Bruegel's Opacity

How does the current interest in the “presence” of the object fit within the study of the visual? Art history, a discipline more interested in the historical location of pictures rather than their continuing activity in the present, often acts to define and freeze images in time. How can we let them breathe in order to recognize their power over us in the present? Is there an alternative to iconographic and iconological analyses that might offer something new to an understanding of Bruegel’s paintings. “Bruegel’s Opacity” is meant to call attention to the way in which his paradoxical pictures resist interpretation while at the same time demanding that we make “meaning” from them.

Can we walk the tightrope of the distinction between our relation to the object as an object, our phenomenological response to its material existence, and the desire to give it significance--including that which it may never have had? Or, must we accept that this distinction is a heuristic tool that often blinds us both to the nature of the encounter and to the quality of the interpretations we place on it? Can we escape Michael Baxandall’s conclusion that: “… what one offers in a description is a representation of thinking about a picture more than a representation of a picture (?)”

In the painting, “The Triumph of Death” (Madrid, Prado, ca.1562) for example, representatives of various classes and occupations of the social hierarchy fill the foreground. From kings and cardinals to aristocrats and pilgrims, they have little to do with the landscape represented behind. In fact, they register as outlined shapes on the surface of the painting regardless of their location in illusionistic space. Bruegel has little recourse to foreshortening, and his actors tend either to be depicted in profile or seen from above so that their actions may more readily be recognized. The absence of perspective plunges us into a wealth of incidents that would escape perception if the principles of either linear of atmospheric perspective had been observed. Our gaze travels the picture surface looking in vain for stasis, for there is no focal point. The picture tells us how to look, or perhaps how not to look, insisting that multiplicity and difference are more important than a single act of comprehension. No one major event or figure offers us the key to the painting’s meaning. The work itself insists on a restless movement during which incident upon incident develop in richly terrifying detail ways the manifold dimensions of the concept of death.

Does this description actually make contact with the picture before us? Does ekphrasis bring the work closer or simply push it further away? Is it any more informative than what the iconographers attempted? Gottfried Boehm refers to what he calls the underside of painting, the fact that it works only by concealing the invisible within the visible. This approach seems relevant to our problem. Citing Husserl he writes:

His conclusive argument postulates namely that the visible front and the invisible back [of an image] categorically and totally diverge from one another and belong to completely different classes. The front of something is always thematic, that is to say that it is grasped in the act of focusing; the back is never thematic, but rather implicit and therefore potential. (1)

My brief description of Bruegel’s painting has focused on what Boehm would call the “thematic.” I have followed the artist’s invitation to “read” the work as its illusionism demands, but I have also been acutely aware of the limits placed on the meaning created by this process in the medium of the visible--what Boehm calls the “potential.” Is the translation of the potential into the thematic all that ekphrasis does; is it both its enduring contribution and its fatal curse? As description attempts to bring the image to life before our eyes, it seems to blinds us, substituting a text for the image and an author for the artist.

Scholars have taken Bruegel’s works apart, objectifying their experience of them to the best of their ability, in the effort to stabilize their conclusions as part of an enduring epistemological system. The “transparency” achieved by these means, in which time is equated with intelligibility and insight with the semiotic, must ignore the “opacity” of visual objects. Belonging to a historical moment that is long gone, these pictures are still with us today, and an encounter with them cannot ignore the contemporaneity of the experience. Confronting the painting as an object, what Heidegger might have called a “thing”--something that has significance for somebody--is crucial for the development of intimacy and the establishment of a bond. (2) Even if the nature of the experience is constituted in retrospect, with the aid of memory, its immediacy, that which took us by surprise--that which cannot be translated into words--will figure in the account, if only by indirection.  

Some words in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that might help. Lacan speaks of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project of putting the eye back in touch with the mind. Referring to Cezanne he asks: “…what occurs as these strokes, which go to make up the miracle of the picture, fall like rain from the painter’s brush is not choice, but something else. Can we not try to formulate what that something else is?” (3) In this talk I have tried to encourage the pictorial rain to keep falling, resisting the interpretive urge to freeze the visuality of Bruegel’s paintings into yet another triumphant declaration of iconographic meaning. Difficult as it is to keep the visual specificity of this art alive and working free from the ice that clings to words predicated on the promise of transparency, I have tried to restore a certain opacity to Bruegel’s art.

(1) Gottfried Boehm, "Indeterminacy: On the Logic of the Image," www.imagehistory.org/texts/2008/3-2-Boehm.pdf, 6.

(2) Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), 163-180.

(3) Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,  1981), 114.

Notes on Seeing

1

To look and not see: an old problem. It usually means a lack of understanding, an inability to divine the meaning of something in the world around us.

2

Cognitive scientists have repeatedly conducted the following experiment and, without fail, they come up with same results. An audience is asked to watch a film of two teams playing basketball. They are given a job to count the number of times the ball changes hands. I have done this, and one has to be very attentive to follow the motion of the ball. In the middle of the game, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the court, turns to the camera, thumps his chest and leaves. Half the people do not see the great ape. They do not believe that he was actually there until the film is replayed and, indeed, a gorilla strolls in and out of the game. Nearly everyone sees the gorilla if he is not given the assignment. This has been named inattentional blindness.

3

Writing at my desk now, I see the screen but this sentence dominates my attention. In fact, my momentary awareness that there is much around the words distracts me: the blue screen of the computer beyond the white edge of the page; various icons above and below; the surface of my desk cluttered with small Post-it squares which, when I turn my head, I can read, “Habermas 254-55”, “Meany et. al, implications for andrenocortical responses to stress” scrawled on pink paper (residue of arcane research); a black stapler; and countless other objects that enter my awareness the moment I turn to them. What is crucial is that I don’t turn to them. For hours every day, I have little, if any, consciousness of them. I live in a circumscribed phenomenal world. An internal narrator speaks words and dictates to my fingers that type automatically. There is no need to think about the connection between head and hands. I am subsumed by the link. Were another object suddenly to materialize on my desk and then vanish, I might well have no knowledge of either its appearance or disappearance.

4

Once, in an unfamiliar hallway, I mistook myself for a stranger because I did not understand I was looking in a mirror. My own form took me by surprise because I was not oriented in space. Expectation is powerful.

5

There are days when I think I see an old friend in the street, but it is a stranger. The recognition ignites like a match and then is instantly extinguished when I understand I am wrong. The recognition is felt, not thought. I can’t trace what created the error, can’t tell you why one person reminded me of another.  Was the old friend a subliminal presence in my mind on that particular day or was the confusion purely external—a jut of the chin or slope of the shoulders or rhythm of a walk? 

6

We do not become anesthetized to horrible photographs of death or suffering. We may choose to avoid them. When I see a gruesome image in the newspaper in the morning, I sometimes turn away, registering in seconds that looking too long will hurt me. People who gorge on horror films and violent thrillers do it, not because they have learned to feel too little, but because they indulge in the limbic rush that floods their systems as they safely witness exploding bodies. It seems that these viewers are mostly men.

7

We feel colors before we can name them.  Colors act on us pre-reflectively. A part of me feels red before I can name red. My cognitive faculties lag behind the color’s impact. Standing in a room my eyes go first to the vase of red tulips because they are red and because they are alive. 

8

My mother once told me about coming home to find our cat dead on the lawn. She saw the poor animal from many yards away, but she said she knew with absolute assurance that it was dead. An inert thing. An it.

9

Photographs of the beloved dead draw me in. I am fascinated. There is the good, dear face, one that changed over time.  It is the picture that preserves the face, not my memory, which is befogged by the many faces he had over the years. Or is it the single face that grew old?  Sometimes I cannot bear to look. The image has become a token of grief. And yet, there is nothing so banal as the pictures of strange families.  After my father died, I found Christmas cards with photographs of unknown people among his papers—happy families—grinning into an invisible lens. I threw them away.

10

Galvanic skin response registers a change in the heat and electricity passed through the skin by nerves and sweat during emotional states.  People in white coats attach electrodes to your hands and track what happens. When they show you a picture of your mother, your GSR goes up. Meaning in the body.

11

Is our visual world rich or poor? There are fights about this. People do not agree. Philosophers and scientists and other academics ponder this richness and poverty question in papers and books and lectures. Human beings have very limited peripheral vision, but we can turn our heads and take in more of the world. When I’m writing, my vision is severely limited by my attention, but sometimes when I let my eyes roam in a space, I discover its density of light and color and feel surprised by what I find. When I focus, say, just on the shadows here on my desk, they become remarkable. My small round clock casts a double shadow from either side of its circular base, one darker than the other, a gray and a paler gray. There is a spot of brilliant light at the edge of the darker oval. As I look, this sight has become beautiful. 

12

Why is a face beautiful?

13

If an image is flashed too quickly to be perceived consciously, we take it in unconsciously and we respond to it without knowing what is happening. A picture of a scowling face I can’t say I’ve seen affects me anyway. Scientists call this masking. Blindsight patients have cortical blindness. They lose visual consciousness but not visual unconsciousness. They see but don’t know they are seeing. If you ask them to guess what you’re holding (a pencil) they will guess far better than people who are truly blind. Words and consciousness are connected. How much do I see of the world that never registers in my awareness? When I walk in the street, I sometimes glimpse a scene for just an instant but I cannot tell you what I have witnessed until a fraction of a second later when the puzzling image falls into place: that furry thing was a stuffed animal and a little boy was dangling it from his stroller. The lag again.

14

We are picture-making creatures. We scribble and draw and paint. When I draw what I see, I touch the thing I am looking at it with my mind, but it is as if my hand is caressing its outline. People who stopped drawing as children continue to make pictures in their dreams or in the hallucinations that arrive just before they go to sleep. Where do those images come from?  I dreamed grass and brush and sticks were growing out of my arm, and I got to work busily trimming myself with a scissors. I wasn’t alarmed; it was a job handled in a matter-of-fact way. If I painted a self portrait  with bushy arms, I would be called a surrealist.

15

Some people who go blind see vivid images and colors. Some people who are losing their vision hallucinate while awake. An old man saw cows grazing in his living room, and a woman saw cartoon characters running up and down her doctor’s arm. Charles Bonnet syndrome. Just before I fell asleep, I saw a little man speeding over pink and violet cliffs. Once I saw an explosion of melting colors—green, blues, reds, and then a great flash of light that devoured them all. Hypnogogic hallucinations. Freud said dreams protect sleep. At night the world is taken from us and we make up our own scenes and stories. When you wake up slowly, you will remember more of that human underground.

16

Deprived of sight, we make visions. Seeing is also creating.

17

There are things in the world to see. Do I see what you see? We can talk about it and verify the facts. Through my window is the back of a house. One of its windows is completely covered by a blue shade. But if I tell you I see a flying zebra you will say, Siri, you are hallucinating. You are dreaming while awake.

18

Sometimes artists can make a hallucination real. A painting of a flying zebra is a real thing in the world, a real thing to see.

19

Why do I not like the word “taste” when applied to art? Because it has lost its connection to the mouth and food and chewing. I don’t like the way this picture tastes. It’s bitter. If we thought about actual tastes, the word would still work. It would be a form of synesthesia, a crossing of our senses: seeing as tasting. But usually it is not used like that anymore so I avoid it entirely when I talk about art.

20

Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object. Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised, and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression. Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing me in your eyes and know that you like what you see.

21

I am looking at a small reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman, which hangs in a room at The Metropolitan Museum here in New York.  It is a girl’s head and face. I say girl because she is very young. From her face I would guess she is no more than ten years old. When I look up the picture in one of my books on Vermeer, I see that there it is called Portrait of a Young Girl, a far better title. We should not turn girls into women too soon. She is smiling, but not a wide smile. Her lips are sealed. My impression is that she is looking at me, but I cannot quite catch her eye. What is certain is that she is answering someone else’s gaze. Someone has made her smile. She is not a beautiful child; it is her looking that is beautiful, her connection to the invisible person. There is shyness in her expression, reserve, maybe a hint of hesitancy. I think she is looking at an adult, probably the artist, because she has not let herself go. She looks over her shoulder at him. I have great affection for this girl. That is the magic of the painting; it is not that I have affection for a representation of a child’s head that was painted some time between 1665 and 1667. No, I feel I have actually fallen for her, the way I fall for a child who looks up at me on the street and smiles, perhaps a homely child, who with a single look calls forth a burst of maternal feeling and sympathy. But my emotion is made of something more; I remember my own girlhood and my shyness with grownups I didn’t know well. I was not a bold child and in her face I see myself at the same age.

22

In some of Gerhard Richter’s painted-over photographs, he painted over his wife’s face and parts of her body. He covered the bodies of his children, too, in snapshots of them as babies and growing children. In these gestures, I felt he was keeping them for himself, keeping the private hidden. Other times, he framed them with swaths of color, turning them into featured subjects. I love those pictures.

23

Mothers have a need to look at their children. We cannot help it.

24

Lovers have a need to look at each other. They cannot help it. 

25

Several years ago a friend sent me a paper on mirror neurons. They were found in the brains of macaque monkeys. When one monkey makes a gesture, grabs a banana, neurons in his premotor cortex are activated. When another monkey watches the gesture, but doesn’t make it, the same neurons are activated in his brain. Human beings have them, too. We reflect each other.

