Psihoanaliza je ikonoklazam moderne u dvostrukom smislu. Osim što je uništila čovjekovu sliku samog sebe, razriješila je napetost između riječi i slike na štetu potonje. Lacan je tvrdnjom da je nesvjesno strukturirano kao jezik sliku protjerao iz nesvjesnog. Za njega se nesvjesno ukazuje prvenstveno između riječi, kao zakazivanje jezika, kao rez. Ako je doista rez, i to filmski rez, paradigmatski za pojavu nesvjesnog, onda postaje moguće na temelju Lacanovih komentara o strukturi i funkciji nesvjesnog u psihoanalizi razmišljati kao o prototeoriji filma. U tom slučaju vremenska bliskost formuliranja teorije nesvjesnog i prve filmske projekcije ne bi bila puka slučajnost, nego simptom. Simptom kao povratak potisnutog posljedica je koja prethodi svom uzroku, njegova skrivena jezgra, njegovo značenje. Jonathan Beller u svojoj kapitalnoj studiji Filmski način proizvodnje sugerira da je o ikonoklazmu psihoanalize moguće razmišljati kao o simptomu traume izazvane kapitalističkom organizacijom vizualnosti čija je paradigma tijekom dvadesetog stoljeća bio film. Na simpoziju Nesvjesno nesvjesnog namjeravamo iskoristiti tu mogućnost: za razliku od psihoanalitičke kritike koja u filmu traži simptome, želja nam je ispitati što se može reći u prilog i protiv ideje da je sama psihoanaliza simptom – simptom filma.
Simpozij Nesvjesno nesvjesnog organiziran je u okviru Filmskih mutacija: osmog festivala nevidljivog filma.
Sudjeluju: Jonathan Beller, Marina Gržinić, Željka Matijašević i Diana Meheik.
Koordinatori: Ante Jerić i Diana Meheik
Simpozij organizira Film-protufilm, a ostvaruje se uz podršku Ureda za kulturu, obrazovanje i sport Grada Zagreba, Hrvatskog audiovizualnog centra i Ministarstva kulture RH. Partner simpozija: Multimedijalni institut.
Raspored
Četvrtak, 4. 12.
13:30 – 14:00: Ante Jerić, Symposium Introduction / Uvodna riječ
14:00 – 15:15: Diana Meheik, “Miracle To Be or Not To Be” / “Čudo (će) biti ili ne biti
15:30 – 17:00: Marina Gržinić, “Racialized bodies, the non-human and the 21st century digital (financial) mode of production” / “Rasizirana tijela, ne-ljudsko i digitalni (financijski) način proizvodnje dvadeset i prvog stoljeća”
Petak, 5.12.
13:30 – 15:00: Željka Matijašević, “For the image narcissistically killeth, but the word narcissistically giveth?” / Jer slika narcistički ubijaše, a riječ narcistički davaše?”
15:30 – 17:00: Jonathan Beller, “The Computational Unconscious” / “Računalno nesvjesno”
Abstracts
Jonathan Beller: The Computational Unconscious
This talk understands the rise of Capitalism as the first digital culture with universalizing aspirations and capabilities, and recognizes contemporary culture, driven as it is by electronic digital computing, as something like digital culture 2.0. Rather than seeing this shift strictly as a break, we might consider it as one result of an overall intensification in the practices of quantification. Thus, if capitalism was already a digital computer, then “the invisible hand,” as the non-subjective, social summation of the individualized practices of the pursuit of private gain, was an early expression of the computational unconscious. With the broadening and deepening of the imperative towards quantification and rational calculus posited then presupposed during the modern period by the expansionist program of Capital, the process of the assignation of number to all variables first discernible in the commodity-form, whereby every use-value was also an exchange-value, entered into our machines, rendering first the rationalization of production in the assembly line and then modern computing. Today, as could be well known from everyday observation if not from media theory, computation arguably underpins all productive activity, and particularly significant for this argument, activities that stretch from image-making, to writing, and therefore to thought. The contention here is not simply that capitalism is the unconscious of computation, it is that the unconscious itself, as the domain of the unthought that organizes thought, is computational. Therefore, not only is consciousness a computational effect, but all the structural inequalities endemic to capitalist production – often appearing under variants of the analog categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, etc., but just as importantly and as often disappeared into our machines – inhere in the logistics of computation and consequently in the real-time organization of language, which is to say, our thought.
Željka Matijašević: For the image narcissistically killeth, but the word narcissistically giveth?
