Newsgroup Hysteria

Question:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – << sorry, did you mean Heidegger btw, I have not heard of Heider. And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Squiggles Fuck Heider and Konrad Lorenz. an he aint needed no fancy kollege ed-ucation neither, no sir! As I recall, he has one. Wonder what in the heck his major was! Same as Bush, I bet…only with out the rich daddy! He’s got a rich daddy? I think George W’s daddy is both rich and influencial…

as for Eric’s, I just do not know

Response:

Same as Bush, I bet…only with out the rich daddy! – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text –

Response:

He’s got a rich daddy? Squiggles

Response:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FactsAndFallaciesOfDepression MIBS (Minimally Invasive Brain Stimulation) http://www.musc.edu/psychiatry/fnrd/tms.htm

Nice link – i realize that History of Psy. is Humanities stuff, but some hard-headed materialists may realize by reading it, that Materialism too is a theory like others. Squiggles

Response:

Fuck Heider and Konrad Lorenz. Eric What’s that cacophanous staccato f**ck sound in the background Eric – is that musack on your sound system; Squiggles

I was thinking of making my sig file "To f***, ta drunk" , but I thought better. —–= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =—– http://www.newsfeeds.com – The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! —–== Over 80,000 Newsgroups – 16 Different Servers! =—–

Response:

<< sorry, did you mean Heidegger btw, I have not heard of Heider. And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Squiggles Fuck Heider

Good God are you a necrophile..? I think the guys been dead for 50 odd years ,, thats the thing about original thought Eric,,it lives on Im afraid… and Konrad Lorenz. God.. you really hate people with intelligence dont you.. If you only knew what a prat this silly outburst makes of you… Heres a list of the people who dont agree with you.. . stretches back to ancient greece on the bright side theres alink to the founders of neurology..like Broca et al.. I wouldnt count on *them* all agreeing with you either though.. http://members.aol.com/rinsowite/history.htm – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Eric Steroids caused my depression…prednisone should be used conservatively http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FactsAndFallaciesOfDepression MIBS (Minimally Invasive Brain Stimulation) http://www.musc.edu/psychiatry/fnrd/tms.htm

Response:

Here is the sound clip of baby pumas – which do sound like birds; if you backspace on this link you will be able to see and hear a description of the puma, or mountain lion, cougar, felis concolor, panther(? – yes i think so), in various states of grace and distress. Cats are perfect animals. http://www.kilroy.cx/photographs/pumas/baby_chirp.au Your post was interesting and i hope to make remarks later.

Thanks Squiggles made my day ..or week even!!! Bob – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Squiggles

Response:

<< sorry, did you mean Heidegger btw, I have not heard of Heider. And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Squiggles Fuck Heider and Konrad Lorenz.

an he aint needed no fancy kollege ed-ucation neither, no sir! – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Eric

Response:

Fuck Heider and Konrad Lorenz. Eric

What’s that cacophanous staccato f**ck sound in the background Eric – is that musack on your sound system; Squiggles

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hmmmm.. I shall ignore that unwarranted assumption sorry, did you mean Heidegger btw, I have not heard of Heider. no Fritz Heider. .the father of attribution theory.. his "Theory of Interpersonal Relations" inspired Festinger and cognitive dissonace amongst many other consistency theorists with his presentation of balance theory. The fundamental attribution error is "the tendency to see persons as the origins of actions". It is simpler to interpret a hostile act as a natural expression of a malevolent person than to understand the situational and circumstantial factors that led him to the act. This exaggerates the role of the person as causal agent. The average person fails to see the social forces that make persons act as they do in various situations. This naive view is held in a more sophisticated was by many clinical psychologists and others. Miller said in 1947(which shows how hitech ..modern ..NOT these theories are) "the laboratory psychologist and the clinician have both concieved the individual as a series of events and tendenciescarried around within the skin of an individual subject. They have both assumed that his delinquencies or his triumphs, his interests or his nervous maladjustments,result fully and simply from structured dispositions within him." a concise glance at an application of Heider http://www.afirstlook.com/archive/attribut.cfm?source=archther Well, he sounds very much like Hume on the Self to me. Perhaps he was influenced by him, even though he was German? Hume believed that the self was nothing but a bundle of impressions. Hume was fantastic and he didnt even need an oscilloscope.. Have you read his enquiry into the nature of madness? We could still learn much from it.. fixed ideas and the false association of ideas arent even touched by neurology but are the root of it for Hume..leading to a distortion of perception that no amount of reason can touch.. Indeed the most paranoic delusions are reasonable if you accept the original premise. Anyone who subscribes to a school of thought that brands people who disagree as wilfull rogues and liars are a species of lunatic for him They wish to compell people to accept their association of ideas that have no such connection in reality.. I have recently come in contact with such a phenomenon and that is what I thought, madness of lunatics thinking they can compel others to accept their ideas having no basis in reality, dx’s and what not! linda .

