Woman spots Man surreptitiously reaching across the table and taking three bites of the cold Margherita leftover from yesterday. Smug looking Italian pizza chef with huge belly and large wad of tomatoes and mozzarella balls in his hands glides gaily over the smooth table top. Both man on cardboard box and Man are oblivious to the layered ambience in the room.
Woman says to Man with utmost delicacy (she thinks), ‘why don’t you wait with that and we’ll have something nice to eat together instead?’
Silence.
‘I thought you weren’t going to do that anymore’, growls Man with his eyes fixed on the reflective surface of the pink marble table.
Woman’s muscles tense, and start to dissolve, transforming into the gelatinous tissue of a jellyfish, while she keeps her gaze intently locked on the shopping bag. The church bells drown under the soundwaves of her pounding heart.
Feigning harmony, though still with supreme neutrality, she responds (she thinks) as follows: ‘I just meant... I mean, I thought we said we’d have dinner together, that’s all.’
With hindsight, Woman can’t affirm definitively if her eyes rolled when delivering this peace treaty. Given her knowledge of the unconscious she remains open to the possibility.
The rift opens.
Enter nameless affects and unthought words. Man – in combat wear – takes centre stage.
As soon as I do ONE little thing that doesn’t follow your rule, your exact pedantic logic, your moral code, you get annoyed. You’ve been annoyed with me for days and days. It’s absolutely ridiculous and it’s totally absurd. I’m sick of it. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m sick of living in your empire. You’ve been awful ever since we arrived here. What’s your fucking problem. You won’t stop being annoyed until I’ve done a hundred sit ups and it’s fucking insane, you’re insane.
Words blend, decomposing into a single super-size milky smoothie of reality and fantasy. A formless goo gushing out of a freshly cut ancient wound. All Woman can taste now are the bitter seeds of fury and guilt, shattered bits of frozen fruit and unavowed emotions from the back of the fridge freezer. This live fragmentation of thinking, destruction in action, makes Woman’s body tremble and long for pure absence and inertia. A body without flesh, fearless.
As she hides behind the small fridge door she imagines herself floating weightlessly through the shady room of the residency, out through the medieval door and up to the cool motionless mountains all alone.
This expensive NutriBullet is about to explode and she has a feeling the sticky raspberry stains will be hard to remove.
In Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost – a beautifully written meditation on the relationship of getting lost and the art of living with uncertainty and mystery – the author quotes Thoreau: ‘Not till we are completely lost, or turned around, –for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, –do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations’. Getting lost, Solnit writes a little further on, is not about losing what is familiar, but rather, about the unfamiliar appearing. In other words, an experience of being lost, of losing our way; what we might call, in slightly different terms, a withdrawal from reality into a mental state of ambiguity and non-purposeful activity, is essential to the discovery of self and empathetic receptivity to others.
From this perspective, subjected to what the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has called ‘the audacious dreams of a restless and enterprising capitalism’, the following question begs to be asked: At this very moment in time, do we have permission to engage in activities without immediate purpose or profit; that is, to be in the world otherwise and aimlessly? Perhaps we can extend this question even further: Is there room to get lost in the landscapes of our social and psychic worlds, mapped and adapted, as it were, by the array of Sat Navs, GPS, self-trackers, digital platforms and live status updates? Virtual voices of action haunt us from within, imploring us to ‘Keep busy and carry on’. Like a motivational refrain they emanate from the internalized echo chambers of influencers, bloggers, vloggers and other manuals for improvement in all aspects of life.
Linda Kuhn’s diverse artistic work plunges us straight into the heart of some of these questions and beyond. Her subtle interventions and carefully constructed installations arguably put us in touch with a different experience of social time: time without explicit content and reason. Both Flow (2015) and Dimmer Party (2017) invoke atmospheres of play, alluding to the experience of getting lost in a time-space marked by ambivalence and impermanence. Flow presents a set of jigsaw puzzles which feature the texts written by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the concept of ‘flow’ in 1970s to designate a feeling of complete absorption or concentration with a particular activity or situation. In Dimmer Party, the dimmable lamps, accessories, champagne glasses and background music, emulate the languid mood of leisure and amusement. But a complexity lies beneath these deceptively playful surfaces – what might, at first glance, seem like a simple rendition of the conditions of entertainment – Kuhn’s artworks, it seems to me, go further by bringing into experiential relief the complex double nature of being lost. The immersive experience of the jigsaw puzzle or party, of which we are reminded at first, appears to be at variance with the felt uncertainty of our actual encounter with the work of art in the ‘here and now’ of the exhibition. Let me try and elucidate more clearly what I mean by this.
On the one hand, on the level of content, Kuhn’s installations represent two kinds of doing where time recedes into the background: time is taken up, as it were, by the activity at hand (at the party we get lost in the music, the softly dimmed light, the enjoyment of socialising, drinking, escaping into a world of satisfaction; similarly, while engaged in the jigsaw puzzle our attention is dominated by the occupation, consumed by the search for the missing puzzle piece); and yet, on the other hand, by placing a particular demand on our bodily and mental response to the environment as viewers, the works in themselves invite us into a very different relation to time and space, one which seemingly makes us feel out of sync with the represented experience. Standing within the installation, contra the actual activity, we are struck by the uncanny presence of time. The felt slowness of looking at the work of art – wondering what it means and where it is taking us – forces itself upon us, causing us to lose our way. Kuhn plays with our sense of time and space and in so doing brings the viewer into interaction with a plurality of temporalities, and greater awareness about the ways in which we structure our engagement with self and others relative to our experience of time and space.
Our daily lives and relations in the modern West are organized, indeed colonized, by the pressures of clock time. As writer and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen astutely points out, today the anxious demands for perpetual activity, be it work or leisure, are woven into the guilt-ridden fabric of existence. ‘Nothing is ever fundamentally “off” and there is never an actual state of rest’. For those of us living under the sway of this so called ‘tyranny of doing’, the fantasy of total control looms large. Yet the promise of peace seems to hinge on a paradox: work frantically in order to get a break from work only so that you can remain active: to follow, like, upload, improve and adjust; keep up with your personal projects, exercise routines, diet regimes, latest Netflix series, political debates, the list goes on. In our modern consumer culture, as Cohen proposes, individuals operate an endless to do list in constant fast forward mode. But what if we were to stop doing and controlling and start being?
Kuhn’s idiosyncratic approach echoes this prevailing dilemma and challenges the privileged place afforded to the overactive and task oriented life in our culture. Her creative practice furnishes us with valuable ways of thinking about the ways in which our social and psychic experiences are organized vis-à-vis technology, and what might go missing in our subjective experience of self and others as a result of this constant distraction and choice. In the encounter with Kuhn’s works of art, time and purpose become suspended, as though to provide an intermediate region of being which sits boldly between states and within indeterminacy, resisting the violence of binary logic (off/on, right/left, male/female, active/passive). This leitmotif animates Kuhn’s piece We Dare to Say Many Things at Once from 2015, comprising a series of delicate watercolours in which two different words with similar pronunciations are faintly embossed. Thrust into ambivalence when reading ‘No’ and ‘Know’, ‘Bye’ and ‘Buy’, for example, the viewer hovers on the edge of one meaning or another, and never quite allowed to settle into the security of either. A neutral space opens up, liberated from the value-laden categories and presuppositions of meaning and purpose.
This gesture has political and psychological implications. It brings into focus what happens if we allow ourselves to stay with an experience and do not evade it by organizing it into the cognizable. Then, and only then, might something quite unexpected and novel about ourselves and the world of others slowly emerge inside us. Getting lost, as Kuhn’s artistic works beautifully stage and disclose, to recall the words of Solnit, is to welcome what is unfamiliar within the familiar with empathy and to inhabit this space of uncertainty peacefully.
iv. Some everyday acts and expressions of our love making:
kissing your runny nose, observing you and being seen, folding the laundry without you noticing, touching your cock and feeling moved, thinly slicing banana in your musli, listening to you and sensing I am heard.
Twilight zone
1. an intermediate area where two different ways of life or states of existence meet; for example, the twilight zone between life and death, fantasy and reality, love and hatred
2. An uncertain or mysterious state or condition
Dancing in the twilight zones of our relationship. It took time to learn this choreography of difference, to create and discover the tonality in which all the colours and beauty of our peculiar movements open into view: a combination of Salsa and Schubert, word and image, collision and creation, passion and fury, oat milk and almond, understanding and ignorance, togetherness and separateness, Jonny's classic mustard and Dijon. Syncopated love rhythm.
Level: Advanced.
"Any part of the body susceptible of becoming excited, of being a seat of pleasure, is an erotogenic zone. Freud nevertheless used the term to refer primarily to a number of specific areas, notably, the genitals, mouth, and anus. These zones he saw as locations of particular instincts known as "component instincts.""
I would like to navigate these mysterious zones with you for a long time.
All Our False Devices is the title of Piotrowska’s new show at Tate Britain, I read in passing as I wait for the bus to take me to the airport; meanwhile, I am enjoying lightly roasted lightly salted almonds, lightly.
_All_our_false_devices_
It is such a brilliant title. It is taken from a Philip Larkin poem, the article tells me. Piotrowska. Joanna. I cannot picture the time when you first mentioned her name to me. I only remember the aftereffect, powerfully: words melting into liquid desire. The syrup of love.
We never made it to Tate Britain. Perhaps we were not ready for all that history then. We needed total presence, modern art, an anti-gravitational love. Our false device.
‘Family constellations’ is your term. I can remember when you first used it to describe your work for me. That was before This is Farewell was born. Interestingly, the article tells me 'Family constellations’ is also the name of a method employed by an alternative group therapy, in which the positioning of bodies in relation to one another is subject to analysis.
All our false ideas are located in the superego, says the psychoanalyst Neville Symington, drawing on Freud (superego: the internalized critical voices of our parents, society, morality, and the grandiose self, inflating and persecuting us from within). Our perception of the world and engagement with others are riddled with fantasies and illusions. They emerge, well disguised, like phantoms of the past stalking us during our darkest hours.
_All_our_false_devices_
What is a defence if not a device? A device of the unconscious: Supreme Instrument of Distortion. 'How do we live with the things we do not want to know?’ (Deborah Levy). Defend, deflect, evade, avoid, escape, expel, compel, propel, project.
’“Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged,” a man tells the narrator in the opening lines of Duras’s The Lover. For many years, I took these to be the words of a wise man.’
These are the words of Maggie Nelson, in Bluets. They linger within me long after I have put down her exquisite little book on my pillow. Ravaged. I want to be loved like Duras’s Woman.
'Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular tangled up historical individuals, but to respect the universal reason in their breasts.’ This is precisely why, for Iris Murdoch, Kant (although 'marvellously near’), misses the mark in his ethics and philosophy of aesthetics.
You used to find it irritating that I cared so much about age. The - younger - age of others. “How old?”, I would ask, contemptuously, whenever you spoke about someone - female - new.
In order to answer your question I will, inevitably, necessarily, deploy a false device: to conceal the deep seated fears elicited in me by the passage of time - the ageing body - anxiety of loss and losing - from which my question, in truth, does stem.
But truth is never one, as Nietzsche so wisely proclaimed; truth begins with two. I think, in fact, it starts with three. I turn to Rebecca Solnit to approach this other truth. Her words seem to convey better than mine the reason within my passion. The reality inside my fantasy (defence) reads as follows, in Solnit’s words: “The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing […] with the years of travel.”
But perhaps Murdoch’s philosophical imaginations - so intensely resonant with Freud’s - bring me even closer to the particular reason within my response. If love, as Murdoch writes, 'is the perception of individuals’, that is, 'the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’; and if, as the vast literature of psychoanalytic theory affirms, the discovery of reality (the other) as distinguished from fantasy (the self) is integral to the maturational process, then it must follow that age is of essence to the experience of truth and ethics. A crucial (though not exclusive) aspect of love rests on the capacity to suspend our self projections and bear the devastating reality with which we are faced: the irreducible difference of the other person. Hence why, for Murdoch, contra Kant, the highest freedom is, by nature, and in its very essence, tragic.
Good parenting is not about achieving perfect attunement with the baby. Misattunement and disturbance, as Winnicott emphasizes, are fundamental to the relationship between individuals. In other words, the issue is not whether we can avoid frustration but whether we have sufficient resources - the capacity - to survive it. Herein lies the highest freedom. Tolerance of separateness: reality, tragedy.
Murdoch’s thoughts on love, ethics and art, also chime closely with the writings of Simone Weil, the French mystic, for whom 'The soul empties itself [se vide] of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.’
From this perspective, then, with Murdoch and Freud (and followers) in mind, attention can be seen as love, a feature of maturity, for just as maturity involves a long and tortuous process of separation, disappointment and loss - the relinquishing of infantile illusions and the omnipotent self - love requires the difficult recognition of a reality outside of the self. Love is never total and maturity is never complete, but their very unfolding, nonetheless, is contingent on time passing. In other words, to love, it would seem, is to experience the trauma of time, ageing.
Your favourite colour is blue. I admit, I did not care much for blue until I met you. But your ripped light blue jeans did it for me, that summer in the yellow and blue countryside. Perhaps the different versions of blue, in you and me, are springs of desire. In which case the desire will grow, as the blue expands with time, with the complexities and conflicts traversed, like Solnit said. Ravaged reality. Tragic freedom.
Four things I miss about you, particularly; deeply, joyfully, sometimes longingly, though not compulsively:
i. The small patch of skin which lives just below your cheekbones, not far from your jawline, bordering onto the curl of your smile. That is the softest place I have ever known.
ii. Holding your head in my hands and stroking it gently back and forth. I always thought to myself it felt like the surface of a golden kiwi. My piano teacher used to say I had long fingers like a pianist; I think maybe I just have hands the size of your head.
iii. Crawling into bed, a bed shared between two, our bed, and letting my body realign itself to the landscape that is yours. A ritual which, needless to say, it knows by heart: how to hook into your legs, where to rest my head on your ecstatic chest, when to settle my left hand on the curve of your collarbone, or clavicle, from the Latin: clavicula ("little key") because the bone rotates along its axis like a key when the shoulder is abducted. Lastly what level of proximity to establish between my tummy and the swerve of your always so slightly overheated body. I imagine the battery of an alarm clock slots into its compartment a bit like this, finding a home in time. Our bodies must have plenty to say while we are sleeping.
A young woman, I shall call her Eliza, is sitting next to a young man, whom I shall refer to as Ethan. They seem to be of a similar age, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, and it is clear from the way in which they are seated, close to each other and holding hands, that they are a romantic couple. They are travelling by coach to the airport furthest away from central Stockholm. Eliza is wearing blue jeans and a cream coloured woollen jumper, her boots are sturdy but smart looking and her brown hair is neatly tied up in a bun. She looks confident and self-assured. Ethan is wearing a generic dark coloured jumper and black jeans. The observed interaction begins just after Eliza has come off the phone with her mother.
Ethan: I still can’t understand anything [he chuckles]. No, actually, I think I understood a little – “dobzhe”, that means “good” right?
Eliza: Yeah, “dobry”, it can mean a lot of things. Like “ladny”, which also means nice. But it’s pronounced differently depending on if it’s a person or a thing. For example, if I say “it tastes good”, or “she’s nice”… [She continues to explain the various uses of the word in detail]
Ethan: Oh so it’s like for an item or object?
Eliza: Exactly.
There is a short silence.
Ethan: Good chat with your mum?
Eliza: Yeah, always good chat with her. We always have good talks.
Ethan: Ah good. That’s what I like to hear [He is stroking her hand gently, silently]
Do you think it’s good business this – going back and forth to the airport?
Eliza: Yeah I think it’s good, not only for the shuttle bus to this airport – all capitals have the same system. But this company benefits from it being the only mode of transport to the airport. No trains go there. So they have a monopoly […]
Eliza takes out her phone and is looking at a ‘story’ on Instagram. Ethan leans over to have a look, still caressing her hand.
Ethan: Where is that?
Eliza: Canada.
Ethan: Where in Canada?
Eliza: I don’t know.
Ethan: Cos there’s the English speaking part and the French speaking part.
Eliza: Eh, yeah.. of course, I know that. I went to school you know, I know about the world. We go to school in Poland too!
Ethan: Oh really? I didn’t think so. So you know how the world works then?
Eliza: Yeah.
He smiles and humours her cheerfully, still caressing her hand, his body snuggled up beside her. They start planning their week and Eliza checks the calendar on her phone.
Ethan: Sure, you can see your friends on Friday, that’s absolutely fine with me. I can see you on the weekend. I’m around.
Eliza: I’m working Monday and Tuesday 9-5, Thursday 2-8. You’re off Sunday right?
Ethan: Monday.
Eliza: Oh right.
Ethan: So Saturday? When do you find out your schedule? […] Yeah, yeah that’s cool.
Eliza: Do you have plans Monday?
Ethan: No, just going to be off. If you’re free…and if the trains are running…
Eliza: You do what you need to.
Ethan: Yeah, I'll wait to see what you say.
Both on their phones, but Eliza looks more engrossed in the activity. Ethan is staring at his phone rather purposelessly. As they are approaching the airport, Eliza gathers her things and puts on her coat in preparation.
Ethan: You checked in?
Eliza: Yeah [her voice sounds impatient]
Ethan: So we just go straight in. Easy.
As if noticing her sharp tone of voice, retrospectively, she gives him a little cuddle. They speak inaudibly and suddenly Eliza exclaims:
Yes! 2-1. Winner, that’s me [pointing at herself triumphantly].
Ethan smiles, but does not say anything.
Outside the bus Eliza heads straight for the luggage compartment. She locates their bags within seconds and points to them.
Eliza: They’re there. One over there and the other one is behind.
She takes a step back, to allow him to go ahead and collect them.
Analysis:
As I conjure up the scene of these two adolescents in love and in conversation, I am struck afresh by the same sense of nostalgia which I felt at the time of the observation. The image of this outwardly self-possessed and poised Eastern European princess on a journey with her doting and starry-eyed young prince, taps into my personal narrative of adolescent love, evoking within me a sense of poignancy and pain; a curious fantasy of familiarity and kindred minds.
Within a minute or two of observing the contact between Eliza and Ethan and listening to their dialogue, I was overcome by a powerful feeling that I already knew the power dynamics of their relationship; I could foresee the inevitable calamity and heartbreak that is built into the choreography of their complementary dance. Of course, I soon became aware of how intensely coloured these presumptions were by my own psychical templates and interpersonal experiences from infancy onward. That said, by the same token, this spontaneous reaction of mine – bearing in mind with vigilance its subjective and affective quality – seemed to provide a useful instrument for the observation; a way in, as it were, to the internal worlds of Eliza and Ethan and their romantic relationship.
