Reanimating the Dead: Robo-Huey and the Political Uncanny [excerpts]

Music: Peggy Lee: Black Coffee and Other Delights If fascism came to America it would be on a program of Americanism.

-- Huey Long, attributed

I want to begin by reading two performances, or "twice performed behaviors," in the Louisianian imaginary.1 The first is a staged pose in celebration of new, college supported enhancements of the Department of Military Science at Louisiana State University. On the cover of the bi-annual newsletter of the College of Arts and Sciences titled Kaleidoscope: Enhancing Creativity, dean Guillermo Ferreyra appears, with a rather toothy smile, brandishing a Kimber .22 caliber target rifle, along side the chair of the Department of Military Science, Mark A. Caruso, who is dressed in military fatigues. The rifle was one of fifty purchased by the college in support of the revival of the ROTC's competitive marksmanship program (the "Rifle and Pistol Team"), perhaps the closest cousin to the lesser recognized, unsupported, yet successful, competitive program of symbolic warfare housed in the Department of Communication Studies: collegiate debate. The politics of representation here is characteristically Louisianian: the activity of debate, which claims the motto Kenneth Burke assigned to rhetoric and argument, ad bellum purificandum, might seem to many a more suitable representation for the goods internal to a collegiate institution. Instead, the instrumentality of war and its Real implement, the gun, was chosen to symbolize the aspirations and creativity of the college and the diversity of its achievements in the past semester. Prima facie, the deathly threat of "the dean with a gun"--which should strike fear in untenured faculty everywhere--tacitly reinforces the new, aggressive (or shall we say preemptive) vision of the college to reclaim the coveted "Harvard of the South" status.

The compliment to the "dean with a gun" image is the performative politics of a new exhibit at Louisiana's Old State Capital building, which is now a state museum: in a darkened room on the west side of the building, a golden statue of Huey P. Long stands behind a podium. Behind the bronzed politician a series of heavy, velvet blue curtains drop to the floor; in the line of his gaze is the kind of floor-standing radio popular in middle class households in the 1930s. The scene is reminiscent of those in many of David Lynch's uncanny noir films, in which a seemingly inanimate person is seated in a cold, mysterious, and richly colored room. When one enters the exhibit, an invisible beam of light is broken, the already dim overhead lights dim further, and the previously frozen statue Long comes to life in playful banter with an unseen radio announcer, whom the automaton patronizingly refers to as "radio boy." I do not wish to describe the exhibit in too much detail, because in my capacity as a Red Stick ambassador I want to encourage those of you who are intrigued to visit the museum (I don't want to spoil your fun). But I will tell you this: the robotic demagogue speaks on a variety of topics, all of which boast about Long's many political accomplishments during his short, political career: from an expressed fondness for LSU's football team, to his repeal of the poll tax, to his program for free school textbooks, to his initiative to pave Louisiana's roads, the robot of Long, whom I affectionately call Robo-Huey, re-enacts the presumed oratorical style of the historical Huey to the delight the curious spectator.

The express rationale of those in the Louisiana Department of State for building a robot of the most famous and powerful demagogue in United States' political history remains somewhat of a mystery. For Louisianians, Long is a much cherished and hated figure, and historically his influence on the governance of the state is undeniable. Given the country-wide fascination with his figure (perhaps signified no more strongly than by the multi-million dollar remake of All the King's Men, which is happening as I type . . . Sean Penn as Huey? That's simply ridiculous . . . ), it is understandable why those interested in Louisiana tourism would encourage another exhibit on Long. Yet this one is unquestionably strange because it features a half-million dollar robo-man. Further, unlike the friendly, animatronic figures of theme parks that Walt Disney dreamed up over half a century ago, Robo-Huey is intended as a bronzed statue come to life, he represents a deliberate attempt to provoke an uncanny response among spectators. Robo-Huey is thus more directly a descendant of the automatons dreamed into existence by Jacques Vaucanson in eighteenth century France: like the mime, automatons were originally scientific marvels, figures that one assumed were statues until they startled the spectator by moving.[2] Given the historical origin of the robot in the fear of the inanimate dead coming to life, the creation of Robo-Huey is designed to produce a confrontation death. Like the exhibit itself, which is articulated to another that enshrines the mystery of Long's assassination, the advertisement of the exhibit leads the reader to Huey's death:

Huey Long once described himself to reporters bet by saying, "I am sui generis (one of a kind), just leave it at that." Senator Long was truly one of a kind. He was the most eccentric, controversial, and successful politician Louisiana has ever seen. He knew what he wanted to do and he saw to it that it was accomplished, whatever it took. . . . Long had his eyes on the presidency, but was shot by an assassin on September 8, 1935 . . . . Before he died two days later, he was said to have uttered, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do."

