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The term ‘MacGuffin’ was coined by Hitchcock’s Scottish friend, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, for something that sets the film’s plot revolving around it. It’s really just an excuse and a diversion. In a whimsical anecdote told by Hitchcock, he compared the MacGuffin to a mythical ‘apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands’. In other words, it could be anything - or nothing - at all. In Notorious, it’s just a lot of fizz: uranium-ore hidden in [wine] bottles. In North by Northwest, it’s ‘government secrets’, whatever they may be. (Hitchcock considered that this was his ‘best’ MacGuffin, because virtually non-existent.) Actually North by Northwest turns out to be one vast MacGuffin, being full of ‘nothings’ like the ‘O’ in Roger O. Thornhill’s name, or the empty prairie, or the non-existent agent named Kaplan. In effect, the function of a MacGuffin is like the ‘meaning’ of a poem - which T.S. Eliot compared to the bone
thrown by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind while the poem goes about its own, deeper business. Hitchcock’s most prescient MacGuffin is in Torn Curtain, whose ‘Gamma Five’ project, concerning an anti-missile missile, anticipated by more than a decade President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ project.

✖ Via The Alfred Hitchcock Story by Ken Mogg, UK edition, 1999, p. 101 [Amazon]

More over at Ken Mogg site. Wikipedia entry for the MacGuffin.

In a sense, a MacGuffin is a mean (an apparatus) as well as an end. Or at least it pretends to be the goal, or the aim of a narrative, it’s conclusion whereas it’s never shown. It’s representing something that is never represented. Maybe it could be understand as the simulacrum capable of sustaining a journey with no end.

• May 15, 2010 link notes tagged: art technology apparatus sense representation mean end movie cinema film auhtor book plot teleology Agamben MacGuffin

In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. Thus, Bush was wrong. What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.

✖ Via “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib” by Slavoj Zizek, May 21st, 2004

First heard of this text via Errol Morris Twitter account. Errol Morris is still thinking about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

• May 08, 2010 link notes tagged: Agamben America Freud Iraq United-States communication homo sacer ignorance knowledge life philosophy science self torture unconscious value zombie cognitive bias Dunning-Kruger