Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis

Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures

Griselda Pollock

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780763163
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of traumatic violence. In a contrary direction, some thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler insists is 'the psychic life of power'. An openly psychoanalytical modelling of trauma for approaching major historical events such as the Holocaust adds yet a third position. Drawing on all three strands, this book poses the question of visual politics to psychoanalysis. It also explores the relevance of the many psychoanalyses to the study of art and other images in post-traumatic conditions. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis builds on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity.
In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyse the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma from enslavement and colonisation to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema.

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CONTEST-NATION

Denmark: A PTSD-struck Nation Contesting Analysis

Henrik Ole Holm

We have no need for experts and judges of taste to decide on our behalf …

Prime Minister of Denmark Mr Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Liberal Party) on his first State of the Nation Speech, 1 January 2002.¹

In this chapter I will explore the contestations occurring between politics of nationalism and psychoanalysis, in the continuing contest over who controls the power of imagery, society and politics for the future.² I shall use some notions and examples well known from psychoanalysis, and occasionally even some Foucauldian concepts, in order to think about the political with the psychoanalytical in the visual arts. My example of a post-traumatic culture is my native country Denmark, and the visual arts are represented by a Canon for the Arts (‘Kulturkanon’) released by the government in 2005 (see <http://kum.dk/Documents/Temaer/Kulturkanon/KUM_kulturkanonen_uk_OK.pdf>) (1.1).

The framework in which this canon-making can be placed reveals a nation acting as if afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), despite being at the periphery of Europe and its current conflicts, and being far away from those recent acts of terror or warfare. The horror of my case lies not in its reflection on suffering on a grand scale, but in the uncanny appearance of trauma in places where it ought not to be found. Nevertheless, Denmark is indeed acting as though it has been the victim of serious distress. Strong nationalistic moods and sentiments in the public arena have been setting the agenda for domestic politics for a decade, paving the way for a right-wing government, culminating in the elections held in 2001, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

At the very beginning of his first term the Prime Minister banned ‘experts’ and ‘judges of taste’, and in his second year in office in 2003, a full-blown cultural war was launched in an interview with a Danish newspaper. The Prime Minister said: ‘The outcome of the Battle of Culture determines the future of Denmark. Not the economic policy. Nor technocratic changes in the systems of legislation.’³

1.1C.W. Eckersberg (1783–1853), View through Three of the Northwestern Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum. A Thunderstorm is Brewing over the City, 1813–16, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. ‘The Father of Danish Painting’, figuring prominently on the Canon of Art list as the first oil-on-canvas work of art.

The cultural war turned out to be a real one, leaving no vital part of society untouched by it. Quick to follow after the speech was the closing down or reorganization of councils, boards and institutions made up of experts who did not share the views of the government. Apart from reorganizing the systems that provide artists with official funding, the Ministry for the Environment was cut to pieces, while the notorious denier of the fact that human activity has caused global warming Bjorn Lomborg became head of the ‘Environmental Assessment Institute’, advising the government.⁴ The universities in general, but especially the humanities, were to be hit hard, due to the fact that any kind of critical judgement or analysis was metaphorically castrated by the ‘no’ of the new fathers in politics. The longstanding tradition of universities being relatively self-governing was annulled and all democratic forums were replaced by a new hierarchical order where students as well as employees lost their voice. The basic educational system was changed so that all initiatives would be measured by numbers. The police were reformed. The municipal system was centralized. Taxes were lowered. Museums had to rely on private funding as never before (which will cause them serious concern, now there is a major financial crisis).

Coincidentally, visual phenomena played a crucial role when Denmark finally found its reason to act as if it were suffering post traumatic stress disorder. The ‘aesthetics’ of the 9/11 attacks did not go unnoticed, and the impact of the visual footage has been used with great enthusiasm to keep fear alive in everyone owning a TV. The pictures of torture from Abu Ghraib appearing in 2004 showed atrocities not easily explained away. The photographs held the promise of a possible defeat for the Coalition Forces in Iraq, sending governments in the US, Spain and Britain on a serious detour from which they were never to recover. But the shock did not come to Denmark.