Well he was writing about it in 1671.. some things dont change.. On the subject this is perhaps the first DSM with methods of diagnosing and prescribed treatments.. Even instructs how to deal with people who dont accept their theories.. http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/ – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – . And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Yes he did dogs but Grey lag geese were his first love .. boy – you’re impressive. standing on the shoulders of giants as they say… I prefer poetry.. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~simmons/1116/16behave.htm The Nature of Sign Stimuli Sign stimuli are usually simple characteristics (e.g. ultrasonic bat sounds trigger avoidance behaviour in moths). Sign stimuli may be specific choices from an array of possibilities. Example: Herring gull chick feeding behaviour. The adult lowers its head and moves its beak. The chick pecks the red spot on the beak, causing the adult to regurgitate. Fixed-action pattern: Pecking the red spot on the beak. Sign stimulus: Red spot swung horizontally at the end of a long, vertical object. Natural selection favours cues associated with the relevant behaviour or object. Some randomness is probable in fixing upon one of many possible sign stimuli for a FAP. An animal’s sensitivity to general stimuli and its sign stimuli are correlated. For example, frogs’ retinal cells are sensitive to movement. Movement is the sign stimulus that releases the tongue-shooting FAP in frogs. A frog starves if surrounded by motionless flies. A supernormal stimulus may elicit stronger responses than natural stimuli. For example, when given a choice between an egg and a volleyball, a Greylag goose ignore the egg and tries to retrieve the volleyball. Supernormal stimulus = Artificial stimulus that elicits a stronger response than occurs naturally. This stuff is very fascinating indeed. I guess it’s behavioural psychology of theory of communication. Human Ethology.. Actually i was having a conversation with my husband the other day, when i downloaded some net sounds — this happened to be the sounds of baby cougars; i also downloaded sounds of wolves which are far louder and more aggressive to my ear. The baby cougar sounds btw, did sound like chicks and not like cats. Anyway, my cat Ophelia heard the sounds of the baby cougars from the kitchen. She is ordinarily a rather lethargic cat. But she came running through the hall and stopped at the door, carefully checking the environment, but still very attentive to the sounds. She finally got the courage to come into the living room and jumped on the desk across the computer (from where the sound speakers are placed) and cocked her little ears, bending her body over the chair, checking out the sound. Amazing. Amazing, because, when i played the wolves’ sounds some time later, when she was in another room, she did not respond. Yeah… species-specific.. I have seen this happen before in animals, not so much in people because language distracts us and we have so much experience. Dont you believe it .. we have our fixed action patterns and imprinted predispositions that advertisers and others take full avantage of.. for example popular music,,the sudden drop in pitch gives an "AH" sensation in the belly.. the backbeat of popular rythms is often 72 beats per minute(heart rate) some relate much musical response to the imprinting of rythm in the womb. The use of lipstick..high heels ..hair ornaments..shoulder pads .. military uniform… all are releasers for fixed action patterns a clear example of the the use of supernormal stimuli is silicon implants but eye make up is a less dramatic form http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/brown "coyness" and flirting are considered human universals especially the "eyebrow flash" See Eibl-Eiblesfeldt "Love and Hate" or just Eibl-Eiblesfelt Its amazing now google can instantly translate from german But i have seen it in animals, and it seem clear from similar observations, that this is something that has developed in the animal over millions of years – you could say it is part of what it means to be a CAT and not a DOG, e.g. The rediscovery of what it means to be a human is long overdue.. IMHO this is not a task that a dehumanized biological psychiatry is remotely qualified to perform. A truly hermeneutic and holistic one could though ..if for example Karl Jaspers work on the phenomenology of psychiatric disorder had a few bucks thrown at it,, In the current climate it hardly seems likely though ( Bob Squiggles Bob Squiggles