The journey of human development is by no means simple. The path toward psychosexual maturity, as Freud astutely proposed, is a long and precarious undertaking for all human beings. Twisting through the plethora of infantile desires, wishes, impulses, obstacles, deprivations, identifications, satisfactions and loss, its course depends on the negotiation of a highly complicated set of developmental stages and processes in early childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The successful transition from one phase to the next is determined by a unique combination of fortuitous and constitutional factors – a mixture, if you like, of our innate genetic makeup and the dynamics of our lived experiences and relations with others and within the self.
According to Freud, then, even the most seemingly unobtrusive symptoms and pointless actions (much like parapraxes, jokes, gestures and dreams) have an intention and bear a connection to the person’s past experiences. In other words, the secret of neurosis in general is that the symptoms, however vicariously, are closely connected to the person’s innermost phantasies and early experiences of sexual life.[1] ‘Sucking at the mother’s breast’, Freud explained, ‘is the starting-point of the whole sexual life […] This sucking involves making the mother’s breast the first object of the sexual instinct.’[2] By discovering what he believed to be the sexual causation of neuroses Freud radically extended the concept of sexuality.
Central to this Freudian thesis was the fact that we must relinquish our first and primary love-object (typically this is the mother) in order to be able to advance to a sexually fulfilling and affectionate non-incestuous love relationship as an adult. In effect of this renunciation, however, ‘the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it’[3] [emphasis mine]. Following up Freud’s formulations, perhaps a closer glance at the body language of Ethan and Eliza might offer a good point of entry to start understanding their ways of relating to each other psychoanalytically.
From the outset, Ethan’s body is somewhat bent and twisted toward Eliza – he strokes her hand fondly and remains seated in the same position of proximity throughout the journey. Meanwhile Eliza, adopting a more assertive stance, has a straight back and is faced at an angle away from Ethan in the direction of the bus. It is interesting to notice how the nature of their respective body languages mimic the different levels of engagement in their spoken conversation too. From what we observe, a structural imbalance of kind seems to permeate the relationship in multiple ways. While Ethan displays a keen interest in Eliza’s family and culture – he inquires about the Polish language and wants to know more about her conversation with mum – Eliza, on the other hand, seems to make minimal effort to reciprocate these gestures. Furthermore, it is Ethan who initiates conversation when they fall silent, he who suggests they meet up the following week, and he who listens attentively and responds to Eliza’s remarks and deliberations about the Polish word for nice and airport shuttle bus service.
On the surface, then, Ethan appears to be active and outspoken. His gratuitous engagement could be seen as a demonstration of the positive excitement and enthusiasm of being in love with someone whom he greatly admires – a harmless feature of the loving experience. Having said that, I wonder if Ethan’s propensity for ‘activity’ also signals a protective measure of the ego aimed at the avoidance of painful affects of passivation. His eagerness to adapt to Eliza’s schedule and to comply with her needs and demands (accepting her triumph, collecting their bags), parallels his accommodating body language and is suggestive of a denial of self – an unconscious subservient mode of defence against fear and anxiety about abandonment, the origins of which would date back to his childhood.
One could propose, in Freudian terms, that Ethan’s readiness to submit to Eliza’s mental organisation, through idealisation and his compliant attitude, provides him with a familiar way of sustaining psychic equilibrium, which must have taken precedence over the satisfaction of his individual desires and needs at some point in infancy. For one reason or another, something in early childhood might have prohibited Ethan from being able to freely express his wants and wishes to his primary carer – without fear of persecution – causing these incestuous wishful impulses to be forced into repression prematurely. This means that some psychical processes were denied satisfaction through discharge and cast out of consciousness; however, as we learn from reading Freud, in the dark and delirious unconscious they continue to grow and flourish, acting as a constant impediment to the adult’s libido and freedom.[4]
The patterns of behaviour we notice in Ethan might well be manifestations of benign defenses that help us to adapt to reality. My own experience of love – and retrospective exploration of my own role in that dynamic: as the idealised object – has made me deeply conscious of the subtle line between healthy admiration and violent idealisation, while also being cautious about how easily exploited that position of idealised object can be, albeit unconsciously. What is more, as I witnessed the interaction between these two lovers, the irritation and impatience in Eliza’s voice seemed agonizingly tangible. Clearly – or at least that was my impression – she is an educated, intelligent and competent young woman, but equally evident was that she seemed unaware of the impact of her words and actions on her loved one (with the exception of that one significant moment in the interaction, after her abrupt sounding ‘yeah’, when she gave Ethan a little hug).
Speculatively, one might draw from this relative lack of sensibility and tendency toward omnipotence – revealed in the way she asserts, and indeed prioritizes, her needs and wishes over Ethan’s – that circumstances were ‘good enough’ (to borrow Winnicott’s term) during her childhood. Perhaps, unlike Ethan, as a child she was freer to act and exist without taking into careful consideration the other’s separate existence and personal interests. Her phone call to her mum (the close attachment they seem to have) suggests possibly that family members for Eliza can be taken for granted, approached more or less as things that exist in service of her own needs – as blank screens onto which we are allowed to project and express all our anger, wants and needs without undue punishment.
In a different but related vein, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin writes that: ‘The ability to enter into exchange with the outside object implies a successful shift from the pleasure principle, self-containment in phantasy, toward the reality principle. That is, the individual’s entrance into a shared reality of creative inter-relationships built on mutual recognition and exchange.[5]
Having recognised this curious conjunction between the mother’s care and her baby’s sexual activity, we are arguably in a better position to appreciate how Freud’s remark on incest helps us understand how in various ways both Eliza and Ethan remain under the sway of the pleasure principle, lodged within the incestuous family matrix: a milieu, which as Luce Irigaray so pertinently puts it, ultimately favours cohesion and unity over difference and desire.[6] Together, Eliza’s competitive and perhaps somewhat inflated self-perception, and Ethan’s compliant approach and underlying sense of inadequacy, seem to complement each other in a dyadic structure which is both fragile and romantic.
[1] Sigmund Freud, (1917) Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis: XVII, p. 257
[2] Freud, (1917) Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis: XX, p. 314
[3] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, S.E. 11, p. 189
[4] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, pp. 169-171
[5] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 37-38
Hysteria is a vast topic; its connotations are fraught and variegated, ranging from the supernatural to the sexual, the photographic to the psychiatric. Having once been defined as a physiological female disorder caused by a ‘wandering womb’, hysteria radically transformed in the late 19th century into a public sensation with Jean-Martin Charcot’s display of hysterics at the Salpêtrière women’s hospital in Paris. Providing a primary model for the study of the neuroses, hysteria was central to the birth and development of Freudian psychoanalysis. Since then, the notion has been subject to numerous historical accounts and modern feminist critiques. Needless to say, hysteria remains a contentious term laden with possibilities and prejudices.
The plethora of books, papers and articles generated by this significant subject-matter seems to render my present task of writing about hysteria an exhilarating yet impossible challenge. I find myself compelled to acknowledge, from the outset, the inevitable failure of mine to do justice to the richness and complexity of the term – the historical, cultural and socio-political vicissitudes of which stretch far beyond the scope of this essay. For the sake of conceptual precision, while heeding my strong personal interest in the field, I have chosen to limit myself to a classical psychoanalytic framework in order to present my understanding of the concept.
I hope to show how the case of hysteria, as it was explored and elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his early writings up until, and including, the first edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), laid the foundation for the modern revolution in our psychoanalytic understanding of human sexuality and psychic temporality. More to the point, I will argue that by examining the expressions and roots of hysterical phenomena in his patients, Freud’s clinical observations of psychopathology enabled him to uncover something rudimentary about the temporal nature of sexuality and its constitutive role in the aetiology of the neuroses and the structure of human subjectivity.
I begin, then, by way of departure, with an extract from Freud’s third case study of a young woman named Katharina as it seems to me to encapsulate in a condensed form one of the characteristics of the hysteric’s internal predicament. As we shall see, it was through the lens of memories in the analyses and case histories of hysterical patients that Freud would arrive at his early inferences about the intimate relationship between temporality and sexuality in psychic life.
‘I came away from the window at once, and I leant up against the wall and couldn’t get my breath – just what happens to me since. Everything went blank, my eyelids were forced together and there was a hammering and buzzing in my head.’
‘Did you tell your aunt that very same day?’
‘Oh no, I said nothing.’
‘Then why were you so frightened when you found them together? Did you understand it? Did you know what was going on?’
Oh no, I didn’t understand anything at that time. I was only sixteen. I don’t know what I was frightened about.’
‘Fraülein Katharina, if you could remember now what was happening in you at that time, when you had your first attack, what you thought about it – it would help you.’
‘Yes, if I could. But I was so frightened that I’ve forgotten everything.’ (SE 2, p. 128)
A perplexing state of affairs; memories of a scene that evoked powerful feelings of distress, the contents of which have since been forgotten and remained inaccessible to conscious thought. ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (SE 3, p. 7). Like an explorer; guided by the trail of his patient’s neurotic symptoms and traumatic memories – including their ambiguous gaps and absences – Freud embarked upon a laborious journey to unravel the psychic conundrums of a young woman suffering from intense anxieties and hallucinatory confusions.
Under Freud’s piercing observation, on the top of a mountain in the Austrian alps, Katharina presents him with a picture of her ‘hysterical attacks’: her crushing breathlessness, the pressing sensation on her throat and eyes, the spell of uninterrupted vomiting, her incessant fear of death and recurrent visions of a terrifying face. The source of her troubles are unknown to Katharina; however, on questioning she is able to recall that they first occurred two years ago. This provides Freud with an important clue which permitted him to suggest that ‘two years ago you must have seen or heard something that very much embarrassed you, and that you’d much rather not have seen’. ‘Heavens yes!’, Katharina replied, ‘that was when I caught my uncle with the girl, with Franziska, my cousin.’ (SE 2, p. 127)
But Katharina’s first recollection is vague and can neither explain the persistence nor the specific character of her symptoms; to paraphrase Freud, the scene lacked the relevant suitability to serve as a determinant and it fails to possess the necessary traumatic force. In order to unpack the meaning of this statement perhaps we need to pause for a moment and examine in greater detail the preconditions responsible for the onset of hysteria. Following Freud, ‘we must take our start from Joseph Breuer’s momentous discovery’, namely that ‘the symptoms of hysteria are determined by certain experiences of the patient’s which have operated in a traumatic fashion and which are being reproduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemic symbols’ (SE 3, p. 193). These experiences – as evinced by the extract – ‘are completely absent from the patients’ memory when they are in a normal psychical state, or are only present in a highly summary fashion’ (SE 2, p. 9).
Deeply indebted to Breuer, Freud proposed that it was in the memory-traces of these experiences that the precipitating causes of the hysterical symptoms could be determined; evocatively articulated as such: ‘the memory of the trauma, acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work’ (SE 2, p. 6). In other words, ‘The memories which have become the determinants of hysterical phenomena’ are withdrawn from the hysteric’s disposal and yet ‘persist for a long time with astonishing freshness and with their whole affective colouring’ (SE 2, p. 9). Here is much food for thought. What is it that grants an event its traumatic effectiveness? And how come the traumatic event is subject to a process of amnesia?
We are reminded of Freud’s fourth case study which might shed some light on these questions. It is the twenty four year old Fraulein Elisabeth von R., who by the time of her first interview with Freud had been suffering for more than two years from a mysterious fatigue and indefinite pains in her legs. Puzzled by this deceptively self-possessed woman – ‘she seemed intelligent and mentally normal and bore her troubles, which interfered with her social life and pleasures, with a cheerful air – the belle indifférence of a hysteric’ (SE 2, p. 135) – Freud suspected that Elisabeth in fact was ‘conscious of the basis of her illness’. He was initially ‘unable to grasp the connection between the events in her illness and her actual symptom’ and was led to believe that ‘what she had in her consciousness was only a secret and not a foreign body’. (SE 2, pp. 138-139).
But Freud persevered with Elisabeth, uncovering layer upon layer of ‘wearisome’ memories, until both the causes and determinants of her symptoms were explained and it was clear to Freud that Elisabeth had no recollection of the painful experience which lay at the heart of her illness:
“This girl felt toward her brother-in-law a tenderness whose acceptance into consciousness was resisted by her whole moral being. She succeeded in sparing herself the painful conviction that she loved her sister’s husband, by inducing physical pains in herself instead: and it was in the moments when this conviction sought to force itself upon her […] that her pains had come on, thanks to successful conversion.” (SE 2, p. 157)
So intolerable was this idea, and the attached affect, that Elisabeth ‘decided to forget about it’ (SE 3, p. 48). The mental process was one where the idea was deliberately repressed from consciousness (SE 2, p. 213). The unbearable idea remained but it could be defended against by becoming detached from its affect and ‘rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic’ (SE 3, p. 49) According to this view suggested by Freud’s conversion theory of hysteria, ideas eliciting intense excitation must have come into conflict with the ego which frustrated the opportunity for discharge through thought-activity (abreaction). The sum of excitation belonging to the incompatible ideas was effectively relegated to the unconscious, and the somatic symptom which arose instead acted as a substitute for the repressed affective idea. Since no idea can be eliminated: ‘Her love for her brother-in-law was present in her consciousness like a foreign body, without having entered into relationship with the rest of her ideational life’. (SE 2, p. 165).
Perhaps now is a good point to return to our thoughts on Katharina. Gradually, as Freud allowed Katharina speak freely, while listening attentively to her words, a set of older related stories began to emerge. She remembered earlier occasions on which the same uncle had made sexual advances to her herself, recollecting a further chain of ‘auxiliary scenes’ from various points in time, all of which concerned Franziska and herself and were ‘interconnected like genealogical trees’ (SE 3, p. 197). Indeed to paraphrase Breuer, her hysterical symptoms were, in typical fashion, ‘overdetermined’ (SE 2, p. 212).
Through this web of Katharina’s interlaced and ramified memories, Freud was finally able to trace his way back to the precipitating cause of her symptoms. The understanding of her case rested on the following important discovery: ‘At that time she carried about with her two sets of experiences which she remembered but did not understand, and from which she drew no inferences [italics mine]. When she caught sight of the couple in intercourse, she at once established a connection between the new impression and these two sets of recollections, she began to understand them and at the same time to fend them off’ (SE 2, p. 131).
Thrusting us straight to the crux of our questions, we begin to discern the intersections between psychical trauma and amnesia. All the provoking scenes from Katharina’s case history (scene 1: witnessing her uncle and Franziska in intercourse, scene 2 and 3: her uncle’s advances toward Katharina), are loaded with traumatic effectiveness and united by a paradoxical logic of absence. The scenes subsist and thrive (in the unconscious) by virtue of, as it were, their disappearance and disguise (from consciousness). In more technical terms, through the process of repression, the memory-traces of the scenes form a separated psychical group within the ego – a foreign body – which remains in isolation from the thought-activity of the ego. As Freud aptly illustrated in the ‘Project’: ‘The hysteric, who weeps at A, is quite unaware that he is doing so on account of the association A-B, and B itself plays no part at all in his psychical life.’ (SE 1, p. 349).
We know by now that hysterical symptoms ‘arise through the psychical mechanism of unconscious defence’ (SE 3, p. 162) – ‘a sine qua non for the acquisition of hysteria’. But clinical experiences also taught Freud that repression is brought to bear invariably on ideas from sexual life. ‘The aetiology of hysteria lies in sexual life’ (SE 3, p. 199). In other words, the incompatible idea which is ‘fended off’ or ‘cut off’ from conscious activity – ‘lodging itself in consciousness like a parasite’ (SE 3, p. 49) – is of a sexual nature. We are reminded of Elisabeth’s ‘peculiar situation of knowing and at the same time not knowing’ (SE 2, p. 165). Following Freud in his investigations into the individual histories of hysterical patients, it cannot fail to be noticed how the search for the cause of hysterical phenomena leads us in roundabout ways to the intricate and opaque sphere of the patients’ psychosexuality. What is more, for Katharina and Elisabeth, the significance of these sexual events, it would seem, lies in the amnesia, or terrifying loss of understanding, which accompanies them; it is the condition upon which a defensive splitting of the mind is brought about. Let us turn to Freud’s thoughts in the ‘Project’ for clarification.
‘No sexual experiences produce any effect so long as the subject is ignorant of all sexual feeling – in general, that is, till the beginning of puberty’ (SE 1, p. 333). And further, ‘We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action. The cause of this state of things is the retardation of puberty as compared with the rest of the individual’s development’ (SE 1, p. 356). Freud was referring to Emma who suffered from a compulsion of not being able to go into shops alone. This compulsion, she thought, must stem from the time she was twelve and entered a shop and saw two shop-assistants laughing together which made her run away in a fright (one of whom had pleased her sexually). Through the analysis, Emma recollected that she had been seduced by a shopkeeper grabbing her through her clothes at the age of eight. Much like Katharina, who ‘had not been disgusted by the sight of the two people but by the memory which that sight had stirred up in her’ (SE 2, p. 131), this experience did not produce any consequences at the time; only later, after Emma had entered sexual maturity did the experience with the shopkeeper gain proper meaning. (SE 1, pp. 353-356).
‘Analysis has led to the surprising conclusion: for every compulsion there is a corresponding repression, that for every excessive intrusion into consciousness there is a corresponding amnesia’ (SE 1, p. 350). Long before his theory of infantile sexuality, Freud was exploring ideas about the deferred temporality of physical trauma and the conditions of sexuality in childhood. When he wrote that ‘it is only ideas with a sexual content that can be repressed’ (SE 3, p. 166), he seemed to corroborating that ‘It is precisely sexual life which brings with it the most copious occasions for the emergence of incompatible ideas’ (SE 3, p. 52). By alluding to the impossibility of making sense of sexual feelings in early childhood, Freud gestured toward the powerful forces of repression in infantile experiences of sexual conflict and their unconscious revival in the period of the illness.
It must be remembered that at the time of writing his case histories, Freud still claimed that the sexual traumas of early childhood required ‘an actual irritation of the genitals’ (SE 2, p. 163), as yet failing to distinguish between his patient’s phantasies of childhood seduction and their real recollections. At this point, then, according to Freud, ‘the awakening of the child’s sexual life’ (Freud, 1905, p. 50) had to be a result of external causes. Interestingly, despite the significance and universality Freud attributed to the aetiological role of seduction, and its implicit premise of pre-sexuality, much of the subsequent reasoning employed by Freud and later proponents of psychoanalysis was present in its embryonic form. After all, ‘the pre-sexual period’ of Katharina’s life corresponded to a time of ignorance; when she ‘was not yet capable of coping with sexual experiences’ and before ‘she has acquired an understanding of sexual life’ as a girl or married woman. (SE 2, p. 133).