It was as if the nation were numb to the implications of the photographs. The Danish government was never as forcefully contested by the opposition as in other countries, and only a few of those in favour of sending the troops off to war began to think the unthinkable, that the mission in Iraq might not turn out as planned. The decision to pull out of Iraq was not motivated by a terrorist attack on the nation. Nor was it motivated by the casualties suffered by Danish soldiers or by a change in attitudes in the public. Denmark just had to leave because the much stronger British forces left the sector around Basra, where the Danes were deployed. So, it was a non-decision with no emotional background or political reasoning on behalf of the success of the operation or the possible defeat of the entire operation. It was just a tactically based regrouping of the troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Instead, 12 cartoons in a newspaper showing the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist caused the disturbance while, at the same time, the government released a ‘Canon for the Arts’. In the explanations offered for why Denmark needed this affirmed Canon, and in the general background offered to support the declaration, I detect through a psychoanalytically-informed analysis symptoms of a nation struck by PTSD.

After having read Naomi Klein’s brilliant analysis of the devastating impact of neoliberal economic theory and practice titled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, first published in 2007, I realize that it is just another version of management through disaster that we are witnessing here.⁵ Klein shows how the Chicago School economists, led by Milton Friedman (1912–2006), used disasters of all kinds to pave the way for private corporations to profit relentlessly from the destruction of public welfare systems through privatization. When disaster hit, the economic shock therapy offered by the Friedmanists can easily be hailed as the only way out of it, since politicians are ready to accept any cure at hand that promises a quick change and also provides the goodwill of financial institutions and private investors. Yet no great shock or disaster providing the opportunity for fast and awesome reforms had hit Denmark. The economy was booming, employment only increasing and wealth was spreading to a degree never seen before. A disaster was wanted, and Denmark went to war in Iraq as part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, and continued to partake in the operations in Afghanistan. But no real crisis came out of it.

As 2004 turned into 2005, Denmark, however, did indeed become breaking news worldwide because of the so-called ‘Satanic Drawings’.⁶ The cartoons were published in October 2004. They were made as a gesture to show how the Danish media would not succumb to any prohibition from Islamic traditions on showing the face of the Prophet. An artist had just declined a commission to draw the Prophet in a book on Islam. His colleagues wanted to show that they were not afraid to draw the Prophet and so they did. One of the drawings showed Muhammad as a terrorist with a bomb placed in his turban. The whole setup was meant as a parody on Muslims inside the country. They had for years, on an everyday basis, been the target of xenophobia, and now the time had come to show that no respect was left for their religion or culture. The international media commented on these cartoons, which spread on the Internet in no time. Riots broke out in the Muslim world at the beginning of 2005, and several people died in the confrontations between police and demonstrators. For the politicians it was the worst diplomatic crisis since World War II.

The power of images

As mentioned above, it was at the peak of the major diplomatic crisis following the release of the cartoons that the Danish government made public the Canon for the Arts, proclaiming that it was produced in order to ward off both globalization anxieties and local cultural radicalism. The 9/11 footage, the photos from Abu Ghraib, the cartoons and the Danish Canon seen together articulate what is not easy to describe or to defend, namely that images possess a power which can, sometimes, under certain conditions, be very forceful. When speaking of the visual politics of psychoanalysis in a post-traumatic world, we might say that it all bears witness to the fact that imagery works on the public consciousness and that it can produce an unwanted and troubled self-awareness which might form the basis of criticality.

My point here will be, however, to propose the opposite. It can also lead to mental stupor and resistance towards analysis. Resistance to analysis is a common problem. But if pictures can shake otherwise solid constructions of egos and ideologies, and if cultural analysis of a visual politics of psychoanalysis knows the diagnosis and performs the talking cure needed, then post-traumatized cultures worldwide could be the last to be engaged with psychoanalysis due to the very reactions defining their illness, such as amnesia and numbness. But for the sake of art and psychoanalysis I will leave a little space for the opportunity that the visual arts can perhaps possess the power to penetrate that resistance anyway, by working slowly, unconsciously and irresistibly on the minds and acts of some people. Perhaps.

A canon full of imagery is indeed produced to shake up something while consolidating something else. It is made to end all doubt and foreclose analysis. The intention is, of course, to re-establish or to furnish already powerful institutions, individuals and ideologies. Canonization in the arts has by no means been an uncontested way of dealing with our cultural heritage, but those in charge of the Canon project do not seem to have been bothered by such doubts. If they were, they reacted by finding it necessary to produce even more canons in order to silence criticism. The national critique of the Canon for the Arts came from experts and the newly marginalized ‘judges of taste’, including many women who were familiar with using psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the ‘psyche’ of a society or a culture. Although their arguments were heard, no real consequence of the critique can be measured; soon many intellectuals just chose not to bother about the Canon any more, continuing their work as though nothing had happened.

