Writing Samples

WRITING SAMPLES 1 Studio handbook for end times: “introduction” 2 Stochastic resonance: Metaphor and metonymy, Bloom’s anxiety system, and virtuality 3 The horizontal atlas: lamella, fantasy, anamorphosis, lucretian flow Studio Handbook for End Times: Introduction from the outline … 1. Introduction to the studio as personal and therapeutic project. a. Not the usual ego-based idea of self-help b. What studio does in professional educational programs c. How the studio idea is specifically meaningful when applied to personal reflection d. The “uncanny” aspect of home as the essence of dwelling AIMS of the introduction: An introduction does not need to be a preview listing ideas to be encountered further in the text. Rather, it is a set-up, a preparation. With the surfeit of self-help literature that floods the market, the reader needs to make a clean break with this kind of quid pro quo thinking. The up-market ideas from psychoanalysis are not difficult; rather, they have been until recently shrouded in technical/professional jargon. The Introduction aims to set up key ideas that will serve the reader for the remainder of the reading project and to establish bonds of trust that will assure the reader that the book is not a series of gimmicks. The reader must accept the invitation to read with adequate awareness of what’s at stake. TOPICS: The peculiarly American idea that you can and should help yourself; the distortion of psychoanalysis into ego-strengthening; the studio as counterpart to the modernized factory. The unnameable: anxiety-fear, an “inner division” and an “outer projection.” The intensification of the Real in the Thing, as impossible-obscene proximity; escape is through fantasy; hence, the world of popular culture abounds in evidence of anxiety-fear’s “extimacy.” The idea of spaces inside of space; the φ as symbol of re- entry and bridge to other topics. The technique of “stepping aside” to see subjectivity “face to face.” A Lucretian framework for experiment. The uncanny as place (home) and situation (negation, obversion); metaphor and metonymy; reasons for taking up a personalized inquiry. Harold Bloom’s system of anxiety; Henry Johnstone’s system of authentic travel. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the “psychoanalytic” (or “analytic”) idea of the human subject developed by Freud began to hit American shores. At first, it seemed a perfect marriage of Old World wisdom and New World pragmatics. Freud’s clinical study of hysterics, paranoiacs, and perverts had revealed that mental illness was not the exception in human culture, it was the rule; it was democratic! There were no sick minds and healthy minds. There were only minds with various manifestations of the sickness that was the mind. The subject was the sickness that could not be cured but for death. The best one could hope for was “neurosis,” the cost of belonging to networks of social relations — family, friends, one’s culture, one’s religion. The universality of this severe diagnosis opened up the public’s curiosity about their mental life, the adjustment to the increasing demands of modernism, and — especially — to immodest thoughts about sex. In exchange for the guilty verdict of Studio Handbook for End Times / SAMPLE WRITING 1 science, the public “pled down the sentence,” so to speak. At a cost affordable to a growing educated middle class, psychoanalysis could provide a new way to imagine subjectivity. While the frame was limited, variations were not. In an age already heated to the boil with spiritualism and ideas about hidden dimensions of time and space, science seemed to be offering the same tricks of space and time, but with added comforts of consultation and control. The séance table was replaced by the analyst’s couch. The problem, in the minds of the first promoters in the U.S., was that the ideas of psychoanalysis might, on one hand, be too easily spread unless key terms remained obscure and ambiguous. If people understood the text too readily, they wouldn’t need experts to translate for them. On the other hand, the real complexities of the mind would put off many clients willing to pay for treatment only if that treatment promised some eventual cure. This led to the biggest distortion of all, one that continues to dominate psychiatric practice in the U. S. — that the aim of treatment is to define and strengthen the ego, the “public” aspect of the personality. The public, misled with the hopes that their neuroses could be dispelled by a kindly medical expert aiming to build personal confidence, would embrace analysis as a path to happiness and accomplishment. Psychiatrists, required to be MDs, would be personal trainers. The MD model — a professional who cures you — provided an upbeat alternative to Freud’s original and somewhat depressing bottom line. Figure 1. Charlie Chaplin in the factory gearbox, Modern Times, 1936; DVD: United Artists, 2003. The shift in psychoanalysis from Freud’s universal