26

Looking at pornography is exciting but loses its interest after orgasm.

27

Reading the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses when Molly Bloom is remembering is erotic because she gives permission, gives up and gives way, and this is always exciting and interesting because it is personal not impersonal. Isn’t it strange that looking at little abstract symbols on a white page can make a person feel such things? I see her in his arms. I am in his arms. I remember your arms.

28

When I read stories, I see them. I make pictures and often they remain in my mind after I have finished a novel, along with some phrases or sentences. I ground the characters in places, real and imagined. But I always remember the feeling of a book best, unless I have forgotten it altogether.

29

I do not usually see philosophy with some exceptions: Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche because they are also storytellers.

30

Some people cannot make visual imagery. They do not see pictures in their minds. They do not turn words into images. I didn’t know such a thing was possible until a short time ago. They see abstractly. They remember the symbols on the page.

31

“I see” can also mean “I understand.”

32

There is a small part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is crucial for recognizing faces. If you lose this ability your deficit is called prosopagnosia.  It happens that a person with brain damage looks at herself in the mirror, and believes she is seeing, not herself, but a double. It seems that what has vanished is not reason, but that special feeling we get when we look at our reflections, that warm sense of ownership. When that disappears, the image of one’s self becomes alien.

33

I look and sometimes I see.

ON BLANKNESS, BEGINNINGS AND DETOURS

Recently, I have become interested in spaces of practice - particularly the artist's studio, the writer's study, the art gallery, and the psychoanalytic consulting room. I am curious about the different processes that take place in these spaces - making, writing, curating, talking, thinking, daydreaming, being anxious, etc. At the same time, I am intrigued by the various stages through which our work develops: for instance, how do we begin a work of art or a psychoanalysis? How do we know when to finish, or end a piece of writing? When has the process of curating an exhibition turned the corner and the show resembles what we had in mind for it? Or when is it that we realize that what we are working on has failed, and what happens after that failure is recognized? How do we move on?

In this short text, I examine the images or ideas we have of beginnings, blankness and detours as three such stages by considering one painting, one essay by a literary author, and one psychoanalytic case history.  I argue that together these images or iterations of practice make the following four propositions: first, we never begin a work of art, a piece of writing, a psychoanalysis at the beginning. Second, there is no such thing as blankness, a new beginning. Third, we are always taking a detour – away from one thing and towards something else. And finally, we are always in the midst of it. 

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings: Detour as Difference

In an interview with the art critic Calvin Tomkins, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg states the following about his practice in the early 1950s:

‘I couldn’t really emulate something I was so in awe of. I saw [Jackson] Pollock and all that other work [by the Abstract Expressionists], and I said, Okay, I can’t go that way. It’s possible that I discovered my own originality through a series of self-imposed detours.’ [1] [Italics mine.]

During the Summer and Fall of 1951, while studying at Black Mountain Art College near Asheville, North Carolina, Rauschenberg produced a series of white paintings. Made up of varying numbers of mathematically calculated canvases (1, 2, 3, 4, and 7), the White Paintings are remarkable in many ways. They are made with household paint and a roller. There is no use of brushes, no gestural work, no mark, no figure, no ground, no frame; they are quite simply large expanses of singularly articulated white canvas.

With the White Paintings, Rauschenberg had, in art critic Henry Geldzahler’s view, ‘wiped out the history of painting;’ in effect the artist had produced a tabula rasa. [2] This is obviously an exaggeration by the art critic, but the point should be taken: the White Paintings enabled Rauschenberg, and artists coming after Abstract Expressionism, to distance themselves and differentiate themselves from what came before them. Through a ‘series of self-imposed detours’ the White Paintings represent the process of beginning as difference. These works show us that all beginnings mark out, and are marked out by, a moment of difference.

The White Paintings enabled Rauschenberg to dislodge himself from the burden and force of the history of painting, more specifically, to differentiate his work from the painting that was being produced around him at the start of his career. As Rauschenberg put it, in the early 50s, he ‘“start[ed] every day moving out from Pollock and [Wilhem] de Kooning, […and this] is sort of a long way to have to go to start from.”’ [3]

If, then, the issue at stake is how Rauschenberg was to make the necessary shifts, take the detours which mark out difference, in order to do something other than move out from an artistic history, inheritance, and influence as formidable and present as the one in which he found himself, then the White Paintings should be understood as a negotiation of this genealogy. For the art critic Geldzhaler, the paintings are just that, because they are a determinate negation of these art practices and histories: they are a ‘wiping out [of] the history of painting.’

I would like to propose that these paintings are also something a little more complex than a simple negation. I would like to suggest that the White Paintings are a type of ‘beginning’. Something akin to Edward Said’s understanding of beginning as the combination of the ‘already-familiar’ and the ‘novel’, but, also slightly different. [4] I would characterize these paintings as a beginning that is made up of both a fidelity and infidelity to what Rauschenberg inherited. On the one hand, the paintings are unfaithful because they are a negation and critique of what came before them. They are a wiping away of the work being done by the most important artists of the time: Pollock, de Kooning, Albers (Rauschenberg’s teacher at Black Mountain College), Newman and others. On the other hand, they are also faithful to that inheritance because they are engaging with similar ideas around the limits of painting. The White Paintings are dealing with what it means to empty content out of painting, to make abstract works of art that deal with painting as experience for both the artist and the viewer. In the case of Pollock, de Kooning, Albers and Newman, the experience should be a transcendental aesthetic one. What Rauschenberg’s White Paintings did was related to this, but also different from them.

When you stand in front of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, they do something quite remarkable. They become the ground upon which, as John Cage noted, your ‘shadow’ is cast. In front of them, you can see your shadow, you can see what is going on in the room around the work, and this was quite an exceptional experience. [5]

As the artist Allan Kaprow said when he first saw them,

[… the] white paintings were an end to art and a beginning. Once a man’s shadow gets into a painting for a moment, everything becomes possible and the conditions for experimentation are thrust upon the scene. Possibility, artists know, is the most frightening idea of all. [6]

The Blank Page, or the Anxiety of Memory

The English author, screenwriter and essayist Hanif Kureishi starts his essay ‘Something Given: Reflections on Writing’ with the following: ‘My father wanted to be a writer. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t want this.’ [7] With this essay, Kureishi constructs an autobiographical narrative about his relationship to writing that is intimately connected to his father’s failure to become a writer. Although his father wrote many books and plays throughout his life, none were accepted for publication. Working in conflict with his father’s failure, where Kureishi found success, and against the wishes of the extended family – who simply did not understand or value the importance of intellectual labour – Kureishi persevered and became a published author.

In this image of the author’s life and work, Kureishi establishes a genealogy for his writing outside of himself. He suggests that his desire to write preceded him: he was born into it. Like psychoanalysis’s conviction that we are born into culture and language, that they precede us, beginnings are always already culturally and linguistically determined, history precedes us, even if our desires are possibly novel constituents of these antecedents.

However, even within, or perhaps because of these historical, cultural and autobiographical antecedents, the blank page – whether it is a canvas, strip or roll of film, the white space of a gallery, or the blank screen (all of which are always already full of their own antecedents) – brings with it conflict and anxiety. As Kureishi informs us, ‘To begin to write – to attempt anything creative, for that matter – is to ask many other questions, not only about the craft itself, but of oneself, and of life. The blank empty page is a representation of this helplessness. Who am I? it asks. How should I live? Who do I want to be?’ [8]

In the midst of these questions, while both knowing and not-knowing what we are doing, sitting alongside that blank page, chaos looms. It can propel us forward or create a standstill. While looking at that blank page, those notes, scraps of ideas, and images, one searches for a magnet around which things will gather. With this hope and intention in mind, eventually one looses oneself in what Kureishi and others call the pleasure of play, those ‘long periods of absorption and reverie’ [9] wherein we imagine and make, we work to create, something else.

What we learn from Kureishi is that the practice of writing, and here I would also say art making and curating, is a process through which a narrative of the self is in Laplanchian psychoanalytic terms, ‘constructed’, ‘deconstructed’ and ‘reconstructed’. [10] Bringing together our autobiographical, psychological, social and historical formations, we begin our creative practices in the midst of chaos. And each time we begin, we attempt to plot a course through that chaos, so as to bring about something new.

Beginning in the Midst of Chaos

So, let’s think about this image of chaos through which we search for something to say, to write, to make, to exhibit, to curate. Perhaps we can appreciate the productivity of chaos in a different manner, when we consider its relationship to the unconscious. For Adam Phillips, the English psychoanalyst and writer, the mess that is the unconscious is a fertile ground for creative practice. The practice of psychoanalysis either idealizes this mess, or wants to bring order to it. Whether the psychoanalysis that one practices wants to tame the disorder or champion it, Phillips sets up a relationship between disorder and creative practice in his text ‘Clutter: A Case History’, which relays the psychoanalysis of a young, mildly agoraphobic painter. [11]

The question of space and creative practice becomes remarkably important for both the case study, and for creative practice more generally. It is necessary to have, make, create, name and inhabit our workspace - whether it be our study, studio, a gallery space or the psychoanalytic consulting room. In the case of the painter under discussion, Phillips wants to remind us to take into account the spatialization of another frame within which some of us work, that of the blank canvas. And here, I would like to add, that of the blank page, or the gallery space. For many - Kurieshi sitting in front of a blank page, or Allan Kaprow in front of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings - the blank page brings with it fear, the threat of the unknown, and anxiety; but it also constitutes the possibility of play, pleasure and something new.

For the artist that Phillips worked with, we are informed that as an adolescent, the painter read an interview with Francis Bacon where Bacon talked about his ‘un-technique’. This is in reference to how Bacon often messed up the blank canvas with random painterly gestures to mark a necessary difference in beginning a work of art. After reading about this, the painter in psychoanalysis also began to clutter his canvasses. But for our young artist, rather than it being a positive and productive chaos within which to work, it was a means of averting his fear of the unknown – ‘to stop what he thought of as the real painting happening’. [12]

With this case history, Phillips is able to begin to unravel the patient’s symptoms, as well as to ask more general questions about the relationship between clutter and the unconscious, clutter and creative practice, clutter and psychoanalytic practice. As Phillips writes,

It is perhaps one of the most useful, indeed pleasurable Freudian insights that the way we defend ourselves tells us, in disguised form, what it is we desire. If clutter was the obstacle to desire, it was also an object of desire. In clutter you may not be able to find what you are looking for, but you may find something else instead, while you are looking for it. [13]

What interests me about Phillips’s interpretation is the way in which clutter is theorized as a prohibition that necessitates a detour, and that in working around the mess, in averting one thing, we find something else. This is exactly what Rauschenberg did, took detours to avoid the work of Pollock, de Kooning and others, so as to make something new.

Phillips ends his essay with guidance taken from the English analyst, writer and amateur artist, Marion Milner’s book entitled On Not Being Able to Paint, Phillips writes, ‘Milner counsels us to be wary of the pre-emptive imposition of pattern, of the compulsive sanity of reassuring recognitions. Of what we might be doing when we are too keen to clear up clutter. Clutter, that is to say, may be a way of describing either the deferral that is a form of waiting, or the waiting that is a form of deferral. Our eagerness for recognition can be a self-blinding.’ [14]

Through these images of our working processes, in our spaces of practice, beginnings are always constituted by conscious and unconscious acts of waiting, of avoidance and deferral, of action, detours, and decisions, and of waiting once more. Born into our historical, cultural, and autobiographical antecedents, we always begin in the midst of it all. By making a mark on, for instance, the blank page or the white canvas, we define possibilities within ourselves and our practice by simultaneously abandoning one route and taking another. We have begun.

[1] Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 63.
[2] Henry Geldzahler, ‘Robert Rauschenberg,’ Art International, 7 (25 September 1963), p. 65.
[3] Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘Bob Rauschenberg’, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking Press, 1962, (repr. 1965)), p. 213.
[4] Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (London: Granta Books, 1985 (1975)), p. xxiii.
[5] John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work,’ Metro, 2 (Maggio 1961), p. 43.
[6] Allan Kaprow, ‘Experimental Art,’ Art News, 65 (March 1966), p. 79.
[7] Hanif Kureishi. ‘Something Given: Reflections on Writing’, Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 1-24 (p. 1).
[8] Ibid., Kureishi, p. 10.
[9] Ibid., Kureishi, p. 12.
[10] Jean Laplanche. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989 (1987)).
[11] Adam Phillips, ‘Clutter: A Case History’, Promises, Promises (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 59-71.
[12] Ibid., Phillips, p. 64.
[13] Ibid., Phillips, p. 64.
[14] Ibid., Phillips, p. 71.

About Class Photos

"This is me when I was ten years old," says Marji in the first frame of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a memoir in graphic form, and we see a little girl, simply drawn, wearing the veil and looking serious, if not glum. [1] The present tense confirms that we are looking at the drawing of a fractured photograph through which the narrator introduces herself. The portrait of the ten year old Marji is merely a detail of a class photo shown in the next frame in which she is not visible: all we can see is part of her left arm and the right hand that crosses over it as she assumes a pose identical to that of the other four girls. "You don't see me," she tells us as she names the other four from left to right. All five wear the veil and all look equally distressed although, with a few lines, Satrapi is able to convey physiognomic differences and a range of facial expressions.