To summarise, then, for Freud the sexual events occurring before ‘sexual maturity’ (SE 3, p. 165) owe their traumatic effectiveness to their unintelligibility, and resulting repression, at the time of the event. The repressed affective response is re-activated later when new events resonate with or come into associative connection with these earlier events. It is now – that is, after sexual maturity – that the hysterical symptom is formed, and the illness breaks out, as a defence against the revival of the original affect. By means of the hysterical symptom, the distressing affective ideas belonging to the whole chain of events, is pushed away, repressed once again. The symptom thus fascinatingly provides a way of simultaneously avoiding the original conflict of coming back in consciousness, by disguising it, and finding a somatic outlet for the affect aroused by it. (SE 2, pp. 205-207).
The boundary between ignorance and knowledge, past and present, are intensely problematised by Freud. He reveals how early sexual experiences – be they internal or external – operate as a trauma unconsciously and retrospectively due to their premature intrusion; and in so doing, Freud not only expands our understanding of the fundamental aetiological factor of sexuality, but early on in the history of psychoanalysis is able to recognise the hysterical disposition as ‘something innate in all human beings’ – ‘a disposition which may vary in its intensity and may lie dormant, waiting to be brought to the fore by life experiences’ (Freud, 1905, p. 32).
Mindful of this, it seems to me that a return to hysteria can have profound value in contemporary psychoanalytic debates concerning the desexualisation of psychoanalysis today. On this topic, Mary Target interestingly asserts that there is a reluctance in modern psychoanalytic circles to consider seriously the power of psychosexuality in adult life. Veering away from the pillars of classical Freudian theory, she explains how the key to psychopathology is located almost exclusively in the relationship realm. (Target, 2015, pp. 43-62)
‘Every adolescent individual has memory-traces which can only be understood with the emergence of sexual feelings of his own; and accordingly every adolescent must carry the germ of hysteria within him.’ (SE 1, p. 356). The kernel of Freud’s radically deconstructive thoughts on psychosexuality and psychoneurosis are there from the start. Born without a fully developed capacity for thought-activity, we all contain memory-traces of conflictual psychosexual experiences which once defied understanding and thus were repressed. As such we necessarily contain the conditions of possibility for a ‘hysterical reaction’ at a later stage in life. Inescapably susceptible to the powerful forces of the unconscious – the return of the repressed – ‘We are all a little hysterical’ (Freud, 1905, p. 32).
Freud, S. (1893) Studies on Hysteria. Standard Edition Volume 2, pp. 1-222. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press (1955)
Freud, S. (1893) On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: A Lecture. Standard Edition Volume 3, pp. 25-39. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press (1962)
Freud, S. (1896) Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. Standard Edition Volume 3, pp. 157-185. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press (1962)
Freud, S. (1894) The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. Standard Edition Volume 3, pp. 41-61. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press (1962)
Freud, S. (1896) The Aetiology of Hysteria. Standard Edition Volume 3, pp. 187-221. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press (1962)
Freud, S. (1950 [1895]) Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition Volume 1, pp. 281-391. London: Vintage/The Hogarth Press (1966)
Freud, S. (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition. Trans. Ulrike Kistner, Ed. Philippe Van Haute and Herman Westerink. London: Verso (2016)
Target, M. (2015) A Developmental Model of Sexual Excitement, Desire and Alienation in Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Ed. Alessandra Lemma & Paul E. Lynch, pp. 43-62. New York: Routledge (2015)
I hear you K. I GET that you’ve put a lid on yourself, all this time; that you’ve denied, however inadvertently, some of your personal needs; confused some of your own wants and desires with those of mine. I hear you explain, time and again how every choice you make, every decision you’re obliged to take —“the struggle of living!”— is trapped in this fearsome prison of judgment. More importantly, I get that you FEEL deafened by the sweet sounding but muddling voice of the beloved self that resounds inside you, and that is me.
“It’s not your fault, L”, I repeat to myself in the silent room of my empty flat. I know that now. The silence carries a breath of sadness and relief, like a bearer of truth that gently alleviates the absence of your familiar sobs of self deprecation.
“But perhaps I am too demanding?”, I ponder further in the dark.
I do, after all, wish that you love and affirm whatever I say; eat healthy food instead of shitty burgers; surprise me with pretty flowers. I ask that you hang up the shelves in a straight line; glue together my broken tile with utmost care; schedule your work trip for Sunday instead of Saturday; make an effort with your mum and dad and stop sulking in the corner; keep those beautiful pecks of yours deliciously pumped.
It’s hard being a person, isn’t it?
Even harder having to live up to that ideal —K the mighty— on whom we all depend for answers. Being a person is not easy, being an image seems impossible. But ah, not so fast. Look again and something else begins to appear: might the impossible image be the easier route after all? Hide behind the ideal and don’t be spurned; remain the helpless child for longer, ensnared in the nest of ego and self-protective relations with others.
Yes K: consciousness is responsibility.
“After being – doing and being done to. But first, being”, writes D.W. Winnicott.
To carry around a defensive body armour on an empty stomach must be exhausting. Even for a Russian soldier. This incorrigible confusion between self and other; inner and outer; fantasy and reality: that is the deadliest source of all your violence.
The controlling, oppressive power that you exert on Her is veiled in an appearance of absolute and ethical love. To hell with that. I want real, naked love.
—
Everything I do is for “her” —her, her, her— the One; Most High; Being; the Word. “I’ve lived and lost myself for her”.
Poor, sweet K.
But there’s more, the echoes of a shell of self in disguise:
“I think I like those black Adidas trainers. I wonder if she would like them too? Do I like them or does she? Who am I pleasing? Who am I? Losing myself in the other.”
Whatsapp received. Confirmed. VISA card accepted. Great. I AM those Adidas black trainers. She will carry the weight of my decisions, this precarious being of mine: a ticking bomb.
Can’t bare to make a mistake, to be a disappointment. Let’s find a solution. Yes: I’ll think and act as if I’ve failed before I start mending the tile, hanging up the shelf, booking the ticket, or (not) buying the flowers. I’ll preempt that feeling of failure, avert the attention away from the task and avoid responsibility for the potential outcome. Situation controlled.
I envy her. Her difference. Do I resent her for it? Of course not! How ludicrous. Let’s suppress in her, as well as myself, this childish jealousy which I neither have the courage nor strength to confront. Let it fester inside: tick tock, tick tock…
“What’s your opinion on Putin’s alliance with Assad?”, she asks me one evening. I see her eyes reaching out for my total, flawless, educated, insightful, PERFECT engagement. (Her: “Really K?”)
I shut down.
She’s disappointed, silenced, upset, confused, diminished. I didn’t want to hurt her. But I can’t stop now; got to keep the familiar, fragile ego in tact. Situation controlled.
I’ll do the work of being disappointed with myself – it’s safer that way; it’s the only way. My mother and father didn’t often tell me I was wrong or right, good or bad. I don’t know what it feels like to be a disappointment and/or a reward who SURVIVES, LOVES AND IS LOVED in conflict.
What a fucking mess.
—
Gillian Rose: “The child who is able to explore that border [between fantasy and actuality] will feel safe in experiencing violent, inner, emotional conflict, and will acquire compassion for other people. The child who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play [with the parent] will be left terrified and paralyzed by its emotions, unable to release or face them, for they may destroy the world and himself and herself. The censor aggravates the syndrome he seeks to alleviate; he seeks to rub out in others the border which has been effaced inside himself.”
This is one of my favourite passages.
—
I won’t tread gently around the sharp edges of your glass coffin K
I need more
much more: less than perfect
a person
who desires
and loves the woman I am: strong, caring, beautiful, educated, confident, compassionate, truthful, sensitive, good; impatient, impulsive, unsure, hysterical, demanding, nasty, selfish, secretive, boring, repetitive, bad, and
willing
willing
“Do you hear me, K?”
willing
to collide, give up, take in, surrender to the infinite work of two beyond twoness
Let me begin by reading to you a passage I came across on the Apps Shop on Google Play introducing ‘the world’s most popular dating app’ – O blessed, almighty, Tinder:
Tinder presents you with the most interesting people around you. You decide who can message you: no one can message you on Tinder unless you choose to swipe right on their profile (and they on yours). That means you only get messages from the people you like and that like you back. And, you can always unmatch with someone at any point. Everyone on Tinder is authenticated through Facebook. In addition to verifying identity, this also allows us to display things like common friends and common interests to give you context when you’re deciding whether to swipe right.
Sadly we don’t have time to linger in the vicinity of these lines; however I’d like us to try and keep them in mind while turning to some very different thoughts on love presented by the Belgium-born French philosopher and feminist Luce Irigaray and the French psychoanalyst Andre Green. By expanding our understanding of the nature of love, and, in particular, opening up a space in which to consider love’s essential bond with symbolic activity, I believe that both these thinkers call us to respond to the urgent and distinctive happenings of today in terms of the digitisation of human relations and romantic love. As we shall see, they give us rich and meaningful ways of thinking the more archaic, secret and phantasmal modes of reason to which the primordial vicissitudes of love initiated us in infancy and continue forever to question us and compel us.
In her book The Way of Love, Irigaray writes: ‘The rift between the other and me is irreducible. To be sure we can build bridges, join our energies, feast and celebrate encounters, but the union is never definitive, on pain of no longer existing. Union implies returning into oneself, moving away, dissenting, separating’. In other words, distanciation, a basic estrangement between self and other, is indispensible to the coming together of two subjectivities in love and communication. The unity of the loving relationship between two separate worlds, Irigaray asserts, is a creative process insofar as it gives birth to ‘a third world’; that is, ‘a work in common and space-time to be shared’; however, importantly, one which remains always open and incomplete, leaving to each term its specificity and its autonomy. Thus if we follow The Way of Love, it would seem, in short, the loving encounter necessarily involves a baffling modality of being, thinking and dialoguing with the other between the two.
Jean Baudrillard in The Agony of Power – a short but critical text on the repercussions of globalisation – observes with polemical acumen and panache that ‘We are in the process of sacrificing this symbolic reserve of incompleteness in favor of a totalization of life through technology and a depletion of all desire’. Needless to say, in the world of digitisation, the opportunities for self-exposure and instant gratification and communication seem endless. As Tinder persuasively attests: Gone are the dismal days of missed encounters, unobserved chances and lost personal and professional contacts. Now is the benevolent age of visibility, connectivity, efficiency and shareability, in which, in the name of progress and enjoyment, human desires are satiated and seized by the proliferation and constant revision of new technologies at our service.
Echoing Irigaray’s thoughts on the relationship between love and language (that is to say, language as a creative labour), Andre Green offers some thought-provoking reflections on the origin of this curious alliance, in terms of the primary matrix of the one and the other in the baby-mother relationship. What I want to suggest is that Irigaray and Green, by delving into the deeper layers of the mind, can help us better understand what is at stake in the dominant discourses of love and human relations today; more precisely, in what way the specific mechanisms of our computer-mediated communication tools might efface some of the fundamental conditions for love – namely those secret zones of experience and symbolic activity that remain fundamentally inaccessible and recalcitrant to understanding and yet simultaneously seem to be the very basis of human love and communication.
Like most proponents of modern psychoanalytic theory, Green recognises that the mother, or primary carer, plays a cardinal role in the originary process of symbolisation. The very earliest mode of mental activity, Green maintains – expanding on Freud’s final theory of the instincts in The Ego and the Id – is entirely disordered and characterised by conflicting instinctual impulses seeking discharge. It is important to note here that Green elucidates a useful distinction with regards to instinctual life, between, on the one hand, the binding processes of the instincts and passions that belong to primordial Eros, and, on the other hand, the unbinding processes of the destructive instincts with which the manifold drives of Eros are in constant conflict. At the beginning, when the infant lacks the basic cognitive schemes for binding, the mother alleviates the traumatic and potentially destructive effects of these instinctual conflicts, by providing a substitute ego, a container and a mirror for the newborn baby – a productive gap or interval, as it were, between the one and the other, which enables the transformation of this instinctual flux – or ‘original madness’ as Green would say – into products of creation: symbols. In the words of Green, ‘The creation of a symbol demands that two separate elements be reunited in order to form a third element which borrows its characteristics from the two others, but which will be different from the sum of these characters nonetheless.’
During this earliest time-space in a person’s life, it would seem, based on Green’s reflections, that we find ourselves in a highly precarious position: the infant exists in a permanent state of absolute susceptibility to the influence of the external (m)other’s care – the excess or lack thereof – as well as to the baby’s own internal forces of destructiveness, all of which overflow the nascent ego’s possibilities of containment and capacities for elaboration, and, in effect, render the ego constantly subject to the threat of a potential mobilisation of destructive instincts. Indeed (here comes the crucial part and it starts to get knotty) the presence of a ‘third’ element – in the form of an irreducible separation or rupture between the two – seems to be a constituent of the creative encounter with the other, providing both the boundary and protection against the threat of fusion while at the same time sustaining the necessary distance that allows, and moreover welcomes, the two to come together in the work of love. We begin to see how no dual relationship exists without some ‘other’ link establishing the relationship between the two. In effect, Green highlights with perspicuity what is a deeply paradoxical dimension of our primordial subjective modality in relation with the other, pushing us toward the very limits of analysability – a secret language which appears to signify affectively and otherwise than intelligibility.
Briefly, then, by way of conclusion, let us return to Tinder. The above passage is framed in a language that is steeped in traditional, totalising ideals of capacity, mastery, commonality, calculation, identity and satisfaction. The other person is framed quite explicitly as a resource or property for my own self-actualisation. Read alongside the thoughts of Irigaray and Green it seems to me that Tinder forces us to focus sharp attention on the extent to which the contemporary world and its irrefutable demands for efficiency and full transparency of intelligibility – risk curtailing the fundamental secrecy that subsists at the heart of the loving relation between two human beings as a condition of its own possibility. We remain embedded in a logic and language that seek comprehensive and certain understanding; no doubt, what emerges in such a ‘Tinder-oriented’ culture, operating as it does in an echo chamber of likeminded people, is a mirror-like closed work: a dual exchange – with two terms – opposite and symmetrical with each other. Without moralising for or against phenomena like Tinder perhaps we must insist on asking ourselves what happens to love’s secret work under the aegis of digitisation and the global order of transparency? How, in truth, does the possibility of loving and entering into dialogue with another person change when the relation itself is guided almost exclusively by the search for personal gratification and self-affirmation? It seems to me urgent that we pay heed to these questions and that we let ourselves be put into question by the movement they engender. For without disjunction and dissymmetry within the self and between the self and other, no third term is created, no symbolisation occurs and the precarious movement of love is surreptitiously cemented.
Presented at Thinking Love 2016 Conference with Luce Irigaray. Published in Odiseo Vol. 8, September 2016
‘When will I learn to speak?’ my friend sighed, as I rinsed away the black residue that lingered in bitter abandon at the bottom of our empty coffee cups. Breakfast was finished and so were my friend’s efforts to describe to me the tortuously abstract theory he was currently devising about the work of art, his work of art. He stood up, his hands now stretching toward the ceiling, as if to give thanks to the bare white walls that sheltered him with their confident neutrality and calm.
‘No, really, when will I learn to speak?’ he uttered again, in a gentle but daring voice – that particular tone of his, so immediate and familiar, and yet in the presence of which I still felt a touch of shyness. The soapy sink seemed suddenly to embody the agonising humour of his quiet despondency. I could hear the truth of his words; I could see its unbending cruelty and beauty appear right there in the midst of the dissipating bubbles of washing up liquid. As if compelled by this image and drawn along by an incessant desire to speak the words clamouring silently between us, I began writing.
Force of Fascination
‘To write is to let fascination rule language’, states Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature. ‘It is to stay in touch, through language, in language, with the absolute milieu where the thing becomes image again [and] where the image, instead of alluding to some particular feature, becomes an allusion to the featureless, and instead of a form drawn upon absence, becomes the formless presence of this absence, the opaque, empty opening onto that which is, when there is no more world, where there is no world yet’ (Blanchot, 1982, p. 33).
For Blanchot, writing begins in a moment of fascination – that is to say, only when the writer allows language to maintain or provoke contact with that point at which what one sees imposes itself upon the gaze, as if seeing were a kind of touch. Whoever is ‘fascinated’, inevitably abandons the world of reality, where the possibility of seeing presupposes distance and separation, and instead enters into the realm of fascination. Under this ‘spell’, we are robbed of our power to give sense and appearances touch us with an immediate proximity; they seize and ceaselessly draw us close, even as they leave us absolutely at a distance. What is given to us by this ‘contact at a distance’ is thus not the real object of real touching but rather the object as it collapses into its (imagined) image.
How, then, might these somewhat obscure thoughts on the force of fascination – this paradoxical movement whereby the writer comes into her own and simultaneously withdraws from the world – have any philosophical bearing on the question of the relationship between artistic activity and language? Does this secret milieu of fascination reveal something essential about the possibilities of language and creativity more generally?
In The Work of Fire, Blanchot writes: ‘[W]e know to the point of being tired […] that every spoken or written text is made of words and ideas. We know it but we do not know it, and we constantly become blind to one or the other of these aspects, either to the word or to the meaning, until we deny the action and its value’ (Blanchot, 1949, p. 47). The way in which language operates in everyday communication is such that we cannot see at the same time ‘the heads and tails together’. In other words, the two elements of language – words and ideas – are reduced to one, and only at rare moments, in the movement of dialogue and poetry, does something occur which enables us to glimpse the whole facility of language, ‘whose two sides we otherwise see only as folded one over the other, each hidden by the other’ (ibid, p. 47). In ordinary life, the secrecy of language is hidden; language as language remains silent.
Drawing on Mallarmé’s observations of language and artistic creation, Blanchot acknowledges a distinction between the so-called ‘crude word’ and ‘poetic word.’ In crude or ordinary speech, he argues, language serves primarily as a tool for human understanding and certainty. Words are transmuted into meaning, meaning back into words. The absence of the real object disappears in the presence of meaning. Moreover, ordinary language tends to give us the comforting illusion of immediacy. The ‘crude word’ is of course neither crude nor immediate, but rather gives this impression because we have grown accustomed to it: ‘We are used to it, it is usual’ (Blanchot, 1982, p. 40). It becomes utilitarian. In Blanchot’s view, the force of language lies precisely in ‘making the immediate appear to us not as the most terrible thing, which ought to overwhelm us […] but as the pleasant reassurance of natural harmonies or the familiarity of a native habitat’ (ibid, p. 41). This extraordinary power of language to hide itself as well as bestow upon words and objects an illusion of familiarity and utility, leads Blanchot to recognise a paradox or mystery inherent in language.
Blanchot argues that this paradox can take different forms. It manifests itself in the mystery of poetry, as poetry appears to express a particular form of symbolisation which is curiously akin to the process of our primary relationship with the mother in infancy, as it is described in the field of psychoanalysis. By taking a closer look at poetic language – that is to say, the specific mode of language that operates in the work of art and artistic creation – one can discern how Blanchot’s reflections on the force of fascination can be brought to bear on psychoanalytic configurations of the origins of human creativity and language.
