The kneeling Hallelujah.

See Jon Paraleles' NY Times review of the Brookklyn Barclay's Center concert, "Confessions of a Man in a Fedora" 

And for Leonard Cohen's sweetly gracious response to the meaning of Hallelujah and the "baffled king"  --- Cohen's own midnight answer on his way out of his Brooklyn concert, 20 December 2012, recorded on video here on a Heck of a Guy.

"Grace and Gratitude" -- Dan Reilly's review

Brooklyn Hallelujah

Link to the Dublin Hallelujah 14 September 2012

Leonard Cohen - Halleluah

Hallelujah - Original Studio Version

Twitter Tweets and Žižek and Minitel

One waits for the stimulus:

you’ve got mail. 

Today, with or without AOL, one’s phone signals a tweet “connection”  or notification.

One looks for — one “checks,” as one says — one’s email, Facebook account, blog, etc. 

 

The point, and this is how social networking works as social marketing, this is how people fall in “love” with a brand, despite the shortfalls of the brand, is that anticipation and satisfaction are the same. There is a willing, all-too-willing suspension of judgment. Nothing need ever be evaluated.

  

 Thus it is the checking activity itself that reinforces the activity because this mini-event, this little tone or buzz is all the “reward” we get and, so advertisers have learned to their profit, as Twitter also knows this: this is all we actually need. 

See Jaron Lanier for his reminiscence of the “Well” experience that he himself co-founded, and thus for a kind of virtual media archaeology in the mode of nostalgia in Lanier, You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011) — and it is worth adding that this nostalgia has been a while brooding as he began this reminiscence in a online version “One Half of a Manifesto” in 2000. And see too Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce – and Why It Matters (New York: Spiegel und Grau, 1996) as well as, if in general, Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), especially pp. 101f.

 
Slavoj Žižek invokes this phenomenon in Lacanian terms, giving the example of the French minitel.

Now, the minitel, for those who do not know, was (it is one among myriad, often instantly forgotten legions of extinct technologies) a physically dedicated, chunkily, at the time futuro- but nowadays retro-techno little screen-plus-keyboard version of what would come to be translated into the intensified virtual encounters of AOL’s and other online chatrooms.

Indeed, as a student in Paris in the mid-1980s, I remember using the minitel, both in terms of its frisson and the plastic insignificance or flatness of the same. 

And as Žižek writes in his Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, “enjoyment is primarily enjoyment in the signifier.”




Žižek’s point recollects or sharpens Jacques Lacan’s discussion of jouissance, that is to say: enjoyment as enjoyment, most especially erotic enjoyment. 

By its nature, desire is elusive, which is also why it is able to serve an ethical function, qua imperative, for Lacan. 

In his own reminiscence, Žižek’s analysis takes this apart in more rather than less fundamentally Hegelian terms (depending, to be sure on just how high-church Hegelian or indeed Lacanian you are):

…the idea of minitel is “sex is an Other.” You type in your password but you do not communicate with a paid prostitute, you communicate with hundreds of people doing the same thing you are doing.

 So you pick up one of the messages and you do it: you send in your own message to him or to her — you don’t know to whom, that is the charm. You only have the family name: it may be a man or a woman. You send your message to someone you don’t know, you exchange dirty messages: “I will do this to you, you will do that to me.” The point is that people became obsessed by this. Lacan says — he even uses vulgar terms — that if I’m speaking now about fucking it’s the same as if I’m fucking. This is literally realized now in France; sex can be purely the matter of a signifier of exchanging dirt.

 

  
See Žižek's 1992 Flash Art interview with Josefina Ayerza.   For a political theoretic discussion of the French Minitel qua telephone based electronic information technology, distinct from the internet, see Heather L. Moulaison (@libacat), “The Minitel and France’s Legacy of Democratic Information Access,” Government Information Quarterly, 21 (2004): 99-107.

Effects, Mediations, and Primes

Rather a lot is needed to come to terms with the various versions of Cohen’s Hallelujah and the Hallelujah effect that is the Hallelujah song on the internet — not at all unlike the ads that seek to illustrate, in a sometimes unintentionally humorous fashion: this is your brain on drugs. 

To this extent, the Hallelujah effect as a phenomenon is all about entrainment and addiction. Like drugs, the joke can be varied: this is your brain on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.

     

The 1998 movie, You’ve Got Mail, written by the late Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and documenting the erotic subversion of the then AOL experience testifies in the interim to fair irrelevance by contrast with the larger phenomenon (and profit margin) of internet pornography or the even more comprehensive phenomenon of sexting but also online dating, from hookups to marriage. Thus and although it might have done so, Ephron’s film centered upon but was at the same time oblivious to the stimulus effect of AOL’s famous acoustic notification for the dynamic of the love story itself.  

This is a book about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and in particular about kd lang’s several covers of that song, as well as about other songs that she sings, especially in their video presentations.  

It is about the relevance of John Cale’s cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah for kd lang’s cover as it is for everyone else covering Cohen’s song.