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Climate Change in the Aesthetic State (a Memory

(Dis)Order)
Tom Cohen Professor of Literary and Media Studies
a
The English Department , The University at Albany, SUNY
Published online: 04 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Tom Cohen Professor of Literary and Media Studies (2004) Climate Change in the Aesthetic State (a
Memory (Dis)Order) , Parallax, 10:3, 83-98, DOI: 10.1080/1353464042000226099

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 parallax, 2004, vol. 10, no. 3, 83–98

Climate Change in the Aesthetic State (a Memory (Dis)Order)

Tom Cohen

This new system of controls is changing the social bond and

modifying the meaning of the human. Representations are becoming
uniform...We are witnessing the extinction of psychic space...This
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threat of extinction of psychic space is characteristic of the planetary

age...I would also include in this picture of the symptomatology of
the planetary age the role played by images.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Future of a Failure’

The future belongs to ghosts.

Derrida, Specters of Marx

The seduction to thought inherent in the labyrinthine phrase conceptual (dis)order lies,
perhaps, in its suggesting a fold or occlusion that precedes and cannot be remarked
by those inscribed in certain conceptual templates, a fault within an ‘order’ (the
resonance of command echoes here) that may police itself while dispensing a
perceptual field – that is, an archival disorder. And to the degree that it might be
totalized or imperil the system it seems to advance, it may be perhaps a gran mal
d’archive. Here conceptual too takes on resonance and draws attention to where sensation
– the aesthetic, say – plays its role, where the hand that was thought to have grasped or
touched (Begriff) persists as archival imprint or phantom program. The latter’s
reference to the hand implants at the Ursprung of the concept of concept the emblem
of human technics and writing, implicitly asking where such implants – say,
Enlightenment tropes of ‘light’ or mimesis – are sustained by self-feeding interpretive
reflexes over, and against, graphematic operations. (Were this hand further reduced to
a pointing finger, perhaps, it might invoke the mimetic urge to point at some thing, to
indicate or accuse, index or digitalize, imprint or archive.) The chain might run as
follows: a political or consumerist or intellectual or epistemological (dis)order would
reign by virtue, ‘today’, of how perception and memory are programmed and the
latter, in turn, draws one to the graphematic orders of inscription. From here the
sensorium would be generated, levers set, temporalities managed.

If one wished to address where or how an intervention in such a totalized horizon

might occur, one could, as in the model Benjamin turns to, conjure the archival sites
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DOI: 10.1080/1353464042000226099 83
 where the aesthetic appears inscribed. One might be tempted, following this opening,
to ask how the aesthetic as such may have been programmed in biopolitical terms by
tele-technic principles, auratic habits, prehistorial or Enlightenment epistemes no
longer sufficient to address where current economic and archival models appear to be
reaching self-generated limits (natural reserves, ‘democratic’ models, concepts of
citizenry, market economics). To take one minor example: the way that sight had been
programmed as an ocularcentric ‘order’ which assumes a transparency of knowing
and seeing (eidein), formalizes an ancient model of the hunt and consumption of prey,
and which simply forgets the mnemonic and graphematic programs (tele-technics) which
generate the effect it calls the eye.

1. Homeland Security
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The line from Derrida’s Specters of Marx cited above – that ‘the future belongs to
ghosts’ – can bear a number of readings. One would be that any conceit of the future
is only a phantasm generated by mnemonic recordings and the dead; a second might
be that the planetary to come will persist as a spectral order in which the rules of
disappearance, mourning, trans-identity, and chronographics will have altered
irreversibly.

There have been a number of recent critical calls in special journal issues or
conferences to examine tears and folds in this newly totalized scene by appealing
to non-anthropomorphic horizons. Such have taken very different forms around
questions posed as ‘mourning revolution’ or ‘virtual materialities’ or ‘the catastrophe
of the sensible’ – wherein the aesthetic is, in a somewhat Benjaminian mode, targeted as
a site of the political.1 If new catastrophe narratives attend this moment – associated
with nuclear terror or climate change, say – these appeal to something beyond the
‘global’ as a totalizing figure. Something like the term planetary, for instance, has been
tentatively offered as a replacement for the global (Kristeva, Spivak, Miyoshi) but it
seems to have little traction except as a negative place-holder: does ‘planetary’ today
imply some inter-transit of societal borders or, with its astronomical inflection, the
material and non-anthropomorphic orders that host bios or ‘life’?2 This appeal to what
is not controlled by humanist metaphors has an unlikely if inverse parallel in what is
called the global war on terror. From a certain perspective, the latter might also be
considered a totalizing war on or against any possibility of the system’s critical rupture
or intervention – including Benjaminian ‘shock’. That is, something altering the
accelerated archival orders and memory regimes. One of the signal openings that
occurs here – that is, in a field conceived as increasingly self policed – may be the sort
of intervention Benjamin hypothesized as occurring solely within networks of memory,
within how the senses themselves are programmed, within the archival orders in
which agency and the human are pre-defined. The aesthetic shifts in this field from its
marginal status as ‘play’ to redefining the site of mnemonic politics and the sensorium
of ‘man’ – that is, how otherness is commodified, signs selected and processed. It
questions the need to probe further what can be called, today, less ‘empire’ than a
mobile archipelago of aesthetic states – logics and spectral sites from which the levers of
consumption and perception, the eye and memory appear set.
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 A rhetorical example of this schism in the heart of the post ‘global’ polis may be
referenced to the redefinition of the planetary from being an infinite combinatoire of
virtual spaces to a fragile or vanishing reserve. Thus, while for ‘Bush’ (heard as
corporate name) the spatial and temporally horizonless war on terror requires the poster
of a human face and agency – first Osama, then Saddam – to pursue, rendering each
in turn spectres within a double chase circled back on itself, it can also be viewed as a
totalizing blind staged for and by certain archival programs at work.