In Lacan’s later works, corresponding with the introduction of the Real as a third order by which the importance of the Imaginary is played down, in his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960), the dynamic of Lacan’s concept of ‘subjectivity’ is being gauged at the intersection and tension between the Symbolic and the Real, not between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, as it was before. Clearly, Lacan’s concept of narcissism is closely related to the narcissistic image (mirror image) with its ensuing fictionality, falsity, aggressiveness, duplicity and lethality, the lethality of the visual. The Symbolic order, as a stabilizing order, comes to the rescue by separating the subject from the image, by forcing him to renounce the symbiotic relation with the object a. How is it possible that this act of symbolic castration/creation never comes to be approximated to any form of narcissism? Lacan’s pivotal “Rome Discourse” emphasizes the perilousness of the word, the words which define us, the names which exist for us before we are born and persist beyond our death, the words which make us “faithful” or “renegades”. On the one hand, Lacan oscillates between the restorative power of the Symbolic and its linguistic dimension – language, while, on the other hand, the words which create/define us have a deadly power of annihilation, which is Lacan’s true debt to Hegel.
‘Subjectivity’ is in Lacan’s work threefold. First, there is the ego (moi), captivated in the Imaginary, by the image; the subject (sujet), imprisoned within the Symbolic, in the discourse of the Other and, finally, the true I (Je), the place of authenticity and non-narcissistic creation, organized around desire which has yet to be found, engendered and created. Probing more deeply into contemporary theories on narcissism, I intend to demonstrate that our symbolic being, our construction as subjects is also narcissistic. Narcissistic images are most vibrant and resonate ‘perfectly’ when they are subliminally reduced to some basic, defining sentences such as: “I am omnipotent and you are nothing but a part of me”; “You are omnipotent and I am the mirror which reflects/confirms you as such”.
Contemporary views on narcissism allow us to translate clinical narcissism into a loosely structured self, with permeable boundaries towards others, or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, organized around the desire of the Other, which makes the position of the subject extremely fragile, dependent and self-defeating. The three ideals of psychoanalytic ethics/cure are: independence, authenticity and love, and they correspond to the three tenets of the structured I (Je): demarcated from the object/objects, authentic at the place of his own desire, and endowed with healthy-‘love thyself’-narcissism.
Diana Meheik: Miracle To Be or Not To Be
While a miracle used to represent an insight into the supernatural or unnatural acting of the irrational or irrationalized order, today it catches one’s attention mainly in a political sense. Most often viewed as a moment of exception, and on account of that rarely thought of, the problem of the miracle becomes interesting in the inaugural moment of conception, as it breaks away from necessity, just as something which causes the society to reorganize. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s politics of desire “miraculating” machines inscribe quasi-causes of production into socius – whether “the body of the earth, that of tyrant, or capital.” My goal is, with the assumption that a miracle can detect (or hide) a connection between desire (thought of in terms of Deleuze and Guattari) and society, to inscribe film into the moment of becoming which in itself contains a quasi-cause, and if we think of the unconscious as a transcedental field which comes before individuation (becoming) then it is organized exactly as a quasi-cause. Film is a miracle (if we think of the cut as a discontinuity with causality), although it does not contain one, but it also miraculates.
Marina Gržinić: Racialized bodies, the non-human and the 21st century digital (financial) mode of production
If the cinematic mode of production conceived so ingeniously by Jonathan Beller is the mode of production for 20th century capitalism, then I propose, in analogy to Beller, another mode of production for the 21st century: the digital mode for the production of financial global capitalism (Gržinić 2004, 2008). Furthermore, I posit a thesis: that it is necessary to insist on a division from the inside of financial global neoliberal capitalism and the digital mode of production and its images. This division has to be conceptualized around the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial lines that cut global neoliberal capitalism from within. The imperial, colonial, racial division, though expelled ferociously from global financial capitalism, is returning with vengeance, dividing film productions and reframing their images through racialized labor, racialized images and the racialized Other.
Or differently, this division should be reworked constantly, not simply as the symptom of, but the condition of global neoliberal capitalism; only then can we think of a decolonial, political mode with which to reformulate what the pertinent political productions of today are, some of which I proposed in a very condensed video-film program (8 positions only) for Film Mutations 2014. If we make this division, then we can understand the politically pertinent new semio-technological im/possibilities for life, labor, the human and humanity, freedom and knowledge in and outside films. In addition, we can start a process of re-reading psychoanalysis, and also of re-articulating Hollywood mainstream kitsch, such as in Lucy or performative documentaries like The Act of Killing. Which images are we talking about when referring to the digital (financial) mode of production?
Jonathan Beller, with his cinematic mode of production, invites the possibility of rereading the proposed line of concatenation of selected auteur film productions of the 20th century, which Gilles Deleuze conceived in the 1980s. Deleuze recuperates a selected history of the 20th century Western auteur film productions through two images, two notions of body-mental relations to/within film: the image-movement and the image-time. Beller’s cinematic mode of production gave these images the missing frames of labor, of capitalist production relations and the capitalist means of production.
On the other hand, with the digital (financial) mode of production, we can go further and ask what the film images of the 21st century are. The list is long, though some images can possibly be enlisted as brands: the image-event, the militant image, the commodity-image. At this point, we have to radicalize the status of these images of the digital (financial) mode of production even more, and ask: with and beyond Lacan, what is the unconscious of these images? More precisely, what is the racialized unconscious of these images, and therefore, what is the status of psychoanalysis in relation to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions contemporary film production and its financial-images?