‘In poetry we are no longer referred back to the world, neither to the world as shelter, nor to the world as goals’ (ibid, p. 41). The poetic word is always allusive; it suggests and evokes, and unlike in ordinary language, it is ‘not obliged to serve, to designate anything or give voice to anyone. Words in the domain of poetry no longer exist merely as a means through which I master things in thought by substituting the absence of an object for the (illusory) immediacy of an idea. Quite the contrary, in poetry, words tend to be juxtaposed, defamiliarised, reinvented and split, thereby disrupting the reassuring metamorphosis of meaning into words and words into meaning. Furthermore, by emphasising the materiality of words, rhythm and sound – as well as heightening our awareness of the meaning, thought and feeling – poetry seems to dramatise, rather than conceal or annihilate, the distance between the elements of language. In The Work of Fire, Blanchot explains:
‘There is not only change, transformation of one element into another, but also the simultaneous maintaining of two opposite perspectives as if identical – as of an object that demands to be seen from one single point in all the aspects it presents, from all the points from which one can see it – when, moreover, each aspect would be the entire object, and each aspect would assert itself in its sufficiency and its opposition to all the others, and yet all the aspects would have to show themselves in such a unity that the object appeared as stripped of aspects, without appearances’ (ibid, p. 53).
Arguably, what is illustrated here is the paradoxical relationship between language in general and poetic language in particular. Poetry is ‘only more striking and even more a mystery’ inasmuch as the poetic word seems to create as well as tear apart the mystery upon which ‘the powerful machine’ of language and communication depends. It is as if poetry demanded ‘a fundamental unity, an awareness superior to the two poles… originally united in one single relationship [which] began to exist apart, like two independent beings’ (ibid, p. 52). Blanchot elaborates further: ‘The two elements of language were at first only factors, isolated by analysis but not existing apart in reality’.
Magical Illusion of Unity
In his 1925 paper on negation, Freud writes the following:
‘The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there’ (Freud, 1995, p. 668).
According to the psychoanalytic view, the human being is born without a fully developed ego. It suggests that the newborn lacks the cognitive capacity to integrate and make sense of stimuli by differentiating between external reality and internal phantasy. The newborn exists in a state of formlessness – a bundle of contradictory drives, needs and instinctual energies, pressing desperately toward satisfaction at all costs. Each time satisfaction is denied, the unbearable loss and tension caused by the overwhelming excess of instinctual energy acts as a traumatic break in the continuity of the baby’s existence. At this point, before the baby has developed the capacity for symbolic representation and linguistic expression, the helpless baby is at the mercy of the mother figure’s undivided care and attention not only for survival, but also for fulfillment.
Through her constant love and availability, the mother enables the child to bear the unavoidable interruptions of being and take pleasure in their momentary alleviation. As Winnicott states, in his seminal work Playing and Reality, the mother provides the baby with a holding environment, an auxiliary ego through which the infant’s unbound emotions can be translated into more tolerable and familiar forms and so assimilated into his or her developing ego. The child, in effect, begins to establish an image or mental representation of the mother – the baby’s first ‘life-giving’ object. But this ‘imago in the inner world,’ Winnicott explains, ‘is kept alive and significant only by the reinforcement given through the presence of the external mother’ (Winnicott, 2005, p. 131). Thus, during this most vulnerable and formative phase of the infant’s life, the mother’s ‘actual’ presence and responsiveness are essential.
For Marion Milner, a close associate of Winnicott, creativity involves a transfiguration of the external world, which is an internal process by which the individual colours the world around them with a sense of meaning and aliveness (Milner, 1950, p. 31). For Milner and Winnicott, the question of creativity is deeply bound up with infantile experience, through which the process of symbol formation and coming to believe in the reality of the ‘real’ world is made possible (ibid, p. 67). Exploring the question of creativity, then, is fundamentally about ‘tackling the question of what life itself is about’ (Winnicott, p. 133).
Expanding on Freud’s conceptualisation of the creation of ‘reality sense’, Winnicott observes that, ‘the infant comes to the breast when excited and ready to hallucinate something fit to be attacked. At that moment the actual nipple appears and he is able to feel it was that nipple that he hallucinated […] In this way [the baby] starts to build up a capacity to conjure up what is actually available’ (Milner, p. 162).
This early state of relatedness is an original form of creativity and provides the essential basis for ‘realising, making real, for feeling as well as for knowing the external world’ (ibid). Although the baby and mother are never entirely undifferentiated once the baby has been born, they nonetheless relate to each other within a closely merged unit-space, where the baby must be able to freely and uninhibitedly express, as well as rely upon, the satisfaction of his or her selfish needs. This unique space is made possible by the mother’s adaptation to the child, so that the child experiences the world as part of, as well as being discovered or created by, him or herself. It is only here, Winnicott notes, ‘in this unintegrated state of personality, that which we describe as creative can appear. This if reflected back, but only if reflected back, becomes part of the organised individual personality’ (Winnicott, p. 86). Milner describes this pre-logical fusion of subject and object when she writes: ‘Moments when the original poet in each of us created the outside world for us, by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, are perhaps forgotten by most people; or else they are guarded in some secret place of memory because they were too much like visitations of the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking.’
At this stage, when the boundaries between the self and mother are blurred, before the child can perceive the mother as an independent being, it is essential for the baby to be allowed an initial time-space of illusion in which the baby is able to relate to the mother as an object that he or she has conceived. As a result of the mother’s physical and emotional attunement toward the baby, the growing infant is given some experience of magical control by which ‘the inner becomes actualised in external form and as such becomes the basis, not only of internal perception, but also of all objectivity’ (Winnicott, p. 63). These infantile experiences of magical illusion and omnipotence are fundamental for the nascent ego that is just beginning to organise itself and symbolically create a sense of being. Gradually, the child is able to build up the ability ‘to bring people alive in the inner psychic reality, apart from seeing, smelling, feeling’ (ibid, p. 29).
Sense Beyond Reason
If our childhood fascinates us, Blanchot writes: ‘this happens because childhood is the moment of fascination’ (Blanchot, 1982, p. 33). In analogous but varying ways, Blanchot, Winnicott and Milner all seem to prompt us toward this primary moment in human experience, where the force of fascination holds sway. The closer we get to the secret region of language in poetry or the self’s original creativity in infancy, the further away we seem to be from the reality of objectivity and understanding, and yet, the clearer it also becomes that the illusion of oneness is the condition for the sense of twoness that is so fundamental to language and meaning. The works of Blanchot, Winnicott and Milner approach what seems to be the very secret upon which our capacity to reason, measure and assess the world in public depends. As Blanchot so beautifully puts it: ‘There is a sense other than intelligible sense, there is a meaning that is not yet either clear or distinct, that is not expressly thought, but that is, as it were, played or mimed or lived by every being capable of grasping and communicating meaning’ (Blanchot, 1949, p. 55).
Blanchot, M. (1982) The Space of Literature. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press
– The Work of Fire (1949), Trans. Charlotte Mandell, Ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, Stanford: Stanford University Press
Freud, S. (1925) ‘Negation’ in The Freud Reader (1995), Ed. Peter Gay. London: W.W. Norton & Company
Milner, M. (1950) On Not Being Able to Paint. New York: Routledge
Winnicott, D.W. (2005) Playing and Reality. London: Routledge
Published in Under the Influence, Issue 16, April 2016. Extended version presented at Sussex Phenomenology Conference, 2015
In Search of Truth: A Quest for Proof - Cédric Villani
“Nonlinear Landau damping is a monster, no doubt about it – with as many heads as the Hydra! Nonetheless, I remain convinced that nothing can stop us. My heart will conquer without striking a blow.” (Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem)
One evening, a couple of years ago, as I sifted through a large stack of books, leaflets and papers lying next to my father’s favourite seat on the sofa, I was drawn to a plain, yellow coloured book entitled Théorme vivant. Flicking through the pages I noticed a handwritten message decorated with a mass of comical figures and strange little doodles. My father who had just returned from a visit to the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris looked up and smiled. The author, it soon transpired, was the French mathematician, Cédric Villani.
Villani is widely regarded as one of the most prominent mathematicians of his age. Director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, one of the oldest and most vibrant research institutes for mathematics and theoretical physics, Villani cuts a unique figure in the larger pantheon of scientists, always dressed in an elegant three piece suit, ribbon-like silk cravat and a large spider brooch on his jacket collar. With his flamboyant style and somewhat eccentric personality – think Charles Baudelaire meets Karl Lagerfeld – Villani has even been described as “the Lady Gaga of mathematics”. His work on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics has won him a long list of internationally acclaimed awards including, amongst others, the Fermat prize, the Poincaré prize, and the Fields medal – the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics. The Fields medal, often referred to as the Nobel prize of mathematics, is awarded once every four years, and only to mathematicians under 40. In 2010 at the age of 38 Villani was awarded the medal for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation in mathematical physics.
Villani’s book Théorème vivant (2012), published in English translation as Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure (2015), is an impressive tapestry of autobiographical narrative, jargon-laced email correspondence, historical and personal reflection, pencil drawing and advanced mathematical notation. In the book, we follow the author as he embarks upon one of the most important projects of his career, venturing into the unknown behaviour of particles in hot gases and plasmas, which would eventually lead him to the Fields medal. The playful wit, the acute sensitivity to the singular nature of the creative process, the verbal agility, and the refreshing juxtapositions of expression – from the complex to the commonplace and the poetic – permeate his work. With a storyteller’s sensibility, Villani draws us into a dramatic world that is driven by desire, emotion, wonder, fear, uncertainty and risk; he battles with the mysteries and monsters of the mathematical mind, exploring the precarious way to scientific discovery.
Eugenia: Reading your book Birth of a Theorem was a fascinating experience, not least for the slightly narcissistic reason that I recognised several of the names and settings which you so vividly describe. I grew up in a world imbued with the alien words and bizarre scribbles of a mathematician; his absolute devotion to work was omnipresent from an early age. Being surrounded by mathematicians from all over the world, each with their unique wisdom, humour and warmth, granted me a fondness and respect for this curious example of mankind. I still find their indelible tenacity, passion and brilliance captivating; however, living with their eccentricities can be maddening (!)
You have pointed out in a previous interview that ‘the mathematical thinking process is mainly non verbal’. In other words, when you are thinking of a problem, you do not use the same area of the brain as the one you use for language. I find this intriguing and I wonder whether this is partly what can render the mind of a mathematician so unfathomable to those of us who operate within the world of visual, musical and literary language. Could you say a bit more about this ‘mathematical thinking process’? Why are you drawn to this particular mode of thinking and what is the distinction between these two worlds would you say?
Villani: The idea that the math reflexion is nonverbal has been observed by neurospecialists in experiments. It is just a fact: the areas which are « lit » in the brain during mathematical deep thinking are just not the same as those which are active during speech. But this is very much in accordance with what we mathematicians say: mathematical reflexion is nonverbal, even though transmission is verbal, of course! On the other hand, these areas which are most useful for mathematics seem to be roughly the same as for some visual and spatial tasks. So, even if this could be part of the difficulty of mastering the mathematical spirit, it is certainly not the whole of the problem. Let us also add that exact additions, and multiplication tables, are related to verbal areas. This is also consistent with the habit of present-day mathematicians to despise calculation skills and dismissing them as « not the essence of mathematics ».
… When describing their work, mathematicians often use images, analogies, taken from schemes, plans, networks, or military. Striking examples are due to Poincare, Einstein and many others.
Eugenia: Science and maths are often upheld as the ultimate measures of truth and understanding – especially in our digital age where the authority of quantifiable data and evidence-based knowledge seem to be valued above and beyond all else – and yet, I’m often surprised by how little the word ‘truth’ crops up in mathematical conversations among mathematicians. More often, as your book shows, we hear talk of proofs, beautiful solutions, theorems, conclusions, results. We are probably more likely to come across the word ‘truth’ in an artist’s statement than a mathematical paper! Is this right? In which case, why is this so? Might there be something about the very notion of truth that lends itself to doubt and uncertainty; the very conditions for logical thinking?
Villani: Mathematics is the science of truth. It is entirely built on the idea of exact truth, non-arguable because it is entirely proven from basic principles and logical deductive reasoning. We all believe this, except for some tricky subtleties related to the meaning of proof (keywords here are Goedel's theorem of incompleteness, and the consistency of mathematics, which is a wide open problem). So it is not surprising that truth is not really part of our conversations: what is not true, it is our duty to just remove. About beauty it is a different thing: that is all our art, to find the beautiful proofs and beautiful theorems, because we believe that what is beautiful is also good. Distinguishing true from false is normally just applying the rules; distinguish beautiful from ugly is an art which has to be learnt the hard way.
Eugenia: In a famous lecture course delivered at Freiburg in 1951-1952 the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that ‘Science does not think’. This is a polemical claim, which forms a part of his wider critique of the dominance of representational thinking in the modern epoch. He gives an example of a mathematician. A mathematician, he says, can explain a mathematical problem in every possible respect, and yet he cannot, by way of mathematics, explain or tell us anything about what mathematics as mathematics is.
Villani: I am not sure I understand what Heidegger really means, but it is my feeling (as that of many colleagues) that he is overrated. But you know, I am certainly biased.
Eugenia: I was struck by something you said in the book. You write that ‘Probably no one who read the article that finally appeared in Acta Mathematica had the least inkling of the euphoria I experienced that morning. Technique is the only thing that matters in a proof. It’s a pity there’s no place for the most important thing of all: illumination.’
I think it’s a wonderfully original paragraph. Could you expand a bit on this comment? From a mathematician’s point of view, is there a difference between a proof and truth?
Villani: Proof is the way to demonstrate truth. There may be thousands of proofs, but just one truth (except possibly for the logical subtleties which I was mentioning, but which do not play any role in that part of mathematics which is considered in the book!) But a proof is in no way a reflection of the mind path which has presided over its birth. The proof is what it is, it has to be rigorous and self-promoting: that is, it has to be written in such a way that the reader will become convinced of its truth. This is very different from the way the mathematician works. I don’t see any contradiction in there: just, the product is very different from the production process. The scientific process is full of adventure, mistakes, uncertainty, doubt, illuminations, coups de theatre, joys and fears. The science is full of certainty, explanations, and evidence. All my book is about this duality.
Eugenia: I wonder if you can say a few words about how you experience the creative process of mathematics in relation to the creative process of writing. There are similarities no doubt, but the end results are very different. Were you trying to capture something about mathematics – perhaps this ‘illumination’ – in the Birth of a Theorem which is lost in the mathematical product or proof itself?
Villani: The creative processes of writing and doing mathematics are certainly quite different. On the other hand, there are similarities in the way certain ingredients are used: dialogues, ideas coming from the environment, the role of culture, etc. As for what « Birth of a Theorem » tries to capture, indeed the illumination is the key.
Eugenia: You grew up in a literary family – in what way, if any, do you think this environment informed the way you approach mathematics now? How important do you think it is that we stage a dialogue between these two fields in culture and education today? The danger, it seems to me, is not maths or science or technology itself, but rather an unthinking relation to each of them on the part of the human being.
Villani: I think that my family environment being literary has really no influence on my approach to maths. But I grew up in a family of teachers, and I am definitely a teacher — always was. I totally agree with you about the danger of having no communication between science and literature. (By the way, I never say « maths or science » since for me maths IS a science.) I totally disagree, on the other hand, on the usual duality which is made of this: in man’s work there is everything that is literature or arts-related, there is also everything that is science-related, but there is a third category which is most often forgotten, which is about building and manufacturing skills. It is really different from the other two, and is also part of our world and culture.
Eugenia: There are lots of monsters in your book! This is what you call the logical problems you’re grappling with. You speak about the value and importance of stories and storytelling. What role does fiction play in maths?
Villani: Maths is full of dreams, for sure. Things that we imagine, that we create, sometimes for their only esthetic value. Think that the Higgs boson was imagined decades before it was really observed. The same with the kinetic theory of gases and the atomic hypothesis — one of my fields of research, in the mathematical world. But I would not call this fiction stories. Most of the time, in a fiction story, you go on telling about stories which you know CAN’T be true! Here we are looking for things that are plausible. For things that are so beautiful that they have to be true… it reminds of the « ontological proof of God » in some sense, except that it is much more modest!
Eugenia: It goes without saying that mathematical work does in fact yield fundamentally ‘useful’ results and proofs (even if their function or implementation can take years to emerge); however, something about the very lack of instant applicability or utility in ‘the real world’ (an increasingly algorithm-driven and fast-paced one too) lends the ‘mathematical thinking process’ particular value and beauty today. Would you agree or not? Any thoughts on this?
Villani: The function or implementation will usually take decades, rather than years. But I think that the applicability of mathematical thinking makes it even more beautiful, and I would certainly not try to separate the value of the math from its impact.
Eugenia: I couldn’t help but think of one of my favourite passages of all time. It’s by Paul Valery:
‘All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.’
Villani: Thank you for that beautiful quote, which could be indeed the words of a scientist. You may know that Valery met Einstein once, near Institut Henri Poincare. He took out a small notebook from his pocket and asked Einstein whether he also kept a notebook to note down interesting ideas that would strike him. Einstein answered that it would really be of no use to him, since his new ideas were « so very rare » !
Today, if you were to enter the word ‘selfie’ into the hashtag bar on your Instagram, you may (or may not) find yourself astonished to discover that there are nearly 216 million photographs hashtagged selfie on just this social media app. And if, spurred by this staggering truth, you then decided instead to type in the word ‘me’, you might find yourself completely dumbstruck. For there are currently three hundred and twenty million, three hundred and sixty four thousand posts of different, but oddly alike, ‘me’s’.
From now on, it’s me, me, me, my selfie and I.
Let us take a moment, for clarity’s sake, to establish what the definition of this modern phenomenon is. According to the bible of information, Wikipedia, a selfie is:
‘a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfies are often shared on social networking services such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They are usually flattering and made to appear casual. Most selfies are taken with a camera held at arm's length or pointed at a mirror, rather than by using a self-timer.’
Apt as this description may be, it also needs to be said that the very best way of securing a high rate of selfie likes, is by tilting your chin down somewhat, pouting moderately, whilst allowing one eye to look up playfully into the camera. Not to mention the crucial post-production work – a most delicate process that involves a variety of photo filters and fine adjustments to the selfie’s general fun factor and spontaneity levels.
Joking aside, the popularity of the smartphone self-portrait seems to have reached an unprecedented height across the globe. Hailed by some as a creative form of self-expression, an empowering platform for changing identities, or simply a natural evolution of our need to depict ourselves pictorially, others are more critical towards the trend, suggesting that it might be a sinister sign of our growing narcissism and self-obsession in a capitalist consumer society. Whichever way we choose to look at the phenomenon, the reality of it confronts us with a quandary: what does it mean to be human in an age of hyper connectivity and electronic self- exposure?
