The Unknowable Intention: Desire Is a Demon

The Unknowable Intention: Desire Is a Demon

Thacker’s Types of Worlds in relation to horror:  1. Pagan horror, such as Wicker Man, The Witch, and Midsommer, are the horror of the World-for-Us because pagan techne is for the instrumentalization of the world. In Pagan religious praxis the spiritual realm is studied to transact with according to the intentions of the practitioner. From the perspective of Demonology, which is how the Christian Church viewed pagan praxis, demons were identified by name to bind them for a transactional intention. However, once summoned, demons often were able to trade their binding for the binding of the summoner. The mythological structure of the Faustian Bargain reveals this reversal in which obtaining the demon’s favor exacts a high price.  2. The Horror of the unknowable intention of the Other explored in narrative troupes such as the “Slasher” or demonic possession is the horror of the World-In-Itself. The world of the unknowable other withdraws from us as the enigma of Being-In-Itself. This is the same enigma as that of the Being-for-Itself of Heidegger's Present-at-Hand intention, but the Other’s intention withdraws from subjective intention in a sinister manner in the Horror genre because the paradox of intentional ambiguity appears as the threat of desire’s inherent unknowability. It is not just unclear what motivates Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers to kill, it is unknowable. This unknowability is the horror of the “in-itself” of desire’s eternal withdrawal from the intention. When this indeterminacy shifts from the external Other to the internalized Other of the voice from within, the question shifts from “What does the Other want from me?” to “What does the Other who speaks as me want?”. This internalization of unintentional desire is ultimately the reason why the desire of the Other is unknowable i.e.: the Other’s desire is also unknowable to himself. Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers also don’t know why they do what they do, even though the narratives of both include various versions of “Origin Stories.” Origin Stories may go some way to suggesting the Slasher’s intentions but offer no final or definitive account of the ambiguous excess of his desire. The demonic possession narrative simply conveys the unknowability of the desire of the Other to the ambiguity of the desire within. The intention of the Other withdraws from the subjective intention in the same way that the subject withdraws from itself as the subjective unconscious, which is why the unconscious is the fount of all horror.  3. The Cosmic horror of no-intention is most associated with HP Lovecraft. The end of entropy is not the unintentional relations of chaos but the total absence of relations. Cosmic Horror such as Stephen King’s The Mist or Lovecraft’s The Color out of Space present the absence of intention as what cannot be brought into relation with the subjective intention. This is not the unknowability of intention, nor the negation of intention, but the before and beyond of both.  https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Return of the Gods: the Other's Intention

https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/ Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe? “I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.” “When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about how he wasn’t there at the foundation of the Universe, God starts talking about those weird and heady creatio ex nihilo times all cool like were you there when Deep calls to Deep? and this sounds badass, but then God gets lost in rambling about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff that nobody’s sure why He made or what exactly they even are—but God wanted to seem like He was in more control than He actually was.” “God reveals His unconscious in this diatribe when He disavows His part in the evil that Job is suffering. Jung interpreted God’s “shadow self” as His repudiation of His relation to His son Satan—which is to deny that if you are the author of everything, then you are also the instigator of evil.” “For me, God’s shadow is ambiguity, which is His inability to determine all there is of the Universe. In other words, God has an unconscious just like the rest of us. He can’t be omnibenevolent because of His part in the evils of the world. But this lack of at-oneness, this lack of control, allows for whatever cool but incomprehensible stuff might follow from this impotence.” “My favorite Talmudic passage depicts rabbis arguing about the Oven of Akhani, which was a dispute about the purity of said oven for kosher cooking. God shows up to settle the controversy because it’s His law after all. But Rabbi Joshua tells God that He doesn’t have a say in the matter since the Torah is in their hands now.” “The gift of ambiguity is better than clarity because it is always open to further interpretation, and the joy of humanity is the community of interlocutors that indeterminacy gifts to us. Belief as a test of faith was a huge mistake. Religion took a wrong turn when it started to lift up psychosis as its preferred position. Psychosis is fine and has its place, but neurotic doubt is an undeniable salve for too much belief.” “I’m whatever religion they were at Gobekli Tepe. Religious practice should be a celebration of irreducible ambiguity. I was so excited when they uncovered Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey and Klaus Schmidt was like, “What the hell was going on here?” and decided it was a prehistoric zoo. Here was a city almost twelve thousand years old, built not for sedentary and hierarchical people but for the sacred practices of hunter-gathers who came together uncoerced to celebrate holy mysteries with ambiguous trickster gods in liminal spaces designed for music, dancing, stories, feasting, and shit-tons of carved animals doing stuff, like a vulture presenting an orb to a man without a head but with a prominent phallus, and the sublime wonderment of a submerged room with benches along the walls and loads of giant stone penises in the middle for some reason.” “Schmidt and countless others have speculated on what these people thought that they were doing there. I for one, perhaps naively, hope they didn’t precisely know what they were doing there. Hegel famously pondered the “mysteries of the Ancient Egyptian religions,” to which Žižek postulated that “the mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians too.”” “Amen.” https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics.