Thus a recently circulated and suppressed Pentagon report on climate change

concluded that the latter was more of a threat to U.S. security than terrorism – since
it already made plausible a string of international catastrophes that would plunge the
‘planet’ in as little as two decades into a state of perpetual wars of survival between
local states and classes, nuclear armed in many cases, over things like water and
reserves. Yet because it was not ‘human’, hence without image, had no star power or
aura, and would wreck current economic and electoral agendas, it would appear
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occluded – in favour of a discrete human other, even if faceless and stateless: the
spectral ‘terrorist’. The Observer’s account which publicized the report, before it was
discounted as extreme case scenarios in the American media, emphasized the
contradiction that this account was issued by the Pentagon – the site not of
environmental but security analysis. Even bracketing that a state of permanent local
wars might fulfill a certain Pentagon imaginary, the chains of cataclysms unleashed by
melting ice-caps and extincting bio-systems, redefined borders and eviscerating water
or agriculture (all of which have occurred before on earth) described a landscape
without reserve in which a drastic culling of human populations would occur as the
surviving pinnacles of resources would turn into fortresses. While the list was
impressive – England turned into Siberia, the Hague and Bangladesh under water,
overwhelming inundations of survivalist emigrations, nuclear exchanges as accepted
defense – it did not go on to note that no recognizable model of a national or global
economy would persist any more than the predicates of formal democracy, ‘human’
rights, with reversion to martial orders. What is interesting here may not be the
likelihood of this scenario arriving on time or as such but its virtuality – that it has
entered the province of the real with the Pentagon’s imprimatur, as a matter of ‘national
security’, from what seems a non-anthropomorphic logic, the impossible.3

Whatever the DoD adduces must, behind the scenes, enter into war planning, enter
(in occlusion) into the phantomatics of the real today – always referenced to a future
pacification. A non-anthropomorphic and pan-systemic threat to ‘national security’ that
is greater than terrorism is displaced onto a discrete human other. This occludes several
possible logics, on which war planners for such eventualities would pre-emptively
reflect:

• That the current ‘global’ dispensation operates in a time-bubble that anticipates

its own displacement by the very engines that accelerate it – before not human
‘enemies’, even spectralized, but the non-anthropomorphic and tele-technic
systems of a wholly other.

• That the assumption by The Observer’s critic that the report would ‘embarrass’
Bush’s dismissal of climate science as merely desired by its corporate
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 contributors interests is naïve. One could as readily deduce – since ‘they’ have
if anything better information – that they already know and consider the
scenario described by the suppressed report irreversible. No half efforts could
possibly be co-ordinated globally and the attempt would cripple the American
economy irreparably and, more important, unpredictably alter electoral politics
as known. A strategy to secure ‘future’ reserves gets underway – for some, for a
time.

• That the totalized war on terror without temporal or geographical horizon would
be caught in a spectral pursuit of a stateless, and faceless ‘other’ it can only
exponentially generate – and which is openly replicable and replaceable.

What is interesting in this rhetorical episode or fable from the post-global archive (‘of
course these things would not happen, there is no precedent’) is the policing role still
humanizing figures like mimesis and identification serve. Based on this virtual
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narrative, one could say that there would be not only a global war on ‘terror’ in defense
of the very models that assure their own alteration, but coming wars of reinscription as
these proceed.

The trope of ‘homeland security’ feeds an aesthetic ideology of the house, the interior
reserve, the familial and familiar. It is spellbound by auratic programs: historicism,
mimeticism, identification, ocularcentrism (the transparency of seeing and knowing),
mutating reference systems. In the above case a totalized ‘war’ on terror which is
without temporal or geographic border displaces onto human agents an unprecedented
calculus arriving from non-anthropomorphic zones. This casts the global war on terror
– with terror also heard as any interruption or intervention of the archival orders, the
‘homeland’ – as a spectral war in a redoubled sense. It is a war over pre-empting and
consumed futures channeled back into a discrete human other, donated the faces of
Bin Laden or Saddam to occlude the implications of a ‘greater’ threat of system-wide
eviscerations to come. It totalizes an aesthetic horizon as a sort of double-chase, in
which the pursued terrorist – either simulating one of our ‘own’, or faceless and
stateless, infinitely replaceable – occludes and stands in for a logic implanted in
advance of the pursuer. Thus the war on terror exponentially generates the target
pursued (more nuclear black markets, more jihadists, more international alienation,
more retreat from democratic facades, and so on). And what is occluded is what has
no entry into the perceptual template – no star power in cinematic terms, no aura, no
personification, the wholly other of extinction events and climate change.

