This is another one of the articles that were accepted and then turned back--in fact three times over the past few years: once with quite explicit anti-Jewish comments, the second with the statement that it was not political enough, and the third because it was too difficult for most non-scholarly people to understand. Yet each time an editor accepted it, then a committee turned it back, and a polite note saying it deserved to be published--but not in our journal, please.
Introduction: Stylistic Fields and Festivals
Let us call this symbolic-imaginary space, in which the
conscious mind operates under the influence and domination of the stylistic
categories, a “symbolic field”. The term seems quite appropriate for use in
this purely spiritual domain as well. In the “physical” sphere one speaks of
“magnetic fields” run through by lines of force, or of electric fields charged
with “tensions.” Maintaining the lucid distinction that should be made between
the spiritual sphere and the physical, the “field” image assumes suggestive and
illustrative values that no one would readily dispense with. A “stylistic
field: can be imagined as run through by very heterogeneous determining lines,
as a highly complex space, in keeping with our concept of the multiplicity and
irreducible diversity of the “abyssal categories”. [1]
The Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga’s concepts of stylistic fields, lines of
tension, a highly complex imaginary space wherein specific individuals,
historical groups, unconscious and conscious memories play out their
complicated interactions have for more than forty years remained as the guiding
principles of my approach both to the history of mentalities and
psychohistory. For me, the argument
rests on the unresolved and irresolvable tensions that bind the perceived from
the unimaginable, the articulate from the unspeakable, the conceptual from the
inconceivable, and the existential from the unconscious [2].
In regard to certain
kinds of real events that cannot be explained by normal logical or commonsense
reasoning, the term festival has proved a useful tool or lens: a festival requires, on the one hand, a
recognizable time and place of activity, a group of actors who identify
themselves as such and oppose others as foreign, dangerous and incomprehensible;
and on the other, a set of actions that occur as much in the measurable present
as in the recollected past and the never-ending flow of existential or mythical
timelessness. The festival is thus a game, played partly in Johann Huizinga’s (Homo Ludens) or Roger Caillois’s (Man, Play and Games) sense of a symbolic
transformation of time and place, identity and potentiality, and partly as a
manifestation of dream-work release from the constraints of physicality and
mortality. Such a phenomenological event may involve stylized dress, food, language
and movement. Above all, the festival is an imitation of itself as experienced
in the collective mind and memory [3]
The festival of blood and justice to be discussed here
revolves around particular acts of violence, embodiments of collective hatred,
and a choreography of self-purification or purgation.[4] My discussion starts with
a recent hate-filled act of incredible cruelty by a small group of Palestinian
boys in the Land of Israel who sneaked into a settler-compound and killed
another group of children. Though there can be a limited explanation through
contextualization into the short-term conflict between Arabs and Jews, the
nature and shape of the mass murder cannot be contained within the paradigm of
inter-communal violence. The specific details at once are–more and other than
the whole event–seen as a choreographed performance, and also fragmentary and
filled with too many gaps to register as a localized scenario of terrorism as
played out in the streets of Israeli cities during recent Intifada incidents.
Indeed, the comparison with another event some years earlier which contains
several similar details, only illustrates the inadequacy of a common-sense
explanation.
For that reason, it is necessary to widen the parameters of
time and space to begin to show the deeper mythical and symbolic significance
of the recent murder of the Fogel children in Israel. [5] But
not only is it useful to travel further afield in time and space to grasp the
qualities that distinguish the violent performance from political acts of
terror or pogroms in Eastern Europe or massacres of Jews in medieval England,
France or Germany, it will be needed to transgress the strict boundaries of
historical evidence to examine folklore, literature and iconography. There is
no way the boys who murdered the children in their beds in Israel a few years
ago could have known about the imaginary experiences conceptualized in English
literary documents or recorded in Balkan folkloric texts.
