Triggers and Triggering Devices
And is man’s ego
a thing imprisoned in itself and sternly shut up in its boundaries of flesh and
time? Do not many of the elements which make it up belong to a world before it
and outside of it?[1]
Still
another lens through which we can see what is happening is that of
psychohistory, a blending of psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. For it
is through this lens that we can come to see ritual events intersecting with
historical phenomena in such a way that so-called individuals shift in and out
of focus with the customary roles they play throughout their lives.
This
metaphor of focus can be traced back through many thousands of years to Plato
and the shadows on the cave described in The Republic which we touched on
earlier. But it is in the terms of
optical enhancements to normal vision that the analysis we are making can best
be explained, for it was especially during the nineteenth century with the
invention of photography, cinema and x-rays that significant leaps in
epistemology and aesthetics became possible—to recreate, as it were, the way in
which the world was perceived, recalled, understood and acted upon.[2]
In specific circumstances, moreover, the image
produced by the imaginary performance interferes with and distorts the
self-constructed figure of the self normally recognized by society. Something
in these unusual circumstances triggers the epistemological crisis whereby the
individual actor or the collective troupe cease being aware of the game they
are enacting and believe themselves absorbed into the illusions or delusions of
the transformative event.
The
triggering mechanisms and the codification of the resultant painful expression
into words, images and gestures lies within the individual sometimes and
sometimes within the shared trauma and trancelike states induced in small
groups.[3]
These psychic mechanisms also exist in cultural groups and traditions, as Aby
Warburg has shown in regard to what he calls the Nachleben (afterlife or survival) of key images and structural
themes of late antiquity carried on in Renaissance art. These topoi—places
of rhetorical and sensorial memory—Warburg considers to be Pathos-fomeln (passionate formulae), that is, concentrations of primary
emotional energy that may be articulated according to various styles and
ideologies, but powered more by non-intellectual experiences than by deliberate
attempts to imitate previous statues or paintings.
We
can shape our argument around the writings of a French writer who, from the
mid-nineteenth century represented a form of neo-Catholicism that was more
mystical than popular. In his 1871 book L’Homme (Man) and the chapter entitled
«La Goutte d’eau » (A Drop of Water), Ernest Hello described the processes
of taking and developing pictures by photography.[4] For Hello, science was part of God’s
universe, both as the subject to be studied—nature as the created world—and the
methods by which such investigations are conducted, so long, of course, as they
were understood to be manifestations of the divine will and not as meaningless
or purely rational events. To a certain
extent, the descriptions of these scientific acts were read allegorically in
order to explain an extended analogy between the photographer’s technique and
the chemical transformations needed to effect the art and the way the mind
receives and processes sensations from without, stores them in memory, and
interprets them as meaningful knowledge.
In particular, Hello’s conceit created a rhetorical figure of the
mystical mind producing revealed visions for contemplation and action. In this way, photography is « ‘…le symbole du
souvenir,’ un ‘miroir qui se souvient,’» ( … ‘the symbol of a memory’, a ‘mirror that remembers
itself,’ photography”).
For
us to work with Hello’s conceits and figures, however, we must gloss his
technical language and his terms of reference so as to bring out the psychohistorical
dimensions he would have rejected had he known about them. Thus he begins his extended description by
setting the photographic technology within a perspective of religious
experiences:
La photographie
révèle la durée virtuelle de l’acte humain, qui semble fugitif et qui est
éternel, à moins que quelque chose de supérieur ne survienne pour effacer (p. 109)
Photography
reveals a virtual duration of human activity which [otherwise] seems ephemeral
and which is [in reality] eternal, at least until something superior comes to
erase it.
This
new art invented in the nineteenth century gives the illusion of making
fugitive sensations or impressions of the moment permanent, transforming the
shifts of light and shadows into a portrait of enduring beauty. This is precisely what Impressionists were
attempting to do in their paintings at the same time, that is, to create a new
kind of aesthetic experience that, unlike the academic or classical theories
taught in the schools and used as standards of excellence in the annual salons
in Paris and elsewhere does not seek to show perfect paradigms of ideal beauty,
tried to capture in form, color and texture the play of changing light on
natural scenes and the artist’s sensibility in responding to these living and
spontaneous sensations.
