I. Reeking of Columbus: The Maritime Imaginary of L. Ron Hubbard

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither...

Revelation 17:1 

It was such creatures that, once fully adapted to land, would then turn around and go back to the ocean.  They seem to have done so with remarkable speed compared to the hundreds of millions of years it took vertebrates to emerge from the water.

David Rains Wallace, Neptune's Ark

I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed.

L. Ron Hubbard to his wife, Polly, 1938

Under the Black Ensign is published by Galaxy Press, an organ of the Church of Scientology which publishes only Hubbard's early works and the winners of the annual fiction-writing contest he established.  In 2008, lamenting that "as the years go by, the original issues of every pulp...continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust," the Church began a multimedia campaign to bring the Founder's first works of fiction to a contemporary audience.  Titles available from Galaxy include such gems as The Crate Killer, The Devil - With Wings, The Blow Torch Murder, Chee-Chalker, Killer Ape, Dead Men Kill, The No-Gun Gunhawk, He Didn't Like Cats, The Automagic Horse, A Matter of Matter, Man for Breakfast, and When Gilhooly Was in Flower.  Many of these have been adapted to the stage by the Golden Age Theater in Los Angeles.  

In the series introduction, noted genre-hack Kevin J. Anderson (author of more than ninety "critically acclaimed" works of speculative fiction, including the novelization of LRH's Ai! Pedrito!) is eager to distinguish Hubbard from writers who wrote only for "literary colleagues and academic admirers," and thereby to place him in the company of  "William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and Alexandre Dumas."  Anderson also reminds us that 

following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired, [this makes one want to ask Dan Brown whether he admires Umberto Eco's adventures in semiotics] as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans.  Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmaker, musician and educator.

There is no space to review these claims in detail, (although they do constitute one of the hopefully infrequent instances in which Wikipedia is more critically rigorous than the American National Biography,) but a close reading of Under the Black Ensign does demand some reference specifically to the nautical dimension of Hubbard's contested biography.

Lafayette Hubbard's life was defined by a series of ocean voyages which form, in retrospect, a sort of tragic diachronic archipelago.  Over the course of his life, the sea would be to him first a space of limitless possibility, freedom and intrigue, and finally a trackless wilderness in which he sought refuge from process servers, the DEA, the US Customs and Immigration Authority, the IRS, and the French, British and Moroccan governments (among other persecutors).

By the time Under the Black Ensign was first published in 1935, Hubbard was already a veteran seafarer and possibly something of a navigator.  His father had rejoined the navy after a brief hiatus when Hubbard was ten, and his childhood was punctuated by a series of long ocean voyages.  One of the first took him from Seattle to his father's posting in Washington, DC via the Panama Canal.  During the seven thousand mile voyage, he was impressed by one Commander Joseph "Snake" Thompson, a neurosurgeon and former spy, who according to Lawrence Wright (to whose controversial work I owe other biographical details below) was returning from Vienna, where he had been assigned to study under Sigmund Freud.  

Thompson taught Hubbard the secret of training cats using his own familiar, Psycho, as an object lesson.  He also unwittingly fed an unlikely tributary to the anti-psychiatry movement when, in Hubbard's phrase, "he started to work me over" with a somewhat bowdlerized version of Freudian psychoanalysis.

The family's peregrinations subsequently took them "from the Wild West to the inscrutable East," where, according to his offiicial biography, Hubbard studied with the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan and "drank deep from the 'airy spiralings and dread mysteries' of Asia."  Wright tells us that in his journals, the young Hubbard distilled these observations thus: "The very nature of the Chinaman holds him back...the trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here."  

Not until the final semester of his aborted stint at George Washington University did he launch his first independent maritime adventure.  In 1932, he embarked for the Caribbean in a rented schooner, having recruited fifty "young gentleman rovers" with an advertisement in the University Hatchet specifying that "no tea-hounds or tourist material need apply."  Under Hubbard's guidance, these unfortunate Schwärmerei set out in the 205 foot Doris Hamlin, "still stinking from her previous cargo of livestock and vaguely known in nautical circles for having been blown farther off course than any ship in recorded history," to make film recordings of the haunts of 17th century Caribbean pirates and to "collect whatever one collects for exhibits in museums."  

The trip was a financial and practical disaster, of which (where it not earlier attested) the West Indian folk song "John B. Sails" might have been a relic: the adventurers were blown off course, ran out of food and money, and spent four days becalmed and surrounded by fornicating eels in the Sargasso Sea.  After a series of bad decisions and unfulfilled promises, Hubbard lost all credibility and was ceremoniously lynched in effigy by his comrades.  More than a third of his party deserted even before the boat was recalled, at the behest of the appalled Captain, by its horrified owners, and several sued him afterwards for damages.  Hubbard did not even return home with the Doris Hamlin, and was last seen by its crew in Puerto Rico.  

There, he somehow installed himself (or was installed by his father) under the aegis of the Red Cross relief effort following the San Ciprian hurricane.  He spent most of his time, however, prospecting:

"Harboring the thought that the Conquistadores might have left some gold behind, I determined to find it...Gold prospecting in the wake of the Conquistadores, on the hunting grounds of pirates in the islands which still reek of Columbus is romantic..." ("The Camp Fire," Adventure Magazine).

Hubbard's youthful aspirations and sensibilities seem to have paralleled those of Joseph Smith, to whom he is sometimes compared, in their emphasis on hidden treasure and historical romance.  These themes were still clearly close to the surface when he wrote Under the Black Ensign, three years after he returned, empty-handed, from Puerto Rico.  It was his third or possibly fourth novella, and is set among the late 17th century pirates whose residua he had twice set out to find.

Undissuaded by past misadventures, in 1940 Hubbard joined the Explorer's Club, which he convinced to endorse his "Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition."  Hubbard and his wife (the only other member of the expedition) set sail for the Aleutian islands in his fishing boat the Magician, ostensibly to use modern methods of radio triangulation to more precisely delineate the geography of the Pacific coast.  The boat's crankshaft broke off Ketchikan, and Hubbard, having under-budgeted for such contingencies, was forced to raise funds for a new one by giving sensational accounts of his international adventures to the local radio station before finally returning to Puget Sound, six months older and having made no definite contributions to the geography of the Pacific Northwest.  