Why use a class photo by way of introduction? And why is Marji invisible within it? Satrapi's opening frames tell us a great deal about this most unremarked genre of vernacular photography which, within the visual structure of the comics medium, underscores the ideological transformation effected by the Islamist Revolution that interrupted Satrapi's childhood. The rest of Persepolis plays out the uneasy and sometimes violent oscillation between a "me" that can be visually captured in an image and the evasive "you don't see me" - an oscillation between the subject of totalitarianism and the rebellious "I" who disappears in the gutter between frames. Class photos, even under politically less authoritarian circumstances, dramatize precisely the individual child's struggle between singularity and ideological interpellation. The extreme situation drawn by Satrapi merely accentuates some of the general features of this vernacular visual genre.

Taken by commercial photographers with seemingly few if any artistic aspirations and little desire to deviate from formulaic representations, class photographs share the same general characteristics. A group of students, standing or sitting on benches or by their desks (or standing outdoors, in rows, near the school building) all face forward and look at the photographer. The group is usually photographed head-on, generally through a wide-angle lens. Most class photos distinguish themselves from other institutional group photos by the central position of a teacher, around whom students are arranged. The teacher's presence, like the photographer's, serves as a disciplining force, enjoining the children to assume postures and gazes that demonstrate their acquiescence to a group identity imposed through their membership in their class. In Satrapi's memoir, the unforgiving teacher appears in the fourth frame, holding the veil and instructing the little girls to "Wear this!"

Although not fully visible in the image, the contextual matrix of the class - the school accredited by the municipality or state - plays a key role. Schools are the institutions that teach children to read and write, and which provide them with elements of a national literary and scientific culture and its versions of history. They are also the sites that instruct them in rules of acceptable behavior and morality, tutor civic responsibility, and instill respect for authority and the established economic order. While aided in this task of ideological inculcation by other institutions - the family, the law, the media, and the arts - they are primary agencies in shaping and reinforcing values, outlooks, beliefs, and myths that constitute citizenship in the society where they are located.

Class photos, in this regard, like school diplomas, can be seen as a form of certification - confirmation of grade level, grade ascendancy, and of participation in a trajectory of socialization defining citizenship and national belonging. Each image is visual evidence of this commonality among the depicted group of children, a commonality often enforced and highlighted by the wearing of uniforms, dress and hair codes, and by other means of minimizing or erasing differences. Few markers of difference are visible in class photos, and Satrapi, through the idiom of comics, is able to emphasize how uniformity is imposed and difference discouraged, even punished.

The assimilating pull towards sameness in setting up and posing in these photos makes the possibilities of subversion minimal even within pictures taken in less repressive political settings. Children may try to fool around before or even while the photos are being taken, but the class photos that survive are no doubt the ones that record the most uniform deadpan look on all the faces. Class photographs do more than just to record children's ideological formation: they actually instantiate the force of the institution as it interpellates the individual into a trans-individual group identity. And they certify that interpellation. The school photographer's camera, as such, is one of the technologies of socialization and integration of children into a dominant world-view. By staging the school's, and the society's, institutional gaze, class photos both record and practice the creation of consent.

In the large double frame at the bottom of Satrapi's first page, we see the girls' rebellion against the wearing of the veil that forms the background against which the compliance registered in the class photo must be read. "We didn't really like to wear the veil," the narrator tells us, and individual children, wearing uniforms but sporting different hairstyles, gestures and facial expressions, run around the school yard playing hide and seek, jump rope and even "execution" with the piece of black fabric. The school building with its foreboding black windows remains visible and the games occur in a space external to it, just as in the frame above, girls can fool around outside the school walls but must comply with the teacher in the foreground, inside. Satrapi's expressionist drawing style, relying entirely on bold blacks and whites, underscores this opposition: the bottom image where the children play and fool around has lighter, thinner lines, more white, while the class photo, featuring the uniformity of the veil, is thicker, darker, almost entirely black.

Why does Satrapi begin her story with a class photo? Their sameness and ubiquity would seem to make school photos largely unremarkable. How, then, can we explain their pervasiveness in family albums, their common display on memorial websites and at reunions, and their frequent reproduction in communal histories and in memoirs? Certainly, in spite of their conventionality, they do provide some contextual information about the school, the historical moment, and the cultural values of the time when they were taken. But in most cases that information is minimal and the images remain interchangeable and opaque. And yet, as Satrapi shows, they can serve not just as vehicles of narrative and memory, but also as political media of protest and resistance. How can we explain this capacity?

If we read class photos as a subset of group portraits -- paintings and photographs of guilds, army units, clubs, unions, and youth groups - we might speculate on the associations they evoke. We might see them in the terms introduced by art historian Aby Warburg who in his "Mnemosyne Atlas," mapped a large set of "pre-established expressive forms" that carry and transmit affect across time, constituting a trans-generation memorial repertoire in visual form. [3]

If class photos fall into such a category of expressive forms then their "emotional life" [to use Jill Bennett's term] would be transmissible. [4] By recalling the subordination of individuality to group membership and the incorporation into a social assemblage, they would convey both the desire to belong to the group and the resistance against the coercive submersion of the individual within a class collective. Indeed, this tension between individuality and trans-individual anonymity structures the emotional life of class photos. Since like all photos, moreover, class photos freeze a moment in time, they serve to measure change over time, and to recall past incidents, when they are viewed and reviewed years, perhaps decades, later. They thus not only become potent media for anyone wishing to memorialize and mourn a world of yesterday but also effective mnemonic aids helping to identify particular living classmates - as well as age mates who have disappeared (or been violently removed) from our midst. As documents that carry incontrovertible evidence of past existence and previous acceptance, they assert "we were here" and become powerful emotive as well as political vehicles combating forgetting and the erasure of violence and the exclusion of some members from the group.

It is this very inherent emotional and political life of class photos that Satrapi is able to mobilize in the project of underscoring the violence of the Islamist revolution and her resistance against the loss of individual freedom. Throughout the two volumes of Persepolis, Marji's rebelliousness is never squashed and school remains the site of her resistance. In school in Iran, she stages her resistance to the veil and the conformity demanded of girls and women by the Islamist regime. Later, in Vienna, she rebels against school rules and against the different constraints on individual freedom operative in the West.

In addition, the very ordinariness and ubiquity of class photos enables them to become privileged media of memory and mourning for those who become separated from the group. "From left to right: Golaz, Manshid, Narine, Minna," Marjane names her classmates individually. In the course of the memoir, some classmates will be persecuted and killed, others will comply with the regime and others still will continue to rebel and, along with Marji, to assert their freedom. When Marjane says, "you can't see me," she is activating the emotional life of class photos, both the struggle between individuality and conformity that they stage, and the sites of mourning they can so effectively become. In the medium of comics, the gutter becomes what Warburg calls "the iconology of the interval," that space "between thought and action" where intense emotion can surface and be felt. Class photos drawn in comics form: relying on both genres, Satrapi can provoke an immediate and layered emotional response on the part of her reader.

[1] Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

[2] On Satrapi's style, see Hilary Chute, "The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis," WSQ 36, 1&2 (Spring/ Summer 2008), 92-110.

[3] Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE, Martin Warnke (ed.), Berlin 2003, 2nd printing.

[4] Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art After 9/11 (forthcoming).

Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Throughout decades of rancorous debate between modernist and classical architects, Peter Eisenman figured prominently on the side of the modernists. But this is by now a rather dated quarrel; I believe that aesthetics -- and Eisenman -- have moved on. A period of interactive aesthetics has set in, in which the focus is no longer on an isolated factor within artistic communication, such as the classicists' obsession with the historical code of art, or the modernists' with the formal characteristics of the artwork. Instead, it is the interplay among factors-audience, artist, model/referent, conditions of their contact, as well as code and work -- that draws our attention. Eisenman's 2005 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is almost a parable of this shift in aesthetics, and a powerful example of what the future may hold in store for art.

Eisenman's Memorial deliberately evokes the look of geometric modernism. Located in a vast tract not far from the Brandenburg Gates in Berlin, it is a grid of 2,711 closely spaced, slightly tilted, polished concrete stelae. These blocks are uniform in width and depth, but vary in height from ground level at the periphery to 4.5 meters in the interior. As an environment, the Memorial suggests typical images of modernist alienation -- a cemetery, a labyrinth, a brutalist city of harsh planes and abrupt corners. Considered only in terms of its form, the work conveys the bleak silence and death of meaning proclaimed by Elie Wiesel and George Steiner in their discussion of the Holocaust. It evokes the eerie emptiness of De Chirico's streets, the intellectual coldness of abstraction and minimalism, the denial of empathetic connection.

But inside the grid, a different aesthetic is at work, though it takes a while for this to register. Unnaturally constricted, visitors are conscious of their isolation; the distance between the rows of stelae is too narrow to permit two people to walk side by side. Eisenman's intent, according to the official guide, is "that everyone should experience the memorial individually," but since this isolation is not chosen, it feels like deprivation and victimization. Once in the grid, all one can see is the dark alleyway stretching ahead into the distance between towering banks of stelae. At the end is a spot of sunshine and in some cases a building or tree is visible beyond the grid. Suddenly it registers that there is a beyond, an alternative to the darkness and isolation inside, whereas for the victims of the Holocaust, there was none. The architecture of the Memorial forces viewers to consider their relation to the victims it memorializes: the restriction we experience is like theirs, but it is crucially different at the same time.

The Memorial also makes visitors hyper-aware of each other. The alleys are so narrow and the corners of the stelae so sharp, that anyone about to cross one's path is invisible until the point of collision. Nevertheless, some visitors run through the aisles (and occasionally rollerblade through them -- though that is prohibited). People pop into view as they cross at distant intersections, and then as abruptly pop out. Because the pavement undulates, sometimes dramatically, those seen farther down the aisle will be higher or lower, and if they stand still, they look like sculptures or figures on a stage, backlit by the sunlight of the "outside."

Everything in the unnatural space of the Memorial conspires to heighten an awareness of other people, even the shadows they cast. But though social encounter appears so uncanny here, at the same time one notices the ordinariness of people's behavior, equally striking in this setting. According to Nikolaus Bernau, "Eisenman's dream is of children's laughter resounding at the site. His concept is of the memorial as a part of everyday life that always includes memory and recollection." In the Memorial, memory and reflection become elements in a disquieting mix of behaviors. Visitors look about or stand lost in thought. People cry, take pictures, play tag, kiss. One may find their responses to the situation touching, surprising, irritating -- how dare they ignore the Holocaust to pursue their little pleasures? And then one observes oneself doing the same. The experience of the Memorial inevitably becomes a part of the day, of one's life. Like the mourners, the heedless children, the self-involved lovers, one lodges this place and all that it stands for within the overall context of one's experience and understands that others do the same. People live in many relations to history, and in many relations to each other.

Such thoughts animate the trip through the grid. Always the Memorial is about interaction-between contemporary viewers and the victims of the Holocaust, between oneself and one's fellow viewers. Far from a static "utopia of form," it is an ever-changing set of encounters, complex and contradictory, at once saddening, heartening, and perplexing. And yes, it is beautiful -- in all these respects and for all these reasons. One might say, in fact, that the memorial takes viewers through modernism -- makes them feel through it -- toward the possibility of a more sunlit place beyond. The model of beauty it provides is a heterdox conversation concerning the real.

To appear in Wendy Steiner, The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Introduction: Another Kind of Image

In my normal academic and critical practice I have been invested with close, even myopic, looking at specific images for a long time. I had -- I think -- a good reason for this bias. I believe that images have as much to say as texts, and that encountering, or entering a dialogue with an image takes as much time as reading a novel. Whether we call it "propositional content" as I have at some point (1991) or by any other term, the idea that images visually say something, rather than illustrating something already said, is at the heart of my practice as an art writer. By calling it "saying," however, I do not wish to maintain that the image's content is limited to a rational, cognitive level. The divide between cognition and emotion, or reason and affect never sat easy with me, and I ignore it with conviction.

