Abraham Friedman

May 2013

On the Balance Between Hyper- and Deep Attention in

Hypomnemonic Techniques

By deconstructing the realm of cultural supplements that are

considered “crucial” to modern experience, I begun to see

that the problems of and solutions to that experience are

all matters of pharmacy. The technical objects that we

interact with in transitional space, such as car

transmissions, playlists, songs, and documentaries have are

part of a transitively active sort of consciousness. This

raises the stakes exponentially and broadens the scope

beyond the linear relationship between the player and the

object. Take pharmakon in its more dramatic sense, and the

paradoxes of meaning seem so destabilizing to a sense of

reality, that theory seems hopeless. To primarily invoke the

pharmakon in this way is neither more realistic nor more

mature. It does not treat the poison and the cure as

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integrally related, it just tries to reemphasize that common

rational values like patience reverence; these could always

be proved detrimental, via a more intense analysis or a

“better” enframing. Alternately, reemphasizing the tonic

capabilities of poison invokes this further dualism:

Orthodoxy and nostalgia are on the north pole, radical

relativism and hyper-modernity on the other. I see a

solution in the common platitude, “the solution is in the

problem,” and a variant, “the answer is in the question.”

Because of how platitudinous this saying is, someone who

encounters the inherent notion can at once be relieved that

the sought-after thing is not invisible and futural, but can

also feel deceived by a world that apparently already housed

an answer. The thing in question is, in fact, the world.

This world is a complex of problem and solution, so that it

really hurts to question the “world that an individual

projects onto the world.” One would think that giving the

subject so much responsibility would enrich their

reflection, but the process of modern education proves it to

be harmful. D.A. Winnicott understands we should never ask

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after the “creation” of the transitional objects of either

children or adults. Even Descartes had to have been aware

that his meditations, as a written project, could and would

be abused, because of the transitional nature of the mental

and physical space in which he meditated. He placed great

emphasis on the ritual of his meditations and took almost

excessive care to fight the connections his psyche was

making, but, rightly stated, as an exercise, just to see

where it was going.

Admittedly, Cartesian dualism does become disproven,

dead theory when it is introduced after an elementary

education, religious or secular, which tries to reify a

reality that can be exposed for its dishonest structure,

i.e. children are lied to about poverty, reproduction,

economy. Like in The Matrix, where “reality” is arbitrarily

revealed to Neo because he could be a savior, there exists

the delusion that one can be old enough to now handle the

truth about the dualism of reality. In fact the reality, for

a child is already heterogeneous and so imbued with emotion

that children fantasize about adulthood. Unfortunately,

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adults obsess about youthfulness, and patronize children for

whom the sense of “play” relies on dedication to fantasy and

a sober suspension of disbelief. I notice that children are

somewhat disgusted when adults try to engage them in a

whimsical way. The disgust is natural, but is relevant to

inter-generational relations. The same disgust is displaced

and exaggerated in many common experiences. This is in the

way we “cringe” when we encounter someone either “trying too

hard” to appear young or merely to relate.

Mid-life crises only appear to be crises in retrospect,

once one has come to one’s senses, or during the crisis, in

an ecstatic state. The middle-aged Western male is a visible

example when he sublimates his anxiety about squandered

youth into fetishized objects i.e. material. Whether this

material is a young sexual partner, of either gender, or a

motorcycle, it gives him joy because of the tactile pleasure

one can count on from new “toys.” A man in a recently

starched, un-bottoned shirt driving a red sports car, can be

assumed to be aggressively trying to expose an image of his

world, which, in turn, makes the assumption that his

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perspective is one fraught with anxiety about the critical

Other, who might cringe this display. He may, in fact, be

embarrassed about how he appears to himself from the

outside, yet the function of this object depends on a few

transitional aspects: tactile feeling of combustion and

torque, smell of exhaust, pacifying feeling of the car’s

interior, and the empowering feeling that the machinations

are controlled by miniscule adjustments of his feet and

hands. The first, more obviously tactile phenomena function

as soothing, not comforting aspects, “sedatives that always

work”1 as long as the car is still playfully driven. Like baby

blankets, the interior materials must have interesting

textures to be interesting. The porousness of a hand-woven

blanket makes it feel more natural and animate, but also

makes it better at preserving the smells that define the

object. The last transitional aspect mentioned above

expresses the reflexivity better, though. The type of car

that would be purchased for “fun” is not easier to drive,

regardless of the degree of luxury. Cars that serve this

1 10, Winnicott

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function usually have manual transmissions. When someone

purchases a sports car for the sake of “change,” they must

either have learned to operate a stick shift in their youth,

or be willing to enter into a painful and seemingly endless

learning period.