E-books, e-magazines, e-dating sites, online archives and newsreels pervade our daily lives, offering us a constant source of knowledge and immediate access to the lives of others. Although the effects of this surveillance culture has received significant media attention over the last years, take for example, Wikileaks, there has been little critical response to the philosophical and psychological assumptions regarding the human being, upon which these debates are founded. The truth is that today, the predominant notions of human life and knowledge are closely allied with information and the disclosure of informational data.
In his remarkable book, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (2014), the British psychoanalyst and literary theorist, Josh Cohen, explores some of the possible reasons as to why in contemporary culture we find ourselves in constant need of displaying our own private lives and that of others. Drawing on a number of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic sources, Cohen refers to a particularly pertinent passage in Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground. It reads as follows:
‘We find it a burden being human beings – human beings with our own real flesh and blood, we are ashamed of it, consider it a disgrace and are forever striving to become some kind of generalised human beings.’ (Dostoevsky in Cohen, 2014, p.198)
In light of this statement, it seems to me that a number of very important but often neglected implications of our ‘selfie-dominated’ culture could be discerned. Firstly, might the surge in anonymous self-portraits be the cultural manifestation of a deeper urge to rid the self of that which resists standardization and escapes the order of visibility, and by virtue of this, of precisely what renders us human? How could this fundamental irreducibility of self be linked to our status as corporeal beings, in Dostoevsky’s words, with our own real flesh and blood? In essence, what are the bonds between the burden of being human and the burden of being a singular self?
In order to try and respond to these questions, I suggest that we leave the well lit up reality of selfies for a moment – the familiar site of seeing where illusions of self- possession and sovereignty seemingly hold sway – and turn instead to its attending darkness and much less sharply defined space which is our psychic reality. Rather than proposing any definitive answers, I believe that psychoanalytic insights can help open our eyes to some of the subtle psychosocial mechanisms that operate within the human’s different modes of relationality.
Δ
‘The significance of the mother – unique, incomparable, unalterable throughout the whole of the individual’s life – is rooted in these two relations [career and seductress]; she is the strongest love-object, the paradigm for all later love relationships – for both sexes’ (Freud, 2006, p.43).
Freudian knowledge teaches us that sexuality is an integral part of human life. Challenging the ideas of his time, Freud daringly expanded the notion of sexuality by claiming that the ‘germs’ of our sexual instinct are present from the very beginning of life and manifest themselves through a number of auto-erotic activities and sexual urges and impulses. He pointed out that the pleasure attached to the act of sucking at the mother’s breast, for example, cannot be divorced from our primitive sexuality. Indeed, the baby’s very first experiences of sensual pleasure and un-pleasure are obtained through the satisfaction, or lack thereof, of his or her vital somatic needs.
According to this psychoanalytic conception of the human being, the baby is born without a fully developed ego. From the beginning there is only id, as Freud wrote, and the newborn exists in a state of formlessness, a bundle of contradictory drives and instinctual energies, pressing desperately toward satisfaction at all costs. The unconscious processes in the id pay no heed whatsoever to reality; they are fearless and entirely subject to the unrelenting pleasure principle (Freud, 1995). As the American literary theorist Leo Bersani writes,
‘we desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, without any specific content – which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that it belongs to the non-linguistic biology of human life.’ (Bersani, 1986, p.39).
Expanding on the Freudian ideas of our infantile sexuality, Bersani affirms that masochism is at once a destructive threat to life, and a mode of survival that initiates us into the reality of social relations. Thus he advances the radical claim that human beings are in fact, ontologically, ‘implicated in violence almost from the beginning of life’ (ibid, p.70). Interestingly, what we might draw from this is that human subjectivity seems to be established on the basis of an unconditional drive toward externality which in principle defies the laws of self-interest and self-preservation.
At this stage, then, before the baby has acquired the necessary cognitive capacities for reality testing and sense-making, the helpless baby is at the mercy of the mother’s undivided care and attention for survival. Each time satisfaction is denied, the unbearable tension caused by the excess of instinctual energy acts as a devastating break in the continuity of the baby’s existence. The presence of a loving mother or caretaker is therefore imperative during this most vulnerable period in the infant’s life. As the proponents of object-relations theory show, the mother enables her baby to bear these unavoidable interruptions of being (a state of ‘madness’ to use Winnicott’s expression), and take pleasure in their momentary alleviation, by acting as an auxiliary ego through which the unbound passions can be integrated and translated into more tolerable forms. Since mother and baby are not yet clearly undifferentiated in the baby’s mind, the mother’s unconditional gift of self endows the baby with the illusion of having created his or her own psycho- somatic satisfaction. The containing ego of the (m)other is consequently internalised by the baby; assimilated as part of the baby’s own developing self and sense of being alive.
My point here is simply to show how in the precarious life of the infant the physical, sexual and psychic dimensions form a complex tangle of interlacing and conflicting desires that can never be fully satisfied, rendering them essentially traumatic in nature. Our primary object-relation is therefore crucial for our future existence insofar as it seems to provide the basic ontological conditions of being and giving. These are no doubt the conditions upon which coping with the inevitable experiences of loss and lack in life, as well as creating mature and non-subsumptive relations with others, are largely founded.
Returning to the passage in Dostoevsky’s novella, we shall hopefully find ourselves in a better position now to appreciate why the burden of being human might be intimately linked to our being fundamentally irreducible to the general terms of understanding. Indeed, based on the proposition that our primordial masochism serves life, it would appear to be true that our entry into the world of others is conditioned upon a paradoxical modality of absolute vulnerability and ignorance of being and death; to put it in Levinasian terms, being-towards-the-other (Levinas, 1978, p. 84). A state of total openness, which precedes self-consciousness, is thus constitutive of our subjectivity as sexual beings, and seems to lie at the very heart of what it is to be alive.
Andre Green interestingly describes this initial ecstatic encounter with the mother in terms of an ‘original madness’ which will remain at the core of the subject’s unconscious throughout his or her life (Green, 1986, p 244). As soon as we are born, we are exposed to the other person, forever binding us to what remains beyond the reach of apprehension and interrupts our ambitions of achieving complete knowledge of the self and other. The burden of being human, it would seem, marks precisely the inescapable demand upon us to answer to this unknowable other who gives us the gift of singularity.
Δ
Our capacities for conceptualisation and phenomenalisation – revealing the mysteries of the natural and social world – are indispensable to the structures of modern civilisation and technological progress. Our homes, hospitals, medical treatments, food manufacturing, welfare system and democracy are but a few examples of the astonishing advancements in the history of mankind, made possible through our cognitive capacities for abstraction. My intention here is not to make conclusive judgments about the ethics of technology as such, but simply to pause for a moment and question what happens to the self, and our relations to others, if the technological demands for transparency and universality become the leading goals in society at large? In other words, if the right to the clandestine and singular (that which escapes the order of information and visibility) is denied ubiquitously. Is there not a risk that you, the other person in front of me, on the bus, at work, on Tinder, lying next to me in bed, turns into an objective generality toward which I lack any real sense of answerability and ethical obligation. We are forever striving to become some kind of generalised human beings.
Switch off and keep swiping. There are plenty more matches in the sea.
Needless to say, a carefully curated snapshot of the self can offer great satisfaction inasmuch as it grants us a comforting sense of self-certainty and control. We are the artist, critic and audience of our own being, as it were, and once we’ve mastered the tricks of the trade, the fleeting pleasures of instant gratification and self-affirmation are but a click, post, share away.
Rationalisation, Adorno argues, bears a striking affinity with mythology insofar as they both entail the act of subsuming particular phenomena under universal principles and concepts “in order to reduce the fearsome externality of nature to consciousness” (Cascardi, 1999 p.30). Adorno aptly maintains that in the attempt to master our natural surroundings, the particularity of each individual object or experience becomes divorced from the realm of reason and scientific abstraction. In effect both the realms are compromised – reason is functionalised and becomes a mere instrument of domination, and the internal complexity of the object or experience is violently reduced to a measurable element, a “clear and distinct idea” (Bowie, p.5).
I turn on the camera on the tube – take one, two, three – close but not close enough. What do you think – hair up or down? I smudge on some more lipstick to make sure they look deep red and kissable. “You’re such a babe.” Thanks, but if only I felt like one. Take four, done. #selfieonthego? I upload and wait, two, three, four, five… six …approved. I feel the corner of my lip curl up. I’m OK.
“The individualism of technological civilization relies precisely on a misunderstanding of the unique self” writes Derrida (Derrida, 2008, p. 37). In The Gift of Death (2008), he gives a brilliant account of the paradox that appears to lie at the centre of our current neo-liberal individualist order. It is,
‘…the individualism of a masque or persona, a character and not of a person. [Modern individualism] concerns itself with the role that is played rather than with this unique person whose secret remains hidden behind the social mask.’ (ibid, p.37).
When referring to the uniqueness of a person, Derrida invokes the notion of the secret. His thoughts on the logic of secrecy paint a very different picture of the term from the one to which we are most accustomed. But I believe it can grant us a deeper understanding, albeit indirectly, of what is at stake in our relentless search for the perfect self(ie).
For Derrida, the secret of secrecy, does not consist in hiding something, in not revealing the truth, but rather in respecting the absolute singularity, the infinite separation of what binds me or exposes me to the unique, to one as to the other (ibid, p.123). In an interview published in Points, Derrida explains that,
‘It [the secret] is not a thing, some information that I am hiding or that one has to hide or dissimulate; it is rather an experience that does not make itself available to information, that resists information or knowledge.’ (Attridge, 2010, p.47).
While the common belief is that in keeping a secret I am actively withholding what I already know, Derrida is clearly suggesting that secrecy is a far more complex occurrence than such. It involves responding to that which is kept apart and exposes me to the unique. Thus it is inextricably bound up with the experience of singularity. If we submit to this Derridean understanding of the notion of the secret, we can begin to discern how the event of secrecy relates to our essential responsibility toward one another as singular human beings. Addressing the question of responsibility in his lengthy discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, Derrida writes the following:
For common sense, just as for philosophical reasoning, the most widely shared presumption is that responsibility is tied to the public and to the nonsecret, to the possibility and even the necessity of accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, of justifying and owning up to them. Here on the contrary, it appears just as necessarily that the absolute responsibility of my actions, to the extent that it has to remain mine, singularly so, something no one else can perform in my place, implies instead secrecy. But what is also implied is that, by not speaking to others, I don’t account for my actions, I answer for nothing, I make no response to others or before others (Derrida, 2008, p. 61).
Herein lies the scandal and aporia of responsibility. On the one hand responsibility insists on what is apart and kept secret (singularity and silence), and on the other hand it impels us to speak and thus to dissolve or sacrifice our singularity in the generality of language. ‘Secrecy is essential to the exercise of this absolute responsibility as sacrificial responsibility’ (ibid, p.68). Indeed, much like the primary object-relation between mother and baby, the instant of our absolute responsibility is madness. It is the essential madness, or the experience of singularity, which informs life from the very start and participates in our everyday experiences of love and responsibility as the secret psychic life upon which their possibility is opened up.
Δ
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that we try thinking the bonds between secrecy and subjectivity, in conjunction with the self as portrayed in the selfie versus the work of art.
The selfie reveals.
Rephrasing Derrida’s critique of the masked role in modern individualism, the selfie bores precisely to the extent that it claims to excite curiosity by way of showing, exposing and exhibiting the being behind its mask. Otherwise put, by unveiling everything (or attempting to do so), the selfie forecloses the singularity of the self whose essence shows itself only when it is allowed to be what it is, namely withdrawn, hidden, secret, unknown. In the absence of distance and invisibility, everything is calculated and the self becomes equal and indifferent. Arguably, in a world increasingly driven by techno-scientific objectivity and economic profit, the culture of selfies epitomises this suppression of irreducibility and ambiguity in favour of an identity politics ruled by the principles of equivalence and exchange.
I scroll down, I keep scrolling; deeper and deeper into the abyss of envy and annoyed impatience. Selfie working hard at the gym, selfie on a mountain top in South America, selfie having a FroYo, selfie going for a walk, selfie in Ibiza, selfie without makeup, selfie with makeup. I reach the bottom of the screen, pause, and resume the survey one last time. However, when I put away my phone I’m left with a strange feeling of discontent and wanting more.
The poem, writes Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature (1982, p. 230),
‘…is the veil which makes the fire visible, which reveals it precisely by veiling and concealing it. The poem shows, then; it discloses, but by concealing, because it detains in the dark that which can only be revealed in the light of darkness.’
In the space of the work of art, things are transformed into what cannot be grasped. While the utilitarian logic of our everyday communication wants primarily to rid words and images of their ambiguity, the artwork seems on the contrary to follow the curious poetic movement of secrecy that Derrida and Blanchot describe. Within the work, we often find that distance is kept and things are hidden from view. Interpretation is left open and the person whose infinite being we can never fully know is disclosed precisely by not being entirely exposed. This movement is articulated beautifully by Blanchot (1949, p. 53):
We feel and sometimes regret that poetry, far from reconciling the elements of language, puts infinity between them, to the point where we have to believe that the words it uses have no meaning whatsoever, and the meaning it aims for remains beyond all words. And yet everything happens as if, starting with this dismemberment, fusion became possible, the distance of this infinite distance seemed nonexistent, and from this hostility the opposition stretched out in a simultaneous overlapping.
Recall the original madness of our primary masochism and openness toward the other – the paradoxical movement of antagonistic forces upon which our capacity to give the other the gift of secrecy “without knowing, without knowledge or recognition, without thanks” (Derrida, 2008, p.113) is based. The work of art surely also begins in this primal (con)fusion between destruction and creation.
In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger writes, ‘All art, as the letting happen of the advent of truth of what is, is essentially poetry’. He repeatedly uses the verbs ‘to let’ and ‘to allow’ when discussing the work of art, since for Heidegger, ‘Not only is the creation of the work poetic, but equally poetic, though in its own way, is the preserving of the work’. By emphasising the inherently relational nature of the event of poetry, Heidegger seemingly also touches upon something which is fundamental to the ethical mode of relation as such. Referring to the person who preserves the work, he explains: ‘a work is in actual effect as work only when we remove ourselves from our commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own nature itself to take stand in the truth of what is.’ (1971, p. 72).
Finally, it seems that there is a parallel between the precarious interplay of self and other in our primary experience of sexuality, and the operation of the poetic work in the experience of the artist and reader. Both experiences, in virtue of their commitment to the singular other, point to a happening that explodes the limits of rational understanding and exceeds the order of binary systems. Where there is poetry, there is the enigma of singularity, and thus the inescapable demand upon each individual to respond to the burden of being in a twofold way: to receive and respect the secret self.
Written for and presented at the opening of the art exhibition ME, ME, MIRROR, HaRiviera Gallery, Bat-Yam, Israel, 2014. Published in Odiseo Vol. 6, 2015. Also published in the book Therapy and the Counter-tradition: The Edge of Philosophy, Routledge, April 2016
Fellow readers, writers, avatars, cyborgs, curators of self and others, welcome to the universal kingdom of Hipstermania. On offer this morning, across the Western globe, we have our specially produced organic Kale and Quinoa salad topped with freshly ground turmeric, served with a large cup of ethically sourced coffee, or super healthy and sumptuous pre-meal detox juice “made with love” (whole goji berries, flaxseeds and ginger extract). Find us, with your latest iPhone app, at your local Swedish bakery on the corner of your local flower, antiques or vegetable market in any of the European districts currently in the throes of urban development and social gentrification.
Menu is introduced to you by Girl in white Buffalo shoes from the early 90s, high waisted Acne jeans and father’s bomber jacket; with somewhat knackered dip-dye hair and borderline revolting residues of Friday night’s efforts in geometric nail art. Girl is sluggishly engaging in casual chitchat with post-gender normative Man, former art student and two-legged mutating moustache (who, incidentally, likes tattooing his friends when he is smashed, while preserving a seemingly sensitive side through his digitally mediated love of cats). For Wi-Fi password, please check the innovative typographic scribbles on rustic black board: Anthrax81.
So at last, honoured retro creatures of contemporary culture, I believe that you are ready to sit back, “Relax!” and “Enjoy” (your own performance) to the moderately depressing drones of a band called Lara KnoxXxXxxx / The Burning Prisms of Antarctic Void / ctrl-Shift-alt-attack. However, before indulging in your late Sunday morning brunch, why not first capture the crystalline patterns in your salad on Instagram #amazing #deep #arty @pussymonster. Announce your state of mind on Twitter and instantly connect to the world of fashionable followers. It is widely accepted that immediate recognition in virtual reality helps to enhance the flavour of lived experiences.
Of course I would be lying if I said that I find no aspect of this familiar – though somewhat exaggerated – scenario in the slightest bit appealing. After all, I do prefer the wholemeal beetroot cake to Tesco’s pre-packaged chocolate chip brownie; I have to say that I am drawn to cafés with a quasi-authentic vintage look; and I do enjoy drinking red wine with friends in an old converted warehouse / architect studio. I studied art and literature, I write philosophical texts for fashion magazines, document myself on my iPhone, and love shoulder pads. Who am I kidding; I am a hipster.
“But really, so what?” I display some basic characteristics of a fast growing youth culture hence I automatically become the victimised subject of my own ironic scrutiny. Surely there is nothing wrong in practice about the fact that we yield to social setups with a predictable system of cultural and symbolic codes. However, it seems to me that the more important and pressing question today is one that sadly gets forgotten in our fast paced evidence-oriented climate, namely, What does the rise of the hipster signify in essence?
Perhaps a closer look at this social phenomenon can illuminate some of the urgent ethical ramifications of the dominant Western ideals and changing patterns in social behaviour. In truth, it seems to me, hipsterism is but one extreme example of how our technological age of information and neo-liberal economic individualism is shaping the ways in which we relate to the self and other; determining what is considered acceptable and non-acceptable in our social interaction with others. Viewed from a broader perspective, I wonder what are the underlying implications of this copy-paste culture of simulated authenticity on our lived encounters with real human beings. Could it be the case that the playfully innocent and performative world of the self-referential hipster harbours an inherently violent logic? If so, how might this era of endless ironic shuffling and self-absorption encourage a fundamentally irresponsible attitude toward the other?
The existence of different social groups, formed and united around a certain set of values, ideas or beliefs, stretches back to the beginning of the history of mankind. We seek out communities of people in order to satisfy a basic need for belonging which is intrinsic to the evolution of the species. As members of a group or greater whole – be it the family, romantic couple, athletic team, political party, circle of friends or work colleagues – we experience safety and recognition that arguably affords us an existential purpose. To borrow the language of R.D. Laing, an ontologically secure person is able to cope with the unavoidable sufferings in life without the fear of a total disintegration of self. In other words, having a sense of meaning and continuity of existence is imperative for the psychological and social well being of individuals in any given society.