After his return Hubbard applied to join the US Navy and, through the influence of friends, was commissioned as a Lieutenant (junior grade).  He was given command of the USS YP-422, a lightly armed converted trawler commissioned to patrol the waters of Boston, but was removed from his post before the ship was launched on the grounds that he was "not tempermentally fitted for independent command."  

He did secure another commission before the end of the war, this time as commander of the more heavily armed, purpose-built submarine chaser USS PC-815, which patrolled the coasts of Oregon and California.  Hubbard's brief command of PC-815 was marked by two engagements.  In May of 1943, on Hubbard's orders, the ship expended 37 depth charges and called in two blimps and several other submarine chasers in a protracted battle with Japanese submarine which none of the other vessels could seem to locate.  Japanese records surrendered after the war confirmed that no Imperial vessel was in the area at the time.  A month later, PC-815 was participating in maneuvers off the coast of its home port of San Diego.  Having anchored near South Coronado Island, which is an outlying part of the Municipality of Tijuana, Hubbard began shelling it for gunnery practice, apparently under the impression that it was a) American and b) uninhabited.  The Mexican government protested, and he was removed from command for the last time. 

Hubbard with his second officer

The highly controversial, untitled document known alternately as the Affirmations and/or the Admissions of L. Ron Hubbard refers to the humiliation he suffered as a result of his naval exploits:

I was reprimanded in San Diego in mid-43 for firing on the Mexican coast and was removed from command of my ship. This on top of having sunk two Jap subs without credit, the way my crew lied for me at the Court of Inquiry, the insults of the High Command, all combined to put me in the hospital with ulcers.

The last sentence is interesting, since while Hubbard subsequently claimed that he had left the Navy only after being severely wounded in battle, and that he recovered his health "using only what I knew about Man and his relationship to the universe."  However, Veterans Administration records indicate that in 1974 Hubbard was still receiving disability pay for "duodenal ulcer, bursitis(right shoulder), arthritis, and blepharoconjunctivitis."  There is no official record of his having been injured in combat.

Jack Parsons

It would be twenty-four years before Hubbard returned, once again, to the sea.  In the intervening time he established himself as one of the most prolific pulp fiction writers in American history, dabbled in occultism and "sex magick" with Jack Parsons, a disciple of Aleister Crowley and pioneer American rocket scientist, published Dianetics, and created Scientology.  He had disembarked at the Port of Oakland in 1943 as a handsome if, as L. Sprague de Camp thought, rather satyric young man.  A string of disastrous misadventures stretched behind him, his wife had just left him, and he had no evident prospects.  He returned in 1967, (shortly after an ill-conceived attempt to take over Rhodesia single-handed,) as the portly leader of an established Church, and Commodore of the Sea Organization.

The Royal Scotman

"Sea Org," as Hubbard's penchant for technical abbreviations demanded it be called, now forms the elite nucleus of the wealthy and powerful Church of Scientology.  Its current flagship is the luxury liner Freewinds, which hosts exclusive training courses for wealthy and favored Scientologists.  Originally, however, Sea Org consisted of three re-purposed vessels: the Enchanter, the Avon River, and the Royal Scotman (sic, due to a clerical error in registration) a former cattle ferry.  Their names were later changed to Diana, Athena and Apollo, respectively.  Sea Org's mission was "to get ETHICS IN on this PLANET AND THE UNIVERSE," and to this end its members were asked to "subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this group," signing contracts which pledged their services for "the next billion years."

Hubbard's crews largely echoed the hapless "gentleman rovers" of the Doris Hamlin in median age and general enthusiasm, although they were much better equipped and provisioned and more of them were attractive women.  The fleet began its peregrinations in the Mediterranean, where, in 1968, Hubbard developed a doctrine of reincarnation (giving rise to Sea Org's motto, "We Come Back.")  Recapitulating Hubbard's early efforts in Puerto Rico with a metaphysical twist, the ships cruised coastlines looking for hordes buried by previous incarnations of the Founder.  A former Scientologist told Lawrence Wright,

I was on the bridge with him, sailing past Greek islands. There were crosses lining one island. He told me that under each cross is buried treasure.

Unfortunately, erosion and other natural catastrophes had taken tolls unanticipated by Hubbard's previous bodies, and no treasure was ever found. The Avon River, with Hubbard at the helm, was interrupted in its search for a giant underground space-station containing a mothership and many other vessels and keyed to Hubbard's handprint by the Spanish government's threats to forcibly expel the Royal Scotman from Valencia.

During this period Hubbard brought the same glib energy to bear on the production of "Policy" and "Tech," which he had once applied to pulp fiction.  "Policy" consisted internal directives for the Church, e.g.  "MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY."), while "Tech" referred to the increasingly baroque and gnostic system of levels through which, by graduated training, Scientologists were to achieve enlightenment - the "Bridge to Total Freedom."  His most famous production during this fecund period was OT III, ("The Wall of Fire") which includes the now famous story of Xenu.

As the fleet's Mediterranean peregrinations continued, Hubbard began to develop the idiosyncratic institutions of the Sea Org and became increasingly unpredictable, capricious and paranoid (although the last epithet is questionable since, as time wore on, an increasing number of people were actually out to get him).  He established the Commodore Messenger's Organization, which originally consisted of three girls between the ages of 11 and 13.  They were Hubbard's constant attendants, drawing his baths, lighting his cigarettes, and delivering personal and occasionally profane messages to subordinates, who had to address them as "Sir."  The current leader of the Church is a former Messenger.

Hubbard began to meet out severe punishments on thin pretexts, and to grant correspondingly vertiginous promotions to replace those cast out from the inner circle - for example, at one point he sacked the captain of one of his ships and replaced him with acolye Hana Eltringham, who at that point was in her early twenties, and knew nothing of sailing which she had not learned from Hubbard.  No crew member was immune to precipitous demotions; sometimes quite literally, since it was during this period that he hit upon the practice of "overboarding" as a punishment of officers who had displeased him by their actions, or simply by their suspicious E-meter readings.  It was partially due to local disgust with Hubbard's habit of throwing members of his crew, sometimes bound and blindfolded, into the sea that the Sea Org fleet was expelled from Corfu.  As Hubbard put it, "you have to establish an ethics presence hard.  Otherwise, you're just gonna be wrapped around a telegraph pole."