Hello’s
text then goes further into the procedures of using an apparatus to focus the
objects to be photographed through a series of lenses and on to a chemical-coated
glass plate, emphasizing the need to have all dust and smudges removed so that
the images exactly capture the reflected and refracted light.
Le détail des
opérations que la photographie exige ressemblerait peut-être beaucoup à celles
que fait la conscience. Le nettoyage de
la plaque, qui doit être parfait pour que l’opération soit possible, ressemble
à la préparation intérieure sans laquelle le souvenir et la conscience n’ont
pas leur pureté et leur profondeur. Le
moindre objet qui s’interpose entre le verre et la lumière arrête l’image et
l’empêche de se former. (pp. 109-110)
The details of
the operations which photography requires seem to resemble many of those
carried out in the conscious [mind]. The
wiping of the plate, which must be perfect for the process to be possible,
resembles the interior preparations without which memory and consciousness
cannot have their purity and depth. The
smallest object interposed between the glass [lens] and the light blocks the
image and prevents it from manifesting itself.
These preparatory acts of
technical purification made on the camera stand for the meditational exercises
the Christian mystic must perform before receiving his divine insights and
being able to recreate the original sensations into lasting and
self-transforming memories.
But then Hello discusses the
deeper implications that arise when meditating on the way the sensitized plate
is brought into the photographer’s darkroom for development of the negative and
thus invisible images into positive and visible pictures.
Quand la plaque est bien préparée, l’image se dépose sur
elle, pendant qu’elle est exposée au grand jour, en face de l’objet qu’elle
doit reproduire. (p. 110)
When the plate is well prepared, the
image shows itself on it, while it is exposed to the full light, in reverse of
the object it must reproduce.
These mechanical details, well
known to us,[5]
were still somewhat of a mystery to most people unfamiliar with chemistry, and
the relationship between the reversed images of the negative and the corrected
reproduction in the positive print was striking enough to serve as a heuristic
device in Hello’s teaching.
Mais voici quelque
chose de très frappant. Cette image ne
s’aperçoit pas. Elle est là, mais elle est invisible. (p. 110)
But here is
something very striking. This image does
not make itself visible. It is there,
but it is invisible.
It
is, in fact, this wonderful relationship between the seen and the unseen that
leads the writer close to an insight into what was being discovered during the
course of the nineteenth-century psychology and would become the heart of
psychoanalysis by the late 1890s: the tensions between the conscious and the
unconscious mind.
Hello
finds an almost mystical moment in the transformation of the obscure—with both
the physical sense of darkness or absence of light and of invisibility or even
absence of anything to be seen—into the
manifested image on the plate.
Pour qu’elle
devienne visible, l’operateur appelle à son secours d’obscurité. C’est dans l’obscurité, dans le cabinet noir,
qu’il emporte précipitamment sa plaque, au moment où elle vient de recevoir,
par la vertu de la lumière, l’impression de l’objet. C’est dans l’obscurité qu’il verse l’acide. Alors, lentement, à la lueur d’une bougie, il
voit apparaître l’image. (p. 110)
For it to become
visible, the operator calls on the help of obscurity [darkness]. It is in the obscurity of the darkroom that
it suddenly precipitates on the plate, at the very moment when it received, by
virtue of the light, an impression of the object. It is in the darkness that he
pours out the acid. Then, slowly, in the
glow of a candle, he sees the image appear.
Paradoxically,
in the obscurity of the darkroom a single candle’s light reveals the magical
revelation of the picture of what no longer exists, the brief passing moment
when the camera received the impressions of color and form in a scene that has
changed and never can be experienced again in precisely the same way except now
in the photograph—and that image can be reproduced many times, so that it is
always more and other what the photographer—or the Impressionist
painter—original experience.
Ce portrait, dépose
par un objet présent sur une plaque qui garde l’image sans la montrer encore,
ne ressemble-t-il pas merveilleusement aux impressions sourdes que l’âme à
reçues, sans les montrer clairement ni aux autres, ni à elle-même ? Cette lumière à laquelle elle était exposée,
c’était l’impression du présent. (p. 110)
This portrait,
laid down by an object on the plate which fixes the image without yet showing
it, does this not resemble marvellously the secret impressions which the soul
receives, without showing them clearly either to oneself or to others? This light to which it has been exposed, this
is the impression of the present.