2. Spellbound

What is called climate change involves a transformation of biopolitical environments or

premises – like an archival site of altered and altering inscription. It could equally
name a transformation of critical premises – such as occurs, in the above remarks, to
the category of the aesthetic. According to Benjamin, any intervention before such a
totalizing horizon requires descent into the archival orders which program them – the
re-wiring of memory regimes, definitions, conceptions of ‘the wholly other’, sensorium
templates, the aesthetic. In an extension of this politicization of the aesthetic that is,
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 perhaps, not given its due, Paul de Man conceived of aesthetic ideology as a
programmatic relapse before an anterior event of inscription – the assigning of
humanizing and ameliorating logics to ‘material’ and mnemonic events. Aesthetic
ideology mimes what traditionally occurs to the term aesthetic itself, derived from the
Greek aisthanumai (to perceive) yet marginalized as ‘play’ by post-Platonic thought: it
is instantly installed as a category which then neutralizes access, as it were, to the
motherboard of perceptual programming. Essentially, de Man expands on one
implication of Benjamin’s earlier model of a ‘materialistic historiography’ – a project
capable of performative assaults and intervention in the archival orders from which
competing pasts and alternative futures to those apparently programmed are decided.
Tellingly, when Benjamin condensed this project of ‘materialistic historiography’ –
other names for which, in his work, were translation, allegory, and cinema – as one of
resistance before a totalizing enemy other, in the ‘Theses’, what he calls ‘fascism’ is
referenced not to the most obvious contemporary marker, the Nazi overrun of Europe
(as if even that were symptomatic). Rather, and cannily, it is referenced to an
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epistemo-political style that unwittingly fed over-arching archival drives: what he calls
historicism. Historicism pursues an archivist assemblage of facts leading to a deferred
revelation that neutralizes the possibility of historial intervention – and the
performative recasting of the narrative presents, or levers, it sets. There could be
reason to see Benjamin’s epistemo-critical target as even more totalized in so called
‘global’ orders – a retotalization Hardt and Negri would personify as ‘empire’.

Yet this self-feeding of post ‘global’ horizons – whether by media networks or, at
times, critical tropes (‘empire’) – anticipates something by default: coming wars of
reinscription as if at the preoriginary sites where the sensorium would be set.

There has always been an enigma associated with what Benjamin meant by
attributing a destruction of aura to the advent of cinema. As an apparatus of virtually
absolute tele-technic and mnemonic prowess, it divests itself not of originary presence
but something he likens most to personification – or anthropomorphism. That is, it
suspends the very trope film studies rushed to re-install or re-auraticize: identification,
the mimeticism of the picture, auteurism, the ‘gaze’. It exteriorizes the prosthetics of
memory and phenomenalizes what the eye thinks it sees – while reflecting on itself as
a graphematic operation. At any instant it implicitly precedes and disbands ‘light’ and
identification, while soliciting the associations of both as lure and cover. The cinematic
image as a term is altered from its received sense like other key terms in Benjamin, by
a sort of inversion (‘materialistic’ is spectral, ‘historiography’ confutes historicism). The
image is supposed to be a mimetic, indexal, or a documentary copy. Instead of being
representational, this image names a pan-graphematic and performative site in which
forces of legibility compete to access contesting pasts and alternative temporal
configurations (Eduardo Cadava speaks, accordingly, of a ‘citational structure’ of this
image).4

If one is looking for events to re-inspect that have programmed the horizons of the
‘global’, one might return to the advent of the cinematic image. At this non-site a
covert battle raged over the image as mimetic servant or, alternatively, as graphematic
performative. Depending on this battle’s outcome, different future ‘presents’. (In a
moment, I will point to an example of this in Hitchcock.) It is routine to link the
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 advent of cinema, today, to the accelerations of techno-weaponry and the genocides to
come in that century.5 It is equally linked to the electronic archive and subsequent
digitalization – where the world is dissolved into then recast by number and pointillist
graphics (though, inversely, it measures its success by its mimetic verisimilitude). If
Brian Rotman is right to recall that letteration came into effect with the monotheistic
human era and that an other or hyper graphematics may be presaged, currently, in
the era of the electronic archive and the digital, then such a graphematicism –
whether other or a cinematic acceleration of the letter – has a spectral cast, that of
flickering screens and pulsions, memory implants and phenomenal prostheses.6

If one can propose ‘Hitchcock’ as a sort of Rosetta stone for re-inspecting the advent
or event of cinema, as well as a seeming war within its definition and uses, that is not
because of his concealed place at the heart of the canon, or his seeming practice of a
Benjaminian cinema whose signature-systems, citational networks, and graphematic
logics are perpetually marked. When a late film arrives at the name ‘bird war’ to
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identify this contretemps, it involves a radical or even prehistorial otherness which

pecks out eyes and would drive a version of the human (or the family) out of its house,
or patterns of memorization (as when the school house is attacked). These black
wingbeats attack from the sky without warning and are associated not with ‘nature’
but machines and tele-technics (telegraph wires, tractors). Yet in Hitchcock this is in
fact a late and totalized avatar of the early avenging assaults, from within, of a lodger
associated with the dematerialization of the visible through chemical and spectral
processes (what is called in The Lodger’s sub-title ‘London Fog’). Throughout the early
‘political’ thrillers what would later be called a ‘bird war’ against the human as such –
by the cinematic logics – took the form of anarchistic subversion mounted repeatedly
against the home state (or homeland), monolinguistic ‘England’. Since these agents
were seldom associated with a named alien nation, their logic derived from within
the state itself – as with Mr. Memory’s secret formula for a weapon of mass
de(con)struction. These assaults would always be launched by a cinematic ‘villain’ who
wielded the logics of Benjaminian ‘shock’ – portrayed as a saboteur’s bomb, as single
assassination shot, as secret weapon, each with the power to transform the political
and historical map, start or alter the outcome of a world war. The villain of the
Hitchcock thriller always aims at an event of disinscription, miming the work. In a
famous frame of Sabotage, this atomization of the visual edifice, of buildings in
Piccadilly Circus (‘the center of the world’), is projected by the saboteur Verloc onto a
turtle tank window at the zoo – a screen referenced to the epochal suspension of the
‘human’ as such before pre-mammalian animemes.

