Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:59 — 96.3MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Return conversation with John Cussans on movies as mass propaganda & both cause and symptom of collective dissociation, vampires, hypnosis, and trauma-based social engineering.
Part One: The Technology of Dissociation (0 – 33 mins)
Seen & Not Seen, the soul of the plot & the technology of dissociation, Lacan’s formula for the real, trauma as a substitute for God, what cuts us off from reality, making movies, (8 mins) writing without theory, from Bataille to horror films, the transgressive-erotic, Van Helsing-Dracula identification polarity, the Christopher Lee portal, joining the undead, Bela Lugosi, the film director as sadist-controller, on the borderline of seduction, Neon Demon, identification with Polanski, hypnosis & mind control, flipping the script of the Manson murders, cinema & hypnosis, Friedkin & The Exorcist, back-masking & subliminals & audience triggers, Blue Story, reality & movies.
Part Two: Cinematic Memories (33 mins – 1 hr 4 mins)
Blurring the line, dissociation & mind control, Derren Brown & Stephen Fry, Sirhan Sirhan, theater of hypnosis, (38 min) cinema & suggestion & loss of agency, a serpentine weave of psychoanalysis, two narratives around dissociative identity disorder, unconscious acts of murder, Secret Life of Movies, schizophrenia & disconnection from reality, the pressure of the unreality of reality, going to Morocco, getting back to reality, meeting Paul Bowles, kif & cannabis, cinematic memories and the nostalgia for dissociation, reading and narrative transportation, a traumatic substrate to cinema, the creation of language, the upside of dissociation, prefrontal cortex survival imagination, imagining the soul.
Part Three: Trauma Victims at Breakfast (1 hr 4 mins – 1 hr 32 mins)
Alison Miller, abuse victims, splitting reality, language as a symptom of trauma, cinema & simulations of reality, movies as collective dreams, the dangers of mass hypnosis via cinema, conspiracy and complicity, the auteur theory, communist-capitalist tensions, warring ideologies, collectivism vs. individualism, a democratic art-form (1:19 – 1:24), art films vs Hollywood’s toxic brutalization, hetero-normative vs transgender propaganda, a value-set of tolerance, moral persuasion, transgender propaganda, 2 + 2 = 5.
Part Four: Stop Making Sense (1 hr 32 mins – end)
Trauma & transgender, abuse culture & bad parenting, Disney as traumatizing agency, the formation of sexual identity, negating the body, techno-evolution, generational transformation, making sense, mimetic linguistic tropes, dissociating from a dissociated reality, liminality, “you know” as hypnotic suggestion, the tools of the mind controllers, the contract of language, the misuse of the world literally, the danger of tinkering with language, organic slang, the reification of the creative individual, what takes is what works, the culture of branding, the nature of the control system, social engineering & zeitgeist, collapsing structures, the problem with solutions.
Songs: “Pirates” & “Patience” by Entertainment for the Braindead; Black Box by Emerald Park; Summer by Milgrom; “Change” by Short Hand.
From approximately 2:02:01 to 2:02:02 you’ve articulated a question that I did not know how to ask myself, but I’ve been feeling as though I needed to ask something like that. …does that make sense? 🙂
Thank you.
about dissociating?
Nice conversation. I think I was guilty of saying “am I making sense?” once in our last conversation/pod. In my defense it was sincere in that I could feel instinctively that I was loosing you and wasn’t completely confident about the phenomenon I was attempting to describe. I do think as a catch phrase it has been around far longer than John realizes. Perhaps it was an American populous conversational tic that eventually found its way into academia. Interesting observation to connect these sort of everyday bad habitats we form with in conversation to disassociation. You have been on a role lately. The pod episodes have been great. Excellent guests that compliment you well.
roll or role – a Freudian slip-tic that suggests dissociation at one or both ends…?
Ha! Perhaps. More likely is the fact that I spell like a undisciplined 8 year old, magnified significantly when ever I type from my phone for some reason.
Are you trying to put Freud out of business? Oh wait, he already is.
That algorithms want to coopt your spelling is no mystery, tho the motivation for doing so may be….
In reviewing, I see that the part I found personally relevant begins about 1:57:00. Some quotes from that section:
…”to what extent does knowledge prevent us from discovering things?”
“How the zeitgeist can be manufactured…”
(not trying to reduce everything to conspiracy)
“It’s an attempt to get free of the knowledge that’s been put in me that prevents me from discovering reality with a sort of macrocosm of what’s outside that’s also inside, which is, to what extent has the zeitgeist been manufactured, to what extent has culture been reconfigured as a delivery device for propaganda? So that I can then identify my own insights as compared to the things that have been incepted in me.”
“Am I engaged with reality at this moment or am I falling back on a script?”
*********************************
…”to what extent does knowledge prevent us from discovering things?”