By now,
it should be evident that my interpretation of Hello’s words leads not towards
the religious perspective but towards a more psychological reading, one in
which the stimulus of the light through the lens of the camera and its
impression on the chemical plate represent figuratively the manner by which the
scene to be reproduced—first on that plate, later in the print of the developed
picture, and subsequently in further mechanical printings—requires more than
just a clear lens and clean plate or even a nearly perfect darkened room in
which to apply the acid solution to bring out the image obscurely hidden or
invisible on that plate. The Pathosformeln are to be seen as a
formula or paradigm of primary rays or beams of visible energy that comes from
a radiant source (such as the sun or some type of artificial light) and that
are reflected off the objects perceived and then fixed in the style and
according to the skills and tastes of the historical moment of the photographic
event, so as to be fixed, printed and reproduced in the Nachleben or afterlife of the picture:
Elle emporte l’image dans l’obscurité : c’est là que
le souvenir ou la conscience, agissant sous le voile du recueillement, dans la
nuit et la solitude, font apparaitre l’image autrefois déposée.
It reveals the
image in obscurity: this is that which the memory or the conscious mind, acting
under the veil of peaceful meditation, in the dark and solitary night, makes
appear images previously laid down.
Applying the
Conceit of Photography
His art was one
of æsthetic homage —a sort of visual archaeology of representation—made without
the help of museums, libraries or other accoutrements of modern scholarship.[6]
The
ideas of Aby Warburg when extended beyond the specific fields of study he
invented them for—the motifs of classical antiquity rediscovered and reapplied
in Renaissance Italy, along with some understanding of late-nineteenth-century anthropology,
as he saw during his visit to Arizona and New Mexico in the 1890s and finally
wrote up during a stay in a mental clinic in Switzerland near the end of the
1920s—do not require the logical positivism they grew out of. The chemical processes by which images are
fixed on the photographic plate and made to emerge as reproducible pictures on
the developed print must be further seen as occurring in the flux and violence
of history, laid down in disturbed and excited conditions, and passed on in
fragments and distortions.
As
Bronwen Nicholson shows in regard to Paul Gauguin’s “æsthetic homage” to Polynesian
(or what he called generically “Maori” art), the triggering of his primary
artistic sensitivity came through the medium of his imagination. Gauguin was not concerned to exact reproductions
of the colours, textures and forms he saw in the Marquessa Islands or in Tahiti,
but to integrate these sensations with his personal experiences in his
childhood in Peru or his extended visits to Brittany along with his scholarly
meditation on photographs and other illustrations found in books on ancient
Egyptian, classical Greco-Roman and East Asian art. By attuning his perceptions to the exotic and
archaic worlds he visited, the artist became sensitive to new sensations, and
was then able to integrate, harmonize and recreate what he felt deeply as the
otherness of art itself within his imagination.
This was not merely to break out of the academic stranglehold he saw
deadening the inspiration of fellow artists and patrons nor to discover a
language appropriate to his private experiences. It was above all to express the universal
mystical truths he came to believe lay behind all myths and iconography.[7] His was, as Nicholson puts it,
a restless
probing for the conjunctions and disjunctions between cultures…. He confronts
us with images of human difference and spirituality that defy any easy
confidence and prompts us to ask where we all are, where we have come from,
what are we doing here, where are we all going?[8]
These
are, to be sure, disturbing questions to ask, and it is not necessary to accept
Gauguin’s implied answers which were, at best, appropriate to the opening years
of the twentieth century. The shock of
the ensuing events, from the slaughterhouse of the Great War through the
Holocaust in the Second World War and into the other breakdowns of the old
order that followed, have awakened psychohistorians to the way in which history
cannot be understood as either a conscious pursuit of rational goals or even as
a nightmare of delusionary quests for one utopia or another; rather, we now can
see that what motivates human behaviour on the individual and the mass scale
are dysfunctional experiences in childhood exasperated by abuse, neglect and
other trauma at every stage of development.
