on the possibility of critique

If the psychic has suddenly become such an important television personality, it is not only because of the rise of a vague “new age” spirituality.  Nor is it that the psychic is essentially, radically telegenic: that the psychic’s vision is nothing but a form of tele-vision, and thus coincides perfectly with the medium that would represent it.

Rather: the psychic stands for the perfect passive intellect: the mind of everybody, conceived not as the power to produce conventions and fictions (crime is always a fiction in this sense, a creative act, and the detective, despite extraordinary powers of the imagination, is merely the interpreter. A subtle political theology is at work here: the demonization of creativity. The ethical demand to only interpret, and not create).

Thus the psychic is good for two things: recognizing trends in the stock market, and communicating with the dead, and especially those who have died a violent death.  It each case: the psychic registers a rupture with the norm, a new convention. Psychic intuition is the passive reflex of productive intelligence.

Yet these two forms of psychic intuition also suggest a fundamental, critical tension.  It is this tension that appears, with stunning speculative rigor, in a interlocked trilogy of episodes of the Medium (5.13-5.14).

Two psychics square off in a battle of dreams, anticipations, and preemptive strikes. (In the Medium we find the glorification of a the neo-conservative synthesis of just war theory with the  doctrine of preemptive strikes.  Of course, Minority Report had already exposed the most sinister tendencies of this psychic criminology.)

Each psychic must answer to a patriarch: Alison Dubois to the District Attorney; her nemesis, Caitlyn, to Mr. Lydecker, the visionary capitalist.

These two patriarchs, in turn, represent two conflicting, and historically coexistent, visions of sovereignty.  The distract attorney is a stand-in for the Hobbesian sovereign, to whom everybody must submit in return for protection from violent death.  Thus Alison Dubios anticipates the violent death of the individual. (the psychic criminologist must be sublimely insensitive to mass death, as well as death brought in the name of the law. They can only register the death of the one who is able to die as an individual in the fulness of their rights, who fears violence against their individuality and their rights).  She is receptive to the thought of the every-body, but the everybody only in so far as it refuses to think itself as multitude but only as individuals stitched together into people. The knife of the serial killer, tearing into the flesh of the individual body, sutures it to the body politic.

Mr. Lydecker, on the other hand, represents the sovereignty of the multitude.  His only vision is to cede his vision to the psychic, who does nothing more than register the desires of the multitude for new things.  But needless to say: this representation, imposing a sovereign form on the multitude, and a commodity form on desire, imposes a topological transformation on the multitude.  The multitude does not become a people. It remains a multitude, defined by an anarchic operation of imaginary desire.  But it is able to represent its desire to itself as a convention, as public opinion: as a fundamental consensus about the operation of the economy.  (Up to a point I agree here with Marazzi’s astute analysis of “capital as language” . But I believe that the sovereign form of the financial markets cannot do without the mediation of the purely passive, yet charismatically individualizing intelligence of the visionary.)

The detective show presents an endless symbolic battle between these two sovereigns.  The serial killer is the visionary. The visionary is infinitely responsive to the desire of the multitude. Thus it is the serial killer — no longer fearing death, he is able to realize desire in its most extreme, obscene forms — who presents the extreme form of the visionary.

These three episodes of the Medium, however, suggest a powerful attempt to bring this conflict to a certain resolution.  The son of Mr. Lydecker is a serial killer. And the psychic who is in the father’s pay uses her knowledge of the son‘s crimes (not insignificantly: he cuts out the eyes of his victims) to usurp the father, and take the place of the son.  This crime, a crime of inaction rather than action, represents a revolutionary event. The multitude allows the visionary-capitalist to destroy himself through his son, through his works.  And at the same time, it desires a work that would consist only in sleeping and dreaming. And yet the medium itself — of television, of celebrity — imposes another contortion: one layer of representation has been peeled away, but the  psychic is still only a representative of the multitude, not the multitude itself. And yet, at the same time, the victory of the law, of justice, seems feeble and small.  It saves the life of a substitute teacher, to be sure. But what has it really saved, if not simply the medial logic of substitution itself.