In order to find out what images "say," I have advocated "close looking" as a practice to learn from and engage with the artefacts of visual culture, instead of merely regarding them as illustrations of what we already know. Developing this conviction further, I have proposed that images can perform an equivalent of speech acts; that they can respond ("speak back") to the look cast onto them, and that they can entice viewers to theorize. These tentative ideas are congenial to W.J.T. Mitchell's suggestive question "What do pictures want?" (2005) Hence, when we study and analyze images, they are not so much case studies, subjected to the scholar's scalpel, as dialogical partners. I call such "speaking images", which speak back and make me think, "theoretical objects." [1]

This idea has consequences for the way I develop arguments about how visual images help articulate thought. The usual term "case study" has been both overly inflected by exemplarity and comprehensiveness and, paradoxically, marred by generalization. That is why I am now more inclined to use the alternative, equally over-extended but more specific term "theoretical object." As Hubert Damisch, the creator of that term, explains it in an interview, a theoretical object obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical terms, it will produce effects around itself . . . [and] forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory. (Bois et al. 1998, 8)
 
Do, means of doing it, effects, forces, produces, necessitates . . . every word here is relevant. Compelling collective thought processes emerge in the dynamic between the works as objects, their viewers, and the time in which these come together, accompanied by the social buzz that surrounds both work and viewer as their shared environment. The specific aspects of an image that activate "doing theory" are in constant dialogue with the image to which the analyst is committed to return every step of the way. They are the sites of these thought processes, this triple theoretical activity Damisch mentions. [2]

For the kind of image I am considering here, the term "theoretical object" is therefore better suited to situate my approach than the simpler "case study" -- on the condition that we extend it to cover more than single images. Here, the dialectic of singularity and generalization plays itself out. The object is not this or that artwork, photograph, or film still, but an image-series that activates thought. In the case of a narrative series, these images together activate the construction of, among other thoughts, a story. Each image begins to do what, along with other ones, viewers do, in an ongoing process of performativity. [3]

This performativity is significant for images that, according to our ontological distinctions, do not (materially) exist, as is the case, at least in part, with the images I wish to discuss here. In the first instance, it was an image, or rather, a series of images, that came out of an activity of reading. This "coming out of reading" happened twice over. First, an author wrote a book in which she described images that came out of her readings. Second, I read that book, and images-the same ones? different ones?-came out of my reading of her reading. Except for the cover image, a detail from Pieter Breughel the Elder's painting Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) (1562), there were no images in the material sense involved. Yet, these images were so strong that, after seeing them with my mind's eye, I had to make them, as "after-images" that were interpretants of the images evoked but not presented. This, in utterly succinct form, is the story of my current film project Mère folle.

I use the term interpretant in the sense in which American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce theorized the sign, in order to make the point that images can be signs even if they are not materially extant. Peirce starts his definition of the sign with a perceptible object. The question posed by this object -- What does it mean? -- cannot be answered by revealing something inherent in the object. Instead, the cultural group in which the object circulates works the meaning out in a practice that yields a second, further developed object. That second object, or sign, is the interpretant, a new sign developed on the basis of, and evoked by, the attempt to understand the first sign (Peirce 1985). Objects, hence, also images, are active participants in the performance of analysis in that they enable reflection and speculation; they can contradict projections and wrong-headed interpretations (if the analyst lets them!), and thus constitute a theoretical object with philosophical relevance, whether materially embodied or not.

Two qualifications are required here. First, filmmaking is never something one does alone. There is a wide, and ever-widening, circle of contributors, from professional and amateur actors to make-up artists and translators. For Mère folle, we had, for example, actors, both volunteers and professionals; help with script, camera, sound, translation; people who made a superb website for the project (crazymothermovie.com, dir. Olli Heinola). But most importantly, I am making this film with British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker. Michelle and I have been collaborating since 2002, the beginning of my practice in filmmaking. Hence, when I use the pronoun "I" it should be read as "we" in most cases. I cannot use "we" as this pronoun has been marred by the universalist "we" that strives to create a "wefeeling" that is in turn liable to constitute an exclusive audience and its manipulated benevolence. This is why I choose to avoid it here. Moreover, others, to be indicated as we go along, have made the photographs of draft sequences of this film that stand here as "the image" I am discussing. What I am going to say about the film is my own responsibility -- hence the persistence of "I" -- while the film as such is a collective work, and specifically the work of Michelle Williams Gamaker and myself in an equal partnership. [5]

Second, there is another intense partnership involved, which bears on the status and the nature of the images. The film is a "translation" of a book by French psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine (on which more below), an act that has turned out best served in close collaboration with the author. The images she "saw," or had in mind, when she wrote her book are inevitably very different from the ones that end up in this publication and in the film-to-be. There are several layers of interpretation and imagination between the one and the other. This is why the film images can only be what I call "after-images," with several temporal and visual layers separating the "original" from the images now put before my readers. Still, I am confident I can speak about these images as I contend that there is not actually a fundamental difference, only a difference of degree, between my very tentative images here, and, say, a painting or photograph one can analyze. [6]

Even a material painting has once existed in the artist's mind, and then came off on canvas much different. And that material painting subsequently keeps changing in each act of viewing projected upon it, with time, place, and social circumstance of its subsequent "life" as a work of art. An image, in this sense, will always be in the process of "becoming." By that Deleuzian term I mean something quite specific. Not only each artwork, but a priori the entire oeuvre of an artist, is and remains in the process of becoming. The becoming of an oeuvre implies a retrospective temporal logic according to which each new work recasts the terms in which the previous works could be understood. [7]

Each new phase of that becoming is informed by a later work that retrospectively glosses an earlier work. Each new work puts a spin on the ensemble of what came before it. In that becoming as an oeuvre or a work consisting of multiple images, my theoretical object is the body of images named Mère folle, inflected by what "my work" -- as a reader, filmmaker, and critic of the resulting images -- adds to that corpus. And, according to the retrospective logic I have elsewhere called "preposterous" (1999), the beginning or starting point is the set of filmic images you will see here, followed by the images "I saw," only then followed by those in the author's book and ending with those images the author "saw," and that are inaccessible to me. It is this retrospective impact that is the point of studying an image "in its entirety." [8]

Finally, let me add a word on the ontological impossibility of the term "case study." "The world is everything that is the case," Ludwig Wittgenstein writes at the opening of his Tractatus (2001). In Wittgenstein's terms, then, the images resulting from the multi-layered imaging as you can see them here, are "the case." Therefore, a discussion of them cannot be a "case study" in the classical sense, as then they would be a "case of" -- something else. Instead, any discussion of them emphatically endorses the inescapable fact that the image is part of the world in which it occurs -- in which and hence for which it is the case. The philosopher's opening phrase of the Tractatus brings existential and performative claims together: as a part of the world, the image labors for the latter's transformation. The image is "worldly" in a double sense: it emerges from the world in which I, Michelle, the actors, and the author exist and make images; while the themes and modes it takes on are dictated by that world-a world that posits its conditions of possibility for effective, that is, performative art.
 
The Film: Story-Images
With this in mind, I propose a look at some of the images, or after-images, fragments of what is to be considered one image. These images resulted from the retrospective work on the images the author created, or received, in her mind. As I mentioned earlier, Mère Folle is a feature film based on the book Mère folle by the French psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine (1998). This book, written in the first person, hovers between fiction and theory and integrates the best of both. Mère folle was Davoine's second fiction, after La Folie Wittgenstein (1992). Perhaps I should call it a "theoretical fiction": the term Freud uses to explain the genre of Totem and Taboo, his story of the primitive band of revolting sons killing and eating the tyrannical father (1913). Sometimes, Freud's story intimates, it takes fiction or other forms of imaginative thought to understand something for which reason is too simple. Davoine's book too has theoretical points to make and uses speculation and fiction to make them, and subsequently so has (and does) our film. But, unlike Freud's primary tool of plot, Davoine's points are primarily made through images, not discursive discussion. The plot itself, not absent, serves, rather, to frame the images. [9]

Like the auto-fictional book -- but not in the same autobiographical form -- the film stages the intertwinement of two confrontations. One occurs between a psychoanalyst and her severely traumatized patients. The other confronts this contemporary world with medieval fools, agents of a late-medieval political theatre. Most of the times, these two worlds mingle. For Michelle and me, the theoretical-political importance of the project lies in a positive representation of mad (psychotic) people and a constructive interaction between mad and sane people through which both learn things from the other that help them live their lives. Within the film medieval "fools" strike precisely that balance. This motivates their participation. Hence, in that ambiguous representation of "madness" -- rather than in relation to the book as such -- our first allegiance was positioned.

This allegiance can only be done justice through a carefully thought-through image of the Fools and their contemporary counterparts, the Mad. To achieve this, an ontological uncertainty with bearings on epistemology was our primary guideline. The Fools raise an ontological question that also bears on the status of the images and what they convey. The Fools are not mad but play the fool. So how do we know what "being mad" is, and whether that is different from playing? Can you play what you are; and be, or become, what you play? This is the theoretical question that undermines the authority of the archaeological thrust of psychoanalysis. It lies at the heart of Davoine's social approach to psychoanalysis; her attempt to make the theory and practice less individualistic.

For us as filmmakers, this question was doubled by another one: how can we make that unknowability or undecidability visible, convincing, and productive? The book is an out-of-the-box integration of theory, fiction, and documentary. Here lies the debt the film and its images have towards the book and the points its author seeks to make. As a "faithful" translation, the film owes it to the book to make that integration of traditionally separate domains visible, and to the book as theoretical object in the sense described above, to draw (visual) conclusions from that integration. This is quite a heavy task, especially if we also consider Benjamin's paradoxical view of translation.

Photo 1: Françoise Davoine, author and main actor (photo Markus Karjalainen)
 
The story runs as follows. The opening words tell us that "tomorrow is All Saints' Day". That makes today the Day of the Dead. As it happens, Françoise has just learned of the death by overdose of one of her psychotic patients. Discouraged, she blames herself and psychoanalysis for this tragic failure. She enters a deep crisis that will last until the final pages of the book. She is tempted to abandon her job at the psychiatric hospital. While pondering this decision in the courtyard of the hospital, she takes a book on the Middle Ages out of her bag. It is a book her dead patient had requested she bring him. She had intended to give it to the patient last week, now it is too late. As she rummages through her bag and finds the book, the enigmatic figure of Mère Folle appears - as if out of the book, as its interpretant. A number of medieval Fools accost Françoise, challenging psychoanalysis as fraudulent. Their primary grievance is the privileging of word over gesture, the individual over the group, and the past over the present. Their leader, Mère Folle, is depressed because the Fools do not obey her anymore. She sits down in silence. With a wink to iconography, that staple of art history, she takes the pose of Dürer's famous engraving Melencolia. [11]

Photo 2: Mère Folle arrives (photo Markus Karjalainen)

A long discussion ensues, in which a dead-pan Françoise remains situated in the present without being astonished by the confrontation with another historical time, and responds as if discussing with colleagues. It is this ability to remain her professional self while engaging with other times and their discourses that is her primary strength. That discrepancy in tone was our interpretation of the rather even tone of the argumentative prose in the book, in spite of the exuberance of the descriptive parts. We translated this tone into the main character's calm acting, although the text does not reflect on it per se. [12]

That this discrepancy comes across in the images is due to Françoise's superbly subtle acting. But we had to visualize a point that the book makes constantly yet only implicitly, which is the ontological uncertainty of madness mentioned above. Since playing the fool is the Fools' profession, this took a specifically theatrical form, one that is not in the book. The film shows how, in the course of the discussion, the Fools can no longer be separated from the Mad. These begin to mingle with them, even to chant comments drawn from medieval poems under the direction of the Musical Nurse who tries to calm them with their own means, all of this to the panic of the Head Nurse. [13]

Photo 3: Fools and Mad mingling in courtyard (photo Markus Karjalainen)

Photo 4: Nurses separate Fools from Mad (photo Markus Karjalainen)

But a professional crisis is harder to actually live than Françoise had thought. The fools end up irritating her out of her determination to resign, and reluctantly she returns to work. There she is caught by her affection for and identification with the patients, and the occasional success of a treatment. As she talks with patients, the distinction between the Fools and the Mad fades away slowly. Françoise is struck by the unexpected bouts of wisdom both groups bring forth. This uncertainty is made visible by several means, one of them being the quite simple ploy of playing multiple roles. The most striking instance of this is the performance by actor Thomas Germaine. In the courtyard he shows up among the Fools under the name of Antonin (later, his last name turns out to be Artaud), a self-proclaimed although anachronistic friend of sixteenth-century writer Étienne de la Boétie. As the latter cannot speak, Antonin speaks for him. In the hospital scene, Germaine is a patient, also called Antonin. And in the trial, he acts out Artaud's combination of genius and madness. At this point one already wonders if these figures are one, two, or three persons. Moreover, towards the end of the film he shows up at Françoise's home seeking treatment, and the short treatment they undertake together is successful. His name is Herlat, another name for Harlequin, the King of Death Mère Folle conjures up during the trial - at which point not Harlequin but Artaud appears. All these characters may or may not be the same "person." This questions the ontology of persoonhood embedded in the questioning of madness.

Photo 5: La Boétie, Antonin, and a Fool who lent her ear to the tyrant (photo Markus Karjalainen)
 
Meanwhile, exhausted and dejected after this turbulent half-day, Françoise goes home and parks her car. In her garage she is abducted by two mafiosi and so begins a strange voyage. She is taken to the Middle Ages -- or rather, the Middles Ages surface in the present, in a small, somewhat shabby Parisian theatre. There, Françoise is brought before a court where she is blamed, not for the death of her patient, but for her lack of insight. The episodes of that court case confront her, and us, with the sane reasoning hiding behind the Fool's mask. The alleged fools come from the tradition of "sotties," a political theatre from the late Middle Ages, a kind of carnival of Fools. These are the Fools who merged with the patients at the hospital; their arrival, thus, becomes a political moment. As opposed to the patients, the fools have impunity.

Photo 6: The Court presided by Mère Folle (Murielle-Lucie Clément) at Françoise's Trial (photo Mia Hannula)

Françoise is guarded by her captors. But still, consistent in her in-betweenness, she cannot help herself listening and discussing these issues seriously.