According to D.W. Winnicott, one of the great psychoanalytic thinkers and proponents of the British school of object-relations theory, there is a strong link between individual emotional health and a sense of feeling real. Feeling alive and authentic, that is, acquiring a sense of being, is paramount since it provides the foundation for our ability to relate to the outside world of others creatively. Being able to take responsibility of all emotions and ideas that ‘belong to being alive’ (constructive as well as destructive), is a sign of creativity explains Winnicott, which makes life feel real and meaningful. In order to better understand the individual’s complicated movement toward maturity and responsibility – how it can become infected and stunted during the course of its process and effectively result in various defensive power struggles in adulthood – we must go back a few steps and observe in closer detail the infant’s earliest caring environment.
We know for a fact, from personal experience and psychoanalytic research, that the love and recognition received from our parents in childhood (or the lack thereof) has a profound impact on our process of psychosocial individuation, influencing the ways (successful or unsuccessful) in which our infinite journey toward emotional and psychosexual maturity evolves. According to the psychoanalytic conception of the human being, the baby is born without a developed ego. From the beginning there is only id, as Freud would say, and the newborn infant exists in a state of formlessness, a bundle of erotic and destructive drives, instinctual wishes, needs and urges, pressing desperately toward satisfaction. The loving presence of a carer during these early years in life therefore plays a seminal role in the baby’s survival by facilitating our development into confident adult individuals.
If the parent is not able to meet the baby’s demands for instinctual gratification, for instance due to physical absence or emotional neglect, the baby will experience this as a traumatic break in the continuity of being. But by giving her unconditional love and care (constant attention to the baby’s needs and desires), the caring mother provides a so-called ‘holding environment’ in which the growing child can roam freely without the threats of being abandoned. Until the young child is able to make rational sense of reality it is important for the mother to create an illusory sense of total satisfaction and harmony where the infant is allowed to feel in control of his or her experiences. “I want the breast, I am given the breast, therefore I am the breast”. Indeed, at this particular stage in the baby’s mental life, the baby is clearly unable to relate to the mother as a separate individual in her own right. The mother is treated as a thing or object that exists exclusively in service of the baby’s needs. This naïve egoism of the child’s primary object-relation is described in psychoanalytic terms as a state of omnipotence; this is a necessary time-space of illusory control through which we establish our first sense of selfhood. With the experience of authenticity and being, comes a sense of creativity or agency, granting us the ontological security or, in Winnicott’s terms, ‘unit-status’ whereby we can endure as well as enjoy the hazardous reality of human relations. In effect, we begin to let go of our selfish and unrealistic object-relation in infancy and advance to more mature and responsible interpersonal relations of love and tolerance for the other’s differences in adulthood.
Bearing this in mind, a predicament seems to be brought into view: as liberal democratic societies in the West become evermore consumed by a rampant materialism and societal ideals of self-interest and gratification, the liquidation of meaningful ethical relationships unfolds. Rather than proposing any definitive answers, these psychoanalytic insights open our eyes to the subtle psychosocial mechanisms that operate within the governing modes of relationality today. We live in an era where the global order of advanced individualistic societies is sustained by the possibility of a constant transmission and dissemination of informational data. The very existence of modern Western society depends upon this basic condition; that is to say, upon the uninterrupted dominance of relations of equivalence and exchange that afford minimal space for particularity and difference. Thus, as virtual and technological powers increase the urgency to re-examine the nature of human relations without doubt intensifies. What better way is there to secure the hegemony of efficacy than to nurture – through the media, entertainment industry, Internet, fashion, politics, corporate world – our fundamental infantile desire for omnipotence and self-possession?
It seems to me that the hipster’s relentless celebration of the ironic and light-hearted is a glaring manifestation of the self-infantilising effects of the world’s global will to power and totalisation. By re-creating the world as endless play, the hipster remains master of himself and the other while defending himself against the potential threats to happiness posed by doubt and complexity. Through the digitalisation of culture, human relations are neutralised and subsumed under totalising networks of transparency. We are implored to record the food we eat, outfits worn, places we go, people we meet, thoughts we own, and images we like. Individual happiness, health and harmony are measured, computerised and capitalized; human behaviour can be comprehended through neuroscience and social relations structured into responsible businesses.
As Cyndi Lauper’s anthem goes: “girls just wanna have fun”. Today all we desperately seek is fun. We favour silliness over seriousness, farce over tragedy, mask over face. Individualism in technological civilization is indeed, quoting Jacques Derrida, ‘the individualism of a role and not of a person.’ For the self-actualising individual of the West, everything, from people, electronic equipment, food, spa treatments, democracy, flight tickets, Google, clothes, human rights, yoga, dating sites, freedom of speech and Facebook exists for the sake of my individual happiness and welfare. The world is a treasure of accessible objects of desire to be consumed in the pursuit of total success and enjoyment. Yes, it seems fair to say that just like the omnipotent infant, the world today has become a source of my perpetual pleasure and possession. As Jean Baudrillard aptly writes, ‘We are not succumbing to oppression or exploitation, but to profusion and unconditional care’. Dominated by the pleasure principle, human beings are caught in a vicious circle of self-defensive relations of mastery. In face of the present virtualisation of existence, humankind is at risk of losing what it is that makes life meaningful, namely the drama of human relationality itself.
Psychoanalytic knowledge teaches us that an integral part of the maturational process toward the adaptation to reality and unselfish love involves having to accept the unpleasant fact that our primitive aim – to be loved completely by the other without having to respond to the other’s different demands – can never be entirely satisfied. Responsibility implies a relation between myself and the unique other. Play is a vital component of human existence, but real play indicates a risk and vulnerability of self. Jests, parodies and joking can be creative and fun, but as the exclusive form of communication they become shields behind which we can hide in order to avoid the chance of humiliation and rejection. The mask of another never affects me.
Endless parties, wild states of drunkenness, empty “I love you” slurs, public shaming and crazy costumes are entertaining and “amazing”, but always familiar. How are we supposed to foster a responsible attitude toward the unique other if we only ever exist within the circle of recycled clichés and citations, in other words, within the realm of knowledge? Certainly there are still ethical relations of love and respect for the Other, but it seems reasonable to propose that the structures of our technocratic consumer culture inexorably prompt an evacuation of the responsible authentic self. The notion of subjectivity endorsed today is one which paradoxically counteracts the being of individuals by refusing to face their singularity. The unknowable nature of the self and other disrupts the illusion of harmony and interferes with the efficacy of (impossible) exchange. The hipster, obsessed with being different and ‘imaginative’, is just as firmly gripped within the clutches of capitalism and its cult of identity.
Before the decline of religion in modern industrialised societies, religious faith provided the ultimate measures of truth. Nowadays, under the conditions of modern technology and information, Internet has become the cradle of comfort. The web is constantly at hand, ready to feed and satisfy our insatiable demands, consoling us when we are in search of answers. She offers us peace; a perpetual flow of images, headlines, detailed explanations, critical perspectives, leftist views, royalty gossip, fashion tips, useful contacts and democratic networks. She is our all-mighty and benevolent mother of goodness, quietly rocking her babies to sleep. But trapped inside her digital dungeon of infantile desires, we stop growing, thwart our authentic self and have no choice but to surrender to our own primitive fantasies of self-fulfilment. Where ideals of omnipotence and satisfaction prevail anything that fails to serve as the protecting mother in service of the baby’s needs, will be viewed as an obstacle to happiness. The Other – that is, the authentic self and otherness of all human relations – must in effect be eliminated.
The possibility of unknowingly being put in the spotlight no longer fazes the modern stylists and consumers of cyber culture. In a world where we never know if what we write will be uploaded and shared on Instagram or Facebook; where we slowly start adjusting the colour of our words, the look on our face, the clothes that we wear and places we visit, in order to fashion the very best possible picture of ourselves for the public, have we not lost our freedom to be? To be that is, not as a rigid persona caught in the frenzy of superficial and self-conscious relationships, but rather as a mobile and mature person of creativity and passivity with room for loss, disappointment and confusion.
Once we begin to regard human beings as instruments for personal gratification we cease to become responsive to the irreplaceable being of people which exists forever beyond my cognitive powers and capacities. Instead we begin to perceive people, automatically, as projections of the self, renouncing of our fundamental responsibility to the other. Genuine openness toward the other entails a danger of being hurt, spurned and challenged. Today we mourn rather than value the incompleteness of human relationality.
And so I reach the ending of my plea for a renewed attention to the authentic self and uncertainty of human relationality. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves again whether the conditions of modern individualistic society, this overvaluation of “happiness” and constant appeal to self-satisfaction, are fundamentally at odds with ethical relations. On what condition is responsibility truly possible?
As the French poet @ArthurRimbaud once wrote, “love needs re-inventing.” #profound # keepitreal
Memories mould our mind. Lodged inside us they shape the way we are, grounding us in the past and structuring our interpretation of the present. In his collection From Back Home the Swedish photographer JH Engström traced his childhood memories back to the province of Värmland, in the west of Sweden. Together with his friend, the internationally acclaimed photographer Anders Petersen, Engström revisited his native land to pay tribute to the people, light and landscapes.
Having worked for two years as an assistant to Mario Testino in Paris, Engström moved back to Sweden in 1993, when he started to collaborate with Petersen. After completing his studies in Film and Photography at Gothenburg University and publishing his first book, Shelter, he moved to New York. He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Prize in 2005 for his book Trying to Dance, and has exhibited in galleries across the world. He now lives and works between Värmland and Paris.
From Back Home (Max Ström, 2009) was awarded the book prize at Les Rencontres d’Arles and comprises a multifarious collection of coloured and black and white portraits, landscapes, still-lives, close-ups and aerial shots. The images are united by a sense of spontaneity, and ephemeral tone that lends them an air or tenderness. These are works of intimacy and loss, exploring questions of time, memory and the possibility of return. The White Review talked to Engström about his practice, and about the selection of photographs here published.
TWR – What was it that prompted you to return to your childhood home in Värmland in 2001? The lakes, light, landscape…
Engström – Yes all of those things, and the simple fact that I wanted to get away from cities for some time. The contrast between big cities and nature is a theme which has preoccupied me in my life and in my photography. I also became the father of twins and remembered the freedom I felt in nature as a little kid.
TWR – Were you afraid of distorting your childhood memories?
Engström – No, I never had any of those fears. I don't believe you can control your memories. Of course things had changed, because I had changed.
TWR – Your projects tend to stretch out over a number of years. From Back Home is a collection of photographs taken between 2001 and 2008. Did your work change over that period?
Engström – With the From Back Home project everything came very easily to me. Going back there just triggered those deep emotions and brought them back to life. It affected my work in the sense that it confirmed my belief in the idea that if you stop thinking about your role as a ‘photographer’ or ‘artist’ you will inevitably come nearer to a kind of honest expression.
TWR – It feels as if a shorter period of time would have failed to do justice to the subject.
Engström – I'm glad you read it this way. I believe that time is among the most important tools in my work. Honesty is slippery, but time helps you to approach it.
TWR – You question whether it is ever really possible to go back home. What does home mean to you?
Engström – I still don't know what home means to me. Maybe it is the place where you feel the least restless. The question is one that is constantly present in my work. But I don't think photography takes me back to anything. I believe, or hope, on the contrary that it takes me forward, even if it always, per definition, deals with the past. The idea of memory interests me, though. Perhaps it is an altogether abstract universe. In any case, I have strong doubts as to whether it is even possible to translate memory into language.
TWR – Do you always carry a camera?
Engström – I have it with me most of the time. But I use all sorts of different kinds of formats. In other words, I don't always carry around my 4x5" on a tripod!
TWR – You have a very eclectic visual language. Many of your images have a particularly oneiric quality (I’m thinking in particular of your smoggy faded images). What is it about the medium of photography that appeals to you the most?
Engström – Its directness.
TWR – A few years ago you said ‘I’m always looking for presence. Whenever I try, my doubts get unmasked. Easier then to stick with absence’. This statement has been frequently requoted. Does it still ring true for you today?
Engström – Yes it does. All the questions built into that sentence are also reasons why photography appeals to me. Presence goes beyond any language. Maybe that’s why we keep on trying to capture it.
TWR – The stillness, the clarity of colours and simplicity of the landscape adds an element of melancholy to your portraits of the Swedish countryside.
Engström – For me it’s very simple: the landscape is there and I recognise it. I also like it. Maybe the melancholy comes from the fact that Sweden has four very distinct seasons. This makes the notion of time passing very present, and perhaps this transience is closely connected to melancholy.
TWR – There is a similar feeling of nostalgia and emptiness in many of your photographs. How does this connect with your idea of the impossibility of going back home?
Engström– Well, as I mentioned before, photography is per definition connected to the past. But this doesn't necessarily means it's ‘about’ the past. I’m not sure that it’s actually impossible to go home. But it’s going back home that’s impossible. Indeed, some people claim they’ve found their home, so I guess we have to believe them! But then again, others never really come home. And of course, there is also the notion of an inner homecoming…
TWR – Your book From Back Home was produced in collaboration with Anders Petersen. How has your friendship and partnership with Petersen influenced your work?
Engström – He has been and still is the person who has taught me the importance of hard work. His obsession about expressing himself has also always inspired me greatly. Moreover, he has always been incredibly supportive of what I try to do.
TWR – You lived in Paris when you were very young. How did this affect your relationship with, and perception of, Sweden?
Engström – It made me reflect more on Sweden. It gave me another perspective and enabled my view of Sweden to become less obvious and more critical. This applies to my relationship with Paris too. I had an outside/inside outlook. I like those dynamics.
TWR – At the moment you’re working on your upcoming book, the final part of your trilogy [which also comprises Trying to Dance and Haunts]. What will you be focusing on this time?
Engström – The focus is a love story, a pregnancy and a birth.
TWR – Just to end, there’s a beautiful passage by Maurice Blanchot, which came to mind after looking at your work and which I thought you would enjoy. ‘The essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy, and yet more inaccessible and mysterious than the thought of the inner most being; without signification, yet summoning up the depth of any possible meaning; unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens.’
Engström – I like that quote a lot.
Interview published in The White Review No. 2, 2011.
“The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so)”. (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1980)
The images presented in the work Water Meets Colour Colour Meets Water are loaded with violence. The ocean is tinted with natural sugar colouring, causing an array of absorbing patterns to materialise in the waves. As the colours bleed into the sea, the texture of the water thickens and the motion of the waves is (re)defined, revealing its hidden course and complex networks. The crashing waves, which are carefully contained within the camera frame, pull the viewer into a vortex of frozen shapes and novel configurations that are otherwise indiscernible to the human eye.
Arnaud Lajeunie’s photography raises critical questions about the relationship between human beings and nature. Echoing a tradition of interventionist art practice, his work could be read as an experimentation in colour and form, through which the photographer endeavours ambitiously to challenge the natural flux of things and exceed the confines of human perception. With a variety of techniques, Lajeunie stages creative interventions in nature that interrupt the ordinary visual flow and force us to see the world anew through the seductive exactness of human mediation.
In Water Meets Colour Colour Meets Water, the fluid waves transform into concrete forms, alluring objects of aesthetic appreciation that can be enjoyed by the informed viewer. Shot from above, the ocean is explored as a material which the photographer is keen to expose and control by means of the bright sugar colouring. The photographs ‘fill the sight by force’, to use Barthes’ words, totalising the oceanic landscape and transfiguring the spectator into a solar Eye that feasts upon the opulent images of beauty.
But there is more to Lajeunie’s images than the sweet and violent satisfaction of seeing. The photographs of Water Meets Colour Colour Meets Water arguably signify beyond the regime of pure perception by appealing, interestingly, to what cannot be firmly known and dominated.
According to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the notion of an absolute, stable viewpoint belongs to a type of space which is ‘striated’. Striated space is homogenous and characteristic of the State, whereas the space inhabited by seafaring people, for instance, is heterogeneous and ‘smooth’. In a world order constituted by political borders and territorial divisions, the ocean no doubt occupies a unique position. As an undefined space that exists in constant movement, the sea frustrates the possibility for reification. While striated space is static and panoptic, the smooth space of the ocean is essentially unassimilable and haptic.
Photography, by virtue of its representational nature, shares a basic organising principle of modernity which drives cultural, economic and scientific processes across the globe today. According to a tradition of critical philosophical inquiry, this principle, the so called ‘scopic drive’, expresses the human desire to render legible, rational and knowable, the physical as well as symbolic spaces in which we live. Through modern technologies we seek out ways to eliminate the uncertainty of everyday existence by transfiguring unknown phenomena into visible objects or images of pleasure and rational understanding. In the pursuit of certainty, Western thinking has consequently embraced a violent logic that represses all things which fail to adhere to the laws of reason.
In Lajeunie’s series of images, colour appears as a powerful intrusion upon the ocean. On the one hand it stimulates our scopic desire to master the world in sight, and yet on the other hand it releases us from the yokes of perception by encouraging our imagination to roam beyond the bounds of the picture. The red waves conjure up scenes of political violence and the green colour points toward issues of human pollution. Far from being a neutral space, the ocean too is a victim of human power struggles. By disclosing invisible structures within the sea, Lajeunie grants us a passageway into the ephemeral spaces that remain hidden from public view. Be it the fantastical world of our childhood stories or the geopolitical borders of a globalising world, the world outside is coloured with the deep hues of the imagination.
As Gaston Bachelard writes, ‘Imagination allows us to leave the ordinary course of things’. Unless there is no surprise, no unexpected combination of images, there is no imagination, only perception, argues Bachelard. Operating across both contrasting orders of visibility - perception and imagination - Lajeunie’s photographs act as a salutary reminder of the essential predicament that lies at the heart of photographic practice and modernity at large. He uses colour as an emotive tool to dislocate the viewer and space. Suspended in an open realm between smooth and striated space, his images transcend the dominion of unalloyed force by evoking other images, thoughts and sensations which contradict the immediate representation on the page. Lajeunie’s manipulated waves bear the trace of the irrational, expressing the perpetual tension between violence and freedom.
“The poem is the realized love of desire that has remained desire”
(René Char)
My interest in the question of love, examining philosophically and psychoanalytically what it means to love another person, initially grew out of an experience of interruption and shock – a sense of having no choice but to submit to a profound loss which radically put into question my relationship with myself as well as the one I loved.
Coincidentally, at that time, I was taking a course on Freud called ‘Love and its Vicissitudes’, and another in which we were reading the works of Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage. Needless to say, the question concerning the nature of human relationships and the powerful bonds of love and hate, around which these relations are seemingly organised, were deeply inscribed in my mind. I wanted to try and begin to understand what are the psychosocial mechanisms that inadvertently shape our modes of relationality today, and fuelling my inquiry throughout this time was the wish to learn more about the psychic and social origins of love.