Despite the obvious messianic overtones of this promotional rhetoric, the fact remains that Long is dead-long dead. Rather than serve as a melancholic testament to Louisianian's inability to mourn the loss of a much beloved and hated son, Robo-Huey, precisely because he is automaton, reassures the spectator that Huey Pierce Long is dead. Yet it only does so by threatening his impossible return; it is deliberately posed as both a comfort and threat, erring on the side of comfort. Today, I want to suggest we should not be so comforted.

Despite their obvious dissimilarities, I want to suggest that the image of the "dean with a gun" and the performance of Robo-Huey are linked to the threat of killing machines. From a psychoanalytic perspective, I argue that a homologous, ambivalent desire animates these performances in the processes of "surrogation," the mournful dialectic of remembering and forgetting that Joseph Roach suggests helps people to reckon with the trauma of death and the unbearable meaninglessness of atrocity through the provision of surrogate love objects.[3] Both Robo-dean with his machine and Robo-Huey as the machine are scripted, functioning mechanically and animated by elements in the Louisianian political imaginary. By "political imaginary" I mean to refer to a collective reservoir or myth, trope, symbol, image, and so on, which provides the rhetorical material for identitarian, or representational, politics.[4] By imaginary I also mean to refer, however, to the psyche and psychical structures that inhere in collective consciousness, which are recorded materially in terms of the performance of the archive (documented or textualized records) and the repertoire (embodied performance).[5] Robo-Huey, I suggest, is the performance of death par excellence, and a closer examination of what he represents helps us to see better the uniqueness of the Louisianian political imaginary as one that explicitly embraces an aesthetic of death. I will conclude by suggesting this aesthetic also has national representatives.

ON DEATH MACHINES: THE CASE OF LOUISIANA

In his masterful study of Louisianian politics, Wayne Parent notes that "in almost every category of state politics studies . . . Louisiana is usually marked by an asterisk denoting a peculiarity or exception to the general rule."6 Whether one refers to the 1991 gubernatorial race in which the racketeering Edwin Edwards defeated his opponent David Duke with a barrage of bumper stickers urging Louisianians to "Vote for the Crook," or to the demagogic legacy of the Longs, the rhetoric and oratory dominating what in any other place would be termed "politics" is anything but "usual." Parent locates the uniqueness of Louisiana's political culture in a number of factors, but perhaps none more important than those concerning the complexity of immigration patterns, Louisiana's geographical location and abundant resources, and the states' long and complex history with issues of whiteness, race, and class. My concern is to provide at least a partial articulation of the psychical factors informing this motley political culture and, by extension, its choice of self-representational discourse or "rhetoric." Just like a neurotic or psychotic in therapy, the "case" of Louisiana, and in particular, Huey Long, yields unique insights into the often repressed or simply ignored dimensions of political rhetoric and oratory: the colorful, the bizarre, the seemingly irrational. I will contend, however, that the seemingly bizarre participates in a political rationality that is more familiar than is often supposed. Indeed, an analysis of Louisiana's many colorful symptoms reveals deeper structures that also reappear the contemporary national scene. Louisianian political rhetoric just makes it easier to see.

Although time prevents a thorough examination of the argument, one aspect of Louisianian culture that is markedly unique is its ambivalent embrace of death, a kind of aesthetic best captured by the term "gothic apocalyptic," or perhaps "romantic apocalyptic." As one new colleague from Colorado recently put it, "I've never lived anywhere in the world where people simply don't give a fuck." At the time she made this observation, she was referring to the rampant littering behavior along Louisiana's highways, the sheer amount of buildings in disrepair, the markedly high rate of smokers, and the relatively flippant attitude toward the pollution of petrol-chemical industry and high cancer morbidity rates. In less colloquial terms, my colleague has identified what some would describe as a "death culture" that manifests itself in explicitly licensed enjoyment and relaxed responsibility. In his book on the cultural performances of London and New Orleans, Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach describes New Orleans as a kind of living sepulture, a thriving tomb of funerary rites that embraces life by directly facing and embracing a death that has somehow already arrived. In short, unlike any other culture in the United States, Louisiana is yoked to death; "not giving a fuck" in some sense means having already succumbed to death, if only allegorically.