The epistemological
crisis seems impossible to resolve. Normative rules of historical evidence or
judicial proof do not apply. As the Romanian philosopher and poet Lucian Blaga
put it concerning what we will tentatively denominate a symbolic universe or
collective waking collective dream: “...our ‘world’ is modeled not only by categories
of the conscious, but also by other categories, whose dwelling place is the
unconscious.” The size, shape and volume
of this festive place, Blaga explains, “is not as simple as Kant and his
followers believed, but multiple, or at least two-layered.” [6]
I would add there
are far more than two-layers of consciousness and unconsciousness, since the
mental image also is constituted by forces that are sometimes repressed before
they emerge to awareness and sometimes suppressed from common awareness to
neurotic or even psychotic false-images, if not by huge blind-spots and black
holes that are denied by the actions of the symbolic performance. Blaga
concludes his statement by saying, “’Our world,’ therefore tastes of human
spontaneity with exponential intensity.” Let me modify this somewhat before
plunging into my own study: The festival of hatred is at once determined by
deep, mythical forces released and recreated in historical circumstances, and
therefore spontaneously free to intersect with the ever-new specificities of
history. The deep psychological and
historical forces do not determine the course of events, but the course events
can act as triggers of repressed social energies.
NOTES
[1]Lucian Blaga,
“On the Stylistic Field”, excerpted from The Trilogy of Values
(1946), trans. Florin Ionescu, Romanian Review 3:4 (1985) 74.
[2] As soon as we move from the
notion of the self as purely a matter of consciousness—will, feeling and
awareness of a continuously developing personality that is at best always
cognisant of its thoughts and actions and at worst occasionally forgetful and
inattentive to its operations, we have to move into a more dynamic set of ideas
wherein there is not just a defective or malfunctioning kind of mind that is no
longer aware of who and what it is but that the constitution of the self is a
mixture of awareness, and unawareness, as well as suppressed memories, desires
and antagonisms beneath the level of awareness, and repressed memories. Much of
this dynamic of depth psychology appeared in the nineteenth century prior to
Freud’s formulation of a systematic anatomy of the three-tiered mind—id, ego
and superego—though usually in poetic and fictional writings, philosophic
speculations, and pseudo-scientific ramblings; see White 1960. Our view is of
the mind as a more fluid compound of kinds of consciousness and
unconsciousness, growing and changing in response to its physical and psychic
environment, inner and outer and subject to historical changes—in the sense
that history is not always a rational, intentional process of communal life.
[3] Norman Simms, Festivals
of Laughter, Blood and Justice in
Biblical and Classical Literature ( London, Ont.: Sussco, 2008)
[4] Benjamin, “Recognition and
Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity” argues that “the psychoanalytic
process should be understood as occurring between subjects rather than within
the individual” and “[i]ntersubjectivity... is useful because it specifically
addresses the problem of defining the other as object... It refers to that zone
of experience or theory in which the other is not merely the object of the
ego’s need/drive or cognition/perception but has a separate and equivalent
center of self.” Particularly relevant for our study here is her comment, following
Winnicott: “The creation of a symbolic space within the infant-mother
relationship fosters the dimension of intersubjectivity, a concomitant of
mutual understanding. This [symbolic] space... is a function not only of the
child’s play alone in the presence of the mother but also of play between
mother and child, beginning with the earliest play of mutual gaze.”
[5] I have synethesized many newspaper reports, online
sites, u-tube and television news shows to describe the events of this horrible
act of multiple murder of children by children.
See for instance: Yael Altman on YNet
news for 13 November 2011 at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4041237,00.html; Robert J. Avrech, 2011: “Fogel Family Massacre, Arab
Muslims Arrested” Seraphic Secret (17 April) online at
http://www.seraphicpress.com/archives/itamar_massacre/ (seen 22/04/2011). David
Pollock,: “The Fogel Murders: A Call to Combat Incitement” The Cutting Edge
(11 April 2011); online at http://www.
thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=51786&pageid=37&pagenam... (seen 19/04/ 2011). For disturbing photographs of the murdered
members of the family, see Ryan Jones on
Israel; Today for 14 March 2011 at
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/tabid/178/nid/22697/Default.aspx.
[6] Blaga 1985: 80.
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