It was at this point in my studies that my reading of Emmanuel Levinas, arguably one of the greatest ethical thinkers of the 20th century, assumed a new light. I was captivated by his unique thoughts on the ethical encounter and happy to have finally discovered a philosopher who was passionately devoted to an exploration of the non or pre-conceptual dimensions of human existence, so often neglected in classical philosophy. The visceral language with which Levinas articulates our primordial relation to the other person is extraordinary and in my mind it seemed to resonate with a poetic sensibility that I find in literature and art. By drawing attention to the absolute otherness of human relationships – that is to say, the paradoxical mode in which they signify outside the realm of conceptualisation – Levinas opened up for me an entirely new way of thinking about the nature of relations which appear to resist knowledge. As such, his writings seemed to offer an exciting opportunity to discuss human relations in view of their poetic qualities, in other words, to speak of love as a drama of relationality.
Love, that strange and seductive word and most elusive phenomena to have preoccupied and inspired mankind. Depletion and fulfilment, fear and fascination all dwell within the same conflict-ridden space, where feelings of tenderness and passion are often mixed with hate; ecstasy borders on agony and idealisation can harbour aggression. We are beguiled and bemused by the power it holds over our being, drawn toward its delights and darkness. Whenever we try to unravel the reality of a loving experience we notice how the singular logic of love slips through the psychic web of cognition and confronts us with a mystery. Faced with the attempt to examine what is perhaps the most ambiguous question of all – the nature of human love – we find ourselves pushed to the very limits of rational thought.
However we choose to think of love, be it as a cocktail of chemical reactions in the brain, the expression of divine benevolence or an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, the question as to why we love, whom we love, how we love and fail to love, never quite translates into quantitative terms. Indeed, as so many poems brilliantly testify, nothing is ever clear-cut in the realm of love.
Rather than trying to provide an answer to the question of what is love, I would like to focus our attention onto the ethical significance of the ambiguity engendered by the experience of love. Perhaps there is something unique about the ambiguous nature of love as such – the pull toward life and creativity and the concomitant force toward its contradictory components, destruction and death, that makes ethics possible in the first place. In which case, we can begin to see how some of the social and economic mechanisms in today’s culture, such as the tendency to privilege understanding and identity at the cost of ambiguity, might deplete the poetic condition required for ethical love.
Under the present authority of scientific and technological progress, many aspects of contemporary life are crafted to be shared by the public eye, leaving little scope for question or the chance to venture into unknown space. To quote Jean Baudrillard in The Agony of Power (2010), we are sacrificing ‘this symbolic reserve of incompleteness in favour of a totalization of life through technology and a depletion of all desire’. The dominance of measurable research and evidence based practice is widespread, even within the humanities. And despite that issues of privacy in our age of technology have received ample media attention, there has minimal consideration of the ontological assumptions upon which these popular debates are founded. Are we in the process of concealing that which defies the laws of rational understanding and control, namely the mysteries of love itself?
As a way of approaching these questions I will begin by briefly examining some of Levinas’ central ideas. Against the traditional philosophical doctrines, he advances the radical claim that our ethical relationship with another person is asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. What Levinas means by this is that when I encounter another person, I enter into a relationship with a living human being who is irreconcilably different from me and unable to be subsumed under universal concepts. The other person, be it my friend, loved one, a stranger or my worst enemy, cannot be resolved into images or ideas, and is irreducible to consciousness. In Levinas’ words, as soon as I enter into a ‘face-to-face situation’ with this other person, ‘I am for the other in a relationship of deaconship: I am in service of the other.’
For Levinas then, the ethical is never simply a matter of experiencing values or adhering to a specific set of moral codes and prescriptions. Quite the contrary, my responsibility toward the other ‘slips into me’ before I even have the chance or choice to consider it. Responsibility is unconditional and ‘The moment one is generous in hopes of reciprocity, that relation no longer involves generosity but the commercial relation, the exchange of good behaviour’. In other words, as soon as I freely consent to a decision – consciously assume an ethical stance toward the other – I have already distanced myself from that person by assuming a position of authority (for instance, trying to judge if the person is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or whether or not to help him or her).
Ultimately, what Levinas seems to be suggesting here is that from the comforting site of self-consciousness, we are always capable of taking command of the situation as best suits our own interests and needs. He explains that in favour of self-possession and control, mastery has therefore always been privileged at the cost of our unconditional ethical responsibility. But unlike the self-contained Kantian agent who stays ‘free from any bond with what remains present to it’, in the ethical relationship, my sense of identity as a coherent and unified subject is destabilized and I lose the self-assured stance that keeps me at a secure distance from the other – not too close but not too far. For Levinas, the face-to-face relationship with another person is ethical insofar as it forces us to escape the self and approach the unknowable other in their infinite distance and difference.
Bearing these thoughts in mind, I would like to shed light on the work of another extraordinary writer and thinker, Maurice Blanchot. In The Work of Fire (1949), he writes the following: ‘we feel and sometimes regret that poetry, far from reconciling the elements of language, puts infinity between them, to the point where we have to believe that the words it uses have no meaning whatsoever, and the meaning it aims for remains beyond all words.’ In this passage, Blanchot articulates beautifully how poetry exposes us to an experience which cannot be grasped by reason, and before which I lose all my powers to comprehend, categorize and own the world in thought. Within the space of poetry, the gap between word and meaning remains open, and things are transformed into what cannot be grasped. As if by magic, the world described in the poem is disclosed precisely by not being entirely unveiled.
Whereas the speech of everyday language aims to achieve clarity and certainty, the writing of poetry is juxtaposed, defamiliarized, reinvented and split, disrupting the straight line from word to meaning. In poetry, as Blanchot points out, language ceases to function merely as a means of communication through which we take control over our existence and acquire knowledge. As a matter of fact, by depriving me of my ability to master things in thought, poetry instead obliges me to confront an experience which cannot be synthesized and therefore does not belong to me. Poetry opens us to the mystery of the other.
‘Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry’ . According to Theodor W. Adorno, the Age of Enlightenment initiated a conceptual rationale wherein the processes of rationalization and abstraction were held to be the ultimate means of establishing truth and liberating man from fear of the unknown. Today, while the economic and technological powers strengthen their stronghold across the neoliberal world, it seems that many of these Enlightenment ideals continue to dominate large parts of modern thought, fuelling a monolithic adherence to classical notions of truth, love and autonomy.
When Levinas declared that ‘escape is the need to get out of oneself’, he was no doubt pointing toward the ethical relationship. In his early but seminal book, On Escape (1935), he writes that ‘Escaping is the quest for the marvelous, which is liable to break up the somnolence of our bourgeois existence’. His urgent emphasis on the intrinsically asymmetrical nature of the ethical relationship alerts us to the existing dangers in our pursuit of unity and understanding. The desperate attempt to achieve communion and communication in all aspects of contemporary life, including the political, cultural and social, invariably ends up suppressing the multiplicity of existence and violently reducing the otherness of our fellow human beings.
By turning up side down some of our most established views of ethics and subjectivity, Levinas illuminates how the value of love lies in its negativity. I quote, ‘the very value of love is the impossibility of reducing the other to myself, of coinciding into sameness’. The truth is, he argues, that ever since Plato, through to Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, love has traditionally alluded to the desire for serene union and fusion. As a result, non-coincidence and difference have come to symbolise undesirable states of deficiency or lack that we try to avoid. Think of the vast culture of online matchmaking and dating apps today; how it implicitly ensures as little a risk as possible of rejection or discrepancy of interests between two individuals.
The question is, how do we love another person without intruding upon his or her differences in a society where we are deemed to embrace a relentless chase after individual autonomy, recognition and stability? Levinas encourages us to see that man’s relationship with the other is better as difference than as unity. For those of us who seek love as a perfect union and reconciliation, the other will never be anything but limit and menace, a threat to the stability of self. Unfortunately, in a world where every demand is met by a different option or consumer product, the creative nature of lack is often disregarded and the self-sacrificing or shattering moment in loving relationships is forgotten.
Much like the best of poets, Levinas shows us that permanent desire and non-fulfilment are integral characteristics of human love. In the face-to-face encounter with another human being, and in poetry, we enter into a relation with the other that interrupts the dialectical movement of signification and exceeds reason. For Levinas it is the lack of certainty in the ethical encounter – and Blanchot adds to this the poetic encounter – that awakens our desire for what cannot be satisfied and concerns us in such a way that neither self-interest nor personal need is involved. Responsibility is dangerous; but it is also adventure. As Levinas affirms in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1978), ‘the proximity of the neighbour in its trauma does not only strike up against me, but exalts and elevates me, and in the literal sense of the term, inspires me’.
My personal story of loss and sadness opened me up to the simple but profound truth that ethical love, as opposed to the state of being in love, depends on the renunciation of our primitive wish for reconciliation and fusion (as psychoanalyst Michael Balint would say, the wish to be loved and desired exclusively by the other without having to respond the other’s unique demands). Having been the object of a young man’ idealised love, I finally realised that to deny your beloved the opportunity of withstanding and surviving the unavoidable moments of hate and destruction in human relationships, is the same as to deprive them of a personal subjectivity and block their entry into a reality in which they too learn to accept the other as a similar but fundamentally other human subject. In truth, by hiding any signs of disappointment and suppressing his own demands upon my behaviour, both of us – the fearless princess and her loyal prince – remained caught within the aggressive patterns of a primitive love in which we were unable to tolerate the periods of contradiction, uncertainty and loss. Strange as it may sound, by virtue of my being thrust unwillingly into an utterly new and hurtful reality by the one I loved, at last I was given the chance to mourn the painful loss of my childish omnipotence. Only then did the other person to whom I now felt endlessly responsible, become real, that is, both loved and hated.
Levinas taught me that loss and suffering are basic conditions of responsibility and our openness toward the other. This is not to say that love is pure selflessness or giving, as Levinas at times would seem to believe, but nor is it the complete satisfaction or harmony that is commonly assumed today. Love signifies a relation between two individuals, which involves a poetic movement of impossible fusion and constant tension within and between the self and other. Through overcoming periods of loss we learn responsibility and the humility of accepting disappointment, that is to say, to respect the other’s individual existence and allow the one we love a mutual space of freedom in which to create and contain the paradoxical drama of love.
This essay was published in May 2014 for The ADC*E Essay Series – Issue 1. It was designed and curated by Folch Studio on the occasion of the 1st European Creativity Festival and produced thanks to Arjowiggings Creative Papers. Illustrations by Ángela Palacios.
Parts of this essay were written for my paper ‘The Birth of the Ethical Subject’ which I presented at The Society for Existential Analysis Conference ‘Love and Hate’ in December 2013.
Responding to Martin Heidegger: A Journey into the Question of Being
“I: I don’t deny it. But it seems to me that, in the field in which we are moving, we reach those things with which we are originarily familiar precisely if we do not shun passing through things strange to us.” (Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 1959)
‘As concerns thinking, we are living in the domain of a two-and-one-half thousand year old tradition’, writes Martin Heidegger in his book What is Called Thinking (1976). According to Heidegger, one of the most influential 20th century German philosophers, the guiding force in Western metaphysics has been to ground and explain beings by way of relating them to a constant and originary principle or presence (such as the Forms, logos, God, a transcendental Self or logic). Within the classical Cartesian philosophical framework, the human being is viewed as a self-conscious and theorizing subject who adequately represents ‘in thought’ a reality of objects ‘out there’. Indeed ever since Aristotle, the truth of a philosophical statement or proposition has been established on the basis of its correspondence with reality as presented to and grasped by the thinking subject. As a result of this traditional theory of truth, the being of something has prevailingly come to be regarded as that which is. In other words, as Heidegger asserts, throughout the entire tradition of Western thought, being has essentially been equated with presence.
Heidegger radically puts into question this familiar determination of being as presence – the very foundation of Western philosophy – by arguing that it violently and erroneously reduces all beings to a knowable object of conceptual analysis, in favour of a generalized and decontextualised ideal or truth. The search for a definitive and totalizing objective account of the world (be it philosophical, theological or scientific) has consequently fostered a violent tradition of calculative thinking governed by a restricted notion of being and existence. Western-European thought (in particular since Descartes) has failed to explore the pre-reflective layers of existence that condition the development of rational thinking, and thus the fundamental question as to how the construction of any conceptual system is possible in the first place has been omitted. The holistic nature of knowledge is consequently neglected, subordinated to the dominance of theoretical and scientific modes of understanding, hence the sources as well as limitations of human knowledge remain unquestioned. For Heidegger, this technical approach to human beings is the principal characteristic of Occidental metaphysics, and indeed the origin of ‘the forgetting of being’.
For Heidegger, our relation to Being arguably plays a seminal part in the history of mankind, influencing the modes in which we relate to the world and other human beings. Despite the fact that countless methods of thinking have emerged during the course of history – each positing a new and different way of explaining the world and our place within it – Heidegger suggests that our relation to being has remained fundamentally the same. In so far as the dominant mode of understanding has been structured around the age-old ideal of reason, being has always been coerced into conformity with one or another system of presentation. This rationalization of experience, Heidegger argues, bears signs of a deeply violent and detrimental relation to being, the roots of which can be traced all the way back to ancient Athens.
What do we mean by the word ‘being’? And what does it really mean to be? These questions fuel Heidegger’s passionate concern with language and lead him on a singular journey into the poetical spaces of thought which challenge the pervading instrumentalisation of language and put us in touch with the obscure and opaque echoes of being – the absent and pre-theoretical domain of existence upon which the very possibility of thinking and speaking depends.
‘All reflective thinking is poetic, and all poetry in turn is a kind of thinking’ , states Heidegger. Boldly speaking, we are currently encouraged to believe that rational knowledge is a human capacity and a practical means with which we can achieve order and peace on all levels of existence. Obscurity is viewed fundamentally as a problem, but reason endows us with the truth and control we need in order to maintain a lucrative and stable society. An entity or activity that truly transgresses the boundaries of this dominant rationale, by drawing us into the realms of excess and doubt, is deemed, albeit covertly, a menace to the prosperity of our society. Although art, poetry and music may be considered valid sources of emotional insight, pleasure and amusement, they are rarely considered as valuable sites of truth. This is a prejudice that still appears to govern the Western world today. Heidegger articulates with eloquence this widespread attitude: ‘Logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe’. Reminiscent of some of the early Romantic thinkers, Heidegger appears to believe that the hostility toward other non-conceptual modes of thinking stems partly from the fallacious metaphysical assumption that truth is a universal and stable fact. This basic premise inevitably objectifies being and instrumentalises knowledge, paving the way for the technological and scientific domination of nature. According to Heidegger, the traditional relation to truth is therefore indicative of a decline in the history of being. Western thought, he argues, furthers an increasingly calculative logic which essentially serves to sustain the violent project of modernity.
Agreeing with Heidegger, it is hard to ignore the ethical consequences of this propositional interpretation of truth. Traditionally, we are accustomed to thinking of truth as the ultimate emblem of objectivity and consistency. As a result there is a danger that all beings, including humans, become reified and treated as rigid objects that can be calculated and grasped, fixed in truth. ‘The world is never an object that stands before us and can be seen’; ‘the world worlds’, as Heidegger writes. To be sure, in light of the current socio economical ideals of efficiency, global expansion and material affluence, one cannot help but discern a sinister reality in which this callous relation to being may be willfully disguised and maintained for further exploitation. Everywhere we see instances of nature being subjugated and subordinated to the human being; viewed as existing solely in the service of human national interests. ‘Modern thinking is ever more resolutely and exclusively turning into calculation’ and ‘is about to abandon the earth as earth’ . In a competitive market of exchange values, land turns into capital, books transform into Kindles, experiences become iPad apps and knowledge is translated into transferable skills.
Occasionally we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the ‘thingly’ element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence, for which reason people disavow thought instead of taking pains to make it more thoughtful. Curiously enough, in search of an absolute account of existence, human beings have arguably tended to disregard the pre-rational ‘thingliness’ of things, in favour of a general abstraction and concept. The holistic attitude toward beings and knowledge is thus commonly dismissed and as a result we do ‘not lay hold of the thing as it is in its own being, but makes an assault upon it’. Ironically, from a Heideggerian perspective, we actually obstruct our access to truth, and even abuse the thing by confining it to the narrow parameters of the concept. ‘Can such an assault perhaps be avoided – and how?’ asks Heidegger in his celebrated The Origin of the Work of Art, in which he explores the world-disclosive nature of art and poetry. The work of art, he argues, is a ‘letting happen of the advent of truth of what is’ because it grants ‘the thing, as it were, a free field to display its thingly character directly’. What Heidegger essentially seems to suggest is that art and poetry access the truth of Being and open up the possibility of a non-violent relation to beings. As we have seen, according to the conventional doctrine of thought, objects are considered knowable in so far as they can be fitted into a tightly knit logical system of knowledge. For Heidegger, the work of art on the contrary does not adhere to a specific theorem or set of universal standards, but rather leaves ‘the thing to rest in its own self’ and allows the thing ‘be as it is’.
Today, following the footsteps of Plato’s thinking, ‘we include as obvious that ‘being’ means as much as “actuality”’ and we still insist on knowing the scientific cause of a phenomenon. We are convinced that scientific truth is unfettered by personal opinions and doubts and therefore is the most trustworthy and objective of all knowledge. It seems to me that nowadays there is in general a kind of blind faith in the authority of science. Science is endorsed as the arbiter of truth and regarded as superior in comparison to any non-conceptual mode of saying that defies the current yardsticks of truth-value and factuality. In fact the paradox is that this God-like omniscience of science and also finance has somehow today become equated with ‘common sense’ despite the fact that most of us know very little to almost nothing about either of them. Indeed ‘That all men cannot follow the thought processes of modern theoretical physics is considered quite in order’. With the rise of modern science and technology, even traditional philosophical reasoning has become less valid as a method of inquiry and often, in Heidegger’s parlance, ‘branded as a frivolous whim’. In my view, it seems plausible to wonder whether science has perhaps assumed such a vastly privileged position in our modern-day society in virtue of its formulaic appearance and remoteness from the verbose ‘literary’ quality of philosophical reflection. Heidegger shows us that there is something uncanny about the essential nature of language, which evokes an uncertainty that has caused us deep concern ever since ancient times. Is there indeed something in particular about the indeterminacy of ‘the poetic’ as such that draws us back to the forgotten truth of being? Or do we slip into the destabilizing region of untruth if we submit to the poetic experience with language?