Thus
the psychic irritants of abuse and neglect comes from the person or thing one
cannot recognize or speak, the very heart of the hated self, the umma[9],
the mother. Bat Ye’or explains:
In
a minority and under threat, the umma, implanted in the heart of the
most prestigious civilizations, worked out methods to defend and legitimate
itself. The assertion of its own superiority served as a compensatory valve in
the confrontation with the dhimmi peoples, heirs to great civilization
and mastering their scientific and cultural dynamism. The law prohibited any
friendship and discussion with the dhimmis, as well as the smallest
borrowing of ideas or conduct, the umma thus protecting itself by rigid
prohibitions based on self-glorification. Triumphalism, superiority, the
perfection of the umma, and the wretchedness and abjection of the dhimmi
blinded by error, embodied the perfect order of dhimmitude in practice.[10]
Those subject to the laws of Dhimmitude
also engaged in self-delusion and self-deception, what Jovan Civijic in 1918
called “projective mimetism” and “moral mimicry”,[11]
creating a symbiotic dependency of mutual delirium, a state of absurd existence
wherein the Jew would be the screen on which both Christian and Jew saw
themselves as the inner being they could not tolerate and needed to eradicate
through violence—but also needed to keep from killing one another and
themselves. Civijic also wrote that people “get used to hypocrisy and lowliness
because this is necessary for them to live and to protect themselves from
violence.”[12]
Nevertheless, not all people get “used to” these conditions all the time, and
the mutuality of deception—self-glorification and abjection—keep the latent
rage against the mother-self always alive as a constant irritant ready to be
released into violent action, either in “harmless” safety valves, such as
folkloric plays, or as orchestrated festivals of blood, such as massacres and
pogroms.
NOTES
[ii] Norman Simms, “Representations of Nature Limited
and Unlimited: A Speculative Essay” Literature & Aesthetics 21:2 (2011)
1-25.
[3] An extreme, individualized
version of this theory is discussed by Pontius as a form of “seizure disorder”
she calls “limbic psychotic trigger reaction” or “kindling”. There is to be
found a pattern of criminal acts committed by persons who lack any history of
violent or criminal behaviour. Perform the violent deed without planning
against strangers seemingly out of the blue, report that just prior to the
event they experience “a profound sense of puzzlement, followed by
hallucinations associated with past events” and a few also “experienced delusions
of grandeur.” In the course of the crime, the perpetrators confess that they
“experienced nausea, vertigo, ‘ice cold’ sensations, profuse sweating,
incontinence or other visceral reactions”. They also speak of being
“disorientated for several hours following their crimes” and having a powerful
sense of bewilderment and guilt in the aftermath. The conclusion Pontius
reaches is that “subjects committed crimes while experiencing seizures of the
limbic system, a brain region associated with memory and emotion.” As with rats
who are given brain stimulation by electrical shocks, these persons seem to
suffer something other than “brain damage from kindling”: they suffer seizures,
similar to epileptic fits (Pontius 1996). A few years later, Pontius offered a
more specific diagnosis of such phenomena: “in many cases, these acts of
violence appear to stem from chronic, intermittent stimulation of the vagus
nerve occurring in vulnerable individuals. The vagus nerve runs from the brain
to the gastrointenstinal tracts, and studies show that repeated stimulation of
the nerves can provoke seizures” and she adds “All the subjects had histories
of head injuries,” a sign of probable violent abuse in childhood (see Anneliese
A. Pontius, “Controversial Theory Links Violence Bat Ye’or, Islam
and Dhimmitude, bic ‘Kindling’ in Crime Times
2:4 (1996) 6-7; online at http:216,117k159.91/crimetimes/96d/w96dp6);
and also her “An Explanation for ‘Inexplicable Acts’” in Crime Times 9:4 (2003)
online at http://216.117.159.91/crimetimes/96d/w96dp6.
[4] I depend for paraphrases and citations on Stanislas
Fumet, Ernest Hello, ou Le drame de la
lumière (Paris et Bruxelles : Editions Saint-Michel, 1928)
[5] Perhaps this statement needs
modification as more and more people, and especially young folk, use digital
cameras, where there is no chemical process in the taking or the developing of
pictures.
[6] Bronwen Nicholson, Gauguin and Maori Art (Auckland, NZ:
Auckland City Art Gallery, 1995) p. 6.
[8] Nicholson, Gauguiin and Maori Art, p. 73.
[9] In simple ordinary terms, the umma
is the Islamic community: the mother of all true believers.
[10] Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 106.
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