One by one, the fleet was banned from other European harbors, including those of Gibraltar, Spain and England.  Hubbard's sadistic leadership found new articulations.  Disfavored followers (e.g., for a period of several months, the entire crew of the Royal Scotman, including a dog) were reduced to the condition of "non-existence," which meant being forbidden to wash or change their clothes and being forced to wear dirty rags tied around their arms (or collars) symbolizing their contamination.  Psychic decompensation was common, probably unsurprisingly given the type of people who tended to drop everything to sail aimlessly around the Mediterranean with their spiritual leader, and the conditions aboard ship, which remind one of experiments in operant conditioning designed to induce "learned helplessness."  Victims were confined to windowless cabins guarded by completely silent crew members, and Hubbard effected their "cures" by communicating with them through notes.  He found children particularly obnoxious, and would punish minor indiscretions with sentences to spend the night in the crow's nest, or be confined to the locker where the coiled anchor chain was stored.

The Sea Org stopped for a while in Morocco, where Scientologists played an unclear role in the aftermath of a plot to assasinate the King and were subsequently (yet again) expelled.  They returned to New York briefly, long enough for Hubbard to launch the largest domestic espionage operation in the history of the United States, Operation Snow White, before returning to the seas in 1973.  After a motorcycle accident on Tenerife, Hubbard marrooned his chief medical officer on Madeira, where the hapless leech waited for an entire year to be retrieved.  In 1975, he attempted once again to return to the US, but was warned by an onshore Scientologist who had smuggled a note into a port radio operator's office inside a pizza that the DEA, IRS, Coast Guard and US Customs and Immigrations Authority were waiting in ambush.  Looking for easier pickings, the fleet then essentially invaded the town of Clearwater, FL, whence Hubbard fled first to New York, then to the Pacific Northwest, and finally to a secluded ranch in the Southern California desert near Paso Robles.  He never took to the sea again, and died at his ranch in Creston, CA in 1986.

Over the course of his life, then, L. Ron Hubbard's relationship to the sea described a consistent trajectory.  His first independent trip on the Doris Hamlin clearly presaged his ultimate wanderings with the Sea Org, the main difference being in scale, funding, and ideologic infrastructure.  He was always a charismatic, naive, endlessly imaginative and narcissistic man.  As these traits found expression and resonance in others, he evolved from a garrulous young adventurer into a quixotic naval liability and found his full articulation as the simultaneously loving and sadistic Commodore of the Sea Org.  In the next post, I will specifically examine Under the Black Flag in the context of this biographical sketch.

Apology for Sciento(symbo)logy

Many people whose taste I respect and opinions I value are nonplussed by my participation in a critical enterprise dedicated exclusively to what they consider superfluous cultural excreta.  They consider symbological fiction to be, at best, indicative of phenomena which, they seem to think, are apprehensible by more elevated means.  "Why do you need to read a Dan Brown book - and not just read it, but read it closely, with annotations, even multiple times, in order to delineate certain operations of the culture industry, or ideology, or whatever you want to call it?" they ask.  "Can't you get all that from Adorno?  Isn't that more fun?"  Until I gave the whole thing up as essentially futile, I tried to persuade them that the consensus that books like this are to be read, if at all, then quickly and superficially - say, on a plane - is no accident.  In vain I remonstrated that their apparent vapidity is precisely what enables their subterranean functionality.  Open the black box of symbology, I said, and you will find illuminating assemblages.  My words fell on deaf ears.

This latest sortie in my apparently incomprehensible and Quixotic campaign can only make things worse.  My only consolation is in my fellow-travellers, one of whom gave me the "Review Copy" of L. Ron Hubbard's Under the Black Ensign to which the next few posts will be dedicated.  Another gave me my first copy of Battlefield Earth, which spurred a similarly doomed adventure.  (All traces of that foray have now been erased from the server, presumably after a "Cease and Desist" suit filed by some Scientologist lawyer.)  I hope these colleagues will not join the ranks of my alienated friends if I insist that we engage, at least briefly, with the only writer of ephemeral fiction to undergo full apotheosis.  Even if he cannot, strictly, be called a symbologist, I hope we will derive further insights from applying to his work the dictum to which (as I have argued elsewhere) the methodologic insights of Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault can be reduced, namely, that if something or someone just looks stupid, you're not looking hard enough.

"Il n'y a pas de hors-VED": Further Remarks on Alterity and its Containment

This post is intended less as an elaboration of any new claims than as a continuation/amplification of some of the points just made by Dr. Prandleforth, as well as some of my own earlier arguments.

Let me begin where Prandleforth ended, with some observations that I hope will clarify and specify the claims I have made in my two posts (here and here) dedicated to delineating VED as it appears as the fundamental a priori substrate of all possible symbological cultural production.

                                                     Fig. 1: vulgarized homo economicus

Clearly, VED names both way of thinking about the subject and a way of talking about the subject's relation to any object.  To adopt and endorse the term Prandleforth has just helpfully given a central place our blog's lexicon, VED may be described as a discourse that, by definition, entails the absorption of alterity into identity, both in terms of the subject and of the object.  How?  By way of what we might call the Regime of Equivalence, and by equivalence, I mean more or less what Marx meant by "exchange value."  The resolution of all imaginable objects into the generalized grid of exchange values by VED implies their basic ontological identity; no object is a priori imaginable that cannot be placed within this regime.  The subject of VED, to repeat a point made elsewhere, is simply (a vulgarized) homo economicus as defined by classical economics, that self-transparent calculating-acquisitive instrument.  To the extent that the subject of VED possesses an existence beyond the goal of calculating acquisition, he is simply the dealer of the commodity of his own labor (the object-dimension of himself) as a commodity in exchange for wages that can be invested in other commodities, all to the end of maximizing calculating-acquisitive gain.

