salient points. However, if there is one part of Phil’s logic and methods that needs to be addressed, surely it would be that he claims—in an apparent contradiction—that it is a problem that stems “from within” as well as being “driven by media images [and] media icons.” McGraw did not elaborate how such a relationship between the subject’s interior psyche could be related to a larger social consciousness, but luckily Freud did precisely this in his work Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud writes that “it was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he [or she] cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him [or her] in the service of its cultural ideals.” (39). Considering only this idea, one could imagine how any or all of the four guests on the show could have become anorexic or bulimic because of society’s imposed cultural ideas. However, the fact that Freud writes “cannot tolerate” clouds the situation. The standard explanation of anorexia, incorporating Freud’s vocabulary when possible, would be: the subject feels society imposing the cultural ideal of skinniness, health consciousness, and so on, causing them to try and fulfill the objective to the extreme. But that is no longer Freud’s model. To him, psychosis arises not from the wish to fanatically fulfill society’s imposed ideals, but rather from the subject’s inability or unwillingness to tolerate such ideals. It would be more in line with Freud to say that these guests are, in fact, not enthralled by the media’s glamorous portrayal of youth, beauty, and tiny figures. Instead, from the very beginning of their psychosis, they found these images and ideals to be quite disgusting and deplorable. It was exactly this desire to not tolerate, to rebel, which drove them to the extreme, just so that they could prove to themselves, to their families and friends, to Dr. Phil, and to the whole world that the ideal is an extremely dangerous and perverse one. Engrained within their psychosis is a realization that Freud already understood, but Dr. Phil and the mainstream media are understandably reluctant to make: “this useless thing which we expect civilization to value is beauty.” (45). Dr. Phil can blame Nicole Ritchie and the media which fetishizes small sizes but, as Freud understands, that is simply a confined, contemporary manifestation of the problem and not the problem itself. As he writes: “the urge for freedom…is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether.” (49). Today’s guest, then, are obsessed and drawn into the values and images of the media at the exact symbolic location of their rebellious psychosis. Specific cultural values have always, and will always, continue to change, but the individual’s great need to “defend his [or her] claim to individual liberty against the will of the group” is an innate and unstoppable force and one which, not surprisingly, Dr. Phil cannot understand or articulate.

The Third Worldwide Web

In the nearly two months and 15 entries that comprise the Deconstructing Phil. lifespan, no episode has presented such a dire need of drastic interpretation as this evening's. “Bringing Home Katherine” part one aired today (the second half set to hit the small screen tomorrow) where Dr. Phil introduced his audience to Katherine, a girl who, at 16, fell in love via myspace with Abdullah, a 20 year old Palestinian man, and procured a passport to leave the country surreptitiously. When she was then reported missing, the FBI intercepted her in Amman, but after she later turned 18, with her family unable to stop her, she “ran away” from home again to live with Abdullah and her sister called Dr. Phil for help. Dr. Phil, of course, agreeing that Katherine is in danger, blames the internet. The real culprit is Orientalism. As Edward Said wrote in his groundbreaking work Orientalism, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there.” Instead, Said writes, such concepts, in all their geographic and cultural facets, are “man-made.” It is clear that the Orientalist picture of Palestine presented on the Dr. Phil show is one manufactured and in many ways fantastic. In fact, the dialogue was eerily similar to one of the most famous pieces of literature addressing the topic: Othello. Mary, Katherine’s sister, described her as being “under a spell,” the same way Brabanzio, Desdemona’s father, describes how his daughter was “corrupted/ By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.” (I.iii.60-61). The family also repeatedly alleged (with no apparent factual basis) that Katherine had been brainwashed. At least Brabanzio said it with a bit more sophistication and panache when he bemoaned “O, treason of the blood!/ Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds.” (I.i.170-171). They also characterized both of Katherine’s premeditated, voluntary, and mostly unaided journeys to the middle east as “kidnappings.” This is, of course, the jaundiced and Janused voice of Iago, starting the whole tragedy with the cry of “thieves, thieves, thieves!/ Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags./ Thieves, thieves!” (I.i.79-81). The similarities are astounding, and it would be interesting to further compare Katherine’s story with that of Desdemona and the famous Moor (who, interestingly, some Shakespeare commentators read as an Arab). The main point here, though, is that the picture of the middle east presented by Katherine's family (with the help of Dr. Phil) is very much based on and promoting a fiction. It is extremely unlikely that any of the guests, or even Dr. Phil, ever visited Palestine, and certainly none were experts. The next important thing that Said tells us about Orientalism is that “the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” (Orientalism). As Shawn [sic!], Katherine’s mother says: “I don’t know anything about Abdullah.” Such lack of knowledge is utterly unacceptable for a hegemonic figure (an American, a matriarch, a mass media product, etc.) Instead, it must be filled in—with xenophobic, racist, and jingoist notions if those are all that’s available. Katherine’s liberal international relations stance was stated quite adroitly and succinctly when she said: “I respect [Abdullah’s] culture, and he respects mine.” Though no one explicitly voiced it, the ideological position of those left in California was clearly: I don’t respect his culture (hell, I don’t even know it), but he needs to respect mine. If more evidence is needed that this is really a power struggle in every sense of the word, simply consider the fact that Katherine’s mother was outraged that at “18, according to the state of Michigan, [my daughter is] an adult.” While most people would probably see this as an entirely reasonable, acceptable, and just matter of law, Shawn was so outraged at her lack of control over her daughter that she “considered taking her passport or having her kidnapped.” Here, we can see Said’s point that “Orientalism…as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” (Orientalism). Here Said seems very indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis—the self being defined through the Other—when he writes, “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist…makes the Orient speak.” When Katherine returned to America after her first, unsuccessful expatriation attempt, her sister Mary said “I’m glad she’s here on American soil and alive.” The Orient is where danger is located, the Occident is, by way of contrast within an artificially constructed binary, the place of safety. But in this globalized, post-September-the-11^th-of-2001 world, how far does Mary have to broaden the Other in order to make herself and the place she lives safe seem safe? Of course, her secure and harmless Occident could not include the inner city, or the American military "nuclear" family. Could it include NRA members' houses, where every room has 3 loaded guns? The first generation immigrant living next door to the vigilante Minuteman border patrol? The very idea of liminality seems to become the territory of the Orient as exteriority and “a re-presence, or a representation” become vital since there is, in fact, no interiority and “no such thing as a delivered presence” (Orientalism). When Dr. Phil says “that situation over there…is highly unstable” he was apparently talking about Palestine, but he could have just as easily been talking about dozens of “Oriental” countries from Iraq and Iran to Venezuela and Cuba. But it masks (or, in fact, redefines) a more important question: in what way is the United States “highly stable”? Every episode from the Dr. Phil canon illustrates precisely how unstable America is. In this particular case, Shawn was so worried that Abdullah and his family would “kidnap” Katherine and prevent her from filing the proper paper work to travel across the Atlantic, yet that is precisely what she had previously contemplated. Katherine’s aunt callously cried that “Katherine needed her butt whipped” and yet expressed horror that the Oriental Arab/Muslim might be abusing her. Similarly, when she complained to Dr. Phil, “in America, men don’t call women ‘bitch,’” Dr. Phil could only respond “well, I wish that was true.” In fact, this reveals it all. The essence of Orientalism, wherever it may be found, is that it expresses what Orientalists want for their Orient and (perhaps more subversively) what they would like to see in their Occident too. When Dr. Phil says, so matter-of-factly, “at 16, Katherine shocked the world” he is—as an Orientalist—the one applying the questionable shock therapy to the world, re-shaping (and not just reporting) the Orient in his own warped and equally dangerous western space. Said is insistent, though, that Orientalism is not escaped or surpassed by academics, instead Orientalism is precisely “a distribution of geopolitical awareness in aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.” (Orientalism, see also the picture from The XXth Century Citizen's Atlas, John Bartholomew, Edinburgh, pp7). Perhaps the most important question, then, is: in this supposed critique of Dr. Phil’s Orientalism, even in breaking down his superficially Occidental world, have we really helped to define a true Orient? No, of course we can’t, nor can anyone. There isn’t one.