The goal of this process is to preconsciously attend to

the constraints of the car and the topography of the road by

forgetting the motions, in the Heideggerian sense of

forgetting. The motion of shifting gears in response to

incline and decline seems less subtle and pleasurable than

just steering a car that can automatically shift, but the

benefit of manual transmissions goes beyond subjective

aesthetic activities. Automatic transmissions answer the

false need, imagined by the automobile and oil industry,

which convinced consumers that travel and commuting would be

safer if people had free hands and could pay more attention

to the road. As a Sun-God, Thoth knew that, with the advent

of writing, Egyptians would neither remember what they had

written nor would they know how to use the memory and revive

it for all it’s richness. The auto industry is not some sort

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of evil elder god, however massive it may seem. The

detrimental effect of the popularity of the automatic

transmission was not intended, as if it were a conspiracy to

encourage drunk and distracted drivers. The deeper message

was that “you deserve a car that drives for you,” that “the

little time spent with your kids, dropping them off at

school, would be less chaotic if you had a free hand,” or

else that “you can’t enjoy your morning commute without

constantly drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, or fiddling

around with your radio, trying to avoid commercials.” In the

past few decades, the issue has been exacerbated by cell

phones, iPods, and dashboard screens with Internet

connection and DVD drives.2 The adaptation of automatic

transmissions to the engine of a consumer automobile, rather

than big industrial vehicles, happened around the same time

that members of the middle-class felt deeply obligated to

themselves and their families to be able to authentically

relax and actively vacation. When drivers are not using sonic

and tactile stimulants to enhance the experience of travel, 2 Thankfully, many dashboard systems like this won’t operatepast a certain speed, e.g. 5-10 mph.

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there is nothing to encourage them to appreciate the scenic

exterior of the car or appreciate their surroundings.

Driving an automatic car requires less work and effort, but

“learning to drive stick” only needs to be minimally

mastered to allow the driver same “necessary” activities

that the automatic car supposedly does. I am only distracted

when I think about the process of shifting as I’m doing it.

There is also the uncanny feeling when I start to drive

someone else’s automatic car that I should be doing more,

and might fish around for the clutch when I should be

stomping on the breaks. Besides that, I can still smoke,

eat, and make brief calls on my phone, but always have to be

able to put the down supplementary articles at the notice of

a change in space on the road between cars, or the incline,

as on a bicycle.

The learning experience itself is telling of the

interaction between generations. I inherited my sister’s

first car about a year after I got my license. My father’s

first lesson plan was for me to sit in the car on flat

ground and subtly let go of the clutch, simply to get the

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feel of the car lurching forward. I was left alone,

graciously, because the experience was so tragic and so

frustrating that, after 10 minutes, I returned to him

sobbing and furious that he thought I could do it. I did not

feel neglected or disappointed in him as a teacher. I was

conscious even then that it was absurdly comical how upset I

was by the challenge. My mother had a similar experience

with her father, but he continued to try to teach her, which

made their relationship, at least in those months,

significantly worse. My dad asked a close friend of his,

Jack, my own friend Aaron’s father, to teach me. A few years

later, I laughed with Jack about how terrifying it was for

both of us. He owns a small light fixture manufacturing

company founded by his father, about half an hour north

inland from the Connecticut coast. He said that he used to

have a manual car until the early 90’s when he could afford

a luxury sedan, and with it the luxury of eating his

breakfast on the way to work. He had to re-learn to drive a

stick immediately before teaching me, which made the

experience much more authentic. My own dad’s decision was

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remarkable in that he knew how intimate this learning

experience was, but was humbly aware that it did not need to

be the biological father who taught me this skill. Of course

I still cried a little bit with Jack, but not out of shame.

The beginning of the learning curve is too intense for the

dynamics of the nuclear family to be involved. I was

nominally aware at the beginning of the process that it

would only take about a month to feel comfortable on the

road, but the challenge was truly invigorating because I

couldn’t possibly imagine that level of comfort being

attainable, even having grown up with the meme that “You can

do anything you set your mind to.” This may be helpful when

teaching one’s self a skill like piano, but the more

important the goal, the more frustrating the failure is.