Photo 7: Françoise with her abductors (photo Mia Hannula)

The narrator's own literary and philosophical sources also mix in during the trial in the form of imaginary or dreamt dialogues with great thinkers such as Antonin Artaud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, T.S. Eliot, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Clearly, there is madness and madness, and perhaps where there is madness, genius is often not so far away. There is also a carnival of words taking place; hilarious yet incisive dialogues in which everyone, fool, mad or sane; from the past, the present, or as in-between as the mad are, is on equal footing, and the smart repartees are, by far, not always the narrator's.

Photo 8: Artaud (Thomas Germaine) and Francoise (photo Mia Hannula)
 
For the narrator, this dialogic traversal of time is also a return to her own past. Her boundaries -- in time, space, and identity -- melt down. She becomes capable of identifying not only with her patients, in whose adventures she begins to participate, but also with her former self. Two patients from the past stroll through Françoise's world when she least expects it. These are a woman named Sissi-doctor Davoine's first failure of twenty years ago-and the timeless elfish Ariste who dies at the beginning, only to resurface regularly throughout the film as an "inspector" (or as Françoise bruised super-ego), as a source of gossip, and as a memory. These two phantom patients constantly confront Françoise with the difficulty of her work and the danger, and likelihood, of failure. But nothing is entirely positive or negative, nor a complete success or failure.

Photo 9: Wittgenstein (John Neubauer) and Eliot (Matthew Wright) arguing (photo Mia Hannula)

Photo 10: Sissi (Marja Skaffari) (photo Markus Karjalainen)

From these combined travels Françoise gains a capability to practice immersion into the deliria of her patients, in order to become a fraternal equal to them. Only through such an "extreme identification" will she be able to carve for them an auxiliary space wherein the "catastrophic regions" that generated their madness can be confronted. Psychosis can only be cured through this method, which has profound consequences for the human existence of the psychoanalyst herself and the way she can tell her story. Throughout the story, the narrator has been doing precisely that: becoming an equal to the "fools" and the "mad." [14]

It is on this hopeful note that, during the turmoil of the Carnival of Basel, the immersion into the medieval universe of folly, the story ends. Between the trial and the Carnival, Françoise's day is not over. She treats Herlat, then pays an overdue visit to the grave of her former teacher, the sister of her father's Resistance friend, inveterate Spanish freedom fighter Don Luís, as well as to that of the latter's "mad aunt" who also haunts her childhood memories. Meanwhile, viewers will have made the acquaintance of a number of patients, who each pull the narrator into their own temporal and spatial catastrophic regions. Theoretical considerations, initially only occurring in the mind of the narrator, will be taken over by fools, colleagues, patients, and even a bee who seems to be her interlocutor when she muses about her dilemmas.

The after-images that result from our working through of Davoine's ideas and story can also be called "story-images," since they build up a story that is both the same as the book's and different; and I would even say, one story-image, composed of many fragments. They both visualize and glue together the episodes of the adventure, the voyage to insight Françoise undertakes, and which, in its entirety, constitutes "the image" of the film. The images must remain close to that story, make it concrete, and at the same time betray the length, complexity, and theoretical density of the book. The primary task we saw ourselves confronted with was to turn this into an engaging film without betraying the thoughts of our theoretical object.
 
Loyalty by Betrayal
Making a book into a film: the problems one encounters during such an undertaking are well known. There is, for example the obvious need to compress, the equally obvious task of filling in and fleshing out the appearances of people, places, and objects; and the visualisation of abstract thought. And all this must be done against the desire -- if not the obligation or the need -- to be "faithful" to the book. Before submitting these images to the viewer's gaze, many interventions have already taken place. The question of loyalty to the book, without which it hardly makes any sense to endeavour to "translate" a book into a film, is in itself very vague. What is it to which the filmmaker wishes to be loyal?

For Michelle and me it was important to remain loyal, not so much to the book, as to our own desire to make a film based on it. The theoretical thrust -- offering an alternative vision of psychoanalysis as a profoundly social science -- compelled certain visual decisions that, at first sight, have little to do with theory. Here, I want to discuss some of these decisions, as a contribution to the question of images to which this series is devoted.

The first, major intervention concerned the individualism and the linguistic bias the Fools impute to Françoise. The narrator is semi-convinced by these reproaches, which she recognises all too well from her practice and her colleagues; but she also tries to defend a certain approach to psychoanalysis against these criticisms. Her entire project is a battle against the individualism that keeps the Mad impermeable to psychoanalysis. Her life's work, instead, consists of attempts to preserve psychoanalysis as a social science. In the book this discussion can obviously only remain verbal, although it is narratologically speaking, astonishingly "jumpy": interrupted by small occurrences and verbal punning, misunderstandings and anachronistic "errors", and never leading to a compromise or resolution. Here, a dilemma arises: do we do justice to the discussion, to the author's project, or to the story, and on which level? [15]

In Davoine's book, the story concerns Françoise's crisis and the voyage of discovery that leads to her insight. It is a kind of Bildungsroman slash travel story. If this form was respected in detail, the film would become too centred on a single character, a formal ploy that is better suited to writing than the externalisation of visuality. In particular, this form would not do justice to the fact that in Françoise's eyes, the Fools do have a point. We deployed several levels of dispersal in order to avoid an individualistic, autobiographical interpretation of a story that, in fact, harbours important theoretical insights that go against individualism, and thus necessarily revise the very notion of autobiography-the "auto" of it. These dispersals make the story more general while preserving the singularity of the characters involved. This was our first, primary act of loyalty-by-betrayal. [16]

Another dispersal concerns language. The film is multilingual; actors from different countries speak their own languages. This decision was partly compelled by the need to recruit actors from different countries, casting our own acquaintances rather than getting professionals from a casting agency. But very soon it seemed the right thing to do, and it inspired us to expand on this. The multilingual speeches became images of a multi-cultural Europe, as well as of a certain kind of social madness present in the contemporary world. At the same time, they became almost utopian images of the possibility to communicate against all odds. This ambiguity functioned as an incentive for inventive imagining and subsequent imaging.

In an interview that may make it into the film, the author says that images build bridges because they help to communicate across the boundaries that separate the sane from the mad, the contemporary from earlier times, and different cultural and linguistic communities from each other. She establishes a connection, however briefly, between the function of images and the accumulative effect of the oral transmission of poetry. The tension in this multilingualism between a utopian vision and a certain kind of madness became a rich source of play with the ambivalence of the book toward classical psychoanalysis, the uncertainty of madness, and contemporary European reality. [17]

Thus, the oxymoron "loyalty-by-betrayal" became our guideline. In every decision, both the loyalty -- How did the book represent this? -- and the betrayal -- How to represent this "best," most adequately? -- became an issue of reflection and discussion. Once the linguistic dispersal had become a principle that would be loyal to the book by differing so drastically from it, the visual setting had to be dispersed as well. Geographically, the film is set in different places, moving along with the dispersal of the vision of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst's dilemma, for example, is shared by other psychoanalysts.

Former patients of doctor Davoine are now either independent, or live in a "half-way house" where they are getting ready to re-integrate into society, elsewhere, under the guidance of other psychoanalysts. As an example of a visual-linguistic pun that makes a theoretical point tangible, this house is in "the North," because retrouver le nord is the French phrase for coming to your senses. As the patients, there, struggle to come to their senses, then, so does psychiatry: for filming this half-way house we were lucky enough to end up on historically layered Seili Island, a small island off the coast of Turku, Finland. The island's landscape is beautiful, the mid-summer light extraordinary, and the overall sense of the place gives a peek into the layering of history in the present. On this island, a former leprosy hospital had been converted into a hospital for the insane, only to close in 1962. After the disappearance of leprosy in that part of the world, the old hospital cared for the mad (mostly of the lower classes and more women than men), who were never to return home to the mainland. A chilling requirement for admission, we learned, was that patients bring their own coffin. [18]

In spite of more ontological similarities than usually assumed, film images also differ from paintings or other still images in several respects. One difference that matters enormously for filmmaking is setting. Apart from their obvious movement, film images are set in spaces that have continuous presence and, hence, a function in a film. In a book, the settings can remain much vaguer, indicated only rudimentarily, as is the case in Davoine's book as well. In the film we need to evoke what Mexican psychoanalyst Alberto Montoya Hernández has called "landscapes of madness" (2006). This beautifully ambiguous concept refers both to the imaginary places madness elects to situate itself in, and to images of landscapes that appear mad, or are hospitable to the Mad. [19]

For our purposes, we wished the landscape of madness to be both full of real history of madness, as well as slightly anachronistic. Two parts of the film are set in psychiatric hospitals: the treatment of Sissi by another analyst, and the work Françoise does once she returns to her job on that fateful Day of the Dead. The location for the first part is an obsolete yet formerly actual psychiatric institution in Nokia, Finland, called Pitkäniemi Hospital. It is quite reminiscent of the hospital at Seili. The location for the other part is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands: an art deco building housing an art school, with large echoing spaces that respond to the idea of collective treatment in more ways than one. The footage shows that this cannot be what is known as group therapy, because the patients are too deeply immersed in their madness to connect to each other. This isolation, in turn, comes across through the echoing sound characteristic of the large halls, which makes for difficult understanding. The echo surrounds each patient with an isolating auditive halo. The patients' only sociality is with Françoise, a situation that burdens the latter with the responsibility to begin restoring sociality with and for them. Thus, a drawback of that particular location -- its terrible acoustics -- ends up contributing to making concrete, to "image", the central problem in madness according to Davoine's book: the broken social bonds that leave the patients in what she calls "catastrophic regions," a term that resonates with Montoya Hernández's "landscapes of madness." For Davoine, these regions -- mental and geographical as well as historical -- harbour the violence that generates madness, sometimes generations later.

Other locations include several sites in Paris, such as an old neighbourhood theatre as setting for the trial, and a flea market for a short memory sequence of the Fools being chased away from public space (by adding "by François Premier" they place themselves in the sixteenth century). These sites are "turned mad" by the discrepancies between the normal goings-on and the interference wrought by the Fools. Seili Island and its hospital convey the sense of isolation that is a silent stream in the film, not foregrounded as much in the book. In the South of Spain, we set the visit Françoise pays to Don Luís, the old family friend and Resistance fighter, in order to broaden the scope of the historical violence invoked. Here, a visit to the cemetery dates the film to that long 31st of October, the Day of the Dead, as well as placing it against that other "paisaje de la locura" that was the Spanish Civil War. Documentary footage of a puppet play at an annual medieval festival in Turku opens the film. This sets up the anachronistic time-and-place of the entire story. These are settings where, precisely, history can act up again, as it does in the lives of the patients. [20]

But, in spite of such suggestive settings, the film is not realistic in the traditional sense; it actively avoids this rhetorical mode. We have several reasons for this avoidance of straightforward realism. As the film and its story offer clear indications that it is not realistic, a realist reading will not only be false rhetorically. It will also fail to do justice to the inextricable bond between the film and the reality it critically engages. I am even inclined to generalize this point: realism by definition distorts, obscures, and otherwise bypasses the bond between art -- or literary works -- and reality. That bond, complex and questionable as it is, also remains a primary requirement for art to matter. [21]

In the same vein, I maintain the term "Mad" for the characters that hover in a state of patienthood. The clearest synonym of this word is "mentally ill," rather than the American euphemism "mentally disabled" or, worse, "challenged." Whereas "ill" is a cultural diagnosis of a state that does not preclude competent agency, "disabled" is precisely the opposite of what the characters turn out to be, and suggests permanence; they are rather hyper-abled. That other euphemism, "mentally challenged," again if literally interpreted, implies the possibility to willfully improve the state of one's mind. All euphemisms based on this word "challenged" imply the worst connotations of the ideology of the American dream: challenges can be met; who fails is herself to blame. Here, again, I submit a generalization: euphemisms, well-meant as they are, are misguided attempts to take the sting out of language. They are misguided because, precisely through their erasure of negativity in their connotations, they erase the persistence of the views the older terms express more honestly.

Rather than avoiding the language, culture is in need of different views of a phenomenon that has a history. For this revision of the views the old term may be more useful, reminding us as it does of the dangers inherent in the views they express, not in the terms per se. Thus, such euphemisms do the opposite of performing retrospection; they erase what needs to be re-visioned. The authentication of psychosis compels a commitment to such a strongly historical yet reversed, or preposterous, politics of time.

The impossibility of realism -- its fundamental unrealness -- is most clearly demonstrated by the "actual" psychoanalytic treatments we staged. As mentioned, in the course of the film there are two (supposedly) completed treatments of patients: a shorter one of a man called Herlat, played by Thomas Germaine (whom we already encountered as Fool Antonin, patient Antonin, and court member Artaud) taking place in Davoine's office, toward the end of the film; and a longer treatment of Sissi, taking place early on in Pitkäniemi Hospital. These two sequences pose the cinematic problem of realism with insistence. If played out earnestly, they would have to be documentary in style and boring in length. If tampered with, as we were compelled to do, they might become demeaning to the seriousness of the pain of the (fictionalized) afflicted patients.