Hitchcock practices elaborate signature-systems involving marks, letters, punning

relays, citational hypertexts which the cameos’ logic barely mirrors. In these the
de-auraticization of the cinematic is assumed and premarked – as with the putting out of
all London’s lights opening Sabotage.7 To as if enter the archival labyrinth and attempt
disinscription requires not forgetting that this image derives from graphematic events –
secret agents of marking and imprinting. It requires a mark that appears preoriginary
to letters or perception, such as the recurrent series of lines or bars which traverses the
director’s works and which William Rothman calls the director’s signature. It may be
represented by stuttering lines . This appears as one variation of what Derrida
calls a ‘visor effect’: ‘The perspective has to be reversed, once again: ghost or revenant,
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 sensuous-non-sensuous, visible-invisible, the specter first of all sees us. From the other
side of the eye, visor effect, it looks at us even before we see it or even before we see
period’.8 Hitchcock dismisses the naturalized trope of the ‘eye’ as an ideological
makeover for a mnemonic effect – as when he has it cut by scissors (Spellbound ), or
inhabited by morphing graphic coils (Vertigo), or has it extinguished by mother’s cigarette
in the form of a sunny-side up egg (To Catch a Thief ). When he houses one of his
anarchists assaulting the aesthetic state in the façade of a temple of sun worship, a
trope of a movie house, the relapse to Enlightenment expectations is anticipated and
suckered in advance – indeed, tickets are paid for as donations.

To use Hitchcock as an example of a war within and over the performative definition
of this image is, simultaneously, to return to a contretemps within the sensorium at the
advent of the ‘global’ era. This war is differently mapped, one which for Hitchcock
precluded identifying with either side in the great wars of the last century (hot or cold),
preferring to dwell on them as specular variants, however extreme in differences, of
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post-Enlightenment models of light, subjectality, the ‘human’, reason, sight. At

different sites, Hitchcock will identify his cinematic assault with a nuclear blast, a boy’s
futuristic raygun, a mock worship of asolarity, a faux séance – referenced to an
archival site or non-site, degendered and spectral, called latter simply ‘mother’. One
might say, of course, that any attempt to circle back to reinscribe models that seem
pre-originarily set might have to go past or through this slashing wigged figure, who in
‘her’ way suggests a sort of khora figure as Derrida reads it – an atopos site, as if within
the trace-chains and histories that pass through cinema and this work, where
inscriptions seemed set.

3. Minotaur

What interests, here, is the de-auratic moment implicit in the image. That is, the side
of the cinematic which – while representing people – divests itself of personification, of
mimetic identification, of anthropomorphism. In doing so, it posits something else – or
other – even if that is still at war, like a kind of ‘bird war’ against one form of the
human habitation, of the family, clustered around Bodega Bay. As we know from the
title of Hitchcock’s last film, the trajectory of the cinematic image involves a family plot
– the plotting of the family or house to maintain its name and property, and the
simultaneous plot into which the family logic is as if in-terred, as into an inky bog from
and to which, like a negatived phoenix, all graphic systems arise or return.

One can locate such a site as if at the gates of the underworld – the cinematic portal
to contemporary programs of the image, consumption, mnemonics, the senses. It is
just beyond all roads, outside of the metaphorics of the house, a sort of atopos.
‘Hitchcock’ installs himself, canonically and theoretically, as if at the faux touchstone
of this event, the advent of the cinematic as template for a global teletechnics to come.
If Hitchcock represents a sort of ground zero in and for cinema then Psycho would be
ground zero of Hitchcock. The image in question is an archival still of ‘Norman’ at the
bog from Psycho – a work enigmatically situated at the cross-roads of cinema’s critical
autoscopy and powers, not to mention film production, theoretical investment, and so
on. The bog is being stared at by Norman or Tony Perkins, but the former is as if
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positioned with or behind the camera or viewer. The bog is positioned behind the eye.
It is a swamp into which automotive vehicles of transport like cars and female corpses
are for a time vanished or dissolved. I will call this swamp or bog into which
temporalities and metaphors are vanished a black hole, as this term has been
developed by J. Hillis Miller to name an intractable aporia that actively redistributes,
or engulfs, representational systems. It absorbs light and ingests stars. Certainly Janet
Leigh, but also Perkins himself – who could never leave this single work and would
end his days shilling trash remakes. It is a non-site covertly referenced in the preceding
film as an ‘alphabet soup’, where letters are dissolved in a dark bouillabaisse (the
examples in North by Northwest are spy agencies: F.B.I., C.I.A., O.N.I.). Rather,
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 Norman’s bog – which gathers before it all the artifices of the visible, the histories of
tele-technics rushing through cinema (where ‘globalization’ was charted, its levers set)
– might be called an image of image. We might submit this logic to Derrida’s analysis
of the spectral, which he allies to the cinematic, visibility, and the screen:

What is a specter? What is its history and what is its time?