Paul Ricoeur demonstrated the shift from knowing being as it is in-itself, or as it is essentially, in the sense of without relation to a knower, to uncovering being as a process of relational interpretation, which might be thought of as the shift from the Husserlian "Eidetic" reduction to the Heideggerian "Hermeneutic Circle." Edmund Husserl hoped to disclose the things-in-themselves of the Kantian noumena without the observers intention, so that what appeared to us could show itself from its own intention without the interference of our projective presuppositions. However, he discovered that without the intentions of our presuppositions, nothing can be known. We know what there is through concepts, concepts that are motivated by our intention, rather than neutral observations. Martin Heidegger then showed that this conundrum, sometimes called the Observer Effect, was the result of our having been thrown into the facticity of a particular body at a particular place and time, which necessitated a particular intention.  But the limitations of situated-being's facticity was also the horizon of any possible knowing because knowing is intentional, which is to say that knowing is motivated, motivated in the first place by "Dasein's" thrownness, which is the limit and horizon of its knowing, and then motivated in the second place by the uncertainty reduction of niche construction. Therefore, all knowing is motivated by care about being and not by knowing itself, or rather, knowing itself is care for being. Ontic beings care about the Ontology of the Being from which they were thrown, as well as the particularities of the situation into which they have been thrown. Ricoeur's great contribution to knowing about being was to formulation how an observer's situated intention can contributed to an open circle of other intentional situations. The differences of intentional situations require interpretations of being rather than a closed, determinate identification of being-in-itself. Ricoeur's version of the hermeneutic circle was formulated as the circle of "Self as Another," in which each self knows itself through another, or through the indeterminacy of otherness. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Detroit Warehouse