Everyone, at least those who drive, should know how to drive

stick, in case of emergency. Cars with manual transition

also use significantly less gasoline for two reasons that

both affect the sale of gasoline. On one hand, there is less

resistance from the ground when a standard car is in

neutral, so that, half of the time, you can coast. Like a

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fixed-gear bicycle, an automatic car always needs fuel, so

that it slows down immediately when the accelerator is

released. Secondly, It is physically more difficult to

accelerate a standard transmission with your foot, and each

increase in gear must be made at the precise moment that the

engine needs to be revolving at a slower rate. When gas

prices rose to above $4/g in 2008, I heard a refreshing

solution across many different platforms. It was most

profoundly expressed thusly: “Stop accelerating like an

asshole.” The driving public was also impelled to stop

taking their mobility for granted and “stay-cation,” a

stupid neologism with a noble implication: escapism does not

have to be done too far from home, people should appreciate

where they live, even if it’s dictated by paranoia about

“economic necessity.” The debate between automatic and

manual is a cliché, but that dichotomy is really about

modernity vs. romanticism. Defenders of standard

transmissions charged as evangelical and categorized with

vinyl enthusiasts. The history of technology often proves

that a “new development” is a certain technology is better,

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by virtue of its usefulness to capitalist auto-motion.

Although the film production industry still used Beta-Max

tapes because of their superior quality to VHS tapes, the

VHS industry “won,” because they “took into account what the

consumers wanted.” That was the diagnosis given on a

website, Videointerchange, that services and repairs

antiquated video gadgets. It is inflected with the perverted

supply-side economic model: There is a right to affordable

goods, but only because they should be unaffordable to the

public. Regardless of the format, the videocassette, like

the automatic car, are methodologies for enriching daily

life that depend on the aesthetic needs of biological

agents.

The effort to revive the wonder of daily commutes, by

any means of transportation, gives prominence to the iPod as

a hypomnemonic technique. The downside of this freedom to

choose exactly what one thinks they should listen to from

one’s total standing reserve of electronic music files is

most tangible in the car, where fumbling around anxiously

with one’s iPod to find a particular song to accompany a 5-

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minute drive can be fatal. Even with mix CDs/tapes and

radio, the choice is still there to encourage hyperactivity.

I often insist that, because my car also has a CD player,

but not a tape player, I am inclined to be more patient,

because I can only listen to the few discs in my car.

Nevertheless, I’m always shuffling through unmarked blank

CDs and playing them for a split second in order to figure

which mix it is, so much so that I have been diagnosed with

“musical ADD” by people from many circles. My main critic on

this point is my friend Max, who, I admit, is not being

hypocritical. Although his temperament is erratic and

irreverent, he has the capacity to perform and listen to 1-½

hour ragas. He also composes scores for movies, rather than

compiling them. To score, rather than compile, means that he

is capable of identifying atmospheres that other people may

appreciate and evoking them with relatively subtle

differences in texture and musical gestures. In compiling

popular music for soundtracks, there are too many other

variables that signify how appropriate the music is for a

scene, like lyrical content and nostalgia. So, whether the

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medium is a cassette, CD, or mp3, their ability to be

transported essentially points to the same supplement, a

personal choice in music. The choice is meant to aid in a

healthy immersion with one’s surroundings. I cannot accept

that this is what a mother and daughter are doing on the NYC

subway when they both wear headphones plugged into their

iPhones. However, drives can benefit from a soundtrack. The

British artist David Hockney, now living in Los Angeles, had

a ritualistic sense of the drive back and forth from

Nichol’s Canyon to his studio in Los Angeles proper. The

ritual is almost too fantastically coincidental to believe:

''I have a little house at the beach, and being a person with curiosity, I immediately explore the neighborhoods I live in. So I started driving up the canyons and around the mountains, and I'm also losing my hearing slowly, so I splurged and put a terrific sound system in the car.''Then I started playing Wagner and realized that some of it fit amazingly well with the landscape. So I slowly choreographed a drive that's an hour and a half long, through the Santa Monica mountains, mostly with the music from Parsifal. It matches everything the eye sees and the ear hears. Everybody I take on it says so even if they've never heard of Parsifal or Richard Wagner. I've done it about 200 times. Everybody thoughtI was doing it for them, but I was really doing it for myself.''3