Only when one recognizes the Louisianian imaginary as "gothic" or perversely (and I would add delightfully) morbid do its apparently strange cultural performances begin to make sense. For example, the apparent lack of forethought behind the decision for the dean to pose with a rifle for an academic publication goes much deeper than macho, phallocentric masculinism (which, after Huey will forever be Louisiana's claim to national prominence, if only because of the New State Capital Building looks like a GIANT cock). The apparent mindlessness of the representation of academic performance is scripted in the uncanny, an experience of doubling that subjects one to performances and perserverations frequently beyond conscious control. The dean had to it. He had to hold it. He had to shoot it. He had to be seen with this machine, of which he was supposedly in control. Indeed, "control" is precisely the fantasy offered by weaponry; the truth of the matter is that, excepting sociopaths, killing is always already scripted in the service of something larger than one's self. More importantly, I suggest that the "dean with a gun" image was pre-scripted precisely by the gothic apocalyptic, the same ambivalent desire animating the funerary march of Mardi Gras as a parade of so many mindless, human machines of consumption, gathering on the eve of their demise. It's all about the horrible sublimity of the end, you see.

That the legacy of the LSU College of Arts and Sciences is so deeply associated with the agrarian ideology of the literary elite is, perhaps, even more reason for the appearance of a killing machine as a symbol: you cannot resist change; one is dead to the corporitization and instrumentalization, the scientifi-cation of the academic enterprise. In this respect the cover of Kaleidoscope participates in the so-called "culture wars," a wordy melee among those who would protect the literary canon, those who advocate postmodern theory, and learned by-standing reporters (mostly from the New York Times) bemused by the whole affair. Indeed, the mechanistic and mechanical is a menacing trope among those inside the academy who resist the rigors of "pomo" thought as so much mindless jargon. As Catherine Liu argues, traditional literary studies has a rather long tradition of denigrating the mechanical and the machine, especially among those critical of highly theoretical accounts of literature, such as that of Paul de Man.[7] Bennington notes that "literary studies habitually" uses

the language of machines in a negative way, deploring the mechanical and the technical as the death of values attached to life, form, inspiration, and so on. At best, a 'technical' use of concepts is accorded uneasy neutrality, without ever being allowed to become the heart of the mater. Machines repeat, and repetition means danger-compulsion and death.[8]

The cover of the newsletter directly confronts this conceit, but also in a manner that is classically Louisianian. The archetypal the dean is cast as a death machine, a representative of the Borg. Here our dean was merely submitting to his pre-scripted role in the academic fantasy, but in a way only tacitly permitted, if not demanded, by death-chic of the Louisianian political imaginary. He had to do it; he's the dean (which, we all know, is a bureaucratic automaton, a traitor to his home department, and so on).

As Freud and Liu remind us, whether in the language of dreams or the consciously constructed cultural fantasies of literature and film, in the symbolic and its double, the imaginary, there are no accidents. The weapon is an uncanny machine, a semi-autonomic mechanism with moving parts that, in the hands of the soldier, is an instrument of death. As a machine, the weapon calls our attention to the dialectic of control, to our fantasies of Cartesian ambivalence about possessing and possession: he who controls the machine controls the universe; he who succumbs to the machine--to the Borg, if you will--suffers death. If we might better paraphrase what "not giving a fuck" means for Louisianians, it might be this: "suffering death is just alright with me, suffering death is just alright, oh yeah."

When we think about the rifle and the danger it connotes, that danger is one of automatism. Those in the room may remember the first time (if ever) he or she had held and/or fired a gun: there is, at some level, at least a tacit fear of the accident. What if this thing accidentally goes off and it's pointed at me? I must admit I am personally terrified of firearms because of those suicidal fantasies most of us have entertained: what if I lose my mind and shoot myself, at some level, on purpose? This tacit fear, usually projected into the power to destroy another human being, is none other than the threat of mechanistic automatism, otherwise known as the robot. What if the weapon becomes so automatic that it becomes autonomous, that this machine of human instrumentality subjects me to my own creation? Worse, what if I am but a mere machine, an automaton? Lest you think I'm making much ado about nothing, let me remind you that the threat of losing control of the autonomous weapon is rife in Western culture, perhaps no more so than in film: in Blade Runner, a hero named after the philosophical paranoiac par excellence, Rene Descartes ("I feel, therefore, I am not a machine . . . right?"), must track down and destroy renegade human robots, or replicants, who have turned against their human masters (Liu's analysis of this film in Copying Machines is terrific!); in the Terminator films, androids are determined to destroy the human race, and only a time-traveling rogue assassin can help the humans avert the secular apocalypse; in the Matrix films, everything--even the Messiah--is Memorex; and let us not forget the important way in which fantasies of machine possession are rife in the political imaginary, as The Manchurian Candidate makes plain. For these reasons, I submit that Robo-Huey is literally a political weapon, a uncanny machine that threatens to overtake us even though we recognize this would be impossible. To better make this case, however, we must turn briefly to a psychoanalytic account of the figure of the demagogue.