I say all this by way of rendering more precise what is meant by "alterity" in this context, which can only be defined initially, from the point of view of VED, apophatically: anything would qualify as "alterity" as long as it presents itself to experience as something irreducible to the Regime of Equivalence imposed by VED.  Here we are also in territory already trodden by Marx (for one): for him, capitalism can only exist by way of a constitutive denial of alterity, a denial that appears simultaneously in two complementary manners, as fetishism, and as alienation.  Fetishism is the way this denial appears in relation to the object, since it involves treating the object's exchange value as its essential property, and precisely by doing so concealing its actual essential property as the product of labor; alienation is the was that this denial appears in relation to the subject, since it involves resolving the Gattungswesen of the human being (viz. sensuous, transformative labor, in constant creative interaction with the alterity of the object) into the Regime of Equivalence, once again, by reducing it to an exchange value to be traded for wages, which are then used to purchase fetishized objects of consumption, etc.

"The pure products of America go crazy!" proclaimed William Carlos Williams in "For Elsie."  To be extremely simplistic and reductive, something much like this "going crazy" is what seems to mark off Late Capitalism (the era we share with the symbolgists) from High Capitalism (the era of Marx and Piazzi Smyth).  In simple terms, the Regime of Equivalence, along with the various grand narratives that constituted its concrete narrative-ideological supplements became threatened by many tendencies and currents, which we need not go into now.  The point is that the "denial of alterity" as delineated in the previous paragraph became, as the twentieth century progressed, essentially impossible to sustain except through a kind of madness that could barely disguise itself; and yet the Regime of Equivalence became more and more widely accepted as the only conceivable way of imagining the world - hence the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism, etc, thus rendering the thinking of alterity even more "impossible" than before.  Postmodernism is the cultural manifestation of this phase: it renders a world in which "alterity" - i.e. phenomena that seem to threaten the Regime of Equivalence from without - are everywhere, and everywhere "crazy," and yet nothing outside of VED is imaginable in any full sense.  It is in this sense that symbology is both anti-postmodern and postmodern: as I have suggested in a previous post, its primary function is to perform, narratively, imaginary solutions to the conundrums of a world in which VED is impossible to sustain but its imperative to evaporate alterity still reigns.

There are three specific loci of potential alterity that symbological narrative sets out to domesticate in particular, for the benefit of what I have elsewhere called the "wired subject of late technocapitalism" (whose two alternating poles are the Subject of Symbology and the Subject of Fun): 1) The past; 2) The Orient (closely related to 1; see Said, 1978: passim); 3) humanistic scholarship.  Why, you might ask, is it necessary to domesticate these things, all of them so nicely domesticated for us in the era of High Capitalism?  To answer this challenging question as simply as possible, I will simply refer the reader to the Lyotard's 1979 account of the decline of Grand Narratives as a fundamental condition of postmodernism.  

                                                             Fig. 2: Grand Narrative

Yet we need to render Lyotard's notion more precise.  He (and other observers in the 70s) underestimated the resilience of the grand narratives pertaining to the natural sciences: hence practically everything Dawkins says would be fully recognizable by a nineteenth century positivist, the neuroscientific conquest of human nature is a recapitulation of phrenology, Sam Harris's supposedly groundbreaking effort at elaborating a scientific basis for morality is a repackaging of boilerplate utilitarianism, etc.  This is, as we have discussed before, why the Scientist in symbological fiction invariably occupies an unproblematic role in relation to the Code: alterity cannot be threatening to the Scientist because [s]he [and gender neutrality is important here given the emprirical facts of the symbological corpus] is permanently subsumed in the Regime of Equivalence posited by VED.  But the decline of grand narratives sufficient for subsuming the past (via teleology), the Orient (via colonialism, overtly expressed racism and ethnocentrism, etc.), and humanistic scholarship (via several routes, one being the various attempts at positivist mimicry of the natural sciences, another being various notions of humanizing pedagogy, i.e. bourgeois subject formation, training in Bourdieuvian "distinction," etc), is unquestionably a reality, and it is to this reality in part that symbology responds.

                                                 Fig. 3: Grand Narrative in decline

Prandleforth's contribution has refocused our attention, by way of a valuable consideration of Thomason's use of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, on a related locus of alterity that must form part of our considerations: postmodernism/postmodernity.  It seems important to specify the precise content of the latter formation that the symbological novel, along with most or all mainstream cultural products, seizes on: relativism, which we might characterize as an attitude of bewildered embarrassment regarding 1 and 2 (see above) particularly widespread in the milieu dedicated to 3, generated by the disappearance of the grand narratives described in the previous paragraph.  Now note that relativism is in reality a kind of preservation of the Regime of Equivalence on the cheap, so to speak, but that it appears to the more rigidly contained subject of VED as a disturbing gateway drug on the slippery slope to alterity (to use an ugly mixed metaphor fully appropriate to symbological discourse), in so far as it renders the paroxystic state of the denizen of late techno-capitalism all too palpable.

At this point I would like to take us on a brief detour through Michael Taussig's delightful The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, a book that is half an ethnography of two of the most intensive export commodity-producing realms of South America (the sugar plantations of Colombia's Cauca Valley and the mines of highland Bolivia) and half an elaboration of the theoretical contributions of folk demonology to the critique of capitalism.  Taussig argues that when confronted with the specific alterity of the capitalist model of production and the incentives, forms of relation to work and to fellows, and attitudes towards objects it entails, the denizens of kinship-structured societies who practice exchange primarily through gift and open credit cannot but interpret wage labor as a kind of demonic pact, since it involves the relinquishing of the entire range of relations and activities associated with fertility and community in favor of a set of relations and practices associated with sterility and isolation, in exchange for a form of acquisition that appears obscene and uncanny because of its impersonality.  How does Taussig help us here?  I would like to suggest that the purpose of our enterprise is to treat symbology in its broadest sense as a document of folk beliefs that in a sense mirror those of the Colombian and Bolivian peasants.  The latter developed their demonology out of a need to represent VED to themselves within their own system of representations and values; symbological discourse is likewise a manifestation and reinforcing mechanism of a system of folk beliefs that adherents of VED have developed to represent various phenomena that seem to present a disturbing alterity.  It, too, imagines a kind of demonic pact (see fig. 2 in Prandleforth's post below): that is, cacognosis.  