The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain

visibility. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen, which is why it
remains [...] beyond the phenomenon and beyond being. The specter
is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one
sees and which one projects – on an imaginary screen where there is
nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always
has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that is, a structure of
disappearing apparition.9
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Hitchcock haunts film culture in this odd way. Recently, Gus Van Sant’s near shot by
shot re-make of Psycho literalized and defaced, exposed and erased Hollywood’s
citational dependency on Hitchcock. In this, it seemed to mock the former’s inability
to escape from the endless imitation, faux theft or citation of a certain Hitchcock, as if
a Hegel of the cinematic that cannot be formally exceeded. No doubt, signature
systems traverse this opus from end to end, webs that still have not been traced.
Broken into their parts these signature-systems takes the shape of cameos, syllables,
letters, bodily citations, numbers, marks, aural concatenation. The bog as a viscous
black pool, primal or pre-originary mud, cites the black drowning pool in his early
silent The Manxman which, after receiving a woman’s suicide leap, dissolves into
the inkwell atop the judge or Deemster’s table – from which, in turn, the tip of a
pen emerges. That pen proceeds to signature laws on behalf of the law, signed by the
most compromised of Deemsters, a betrayer of his virtual family, his brother-friend,
the latter’s wife (his lover), their (or his) baby. The bog absorbs light and even what
we can call ocularcentrism, which is to say the naturalized habits of identification
and personification (or aura). It reposes a question put at the advent of cinema as
such – which the film’s cinematographic return to black and white already cites. Perkins
seems to be staring back at the bog, and next to and behind him appears like a parallel
shape a looming tree. A family tree of sorts, it seems dead in advance, ghosted – in a
desert signscape featuring low hills, a bush-like tree on top, a deforested clearing,
shadows cast by a setting sun outside and to his right (Perkins is facing south).

Yet the entire image is not a shot in the film itself. It is a shot of the set – the set of the
work, at Universal Studios, a shot of or as if marking for Hitchcock the horizonless
event of ‘Psycho’ (now in quotes), enfolding all its production, cast, and the prehistories
and afterlife of cinema. It is an archival shot and a shot of – and clearly, with all the
violence that the word implies, a shot at – what might be called the state of the image
or tele-archive. It is a shot of the ‘set’ at the chthonic omphalous of Psycho, whose very
production debris seeps into it openly: the taping is visible for where Perkins is to
stand, hoses thread the ground at his feet, and ghost structures – one looking like a
house, another like a miniature oil derrick – can be discerned in the background.10 Yet
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 if this is a shot of the ‘set’, as auto-citational hive, it engulfs its successive frames and
anchors itself on a desert earth become set, pre-inhabited like the spectragenic tree
whose apparition doubles Norman.

Hitchcock knows these deserts speak of natural history, which is to say temporal
disjuncture – as when in Saboteur, crossing similar terrain in a truck, it is remarked that
these deserts used to be seas. The bog emerges here as a wormhole in organic
recycling, semiotic figures, letters, geological times. The oil-like pond consumes,
inversely, the cars which consume it laden with corpses and newsprint in their trunk
– industrial machines’ consumption of fossil fuel reclaimed by the destinies of oil,
plunging all transport back into that prehistorial site – or marking its own auto-
consumption by and with it, before a future signscape void of trees, largely, or
humans, except for the out of place Norman, pants too short, hand fidgeting in a
pocket. ‘Norman’, here, accelerates all of the residual rites of metaphysics (the serial
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murder of women, say) as if to exceed it fully, as cinema itself. The shot invokes the
prehistories of dinosaurs and their decay or waste, fueling electricity and motoring
industrial advance, and reels forward to witness future eviscerations of trees, natural
images, or ‘life’ on a desert earthscape. And it cites terrestrial futures beyond the
human era – which Norman, out of place, represents. Whatever enters this self-
ingesting frame, whatever citational networks and histories it activates, enters a non
anthropomorphic, de-auratic, perhaps aterrestrial site – since the earth, from the
camera’s perspective, is another ‘set’ (the camera is not natural, not terrestrial – as
Spielberg’s endless recurrence to space aliens, prosthetic boys, and dinosaurs
confirms). The cinematic image spectralizes, but what it seduces with or promises –
the mimetic ordering of memory, representation, archivization – also betrays, since it
was de-auratic from before the start. In the labyrinth of the image, a Minotaur.

One day, on the set of Psycho, this occurred to Hitchcock to shoot – as if a net were to
be thrown over the performative event, that very moment, perhaps to cite or séance it
in its entirety. The still belonging to the archives of the British Film Institute would be
dated – that of a specific day – and undated by its chronographic turbulence, an
autograph of an abyssal location, the bog, and of an event in and of tele-technic
histories (past and to come). Which is why cinema remarks itself, here, through
Hitchcock’s signature-systems – in the odd tree, in the reversion to black and white, in the
invocation of the labyrinth, in its autoscopy of a post ‘global’ (dis)order or ill. What
emerges, briefly, assaults and annotates the blind both of an ocularcentric culture and
the implicit project of film studies, which depends on personification, mimetic
indexing, identification and historicist coding – relapsing almost instantly into the
phantasmatics of a vanished aura, which is to say, into the aesthetic ideologies of the
visual (or visual arts). The latter re-conjured the ‘auratic’ at the scene of its destruction,
according to Benjamin. It wanted to pull the cars out of the bog and go back to
normal, spellbound by the promises of aura. ‘Norman’ at the bog speculates on this
Nietzschean circuitry and the evacuation of Enlightenment programs legislating
definitions of time, the human, perception, the event, mnemonics. And in this, the
archive is not passive – it is active, self feeding. The mimetic promise of the image is
a lure or trap – like presenting the movie house as a faux temple of sun worshippers –
for tourists, set by a cannibal machine.
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 Thus the tree is already and in advance ghosted and, marking the prosthesis of the
‘visible’, pre-inhabited by agonized letteration and runes. It perpetually cites itself,
circularly and in advance, eviscerated upon arrival. The tree, like the bog, is affiliated
to what Psycho calls ‘mother’. The emblem of the natural image on which the camera-
as-recorder depends as point of departure (mimesis) and returns (recognition), the
cited tree is pre-originarily inhabited by an alphabet soup. A Greek gamma looms at
the branches. Nor is it arbitrary, in the director’s signature-system, since he uses it
elsewhere – as the third letter (parallel to ‘C’) – to join the accelerations of cinema to
the explosive conceit of the three, first visible plane in geometry (the Avenger’s triangle
calling card in The Lodger). Reference to ‘gamma’ occurs in the dying Mr. Memory’s
formula for a silent bomber engine, a cinematic weapon of mass de(con)struction in
The 39 Steps: ‘R minus One over R to the power of gamma’. That is, something like the
repetition discretely effaced in the photographic still transformed by the intra-
citational accelerations of innumerable moving frames, exponentially transfigured into
an explosive weapon. Yet the tree’s cross-branches re-cast the gamma again – just as it
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appears to take on horns – revealing the horizontal crossbar of a T or perhaps a