In relation to this dilemma, here I will only briefly discuss one aspect of Sissi's treatment, a major sequence in the film. This sequence is subject to a particular act of translation, that of loyalty-by-betrayal. We made two decisions of betrayal that turned out "loyal enough." In the book, Françoise evokes Sissi's treatment at length in conversations with Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), the physicist devoted to quantum mechanics. He is also a member of the court, and the person she runs into after the trial. These conversations as such were impossible to capture visually: they were too abstract, too lengthy, and full of word play and other linguistic elements that would make the film top-heavy. Brilliant writing, impossible filming. This was an aesthetic consideration dependent on medium. More importantly, there was a theoretical consideration. As an object of conversation, Sissi herself would be invisible or only serve as an illustration, which goes against the grain of a treatment that declares the patient to be of primary importance. [22]

So, to put it simply, in the service of loyal-enough imaging we eliminated the scientist. However, since Schrödinger is widely known for a thought experiment involving a cat, we felt compelled to stage a cat. But instead of to Schrödinger, we gave it to T.S. Eliot, whose reputation is also attached to cats (through the long-running Broadway musical based on his poems). To kill two birds with one stone, in response to both problems, Sissi's treatment, which Françoise remembers as her first failure, is recast as a second attempt at analysis this exuberant patient undertakes, this time engaging with another analyst, Marjo Vuorela.

And, once liberated from the indirectness in Françoise's account to Schrödinger, we could visualize Sissi's dreams of grandeur. While coming from a very simple working-class family, she imagines herself to be (a double of) the Empress of Austria-Hungary. This feature of the character became a great asset for visualization as well as empowerment. Instead of or in addition to having her talk about her imperial status and dignity, we dressed her in a variety of chic clothes, different for each session, with fitting hairstyles and jewelry. As it turned out, and in no small measure thanks of the superb acting of Finnish actress Marja Skaffari, the moving moments in the treatment when Sissi is evoking extremely painful memories are set off against her exuberant dress with very convincing, indeed contagious, poignancy. Through these two serious betrayals to the book we were able to create a gripping image sequence, give Sissi her own voice, and stage her madness without demeaning her. This sequence will probably be shown before the trial.

Photo 12: Sissi at the office door (photo by Olli Heinola)

The sequences of treatments turn on another decision. We envisioned a film with an integration of scenes that are exuberant in mood (rather than in colour and style), using close-ups as a way of slowing down pace from the whirlwind of the carnivalesque scenes, and getting close to the minds of the characters. Close-ups also help us to break through linear time, to slow down, and to bridge to other times. The temporality is always ambiguous, between play-acting and the representation of a different reality. It is by means of close-ups that it becomes possible to place these scenes at a remove from the present, instead of in a chronological temporal continuity. The close-ups help to create the mood, the language, and the interaction necessary to liberate the story from a realism that is at odds with the world of the imagination, which is the ultimate setting.

We wanted to experiment with an approach based on minimal hints, rather than full representation. The acting is demanding, as the actors carry the story and its most implausible, dream-like events, which are filmed without the conventional visual rhetoric of dream representations, such as soft focus or blur. I already mentioned that narratologically, the attention is not systematically focused on the main character. The narrator-psychoanalyst is never securely in charge. Instead, the patients take turns in dominating the scenes. This is especially the case with Sissi and Herlat, but also with other characters, less fully "treated" than these two. Between these narratological changes and the visual shifts, I contend, the film is loyal to the book on a deeper level than a formal similarity would have allowed.

Anachronism and Cultural History
Not only in terms of the main character, places, and languages, but also cinematically we pursued the sense of suspension from linear time, and of dispersal that, Michelle and I found, is the "royal robe with ample folds" that Benjamin presented as an image of translation. The film merges cinematic traditions with theatrical ones. A film with medieval scenes and scenes in remote buildings in it will have to be carefully crafted to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of such films, that is, both a false realism and an offensive, cardboard anachronism. If the film is to be serious in its betraying loyalty to the book's insights, the anachronisms have to be, so to speak, earned. This means that they have to make sense theoretically as well as visually. Françoise's position between the two worlds, times, and visions of psychoanalysis is nicely conveyed in photo 1.

Photo 1: Françoise Davoine, author and main actor (photo Markus Karjalainen)

While she is simply explaining something, the photographer, Markus Karjalainen, has carefully captured her in-betweenness. The iconically baroque colour of her casual and contemporary sweater, the equally baroque foreshortening of her hand, and the mirroring of her face position her strictly in two worlds at once. Her facial expression conveys the joy of the freedom and creativity that that position gives her.

We have, of course, been deeply influenced by other films. The visual exuberance and temporal ambiguity of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is one of many sources of inspiration; so is Orson Welles's The Trial with its over-structured, maddening spaces. Consisting of a single shot, Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark stretches the idea of long shots to the extreme. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death with its surreal trial scene stages people traversing time, as does Sally Potter's Orlando, and Fritz Lang's M stages a judgment with criteria spiralling out of control. We also look at experiments such as Maya Deren's At Land and Agnès Varda's Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.

For the Fools, small characteristic details and props and strong acting make them look as if coming from another time. Photo 2, for example, conveys the other-worldly nature of Mère Folle through a few very simple elements.

Photo 2: Mère Folle arrives (photo Markus Karjalainen)

Her wild hair is pushed back, as if through a strong wind, or a fast pace. Neither were the case during the shooting, but the effect, which was to enhance the idea of "appearance," was created by simply backcombing her hair. At the same time, the low hedges of the glorious French classical garden of the Maison Descartes in Amsterdam set off her layered skirt to suggest she is floating above ground. And her fierce look aheadadds to the feeling that she does not quite belong to where she is. [23]

The central scene of the trial is set in a theatre, which also implicates that art form as a full participant, rather than simply the cinema's "other." On the one hand, up to the structure of the trial scene, the "sottie," a medieval genre of street theatre, is a constant reference; on the other the film refers to Brecht, Pirandello, and twentieth-century street theatre. If we realize that Brecht admired Breughel's painting Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), which he used as a model for his Mutter Courage (Bryant-Bertail 2000, 83-84), the use of this figure both on the cover of Davoine's book and in the sequence of Sissi's treatment, this theatricality becomes even an aesthetic (and political) hub. Yet these theatrical moments are ultimately indistinguishable from the scenes set in a straightforward contemporary setting, such as the scenes at the hospital. Photo 3 shows the Fools on their way out of the courtyard, protesting when at the end of the scene the nurses attempt to cast them out, as happens in photo 4. [24]

In photo 3, on the left, La Boétie beats a makeshift drum, participating in the Fools' charivari (a brutal noise of beating on pots, as a protest).

Photo 3: Fools and Mad mingling in courtyard (photo Markus Karjalainen)

A big Fool (Richard Wank) who so far has been patiently gluing a book together in protest to what he sees as the damage done by reading, follows Mère Folle on her way out. The other Fools are bickering with the Musical Nurse, who tries to calm down the resident Mad with music resonant with their own noise, while her colleague the Head Nurse shoos the Fools out by authority. The shadow her arms cast onto her own body visualize the latter's impotence of her authority. All this is highly theatrical, specifically comedic. And the visual and behavioural clashes, as well as the contagion between the Fools and the Mad -- the protesters and the victims of the system of mental health care respectively -- suggest the difficulty of keeping up a regime when the categories on which it rests melt down. [25]

Once it has been instated as a principle, inter-temporality shows up everywhere. Photo 5 shows the strange inter-temporality among the Fools.

Photo 5: La Boétie, Antonin, and a Fool who lent her ear to the tyrant (photo Markus Karjalainen)

A meeting is staged across four centuries. La Boétie (Carel Smith), the sixteenth century writer and a prominent legal specialist in his day, meets Antonin, aka Artaud, the early twentieth century mad poet and playwright. The medieval Fool on the right (Eloe Kingma) looks to La Boétie, in an understanding born from their shared dumbness. Antonin, who uses La Boétie's rhetorical prose to act out his own tendency to verging on hysteria, looks into an undefined distance. He is temporally in-between, belonging neither to the Middle Ages (although the Fools explicitly adopt him as "one of us") nor to Françoise's contemporaneity (although she claims him as a patient ["an authentic madman"] who likes to makes a nuisance of himself). As he is in-between times, he is also in-between the two groups, the Fools and the Mad. Like the Fools, he seems addicted to arguing and talks with great anger; like the Mad, he is alone, as his distant gaze suggests. Sympathetic to the grievance of the Fools but too mad to connect with them, the creator of the Theatre of Cruelty incarnates in his role the ideal of a kind of language half-way between gesture and thought. Especially in the trial scene, his discourse becomes strongly performative. Yet, there, too, he remains alone. [26]

This loneliness recurs in photo 6, where the members of the court judging Françoise sit at the table.

Photo 6: The Court presided by Mère Folle (Murielle-Lucie Clément) at Françoise's Trial (photo Mia Hannula)

Artaud, who will soon dress up as a monk to further harangue Françoise, looks into the distance. Mère Folle has her eyes cast down; she is consistently self-absorbed and, due to her depression, incapable of exercising her authority. As the scene in the hospital courtyard explains, she is depressed because her tradition has been repressed from public culture. The other three court members on her left look cheerful, while the young Fool on the President's right (Fleur Sulmont) looks confrontationally to the audience. The bird cage on the table is an attribute of Ariste that this young Fool has appropriated. She waves it provocatively in photo 3. [27]

Two particularly theatrical moments are visible in photos 7 and 8. In the former, Françoise is flanked by her two abductors.

Photo 7: Françoise with her abductors (photo Mia Hannula)

The one on the left (Jean-Baptiste Decavèle) alternates force with sympathy for her. He considers his job as an abductor a normal way of making a living ("just doing his job") and establishes a friendly, advising connection with her. He even falls asleep like a baby with his head on her shoulder. The abductor on the right (Bruno Lermon) continually does not understand what is going on, and looks alternately bored, confused, and irritated. Hence, Françoise, who remains as earnest a discussant as ever, is utterly alone, in spite of these two companions. In photo 8, the consistently near-hysterical acting of Artaud becomes a ploy to visualize the character's privileging theatricality in his work.

Photo 8: Artaud (Thomas Germaine) and Francoise (photo Mia Hannula)

Suddenly showing up in a monk's robe, he uses the court case to deliver a plea for his famous Theatre of Cruelty, consistently hovering between artistic and political originality on the one hand, and madness on the other.

Like Eliot (Matthew Wright, left) and Wittgenstein (John Neubauer, right) in photo 9, these characters from the cultural history of the early twentieth century all embody ideas; they are conceptual personae.

Photo 9: Wittgenstein (John Neubauer) and Eliot (Matthew Wright) arguing (photo Mia Hannula)

Their intellectual raving surrounds them with a kind of cognitive aura, comparable to the auditive aura in the Grande Salle scene. They all seem mad to the extent that they push intellectual ideas. It is only the context of a film in which everyone is both a little mad and a little sane that their self-centred utterances converge in something that is the ultimate image or backdrop of this film. In what is both a cacophony of theoretical pronouncements and a convergence of ideas, a tapestry of thought emerges in the proximity of which psychoanalysis had been able to become so individualistic that it reaches the aporia that is Françoise's crisis. The temporal encounter between these thoughts from history turn a chronological cultural history into a preposeterous one, while weaving a backdrop for an acute need to turn to anachronism as a cure. [28]

Conclusion: What Images Can Be and Do

One of the conclusions I wish to draw from this brief consideration of filmic images as responses to the linguistically articulated ones they translate and betray, is the inseparability of visuality and narrativity. The preceding discussion has hopefully shown that images are not ontologically separate from the story they allegedly convey, let alone "illustrate." Rather, they make the story, every time anew. In the context of word-and-image relations, the word "illustrate" is a verb we should for a while ban from our reflections, until we have learned to take for granted that like linguistic utterances, images, too, have performative power. [29]

Also, an image, even a figurative one, is not confined to a visual representation. I am particularly interested in how images make us "do theory," to recall Damisch's words. I contend that what I just wrote about the cacophony of theoretical ideas, forming a tapestry, is itself an image. Only to the extent that it is an image can it be a backdrop against which the story can be set and psychoanalysis, with its failures and potential, can be set in a constant becoming, instead of the rigid legacy of a genius author. Like the cacophony of the charivari, slowly merging into the music the Musical Nurse uses as medicine. Or like the sea in the haunting photo 10, where Sissi, now in the half-way house, stands considering whether to throw herself into the water- being, or playing Ophelia? This is an image that carries with it the many stories of drowned women. While alone, her hands conduct the arguments for or against, considering the Shakespearian madness against the tradition of her own Finnish folklore. [30]

Photo 10: Sissi (Marja Skaffari) (photo Markus Karjalainen)

Finally, the insight I find most important to draw from this is what a cliché would phrase as "learning from the past": something "we" (here in the universal sense) never quite manage. Psychoanalysis is the theoretical framework that keeps us attentive to this historical lesson, if we are only willing to see that not only individual neurosis, but true historically induced madness can be successfully analyzed. This is what Davoine tries to argue -- if this is the right word -- through the images she wrote.