“How the zeitgeist can be manufactured…”
(not trying to reduce everything to conspiracy)
This section, especially, caught my attention. By “knowledge” I assumed you meant all of the things that you talk about in your blog/books/podcast (and more); by “zeitgeist” I assumed you meant (and this ties in with “conspiracy”) all of these nefarious things working together in some coordinated fashion.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re wondering if your knowledge prevents you from discovering…what? I used to think it was man made, but it’s insidious and it’s been going on for so long that I’m not comfortable with that as an explanation.
I’ll leave it there as I don’t want to remark further if I’m not understanding you
Thank you.
thanks for transcribing and summing up…. Yes is the short answer, tho I was really pointing out something I felt was going on with John, and that listening back became very apparent, that his theoretical knowledge (and knowledge of theory) was acting like a prophylactic keeping our interface safe but also preventing both intimacy and deeper creative friction, or (for that matter) conception. Concepts prevent conception. So it’s specifically knowledge that remains theoretical that prevents discovery; which is why “conspiracy theory” is a problem to which solid research (like Recluse’s) is the solution. Most people lack the knowledge to distinguish theory from fact, and so, like these toxic paper satanists of the Grey Faction, conflate the two in order to stay dis-associated from reality.
I just added this to my about page: if conspiracy theorizing is the sublimated quest for God that ends up creating and maintaining a paper Satan, then paracultural analysis is the attempt to trace the contours of psychic trauma by identifying the traumatizing agent, that thereby eventually rediscovers the soul
It’s a matter of what sort of knowledge and how it is used, and the two influence one another. Real knowledge is both based in direct experience and leads to it….
“I just added this to my about page: if conspiracy theorizing is the sublimated quest for God that ends up creating and maintaining a paper Satan, then paracultural analysis is the attempt to trace the contours of psychic trauma by identifying the traumatizing agent, that thereby eventually rediscovers the soul.”
This right here is golden. Thank you..
With respect to ‘nothing making sense’ for many people, my understanding is that this is primarily due to two factors, which underpin the interpretive and linguistic confusion that people are preoccupied with currently. Indeed this preoccupation is an avoidance strategy of these more terrifying underpinnings, both provided by contemporary culture and self generated.
Firstly many of the important concepts that people are given to interpret the world have been hollowed out gradually since the end of 2nd World War – most importantly the concepts of the ‘nation state’, and the concept of ‘war’ itself. This hollowing out has taken place on the basis of ‘national security’ and was developed under the circumstances of the Cold War. Through the use of private front entities, sometimes multinational, viable businesses in their own right, for the purposes of providing ‘operational cover’ the pursuit of ‘national security’ has blurred the distinctions between one state and another, and what constitutes the extent of the state and what is a ‘private entity’.
These ‘cover operations’ have equally compromised the political system, and made the actual allegiances at work in political decision making opaque to the general population, who instead attempt to interpret what they are seeing within a party political framework. Indeed they are encouraged to do so by the mainstream press, which are also infiltrated on the basis of ‘national security’.
Secondly, the development of novel unconventional weaponry, whose mechanism of action and effects are unknown to the general population. Such weapons can bring about political or corporate ‘leverage’ for which there is no apparent reason in the mind of the ordinary person, who must attempt to interpret what is happening within the conventional narratives they are given. Obviously such narratives can never fully ‘make sense’ as they do not correspond to reality.
I thought you might find this interview with André Masson (illustrator of Bataille’s L’Acephale) interesting. I come away with the sense that Bataille barely knew what he was trying to do and was only playing at being an intellectual and esoterist. Considering this, that his “ideas” (if you can call them that) were so influential on more prominent minds than his own is pretty frightening.
http://blacksunlit.com/2016/10/acephale-or-the-initiatory-illusion-paule-thevenin-and-andre-masson-translated-from-french-by-rainer-j-hanshe/
I enjoyed reading the interview, but didn’t read the preceding verbiage. Can you explain what gave you this impression, as I didn’t get it myself?
Mainly that it seems Bataille projected meaning onto an illustration that was entirely “automatic” (aside direction to create a drawing of a headless man). Elements of this icon, which was central to his self developed mythos and supposed cult, that Bataille wrote on specifically in terms of what they represented within his “philosophy” were not designed by Bataille and were only intuitive aesthetic decisions made by Masson. The whole thing reeks of
rather abstract, feigning political, Occult fan-fiction. Like Kenneth Grant or Michael Bertiaux but lacking a complex metaphysics and labyrinthos mythologicus. Granted, this is only the sense I get not having read but a couple
Bataille stories, this interview, and skimmed “The Sacred Conspiracy.” Perhaps secondary sources could convince me otherwise.
Yes I see. The impression I got most strongly from this interview was that these were artists ‘at sea’ if you will, trying to find safe harbour whilst surrounded by violence and uncertainty. Therefore it seems only natural that they would incorporate at least some degree of improvised or ‘automatic’ creativity as means to find there way through the chaos, both present and anticipated. I suspect they all would have felt ideology, and more broadly the mind, were insufficient.