I would now like to consider Prandleforth's statement that "The cacognostic, on the other hand, is an actually transcendent subject, who actually refuses VED."  Now this is of course true, and yet the opposite is also true, insofar as it is at the same time the cacognostic who most closely resembles the vulgarized homo economicus discussed above.  In Reilly's novels, for instance, the endless proliferation of mirror-image cacognostics are all basically avatars of the military industrial complexes of various countries, each seeking geopolitical advantage through the calculating acquisition of valuable objects; Rollins's evil French big pharma magnates are not much different.  In other novels, the cacognostic seeks the Grail, the Benben stones, etc., because he believes they will be the key to unlimited worldly power.  What is strange about this, from the perspective of VED, is simply that he thinks that an exotic historical object, rather than simply capital, will be the key to unlimited power; and yet, he is otherwise represented as seeking said object in much the way that the sometimes idealized, sometimes demonized "cowboy capitalist" of VED pursues profit.  

But note that while the "cowboy capitalist's" way of pursuing profit may be regarded as problematic by some liberals, his motivation is never regarded as questionable or opaque - here is where the cacognostic is his opposite.  What the cacognostic adds to the picture, fundamentally, is an obscene supplement of sado-masochistic corporeal/material enjoyment/jouissance (Malakh, Silas, etc.) which is simply another way of demonizing a kind of fetishization that stands in opposition to but is the grotesque double of commodity fetishism.  This latter proceeds, in a sense, in an opposite manner from fetishism traditionally imagined, that of primitives and Orientals, which crudely fixates on the sensuous materiality of a thing as if it were a divine attribute: commodity fetishism, as per Marx, abstracts and the particular, sensuous materiality of the thing into exchange value, and thus essentially abolishes it.  The cacognostic practices something more like primitive/Oriental fetishism, but does so formally as if he were practicing commodity fetishism.  Thus the representation of alterity in the cacognostic ends up being the self-representation of the vulgar homo economicus himself, in his pathological dimension.  In this regard, the denial of alterity enacted is ultimately a denial of the alterity of the self, that is, of those dimensions of the self that would seem to exceed the articulated logic of VED.   

                                        Fig. 4: the cacognostic as spectral double of the capitalist

Where do the remaining subject positions fit into this picture?  The mythognostic is the insufficiently committed subject of VED, perhaps the relativist in all of us waiting to get out, who needs to be exhorted to acknowledge more resoundingly the self-sufficiency and adequacy of the Regime of Equivalence.  His seduction by the code, and simultaneously by the cacognostic, takes him on a journey that ultimately allows him to reaffirm his VED subjectivity by way of an acknowledgement that the orthognostic is the ideal, i.e. indifférant, subject of VED as he should appear to himself.  The mythognostic's main flaw is his curiosity about the code, which can simply be understood as anything that might appear to deserve an inquisitiveness irreducible to VED motives, and it is precisely this flaw in the presumed reader that symbology sets out to correct.  This, to conclude, is why I am especially troubled when I hear it claimed, in an iteration of symb-pology (B), that Dan Brown is at least getting people interested in scholarship/the humanities/the history of religion who might not otherwise be.  After all, the entire purpose of his "getting them interested" is to evaporate in advance any potential such things might have to trouble such readers.

         



  


               

The Metastases of Alterity: Cacognosis in 12.21

Fig 1. How to criticize with an automatic

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Baudrillard, Simulations 

(Taken from Helguera, "Polyvalent Spaces: The Postmodern Wunderkammer and the Return of Ambiguity")

But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified men... Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth 

I

One might summarize many previous contributions to this forum, and the unpublished work on which they have been based, by defining the symbological novel as a narrative machine for colonizing alterity with normality which is a late emanation of the European encounter with the New World.  Correspondingly, one might gloss many previous analyses of the positions available to the Symbologist by saying that mythognosis corresponds to awareness of alterity, orthognosis to denial of alterity, and cacognosis to engagement with alterity.  The plot of every symbological novel charts the progression of the Symbologist from mythognosis through cacognosis to redemption by orthognosis, which is to say from incurious awareness of alterity to engagement with its substantive particulars, followed by redemption through a formal repudiation of its Otherness.  (As Twinglebrook-Hastings recently pointed out, this is why they have them in airports.)

I will flesh out this concise schema a little, for the sake of the new readers who, no doubt, flock daily to this blog; I hope the old hands will forgive me.  This is how it works: 

The Symbologist initially regards the Object to which the Code refers as existing, but being of mere academic curiosity (e.g. Langdon's initial attitude to the Illuminati in DVC).  The action of the novel begins when events force the Symbologist to regard the Code and its Object (both of which should be understood to stand for the “Other” in the postcolonial sense) as being of practical importance.  Crucially, these events are always caused by cacognosis, and are typically the personal doing of actually cacognostic characters.  It is engagement with alterity, which is to say flirtation with cacognosis, which drives the mythognostic Symbologist from his accustomed indifférance.  For example, in TLS (as Bremselhacker has noted,) all of  the arch-cacognostic Mal’Akh’s activities constitute a performance whose only conceivable audience is the Symbologist, and whose sole object is to convince the Symbologist of its own relevance.  Langdon's intrigue actually generates each subsequent performances, exacerbating the eruption of cacognosis.  

In all symbological novels, the unraveling of the Code prompted by the supervention of alterity (i.e., cacognosis,) leads to one of two possible conclusions

1. The Object is a source of dangerous alterity.  In this case, it is invariably destroyed.  This is common in the Reillyan vein of symbologic fiction, and has also been observed by Twinglebrook-Hastings in Brown’s pre-symbological work Deception Point.
2. The Object turns out not to be a source of dangerous alterity, but to have been misinterpreted as such by the cacognostic (typically because he “took it literally”).  Instead, it turns out to be a metaphorical representation of some commonplace feature of the Symbologist’s ideological landscape.  This is the usual conclusion of classical symbologic novels (e.g. PYR, DVC, TLS, TGK).

Strategy #2 is, as Simon Schaffer has brilliantly demonstrated in his Tarner Lecture "An Antique Land," has its origins in the colonial literature of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, which persistently sought to characterize colonization as a form of return by locating the precursors of the colonists’ greatest achievements (e.g. meridian astronomy) in the immemorial past of the colonized people.  It is also widely observable in other contemporary cultural products such as von Daniken/Tsoukalos’ History Channel series Ancient Aliens and neurosymbological works like James Cameron’s Avatar. 