Photo 11: Ariste (Fleur Sulmont) looking on (photo Markus Karjalainen)

The dead Ariste, who in photo 11 looks on at the scenes of madness played out before him, is the embodiment of that deadly, but potentially curable past. Sissi, as if emerging from the office door to which she seemed glued like a painting, embodying the two-dimensionality the hospital imposes on its patients, insists on the continued presence of the past, in photo 12 where photographer Olli Heinola (also actor and webmaster) has captured her in-between state perfectly. This is her opportunity to make a new start after having been stuck, to "get better," as she says several times. It is, then, also what Michelle Williams Gamaker and I try to argue visually. If we manage that, the translation from book to film can be said to work, not in spite of but thanks to our many betrayals.

Photo 12: Sissi at the office door (photo by Olli Heinola)
 
 
[1] The idea that images "speak back" has emerged from my practice as PhD advisor. Instead of alleging an image as evidence for an argument, I teach my students to look back at them to see if, to what extent, and how they support the argument. And if to an extent the match is not happening, the writer learns from that, rather than regarding that as failure. For the idea of the performativity of images, modeled on speech act theory (Austin 1962), see Bal (2002).
 
[2] Damisch's concept of the theoretical object sometimes seems to suggest these are objects around which theories have been produced. At other times, as in the interview quoted here, he attributes to the artwork the capacity to motivate, entice, and even compel thought. I endorse the latter meaning.
 
[3] On the case study, see Berlant (2007a and 2007b). On the tension between case study and theoretical object, see the introduction to Bal (2010). On performativity, see the relevant chapter in Bal (2002).
 
[4] Ernst van Alphen-also a Damisch interpreter who thinks about the intellectual contribution images can make-devoted the chapter "Caught by Images" of his 2005 book on that subject to images that remain entirely literary.
 
[5] As members of the collective Cinema Suitcase, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I collaborated on the films Mille et un jours (2004), Colony (2007), and Becoming Vera (2008). We have both made other films with other members of the collective, as well as individually.
 
[6] I am aware that the more common term is "adaptation." However, I choose to consider the film a translation, because of the specific issue the activity of translation entails, according to the Benjaminian stream of thought I engage here. Among many studies of adaptation, the collection edited by Stam and Raengo deserves attention.
 
[7] On "becoming," see Deleuze and Guattari (1987), where they use that term throughout. For an argument about the transformative nature of images that supports an anti-intentionalist position, see Bal (2002, 253-85). On the retrospective logic as a historical perspective, see Bal (1999).
 
[8] Although author and filmmakers remain relatively independent from each other, it is relevant to realize that the preposterous logic I have developed as a historical approach squares perfectly with Davoine's conception of history, particularly (but not exclusively) as it plays itself out in madness. See the clip "Françoise on Time" on the video section of the film's website, as well as many remarks in her books (1992, 1998, 2008), and the scenography of her encounters with people from the past.
 
[9] The idea that images are received, rather than created by the author, was suggested to me by Kaja Silverman's recent book (2009), in which she discusses this attitude of artists apropos of Rilke. Davoine's book is an extraordinary integration of theory and images, "facts" and fiction. Among other advantages, such as more subtlety and strong identification, this integration allowed the author to do justice to the lived experiences in the case histories of her patients without being the dominating one who writes them.
 
[10] "While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds," Walter Benjamin writes in "The Task of the Translator" (1968, 75). This essay, central to my argument an images as my primary "philosophical object," will henceforth be referred to by page numbers only. See also the discussion in Derrida (1983, 93-161). For an extensive discussion of Benjamin's text, see chapter two of Bal (2002).
 
[11] The summary in these paragraphs does not distinguish between book and film, in spite of the differences between the two.
 
[12] The author, the main character-narrator, and the actress are the same person. For clarity's sake I will use the first name "Françoise" when speaking about the character, actress, and narrator, and use her last name "Davoine" when talking about the author of the book.
 
[13] Since we had a micro-budget for the film, we mostly had to work with volunteer actors. The Musical Nurse (Leticia Bal) is a professional musician (Feil! Hyperkoblingsreferansen er ugyldig.) but amateur actress, while the Head Nurse is a prominent professional actress (Olga Zuiderhoek). See www.crazymothermovie.com for more information on cast and crew.
 
[14] The notion of "extreme identification" was Michelle's and my interpretation of Davoine's method. The term "catastrophic regions" is Davoine's.
 
[15] See Verstraten (2009) for a film narratology that is consistent with my own narratological concepts. (Bal 2009)
 
[16] Françoise Davoine commented on this point: "I feel not betrayed but expanded" (augmentée, personal communication, January 3, 2010). Many of our interventions started out as need-compelled and received theoretical support retrospectively, or half-way through the making of the film. But I will not go into the adventures of a micro-budget film production here.
 
[17] See the clip "Françoise on Time" on the video page of the website. The author commented further on this in a personal communication after reading a first draft of this paper (January 3, 2010).
 
[18] Thanks to Mia Hannula of the University of Turku, whose constant support and help has been indispensable to us. The beautiful documentary "Women of Seili" by Mikaela Weurlander (2008), which we saw only later, gives background information about the hospital that converges astonishingly with our film. The primary source on this "invention" of madness as a hospitable disease after leprosy remains Michel Foucault. The English edition of his Madness and Civilization is an abridged version of Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, originally published in 1961. A full English translation titled History of Madness was published by Routledge in 2006.
 
[19] As has happened several times during this project, the author of a book, in this case a psychoanalyst working in Mexico City, ended up playing a role in the film. See the clip "Don Luís the younger" on the video section of the website.
 
[20] One funny but revealing incident demonstrates what a "landscape of madness" can be. When shooting the incident of the Fools chased away from the public place, the actors playing cleaners who got rid of the medieval Fools were later approached by resident visitors of the flea market, who thanked them for getting rid of "those crazies." In other words, the action created a space where madness threatened to take over, and the guys in uniforms were automatically taken to be the authorities, who "saved" the market from madness.
 
[21] I am currently devoting three books to this question. One of these, "Of What One Cannot Speak" is currently in press.
 
[22] With the phrase "loyal enough" I am alluding to the object-relation theory idea of the "good enough" mother (Winnicott 1989, 10-1).
 
[23] For this scene, make-up artist Hannele Rantanen skillfully meandered between exuberance (for the Fools) and restraint (for the patients).
 
[24] Brecht also drew on the figure of Dulle Griet for Grusha in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, writing that: "any actress who plays Grusha needs to study the beauty of Breughel's ‘Dulle Griet'" (quoted in Carney 55). The painting is clearly theatrical; Artaud also links theatre to this painting, commenting that it is "mute theater, but one that tells more than if it had received a language in which to express itself" (120). I thank Machteld Harmsen for bringing this information about Artaud's stance and Brecht's preference for Mad Meg to my attention.
 
[25] On the genre of the sottie, see Aubailly (1976). For the concept of theatricality underlying the film we benefit from the work of Maaike Bleeker, who defines theatricality as a "critical vision machine" (2008a and 2008b), as well as from her personal advice. The Musical Nurse plays a self-designed instrument, a set of enamel pots, that she hopes will sound congenial to the Mad who have been riveted by the charivari made by the Fools. On the charivari tradition, see Rey-Flaud (1985).
 
[26] Artaud published a collection of his essays on theatre called Le théâtre et son double in 1938, translated as The Theater and Its Double (1958).
 
[27] Davoine's book follows the conventions of the genre of the sottie with great sophistication, something the film cannot do. For the structure of the sottie, see Aubailly (1976). For the Dutch medieval tradition in the same vein we have greatly benefited from the generous advice of Dutch medievalist Herman Pleij (1989, 1992, 2007a, 2007b).
 
[28] Deleuze and Guattari loosen up the authority/authorship of the philosopher himself by means of the concept of "conceptual persona," a figure that helps them think as well as "become other" (1994). The term refers to "fluctuating figures who express the presuppositions or ethos of their philosophy and through their existence, no matter how inchoate or unstable, give life to concepts on a new plane of immanence." Such conceptual personae can be given shape in cinematic characters. Importantly, these figures are not allegories; they do not "stand for" some idea, concept, or thought, but figure the search for still unformed thoughts. (This formulation of the conceptual persona is partly quoted from and further inspired by Rodowick 2000, n. pag.)
 
[29] For a helpful discussion of images in both texts and visual artifacts see Mitchell (1986). Van Alphen (2005), already mentioned, offers a brilliant case study of visual images in literature.
 
[30] The famous Finnish medieval epic poem Kalevala also features a woman throwing herself into the water. On the bond between women and death, Bronfen.
 
 
 
References
Alphen, Ernst van. 2005. Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Artaud, Antonin. 1958 [1938]. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

Aubailly, Jean-Claude. 1976. Le monologue, le dialogue et la sottie: Essai sur quelques genres dramatiques de la fin du Moyen Âge et du début du XVIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion.

Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. Ed. J.O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
---. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
---. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
---. 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Third revised edition. Toronto: the University of Toronto Press.
---. 2010. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968 [1955]. "The Task of the Translator." Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 69-82. New York: Schocken.
Berlant, Lauren, ed. 2007a. On the Case: Making the Case. Special issue, Critical Inquiry 33 (4).
---. 2007b. On the Case: Missing Persons. Special issue, Critical Inquiry 34 (1).
Bleeker, Maaike. 2008a. Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
---. 2008b. "Being Angela Merkel." In The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, 247-62. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bois, Yve-Alain, et al. 1998. "A Conversation with Hubert Damisch." October 85 (Summer): 3-17.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992 Over Her Dead Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Bryant-Bertail, Sarah. 2000. Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Carney, Sean. 2005. Brecht and Critical Theory : Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics. New York: Routledge.

Davoine, Françoise. 1992. La folie Wittgenstein. Paris: E.P.E.L.
---. 1998. Mère folle: Récit. Strasbourg: Arcanes.
---. 2008. Don Quichotte, pour combattre la mélancolie. Paris: Stock.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press.
---. 1994. What is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso.

Derrida, Jacques. 1983. D'un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée.

Foucault, Michel. 2006 [1961]. History of Madness. Ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge.

Freud, Sigmund. 1953 [1913]. Totem and Taboo. Vol. 13 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1-161.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
---. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Montoya Hernández, Alberto. 2006. Paisajes de la locura. México: Paradigma.
Peirce, Charles S. 1985. "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs." In Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis, 4-23. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Pleij, Herman. 1989. "Van keikoppen en droge jonkers. Spotgezelschappen, wijkverenigingen en het jongerengericht in de literatuur en het culturele leven van de late middeleeuwen." Volkskundig Bulletin 15: 297-315.
---. 1992. "Van Vastelavond tot Carnaval." In Vastenavond-carnaval: feesten van de omgekeerde wereld, ed. Ch. Mooij, 10-44. Zwolle: Waanders.
---. 2007a. De eeuw van de zotheid: over de nar als maatschappelijk houvast in de vroegmoderne tijd. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
---. 2007b. Het gevleugelde woord: geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur 1400-1560. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

Rey-Flaud, Henri. 1985. Le charivari: Les rituels fondamentaux de la sexualité. Paris: Payot.

Rodowick, D.N. 2000. "Unthinkable Sex: Conceptual Personae and the Time-Image." Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies 3, http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/rodowick.htm.

Silverman, Kaja. 2009. Flesh of My Flesh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Stam, Robert and Allessandra Raengo (eds.) 2005 Literature and Film: the Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adapation. New York: Blackwell

Verstraten, Peter. 2009. Film Narratology. Translated by Stefan van de Lecq. Toronto: the University of Toronto Press.

Winnicott, D.W. 1989 [1971]. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001 [1921]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. David Francis Pears and Brian McGuinness. New York: Routledge.

Spent

Spent 2009 (ongoing)
Materials: Artist's Semen, Universal Litmus Paper

A true, all RAW, DADDY BEAR, GANG BANG FUCK FEST! COCKED AND LOADED features 7 hot Daddies fucking 1 lucky bottom boy…a total cast of 8 ass ploughing, cum eating studs, fucking non-stop for 80 minutes all for your pleasure…COCKED AND LOADED features real man to man ass banging…with some of the most awesome feltching scenes you will ever see. And, of course, all the trademark close-up shots by the legendary Michael McKey as he zooms in so you get to see every drop of cum and every man-ramming minute.

8.01. That’s what it says on the porn star’s watch as he begins his ecstatic, over-acted climax. I can see it clearly on the screen, a silver digital watch with a grey face and black LED numbering. The counter on the silver DVD recorder shows me that I am 28 minutes and 39 seconds into the ‘fuck fest’.  The clock on my mobile telephone lying next to the bright orange sheet of universal litmus paper shows me that it is 10.30 exactly. A triangular interface of three separate moments all ‘shot’ through by a porn stars’ orgasm. Maybe there is another kind of a clock in the room, the fingers of my hand wrapped around my dick, a five-digit flesh metronome, each stroke of my hand keeping time, the rhythm see-sawing, faster and slower, creating a score of the fizzing pressure of my own orgasm, getting nearer, ebbing away, getting nearer again, as my hand strokes and hesitates, strokes and hesitates.

The DVD’s that I have been watching are getting progressively more explicit, no frills, no music, no soft lighting just hard, super-sharp fucking. I have produced over one hundred and fifty semen drawings. I described them once as a mapping of desire for an exhibition catalogue. I was wrong. They don’t map desire; they map mechanical reproduction, repeatability, and the boredom of making over and over again. The material evidence of these drawings reduces my orgasm to a mere methodology, an A to a B. My need for explicit images is a need to get it over with, to make the composition, make it number one hundred and fifty one. It is not porn that is brutalising me but drawing, the voluntary act of turning my body into a system, a sequential unit of pictorial production.