3 Isenberg

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In 1980, he tried to portray this uncannily serendipitous in

an effable way with his famous painting, “Mulholland Drive:

The Road to the Studio.” Judging by the year, Hockney must

have been able to score the drive by use of a tape. Unless

there is a particularly good radio station that happened to

play the full third act of Parsifal, he either had the

suspicion that the movement of the piece would cooperate

with the scenery, or else hope that it would. The same sort

of experience is manufactured consciously when people have a

liberal choice in the music they play, especially with other

people in the car. This artificially manufactured

poignancy, through choice in music, depends, naturally, on

the intimate relationship between the listeners, but also on

the manipulative aims of the person choosing the music. The

aims could be benevolent, but seem manipulatively, even in

the case of someone trying “cheer up” a melancholic friend

by playing a song evocative of a more convivial moment in

their past. Even when the choice to manipulate environment

through sound is less apparent, there is a jarring, but

often refreshing, feeling when a meaningful frame constructs

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itself unexpectedly. For instance, when driving with a

friend who is nearing the end of a tumultuous relationship,

it appears to them as if most songs that come up on the

radio relate directly to their situation, to an absurdly

dark degree. Given that the activity of listening to the

radio is more passive than choosing a particular song or

playlist, the emotive brain works double to invest meaning

into the random supplements to its subjective experience.

The scale of poignancy and meaning is entirely relative, so

that old friends might joyfully reminisce about a song from

their past that, in itself, should be heart-breaking, and a

sorrowful person might feel emotionally unable to listen to

a song that reminds them of a lost relationship or deceased

friend, even if the song is categorically “joyful.”

When two people are present in such a space, meaning is

written, not spoken. If one were to try to elaborate the

coincidence or poignancy, especially during the meaningful

time, the poetic truth of the situation would not be

attended to. Transitional space, being transitional, should

not depend on speech to be When two actively-listening

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participants are attuned to the profundity of a song, there

is a pre-agreement. The preagreement is not written, and it

is only negatively spoken when one speaks in a way that

balances the awareness of the context. If the two were

professional actors, we would describe the condition of

their space as a “mutual suspension of disbelief.”

What is to be believed in the first place? A hermeneutic

agent, not the actors themselves, would think that the two

agree on the arbitrariness of poetic truth, even before the

pre-agreement, which gives priority to poetry. In this

situation, presencing is more easily done, planned, and

written, than said. It is written with respect to the

brackets that may be most applicable, but that illuminate

the difference inherent in the relationship. Both

individuals are compelled to write the narrative into

existence for each other, and should not be wary of imposing

meta-poesis on others. One can learn a great deal from the

discrepancies between one and another’s metaphorical image

of a relationship. Hyper-attention, in this moment of

discrepancy, structurally supports the context. If one were

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to read deeply into the song, one is concerned more with

their personal standpoint than with either the standpoint of

the other, their shared space, or the subject matter of the

discourse at hand: the song. There is no singularly

authentic activity here: “Absently” letting one’s mind

wander is both hyper and hypo-attentive, thinking about the

contextual meaning of the song to oneself or analyzing the

lyrics in themselves is not truly deep. Derrida might say

that the latter relating cannot be if measures are

consciously taken to allow for distance and difference in

two fundamental lines in the transitional plane:

1. Between the two people themselves.

2. Between the drives of the participants and the medium

in which they are invested.

These relationships are linear, but the poetic contexts of

the scene and song are parts of an archive. There are two

available positions to be fulfilled, but “there is always

more than one--and more or less than two.”4 The present text

“between to the people themselves,” either alludes to

4 2, Derrida

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something in their history that must be retrieved, or else

the person who chose or facilitated the song hopes to prove

the relevance of this song to their relationship. There is

an archive, whether it is being created, expanded upon, or

maintained. If the relevance of the song is unexpected to

either person, it admits that there was fertile space for

metaphor in their relationship.

The structural relationship in the fertile transitional

space of the car is erotic, so it is almost infinitely

capable of reflexivity, asymmetry, transitivity, and r. The

characters’ roles in a traditionally romantic song are

frustratingly elusive. To whom does the author give

priority? Of the driver and passenger, who is the

protagonist? Does it matter who put the song on, and for

whom?