partially buried J, as if thrust into the ground and (in advance, therefore) transmuting
the terrestrial as much as it dominates the visible orders of the auto-ingesting frame or
as the advent of human technicity would an earth. The tree is itself a front, a mocking
prop for ‘nature’ and genealogical pretenses. The spectral tree is the techne as such.

Hitchcock pretends to invite you into this labyrinth, as the tree morphs into different
insignia. As a tree, the figure appears a guest upon a set no longer terrestrial precisely –
no longer able, in the shot, to affirm the primacy of any metaphorics of home, nature,
the organic. Geistlich, ghastly, a guest or lodger, it has retracted all aura and even face
– of which one is struggling to appear in the crotch of its branched horns. A face wells
up, cast by shadows from a setting sun, in the form of near howling eye and mouth
holes. This face cannot quite establish itself as shadow, cannot quite (not) personify the
slash like ‘tree’ yet, emerging in this labyrinth, cites with its letteral horns a Minotaur –
a figure already circulated in Spellbound (where the narrative tracks as revelation the
pattern of parallel lines). What does Hitchcock intend by presenting this failed
prosopopeia and animist figure at the core of this totem image of imaging – this shot
at once of and at the state of the archive? A monster, neither alive quite nor dead, neither
man nor animeme, this Minotaur remains foggy, chiaroscuro. It is and is not visible.
It is not some one thing in the image but the latter’s seducing and cannibalizing
graphic agencies and structure – rising like ‘mother’ as a shadow with knife raised at
the shower-screen. It rewards the eye that enters the labyrinth of the image with a
precession of personification. Before the bog a war within or between two logics of the
‘image’ remarks itself – even as the little tree atop the hill cites a mushroom cloud,
allying the cinematic blast and atomization of marking systems to the atomic bomb
and its pyrotechnic – an identification Hitchcock makes in Notorious and elsewhere. The
image cites the advent of cinema (and the photograph) as interwoven with histories of
techno-weaponry and techno-genocides past and to come. The now digit-like ‘tree’
appears pre-inhabited by monsters and inert insignia or polygrams.

And it shifts again. For while we have no way to dig it up, I would suggest that the
staff as if thrust into the earth, as if from elsewhere, which is the entire history of
tele-technics, is what remains of the letter ‘J’. Many letters criss-cross Hitchcock’s work
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and are attached to different motifs – the M, the P, the Fr –, the O of course, the
A or H. But it is a letter that seems almost at the limit of not being one that interests
here – the ‘J’. As one point where letteration dissolves into the spellbound itinerary of
digital graphicism, the ‘J’ appears a kind of slash or line. This pattern of lines which
precedes aura and personification and which is sought out in Spellbound to counter a
case of tele-amnesia, may recur, may signal pre-recurrence as such, appearing as it
does in every Hitchcock work. This seriality of bars or slashes is beyond semantic
recuperation – it signifies or symbolizes nothing, registered as spectral metrics or
frequency, like the alternation generating space or time. It flashes up as if it were a
kind of motherboard materializing and segmenting numerous combinatoires at the
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 non-site where the visible emerges. And the ‘J’ is not only the closest a letter might
come to a staff, a stroke, a one, a bar, a gash. It is a letter that is also mysteriously
effaced in Hitchcock’s proper or brand name. We never will hear of an Alfred J.
Hitchcock, or an Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, the director’s legal or birth name. The ‘J’ is
erased, even if Joseph as dream technician of multi-colored weaves might, too
obviously, too mimetically, romanticize the filmmaker’s vocation. Only it is buried – as
if in fear that the de-auratic side of the cinematic event would have to place the
associations of the biblical Joseph under arrest. The name and even the initial J is
occluded, without trace, even if it returns endlessly in a certain staff or slash, a cut or
bar – the pattern which William Rothman called, precisely, the director’s virtual
‘signature’. It precedes even letteration as a staff or line, a cut or digit, a ‘one’ or zero,
a pointing finger trying to index and indicate the mimetic real. It is as if the site of
recurrence which stands before the bog, mobilizes brigades of MacGuffinesque zeroids
which eviscerate, as here in the ovular circuit embedded as the hole outlined by the
tree’s double trunk.
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Hitchcock’s Minotaur is not in the image but rather is it – its citational or graphematic
structure, its assaulting signature-systems, its virtual revocation of aura, identification,
personification, mimesis. As an image of the ‘image’ it documents a catastrophic
betrayal – by and of man, by and of his technics, by and of ‘light’. The image betrays
like the painting of the mocking jester in Blackmail pointing his finger perpetually at
any viewer. It betrays, too, itself as ‘image’ – since it differs radically from what it
appears to be and do (index, reproduce). It betrays not only the eye as a trope but its
own mimetic promise – the ‘human’ dwelling, the terrestrial map, bio-politics,
‘mother’, nuclear mystery, chronographic faults. Which may be why the secret agents
within the image dis(as)semble – first a personified dead tree, then a gamma, then a J,
then mere bar or slash.