Response:

Hume was fantastic and he didnt even need an oscilloscope.. Have you read his enquiry into the nature of madness? We could still learn much from it.. fixed ideas and the false association of ideas arent even touched by neurology but are the root of it for Hume..leading to a distortion of perception that no amount of reason can touch.. Indeed the most paranoic delusions are reasonable if you accept the original premise. Anyone who subscribes to a school of thought that brands people who disagree as wilfull rogues and liars are a species of lunatic for him They wish to compell people to accept their association of ideas that have no such connection in reality.. And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Yes he did dogs but Grey lag geese were his first love .. boy – you’re impressive.

standing on the shoulders of giants as they say… I prefer poetry.. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~simmons/1116/16behave.htm The Nature of Sign Stimuli Sign stimuli are usually simple characteristics (e.g. ultrasonic bat sounds trigger avoidance behaviour in moths). Sign stimuli may be specific choices from an array of possibilities. Example: Herring gull chick feeding behaviour. The adult lowers its head and moves its beak. The chick pecks the red spot on the beak, causing the adult to regurgitate. Fixed-action pattern: Pecking the red spot on the beak. Sign stimulus: Red spot swung horizontally at the end of a long, vertical object. Natural selection favours cues associated with the relevant behaviour or object. Some randomness is probable in fixing upon one of many possible sign stimuli for a FAP. An animal’s sensitivity to general stimuli and its sign stimuli are correlated. For example, frogs’ retinal cells are sensitive to movement. Movement is the sign stimulus that releases the tongue-shooting FAP in frogs. A frog starves if surrounded by motionless flies. A supernormal stimulus may elicit stronger responses than natural stimuli. For example, when given a choice between an egg and a volleyball, a Greylag goose ignore the egg and tries to retrieve the volleyball. Supernormal stimulus = Artificial stimulus that elicits a stronger response than occurs naturally. This stuff is very fascinating indeed. I guess it’s behavioural psychology of theory of communication.

Human Ethology.. Actually i was having a conversation with my husband the other day, when i downloaded some net sounds — this happened to be the sounds of baby cougars; i also downloaded sounds of wolves which are far louder and more aggressive to my ear.

The baby cougar sounds btw, did sound like chicks and not like cats. Anyway, my cat Ophelia heard the sounds of the baby cougars from the kitchen. She is ordinarily a rather lethargic cat. But she came running through the hall and stopped at the door, carefully checking the environment, but still very attentive to the sounds. She finally got the courage to come into the living room and jumped on the desk across the computer (from where the sound speakers are placed) and cocked her little ears, bending her body over the chair, checking out the sound. Amazing. Amazing, because, when i played the wolves’ sounds some time later, when she was in another room, she did not respond.

Yeah… species-specific.. I have seen this happen before in animals, not so much in people because language distracts us and we have so much experience.

Dont you believe it .. we have our fixed action patterns and imprinted predispositions that advertisers and others take full avantage of.. for example popular music,,the sudden drop in pitch gives an "AH" sensation in the belly.. the backbeat of popular rythms is often 72 beats per minute(heart rate) some relate much musical response to the imprinting of rythm in the womb. The use of lipstick..high heels ..hair ornaments..shoulder pads .. military uniform… all are releasers for fixed action patterns a clear example of the the use of supernormal stimuli is silicon implants but eye make up is a less dramatic form http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/brown "coyness" and flirting are considered human universals especially the "eyebrow flash" See Eibl-Eiblesfeldt "Love and Hate" or just Eibl-Eiblesfelt Its amazing now google can instantly translate from german But i have seen it in animals, and it seem clear from similar observations, that this is something that has developed in the animal over millions of years – you could say it is part of what it means to be a CAT and not a DOG, e.g.

