History as Job’s Dung-Heap :
The Delusions of the Media
Je suis juif et je vous emmerde.[1]
—Amedeo Modigliani
Maurice Maeterlinck disait que les paroles que
nous prononçons n’ont de sens que grâce au silence dans lequel elles baignent
History is a collective dream, a confusion of wish-fulfilments,
anxieties and other fantasies, but collectively experienced in trance-like
states or pronounced by public dreamers, such as kings, priests and shamans or
prophets.
Like all dreams, nothing in history—our own personal lives as recorded
in memory, or community myths and legends—is as it seems to be on the surface
and in the textual patterns woven into narratives, pictures and arguments; so
that all must be exploded into constituent parts, analysed, and
interpreted.
To make sense of history, one must subject it to interpretation. But before that can be done, it must be
analysed, and before that it needs to be fissured, struck on the surface by
many hammer blows of rationality, scepticism, cynicism and rage. No reasonable person can accept at face value
the idea of other people’s memories, whether textualized into documents, retold
as epic events, or described as private experiences. If there is a truth, and why should there not
be, it will certainly come in a simple, seemingly coordinated and coherent form,
and therefore all attempts to pass down through the ages—or even within the
single generation of a family or an individual person—falters on the confusions
of life.
Re-Imagining the Text of History
One of the great possibilities that x-ray photography
offers—and already noted within the first decade of its discovery by Roentgen
near the end of the nineteenth century-- to art historians and also
psychohistorians is of seeing beneath the surface of completed paintings, and
thus observing earlier versions of a picture than that which the creator
finally decided to make public.
Sometimes, the canvas contained a completely different scene altogether
which for one reason or another was painted over and a new picture put in its
place. At other times, as the artist
proceeded with the work, he or she decided to change the composition, to modify
the proportions, and to make other alterations for various aesthetic and strategic
purposes. Thus while not contesting the
final product itself as part of the artist’s oeuvre and legacy, the new
technique of x-raying—and associated processes of re-perceiving the object d’art through an array of filters
and chemical analyses of the colours applied to the canvas—gives the work a
sense of progress through time, an indication of how the artist worked and
thought about the subject.
Other techniques of analysis involve magnification of
the images so as to read the brush strokes and other means of applying and
modifying the surface textures of the painting, and also, far more
controversial, of identifying in these magnifications—and sometimes rotation of
the surface so as to obtain new angles of vision, the shape and depth of the
canvas as a three dimensional object; so that what emerges for analysis and
interpretation are aspects of the “picture” that may be considered to be below
or beyond the artist’s own intentions, awareness or conscious purposes or
recognition. While this not involve the
so-called micrography of ancient manuscripts produced in cultures where the
written word, like images, is tabooed in certain religious contexts, so that
signs or messages are used subversively or secretly to infiltrate the spiritual
precincts of the object or composed so as to constitute the object or some
abstract pattern placed as an adornment on it, or may be a consequence of more
archaic rituals of creation and composition, such as are seen in cave drawings
or statuary; that is, the product of deep attention of shamanistic art,
enhancing at increasing levels of perceptual awareness the markings of either
transforming mind into matter or, alternatively, of self into natural oblivion.
By analogy, literature, philosophy and history can
also be examined by rhetorical strategies that look below the surface of the
text, explode the apparently well-patterned word-structures, and rotate the
argument, narrative or description so as to gain new vantage points and
appreciations of depth, volume, form and ontological development.
The main
example to be used here centres on the way the international media handled the
2014 Gaza Crisis and the Israeli invasion codenamed Operation Protective
Edge. will, after setting out the "what"
of the situation—that is, how the news is distorted, manipulated, controlled—examine
the much more difficult question of why this perversion of actual events was so
successful. While there will be no
specific individuals subject to close examination—as though we could, at a
distance of space and time—treat them like patients in a psychoanalytic
programme, there can be a demonstration of what type of persons are susceptible
to this clearly propagandistic manipulation of facts and commonsense. That means, insofar as such types of
suggestible personalities can be sketched out without adequate detailing of
their birth, childrearing, and educational regimes, including the textures of
their parental and communal circumstances, discussing their personalities: much
of this by reading back from current behaviours and written documents,
interpreting such evidence as symptoms of prior conditioning. The examination then goes on to describe way
in which the pressures of the different crises in the world that form the
context of the Gaza incursion , or
rather, the matrix of historical expectations, psychological expectations, and
cognitive prejudices work together to drive such personalities. It will then be necessary to look at manner
in which the cognitive and affective processes of the brain are structured and
restructured in the course of normative biological development and then in
response to traumatic and anxiety-causing events. It is
known today that the neuronal system keeps changing in the course of an
individual’s life and does not reach some form of mature conclusion at the end
of adolescence, but rather that the brain is subject to constant inhibition and
stimulation of synaptic connections in response to changes in the hormonal
environment—triggered, of course, by diverse kinds of excitation, from fear and
anxiety through to desire and aspiration.
We know too that
it is in the context of this plastic,
malleable brain anatomy (the arborescence of neurons, their shifting synaptic
connections) process new feelings and stored information, reconstitute memories,
generate hallucinatory denials, compensations, displacements, elaborations of
false memories, etc. In this light moreover, the triggering of hormonal
events and patterns of reception do not occur in a biological vacuum; they are
subject themselves to external stimuli in the constructed world of human
history. In addition to the
manifestation of these responses in emotional and cognitive acts, the active
and conscious mind articulates itself in terms of language and the formalized,
cultural means of stimulating, shaping and storing the ideas spoken of. This means we have to examine closely the power
of words and images to mimic and transform one’s consciousness of reality, and
here the role of enargiea comes into
play—the creating of vivid sensations that block out and substitute for reality
as can be seen in rhetoric and poetry, as well as in the forms, shapes,
patterns and rhythms of the other arts. The release of hormonal energy,
the altering of how genetic codes express themselves, the defensive mechanisms
of moral censorship, etc etc.
While I use
some contemporary neurological development sources, I find the books of the
1890s and pre-War 1900s most interesting because they were already sensing
significant changes in the mentality of Europeans--mostly, of course, in
literature and art--and starting to absorb the qualitative effects of
psychoanalysis, notions of relativity, etc. Much of this was shoved out
of the way and forgotten by the trauma of the Great War. It was simply too
much to absorb and handle. Now we reap the whirlwind.
[1] “I am a Jew and I shit upon you.”
Cited by Jean-Jacques
Bedu, Francis Carco au cœur de bohème
(Paris: Editions du Rocher, 2001) p. 256.
[2] “Maurice Maeterlinck said that the words we speak make sense only
because of the silence in which they are
immersed.” Bedu, Francis Carco au cœur de bohème, p. 344.
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