Norman is outside, in the open, without what he elsewhere called his ‘trusty umbrella’.
No protection, no family order, as if Hamlet were father (‘Do not forget!’) and son in
the same space – or rather, precisely as something called ‘mother’. And even the
psycho’s ‘gaze’ that is supposed to be so abyssal appears that of blinded eyes – as
if the ocularcentric reign whose revocation is in this shot performed again and
commemorated were registered as just another moment within the histories, relays,
and transcription (in and outside of the histories of the cinematic it stands at an
imaginary center of ) which arrive and depart, or try to, from this site. If, that is, the
logics of the black hole do not present them with a one way ticket – irreversible in a
movement away from received models of the human. Yet if so, it is not to escape to
anything like a nature, the natural image, even a referentially secure earth. On the
contrary, even the latter is exposed as fronts and effects of a tele-technic order of forms
and temporalities, ‘life’ and bio-systems, all of which appear inhabited by mnemonic
orders – like the sequoia cut in Vertigo, in the centre of which is the graphematic
archive of historical events preceding the origin of modern English (‘Battle of
Hastings’). One is, rather, in a sort of aterra – the sheer semioticity of the planetary
whose radically other is not recuperable as a human face or eye.

Hitchcock’s ‘J’ is all but preletteral in the absence of its umbrella-like spur, masking a
preoriginary cut or slash that serially engenders space and perception. It lodges. And it
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 occurs in the face that struggles to emerge in the tree, a prosopopeia of a J and its zeroid
logics. The letter ‘J’ devolves, after all, in its family tree, through the figure of the I
or the digit, back to the pictographic hand – with its ten fingers – of Egyptian
hieroglyphics. The ‘J’, in one sense, is a nexus where letteration and the graphematic
of the visible meet as in a sort of transit station into or dissolving cognitive relays,
postal systems, mnemonic regimes, digitalization. As a hand, it is also the emblem of
technicity as such, not only at the advent of the ‘human’ (as in the cave paintings) but
the contemporary tele-technic order. The tree or ‘J’, hand or digit or gash that is (in)
‘Norman’ at the bog, is Hitchcock’s telegrammed retort to the cave painters’ hand
imprints – traversing and updating, stripping bare and marking, another point in the
same tele-technic history. And yet cinema, notoriously, is supposedly an ‘art’ or techne
as if without hands – or for that reason not quite one, it was said, since hands are not
applied, or left, like so many early Hitchcock characters, in handcuffs. The anthropoid
eye sees but select waves and mnemonic orders, or ‘objects’, quickly archived; select
temporalities, determined by media and advertising logics of repetition and reception.
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It phenomenalizes programs, inscriptions. One can situate oneself endlessly in the

histories arriving and departing in advance by and within this placeless image. Relays
scatter across all of Hitchcock’s production, as in what is called in Secret Agent the ‘spies’
post office’ – a citational network, in turn telegraphing all of ‘modern’ history (from
marks and hieroglyphs to enphantomed futures), all modern world wars including the
‘global’ war on terror. Hitchcock was the first ‘master of all media’ on a planetary
scale, and marked its imperial destiny in repeated asides (like Norman’s recording of
the Eroica). One cannot get out of the image, which consumes its frames, and which
here assumes the ingesting logics of the bog as black hole – at what is at once the dawn
of the global and its proleptic supersession. The absence of the bog from the frame is
matched, here, only by the absence of ‘mother’. ‘Mother’, without gender or body, a
Derridean khora, ‘is’ not personifiable in any Oedipal or family diagram or even
voicing. ‘Mother’ – the absent ventriloquized ventriloquizer, without gender or
spectral place – is not buried in the bog, like some first corpse to be incarnated in
failed repetitions. ‘Mother’ is the bog.

‘Norman’ here appears solitary – almost. He does not know if he is in quotation marks
or not, neither man nor not, or whose voice speaks his. He is accompanied by an
entire frame of disincarnations and failed personifications, before the bog, looking at
it, into the camera or the eye of a future viewer who does not know his eye to be the
locus of this catastrophe of the sensible. At ground zero of the cinematic and its era – which
is and is not the ‘human’ era on earth that it records and produces, that it prosecutes
and indicts, as with a finger of accusation – the archival shot of the set of Psycho is
reflected back into its labyrinthine status as event. Summoning rituals of identification
and mimetic accounting, the image parries and disaggregates the touristic eye so that
it itself might assume the reassuring front of a mimetic-political trance. As the shot
activates its switchboard numerous trace-chains are mobilized – the oily bog, the tree’s
prosopopeia, the emergent Minotaur’s import, the blind of ocularcentric premises, the
de-auratic, the absent citation of ‘mother’ and the serial murder of women, the hoses
curling about the desert floor of a terrestrial set, the citation of all industrial machines
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 in their dependency on black oil for animation, for movement, eviscerating fossil or
archival reserves that go back to dinosaurs and beyond, desertification, the inscription
of cinematic logics in nuclear blasts and weaponry. We now see why Hitchcock shot
this set – which mimes and captures, denies and performs a site of disinscription.
Which is why the film begins in, opens with its first shots of, Phoenix.

