Standing Over the Glass Bridge Above the World's Rift

Shannon Li

Avital Ronell

GERM-UA 244

Nov. 23rd, 2023

Standing Over the Glass Bridge Above the World’s Rift

For psychopharmaceuticals, positivist psychology categorizes them: anxiolytics, empathogens, stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens. and these drugs, which are always chemically and electronically interfering with the brain’s natural way of functioning. The user of a drug usually expects a specific drug to work. Users of drugs usually expect that a particular drug will bring about a particular effect that will change the mental dilemma they are currently experiencing. This paper will combine psychotropic drugs and postmodernist writing to explore whether the world of hallucinations Walter Benjamin refers to is actually a gift from mother Nature.

In Hashish in Marseilles, Benjamin describes what he sees after smoking marijuana. The reality of everything is veiled in a veil of fantasy. What is most noticeable is his motivation for smoking marijuana: pleasure: “My walking stick begins to give me a special pleasure” (118). Although he hesitates for a long time, when he does try it, he gets excellent feedback. Admittedly, he did get good results. Because he wanted pleasure, marijuana brought him pleasure. But there is an extremely dangerous passage here: the pleasure obtained by using hallucinogens always comes in the form of fantasy. And the presence of fantasy must be supported by unconsciousness, which has no possibility of creating fantasy with anything other than language; fantasy must be decomposable by consciousness.

In Jacques Lacan’s Seminar 14: The Logic of Fantasy, he argues against Descartes’s congito and proposes a model that depicts four different situations. Specifically in the fifth part of his seminar on the subject.

I am, I think

1. I am, I think
2. I am not, I think
3. I am, I don’t think
4. I am not, I don’t think

For fantasy, it is not that the subject is thinking, but that the subject is not thinking. Unconscious subject is structured like a language, and the subject discovers that the request to the big Other cannot be fulfilled, and thus further discovers Object petit a. This is because Object a, as an absence, is always at the very center of desire. that is always at the very center of desire. The subject desires Object a, but it is always out of reach. Desire can be fulfilled, and desire will always continue to arise. object a will always manifest itself in other forms. And it is in this way that the subject, through the inaccessibility of Object a, recognizes and feels again and again the original emasculation that once took place in the Imaginary register. By entering the language, the subject is emasculated, and must accept the absence of Object a. And precisely, Object a in the Symbolic register is the constitutive exception of the subject. We can demonstrate here, through the dialectic of desire, that Object a is not absent, but exists in the form of absence. The quest for Object a is precisely because Object a is desired to exist. If there were no lack, the subject would not desire something.

The thinker is not the subject, but rather the unconsciousness. The ground of the unconsciousness is the unthinking consciousness, the directly identified perceptions of the human being that have not yet been symbolized. The four relations of Being to Thinking mentioned above are in fact the four relations between the unconscious subject and Object a in Lacan’s sense. And there is an intersection between “je ne pense pas” and “je ne suis pas”, where there is a missing phallus in the Imaginary register. representation, we can call it -φ. Something has been sent away that has understood that something is missing, but it doesn’t understand what it is missing, so it is -φ. This is precisely what Heidegger means by Dasein. unthinking consciousness, the most superficial consciousness. The perceptions with which one directly identifies. “From the beneficial dialectic to which there was offered in advance total order, absolute knowledge, and which is called the Dasein " (part 22). This chaotic, egoless state, close to the community of mother and child, is precisely the pre-linguistic one, before the mirror stage. And this state is where the hallucinogens are constantly trying to get to. And here, precisely, is the place that Benjamin depicts as the place to which Mother Nature constantly throws people: “she now throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls toward existence " (126).

Returning to Benjamin’s hallucination journey, we can then see that hallucination is the structure of the neurosis subject. Through fantasy, the subject fantasizes about giving his -φ to the big Other. through a fantasy frame the Object a fantastically ceases to be lost. This is where marijuana and all the hallucinogens act as a master signifier. The subject can then enter the signifier chain through his fantasized phallus in order to produce some figurative object of desire. But the figurative desire object is bound to fail because Object a is originally lost. In Benjamin’s original text, he refers to the morning after smoking marijuana: “What one writes down the following day is more than an enumeration of impressions” (Benjamin 122). Here, Benjamin describes a pre-linguistic dream, one that cannot be interpreted. And precisely this is the repressed desire. The unconsciousness has only one purpose, the fulfillment of repressed desires. And so Benjamin’s description speaks of a pure desire: to escape. Escape from the Symbolic order, from the real world bound by the signifier, to a beautiful fairyland filled with hallucinations, as Benjamin writes in the end: “…hashish persuades Nature to permit us-for less egoistic purposes-that squandering of our own existence that we know in love” (126). As mentioned earlier, the purpose of hallucination is to arrive at a chaotic pre-linguistic world.