The rediscovery of what it means to be a human is long overdue.. IMHO this is not a task that a dehumanized biological psychiatry is remotely qualified to perform. A truly hermeneutic and holistic one could though ..if for example Karl Jaspers work on the phenomenology of psychiatric disorder had a few bucks thrown at it,, In the current climate it hardly seems likely though ( Bob – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Squiggles Bob Squiggles

Response:

Well, he sounds very much like Hume on the Self to me. Perhaps he was influenced by him, even though he was German? Hume believed that the self was nothing but a bundle of impressions. And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Yes he did dogs but Grey lag geese were his first love ..

boy – you’re impressive. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~simmons/1116/16behave.htm The Nature of Sign Stimuli Sign stimuli are usually simple characteristics (e.g. ultrasonic bat sounds trigger avoidance behaviour in moths). Sign stimuli may be specific choices from an array of possibilities. Example: Herring gull chick feeding behaviour. The adult lowers its head and moves its beak. The chick pecks the red spot on the beak, causing the adult to regurgitate. Fixed-action pattern: Pecking the red spot on the beak. Sign stimulus: Red spot swung horizontally at the end of a long, vertical object. Natural selection favours cues associated with the relevant behaviour or object. Some randomness is probable in fixing upon one of many possible sign stimuli for a FAP. An animal’s sensitivity to general stimuli and its sign stimuli are correlated. For example, frogs’ retinal cells are sensitive to movement. Movement is the sign stimulus that releases the tongue-shooting FAP in frogs. A frog starves if surrounded by motionless flies. A supernormal stimulus may elicit stronger responses than natural stimuli. For example, when given a choice between an egg and a volleyball, a Greylag goose ignore the egg and tries to retrieve the volleyball. Supernormal stimulus = Artificial stimulus that elicits a stronger response than occurs naturally.

This stuff is very fascinating indeed. I guess it’s behavioural psychology of theory of communication. Actually i was having a conversation with my husband the other day, when i downloaded some net sounds — this happened to be the sounds of baby cougars; i also downloaded sounds of wolves which are far louder and more aggressive to my ear. The baby cougar sounds btw, did sound like chicks and not like cats. Anyway, my cat Ophelia heard the sounds of the baby cougars from the kitchen. She is ordinarily a rather lethargic cat. But she came running through the hall and stopped at the door, carefully checking the environment, but still very attentive to the sounds. She finally got the courage to come into the living room and jumped on the desk across the computer (from where the sound speakers are placed) and cocked her little ears, bending her body over the chair, checking out the sound. Amazing. Amazing, because, when i played the wolves’ sounds some time later, when she was in another room, she did not respond. I have seen this happen before in animals, not so much in people because language distracts us and we have so much experience. But i have seen it in animals, and it seem clear from similar observations, that this is something that has developed in the animal over millions of years – you could say it is part of what it means to be a CAT and not a DOG, e.g. Squiggles – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Bob Squiggles

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – WOW…!!!! Hysteria and Cyberspace Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor 07.10.1998 Interview with Slavoj Zizek Slavoj Zizek is engaged in the psychoanalytical theory of film and pop culture, covering a broad area from Hitchcock and Lynch to horror stories and science fiction. If you go to Yahoogroups and search for Cyberspace, there are many sociology and philosophy of culture -type groups on Cyberspace life and they can be very scholarly. The ideas here are interesting from an aesthetic-sociological analysis; but i think the part on subjective versus objective reality (especially sex and masturbation) is something i would find naive and sort of rambling. It’s really philosphically naive. I think that the only difference between in your head reality (and i guess according to this author’s equation of that with virtual reality) and real reality, is the number of stimulii available to your senses and the context. The context is the missing variables — the things you do not know about the person that may in their very absence act as fantasy evoking in your head. Squiggles Well I think the contrasting of foucaultian,neo-Jungian and the Noosphere blasts away so many cobwebs… Everyday newsgroup interactions demonstrate the power of the hyperreal over individual subjectivities… It is clearly time for the drastic revision of what classical theories of interpersonal perception exist… Come back Heider..all is forgiven IMHO the idea that the construction of the Other leads to a virtual signification not veridical and always did.. is profound… The use of the Other as a masturbatory object with the accompanying alienation and loss of true intimacy is sadly ubiquitous… Konrad Lorenz and the ethological conception of "supernormal stimuli" could have much to contribute here. Bob Uhm Bob, sounds like your love life really sucks