I encountered this frame or shot (and one may let the term resonate) reproduced from
the BFI archive in Peter Conrad’s The Hitchcock Murders, where he glosses it as Norman
Bates’ or Hitchcock’s ‘Golgotha’.11 Yet, inverting the Christian metaphor, Hitchcock
would rather be cinemagraphically displacing the chronography of a ground zero in
calendars or time – amid a frozen hailstorm of Nietzschean circuits. Any Christian
citation recedes to disclose at first pagan, then animist, and finally de-auratic
divestments – letterations, defeated personifications of the ‘natural’, and of course
Norman. Let us return this shot, now, to its archival vaults. De-activate it.
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Let it fall back among the numerous ghosts that haunt and construct our ‘present’.
What we call ‘Hitchcock’ certainly saw himself, or itself, as at the dawn of
‘globalization’, the first master of all tele-media – and he analyzed his powers from
the policial or imperial position (an ‘Empire Hotel’ turns up here and there) as well as
the subversive or anarchivist Resistance (a term that also recurs). We can try to put the
shot back in its place, its archival file, if it had one, even if there lingers a suspicion that
just such re-wiring of archival settings is irreversible. ‘Norman’ at the bog appears to occur
beyond any model of mourning we are familiar with. At the border of the aesthetic state
and the bios, beyond roads and transit, outside ‘mother’s’ house, it also presents a gash
at or in the archival order where ‘life’ appears an effect of animation – a preparatory
cut in perpetual anticipation of coming wars of reinscription. It remains a question
whether one can pursue such readings in today’s climate as more than an archival
curiosity or worse, the idling of a flâneur spellbound before the latest variant of the
‘last man’? In either case, ‘Norman’ at the bog seems a treacherous memorandum of a
future site and the question it shrouds – which is that of Norman’s place in the temporal
backloops of a gran mal d’archive.

Notes
1
See among many examples, the special issue on access to planetarity. No one can’. p.78. See also
‘Mourning Revolution’ of parallax 27 (April–June Julia Kristeva, ‘The Future of a Defeat’, in Parallax
2003), or ‘Virtual Materialities’, the title of the 2004 27, issue on ‘Mourning Revolution’ (April–June
IAPL conference, or the phrase ‘the catastrophe of 2003), pp.21–2.
3
the sensible’, a 2004 Cerisy project hosted by In Mark Townsend and Paul Harris’ report in The
Bernard Stiegler and Georges Collins. Observer (2004), we read the videogame speculation:
2
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a ‘Climate change over the next 20 years could result
Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in
2003), specifically the third chapter, ‘Planetarity’, wars and natural disasters. A secret report,
pp.71–102 and Masao Miyoshi, ‘Turn to the Planet: suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained
Literature, Diversity & Totality’, Comparative by The Observer, warns that major European cities
Literature, Winter 2002. Spivak recently argued for a will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged
turn from the term ‘global’, as a totalizing and blind into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict,
metaphor, toward what she would name the mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting
‘planetary’, with a caveat: ‘I cannot offer a formulaic will erupt across the world’. The report can be
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 6
accessed at www.ems.org/climate/pentagon-climate See Brian Rotman, ‘The Alphabetic Body’, in
change.pdf. Parallax 22, special issue on ‘Random Figures’
4
This graphematic reading of the image was a key (January–March 2002): ‘philosophy’s inability/
to Benjamin’s thinking from his early work. See refusal to countenance the presence of images in its
Walter Benjamin, ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’, texts, its unease in the face of the picture, is too
in Selected Writings, vol.1 1913–1926, [eds.] Marcus thorough, unexamined, universal and deep-rooted
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press: not to suggest other -iconophobic or anti-visualist –
London, 1996), p. 86. This evocation of the forces at work’. p.100.
7
photographemic ‘image’, or its warring logics, A voiding of personification and identification is
draws on Eduardo Cadava’s brilliant resuscitation marked in advance of any possible star power – a
process anatomized in the dismantling of Cary
of the Benjaminian problem in that critic. What is
Grant’s trusted face into disconnected, potentially
at issue may be what Cadava terms ‘the citational
murderous, parts (Suspicion).
structure of photography’, the motherboard 8
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the
of traces that, when entering legibility for the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,
reader, shred the pretext of mimetic reproduction trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994),
or indexing. See Eduardo Cadava, ‘Lapsus p.101.
Imaginis: The Image in Ruins’, October 96 (Spring 9
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.100–1.
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2001), p.55. 10
The desert mimes what North by Northwest quips as
5
The association of cinema with new modes of a counter-advertising logic for Cary Grant: ‘Think
typography and techo-weaponry is most succinctly thin’ – that is, evacuate metaphorics, as at the
made in Friedrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, prairie stop.
11
Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders (New York:
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Faber and Faber, 2000).

Tom Cohen is Professor of Literary and Media Studies in the English Department at
the University at Albany, SUNY. He is author of Anti-Mimesis (Cambridge University
Press, 1994), Ideology and Inscription: ‘Cultural Studies’ after Benjamin, Bakhtin, and de Man
(Cambridge University Press, 1998), and two forthcoming volumes on the aesthetic
politics of cinema, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies -Volume 1: Secret Agents and Volume 2: War
Machines (Minnesota Press, 2004). He also co-edited Material Events – Paul de Man and the
Afterlife of Theory (Minnesota, 2001) and edited Jacques Derrida and the Humanities
(Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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