I moved back to Chicago after my undergraduate years in Southern Indiana at Indiana University, and my roommate and partner in all things philosophical Scott moved to Detroit where he discovered the Detroit warehouse party scene that I had been traveling to since 1991, especially for Richie Hawtin's Packard Plant parties. I even wrote a Cheesy article about going up there for the techno scene for the student newspaper. Hopefully that thing has not been archived somewhere. I was quite proud of how "underground" I was.  We left Bloomington, Indiana in 1995 with our totally useless degrees in Religious Studies and Philosophy. Scott had a moment of no return seeing DJ Bone blowing minds at an abandoned building with stolen electricity "somewhere in Detroit," and then visiting Submerge to spend what very little money he had on Underground Resistance records, which explains the heavy presence of UR on this mix. Thankfully, the first time that he went shopping, Mike Banks was there to help him spend his money right.  For me, it was DJ Hyperactive showing me what to buy at a record store on the Southside of Chicago that I can't remember the name of right now, but it wasn't Gramophone, which is on the Northside and where fellow IU grad Miles Maeda worked. I first heard Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Juan Atkins, and German techno, mostly Tresor records, from Hyperactive. I once went to a party when I was an undergraduate at IU where Miles Maeda was spinning, and he was playing a lot of Detroit stuff too. I specifically remember hearing Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Aux 88 for the first time at that IU party, and this taught me that whatever beef there supposedly was between Detroit and Chicago, it wasn't very deep. In terms of Chicago house music, my hero was Derrick Carter. I would buy his mix tapes at Gramophone, and then spend the rest of my life trying to find those record. Thirty year later, I've been able to discover quite a few. 1. Convextion, Miranda: This one tickles the brain into a remembrance of forgotten dimensions of the body. This was one of the first records that an anonymous member of the UR crew handed to Scott when he politely asked for some help one day at Submerge back in 96. 2. Thomas Barrett, Re-synthesized: Pure UR madness. It builds and builds without a breakdown or a break of any kind. We're just marching the f— forward into the post-industrial collapse of the the lost future. Get in line or get lost. 3. Psychofuk, Pyschofuk: I really don't know what this is, other than it was one of the records given to Scott at Submerge. Oddly it's on Strictly Rhythm, which is a New York label that isn't associated with this sort of synthesized psychosis. Whatever "Psychofuk" is, it is properly named because it has the correct affect that "Hi-Tek" funk should on one's nuero-biology. These esoteric esoteric sounds call the far near. 4. Basic Channel, Phylps Track 11/11: Scott and I had a Hyperactive mixtape with it on it, and we use to call it the "Train Song," until Scott asked Carlos Soulffront what it was when we heard him put it on at a 90Detroit party. German Dub Techno was the perfect combination of groovy and electronic. A synthesizer manipulates and amplifies electricity. Human bodies are run on electro-chemical grooves. German Dub Tech Scientists were able to put electricity into these enchanted kinds of body grooves because of their past experiments with "Electric Body Music" and Dub Reggae. They then ran the whole tincture through an echo chamber, and this is what came out. Play it loudly on a good sound system. 5. Sender Berlin, Sendersuchlauf: Trust the Germans with their electronic dub machines. They understand post industrial collapse and the weird, wonderful noises that it makes. They loop these sounds and run them through strange filters, and then they slam a four on the floor bass apocalypse down, which really ties the room together. You'll love it. 6. Juan Atkins, Session 1: The Originator! Germany and Detroit have had an uncanny connection from the begging of this electronic music thing. Kraftwerk and Can got electronic noises moving towards body movement in the 70's. And then the Electrifying Mojo introduced Detroiters to both German synth music and Italio-disco in the late 70s / early 80s. Juan Atkins had no idea how his music was being regarded in Europe in the early 80s, but it was regarded and highly so. Germans have enthusiastically followed Detroit's techno output ever since. Juan took a class in high school about "Futurism," and then he bought the proper machinery to create the Future's soundtrack. 7. Suburban Knight: Echolocation: What an eerie UR banger. Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay about how we can't really know what it's like to be a bat because we know the world visually rather than through echolocation. Thankfully, James Pennington was able to disclose the "what-its-like-ness" of bat-ness with this track. 8. I think this track is called "One Sparkle" by Fumiya Tanaka: I remember it being on a Tresor compilation of some kind, but I can't find it right now. It sounds like a Jeff Mills track to me. The Japanese loved Detroit techno too, and I love this track's hauntological, driving vibe. There's some sort of deformed signal that might be a ship lost at sea in a storm ringing its warped, liquid-metal bell for help. But when you get there, its a massive 1950's fly saucer, and it ripples with the aquiferous music of the raging sea, as if it and the sea had always sung like that to each other, so no emergency after all, I guess. 9. Luke Slater (Planetary Assault Systems), Dungeon: I have no idea why Luke Slater called this track "Dungeon," but those are not the vibes that it gives to me, unless we're talking about the famous Tesor club in Berlin that in many ways resembled a dungeon because it was in the basement of what had been a fallout shelter in East Berlin. But Slater is an Englishman from Reading who definitely spun in some pretty dank place, including Tresor. This track sounds like some very esoteric alien creed with those staccato, metallic xylophone loops. And then there are those Kraftwerk Autobahn rushes employing the doppler effect to its proper ends. 10. Sender Berlin, Tragerfrequenz: Yes, twice. I'm just now realizing that I don't really know anything about Sender Berlin, except that they're German and on Tresor's record label, which is how I first heard them. This one is like an accidentally overheard, alien chant. When alien's get together for spell casting, it sounds like bouncing fuzz.  11. Octave One, Eniac: The track is named after the world's first electronic, general-purpose digital computer. The Burden Brothers of Octave One are a perfect example of Underground Resistance's combining of funk, jazz, soul, and technology. This track sounds like the sort of trains of the future that we were promised but never materialized. Detroit is famous for having a monorail that runs around its downtown, which very few people ever ride because it really doesn't go anywhere useful. It was a particularly odd sight in the 90s before any of the revitalization efforts began in the downtown area. It just continually ran around a decrepit city scape providing a haunting contrast between the Detroit of the past and its seemingly cancelled future. 12. Daniel Bell: Science Fiction. This was a short but very cool phase in Daniel Bell's career in which he made bleep and boop techno. I love the 1960 Sci-fi vibes. Bell takes us to a clandestine laboratory of officially banned but secretly performed experiments with this one. Someone is trying to revivify something awful, and it's working. Just keep turning those knobs and let's see what happens. 13: DHS, House of God (Surgeon remix): I heard Hyperactive playing this one a lot. I had, like most people who grew up on sample-based, electronic music, heard the original and loved it. The "Industrial" music on "Waxtrax," sometimes called "Electric Body Music," and the Italo disco that a lot of Chicago DeeJay's played around the time "House" officially became a thing, were much more influential on House than is sometimes admitted.  14. Joey Beltram, Ten Four: Some say that Joey Beltram's "Energy Flash" was the first true techno track. Who can make the final call about such arbitrary things? This track sounds like a cult of clapping monks getting swept up in the enthusiasm of their daily worship service to electrical storms.  15. Jeff Mills, Alarm: The "Wizard" is definitely one of the best to ever do it. This specific warped alarm sound used to make the warehouse dancers giddy with joy. And the shaking tiny metal things got everyone feeling as ecstatic as the Hare Krishna's jumping around with their finger cymbals. I got to see him again a few months ago. He's still the Wizard, but sounds systems aren't what they used to be. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Out of Darkness: What Is Otherness?

What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, "Quest for Fire" and the "Clan of the Cave Bear." Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human. https://youtu.be/AXgrppWd5Vs https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19245677 https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.