Reflexively, it can be simply thought, that both

people meant the song for the other, that the objective of

playing the song, is neither in the lover, beloved,

passenger, driver, author, nor inspiration, but is in all of

them at once. This naïve hope for sameness drives the desire

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for universally profound lyricism, where all listeners can

be protagonists. The negative space left by cliché lyrics,

especially because of their banality, does express a lot

though. A song that does not adequately illuminate or

validate the preagreement about the relationship raises

questions to the party to whom the song is being played at:

“Is that how you feel about me?” “Is that how you think I

feel about you?” “Can that be about us?” On one hand, the

questions assert sameness in that the drama in the song

parallels reality, whether fairly or poorly. On the other

hand, the question of “that” prioritizes the innate

difference between a song’s reality and the questioner’s

own. In this reflexive mode, the one who chose the song and

the one who is meant to analyze the relevance are cast as

curator and critic, respectively. The more blatantly

relevant the song is assumed to be, the nearer the two

actors are to the asymmetry in the song. Both parties are

forced to accept that the curator is the protagonist and the

critic is the deutoragonist.

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Emphasizing this difference threatens violence to the

deutoragoist, but, because this threat is inherent in the

psychic space between the song and the relationship, only an

axiomatic change is needed. Similarly, imposing meronomies

in psychoanalysis, whether written or practiced, can be

disrespectful to theoretical and real analysands. There is a

fine line between transference and the illusion of sameness.

Winnicott states critically, without commentary, that “In

Psychology, the idea of interchange is based on an illusion

in the psychologist.”5 Rightfully so, but this criticism is

close to the very popular, albeit completely wrong, image of

Freudian objectification: psychic things are only

substantial in that they are emblems of archetypal dramas,

despite the fact that they are in an individual’s

preconscious, not just the collective pool. In fact, Levinas

brought the same criticism against psychoanalysis in “The

Ego and Totality.” For him, the director of the transference

must be aware that Love is not enough. This violence is

necessary though, in due measure to the patients growth.

5 16, Winnicott

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Sometimes analysis benefits from cold compartmentalization

and attention to eminent allegories to poetic myth. Other

matters are more approachable as they exist in an

indeterminate transitional space. The third axiom from the

first relationship listed above, transitivity, actually

functions transitively and transitionally towards the second

relationship. To give due respect to the song itself, the

presence of the song’s reality should be questioned. The

song itself, let alone the recording, is an intermediary

space between the author and subject matter of the song.

It’s a different matter if the actors know too much about

the history or person of the author.

In my example, the actors are not referring to “that”

that song, they are referring to “this.” In the following

questions, what does “this” refer to: “Is this how you feel

about me?” “Is this how you think I feel about you?” and,

more fundamentally, “Is this about us?” “This” is neither

the song, nor the relationship. Those are technical objects.

These technical objects are treated like Reese’s Cups in

commercials that ask, “How do you eat a Reese’s?” What does

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this song mean to you? What romantic comedy does your

relationship most resemble? “This” is not merely psychic.

Drives and investments are not just redirected in the

individual’s minds, but in the physical ways that they

interact. This depends on how profound the event was for the

other listener against the expectations of the planner. The

song, of course, can still be enjoyed if the process of

letting the song play does not create serendipity or a

nominal aura for the two people. The plan to exteriorize the

meaning of the song might seem so manipulative as to insult

the would-be deutoragonist. If the primary actor asks for a

response, then the secondary person is inclined to question

the “this” in a way that Winnicott strongly recommends

against. It can be asked vocally, with a facial expression,

but especially by silence: “Did you conceive of this or was

it presented to you from without?”6 Both options are wrong

and disrespectful. The subject either has total or no

responsibility in the matter, and failed either way to reify

the transitional play-ground. Just as a child’s stuffed

6 16, Winnicott

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animal continuously fails to present itself as “real” to

adults, emotional investments in songs may translate so

rarely that one loses faith in the technical object itself.

Playlists are created to preserve the memory of the personal

meaning of songs at either the moment of creation, the

passed time that the creation honored, or the moment that

the order is recovered and the songs are played.

