Images from Paradise
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Images from Paradise

The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia

Eszter Salgó

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Images from Paradise

The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia

Eszter Salgó

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About This Book

Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the "art of European unification." The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate "collective effervescence, " allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the "ever closer union, " thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization's legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781785336195
PART I
Images
NUMINOUS STORIES ABOUT EUROPE’S REBIRTH
Images
CHAPTER 1
NEED FOR A PARADISE DREAM
In his essay Leviathan: A Myth, Michael Oakeshott asserts that the substance of civilization itself is myth, a collective dream:
We are apt to think of a civilization as something solid and external, but at bottom it is a collective dream. … What a people dreams in this earthly sleep is its civilization. And the substance of this dream is a myth, an imaginative interpretation of human existence, the perception (not the solution) of the mystery of human life. (Oakeshott 1947/1975: 160–61)
Oakeshott admired poets’ and writers’ capacity to dream more profoundly—to preserve, rather than to break the dream, “to recall it, to recreate it in each generation, and even to make more articulate the dream-powers of a people” (1947/1975: 161). He believed that literature’s gift consisted in offering us imagination and, as a result, the expansion of our faculty for dreaming. Seen from this light, even a book of philosophy may aspire to evoke the common dream that binds the generations together and makes the mysterious narrative more comprehensible. For Oakeshott, the myth that Thomas Hobbes inherited and that gave coherence to the collective dream was the myth of the Garden of Eden: as a result of an original sin, mankind was banished from the garden, from the ambient of peace and happiness, but, despite humans’ disappointing conduct, divine grace promised an ultimate redemption, the restoration of the pristine order.
The notion of the broken unity and its renewal has been a central strand in the whole of Western thought (Berlin 1990); the return to a state likened to the golden age had already been envisaged as early as Virgil (Eclogue IV). The belief that the reign of Saturn during the early days of humanity signified a golden period of virtue and justice was a vulgate mythological notion and commonplace in ancient poetry. The association of Saturnia tempora with the idyllic era occurs in classic ancient mythology after which the god Saturn, probably originally the protector of the harvest, became identified with the Greek Kronos, king of Crete. Since the primary trauma, provoked by the expulsion from paradise and by the splintering of the pristine unity, man’s primary desire has been to put the fragments in order, to restore serenity, so reestablishing the perfect state that had been lost. Nostalgia for paradise runs through European thought from its earliest beginnings; it underlies all the old utopias and has deeply influenced Western metaphysics and moral and political ideas (Berlin 1990: 23–24).
As Oakeshott asserts, a civilized life is created out of the desires, fears, and other inner drives intrinsic in human nature, the anxiety provoked by expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the longing for a definitive return. Many contribute to the construction of the paradise myth; theologians, poets, and artists may become the true custodians of the dream.
The fantasy of returning to the idyllic land has an immense political significance if we consider that every political agenda contains a reference to paradise. All political projects promise and seek to foster the illusion of the reappearance of the lost state of harmony, unity, and fullness; what differentiates them from each other is their image of the sublime Garden of Eden and how their members fantasize about bringing back the “fantastic family.” The European Union is no exception; at the core of the integration process has always been a (paradise) dream. According to Joseph Weiler, for example, the legitimacy of the organization is rooted in the “politically messianic”: the justification for its actions is “the vision offered, the dream dreamt”; its motivating engine derives “from the ideal pursued, the destiny to be achieved, the ‘Promised Land’ waiting at the end of the road” (2011: 7). European integration may be seen as a “political messianic venture par excellence,” with the messianic representing a key component of its political culture, manifest both in its rhetoric and in its policy decisions. On the one hand, the ceremonial and sermonical language is rich in pathos (and in bathos); on the other, the persuasive vision that has inspired generations of European idealists of the “ever closer union among the people of Europe” as the only route back to paradise is indicative of the mythical dimension of the European art of unification (Weiler 2011: 8).