THE DEMAGOGUE AS A NEUROTIC ROBOT

Understood psychoanalytically, I have been suggesting that both the figure of the dean and the demagogue are machines animated by elements in the Symbolic, and more particularly, the political imaginary--social roles, scripts, and mythic constructs that provide real people social functionality. To say that deanship and demagoguery are, in part, social scripts performed by flesh and blood individuals is not to suggest that these roles are some how a fated and deterministic, nor is it to suggest that individuals who mimic deanness and demagogery are mindless robots. Individuals are robotic only to the extent that at some level structures-albeit socially constructed ones-run the show more than we would like to admit. After all, we accuse our fellow human beings in the so-called private sector as mere "drones" for "The Man" anyway, so who is to say you and I are not similarly scripted?

Understanding the agency of symbolic elements becomes easier when we grapple with the psychical structures of neurosis . . . [cut of a bunch of psychobabble about hysteria and obsession].

If one accepts-even only tentatively-this description of the psychical underpinnings of demagoguery, then one can understand how the automaton is the logical extension of the transferential power of the demagogue: like all phallic objects or objects that move on their own accord, the demagogue represents absolute and complete autonomy; he demands our affections by denying a need for them; he engenders love by promising but never completely fulfilling the promise; he is, in effect, his own god. Let me return again to the promotional rhetoric of the Robo-Huey exhibit:

Huey Long once described himself to reporters bet by saying, "I am sui generis (one of a kind), just leave it at that." Senator Long was truly one of a kind. He was the most eccentric, controversial, and successful politician Louisiana has ever seen. He knew what he wanted to do and he saw to it that it was accomplished, whatever it took. . . . Long had his eyes on the presidency, but was shot by an assassin on September 8, 1935 . . . . Before he died two days later, he was said to have uttered, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do."

Suddenly the slight mistranslation of sui generis as "one of a kind" makes much more sense: that which is entitled to its own category is ultimately the charismatic obsessive neurotic, whose transgressions can only be disciplined by destruction. Huey P. Long was and is an autonomous, political machine; it is only fitting that he has been petrified into a kind of living death.

The decision to revive Huey as a automaton can be read as a process of surrogation or substitution, a process that deliberately forgets as much as it remembers. Joseph Roach explains that

Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure . . . survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternatives. Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely, surrogation rarely if ever succeeds . . . . the very uncanniness of the process of surrogation . . . may provoke many unbidden emotions, ranging from mildly incontinent sentimentalism to raging paranoia. . . . [in times of tension between generations and over alienation] improvised narratives of authenticity and priority may congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin.[23]

Of course the figure of Long is the phoenix from the flames of the Lost Cause. But, he is also an object of derision that somewhat startlingly becomes less threatening as surrogation devolves over time into caricature. Instead of depicting Huey as a despot, he is described as Robin Hood. Instead of describing him as arrogant and narcissistic, he is characterized as strong-willed and determined. Instead of calling him a fascist, he is a populist. Perhaps because memory of Long's political machine is choosey, Robo-Huey is deliberately less life-like than his contemporary animatoric cousins, as if to keep spectators from too closely identifying with his ravenous love of political might. He is not a cheerful mouse, nor a long-haired pirate, nor a breathing granny gazing into a crystal ball. He is a statue come to life, not so much a robot as we know it but the living dead. Unlike other, more familiar automatons, Robo-Huey continuously reminds us of (his?) death.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: ON NATIONAL ROBOTICS

Freud defines the uncanny in general as a compulsive obsession with the traumatic, when obsession is defined as the simultaneity of a wish and counter-wish. The uncanny is an aesthetic phenomenon involving an event and a feeling. The event is the failure of repression, and the feeling is a variation of negativity (fright, horror, dread, and terror are variously used to denote the feeling). The failure of repression and the "uncanny effect" results when either a "primitive belief," which we have previously repressed, finds confirmation in experience, or when something familiar to us (including a feeling) that we have previously repressed recurs.24 The experience of the uncanny is caused by with two failure-events in particular: First, an experience of doubling, such as with a doppelgänger or an unexpected mirror image, can invite terror (which Freud speculates is the double of feelings of unity before the ego separated itself from the world). Second, the "eternal recurrence" of the same-repetition of the same character traits in different people, or a recurrence of similar events (deja-vu) -can invite an uncanny effect, which Freud asserts reminds us of the instinctual compulsion to repeat. It is not surprising that the uncanny object Freud singles out as provoking both failures, the strange object of surrogation par excellence, is the automaton: the machine that is not only a double of me, but one that is a mindless me repeating mindlessly.