Hmmmm.. I shall ignore that unwarranted assumption sorry, did you mean Heidegger btw, I have not heard of Heider.

no Fritz Heider. .the father of attribution theory.. his "Theory of Interpersonal Relations" inspired Festinger and cognitive dissonace amongst many other consistency theorists with his presentation of balance theory. The fundamental attribution error is "the tendency to see persons as the origins of actions". It is simpler to interpret a hostile act as a natural expression of a malevolent person than to understand the situational and circumstantial factors that led him to the act. This exaggerates the role of the person as causal agent. The average person fails to see the social forces that make persons act as they do in various situations. This naive view is held in a more sophisticated was by many clinical psychologists and others. Miller said in 1947(which shows how hitech ..modern ..NOT these theories are) "the laboratory psychologist and the clinician have both concieved the individual as a series of events and tendenciescarried around within the skin of an individual subject. They have both assumed that his delinquencies or his triumphs, his interests or his nervous maladjustments,result fully and simply from structured dispositions within him." a concise glance at an application of Heider http://www.afirstlook.com/archive/attribut.cfm?source=archther And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget.

Yes he did dogs but Grey lag geese were his first love .. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~simmons/1116/16behave.htm The Nature of Sign Stimuli Sign stimuli are usually simple characteristics (e.g. ultrasonic bat sounds trigger avoidance behaviour in moths). Sign stimuli may be specific choices from an array of possibilities. Example: Herring gull chick feeding behaviour. The adult lowers its head and moves its beak. The chick pecks the red spot on the beak, causing the adult to regurgitate. Fixed-action pattern: Pecking the red spot on the beak. Sign stimulus: Red spot swung horizontally at the end of a long, vertical object. Natural selection favours cues associated with the relevant behaviour or object. Some randomness is probable in fixing upon one of many possible sign stimuli for a FAP. An animal’s sensitivity to general stimuli and its sign stimuli are correlated. For example, frogs’ retinal cells are sensitive to movement. Movement is the sign stimulus that releases the tongue-shooting FAP in frogs. A frog starves if surrounded by motionless flies. A supernormal stimulus may elicit stronger responses than natural stimuli. For example, when given a choice between an egg and a volleyball, a Greylag goose ignore the egg and tries to retrieve the volleyball. Supernormal stimulus = Artificial stimulus that elicits a stronger response than occurs naturally. Bob – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Squiggles

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – WOW…!!!! Hysteria and Cyberspace Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor 07.10.1998 Interview with Slavoj Zizek Slavoj Zizek is engaged in the psychoanalytical theory of film and pop culture, covering a broad area from Hitchcock and Lynch to horror stories and science fiction. If you go to Yahoogroups and search for Cyberspace, there are many sociology and philosophy of culture -type groups on Cyberspace life and they can be very scholarly. The ideas here are interesting from an aesthetic-sociological analysis; but i think the part on subjective versus objective reality (especially sex and masturbation) is something i would find naive and sort of rambling. It’s really philosphically naive. I think that the only difference between in your head reality (and i guess according to this author’s equation of that with virtual reality) and real reality, is the number of stimulii available to your senses and the context. The context is the missing variables — the things you do not know about the person that may in their very absence act as fantasy evoking in your head. Squiggles Well I think the contrasting of foucaultian,neo-Jungian and the Noosphere blasts away so many cobwebs… Everyday newsgroup interactions demonstrate the power of the hyperreal over individual subjectivities… It is clearly time for the drastic revision of what classical theories of interpersonal perception exist… Come back Heider..all is forgiven IMHO the idea that the construction of the Other leads to a virtual signification not veridical and always did.. is profound… The use of the Other as a masturbatory object with the accompanying alienation and loss of true intimacy is sadly ubiquitous… Konrad Lorenz and the ethological conception of "supernormal stimuli" could have much to contribute here. Bob