This power to invoke personal time and place produces a

meta-narrative, where one is more so the director of their

own life than an actor or character. Playlists, mixes, and

systems of computer archiving are not just thematically

hypomnemonic, but autobiographical and chronological. The

character is the ghost-self who once created the archive,

not fully aware that it may later be used for the sake of

nostalgia. When as a director, one might go through an old

notebook, a computer folder from 5 years ago, or find and

listen to a mix tape; one imagines that the archivist was an

un-self-conscious character. The character would only know

that the components of the archive were relevant at that

temporal moment. Rediscovering the archive, the actor

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retroactively gives credit to the ghost archivist, which

insists that the structure of the archive’s parts is only

becomes meaningful in the romantic perception of the actor’s

past. The actor is the ego and the director governs the

actor’s investment in the past like the Super-Ego. The

character is seen as Id-like by the actor, but is in fact

pre-conscious. If someone is browsing the Internet with no

intention, waiting for an article to reveal itself as

relevant, the article will likely be bookmarked or the link

address filed away for later. Even if an article is read

cursorily, it is healthier for it to be filed away for later

close reading. Transactive memory, in contemporary brains,

has already deteriorated because of the availability of

information on the Internet, so that it is pretentious to

believe that one can deeply internalize a thing on the

Internet. It is the simple act of storing it away that makes

us less anxious about retention. We can chastise people for

not remember the things they’ve seen on the Internet, but

does not that impose too much necessity on the things

themselves? Especially when pop culture is consumed for use

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in psychoanalytic theory, does it really matter that one

remembers a specific interchange from some despicable

reality TV show? If a small piece of media speaks to a

theoretically deeper structure, then we benefit from the

sort of “skimming” that Heidegger warns against in “The

Thing.” Aimlessly browsing is usually negative, but it can

contribute to a broader, albeit vaguer, sense of the

collective consciousness of culture. Imagine that a teenager

posts a 20-minute TED talk about memory on their Facebook

wall, only having watched the introduction, 4 minutes from

the middle, and the last 45 seconds. This corresponds well

to the teenager’s Ego-Ideal.

If we critically dissect the action, looking for the

pretense, then the need to expose the fraud is born from the

anxiety of the critic’s own Ego-Ideal, anxiety about

authentic intellectual experience. During our second session

on Derrida’s Archive Fever, a student gave the example of a 13-

year-old girl’s social media profile, probably insinuating

Facebook. She condemned the unstable structure of the

platform, which encouraged the girl to lie about her

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interests and favorite books, movies, etc. She meant to

defend the girl by explaining that this anxiety about

identity comes from the very structure of the profile:

“What’s to stop her from lying just to fit in?” Her

perspective on the dilemma actually hoped that there could

be parameters that demanded truth in both speech and writing

about oneself. To lie about one’s interests, especially in

adolescence, is a natural and necessary way to experiment

with the desires of one’s Ego-Ideal and the very real

desires of the Super-Ego. The dishonest choice in favorite

books is not entirely arbitrary. Especially if the girl had

not read Sylvia Plath, then she is creating a hopeful future

for herself. Who is to say what one’s favorite books are?

How could I possibly know if loved Munro Leaf’s children’s

book “Ferdinand” more deeply and authentically than Playing and

Reality?

The structure of the public profile comes from

traditional questions about others’ identity. When a Job

interviewer asks what the interviewee has read recently,

they can expect a pause, because the interviewer expects a

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list that is tailored to correspond to the position being

offered, let alone the company’s “philosophy” and the taste

of the interviewer herself. The question “what do I like?”

is an interior created by the persistent question from the

outside: “What are you like?” This question can be directed

at oneself although and because it is always an outside

question. Autobiographical thought is not a eulogy; the

object of reminiscence is either present or past, and the

subject is either futural or dead. In the film Dear Zachary,

the filmmaker Kurt juxtaposes this uses the tri-partite

subject structure that I offered in the first paragraph to

explain the consciousness that transcends between death and

life. He is in a privileged position to being the

Grandfather in this scenario, but not Andrew’s symbolic

father, even when Zachary was still alive.

In the modern paradigm of nuclear, local inter-

generational progress, grandparent, parent, and child mean

to represent past, present, and future. From the perspective

of both the parent and child, this puts most pressure on the

present, so that the parent has the most agency, and is

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ultimately responsible for the failure of progress. As all

grandparents were once parents, forget having been children,

the relationship between the grandparent and their

grandchild is a phantastical model of the child “becoming”

mature that makes the role of grandparentage less personal

for the past that they represent and, at the same time, that

much more powerful for the child.