sickness to optimistic self-help with personal trainers had a distant echo. The atelier — the French word for the studio in which craftsmen, artists, and architects labored on their works — embodied the mental process of creativity. It was an “angelic space,” not for the factory-like production of practical goods but for miraculous conception of works of art. Mind and matter blended, forces flowed and created harmonies. The studio embodied the impossible. Unlike the analyst’s couch, where the past was invaded to discover its hidden traumas, the studio projected toward a magical future. Both the couch and the studio sought treasures hidden in the unconscious, but the studio’s conceptions were magic objects that could be shared as works of art. The romanticizing of the studio came at a time when factories were struggling to escape the poet William Blake’s image of them as “dark satanic mills.” New factories were streamlined, bright, hygienic. Work, increasingly Studio Handbook for End Times / SAMPLE WRITING 2 alienating as mass production and the efficiency of assembly lines took over, became discipline (think of Charlie Chaplin’s construction of the factory scene in Modern Times). The new satanic mill put Satan on a television screen, broadcasting from his corner office, dictating orders to willing workers. However, the new mill was cleaned up to secure an even tighter grip on the worker, not just to compel labor but to control thoughts and feelings as well. It was not good enough to be a slave; it was necessary to want to be a slave; to identify with servitude. The studio went further than the modern factory floor could. It gave voice to the idea of the autonomous subject, able to go beyond the dictates of consumer demand; able to realize the hitherto impossible. Where the factory exemplified the automaton, the perfectly coordinated machine, the studio embodied the ideal of tuchē, Aristotle’s idea of human opportunism, affordance, and ingenuity making do with things lying at hand. Marx’s vision of humanity in heavy or light chains was popularized by movies such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and panoramic art such as Diego Rivera’s murals of oppressed humanity struggling for freedom. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German unrest following World War I pitted the model of collective prosperity against the reality of personal subjection. A new society moved in lock-step toward ever-increasing material wealth on one hand and the likelihood of personal alienation and dissatisfaction on the other. If the factory assembly line was the “dirty fantasy” related to this kind of reality, the studio provided “clean fantasy” — a place of “spiritual” production, where dissatisfaction and alienation evaporated into the pure bliss of liberated artistic “conception,” uniting the physical and mental aspects of that term. This was an unreal idealization of the forces of the times, but it shows how one and the same situation can only be adequately represented by two fantasies, one “dirty” and the other “clean.” It takes a little time to realize that the idealization of the studio (sun flowing in from large windows, works of ingenuity being perfected by thoughtful, happy workers) is simply the obverse of the rigidly disciplined factory. But, what could possibly serve as the single “reality” behind these two antagonistic images? Freud’s answer was obscured for many years, and made nearly invisible by ego-psychology versions of his work. It was not an answer that could be stated easily, but it was one that related so directly to our ideas of how space and time are structured that its central, singular inner antagonism had no option but to produce two strikingly contrasting “scenes.” This idea, this thing with a built-in inner antagonism and obverse material ideals, cannot even be named with one word. Its name can be pronounced only in the presence of “external circumstances” that seem to call it out as a response; but, in truth, it would be impossible to say which came first, the circumstances or the subjective response. It would be more accurate to say that call and response emerged simultaneously and so quickly differentiated, each from the other — one as an “outside” of external conditions, the other as an “inside” of subjective feelings — that re-combining them would be nearly impossible. The inside-outside condition of this thing with the built-in division was like the Roman god Janus, whose multiple faces reduced the north, south, east, and west of material space to a single entity — an “out there” — that was also, paradoxically, an “in here.” Intimacy and externality were given permanent polarity on the condition that they would never be allowed to fully separate. Studio Handbook for End Times / SAMPLE WRITING 3 The Janus-style name of this new idea that gave rise to both the factory floor and the romanticized artist’s studio was — anxiety-fear.

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