Insofar as Robo-Huey is inescapably yoked to the political imaginary, we can postulate that he participates in a larger discourse of the "political uncanny," the idea that certain figures on the national political scene are "robots" or puppets animated by a larger, governing will. Again, this is precisely the fantasy animating Hollywood thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but we can also locate the ominous doubles of the repetition machine in public dreams like the 1999 theatrical hit, Wag the Dog. In this memorable film, which would seem almost inseparable from the real-life exploits of former president Bill Clinton, a character played by Robert Deniro, "Mr. Fixit," is paid to fabricate a fake war in Algeria to divert the public's attention from a presidential sex scandal. The obvious Orwellian overtones aside, what is mildly uncanny about the film is not only its double in real life political spectacle, but its accurate depiction of the political machine as an autonomous abstraction: politics is a coordinated apparatus comprised of different moving parts, and none of the moving parts have any sense of what the other moving parts are doing. Presumably, Mr. Fixit is orchestrating the whole, but the film constantly tempts the viewer to question how much he is controlling this machine: once set into motion by someone, the symbolic seems to take care of itself. The weapon, in other words, fires on its own accord.

The troubling part of this fantasy is that it is also an undeniable reality. The troubling part of this fantasy is that the political machine, like the invention of the automaton, is ultimately rooted in the capacity of humans to reason. Instrumental rationality-if only gleamed from the mundane advent of serialization-fetishizes or mystifies the collaboration of its working parts. This is, in fact, the deathly aesthetic of the automaton, which in Europe arose during a time when proto-engineers were obsessed with hiding the many working parts of machines, as the face-plate of a clock is apt testimony. The mass appeal of documentaries like The War Room or even Fahrenheit 9-11 is that they promise to remove the face-plate, they promise to disclose how the autonomous political machine works, and frequently in the interests of no one but the machine itself. What troubles contemporary historians of technology and human perception like Paul Virilio, however, is that the fetishized aesthetic of the political machine runs cover for a an even more troublesome war machine, a kind of self-driven apparatus that led many to characterize Operation Desert Storm as a "Nintendo War," and recent efforts in the Middle East as parodic replay, "Operation Desert Storm: Reloaded."

In sum, I am arguing that Robo-Huey is no mere toy, no mere spectacle designed to amuse and delight tourists. He represents simultaneously that which we fear is coming and that which has already come to pass: politics is on the side of the aesthetics machine. Or as Walter Benjamin once put it,

"fiat ars-pereat mundus," says fascism, expect from war . . . the aesthetic gratification of sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l'art our l'art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism.[25]

Benjamin urged that, in response, we should rigorously and ceaselessly politize art, even that which passes for the detritus of the rabble in popular culture. This is why we should be more startled than amused by the Robo-Huey exhibit. After all, the Office of the Secretary of State has developed an educational outreach curriculum about the exhibit, with lesson plans for grades K-12.

Notes

[1] Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36-37. [2] See Catherine Liu, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 76-105. This book fucking rocks! [3] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). [4] My understanding of "politics" here is rather broad and Foucauldian, meaning that it concerns questions of identity, representation, and power; politics is always a struggle of meaning. [5] See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. 1-52. [6] Wayne T. Parent, Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2004), 2. [7] Liu, Copying, 1-20. [8] In Liu, Copying, 23. [9] Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 194-195. [10] There is actually a third: phobia. However, phobic structures are not subject structures like obsession and hysteria, and operate rather as a kind of threshold for obsession, hysteria, and perversion. See Fink, A Clinical, 163-164. Lacan the neuroses from psychosis in that both the hysteric and obsessive subject structures form a question: "Am I a man or a woman?" and "Am I alive or dead?" respectively. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, translated by Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 195-182. [11] For a description of the symptoms of obsession, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 281-282. [12] Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 122. [13] Fink, A Clinical, 124. 14 Incidentally, obsessives are particularly prone to the Virgin/whole dialectic, another reason why Mel Gibson will eventually be destroyed, at least symbolically, for his epic The Passion of the Christ (2004). [15] For a description of the symptoms of hysterical neurosis, see Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 195-195.

. . .

[23] Roach, Cities, 2-3. [24] See Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," translated by David McLintock. In The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003), 123-162. [25] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility," second version, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume Three, 1935-1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2002): 122.