Near the end of “Dear Zachary,” when thirds of

Zachary’s ashes are being scattered with the thirds of his

fathers, Andrew’s med school classmate opines about

cremation: “When I saw the urn, I knew that was not ‘him.’

That was a mass of tissues, protein, fat. Something else

leaves a body.” Even if she meant that Andrew’s “soul” had

left, what she was really describing was the same thing that

the movie attempts to locate, and, in fact, is a major part

of: Andrew’s true being, a complex of confusing,

heterogeneous, but material components that made “Andrew”

before and after death. The film expresses the reality of

identity, in that it was an attempt to encapsulate the truth

of Andrew, but one that specifically could never be

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exhausted. It is misguided to think that the poignancy of

the filmic memorial depends on Kurt Keunne’s subjective

memory of Andrew. The conceit seemed arbitrary in the

beginning: the memorial was to be made for Zachary, but only

to show him the father he didn’t know; Kurt’s impetus being

the realization that he didn’t know Andrew as a

photographer. It turns out that his project is described in

good faith. Documentaries that memorialize and mourn an

untimely death tend to retroactively contextualize a life,

and the interviews show the anxiety that close friends of

the deceased having about painting memories with “rosy

glow.” In fact, Andrews life was not “painted” at all, it is

seen very much alive in the film, and is a testament to the

human tools of remembrance that a singular consciousness may

be preserved just as it seems in life, as the particular

center of collective experience and an emphasis at the

center of the chaos of memories and things.

Andrew’s friends earnestly attempt to express the

absurdity of the death in the simplistic distinction between

such a well-adjusted, almost divine sort person and his

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annihilator, they denied his self-consciousness by positing

Andrew and Shirley as victim and murderer. Andrew was not

the victim of absurd destruction, which would, in the legal

perspective, be threatening to the public interest. There is

some truth to that flawed legal opinion that warranted

Shirley’s release. Andrew’s life was heroic and mature, but

marked by anxiety and weakness in will. Shirley, as a

narcissistic force, identified what she saw as the complete

Andrew, a system of super-human confidence and sub-human,

insecure doubt. What is not identified, but is revealed in

the attempt to recreate his spirit is his true humanity

beyond, but ultimately reliant on body and psyche. I though

not to read his nail-biting or interest in surgical

operation as “clue” just as much as I thought that Kurt

worrying about clues to the crime was unhealthy before I

knew the murderer was Shirley. In the greater context, where

an audience may analyze the meaning of this saga for

personal, philosophical reasons, the participants in the

film felt that Shirley’s motivation would be the key to a

sort of cipher, which would in turn validate a way to

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definitively “tell Andrew’s story,” effectively freezing him

in time. Neither the story of an individual as a “saga” nor

its meaning as a “cipher” are necessarily metaphorical. Kurt

did not merely attempt to piece together the dramatic

structure of Andrew’s life in a more blatantly media-related

way, as if it were a puzzle that would speak for itself if

the facts were not manipulated and were presented without

commentary. What Kurt encountered though, was that the

process of grieving displayed in the movie was aimed at

Andrew’s life as a riddle. The components of the riddle seem

distinct, pictures and words, but those are both modes of

memory from perspectives of systems of meaning that are also

difficult to distinguish. At different points, they seem to

favor certain systems of meaning over others, but commonly

rely on the dynamics of tragedy and the prescriptive

structures of both faith and law.

The ease with which the film became a true crime drama

elucidates another aspect of the pharmakon of the Archive.

What the grandparents might have realized what that Shirley

was not representative of mindless chaotic evil. The tragedy

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was not spontaneous, for Shirley, at least. Spontaneous acts

of violence are not asocial; they are an expression of the

desire to impose drives onto society. Although the pain of

the losses was visceral and infuriating to Andrew’s parents,

their legal adventures were only healthy once they

politicized their struggle. Before they realized the

futility of reasoning with the Newfoundland legal system,

their demand for an apology was misdirected. It was not

selfish, it was just mired with the inconstancies of law and

memory. They saw that the law, as it was written, did not

correspond to their view of the world, and rightfully so.