Mothers against canonization

We can approach the Canon in polarized terms, having the ‘no’ of the father as the inaugural act, and the protest against it as marked by the maternal. Thus the women who criticize canonization as a tool for exercising power relations stemming from narcissism not only focus on the installation of the indispensable (phallus), but also identify the process that creates a void (vagina or asshole) for the rest to fall into. From Nanette Salomon’s concluding remarks in her article ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’, we know that in canonization ‘the deeper stratifications of gender, race, and class continue to operate within the culturally expressed power relationships that he [Vasari] articulated’.⁷ Griselda Pollock took on the job of ‘Differencing the Canon’ in her 1999 book of that title, and she noted that ‘the canon is fundamentally a mode for worship of the artist, which is in turn a form of masculine narcissism […] The excessive valorisation of the artist in modern Western art history as a “great man” corresponds with the infantile stage of idealisation of the Father’.⁸

In the Danish Canon for the pictorial arts only one woman is included. Her name is Astrid Noack (1888–1954), and she appears among 11 men or unknown artists. The statue by Noack shows a nude female in a contrapposto entitled Standing Woman (1.2) Noack stands out for not being a spectacular or noteworthy exception among artists, since she belonged to a group of traditionalists who searched for classical, eternal beauty in modernity. Her work has no real significance in Danish art history; measured by that standard the inclusion of her work is a kind of differentiation of the canon, although not on any large scale, to be sure.⁹

The sculpture fits the idea of a canon perfectly, harking back to Polykleitos and his most canonical work, the Doryphoros (c. 450 bc), clearly visible as the model for Noack’s rendering of the solid young woman. She looks protective and perhaps even a little frightened, balancing between awareness and introversion. It is perhaps a precise figuration of the ambiguous feelings shared by many in the period in which she was made, from 1937 to 1941, during the Nazi regime and the first years of World War II, before the Battle at Stalingrad turned out in favour of the Allies, and before many ordinary citizens dared to hope that the Nazis would lose the war. Her attitude is articulated as the timeless, eternal, and common expression of the feminine as such.

Allow me to make a rather far-fetched comparison making it possible to connect Noack’s figure with the thought of Freud and others. Compared with the Vatican Gradiva, a bas-relief of which Freud had a plaster replica in his consulting room – a sculpture he named after a novel called Gradiva, which he analysed in a famous article of 1903 – the statue by Noack is not walking joyfully forward, as does the young girl in the Roman relief. Freud used the example of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1907) to unravel the double face of art in which the figure stands as both the ‘memory-bearer of its own culture [but also] as the screen for our own recognized memories’ as Griselda Pollock has it in her reading of Freud’s text.¹⁰ If Noack’s sculpture reveals the dreams and memories of the canonizers, and thus unveils their hidden dreams, they share her nostalgic longing for a mankind as fragile, but nevertheless as solid, enduring and unchangeable, as this figure seems to be. But this woman would presumably be the very last one to stand up against the Canon. And when the ‘Mothers of Feminism’ are on the move against it, Noack...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface – New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts
• Introduction
• 1: Contest-Nation Denmark: A PTSD-struck Nation Contesting Analysis
• 2: In Miniature: Trauma and Indigenous Identity in Colonial Canada
• 3: The ‘Irish Holocaust’: Historical Trauma and the Commemoration of the Famine
• 4: Courbet’s Trauerspiel: Trouble with Women in the Painter’s Studio
• 5: Astonishing Marine Living: Ellen Gallagher’s Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum
• 6: New York Transfixed: Notes on the Expression of Fear
• 7: Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Vicissitudes of Surveillance
• 8: Towards an Iconomy of Violence: Julia Kristeva in the Between of Ethics and Politics
• 9: From Horrorism to Compassion: Re-facing Medusan Otherness in Dialogue with Adriana Caverero and Bracha Ettinger
• 10: Encountering Blue Steel: Changing Tempers in Cinema
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• eCopyright