Uhm Bob, sounds like your love life really sucks sorry, did you mean Heidegger btw, I have not heard of Heider. And as for Konrad Lorenz, i have only read his animal book – was it on Dogs – i forget. Squiggles

Response:

Well I think the contrasting of foucaultian,neo-Jungian and the Noosphere blasts away so many cobwebs… Everyday newsgroup interactions demonstrate the power of the hyperreal over individual subjectivities… It is clearly time for the drastic revision of what classical theories of interpersonal perception exist… Come back Heider..all is forgiven IMHO the idea that the construction of the Other leads to a virtual signification not veridical and always did.. is profound… The use of the Other as a masturbatory object with the accompanying alienation and loss of true intimacy is sadly ubiquitous… Konrad Lorenz and the ethological conception of "supernormal stimuli" could have much to contribute here. Bob

Response:

WOW…!!!! Hysteria and Cyberspace Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor 07.10.1998 Interview with Slavoj Zizek Slavoj Zizek is engaged in the psychoanalytical theory of film and pop culture, covering a broad area from Hitchcock and Lynch to horror stories and science fiction.

If you go to Yahoogroups and search for Cyberspace, there are many sociology and philosophy of culture -type groups on Cyberspace life and they can be very scholarly. The ideas here are interesting from an aesthetic-sociological analysis; but i think the part on subjective versus objective reality (especially sex and masturbation) is something i would find naive and sort of rambling. It’s really philosphically naive. I think that the only difference between in your head reality (and i guess according to this author’s equation of that with virtual reality) and real reality, is the number of stimulii available to your senses and the context. The context is the missing variables — the things you do not know about the person that may in their very absence act as fantasy evoking in your head. Squiggles

Response:

WOW…!!!!