The desire, initially, was for justice, as they knew it, to

proceed with its will. After they realized they were merely

prosecutors, not ambassadors of the will of the citizenry,

their desire became an instance of “archive fever.” Before

they decided to write law themselves, or inspire others to

do so, they were that they could benefit from the type of

legal obscurity that postponed trial because of a

translation discrepancy. Law contains the identity of a

people by reifying connections between the infinitely

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complex will of the world and the people who have beliefs

about justice. In Andrew’s parents’ case, their narcissism

was noble; the law was used as a monolithic structure that

the case should not have to conform to. A common trope in

American pop culture is the arcane law that saves the day.

Someone is wrongfully convicted, but an adept archivist

remembers some statute from the 18th century that

invalidates the prosecution. It can be used for comical

effect (She can’t go to jail if she’s never registered a

horse!) or dramatic tragic relief, which would validate what

“everyone knew all long.” That the law was forgotten and

antiquated makes it even more valid. The ghosts who wrote it

knew that it would still be applicable in the future because

the law felt authentic and realistic then.

The archive of law and media has never been too big to

navigate. Choosing cathexes is not a modern skill; the mass

of culture is always too big; it is proportionate to the

infinite mass of the unconscious. Anxiety about

inauthenticity, i.e. fraudulent experience, heightens

awareness about the pharmakon. Media, in so far as they can

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be used as tools, can be abused. The use of media, in this

respect, is often accompanied by the threat of

arbitrariness, regardless of the authentic quality of the

medium. Books are categorically, truly better than hand-held

videogames, but are not perfectly messianic. A book, as a

transitional object, does not only expect deep attention from the

reader. When a reader is hyper-aware of this expectation,

the innate response is to disengage from the uncanny psychic

space that the scene of reading makes present. Instead, one

should embrace the same time-direction that is so

discomforting: “having already read the book.” But one can

only desire this space in the future. Therefore, the always-

already is not hopeful for an actor, because one expects from

the future the same presence that is not possible in the

present. In order to curate the near future without

neglecting the hyper-attention required by the experience of

a book, the space to which “having already read that”

refers, needs more than grammatical or syntactical

rephrasing. The future-perfect tense satisfies the

sensibilities on both sides of the speech/writing dichotomy.

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The future perfect a poetic mode in that it makes truth

claims about the future. Its use in both speech and written

does not concern the conditions of failure between the

present and the desired future, despite that the subjunctive

mood is unconsciously invoked in the use of the future-

perfect. When one says, “I will have read that book,” they

insist that they “should” read the book, meaning that, even

before the book was authentically read and internalized, one

knows that it will have been an enriching experience. This

recommendation may be surprising but not shocking, because

this mode of experience is not new for anyone, it is just

what they try not to do. The experience of symphonic music,

performed live, can never be perfect enough that rich

attention is immediately given.

Making the experience past is attractive, because the

modality disguises itself as either an effort towards the

future or of presence. It is impossible and unhealthy to

imagine exponentially better technical objects than are

available today, so welcome improvements in culture can only

come as a surprise or shock, as it is when you become aware

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that your deeply personal assessment of experience was

expressed much more lucidly 300 years ago. Through the

recommendations of Winnicott, I’m comforted that I’ll always

be aware of the need to construct my and others’ space and

time in order to occasion “play.” What I learn from the

examples of the objects of mid-life crisis, YouTube and CD

playlists, and the phenomenal record of Andrews’

consciousness after death is that authentic experience

should be at once hyper- and hypo-attentive, just as

Socrates insists that a great writer should be both a comic

and tragedian. He was not saying that one should be capable

of both, but that each work should express all degrees of

maturity and gravity, even the most reverent work. Joanna

Newsom writes and sings about the pharmakon and media better

than I ever could. “As I walk from a higher education, for

now, and for hire,”7 I’ll let her conclude the paper for me:

“Never get so attached to a poem

You forget truth that lacks lyricism”

7 Newsom

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Works Cited, Bibliography:

Derrida, Jacques; trans. Prenowitz, Eric. “Archive Fever: A

Freudian Impression,” from Religion and Postmodernism, ed.

Taylor, Mark. University of Chicago Press

Isenberg, Barbara; “Hockney's Newest Works Range From

Landscapes To Laser Prints” Los Angeles Times [1990]

Newsome, Joanna; “En Gallop.” Walnut Whales [2002]

Winnicott, D.A. Playing and Reality; Routledge Classics, New

York [1971]

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