Fig 2. Cacognosis

The progression of the Symbologist through a series of relations to alterity is the backbone of the symbological novel, and is analogous in its strict formality and propaedeutic intent to the Medieval morality play.  It is on this basis that symbological fiction generally has been characterized as a reaction to postmodernity, broadly understood to include all manifestations of postcolonialism and poststructuralism, those Hellmouths which endlessly unleash coruscating swarms of alterities.  Within Symbologist's renunciation of the postmodern condition, cacognosis plays the role of the Devil in the Temptation of Christ (Matt 4:1-10): it is the force which tempts the Symbologist from the path of righteousness, and its rejection constitutes his redemption.

This functional characterization of cacognosis does not exhaust the subject, but is essential to a close reading of 12.21; the novel lacks a cacognostic character in the usual sense, but cacognosis plays its usual role nothetheless.  

Thomason has only one important cacognostic character, Chel’s mentor and surrogate father Victor Cranning.  Unlike Mal’Akh, Teabing, Bezumov, Senator Kurtz, or any of the other cacognostics familiar from the classics of the genre, Cranning is very nearly irrelevant to the plot; he does not set its events in motion personally, nor does he have have the usual cat-and-mouse relation to the Symbologist.  It is not his activity which motivates the transition from awareness to engagement for Chel or Stanton.  However, as St. Basil tells us, "by this silence, history wishes to train the activity or our intelligence, giving it a weak point for starting, to impel it to the discovery of the truth" (Hexaemeron 1:3).  Cranning is a tiny piece of flotsam whose course allows us to deduce the direction of the great whorl of cacognosis.

2

Cranning trains the activity of our intelligence in two important respects, one direct; the other indirect.

First, he directly confirms that cacognosis tout court is to be identified with postmodernity.  We initially encounter him in what Pablo Helguera calls a "postmodern Wunderkammer:" the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is described (by Thomason) as follows:

The Museum intentionally obscured the lines between fact and fiction.  Part of the fun was trying to figure out which exhibits were real.  Still, Chel was philosophically ambivalent about a place that inspired concusion and defied logic.  Not to mention how uncomfortable she was with the exhibit her old mentor was putting up there. (123).

The exhibit turns out to be a representation of the four races of man allegedly described in Mayan cosmology.  Its fixation with indexical, immediate relations of signification (each piece is a sculpture of the human form in the medium allocated by Mayan cosmology to the respective race of man, e.g. corn, chicken bones, etc.) is instantly reminiscent of the logic of spirit animal assignation Thomas imputes to contemporary Guatemalan peasants:

A man’s wayob was a symbol of who he was: the brave man, like a king, was a jaguar; the funny man, a howler monkey; the slow man, a turtle. (72)

Cranning's work is, to filch a Hesperidean apple from the garden of Brown himself, "symbologically perfect": it refuses all forms of signification other than the indexical, and its referents belong to autochthonous myth.  However, the point is clearly that despite it’s symologic orthodoxy, Cranning’s exhibit qua engagement with the Other is cacognosis and therefore belongs in a sanctum of postmodernity which “intentionally obscured the lines between fact and fiction."  It is precisely because Cranning seeks to understand (which in symbological fiction means also “to emulate”) the Other that he counts as postmodern, and cacognostic.

Fig 3. Alleged physician; total douchebag.

The second, sense in which Cranning trains our intelligence is indirect, for the primary manifestation of cacognosis in 12.21 is not Cranning personally, but rather the the plague itself, Thomason’s stupid, fictitious prion disease “VFI.”  VFI is, in fact, so stupid in its particulars, that its invention by someone who claims at some point to have attended a medical school somewhere must signal a deliberate allegory in which the signifier is writing checks the referent cannot honor.  And indeed, if we attend to the morphology and functionality of VFI, we discover some salient facts supporting this deduction: 

First, VFI is acquired by contact with the Code (in this case, the codex); crucially, it is only acquired by cacognostic contact with the code.  Chel’s orthognostic uncle found the hidden city, but was spared because his only motivation was nationalist pride and respect for is ancestors.  On the other hand, Volcy, who “let the white man’s obsession with the Long Count compel him to sacrifice the honor of his ancestors” (76, read: “let the white man’s engagement with his alterity compel him to tempt them with it) is afflicted.  According to the strict constraints of the symbological novel, the Symbologist is the only subject; all other characters are allegorical representations, so the only possibility for an orthognostic, like Volcy, who flirts with cacognosis is annihilation.  (This is, incidentally, why in novels with a cacognostic character the copout always results in the cacognostic's death, and why that death is nearly always an act of nature rather than of any other character.  For the cacognostic to survive the copout, he would have to change his relation to alterity, which is only possible for the Symbologist.)

Fig. 4. The workings of ideology made visible.

Second, the plague, like cacognosis, is transmitted by the organs of vision and causes fatal insomnia.  One need hardly point out that this is a precise reversal of John Carpenter’s acerbic critique of ideology in the film They Live, which imagines a universe where magical sunglasses make ideology visible and stop subjects from functioning "all by themselves." Thomason instead enjoins us to don "eye covers" when faced with the Other, and prove our sanity by our ability to sleep.  

Third, the equation of VFI with cacognosis is confirmed by the means of its control.  Early on, Thomason says that "LAPD had been called in to stop the metastasizing press."  This seems a bizarre metaphor, particularly for an alleged doctor, until juxtaposed with the only other reference to metastasis in 12.21: 

It's like a cancer.  Even if it's metastasized, you remove the tumor at its original site so it doesn't spread further.  We need to know what it is and how it started to have any chance of fighting it. (121)

This is, of course, true neither of cancer nor of prion disease, but it is true of cacognosis, as is roundly demonstrated by every other symbological novel; the redemption of the Symbologist always consists in locating the source of cacognosis (which is typically seated in an individual like Mal'Akh, Teabing, or Bezumov,) and extirpating it by one of the two means described above.

Fig 5. Cacognosis.