The Maastricht Treaty that sanctioned the birth of the European Union did not assign to the new community “that power of symbolic crystallization which only a political act of foundation can give” (Ha­ber­mas 2001: 6). Yet the desired political goal of the reunification of the European family requires some kind of symbolic legitimation that in the national settings emerged from religious, quasi-religious, or mythopoetic factors. For Europe the only religious option, asserts Richard Roberts, is Neo-Paganism, “a paganism of the shamanic type,” which would treat nature as bearer of an imminent sacred and provide people a sense of the immanent sacred (2006: 159). The supranational elite have proposed another way to reinforce the religious dimension of its legitimation. A transcendent quality has been attributed to the project of federalism and to the new euro: around the cult of the United States of Europe an official soteriology has been developed; Europa, and not Gaia, has been identified as the deity that Europeans should adore.
The transitional period of disorder and uncertainty has strengthened people’s quest for transcendence. Today, more than in the past, the EU needs awe-inspiring capacity in order to shift citizens’ loyalty from the states to the organization as a source of identity and existential security. As a response to the 2008 crisis and to citizens’ deepening sense of alienation and quest for transformation, Eurofederalism has asserted itself as a political soteriology, appropriating from religion the function of myths, symbols, and rituals, thereby seeking to intensify the sacral aura of supranational Europe. Political religions, says Emilio Gentile, “reproduce the typical structure of traditional religions, … and propose to bring about … a ‘metanoia’ of human nature out of which shall come forth a regenerated ‘new man’, totally integrated into the community” (1993: 309). The prophets of Eurofederalism have launched new symbols and rituals, an iconography and a semiotic discourse though which they promise their community of believers an encounter with the sacred, spatial and temporal transcendence, and feelings of individual and collective rebirth. Conscious (or not) of their immense influence, federalists use myths more and more often as a political tool for constructing and strengthening a European collective identity, legitimizing the EU, creating loyalty and a sense of belonging, and for strengthening the affective dimension of Europe’s “fantastic family.” The crisis the EU suffers from is frightening, disorientating, paralyzing, and therefore unacceptable. But once it acquires a sacred meaning, a mythological dimension, the symbolic reintegration into the primordial chaos may also signify a chance to regain paradisiacal conditions and to discover the (European) Land of Cockaigne.
Political communities are inconceivable without myths. Myths are common and accompany normal political life; however, when they become overflourishing and overpowerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of social neurosis or psychosis. In transitional periods (as we have today), myths proliferate. In times of uncertainty and continuous flux, myths revive people’s hopes—they seem to provide the possibility of eluding present difficulties, finding refuge in an imaginary glorious past or future, expecting resolution of problems from idealized leaders, fostering the illusion of creating order in the universe, and returning to paradise by putting together the fragmented pieces of the broken whole. Some of the paradise myths are explicit, others implicit; some are evident, others veiled; some are generated consciously, others unconsciously.
The European Union, similarly to nation-states, requires narratives to create a basis for legitimate political authority, to foster an intimate community feeling, and to strengthen members’ allegiance. Yet in Europe, shared memories are missing, and therefore the affective element, the feeling of belonging to a European family, is absent or weak. There is no passionate identification by individual citizens with the EU, only feeble allegiance based on economic and political calculations. It is because nations have navels, genuine or fabricated (Gellner 1997), and these navels and the myths and symbols, memories, and traditions they represent have such a strong value for the people that so far we haven’t seen the shift of allegiance from nation-states to supranational Europe. Federalists believe that to transcend European citizens’ attachment to the nation-family, to create and reinforce identification with the European Union, an umbilical cord has to be invented linking Europeans to the polity. Similarly to attempts seeking to tell the story of the nation, the narratives of Europe hark back to a golden age (ancient Greece, the Renaissance, or the era of Enlightenment), to traumas suffered (World War I, World War II, or communism), and to exceptionalism and a civilizing mission—a sui generis organization, a model for others to emulate (della Sala 2010: 6). The vision of the United States of Europe, the New Narrative for Europe: The Mind and the Body of Europe (a manifesto written in 2014 as a response to European Commission president José Manuel Barroso’s call), with the symbolic representation of Europe as an epic phoenix, and the story of mythological princess Europa (narrated by the European Central Bank) are different versions of the same ancient paradise myth. The custodians of these collective dreams are national and supranational policy-makers, intellectuals, artists, and (some) citizens.
While myths perform several functions, this part of the book chapter explores the role they play in provoking moments of transcendence, the perception of a return to the pristine idyll. Suzette Heald and Ariane Deluz, in a collection of essays, explore the interface between the psychoanalysis and anthropology through the interpretation of culture with a particular emphasis on the symbolic process and the nature of subjectivity (1999). Insights from psychoanalysis and anthropology will offer us the opportunity to give more depth to explanations of the proliferation and the growing role of myths in Europe and to reveal people’s intrinsic quest for paradise and the political elite’s endeavors to sacralize politics.
