I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Room for Thought

361 Room for Thought Aby Warburg filed for release on his own consciousness to the surprise of Ludwig Binswanger, who, when he considered the patient’s disorder, was cureless. Like Heidegger, like Jung, Binswanger was a technophobe who saw delusions of reference to technologization as the chronic endpoint of psychotic regression. Contrariwise, Freud, in his Schreber reading, saw the point of any delusion, which invariably and endopsychically ranged from underworlds to the cosmic or galactic projections of techno-futures, as being the point of return to world, no longer the world lost in the breakdown but a Sensurround of cathected relations all the same. Jung was still on the future track of transference when he inspired Freud’s inside view of delusions as attempts at recovery: Freud credited Jung’s early work on schizophrenia, in which flights of ideas and motor stereotypies were analyzed as relics of former object-cathexes. But when the transference was negated, object relations were ditched for the big picture of the Unconscious bigger and older than the two of us, self and other. The technical contours of a certain genre of psychotic delusion were too tightly strapped to the transference onto Freud he had abandoned. The technical connection is too interpersonal for Jung (for reasons of his own). Heidegger viewed outright technologization in thought or delusion as the original provenance of application to which psychoanalysis belonged as techno theory. Binswanger stayed on the same side as Freud of the Jung divide but staggered their neighborhood via strict zoning distinctions between schizophrenia and melancholia, for example. In the mapping around this example one recognizes Benjamin’s Freudian affiliation. Like Schreber, Warburg only had to prove through performance of his professional duties and thus also in writing that his right to reside in the 362 Room for Thought (former) world was back, back up and functioning. In his presentation on “The Serpent Ritual,” Warburg moreover reclaimed his techno disorder as order of the world in decline against which he delivered the prehistory of and antibody to our relationship to the shock of heirs in the face of primordial relations with nature. In drawing on encounters with honest Indian cultures, which he sought out during his visit to the United States twenty-seven years earlier, going native in reaction to the horrors of the middlebrowbeat Back East, Warburg attended to a span of commemoration of his career that he intended to delegate as rededicated to a new discipline of study not to be confused with art history, which he considered abandoned with this talk. By the end of his presentation Warburg comes full circle within the span of tension that he is documenting and reclaiming when he touches down in San Francisco via his snapshot of a businessman—Warburg refers to him as an “Uncle Sam”—who, together with the electrical wires overhead, bisects the foreground in front of brand-new neoclassical buildings that could have been erected in Germany at that same time. In this photo Warburg was able to capture “the figure of overcoming of the snake cult and the fear of lightning, the heir to the aboriginal peoples and the gold-seeking suppressor of the Indian” (58). The electrical wire or “copper snake” signi fies Edison’s wresting of lightning from nature. But Warburg revalorizes the wire Americans suspend outside and the Central European sensibility tucks away underground as openly repressed line to pagan beliefs. “The American of today fears not the rattlesnake. It is killed, certainly it is not worshipped as divine. What is offered as countermeasure is extinction. The lightning bolt ensnared in the wire, the impersonal electricity, has engendered a culture that has put the pagan past away.” The German phrase, mit dem Heidentum aufgeräumt, also means, literally, to clean up “with” or “by means of” paganism. What does our new techno order of the world set in the place of paganism overcome? The forces of nature are no longer viewed in anthropomorphic or biomorphic contexts but rather as endless wavelengths that obey the touch of the human hand. In this way, the culture of the machine age destroys that to which the sciences, growing out of myth, had painstakingly laid claim, the space or room of contemplation (Andachtsraum), which laid the foundation for thinking space (Denkraum). “The Mnemnosyne Atlas” alone would indicate that Warburg was gadget lover enough to have a more differentiated relationship to this prose and cant of technophobicity . Warburg brackets out (and implicates as one of...