The answers to Stanton's two questions, i.e. "what it is" and "how it started" provide the final proof of the equation of cacognosis with alterity.  As I think I've demonstrated, what VFI is is cacognosis.  Where it started is a little more complex: its proximal cause is cannibalism (that perennial symbol of cultural alterity, ascribed at various times to basically everyone encountered by Europeans leaving Europe over the last five hundred years); but its ultimate cause, as Volcy explicitly tells us, is the cacognosis of people like Victor Cranning. 

3

This line of enquiry leads to the final question I will attempt to answer in this post, which concerns the role of what we have been calling "vulgar economic determinism" in 12.21.  In the (now lamentably remote) last post on this blog, Bremselhacker gave a compelling account of the complementary means by which classical ("strong") symbology and para-symbological discourses such as David Brooks saccharine and obnoxious neurosymbology ("weak symbology") serve to re-contain the Symbologist (and the reader) as subjects constituted strictly by the pedestrian ideology of modern techno-capitalism.  

The entire essay rewards re-reading, but the element I wish to build on here is his claim that in strong symbology, the suspension of VED as the sole conceivable basis for human behavior renders the mythognostic Symbologist opaque to himself because it ostends the possibility of a transcendent subjectivity.  Once Langdon begins to believe in the possibility that the Grail exists, it "changes everything," and causes him to ask whether "you realize the implications this could have?!"  This moment is exactly coincident with the appearance of cacognosis, which is to say, alterity.  That is because they are the same narrative gesture.   

(As an aside, this ontologic failure of self-transparency is impossible in weak symbology, because the economy of truth is different in that "science" is never called into question; the subject of weak symbology is not self-transparent, but his recovery consists in discovering that science has accounted or his non-transparency by proving the phenomenologic monotony of VED).

What Thomason's awful book allows us to see, then, is the true nature of cacognosis.  In strong symbology, the mythognostic Symbologist is tempted by the possibility of a transcendant subjectivity (i.e., one which transcends VED) but redeemed by the revelation that the signs of the Other were only metaphors for the himself (i.e., VED).  The cacognostic, on the other hand, is an actually transcendent subject, who actually refuses VED.  (This is why cacognosis is always Orientalized.)  Examples abound, from Silas' asceticism to Mal'akh's tattoos, but the purest example I can call to mind is Victor Cranning, whose animating goal is to obtain the priceless commodity, remove it from the circuits of capital, and remove himself from society in order to enact a radical alternative to the present order.

And what, exactly, is the transcendent possibility represented by cacognosis?  This is precisely the point: you, the reader, and he, the Symbologist, can never know, because to tell you would subvert the entire function of symbological narrative.  The cacognostic cannot speak.   This is why Martin's Ahmed Aziz, and, for that matter, Chel and Stanton, cannot even parrot existing orthodoxy in their disciplines.  To do so would contravene the necessity of preserving, as Twinglebrook-Hastings has put it, "the existing order of things that the symbological narrative functions to maintain while absorbing anything subversive."  Even actually existing academic consensus represents a tentacle of the alterity, the suppression of which is the primary histologic commitment of the symbological novel.  

So, in the end, Thomason leaves one feeling a bit like Odin.  Reading his second and, (pray God) final offering may be phenomenologically indistinguishable from having one's eye gouged out; but the prize of knowledge demands sacrifice.

"Sie wissen es, und sie tun es": How to stop worrying and love VED

In light of the promising strides we have taken of late toward a synthetic grammar encompassing the characteristic operations common to classical symbological narrative, "weak" symbological narrative, and neurosymb(-p)ological discourse, I would like to propose a formula whose resemblance to what Prandleforth recently identified as "the main aporia of neurosymbology" will be obvious. I will call this the First Antinomy of Symb(-p)ological Reason, and phrase it as follows:

Thesis: The predictive models of behavior permitted by the presumption of VED as the basic substrate of human motivation render the subject transparent to himself* and to others.
Antithesis: The presumption of VED as the mechanism underlying all human behavior implies a concealed substrate unavailable to the subject through through mere introspection or observation of the phenomenal stratum of his behavior. Therefore, it renders the subject no longer transparent to himself.

In other words, VED is universally used, across the political spectrum, as the basis of policy arguments and marketing strategies alike, and provides the unquestioned basis of most pop sociology and economics. It is therefore understood to provide and widely accepted as providing a sufficient account of human experience and motivation, and in certain spheres this is acknowledged publicly and openly with no apparent discomfort or shame. On the other hand, VED appears in many areas of discourse as a crafty secret sharer, providing the dark, unacknowledged truth of our actions, altruistic or unselfish as they may seem. For example, opponents of everything from vaccines to abortion tend to impute VED motives to their purveyors in order to unmask the secret, craven motives underlying their participation in an allegedly sinister practice. The resonance of such arguments, as indicated by their prevalence, suggests that VED requires a logic of supplementarity: it is taken by the collective social imaginary as as both sufficient and complete, and in need of a supplement, which would be identical with precisely that which is absent in the motives of those we stigmatize with the accusation of VED, even as we unquestioningly proceed as though we assume VED as the unproblematic explanans of all behavior.

At this point, I would like to pause and preface my further considerations with the following hypothesis: symb(-p)ological discourse consists in the elaboration of imaginary resolutions of the aporia deriving from the First Antinomy.