Psychoanalysts understand paradise as representing the happy period of our life when we could enjoy ourselves without anxiety or compulsion: the idyllic infanthood, the era of omnipotence, the joyful period previous to the trauma, the ontogenetic and phylogenetic paradise of the primal sea-mother Thalassa (Ferenczi), the pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic imaginary realm (Lacan), the period when mother and infant constituted a unit (Winnicott). Longing for the golden era previous to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is part of the universal quest for happiness. Adults, as well as children, need to experience those special moments of perfect harmony, wholeness, and pleasure. As Géza Róheim points out:
In growing up we substitute active for passive object love. We find substitutes for the love objects of infancy, but under the veneer of giving love we always retain the desire to receive love, and the loves and triumphs of adult life are really ‘Paradise Regained’, the refolding of the infancy situation on another level. (1942: 164)
For Christopher Bollas, a renowned writer and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, throughout the whole of life there is a search for “transformational objects,” which provoke the metamorphosis of the self and the conversion of emptiness, agony, and rage into fullness and contentedness. Transformational object-seeking in adulthood is an endless memorial pursuit of transcendental experiences. The object is sought not because of its characteristics but for the magic experience it may deliver. What Bollas calls “aesthetic moments” are liminal moments that provoke the metamorphosis of the self, something that can allow for the reexperiencing of the golden era of early infanthood when, feeling protected and loved by the mother, the infant was filled with a sense of joy. This British psychoanalyst asserts that moments provoked by the encounter with “transformational objects” constitute an intimate relationship between subject and object and provide the person with a generative illusion of fitting with an object, evoking an existential memory: “the aesthetic induces an existential recollection of the time when communicating took place solely through the illusion of deep rapport of subject and object” (1978: 386).
Bollas’s thoughts have great relevance for political and social studies. Often we assign to the political elite the ability (and/or the duty) to transform our total environment and to (re)establish today those paradisiacal conditions that characterized our (real or imaginary) infanthood. Time and again we yearn for a strong and intimate relationship with an object that could provoke the experience of metamorphosis. Though neither culture nor politics can possibly fulfill our needs and desires as our (imaginary) mother did, they may occasionally offer moments for recollections of intense ego memories and for self-transformation.
Lacan is pessimistic about man’s longing for reencountering the mother of idyllic infanthood. He used the term “imaginary solutions” to describe people’s attempts to replace unmanageable reality with wish-fulfilling fantasy by constructing all kinds of self-defeating solutions. His thinking again recalls Freud, who in “Totem and Taboo” defined fantasy as “tak[ing] flight from an unsatisfying reality,” which implies also one’s withdrawal from the community of man (Freud 1913: 74). Immersion in fantasy represents for Lacan not the denial of difficult inner and outer realities, but perhaps the only way to accept them and find a symbolic resolution. The fact that nothing in the Symbolic can fulfill our desire to transform our division into completeness drives us to bring something in from another realm—the quasi-imaginary objet petit a, from the field of fantasy, in the hope of being able to leave behind our frustrating state.
Lacan argues that a residue of the “primal union” with the maternal body survives the infant’s entry into the symbolic order. After its ban by the Symbolic, the “fundamental phantasy” is attached to the remnant of the Real in the form of the little nugget of originary enjoyment, which Lacan called the objet petit a. He used the term jouissance to capture the satisfaction provoked by the use of the desired object. The subject’s only object of complete satisfaction, the mother, is forbidden; the subject will search for substitutes, but these desire-provoking objects will never fulfill the dream of complete joy. Jouissance is something total but impossible; it is what desire can never reach, the void that can never be filled. Jouissance is an excessive pleasure and pain, something extra that turns pleasure into a fascinating, even unbearable intensity; it represents the “excess beyond the given, measurable, rational, and useful … for the stake of which we do what might otherwise seem irrational, counterproductive, or even wrong” (Dean 2006: 4). Unlike the pleasure principle, jouissance provokes a rise (rather than a drop) in tension.
