What Freud discovered in Totem and Taboo was also discovered that same year by anthropology, though in some other place under the name of Cargo Cult. Because he stands at the switches of telecommunications, the white man is what Freud calls a 'prosthesis god'; that is, he is a god, according to the Cargo Cult, to the extent that he is living dead. Insofar as his sensorium consists only of devices which the dead build to keep in touch with the living, the white man controls a phantom zone he also embodies. The first telecommunications prosthesis which the Cargo Cult put at the center of their blocked relation to the dead was the flag pole thorugh which, they believed, the white man received only to keep to himself messages from the dead who must slave for the white man's every wish.
According to Freud, every prosthesis represents not so much an addition as the replacement or castration of that which it extends. But castration and death, according to Freud, cannot be represented but only embodied - for example, by some dead person. Thus every point of contact between a body and its media extensions marks the site of some secret burial. The white god of the Cargo Cult holds the place of unmournable death. The underworld slave labor camp contains the mournable deaths which, from the cult of Isis to psychoanalysis, have always taken the dead father as model. In Freud's Ratman case - where Freud first borrows the phrase 'omnipotence of thoughts' from Ratman, who coined it to describe the efficacy of his deathwishes - the dead father must pay, must slave for Ratman's every wish. Ratman's dead sister is the rat at the controls of his Cargo Cult. In exchange for the total thought control her brother thus grants her, the rat never conveys to him the message of the unmourned dead. The mourned dead know Ratman's thoughts only to the extent that he does not know it; the dead, however, must slave for Ratman's every thought.
Death cults thus operate on two levels which correspond to two irreconcilable zones of theorizing in Freud. In the Oedipal zone, repression - of the death wish - animates the dead, who return as vengeful phantoms but recede, at the end of mourning, as friendly ghosts or fond memories. And yet, what can never be acknowledged is that these mourned dead in fact enter an underworld they never leave. At this level the mourned dead continue to receive and slave for every death wish. In the zone of Narcissus, ancient childhood conceptions of death or the dead, conceptions otherwise believed to be surmounted, return. These ghosts from childhood, which correspond to the unmournable deaths of children, always love the haunted survivor - to death. But these ghosts are menacing or vengeful only to the extent that the survivor must, in order to keep his secret and have it too, put on a show of reproachful combat with some demon or even stage his own self-reproach.
Check out this month's quote: from "the art of psy fi"(Aberrations of Mourning, 360-361)
TWD woven by Peter Krapp