David Brooks's hot-off-the-press essay "Social Animal" provides us with a helpfully succinct illustration of the operation I am attempting to map out. Since Prandleforth has already provided us with an incisive rhetorical analysis of this veritable concrete universal of neurosymb(-p)ological discourse, I would only like to add the following: Brooks's early twenty-first century bourgeois everyman, Harold, recognizes himself as the subject of VED, understands his motives to be fully transparent to introspection, and is distressed by the resulting sense of being "shallower than [he] need[s] to be" because he perceives acquisition of wealth and consumption as the be all and end all of his existence qua homo economicus. "His superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety" because he "is inarticulate about the things that matter most." This is precisely the scenario that demands, here as throughout the body of discourse whose many forms we have been characterizing on this blog, what we might call the symbological supplement: the unveiling of an allegedly previously concealed realm of values, experiences, and motivations that, in fact, result in the reinstatement of the unsatisfactory realm of experience they were supposed to supplant, now understood as necessary and transcendent rather than contingent and accidental. Harold's enlightenment proceeds through the pedagogical project of neuroscience, conceived and presented by Brooks purely in its ideological dimension (that is, what is of value about neuroscience and related areas of research is that they provide the possibility of suturing the gap between the experience of VED as transparency and autonomy and the experience of VED as "shallowness" and mystification). After his conversion at the hands of the motorcycle-riding Russian folk dance enthusiast neuroscientist, Harold can resume being what he has already been. In becoming transparent to himself (through neurosymbology's account of why the things he was doing already constitute the natural and necessary form of his existence, as programmed by evolution and early neurological development), he learns how he may again take satisfaction in his non-transparency to himself (in "situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, and tasks," a.k.a. late capitalism's endless varieties of consumption). The symbological supplement, then, furnishes the subject of late capitalism with a form of imaginary self-transparency adequate to and consistent with his continued acceptance of the sufficiency and normativity of VED.

A further way of explaining the symbological resolution of the First Antinomy proceeds via Prandleforth's recent narrative analyses of the bifurcation of the subject of late capitalism, as represented and interpellated by symbological discourse, into the "subject of symbology" and the "subject of fun." To summarize Prandleforth's conclusions, the "subject of symbology" is, precisely, the subject of VED conceived as entirely transparent to him- or herself**, while the "subject of fun" is the subject of VED for whom the "fun" consists precisely in a supposed temporary suspension of the imperatives of VED and a concomitant loss of the sense of self-transparency continuous with the assumption of VED. It would be tempting to propose that the subject of symbology stands as the desired product of the interpellation carried out by symbological narrative, that is, it serves as the point of identification for the subject in its attempt to fully assume the superego injunction to enjoy, while the subject of fun serves merely as the vehicle for this operation (and this is certainly an important part of the story, as Prandleforth's most recent posts have suggested); and yet, it is important to emphasize that symb-pological discourse, at least in what I have called its (A) iteration, proceeds in precisely the opposite direction, enjoining the reader/viewer to fully abandon the fantasy of transcendent subjectivity known as Orthognosis (whose underlying identity with the self-transparency of the subject of VED I demonstrated with regard to Avatar), and effectively reassume the position of the "subject of fun" who ceases to require of himself the introspective self-transparency at precisely the point at which he remarks: "who cares about all that New Age/conspiracy theory/dream nonsense, it was a good read/entertaining movie." The point here, though, is that VED is revealed to be the truth of OG, just as OG is revealed to be the truth of VED in a kind of mutual transfiguration nicely concretized in the closing scene of Avatar, in which we witness, as I argued previously, the apotheosis of the "deracinated, 'wired' subject of late technoscientific capitalism" in the form of the Na'vi ritualistic mind-meld.

Now, we have already established elsewhere that the symb-pologist's primary task is to articulate the cop-out's implication of strong irrelevance and oblige the reader to adopt the appropriately indifférant (in other words, "fun-loving") stance. The viewer/reader's resumption of his prior position as subject of fun through narrative identification with the subject of symbology, of course, leaves him conveniently ripe for the consumption of more symbological discourse, in which the structuring dialectic of self-transparency and self-opacity can be rehearsed once again. The foregoing has suggested that this "movement of spirit" can proceed by several different and equally effective paths. If, as we have already asserted previously, weak symbological narrative is distinguished in part by the fact that some explicit form of VED retains an explicit presence in the narrative, it allows the reconciliation of the "subject of fun" (unselfaware subject of VED) with the "subject of symbology" (self-transparent subject of VED) to be accomplished efficiently and with a minimum of risk that the concluding OG position be perceived as anything other than the truth of VED. Strong symbological narrative, on the other hand, enacts a more capacious supplementation of VED in its proliferation of idiotic pseudo-knowledge and therefore achieves a more decisive recontainment at the probably worthwhile cost of an increased risk (hence, it is worth noting, the greater potential for strong symbology to generate symb-pology [B], and the greater necessity for particularly strident statements of symb-pology [A]).

I will close, then with the following propositions:
1) Weak symbology, like most instances of (neuro-)symb-pology, interpellates the subject of symbology through identification with the subject of fun. In other words, it functions by engaging with the supposed introspective self-awareness of the reader/viewer in order to instruct him to enjoy, and presents this "fun"/"immersion directly in the river" as the necessary consequence of the fuller awareness provided by the symbological supplement.
2) Strong symbology interpellates the subject of fun through identification with the subject of symbology. That is to say, the reader/viewer's "fun" consists in his fusion with the fantasy of transcendent subjectivity (distributed in some form along the MGCGOG continuum) pursued in the narrative, a fantasy which he ideally concludes by identifying with the given facts of his existence qua VED subject of late capitalism.
3) These operations are mutually complementary and mutually reinforcing. Indeed, as I believe we are beginning to substantiate, they both form (essential components of) a system of meaning (synchronically) and constitute and deliver forms of experience that require a potentially endless stream of further supplementation via related cultural products drawn from the constellation to which they belong.

In the name of advancing the systematicity of our inquiries, I hope to comment soon on the impressive recent contribution of my colleague Twinglebrook-Hastings to the elaboration of the long-neglected area of paragnosis, particularly in relation to our productive ongoing interrogation of VED.

*I use the masculine pronoun in reference to the subject of fun/symbology advisedly, as the discourse in question makes explicit that the female subject position we have O(f) by definition cannot experience a traumatic gap between her awareness of VED and her assumption of VED. Tom Martin's Kingdom and Julia Navarro's The Bible of Clay are, of course, the most daring treatments to date of the problem of feminine indifférance in symbological discourse.
**On the other hand, I am being gender neutral here because the position O(f) may, in fact, stand in for the subject of symbology qua subject fully transparent to introspection. The O(f), on the other hand, may not respond to the radical gap between this transparency and its concomitant opacity with anything but a sigh of indifférance, and therefore her perspective cannot constitute the point of departure of any symbological discourse (thus, in Kingdom, despite Nancy Kelly's apparent position as protagonist and primary site of readerly identification, I would propose that she must finally be understood as Anton Herzog's symptom [cf. Lacan: "Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father"]).