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hysteria and Cyberspace Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor 07.10.1998 Interview with Slavoj Zizek Slavoj Zizek is engaged in the psychoanalytical theory of film and pop culture, covering a broad area from Hitchcock and Lynch to horror stories and science fiction. The philosopher from Ljubljana, Slovenia became popular with his book ENJOY YOUR SYMPTOM!: JACQUES LACAN IN HOLLYWOOD AND OUT. Recently his study on the efficiency of the phantasmatic in the new media was published, currently he is writing a text dealing with cyberspace. After checking the abundance of titles dealing with the strange phenomena connected to the ‘virtual worlds’ Zizek comes to the conclusion, that – in contrast to the popular, exoticising readings of the net – the predominant psychic economy of electronic networks is a hysterical one. Mr. Zizek, in several essays you developed a critique of the so-called "virtualization of reality" which supposedly accompanies the development of information technologies. Recently you talked about several notions of cyberspace at the Humboldt University in Berlin. There is a ‘collective’ notion of cyberspace that was popularized for example via the idea of The Borg in Star Trek. The Borg seems to be something like a cybernetic insect state, combining the old image of the parasitic alien with a man-machine relationship which fuses the individual into ‘One Being’ via communication devices. This idea seems to correspond with the general trend towards a more or less predominant use of conspiracy theories to interpret the modern world… Slavoj Zizek: If I understand this point of a one-mind-entity correctly, then it’s a version of cyberspace I didn’t mention. I first of all mentioned the deconstructionist version of cyberspace which is this post-Cartesian one: Each of us can play with his/her identities and so forth. This is the feminist, deconstructionist, Foucaultian version. But as you probably know there is another, let’s call it the New Age school of cyberspace-ideology. It is this neo-Jungian idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation… …the Noosphere… Slavoj Zizek: Yes, that’s precisely the idea. We all share one collective mind. What I find so interesting about it, is the ambiguity of this fantasy: It can be presented as the ultimate horror. Already in the fifties the big threat of communism was the notion of brainwashing, the ability to establish "one mind". The best cold war paranoia movie which employs this already in an ironic way is "The Manchurian Candidate" with Frank Sinatra. An American officer is captured by North Koreans in the Korean War and brainwashed to become a killer who kills on order, without being aware of it. Today you still have on the one hand this negative utopian image of the collective mind, while on the other hand you have this positive New Age image. There are two opposite versions, but what I’m tempted to disagree with is their common presupposition, which is that cyberspace means, to put it very simply, the end of individuality, the end of Cartesian subjectivity. All positive properties are externalized in the sense that everything you are in a positive sense, all your features can be manipulated. When one plays in virtual space I can for example be a homosexual man who pretends to be a heterosexual woman, or whatever: either I can build a new identity for myself or in a more paranoiac way, I am somehow already controlled, manipulated by the digital space. What you are deprived of are only your positive properties, your personality in the sense of your personal features, your psychological properties. But only when you are deprived of all your positive content, can one truly see what remains, namely the Cartesian subject. Only in Cyberspace do we approach what Cartesian subjectivity is all about. You remember when Descartes elaborates the process of universal doubt. One doubts that anything really exists in order to arrive at one’s "ego cogito". Descartes develops this idea saying: Let’s imagine an evil god, an evil spirit who just tricks us into believing…. But isn’t cyberspace, virtual space, the materialisation of this evil spirit? And it’s crucial to go through this universal doubt: What if everything is just digitally constructed, what if there is no reality to begin with? It’s only when you go through this moment of universal doubt that you arrive at what Descartes means by "cogito ergo sum". For this reason I absolutely do not think that Cartesian subjectivity is threatened. Instead I think, it’s only today that we are arriving at it. The Borg story seems to develop a metaphor for cyberspace, the idea of a collective consciousness via communication tools. On the other hand, there is your idea of the computer as an asexual complement of man, something that constitutes the Big Other. Couldn’t these metaphors be applied to all electronic media or even to media in general? A lot of properties which are attributed to Cyberspace today could equally be attributed to television for example. One has millions of people sitting in front of tv screens, being simultaneously fed the same intellectual or emotional ‘content’ through the Big Apparatus. Slavoj Zizek: I definetely agree with this, but I’m tempted to say that we maybe can go even further! This is my big thesis a propos sexuality. What was so shocking about virtual space was not that before there was a ‘real’ reality and now there is only a virtual reality, but through the experience of VR we have somehow retroactively become aware of how there never was ‘real reality’. Reality always was virtual, we just weren’t aware of it. I think what is so horrible about virtual sex is not: My god before we had a real partner whom we touched, embraced, squeezed, and now you just masturbate in front of the screen or you don’t even masturbate, you just enjoy knowing that maybe the other enjoys it through the screen or whatever. The point is we become aware of how there never was real sex. It’s not only that masturbation is having sex whith an imagined partner. What if real sex is only masturbation whith a real partner? That is to say, you think you’re doing it with a real partner but you use the real partner as a masturbatory device, the real partner just gives you a minimum of material so you can act out your fantasies. In other words there are always at least three in sex, its never you and the partner, you must have a fantasy to sustain it. When the fantasy disintegrates, the partner gets disgusting. It’s horror. In Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" for example; in the middle of the play Hamlet looks at Ophelia and has this moment of

‘Realitaetsverlust’: – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – What a disgusting person she is. Because precisely what gets lost is this phantasmatic support. I think a certain dimension of virtuality is co-substantial with the symbolic order or the order of language as such. There is another point, which is maybe connected to the phenomenon of collective mind you evoked. I claim one should approach the dimension of being ‘undead’. In this precise sense that undead doesn’t simply mean ‘alive’, it means dead but nonetheless alive. Think about Stephen King, zombies and vampires. Here I connect cyberspace with what Lacan calls tissue of libido, ‘lamella’, a substance of life which cannot ever be destroyed. The problem here is no longer mortality but the opposite: It’s this kind of horrible life form, like that of vampires, which you can never get rid of. The ultimate horror becomes the very ‘Unsterblichkeit’, this very immortality. In the new text which I’m writing now, I’m trying to establish this impossible connection, a link between Kleist, Wagner and cyberspace. If you read Wagner’s operas closely, the fundamental complaint, I think, the "Klage" of all the big Wagnerian arias, is the following: Their heroes – except in Lohengrin and Tannh

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