‘For equipment to be ready means that it is dismissed beyond itself, to be used up in serviceability’. According to Heidegger there is a crucial difference between a work of art and a piece of equipment. Let us take the smartphone for example. In the smart phone ‘the event of its being created’ – simply ‘that it is’ – vanishes in functionality and usefulness. Even if I were to be gripped by the truth that the smartphone is, it would soon be forgotten when I reach out to text someone, check my email or search for an address with the GPS. However, In the work of art, however, the ‘createdness’, to use Heidegger’s idiosyncratic word, does not fall into oblivion. Quite the opposite: the eventful fact that the work is rather than is not, comes to the fore and is part of the created work. Unlike in the smartphone, ‘In the work of art something other is brought together with the thing that is made’ [emphasis mine]. Standing face to face with a great work of art such as Michelangelo’s David, Mozart’s Requiem or Nabokov’s Lolita, I am struck by the brute and bare truth that it is.
‘Commonly, an inquiry aims straight for the answer. It rightly looks for the answer alone, and sees to it that the answer is obtained. The answer disposes the question’ . It is interesting to observe, even only on an intuitive note, that our traditional ideas of knowledge have long been based on the question of mastery. We believe that we know something truly once we have represented it as a stable idea or judgment which we can possess. What we can glean from the above quote by Heidegger is the sad reality in which the thought itself is sought at the cost of thinking. In other words if we fail to achieve this impression of authority and totality, thinking is soon rejected. As Heidegger aptly elucidates, ‘Public opinion today cherishes the notion that the thinking of thinkers must be capable of being understood in the same way as the daily newspapers.’ Indeed whatever withdraws and refuses to correspond to a solid representational idea, and therefore cannot be mastered, is commonly viewed as a problem or flaw. Hence we try to rid ourselves of the question (weakness) by way of avoiding it or finding an answer to it (strength). As a rule, in our present day when the ideals of completion and management seem to be escalating by the minute, practically anything that gives rise to a sense of defeat or a lack of command is viewed as a negative sign of failure. Indeed one is almost inclined to say that we are encouraged by society to experience the loss of certitude as a lack of competence and a personal attack on our ego-capacity as self-assured rational subjects.
A loss of total control (the illusion of) is without a doubt ineffective and unprofitable in modern society because it challenges the very epistemological foundation upon which our political and ideological structures of cohesion are built. When we experience a loss of control and logical comprehension – for example when standing in the presence of a great work of art – we are ‘transported out of the realm of the ordinary’ and thrust into the extraordinary where everything familiar and hitherto existing becomes other than being. Expressed in Heideggerian language, by being drawn into that which withdraws and conceals, we are released into the truth of beings, that is, their ‘presence sheltered in absence’ . Truth is always this event. As we have seen, it happens only as the conflict between clearing and concealment. Standing within the presence of the artwork we break out of the domain of logic and common sense and enter into the neighbourhood of poetry and thinking where lack is no longer a defect and happiness is ‘attuned to sadness’ . Heidegger asserts that this happening of truth – whereby the work of art is brought into presence and first assumes its radiance as an appearance – cannot occur independently of those who respond to it and preserve it. Truth is not, as in the dualistic tradition of Western metaphysics, an infinite and atemporal object of knowledge or making, ‘somewhere among the stars’ which ‘stands before, over against, opposite us’ . Rather, as Heidegger stresses, it is a happening which is always bodily, split, historical and exceeds human cognition precisely because we are standing within it; indeed we are only in so far as it remains concealed. Accordingly, to pursue the truth of beings must be to pursue the origin of being.
Perhaps it is in this light that we should read Heidegger’s polemical statement ‘Science does not think’, in order to hear it more truthfully and beyond its obvious outrageousness. For as Heidegger states, ‘Historical science may thoroughly explore a period, for instance, in every possible respect, and yet never explore what history is. It cannot do so scientifically’. Thinking, on the contrary, is essentially poetic and abides in the neighbourhood of truth. Although poetry and thinking are different, for Heidegger they seem to belong together by virtue that they both draw towards that which is most thought-provoking and calls on us to think, namely the question of Being. They both belong within the Saying, that is, the gathering relation which ‘sets all present beings free into their given presence, and brings what is absent into their absence’ . According to Heidegger, this is the essential being of language. ‘The word – no thing, nothing that is, no being; but we have an understanding of things when the word for them is available. Then the thing “is”.’ What is the word for the word? Heidegger asks us. Indeed if we try to find an answer to this confounding question we find that it immediately slips out of our mind. The word is the ‘non-thing’, the ‘absence’ or ‘unbeing’ which ‘allows the thing to presence as thing’. To put it differently, the word is precisely the gathering relation we mentioned earlier, which gives Being and yet is not.
In agreement with Heidegger, the word is mystery. But despite this paradoxical and conflict-ridden nature of words, language is still commonly viewed as a means of expression, a tool to be employed and possessed just like any other instrument which can aid us in our search for ‘handy information’, and increase our cultural and financial capital. In a climate dominated by utility and ‘the will to action, which means the will to make and be effective’, thinking rarely reaches beyond the common parameters of ratiocination and calculation. Neuroscience and computer science roam into the unknown, but only in order to render it known.
To be sure, the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that colour is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth. To be sure, the poet also uses the word – not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have used them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.
As Heidegger would say, the poem lets the tree be a tree in bloom. It does not explain why the tree is as it is, it says only that it is. Thinking, art and poetry therefore do not lead to ‘salvation’ or produce ‘new wisdom’. ‘Thinking itself is a way’ which ‘always risks going astray, leading astray’. More importantly, thinking demands that we respond and preserve this path in order for it to come into being. Just like the work of art needs us to let it be a work of art, thinking also calls on us to persist on the way. In other words thinking is not an enterprise of eliminating questions. By following the path of thinking we maintain the riddle and enter the daunting labyrinth into which it leads us. Therefore thinking never occurs within the secure sphere of commonness and traditional metaphysical thought. For once we yield to the path of thinking or the work of art, we are no longer the active masters and speakers of language and thought. ‘To think is before all else to listen’ which means to let the essential being of language speak to us. Renouncing our claim to being we allow ourselves to hear the echoes of untruth, absence and otherness.
‘Today, when talk about “being” and “existence” is practically a daily routine, we notice only the monotony of the sentence “being is.” At best, we are offended by the elusiveness of the apparent generality and abstraction it expresses.’ However, ‘The fact that we take the ‘is’ too lightly, is no proof that the ‘is’ and what it names does not keep within it weightiness that we can hardly even weigh’. Paraphrasing Heidegger’s example, without the “is” in the phrase “the tree is” the tree would fall into a void, taking along with it the whole science of botany. In our current society, as more and more phenomena, including language, take on an ‘equipmental’ character, it is almost impossible to notice the ‘un-heard-of sense of this sentence “being is”. Virtually everything which serves as a ‘tool’ for us to achieve the fantasies we are implored to embrace – of completion, constant satisfaction and success – prevents us from ‘the possibility of undergoing an experience with language’. For practical purposes we are prompted to view with suspicion any sign of the poetic nature of language as soon as it appears outside the conventional confines of ‘culture’. Language no doubt plays a major part in this normative project when ‘even’ Critical Theory has become capitalised and pressed into the recognisable discourse of employability and educational outcomes. Spectacles like facebook, online dating, national identity cards, credit cards, the right to vote, all grant us a specific kind of experience of existence, purged of the overwhelming, estranging, unfamiliar and uncanny reality that ‘being is’.
Admittedly many of these reflections sound strange to our rationally trained ears and perhaps especially so in a time when the requirements for empirical evidence and verifiability are overriding. In fact the risk is great that we quickly relegate them to the category of obscurantism. But I think we can learn something essential from Heidegger if we resist this temptation and avoid dismissing his critique of Western thinking merely as a reactionary and nostalgic yearning for a pre-metaphysical language. Naturally, this does not mean to say that we should be uncritical of Heidegger or deny the essentialising tendencies and tones that are present throughout his work. Indeed it impossible to hear Heidegger’s language in abstraction from the horrendous and unforgivable reality of his complicity with Nazism.
But following the winding ways of the Heideggerian landscape is by no means an easy matter. We enter into the enigmatic, lyrical, cyclical and strange, where common sense is turned upside down and the assurance of comprehension and clarity is denied. Huffing and puffing, we are close to give up. But if we are willing to listen, ‘to keep clear of prejudice’ , and to remain on this endless path we might after all find that we have left the familiar site of reason and embarked on a journey into the region of poetry and thinking. Perhaps then, together with Heidegger, we too must attempt to ‘step back’ from our customary ways of thinking, which insist on explaining, representing, grasping and seizing, in order to ‘raise again’ the forgotten question of being and ‘step back into the sphere of human beings’. Heidegger shows us that this demands that ‘we speak from within language’ and ‘trace thinking within thought’. In other words it means that we must depart from traditional modes of thinking which merely utilize (or ‘use up’) language in order to speak about things, that includes human beings, language and thought. As long as we remain fixed in this habitual framework of thinking we will continue to violate, and indeed annihilate beings, by objectifying them. Surely a current symptom of this technical and instrumentalising attitude toward language is ‘Google translate’. Amidst my countless Linkedln, Academia, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter ‘profiles’, what happens to me? In order to reach beings without encroaching upon them, we must detach ourselves from the realm of the known and attempt to think Being, that is, language as language, thinking as thinking, things as things. For only in so far as we think of a being in its essential nature do we let the being appear in its veiled presence and consequently protect it.
The paradox is that we can only ever have this experience of the truth of beings by surrendering to an experience which we never actually possess; that is to say, by hearing, responding and preserving a language which is never truly our own; or again, by offering our self and becoming other. Surely this is why it is also so difficult to read Heidegger, because reading turns into thinking. When reading Heidegger we are forced to abandon and question our common sense notion of what reading and thinking is. Indeed, under the existing reign of the quantifiable and cognitive, the idea of thinking as a matter of offering, dispossession and lack seems remote, and furthermore, dangerous. We shy away from the prospect of entering into a poetic and thinking experience with the truly paradoxical, and we struggle knowingly and unknowingly through various means to familiarize whatever appears alien to reason and representation.
But I cannot help wonder if our reluctance to offer ourselves completely to an experience, in the Heideggerian sense of submitting, suffering and enduring an experience, touches on a fundamental fear of confronting our own mortality. Rather, I wonder if our eagerness to be constantly experiencing ‘something’, in other words, to be governing and controlling the appearance of our existence, be it through facebook, drinking, drugs, eating, clubbing, buying, talking, working, demonstrating, does in fact reveal a deep-seated unwillingness to accept with humility our position as mortal human beings. To surrender to the naked and plain fact that we are, everyday and everywhere, is indeed far more dizzying and demanding than yielding to the seduction of an intoxication or the allure of an explanatory system of thought.
Drawing on etymology Heidegger traces the root meaning of the word ‘thinking’ back to the Greeks. In a beautiful passage he writes ‘[In thinking] What is perceived concerns us in such a way that we take it up specifically, and do something with it. But where do we take what is to be perceived? How do we take it up? We take it to heart’. This does not mean that we leave ‘something where it lies while we pass by indifferently’. But nor does it mean that we conceptualise or internalise it and violently reduce the other to the known. On the contrary, it can encourage us to acknowledge and appreciate the gift of our essential nature which is not, as Heidegger suggests, to prize and to know, but to continue to listen and welcome thinking, by gently holding a being as being within the shelter of our heart.
“Ladies and gentlemen! We shall begin not with premisses, but with an investigation. We are choosing as its object certain phenomena that are very frequent, very familiar and very little appreciated, and which have nothing to do with illnesses in so far as they can be observed in a healthy person. These are the so-called lapses of mankind.”
This is how Sigmund Freud opens one of his shorter essays written in the beginning of the 1900s in which he explores, somewhat controversially, the significance of lapses; that is, the verbal and non-verbal mistakes that we make regularly in our everyday lives. An early but seminal text in the history of modern psychology and semantics, this essay focuses our attention onto the often neglected yet fascinating features of human existence – namely those paradoxical moments of ambiguity caused by unexpected breaks in the continuity of life.
For Freud, even the slightest, ostensibly most insignificant slip or error in communication is meaningful. A person who is intending to say one thing to his beloved will accidentally state the opposite. Another person might suddenly be struck by an outbreak of hysterical laughter, while someone else will inadvertently read a different word than that which is written on the paper in front of him. For instance, on occasion, we might find ourselves automatically telling a white lie in spite of our conscious effort not to do so. Or still, as if compelled by an extraneous force, a musician will find that her fingers are drawn to the wrong note at precisely the point when she feels the most confident. Indeed the list is endless, but of one thing we are certain, and this is the fact that all examples confront us with a surprisingly similar situation. If we are willing to pause for a moment and look closer at these peculiar phenomena, it appears that something more profound can be observed. In each of the above-mentioned cases, a disruption takes place in the person’s habitual way of thinking. In other words, our logical comportment toward the world collapses and we find ourselves temporarily at odds with ourself, and acting, as it were, in spite of ourself.
Perhaps therefore, like Freud, we should not reject these curious occurrences in human behaviour until we have explored more fully what seems to be their common denominator. Lapses in language and behaviour are hardly stable objects of scientific knowledge. And while some may argue that such inconspicuous events are unworthy of attention, I suggest that we try to set aside our rational prejudices at present and let these logical crevices lead our thoughts elsewhere, along the poetic paths of history and literature. What is it about these small and daily ‘mis-’ takes that causes such reluctance in us to take them seriously? I wonder if, in fact, something as fleeting and trivial by nature as a slip of the tongue can reveal to us a human predicament infinitely more unnerving than may first appear?
I’d like to turn back briefly to a period in Russian history when this country bore witness to its fearsome degeneration into Joseph Stalin’s autocracy. The late 1920s was a time of intense oppression and enforced national and cultural unification. In an attempt to overcome the backwardness of post-revolutionary Russia, and to unite the vast country, Stalin employed a plethora of coercive measures; strengthened political bureaucratisation and centralization, nationalisation, terror-campaigns, Five Year Plan, purges and brutal collectivization. Socio-political restructurings were fast implemented by the Soviet state, leading to ever-increasingly severe restrictions and regulations on behalf of the population. By the beginning of the 30s, music and writing were strictly censored and all cultural production, including literature, was forced to adhere to the rules of the official art movement Socialist Realism. Revived again was the age-old Aristotelian notion of mimesis, according to which art is supposed to be a pure reflection of society in order to promote the right ideals, as well as to instruct the people how to live and consequently assist the formation of social and ideological unity.
As with every dictatorship throughout history, in order to secure total political dominance, Stalin had to ensure that there was little space for social criticism and consequently limited possibilities for contemplative thought. As a result, all competing voices were silenced and a dialogue of personalities was denied. Stalin – the centring authority from which all meaning seemingly emanated – instead became the nucleus and personification of absolute truth. During the Soviet era, as the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) argued in his famous essay Discourse in The Novel, the language of officials was effectively passed off as universal and directly expressive of reality. Presented as a neutral medium as well as the anchor of certainty and objectivity, language itself became a means of homogenising the consciousness of the masses and reducing them to passive, malleable, consumers of meaning.
According to Bakhtin, language is not an autonomous given but a complex product of signifying structures based on discontinuity and difference. Echoing the Saussurean definition of the linguistic sign, Bakhtin argued against the pervading Aristotelian ideals of representation and showed how languages, words, speech-acts and readings are fundamentally dialogic. He explained that each semantic ‘entity’ is inseparably merged with the other. In different words, quoting Bakhtin himself, No living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme. Hence all language is a dynamic play of interweaving and opposing forces.
Despite the fact that all questioning was forbidden under Stalinism (or perhaps due to this reality), literature assumed a crucial role in the arena of social and political critique. For some of the greatest Russian authors such as Andrei Bely, Yuri Olesha, Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Bulgakov, the inherent ambiguity of literary language became a unique creative resource for circumventing censorship. In the world of literature, words could be used and experienced in a non-instrumentalising manner, as pocket holes of freedom which allowed the contradictions and conflicts in society to be simultaneously revealed and concealed. In terms of their narrative voice, formal structure and ideological position, ambivalence therefore became a dominant characteristic of the novels of this period. Through humour, metaphor and irony, Soviet authors and readers arguably could inhabit the enigmatic void between word and thing without having to – or indeed being able to – affirm an ‘ultimate’ message.
Rather than silencing and smoothing out the duplicity of communication, by obeying the rigid laws of Socialist realism, numerous Russian novels from the 20s and 30s seemed, on the contrary, to exaggerate the intrinsic surplus of meaning in words. In the grotesque and carnivalesque worlds of the Soviet writers, hierarchies were inverted, realism and magic merged, and common-sense logic was subtly overturned. But as regulation became increasingly strict and censorship grew stronger during the 30s, even some of the most celebrated authors of the time were accused of ideological deviation, promoting anti-socialist propaganda, and were banned and murdered or forced to flee the country in order to avoid imprisonment.
The lapse, for Freud, is considered to be something meaningful insofar as it highlights a disjunction within consciousness. In a slip of the tongue, for example, conscious thought is split and confronted, albeit for a second, with the presence of its unconscious source. Language suddenly ceases to be a means through which we can ‘accurately’ comprehend and take control of reality and our reactions. Recalling Bakhtin’s thoughts on the dialogic nature of language, the lapse, unlike normative thinking and speaking, makes noticeable precisely this latent presence of the ‘other’ – that is, the infinite and absent meanings upon which all language is founded. In other words, it points to the obscurity of meaning which must be suppressed in our everyday communication in order for us to make sense of things. In much the same manner as the joke, dream or pun, slips demand a suspension of this reality principle, forcing us to momentarily recognise that we are not always the masters of ourselves and others. In the absurd realm of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, rational certainty crumbles and the sense of ambivalence rules. The line between word and object is refracted, depriving us of the possibility of identifying any single given truth.
The idea of an outside, an unknowable other that cannot be comprehended or grasped, has no doubt been one of the most fundamental sources, if not the most rudimentary source of fear to prevail in the history of mankind in the West. It is for this reason, some philosophers suggest, that the tradition of European philosophy has essentially been a violent pursuit of certainty and domination at the cost of all alterity. Why does a loss of rationality prompt us to discard a phenomenon as frivolous or dangerously deceiving? As Freud writes, ‘is there anything that, in a particular case, out of all possibilities, urges me to misspeak in one particular way’?
If indeed comprehension requires that every relation of otherness is identified and ultimately eliminated, perhaps there is something truly uncanny about the indeterminacy of lapses and literary language. Much like a metaphor or dream, a slip of the tongue makes something otherwise alien appear. Forcing us to face the illusory nature of self-possession and sovereignty, lapses and literature (when at its best) let us hover freely in the unknown region in between emptiness and excess.
For Maurice Blanchot, the power of literature lies in its obscurity. The writer is pulled into a realm of uncertainty by the ‘dread-filled desire’ that colours the canvas of the writer’s life and yet compels him or her to respond to the dizzying and devastating force of fascination. Much like the paradoxical movement of language, the effects of lapses lead us into an indeterminate realm of fascination where, to quote Simon Critchley, ‘blindness is still vision, vision that is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing’.
This essay was published in TANK Vol. 7, Issue 7, 2014.