On October 13, 2023, a 25-minute long animated pilot episode entitled The Amazing Digital Circus was pushed to YouTube. Its plot follows the protagonist as he travels into an electronic circus in a computer and is unable to return to the real world. At the end of the story, the protagonist, Pomni, after a hopelessly failed escape attempt, finally comes to terms with reality in an expression that cannot be described in words on paper. As figure 1 presented which is a screen shot from 24:35.

This is an extremely typical postmodernist work. It uses the comedy of the absurd to describe the experience of a person who faces the lack of the Real head-on. There are many other works of art created based on a certain desire: Backroom, SCP, Liminal Space, Cores including Weirdcore, Dreamcore and Traumacore. With the exception of The Amazing Digital Circus, all of these works of art have one irreplaceable characteristic: they are the result of the co-creation of the same narrative core by the general public. These works can only be created in the 21st century because they are dependent on the highly developed electronic communication network. And it is precisely this phenomenon that manifests a certain postmodern fantasy: a communal dream world that exists only in cyberspace.

If Benjamin’s marijuana use was an attempt to return to the good fairyland, the birth of those aforementioned cultural works was itself an attempt to create an electronic fairyland. And the fantasies, because of this, are completely unconscious attempts. These fantasies, including Digital Circus, are about spaces of some kind. And these spaces, often in the form of an abstract and fragmented narrative, are chaotically edited into a video with serene music. In Walter Benjamin’s other book, One-Way Street, he describes a kind of ruin “Seville, Alcazar.-An architecture that follows fantasy It is undetected by practical considerations. These rooms provide only for dreams and festivities-their consumption. Here dance and silence become the leitmotifs, since all human movement is absorbed by the soundless tumult of the ornament” (Travel Souvenirs). This kind of ruin is precisely how perfectly it interprets the way those spaces exist. Pairing the subject with the object, and the traveler has to be absorbed by those ruins. Most of the above-mentioned works of cyberculture can be referred to as ruins. Ruins, a kind of shattered, once-human existence of a building. Ruins are always associated with people, but they do not neatly map the prosperity they once enjoyed when they were rightfully intact.

When people engage in public, crowded fantasies by constructing such communal dreamscapes, it is surprising that people appreciate brokenness. Yet it is not so much the brokenness that one admires, but the prosperity. Through the ruins one sees prosperity. One fantasizes about the luxury and enjoyment of that ruin when it is intact. This is the nostalgia of the postmodern network, and if we look back at Benjamin’s marijuana, we can see a hint of it. “Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, or eternity too long……I feel this humor infinitely when I am told at the Restaurant Basso that the kitchen has just been closed, while I have just sat down to feast into eternity” (119). If that psychedelic vision of lost time, that hallucination that distorts the notion of space and time, could keep me forever in this most beautiful fairyland, then I could escape from the Real for eternity; it is the Real that is so violent that one has to flee to the hallucination. This is the most postmodern aspect of Digital Circus: it is not that people want to escape from the virtual and return to the real, but that they want to escape from the real and come to the virtual. Through a completely opposite narrative, Digital Circus succeeds in reconfiguring the world in terms of what Benjamin describes as humor.

Now, let’s combine those public cyber-illusions with the hallucination Benjamin describes, and we are able to get a postmodernist dilemma: there is nowhere to escape. As the theme of Digital Circus suggests, the protagonist, Pomni, is constantly trying to escape from a place from which she has no possibility of escaping in the foreseeable future. Even for marijuana smokers, in the end, one still has to go back to that sad reality to eat the meal set out on the plate. This, precisely, is the aforementioned -φ, an absent imaginary phallus. the subject, emasculated by language and symbolic order, loses all ability to really make any material difference to all lack, and is only able to masturbate in front of a darkened computer in the basement in front of an illuminating consumer sex product.

Work Cited

“THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS: PILOT.” Youtube, uploaded by Glitch, 13 Oct. 2023, youtu.be/HwAPLk_sQ3w?si=t7HJONNTQicHH4Ax.

Benjamin, Walter. On Hashish. Translated by Howard Eiland, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2006.

—. One-Way Street. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Translated by Edmund Jephcott, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2016.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan : Book XIV : The Logic of Phantasy : 1966-1967.” Norton, Aug. 2011.