One consequence of the subject’s dependence on ego-gratifying fantasies is that they mislead him to seek self-fulfillment through the objet petit a—the objectified cause of desire that the subject believes will return to him the precious sense of wholeness that has been lost. The objet petit a represents the desired integrity or wholeness; it does not refer to a specific need, but to the wish to become complete again, to be fully loved by the other, which is both impossible (since the self, created only after the separation, has no access to the primal union) and prohibited (through the action of language and Law). The object petit a is a compelling marker that pushes the subject toward substitutes that hold the potential illusion of fulfilling the constitutive lack, only to be reminded again and again that this lack is not fulfilled. It makes all substitute objects inadequate, deferring and differing pleasure, always in search of something else or more or elsewhere. This objet petit a is the inner secret or the kernel of the subject, creating a ceaseless and descriptive pressure to return to the “primal union,” which at the same time gives rise to an awesome, obscene enjoyment. As the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek asserts, the objet petit a is “a gap in the centre of the symbolic order—the lack, the void of the Real setting in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a pure semblance of the Mystery to be explained, interpreted” (1992: 8). Phantasy is a construction that stimulates desire exactly because it promises to cover over the lack in the Other, the lack created by the loss of jouissance:
It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. (Stavrakakis 1999: 46)
In a nutshell, fantasy is a longing for reconciliation and fullness, an attempt to compensate lack, to heal the wound caused by the primary trauma. The objet petit a and the “transformational object” do not refer to a specific need but to the wish to become again complete, to be fully loved by the other, in a way that would fill the lack. They both function as metaphors for the lost paradise: a paradise where we can enter for a limited period of time (Bollas), a paradise that will remain for us forever unreachable (Lacan).
Fantasy is not a strictly individual entity. From Freud’s standpoint, fantasy has always been present at the societal level in all civilizations in the form of legends, fairy-tales, and myths. Lacanian thinkers also believe that fantasy belongs to the social world because it is a construction whose primary function is to cover over the lack in the Other.
People’s shared dreams manifest themselves in myths. Myths constitute the common illusory experience that holds communities together. On the one hand they express populations’ striving for a return to idyllic infanthood and for ideal parental figures; on the other, they mirror politicians’ attempts to create the illusion of a pristine family and of regained order, harmony, stability, and happiness. Like dreams, myths surface as expressions of the mental state of societies. They disclose people’s shared needs, desires, fears, and traumas suffered. The tendency to explore wish fulfillment rules not only nocturnal dreams but daydreams as well, not only individual but also collective fancies. Myths are like the concealed fulfillment of a repressed wish. Societies in their fancies attain just that which is painfully missing; they may escape from a real or imagined danger or obtain the extinction of real or imagined enemies. Myths reflect man’s longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, a yearning that received various symbolic representation.
According to Jung, in ancient times man expressed his creativity by narrating and re-narrating myths; the realm of myths was the “world of fantasies,” the result of the activity of a highly artistic mind, where rather than seeking to gain an objective understanding of the real world, the goal was to adapt it aesthetically to collective fantasies and expectations (1979: 20–21). In this sense, the world represented in ancient myths had little to do with the external reality and reflected instead man’s inner reality. The Swiss psychoanalyst compared this psychic reality to children’s way of thinking. Just like imaginative children who attribute to their dolls and toys the qualities of animate things, ancient Greeks with their myths created and became inhabitants of a world of marvels. An expression of the indissoluble link that binds us to the men of antiquity is “fantasy-thinking,” which corresponds to the archaic ways of thinking and feeling and which “re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies” (Jung 1979: 28).
Myth for Lacan is a mixture of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; its main functions consist in “papering over the impossible, real kernel” around which the myth is constructed and for which it was originally formulated (Grigg 2006: 55). Žižek’s extensive study of the role of fantasy and myths in contemporary social and political life finds that ideology is an imaginary domain that is reproduced though the fantasy identifications of human subjects. In line with Lacan, he argues that the purpose of ideology is to fill in or cover over the lack caused by the loss of jouissance. Its function is “not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the special reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (1989: 45). The French-Greek psychoanalyst and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, inspired by Freud, arrived at a similar conclusion. According to Castoriadis, people have difficulties in accepting the chaos, the abyss, and the groundlessness from which humanity has emerged. Many refuse to recognize the death dwelling within every life; thus, “myth is essentially a way for societ...

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