My experience is fractured, not the self-absorbed onanistic pleasure of libidinal need but an array of necessities that disperse the encounter with myself. Propped up awkwardly on a cushion leaning on my left arm, remote control in hand. The litmus paper in front of my cock angled slightly up to the left so that the ‘composition’ can be framed on the paper. My eyes shift from screen, to remote, to paper…back to screen. The rhythm of intercourse on the screen falls into the rhythm of my hand and then my hand falls behind, the endless edited thrusting explored from every angle, known visually from all sides. The ache in my left arm reminds me that it needs to move; I angle my body closer to the paper.

The porn stars eyes have betrayed him. As he waited his turn at the ‘cum hole’ his eyes flicked towards the camera. I am no longer the eternal voyeur visually eves-dropping, the straight trajectory of his desire has been disrupted and he has acknowledged his performance within the scene no matter how quickly he takes his eyes away again. The remote, the paper, frame my own scene, puncturing the smooth flow of my own desire. The shadow of a boom mike crosses his leg and then quickly withdraws, as he steps towards the bed he reveals a clothed boy behind him sitting on a sofa. How old is he? Early to middle twenties? He is wearing a grey t-shirt and blue jeans, a clipboard clutched to his chest with campy efficiency. His gaze is not boredom, or invested physical interest, but a kind of efficient directorial stare at a job getting done. I too have bodies to direct, and paper, an orange screen for my efficient ejaculations, director and performer, a producer and consumer. My arm begins to hurt, time to shift again, angling my body further from the paper this time.

Fast forward, rewind, trying to get just the right moment. I can digitally control these porn stars, get them to re-enter or cum again and again endlessly repeating their contorted faces at the moment of orgasm, finding my favourite position, my eyes eating the screen. Click, not close enough, click, not extreme enough, always trying to see more, to catch every texture of the skin of the cock, to scoop up the last visual viscosity of the semen as it spatters onto the face and chest of the ‘bottom’.

I am never in it. No imagined positions or transference, no attempt to be a top or bottom my eyeballs are dispassionate and disconnected to the rest of my body but slip over not into the screen. I can feel my balls beginning to tighten, here is the familiar conclusion, not eagerly anticipated but not necessarily uninvited either. End of the process.  I move my hand quickly up and down my cock, the rhythm quickening pace with the porn star so that we can come together. He is purely focused on the money shot, isolated in his own universe and strangely separate from the bottom who watches with a staged anticipation but also with a kind of locked out distanced look on his face.

If I am so separate from the screen then why do I ‘cum’ with him? Why do I want to perform this sexual swoon at exactly the same time? Am I slipping into the directed fantasy of the film, are the cries of “yes, yes cum, shoot it” for me? To me? Of me?

In-take of breath…eyes too wide to see and then the charges through my body and the separate thrusts of my balls as the semen is pushed out of my dick. I am not lost in the drenched feeling of orgasm, never un-tethered or oblivious as my eyes quickly dart downwards across my chest and down onto my penis. This is my money shot, making sure the semen hits the orange of the paper, the litmus target. I try not to compose, not to frame the orgasm but, as the now dead, meaningless and hollow sounds of the porn movie continue on with its ‘fuck-fest’, I move my cock around so that it creates flicks and splashes, an onanistic Pollock tracing loops. As soon as the semen hits the litmus paper it turns green, no longer anything to do with me, that green is the shut off, the severing away from myself. That green is the objective, dispassionate evidence, an aesthetic mould that bleeds away from the private, the inside and onto the public.

Press the off button.

Cum time: 10.56
Cum Date: 06/08/09

Spent 2009 (ongoing)
Materials: Artist's Semen, Universal Litmus Paper

Masturbating. Onanism. Self-love. Auto-affection. Auto-eroticism. Self abuse. Self-pollution (selbst-befleckung). Defiling with the hand. Playing with yourself. Wanking. Frigging. Beating off. Fingering. Tossing off. Beating the beaver. Flogging yourself. Gerkin jerkin’. Jacking off. Digitizing. Chocking the bishop. Mangling the midget. Punching the clown. Spanking the monkey. Whipping the pony. Chafing the weasel. Flogging the dog. Strangling the snake. Shooting your load. Squirting. Ejaculating. Spent.

Here is the rub: what is this corporeal violence, this vicious carnality, this fierce appetite, this pathology of the imagination, the solitary pleasures of masturbation, this act of ejaculation? Cruel? Murderous? Necrophilic? Frequently. Atheological? Yes. A case of dwarf love, coulrophobia, zoophilia or animal cruelty? Sometimes. Sadistic? Over and over again. Masochistic? Time and time again. Repetitive? Repeatedly. Sado-masochistic? Undeniably. Narcissistic? Always.

Masturbation, the solitary vice, you just can’t beat it.

Narcissism
Masturbation is an act of profound narcissism. It is a love for the self. Of the self. It is enacted by a subject who takes itself as its own love object. It bespeaks the dangers of human solidarity itself. However secretive or furtive, however under-hand, it still leaves an indelible mark. Even in private it is the act of the exhibitionist. Asocial sociality. We make a spectacle of ourselves. (And we watch ourselves doing it.) Masturbation evinces an excessive need for admiration and affirmation, a selfish-ness, a disregard for others. It is a perversion par excellence, a perverting of desire, polymorphously so: an aberration, libidinous, carnal, an instinctual act of self-presentation, and likewise a coming-to-death, always pertaining simultaneously towards both life and lifelessness. With a shiver, a shudder, with in-joyment we surrender ourselves to sensual, jubilant, excruciating paroxysmal pleasure. Spent. It is the death instinct turned around upon our own ego, an infinite delay and pleasure, a sexual satisfaction crucial for masochism’s contractual, destructive attitude.

Which is not to say it necessarily happens alone. We inflict pain and pleasure, harm oneself as if another, harm oneself and another, be harmed by them. Then they call it ‘mutual’ or parallel masturbation, reciprocal and reciprocated, but nonetheless there’s something asymmetrical in, always a sadistic edge to, this pleasure from the law of coming or squirting at or on or into the mouth or arse or cunt of an other.

Touching
Masturbation is all about contact. Touching. Touching the self. Touching the other. Touching the other as self. Skin on skin. The skin, wrote Freud, is a sensory filter between the internal and external worlds. Fair enough. But skin, the largest of the body’s organs, is also continuous. Inside and outside. Continuous contours. Baroque. Touching is for Freud a source of pleasure, much as it is a danger, and even a perversion if, as he warns, the individual becomes preoccupied by lingering over the stage of touching at the expense of and to the extent that the ‘sexual act’ is no longer the desired outcome of any given encounter. This is touching for its own sake. Imminence itself. Touching as touching, then, a touching of the self, an act of auto-affection, a solitary pleasure.

When it comes to such touching, there is of course something manual, instrumental, about such handy work. Such contact. Such control. Painfully intimate and yet strangely dissociative. But where is the locus of power, the management of such a regulative regime? For Luce Irigaray, auto-affection for men always already involves some kind of mediation by way of a tool or an instrument: a hand, a device, a woman’s body. Here, because of this enforced distance that he has from himself while touching himself, he can only touch himself as other to himself. Contrary to this, as Irigaray makes clear, woman’s masturbation needs no mediation. She touches herself ‘in and of herself.’ Leo Bersani, always ready to queer things a little further, suggests that the authority lies elsewhere since for him ‘in masturbation the… body, more specifically the penis, disciplines the hand that would rule it.’
 
Economy
Masturbation is aeconomical. This touching, this contact, is against the economy of heterosexual genital intercourse. It is that dangerous supplement deceiving nature – because it supplants rather than complements nature – and thus the natural order of things. It is non-procreative eroticism. It leans away from husbandry and towards squandering  (extravagant spending, and scattering too) and wastefulness. Its precious seed, in all of its purity, dirtiness, and abject material-ness is spilt wondrously, wastefully, exhaustively. Spent. Its true worth is finally fully understood as George Bataille’s celebration of the philosophy of dépense, of expenditure or waste. Against classical utility, masturbation is generative and non-generative, productive and disposable, a perverse sexuality that speaks of a non-genital finality, a matter of ‘non-logical difference’. As symptomatic of Bataille’s general economy, it is unproductive expenditure par excellence. Unproductive activities always lead and are tied to economic anxieties. Masturbation is an autarky: economically self-reliant and self-sufficient. Convenient. Cheap. Free even! All strong motives. Supply and demand are endless – physiologically and socially: alone, in pairs, with lots of people, etc. Masturbation is a quantitative problem. This is no economy of scarcity. As Thomas Laqueur writes, there is no bottom line in the masturbatory economy. You come, come, and come again. Spurt. Trickle. Gush. Repeatedly so. Serially. Daily. Spend. Spend. Spent. Fiscally-speaking, especially in this climate, who can afford (to waste) the money shot?

Aesthetics
Masturbation has an aesthetic all of its own; it is the ultimate incitement of the theory of the qualities of feeling. It is graphic; material, embodied, enfolded. It demands we ask a Proustian question: how is that (by, from) me? Squirting, ejaculating has a trajectory, a temporality, a rhythmic pulsation, and the beginnings of a narrative. It has a morphology, it is morphogenic even. It also has a spatiality, a spacing, a gradual bleed, for instance, across the litmus paper. Form and formless-ness. And repetitive, where repetition is boredom, banality, chaffing, soreness, an operation in the service of the death instinct. Squiggles. Baroque. In the end it is perhaps a little like Darwin’s aevolutionary coral.

This masturbatory aesthetic has taken many forms, and formless-nesses.
Date: 10th November 2005, Guggenheim, NYC, 5pm-12am: In ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ Marina Abramovic re-performs five earlier performances by other artists and two of her own, including Vito Acconci’s ‘Seedbed’ (1972). In re-performing ‘Seedbed’, she remembers, repeats, and works through the original, re-enacting the self-pleasure of another as her own. The audience are raucous, cheering and jeering her efforts. She has four orgasms.

Date: 1994-2002: In ‘The Cremaster Cycle’ Matthew Barney acts out an eight-year extended exercise in narcissism and anal sadism. This masturbatory machine, this investigation into the creative potential of perversion with its Vaseline and tapioca sculptures, circles around the cremaster muscle, the muscle that covers the testis, that raises and lowers the scrotum in order to regulate the temperature of the testis and promote spermatogenesis. Feel it ripple. Barney has put the masturbation into Cremaster.

Date: 1991 (and other times): In penning her ‘Woman’s Ejaculation Guide’, performance philosopher Shannon Bell is intent on a re-eroticisation of female ejaculation by speaking about her own ejaculating female body, with its rushing and gushing fluids, and of how female ejaculate serves the purpose of pleasure. She writes about the Greeks such as Galen and Hippocrates who believed in the female seed, about Aristotle who understood the fluid as pleasurable, as evidence of the female prostate, and mentions the Ugandan Batoro who have a custom called ‘kachapati’ which translates as ‘spray the wall’. Her ‘how to’ guide produces results.

Date: 4th October, 1991: former porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle is at the Live Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne contributing her ‘Sluts and Goddesses’ workshop to an event entitled ‘Burning the Flag? American Live Art and Censorship’. The workshop includes a re-staging of her regular ‘Public Cervix Announcement’, and culminates in ‘The Legend of the Ancient Sacred Prostitute’, a magic masturbation ritual in which Sprinkle charms her audience by orgasming multiply on stage.

Date: 1970-73: Valie Export masturbates in a tub for Mann & Frau & Animal.

Date: 15th-29th January, 1972: For ‘Seedbed’ Vito Acconci is under a false floor in the Sonnabend Gallery for eight hours a day, three days a week. With his black jumper on and his cock out, he performs an action. Repetitively. Solipsistically. His body a mere means, an instrument, his goal is to produce seed. He masturbates, out of view and by way of a disembodied voice vocalises through loudspeakers his fantasies about the visitors to the gallery.

Date: 1946: Duchamp’s ‘Paysage fautif’, a stained landscape of dried and gluey fluid is later identified by the FBI laboratories in Houston, Texas, as human semen.

Date: March 1920: Picabia’s blasphemous and iconoclastic ‘La Sainte Vierge’ (1920), his ink stain as the Virgin Mary on paper from his journal, was illustrated in the Dada periodical 391. Whether seminal or urinal, it echoes both the accidental blot drawings of 18th century English landscape painter John Robert Cozens and anticipates Jackson Pollock’s joyless and boorish hyper-masculinist action painting.

There are of course others. This is a never-ending sadistic, masochistic, sado-masochistic, vicious cycle – always the same, always different - of corporeal violence and solitary pleasures, of narcissism, touching, unproductive expenditure, a unique quality of feeling, and a graphic self-making. Jordan McKenzie is just the latest. There will be others to come.

Give the masturbator a hand.

Spent 2009 (ongoing)
Materials: Artist's Semen, Universal Litmus PaperMasturbating. Onanism. Self-love.